Royal Patrimony

Chaucer visited Italy in the 14th century, and Shakespeare patterned numerous plays on Italian scenarios, but it took the Renaissance's archetypical gentleman, Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier, to import the pictorial arts to Britain. A diplomat to Henry VII, he brought as a gift a portrait of St. George by Raphael.

From such a splendid beginning, the British royal collection came to fill six castles and grow into the most valuable private collection in the world. From its 50 Canalettos to its 200 Da Vinci draw ings, the crown's choice is still an unnationalized treasure. The bulk, of which some 172 works are now on public view in Buckingham Palace's Queen's Gallery, bespeaks, above all, the influence of the Italian Renaissance.

For many centuries, royal patronage was an index to British culture. Eliza beth I learned that "the Italians had the name to be the cunningest," but what Italian paintings the crown acquired were largely sold off by Cromwell though the Restoration Stuarts searched to recover them.

German-descended George III may have lost the American colonies, but he brought the greatest royal acquisitions from Italy to England. Through a vendor, Joseph Smith, who wheedled a post as consul to Venice, the King's additions to the royal collection increased by batches of Canaletto. Horace Walpole scorned Smith as "the merchant of Ven ice," but that shrewd gentleman sold his purchases for some $300,000 to the King on the installment plan-with interest. George Ill's wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg requested a sketch of Florence's Uffizi Gallery from a compatriot named Johann Zoffany. The elegant composite result (see opposite page) displeased the Hanoverian monarchs because of the prominence it gave to visiting Englishmen, even though it reproduced more than a dozen masterpieces of Italian art. Later scholars did blow ups of each of the copied paintings and found that the varied brushwork of early masters was imitated with a genius forger's fidelity.

Through the mercenary auspices of such as Consul Smith, and the thousands of Englishmen who discovered Italy on the Grand Tour, the masters of Florence and Venice built the base of British taste. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768 its president was Sir Joshua Reynolds, who canonized the images of Raphael and applied the Renaissance's grand manner to contemporary subject matter. In time, Gainsborough, Benjamin West, Turner and Constable became academicians. Royal patronage had bent the Italian Renaissance to its own visual empire, and the royal collection swelled with homegrown products. Before, Britain had only appreciated great painting; now it excelled at it.

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