![]() 10 Cowdray, Sussex (1520–42), a courtyard house begun by Sir David Owen (1459–1535) and completed by the courtier Sir William Fitzwilliam ( c.1490–1542), had a first-floor gallery in both the north and south ranges. Probably constructed in anticipation of the king’s visit of 1531, it contained a Stone Gallery on the ground floor and an Oak Gallery above it whose display of carved heraldic panels, though much reordered, may have furnished the room since the 1520s ( fig. Coeval with the galleries at Hampton Court and Whitehall was the range built on the west side of The Vyne, Hampshire, by William Sandys, 1st Baron Sandys (1470–1540), Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain. ![]() 9 Royal models were inevitably emulated by members of the court and more widely by the aristocracy. The Tudor court provides a number of examples of galleries in which works of art were displayed: at Hampton Court Cardinal Wolsey’s Gallery was glazed in 1514 and three years later hung with Flemish tapestries, while the King’s Gallery in the Cloister Court ‘contained musical instruments, a Mappa Mundi and numerous paintings’. It served as a model for subsequent galleries in which such elements were subordinate to the whole – a pattern that only changed in the late eighteenth century as notions of display shifted in favour of the aesthetic value of individual works of art. 8 At Fontainebleau, between 15, Sebastiano Serlio, Giovanni Battista Jacopo and Franceso Scibec da Carpi produced a synthesis of architecture, painting, stucco work and wood carving in the Gallery of François I, which linked the king’s apartments to the Chapel of The Trinity. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century display OriginsĪcknowledged as a French innovation, the gallery of display gained architectural and decorative sophistication in Italy before being adopted more widely. 7 The country house gallery reflected these social and recreative functions it was analogous to the French promenoir and, together with the rooftop leads, provided a secure place for exercise, particularly for women and children. They were ‘havens of beauty with views within and without’, places ‘where curiosities and conversation could be combined’, and ‘garden for wintertime’ where confidential political business could be conducted. 6 Those built at Hampton Court and Whitehall Palace in the 1530s, and elsewhere, were first and foremost private spaces for royal use, for they connected directly to the king’s and queen’s privy lodgings and gardens, and they were shared only at royal discretion. 5 The galleries of Henry VII’s palaces and those of his courtiers were used ‘for exercise in wet weather, for dancing, and no doubt for a good deal of social and political intercourse’, even, on occasion, for target practice. 4 The two-storied galleries that Thomas Bourchier ( c.1411–1486), Archbishop of Canterbury, introduced between 14 around three sides of Stone Court at Knole, Kent, were, for example, probably primarily for communication, while the similar structure that Henry VII built in 1506 at Richmond Palace, commanding views of the Privy Garden and Thames, and the near contemporary wooden gallery at Thornbury Castle, South Gloucestershire, built over a stone cloister by Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham (1478–1521), had in part a recreative function. ![]() If first a means of communication, galleries evolved as places of recreation and display, though these functions were not necessarily mutually exclusive with the loss of evidence it is difficult to make categorical judgements about sequence and chronology. How have galleries evolved in terms of their location, orientation, modelling, decoration and lighting to serve the display requirements of works of art? To what degree did picture and sculpture galleries develop from spaces used for other purposes, and did one differ from the other? How were British examples influenced by earlier continental models and ideas, and how did they relate to the typologically similar galleries of palaces and great town houses? What follows is an attempt to draw together from the too often parallel literature of architectural and art history various disparate strands that touch on these questions. 1 This essay considers the converse: how architectural design has been put into the service of collections of painting and sculpture in British country houses. In this passage from The Elements of Architecture (1624) Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) suggests that Painting and Sculpture are handmaidens to Architecture, responsible for her adornment. For which ende, there are two Arts attending on Architecture, like two of her principal Gentlewomen, to dresse and trimme their Mistresse: PICTURE & SCULPTURE Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theater of his Hospitality … may well deserve … according to the degree of the Master, to be decently and delightfully adorned.
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