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from Part II - Architectural Space and the Status of the Object in The Faerie Queene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
On 29 april 1609, Thomas Howard, third Viscount Bindon, then extending his house at Bindon Abbey with a long gallery, wrote a short letter to Robert Cecil. Galleries, or long galleries, are rooms commonly associated with English architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even if many of the larger houses and palaces built in England from at least the fourteenth century did have covered corridors (used primarily as means of communication, for example between houses and their chapels). Bindon's letter to Cecil contained a request for a gift that he could place in his gallery:
a request to be beholdyng for the bystoying [sic] your Lordships picture yn the garter robes, to be plased yn a gallyrey I lately made for the pyctures of sundry of my honorabll frends, whos presentatyon therby dayly to byhold, wyll gretely delyght me to wawlk often yn that place where I may see so cumfortabll a syght.
Bindon seems to be anticipating a multiplicity of activities in his gallery. It will not just be a place where he can examine the paintings, and gain delight and comfort from the sight of Cecil in his state robes; he will also go there to refresh his spirits and, as he takes exercise, his body. In the same way, fifteen years later, in his Elements of Architecture (1624), Henry Wotton would list the gallery among those rooms in a house ‘that are appointed for gentle Motion’.
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