ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how travel, art and literature were interconnected and dependent on each other. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars had dispersed aristocratic art collections throughout Europe, and Britain, which had had relatively impoverished holdings, became Europe's cultural leader in the span of less than fifty years. Italian art was, in many ways, both familiar and unknown to British viewers at the turn of the nineteenth century. The more privileged viewers might own a work or an engraving, or have direct experience of important works through their travels. The chapter also explains Britain's relationship with art but it closed with an examination of the fusion of British print and visual culture, a fusion made possible through the exploration of Italian culture in the intervening years. Italian art left an indelible mark on Romantic writings, even as such texts assigned new value to the Old Masters.
