If Vasari is to be believed, Toto was the chief architect of this building; in any case, it may be taken for granted that he was one of the leading Italians employed there. In the royal accounts he is always spoken of as “paynter,” but the term included the makers of works in coloured plaster, with which the exterior of Nonsuch was covered. “Toto’s earliest education,” says Mr. Digby Wyatt, “had specially fitted him for dealing with such an infinity of allegorical and quasi-pictorial sculpture as that with which we shall find Nonsuch to have been adorned; since his father, in whose ‘bottega’ he was first brought up, obtained his nickname of ‘Nunziata’ from his annually furnishing all the quantity of imagery with which the feast of the Annunciation was wont to be set forth in a tangible shape at Florence.”[[602]]
TOTO AND PENNI
“Antony Toto and Barthilmewe Penne” first appear in the Household Accounts in 1530, “upon several warrantes being dated the iiijth day of June, anno xxij, for their wages, after the rate of xxv li a year to every of them, to be paid unto them quarterly, & during the Kinges pleasure.”[[603]] Thus each received £25 a year, the payment for the two being always entered in one account, £12, 10s. each quarter, and 22s. 6d. each annually for their livery coats. On one occasion the scribe has confused them, and has entered them as “Anthony Pene and Bartilmew Tate.”[[604]] There are some interesting items concerning Toto in the Hampton Court Accounts,[[605]] from which we learn that in addition to his work as an architect and decorator he was employed as a painter of pictures. Thus, in 1530, there is an entry: “To Antonye Tote, painter, for the painting of five tables standing in the King’s library—First, one table of Joachim and St. Anne. Item, another table, how Adam delved in the ground. Item, the third table, how Adam was droven out of Paradise. Item, the fourth table, of the burying of our Lord. Item, the fifth table, being the last table, of the burying of our blessed Lady. The said Antonye taking for the said five tables, by a bargain in great, £6, 13s. 4d.” Toto was also a restorer of old pictures, for on the same page is the following: “Item, to the said Antonye for sundry colours by him employed and spent upon the old painted tables in the King’s privy closet, 13s. 4d.”; and again, “also paid to Antoyne Tote, painter, for the painting of four great tables—that is to say, one table of our [Lady] of Pity; another table of the four Evangelists; the third of the Maundythe [the feet-washing on Maundy Thursday?]. The fourth [title omitted]. The said Antonye taking for the said tables, by a bargain with him made, by great, 20l. soll.” These entries show that painters at Henry’s Court received separate payment for pictures and other special works, and that their salaries were in the nature of retaining fees. They also received a daily wage when engaged on work of some duration, as can be gathered from several quotations from the accounts already given. In 1530 Toto was engaged in this way at one shilling a day, and with him were associated Philyp Arkeman (10d.), Lewes Williams (9d.), and John Devynk (3d.). The work consisted of “new painting and gilding certain antique heads brought from Greenwich to Hanworth at the King’s commandment, and new garnishing of the same.” In June 1532 he was employed upon a similar job: “Also paid to Anthony Tote and John De la Mayn, the King’s painters, for their wages, coming from London to Hanworth for to see the finishing and setting up of certain antique heads new painted and gilded, either of them by the space of three days at xiid. the day, for themselves and their horses.”[[606]] These were the terra-cotta roundels modelled by Giovanni da Maiano, the John De la Mayn of the accounts, which appear to have been painted and gilded by Toto.
ANTONIO TOTO, SERJEANT-PAINTER
On 15th January 1532 he received a special sum of £20 by the King’s commandment, for some service not mentioned.[[607]] He became a naturalised Englishman in 1538, his patent of denization being dated 26th June in that year. In it he is described as a native of Florence, in the Emperor’s dominions.[[608]] In the same year he was employed by Cromwell on some work at Havering, for which he was paid 51s. 1d. on 26th May.[[609]] On the 28th November 1538 he and his wife Helen received a grant in survivorship of two cottages and land in Mycheham (Mitcham), near Nonsuch, which was to be held by payment of a red rose at St. John Baptist’s Day annually.[[610]] On the following New Year’s Day he presented the King with a “depicted table of Calomia” (the Calumny of Apelles)[[611]]; and on the 1st of January 1541 a “table of the story of King Alexander.”[[612]] On the 14th of April 1541 he obtained a licence to import 600 tuns of beer,[[613]] and on the 2nd December 1542 he received a lease of the manor of Ravesbury, in Surrey, which belonged to Sir Nicholas Carew, attainted, for forty years, at £42, 6s. 8d. rental.[[614]]
Toto succeeded Andrew Wright as the King’s serjeant-painter in 1543, and he continued to hold the same position throughout the reign of Edward VI, and in that capacity he provided the tabards for the heralds, and at the coronation of Edward furnished all materials required by the College, whether in satin, damask, or sarcenet, for Kings, Heralds, and Pursuivants. He also devised patterns and painted the properties for the court masques. Thus, at Shrovetide 1548, he received 20s. as a reward for his pains in drawing patrons (patterns) for the masks, and a similar amount a year or two later for attending the Revels and drawing and devising for painters and others. In 1550 he supplied “antique moulded heads” for a temporary banqueting house, and in 1552 he was employed in preparing properties for a masque on the State of Ireland, and received 4s. for painting an Irish halberd, sword, and dagger, and a coat and cap with eyes, tongues, and ears for Fame.[[615]] On New Year’s Day 1552 he presented King Edward with “the phismanye of the Duke of —— (name obliterated), steyned upon cloth of silver, in a frame of woode,” for which he received in return a gilt salt with cover weighing a little over nine ounces. He was still serjeant-painter at the death of Edward VI, and for the King’s funeral had an allowance of seven yards of black cloth, with three more for his servant.[[616]] It is to be supposed that the numerous pictures Toto presented to Henry VIII and his son were of his own painting, though there is no actual proof of this; his chief works in England appear to have been architectural and decorative.
His fellow-worker, Bartolommeo Penni, another Florentine, may possibly have come with him to England in 1519. He was, in any case, settled in London and in the service of the King in the summer of 1522, for in a valuation of the lands and goods of the inhabitants of London of that date, he is entered in the parish of St. Martin Orgar as “Bartholomew Penny, stranger, in fees of the King yearly, £25.”[[617]] Penni may possibly have been a brother of Gian Francesco Penni, called Il Fattore, one of Raphael’s pupils, and of Luca Penni.[[618]] The latter was at work for some years at Fontainebleau under Rosso, and, according to Vasari, afterwards repaired to England; but there appears to be no foundation for this statement, Vasari having probably confused him with Bartolommeo.[[619]] In the royal accounts his name is always coupled with that of Toto when his quarterly salary is paid, but otherwise there is no record of him, except his patent of denization, dated 2nd October 1541, in which he is described as a subject of the Duke of Florence.[[620]] For some reason Penni did not sue for the letters patent for more than a year later, when the King’s style and great seal had been altered, so that by the Lord Chancellor’s command they were not to bear date until the 28th January 1543, and a fine of 13s. 4d. was inflicted. Beyond this, nothing is known about him, but the work he undertook for the Crown must have been of a similar nature to that done by Toto.
ROVEZZANO, MAIANO, AND BELLIN
Two Florentine sculptors of note, Benedetto da Rovezzano and Giovanni da Maiano, were at work here throughout the whole of Holbein’s sojourn in England. It is probable that they were brought over by Wolsey on purpose to work on the great tomb and monument he was erecting for himself in the tomb-house at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and after Wolsey’s fall, when Henry VIII seized upon the materials and such of the work as had been finished and proceeded to adapt it for a tomb of his own, the two sculptors were retained in the King’s service, though Benedetto, at least, was anxious to return to Florence before Wolsey’s downfall. Their names occur constantly in the royal accounts. Rovezzano is sometimes entered as “Benedict, the King’s tomb-maker.” Giovanni da Maiano was a noted worker in terra-cotta, and Wolsey employed him on such work at Hampton Court. On the 18th June 1521 he rendered an account to Wolsey for ten roundels of terra-cotta (rotundæ imagines ex terra depictæ) at £2, 6s. 8d. each, and three histories of Hercules at £4 each, “for the Palace at Anton Cort.”[[621]] These were the roundels already spoken of in connection with Toto. Maiano was one of the artists associated with Holbein in the decoration of the Greenwich Banqueting House, in the accounts of which he is entered as John Demyans. He was in the royal service, and received a salary of £20, being entered in October 1528 as “John Demayns, gravour.”[[622]] In 1526 his name occurs in the accounts of Thomas, Lord Rocheford. “To Mane, the painter, for making the pattern of your seal of arms, 3s. 4d.,” and it was as a seal-engraver that he was largely engaged at the Court. In Cromwell’s accounts the two sculptors are sometimes entered as Benedict Rovesham or Rovesame and John de Manion or Manino. Their work on Henry’s tomb appears to have gone on until 1536, when the project was abandoned for a time. Both men seem to have left England shortly afterwards.
Nicolas Bellin of Modena was one of the most prominent of the Italian artists engaged at the English Court during the latter half of Holbein’s residence in England. Mr. Lionel Cust[[623]] suggests that “the similarity of name would lead to a possible identification of this Niccolo with Niccolo dell’ Abbate da Modena, who arrived in France after the accession of Henri II, and took an important share in the decorative paintings at Fontainebleau, where he died in 1571”; but the latter, who, as a painter, was by far the more important artist of the two, did not reach France from Italy until 1552, whereas Bellin had been in the employment of Francis I as early as 1517.[[624]]