On 10 January 1859, the Prince of Wales, aged seventeen, was sent on a five- month-long educational trip to Italy, a short version of the traditional Grand Tour. The plan was that he would spend the first few months visiting the ancient and modern sites of Rome and then proceed on to Florence and Northern Italy before returning to England in the summer. However, the outbreak of civil war in Tuscany at the end of April 1859 caused a premature end to the prince’s trip when
he was forced to return home much earlier than planned.59 Nevertheless, the
surviving records of his three-month stay in Rome offer a revealing insight into
his artistic experience of the city. In his hand-written Diary,60 Bertie wrote short
accounts of his daily activities in Rome, which include brief notes on the artworks he saw and admired. In addition, there are several albums with letters from Bertie’s tutors to Albert, and correspondence between Bertie and his father. These documents together allow us to draw useful conclusions about the development of the young prince’s artistic taste in that they indicate his future career as a collector of sculpture.
Since the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour had been understood as an essential part of a young British nobleman’s education, and Rome, the seat of Europe’s ancient classical heritage, was the main travel destination. There,
59 The seriousness of the civil war situation felt by English tourists in Rome was expressed by John Charles Robinson,
Superintendent of the South Kensington Museum, who wrote from Rome on 4 May 1859, comparing the local riots to the recent Indian Mutiny: ‘One might suppose Rome to be a second Lucknow, and the Campagna outside, hot and dusty and lovely as it is, to be swarming with brigades and sepoys ready to cut the throats of every living soul.’ Quoted from Anna Somers Cocks, The Victoria and Albert Museum: The Making of the Collection (Leicester: Windward, 1980), p. 63.
exposed to famous historical sites and original artworks, Grand Tourists were
expected to develop their knowledge and hone their taste in art.61 At the beginning
of the nineteenth century, travelling to Italy had been nearly impossible due to the Napoleonic Wars, but from the 1820s onwards, Rome became more popular than ever. No longer the exclusive preserve of young British aristocrats, the city attracted an international audience from a wider social circle. Regularly updated
guide books, such as Murray’s popular Handbook of Rome,62 the fifth edition of
which was published just before Bertie’s travels in 1858, provided English tourists with a background on key attractions and useful information on travel, food, entertainment and shopping.
Like Bertie, Prince Albert had travelled to Italy as a young man. In the winter of 1838/39, Albert spent almost three months in Florence where he explored the Grand Ducal art collections, before travelling on to Rome to see the
major antiquities and contemporary artists’ studios.63 Yet, at the time, Albert had
preferred Florence, where the art of the Renaissance made him feel ‘intoxicated
with delight’, while Rome did not exert any particular charm on him.64 However,
two decades later, when Bertie was repeating the Italian encounter, Albert opted for Rome as the primary destination for his son. In fact, the educational advantages of Rome over Florence were widely accepted. As expressed in the account of a young middle-class tourist in 1848, the benefits of Rome were such:
Florence perhaps has most charms for me, but Rome gains daily in interest, and the beauty of the Campagna quite enchants me. Then Rome has this advantage over Florence; it is filled with artists at
61 For more on the Grand Tour, see, for example, Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour (London: Croom Helm,
1985); Jeremy Black, The British Abroad. The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 2003).
62 A Handbook of Rome and its environs; forming part II. of the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (London: John
Murray, 1858).
63 Charles Grey, Biography of H.R.H. The Prince Consort. Compiled from Letters and Memoranda (London: printed for
private circulation by Smith, Elder and Co., 1866), pp.199-200.
work, several of whose studios I have visited, and to see new thoughts embodied in painting and sculpture round me, to see works of living genius, seems to give fresh ardour and stimulus to all my studies, and to enable me to appreciate more fully the works of those
who are gone.65
Although Bertie’s Rome trip formed part of a tradition of royal educational tours, the special reason for its occasion was, in fact, more particular and profound. Since his early childhood, Bertie had fared ill in his learning and ability to concentrate, and, at the time of his coming of age, in 1859, Victoria and Albert
were alarmed by their son’s limited intellectual progress.66 According to Bertie’s
personal tutor, Robert Bruce,
[h]is thoughts are [concentrated] on matters of ceremony, on physical qualities, manners, social standing and class and these are the destinations which command his esteem and arouse his exaltation. It follows that in his own ease he attaches but little value to the acquisition of knowledge and that the proposition of it does not weigh
much with him in forming his estimate of others.67
In order to eliminate these ‘obnoxious and dangerous elements’ from his mind and focus his ‘intellectual powers’ in the right direction, Bruce suggested that the
prince be exposed to ‘steady learning’ and ‘superior genius’68 to encourage him to
become ‘the first gentleman of his country’.69 Travelling to Italy was, therefore,
65 Susan Horner was a well-educated English middle class tourist who visited Rome in 1848 and later became a successful
writer on Italian subjects. Susan Horner, Journal of a tour in France and Italy, 1847-1848, extracted from my letters home, and notebooks, Manuscript Journal, entry for 10 April 1848, p.100, http://0-
www.grandtour.amdigital.co.uk.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/Contents/DocumentDetails.aspx?documentid=67803&prevPos =67803&vpath=contents [accessed: 16 Jan. 2012].
66 Magnus (1964), pp. 7-11, see also Charlotte Pangels, Dr. Becker in geheimer Mission am Queen Victoria’s Hof 1850 bis
1861 (Hamburg: Jahn & Ernst Verlag, 1996), pp. 69-70.
67 RA/Z/444/77, Colonel Bruce to Prince Albert, 26 March 1859. 68 Ibid.
69 In a confidential memorandum Prince Albert discusses the outstanding manners and deportment which a ‘gentleman’
seen as a possible cure to Bertie’s un-princely inclinations and Bruce agreed with Albert that Rome was the place where ‘triumph of genius and learning are
everywhere apparent’.70
In the daily royal column of The Times, the Court Circular, the Prince of
Wales’s tour was officially announced as the typical continental journey of a young English gentleman at his coming of age, ‘to enable him to study the
antiquarian and objects of classical and artistic interest.’71 The travel time was
well-thought-out to coincide with “the season”, when many foreign visitors came to the city to follow the sumptuous celebrations during the Roman carnival and Easter week from the end of February to April. During this time, the young prince was likely to meet other members of the European aristocracy and celebrated persons of culture who flocked to Rome for a few weeks of sightseeing and festivities. Apart from his tutor, Bertie’s permanent travel party consisted also of
his history teacher, Albert’s private secretary, an equerry anda royal medic, while
further Englishmen associated with the court joined occasionally for day trips and dinners. Instead of lodging at the most fashionable hotel in the city, on the central Piazza d’Espagna, the royal party stayed at the Hotel des Isles Britanniques, on the Piazza del Popolo, nearer to the city gate where it was safer and quieter since
the prince was officially travelling incognito.72 This location was convenient for
planning excursions into the countryside and a useful starting point for visits to artists’ studios, many of which were located along the three main avenues leading
off the Piazza del Popolo [fig. 1.2].73
70 RA/Z/444/77, Colonel Bruce to Prince Albert, 26 March 1859.
71 RA/Z/444/29, newspaper cutting from the Court Circular, 5 January 1859. 72 RA/Z/444/49, newspaper cutting from Giornale di Roma, 7 February 1859.
73 See The Artistical Directory; or Guide to the Studios of the Foreign Painters and Sculptors resident in Rome, to which
are added the principal mosaicists and shell-engravers, with much supplementary information useful to the visitor of the “eternal city.”(Rome: Tipografia Legale, 1856). Favourite streets where artists lived in the 1850s were the Via del Babuino, Via Margutta, the parallel streets between Via del Babuino and Via del Corso, as well as the small streets around Piazza Barberini.
Bertie’s daily timetable was carefully planned with hours of lessons and letter writing, interspersed with more pleasurable activities like horse riding and guided sightseeing tours. For the latter, Bruce had arranged for well-known experts from the English community to be the prince’s guides. While the Rome connoisseur Joseph Pentland (1797–1873) was asked to serve as cicerone to the antiquarian sites, the eminent Welsh sculptor John Gibson (1790–1866) was
engaged as a guide to the local art collections and artists’ studios.74 After a few
days in Rome, Bruce proudly reported to Albert of his success in winning these two authorities:
Mr Pentland and Mr Gibson have hitherto been our guides. The former is zealous and well informed, […] very pleasant and Protestant and an old servant of the Crown and moreover on good terms with both natives and foreigners. He is not perhaps very […] antiquarian but he is sufficiently erudite for the purpose. [...] He has drawn up a very clear programme of operations and already accompanied us several times on our antiquarian expedition. Of Mr. Gibson I need say nothing – His pre-eminent quality as artist is universally acknowledged and he
has agreed to accompany H.R.H. to the studios, Vatican &c.75
Most importantly, both guides were highly respected personalities, with excellent connections in Rome, who could be trusted to devise an exemplary sightseeing programme for the young prince. Gibson was the leading British artist in Rome and most esteemed by Victoria and Albert, for whom he had frequently worked as
74 Pentland was a naturalist and traveller who had studied the geography of South America before settling in Rome in 1845,
where he became so acquainted with the local antiquities that he was employed by the publisher John Murray to edit his popular travel guides to Italy. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 43, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) pp. 621-22.
For Bruce trying to engage Gibson, see RA/Z/444/47, Colonel Bruce to Prince Albert, 6 February 1859.
a sculptor and artistic advisor since the 1840s.76 Trained in the studios of Canova and Thorvaldsen, he was one the most respected sculptors of his generation who followed in the tradition of the first modern art historian Johann Joachim
Winckelmann (1717–1768) and his reconstruction of the Greek ideal.77 Inspired
by the principles of classical aesthetics based on ‘noble simplicity and calm
grandeur’,78 Gibson considered Greek sculpture as the most appropriate model for
emulation in contemporary sculpture. By entrusting Bertie to Gibson’s tutorship, Victoria and Albert evidently hoped that their son would acquire the knowledge of an established classical repertoire and sharpen his taste accordingly. Yet a comparison between Gibson’s view of the classical canon of sculpture with what caught the Prince of Wales’s eye during his Rome sojourn, indicates the deviation of Bertie’s taste from the expectations of a classical art education.
Antiques in the Vatican and Capitoline collections
On 16 March 1859, six weeks after he arrived in Rome, Bruce proudly informed Albert about the Prince of Wales’s sightseeing progress: ‘H.R.H. has now however entered the region of art and during the present week several mornings
will be devoted to the Vatican.’79 Rated as the ‘most magnificent museum of
ancient sculpture in the world’,80 the Vatican collections were an essential part on
the prince’s visiting schedule. For Bertie to derive the greatest benefit from it,
76 By 1859, the royal collection contained the following sculptures by John Gibson: two full-size marble sculptures of
Queen Victoria (1844-47), a marble bust of Grazia (1842), a marble relief of Cupid and Psyche (1845) and a portrait bust of Queen Victoria (1851). See ‘Appendix II: Royal Gifts’, in Victoria & Albert: Art & Love (2010), pp. 456-62; see also Elisabeth Darby, ‘John Gibson, Queen Victoria, and the Idea of Sculptural Polychromy,’ Art History 4, 1 (March 1981), pp. 1-20; Regarding Gibson’s role as artistic adviser to Victoria and Albert, the Royal Archives contain several letters from 1847 to 1851 between Gibson and the Queen’s Household, in which Gibson acts as correspondent for several Roman-based artists. RA/VIC/ADDL/MSS/C/4; See also Victoria & Albert: Art & Love (2010), p. 44.
77 For more on Winckelmann’s Greek ideal in art and its posthumous reputation, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal:
Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 18, 21, 33, 222- 56.
78 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1972).
79 RA/Z/444/73, Colonel Bruce to Prince Albert, 16 March 1859. 80 A Handbook of Rome (1858), p. 184.
Gibson, in charge of the Vatican tours, planned the time of his visits carefully, suggesting to wait until mid-March, when it was getting warmer so that the impression would be more enjoyable and profitable. In addition, his strategy was to select only a few highlights which would inform his royal student of the principal ideas of classical sculpture. According to Lady Eastlake’s biography of the sculptor, Gibson was convinced that ‘the greater number of visitors who go to the Vatican collection spend too much of their time in dwelling upon inferior
works – stiff, hard repetitions’.81 It is therefore likely that he suggested Bertie
should concentrate on selected antiques of the highest quality rather than wasting valuable time with the multitude of Roman copies which populated the museum
corridors and were considered as inferior to ideal Greek art.82 Guiding the royal
party through the sculpture galleries, Gibson would then have pointed out original Greek works and the most accomplished Roman copies, all of which would have suitably been described with the adjectives he frequently used in his descriptions of sculptures, such as ‘beautiful’, ‘chaste’, ‘pure’, ‘majestic’, ‘sublime’, ‘true to
nature’, ‘graceful’, ‘noble’, and ‘dignified’.83
As the highlight of their visit, Gibson would have showed his group the heart of the Vatican Museums, the celebrated Belvedere courtyard, known as the
first sculpture museum in Europe.84 Here, displayed in individual top-lit niches,
visitors could admire the masterpieces such as the Apollo Belvedere [figs. 1.3],
which Gibson described as ‘the finest of all the Greek specimens of ideal art
81 Gibson quoted in Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, R.A. Sculptor (London: Longmans, Green and Co,
1870), p. 172.
82 During the 1770s, intended as a major political statement about the papacy’s link with classical antiquity, the Vatican
was acquiring numerous newly excavated antiques which were put on display in the expanded sculpture halls of the Museum. See Jeffrey Collins, ‘The Gods’ Abode: Pius VI and the Invention of the Vatican Museum’, in The Impact of Italy. The Grand Tour and Beyond, ed. Clare Hornsby (London: The British School at Rome, 2000), pp. 173-94.
83 While describing the antique sculptures at the Vatican and Capitol collections, Gibson used these adjectives repeatedly.
See Eastlake (1870), pp. 172-91.
84 On the development of the sculpture collection at the Belvedere Court, see Francis Haskell & Nicholas Penny, Taste and
which have been preserved to us.’85 While some argued that the statue was a
Roman copy,86 Gibson adhered to Winckelmann’s theory87 that it was not only an
original Greek sculpture, but its most elegant example:
The swelling of the nostrils and the disdain on the lip are so delicately expressed that the beauty of the divine countenance is undisturbed. What judgement is required! and what a specimen it gives us of Greek refinement. No description in prose or poetry can impress the mind with an image of sublimity as this statue does. The form is refined to
the highest degree of beauty, even celestial beauty.88
Here, Gibson admired the concurrence of the delicate facial expression and the body’s posture, pervaded by elegant restraint and widely considered as a mark of
the utmost quality of Greek sculpture. Apart from the Apollo, Gibson was also
enthralled by the celebrated group of Laokoon and his two sons attacked by
serpents, which was considered as embodying the climax of human suffering [fig.
1.4]. Traditionally praised for its dignified expression of agony,89 Gibson
described this work as ‘worthy of the great schools of Grecian art’.90 He agreed
with Winckelmann’s interpretation that Laocoon’s expression was emblematic of
Greek sculpture’s ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’.91
Although Bertie would have certainly also learned about numerous other
antiques in the Vatican which formed part of Gibson’s canon, only the Apollo
Belvedere and Laocoon left a marked impression that we know of upon the
prince. In his Diary, he wrote: ‘We went over the statues which I admired very
85 Eastlake (1870), p. 177.
86 See Haskell & Penny (1981), p. 150.
87 For Winckelmann’s theory about the Apollo Belvedere, see Carlo Fea (ed.), Storia delle arti del disegno presso gli
antichi di Giovanni Winkelmann (Roma: Pagliarini, 1783), vol. 2, p. 355.
88 Gibson quoted in Eastlake (1870), p. 177-78. 89 Haskell & Penny (1981), p. 244.
90 Gibson quoted after Eastlake (1870), p. 178. However, according to modern scholarship the original Greek provenance
of the Laocoon has not been clarified. See Haskell & Penny (1981), p. 246.
91 For more on the eighteenth-century dispute about Winckelmann’s interpretation of Laocoon, see Victor Anthony
much, the Apollo Belvedere & Laocoon where [sic] the two I liked best – It was a
great pull having Gibson with us as he showed us the best statues.’92. Despite
being taciturn in his record of the visit, Bertie’s reason for emphasising in particular these two statues becomes more evident in a letter to his father: ‘I admired the Apollo and Laocoon very much, having seen copies of these celebrated statues so often, I was very happy to have the opportunity of seeing the
originals.’93 Through his admiration of the famed Vatican antiques, Bertie tried to
impress his father who was a known collector of bronze reductions after famous