When Richard Haydocke’s translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura… was published in 1598, England was regarded as a backwater of the European art world. Though the Tudor monarchs had begun to develop their patronage of artists to bolster the prestige of the English crown as it played a greater role in European politics and the wider world, there were few publications in English to support the training of artists or cultivate the taste of their patrons.
Richard Haydocke (ca. 1569-ca. 1642), a Fellow of New Colllege, Oxford, and known chiefly as a physician and sometime preacher, who spent his “spare howers of recreation” as an amateur artist, was well placed at the center of the bookish world of Oxford to pursue his interest in bringing the latest Italian theorizing on art to England. It is likely that he travelled in Italy in the 1590s, where he would have seen works of art in the new Mannerist style. In his preface, he relates that he originally only had access to “a poor copy” of Lomazzo’s Trattato, first published in Milan in 1584, provided by his friend Thomas Allen, an Oxford mathematician, astrologer and collector of manuscripts, before another friend, who preferred to remain anonymous, supplied him with a better copy (probably the 1585 edition). His book was dedicated to Sir Thomas Bodley, whose great project of establishing a collection of books for the University library, now known as the Bodleian Library, was already in process. And Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo was handsomely produced by Joseph Barnes, the original printer of the University of Oxford press.
Described by later writers as the “bible” of Mannerism, the original Italian edition of Lomazzo’s Trattato... consisted of seven books but did not include illustrations, probably because the painter and theorist had gone blind by the age of thirty-three. Haydocke informs the reader that he wished to give Lomazzo greater credit for his role in the history of art than he had received from some of his contemporaries, including Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, whom Haydocke accused of plagiarizing a whole section of Lomazzo’s second book in his work on Albrecht Dürer, Di Alberto Durero pittore e geometra… (1591), and Antonio Possevino, who had completely omitted Lomazzo from his Bibliotheca selecta (1593) of noteworthy writers on the art of painting.
Haydocke actually translated only five of Lomazzo’s seven books and added a “briefe Censure of the booke of Colours….” But in addition to translating the text into English, he describes how he made multitudinous corrections, attributing the errors– “so many flies of presse-errours”–in the original Italian that Lomazzo must have “swallowed” as a result of his blindness. Major additions to his translation were the frontispiece with its fine portrait likenesses of Lomazzo and himself and thirteen “pictures” that Haydocke himself executed, with apologies for his clumsiness, to illustrate the treatise. Though some derived from Durer’s De symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1532) or Gallucci’s later adaptations of them, others were Haydocke’s own inventions and showed his interest in Mannerist art, as is evident in the attentuated figures of the nude couple in the section on human proportion, and the elegant study of the horse, both of which reveal his study of anatomy for his work as a physician. The unusual allegorical figures of the visual arts in the four corners of the frontispiece, and the scrolling cartouches and other ornaments are also in the Mannerist style.
A recent acquisition for Marquand Library, Haydocke’s book, packed with allusions to scholarly writing and aesthetic debates, and illustrated in a style that showed recent developments in avant-garde European art, is one of the first illustrated publications in English on art theory, preceding by many centuries the publication of Nicholas Hilliard’s contemporaneous Treatise concerning ‘The Art of Limning,’ (not published until 1912), to which Haydocke alludes to in his preface.
Nicola Shilliam, Western Art History Bibliographer
