Sixteenth-Century Rebirth
Tudor Renaissance. James Lees-Milne. (Batsford. 2 i s.) IN The Age of Adam Mr. James Lees-Milne gave us a study of architecture and decoration during the English High Renaissance, and in his new book he goes back to their crude and tentative origins in the sixteenth century. He would not object to the word " crude " because his attitude to the period is admirably balanced ; he has taken immense pains to see and assess all that is worth- while, and he has found much to admire as genuinely part of the classical tradition and much that is peripheral. The result is a book which was much needed, sines, for the last 50 years, we seem to have treated this period in much trio cavalier a fashion so far as
the visual arts are concerned. With grace and erudition Mr. Lees- Milne now gives the material on which we may make our own individual judgement of the period. The classicists haye tended to see the sixteenth century in England in terms of barbarism made more barbaric by misunderstood excres- cences of Italian origin, while the mediaevalists see only the decadent vestiges of Gothic splendours. Nothing in the visual arts seeming quite good enough,, we were perhaps wise to accept that our Renais- sance at this time was a literary one, that literature was, so to speak, chosen as the means to educate Our national culture—for literature „usually prepares the way for classicism in the other arts. Sophocles comes before Praxiteles, Petrarch before Masaccio, Wyatt and Shakespeare before Inigo Jones and Wren.
This may be taken as an argument against Mr. Lees-Milne's main thesis, that if Henry VIII had not seceded from Rome our culture throughout the century would have been transformed by Italian influences. No doubt if Henry had remained the charming aesthete of the first years of his reign, he would have had his Fontainebleau, have enticed a Primaticcio or a Rosso to create for him a palace of the arts. But it is by no means certain that this injection of the Italian spirit would have been as successful as was that under Francis I, who knew intuitively that it was the French genius to absorb other cultures in order to amplify and enrich its own ; by a magnificent effort of the will he revitalised literature and the arts at the same time. If Rosso and Primaticcio had decorated Nonesuch instead of Fontainebleau, they would have astounded the English but stunned their culture so far as the visual arts were concerned. What might have happened on a large scale is shown by the crudely hideous English version, at Eton, of the portrait of Diane de Poitiers as Sabina Poppaea.
Wasn't it, perhaps, fortunate that our Culture was not forced to undergo this artificial insemination of the Italian Renaissance, that Humanism in the arts trickled into England and took three genera- tions before it burst out into the magnificent euphoria of the .literature of the end of the century ? One finds oneself reluctantly admitting that Spenser's peculiarly English classicism was more beneficial than the sudden, superb Italianism of Wyatt and Surrey earlier in the century. But Mr. Lees-Mil= is certainly right in saying that, if this early Italianism had been allowed to flourish, our national culture would have been very different. What would have happened if Wyatt and his equivalent in architecture, the builder of Longleat, had had a succession of immediate followers ? It is a question fascinating to contemplate. MICHAEL SWAN.
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