Balthazar Gerbier in Seventeenth Century Italy
L.R. Betcherman describes how, early in the seventeenth century, an English royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, despatched his Dutch agent to Italy to form a sumptuous art-collection.
When the Marquis of Buckingham sent Balthazar Gerbier—an immigrant Dutch painter—to Rome and Venice in 1621 to buy paintings, he gave him an assignment that perfectly suited his talents and inclinations. For in Italy, as a connoisseur and practitioner of art, Gerbier found his spiritual home. Italy was to shape him, and he, in his turn, was to contribute to the Italianizing process that was moulding English taste.
The collection that he amassed for Buckingham was predominantly Italian (“the pearls of Italian art”) and the aesthetic doctrine that he propagated all his life was Italianate: “I shall always prefer the ancient magnificency to that of all other nations; for the buildings of Italy are pleasing from the plinth of the rustic until the rail that finisheth the front, on the top whereof are not seen the great garrets which the French affect so much, and who are but receptacles for wind.”1 There were to be other Italian journeys for Gerbier during his years as Keeper of York House, Buckingham’s palatial mansion in the Strand, but none could have equalled the delight of the first.
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