George Berkeley's Grand Tours: The Immaterialist as Connoisseur of Art and Architecture

In the summer of 1711, having finally seen the first edition of his Characteristicks through the press, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the consumptive 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, left the ‘great smoak’ of London for Naples, which had been the southernmost point of his Grand Tour 23 years earlier [Fig. 51]. ¹ Though still only 42 when he died in Naples little more than a year later, since that first tour Shaftesbury had established himself as an immensely influential arbiter (and merger) of morality and taste. ² Thus, although the ten-page Letter concerning Design he wrote to Lord Somers whilst confined to his grand Palazzo during the first months of 1712 was not published until much later, Shaftesbury's reputation was such that, within weeks of arriving in England, it was circulating in manuscript and had joined his other canon-creating writings on the shelves of the (largely Whig) intelligentsia. ³