DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61252#0035
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
XXXI
churches secretly negotiated the sale of altar-pieces and
other treasures, which had been consecrated by the worship
of ages. If at this time the taste or fashion had run in
favour of the earlier Florentine, Umbrian, and Venetian
schools, we might have amassed precious things; but we
knew not their value. Perhaps it is a mercy that we were
still in the shadow of ignorance; for otherwise, when all
reverence and all order were for the time set aside, we
might have had the frescoes of Angelico or Ghirlandajo
torn down, and sold by the square foot in Pall Mall. Where
fashion and the wish to possess predominated over taste and
veneration, such a proceeding had been possible.
No such desecration did, however, take place. The
French stabled their horses in the refectories of con-
vents, and in the oratories, rich with the most gracious
and glorious creations of human genius; or they smeared
with smoke and dirt the heads of apostles and saints,
but they did not cut them out of the walls or panels, as
they cut the miniatures by hundreds out of the illumi-
nated MSS. They left the walls standing, to rot with
damp, or to be whitewashed, or to be built up, or to be
treated in any other way which the hopelessness or reck-
lessness of an impoverished and oppressed people might
allow ; meantime, the palaces of the Barberini, Borghese,
Pamfili, Colonna, Falconieri, Lancelotti, and Spada princes,
were despoiled by English gold. Carraccis, Claudes,
Poussins, arrived by ship-loads. One stands amazed at
the number of pictures introduced by the enterprise of
private dealers into England between 1795 and 1815,
during the hottest time of the war. Not from Italy only;
from Holland and from Belgium came the choicest pic-
tures of theii' native artists. It is honourable to us, that
the taste—or the fashion—for the works of Hobbema and
Cuyp, and the high prices now given for their works, arose
out of the predilection of the English amateurs for those
XXXI
churches secretly negotiated the sale of altar-pieces and
other treasures, which had been consecrated by the worship
of ages. If at this time the taste or fashion had run in
favour of the earlier Florentine, Umbrian, and Venetian
schools, we might have amassed precious things; but we
knew not their value. Perhaps it is a mercy that we were
still in the shadow of ignorance; for otherwise, when all
reverence and all order were for the time set aside, we
might have had the frescoes of Angelico or Ghirlandajo
torn down, and sold by the square foot in Pall Mall. Where
fashion and the wish to possess predominated over taste and
veneration, such a proceeding had been possible.
No such desecration did, however, take place. The
French stabled their horses in the refectories of con-
vents, and in the oratories, rich with the most gracious
and glorious creations of human genius; or they smeared
with smoke and dirt the heads of apostles and saints,
but they did not cut them out of the walls or panels, as
they cut the miniatures by hundreds out of the illumi-
nated MSS. They left the walls standing, to rot with
damp, or to be whitewashed, or to be built up, or to be
treated in any other way which the hopelessness or reck-
lessness of an impoverished and oppressed people might
allow ; meantime, the palaces of the Barberini, Borghese,
Pamfili, Colonna, Falconieri, Lancelotti, and Spada princes,
were despoiled by English gold. Carraccis, Claudes,
Poussins, arrived by ship-loads. One stands amazed at
the number of pictures introduced by the enterprise of
private dealers into England between 1795 and 1815,
during the hottest time of the war. Not from Italy only;
from Holland and from Belgium came the choicest pic-
tures of theii' native artists. It is honourable to us, that
the taste—or the fashion—for the works of Hobbema and
Cuyp, and the high prices now given for their works, arose
out of the predilection of the English amateurs for those