Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558-1625.

Anthony Wells-Cole. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. xii + 344 pp. $75. ISBN 0-300-06651-1.

Among the virtues of this hefty work are its illustrations: an outpouring of decorative imagery including masonry, plaster friezes and ceilings, overmantels, hall screens and cabinetry, wall paintings, tapestries and applique wall hangings, needlework cushion covers, intarsia panels, banquet trenchers and silver spice bowls. Some objects are familiar; others have been reproduced rarely, if at all. The "visual culture" of early modern England is here brought vividly to light. Wherever one looked in Knole or Burton Agnes or Hardwick Hall (their ostensibly iconophobic, Protestant milieu notwithstanding), the eye was likely to fall on lavish and intricate objects. The Elizabethan domestic interior, as a Gesamtkunstwerk in wood, stone, and textile, rivaled the most opulent fantasies of the poets.

Whence the profusion of imagery carved or molded or sewn into these houses? Anthony Wells-Cole argues that their most important source is to be found in the widespread and systematic use of continental prints. These materials, whether individual prints or collections, fall into two kinds: "subject" prints, chiefly illustrations of biblical or classical themes, and "ornamental" prints of decorative patterns or motifs. The bulk of these prints were published in Antwerp by Cornelis Bos, Jacob Floris, Jan Vredeman de Vries, Maarten van Heemskerck, and others.

Despite the range of its reference, this remains, as the author notes, a sampling rather than an exhaustive study. Acknowledging Mark Girouard's Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (1966) as a pioneering work in this field, he avails himself of a large bibliography of more recent studies of English houses on the one hand, and of continental prints on the other. Wells-Cole's achievement is to have grafted these two branches of scholarship into a single stock, and to have made a number of convincing matches between the myriad print sources and their specific English "destinations."

In his fullest account of a single house, Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, Wells-Cole looks for themes that might afford an insight into its illustrious proprietress, Bess of Hardwick. More interesting, however, is the author's ability to reconstruct a rather haphazard method of composition by which, typically, the artist combines bits and pieces of the various prints at hand. For a painted doth depicting the conversion of Saul, for example (276-77), Bess's master craftsman John Balechouse used one print for the main design and four others for individual figures - none of which has anything to do with the story of Saul (a mounted soldier in Saul's company has his origin in the figure of King Arthur in an engraving of The Nine Worthies designed by Maarten van Heemskerck). Such crucial, and purely formal, decisions must qualify any attempt to over-read these composite images on the questionable assumption that their motifs must contain a coherent iconographic intention.

The book is thick with detail but thin on speculation. What is to be concluded from this research? According to the jacket copy, prints "effected an information revolution similar to that of computers in our own time," but not much is made of this claim in the text apart from the observation that prints in this period were cranked out on an "industrial scale" (5). It is, however, newly clear from the wealth of evidence presented that, as W.J. Ivins wrote, prints were the "standard medium for passing visual information" across Renaissance Europe (4). Prints made possible a method of composition by piecemeal assemblage that allies the final image all the more closely with the contemporary printed page, similarly assembled from woodcuts and blocks of type. Also clear is the fundamental point that in the importation of continental styles and images, the influence of prints was far more pervasive than the presence of any individual artist, however prominent. When the history of English visual culture still tends to center around the handful of famous expatriates from Holbein to Van Dyck, it is salutary to recall the teams of inglorious plasterers and woodcarvers all over England tracing their patterns from the well-worn pages of print books.

ERNEST B. GILMAN New York University