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Richard Haydocke and Alexander Browne: Two Half-Forgotten Writers on the Art of Painting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederick Hard
Frederick Hard*
Affiliation:
Newcomb College, Tulane University
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Extract

Richard Haydocke, who published at Oxford in 1598 a translation of Lomazzo's Trattato dell'arte della Pittura, and Alexander Browne, who claimed authorship of the Ars Pictoria (1669), are not completely unknown to fame. Each had rather curious contacts with historically important persons: the former, with King James I and with Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library; the latter, with the Duchess of Monmouth, and with Mr. Samuel Pepys, whose wife was his pupil. It is true that the shrines of these writers have been visited but seldom, although the diligent inquirer will find that each is accorded a brief notice in the catholic pages of the Dictionary of National Biography, and occasional comment upon one or the other crops up in widely scattered sources.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , September 1940 , pp. 727 - 741
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

1 Reprinted in Rome in 1844. There has been no English translation since Haydocke's.

2 Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to Thomas James … ed. G. W. Wheeler (Oxford, 1926), pp. 6, 23, 24, 27. 100.

3 i (1912), 1–50.

4 See Compleat Gentleman (1622), pp. 104 ff.

5 See p. 986.

6 See John Nichols, Hist, and Antiq. of Leicestershire, etc. (1800), iii, pt. I, pp. 489–490.

7 “Collected from the Writings of the Ablest Masters … as Albert Durer, P. Lomatius, and divers others.” See p. 9 for passage from Haydocke's Lomazzo.

8 E.g. Notebooks, ii, 24, Walpole Society, xx (1932).

9 Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty (1753), “Preface,” pp. v–vii, xvii; Chapter xi, pp. 76–77.

10 Wheatley ed. (1902) iv, 408.

11 Ibid., v, 64.

12 Ibid., pp. 98–99.

13 Ibid., p. 131.

14 Ibid., p. 284.

15 Ibid., p. 285.

16 Ibid. (May 28, 1666), v, 300.

17 In his History of Engraving and Etching from the 15th Century to the Year 1914, he writes: “… The year 1669 has been given as the date of the first edition of the Ars Pictoria. That of 1675 is described on the title-page as a second edition; but until I find a copy dated 1669 (which is not in the British Museum, nor mentioned by Hazlitt or Lowndes) I shall be inclined to regard his Whole Art of Drawing, Painting, Limning and Etching, published by Peter Stint, 1660 (in which the article on etching exactly corresponds to the Ars Pictoria) as the earlier edition alluded to.”

18 Ed. cit., viii, 330.

19 Two additional absurdities may be noted:

A side-note on p. 69 in Browne's text reads: Vide George Vasari della pittula capib. This is an obvious misreading of Haydocke's Vide George Vasari della pittura cap. 16. That this is an error of ignorance rather than of bad proofreading is suggested by the fact that the blunder appears in the second edition also.

On p. 26 of the Ars Pictoria, in a discussion of the differences between painting and carving, Browne states that painting “is distinguished from Caruing, (though not essentially, but onelie accidentally (as is saide in the Proeme) by reason of the diversitie of the matter, wherein both of them represent Naturall thinges). …” This is exactly the text of Haydocke, of course, (p. 15). Browne's parenthesis “as is saide in the Proeme” makes no sense at all, for the simple reason that there is no “Proeme” to his treatise. In Haydocke, on the other hand, the reference is clearly to the somewhat lengthy “Preface,” in which the distinction between painting and carving is discussed. It is evident that Browne has here, as elsewhere, stupidly reprinted his original.