Historical notes: The evolution of the Grand Tourist

THE WAY in which England and even Britain as a whole became civilised through contact with Italy - the story of the Grand Tour and its evolution since the Renaissance - makes for fascinating study.

It was by encountering the new art in 16th-century Italy that the English first began to appreciate painting, sculpture and architecture in something like the way we do today. Travel to Italy had been undertaken for a variety of reasons. Pilgrimage to Rome was encouraged by the religious rulers who succeeded the emperors. Authors from Chaucer to Erasmus eventually mocked this custom and the Reformation sealed its fate where their co- nationals were concerned. But the urge to travel proved too strong to be extinguished by a mere change of religion. From the mid-16th century, northern Europeans justified travel to the south in terms of secular education. English students had travelled to Italy to learn Greek and Latin; now they travelled to learn Italian and to study medicine, diplomacy, dancing, riding, fencing, and only very gradually art and architecture.

After Henry VIII's break with Rome, and even more so after the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth in 1570 and the subsequent war with Spain, prior to James's peace treaty of 1604, Italy was not easily visited by Englishmen. The literary culture travelled relatively easily and influenced Shakespeare, but in order to absorb the visual renaissance (other than through the medium of prints) it was essential to travel to the source.

Where architecture is concerned - though in the present relativist academic climate it is currently unfashionable to say so - John Aubrey's comment seems to me roughly correct: "In Queen Elizabeth's time Architecture made no progress but rather went backwards." Once the visual arts did become established as the major attraction, however, the English energetically made up for lost time. Where once pious (and not so pious) pilgrims visited sacred shrines and returned with relics, now Grand (and not so grand) Tourists visited Roman ruins and returned with works of art. In the early Stuart period, the 1614-15 tour of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, who took Inigo Jones with them as their cicerone, epitomises the self-conscious effort of the English to catch up what had been happening abroad.

Even now, though, our efforts were not sustained for long enough to consolidate the assimilation of the Renaissance and the establishment of a native school of art (after the foreign imports of Torrigiano, Holbein, Van Dyck, Rubens and Lely). Civil War in the 1640s saw most artists, imported and home-grown, scatter or die patronless. Charles II was, above all, concerned never to be sent "on his travels" again and so, although pleased to receive diplomatic gifts in the form of paintings, he never went to the expensive lengths his father had done to seek out and acquire works of art.

Charles was a Francophile owing to his years in exile in his mother's country and if anything the French orientation in matters of taste increased under his openly Catholic brother, James II. Their increasingly wealthy subjects, however, looked back to the example of Charles I and his courtiers and rediscovered Italy.

As our understanding of the sources of Renaissance civilisation grew - and through this, of classical civilisation itself - so too did the importance of Italy as the ultimate destination for the Grand Tourist. By the 18th century, study of the arts in their continental context had come to be regarded as a prerequisite to becoming not merely a "virtuoso", but virtuous in the modern sense of the word also.

Edward Chaney is the author of `The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo- Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance', published this week by Frank Cass, pounds 45