This chapter will probe early modern notions of creativity by considering the artistic activities, in and for England, of the most sought-after painter in seventeenth-century Europe – Peter Paul Rubens. The artist's busy workshop helped to satisfy the demand for his works, and as a result Rubens's English patrons, ranging from various dignitaries to Charles I himself, were the recipients of paintings with varying degrees of the master's own participation. An inquiry into Rubens's practice of delegating to studio assistants, and into the value placed by him and his British viewers on autography, will elucidate attitudes towards the manual aspects of creation. A related area of investigation will focus on the phenomenon of self-repetition in the artist's works for his English clients, some of which works were replicas of earlier compositions or reused motifs from previous inventions. Finally, a broader exploration of responses to self-replication, extending at times beyond the shores of England or the confines of painting, will bring to the fore the tensions inherent in early modern attitudes to art.

Replicas and Studio Hands

Although Rubens's stay in England as a diplomatic envoy dates to 1629–30, his relationship with English patrons had begun some thirteen years earlier when Sir Dudley Carleton, the English Ambassador to The Hague, had sought to trade a diamond chain for a hunt scene by the artist.

This book has its origins in an interdisciplinary conference of the same name, held at the University of Manchester in September 2008 as part of a four-year research project entitled ‘Musical Creativity in Restoration England’, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. The conference brought together a group of seventeenth-century specialists including those working in cultural studies, print culture, the history of ideas, and of course historians of art, architecture, theatre, literature and music, to explore how we can seek to understand what it meant to be creative in the early modern period in England. Te symposium revealed the wide variety of approaches to studying creativity being taken by scholars and research students across the humanities, and led to exciting and fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas between its participants, resulting in discussions that in some cases have led to long-lasting research collaborations.

Tis book presents a selection of twelve essays that were developed from the twenty papers given at the conference. In selecting this group, the editors have sought to include a representative sample of the research that was presented, while also aiming to ensure that the collection is accessible to a genuinely interdisciplinary readership. While music examples are used in some of the chapters, these are kept to a minimum, and are supported by audio samples available at www.alc.manchester. ac.uk/subjects/music/research/projects/musicalcreativity.

This essay grows from a concern with the old art-historical problem of how the perception of art, or in this case more specifically architecture, changes over time. It sets out to explore how verbal representations preserve clues about such changes in the way we see the world, while proposing that the dialogue between subject and object is perhaps more palpable in texts than it is in pictures. The protagonist is seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn, who travelled in Italy between 1644 and 1646. The account of this journey forms part of his seminal Diary, which he compiled mainly retrospectively from the 1660s onwards. One of the main seventeenth-century English sources for historians of all fields and by some even regarded as having changed travel writing, Evelyn is nevertheless well known for having copied generous parts of his text from earlier guidebooks.2 In the following I will try to dismantle sentence by sentence one short passage in which he describes the city of Genoa. Comparing his text to other seventeenth-century guidebooks allows us to see not only what Evelyn copied, but also what he altered, what he added, and, more importantly, what these alterations and additions tell us about contemporary modes of perception and representation. The ensuing analysis raises questions about concepts of creativity and originality in the period while probing the ordering of vision and knowledge in the seventeenth century.

Introduction

Edward Phillips's attempt to define creation in 1671 highlights a number of issues that are central to developments in thinking about creativity, knowledge and artistic innovation during the seventeenth century. His idea of creating ‘something’ from ‘nothing’ implies, at one level, absolute novelty: a lack of precedence, a complete rupture with and effacement of a past state or experience; something appears where once there was emptiness or blankness. Simultaneously, however, the emphasis on ‘making’ and especially ‘forming’ suggests that there are materials to be moulded: existing matter to be reshaped into something new; Phillips suggests that creation has to be made from something, even as this ‘some-thing’ is described as ‘no-thing’. This ambivalence – the ‘as it were’ in the definition – hints at the multiple concepts and interpretations of creativity that existed in the seventeenth century.

In the early modern period – particularly in the realm of epistemology – creation was understood both in terms of reshaping, translating and reconfiguring that which exists and as the production of fresh entities ‘out of nothing’. Seventeenth-century theories of creativity seem to emanate from precisely this tension between novelty and precedent, between the purity of the new and the foundation of the old.