That's true, but I'm not sure how much it applies: the Royal Society wasn't a gentlemen's club, it was an academy with a royal charter, meant to garner international prestige. It's more comparable to the Berlin or French academies, and gentlemen's clubs are somewhere in between that and a salon.
As for the Society of Dilettanti, I came across that years ago when first researching Peter's life and wondering if clubs formed a part of it, and while the Society initially looked promising (the 1734 founding date!), 1) it required members to have visited Italy, which Peter hadn't, so he couldn't have joined that one specifically, 2) I was never able to find any evidence that they admitted foreigners, which would form a precedent for the possibility that he could have joined some other club. I've gone through the list of members from 1736 on and not found any well into the 1740s.
So I'm still unsure. What I have seen is a couple references to people using "So-and-so wants to admit foreigners to our club!!" as a scare tactic, which suggests that admitting foreigners was definitely not the norm. In the nineteenth (or late eighteenth? I forget) century, there was a push to allow foreign ambassadors to join a certain club, and that was controversial.
Which leaves me thinking that Peter *probably* couldn't have joined one, but between him passing as English, and the possibility that some clubs might have been less exclusive, I'm not 100% sure.
Also, the Society of Dilettanti always makes me think of this passage from one of Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy skits:
I think we have a problem – English people in general have a problem. We tend to go into the world, going, "Hello, hello... Hello, do you speak English? Hello!" You know, in Afghanistan. "Hello, sausage, egg and chips, please… A sausage, egg and chips. Okay, two sausages. Do you speak English? You just don't try, do you?! Here all day speaking Afghan..."
It's quite possible that a bunch of Englishmen talking about their opinions of the modern-day foreigners they'd met, and the need to relocate the art and archaeological findings to more civilized countries, would *not* have been the most congenial environment for modern-day foreigners. ;) Except Algarotti, who would have been nodding vigorously and getting on his soapbox to feed them more ammunition, and who, of course, was hated by nineteenth-century Italians for having helped relocate all that art out of the country. Which is one reason he's not more famous today. :P
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Clubs
Date: 2024-10-06 03:42 pm (UTC)As for the Society of Dilettanti, I came across that years ago when first researching Peter's life and wondering if clubs formed a part of it, and while the Society initially looked promising (the 1734 founding date!), 1) it required members to have visited Italy, which Peter hadn't, so he couldn't have joined that one specifically, 2) I was never able to find any evidence that they admitted foreigners, which would form a precedent for the possibility that he could have joined some other club. I've gone through the list of members from 1736 on and not found any well into the 1740s.
So I'm still unsure. What I have seen is a couple references to people using "So-and-so wants to admit foreigners to our club!!" as a scare tactic, which suggests that admitting foreigners was definitely not the norm. In the nineteenth (or late eighteenth? I forget) century, there was a push to allow foreign ambassadors to join a certain club, and that was controversial.
Which leaves me thinking that Peter *probably* couldn't have joined one, but between him passing as English, and the possibility that some clubs might have been less exclusive, I'm not 100% sure.
Also, the Society of Dilettanti always makes me think of this passage from one of Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy skits:
I think we have a problem – English people in general have a problem. We tend to go into the world, going, "Hello, hello... Hello, do you speak English? Hello!" You know, in Afghanistan. "Hello, sausage, egg and chips, please… A sausage, egg and chips. Okay, two sausages. Do you speak English? You just don't try, do you?! Here all day speaking Afghan..."
It's quite possible that a bunch of Englishmen talking about their opinions of the modern-day foreigners they'd met, and the need to relocate the art and archaeological findings to more civilized countries, would *not* have been the most congenial environment for modern-day foreigners. ;) Except Algarotti, who would have been nodding vigorously and getting on his soapbox to feed them more ammunition, and who, of course, was hated by nineteenth-century Italians for having helped relocate all that art out of the country. Which is one reason he's not more famous today. :P