Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar.

These fourteen essays honor the academic career of Oliver Millar and his service as Surveyor and Director of the Royal Collections on the occasion of his retirement in 1988. In keeping with Oliver Millar's interests in seventeenth-century art, David Howarth has collected essays on the portraiture, patronage, collecting and aesthetic taste of the Stuart court both before and after the Civil War.

The essays are by leading scholars in the fields of art and history and emphasize the ties of English court culture to developments in continental Europe. Susan Barnes traces the friendship of the English art impresario John Gage and Anthony Van Dyck in connection with the artist's brief visit to England in 1620-21. Michael Jaffe disentangles the attribution of two versions of Van Dyck's portrait of Sir Edmund Verney, identifying the hand of the master from a studio product. Landscape etchings by John Evelyn, catalogued here by Anthony Griffiths, are interesting as the first examples of amateur-produced prints in England. Ronald Lightbown examines the career of French sculptor Isaac Besnier at the court of Charles I as an example of "Mannerist and Baroque taste" (132).

A general focus in all of the contributions is the connection of art and politics, defined in the broadest possible sense. In his essay on Caroline architecture and masque designs, David Howarth observes that "For [Inigo] Jones, architecture was the physical expression of a carefully constructed system of social and political values" (68). There is virtually no difference in distinguishing the personal from the political in discussing court culture. A professional career, especially for an upwardly mobile character such as Inigo Jones, depended upon astute alliances within the court which changed with royal favor.

John Newman examines the effect of Archbishop Laud's religious policy in the planning and ornamentation of churches through an analysis of tracts on religious debates and the surviving evidence for religious architecture. The meaning of architectural form, and especially the use of the classical orders, was closely tied to controversy over the nature of the reformed Church.

The history of English art during this period is often the story of the good and the great: enlightened patrons selecting artists of quality to forge potent public images. These issues are at the heart of the essays by Alastair Laing on the painter Peter Lely and patron Sir Ralph Bankes, or the discussion by Malcolm Rogers on the portraits of Sir Thomas Killigrew.

The essays in this collection point up a pressing concern in the study of English seventeenth-century art: the relationship between vernacular artistic traditions and the arrival of foreign artists patronized by the court for their sophistication, skill and certainly, novelty. The traditional assumption, manifested in several of these essays, is that foreign artists such as Van Dyck and Rubens significantly raised the level of artistic production in England from Mannerism to an international Baroque style.

Susan Foister's contribution on "Foreigners at Court: Holbein, Van Dyck and the Painter-Stainers Company" stands out as a revealing look at the tensions between native artists, desperate to compete in a climate of changing court tastes, and the influx of foreign artists eager to supply and encourage a new demand. Through the discovery and analysis of new documents Foister does much to broaden our understanding of how artists such as Holbein worked within an established artistic practice in England; and the arsenal available to English artists in their struggle to secure commissions. Her essay is a model of its kind.

The festschrift adds considerably to our knowledge of English art and its context, and raises many new questions about the significance of art as a marker of social attitudes.

Christy Anderson WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD