ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
including the “silken Frontispiece” to the book, it seeks to titillate without
ever becoming erotic or disturbing. Quarles gives us the frills—literally, in the
frontispiece—the set speeches, the swell of grand passions, the extended
pictorialism associated with Sidney or Spenser, the sense that something
significant is occurring; and so the poem served those without either the
leisure, inclination, or energy for the original.
Initially at least, Argalus and Parthenia capitalized on a flair for romance that
accompanied the coronation of Charles and his marriage to Henrietta Maria—
the king and queen who elaborately presented themselves as if they belonged to
the ideal order of courtly art, not to the hurly-burly of political reality, a role
Charles continued to play until the very end when, in Marvell’s phrase, he
mounted “the tragic scaffold high” in 1649 and bowed his comely head to the
executioner’s axe. The immediate success of the Emblems, on the other hand,
ought to be traced to a slightly different source: to a convergence between high
and low forms of art, pictures and scripture.
Under the Stuarts in general, but especially under Charles and following the
lead of nobility like the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Arundel, England
witnessed an extraordinary increase in interest in the visual arts among the wellto-do.
51 With Van Dyck and Rubens making extended visits, the Caroline court
was instrumental in effecting this shift in cultural focus; indeed, the king and
queen amassed the finest collection of art yet by any English ruler, with works by
many of the greatest European artists being represented in their rooms and halls.
There were paintings by Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Holbein, Dürer,
Cranach, and others, including, of course, van Dyck and Rubens. England was
clearly no longer the home of miniaturists only. At the same time, testifying to
the diffusion of interest in the visual arts was a substantial increase in the number
of treatises published during the first half of the century. A theoretical work like
that by the Dutch humanist Franciscus Junius the Younger, De pictura veterum
(1637), was now quickly brought out in an English version (1638). (Until Junius’s
work, the only other broad assessment of the arts available in English had been
Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Gian Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’ arte de
la pittura, 1584). Over the same period, more specialized essays on architecture
and the arts also began to appear. Sir Henry Wotton’s The Elements of Architecture
(1624) and Sir William Sanderson’s Graphice, or The Use of the Pen and Pensil
(1658) are among the best known today, while prints and drawings by contemporary
artists like Wenceslaus Hollar—the gifted Dutch engraver who served England’s
greatest private collector of the period, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel—could
be purchased with increasing ease from London booksellers. A “complete
gentleman,” noted Henry Peacham in the 1622 work of that title dedicated to
Howard’s second son, ought to know how to both paint and draw. So, too, he
should possess a knowledge of “the Lives of the Famous Italian Painters.” And in
the example of Nathaniel Bacon of Suffolk, a still widely respected portraitist and
the son of England’s premier baronet, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Peacham found reason
to celebrate an exalted, native connection with the arts.
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