Mission Possible: Italian Grand Tour

"Excuse me sir; which way is Leonardo's Statue of David?"

Your mission should you choose to accept it: Travel all around Europe and...eh, that's it. For two hundred years starting in 1660, the mission of young men of means was to tour the classic sites of the Old World and bring back what they learned, but sometimes they found a bit more than they bargained for.

My own European Grand Tour involved run-ins with the police of Denmark, Germany, Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia and had absolutely nothing to do with Art or Culture whatsoever, but that's a story I'm going to keep until we meet sometime for a beer.

Of course, for most people, carousing around and being waited on hand and foot seems like a luxury and, well, it is. The ability to breeze around Europe implies lots of free time and money. The traditional Italian Grand Tour was taken by pretty much everyone of means; aristocrats, intellectuals, the curious and bon vivants alike. Stendhal seemed to speak for a generation of over-indulged rich kids when in 1817 he wrote of his impending voyage: “Outbursts of joy, heart pounding. How crazy I still am at twenty-six! I’m going to see beautiful Italy!” I probably wouldn't have burst into flames like Stendahl, but I do know what he means. Viva Italia!

Antique map of Urbino, home of the famous Palazzo Ducale with it's remarkable intarsia studiolo

Grand Tourists passed through the Alpine wonderland of South Tyrol on their way to Italy

Hippolyte Taine wrote that "Venice is the pearl of Italy. I have seen nothing equal to it."

Grand Tourists were often drawn to Italy by Romantic notions of languorous evenings sketching under crumbling ruins. Pampered toffs from all over Northern Europe wore pot-pourri bags under their armpits and foreswore bathing for months on end to endure such physical hardships as dozing under trees and endless social engagements in Venice or Florence. Poor Rupert must be exhausted.

But while on one level it was all a "larf" to the English, they also took it all very seriously. Almost like doing military service. Young men [I'm not sure if any women were included in this rite of passage] galloped off as cultural spies to bring back all they could glean from the Old World to use as valuable fodder for Empire, King and Country.

Thomas Cole, 'The Course of Empire - Desolation', 1836

British historian E.P. Thompson explains that the Grand Tour of the 17th and 18th Century was a very serious matter: If the British were to maintain control of their Empire they must be seen to be at the forefront culturally, and that meant studying the classics at their source. According to Thompson, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power."

"The primary value of the Grand Tour lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. In addition, it provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music. A grand tour could last from several months to several years" New York Times

Giuseppe Agostino Vasi illustrated St. Peter's Basilica in 1774

18th Century street scenes of Florence and Rome

Rome was, of course, the main destination. Sure there was always Florence, which according to Kenneth Clark, was a "city of hard heads, sharp wits, light feet, graceful movement", but it was still Rome with all it's bustling humanity, "a city that is like a huge compost heap of human hopes and ambitions, despoiled of its ornament, almost indecipherable, a wilderness of imperial splendor", that enticed countless young suitors from England's shores.

An Assassination at the Porto Del Popolo

No wonder it struck travelers from England as a bit of a shock when they arrived. Charles Dickens himself seems to have been not a little grossed out when he arrived "travel-stained and weary" at the Roman gate of Porta del Popolo in 1844 (his few lyrical descriptions of monuments notwithstanding). Perhaps he came like the rest; expecting to learn Empire from the best, only to find a dissipated soup of Old and New.

Dickens complained in Pictures from Italy that Rome is filled with "a multitude of chattering strangers" and "narrow streets choked by heaps of dunghill rubbish." At one point, he turned a corner and ran right into the Dead Cart, with the bodies of the poor on their way to an unofficious dumping outside the city walls.




He seemed underwhelmed by other tourist destinations too, saying of St.Peter's Basilica that he'd "been infinitely more affected in many English Cathedrals when the organ is playing." The Jewish Quarter he described with casual anti-semitism as a "miserable place reeking of bad odors, but where the people are industrious and money-getting." He even called Bernini's monuments "intolerable abortions"! Ouch.

Beautiful Albumen Silver print of a panorama of Rome, 1885

"Italy and in particular the State of the Church had come out of the Napoleonic wars very impoverished. Pope Gregory XVI, then aged 80, was afraid of novelties and considered the railway an invention of the Devil. According to the French poet Lamartine, Italy was the "Land of the Dead" and for the Austrian Chancellor Metternich it was "a mere geographic expression"."(source)

Dickens went to bed that night "with a very considerably quenched enthusiasm."

I traced the traditional Grand Tour route in red on this antique map of Europe.

Grand Tour William Thomas Beckford.jpgThe traditional Grand Tour route was to travel from London by boat through Holland and Germany down the Rhine to Mannheim. Then hop in a coach to Munich, before crossing the border to Austria. Typically they'd travel on horseback or by foot over the Brenner pass into Italy, and on to Venice. From Venice the itinerary was to trace a meandering path through Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, Reggio, Bologna, Florence, Siena and then onwards to Rome and Naples.

I don't know, it all sounds pretty good to me. I remember my days traveling around Europe with not a care in the World as being some of the best of my life. All these old prints are making me want to hit the road again. Who's with me?

The famous Bay of Naples, and Sorrento

 "How I long to return to Sorrento,

To the lonely sea and sky,

I left my vest and socks there,

I wonder if they're dry"

Spike Milligan

Albumen photo (circa 1820) of an incredibly animated street scene in Naples by Giacomo Brogi

Ruth Orkin's classic 'An American Girl in Italy' speaks volumes about being a stranger in a strange land.

Art Nouveau Book covers, by 'Decorative Designers'

I've been a book sniffer for a long time. There, I said it. I like to wear a trench-coat and sneak into the back of the used bookstore and stick my nose in dusty old books. New, old, it doesn't matter. I still remember the smell of my brand new school books from when I was a kid. Before we get started, the answer is no, they don't make them like they used to. There are many reasons for that, but here's the short version:

Until the 19th century, books were sold unbound or sewn into simple paper covers. A collector of books would commission the local bookbinder to come up with a binding for all the books of his library. By about the 1860s, soon after the American Civil War, cloth bindings became popular and began to feature gilt stamps, blind embossing and flamboyant custom designs. As binding technology advanced, so entered the Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements creating an artistic confluence that produced extraordinarily beautiful book covers in a short space of time. Then came paper dust-jackets which, alongside a change in public taste, caused the decline of these decorative cloth bindings. That was the end of that.

"Most significant in the last decade of the [Nineteenth] century, particularly in America, is the rise of the artist-designer. From the late 1880s until about the start of World War I, book covers reached new levels of sophistication through highly professional layouts and stylized pictorial representations.

"Architects, landscape painters, illustrators and graphic artists alike were drawn to book design. While some of these designers would be responsible for only a handful of covers, others were extremely prolific, producing hundreds and hundreds of covers. Consequently, decorated cases of this period display an astonishing diversity of design styles and reflect a wide range of influences, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Japanese prints and the so-called poster style of design." (source)

In stepped the Decorative Designers (or DD as the company was called), in 1895. It was founded by the husband and wife team of Henry and Lee Thayer, a talented and incredibly driven team of artist-designers with a real head for business. "The founder of the firm was Henry Thayer (1867–1940) who was trained as an architect (following the example of Stanford White, architect-book cover designer). Thayer was responsible for much of the lettering produced by the firm." Henry was the business guy, and did a lot of the lettering, but Emma Redington Lee (1874–1973) as she was actually named, was the real star in my opinion.

She started out as a mural artist, but upon co-founding DD with Henry, became a serious figure in publishing and design. Lee Thayer (as she was known) specialized in decoration, and designed most of the bindings including the beautiful decorative borders and designs, and also published over sixty mystery novels as well as many Children's books. She was responsible for designing a staggering amount of titles in a relatively short space of time. Anything up to 20,000 by some estimates. "During the heyday of decorated publishers' bindings no other American designer produced as many book covers as The Decorative Designers." (source)

The Decorative Designers monogram appeared on over 25,000 book covers, dust jackets, and text decorations. Still thirsty for more examples? I posted over one hundred here.

Henry Thayer and Emma Redington Lee Thayer were married in 1909 but later divorced in 1932, on the grounds of desertion. Who deserted whom, I don't know. I can guess, but I'd like to think Lee jumped into a 1920 Revere Tourer and sped off with her tennis instructor Rupert, silk scarf flying.

"Other graphic designers as talented and prolific as the Thayers worked for the company at various times, the most important being Jay Chambers, who was with The Decorative Designers from 1902 through 1916. The firm produced thousands of book covers at a rapid rate. The number of artists in the organization partly accounted for this. Another factor in the success of the “DD's” was its efficient and innovative method of operation. Labor was divided according to individual talents: Henry Thayer did lettering and handled business affairs, Lee Thayer specialized in conventionalized decorations, Jay Chambers excelled at figure design, and so on." (source)

Their designs were often initially sketched by hand, then transferred to brass plates and engraved by Rome K. Richardson and Adam Empie, both of whom occasionally designed covers individually using the monograms RR and a conjoined AE, respectively. Charles Buckles Falls (d.1960) and Jay Chambers (d. 1929) were in charge of drawing the figures featured in narrative designs. (source)

"After 1900, cover designs gradually became simpler. By 1910, the widespread use of decorated cloth on books was largely at an end. The illustrated paper book jacket, which had been in limited use for years, caught the public's fancy and proved to be an even cheaper advertising tool than decorated cloth cases. The golden age of publishers' bookbindings was over." (source)

It was a short but illustrious run. 

One of my faves, with no less than Maxfield Parrish illustrating

The distinctive double D logo that appeared on their designs

Decorative Urns in Drawings and Paintings

Simple curves emphasize the play of light on this English vase. Jeffrey Wyatville, Derbyshire (1820)

"Monsieur, je deteste les urnes! Elles devraient être brisées en morceaux pour pavez nos rues!"

Doctor Samuel Johnson.

Not exactly sure why I wrote that in French, as Johnson was a blue-blood Brit. Probably because I knew it would piss him off. Anyway, Johnson may want them smashed to pave our streets, but I happen to like urns. Especially old drawings and paintings of them.

They come in pretty handy for designing murals, too. Throw in an ornamental urn or two and you've instantly grounded your landscape and added an extra dimension of historic authenticity. That's why I tossed one into the mural above. I feel that their symmetrical curves and tight decoration offset a loosely painted landscape nicely. Reference images can be hard to come by, so I'm posting some here for you.

Mural I did for Kips Bay Show House, New York City

The urn I used in the mural, by Claude Ballin for Versailles (1665)

A little moss will help your urn 'sit' in your landscape. Charles Nizet, Chateau de Raray

Up to the challenge? Try painting this Charles le Brun vase. Versailles, (1678)

I love the shape of this tree. Urn by Claude Ballin for Versailles (1665)

All Illustrations above are from a fantastic book that I highly recommend, called Garden Vases, with incredible paintings by the talented architectural painter, Andrew Zega.

Architectural drawings of urns are scattered throughout literature. Architects on their Grand Tours of Italy and France would painstakingly measure and draw every urn they came across, along with everything else. I've collected a few together for you here. Whether you use them as reference material is up to you, I enjoy them simply as an example of draughtsmanship and the thirst for knowledge displayed by their authors.

from; William Pain, House Carpenter (1792)

from; Ornamental Drawings, Batty

Urns and Ornaments, by Benjamin Asher

Urn engraving, by Stefano Della Bella

'The Breakers' Mansion, Rhode Island

By George Smith, Cabinetmaker

I posted a huge set of Blouet's drawings here.

And the last word goes to the great Paolo Uccello