At the Italian language class I attended today we were given an interesting assessment task. The group was divided into pairs and we were invited to choose a subject of interest and write a short essay on it during the coming week Divided up on the relatively random basis of who happened to be sitting next to whom at the time, I found myself paired with a musician. Quite quickly we decided that it might be interesting to write about the influence of Italy and Italians on the arts in Britain. He will write about music; I will write about painting; and we will each chip in any other thoughts we might have.
Oddly, I found myself thinking in the first instance about literature rather than painting. Geoffrey Chaucer, I discovered, was quite fluent in Italian, having visited the area twice, and drew the themes of several of his celebrated “Canterbury Tales” from Italian literary sources. Less surprisingly I reflected on Shakespeare, and the prominence of Italian material in his plays. I knew about his familiarity with the tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte, but was surprised to find that no fewer than eight of his plays have an explicitly Italian context, including two set in Verona and two in Venice.
There are two theories attempting to explain this. The first sets out from his famous “lost years” (1585-92) when nothing is known about what he was up to, and many have speculated that he actually spent time in Italy. I’ve also heard it argued that Italian merchants and bankers were common in the London of his day, and he could have had easy contact with them. I rather like the first theory, although there is no solid evidence for either explanation.
It did strike me that perhaps John Milton also should be considered, and that perhaps Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained might have owed something to a familiarity with Dante. When I looked into this, however, the preferred account of his literary models gives priority to Virgil. He doesn’t even seem to have heard of Dante.*
Rummaging through my copy of Milton’s poetry this afternoon, however, I came across a quite remarkable statement. “God hath yet ever had this island under the special indulgent eye of his providence.” (Of course, he meant England, not Britain. This was before the Act of Union.) It is startling to realise that there are still plenty of people around in this country who share Milton’s view of things. Surveying as I have been today the involvement of English artists of several disciplines in wider European traditions, it is very sad indeed to find that so many people still appear to share Milton’s view of the country as under the “special indulgent eye of …. providence”. The continental European elements of our culture are not some kind of lately-imposed entanglement with the European Union. They are organic and deeply-rooted. The current movement to disengage the UK from the EU does not constitute an attempt to recover our essential historical separateness, but an ideological fantasy that can be challenged, if by no other means, by a familiarity with the history of the arts. Joh Milton, you have a lot to answer for!
*Herbert Spencer is reported to have mourned on one occasion, “a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact”.