Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future.

Ernest Gilman. Recollecting the Arundel Circle: Discovering the Past, Recovering the Future.

Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2002. xi + 182 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $51.95. ISBN: 0-8204-6147-4.

Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel (1585-1646), was one of the most important English art collectors before the civil war. Arundel's activities were crucial for the introduction of Renaissance art and architecture in England, but his interests and activities ranged much wider, from medicine, philology and heraldry to the politics of empire: one of his last and unsuccessful projects was to organize an expedition to Madagascar.

Much remains unclear about the significance or motives of Arundel's collection. Recent studies such as those by David Howarth have offered answers based on historical investigation of documentary evidence. Gilman has chosen a different approach: to single out the most heterogeneous of Arundel's activities and interests, and to explore, often by associative reasoning rather than argument based on primary sources, the possible links between them. Recollecting the Arundel Circle argues that colonialist exploration and collecting classical art were not disparate interests, but in fact occupied the same imaginative space in Arundel's mind. It is a study in the circulation of ideas and tropes, but in its indebtedness to New Historicism it seeks a grounding in historical analysis. Thus Harvey's research into the circulation of the blood and the analogies he saw between human procreation and artistic theory (although that analogy is not as new as Gilman suggests on p. 136, because both are clearly based on Aristotle's theory of the four causes) is connected with Daniel Mytens portrait of the earl in front of his statue gallery, which Gilman reads as a representation of Arundel as not only the owner, but also the begetter of life in these art works. Gilman also offers a welcome interpretation of Franciscus Junius's De pictura veterum which links Junius's attempts to bring the ruins of classical art back to life with Renaissance thought about the nature of bonds between past and present, or life and death in other disciplines such as medicine or artistic theory.

These explorations try to integrate Arundel's artistic, medical, political, and colonial interests, and they certainly offer interesting cues for a reconsideration of the activities of great collectors in early modern England. But one central issue remains uninvestigated: that of classicism itself, around which so much of his activities were centered. Another issue that hardly figures is that of the acceptability of portraiture and religious or pagan art. During Arundel's life this, rather than the topics of classicism, perspective, or the visual rhetoric of silent images, was the dominant theme in English discourse about the arts. One of the more acceptable apologies for portraiture--and one formulated by Junius--was that portraits commemorated the exploits of ancestors and thereby excited their beholders to virtue. In Gilman's interpretation of Mytens's portrait, much is made of the earl's staff which points to his statue of the Venus Pudica. According to Gilman the staff touches the statue, and thereby it becomes animated. But they do not, and this makes the beholder conscious of the difference between the geometrically structured, ideal space of the gallery and the much more opaque space in which the earl is seated. Because of this difference the earl, unlike his statue gallery, seems to be part of the space of the beholder and to address the spectator directly to draw attention to his collection. In the companion piece his wife (whom Gilman hardly discusses) is seated in front of a gallery of ancestor's portraits. What happens here is not so much a painted attempt at bridging the gap between the classical past and the living present, as a visual reminder of the virtue of the earl and his wife in the best Roman tradition. Gilman has done much to undermine traditional compartmentalizations of Arundel's activities, but the central feature of the latter's self-fashioning as the inheritor of Roman culture, with all that implies about his attitude towards classical art, remains unaddressed.

CAROLINE VAN ECK

University of Ghent, Belgium