First Interruption of Fashion
'The Englishman Italianate is the Devil Incarnate' was a saying that became popular, when members of the new nobility took to travelling abroad and bringing back foreign ideas about shapes and colours and decoration. It was no new thing for some foreign influence to affect the work of English craftsmen; but previously such influences had been absorbed and understood; they emanated from fellow craftsmen in countries that were in a parallel phase of civilisation - the phase that had produced the Gothic architecture of North-Western Europe. French and Flemish ideas had been comfortably accommodated; but the 'Italianate' fashions of the mid-sixteenth century were different; they were intellectually and artistically alien, representing a new mode of thought, a new approach to life; and in England it was dimly perceived that the fashions were not unrelated to the new values and moral codes of the people who introduced them. It was a period not only of social and economic change but of intellectual ferment. As Professor Macneile Dixon has pointed out: 'Side by side with men conspicuous for genius and accomplishments, it threw up men conspicuous for wickedness, men at their best in every department of taste, and at their worst in every department of conduct'. (The Englishman, by W. Macneile Dixon, Edward Arnold & Co., 1931, Chapter IV, page 151.)
These much-travelled noblemen wanted to impose the system of design that had been standardised in the Roman Empire, and revived by the architects of the Italian Renaissance, who used it with a freedom and significance transcending anything Roman. But in England it was not then recognised as an illuminating system of design, a regulating framework for the proportions and embellishment of almost every object. It was regarded as a fashion and resented as such by men who had to conform to its apparent requirements in their everyday work: so they borrowed and mishandled its external features and applied them to the sturdy basic shapes that had been evolved in the true English tradition. Acanthus leaves, scrolls, rosettes, bloated and misshapen versions of Ionic and Corinthian columns and pilasters, and the figures of classical gods and heroes, were carved bluntly and without respect or sympathy by men whose grandfathers had brought to the garniture of English Gothic buildings a sensitive delicacy of touch and had endowed with spiritual grace the sculptured figures of saints and angels.
Art had become a specialised, aristocratic study; the craftsman, who was also the designer in the Middle Ages, was becoming the artisan, the workman whose skilled hands obeyed directions that were dictated by fashionable taste. He was losing his independence and his right to initiate ideas. It was the first rift between art and life since the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries. It foreshadowed the wider rift that occurred after the first industrial revolution; and the taste of the new rich mercantile classes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries anticipated the coarse lavishness we associate with the Victorian period. The Elizabethan and Jacobean age, like the Victorian, produced great literature and poetry, and was a time of expansion and adventure and sublime confidence in the rectitude of current ideas. But design was in eclipse; and at first the printing and circulation of copy books purporting to give details and instructions about the use of the classic orders of architecture did little to lighten the darkness. The craftsmen struggled on, resentfully confused; while their patrons, the great lords and merchant princes and the gay glittering gentlemen who adorned Queen Elizabeth's court and who played with equal ability the parts of lover, poet, soldier or trading, fighting, exploring mariner, were intoxicated with the ideas that flowed into England from East and West. From Europe came the classic orders of architecture and the system of design they represented, now tricked out with French and Spanish as well as Italian interpretations; from the New World came a sultry intensity of colour, which brought to the decoration of houses and furniture an almost tropical exuberance. It was the last time that colour so strongly affected everyday surroundings; and the memory of it was almost effaced within half a century by the calculated austerity of the Puritan period, when England became for a few years an efficient but unhappy republic.
There were a few elegant trifles; some delicate and well proportioned domestic glass; but goldsmiths and silversmiths were as confused as woodworkers, and overloaded cups and plates and caskets with ill-digested classic ornament. Some of the more ambitious examples of the Elizabethan goldsmiths' art might easily be taken for typical exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851; but things of common use, such as pewter vessels, latten and brass candlesticks and chandeliers, were uncomplicated by concessions to fashion. They were shaped with the masterly competence that was still exercised in country districts too remote to be influenced by modish notions; for in the country the English tradition of design persisted. Indeed it remained for centuries, and up lo die nineteen-twenties there were a few 'lost' pockets of medieval civilisation in the west of England, notably in the Gotswolds, where masons and joiners still shaped stone and wood as they had been shaped by craftsmen four hundred years earlier, and did so unconsciously, for their little family businesses had unbroken continuity with the past - they had worked that way for generations.
During the sixteenth century there was a great increase in the production and use of textiles. William Sheldon's tapestry-weaving works were established at Barcheston in Warwickshire as early as 1509, where wall hangings and possibly carpets were produced. Oriental patterns were generally used, and were sometimes associated, not always happily, with heraldic motives. Only a few tentative experiments in upholstery had been made by the end of the century; but more fabrics were used in furnishing, particularly for curtaining the huge beds that stood like malformed Roman temples in the bedrooms of the wealthy. Perhaps those monstrous beds betrayed more emphatically than anything else the craftsman's profound ignorance of the rules that governed the proportions of the classic orders of architecture and the system of design they inspired. Classical design was as little understood in the sixteenth century as industrial design in the nineteenth. But in the first half of the seventeenth century an end was made to confusion, for in the sixteen-twenties and thirties the influence of the first great English practitioner of classic architecture, Inigo Jones, gradually unified and expanded, and ultimately controlled, the work of craftsmen, as over five hundred years earlier, the Norman builders had unified and expanded the crafts. Thereafter, throughout the rest of the seventeenth century, the English tradition in design developed in a new and fruitful way, and what may well be called the Golden Age of English design began at the Restoration of Charles II. But it was preceded by a period of conflict; for understanding came slowly and confusion died hard.
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