Rite of passage by water
Bruce Boucher
VENICE AND THE GRAND TOUR by Bruce Redford Yale, £20, pp. 137 Bruce Redford's Venice and the Grand Tour celebrates a special relationship of a different kind: the allure of Venice for young Britons in the 18th century and the common strands of mythology linking the Queen of the Adriatic to this country. Venice was an obligatory staging post on the Grand Tour for young milordi who brought home Canaletto's cityscapes and Rosalba Carriera's pastel portraits as tro- phies of their visits during carnival or on Ascension Day. Venetian history, annually re-enacted by the Doge and Signoria, also fascinated British visitors by virtue of its mixed constitution, its anti-clericalism, and its legacy of tolerance.
So far, so conventional, one might say; but Redford gives his material a distinctive gloss by narrowing the definition of the Grand Tourist while emphasising the Venetian state as a serious political model, `both literal and ideological', for the British ruling class. Whereas the Grand Tour is customarily seen as part of the pattern of continental tourism during the period, Redford interprets it specifically as a rite of passage for British patricians between the ages of 16 and 21, invariably accompanied by tutors who would induct them into soci- ety. His argument is patterned upon classic if well-worn anthropological studies by van Detail of a view of Venice by Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638) Gennep and Turner and decked out in fashionable terminology like `spolia' and `sacra'. Though sounding plausible, this tribal interpretation evidently perplexes the author as it is played down later — with good reason, since it excludes major observers of the period, like Walpole and Gibbon, from the ranks of Grand Tourists.
The author makes more substantial claims for an identification by British patri- cians with their Venetian counterparts in the main body of his text. Again, this is superficially attractive as a concept and has occasionally been formulated in terms of Hanoverian monarchs as doges, and Whig grandees as senators dwelling in Palladian palaces; yet even this comparison should be handled carefully, since Venice's republi- can status and lack of a court culture mili- tated against too specific an analogy. Redford, however, pushes the comparison further in his reading of Canaletto's English paintings as bringing 'Venice and London into mysterious relation' or seeing Kent's Temple of Venus at Stowe as con- taining a coded message about Cobham's political creed and debt to Venice. Magari, as the Venetians might say, but these messages seem so deeply embedded in the works discussed as to have passed unremarked by contemporaries.
Here the author might have cast a wider net and paid more attention to chronology. It is true that Venice occupied a serious place in political writings of the 16th and early 17th centuries, but its real and theo- retical importance diminished rapidly thereafter as Hale and Stoye noted long ago. The recital of Venetian shortcomings became de rigueur from John Evelyn's day onwards, and despite conventional encomi- astic tributes everyone knew the game was up, except, that is, the Venetians who still regarded their English and French visitors as culturally inferior. Although Redford refers in passing to 'the Other', Italian opinions are not consulted here. Similar problems beset the reading of Palladian architecture offered in Venice and the Grand Tour. Redford himself concedes that Venetian building types were not 'consis- tent political markers'; instead they were polyvalent and embraced by Whigs and Tories alike. The same could be said of Venetian artists like Pellegrini and Ricci, purveyors of an international rococo style, as much sought after in Mannheim and Paris as here.
It would be wrong to leave the impres- sion that Venice and the Grand Tour does not offer novel insights or discussions of its terrain. When the author sets aside his grander theories, he can be a sensitive observer of portrait conventions and an acute interpreter of poetry. The opening pages on Pope's Dunciad and the closing account of Beckford and Byron are espe- cially illuminating, although they demon- strate that the English always had a shrewd sense of the 'withered power' of St Mark's lion.
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