C O N N O I S S E U R S H I P O F T H E A RT S ~ J e r e m y Wo o d
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uthorship of the newly-identified likeness of Nicholas Lanier is the subject of much discussion in the present book, but I propose to concentrate on what it tells us about Lanier’s connoisseurship of the arts, taking into account the portrait’s date of 1613. Lanier was a relatively young man at that time, but, although his dealings with famous artists and years of travelling abroad lay ahead, the portrait is a sophisticated visual statement in the context of British art, significantly pre-dating Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s Self-Portrait of around 1620 in a private collection (fig.20),1 a work that reveals Bacon as a man of learning, seated at a table covered with books, examining a drawing and with two of his palettes hanging on the wall in the background. Both portraits belong to a tradition in European art that informs the spectator about the intellectual and artistic attainments of the person depicted, usually by showing him or her with books, works of art, and, in a few cases, musical instruments. As will be argued below in more detail, we are shown visual evidence of three of Lanier’s many accomplishments in the portrait of 1613. But, in the present context, we need to focus on his knowledge of European painting because the portrait was made not long after his first recorded travels in Italy of 1610-11, when he could have seen sixteenth century images of virtuosi – of the kind mentioned briefly above – that inform the conception of this work. His later status as an art expert is shown by the authority that Charles I gave him to purchase the Mantuan collection through the agency of Daniel Nys,2 and the royal warrant issued in August 1628, shortly after the arrival of the Mantuan pictures in London, that required him – together with Inigo Jones – ‘to cause a p[re]sent Inventory to be made of all his M[ajestie]s Pictures Statues and Meddalls of mettall and Stone’, unfortunately now untraced.3 Not least, Lanier was also a pioneer collector of Italian drawings,4 although, perhaps surprisingly, there is no hint of this in the newly-identified portrait.
The portrait of 1613 throws new light on the dating and identification of a chalk drawing of a man’s head by the famous Bolognese master Guido Reni, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (fig. 21),5 that Susan James published in 1996 as a likeness of Lanier.6 She placed this drawing around 1625-6 when Lanier had returned to Italy with the intention of exporting a sizeable group of paintings from Rome – many by contemporary Italian masters – for Charles I’s collection.7 Daniel Nys left a vivid pen description of Lanier at this time going around ‘buying the earth with his well-lined purse’.8 Contact between Lanier and Reni seems possible at this date, but it is worth considering whether they met for the first time more than a decade earlier in 1610-11 when Lanier is thought to have accompanied William Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and later 2nd Earl of Salisbury (1591-1668), on a trip to Italy,9 shortly before he commissioned the newly-discovered portrait. James’s identification of the man in Reni’s drawing as Lanier seemed tenuous before the emergence of the portrait under discussion, but the similarity between the two suggests that the drawing is earlier in date than she thought and it now emerges as a more convincing likeness of Lanier. Abraham van der Doort, who was Keeper of Charles I’s Cabinet Room at St. James’s and a Groom of the Privy Chamber, recorded that the king bought a Saint Peter by Reni from Lanier, a work that was displayed in the Adam and Eve Stairs Room at Whitehall,10 and that may still be identifiable with a canvas in the
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1. See Karen Hearn in Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630, ed. Karen Hearn (exh. cat. The Tate Gallery, London, 1995-1996), London, 1995, p. 222, no. 149, repr., with further references. 2. The literature on this topic is now extensive, but see Lucy Whitaker, ‘L’accoglienza della collezione Gonzaga in Inghilterra’ in Gonzaga. La Celeste Galeria. L’esercizio del collezionismo (exh. cat. Palazzo Te and Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, 2002), Milan, 2002, pp. 233-249, with further references. The bulk of the documents are in W. Noël Sainsbury, Original Unpublished Papers illustrative of the Life of Sir Peter Paul Rubens as an Artist and Diplomatist preserved in H.M. State Paper Office, London, 1859, pp. 320-340. 3. As described in National Archives, London, PRO Signet Office 3/9 (August 1628). 4. The most complete discussion of this aspect of Lanier’s activity is Jeremy Wood, ‘Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666) and the Origins of drawings collecting in Stuart England’, Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c.1500-1750, ed. Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam, and Genevieve Warwick, Aldershot and Burlington, Vermont, 2003, pp. 85-121. 5. Red and black chalk on gray paper; 41.91 x 29.21 cm. Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of the 1993 Committee (AC 1993.21.1). 6. Susan E. James, ‘Reni’s Drawing of Nicholas Lanier. A recent discovery at LACMA’, Apollo, CXLIV, October 1996, pp. 14-18. 7. For this enterprise, see Antonio Bertolotti, ‘Esportazione di oggetti di belle arti da Roma per l’Inghilterra’, Archivio Storico Artistico e Letterario della Città e provincia di Roma, IV, anno VI, fascicolo II, March-April 1880, pp. 74-90; and idem, ‘Relazioni di Inglesi col Governo pontificio raccolti negli Archivi romani’, Giornale Araldico, XV, nos 7-8, 1888, p. 13. 8. Daniel Nys to Alessandro Striggi, 2 August 1625: ‘Va vederlo il mondo con sua borsa ben fornita’; Alessandro Luzio, La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’ Inghilterra nel 1627-28. Documenti degli archivi di Mantova e Londra raccolta ed illustrata, Milan, 1913, p. 137. The translation is from Ian Spink, ‘Lanier in Italy’, Music and Letters, XL, 1959, p. 243. 9. For a summary of Cranborne’s travels, see Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour. Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance, London and Portland, Oregon, 1998, p. 208. The problems raised when tracing Lanier’s movements at this time are discussed further below. 10. ‘Item the Picture being onelye a head of St Peetr Bought by ye kinge of Mr Nicholas Laneere uppon a Strayning frame. [Done by Gui=do Bullones in margin]’; Oliver Millar, ‘Abraham van der Doort’s Catalogue of the Collection of Charles I’, Walpole Society, XXXVII, 1958-60, p. 10.