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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2016
‘Remember the impression one gets from good architecture, that it expresses a thought.’ Wittgenstein's prompt to himself comes to mind when, in looking at Elizabethan buildings today accepted as ‘good architecture’, we ask, but what is the thought? The thinking behind prodigy houses and their lodges is not easy to discern; it has to be addressed indirectly because the Elizabethans left no statements about their architectural intentions. But it is useful to look at discourses adjacent to architecture. Of these, rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion, is one of the most significant. ‘Rhetoric and architecture’, writes the historian of memory, Mary Carruthers, ‘have had a venerable dialogue’. This essay argues that such a dialogue exists in the minds of the Elizabethan patron-builders, at various levels of consciousness. New ideas meet with, and in turn are shaped by, an education in which rhetoric has played a significant role.
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, tr. Winch, P. (Oxford, 1980), p. 22.Google Scholar
2 Carruthers, Mary, ‘Introduction’ in Rhetoric beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, ed. Carruthers, Mary (Cambridge, 2010), p. 4 Google Scholar. In the extensive literature on rhetoric and architecture, the following have been especially useful: van Eck, Caroline, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar, also van Eck, Caroline, ‘Architecture, Language, and Rhetoric in Alberti's De re aedificatoria ’, in Architecture and Language, ed. Clarke, Georgia and Crossley, Paul (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 72–81 Google Scholar; Payne, Alina A., The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999)Google Scholar; Onians, John, The Bearers of Meaning (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; Callebat, Louis, ‘Rhétorique et architecture dans le “De Architectura” de Vitruve’, in Le Projet de Vitruve: objet, destinataires et réception du ‘De Architectura’ (Rome, 1994), pp. 31–46 Google Scholar; Markham, Thomas A. and Cameron, Deborah, The Words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language (London, 2002).Google Scholar
3 Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, part 4; Ploeg, Sophie, ‘Staged Experiences: Architecture and Rhetoric in the Work of Sir Henry Wotton, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanburgh’ (doctoral thesis, Netherlands: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, 2006)Google Scholar; McDonald, Russ, ‘Compar or Parison: Measure for Measure’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Adamson, Sylvia and others (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 39–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On rhetoric in relation to Burghley's retirement, see James Sutton, M. in Patronage, Culture and Power: the Early Cecils, ed. Croft, Pauline (London, 2002), pp. 159–79 (p.163).Google Scholar
4 Girouard, Mark, Elizabethan Architecture (New Haven and London, 2009), p. xix.Google Scholar
5 Vickers, Brian, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Skinner, Quentin and others, general editor, Schmitt, Charles (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 715–45 (p. 715).Google Scholar
6 However, Girouard notes Robert Cecil's hour-long meetings with his surveyor, William Arnold, on the remodelling of Cranborne Manor, Dorset, probably from 1605 onwards (Elizabethan Architecture, p. 400). Roger Ascham, perhaps following the example of Castiglione's Il cortegiano [1531], introduces his Scholemaster (published 1570) as a debate about education at a dinner party. The gathering included several patron-builders, William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, builder of Hill Hall, and Lord Petre, builder of Ingatestone Hall in Essex. As a compliment to his guests, Ascham presents his book as ‘but a small cottage’ compared with grander buildings. While this is a trope, it suggests how the topic of building must have been near the surface of their minds.
7 For accounts of rhetoric, see, for example, Vickers, Brian, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar and, for the English scene, Mack, Peter, Elizabethan Rhetoric (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A convenient guide to the terms is Lanham's, Richard A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1991).Google Scholar
8 Rainolds, John, Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric, ed. and tr. Green, Lawrence D. (London and Toronto, 1986), p. 221.Google Scholar
9 See Mack, Peter, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 208–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Mulcaster, Richard, Positions Concerning the Training up of Children, ed. Barker, William (Toronto, 1994), p. 266.Google Scholar
11 A useful account of these and other rhetoric textbooks is to be found in Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, ch. 2. It is also likely that an individual such as Burghley was acquainted with the discussion of rhetoric in St Augustine of Hippo's De doctrina Christiana, Bk 4, with its emphasis on how style can produce delight in the receiver.
12 De officiis, I, xxxix, 139 Google Scholar. On the passage, see, for example, Onians, , Bearers of Meaning, p. 153 Google Scholar; and Husselby, Jill, ‘The Politics of Pleasure’, in Patronage, Culture and Power, pp. 21–45.Google Scholar
13 Cicero, , Orator, XI, ed. Hubbell, H.M. (London, 1939), p. 313.Google Scholar
14 Baldwin's, T.W. William Shakespere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana, 1890)Google Scholar is still invaluable here. The introduction to Renaissance Figures of Speech, pp. 1-3, cogently summarizes rhetoric's importance in Elizabethan culture.
15 Vickers, , ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, p. 741.Google Scholar
16 Hartshorne, E.S., Memorials of Holdenby (London, 1868), p. 15 Google Scholar quoting British Museum (now British Library), Add. MS 15,891, f. 32.
17 On delectare in rhetoric, see Lausberg, Heinrich, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, tr. Bliss, Matthew T. and others, ed. Orton, David E. and Dean Anderson, R. (Leiden, 1998), para. 257.2, 2.Google Scholar
18 Camden, William, Britain, tr. Holland, Philemon (London, 1610), p. 594 Google Scholar. On Corbet and his castle, see Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, pp. 138, 197–99, especially pp. 197-98Google Scholar, where he comments on the Elizabethan character of its style.
19 Camden, William, Britannia (London, 1607), p. 450 Google Scholar, uses the phrase ‘Architecturae studio'.
20 From the start of Alberti's De re aedificatoria, delight is important, but the origin of these English phrases is rhetoric's brief ‘to delight’ and ‘to move’.
21 Rainolds, , Oxford Lectures, p. 157 Google Scholar. Paul Raffield observes that the English manuals of rhetoric do not refer to the Aristotelian connection between rhetoric and justice, but that this was understandable as such handbooks were intended simply for the acquisition of technical skills in oratory. (‘The Inner Temple Revels (1561–62) and the Elizabethan Rhetoric of Signs: Legal Iconography at the Early Modern Inns of Court’, in The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court, ed. Archer, Jayne Elisabeth and others (Manchester, 2011), pp. 32–50 (p. 37)Google Scholar).
22 Quintilian, , Institutio Oratoria, ed. and tr. Russell, Donald A. (London, 2001), vol. 5, XII, 1, p. 197.Google Scholar
23 Cicero, , Brutus, XXIII, tr. Hendrickson, G.L. (London, 1939), p. 35 Google Scholar; quoted by Rainolds, at the start of his Oxford Lectures, p. 95.Google Scholar
24 Vickers, , ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, p. 743 Google Scholar. On eloquence in the period, see Rhodes, Neil, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (London, 1992)Google Scholar, and the opening pages of Wilson, F.P., Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford, 1945).Google Scholar
25 ‘Powre above powres, O heavenly Eloquence, / […] Shall we not offer to thy excellence / The richest treasure that our wit affoords?’ wrote Samuel Daniel (‘Musophilus’, late 1590s, in Poems and a Defence of Ryme, ed. Sprague, A.C. (London, 1965), p. 96 Google Scholar).
26 Camden, , Britain, tr. Holland, , p. 408 Google Scholar, perhaps following Harvey, Gabriel in Gratulationium Valdinensium Libri Quatuor (London, 1578)Google Scholar, in his eulogy of William Cecil.
27 Burghley's belief in the importance of eloquence comes through in his letter of 1578 to his charge, SirHarington, John, in Nugae Antiquae (London, 1792), II, pp. 282–86Google Scholar (quoted by Wilson, , Elizabethan and Jacobean, p. 5 Google Scholar). Ascham's correspondence with the German educator, Johannes Sturm, brings out the importance of eloquence as a guiding light: see The Letters of Roger Ascham, tr. Hatch, Maurice and Vos, Alvin (New York, 1989).Google Scholar
28 Peacham, Henry, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577)Google Scholar, sig. A2r.
29 Banister, John, The Historie of Man (London, 1578)Google Scholar, sig. Aiiv. Quoted by Friedman, Alice T., House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (London, 1989), pp. 37, 19 Google Scholar. The Willoughby papers are currently inaccessible due to the need for conservation.
30 For a recent account of these, and their continental sources, see Mack, , Elizabethan Rhetoric, pp. 76–102.Google Scholar
31 Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorike, for the use of all sutche as are studious of eloquence (London, 1553)Google Scholar; Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie 1589 (Menston, 1968).Google Scholar
32 British Library, MS Add. 39,830, f. 199r; Barker, Nicolas and Quentin, David, The Library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell (London, 2006), p. 381 Google Scholar, item 1475, misattributed to Richard Puttenham.
33 Puttenham's 1576 booklists in Hants Record Office have been researched by Willis, Charles, Shakespeare and George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (St Leonards-on-Sea, 2003), and on p. 172 Google Scholar he reproduces the page with the Vitruvius entries. One copy is folio, in Italian, the other is in Latin. Whigham, Frank and Rebhorn, Wayne A., The Art of English Poesy by George Puttenham (London, 2007), p. 370 Google Scholar, n. 83, note that Puttenham takes the story of Dinocrates from Vitruvius, II, Prefaces, 5–7.
34 R.D., , Hypnerotomachia. The Strife of Love in a Dreame (London, 1592).Google Scholar
35 Daniel, Samuel, The Complaynt of Rosamond (London, 1592)Google Scholar. This borrowing was first noted by Saxl, Fritz and Wittkower, Rudolf, British Art and the Mediterranean (Oxford, 1948), pp. 41–42.Google Scholar
36 See Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, tr. Godwin, Joscelyn (London, 1999)Google Scholar. Christy Anderson, ‘Learning to Read Architecture in the English Renaissance’ is perceptive on the eloquence-inspiring wonder of this work, both in the original and ‘with even greater force’ in the English part translation (in Gent, Lucy, ed., Albion's Classicism (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 265, 267Google Scholar).
37 Vitruvius, De architectura, III, 1.Google Scholar
38 Vitruvius, De architectura, I, 2.Google Scholar
39 Alberti, Leon Battista, De re aedificatoria (Florence, 1485).Google Scholar
40 Onians, Bearers of Meaning, ch. 10. See also Van Eck, ‘Language, Architecture, and Rhetoric’.
41 William Turner, the botanist, said that he learnt his subject partly by experience, partly ‘by conferring with the best learned men that I could find’ and partly from reading the best books on the topic. (Quoted in Bartlett, Kenneth R., The English in Italy 1525–1558 (Geneva, 1991), p. 211.Google Scholar) The same would have been true of the Englishman keen to build.
42 See Gent, Lucy, Picture and Poetry (Leamington Spa, 1981)Google Scholar, Appendix. Other copies have been since been discovered, in booklists and/or libraries.
43 For example, Cicero, writes that adherents of the Stoic school ‘work by rule and system and are fairly architects in the use of words’ (Brutus, CXVIII, p. 107).Google Scholar
44 Pollio, Vitruvius, I dieci libri dell'architectura, ed. and with a commentary by Barbaro, Daniele (Venice, 1556)Google Scholar; Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura libri decem, ed. and with a commentary by Daniele Barbaro, also Vitruvius Pollio, I diece libri dell'architettura, ed. and with a commentary by Barbaro, Daniele (both Venice, 1567).Google Scholar
45 Owners: John Dee (copy in Chetham's Library, Manchester), Sir Thomas Tresham, Ben Jonson (copy in Boston Public Library), Richard Mulcaster, Sir Thomas Knyvett, William Paget, Lucy Countess of Bedford, Arundel (the copy given him by Northumberland, now in the Royal Society Library), Bodleian Library (copy given by Henry Stanford: see A. Marr, ‘“Curious and Useful Buildings”: the Mathematical Model of SirEdmondes', Clement, Bodleian Library Record (2004), pp. 108–50 (p. 130)Google Scholar, Sir Francis Willoughby (probably owned two copies), Inigo Jones (copy at Chatsworth). Of Puttenham's two editions, one was Latin, in quarto, and so could have been Barbaro's. A copy belonging to an unidentified early owner is in Cambridge University Library, Ff. 2. 28 (Fig. 3).
46 An entry for a Privy Council meeting of 12 February 1550/51 (which Somerset attended) reports a gift of 600 demi souveraignes to be given to Barbaro, as a gift from the king (Acts of the Privy Council, vol. 3 (1550–52). (Information from Elizabeth Goldring.)
47 Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, V, 1534–54 (London, 1873), pp. 338–62.Google Scholar
48 Barbaro, , I dieci libri 1556, p. 274 Google Scholar. See Laven, P. J., ‘Daniel Barbaro’ (doctoral thesis, University of London, 1957), p. 179.Google Scholar
49 Bess of Hardwick and Robert Cecil both illustrate, in different ways, how keen the patron-builder was to do so. See Girouard, , Elizabethan Architecture, pp. 388 and 54.Google Scholar
50 See The Letters of Roger Ascham, p. 159 Google Scholar. Barbaro's, Rhetoricorum Aristotelis libri tres, interprete Hermolao Barbaro (Venice, 1544)Google Scholar is a commentary on his great-uncle Ermolao's Latin translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
51 Hatfield House archives, 1568 booklist, f. 5V.
52 Barbaro, Daniele, Delia eloquenza (Venice, 1557)Google Scholar. In this work he makes a link between rhetoric and architecture, on the basis of an Aristotelian concept, arrived at from his years in Padua, in which architecture is considered as a mental activity comparable to that involved in rhetoric. Both are concerned with contingent truths. See Van Eck, , Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts, p. 38.Google Scholar
53 The passage occurs at the end of Vitruvius, I, 2, 9, in Barbaro, , I died libri, p. 36 Google Scholar: ‘Come le maniere del parlare, che si chiamono idee, sono qualità dell'oratione conveniente alle cose, & alle persone, cosi le maniere de gli edificii sono qualità dell'arte conveniente alle cose, & alle persone. & si come à formare e una idea dell'oratione otto cose sono necessarie, cioè la sentenza, che è lo intendimento dell'huomo; lo artificio, col quale come con certo instrumento si leva il concetto; le parole che esprimono i concetti; la compositione di quelle, con i colori, & figure; il movimento delle parti, che numero si chiama; & la chiusa & il fine della compositione: cosi per ispedire una maniera delle arti, sei cose [sic] sono necessarie’. (Translations of Barbaro by Lauro Martinez.)
54 Ibid., p. 36.
55 Ibid., p. 115: ‘oltra che nell’ Architettura egli si deve avvertire, che l'occhio habbia la parte sua, & con la varietà de gli aspetti secondo le figure, & forme diverse de i Tempii si dia diletto, veneratione, & autorità alle opere. & si come la oratione ha forme, & idee diverse per satisfare alle orecchie, cosi habbia 1'Architettura gli aspetti, & forme sue per satisfar a gli occhi’.
56 Ibid., p. 115: ‘le parole, le figure, la compositione delle parole, i numeri, le membra, & le chiuse […] le proportioni, i compartimenti le differenze de gli aspetti, i numeri, & la collocatione delle parti’.
57 British Library, MS Add. 39,830, f. 164V (Barker, Library of Thomas Tresham, p. 428, item 1845).
58 That Tresham read his copy of Barbaro's commentary is suggested by the following, which also helps explain why Tresham chose to make the Lodge triangular: in commenting on Vitruvius, De archiiectura, I, 1, 16, Barbaro not only explained why the square, the triangle, and the hexagon had an especial virtue that linked them, ultimately, to the influence of the stars; he also supplied diagrams ( Barbaro, , I Dieci Libri (1567), p. 24 Google Scholar). The other two shapes also appear prominently in the Lodge. This passage and the diagrams would have made the use of an equilateral triangle compelling — it clinched the felicitous puns on Tresham and Trinity.
59 See Girouard, Mark, Rushton Triangular Lodge (London, 2004), pp. 14–15.Google Scholar
60 Girouard, , Elizabethan Architecture, p. 237.Google Scholar
61 Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, Vitruvius Pollio, I Dieci Libri dell'Architettura, p. 115.
62 On the tradition of comparing verbal and material structures, in relation to the Elizabethans, see McDonald, ‘Compar or Parison’.
63 Eco, Umberto, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1986)Google Scholar, ch. III, ‘The Aesthetics of Proportion’, pp. 28–42.
64 Hawes, Stephen, The History of graund Amoure and la bel Pucell, called the Pastime of pleasure, conteyning the knowledge of the seven sciences, and the course of mans lyfe in this worlde (London, 1555)Google Scholar. This popular work was composed 1505–06, first published in 1509, and there were several editions to 1555.
65 Hawes, Stephen, The Pastime of Pleasure, 1555, ch. VIII (Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages (London, 1846), vol. XVIII, p. 30 Google Scholar). Quoted by Parker, Patricia in Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), p. 114.Google Scholar
66 See Girouard, , Elizabethan Architecture, p. 18.Google Scholar
67 Husselby, Jill demonstrates this in convincing detail in ‘The Politics of Pleasure’, in Patronage, Culture and Power, pp. 33–38 Google Scholar. On the symbolic importance of thresholds and gateways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Stevenson, Christine, The City and the King (New Haven, 2013), pp. 64–72.Google Scholar
68 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, vol. 3, VII, Prooemium I, ed. Russell, III, p. 151.
69 It appears, adapted into a compliment to Sir Francis Willoughby's building of Wollaton Hall, in Dr John Banister's Historie of Man (London, 1578), sig. Aiv verso, and was also adapted by Francis Bacon (quoted by Anderson, Christy, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 93 Google Scholar and 242, n. 15).
70 Ascham, Roger, The Scholemaster (London, 1570).Google Scholar
71 Ascham, , The Scholemaster (Menston, 1967), p. 52V.Google Scholar
72 There is an echo of this rendering of Quintilian when Henry Wotton writes that the architect's ‘truest ambition should be to make the Forme (which is the nobler Part (as it were) triumph over the Matter’ ( The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), pp. 10–11 Google ScholarPubMed). Some Elizabethan patron-builders, at least, as well as Wotton's architect, should be given credit for thinking about ‘Forme’.
73 Ploeg, , ‘Staged Experiences’, pp. 51–55.Google Scholar
74 Shakespeare, William, Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii. 407 Google Scholar (in The Complete Works, ed. Craig, W.J. (Oxford, 1905, reprint of 1955Google Scholar). In decrying such art, Berowne shows off his love of it.
75 Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Hoby, Thomas [1561] (London, 1956), p. 59 Google Scholar. For recent discussion of figures, see Renaissance Figures of Speech, pp. 6–8.Google Scholar
76 Puttenham, , Arte, p. 219.Google Scholar
77 Elizabethan ornament in architecture is a complex subject. It is also related to Serlio's discussion of ornament, Wenderlich Dietterlin's books of illustrations, and knowledge of Netherlandish buildings, nearer at hand and more likely to be seen than examples from southern Europe.
78 The editors of Renaissance Figures of Speech observe that ‘the theory of the figures is built on shifting sands’ (p. 6).
79 Quintilian, , Institutio oratoria, vol. 3, VIII, 3, 12; ed. Russell, III, p. 347 Google Scholar. His helpful discussion of metaphor, VIII, 6, 4–18, would have been known to the patron-builders. Puttenham has much to say on metaphor in his Arte, III, xvi, pp. 148–50.
80 He clearly distinguishes energia from the similar sounding enargeia.
81 Puttenham, , Arte, III, iii, p. 119.Google Scholar
82 Vickers, , ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, p. 743.Google Scholar
83 Wilson, Thomas, Arte of Rhetorique, 1560, ed. Mair, G.H. (Oxford, 1909), p. 176.Google Scholar
84 Edmund Spenser's 1.61 of ‘Januarye’ of The Shepheardes Calender [1579] ( The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Smith, J.C. and de Selincourt, E. (Oxford, 1912), p. 423 Google Scholar) was praised for its verbal play (in the notes by the anonymous E.K.).
85 Carruthers, , Rhetoric Beyond Words, p. 4.Google Scholar
86 Spenser, Edmund, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579).Google Scholar
87 Kuin, R.J.P., Robert Laneham (Leiden, 1983), p. 69 Google Scholar. (‘Laneham’ is usually known as Langham today.) On Kenilworth, see Morris, Richard K., ‘“I was never more in love with an olde howse nor never newe worke coulde be better bestowed’: The Earl of Leicester's Remodelling of Kenilworth Castle for Queen Elizabeth I’, The Antiquaries Journal, 89 (2009), pp. 241–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
88 Wotton, , Elements of Architecture, p. 119.Google Scholar
89 Annotation on Barbaro, I died libri 1567, pp. 34, 35Google Scholar. Hart, Vaughan and Tucker, Richard, ‘“Immaginacy set free”: Aristotelian ethics and Inigo Jones's Banquetinge House at Whitehall’, Res, 39 (Spring 2001), p. 151 Google Scholar, show how Jones moves towards an understanding of decorum that meets with Classicism's approval.
90 On translations of decorum in the architectural treatises, see Payne, , Architectural Treatise, pp. 56–57 Google Scholar. She notes that ‘the aesthetic component of the theory of decorum was not lost on Vitruvius's readers’. For a discussion of decorum in Vitruvius, see Jones, Mark Wilson, Principles of Roman Architecture (New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 43–44.Google Scholar
91 Husselby, , ‘Politics of Pleasure’, p. 21.Google Scholar
92 Information from Elizabeth Goldring.
93 Grimald, Nicholas, Marcus Tullius Ciceroes Three Bookes of Duties (London, 1556 and later editions).Google Scholar
94 Ascham, Roger, Toxophilus, the Schole of shootinge, conteyned in two bookes (London, 1545).Google Scholar
95 Greene, Thomas M., ‘The Perfect End of Shooting’, English Literary History, 36 (1969), p. 621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
96 Grimald, , Three Bookes, f. 39V, translating De officiis, I, 98, tr. Miller, Walter (London, 1913), p. 100 Google Scholar: ‘Ut enim pulchritudo corporis apta compositione membrorum movet oculos et delectat hoc ipso, quod inter se omnes partes cum quodam lepore consentiunt, sic hoc decorum, quod elucet in vita, movet approbationem eorum.’
97 Puttenham, , Arte, III, xxiiii, p. 231.Google Scholar
98 Ibid., p. 219. Had Puttenham been reading Cicero on how the orator must make careful and attractive approaches to his oration ( Orator, L, 50, ed. Hubbell, , p. 343 Google Scholar)?
99 See Hart, and Tucker, , “‘Immaginacy set free”’, p. 151.Google Scholar
100 Hartshorne, , Memorials, p. 15.Google Scholar
101 But it is a problematic concept in that while supposedly coming from nature, it actually becomes an art. See Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Parker, Patricia and Quint, David (London, 1986)Google Scholar, especially the essay by Attridge, Derek, ‘Puttenham's Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory’, pp. 257–79Google Scholar, and that by Kahn, Victoria, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’, pp. 373–96Google Scholar. In Hamlet, appropriateness whether in the guise of fit behaviour, fashion or morality is tested and found wanting: it is mostly trivial, mendacious or poses an insoluble problem.
102 Cicero, , Orator, L, 50; ed. Hubbell, , p. 342 Google Scholar: ‘Vestibula nimirum honesta aditusque ad causam faciet illustris’. The cross-reference of ‘vestibulum’ to Pindar's ‘prothuron’, porch, is provided by the Loeb editor. For a guide to metaphor in rhetoric, see Lausberg, , Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, pp. 250–56.Google Scholar
103 As Dundas, Judith says of the Renaissance reader, in Sidney and Junius on Poetry and Painting (Newark, 2007), p. 217.Google Scholar
104 Pindar, , Olympian Odes, Pythian Odes, ed. and tr. Race, William H. (London, 1997), p. 103 Google Scholar. Ronsard — well known in England, with a long passage on his odes in Puttenham's Arte — drew on this ode in one of his own dedicated to François I's love of architecture ( McGowan, Margaret, Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (London, 1985), pp. 130–31Google Scholar). Pindar's ode is dedicated to the winner of the mule race. Burleigh enjoyed wit, and when he had himself shown riding on his mule (Bodleian, Proscholeum), he probably was thinking not only of commemorating the fact he rode around on a mule given him by the French ambassador — a nice oblique compliment to the French donor - but of a comparison with great rulers shown riding splendid horses: it would be indecorous to compete with princely magnificence, but not every race is to the swift — his works, including buildings, are memorials enough.
105 The conceit is also used in Guillim, John, A Display of Heraldrie (London, 1610)Google Scholar, sig. (a)2r.
106 Sidney, , Apologie, p. 118.Google Scholar
107 Hartshorne, E.S., Memorials of Holdenby, p. 15.Google Scholar
108 Puttenham, , Arte, III, vii, p. 128 Google Scholar; also pp. 132, 148, 220. The view came from all quarters. Castiglione even said that figures of speech are (in Hoby's translation) ‘the abuse of Grammer rules’ (Book of the Courtier, p. 59).
109 Any weight carried by the columns is that of symbol, since the little castle caps indicate the house of Cecil, a bogus aristocratic ancestry claimed by William Cecil.
110 Puttenham, , Arte, III, xix, p. 201.Google Scholar
111 Ibid., III, xix, p. 193. For further examples of such parapets, see Girouard, , Elizabethan Architecture, p. 218.Google Scholar
112 Ibid., III, xix, p. 205.
113 Ibid., III, xviii, p. 155.
114 On glass in Elizabethan houses, see Girouard, , Elizabethan Architecture, pp. 256–98.Google Scholar
115 Cicero, , Orator, CXXXIV, 134 Google Scholar; ed. Hubbell, p. 407.
116 Kuin, , Robert Laneham, p. 69.Google Scholar
117 Puttenham, , Arte, III, xix, p. 189 Google Scholar. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique, classifies it as a trope, a figure in which a word undergoes a change of sense.
118 Puttenham, , Arte, III, iii, p. 119.Google Scholar
119 Pevsner, Nikolaus, The Buildings of England: Northamptonshire (Harmondsworth, 1961), 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 281–82.Google Scholar
120 Girouard, , Elizabethan Architecture, p. 189 and pp. 312–16.Google Scholar
121 Puttenham, , Arte, III, xx, pp. 206–07Google Scholar. Cf. also Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, under expolitio, sig. P4V. Websites for exergasia are numerous and helpful.
122 [Pseudo-Cicero], [Rhetorical Ad Herennium, tr. and ed. Harry Caplan (London, 1954), IV, xlii, 54, p. 365.
123 Sidney's phrase, in Apologie, p. 118.
124 Hersey, George L., Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (London, 2000), p. 101.Google Scholar
125 Junius, Franciscus, The Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638), III, 2, p. 256.Google Scholar
126 For today's interpretation of simmetria, see Vitruvius: Ten Books of Architecture, tr. Rowland, Ingrid (Cambridge, 1999), p. 150 Google Scholar, and Jones, Wilson, Principles of Roman Architecture, pp. 40–43.Google Scholar
127 Legh, Peter, The Music of the Eye, Or, Essays On the Principles Of the Beauty and Perfection Of Architecture (London, 1831)Google Scholar — perhaps adapted from Junius, , Painting of the Ancients, p. 82 Google Scholar: viewing good pictures offers ‘a most sweet Musick to the eye’.
128 Van Eck, , British Architectural Theory, p. 13.Google Scholar
129 Shute, John, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (London, 1563).Google Scholar
130 An exception is Hart, Vaughan, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts (London, 1994), p. 211 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, n. 13, citing many usages of ‘symmetry’, but he chooses not to follow through the implications for the period pre–1600.
131 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Ff. 2. 28, p. 20. He is trying to understand it in relation to eurythmia.
132 A third example occurs when Robert Stickells writes to Sir Thomas Tresham that he has ‘mayde them [the measurements of a drawing he is sending?] by the Simetry or mean agreinge withe the Doric Architrave frees [frieze] and corniche’ ( Van Eck, , British Architectural Theory, p. 19 Google Scholar): bi-lateral likeness cannot be what he means.
133 OED, Symmetry, 3b gives 1823 as the first use of symmetry strictly in this sense. Hon, Giora and Goldstein, Bernard R., From Summetria to Symmetry: the Making of a Revolutionary Concept (New York, 2008) conclude, p. 113 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, that though the precept can be found in Alberti, nonetheless ‘prior to the mid-eighteenth century the term, symmetry, does not occur in any of its modern senses’.
134 Alberti, L.B., On the Art of Building in Ten Books, tr. Rykwert, Joseph and others (London, 1988), I, p. 29 Google Scholar. See also On the Art of Building, IX, p. 310 Google Scholar, on the importance of twinning.
135 St Augustine, , De Ordine, tr. Borruso, S. (South Bend, Indiana, 2007)Google Scholar, II, Second Debate, 11.34, pp. 97 and 96: ‘Unde ipsi architecti iam suo verbo rationem istam vocant et partes discorditer collocatos dicunt non habere rationem’. (For its quotation concerning the Escorial, see Kubler, George, Building the Escorial (London, 1982), ch. 10Google Scholar; and Anderson, Christy, Renaissance Architecture (Oxford, 2013), p. 96.Google Scholar) On the centrality of St Augustine to the Elizabethan culture of learning, see Wilson, , Elizabethan and Jacobean, pp. 5–7 and 15–16.Google Scholar
136 Du Cerceau, Jacques Androuet, Le premier volume des plus excellents bastiments de France (Paris, 1576).Google Scholar
137 Norden, John, Speculi Britanniae Pars Altera: Or, A Delineation of Northamptonshire (London, 1720).Google Scholar
138 Norden, , Speculi Britanniae, p. 50 Google Scholar. See also George Chaworth, 1607, describing the Earl of Dunbar's house at Berwick: the building has ‘that uniforme proportion everye waye generally, as wold stodye a good architector to describe’ ( Girouard, Mark, Robert Smythson (London, 1966), p. 34 Google Scholar). Mildmay Fane in ‘Thorp Palace: a Miracle’ says the palace's ‘uniformity’ sits in triumph over the statues (in Fowler, Alastair, The Country House Poem (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 221 Google Scholar). This ‘palace’, Longthorpe Hall, built 1653–56, is certainly the picture of bilateral symmetry. The OED under ‘uniform’, 4, cites Thomas, William, 1549, in his History of Italy, 207 Google Scholar: ‘buildynges on bothe sides so fayre and uniforme’.
139 Wotton, , Elements of Architecture, pp. 20–21 Google Scholar. Quoted by McDonald, , ‘Compar or Parison’, p. 42 Google Scholar. The comparison made by doctors between the human body and a building, and found in Banister, Historie of Man, derives from antiquity.
140 Haydocke, Richard, A Trade Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (Oxford, 1598).Google Scholar
141 Haydocke, , in Van Eck, , British Architectural Theory, p. 23 Google Scholar; ‘correspondencie and agreement’ translates. Lomazzo's ‘consonanza e rispondenza’, and ‘commodulation’ and ‘modell’ translate ‘commodulazione’ and ‘modulo’ (Trattato dell'arte (Milan, 1584), p. 35).
142 Hilliard, , The Arte of Limning, ed. Thornton, R.K.R. and Cain, T.G.S. (Manchester, 1981), p. 71 ff.Google Scholar
143 Strife of Love, p. 22r. R.D. also uses the term on p. 24V.
144 Van Eck, , British Architectural Theory, p. 23 Google Scholar. Lomazzo, wrote ‘la proportione, & misura de le parti con ragione nomerate, & comprese’ (Trattato, p. 35).Google Scholar
145 Hilliard, , Arte of Limning, p. 99.Google Scholar ( Dundas, , Sidney and Junius, notes this view pp. 162–63.Google Scholar)
146 Ibid., pp. 83, 99.
147 Van Eck, , British Architectural Theory, p. 183.Google Scholar
148 For example, Barbaro, , I died libri 1567, p. 29 Google Scholar: ‘a conviniencie [agreement] or mesure […] betweene the part & the whole’; and Vitruvius here ‘expresses him selfe for order and simmitri’.
149 Cited by McDonald, , ‘Compar or Parison’, pp. 42–43.Google Scholar
150 Drayton, Michael, ‘Peirs Gaveston’, 1. 158 Google Scholar, in Works, ed. William Hebel, J. (Oxford, 1931), vol. 1, p. 163.Google Scholar
151 And indeed OED, symmetry 3a, says ‘harmonious working of the bodily functions’.
152 Puttenham, , Arte, III, xxiii, p. 219 Google Scholar. From whatever source, he is referring basically to the Canon of Polyclitus, which Junius, , Painting of the Ancients, III, 2, 6Google Scholar, deals with at some length. Herbert's, George use of ‘symmetrie’ in his poem ‘Man’ in The Temple (The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Patrides, C.A. (London, 1974), p. 106)Google Scholar also comes from this tradition.
153 Daniel, , Poems, p. 132.Google Scholar
154 Guillim, John, A Displaye of Heraldrie (London, 1610).Google Scholar
155 Guillim, Heraldrie, sig. (b)3r. Puttenham writing of ‘Proportion in figure’ speaks of ‘your meeters being by good symmetrie reduced into certaine Geometricall figures’ (Arte, p. 75) — he cannot be understanding symmetry in terms of commodulation.
156 On the importance of number, see Tafuri, Manfredo, Venice and the Renaissance (London, 1989), pp. 124–25.Google Scholar
157 Hartshorne, , Memorials of Holdenby, p. 15.Google Scholar
158 Summerson, John, Architecture in Britain 1530 to 1830 (Harmondsworth, 1953; paperback reprint of 1970, based on 5th rev. edn), p. 75.Google Scholar
159 Mercer, Eric, English Art 1553–1625 (Oxford, 1963), p. 39 Google Scholar; Pevsner, , Buildings of England: Northamptonshire, p. 281.Google Scholar
160 This echoes St Augustine on the virtues of agreement between elements on both sides (De Ordine, pp. 97 and 96). Russ McDonald observes that Burghley is using the figure of parison (‘Compar or Parison’, p. 53).
161 See Anderson, Inigo Jones, ch. 6.
162 Inigo Jones, annotation in his copy (at Chatsworth) of Barbaro, , I died libri 1567, p. 128 Google Scholar.
163 Puttenham does so at the start of Bk II, on proportion. The mathematician Robert Recorde in his popular The Grounde of Artes (London, edition of 1561), sets before his text Wisdom, 11, 21: ‘Thou O God hast ordred all thinges in Measure Number & Weight’.
164 This is discussed by Anderson, , Inigo Jones, pp. 130–64Google Scholar. Junius, , Painting of the Ancients, III, 2 Google Scholar, provides a near-contemporary account of the question of number in aesthetics. 136
165 Quoted by Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing (London, 1983), p. 223.Google Scholar
166 Grimald, Two Bookes, f. 6v, translating Cicero, De Officiis, I, 14: ‘Itaque eorum ipsorum, quae aspectu sentiuntur, nullum aliud animal pulchritudinem, venustatem, convenientiam partium sentit; quam similitudinem natura ratioque ab oculis ad animum transferens multo etiam magis pulchritudinem, constantiam, ordinem in consiliis factisque conservandam putat’.
167 Quoted from Junius, , Painting of the Ancients, I, iv, p. 47 Google Scholar, whose translation I use because it brings us close to the language and the thinking of the Elizabethans.
168 Camden, William, tr. Holland, Philemon, Britain (London, 1610).Google Scholar
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171 Wotton, , Elements of Architecture, p. 12.Google Scholar
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174 Puttenham, , Arte, III, i, p. 114.Google Scholar
175 As late as 1951 Nikolaus Pevsner in a perhaps playful phrase echoed Walpole when he (Pevsner) wrote that the gorgeous external wall of Launceton's sixteenth-century chapel was ‘decorated with barbarous profuseness’ ( Buildings of England: Cornwall (Harmondsworth, 1951; 2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 96).Google ScholarPubMed
176 Bacon, Francis, Essays (Oxford, 1902, reprint of 1955).Google Scholar
177 Bacon, , Essays, p. 181 Google Scholar. It is interesting that architecture is connected with rhetoric in Bacon's mind, for as he turns to the house itself (p. 182), he cites Cicero's works on oratory.
178 Jonson, Ben, ‘To Penshurst’, written before 1612, Complete Poems, ed. Parfitt, George (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 95.Google Scholar
179 The introduction to Robert Peake's translation of Serlio is an example of the disparagement of Elizabethan building. John Evelyn can be observed switching tastes. And somehow to read Hawksmoor describing Dietterlin as ‘a fantasticall painter’ who ‘put the whole disposition of Ancient building into Masquarade’ (quoted in Guerci, Manolo, ‘The Construction of Northumberland House and the Patronage of its original builder, Lord Henry Howard, 1603–14’, Antiquaries Journal, 90 (2010), pp. 341–400 (p. 383)CrossRefGoogle Scholar) counts against the Elizabethan buildings, often coloured by Dietterlinesque detail. Horace Walpole's dismissive remarks about an ill-informed taste that enjoyed richly decorated stone reliefs, instead of intellectually guided ornament, fed into the canons of a developing history of architecture.
180 Donne, John, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Hayward, J. (London, 1962), p. 730,29 February 1627/8.Google Scholar
181 Donne, , Complete Poetry, p. 615 Google Scholar — but this is a bit of a joke, since when does he not employ his rhetorical skills? On the decline in rhetoric's status, see Haldar, P., ‘The Function of the Ornament’, in Law and the Image, ed. Douzinas, Costas and Nead, Linda (London, 1999), pp. 117–36.Google Scholar
182 Shakespeare, William, Loves Labours Lost, I. i. 112–13.Google Scholar
183 As Wren was also to observe in Tract II: Wren's ‘Tracts’ on Architecture and Other Writings, ed. Soo, Lydia (Cambridge, 1998), p. 157 Google Scholar, quoted in Ploeg, , ‘Staged Experiences’, p. 210.Google Scholar
184 So the courtiers take Hilliard's side in that, although they are not artists, their eyes have the cunning to recognize a living beauty.
185 British Art History's debt to the Warburg Institute, noted by Gent (‘Introduction’, Albion's Classicism, p. 1 Google ScholarPubMed), is discussed by Anderson, Christy in ‘War Work: English Art and the Warburg Institute’, Common Knowledge, 18:1 (2012), pp. 149–59, especially pp. 158–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Saxl, Fritz and Wittkower, Rudolf, British Art and the Mediterranean (Oxford, 1948).Google Scholar
186 Salerno, Luigi, ‘Seventeenth-century English Literature on Painting’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), pp. 234–58, especially pp. 239–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
187 Rudolf Wittkower, unpublished lecture given at Columbia University, New York, May 1966, published as ‘English Literature on Architecture’ in Wittkower, Rudolf, Palladio and English Palladianism (London, 1974), pp. 95–112 (p. 99).Google Scholar
188 Bacon, , ‘Of Beauty’ [1612], Essays, p. 177.Google Scholar
189 This passage is quoted by Moxey, K., ‘Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Dürer and Grünewald’, in Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Essential Dürer (Philadelphia, 2010), p. 210 Google Scholar. The trajectory of this view is given by Belting, Hans, The Germans and their Art, tr. Kleager, Scott (New Haven and London, 1998), pp. 49–60.Google Scholar
190 Benn, Gottfried, in ‘Art and the Third Reich’ ('Kunst und Drittes Reich’), written in Berlin in 1941 (first published in Ausdruckswelt. Essays und Aphorismen (Wiesbaden, 1949))Google Scholar; English translation in Primal Vision: Selected Writings of G. Benn, tr. Deutsch, B. and others, ed. Ashton, E.B. (London, 1961), p. 99 Google Scholar. Ashton informs us that when, in the late 1940s, Benn was preparing to publish this collection of his essays, he was subject to pleas by friends — ‘lingering or resurgent half- or three-quarters Nazis who had already envisioned Benn as their literary spokesman’ — to ‘curb his “attacks on Germanism,” begged him to delete at least Art and the Third Reich'.
191 There is a momentary point of contact with Mann's, Thomas Dr Faustus [1948], tr. Woods, J.E. (New York, 1999), p. 259 Google Scholar: Mephistopheles challenges the composer Adrian Leverkühn to ‘dare a barbarism, a double barbarism’ in outfacing the civilized heritage — essentially a Classical heritage — and composing atonal music (associated by Mann with the Third Reich).
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