of the more rare and excellent inventions: in the other we place the statua’s of all principal inventors. There we have the statua of your Columbus, that discovered the West Indies: also the inventor of ships: your monk that was the inventor of ordnance and of gun powder: the inventor of music: the inventor of letters: the inventor of printing: the inventor of observations of astronomy: the inventor of works in metal: the inventor of glass: the inventor of silk of the worm: the inventor of wine: the inventor of corn and bread: the inventor of sugars: and all these by more certain tradition than you have… For upon every invention of value, we erect a statua to the inventor, and give him a liberal and honourable reward. These statua’s are some of brass; some of marble and touch‐stone; some of cedar and other special woods gilt and adorned: some of iron; some of silver; some of gold.’
And when he had said this, he stood up; and I, as I had been taught, kneeled down; and he laid his right hand upon my head, and said; ‘God bless thee, my son, and God bless this relation which I have made. I give thee leave to publish it for the good of other nations’.
IC8 Martin de Charmois (1609–61), from his Petition to the King and to the Lords of his Council
One of the key documents in the history of European art is the petition for the founding of a Royal Academy in France in 1648. The complete text is reproduced in Art in Theory 1648–1815 IB4 (pp. 80–6). However, we have thought it helpful for the purposes of the present anthology to excerpt a short passage which is often overlooked in focussing on the Academy’s attempt to free art from the craft restrictions of the guilds and institute painting as a fully fledged liberal art. This passage contrasts the status of art under the enlightened patronage of Louis XIV to its status under the despotism of the Ottoman Turks. The argument is that highly accomplished portraits of the monarch, capturing not only his physical appearance but also his inner qualities, can, if ‘carried into the further reaches of the world’, aid in the spread of civilization. By the same token, restrictions on the visual arts of the kind found in Islam, are seen to hinder the progress of civilization. The text was translated for Art in Theory by Chris Miller.
[T]hough Your Majesty has distinguished himself by very remarkable actions, his portraits, which are carried into the further reaches of the world, have played a great part in converting to adoration the admiration elicited in foreign minds by his renown….
Yes, painters and sculptors may pride themselves, Sire, that they can not only express the very least lineaments of the face, but that they can go beyond these to inclinations, and exhibit these to the eyes of those who have the least tincture of physiognomy. One might indeed add, that those who laid the foundations of the Ottoman Empire had these arts in such high esteem that they banned them in every land that came under their yoke; either because they deemed men unworthy to enter into competition with their Creator, or because they wished to maintain their subjects in ignorance, lest painting, which is a form of writing, if we are to trust to the interpretation of it given by the Greeks, should enlighten and improve them no less than the characters of printed books or manuscripts.
IC9 Dorothy Osborne (1627–95) from letters to Sir William Temple
No less than 77 letters survive from the long epistolary courtship of Dorothy Osborne and William Temple (cf. IC15), whose marriage was opposed by both their families, respectively Royalist and Parliamentarian. They eventually married in 1654. The letters reproduced here date from 30 January and 6 February 1653. The extracts concern the fashion for collecting ‘seals’ (the dictionary definition of which is ‘a trinket, containing an engraved stone for sealing letters’), presumably the very seals with which Dorothy sealed her letters to William. In the second extract she comments on one of an ‘idol’ brought from the ‘Indies’, nicely capturing the frisson which must have passed through members of polite society like her, enabled by the burgeoning power of England, to actually touch, and possess, a token of an alien way of life. The extracts are from The Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, with an introduction by Sir E. A. Parry, London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1903, pp. 44–6.
[…] I have sent into Italy for seals; ’tis to be hoped by that time mine come over, they may be out of fashion again, for ’tis an humour that your old acquaintance Mr Smith and his lady has brought up; they say she wears twenty strung upon a ribbon, like the nuts boys play withal, and I do not hear of anything else. Mr Howard presented his mistress but a dozen such seals as are not to be valued as times now go. […]
Sir, – You have made me so rich as I am able to help my neighbours. There is a little head cut in an onyx that I take to be a very good one, and the dolphin is (as you say) the better for being cut less; the oddness of the figure makes the beauty of these things. If you saw one that my brother sent my Lady Diana last week, you would believe it were meant to fright people withal; ’twas brought out of the Indies, and cut there for an idol’s head: they took the devil himself, sure, for their pattern that did it, for in my life I never saw so ugly a thing, and yet she is as fond on’t as if it were as lovely as she herself is.
IC10 Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) ‘Of the Naturall Condition of Mankind’
At the other end of the spectrum from ideas of the ‘noble savage’ (cf. IC12, IIC2) lies Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature as a ‘war of all against all’. For Hobbes, this condition, or something close to it, was exemplified in his own time by the newly discovered peoples of North America. Their apparent lack of agriculture and settled towns, not to mention anything recognizable as ‘polite arts’, led Hobbes to identify them as belonging to modern equivalents of a primitive stage of human development existing before the onset of civilization as he would have understood it (cf. IC17). The present extract is taken from Chapter 8, ‘Of the Naturall Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity and Misery’, of Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651 shortly after the end of the English Civil War. We have used the modern edition, with an introduction and notes by Christopher Brooke, London: Penguin Classics, 2017, pp. 102–4.
Hereby it is manifest, that during the time when men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man. […]
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what is their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time, no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short. […]
It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.
IC11 John Tradescant (1608–62) from the Museum Tradescantianum, or A Collection of Rarities
Unlike the Inventories of the Palazzo Medici (IC1), or the goods of the Portuguese merchant Simão de Melo (IA7), the present text is from the catalogue of a consciously assembled ‘cabinet of curiosities’. (For an earlier and more modest example, cf. IC3.) It was compiled by John Tradescant the Younger in the mid‐1650s and lists the collection
