ABSTRACT
S urviving jerome's misgivings, Chaucer's irony and even Erasmus's sarcasm, the phenomenon known as pilgrimage lasted considerably longer than its successor, that which the seventeenth-century priest and former pilgrim, Richard Lassels, first identified as the Grand Tour. Moreover, though Lassels's pioneering Voyage of Italy (1670), introduced innumerable influential Englishmen to ‘art’ and even Vasarian art history, within its shorter life-span the Grand Tour was less consistently concerned with art and architecture than the pilgrimage had been with relics and sacred places. Even in Lassels's fascinating preface on the theory and practice of travel, art in the modern sense of the word hardly featured. It had featured even less prominently in the mid-sixteenth-century diary of Sir Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione's Cortegiano, who deserves no less fame as the first Grand Tourist. Evolving out of and, in Protestant northern Europe, reacting against the medieval practice of pilgrimage in response to demand for a non-superstitious justification for travel, the Grand Tour began as an exclusively educational phenomenon. Even in its maturity in the eighteenth century, after the establishment of rules of ‘taste’, when the Grand Tour became almost synonymous with artistic concerns, these remained subordinate to an educational ideal of virtuosity, which Lord Shaftesbury argued led to virtue in the modern sense of the word.
