Grand Tour

In all but name, the grand tour came into being during the sixteenth century as a secular alternative to the ancient but increasingly discredited custom of pilgrimage, the instinct to travel proving too powerful to be suppressed by a mere alteration in religion. This primarily educational phenomenon, involving study of the foreign, including the acquisition of a language or two, rather than the aspiration to reduce one's time in purgatory, thus emerged most noticeably among those northern European nations that rejected Roman Catholicism (though as Petrarch and the Wife of Bath had testified, there was always a secular ingredient in pilgrimage).

Because of renewed emphasis on the commandment against graven images, however, the visual arts in most of these Reformed countries remained in a condition inferior to those of the more religiously conservative Mediterranean region. With the ongoing patronage of both the church and its competing city-states, Italy in particular continued to flourish as the producer of exemplary works of fine and decorative art long after most other aspects of its economy had declined. The longevity of this phenomenon was indeed in large part due to the grand tour phenomenon, northern tourists providing an alternative and expanding market for the widest range of found, improved, or manufactured goods, from the tawdriest souvenir, fake or otherwise, to the masterpieces that still grace Britain's country houses. Where medieval pilgrims of all classes had acquired artifacts ranging from lead tokens to jewel-encrusted gold and crystal reliquaries, the elite travelers of the eighteenth century established rules of taste according to which it was the art and artist, almost regardless of religious significance, that prevailed. Eventually, via an ever-more dominant middle class, this phenomenon filtered down to the secular equivalent of the humbly born medieval pilgrim who emerged with mass tourism.

With grand tour taste increasingly dominated by classical antiquity and its Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment reinterpretations, the gap between the competencies of England and Italy, where visual culture was concerned, set the tone for most of the ca. 1550–1850 period. Classical learning underpinned English appreciation of the antique, but it was not until the French Revolution cut Britain off from the still largely Catholic continent that its contemporary artistic production begin to rival Italy's. After the defeat of Napoleon, the grand tour revived, but its conventions were soon to be replaced by “the grand circular tours” of Europe evolved by Thomas Cook, involving travel by steam ship and train along with new forms of industrial consumption, mass-produced “souvenirs” replacing the pilgrim badges and cheap relics of the Middle Ages.

Meanwhile, the acquisitive role of the elite was increasingly assumed by the state, masterpieces being gathered together in national museums. Directors of the new institutions, such as Charles Eastlake of the National Gallery, were often transitional between the two traditions, having to mediate between the tastes of the privileged and hoi polloi. Even in the later nineteenth century, a degree of anxiety regarding works of art persisted, in part the legacy of the patriotic [Page 689]Protestantism of the early modern period. In 1878, a full-scale, wooden mock-up of an Egyptian obelisk, already known as “Cleopatra's Needle,” was placed outside the Houses of Parliament, but this proposed location was vetoed as symbolically inappropriate, and the original was erected more discretely on the embankment. Few could have known that a quarter of a millennium earlier, the great collector Earl of Arundel had hoped to erect an ancient obelisk in his riverside garden a few hundred yards downstream. Arundel's uninhibited enthusiasm for acquiring a wide variety of works of art may in part have been thanks to his religious background: he was born and raised a Roman Catholic and died one in exile in Italy during the Civil Wars. Though his great art collection, like that of Charles I, was dispersed, his example, not least in allowing interested parties access to his house and gardens, was crucial in the establishment of the British Museum in the following century. The Arundel Society, named after the collector Earl, was created in 1849 at a meeting in Eastlake's house to promote greater knowledge of medieval and Renaissance art and make chromolithographs of the best pictures available to a wider public.

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