Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel
Fichingfield, 1585 - 1646, Padua
Son of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel and Anne Dacre. Was an English courtier in the courts of King James I and King Charles I; noted as an art collector and politician. Referred as the 2nd Earl of Arundel, or the 14th or the 21st, depending on the method of counting.
Page Link: http://vocab.getty.edu/page/ulan/500057345 Accessed 11/4/2020
Thomas Howard, 2nd [14th] Earl of Arundel [and Surrey]
(b Finchingfield, Essex, July 7, 1585; d Padua, Sept 24, 1646).
Politician and diplomat. Pre-eminent aristocratic patron and collector of the early Stuart period, he became known as the grandest man in England and one of the most cultured in Europe. He was the grandson of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1536–72), and the son of Philip Howard, 1st Earl of Arundel (1557–95), who was attainted in 1589 on a charge of high treason, with all his honours forfeited and his possessions confiscated by the Crown. The earldom was restored to Thomas Howard in 1604; he was granted Arundel Castle, W. Sussex, and the Norfolk estates that remained.
In 1606 the Earl married (2) Aletheia Talbot, youngest daughter of the rich and powerful Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury (1553–1616). Thereafter he began to make his mark on an English court rapidly becoming more receptive to foreign tastes through the influence of Anne of Denmark, consort of James I, and their son Henry, Prince of Wales. The Earl of Arundel owed much to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s knowledge and encouragement, the most valuable help he received being the services of Thomas Coke, secretary and artistic adviser to the Earl of Shrewsbury, who became the first agent employed in forming the Earl’s collection.
The Earl and Coke went together to the Low Countries in August 1612. It is thought that Arundel sat to Rubens, though if he did the portrait has been lost. What is certain, however, is that he encountered a far wider range of paintings than he had previously seen. He visited the collection of the Duke of Aarschet near Brussels and that of the Postmaster-General at Antwerp, where he greatly admired Sebastiano del Piombo’s Cardinal Ferry Carondelet and his Secretary (1512–13; Madrid, Mus. Thyssen-Bornemisza), a picture he believed was a self-portrait by Raphael and which he eventually acquired in 1618.
In the autumn of 1612 Arundel and Coke left the Low Countries for Padua, intending to undertake a prolonged tour of Italy, but plans were frustrated by the death of Prince Henry, causing their return to England. By the following April the Earl had returned to Italy after accompanying Elizabeth, daughter of James I, to Heidelberg, following her marriage to Frederick V, Elector Palatine (1596–1632). Arundel and his wife, with an entourage of 35 that included Coke, Inigo Jones and William Petty, went first to Milan and were in Venice and Vicenza in the early autumn of 1613. In Venice the Earl commissioned Palma Giovane to paint an episode from the history of the Howard family (untraced). They then spent six weeks in the Monasteria delle Grazie in Siena studying Italian, before the Earl and Jones went on to Rome, arriving at New Year 1614.
The Earl and his entourage spent longer in Rome than anywhere else in Italy, using the city as his base for excursions down the Via Appia to Gaeta and Naples. Rome undoubtedly represented the climax of the Italian tour, a point made by the Earl in a letter to his wife, when they were temporarily separated: ‘I would wish you to see Rome well, for there are no more such places’. He bought works of art extensively, but the only known purchases are four statues all’antica (Oxford, Ashmolean) that he ordered from Egidio Moretti. Arundel and Jones may have stayed with the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose collection of Classical statuary, reliefs and inscriptions they would have seen. Giustiniani evidently contrived a dig in the Forum.
In June 1614 the Earl and Countess turned for home, travelling by way of Siena, where on 14 June the Earl bought a manuscript copy of Vitruvius’ On Architecture (London, BL, Arundel MS., 122). In Florence they stayed at the Palazzo Pubblico. On this tour, the Earl gained an understanding of Italian culture such as no other Englishman had yet acquired, and his attempts to transplant Italian mores and tastes to England were to have a lasting influence.
After their return at Christmas 1614, the Earl and Countess divided the growing collection among their three houses in London: Arundel House (destr. 1678) in The Strand, with a gallery (c. 1615–17) designed by Jones; a property at Greenwich, remodelled by Jones (1615; destr. 1617); and a villa (destr.) at Highgate. The collection also included cabinets and tables inlaid with agate, chalcedony and lapis lazuli such as had never been seen in England. In 1616 the collection of paintings was augmented by pictures from the collection of Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, repossessed from Dudley Carleton, 1st Viscount Dorchester, and given to the Earl of Arundel by James I. The spirit of these years is evoked in two portraits by Daniel Mijtens the elder of the Earl and Countess (1617; both London, N.P.G., on dep. Arundel Castle, W. Sussex; for the portrait of the Earl) seated against imaginary views of the south gallery at Arundel House.
At this time the Earl was pursuing what he described as his ‘foolish curiosity’ for the works of Hans Holbein the younger. From John Lumley, 1st Baron Lumley, a relation by marriage, he inherited works that included Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (1538; London, N.G.) and Erasmus (Longford Castle, Wilts). Such was the fame of his collection that in 1620 Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, begged a portrait in return for a painting of the Earl’s choice from the Medici collections. Arundel sent Holbein’s Sir Richard Southwell (1536; Florence, Uffizi), though what he received in exchange is not known. The magnificence of the Earl’s Holbeins can be gauged from a reference by Joachim von Sandrart in Teutsche Academie (1675) to seeing a gallery full of them at Arundel House when he was in London in 1627. The collection was enriched when his brother-in-law William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), gave him the series of Holbein’s portrait drawings of the English court (Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Lib.).
In the winter of 1620–21 Anthony van Dyck came to London, and it is probable that the Earl commissioned from him the Continence of Scipio (1620–21; Oxford, Christ Church Pict. Gal.); a drawing of Arundel by van Dyck also dates from this period (see fig.). In 1623 Coke died, and Petty succeeded as the Earl’s chief agent. In 1624 Petty was sent to Greece, where he collected a wide range of objects, from inscriptions to such bronzes as the Hellenistic head of Sophocles (London, BM), which at the time was thought to be the head of Homer. The inscriptions were published by John Selden (1584–1654) in 1628 as Marmora Arundelliana. Although by the time the book appeared Charles I and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, had Italian pictures of equal importance to those of the Earl, neither they nor indeed any collector in England had possessions equal in diversity, number and quality to the Arundel Marbles, the fame of which had spread to continental Europe.
After the publication of the Marmora Arundelliana, the Earl became increasingly interested in graphic art. In 1635 it was said that his chief preoccupation was with drawings, and it is possible that Petty, in Italy on the Earl’s behalf for most of the 1630s, acquired the celebrated collection of drawings that had belonged to the Florentine Niccolò Gaddi; Vasari’s Libro del disegno may also have belonged to the Earl. In 1636, while in Germany on a mission from Charles I, the Earl met Wenceslaus Hollar, who accompanied him on the rest of the journey, making drawings on the way. Hollar then came to England with the Earl and was employed to make engravings of works of art in the Earl’s collection. In 1637 it is recorded that the Earl took an Italian connoisseur into his cabinet-room, designed for him by Jones, where more than 200 albums of drawings attributed to Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were shown to him. Arundel’s taste in drawings, however, was not confined to the masters of the High Renaissance; it is probable that he also owned a corpus of drawings by Annibale Carracci for the ceiling (1597–1601) of the Palazzo Farnese, Rome.
Later acquisitions by Petty for the Earl included the Christ Crowned with Thorns (Munich, Alte Pin.) by Titian, from the studio of Domenico Tintoretto; a Psalter by Giulio Clovio (Providence, RI, Carter Brown Lib.); and, in 1639, the collection of gems that had belonged to the Gonzaga family, the finest ever assembled. Perhaps the most important of the Earl’s acquisitions of the 1630s was that of the library of Willibald Pirckheimer, an event that may have been celebrated in the portrait of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (London, N.G.) by Rubens, with Arundel in the same pose as that in Dürer’s etched portrait of Pirckheimer. An anonymous portrait of the Earl after Anthony van Dyck also dates to the 1630s. The library contained a uniquely rich deposit of the drawings, letters and diaries of Dürer. Petty failed, however, to purchase for the Earl the obelisk that Bernini erected in 1651 in the Piazza Navona, Rome, as part of his Four Rivers fountain. The Earl was interested in owning not only paintings by Titian and Veronese—those favourites of the Stuart collector—but also medieval manuscripts and vestments, archaeological remains and Egyptian obelisks, as well as documents that related to the lives of artists. The collection of Charles I was largely formed by the Gonzaga family, that of the Duke of Buckingham by the eye of Rubens, but that of the Earl of Arundel depended upon a personal vision: a breadth of interest and experience that made its creator respected, admired or resented by the great Italian collectors of the Baroque age.
The collection began to be broken up when the Earl became bankrupt in 1639, the year in which van Dyck painted Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, with Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel (London, N.P.G., on dep. Arundel Castle, W. Sussex). Many major museums have pictures that belonged to Arundel: the Man in a Red Chaperon by Jan van Eyck and the Vision of St Helena by Veronese are both in the National Gallery, London; St Margaret by Raphael is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Rubens’s three-quarter-length portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, painted in 1629, is in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA. The Arundel gems are dispersed: the Felix Gem is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which also houses the largest part of the collection of Arundel Marbles.
Bibliography
M. F. S. Hervey: The Life, Correspondence & Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge, 1921)
F. Springell: Connoisseur & Diplomat (London, 1963) [incl. most of the letters in London, BL, Add. MS., 15970]
D. Howarth: Lord Arundel and his Circle (New Haven and London, 1985)
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (exh. cat., ed. N. Penny; Oxford, Ashmolean, 1985)
David Howarth, https://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2319/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T039114
Published online: 2003, Grove Art Online, accessed 11/4/2020
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