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The Denmark House Helicon: iconography and surviving traces

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14601176.2012.706966

1943-2186

Michael Trapp,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. R. Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), p. 92. When Anne moved in after the completion of the work in 1617, the palace was officially renamed ‘Denmark House’ and kept this name up until the Commonwealth: see Colvin, HCW 4 (HMSO, 1982), p. 260, citing R. Needham and A. Webster, Somerset House, Past and Present (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), pp. 69–70 and 136–138. 2. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 90–92. 3. Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, p. 269. 4. L. Morgan, Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and early Seventeenth-Century Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 115–121. 5. The Trust acquired the ‘bath’ in 1948, on condition that the then London County Council should take responsibility for its day-to-day management; the responsibility subsequently passed from LCC to Greater London Council, and thence to Westminster City Council. The ‘bath’ had previously been owned (from 1922 onwards) by the Rev. William Pennington-Bickford, Rector of St Clement Danes, and his wife Louie, both of whom died in 1941. Before that, from 1893 onwards, it had belonged to the New Oxford Street draper Henry Glave and his family. 6. The ‘Roman’ label is first seen in a trade directory of 1838; before that the establishment had been known simply as a cold bath — or, more strictly, one of a pair of cold baths — run either from 5 Strand Lane or (initially) from 33 Surrey Street since the 1770s. The new identity was however quickly canonized by being taken up first in the second volume of Charles Knight's London, published in 1842 (pp. 165–167), and then in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, published in 1849/50 (ch. 35). 7. See for instance the notice outside the ‘bath’ in Strand Lane, the text of which goes back to a pamphlet issued by the National Trust and the LCC in the 1950s, and reflects the results of the investigation carried out by the LCC Architect's Office in the 1940s. The same text forms the basis of the current Wikipedia article on the ‘bath’. 8. K. Hayward, Building Material Report — Strand Lane ‘Roman’ ‘bath’: The Results from the Sampling and Analysis of the Building Material from the Bath and Associated Structures, London Borough of Westminster (Pre-Construct Archaeology Report No. R11125, November 2011). I am very grateful to the National Trust and King's College London for giving permission for this study to be carried out, and to Dr Hayward and Pre-Construct Archaeology for the full and lucid report. 9. K. Hayward, op. cit. n. 8, pp. 9–10 and 13. 10. S. Black in K. Hayward, op. cit. n. 8, p. 16. 11. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, p. 227 (n. 22); Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, p. 269. 12. National Archive E 351/3246, accounts for 1 October 1611 to 30 September 1612. 13. Earlier entries for the same year in the Works Accounts (E 351/3246, preliminaries) refer to ‘sondry woorkes about the fountaine in the Garden, and building a house towardes the Thames for Mounser de Cois to make the Rocke in for the ffountaine’ (cited by Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, p. 269). 14. W. A. Shaw (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 24: 1710 (London: HMSO, 1952), p. 236: online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx? http://compid=85735&strquery=‘strand lane’ Date accessed: 4 April 2012. 15. For Vernon (1666–1726), see E. Cruickshanks et al. (eds), The Commons 1690–1715 (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), s.v., and the online version at http://www. historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/vernon-thomas-1666-1726. The house, built in the early 1690s by the Arundel agents Simon and Nevison Fox (father and son), is the one described by Strype as ‘a fine, large and curious [i.e. elaborate] house’ (J. Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (1720 edn), Book 4, Ch. 7, p. 118, online at http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/strype/TransformServlet?page=book4_117&display =normal), and by Vertue as having a stairwell frescoed by Louis Laguerre with the story of Hercules and Omphale (G. Vertue, Note-Books, Volume 24 (London: Walpole Society, 1935), p. 187 [V.125, B. M. 69b]). Having passed from the Foxes to the Vernons, and thence in 1741 to the Danvers family, it burned down in 1765, to be replaced by the present Nos 33 and 34 Surrey Street and the predecessor of the current No 35. Substantial remnants of its brick vaults still survive between Nos 33–34 and the ‘bath’: see K. Hayward, op. cit. n. 8, pp. 10–11, 14 and 16. 16. Foord worked with the Rev. Pennington-Bickford in the 1920s, publishing two short, privately printed pamphlets on the ‘bath’, and living long enough to be interviewed by the members of the LCC Architect's Office who investigated the history of the bath on behalf of the National Trust in 1947: see the Statutory Planning File on the ‘bath’ in the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA/4441/01/0109), English Heritage file WM645 (held at the London Office in Waterhouse Square), and Foord's own two pamphlets, The History of the Roman Bath in Strand Lane (1923), Guildhall Library PAM 3056, and The Roman Bath in Strand Lane: A Notable Monument of Roman London (1932), BL010349.de. 33. 17. Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, 270. 18. J. Saunders in C. Knight (ed.), London, Vol. 2 (1842), p. 166. 19. The ‘bath’ is not quite alone in this. The inside of the original perimeter wall of the King's College London campus, running down the west side of Strand Lane, incorporates a patch of brickwork of late Elizabethan or Jacobean date, which looks like the only part of old Somerset House and garden still standing above ground level. See K. Hayward, op. cit. n. 8, pp. 11–12 and 15–16. 20. Smythson's plan is in the RIBA Library Drawings Collection, RIBA22792. The description is by Johan Wilhelm Neumayr von Ramssla, in his Des Durchlauchtigen Hochgebornen Fürsten und Herrn, Herrn Johann Ernsten des Jüngern, Hertzogen zu Sachsen … Reise in Franckreich, Engelland und Niederland (Leipzig: H. Gross, 1620), pp. 184–185 (available online from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). De Caus's design is Problème 13 from Book II of Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (Frankfurt: J. Norton, 1615), foll. 12v–13r, available online from CNUM at http://cnum.cnam.fr/ILL/FDA1.html. All three are set out by Strong, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 88–91, and Morgan, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 112–117. 21. See further below, p. 11. 22. Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 257–259. 23. See A. White, ‘Cure family (per. c. 1540–c. 1620)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004), online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/73265 Date accessed 29 February 2012. 24. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, p. 91 (but not specifying that it appears only in the second edition, not the first); Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, p. 118 (mistakenly assigned to Book II). 25. The Survey of the Antiquities of the City of Oxford, composed in 1661–66 by Anthony Wood, ed. A. Clark (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1889–99), Vol. 15, p. 431. ‘With my gentle flow’ perhaps echoes Spenser's ‘Sweet Thames, flow softly … ’. 26. Twyne's Latin text seems faulty in the second line of the couplet for the Trent. My translation assumes that his Thamis is a mistranscription for Thamesi, but this may not be right. My KCL colleague Victoria Moule suggests that the reference is not to the Thames but to the Tame, normally singular, but maybe featuring here under an unusual plural form (T(h)ami/T(h)amae), perhaps even equivocating on the similarity of ‘Tame’ and ‘T(h)ame(s)’. 27. On the importance of Pratolino to both de Caus's practice, and his published work, see Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, pp. 43, 48, 197. 28. E.g. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 78–83, 91, 99; Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, pp. 42–50, 113, 118–121. 29. For the sources and an overview of the garden, see W. Smith, ‘Pratolino’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 20, 1961, pp. 155–168. Guerra's drawing is reproduced by Morgan (ill. 31), Schickhardt's by Strong (p. 46). 30. Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, pp. 42–50. 31. Pace Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, p. 120, proposing that de Caus not only incorporated an acoustic element on his mountain, but also tried to go one better than Buontalenti at Pratolino by integrating it more smoothly into the overall composition. 32. Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, pp. 119–121. See also E. MacDougall, Fountains, Statues and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 121–122; and L. Cellauro, ‘Iconographical Aspects of the Renaissance Villa and Garden: Mount Parnassus, Pegasus and the Muses’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 23/1, 2003, pp. 42–57. 33. Recently restored by the École française de Rome: see http://www.villamedici.it/fr/history/2/restaurations/30/le-parnasse. 34. See J. Laver, ‘Designs for the Florentine Intermezzi of 1589’, The Burlington Magazine, 60, 1932, pp. 294–295 and 298–300; J. M. Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). The key point for a possible connection with de Caus is that an engraving of this design was published in 1592 by Epifanio d'Alfiano; intriguingly for the Somerset House design, it includes, besides Apollo, Muses, Pierides and hamadryads, a female river-deity reclining with an urn at the foot of the mountain. Both the British Museum (AN442102001) and the Getty Research Institute (P910002** (FF. 203)) include copies of this engraving in their online databases, though the Getty's accompanying documentation and analysis is much richer: http://library.getty. edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=551616. 35. There may even have been examples available locally in and around de Caus's home town of Dieppe: see P. Johnson, ‘Producing Pleasantness’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 29/3, 2009, pp. 169–191. 36. Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, pp. 120–121. 37. Elegies 3.3.1–2, 13–14; Propertius's landscape, more studiedly artificial than Ovid's, embraces spring, caves, trees, mossy ground, and a rocky shrine decorated with ‘pebbles’ (lapillis) and carved oscilla. 38. Satires, Prologue 1–3. 39. Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 15–20; House of Fame, 521–522; Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1809–10; Lydgate, Troy Book, Prologue, 36–45. Chaucer in his turn seems to have been influenced by a combination already made by Boccaccio: see J. L. Lowes, ‘Chaucer and Dante’, Modern Philology, 14, 1917, pp. 129–159, esp. 149–150. 40. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 5.250–678. 41. De Caus, ‘De Vitruve’, Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes, MS 339, fol. 23r, cited by Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, p. 41. 42. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, p. 91; Morgan, op. cit. n. 4, p. 118 (‘not Apollo (unless Neumayr’s description is incomplete)') and p. 120 (both Buontalenti and de Caus base themselves on Ovid's Helicon, but add Apollo). 43. Referred to by Strong, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 90 and 227 (n. 27), but not quoted; the necessary text (from a French-language edition of 1719) can be found in L. Pattacini, ‘Andree Mollet, Royal Gardner in St James's Park, London’, Garden History, 26, 1998, pp. 3–18, at p. 16, n. 8. 44. For the expansions in later editions of Mandelslo's journal, such that ‘the contributions of others greatly outweigh Mandelslo's own observations’, see W. Robson-Scott, German Travellers in England 1400–1800 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), p. 91; W. Mahdi, Malay Words and Malay Things (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), p. 273. The carelessness in the use of Neumayr for this particular addition comes through, for instance, in the assertion that it is the statue of the Thames, not its name-plate, that is worked from black marble. 45. E. Maréchal and L. de Jong, The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (Brussels: Crédit Communal, 1990), p. 53 (inv. 957); http://www.wilanow-palac.pl/minerva_amidst_muses.html; Mauerbach Benefit Sale, 29 October 1996, lot 64 (cat. p. 49). 46. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, p. 91. 47. Therefore not, as Strong asserts, the rivers of the ‘newly created Empire of Great Britain’; Scotland was not represented. 48. All described in Tethys Festival: or, the Queenes Wake, London: John Budge, 1610; the description of the water-flow is quoted by Strong, op. cit. n. 1, p. 92. The sets for this masque were designed by Inigo Jones. 49. Strong, op. cit. n. 1, p. 92, comparing the ‘Ballet of the Provinces of France’, staged for Catherine de’ Medici in the gardens of the Tuileries palace in 1573. 50. Two editions in 1604, from E. Allde (unauthorized) and S. Waterson (authorized); reissued 1623, by Waterson. Modern edition: E. Law (ed.), Samuel Daniel. The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (London: Quaritch, 1880). Discussed in R. Strong, The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy. III: Jacobean and Caroline (Boydell, 1998), p. 136. 51. S. Daniel, dedication To the Right Honourable the Lady Lucie, Countesse of Bedford. 52. See in particular J. Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 148–151. 53. F. O'Donoghue, Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Vol. 1 (A–C) (London: British Museum, 1908), p. 55 (Anne (of Denmark) 17); noted also in N. Faaborg, Danske Gradfiske Portraetter: Kongehuset (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, 1980). British Museum, Prints & Drawings O, 8.175. 54. M. Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 48; ead., ‘Robert Dudley and the Inner Temple Revels’, Historical Journal, 13, 1970, pp. 365–378; C. Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), pp. 50–52. 55. R. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: OUP, 1963), p. 140 (Med. 23); inscribed ‘Castis diadema perenne’. 56. R. Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), p. 42 (attributing the painting to Joris Hoefnagel); K. Hearn (ed.), Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630 (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), p. 63. 57. J. N. King, ‘Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen’, Renaissance Quarterly, 43, 1990, pp. 30–74; S. Doran, Marriage and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 57, 151–152. 58. R. Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 187–191. 59. C. McManus, Women on the Renaissance Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 109–111. The disapproving comment, much cited, was Dudley Carleton's, in a letter of 15 January 1604 to Sir John Chamberlain (National Archive SP 14/6/21): ‘Only Pallas had a trick by herself, for her clothes were not so much below the knee but that we might see a woman had both feet and legs, which I never knew before. It is the same letter that also mentions the source of the costume materials (suggesting that this was meant to be generally appreciated): ‘Their attire was alike, loose mantles and petticoats, but of different colours, the stuffs embroidered satins and cloth of gold and silver, for which they were beholden to Queen Elizabeth's wardrobe.’ 60. Virgil, Eclogues 6.64–6; Propertius, Elegies 3.3. 61. This river-deity (Aganippe?) shows up clearly in Alfiano's engraving (n. 34 above); I am less certain I can see it in the sketch attributed to Buontalenti himself, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (E.1189–1931: see J. Laver, op. cit. n. 34). 62. G. Legh, The Accedens of Armory (London: Richard Tottill, 1562), foll. 203r–v. 63. For the details of the layout of the east wing of Somerset (Denmark) House, see Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, pp. 255–260; S. Thurley, Somerset House: The Palace of England's Queens, 1551–1692 (London: London Topographical Society, 2009), pp. 35–37 and 42–44 (with plan on 37). 64. See G. Fisher and J. Newman, ‘A Fountain Design by Inigo Jones’, The Burlington Magazine, 127, 1985, pp. 530–533; J. Harris, ‘The Diana fountain at Hampton Court’, The Burlington Magazine, 111, 1969, pp. 444–449. The fountain was moved first under the Commonwealth to the privy garden of Hampton Court Palace, where the figures were rearranged in around 1690, then put into storage in 1701, and finally re-erected its current position in 1713. 65. Cornelius Bol, Somerset House from the River Thames, Dulwich Picture Gallery DPG360 (Thurley, op. cit. n. 61, p. 101, Cat. 9); Wenceslaus Hollar, Birds-eye plan (Thurley, pp. 101–102, Cat. 10). 66. Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, p. 270. An unexecuted design for the cistern house, probably by Inigo Jones, is in the R. I. B. A. collection, RIBA22798; what was eventually built, on the site of some old kitchen outhouses, was a lead-lined timber cistern measuring 44 ft × 12 ft × 3 ft 10 in [c. 13.5 × 4 × 1 m], resting on a broad brick foundation. 67. Thurley, op. cit. n. 61, p. 45. 68. Colvin, op. cit. n. 1, p. 268; A. Scott-Elliot, ‘The Statues from Mantua in the Collection of King Charles I’, The Burlington Magazine, 101, 1959, pp. 214 and 218–227. 69. Thames, Humber, Mersey, Dee, Medway, Tweed, Tyne, Severn (but no Trent): J. Baretti, A Guide Through the Royal Academy (London: T. Cadell, 1781), p. 5. 70. S. Thurley, op. cit. n. 61, pp. 114–116 (Cat. 21) and pp. 63–69; also p. 130 (Cat. 34). 71. J. Redington (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Papers, 1720–1728 (London: HMSO, 1889), p. 271: vol. CCXLVII.48 (entry for 4 May 1724). This account also describes the ‘Old Waterhouse’, like the St Clement's watch-house next door to it, as projecting over the lane and resting on the Somerset House wall (compare the description in the 1612 works accounts of the cistern as standing ‘over the Strand Lane’). Unless the 1724 survey is in error, there is more to be teased out about the building's original shape. Projection out over the Lane, however, does not fit well with the measurement of 14 ft [c. 4 m] square given by Vernon in his petition of fourteen years earlier.