Horror on the Grand Tour

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product of a system for ordering knowledge of the foreign which was subject to historical change. Transformations in the procedures for describing and commenting on works of art as objects of the traveller's attention have therefore been largely ignored. Many such transformations nevertheless took place over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: new theoretical options became available, strategies which had previously played an important role in commentary on art were rejected or excluded, and the boundaries defining those empowered to utter this commentary shifted considerably. This reluctance to situate accounts of art in Italy within the context of a discourse of European travel is evident in the comments of literary critics as well as in those of art historians, and in both cases is partly due to a preoccupation with assessing the merits of particular travel books, rather than examining the common determinants of the whole range of utterances about art in Italy possible at any given period. The historial specificity of the writings is obscured both by assessments of the adequacy of language to its objects which invoke twentieth-century expectations in the guise of absolute criteria of judgment, and by appeals to concepts of 'literary merit', for which absolute, a-historical status is also claimed. Such distributions of praise and censure frequently pose a continuity between the qualities identified in the text and the abilities of the author, as a means of reinforcing distinctions between individual writings. Taste and the Antique, for example, by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, removes one travel book from its discursive context by the declaration that 'the visual appetite and discrimination of the Richardsons are quite exceptional' (1982, p.45). Herbert Barrows' introduction to Hester Piozzi's Observations and reflections made in the course of a journey through France, Italy and Germany expresses its appeal to exceptional abilities even more directly: 'It is a better book than many of its contemporaries simply because it is by her' (1967, p.xiv). This article; in contrast, is concerned with analysing certain historical changes discernible in utterances which order knowledge of the foreign; it is not concerned with judging the merits of the works in which these utterances appear. The passages considered here are taken from works which follow the literary forms of several different genres: guide books and treatises on art as well as narratives of journeys. These passages are all analysed, however, as part of a discourse in which the objects of commentary are delimited by the practice of travel on the Grand Tour, and in which the subject speaks with an authority based on a claim to personal experience of travel. This authority may assume an important role even in writings which do not explicitly proclaim a co cern with travel on the title page: in William Aglionby's Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues, for example, information about the history of painting is proffered by a 'Traveller', returned from Italy. Though concerned with the formation of certain concepts in the course of the eighteenth century, the present survey analyses these concepts as the products of sp cific orderings of language, and not as abstract enti ies to be defined in isolation from their linguistic context, as in a 'history of ideas' or a 'a history of taste'. The theories and arguments which are discussed here, moreover, are considered as strategies with precise rhetorical functions within the discourse of European travel, rather than generalized patterns of thought to be abstracted from it.