Venice and the Grand Tour [Hardcover]

Professor Bruce Redford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 1996

For well over a century, the Grand Tour of France and Italy - which included a stay in Venice - served as the ultimate in finishing schools for the young male elite of Great Britain. This book explores Venice's hold on the imagination of the Grand Tourist and connects the ideology of the Tour to the mythology of Venice. According to Bruce Redford, the Tour offered a combination of aesthetic, social political and sexual experience, and it provided its alumni with a life-long source of cultural and political authority. Yet from the beginning the Tour was also viewed with deep suspicion: it was feared that the very experiences that completed the British gentleman might well undo him. The aspiration and ambivalence that characterise the Tour attached themselves most powerfully to the time spent in Venice. Drawing on a wide range of materials - from guide-books to portraits, satirical poems to garden pavilions - Redford investigates Venice's power of attraction for the English and shows that it was a source of many echoes and metaphors of England's own cultural, political, and geo-graphical situation.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Redford (English, Univ. of Chicago) examines the uses of the "grand tour" of France and Italy for young English gentlemen of the period 1650-1800, explaining why it was held in contempt as well as in high regard. He enumerates the social, artistic, political, and moral aspects of the tour and shows how Venice epitomized the tour's many facets. Redford illuminates the literature, political writings, and even the portraiture of the period, illuminates the influences that the entire experience had on the Englishman travelers who would later be among the most important names in Britain, e.g., Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Gray. This volume serves as a valuable preface to such works as John Pemble's Venice Rediscovered (Oxford Univ., 1995), which addresses the period beginning in 1800. Suitable for academic libraries.
Norman Malwitz, Queensborough P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First edition (October 30, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300069111
• ISBN-13: 978-0300069112
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,408,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A tour of a most interesting variety, April 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Venice and the Grand Tour (Hardcover)

What I like about this book is that it touches on all of the most interesting parts of the Grand Tour and things connected with the tour without belaboring any of them. It covers anxieties about the tour; the influence of the tour on art and architecture; the differences in the tour in Venice and Rome as reflected in portraiture; and the development of the tour over time as reflected in poetry and prose. It is an even-handed and fair explication of the vast body of literature, poetry, art and architecture connected with the tour. Instead of trying to force a narrow thesis on this wonderful diversity, it leaves the reader to draw many conclusions for herself. It is written in Bruce Redford's inimitable and impressive style. Every time I read a book by Bruce Redford, my vocabulary increases by at least 100 words, and my appreciation for the english language and english heritage increases 100 fold. This book contains beautiful paintings-- especially the magnificent Cannalettos. I highly recommend reading and owning it to anyone interested in the Grand Tour, scholar and layperson alike. This book would be especially interesting to a young person embarking on their own grand tour to study abroad in Europe.