The Earl and Countess of Arundel: Renaissance Collectors; An Exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, 2 May-1 October 1995.

Looking at us from the large-sized front cover of the item under review is Thomas Howard, second Earl of Arundel, as seen in Anthony van Dyck's first portrait of the Earl dating from van Dyck's visit to England in 1620-21. This painting was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1986. Previously in a private collection, the painting was not inaccessible: it had, for example, appeared in the 1982 exhibition, Van Dyck in England, organized by Oliver Millar. Nonetheless, ownership by a public museum of the Getty's stature is a significant development because it will bring new prominence and scholarly attention to the painting.

Two initiatives stemming from the Getty purchase are the catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition at the Getty on "The Earl and Countess of Arundel: Renaissance Collectors" and Christopher White's book, Anthony van Dyck: The Earl of Arundel, forthcoming in the Getty Museum Studies on Art series. This work constitutes the first major contribution to Arundel studies since David Howarth's twofold effort - the book, Lord Arundel and his Circle, and the exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum - a decade ago. My purpose here is to assess this new work as exemplified by David Jaffe's essay by highlighting two elements that offer the greatest potential for further exploration.

The first concerns the sections on van Dyck and Rubens. Despite the juxtaposition of these two sections, the comparative possibilities are not explicitly pursued and hence there is no analysis of the striking differences in the respective artists' representations of their common patron. The challenge will be to generate a critical terminology to express the difference that can achieve a reasonable degree of consensus. The choice of words in David Jaffe's evocation of the two painters' approaches to Arundel is often revealing and provides a suggestive starting-point. The impression of Arundel conveyed by Rubens is described as "majesty" and "charisma." A quite different effect is indicated by the slightly negative connotation of the word "fondling" in van Dyck's depiction of Arundel's "casually fondling" his Garter badge. I think Jaffe's perception here is accurate: the precise positioning of the fingers of Arundel's left hand as it holds the badge is the most conspicuous aspect of van Dyck's portrait. Where Rubens tends to enhance or idealize Arundel's heroic bearing, something in van Dyck, without being ironic or parodistic, appears to resist this transcendent image. Further delineation of van Dyck's tone may be linked in part to what Jaffe summarizes in highly condensed fashion as the new force of "naturalism" compounded by the stylistic "revolution" derived from "'avant-garde' Venetian painterly tradition."

The second element in David Jaffe's catalogue essay that may foreshadow a promising future direction in Arundel studies involves the section with the intriguing title "The Paper Museum," which refers to Arundel's plan to disseminate his collection to a wider public by employing artists such as Wenceslaus Hollar to make etchings of the original objects for purposes of documentation and circulation. Jaffe usefully calls attention to the resulting transition from private to public: "Yet Arundel was alone among the collecting elite in his wish to transform a private collection into print"; "Encouraging free access to study works of art changed a connoisseur's status from collector to public benefactor and the status of his holdings from collection to academy." The issue is less to characterize Arundel's personal motivation as either benevolently altruistic or shrewdly self-promoting than to draw out the implications of his activity at the more general level of discourse and social structure.

Here there is an opportunity to place Arundel's multi-faceted patronage more firmly in the context of the study of the early formation of museums as new cultural institutions. As Jaffe rightly notes, "the English were late-comers to this European habit of art gathering," and Arundel and his wife are therefore all the more historically important as "taste-setters during a period which marked the beginnings of the great tradition of English collecting." The landmark volume edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor - The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe - contains only an exceedingly small account of Arundel (226-28). But Jaffe's various observations about the institutional aspects of Arundel's collecting suggest that the time may be ripe for a scholarly approach to Arundel consistent with the aims of Impey and MacGregor's Journal of the History of Collecting, founded in 1989.

Such an approach might consider, without conflating, a wider range of the meanings of the term acquisition. Arundel's collecting impulse is by no means restricted exclusively to the high-art pursuits of recovering classical artifacts or cultivating contemporary painting. As Philippa Glanville puts it in her Silver in Tudor and Stuart England, Arundel's purview includes "exotica" (319). Moreover, acquisition extends, according to Richard Pennington's catalogue raisonne of Hollar's etched work, to Lady Arundel's acquiring a black page in Italy in 1632 (316) and finally to the vision, even though not implemented, of acquiring the island of Madagascar, a vision recorded in van Dyck's last portrait of the Arundels in 1639-40.

PETER ERICKSON Clark Art Institute