2 - Visual Culture, Medleys and Partisanship

Summary

Building upon the discussions of tradesmen in virtuoso culture from the previous chapter, we now turn to the visual productions of the engravers, draughtsmen and writing masters within Bagford’s network: John Sturt, Bernard Lens II, George Bickham and Samuel Moore, amongst others. The first visual production discussed is the ‘medley’: a little-studied genre of trompe l’oeil etchings and drawings appearing in the 1700s that portrayed various prints and papers as if they were scattered upon a table surface. The chapter closes by discussing the curious spectacle of miniature writing, or micrography, in which religious texts were miniaturised into spaces as small as a penny or shaped into ‘word-images’ (calligrams) representing divisive monarchs. While these productions were created and sold within virtuoso culture, analysing their deceptive illustrations and allusions highlights their additional roles as graphic satires well-suited to navigating controversy and censure during the first age of party.

Analysing the political functions of medleys and micrography can add to our understanding of visual prints and their increasingly significant place within later Stuart society. During this period, the public became a source of legitimacy in the emerging two-party system. As a result, graphic satires started to respond to one another in a contest for ‘public opinion’. The events of the Popish Plot (1678) and the Sacheverell Affair (1710) sparked what Mark Knights calls a ‘visual turn’ in political culture. One aspect of this culture that remains unclear, though, is ‘how much of the printed imagery remained in circulation beyond its first publication, either through reprinting or through a culture of collection or display’. This question is especially relevant for a period of increased collecting activity: from the expanding second-hand book trade, to the republication of pamphlets, poems, sermons and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts into miscellanies. The medley itself was a genre of ‘graphic collection’, bringing together a range of ‘old’ and ‘new’ objects. Their compositions help us to think about the visual transmission of texts and images from past to present, the sociable context of audience interpretation, and the way collecting added new meanings onto objects beyond the intentions of their producers.