Donne’s metaphor of the “well-made, and well-plac’d picture, [which] looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it” depends upon the viewer’s engagement with the artwork, the dynamic between the viewer and the artwork. Although any discussion of Donne’s actual appreciation of visual art during his lifetime must remain speculative, bequests in his will, and bequests made to him in the wills of others, allow the reconstruction of “Dr Donne’s art gallery”, to use the title of Wesley Milgate’s article which does just that.
1 Wesley Milgate, “Dr Donne’s Art Gallery”, Notes and Queries (1949): 318–319. Donne’s own will makes mention of twenty paintings, eighteen of which are named or described. These include some of the portraits of Donne himself, as well as a number of paintings with religious subject matter, such as the “Picture of the blessed Virgin Marye which hanges in the little Dynynge Chamber… the picture of Adam and Eve which hanges in the great Chamber”; “the Picture of the B: Virgin and Joseph which hanges in my Studdy” and “the fower large Pictures of the fower greate Prophettes which hange in the Hall”.
2 “Donne’s Will”, R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), Appendix D.II; p. 563; p. 564. Milgate’s article leaves us with the impression of Donne in the Deanery of St Paul’s surrounded by pictures; in Gilman’s words, “[his collection] was surely large enough to have filled nearly every corner of Donne’s little world with imagery”.
3 Gilman, Iconoclasm, pp. 120–121. Not only does Milgate’s article reconstruct Donne’s visual world, but it also reconstructs, to some extent, Donne’s place in a network of friends who were connoisseurs of painting. Christopher Brooke, the addressee of the verse letter “The Storme” with its mention of Hilliard, bequeaths to Donne in his will “a peece of Apollo and the Muses – being an originall of an Italian master’s hand as I have bin made to believe”.
4 Milgate, “Dr Donne”, p. 318. And more tantalisingly still, Milgate proposes that the painting Donne bequeathed to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, “the Picture of the blessed Virgin Marye which hanges in the little Dynynge Chamber”, was the same one listed in Abraham van der Doort’s catalogue of Charles I’s collection as “done by Titian; being our Lady, and Christ, and St John […] given heretofore to his Majesty by my Lord of Carlisle, who had it of Dr Donn, painted upon the right light”.
5 Milgate, “Dr Donne”, pp. 318–319. Efforts to track down this possible Titian, which was redistributed with the rest of Charles I’s collection after the Revolution, have so far not yielded any concrete results.
6 The story so far has been reconstructed by Dennis Flynn, “John Donne’s Titian: What was it, how did he get it, and what does it mean for us?” Many thanks to Dennis Flynn for sharing this unpublished article with me. Without the painting itself this attribution cannot be confirmed. Nevertheless, the possibility that Donne owned a Titian allows Hurley to identify him as a “connoisseur” of art.
7 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 163. In reconstructing, as far as possible, Donne’s “art gallery” as a background to exploring his treatment of visual art in his writing, we may run the risk of assuming that we know how he looked at the paintings he saw and projecting anachronistic assumptions about attitudes to and perceptions of visual art onto the seventeenth century. In an article attempting to qualify the many attempts to find visual sources (primarily Italian) for Milton’s
Paradise Lost, Michael O’Connell has argued that we should be wary of such easy parallels, arguing that Milton, as an English Protestant, would have seen visual art, particularly that with a religious theme, in a very different way from either his Italian Catholic contemporaries or his twentieth-century readers.
8 Michael O’Connell, “Milton and the Art of Italy: A Revisionist View”, in Mario A. Di Cesare, Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 215–236. Milton himself makes no comment at all on the visual art he encountered, and O’Connell points out that English travellers of the period in general have very little to say about the artworks they saw and the artists who made them. He attributes this not only to “Protestant wariness of idolatry” but also to the fact that, partly due to Reformation iconoclasm, the English were “untrained in habits of perception, not only of its iconology but also of the complexities of mannerist and baroque styles”.
9 O’Connell, “Milton”, p. 223. Lucy Gent similarly urges caution in making too many assumptions about the knowledge and appreciation of art of Donne’s contemporaries, commenting that “the desperate shortage in sixteenth-century English of terms to do with art is a clear index of a lack of contact with works of art being produced, or recently produced, in Italy or France”.
10 Gent, Picture and Poetry, p. 16. The same caution should apply to any claims we make regarding Donne and the visual culture of his time. Although, unlike Milton, Donne’s Catholic upbringing may well have given him a different perspective on devotional art, the biographical journey bridging his Catholic youth and his Protestant ministry cannot be assumed to mean that his attitude to images was any simpler or more easily described – rather, the contrary. As with his attitude to visual art generally, it is hard to pin Donne down to any clear stance regarding the iconoclasm linked to the Reformation that spread through England in the 1530s and 1540s, and on the debates that continued during his lifetime.
11 See Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Volume 1: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) and Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England 1535–1660 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1973).The risk of assuming simple equivalences between how people see visual art in different cultures and different periods is another reason to be wary of the interart
Zeitgeist comparison proposed by Mario Praz and Wylie Sypher. The verbal-visual parallels identified by Sypher, Praz and later critics tend to be between English literature and Italian Renaissance art. The mannerist instability and doubt that they identify in poetry and painting alike is said to reflect a loss of Renaissance certainty that affects Catholic and Protestant sensibilities equally, and Sypher indeed refers grandly to “the mannerist God of Donne and Calvin and the Jesuits [who] imposes his will by fiat, and [whose] justice is despotic, inexplicable, perhaps equivocal”.
12 Sypher, Four Stages, pp. 132–133. But even if this was not the primary intention of Sypher and Praz’s project, the fact that the visual analogues evoked are all (perhaps inevitably) Continental, Counter-Reformation works, skews their argument towards a Catholic interpretation of Donne, particularly when his religious poems are under consideration.
This is made explicit in Murray Roston’s
The Soul of Wit, which situates Donne’s poetry within a Counter-Reformation philosophy and aesthetic by placing Sypher and Praz’s interart approach alongside the theory developed in the 1950s by Gardner and Martz, that Donne’s Holy Sonnets in general follow the pattern of meditation prescribed in the
Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola (1548).
13 Martz, Poetry of Meditation, pp. 43–53; Gardner, “Introduction”, Divine Poems, pp. l–lv. Comparing Donne’s poetry with paintings by artists such as Tintoretto and El Greco, Roston argues that the destabilising techniques of mannerist art, such as “the unexpected angle of vision, the convulsed figures… the inversion of perspective, or the shocking hues” are “remarkably close to those developed in Donne’s verse”.
14 Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit: A Study of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 166; p. 160. Cf. Martin Elsky, “John Donne’s La Corona”, pp. 3–11; Louis Martz “English Renaissance Poetry: From Renaissance to Baroque”, in From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), pp. 3–38.Perhaps this is what we can take away from Sypher and Praz’s interart comparison. Leaving aside the over-generalised analogies, and the elision of historical and cultural differences between England and Italy, their intuition that there is a visual aspect to Donne’s poetry remains worth pursuing. What they identify is a disquieting, destabilising visual quality that, finally, is not a million miles away from Gilman’s observations regarding “the crosscurrents of attraction and repulsion flowing through Donne’s preaching on the image”, and through his poetry. Gilman locates the unsettling visual quality in Donne’s poetry firmly in the context of the iconoclastic controversy in England: “a man split between the Roman and the Reformed church, Donne would seem to have absorbed both sides of the iconoclastic controversy into the language of his little world, where their antagonism remains fully charged”.
15 Gilman, Iconoclasm, p. 135.