Gibbon, Edward
- Dictionary and Archive of Travellers
- Title
- Gibbon, Edward
- Full Text of Entry
-
(1737 - 94), historian, e. s. of Edward Gibbon of Putney; educ. Westminster and Magd. Oxf. 1752 - 3; Lausanne 1753 - 8; MP 1774 - 84; Lausanne 1783 - 93; author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776 - 88]; unm.
1764 - 5 Turin (26 Apr. - 12 May 1764), Milan (13 - 19 May), Pavia (20 - 21 May), Genoa (22 May - 12 Jun.), Piacenza, Parma (13 - 15 Jun.), Modena (17 Jun.), Bologna (18 Jun.), Florence (19 Jun. - 22 Sep.), Lucca (22 - 24 Sep.), Pisa (25 Sep.), Leghorn (26 - 28 Sep.), Siena (29 Sep.), Viterbo (1 Oct.), Rome (2 Oct. - 5 Dec. 1764), Naples (28 Jan. 1765 - Mar.), Rome (19 Mar.), Loreto, Ferrara, Padua, Venice (22 Apr.), Susa [England 25 Jun. 1765]
No British traveller's visit to Italy in the eighteenth century was of greater consequence than Gibbon's, and none was more thoroughly prepared. At twenty-seven he had already lived five years in Lausanne and published his Essai sur l'Etude de la Litt?rature [1761], and immediately before his visit he had read ancient and modern histories, prepared a table of roads and distances, filled a notebook with remarks on geography, and studied Spanheim's treatise on ancient medals and coins.1
He travelled with William Guise, whom he had met in Lausanne.2 They entered Italy via Mont Cenis and came first to Turin, where Gibbon was introduced to the King, Charles Emmanuel III. He was struck by the Borromean Islands, 'a work of the fairies in the midst of a lake encompassed by mountains'. In Genoa he noticed the memorials to the recent deliverance from 'Austrian Tyranny', and he inspected 'every scene of action within the enclosure of her double walls'. They had intended to sail from Genoa to Lerici, but conditions were against them and they went to Florence by road. Much of the Farnese and Este collections had been removed from Parma and Modena to Naples and Dresden, but the 'precious relics' which remained detained him. He spent four months in Florence, visiting the Uffizi fourteen times. The Venus de Milo he had known 'ever since my cradle: books, conversations, engravings, copies had been placed before my eyes a thousand times'; but he found the Uffizi statues restored and largely of indifferent quality: accordingly 'the writer is always afraid of building whole systems based on the caprice of some modern sculptor'. While he sought to understand 'the progress and decadence of the arts', he remained sceptical concerning their value for the historian.3 On 13 July he commissioned a drawing of an Egyptian statue for his friend Joseph Needham, and on 6 August he visited Thomas Patch with Guise.4 He studied the Tuscan classics, 'but the shortness of my time, and the use of the French language, prevented my acquiring the facility of speaking'; he was a silent spectator at the conversazioni of Horace Mann. In Pisa he met his cousin John Acton and his nephew, John Francis Edward Acton.
Gibbon reached Rome early in October, and twenty-five years later he could still recall the strong emotions which then agitated his mind; after a sleepless night 'I trod, with a lofty step, the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell'. He told his father that 'whatever idea books may have given us of the greatness of that people their accounts of the most flourishing state of Rome fall infinitely short of the picture of its ruins'.5 On 5/6 October Gibbon and Guise, with William Ponsonby, submitted to a course from James Byres, to find that 'in the daily labour of eighteen weeks [apparently an error for eight] the powers of attention were somewhat fatigued'. Six weeks were then spent in Naples, 'whose luxurious inhabitants seem to dwell on the confines of paradise and hell-fire'; later he commented on the Neapolitan 'mixture of pride, vice, slavery and poverty'.6 Gibbon was presented to the young King Ferdinand by William Hamilton, whose antiquarian and geological studies he admired. He returned through Rome, without kissing the Pope's foot, via Loreto and Ferrara to Venice, which afforded 'some hours of astonishment' but, he told his mother, it was the least satisfactory of all Italian cities; singular objects soon gave way 'to satiety and disgust', while the Piazza S.Marco was decorated 'with the worst Architecture I ever yet saw'.7 The University of Padua he pronounced 'a dying taper'.
Gibbon later reflected in his Autobiography on the use of foreign travel. 'With the education of boys, where or how they may pass over some juvenile years with the least mischief to themselves or others, I have no concern', he wrote, but the ideal traveller should have age, judgment, 'a competent knowledge of men and books, ... freedom from domestic prejudices' and an 'indefatigable vigour of mind and body'. Gibbon possessed all these attributes: 'it was at Rome, on 15 October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind'.
1. See Gibbon, Autobiography. 2. See Gibbon Journey. 3. See F. Haskell, History and its Images, 186 - 93. 4. Borroni 1985, 27 - 9. 5. Gibbon Letters, 1:184 (9 Oct. 1764). 6. Ibid., 197 (21 Jul. 1765). 7. Ibid., 193 (22 Apr. 1765).