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Animating the Antique
Animating the Antique Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory
Sarah Betzer
The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of CAA.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Additional credits: page i, Laurent Pécheux, Pygmalion and Galatea (fig. 8), detail, photo © The State Hermitage Museum (Vladimir Terebenin); ii–iii, Carlo Gregory, view of the Dying Gladiator (fig. 18), detail, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; vi–vii, Hubert Robert, The Salle des Saisons at the Louvre (fig. 53), detail, photo: M. Urtado, provided by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York; xiv–1, Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, The Sleeping (Borghese) Hermaphrodite (fig. 3), detail, photo © National Trust Images / Matthew Hollow; 22–23, Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Humphry Morice (fig. 32), detail, Brinsley Ford Collection, London; 80–81, Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, The Dream of Ossian (fig. 63), detail, photo © Montauban, Musée Ingres (Marc Jeanneteau); 120–21, Jacob More, Mount Vesuvius in Eruption (fig. 73), detail, photo: Antonia Reeve; 170–71, Pierre Jacques, Venus de’ Medici, 1576 (fig. 106), detail, BnF; 202–3, views of the Subiaco Niobid (fig. 121), detail.
Names: Betzer, Sarah E., 1972– author. Title: Animating the antique : sculptural encounter in the age of aesthetic theory / Sarah Betzer. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores tensions in aesthetics and art theory between antique figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations. Examines the work and thought of Goethe, Winckelmann, Hegel, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and others”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021018168 | ISBN 9780271088839 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Sculpture, Ancient—Appreciation— History—18th century. | Sculpture, Ancient— Appreciation—History—19th century. | Figure sculpture—Appreciation—History—18th century. | Figure sculpture—Appreciation—History—19th century. | Aesthetics, Modern—18th century. | Aesthetics, Modern—19th century. Classification: LCC NB70 .B48 2021 | DDC 732—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018168 Copyright © 2021 Sarah Betzer All rights reserved Printed in China Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses.
For Susan and Peter Betzer
Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments xi
Introduction
Art History, Aesthetics, and the Body After Archaeology 1 Chapter 1
Toward an Eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 23 Chapter 2
Moving Shadows 81 Chapter 3
From the Ash to the Fire 121 Chapter 4
In the Round 171 Coda
Photography, the Rise of Relief, and Nachleben 203 Notes 217 Bibliography 235 Index 251
Illustrations
1. Anton von Maron, Portrait of Winckelmann 2 2. Niccolò Mogalli, after Mosman, Antinous Bas-Relief 3 3. Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, The Sleeping (Borghese) Hermaphrodite 5 4. Nan Goldin, The Hermaphrodite Sleeping, Le Louvre 5 5. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “Ichnographiam Campi Martii” 7 6. Nicolas Beatrizet, Laocoön and His Sons 10 7. Hubert Robert, The Finding of the Laocoön 11 8. Laurent Pécheux, Pygmalion and Galatea 24 9. Charles Natoire, Artists Drawing in the Inner Courtyard of the Capitoline 35 10. Robert, A Draftsman at the Capitoline Museum 37 11. Robert, Antiquities at the Capitoline Museum 38 12. Giuseppe Vasi, after Campiglia, Artists Drawing the Dying Gladiator in the Capitoline 38 13. Adolph Menzel, Storage Room During New Construction in the Altes Museum, Berlin 39 14. Blanchet, Portrait of Henry Willoughby, Later Fifth Baron Middleton 40 15. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Thomas Dundas 41 16. François Perrier, three views of the Farnese Hercules 43 17. Perrier, Borghese Gladiator, Arrotino, and Wrestlers 44 18. Carlo Gregory, after Campiglia, two views of the Dying Gladiator 45 19. Giovanni Volpato and Raffaello Morghen, engraving after the Apollo Belvedere with notations by Canova 47
20. Johann Zoffany, Sir Lawrence Dundas and His Grandson 48 21. Ganymede with an Eagle, Roman 50 22. Jean Grandjean, M. Hviid Pointing to the Restoration of the Albani Antinous in the Capitoline Museum 51 23. Cupid and Psyche, Roman copy after a Hellenistic original 52 24. Batoni, Cupid and Psyche 53 25. Blanchet, The Apollo Belvedere Among Dead Trees 58 26. Blanchet, The Venus de’ Medici Among Dead Trees 59 27. Adam Partnership, Ceremonial Scene from the Long Gallery at Croome Court 60 28. Blanchet, The Dying Gladiator 60 29. Blanchet, The Borghese Warrior 61 30. Blanchet, The Farnese Hercules 61 31. Perrier, Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici 62 32. Batoni, Portrait of Humphry Morice 64 33. Unknown artist, plaster reduction of the Farnese Hercules 65 34. James Barry, Self-Portrait with James Paine and Dominique Lef èvre (with the Belvedere Torso) 66 35. Henry Singleton, The Royal Academicians in General Assembly 68 36. Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall 71 37. Zoffany, Tribuna of the Uffizi 72 38. Gérard Audran, Medici Venus 73 39. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet 74 40. Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall, detail 75 41. Mary and Matthew Darly, My Lord Tip-Toe, Just Arrived from Monkey Land 77
Illustrations ix
42. Philip Dawe, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade 77 43. Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall, detail 79 44. Thomas Rowlandson, Bear and Bear-Leader Passing the Hôtel d’Angleterre 79 45. Belvedere Torso, likely a copy after a Greek bronze 82 46. Joseph Wright of Derby, Academy by Lamplight 85 47. Unknown artist, Torchlight View of the Apollo Belvedere 86 48. Charles Clément Bervic, after Bouillon, Laocoön 87 49. Nadar [Félix Tournachon], caricature “My God, what’s that?—It seems to be a gentleman who found himself frozen in the Ingres room. . . .” 89 50. Auguste Desnoyers, after Ingres, Cupid and Psyche 91 51. Félix Massard, after Ingres, Apollo Lykeios 92 52. Antoine Béranger, after Valois, detail from a large Etruscan-style vase 93 53. Robert, The Salle des Saisons at the Louvre 94 54. Simon Thomassin, Laocoön 95 55. Farnese Hercules, engraving from Winckelmann, Histoire de l’art chez les ancien 95 56. Desnoyers, after Ingres, Cupid 98 57. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, attrib., Apollo Belvedere 99 58. William Pether, after Wright of Derby, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight 99 59. Zoffany, attrib., The Antique School of the Royal Academy at Somerset House 100 60. Ingres, Académie 101 61. Gérard de Lairesse, Le grand livre des peintres, plate 15 101 62. Louis-Joseph Masquelier, after Lespinasse, “Perspective with Shadows; Finding Shadows by Torchlight” 102 63. Ingres, The Dream of Ossian 103 64. Lejeune, after Robertson, Robertson’s Phantasmagoria 104 65. Jean-Jacques Avril the Younger, after Bouillon, Apollo Belvedere 105
66. Benjamin Zix, Emperor Napoleon and Empress Marie-Louise Visiting the Salle du Laocoön at Night 107 67. Ingres, Phocion 111 68. Ingres, four studies after Phocion 112 69. Ingres, two studies after Cupid and Psyche 113 70. Large Herculaneum Woman / Small Herculaneum Woman, Roman 123 71. Victor-Jean Nicolle, The Imaginary Studio of an Ancient Sculptor 125 72. “Head of Isis” excavated from the entrance of the Temple of Isis 125 73. Jacob More, Mount Vesuvius in Eruption 132 74. Louis-Jean Desprez, etched by F. Piranesi, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii 136 75. Giovanni Piranesi, Temple of Isis at Pompeii 137 76. G. Piranesi, View of the Egyptian Temple in the Precinct of Isis at Pompeii 137 77. Desprez, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii 138 78. Desprez, Temple of Isis at Pompeii 138 79. Desprez, The Temple of Isis in Pompeii: Imaginary Reconstruction 139 80. Engraving from William Hamilton, Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii 141 81. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Discovery of a Skeleton in a House in Pompeii 142 82. Claude-Mathieu Fessard, after Fragonard, Travelers Viewing a Skeleton at Pompeii 142 83. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa 143 84. Théodore Chassériau, The Tepidarium 144 85. Tepidarium of the Forum Baths, Pompeii 146 86. François Mazois, Details of the Baths 146 87. Chassériau, Tepidarium at Pompeii 147 88. Engraving after Zahn, Tepidarium 147 89. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Greek Interior (The Gynaeceum) 149 90. Chassériau, A Room with a Staircase; A Trace on the Wall 150 91. Chassériau, Bath in a Seraglio 153 92. Chassériau, study for Apollo and Daphne 154
x Illustrations
93. Aphrodite, known as the Venus de Milo, Greek 155 94. Louis Jean Francois Lagrenée, Pygmalion and Galatea 156 95. Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Pygmalion and Galatea 157 96. Chassériau, The Tepidarium, detail 159 97. H. Dupont, after Girodet-Trioson, Dibutades 159 98. Giorgio Sommer, Plaster Casts of Bodies, Pompeii 160 99. Michele Amodio, Pompeii, Human Cast from the Excavations, 1863 161 100. Amodio, Cast of a Young Woman 162 101. Sommer, Vesuvius Erupting, 26 April 1872, 3 pm 164 102. “Gradiva,” Roman relief 167 103. Sigmund Freud’s study in Vienna 168 104. Subiaco Niobid (now Subiaco Ephebe), Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze 181 105. Willem van Tetrode, Puttos Bearing a Vase 183 106. Pierre Jacques, Venus de’ Medici 183 107. Edme Bouchardon, The Barberini Faun 184 108. Bouchardon, Apollo Belvedere, two studies after the antique 185 109. Bouchardon, Eros Bending His Bow, two studies after the antique 185 110. Bouchardon, five studies for Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club 186
111. Bouchardon, four studies for Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club 186 112. Bouchardon, Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club 187 113. Perrier, three views of the Venus de’ Medici 188 114. Peter van Lint, Venus de’ Medici 189 115. Domenico Marchetti, after drawings by Tognoli of Canova’s The Three Graces 190 116. Bernardino Consorti, after Canova’s The Three Graces 191 117. Apoxyomenos, Roman copy after Greek bronze by Lysippos 194 118. Eros Bending His Bow, Roman copy after a Greek bronze by Lysippos 195 119. Illustration of Youth Tying His Sandal in Löwy, Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst 205 120. Views of the votive figure of Nikandre in Löwy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art 206 121. Views of the Subiaco Niobid in Reymond, “Le Niobide de Subiaco” 207 122. Illustration of the Subiaco Niobid in Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture 208 123. Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas, plates 4, 5, and 6 214
Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of sustained—and intellectually and personally sustaining—conversations over many years. I am grateful to the institutions, colleagues, friends, and family who have been partners along the way and have supported my work on a project that has vastly expanded my horizons. This book has been shaped by encounters with colleagues near and far. For invitations to speak, for their engagement with material that found its way into these pages, and for their practical (and often moral) support, I thank: Matthew Affron, Carmen Bambach, Ting Chang, Chloe Chard, Kate Cowcher, Clarisse Fava-Piz, David Getsy, Meg Grasselli, Phyllis Hattis, Joy Kenseth, Karen Lang, Catriona MacLeod, Carol Mattusch, Satish Padiyar, Peter Parshall, Adrian Randolph, Kristin O’Rourke, the late Mary Sheriff, Victor Stoichita, Richard Taws, T. Barton Thurber, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Laura Weigert, and Richard Wrigley. I remember with gratitude a conversation with the late Ian Jenkins that precipitated a revelation about the project’s stakes and the enduring power of nineteenth-century sculptural associations. My work in the eighteenth century has been indelibly shaped by the late Angela Rosenthal, whose loss remains keenly felt. And an especially deep thanks is due to Whitney Davis, who offered invaluable feedback on the full manuscript, inspired through his scholarship, and has been a steadfast mentor and friend throughout this project’s realization.
I thank Elizabeth Prettejohn for providing the impetus to consider “The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture” at a 2009 workshop at the University of Bristol, as well as fellow participants especially Stephen Bann, Whitney Davis, Alex Potts, and Caroline van Eck. This meeting marked the beginning of an exchange with Alex Potts, who has been a constant and generous interlocutor in the many years since and without whose intellectual companionship the project would have been immeasurably diminished. I have been a beneficiary of the energy and dynamism of classical reception studies as the field was shaped at Bristol by Elizabeth Prettejohn and Charles Martindale, as well as by Shelley Hales, who, with Joanna Paul, organized a stimulating conference on Pompeii that was generative for my thinking at an early point in the project’s evolution. I have been tremendously fortunate to have had the support of residential fellowships that provided the luxury of time, space, and collegiality at key points in this work’s gestation. The project was hatched during my tenure as Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2010–11). Elizabeth Cropper, Therese O’Malley, and Peter Lukehart worked their matchless alchemy to produce an environment at once inspirational and daunting in its expectation of great things. I deeply value the friendships and conversations forged in that flame—including with Shira Brisman, Dipti Khera, Rachel Kousser, and
xii Acknowledgments
Laura Weigert. Mary Beard’s arrival in our midst in spring 2011 brought anarchic inspiration by a valued conspirator. The intellectual ground plan for the project was consolidated during my year as Hetty Goldman Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, from 2014 to 2015. That period was formative, no doubt in part due to the osmotic effects of life on Einstein Drive but largely thanks to a remarkable Princeton cohort. Conversations—and daily life— with Yve-Alain Bois, Fabien Capeillères, Suzie Clark, Michael Cole, Vincent Debiais, Brigid Doherty, Linda Goddard, Jennifer L. Morgan, Alex Potts, Alistair Rider, Amy Singer, Laura Weigert, and Carolyn Yerkes significantly informed my thinking about the work and helped me cut the path to its completion. I thank Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen for the invitation to test my ideas in the context of a roundtable in European Cultural Studies; that dialogue, with Alex Potts and Tony Grafton, and the broader workshop conversation—with particularly incisive questions from Michael Koortbojian and Joan Breton Connelly—marked a turning point in my understanding of the project’s shape and aims. Princeton was likewise the setting for the second in a series of unforgettable encounters with Jacqueline Lichtenstein, whose analyses of the art-theoretical debates of the long eighteenth century have been formative for this project. Jacqueline’s inimitable combination of brilliance, toughness, and deep humanity is deeply missed. A Howard Foundation Fellowship supported a sabbatical semester in New York in fall 2018, where the manuscript was completed in the fold of Columbia University and in the company of fellow dix-huit and dix-neuvièmistes: Jeffrey Collins, Anne Higonnet, Dipti Khera, and Meredith Martin. Michael Cole has been a deeply valued interlocutor
and has my undying gratitude—for his friendship, for his careful reading of the full manuscript, and for having given me the keys to the kingdom: in this case, an unassuming key to the unmarked door behind which I worked deliciously incognito in the most inspiring surround of Meyer Schapiro’s office. A final round of polishing took place in spring 2019 at Cambridge University, where I enjoyed the greatest possible warmth and hospitality as the Thomas Jefferson Fellow at Downing College. At Cambridge, I benefitted from the lively intellectual exchange at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH). Friends and colleagues ensured that my time at Cambridge was as happy as it was productive; I am grateful for intersections with Vicki AmberySmith, Mary Beard, Rosalind Blakesley, Alan Bookbinder, Frank Salmon, Luke Syson, and Carrie Vout. I feel especially lucky to have overlapped there with Caroline van Eck and Jennifer Roberts, both of whom read portions of the manuscript and urged me forward with their characteristic brilliance and straight talk. It has been a privilege and delight to work with inspiring students who have contributed to this project’s shape and ambitions. Conversations about the afterlives of the antique with students at the University of Virginia, in particular Ashley Boulden, Alicia Caticha, Janet Dunkelbarger, Elizabeth Doe Stone, and Claire Weiss, have sharpened my thinking. For their invaluable work as research assistants, I recognize Ashley Boulden, Karl-Magnus Brose, Liz Doe Stone, and Ty Vanover. My colleagues at UVA have lived with this project with characteristic good humor and patience, particularly Paul Barolsky, Francesca Fiorani, Douglas Fordham, Tyler Jo Smith, David Summers, and the Pompeii brain trust: John Dobbins, Dylan Rogers, and Bill
Acknowledgments xiii
Wylie—many of whom read portions of the manuscript and all of whom enthusiastically engaged with this research from its earliest intimations. Dan Weiss, director of the Visual Resources Center, devoted herculean effort to procuring images and permissions, and our departmental team, Laura Mellusi and Keith Robertson, ensured administrative smooth sailing. I thank Chad Wellmon, Bo Odom, Rachel Most, Dean Ian Baucom, and Dean Brie Gertler, wonderful partners in curricular adventures, whom I recognize for the gift of allowing me to step away for the sabbatical that enabled the completion of the project. And for their sustaining friendship, I recognize Bruce Holsinger and Anna Brickhouse, Bill Wylie and Grace Hale, and Maurie McInnis. This book is the result of work in many archives and collections, and I sincerely thank those who made my research possible. Particular thanks are due to Louis Ayres, House and Collections Manager at Saltram, for her generosity during my visit and for mentioning the now-dispersed sculpture collection, and to Charlotte Burnskill, at the Brinsley Ford Archives, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. At Penn State University Press, it has been my great privilege to work once more with Ellie Goodman, who has been a champion of the project for longer than I would like to admit. Also at the press, I benefitted from Maddie Caso’s scrupulousness
and care. I am grateful that the manuscript bears the traces of Annika Fisher’s winning combination of precision and good humor. It is an extraordinary pleasure to see the text brought to life (speaking of animating!) by Jo Ellen Ackerman’s design acumen. And I am deeply indebted to Lory Frankel, editor extraordinaire. I gratefully acknowledge the University of Virginia Dean’s Faculty Research Funds and the Department of Art for providing critical support for the image and publication program. And I am honored to recognize the support of a Milliard Meiss Award from the College Art Association. Portions of chapters 1, 2 and 3 first appeared as “Patch, Walpole, and Queer Complicity,” Art History, 43 no. 5 (2020): 1038–64; “Ingres’s Shadows,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013): 78–101; and “Afterimage of the Eruption: An Archaeology of Chassériau’s Tepidarium (1853),” Art History 33, no. 3 (2010): 466–89. I am grateful to the Taylor & Francis and the Association of Art History for their kind permission to reproduce this material here. Above all, I recognize my family—Susan and Peter Betzer, Katherine Betzer and Maggie Dillon, Ruth and Doug Crane, Mike and Cathy Crane, and our partners in parenting, Paul Deslandes and Jeff Hodgson—for their love, enthusiasm, and sense of adventure. This book owes its most precious intellectual debt, along with its existence and its animating flame, to Sheila Crane and to Madeleine Crane Betzer, lights of my life.
Introduction
Art History, Aesthetics, and the Body After Archaeology
I
n 1873, scholar and aesthete Walter Pater wrote a biographical essay on Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the eighteenth-century antiquarian and scholar whom art historians tend to recognize as the “father” of the discipline of art history. Pater observed, “To most of us, after all our steps towards it, the antique world, in spite of its intense outlines, its own perfect self-expression, still remains faint and remote. To [Winckelmann], . . . it clearly came to seem more real than the present.”1 In a 1768 portrait by Anton von Maron, Winckelmann is depicted as if caught in the midst of work on his Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished antique monuments) (fig. 1). This two-volume book, published the previous year in Rome, is alluded to by the strategic inclusion of the manuscript in the painting’s foreground and an engraving of the Roman relief of Antinous (then in the Villa Albani), which Winckelmann reproduced
2 Animating the Antique
Introduction 3
Figure 1 Anton von Maron, Portrait of Winckelmann,
1768. Oil on canvas. Klassik Stiftung, Weimar. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 2 Niccolò Mogalli, after Nikolaus Mosman,
Antinous Bas-Relief, 1767. Engraving from Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi inediti (Rome, 1767), vol. 1: cat. no. 180.
and discussed in his text (fig. 2).2 It is a portrait that radiates intellectual vitality. Winckelmann, eyes sparkling, with his gesturing arm somewhat akimbo, takes up a dynamic pose—here is thought in action, if ever there was—his body’s dimensionality and its liveliness telegraphed by the light radiating off his garments and by the punctuations of the fur tumbling from neck to ground. In this image, Winckelmann stands in stark juxtaposition to his antique interlocutors. Homer is conjured on the right by way of an empty-eyed bust. Antinous, while benefiting from the “intense outlines” of copperplate engraving, is summoned in reduced—and reproduced—monochromatic form, an allusion to what Pater acknowledged as the challenge faced by a scholar who “had to penetrate
Greek art through copies, imitations, and later Roman art itself.”3 To fully grasp this tension—an invitation the picture surely offers to its viewers—it is worth noting that the fur is more than merely trim; the bushy warmth escaping from the sleeve’s edge signals that this coat is fur-lined. Its sparkling crimson exterior effects a visceral inversion: the inside is here made over into spectacular, pulsating outside. Von Maron’s portrait is thus an especially apt reference point for reconsidering Pater’s insight: it is no small matter for Winckelmann to surmount the chasm of history and live among the ancients. He does so, in Pater’s text, as in von Maron’s portrait and in Winckelmann’s own account of his work, by way of his extended, direct communion with the artifacts of antiquity. Writing only a few years after Pater, author and theorist Vernon Lee (born Violet Paget) likewise considered the challenges that material traces of the antique posed to contemporary spectators. In her 1881 essay “The Child in the Vatican,” Lee set her sights on the art museum, the institutional setting in which such encounters had, from the mid-eighteenth century, been framed. Lee was preoccupied by a particular scenario: museumgoers beholding ancient sculpture. In her estimation, the Vatican, boasting one of the earliest and foremost collections of ancient sculpture, was “eminently a place of exile; or worse, of captivity, for all this people of marble: these athletes and nymphs and satyrs, and warriors and poets and gods” (18). Admitting that “galleries are necessary things, to save pictures and statues (or the little remaining of them),” Lee observed that they are nevertheless “evil necessities” inasmuch as “a sort of negative vandalism always clings to them, specially to the galleries of statues, so uninhabited, so utterly sepulchral” (18). For Lee, the problem of the art museum was bound up with a more
4 Animating the Antique
particular concern. “We ask ourselves,” she writes, “whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? We shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least” (23). In her anxious reflections on whether the antique had lost its affective power, Lee demonstrates a sensibility well established by the second half of the nineteenth century, one that still powerfully informs contemporary art-historical analysis. This perspective turned on a seductive series of associations: the sculptural antique was conceived as remote and cold, resolutely antimodern, and it thus left spectators uncomprehending, if not themselves deadened. As demonstrated by the phenomenal 2018 exhibition and catalogue Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body, these tensions remain central and are arguably axiomatic to figural sculpture.4 Lee’s reflections feature here as a late episode in a history that has yet to be written: a history of encounters with ancient GrecoRoman sculpture between 1750 and 1900 and their Janus-faced nature, as beholders and sculptures were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification. Von Maron’s portrait figures within a rich record of instances in which sculptural encounters, both experienced and imagined, were depicted in two-dimensional representations, from drawing and print mediums to painting and photography. Through the analysis of a series of such striking episodes, this book offers a new understanding of the distinctive ontology of ancient sculpture that animated wide-ranging eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury artistic imaginaries. My account begins in Italy in the decades following the rediscoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii in the Bay of Naples circa 1750, when a new and distinctively eighteenth-century conception of the nature of antique sculpture began to be consolidated.
It ends in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when Lee and her intimate collaborator, artist Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, were at work on their “Gallery Diaries” around the same time that proliferating photographic depictions of sculpture converged with a new insistence on sculpture’s planarity. The intervening century and a half witnessed fraught negotiations over what constituted the antique as well as what significance it could be understood to have for contemporary life. This study examines pictorial traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, beginning with the uptake of archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments in the mid-eighteenth century and culminating in the anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks that emerged at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An alternative account of the modernity of antique sculpture takes shape here, in which “modernity” is understood not in terms of iconographic and stylistic change but as a process bound up with the imagined promises and threats that encounters with a set of curiously enduring forms seemed to offer. At the heart of my account is the assertion that the analysis of artists’ attempts to render sculptural encounter in two dimensions opens up a new understanding of sculpture in the round as it was conceived, thought through, and experienced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Sleeping (Borghese) Hermaphrodite of 1765 is a case in point (fig. 3). This antique sculpture figures in an extraordinary series of grisaille paintings after famed antiquities executed by French artist Louis-Gabriel Blanchet. The picture is almost certainly the product of Blanchet’s firsthand encounter with its antique referent at the Villa Borghese. It may well have been completed with recourse to large-scale engravings after the antique,
Figure 3 Louis-Gabriel
Blanchet, The Sleeping
(Borghese) Hermaphrodite, 1765. Oil on canvas. Saltram House, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images / Matthew Hollow. Figure 4 Nan Goldin, The
Hermaphrodite Sleeping, Le Louvre. From Scopophilia, 2010. Photo courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Nan Goldin.
Introduction 5
like those found in Blanchet’s studio after his death.5 The final canvas thus would have invoked real and reimagined experiences of sculptural viewing, even as it subjected the figure’s famously unruly physiology—a revelation that turned, as it were, on spectators’ movements around the sculpture—to the conventions of planar representation. These operations are beautifully, if arguably more violently, captured in Nan Goldin’s more recent picturing of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in the Louvre (fig. 4). Here, the polysemy of the sculptural figure’s anatomy, typically revealed over time and
6 Animating the Antique
through space, is markedly fixed, not unlike a pinned butterfly. Blanchet’s painting frames a strikingly different view onto the sculpture. The Hermaphrodite appears as if washed ashore (evoking Francis Bacon’s understanding of antiquities as “remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time”) amid other marble remnants of the antique, tumbled together in a vast museum storeroom.6 Massive stone slabs impinge upon the space of the figure in the foreground and, more precipitously, in the background. There, fragments are stacked together, puzzlelike, in a form evocative of the work of Blanchet’s fellow Roman, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose 1762 Campus Martius antiquae urbis (The field of Mars in ancient Rome) was packed to bursting with trompe l’oeil stone slabs, notionally reassembled, as in the volume’s title page and its immense “Ichnographiam Campi Martii” (fig. 5). When fully unfolded, Piranesi’s monumental composition pushes at the limits of the laws of perspective and of physics. Taking the form of a massive, reconstructed map carved on stone, Piranesi’s representation pictures broken segments held together by depicted metal brackets (presumably attached to a wall), even as the accretion of further loose (and thereby ostensibly gravity-defying) stone fragments on top of the stone map’s foundation threaten the composition’s planar logic. Unsecured by clamps, Blanchet’s slabs, riddled with fractures, insert an ominous note into the composition, even as they draw attention to the surprising sense of movement that infuses the artist’s ode to marble. When encountered in the museum, the Borghese Hermaphrodite’s chilly sinuosity of form provides an apt mirror for the figure’s self-contained, introspective mien, its eyes closed as in sleep. In Blanchet’s hands, however, the
figure is amplified in a fleshier rendition of the body, and it is captured in a pose of twisting torsion. Set atop Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s signature mattress, which is canted up like an inflatable raft on choppy waters, the figure appears to struggle with pillow and sheets, twisting and turning as if in the midst of a violent dream. These spatial manipulations strongly suggest that the figure, along with its stony accoutrements, is in danger of sliding into the viewer’s lap. In this way, Blanchet’s picture is uncannily redolent of mausoleum, museum, and bedchamber all at once. Blanchet’s Hermaphrodite is less a sculpture than a body among the ruins. The picture’s gripping strangeness turns above all on Blanchet’s dramatic exploration of a confrontation between the plastic (or sculptural) and the pictorial. Such transformations, or transitions, of figural sculpture from three dimensions to two forced artists and beholders to confront the fundamental dynamics of sculpture-in-experience, operations that form the very core of Animating the Antique. Examining works like Blanchet’s allows an exhumation of eighteenth-century understandings of the shifting nature of ancient sculpture. In stark contrast to Goldin’s photograph, Blanchet’s Hermaphrodite conjures and attempts to hold in equipoise vivacity and deathliness, together with the related antinomies of warmth and coldness, movement and fixity, present and past. In so doing, it opens a window onto an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique that had far-reaching ramifications in the making and beholding of modern art, in the articulations of art theory, and also in the writing of art history. Animating the Antique turns on two essential and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenthcentury ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the
Introduction 7
Figure 5 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “Ichnographiam Campi Martii.” Engraving from Piranesi, Campus Martius antiquae urbis, 1762. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
nineteenth century, and that attending to the enduring power of this model equips us to newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture’s allure: its mobility, mutability, and capacity for transformative encounter. At the heart of the matter are episodes of imagined vivification and transformation, understood through the pictorial traces left by artists who worked to render in
two-dimensional mediums figural sculpture seen and experienced in the round. I examine these encounters—framed by the tension between sculpture viewed in time and space and its translation into two-dimensional representation—in order to gauge the changing emphasis placed on the process of apprehending and viewing sculpture, to track varying models of ideal viewing positions, and,
8 Animating the Antique
crucially, to evaluate shifting assumptions about gendered viewing. A wide range of materials is brought to bear in the chapters that follow: drawings and paintings, engraving and photography, travel accounts and gallery diaries, literary descriptions and philosophical texts. Of central importance is the question of how sculptural encounters, at once material and imagined, were given visual form in works of art and in the artistic processes through which they came into being. What emerges is a new account in which sculpture’s gelid and mortifying capacities are shown to be intimately linked to the animating, vivifying, and transformative power that was associated with beholding antique sculpture. This structural dialectic cut both ways, ensnaring beholder and sculpture even as it underwrote artistic, philosophical, and touristic encounters alike. As the episodes that follow attest, one of the book’s primary claims is that an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique may be charted well into the late nineteenth century. Careful scrutiny of this trajectory provides a new sense of the connective tissues that bind together periods and materials that have tended to be treated in isolation. Spanning the period between roughly 1750 and 1900, this study redresses an art-historical literature shaped profoundly by narratives of artistic revolution and avant-garde rupture that tend to enshrine, whether explicitly or tacitly, a radical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Animating the Antique reveals instead long-overlooked continuities across the modern period. Certainly, encounters with ancient sculpture in the nineteenth century frequently elicited highly charged aesthetic responses, whereby sculptural form functioned as a time-collapsing pivot, bringing past and present into contact. While chronologically wide-ranging,
the artists and works of art included here are firmly connected by their common orientation to issues of apprehension, touch, and sight, themes that were thrown into relief through modern encounters with antique figural sculpture. As the book’s materials vividly attest, such embodied experiences could precipitate self-reflection or self-discovery, with powerful implications for our understanding of desire and subjecthood.
Picturing Sculpture After the Aesthetic Turn Scholarship examining the afterlives of ancient sculpture has tended to follow several well-charted tracks. Classical reception studies have explored eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philological and artistic reckonings with Greek and Roman antiquities. A rich literature in grand-tour studies has plumbed touristic itineraries, social networks, and collecting habits to reveal the pleasures and perils attendant on encounters with art in an age of international travel. Scholarship focused on historical shifts in the collecting, exhibition, and display of antiquities has revealed significant transformations in these practices between 1750 and 1900. The vitality of these lines of inquiry has dramatically reconfigured our understanding of what has come to be known as “the long eighteenth century” and has, among other things, significantly expanded our sense of the period’s visual and material culture, including its artworks, objects, and makers. At the same time, scholars have identified the eighteenth century as a moment distinguished by an outpouring of art-theoretical and philosophical reflection about aesthetic experience or about what is entailed in subjective encounters that stimulate the senses, passions, and judgments of beauty.7
Introduction 9
These eighteenth-century preoccupations built upon what David Summers demonstrates were significantly earlier considerations of aesthetic knowledge and perception, particularly the “new” definition of the beholder’s point of view as individual and subjective that surfaced in the early modern (late medieval, early Renaissance) period. According to Summers, the “language of the particular intellect” that developed in the Renaissance provided a foundation for modern aesthetics, especially “the kinds of judgment belonging to the making and viewing of works of art.”8 The eighteenth century was not the sole point of origin for ideas understood as specifically modern interventions into aesthetic thought. Nevertheless, it is significant that the term “aesthetics” emerged during this time, and even more crucially, central concepts for thinking through artistic encounter and experience, including “taste” and “sentiment,” took on their modern meaning.9 While reflections on representation, mimesis, and the dynamics of viewing works of art had long featured in writing about art, as Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla have observed, “it fell to [the eighteenth century] in particular to articulate the complexities of affective experience.”10 Although earlier intimations may be tracked to the late seventeenth century, Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s 1719 Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (translated into English in 1748) decisively signaled an “aesthetic turn,” insofar as it situated the beholder’s feeling—construed as sentiment and sensibility—as the primary, if not exclusive, criterion for judging artistic accomplishment.11 This vital shift, from the scrutiny of art objects to an emphasis on subjective experience, only became more pronounced in subsequent publications and would inform writing and thinking about aesthetics for
decades to come. In his 1757 “Of the Standard of Taste,” David Hume emphatically embraced it, asserting, in Ernst Cassirer’s admirably efficient resumé, that “all value judgments as such are concerned not with the thing itself and its absolute nature, but rather with a certain relation existing between the objects and ourselves as perceiving, feeling and judging subjects.”12 In the decades after Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s coining of the term “aesthetic” in 1735, aesthetic experience was conceived as a reciprocal encounter between the art object and its sensate, beholding subject.13 As Hume’s writing attests, such explorations of aesthetic experience were closely tied to crucial epistemological shifts in the understanding of human subjectivity so that, in Ashfield and de Bolla’s view, “what the period said and thought about artworks [was] bound up with what it thought and said about the nature of human experience more generally.”14 The rise of aesthetic theory was intimately linked to claims articulated by Lord Shaftesbury and Joseph Addison about the role of the art critic and was thereby intertwined with new conceptions of the fine arts and an expanded topography of amateurs, critics, and a novel public for art.15 As Jacqueline Lichtenstein argues, by the mid-1750s, “three new regimes” had emerged: the interlocking discourses of aesthetics and art history (both with origins in Germany) and art criticism (with origins in France).16 In the age of the grand tour’s ascendency and in light of philosophical reflections on affective experience, encounters with Greco-Roman sculptural artifacts were shaped by new pressures and expectations. Such expanded horizons, born of pivotal Enlightenment debates and explorations, had formative effects on painting and sculpture. Taking the measure of these shifts requires interweaving an
10 Animating the Antique
examination of philosophical and art-theoretical literatures in tandem with histories of art making and beholding. By foregrounding historical situations of beholding and by excavating the traces of the imaginative and material operations involved in artists’ transformation of the plastic to the pictorial, I offer a new understanding of how these sea changes registered in the realms of representation and art making. The origins of the compelling rhetorical marriage of antiquity, sculpture, and morbidity have been traced to the seventeenth-century founding of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts and to the paragone, or contest between painting and sculpture.17 I address this rhetorical tradition with an eye toward how the discursive realm of art-critical and art-philosophical writing intersected with the world of art making in the period in question. A further historiographic tendency, which I would argue is linked to the paragone debates of the long modern period, is the separate treatment of painting and sculpture in art-historical accounts, despite the predominance of academic systems in which artistic training was shaped by the intermingling of painters and sculptors. In this way, scholarly analysis has tacitly adopted the habits of mind signaled by the paragone, which emphasized, above all, distinctions between the pictorial and spatial arts.18 In this study, devoted to the analysis of two-dimensional representations of objects that existed in three dimensions, interactions between the arts—whether manifested by friction, contest, or continuities of translation—necessarily take center stage.
Eighteenth-Century Thresholds By the eighteenth century, masterworks of ancient sculpture had long been the focus of connoisseurial and artistic admiration. In the Renaissance, artists
Figure 6 Nicolas Beatrizet, Laocoön and His Sons, ca.
1520–65. Engraving. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
and art enthusiasts had embraced such finds as the Apollo Belvedere, which, in Leonard Barkan’s admirable turn of phrase, “reentered the world circa 1490.”19 Myriad prints, drawings, and sculptures after the celebrated Laocoön group attest to the avidity with which the work was received after its 1506 rediscovery, ultimately making it the most famous of all antiquities in the sixteenth century (fig. 6). While an enthusiasm for these and other disinterred artifacts was palpable during the Renaissance, encounters with ancient sculpture took new form and opened up newly resonant associations, expectations, and meanings in the eighteenth century. Eighteenth-century artists and their
Introduction 11
Figure 7 Hubert Robert, The Finding of the Laocoön, 1773. Oil on canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund. Photo © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Katherine Wetzel).
contemporaries were particularly enthralled by the sixteenth-century rediscovery of famed antiquities, as Hubert Robert’s monumental painting from 1773, The Finding of the Laocoön, attests (fig. 7). Robert’s painting conjures a scene of explicitly sixteenthcentury revelation, communicated by the clothing worn by the assembled workers and onlookers as well as the Raphaelesque architectural setting within which the drama of discovery unfolds. Nonetheless, his rendition of spectacular sculptural encounter is clearly the product of a distinctively eighteenth-century nexus. In the second half of the century, expanding circuits of European tourism, burgeoning archaeological activity (above all, the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1738 and 1748, respectively), and the establishment of public art museums (notably the Capitoline in 1734
and the Vatican Pio-Clementino in 1770, both in Rome, and the Louvre in 1793 in Paris) enabled unprecedented access to these objects for a growing art public, including artists, tourists, and locals. Encounters with antique sculpture were facilitated by the grand tour’s typical itinerary of cultural pilgrimage, which featured stops in Florence, Rome, and Naples, even as technologies of reproduction, utilizing plaster, porcelain, or print mediums, allowed for the dissemination of prized artifacts to an expanding pan-European network of collectors and readers. Vitally important eighteenth-century developments, including the rise of aesthetics, modern archaeology, the modern art museum, and the foundations of art history, contributed to antique sculpture’s newly consolidated artistic and
12 Animating the Antique
art-philosophical centrality, which in turn produced new expectations for encounters with and responses to the antique. The archaeological discoveries made in the Bay of Naples around 1750 were experienced as an eighteenth-century analogue to the lunar landing of 1969, bringing a new material reality to visions of the antique previously confined to the partial, the fragment, and the ruin. Spectacular revelations of singular antiquities like the Laocoön group had earlier marked the sixteenth century, as had the desire to bring together monumental antique vestiges with views of the modern metropolis in ambitious projects such as Antonio Lafreri’s sixteenth-century Speculum romanae magnificentiae (Mirror of Roman magnificence). However, conceptions of antiquity profoundly shifted in light of large-scale archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Visitors to Pompeii were struck by the altogether new proximity to the past offered up by the “mummified city” (invoked by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1787), where they took in “the whole affecting scene of ruins” (in the words of William Beckford in 1780), or in Herculaneum, where one could travel down in wicker baskets to subterranean chambers filled with remains, both artistic and human.20 Forged in these sites, new practices of archaeology collapsed the distance between past and present while instilling a newly materialized, and increasingly systematized, vision of antiquity imagined in the aftermath of ruin and excavation. Throughout the nineteenth century, thinking about the antique was reshaped by new archaeological revelations, from the Elgin Parthenon and Aegina marbles in the first decades of the century, to ongoing discoveries about polychromy, and excavations at Mycenae and Pergamon in the 1870s and early 1880s. The rise of anthropological
approaches, together with more rigorously scientific archaeological exploration and analysis, gained ground over the course of the nineteenth century. Idealizing explanatory schemes, like those of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, began to be challenged and displaced by the likes of Richard Payne Knight, Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, Walter Pater, and Eugénie Sellers. Far from an immutable ideal or iconographic constant, conceptions of the antique between 1750 and 1900 were volatile, fraught, and contested. At the same time, figural sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome endured as key touchpoints in powerfully affective artistic encounters and as the focus of tremendous intellectual and creative energies. In a period marked by wide-ranging antiquarian and scholarly efforts to excavate antique origins and genealogies, the “antique” was a strikingly polysemous concept, both in terms of associated objects and imagined origins. At the same time, Greco-Roman antiquity was understood in dialogue with an imagined “living antique” that indigenous populations, in North America, Africa, and elsewhere, were thought to embody. Upon encountering the Apollo Belvedere in 1760, Benjamin West famously declared, “My God, how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!”21 Like West, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Winckelmann both saw echoes of ancient Greece in Native American cultures, while the North African and Middle Eastern subjects of nineteenth-century orientalist paintings were likewise conceived as living vestiges of a surviving antiquity. Alternative visions of the antique also informed the recuperation of divergent histories and forms situated in the distant past. The Comte de Caylus (Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières) and PierreJean Mariette, for instance, were invested in an
Introduction 13
expanded conception of the antique by way of, as Kristel Smentek has observed, their interest in artifacts from China.22 Nevertheless, the universe of Greco-Roman objects garnered the sustained convergence of aesthetic, touristic, and museological attention that formed the ground plan for an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique. Archaeological exploration, including its literatures, analytics, and imagery, features as a backbone of this study, from its eighteenth-century incarnations through the more systematic studies undertaken by Emanuel Löwy, Adolf Furtwängler, and others at the end of the nineteenth century. These dynamics are a particular focus of chapter 3, which considers experiences and images of the sculptural antique in the context of the Bay of Naples. Accelerated archaeological activity in the mid-eighteenth century dovetailed with the emergence of the public art museum. As pictorial depictions and textual accounts of visiting the Roman collections of the Capitoline and Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino attest, the advent of the public museum was, at its origins, closely tied to the collection and display of antique sculpture, since these artifacts constituted the core of a number of early public museum collections.23 In the decades around midcentury, new exhibition practices further emphasized the importance of individual objects, which were reframed and isolated for special attention from the all-over decorative schemes that had prevailed in the baroque installations characteristic of earlier private collections.24 This type of display was particularly striking in the case of sculpture, which, with the advent of public museums, became accessible to a broader range of viewers. Publications documenting these collections, such as Giovanni Gaetano Bottari and Niccolò Foggini’s Del Museo Capitolino (1741–82), played a role in this
process; this volume’s pairing of image with descriptive text effectively standardized the format that remains the convention even to this day.25 Spaces of museum collections and experiences within them feature prominently throughout the book, notably in chapter 2, where the installation of antiquities, first in Rome and then in Paris, is considered both in terms of the highly loaded nationalist stakes that marked the foundations of the Louvre Museum and relative to luxury print productions whose two-dimensional representations aimed to capture the spatial and temporal experience of the museum. Chapter 3 takes up the circulation of quite different museum artifacts: photographs produced beginning in the 1860s by Giorgio Sommer, Michele Amodio, and others depicting the newly created plaster casts that from 1873 greeted visitors to Pompeii’s site museum. Chapter 4, anchored by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s efforts to animate art and, above all, sculpture, takes up a project that was ideologically and practically situated in dialogue with contemporary exhibition spaces. A new and urgent sense of art’s historicity also emerged in the eighteenth century. Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’antiquité expliquée et represéntée en figures (1719) put the object, its apperception, and its representation at the forefront: “By this term antiquity I only mean that which can be seen in front of one’s eyes and may be represented in images. . . . If what has to do with laws, government, and the policing of cities and republics is sometimes considered, it is only by chance. We would say the same for chronology and geography.”26 The object stands at the center of Montfaucon’s project, albeit as understood through the lens of philological explication, with recourse to ancient texts. While this method proved essential to emergent archaeological
14 Animating the Antique
approaches, missing is a sense of historical development or an overarching scheme, much less a rigorous conception of the interrelations between morphology and historical origins.27 In subsequent decades, compendia of collections like those published by Caylus and Mariette reflected a newly emphatic focus on objects and attested to an epistemic shift that, as Arnaldo Momigliano has emphasized, entailed both a “revolution in taste” and “a revolution in historical method.”28 It was only in the decades immediately following the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, with Winckelmann’s 1764 The History of the Art of Antiquity, that objects would be scrupulously described and presented within a systematic structure.29 Henceforth, the form and meaning of works of art were understood to be inextricably linked to the historical situation of their creation, which was capaciously conceived to include politics, climate, and geography.30 Traces of this Winckelmannian heritage persisted, and they are the focus of sustained analysis throughout this book. This strand culminates in chapter 4, in Pater’s and Lee’s embrace of Winckelmann as a key forefather and in the long-term refinement of an essentially Winckelmannian model in the accounts of sculpture in the ancient world written by Löwy and Furtwängler (and Sellers).31 Winckelmann’s approach is emblematic insofar as it cannot be understood solely through the lens of antiquarian and archaeological preoccupations. In its distinctive admixture of historicism and subjectivity, it bears the traces of another crucial eighteenth-century development: philosophical inquiry that emphatically centered on bodily sensations and aesthetic experience, thereby placing altogether new pressures on the spectator’s embodied encounter with works of art. Many, if not all, of
the objects and episodes that animate this book resonate with what David Freedberg has famously termed the “power of images” and with more recent explorations of object agency or, in Caroline van Eck’s formulation, “living presence response.”32 Again and again, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century beholders wrote about and gave pictorial form to their understanding that antique sculpture had the capacity to exceed its static, marmoreal bounds and approximate the pulsations of life, even as it stimulated heightened sensations on the part of the spectator. I do not aim here to contest the degree to which the imagined power of art objects—or artifacts, to follow a Gellian inquiry into the ways in which art may be seen to be endowed with agency—may be considered fundamental to the category “art.”33 Certainly, cases in which artworks are perceived as life-imbued agents represent a significant motif in the history of art writing from at least as early as Pliny and Callistratus in the first and third (or fourth) centuries ce.34 While taking into account the transhistorical nature of art’s power, agency, and capacity for lifelikeness, this book reveals the degree to which the eighteenth century was a pivotal, even transformative, episode in this history, an assertion that forms its backbone. Building upon earlier seventeenth-century developments, watershed texts by Isaac Newton and John Locke had profound implications for the early decades of the eighteenth century. The decades following Locke’s publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 were marked by a surge in inquiry, spanning scholarly and popular realms, that focused on empirically based, experiential operations of sensation and perception. In what Michael Baxandall describes as an age of “vulgar Lockeanism,” a preoccupation with perception and the essential role of perceiving subjects was
Introduction 15
omnipresent, from philosophical texts to popular manuals such as Francesco Algarotti’s best-selling Newtonianism for the Ladies of 1737.35 This focus on the necessarily interactive operations of sensory impressions produced by the perceiving subject’s encounter with “Nature” (or, in Locke’s term, “Substance”) that together contributed to the mind’s perception likewise had important implications for the analysis of encounters with art. Important publications by Dubos and Shaftesbury were emblematic of an eighteenth-century efflorescence of post-Lockean reflection on what encounters with art entailed, as well as judgments and experiences of beauty (or the lack thereof ). Increasingly, in the eighteenth century, the value of a work of art depended less on its adherence to accepted rules than on its ability to move its beholders, to stimulate their senses and passions. This significant shift meant that aesthetic experience was newly conceived as a quasi-intersubjective encounter between artwork and beholder. Against this backdrop, as David Marshall observes, “Extravagant claims for the ideal experience of art appear to have been translated into extravagant expectations for and demands upon the experience of art.”36 One node of investigation into particularly “extravagant” experience was Edmund Burke’s theorization of the sublime in his 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Engaged with crucial precursors in Longinus (On the Sublime, first century ce) and Nicolas Boileau’s translation and commentary on Longinus’s text, Burke strategically shifted the discursive center of gravity that informed the work of Longinus and Boileau, where a balance was struck between an examination of rhetorical traditions, or styles, and the experience of beholders and spectators. Even as Burke summoned
a new topography of the sublime as it was elicited by vistas and objects redolent of the infinite and obscure, the vast and powerful, and so on, his interest was, above all, in a symptomatology of the sublime (and beautiful). The experiences and sensations stimulated by such encounters were, in fact, at the core of his inquiry.37 The critical point here is that while the sublime stands as a sort of limit case (and was not often invoked to describe encounters with sculpture), it is exemplary of a more extensive eighteenth-century preoccupation with and theorization of the receptivity and sensitivity of beholders. This preoccupation was indispensable to thinking through aesthetic encounters in general terms, whether in philosophical texts such as Burke’s, in period novels, or in myriad diaries and letters from those making the grand tour. Such traces are evident in sculptor Étienne Falconet’s Reflections on Sculpture from 1761, in which he asserted that the sculptor’s craft turned equally upon form and feeling: “To express the form of bodies, but without adding feeling, is to do one’s duty only by half. To fuse these two parts (but what a difficulty!), that is the sublime in sculpture.”38 In short, the eighteenth century yields ample instances where aesthetic experience was conceived as heightened, intense, and interested in the sense of activating embodied responses to aesthetic objects. Such a view from the ground, as it were, supports a crucial corrective to the familiar account of the emergence and development of aesthetics as a philosophical subfield in the eighteenth century. If, the story goes, we witness the pivotal reorganization according to which earlier reliance upon universal criteria for art was replaced, in an age of empiricist epistemology, with an attention to the subjective effects produced by art, this new focus, which
16 Animating the Antique
threatened to dissolve in an orgy of subjectivism, was immediately tempered by the imperative of rational disinterest. This two-step allows for a telos according to which Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of 1711 has been connected with the Kantian apotheosis of disinterest in the Critique of Judgment from 1790. His imperative of disinterestedness tends to be understood as a primary, and pernicious, inheritance of the eighteenth century and the quintessence of what constitutes aesthetic experience. Certainly, the widespread circulation of Kantian philosophy may be credited with having radically reconfigured medieval scholastic meanings (traces of which persist in Cartesian thought) of “objective” and “subjective,” with the result that, by the mid-nineteenth century, the modern sense of “objectivity” as a basically epistemic goal had been consolidated. Immanuel Kant’s reformulation of these terms “reverberated with seismic intensity” in all domains of intellectual life in the nineteenth century—even though this line of thinking was, to a certain extent, built upon the eighteenth-century sensationalist philosophers Kant dismissed.39 Crucially, the nineteenth-century rise of postKantian objectivity was essentially yoked to its necessary counterpart in the guise of a new alertness to the “subjective self.” It is in this sense that Kant underpins my account—less as the thinker who quashed subjectivity in the service of disinterestedness than as one who offered a powerful model for the imbrication of these terms in their modern construal. My study’s chronological logic and argumentation acknowledges Kant’s formulation as one that prompted a sea change in conceptualizing, and perhaps also experiencing, aesthetic encounter. Eighteenth-century aesthetics and the imperative of “objectivity” have been understood as tendencies aided and abetted by the social and
architectural forms attendant on the rise of the modern art museum. Hans Belting has linked the founding of the Louvre with “a drastic and irrevocable change” in which “the contemplation of art” is replaced with “the retrospective contemplation of art history.”40 Here, Belting seems to channel Quatremère de Quincy, who, in his Moral Reflections on the Purpose of Works of Art from 1815, decried the rise of informed, rather than sensitive, beholders since artists desired “a public that feels, not one that reasons.” In his view, the aim of the historical museum “is to kill art and turn it into history.”41 I am interested instead in emphasizing a different eighteenth-century inheritance, one that recognizes that the call for disinterestedness was itself a symptom of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with aesthetic receptivity. Encounters with sculpture were central to this development and continued to be marked by affective expectations well after the rise of the universal art museum and the related expansion of art-historical thinking. In the age of aesthetic theory, antique sculpture was embraced as a productive site for self-recognition and self-conception, as demonstrated in, notably, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations (1754) and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (Sculpture: Some Observations on Form and Shape from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream) (1778). Denis Diderot may well have had these associations in mind in his Salon of 1765, in which sculpture’s connection to abstract philosophical reflection helped ensure its secondary position vis-à-vis painting.42 My study mines a particularly rich art-critical and philosophical literature that took up questions of sculpture and encounter: from Herder, Diderot, and Rousseau to Hegel, Hildebrand, Pater, and Lee. A central
Introduction 17
contention here is that the importance of aesthetic experience can be traced not only through philosophical and explicitly art-theoretical writing but also in fiction, travel writing, and ultimately, if perhaps more speculatively, in picturing itself.43 I propose that some of the most interesting thinking about the experience of ancient sculpture was articulated in two-dimensional depictions of encounters with such objects. Baxandall’s account of a cultural moment that may be perceived as Lockean suggests the broad currency of thinking about sensation and perception in the visual arts and provides a crucial point of departure for my study. In this historical situation, it is perhaps not surprising to find approaches to picturing that engaged antique forms not simply— to use Baxandall’s Lockean terminology—as “substance itself ” but rather as material that made itself “present, in the guise of sensation, perception or complex ideas of substance.”44 This book trains its attention on precisely those pictures that thematize or take up in interesting ways the matter of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing in the round. By the mid-nineteenth century, an emphatic opposition was strongly forged between ancient sculpture, as a key cipher of a deadening classical past, and the “painting of modern life.” However, such had not always been the case. Only decades prior, the sculptural antique occupied center stage in a series of interlocking discourses: on the nature of art and its history, on judgments of beauty and the cultivation of taste, and, indeed, on the nature and limits of human perception. Far from frozen morphological templates of ideality, Greco-Roman antiquities were explicitly volatile, as they were shuttled, for instance, from Italy to France and back again, even as they were conceived theoretically as the prevailing site of artistic and aesthetic transformation.
Animating the Antique This historical lay of the land sets out the crucial ingredients for an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture, outlined in chapter 1, whose essential elements were mobility, mutability, and the capacity for encounters with the antique to yield potentially transformative experiences. Pictures of sculpture at the Capitoline Museum by Charles Natoire and Hubert Robert vividly summon mobility in terms of the actual movement of antiquities— their unearthing from the ground and their physical and conceptual movements from private to public collections. At the same time, Natoire and Robert take as their subject the mobility of consumers and beholders of art, who likewise would have been aware of antique sculpture’s mobility as facilitated by its replication and circulation in reproductive mediums. In a remarkably evocative example, an engraving of the Apollo Belvedere by Giovanni Volpato and Raffaello Morghen, carefully annotated with measurements and observations by Antonio Canova, tells the story of how such prints traveled—in this instance, to the Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino, to be put into dialogue there with the represented sculptural artifact, and away again to the artist’s studio. As Canova’s exacting notations attest, the question of the antique’s mutability—its capacity for and subjection to formal modification—loomed large in an era in which canonical forms were reproduced in an unprecedented array of reproductive mediums: from plaster casts and cork models to bronze and lead. Mutability, in the sense of physical transformation, was likewise a fact of life of the antique in a period of accelerated archaeological excavation. Jean Grandjean’s gripping drawing shows Andreas Christian Hviid pointing to traces
18 Animating the Antique
of restoration that had been made to the Capitoline Antinous prior to its public exhibition. The drawing thus evokes an era when unknown finds and canonical sculptures alike were often significantly transformed as they moved out of the ground and into networks of dealers, restorers, artists, and collectors. As attested by Blanchet’s extraordinary series of grisaille paintings after such famed antiquities as the Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici, mutability likewise entailed transformations wrought through the movement of sculptural form from three dimensions into two. Blanchet’s singular depictions of the Apollo and Venus amid dying vegetation are among many instances that reveal the myriad possibilities for radically new stagings and affective scenarios. Aesthetic experience often held out the possibility of transformative encounter. James Barry, who wrote from Rome about “that ardor, and I know not how to call it, that state of mind one gets on studying the antique,” created, in his early Self-Portrait with James Paine and Dominique Lef èvre from around 1767, a picture of remarkable sensitivity to what was at stake in encounters with Greco-Roman sculpture in the age of aesthetic theory.45 Summoning up the familiar form of the Belvedere Torso, Barry invoked the object’s power as site of artistic inspiration in the setting of homosocial enthusiasm. By understanding the capacity of transformative encounter as central to eighteenth-century thinking about, experience of, and picturing of the antique, it is possible to recognize in Barry’s painting the complexity of the artist’s reflections on the antique, in which animation and petrification unsettlingly coexist. Spanning roughly a century and a half, from the decades following the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii to the turn of the twentieth century, Animating the Antique tracks a range of modalities of
animation, including Thomas Patch’s depictions of sculpture’s dangerously seductive allure (in chapter 1); J.-A.-D. Ingres’s memories of atmospheric, torchlit views of sculpture and the rendering of anthropomorphic shadows (in chapter 2); Théodore Chassériau’s phantasmic resurrection of Pompeian remains (in chapter 3); and Vernon Lee’s distinctive theorizing of the experience of sculpture in the round in her “Gallery Diaries” (in chapter 4). Throughout, I aim to provide a richer account of the persistence of antiquity in the modern period by tracing the dialectic logic of the modern sculptural encounter, poised between the threat of mortification and the promise of animation and transformation. Underwriting the roughly chronological organization of these chapters is an accordion logic, whereby the analysis expands both earlier and later in time around a central episode. For example, chapter 3 is anchored by a thoroughgoing examination of Chassériau’s The Tepidarium, a large-scale canvas depicting Pompeii, whose genesis dates to the mid-nineteenth century. From here, the account folds backward, to the 1770s and the discovery in Pompeii of the famed “breast imprint,” a negative sculptural impression in ash that captured the traces of a beautiful female torso. The chapter then moves to an analysis of Giuseppe Fiorelli’s plaster casting techniques developed in the early 1860s and the emergence of photographic views of these modern “sculptures,” culminating in reflections on how Norman Douglas, Wilhelm Jensen, and Sigmund Freud engaged Pompeii’s uncanny sculptural capacities at the turn of the twentieth century. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, substantial incursions had been made to the very idea of an enlivened and enlivening antique. Among the significant challenges to Winckelmann’s and Hegel’s vision of the antique, which insisted upon
Introduction 19
its idealized, calm self-sufficiency, was Friedrich Nietzsche’s fundamentally new articulation in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) of the concept of the Dionysian: the chaotic, passionate, instinctual, and savage. Nietzsche was particularly interested in moments in the arts of Greek antiquity, such as in the operation of the chorus in Greek tragedy, when the duality of opposing forces represented by “the Dionysian phenomenon” and the countervailing Apollonian mode were both in evidence, working as a structuring dynamic. Written contemporaneously with The Birth of Tragedy, Pater’s biographical essay on Winckelmann celebrated the latter not for his clearheaded antiquarian knowledge but rather for his intimate and history-defying connection with Greek aesthetic and erotic sensibilities, forged, as Pater emphasized, through Winckelmann’s appreciation of ideal antique bodily form. Chapter 4 explores responses to fin de siècle challenges in the final decades of the nineteenth century, including Pater’s essays on the origins and developments of Greek art and Lee’s “Gallery Diaries.” As in Pater’s Winckelmann essay, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson aspired to reanimate the antique and, in so doing, to save it from its mortifying enframement in the museum and from deadening philological explanations alike. Instead, and with an eye to current debates among scholars of classical art and archaeology as well as to new developments in the psychological interpretation of objects and the study of Einfühlung (empathy), Lee and Anstruther-Thomson committed themselves to a radically embodied, empathic formalism. Lee’s work, rooted in movement and viewing in the round, is here considered relative to a long tradition of thinking through and picturing sculpture’s sidedness. This tradition is explored in the guise of sculptural process via the words and hands
of Benvenuto Cellini, Michelangelo, and Edme Bouchardon; in terms of sculptural picturing as practiced in engravings produced by François Perrier and Antonio Canova; and in the relatively new medium of photography in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Around this same time, questions of sculpture’s Vielansichtigkeit—the degree to which the object did or did not insist on multiple points of view—became vitally important to the historiography of ancient art and the understanding of sculpture, generally speaking.46 The book concludes with a stark face-off between Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s insistence on sculpture’s aspectivity and a quite different, very powerful vision of sculpture’s essential planarity, a position articulated by sculptor and theorist Adolf von Hildebrand in 1893. The quick and formidable uptake of Hildebrand’s vision of sculpture’s planar imperative is attested by Heinrich Wölfflin’s anxious reflections on the photographing of sculpture in 1896. These decades represent an endpoint for the dialectic logic that motivates this book. The 1880s and ’90s stand as a decisive point, when art- historical and art-theoretical preoccupations and values congealed around the planar and the particular form of relief sculpture, marking a critical displacement of the figure in the round.47 This shift marked the demise of a model that had, for 150 years, animated a productive dialectical interplay between the pictorial and plastic, the static and the mobile, the time of the antique and the time of beholding.
Desiring Antiquity The instances I have found most gripping and ultimately the most productive for my work in tracing the afterlives of an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture have tended to be
20 Animating the Antique
those, to borrow a slightly modified phrase from Alex Potts, where the form and significance of ancient sculpture is not assumed to be selfevident.48 From Blanchet’s grisaille “ghosts” and Patch’s dilettanti to Ingres’s creepily suggestive shadows and Wölfflin’s concerns about the “corruption” of improperly photographed “false impressions,”49 I have tended to highlight artistic projects that entailed some degree of making strange and in which traces remain of the negotiation between experiences in three dimensions and their making over, anew, into two-dimensional depictions. That strangeness also touches on questions of desire. If debates about early Christian antiquities in the second half of the sixteenth century reveal an antiquarianism informed by fervent Catholicism, the eighteenth century was marked by a strikingly different, and overtly secular, orientation to the antique world. From Winckelmann, Knight, and the Society of Dilettanti more broadly to Fuseli, the study of the antique was intimately bound up with questions of desire, which were articulated in a deeply libertine set of investments and commitments.50 In a particularly evocative passage from Plastik, which Andrei Pop aptly describes as a “protoromantic manifesto,” Herder summoned the experience of viewing the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in terms that reinforce this point.51 In a passage that zeroed in on the sculpture’s power to channel overwhelming, even dangerously, all-consuming bodily desire, Herder wrote, “Whoever . . . stood before the famous Hermaphrodite and didn’t feel in every bend and curve of the body, in everything he touches and does not touch, that Bacchic dream and hermaphroditism are the ruling forces, that he is awash in the torture of sweet thoughts and lust, pushing through his body like a mild fire—whoever did not feel this and did not discover in himself the
involuntary echo or resonance of these struck chords; to him neither my words nor any others can explain it.”52 That the passage is marked grammatically by the equivocation between imagined beholder—“whoever . . . stood before the famous Hermaphrodite”—and the “he” of the represented subject—“awash in the torture of sweet thoughts and lust”—is crucial. Herder here develops a more general proposition that subtends his consideration of sculpture in his book: sculptural encounter turns on recognition, bodily resonance, and, in this case, mirroring. The Hermaphrodite episode is, in short, exemplary. And in its exemplary status, it highlights, rather than sublimates, the disconcertingly reciprocal terms that might be involved in sculptural encounters. The fact that a powerfully charged desirous circuitry between male bodies held an exemplary place in Herder’s discussion has not featured prominently in subsequent evaluations of his project. By contrast, Winckelmann’s account of canonical ancient art was quickly recognized as bearing the traces of his marginalized sexual identity. By the early nineteenth century, references to “Winckelmann” operated as a sort of queer shorthand or literary handshake.53 This association proved enduring; many decades later, Pater, following Goethe, invoked Winckelmann’s “romantic, fervent friendships with young men,” friendships that “perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture.”54 It has become a commonplace in art history to recognize Winckelmann’s importance, from his instrumental role in art history’s disciplinary foundations to his pivotal contributions to encouraging the enthusiasm for ancient sculpture that took Europe by storm in the second half of the eighteenth century. Less clear by far is this: if we have come to recognize the
Introduction 21
degree to which Winckelmann’s project was underwritten by a particular sexual politics and turned on the author’s orientation to an ideal of Greek same-sex desire, what purchase, if any, did these origins have on the subsequent embrace of Winckelmann’s aesthetic and emulative priorities? In consideration of these questions, Whitney Davis has examined the sedimentation of taste from what we might term a Winckelmannian homoaesthetics, founded on “manifestly homoerotic prototypes and significance,” to Kantian universalizing—and, thus, de facto normalizing— judgments.55 Far from a marginalized position, Winckelmann here emerges as nothing less than the queer machinery undergirding eighteenthand nineteenth-century canon formation. Taking up the historical period that saw Winckelmann’s eroticized admiration transformed
into “a virtually universal standard,” this book traces the vicissitudes of canon formation in episodes that, again and again, conjure unruly desire—where desire appears to operate at a distance from the norms of gender.56 The project of animating the antique notably hinged on such episodes, from the sodomitical logic of Patch’s Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall to desire made strange in Ingres’s studies after the antique in the round, Chassériau’s fantasy of female homosociality in Pompeii, and Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s work as sexual outsiders to constitute and manage embodied, desirous encounters with art. Taken together, the episodes that follow attest to the queerness to be found at the heart of the reception of the classical tradition, and in so doing, they begin to offer an answer to how we might otherwise conceive of the shape of Winckelmannian afterlives in art’s history.
Chapter 1
Toward an EighteenthCentury Ontology of Ancient Sculpture
T
he sculptor’s arms are flung wide in awe (fig. 8). Chisel still clutched in his outstretched hand, the fixity of his gaze and the dramatic interruption of his work telegraph to the beholder that this is no usual studio scene. Rather, it is an instant of miraculous transformation, as the pallid, inanimate marble figure before him is overtaken by the roseate glow of living flesh. It is only a matter of time, the painting proposes, until those blank, unseeing eyes are endowed with sight and those limbs with movement. In its artful unfurling of the narrative of Pygmalion and Galatea, Laurent Pécheux’s 1785 canvas takes its place alongside a remarkable number of pictures devoted to the subject in the second half of the eighteenth century. Like representations of the tale of Zeuxis, the narrative echoed foundational myths of artistic origins. In this instance, questions of mimesis loom
24 Animating the Antique
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 25
Figure 8 Laurent Pécheux, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1785. Oil on canvas. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo © The State Hermitage Museum (Vladimir Terebenin).
large. In Ovid’s telling, Pygmalion’s carved female figure stands for, and indeed emphatically displaces, actual women—even as the tale powerfully frames what will prove an enduring theme for centuries to follow: the intertwined nature of artistic creation and desire.1 Eighteenth-century pictures like Pécheux’s have been compellingly linked to period materialist discourses on living matter or, rather, on the capacity for matter to live and to feel. One particularly vivid episode concerns Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s query in 1769 about the difference “between a man and a statue, between marble and flesh,” to which Diderot famously replied, “Not much. Flesh can be made from marble, and marble from flesh.”2 Pécheux’s canvas suggests another related line of inquiry by organizing the Pygmalion narrative specifically in relation to antique sculpture. Here, Galatea is none other than the Venus de’ Medici. In its staging of sculptural encounter and sculptural transformation broadly construed, with implications for both sculpture and beholder, the painting provides a rich point of departure for a chapter that aims to trace how thinking the antique took distinctive shape in the eighteenth century. By the time of Pécheux’s canvas, encounters with ancient figural sculpture had long lent shape and meaning to the grand tour, even as they were framed by new preoccupations and expectations. This chapter isolates the key qualities that came to define experiences with antique figural sculpture in the mid-eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture outlined in what follows turned, I will argue, on three defining conditions: mobility, mutability, and the capacity for transformative experience. Mobility references the physical movement of antiquities: their unearthing, transport, installation, and display. Taking off from
Perrier’s 1638 engravings, I follow the physical displacement of antiquities as well as their virtual circulation via diverse technologies of reproduction. The eighteenth century witnessed the efflorescence of practices of reproduction, replication, and translation trained on ancient sculpture: from drawing and painting to engraving, plaster casts, and porcelain. Prints, casts, and copies all played instrumental roles in an emergent history of ancient art, as is evident, for example, in the early publications of Winckelmann and Herder. If it is true that in the eighteenth century the “antique existed in and through its copies,” this is not, however, to foreclose on the second term, mutability.3 In reference to the decades following the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, Quatremère de Quincy later remarked: “Never, within a similar period of time, have so many antique remains been brought to light. . . . There were no limits to the hopes and expectations of those interested in the arts. Who knew where the discoveries might lead? . . . Crowds of statues emerged from the ruins of the classical world.”4 In response, networks of antiquarians, sculptors, and dealers intervened to modify, transform, and render anew what were, in many instances, merely fragments of sculptures. The antique Cupid and Psyche group excavated near Hadrian’s Villa in the early eighteenth century is a powerful case in point. While the sculpture is now lost, a drawing by Pompeo Batoni commemorates how the saccharine embrace, rendered familiar by the related Capitoline group, was transformed through its restoration into a lover’s violent recoil (see figs. 23 and 24).5 Whereas Batoni’s drawing marks a striking departure from innumerable representations of the Capitoline Cupid and Psyche group, mutability might also be understood in terms of
26 Animating the Antique
morphological variations among representations that took the same objects as their subject. Blanchet’s grisaille series from 1765 at Saltram House is exemplary insofar as it demonstrates the remarkable plasticity of form as it was moved through materials: from marble, to drawing, to engraving and painting. As Blanchet’s depiction of the Hermaphrodite attests (see fig. 3), even the slight modification of a commonly held vantage point could nevertheless be harnessed to startlingly transformative ends. Works like this prepare us to consider what was at stake when artists probed sculpture’s unique capacity for being seen in the round—viewing that moves at once over time and across space—since what could be seen was constantly shifting, often with striking effects. Such pictorial representations explored sculpture’s faciality, or sidedness, in order to unsettle the idea of the medium’s moribund stasis and to make the familiar strange. These dynamics had new power in the eighteenth century, thanks to the concerted theorization of the transformative possibilities of aesthetic encounter. This last vital characteristic of an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique permeated writing about sculpture in the period, from philosophical texts to tourist diaries. Provoking the possibility of animating the spectator and/or animating the sculpture, encounters with the antique were underwritten by a sense of these objects’ time-collapsing properties, qualities that powerfully dovetailed with a post-Winckelmannian emphasis on sculpture’s special, and distinctly material, historicity. In the eighteenth century, I want to insist, art’s capacity to invoke “living presence,” a property that has been posited as a transhistorical aspect of works of art, took on very particular shape and power.6 In tandem with detailing the eighteenthcentury ontology of the antique, the first part of the
chapter traces a variegated landscape of beholding sculpture in reference to a series of evocative pictures that took significant form in the cosmopolitan setting of Italy in the second half of the century. The second part of the chapter introduces three episodes in which an orientation to questions of mobility, mutability, and the capacity for transformative encounter prove particularly salient. The chapter moves from Robert’s and Natoire’s drawings of antiques in the newly opened Capitoline Museum, as well as Barry’s and Grandjean’s depictions of the mesmerizing effects of the Capitoline Antinous and Belvedere Torso, to Herder’s and Goethe’s delight at the firsthand scrutiny of prized antiquities. These key images and texts speak to myriad modes of sculptural encounter, whether artistic, touristic, philosophical, or admixtures thereof. At the same time, such practices of looking, copying, imagining, and depicting suggest the promises and perils of sculptural admiration that so often hinged on identification between viewer and sculptural object, as well as the potential for the viewing subject’s transformation. Patch’s resolutely unbeautiful depiction of grand tourists and ancient sculpture in his Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall (ca. 1760–61) directly addresses this tension. This monumental picture offers, with palpable relish and humor, a sort of ground plan of the varied taste-performing and taste-making practices at the heart of contemporary artistic and tourist cultures in Italy. If, as Pécheux’s painting suggests, the beholder came to be understood as a vital component of the work of art and, indeed, may be said to complete the art object, these experiences of transformative viewing were particularly charged when viewers came face to face with antique figural sculpture. The myth of Pygmalion and its thematization of marble’s
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 27
materiality provides a germane starting point for my exploration of an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique.
The Myth of Pygmalion and the Flesh of Marble In his entry “Sculpture en bronze” for Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Louis de Jaucourt remarks, “The number of statues of all sizes that the ancients made in bronze, is almost incredible.” But despite the fact that, as Jaucourt emphasizes, in antiquity bronze played an outsized role in both the making of and writing about sculpture, by the eighteenth century, classical sculpture was overwhelmingly associated with the medium of marble.7 And while sculpture more broadly encompassed a range of mediums—including terracotta, plaster, porcelain, and bronze—marble was the quintessential material for reflections on the art of sculpture. Consider Diderot, who, in 1765, tellingly reduced the art to a single medium. Having described sculpture as that “most philosophical art,” an art of profundity and stasis, he offered the scathing summary: “No laughter in marble.”8 No further elaboration was necessary thanks to sculpture’s synecdoche, marble. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the art of sculpture was strongly associated not only with marble but also with touch, line, and the antique. Lichtenstein provides the foundational account, in which Roger de Piles plays a primary role in retooling the associations foundational to long-standing paragone debates. As she demonstrates, post–de Pilesean discussions of sculpture were intimately connected to “debates about the status of antiquity.”9 A century after Diderot’s formulation, critical attacks on sculpture proliferated in no small part because the medium
was so thoroughly bound up with its perceived Greek origins. In the German context, it has been observed that “it would be no exaggeration to see antiquity . . . as identical with the statue,” an elision telegraphed, as Catriona MacLeod observes, by Goethe’s 1804 juxtaposition of romanticism not with classicism but, rather, with the “plastic” (das Plastische).10 The “death of sculpture” could not only be imagined but emphatically asserted, thanks to its thoroughgoing identification with its classical incarnation.11 In its eighteenth-century construal, antique sculpture was, above all, associated with figuration in the guise of gods, heroes, and warriors. In the hands of past masters, marble had been rendered with such virtuosity that it appeared as if human flesh. The miraculous mechanics involved in the transformation—or perhaps better, metamorphosis—of marble into quasi–human flesh emerged as a noteworthy enthusiasm of the eighteenth century. Drawing on the narrative made famous by Ovid, the subject of Pygmalion’s animated statue flourished in the visual arts as it did in literary and philosophical treatments. Beginning in the second decade of the eighteenth century, a strategic and consistent sleight of hand is evident across the many painted renditions of the Pygmalion myth. In paintings by a wide range of artists, from Jean Raoux’s 1717 canvas to Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s from 1785, the modification is clear. In Ovid’s account, “With extraordinary art / From snowy ivory [Pygmalion] formed a girl, of beauty more than human, and fell in love.”12 And yet, surveying the paintings, there is nary an ivory girl to be found. Before she is flesh, Pygmalion’s beauty is emphatically materialized in marble, just as the sculptural figure is definitively life-scale.13 In this sense, paintings of the period repeatedly elide the double metamorphosis—of materials and scale—in
28 Animating the Antique
Ovid’s myth.14 In scenes like Pécheux’s, human-sized marble takes center stage, and its transformation from hard, gleaming white surface to yielding, rosy flesh is the main event (fig. 8). In Pécheux’s rendition, Galatea is in the midst of coming to life, feet first; the frozen orbs of the statue’s eyes and the hard gleam of her breast are distinguished from the warmer tones of the figure’s “living” abdomen and legs. Meanwhile, Pygmalion kneels before Galatea/Venus, arms thrown out in a pantomime of awe at the “miracle of animation” unfolding before him.15 The exchange of Ovid’s ivory for marble in depictions like Pécheux’s may well speak to the axiomatic nature of marble to the very idea of sculpture. In this sense, its depiction reinforces the allegorical valence of images that take up something like sculpture’s primal scene. In representations of the Pygmalion myth, sculpture’s dimensionality is at once linked to the medium’s mimetic capacities as well as its unique material qualities. Whether its origins lie in bone, horn, or tusk, Ovid’s ivory is a soft, relatively malleable, organic material. Aside from its famed deployment in colossal chryselephantine sculptures such as the Athena Parthenos, ivory was frequently used in the creation of objects on a diminutive scale, as in the case of ancient ivory dolls.16 Marble is a quite differently evocative substance, distinctly positioned to serve as that most resolutely inanimate material, all the better to contrast with the warmth of flesh. In eighteenth-century reflections on sculpture, whiteness and coldness are repeatedly celebrated as marble’s essential material qualities. Setting aside references to marble’s diverse colors, like Baron d’Holbach’s Encyclopédie entry noting that “the colors of marble vary infinitely,” Winckelmann famously remarked in his History of the Art of Antiquity that “since white is the color that reflects the
most rays of light, and thus is most easily perceived, a beautiful body is all the more beautiful, the whiter it is.”17 Winckelmann’s affirmation of the “supremacy of white Greece” is situated within what Philippe Jockey has shown to be a centuries-long “decoloration, that is, white recoloration, of Greek antiquity.”18 Throughout eighteenth-century texts, marble’s famed whiteness is understood to invoke the idealized “skin” of Greco-Roman statuary, an association that was thoroughly bound up with ideologies of race and nation in an age of empire.19 In 1780, in his tenth discourse delivered to the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds concluded his reflections on sculpture by placing materials front and center: “The uniformity and simplicity of the materials on which the sculptor labors, which are only white marble, prescribes bounds to his art, and teaches him to confine himself to a proportionable simplicity of design.”20 Here, sculpture qua medium was fully reducible to marble in all of its monochrome glory. The association endured; decades later Hegel would laud white marble as “above all the most appropriate” for sculpture. While he had to admit that other materials had been deployed, whether the granite and basalt favored by the Egyptians or the bronze utilized by the ancient Greeks, Hegel concluded that “marble in its soft purity, whiteness, absence of color, and the delicacy of its sheen harmonizes in the most direct way with the aim of sculpture.”21 While based in an assertion of marble’s ability to capture the effects of light and shade with greater subtlety than did other materials, Hegel’s privileging of white marble was connected to his broader argument about the essentially abstract nature of ideal sculpture; in its achromy, white marble would allow the maximal perception of sculpture’s form.22
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 29
Hegel’s argument was articulated during a period in which marble’s meanings and associations were significantly in flux. From its consolidation in the course of sixteenth-century paragone debates, the idea of sculpture had been intimately connected to the material of marble and the assumption of direct carving, which, taken together, distilled an image of platonic creation: out of unhewn stone, the artist’s idea would be revealed. In this construal, marble sculpture stood as a point of access—to the individual artist’s idea and, as important, to the traces left by the artist’s hand in the execution of surface modeling. But by the early eighteenth century, texts by Joseph Addison and Jonathan Richardson acknowledged that classical figural sculpture was bound by serial relations.23 Increasingly, marble sculpture began to be conceived in terms of its circuits of replication. By 1784, a crucial step had been taken in conceiving of marble as a material of reproduction. In the first volume of the Museo Pio-Clementino (1782), authored by Giovanni Battista Visconti with the assistance of his son Ennio Quirino Visconti, marble sculpture was occasionally identified as a copy of a bronze Greek original, as with the Apollo Sauroktonos by Praxiteles, a marble copy of which was part of the PioClementino collections.24 The second volume, published by Ennio Quirino Visconti in 1784, heralded two new shifts. Faced with sculpture in which excellent conception was paired with lessthan-excellent execution, Visconti began to assume the existence of lost Greek originals whose design and execution would have been equally superb. It was out of this emergent set of relations that the fundamentally derivative category of “GrecoRoman” sculpture took shape. Visconti also began to assume the existence of bronze originals “behind” marble sculptures, even in the many cases in which
no such works were documented in ancient texts.25 As marble was put into new relation to bronze (originals), not to mention the clay models that preceded them practically and conceptually, marble’s “originary” status was increasingly destabilized. The arrival of newly discovered Greek figural sculpture in western Europe accelerated this reappraisal. Pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina acquired by Ludwig I of Bavaria and exhibited in Munich, and the friezes from Bassae and the Parthenon sculptures (exhibited by 1816 in the British Museum), could all be dated to the fifth century bce. These archaeological revelations stimulated a large-scale reevaluation of Greco-Roman sculpture and set the terms for new historical and stylistic genealogies established later in the century. The new analytic and interpretive methods of Kopienkritik (copy criticism), with deep roots in philology and new scientific thought, were formalized by the time of Adolf Furtwängler’s 1895 Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture and signaled decisively the understanding of marble as the medium of ancient copies.26 Whiteness itself was under pressure, thanks to the burgeoning awareness that the Greek sculptures embraced for their achromy would have originally been polychrome. After key archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum (where, in 1760, a statue of Diana was excavated that bore traces of blond hair, along with red and gold decoration on the hem of its drapery), at the Parthenon in Athens, and the temple of Aphaia on Aegina, documentation of ancient polychromy circulated ever more widely.27 Already evident in Winckelmann’s 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity, knowledge of sculptural polychromy expanded broadly after 1814 thanks to Quatremère de Quincy’s influential Le Jupiter Olympien, ou l’Art de la sculpture antique considéré
30 Animating the Antique
sous un nouveau point de vue, which posited that the Panathenaic procession, the Parthenon’s famed relief sculpture that graced the cella’s exterior walls, would have been vividly colored. Drawing upon ancient textual sources and firsthand observations in its exposition of what he termed “polychrome sculpture,” Quatremère de Quincy’s magnum opus was anchored with chryselephantine cult statues, like Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia, illustrated in spectacular and chromatically vivid reconstruction drawings by the author.28 Ongoing research on ancient polychromy was sustained in large part by the imbrication of scientific archaeology with architectural training, publishing, and design in the hands of such figures as Gottfried Semper, Leo von Klenze, Jacques Ignace Hittorff, and Owen Jones.29 Despite such popular visualizations as Jones’s exhibition of polychromed casts of the north frieze of the Parthenon, displayed in the Greek Court at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, the subject remained polarizing, and a strong association between marble’s whiteness and classical art proved (and to some extent continues to prove) nearly impossible to dislodge.30 The association of Greece with marmoreal whiteness—conceived at a polar remove from color—was endowed with the appearance of unquestionable rationality in the second half of the eighteenth century thanks to the scholarly and museological ground laid by a burgeoning history of art and public art museums. The stakes and politics of the association are further amplified by Jockey’s observation that the moral condemnation of color that surfaces already in Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 Essays returns in explicitly racialized terms in the middle of the nineteenth century in Arthur Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. Much was at stake in the continued embrace of antique sculpture’s “illusory whiteness.”31
Resistance to color was especially virulent in the realm of figural sculpture, as notable efforts by contemporary practitioners attest. While Jones’s 1854 “experiment” was roundly criticized, polychromed sculptures by Antonio Canova (Paolina Borghese, 1804–8; Hebe, 1808) and John Gibson (Queen Victoria, 1844; Aphrodite, later called the Tinted Venus, 1854) were subject to erasure and revision.32 Canova’s polychromed sculptures, like those of Jean-Léon Gérôme, were stripped of their color, not unlike the work of their ancient predecessors. Clearly, the modern history of sculptural polychromy is intimately bound up with the history of chromophobia, one symptom of which has been the violent removal of color from sculptural surfaces. Debates about ancient sculptural polychromy continue into the present, in terms that demonstrate that the aesthetic stakes have always also been politicized and often overtly racialized.33 The “savage” nature of color invoked by Winckelmann and Goethe maps all too easily onto the logic of the twenty-first-century alt-right rejection of a growing understanding of the richly diverse hues and subjects that populated the ancient world. In the eighteenth century, the association of sculpture’s ideal form with whiteness and intellection took shape within a distinctly racialized worldview of the Enlightenment. If Falconet’s assertion of 1761 that “the nude is the principal object of the sculptor’s study” proved largely true in European art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, marble’s widespread associations with whiteness, abstraction, and ideal form give the lie to the medium’s universalizing connotations.34 Only specific bodies were conjured by its translucent “skin.”Far from abstract terms, references to blackness and whiteness were, as Anne Lafont has recently demonstrated, explicitly tied to notions of
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 31
race and questions of morality in eighteenth-century art writing.35 The medium of marble brought these associations starkly to the surface, not least thanks to the association of marble with the human body. D’Holbach’s Encyclopédie entry, for example, defines marble as “ordinarily filled with veins.”36 Again and again commentators invoked the fleshiness of stone, as in Winckelmann’s encomium on the subject, which appeared in his discussion of the Laocoön group: “Though the outer skin of this statue when compared with a smooth and polished surface appears somewhat rough, rough as smooth velvet contrasted with lustrous satin, yet it is, as it were, like the skin of ancient Greeks, which had neither been relaxed by the constant use of warm baths . . . nor rubbed smooth by a scraper, but on which lay a healthy moisture, resembling the first appearance of down upon the chin.”37 The transformation of marble into quasi-skin remained the ultimate sign of mastery, even as questions of surface effect took on particular importance in the years following the revelation of the Parthenon marbles’ relatively coarse surfaces.38 At the same time, marble’s metamorphic hardness, opacity, and reflective sheen were situated at a far remove from the softness and translucency of flesh. While the materiality of marble was linked visually and rhetorically to its capacity for lifelikeness, and it was prized in part for its evocation of skin, within its Pygmalion promise of animation lay its opposite: the threat of mortification and the understanding of the marble body as a corpse. If sculpture was “grave and austere,” as Reynolds asserted in 1780, the purported coldness of the material loomed large for many commentators.39 In Rousseau’s Pygmalion, the sculptor declares his lack of inspiration with reference to the material’s
inherent chill, announcing, “The marble emerges cold from my hands.”40 In his Berlin lectures of 1801–2, August Wilhelm Schlegel conceived of sculpture as essentially corporeal, even as his reflections were fundamentally informed by a sense of the mortifying chill of marble.41 Undergirding François Guizot’s repudiation of sculptural painting in 1810 was the critic’s invocation of “that idea of immobility or of coldness that is necessarily attached to a statue.”42 Reflecting on his intermedial experimentations roughly a century after Rousseau, Gérôme wrote that if he had “from the outset concerned [himself ] with the application of color to marble,” this was the direct result of the fact that he had “always been frightened by the coldness in the sculptures which, once the carving work is complete, have been left in their natural state.”43 In this, Gérôme was not alone; in his time, the “chill” of marble would be systematically yoked to a sense of its sepulchral and deathly characteristics by such critical figures as Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Hippolyte Taine, and Émile Zola.44 Despite the consistent assertion of marble’s chill and the seductive logic of this association, whereby marble is linked to the antique and thus conceptually with the dead and remote, marble is not inherently cold. Viewed scientifically, these assertions beg the question of marble’s relative thermal conductivity. In the context of the art museum or gallery, a sculpture responds to the temperature of the room, which is likely to be lower than a visitor’s body temperature. When a warm hand touches marble at a cooler room temperature, how quickly does it draw heat from the human hand? Marble’s thermal capacity or the material’s absolute value in these terms registers on a spectrum, from materials relatively slow to transmit heat (or cold) to those that do so relatively quickly. Whereas paper registers at the low transmitting end
32 Animating the Antique
and silver at the high transmitting end, marble appears roughly equivalent to slate; it is around five times more transmissive than milk but nearly fiftyfive times less conductive of heat or cold than bronze.45 Put simply, in the world of materials, the “touch” of marble is experienced as significantly less cold than that of bronze, thanks to the substances’ relative thermal conductivity. This is an extended explanation of a simple but crucial point: the pervasive association of marble with coldness—a pairing that pervades eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discussions, not to mention those of the twentieth and twenty-first—must be understood as a rhetorical argument rather than an exposition of material fact. For Diderot, the fact that “the material [sculpture] uses is so cold, so refractory, so impenetrable” made it difficult to approximate (human) likeness. On the one hand, the material itself presented a stark challenge to any artist who aspired to “soften . . . this cold, hard material, in order to make soft, sweet flesh of it.” On the other hand loomed the equally daunting association of sculpture in general and marble in particular with the antique. In the decades following the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the “antique” took on an entirely new material immediacy, as chapter 3 explores in greater detail. At the same time, it was increasingly tied to a sense of fatality. The magnitude of transforming marble into flesh is evident in Diderot’s response to Falconet’s sculpture Pygmalion, exhibited in 1763, “How soft the flesh! No, it cannot be marble!”46 Rousseau likewise chose his words carefully when his Pygmalion apostrophized, “It’s not at all lifeless marble with which I am enamored.”47 In such examples, the drama of bringing to life assumes—and indeed requires—the deadness of stone. Whether summoned in the imagination or through the beholder’s touch, marble tended to be conjured at once as
epidermis and proof of its antithesis: the gelid body as corpse. Of course, it is precisely this gap that is miraculously bridged in the Pygmalion myth, a tale of animation that captured the imagination not only of artists but also of eighteenth-century scholars, philosophers, and writers, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Condillac. As J. L. Carr has explored, beginning with philosopher André-François Boreau-Deslandes’s 1741 Pigmalion, ou la statue animée, this narrative and especially its climax in the animating of marble proved an exceptionally fertile avenue for exploring Lockean empiricism and, in particular, the suggestion that “matter might be able to think.”48 Voltaire, Diderot, and Condillac may all be seen to follow in Deslandes’s footsteps, since the statue’s first thoughts may be seen as a “tribute to empiricism,” while Pygmalion’s responses “betray allegiance to Spinoza as well as Locke.”49 In his response to d’Alembert’s query about the difference between man and statue, Diderot asserted the fundamental equivalence between marble and flesh, in an echo of Deslandes’s earlier text. In his 1754 Treatise on the Sensations, Condillac’s focus for his radically empiricist reflections on the primacy of the senses in the development of the cognitive capacities in an (imagined) insentient human being explicitly used a statue’s animation as demonstration.50 While more specifically focused on paragone debates than his predecessors, Herder, too, harnessed the Pygmalion narrative in his 1778 Plastik, subtitled Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (Some Observations on Form and Shape from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream). Like Voltaire and Condillac before him, Herder took up the matter of animation in a text shot through with references to the unruly “flesh” of marble. Herder’s book has often been
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 33
described as a philosopher’s account of sculpture, marked by his ambition to engage Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön and to push the argument further in light of the very different experiences between beholding painting or sculpture. Commentators have provocatively noted that Herder’s Plastik is devoted above all to touch, even more than sculpture. Nevertheless, Herder was a product of his time insofar as he assumes that sculpture is antique, figural, marble, and white.51 Herder focuses close attention on the subjective and sensory experiences of the beholder, but they do not exist in a vacuum. The text’s most frequently cited passage in Plastik zeroes in on the “lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture.” The passage culminates with the perambulating beholder having resisted the temptation to allow “a single viewpoint” to predominate. As a result, he enjoys a quasi-intersubjective apotheosis in which, crucially, “the sculpture lives” (41). Here, as elsewhere, the text reveals a strong emphasis on animation in such key passages as: “Sculpture creates in depth. It creates one living thing, an animate work that stands there and endures” (44; emphasis original); “A sculpture before which I kneel can embrace me, it can become my friend and companion: it is present, it is there” (45; emphasis original); and “The well-proportioned human being is not an abstraction derived from the clouds or composed from learned rules or arbitrary conventions. It is something that can be grasped and felt by all who are able to recognize in themselves or in others the form of life, the expression of force in the human vessel” (77; emphasis original).Whereas Herder had earlier stipulated that “a statue must be alive: its flesh must be animated; its face and countenance must speak,” nowhere in Plastik is touching invoked in the sense of a warm human body coming
into contact with cold, resistant marble.52 Jason Gaiger has aptly described Herder’s “touch” as more imaginative than literal.53 Nevertheless, Plastik offers an ideal model in which sculptural encounter interpellates sculptural surface—that is, marble—as skin. Herder’s account is a familiar landmark in theoretical writing about sculpture and his attention to what we might now call the “beholder’s share” is well known, but what is crucial to note here is that Herder strategically refutes intimations of coldness to emphasize instead sculpture’s life. In so doing, and in tilting the deck toward the intersubjective, Herder’s analysis leans heavily on the idea of the viewers’ experience, which had emerged as a prominent concern in the eighteenth century. As Herder’s text demonstrates, the Pygmalion narrative provided a framework for exploring the processes of transformation that might engage multiple valences of animation. Various renditions of the Pygmalion myth miraculously bridge the gap between inanimate and animate, but this move receives particular emphasis in Ovid’s version. As George Hersey has noted, while Ovid is far from the first to narrate the tale, his account is distinctive. Notably, Ovid scrupulously attends to the physiological aspects of the scene of transformation, and not only in terms of the statue’s development from bone to flesh. In Hersey’s estimation, Ovid offers “a new category of artistic effect . . . an effect of livingness that is felt, neurologically, muscularly, in the blood, by the viewer.”54 Hersey’s analysis is useful for thinking about the traction a specifically Ovidian Pygmalion narrative gained in the eighteenth century, when the account would have resonated with the thinkers cited here and with sensualist philosophy more broadly.55 Insofar as it involves Pygmalion’s self-awareness, in which physiological and psychological response is
34 Animating the Antique
stimulated by a work of art, the myth functions as a touchstone for emergent conceptions of aesthetic encounter. At the same time, the narrative lends itself exceptionally well to the terms of eighteenthcentury sculptural experience, according to which the viewer takes on an entirely new priority by “completing” the work of art and also often being transformed by it. What an Ovidian-qua-empiricist and sensualist reading of the Pygmalion narrative emphasizes is that such “completion” must be understood as a two-way street, a transformation at once of the work and of the beholder, such as that beautifully attested by Winckelmann’s sublimation (and citation) of the Pygmalion myth in his famed description of the Apollo Belvedere, at the end of which the author assumes the role of “Pygmalion’s beauty.”56 Our thinking about eighteenth-century depictions of the myth of Pygmalion is significantly enriched by bringing to bear historical developments that have tended to be conceived in distinct orbits. In so doing, this book offers an expanded argument about why we witness the efflorescence of such imagery in just this period.
Mobility In the eighteenth century, ancient sculpture was on the move, thanks to its unearthing, transportation, installation, and display, as well as its reproduction and replication. The mobility and, indeed, volatility of ancient artifacts were forged in an age of accelerated archaeological activity in Rome and its environs, including locations to the south, above all in the vicinity of the Bay of Naples. As Ilaria Bignamini has observed, in the decades after midcentury, Rome was beyond compare as a center of archaeological activity: “No other place on earth could possibly compete” with Rome, thanks to the
fact that “its inexhaustible sources of antiquities were able to be legally unearthed by citizens of any nation and exported from Rome to any destination in Europe.”57 A veritable explosion of archaeological activity, led by British excavators Thomas Jenkins, Gavin Hamilton, Robert Fagan, and others, particularly in the periods 1761–79 and 1792–96, has been scrupulously documented by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby.58 Their work has shed light on the networks of Italian and foreign excavators, dealers, and tourists, as well as a series of popes who took advantage of these agents and activities to assemble unparalleled collections of antiquities. Intimately linked to the exhumation of new finds was a thriving international trade in antiquities, which resulted in what was for some an alarming scale of movement of antiquities from Italy to collections in Scandinavia, Germany, and above all, England. Another form of sculptural movement took place within Rome, where important sculptural works previously held in private collections were physically relocated, becoming newly visible in emergent public art museums. A vivid case in point is the Capitoline Museum, housed in the Palazzo Nuovo on the Capitoline Hill. Unveiled in 1734, the collection comprises select papal holdings, in addition to an extensive collection of antiquities recently acquired from the antiquarian and dealer Cardinal Alessandro Albani by Pope Clement XII (Lorenzo Corsis, r. 1730–40). Clement XII was at once anxious to protect Albani’s famed collection from certain export and to consolidate the explicitly civic address—not to mention the implicit certification of papal power and taste—of these impressive holdings in their new museum situation.59 Roughly four decades later, in 1770, the Museo Clementino opened, allowing new access to the Vatican’s antiquities. Renamed the Museo Pio-Clementino after 1776,
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 35
Figure 9 Charles Natoire,
Artists Drawing in the Inner
Courtyard of the Capitoline, 1759. Pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, white highlights over black chalk lines on tinted grey-blue paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michel Urtado).
when Pope Pius VI’s work with architect Michelangelo Simonetti resulted in the substantial expansion and reorganization of the combined Museum Clementinum and Museum Pium, the resulting museum housed an extraordinary collection, including such masterworks as the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön group, and the Hercules Torso.60 Sculpture’s mobility—its unearthing from the ground and its physical and conceptual movement from private to public collections—resulted in new occasions for viewing by diverse constituencies. Collections like those of the Capitoline, whose public orientation was telegraphed by its location at the seat of civic government, quickly became destinations for art enthusiasts of all stripes, including tourists, artists, antiquarians, and collectors. While far from an archaeologically exacting reconstruction,
Natoire’s pen, ink, and chalk sketch of the inner courtyard of the Capitoline captures a panorama of encounters that speaks to the diversity of human activities in and around the collection (fig. 9). In the background, a woman fills vessels with water, apparently oblivious (perhaps through habituation) to the figure behind her: the famed colossal statue of a river god known as Marforio, one of the “speaking statues” whose quasi-animation turned upon poems attached to it by visitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.61 A man standing to the left of the monumental Egyptian statue of Arsinoe, wife of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, now in the Vatican, appears so struck by the scene in front of him that he is rendered immobile, raising his hand in what appears to be an involuntarily gesture.62 The drawing equivocates: does the man respond to the woman or the
36 Animating the Antique
monumental sculpture behind her? In center middle ground, observed by a visitor with walking stick and cape, an artist sits on a low stool. Caught in the act of sketching, the subject of his attention pushes beyond the limits of what is visible of the gallery on the left side of the sheet. This foursome of figures given over to visual acuity and discernment is rounded out by the performative student or antiquarian at the far left of the composition, who wields a loupe (perhaps unnecessarily) to better consider the sculpture before him. Natoire’s landscape of antiquities and observers is constituted here as an emphatically liminal space between the museum proper and the fabric and rhythms of the city beyond. In this fantasia, the collection spills out, as it were, to envelop the monumental anchor of Marforio, which had been moved to the Capitol in the first half of the seventeenth century. In his early image of this watershed space, Natoire insistently troubles the division of inside and outside, inserting the soupçon of the rustic or even pastoral by way of the informal encounter with ancient sculpture framed on the right, a move reminiscent of some of Perrier’s early prints of antique sculpture. Adjacent and coexistent with this scene of quasi-natural coexistence of the human and the sculptural are the quite differently engaged and, above all, intensely looking figures who populate the left side of the sheet. While these enthusiasts technically did not require formal authorization to sketch, as one would upon breaching the staircase to access the piano nobile and the official space of the museum, they nevertheless stand for a range of more and less institutionalized kinds of looking of the period, whether touristic, artistic, or antiquarian.63 When Natoire made this drawing, he was serving as the director of the French Academy in
Rome, which was housed in the Palazzo Mancini, where he had previously been a pensionnaire. In that capacity, he avidly encouraged his students’ study of the antique, which he described as “the most essential” aspect of their preparation.64 Natoire’s investments took many forms, from acquiring marble sculptures and casts after the antique for the French Academy’s collection to installing a collection of casts of antique artifacts featuring statues, busts, and fragments in a garden purchased in 1755 to facilitate study by Academy students.65 In this Natoire built on the legacy of his immediate predecessor, Nicolas Vleughels, who oversaw the arrangement of the plaster-cast collection unveiled in 1727 at the Palazzo Mancini and for whom the copying of casts functioned as a means of building a “storehouse of memory.”66 Natoire’s drawing was thus informed by the artist’s firsthand experience and commitment to ensuring the direct access to antiquities for artistic training. Upon arrival in Rome in 1754, Robert was welcomed into the fold of the French Academy and took up study of the city and its monuments. In a drawing roughly contemporaneous with that of Natoire, Robert frames essentially the same space and assembles many similar figures (fig. 10).67 By contrast, artistic emulation here emerges as the heart of the matter, both thematically and compositionally. Robert’s gallery is visited by mothers and children, gypsies, multiple figures in togas, and even a leaping dog. At the center of this swirl, in a drawing alert to the continuities between the new museum spaces of the Capitoline and collections conceived specifically for artistic training, the artist appears intent, even single-minded, in his work copying the Amazon before him. Collections like the Capitoline were vital resources for aspiring artists, as they increased
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 37
Figure 10 Hubert Robert, A Draftsman at the Capitoline
Museum, 1762. Red chalk on paper. Collections Musée de Valence. Photo © Musée de Valence (Philippe Petiot).
accessibility to objects whose examination had often only been possible through negotiated access with individual collectors or through their reproduction in prints and casts. Robert’s red-chalk drawing Antiquities at the Capitoline Museum (1762–63) features some of the Capitoline’s foremost holdings, among them Cupid and Psyche, Agrippina, and Antinous Osiris, attesting to the emergent star status of a number of the collection’s antiquities (fig. 11). At the same time, the strikingly nondescript location and the apparently haphazard organization of the sculptures telegraphs their mobility; it is as if they are glimpsed within a vast storeroom or entrepôt, not yet installed in the context of the museum.68 The blocks supporting Agrippina dramatize the temporary nature of the sculpture’s
situation. As if to further emphasize this point, Robert has assembled sculptures that were, for the most part, newly excavated and thus recently subject to active conceptual and physical movement. While the Agrippina stands as an exception (having been recorded in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in 1659), the Antinous Osiris, excavated in 1739 at Hadrian’s Villa, and the Cupid and Psyche, unearthed on the Aventine Hill in 1749, attest to the relatively recent archaeological vintage of the assembled artifacts.69 Giovanni Domenico Campiglia’s Artists Drawing the Dying Gladiator in the Capitoline, published as a frontispiece to the third volume of Bottari’s Del Museo Capitolino in 1755, summons up a scene similar to Robert’s, with sculptures jumbled together in an unceremonious arrangement (fig. 12).
38 Animating the Antique
Figure 11 Hubert Robert,
Antiquities at the Capitoline Museum, ca. 1762–63. Red chalk on paper. Collections Musée de Valence. Photo © Musée de Valence (Philippe Petiot). Figure 12 Giuseppe Vasi, after Giovanni Domenico
Campiglia, Artists Drawing the Dying Gladiator in the Capitoline. Engraving from Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, Del Museo Capitolino, ed. Niccolò Foggini, vol. 3 (Rome, 1755), plate 1.
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 39
Figure 13 Adolph Menzel, Storage Room During New Construction in the Altes Museum, Berlin, 1848. Colored chalk on light brown paper. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin / Jörg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York.
In addition to its substantial art collections, the Capitoline complex housed the Accademia di San Luca’s Accademia del’ Nudo from 1754 until the early years of the nineteenth century, an institution frequented by an international cohort of painters and sculptors.70 Campiglia conjures the Capitoline art collections—albeit not its recognizable galleries—as a destination specifically dedicated to artistic training. Interspersing sculptural and human bodies, Campiglia equivocates between the two, as well as between “original” and “copy,” as demonstrated by the Dying Gladiator in the foreground
and its replicated form in the reduced scale sculpture-in-progress, visible at a distance. With their haphazardly cluttered figures, Giuseppe Vasi’s engravings after Campiglia and Robert’s Antiquities at the Capitoline Museum evoke the arrangement of plaster-cast collections or museum storage rooms like Adolph Menzel’s remarkable depiction of a storeroom of the plaster-cast gallery in Berlin from 1848 (fig. 13).71 Early museums were far from solely the province of artists, as drawings by Natoire and Robert attest. One of the most evocative commemorations
40 Animating the Antique
of the early experience of visiting the Capitoline Museum takes the form of a letter from one antiquarian to another. Writing to the Comte de Caylus, Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy describes the “shock of electricity” he felt “the first time [he] entered the Capitoline Museum.” Far from a private collection or “cabinet,” the museum, as he recounted, “is a dwelling of the gods of ancient Rome; the school of the philosophers; a senate composed of the kings of the Orient. What can I tell you of it? A whole population of statues inhabits the Capitol; it is the great book of antiquarians.”72 As Pope Clement XII had hoped, artists, antiquarians, and scholars, together with collectors and grand tourists, converged upon the Capitoline by way of varied itineraries that constitute another key valence of mobility. Blanchet’s portrait of Henry Willoughby commemorates this grand tourist’s visit to Rome in 1754 and bears its own trace of the Capitoline collection (fig. 14). The eldest son of a member of Parliament and his heiress wife, Willoughby notably also sat for portraits by Pompeo Batoni and Anton Raphael Mengs.73 Blanchet’s portrayal captures the privileged swagger of an elegant sitter bedecked in quasi-regal folds of ermine and velvet. His aquiline features are highlighted by the ray of light that illuminates his forehead and nose, setting its sheen against the relatively shadowed—and by implication here, overshadowed—bust of the Capitoline Antinous, whose head appears as if deferentially bent, to the sitter’s left. Grand tourists like Willoughby were consumers of art, as collectors, viewers, and letter writers. Their strategic self-fashioning in portraits like Blanchet’s suggest how encounters with the antique have left their mark on, and even in, the sitter’s body. The latter scenario is given exceptionally vivid form in Batoni’s 1764 portrait of Thomas Dundas
depicted in the company of four of the most prized antique sculptures of his time (fig. 15). Made in the “golden era” of the grand tour, between the mid1760s and mid-1770s, Batoni’s portrait functions as a brilliant distillation of the taste-making that lay at the heart of such travels, whereby young tourists would, often with the aid of knowledgeable guides, self-consciously cultivate the refinement of their taste through firsthand exposure to the ideal forms
Figure 14 Louis-Gabriel
Blanchet, Portrait of Henry
Willoughby, Later Fifth Baron Middleton, 1754. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo.
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 41
Figure 15 Pompeo Batoni,
Portrait of Thomas Dundas, 1764. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
42 Animating the Antique
of antique sculpture. Batoni’s portrait of Dundas took one of the key destinations, the Vatican’s octagonal Cortile Belvedere, which housed the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the Belvedere Antinous, and the Vatican Ariadne (then known as Cleopatra), to which Dundas pointedly gestures.74 Founded in the Renaissance as the Cortile delle statue, the octagonal courtyard represented a powerful point of origin for the Vatican collection of antiquities.75 Batoni’s portrait depicts the space just prior to its transformation in the 1770s under Pope Clement XIV, with the addition of Simonetti’s distinctive portico or “peristyle,” in the words of a shrewd period commentator. Batoni has edited any reference to what had been a much remarked-upon aspect of the statues’ display: the wooden cases whose doors could be opened to reveal the sculptures within.76 In broad terms, Batoni has strategically transformed what records suggest was a light, open space in which the group of iconic sculptures were situated at regular intervals in the open-air courtyard. Instead, the visual field has been radically telescoped so that the sculptures are compressed in a cavernous surround lit only by a slender bend of blue sky. In this last regard, Batoni uncannily anticipated crucial aspects of the sculptures’ exhibition post-Simonetti, in which the theatrical potential of viewers’ encounters was fully exploited by the sculptures’ placement in individual gabinetti theatrically illuminated by oculi. As Jeffrey Collins has observed, functioning like temples or chapels, these gabinetti encouraged the sense of an individual’s connection with the ancient sculpture, facilitating the aesthetic experience “promoted by Winckelmann and diffused by innumerable touristic guidebooks and travel narratives.”77 By the 1770s, encounters with sculpture and judgments of taste in the context of the grand tour
involved more than simply the recognition of ideal form, as the architectural transformations of the Cortile Belvedere suggest. As the design and apparent efficacy of the gabinetti attest, emphasis had shifted to stress aesthetic experience that entailed varying degrees of identification on the part of the viewer. As Martin Myrone observed, in Italy the “British or Irish gentleman would encounter the material fragments of the classical heritage to which he was supposedly heir, where he could discover the rapture of identification with his noble predecessors.”78 Batoni’s picture, too, turns on an explicitly identificatory logic. Dundas is not merely shadowed by the Apollo Belvedere, but he himself takes on a somewhat more assertive and expansive version of the sculpture’s recognizable pose. By the time travelers such as Willoughby and Dundas had arrived in Rome, their itineraries and expectations would have already been shaped by their familiarity with celebrated antiquities.79 Early travel narratives were published in the late seventeenth century and took off with a vengeance in the early eighteenth century with the publication of Richardson’s 1722 Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings and Painting in Italy. This guide attested that the grand tourist would experience “pleasure and improvement from the sight of [the] fine objects,” as Richardson prepared readers for their own firsthand encounters, having helpfully organized the account as a series of destinations.80 Even by the early decades of the eighteenth century, such itineraries bore the traces of travelers’ alertness to the wide array of reproductions circulating in myriad forms, from prints to plaster casts and cork models. Crucially, in addition to the physical movement and reinstallation of sculpture, the second half of the century saw an explosion of replicative practices. Plaster, marble, bronze, porcelain, and
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 43
Figure 16 François Perrier,
three views of the Farnese
Hercules. Engravings from Perrier, Segmenta nobilium signorum e[t] statuarum, quaetemporis dentem inuidium evasere urbis aeternae ruinis erepta. . . . (Rome, 1638). University of Virginia Special Collections.
engraving after the antique allowed for the wideranging circulation of ancient forms. An “imaginative geography” of antique sculpture would have been further solidified by print reproductions of noteworthy works.81 While the works of Cornelis Cort, Jan Goessaert, and Marcantonio Raimondi provided early models, François Perrier’s Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum (Rome, 1638) set the standard for print reproduction after the antique. Perrier’s volume included one hundred engravings of celebrated sculptural works, the most eminent of which were depicted from multiple perspectives, as was the case with the Farnese Hercules (fig. 16). Focused nearly exclusively on ancient artifacts, aside from Michelangelo’s Moses, Perrier’s publication aimed to preserve the objects depicted from the ravages of time (an ambition attested by the allegorical frontispiece), while perhaps also providing models for artists.82 While prints had served as the primary medium for the dissemination of information about the most famous sculptures from antiquity since the early
decades of the sixteenth century, Perrier’s innovative volume, dedicated to only the most “noble” exemplars, was embraced in the late seventeenth century, notably in publications of prints by Jan de Bisschop (1668–69, 1671), Joachim von Sandrart (1680), and Pietro Santi Bartoli (1693).83 Although Perrier’s rear view of the Farnese Hercules captured a vantage point not far removed from Hendrick Goltzius’s striking depiction almost fifty years prior, Perrier’s images generally privilege the frontal views that would come to dominate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print reproductions, like the engraving of the Farnese Hercules that appeared in the French edition of Winckelmann’s Histoire de l’art chez les anciens of 1801 (see fig. 55). In numerous instances, Perrier depicted sculptures in outdoor settings, as he did with the Borghese Gladiator, framed in two of his four views by atmospheric rock outcroppings and foliage; the Arrotino, who appears sharpening his knife in a forest; or the Wrestlers, framed by the Colosseum (fig. 17). Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny note
44 Animating the Antique
Figure 17 François Perrier,
Borghese Gladiator, Arrotino,
and Wrestlers. Engravings from Perrier, Segmenta nobilium signorum e[t] statuarum, quaetemporis dentem inuidium evasere Urbis aeternae ruinis erepta. . . . (Rome, 1638). University of Virginia Special Collections. Figure 18 Carlo Gregory,
after Campiglia, two views of the Dying Gladiator. Engravings from Bottari, Del Museo Capitolino, ed. Niccolò Foggini, vol. 3 (Rome, 1755), plates 67 and 68. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
that Perrier’s approach echoed earlier prints after the antique and drawings from Roman sketchbooks, which often included “fanciful architectural or landscape settings.”84 However, Perrier conjoins invented scenery with a scrupulous accuracy in the depiction of the sculptures’ forms. Throughout his project, Perrier works to actively animate the sculptures in question: freed from their pedestals, they could be depicted as human subjects rather than static objects. Following the opening of the Capitoline Museum, Perrier’s example and reproductive engravings after the antique more generally were harnessed to new ends in museum catalogues. An early
exemplar of the genre, Bottari’s Del Museo Capitolino (1741–82) paired catalogue entries and illustrations in a format that remains omnipresent in museum publications to this day.85 The compendium reiterated the earlier practice of providing multiple views of particularly salient works, like the Dying Gladiator, which was depicted both frontally and from the rear in Bottari’s publication, in a mode quite unlike the array of sculptures, including the Dying Gladiator, in the volume’s frontispiece (fig. 18). In addition to ambitious print volumes and museum catalogues that brought together visual and textual description, individual engravings likewise proliferated in the second half of the
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46 Animating the Antique
eighteenth century. In some instances, it is possible to reconstruct how such engravings after the antique might have served artists. An engraving of the Apollo Belvedere by Volpato and Morghen, owned by Canova and now held in Bassano del Grappa, is particularly evocative in this regard (fig. 19). The sheet attests to Canova’s use of the engraving as a working document on which he inscribed detailed measurements and notes for future reference, such as the annotation to the right of the figure’s left (non–weight bearing) calf, which indicates that here “the flesh gravitates and is a little enlarged.”86 Thanks to this document, we can imagine Canova, armed with engraving, calipers, and pencil, examining and recording, measuring and reflecting upon—and indeed, presumably even touching—the Apollo Belvedere in the space of the Pio-Clementino. While prints, together with copies in bronze and lead, among other materials, had been available to earlier collectors and connoisseurs, the eighteenth century was marked even more broadly by the efflorescence of a wide range of practices of reproduction and replication, particularly in threedimensional mediums. As Malcolm Baker notes, reduced-scale bronzes after the antique proliferated, like those featured in Johann Zoffany’s portrait Sir Lawrence Dundas and His Grandson from 1769–70 (fig. 20). Objects like the miniature Apollo Belvedere, Capitoline Antinous, and Borghese Gladiator on Dundas’s mantel were widely available in Rome in the 1760s, thanks to four foundries (including, notably, that of Giacomo Zoffoli, the source of the seven statuettes depicted in Zoffany’s canvas, a number of which are extant) specializing in the production of such small-scale replicas.87 As it became more difficult to obtain original ancient sculptures and as export restrictions became
increasingly severe, the range of three-dimensional reproductions expanded. In addition to bronze reductions, in the mid-eighteenth century, lead sculptures appropriate for garden display became widely available. Replicas in plaster and porcelain also multiplied, like those produced by Volpato’s porcelain factory, which opened in 1785 and whose biscuit-ware productions were distinguished by their scrupulous adherence to the originals’ forms.88 Plaster casts were known to have been employed by artists as early as ancient Egypt, and casts after antique sculpture were regular features of royal and aristocratic collections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Famously, in 1540 King Francis I charged Francesco Primaticcio with overseeing the production of plaster casts after the most celebrated antique and contemporary sculptures in Rome. However, in the eighteenth century, plaster casts came to occupy a privileged position in the domain of three-dimensional reproduction. The burgeoning demand for plaster casts after the antique encouraged their production and circulation well beyond princely collections, as they increasingly entered artists’ studios, European academies (such as those in Stockholm and Copenhagen, which had cast collections from the time of their establishment), university collections (like the University of Göttingen, whose cast collection dates to the later 1760s), and museums. As Eckart Marchand and Rune Frederiksen have emphasized, collections of reproductive plaster casts were, “by and large, an invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” a period that witnessed an explosion of both institutional and private collecting of plaster casts.89 At the same time, the remarkable uptick in reproductive casts in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, together with the widespread circulation of prints
Figure 19 Giovanni Volpato and Raffaello Morghen,
engraving after the Apollo Belvedere with notations by Antonio Canova, undated. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. Photo: Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa.
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48 Animating the Antique
Figure 20 Johann Zoffany,
Sir Lawrence Dundas and His Grandson, 1769–70. Oil on canvas. The Zetland Collection.
after the antique, continued practices begun in the Renaissance, only now powerfully accelerated to become crucial vectors of the diffusion of the “myth of a white antiquity” through their effective erasure of color.90 If the existence of plaster casts after the antique allowed collectors and curators to form new combinations of sculpture in new venues, encounters with them likewise consolidated a sense that they were privileged objects, thus shaping expectations of scholars, tourists, and collectors alike.91 These collections of plaster casts profoundly shaped academic and philosophical thinking about the antique and the paragone debates. For one, Herder’s published reflections on sculpture and painting were the result of the powerful impression
classical sculpture made on him in experiences gleaned almost entirely from casts in the collections at Versailles and Mannheim.92 Reproduction, in both two- and three- dimensional mediums, was a vital aspect of eighteenthcentury encounters with the antique, one funda mental to the practices of discernment, perception, judgment, and consumption that so distinguished the period.93 Reproduction also played a vital role in the development of a history of art, insofar as Winckelmann’s early polemical formulations about the worthy qualities of ancient art in his 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture)
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depended, in this pre-Italian phase of his career, on his encounters with engravings and plaster casts. That prints remained vital to his work once in Italy is attested by Winckelmann’s writing to Baron von Stosch in 1760, “I need many prints,” and by a description of their presence on his desk and bed in the Villa Albani.94 As von Maron’s magisterial 1768 portrait corroborates, Winckelmann understood the importance of engravings both for the extended study of objects first encountered in the flesh and for the reader who might not have the benefit of this experience (see fig. 1). In von Maron’s portrait, Winckelmann is depicted as if caught in the midst of work on his Monumenti antichi inediti (Unpublished antique monuments) of 1767, doubly referenced by the manuscript and by the engraved sheet depicting a pivotal work in Winckelmann’s text: the Roman relief of Antinous, then in the Villa Albani.95 The scrupulous object study that subtended Winckelmann’s ambitious project—from the 1755 Reflections through to his Monumenti antichi inediti—depended upon access to sculptural collections and to reproductive technologies, including plaster casts and prints. And, as Winckelmann was all too aware, imitation often also entailed transformation.
Mutability In a series of essays written at the end of the nineteenth century, Wölfflin observed that while photographing sculpture presented challenges, with careful consideration a sensitive viewer could discern a privileged single view that best encapsulated the work’s form and meaning. Wölfflin’s stated intention was to sharpen “awareness of the fact that an old figure should not be viewed from every which side, [but] rather has a particular view, and
that only a criminal carelessness denies it this artistically-willed view whenever an illustration is made.”96 Indeed, Wölfflin expressed considerable frustration with the fact that the single “comprehensive main view” seemed only too-often ignored in reproductions. His assertion suggests one explanation for why, in the eighteenth century, so many sculptures were depicted in roughly similar views when they could, at least in theory, have been captured from an infinite number of viewing perspectives. But for all of the freezing and stilling of sculpture into recognizable ur-views (whether or not they would later be deemed correct, following Wölfflin’s criteria), in the mid-eighteenth century the sculptural antique was remarkably, and indeed quite literally, mutable. In the hands of artists like Perrier, antique forms, their settings, and even their distinguishing features could be the site of invention and radical modification. Inasmuch as the strategy of reproduction opens onto the question of mutability, so too does the avid unearthing of antiquities in this period. Active archaeological digs in the Roman Campagna continued to yield substantial discoveries. Objects excavated at Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli, and many other sites were shuttled out of the earth and into an active network of dealers, restorers, artists, and local and international collectors, even as they often underwent significant alterations along the way. The famed Ganymede with an Eagle, imported to England from Italy in 1763, is a revealing case in point (fig. 21). Roman sculptor, restorer, and dealer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi was commissioned by Matthew Brettingham the Younger and Gavin Hamilton, the agents of the second Earl of Egremont, to make substantial renovations to the work that, notably, resulted in the addition of a head and right arm, together with the eagle’s beak and
50 Animating the Antique
bottom portion of the left wing. Prior to the object’s export to England to enter the Earl’s collection at Petworth House, Cavaceppi patinated the sculpture’s surface with chlorine and made an engraving of it to include in his Raccolta d’antiche statue, busti, teste cognite ed altre sculture antiche, published in Rome in 1786.97 Cavaceppi was fully integrated into the international social and commercial networks of excavating, selling, and collecting antiquities, and his work vividly demonstrates the degree to which their finding and making was interwoven, particularly in the decades around midcentury.98 As Collins observes, “the explosion of excavations meant more work for the restorers” who were attached to papal collections. Beginning in 1770 and over the following decade, the Vatican ran two restoration studios where specialist sculptors labored “six or more days a week to transform mutilated fragments into completed works of art.”99 Account records further illuminate the remarkable continuity that existed between restoration and creation in this context. In the early 1760s, artist Barry effused about the “great numbers of ancient statues” available in Rome, which, when “entire,” may vividly express “some opinion of the ancients.” However, “there are legs, and thighs, and feet, and heads, brought out of old houses, and gardens, and other places, most of which have lain unheeded ever since the fifteenth century.” In response to the influx of the English, these bits and pieces have increasingly been reconstructed by antiquarians and dealers with appalling results: “Fragments of all the gods are jumbled together, legs and heads of the fairies and graces, till . . . a monster is produced neither human or brutal.”100 As the existence of the Vatican workshops attest, celebrated antiquities in public collections likewise bore the traces of substantial modification. In a
Figure 21 Ganymede with an Eagle, Roman, second
century ce. Pentelic marble. Petworth House, National Trust. Photo © National Trust / Andrew Fetherston. Figure 22 Jean Grandjean, M. Hviid Pointing to the
Restoration of the Albani Antinous in the Capitoline Museum, 1780. Black chalk on grey prepared paper, heightened with white chalk. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
striking drawing of 1780, Grandjean depicted fellow Dutchman Hviid with the Capitoline Antinous (fig. 22). Reportedly discovered at Hadrian’s Villa, the statue was part of the substantial collection of antiques selected by Albani and purchased by Clement XII in 1733 for the new Capitoline Museum. Before it was exhibited, however, the figure was significantly restored by sculptor Pietro Bracci, whose records document the addition of the left arm, two fingers of the right hand, the left hand, the left leg, and the right foot, together with a new tree trunk and plinth.101 Grandjean insists upon this history of modification in his drawing, which depicts Hviid with finger resting on the joint below the figure’s left
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52 Animating the Antique
knee that marked a boundary of a key area of restoration. The intensity with which Hviid locks the viewer into a circuitry of informed looking creates an encounter framed by the desire to identify sculptural origins and additions in order to reveal how—and where—solid marble bodies had been (recently) made over, anew. In a picture in which the contradictory impulses to accuracy and invention are merged, Grandjean’s picturing of Hviid’s deeply shadowed, emphatically pointing hand ensures that we be alert, as eighteenth-century viewers were, to the mutability of sculpture’s form.102 Another of the famed sculptures in the Capitoline, the Cupid and Psyche group, arrived as part of the Albani collection purchase, having been discovered on the Aventine Hill in 1749 (fig. 23). Given that year to the Capitoline Museum by Pope Benedict XIV, the group was celebrated in engravings and travel accounts for its depiction of innocent heterosexual desire. Reproductions appeared in gems, as an intaglio, and in biscuit porcelain by Sèvres, as well as in larger-scale plaster.103 A closely related sculpture of Cupid and Psyche had been discovered earlier in the century, evidently by collector and excavator Count Giuseppe Fede, on his property adjacent to Hadrian’s Villa. This work, captured in a spectacular red-chalk drawing by Batoni around 1730, is virtually identical to the Capitoline version, aside from a noteworthy exception: a twist of the neck and a turn of the raised wrist transform Cupid’s gesture into one of apparent revulsion (fig. 24). Highlighting the striking results of these modifications, which Haskell and Penny attribute to the work of restoration, Batoni’s drawing of the now-lost group telegraphs the startling mutability of antique form as it was shuttled through eighteenth-century networks and mediums.104 Even as the encounter takes on a new
degree of animation and urgency thanks to the confrontation between Psyche’s desire and Cupid’s violent antipathy, Batoni has further amplified the distinction between the depicted marble sculpture group and his drawing by exploiting the capacity for chalk to evoke the softness and malleability of skin. Two forms of mutability are thus simultaneously in
Figure 23 Cupid and
Psyche, first or second century ce, Roman copy after a Hellenistic original (second century bce). Marble. Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: Universal Images Group / Art Resource, New York.
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 53
Figure 24 Pompeo Batoni,
Cupid and Psyche, ca. 1730. Red chalk on paper. Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.
play, the first of which is the structural modification of antique sculpture. Just as crucially, artists’ work after the antique in two-dimensional mediums likewise opened productive avenues for exploring and exploiting morphological variation. As Batoni’s drawing suggests, depictions of ostensibly immutable marble forms could lend themselves to
projecting and probing alternative scenarios of human desire, a dynamic often at the foreground of encounters with the antique.
Transformative Encounter The eighteenth century witnessed a new emphasis on the experience of beholders of art, as was evident in the exploration of representations of the Pygmalion narrative. In this sense, sculpture was deeply enmeshed in these broader developments. As Marshall observes, “Unprecedented demands were placed on the experience of art” in an era when “the criteria for judging works of art shifted from conformity to classical rules to the power of art to shape the subjective experience of readers and beholders.”105 Descriptions of such encounters live on in the myriad letters and memoirs penned by grand tourists. These writings repeatedly capture travelers’ impressions of antique sculpture, their descriptions certifying their acute powers of observation, their sensitivity to beauty, and thus their unimpeachable taste. In one notable early example, Richardson reports that he spent “ten Hours in [a] Gallery [in the Uffizi] considering the Beauty of the Statues there.” Above all, Richardson was taken with the Venus de’ Medici. While he expressed reservations about the sculpture’s proportion, noting that “the Head is something too little for the Body,” he was filled with admiration for its lifelikeness: “It has too such a Fleshy Softness, one would think it would yield to the Touch. It has such a Beauty, and Delicacy; such a Lightness.” Whereas Richardson arrived at the Uffizi with “some Prejudice against [the Venus],” thanks to his study of casts of the sculpture, the encounter with the real yielded new admiration, much of which turned on the capacity for
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the marble, of “a Beautiful Colour,” to evoke the transparency of flesh.106 More than one hundred years later, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860) begins with a scene of sculptural encounter; in the Capitoline, the protagonists are surrounded by celebrated ancient sculptures, among them the Dying Gladiator, the Antinous, and the “Faun of Praxiteles” of the novel’s title. Like Richardson, Hawthorne evidently found the trope of marble-becoming-flesh generative. The novel’s characters are introduced during a curious episode of sculptural animation and transformation. Despite being “wrought in that severe material of marble,” the Faun captivates a trio of artists who see in its form the perfect portrait of their friend, the young Italian Donatello.107 Captivated by the play between the “magic peculiarity” of the Pentelic marble and the reanimation of the sculpture by Donatello, who gamely apes the sculpture’s pose and character, an oil painter named Miriam is the first to recognize the resemblance (10). At the end of a series of passages displaying Hawthorne’s extraordinary ekphrastic skill (and, by implication, Miriam’s attunement to form), Miriam is seized by powerful emotion, thanks to her encounter with the Faun, its promise of animation, and with it, the fleeting sense of connection to an earlier, prelapsarian state. So struck is she by these reflections that her companion, the sculptor Kenyon, is startled to discover that Miriam has been moved to tears. A century earlier Goethe noted a similarly intense response, when in 1769 he reported having been “in ecstasies” over a plaster of the Laocoön group “recently cast after the original in Rome,” which he (like Herder) encountered in Mannheim. Years later in Rome, his enthusiasm was heightened when he was confronted by many of the same sculptures in marble. As in the case of Richardson, the
materiality of marble played an essential role in Goethe’s encounter with the Apollo Belvedere. But even as he lamented that “the plaster always looks chalky and dead in comparison [to marble],” Goethe immediately offered a countervailing image of the generative aspect of plaster casting: “And yet what a joy it is to enter a cast maker’s workshop, where one sees the magnificent limbs of the statues issue individually from the molds and so obtains entirely new views of the figures.”108 In Goethe’s reflections on marble and plaster forms, from plaster’s disappointing deadening of marble’s flesh-like qualities to the generative processes of plaster casting, animation and mortification are recurrent motifs. Herder’s account of his visit to Rome in 1788 and 1789 provides another instance when the sensitive scrutiny of sculpture has transformative effects. In a letter to his son, he describes a torchlit visit to the Belvedere in 1788. Commencing with “the great, beautiful Hercules,” Herder notes that while the sculpture is fragmentary, “his muscles, his wide chest, his beautiful back, his brave legs are alive.” The tour’s final stages included observation of “the beautiful Antinous . . . the beautiful Apollo, [and] the tolerant, exhaling Laocoon,” before returning “again to the beautiful Apollo, where we closed our great divine apparition.” What was at stake for Herder is distilled in crystalline form in the final sentiments in the letter, where he attests that he has “learned more philosophy from poets than from the philosophers” and that one must “see artworks . . . to become an excellent philosopher.”109 Encounters with works of art, which Herder explicitly defines as classical sculpture, are at once foundational and philosophically transformational. While Herder understood his firsthand examination of classical sculpture to be critical for his intellectual formation, many other travelers basked in
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 55
the sheer delight of the encounter. Charles Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie (1788) stands as a classic in this genre, with Dupaty effusing about the Apollino: “What beautiful features! This line that forms the complete design, how justly drawn! how it glides! how it parts and returns! How invisibly it connects the limbs one with another!”110 But lurking just beyond the oft-rehearsed admiration of works like the Apollo Belvedere was the specter of aesthetic encounters gone awry. One such story was reported by English tourist Charlotte Eaton, who explained that while she had “gone mad about the Apollo [Belvedere],” she was not the first: “A far more unfortunate damsel, a native of France . . . at the sight of this matchless statue, lost at once her heart and her reason. Day after day, and hour after hour, the fair enthusiast gazed and wept, and sighed her soul away, till she became, like the marble, pale, but not like the marble, cold . . . death at last closed the ill-fated passion, and the life of ‘the maid of France.’” Luckily, Eaton hastened to add, “English maids don’t die of love—neither for men nor statues—therefore I hope to live to admire the Apollo.”111 In her consideration of the pleasures and perils of the grand tour, viewed through these and other documents, Chloe Chard notes, “The expression of pleasure in an ancient statue establishes that the traveler is speaking as a full participant in the grand tour, able to appropriate this topography for his or her own enjoyment, and this power of approbation is proclaimed all the more strongly by the lack of any need to express reservations about the delight which the sculpture arouses.”112 Such writing, then, testifies to how expectations for a certain kind of firsthand experience of sculpture had become pervasive, not merely in the realm of tourism. This is familiar art-historical terrain. Wellestablished accounts of the allure of the antique for
modern artists and art viewers are firmly rooted in the eighteenth century and, indeed, in art history’s own history. Beginning with Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755) and more fully elaborated in The History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), Winckelmann established the modern parameters of a history of art. And, no less crucially, he posited ancient sculpture as the pulsing heart animating art historians’ and artists’ enthusiasms. We may deduce something of the role Winckelmann mapped out for sculpture in what is perhaps the most reproduced passage from The History of the Art of Antiquity, which takes as its subject the Apollo Belvedere: “In gazing upon this masterpiece of art, I forget all else, and I myself adopt an elevated stance, in order to be worthy of gazing upon it. My chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honored with his presence—for my figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty.”113 Here, Winckelmann at once celebrates the morphological ideality of the Apollo Belvedere and insists on the sculpture’s transformative effects on its rapt spectator. Notably, it is the beholder, rather than the statue, who is animated in this fundamental reordering of the Pygmalion myth. The logic of this passage is best understood in relation to Winckelmann’s intersubjective theory of imitation, according to which copying antique sculptures involved much more than the arid repetition of ideal form. In Winckelmann’s formulation, the encounter with the antique turned on the (contemporary) artist’s identification with—and, by extension, transformation by—an ancient emulative circuitry that lay behind the sculpture as a sort of primal scene, itself motored by the intersubjective
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relationship between artist and beautiful model; these origins lived on in the sculptural artifact and thereby held out a sort of access to this lost utopian past. Registering this fundamentally transformative logic of Winckelmann’s project, Goethe proved himself an astute reader when he famously remarked of Winckelmann, “We learn nothing by reading him, but we become something.”114 As the Apollo Belvedere passage suggests, Winckelmann’s project cannot be solely understood through the lens of antiquarian and archaeological preoccupations, for it bears the traces of eighteenthcentury sensualist and empiricist philosophers writing after Locke. For many of these authors— among them Voltaire, Diderot, and Condillac— sculpture functioned as a veritable planet around which a series of theoretical proposals orbited. Lichtenstein trenchantly observes that all of this philosophizing on sculpture had dubious effects on sculpture itself—that is, in the realm of the creation and reception of sculpture in the period.115 However, she and others rightly emphasize something vital: talking about sculpture was by the 1760s well established as a means for exploring the fundamental operations of the human senses.116 Positioning himself in the sensualist and empiricist tradition, Herder, a student of Kant and admirer of Winckelmann, added his voice in 1778 to this esteemed philosophical lineage. In Plastik, Herder brought together current philosophical analyses of the senses with an evaluation of the distinctive experiences that were the product of encounters with painting and sculpture. Working in this volume to dislodge what he considered vision’s (and therefore painting’s) effective colonization of the aesthetic experience, Herder aimed to restore touch—and sculpture with it—to its rightfully primary place. For Herder, the heart of the matter was that sculpture,
quite unlike two-dimensional mediums like painting, called on Gefühl, or “corporeal feeling,” to draw the spectator into an utterly different three-dimensional interaction.117 Herder argued that with sculpture, the viewer is interpellated in a spatial and social interaction in which she becomes aware of the reciprocal nature of her contact with the sculptural body (for Herder, sculpture is de facto figurative). He explained that “because [sculpture] presents a human being, a fully animated body, it speaks to us as an act; it seizes hold of us and penetrates our very being, awakening the full range of responsive human feeling.”118 Sculpture’s special appeal to the body had important implications for viewing experience. If paintings could be grasped immediately through eyesight alone, which Herder saw as their shortcoming, sculpture required more: “The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we can learn through sight.”119 However, sculpture’s physicality, as well as the prolonged physical examination it required, was far from straightforward. Indeed, the passage in which Herder most carefully considered the mechanics of sculptural encounter reads as an ode to gratification deferred where the question of eventual knowledge is altogether more tenuous than might be expected: Consider the lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture. What would he not do to transform his sight into touch, to make his seeing into a form of touching that feels in the dark? He moves from one spot to another, seeking rest but finding none. He cannot locate a single viewpoint from which to view the work, such as a painting provides, for a thousand points of view are not sufficient. As soon as a single rooted viewpoint takes precedence, the living work becomes a mere canvas and the beautiful rounded form is dismembered into a piti-
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 57
ful polygon. For this reason, he shifts from place to place: his eye becomes his hand and the ray of light his finger, or rather, his soul has a finger that is yet finer than his hand or the ray of light. With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arose from the arm and the soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as if it feels.120
In the flight from “mere canvas,” the spectator’s restless movement around the periphery of the sculptural body threatens to yield no information at all, to fall away into a series of sequential views that add up to nothing. And yet, once the threat of dismemberment is overcome, the sculpture provides an aesthetic experience whose movement is something like that of the sublime. The Kantian sublime is triggered by a “formless object,” which resists or defies cognition and thus overwhelms the subject with an immersive excess that short-circuits reason and is consequently experienced as the threat of annihilation.121 But, of course, the movement of the sublime in Kantian aesthetics is destined for the apotheosis of thought insofar as the formless or fragmented impression is ultimately rendered as subject to comprehension (Zusammenfassung), to “getting it.”122 Kant’s formulation at once imposes a distance from the world of objects and firmly subjects the senses to reason since the experience of the sublime culminates, as it does, with the subject’s awareness of their supersensible faculty. Nevertheless, the movement of the sublime offers a productive comparison with Herder’s formulation, in which the sculptural body ultimately allows the viewer to recognize a formal homology with their own consciousness. Once we “have it,” the sculpture is a three-dimensional manifestation of the inner life of the mind.
As Winckelmann’s and Herder’s writings on encounters with classical sculpture attest, the eighteenth century saw a consolidation of ideas about sculpture in which new emphasis was placed on the question of the viewer’s experience. In what Potts terms the “modern sculptural imaginary,” considerable interest was directed to an embodied, affective encounter, with the result that “a shift occurs, . . . whereby the structuring of a work is partly defined through the viewer’s encounter with it, and can no longer be located entirely in its form.”123 Of course, there are important implications to such a sea change, discernable not only in travel accounts but also in sculptural encounter as it was captured in representational practices. Indeed, we are now poised to return to familiar grand-tour portraits, such as those of Dundas and Willoughby, with a somewhat different attunement to what was at stake in the experience and depiction of sculptural encounter. Such pictures captured sitters who were participants in the grand tour, in an age of the art museum, and in the decades after midcentury, in a cultural milieu informed by newly “extravagant” expectations for encounters with art. Paintings such as these at once certified their sitters’ or commissioners’ cultural refinement, even as artists and tourists of Blanchet and Batoni’s time operated in an era shaped by a burgeoning sense that seeing objects such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, and the Farnese Hercules could be transformative.
Blanchet’s Ghosts In 1765, Blanchet, a French artist who had been based in Rome since 1728, completed a remarkable series of paintings after the antique. This group of eight canvases depicted six of the most famous ancient figural sculptures of Blanchet’s day: the
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Figure 25 Louis-Gabriel
Blanchet, The Apollo
Belvedere Among Dead Trees, 1765. Oil on canvas. Saltram House, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images / John Hammond. Figure 26 Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, The Venus de’
Medici Among Dead Trees, 1765. Oil on canvas. Saltram House, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images.
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 59
Apollo Belvedere (fig. 25), the Venus de’ Medici (fig. 26), the Dying Gladiator, the Borghese Warrior, the Farnese Hercules, and the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (see fig. 3), together with two smaller canvases depicting simulated reliefs of the three Graces and a medallion portrait of a Roman youth.124 The pictures were most likely purchased in 1764 by Robert
Parker the Younger (later Lord Boringdon), who was then in Rome during an abbreviated grand tour. Having tragically lost his new wife, who died in Naples after only a few months of marriage, Parker traveled on to Rome, where he commissioned Angelica Kaufmann to paint a portrait of himself, which today hangs with the Blanchet pictures in the family estate, Saltram House.125 Inasmuch as he has been considered, Blanchet is largely known for his portraits of the Stuart Court in exile; for his grand-tour portraits, as in the case of his portrait of Willoughby (see fig. 14); and for his elegantly drawn vedute of the Roman countryside.126 The series of paintings after ancient sculpture occupy a singular position within Blanchet’s oeuvre, even in relation to the allegorical paintings he created for interiors. As grisaille depictions after the antique, the series resonates with what was, by the mid-1760s, a recognizable feature of interiors designed by Robert Adam, who would be employed by the Parkers to improve Saltram House beginning in 1768. Kedleston Park, Croome Court, and Osterley Park House, among others of Adam’s projects, featured grisaille trompe l’oeil paintings of bas-relief sculptures.127 A Ceremonial Scene designed by Adam for the Long Gallery at Croome Court is an excellent example (fig. 27). Executed in a similarly restrained palette, with its sights explicitly trained on antique sculpture, the Ceremonial Scene enjoys some common ground with Blanchet’s pictures. However, Blanchet’s paintings predate any record of Adam’s work at Saltram.128 More significantly, the pictures depart from Adam’s work in grisaille insofar as the paintings depict individual figures rather than figural groups. Indeed, in their single-figure format and in the scale of their depiction, Blanchet’s paintings are perhaps best understood as an unusual modification of a genre
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familiar to Blanchet: grand-tour portraiture, only, in this case, portraiture of sculpture. Blanchet’s remarkable suite of paintings invokes familiar antique forms even as they are here reconceived on the level of form and narrative. The depicted artifacts are yoked to new ends in their capacity to probe the limits of painting and sculpture while simultaneously framing viewers’ experiences of sculptural objects rendered in paint. While we may never know with certainty where the pictures originally hung at Saltram, they were surely conceived as a group.129 Within the group, three sets of pairs emerge: the Apollo Belvedere and Venus
Figure 27 Adam Partnership (Robert Adam, designer),
Ceremonial Scene from the Long Gallery at Croome Court, High Green, Severn Stoke, England, 1765–66. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1960. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. Figure 28 Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, The Dying
Gladiator, 1765. Oil on canvas. Saltram House, Devon, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images.
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Figure 29 Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, The Borghese
Warrior, 1765. Oil on canvas. Saltram House, Devon, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images. Figure 30 Louis-Gabriel Blanchet, The Farnese Hercules, 1765. Oil on canvas. Saltram House, Devon, National Trust. Photo © National Trust Images.
de’ Medici (see figs. 25 and 26); the Dying Gladiator and Sleeping Hermaphrodite (see figs. 28 and 3); and the Borghese Warrior and the Farnese Hercules (figs. 29 and 30).130 These pairs are discernable thanks to the pictures’ formats and subjects; the horizontally oriented canvases of the Gladiator and Hermaphrodite suggest a reciprocity of compromised bodies, bodies that contain a revelation at their core. By contrast, the Apollo and Venus pairing bespeaks canonically ideal forms, masculine and feminine. This leaves, as a final couple, the vertically oriented, niche-bound strong men.
The imperative to see these pictures in terms of pairings is nowhere clearer than in the case of the Apollo and Venus duo, where branches of dying vegetation in the paintings’ backgrounds extend like arms to establish a compositional mirroring between the two canvases while simultaneously securing the paintings’ lateral relations—Apollo is designed to stand to Venus’s left. The remarkably similar settings in which the two figures are depicted marks a striking departure from the vast corpus of extant images after these famed antique sculptures. Perrier’s engravings of the Apollo and Venus from 1638
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Figure 31 François Perrier,
Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici. Engravings from Perrier, Segmenta nobilium signorum e[t] statuarum, quaetemporis dentem inuidium evasere Urbis aeternae ruinis erepta. . . . (Rome, 1638). University of Virginia Special Collections.
epitomize the familiar neutral backdrops that tended to be the rule for such images by the mid-eighteenth century (fig. 31). It is likely that Blanchet’s completed paintings were developed with recourse to similar drawings and prints after the antique, only in this case measured and marked up to ensure accurate translation, as in the case of Canova’s annotated print of the Apollo Belvedere (see fig. 19).131 In the course of his work from sculpture to drawing to paint, Blanchet exchanged Perrier’s non-spaces for a gloomy, vegetal atmosphere in which verdant boughs are overshadowed by large dead limbs that bisect the
composition, their withered extensions curling into the foreground in an unsettling embrace around the sculptures’ plinths (while difficult to see in reproduction, Blanchet’s Venus, like the Apollo, features an arboreal extension creeping into the right foreground). The decision to include dead trees among the living had an echo in contemporary garden design; Horace Walpole famously decried landscape designer William Kent’s decision to plant dead trees in Kensington Gardens “to give a greater air of truth to the scene.”132 In Blanchet’s hands, the trees are an essential ingredient for crafting what Alastair Laing
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aptly describes as “setting[s] evocative of transience and decay.”133 Indeed, the sense of forbidding—if not foreboding—that these trees instill, thanks to their proximity to the sightless statue-sitters, may well have played a role in the fact that the paintings appear to have been known within the Parker, Earls of Morley, family as “the Ghosts.”134 Mutability may here be understood in relation to the pairings, which result in the unfurling of more and less explicit discursive circuits as well as in the particular inflections, sensations, and sentiments produced by depicting sculptures in these specific settings. At the same time, Blanchet’s series creates a relationship between the painted sculptures and their three-dimensional referents that hinges, in another valence, on mutability. In Blanchet’s handling of color and space, the series registers a pronounced interest in the operations of moving form through materials and in the related negotiation of sculptural viewing across two and three dimensions. Far from the famed pure whiteness of Carrara marble, the sculptural surfaces depicted in these paintings tend toward grey and green hues. And thus, the proximity of Apollo’s legs and the dead branch at his feet suggest less an encounter between enduring and transient materials than they do an uncanny continuity of form and tone. Is the sculpture marble, or is it rather more vegetal matter subject to the natural laws of decomposition? In his deployment of grisaille and in crafting such distinctly muddy figures, Blanchet situates the depicted sculptures at a remove from the white marble of their sources, which thereby makes them appear less frozen and more organic. Indeed, across the series, Blanchet conjures the specter of sculptural animation. This effect is perhaps most pronounced in the depictions of Apollo and Venus, thanks to the figures’ coloration and enframement
by the landscape. Indeed, a similar observation might be made about the Dying Gladiator and Hermaphrodite, both of which are presented compositionally as protagonists. In this sense, Blanchet’s exploration of painting’s ability to animate and narrativize is a remarkable parry into ongoing paragone debates.135 To turn the usual comparative logic on its head, if the Apollo Belvedere might be usefully compared to Batoni’s portrait of Dundas, so too might we see in the Dying Gladiator the spirit of Batoni’s extraordinary reclining portrait of Humphry Morice from 1761–62 (fig. 32). In Blanchet’s hands, the sculptures appear in the guise of sitters, with all the centrality and directness of address that such conditions imply; while the sculptures do not meet the viewer’s gaze, their depiction according to familiar ur-views emphasizes their particularity, identifiability, and fame as discrete objects. At the same time, the curious mutability of Blanchet’s interrogation of antique form is quite unlike the earlier instances of Perrier’s plinth-banishing animations. Indeed, Blanchet’s pictures emphatically insist that they depict sculptures in paint. Inasmuch as Blanchet’s pictures function according to a logic of discrete pairs, they are nevertheless bound together by the artist’s overriding interest in sculptural and spatial enframement. Each sculpture stands—or reclines—on a base that is clearly demarcated as such. Blanchet has taken care to render these bases as appropriate to their subjects: from the roughly circular supports buoying the Apollo and Venus to the rectangular bases for the Warrior and Hercules, as well as the generous elliptical ground supporting the Gladiator and Bernini’s extraordinary mattress for the Hermaphrodite. In some instances, we observe a reduplication of framing devices, as in the case of the Borghese Warrior,
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Figure 32 Pompeo Batoni,
Portrait of Humphry Morice, 1761–62. Oil on canvas. Brinsley Ford Collection, London.
who stands on a double base situated on a stone slab, all of which is framed within a niche. Out of this robust emphasis on enframement emerges a crucial unifying compositional and spatial thread: each of the sculptures’ bases rests on a common grey stone slab or ledge, whose form, color, and perspectival depiction is roughly continuous throughout the series. This feature is not insignificant, especially when we recall the great likelihood that these pictures would have originally hung as a group in the same space, as they do today at Saltram. The possibility that Blanchet’s pictures may well have been exhibited alongside three-dimensional reproductions of antique sculpture provides an added charge to the encounter they stage. While its collections are now largely dispersed, Saltram was home to a significant corpus of sculpture. One
rare extant object, a plaster reduction of the Farnese Hercules, provides a sense of the juxtapositions this setting would have made possible (fig. 33).136 Whether hung in a dining room or library, the series would have transformed the space it occupied into a quasi–sculpture gallery. The dramatic spatial recession staged in the six principal canvases, when organized around a room, would further expand the architectural space, transforming viewers into gallery visitors thanks to the pairing of painted statues with three-dimensional sculptures.137 Originating in Blanchet’s (and perhaps also Parker’s) encounters in Rome with the paintings’ sculptural referents and developed with recourse to Blanchet’s drawings after the antique, ultimately, in Devon, the pictures’ depiction and installation would have at once recalled the original
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Figure 33 Unknown artist, plaster reduction of the
Farnese Hercules. Saltram House, Devon, National Trust.
three-dimensional sculptures to which they referred, even as they moved significantly beyond them to stage altogether new encounters for viewers at Saltram.
Barry’s Torso Like Blanchet’s Saltram paintings, Barry’s Self-Portrait with James Paine and Dominique Lef èvre (with the Belvedere Torso) (ca. 1767) is a picture underwritten by period mobility, taking shape in Rome, only to travel back, as did Barry, to England (fig. 34). Painted early in the Irish artist’s five years of study in Rome between 1766 and 1771, the work was a product of the nexus of travel, the experience of art in the context of
public museum collections, and its power to transfix and perhaps also transform. A masterful depiction of a painting within a painting, Barry captures his own likeness as if in the midst of portraying his Roman artist colleagues: James Paine Jr. (1745–1829), a British sculptor and architect, and Dominique Lefèvre (ca. 1737–1769), a student of Joseph-Marie Vien and pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome thanks to his Prix de Rome win in 1761. Looming behind the three figures on the canvas—and notionally behind the viewer thanks to the picture’s mirror logic—is the shadowy form of the Belvedere Torso, whose monumental scale is amplified by its appearance at the top of the composition. In this first of his gripping series of self-portraits, Barry appears under the sign of the Torso, a work admired by the artist as the apex (here at once literally and figuratively) of artistic achievement. Early on in his letters from Rome, Barry singled out the Torso for its minute attention to the same sort of “close anatomical investigation” still invaluable for artists. Indeed, in this letter, the sculpture triggers the artist’s extended reflections on myology, the scientific study of muscles. And it seems safe to suspect that the Torso was one of the few antique statues (Barry indicates “seven or eight”) on whose “entire superiority” he reflected through extended study at the Belvedere, the Capitoline (where he acquired a license to copy), and elsewhere.138 Although Barry described his study of the antique as preparation to copy after Raphael’s frescoes at the Villa Farnesina, he had earlier suggested a rather different hierarchy in asserting Raphael’s inadequacy when compared to ancient figural sculpture, whether beautiful, grand, or sublime. In the final analysis, Barry wrote, “as to the Torso, the Laocoön, and such like characters, [Raphael] appears not at all qualified to succeed in
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Figure 34 James Barry,
Self-Portrait with James Paine and Dominique Lefèvre (with the Belvedere Torso), ca. 1767. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London.
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them.”139 Barry’s Self-Portrait took shape during a period when the artist was fully, even ecstatically, given over to copying the antique. In his letters to patrons Edmund Burke and Fenn Sleigh, he described the “inspiration . . . caught from the antique” in terms of “that ardor, and I know not how to call it, that state of mind one gets on studying the antique.” Barry described this altogether new experience as an alternative reality: “A fairy land it is, in which one is apt to imagine he can gather treasures, which neither Raffael nor Michael Angelo were possessed of.”140 Even as he frequented museum collections at the Capitol and the Vatican, Barry was also a participant in the burgeoning trade in copies and reproductions. The topic of casts surfaces repeatedly in his letters from Italy. Writing to Burke, a member of parliament and philosopher, Barry allowed that while he was not particularly pleased to hear about the founding of the Royal Academy, “a fine collection of gessos or casts of the antique, and the medals, sulphurs, books, &c. they intend accumulating, will be an acquisition of the greatest value to the public.” “For my own part,” he continued, “I should die of chagrin and melancholy in any place where there is not this, as my thoughts day and night run on nothing else but the antique.”141 Writing in May 1769 to Reynolds, the inaugural president of the Royal Academy, Barry’s fourth and final postscript implored Reynolds to have “casts and moulds made for the academy.”142 This was a call to action Barry himself clearly heeded. As he prepared to depart from Italy, he assembled “five cases, which, except for a few things in my head, contain all that I am worth in the world.” At the top of Barry’s itemized list, we find “a Laocoon, the Torso of the Belvedere, the fighting Gladiator.”143
Barry’s enthusiasm for the antique did not diminish upon his return to London, where he was elected to the Royal Academy and later assumed the position of professor of painting. In his lectures delivered at the Royal Academy between 1784 and 1799, Barry continued to extoll the Torso’s supremacy, describing it as an “unparalleled piece of excellence,” “unique” in its “perfection,” insofar as “there is nothing that can be put into the same class with it.” In his view, the Belvedere Torso was “the most complete, perfect system, or arrangement of parts, that can possibly be imagined, for the idea of corporeal force, which is was intended to represent.”144 Academicians and students in the audience of the Council Chamber at Somerset House would have been surrounded by casts after the antique as they listened.145 Henry Singleton depicted just such a commingling in his 1795 painting of The Royal Academicians in General Assembly, which shows the Council Chamber packed with Academicians whose horseshoe grouping is framed by plaster casts: from the Apollo Belvedere on the far right, to the hulking Laocoön group, and the Belvedere Torso on the far left (fig. 35). The Borghese Gladiator and Venus de’ Medici occupy slightly secondary positions in the rear. Yet another iteration of the Torso appeared on an altogether more intimate scale, emblazoned on the “gold and silver Medals annually distributed as premiums to the Students.”146 While not captured by Singleton, the Torso’s place in the Council Chamber would have been amplified in a second iteration on the ceiling, where it was recapitulated in Kaufmann’s allegorical composition devoted to “Design.” As a period guide by Joseph Baretti explains, Design, one of a set of four female allegorical figures representing the Elements of Art, was represented by “a Female seated, and studiously employed in delineating the famous
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Figure 35 Henry Singleton, The Royal Academicians in
General Assembly, 1795. Oil on canvas. Royal Academy, London. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London (John Hammond).
antique Torso, which by way of excellence is called, The School of Michelangelo.” As Baretti (whose portrait by Barry was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1773) emphasizes, by the 1780s the Torso was sometimes called the “Torso of Michelangelo, so emphatically called, because Michelangelo termed it His School, thinking it the very best remain of Greek Sculpture that the World could show.”147 Something of the Torso-to-Michelangelo trajectory is indicated in John Runciman’s 1767 Self-Portrait, which appears to be a rejoinder to Barry’s selfportrait with Paine and Levèque in which Michelangelo’s Day has supplanted the position reserved for the Torso in Barry’s painting. And as William Pressly remarks, Blanchet’s Portrait of Barry, likely executed in 1767, configures the sitter’s body in a
similar pose, though it is unclear which picture was created first.148 For his part, Barry returned to the Torso for inspiration for numerous compositions: The Education of Achilles (ca. 1772), Self-Portrait as Timanthes (ca. 1780–1803), and his late, monumental Birth of Pandora (1791–1804).149 In this sense, Barry’s early self-portrait at once asserts the artist’s admiration for the Belvedere Torso and his identification with it, insofar as emulation of the sculpture would shape his artistic output and pronouncements for decades to come. Thanks to the inclusion of Paine and Lefèvre, Barry’s self-portrait offers a striking depiction of artistic collectivity forged in the shadow of the Torso, a noteworthy departure for an artist whose biography includes rather more narratives of
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violent interpersonal rupture than of community building. Paine, whose distinctive features are recognizable in a 1769 print by Pariset, stands in the background.150 The sculptor is close enough to the Torso to cast a shadow upon it and appears locked in contemplation. As Paine gazes upon the statue’s massive chest, his left hand settles under his coat jacket and thus on his own chest in a gesture that elegantly emphasizes that this is a scene of connection between sculptor and sculpture; identification is doubly certified here, at once visually and by way of touch. Lefèvre, in the middle ground, holds a wooden palette (conspicuously absent of paint) in his left hand while his right fingers the black cord of his cloak. Staring in the direction of a large canvas that bisects the right edge of the composition, he appears consumed by his thoughts, which presumably are focused on the translation of the threedimensional artifact towering above him into what will ultimately take two-dimensional shape through the deployment of brush and pigment. Whereas Barry’s own visage is summoned up in compelling, quasi-living form—from the vivid crimson of his jacket to the expressive dishevelment of his hair and piercing address of his eyes and pursed mouth— Paine and Lefèvre are rendered in relatively rough, monochrome fashion. This disjunction at once points to the “two levels of reality” virtuosically crafted by Barry in the picture, even as it emphasizes the formal continuities between the three greyish white forms of painter, sculptor, and sculpture.151 Indeed, we might push the formal and notional connection further. In Barry’s tautly compressed rendition of his colleagues, we grasp remarkably little of their bodies. Effectively reduced to studies of heads and hands, Paine and Lefèvre counterbalance precisely what the sculpture lacks.
The two figures’ state of relative painterly unfinish further contributes to the continuities between them and the rough—and, of course, technically partial—sculptural form.152 An ode to the essentially rapt nature of the study of the antique articulated so often in Barry’s letters from Italy, the picture likewise conjures up a Roman topography punctuated by venues in which artists could come together in shared study of the human figure, whether in the guise of life models, plaster casts, or actual antiquities. During his years in Rome, Barry attended evening sessions at the French Academy at the Palazzo Mancini and at the Accademia del’ Nudo in the Capitoline.153 In the study session depicted here, Barry is not the only one transformed by an encounter with the Torso. This point is unsubtly hammered home by the fact that Lefèvre’s eyes, which are the key individuating features of the profile portrait, are rendered sculpturally. Tightly juxtaposed with Barry’s dancing, light-catching eyes, Lefèvre’s are, by contrast, blank, smooth sockets redolent of a classical bust. Lefèvre’s connection to the Torso would have resonated at another level as well, insofar as at the time of Barry’s painting, Lefèvre was at work on a commissioned painting of Deianeira and the Centaur Nessus, an episode from the life of Hercules. While the painting’s current location is unknown, Lefèvre’s composition no doubt followed in the footsteps of Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, whose 1755 morceau de réception was subsequently exhibited at that year’s Salon, and the earlier Guido Reni, both of whom executed canvases of the same episode. Both works depict Hercules saving his bride, Deianeira, from the centaur Nessus, who, in Ovid’s telling, fell for her and attempted to abduct her after offering her transport across a river. In Lagrenée’s and Reni’s hands, Hercules is shown standing on
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the far side of the river with the bow and arrow that will ultimately kill Nessus. While the Torso would at first glance appear an unlikely source of inspiration for the depiction of a fully formed Hercules, in Winckelmann’s celebrated description of 1759 (which had been translated into English by 1767 and twice published by Fuseli), the art historian heralds imaginative completion and, more important, animation as the necessary byproduct of sustained, thoughtful contemplation of the Torso. As Winckelmann asserts in his “Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome,” “A first glance will perhaps allow you to see nothing but an unformed stone; but if you are able to penetrate the secrets of art, then you will see a miracle in it—if you consider this work with a calm eye. Then Hercules will appear to you as if he were in the middle of all of his labours, and the hero and the god will simultaneously become visible in the work.” Having thus thrown down the gauntlet, Winckelmann harnesses this short, “ideal” treatment to demonstrate his own sensitive beholding, over the course of which the extant traces of the Torso instigate narrative associations with Hercules’ labors and ultimately suggest a complete reanimation of the sculpture/god. “If it seems incomprehensible to locate a thinking power in some part of the body besides the head,” Winckelmann observes, “then one learns here how the hand of a creative master is capable of animating matter.”154 Barry was a reader of Winckelmann, and his canvas is redolent of the “miracles” promised by Winckelmann, miracles in this instance founded upon artistic identification and transformation.155 At the same time, as much as the Torso is animated here as the magnetic focal point for artistic inspiration and homosocial enthusiasm, Barry does not shy away from the other side of the coin of antique encounter in that his
painting transforms two of his contemporaries into quasi-sculptural forms.156
Patch’s Venus If Barry’s painting tends to emphasize the imagined promises rather than the perils of emulative and transformative encounters with the antique, other artists took a different approach. Painted in the years just prior to Barry’s self-portrait, Patch’s A Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall (ca. 1760–61) provocatively opens onto the transformative potential of grand-tour taste-making under the influence of Winckelmann’s experiential aesthetics (fig. 36). A bitingly funny and deeply canny canvas, Patch’s painting provides a visual counterpoint—albeit in a sharply satiric tone and with an eye to ostensibly transgressive desire—to the worry articulated in Eaton’s account of the “unfortunate damsel” who lost her heart, and mind, to the Apollo Belvedere. Patch’s canvas reverberates within a veritable echo chamber of pictures in which tourists are positioned in relationship to ancient figural sculpture in tacitly and explicitly transformative encounters, as in the portraits of Willoughby and Dundas (see figs. 14 and 15). Like others of Patch’s multifigure conversation pictures executed between roughly 1760 and 1774, Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall is, as its title explicitly announces, a product of grand-tour culture. In contrast to Patch’s other paintings, however, in the Dilettanti picture, sculpture reigns—at once spatially anchoring the panoramic composition and constituting the painting’s ideological moorings. The picture thus takes its place among an impressive body of grand-tour imagery focused on dilettanti and sculpture or, more broadly, encounters with the antique.
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Figure 36 Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a
Sculpture Hall, ca. 1760–61. Oil on canvas. Brinsley Ford Collection, London.
Despite its very different deployment of figures, sculpture, and space, Patch’s Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall is usefully illuminated by the portrait of Dundas insofar as here, too, the painting operates in the interstices between real and imagined spaces. The canvas likewise engages with period discourses on the transformative effects of grand-tour travel and artistic education, albeit in an entirely different tone. If Rome looms large for Batoni’s portrait, the city invoked by Patch’s canvas is that second city of antique sculpture in the age of the grand tour: Florence. In Florence, the famed Tribuna of the Uffizi housed masterworks of ancient sculpture together with Renaissance paintings and, prior to roughly 1767 to 1779, treasures from the natural world.157 The Dilettanti canvas depicts five of the Tribuna’s internationally famous sculptures: the Arrotino (knife-sharpener), the
Wrestlers, the Venus de’ Medici, the Mercury, and the Dancing Faun.158 In a pictorial move not unlike that of Batoni, Patch’s selection of these particular objects conjures the specter of the Uffizi, even as the relatively spartan setting of the hall creates a curious tension between familiar objects and their architectural envelope. In his Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–77), Zoffany quite differently deploys the effect of the real to render the famed interior as a horror vacui of identification, an interior pulsating with an accretive sedimentation of sculptures, paintings, and tourists (fig. 37).159 Zoffany’s canvas may be seen as a subtle reflection on taste, insofar as it functions as a vital record of the social and artistic pleasures afforded by travel to Italy.160 By contrast, Patch’s canvas deploys an emphatically caricatural depiction of its twenty-five
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figures in the service of knowing critique. Indeed, artists in Patch’s circle explored how art-historical work was intimately—indeed literally—connected to practice in caricature.161 Reynolds’s parody of Raphael’s School of Athens is an excellent case in point. Painted in Rome in 1751, when the artist was living with Patch at the Palazzo Zuccari, the canvas commemorates this milieu by including Patch among the assembled figures.162 As in Reynolds’s picture, in Patch’s Dilettanti humor is the product of an insider’s view of art. Working in a satiric register quite distinct from the logic of identification and
transformation so fully absorbed in Batoni’s portrait of Dundas, Patch invokes the familiar grand-tour rhetoric of ideality and absorptive looking in order to figure its potentially transgressive outcomes.163 A crucial node in these operations sits at the center of the composition, where Patch has positioned the Venus de’ Medici, but with an important alteration to the sculpture’s usual depiction. The familiar forward address of the figure is here modified so that “she” turns away from the picture plane to address the man who clambers ungracefully upon her. This figure is none other than the artist
Figure 37 Johann Zoffany,
Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772–77. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
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Figure 38 Gérard Audran, Medici Venus. From Les proportions du corps humain, mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité (Paris, 1683).
himself, who occupies the perspectival center delineated by the apsidal niche of the background, rather than the Venus. When Patch was at work on this painting, the Venus de’ Medici was among the most beloved and recognizable ancient sculptures, heralded in both literature and art as the queen of either beauty or desire. Yet Patch appears oblivious, immune even, to its charms. That the physical contact he depicts is emphatically not an amorous advance is announced by the fact that Patch wields a compass, one end of which is planted squarely in the mouth of the Venus. The remarkable gesture is redolent of Zoffany’s depiction of artist Richard Cosway in a strikingly proprietary and aggressive pose—with cane planted on the pubis of a plaster cast of an antique Venus—in The Royal Academicians (1771–72).164 Employed in the service of the scrupulously accurate measuring essential to antiquarian study and to the process of copying (and scaling) sculpture, the compass draws our attention to the statue’s existence within an international market in antiquities in which Patch participated as restorer, collector, and dealer.
Patch’s deployment of the compass in the Dilettanti picture, however, may resonate with more than the artist’s role in the contemporary antiquities trade. The tendency, common among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists concerned to shore up their “scientific” interests over other less valorized enthusiasms, is vividly on view in Gérard Audran’s meticulous anatomical drawings of the Venus de’ Medici, published in Les proportions du corps humain, mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité (Paris, 1683) (fig. 38). As Bruce Redford observes, “Audran presents his sculptural specimens as specimens, to be exposed from multiple vantage points and dissected through painstaking measurement, without the slightest hint of stylistic grace or concession to aesthetic pleasure.”165 Having asserted that he is free from sexual interest, such a viewer is, in John Barrell’s description, “free to gaze, and gaze again, and, if he can get close enough to the original, he evinces the innocence of his pleasure by getting out his calipers and footrule.”166 Patch’s compass-gesture thus provides a framework for understanding the artist’s relations with the female figure as professionalized and instrumental. Accordingly, “her” allure is managed through the emphasis on the sculpture’s status as an object caught in the interconnected webs of study and commerce. A useful counterpoint to Patch’s self-depiction with the Venus and compass, Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet (1765) depicts the philanthropist, collector, practicing engraver, and pedagogue Watelet in the process of working on his L’art de peindre (Paris, 1760) (fig. 39). His attention fixed on a bronze reduction of the Venus de’ Medici, Watelet appears to have paused in the process of analyzing the sculpture’s proportions, which would be recorded in an engraving in his book. That text included an extended poem in which Watelet pairs
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the sculpture’s beauty with the necessity for “fixing these calculations that Art dares to require.”167 While the intellectual nature of Watelet’s attention is underscored by the glimpse of a reversed drawing of the sculpture in the pages of the album before him, Greuze cleverly suggests something of an interpersonal exchange through the composition’s balance of a reciprocity of gazes and by its deployment of a mirror logic of gestures. In the meeting of two gleaming figures, the diminutive, exposed female figure and amateur spectacularly clad in a grey satin dressing gown that shines to the point of appearing silvered, there is no doubt that he is the viewer from whom Venus modestly shields her body.168 Patch’s compass likewise orients viewers to particular aspects of the artist’s identity. Indeed, the compass seems to have functioned as a sort of personal emblem for Patch. This identification is suggested by a 1768 self-portrait in which Patch once again pictured himself with the implement, in this case measuring the distance between the forehead and mouth of a sculpted head. But quite differently than in Greuze’s portrait of Watelet, Patch’s depiction in the Dilettanti painting engages with the main trends in period commentary on the Venus, which tended to a “blend of gloating and pedantry.”169 Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall does not simply present a view of the artist as obdurately insensitive to beauty. As Patch grabs onto the Venus’s outstretched arm for balance, her hand responds with a frozen spasm of resistance; the antipathy is evidently mutual. Plunging his calipers into the sculpture’s mouth, Patch’s “tastelessness” turns on his imperviousness to the female goods on offer (fig. 40). The artist betrays no longing, and the Venus remains an inanimate object, antithetical to the Pygmalion topos. In this regard, too, Patch’s depiction parts ways
with the vast majority of writing about the sculpture by antiquarians, historians, and tourists alike. This departure is of particular interest at a moment when aesthetic appreciation and connoisseurship were increasingly understood in terms of subjective receptivity. Patch was, in fact, by the early 1770s, extremely well-connected within an Italian—and international—community of scholars, dealers, and art historians.170 Given that Patch was a restorer, picture-negotiator, and author of publications of
Figure 39 Jean-Baptiste
Greuze, Portrait of ClaudeHenri Watelet, 1765. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 75
Figure 40 Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a
Sculpture Hall, ca. 1760–61, detail. Oil on canvas. Brinsley Ford Collection, London.
engravings after Masaccio, Giotto, and Lorenzo Ghiberti (published 1770–74), his determination to depict himself as an unfeeling viewer of art is striking. We might understand Patch’s self-mockery to suggest that the only taste in question is that designated by the marketplace of copies—a cunning betrayal of the compact of aesthetic experience. Patch’s depiction in Zoffany’s Tribuna offers another framework within which to evaluate his anchoring role in the Dilettanti’s topography of interested looking. Standing prominently in the foreground of Zoffany’s picture, Patch is paired with another canonical Venus: Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Patch’s relation to the monumental nude is activated by his left hand, curiously pointing away from the Venus and toward the gleaming sculptural group behind him, a gesture that Ronald Paulson has unforgettably described as Patch “holding on to the Venus but thinking about the Wrestlers.”171 This motion (and its interpretation) point back to a vital aspect of Patch’s biography. By 1751 Patch had run
afoul of the bishop of Tivoli, and in October 1755 he was ordered to leave the Papal States precipitously.172 That Patch’s sexual orientation tended toward men and thus that his “offence” was sodomy is now widely assumed in scholarly accounts.173 A recently surfaced description by Edward Gibbon of a 1764 visit to Patch’s studio recounts surveying drawings after “obscene [antique] medals” that reflected the ancients’—and possibly also Patch’s— taste, coyly summoned by Gibbon (in French) as “rear entrances for their visits, even to women.”174 These accounts are germane to Patch’s self-presentation, insofar as they are strikingly resonant with the dynamics of sculptural looking that punctuate the painting’s panoramic composition. Flanked by two male nudes, the Venus is clearly overshadowed, not by the Wrestlers this time, but rather by the Arrotino, which clearly attracts the lion’s share of attentive, and arguably transformative, viewing. While not singled out for praise by Winckelmann, the Arrotino’s evidently magnetic power nevertheless speaks to what has long been recognized as a distinctive feature of the Winckelmannian program and its particular logic of ideal form.175 Quite unlike Burke’s rigorous gendering of the sublime and beautiful in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757, Winckelmann positioned the male sculptural body alone at the apex of artistic achievement, a selfsufficient source of the beautiful and sublime. As the special province of effeminate masculinity, the smooth-limbed, youthful beauty of the Apollo Belvedere—“the highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity”—trumped the burly masculinity of the Farnese Hercules and the Belvedere Torso, as well as depictions of virile femininity.176 By the time of Patch’s painting, Winckelmann had begun to establish the terms of a specifically intersubjective
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sculptural encounter, famously demonstrated in his remarks on the Apollo Belvedere, which conclude with the author’s own transformation into “Pygmalion’s beauty.”177 In this paradigmatic episode, Winckelmann is not just moved but transformed. If Winckelmann’s influence can in part be measured by the canonization of the sculptural ideals and aesthetic terminology he celebrated, the embrace of his writing by grand tourists was not without its challenges. Chard has demonstrated that tourist responses to classical sculpture adopted the Winckelmannian paradigm by understanding the emblematic classical body as one that, while male, worked to combine “‘masculine’ strength with ‘feminine’ softness . . . [and] tempered force with grace.” Even so, Chard notes the anxious repudiation of “effeminate” sculpture typical of writing by travelers who evidently struggled with the desire to praise effeminate masculinity and indeed to recognize such bodies as “a source of pleasure,” even while “keep[ing] the threat of effeminacy at bay.”178 To this end, male writers employed the rhetorical strategy of referring to the aesthetic responses of female spectators. Writers like “Lancelot Temple” ( John Armstrong) could, in 1771, assert, “The antinous is a wellshaped, insipid young man. But the apollo! If I was a woman, I should be more in love with the Apollo than as a man I was in love with the venus [de’ Medici]. For I have seen many women whom I should prefer to the Venus; but never such a beautiful graceful sublime figure of a man as the Apollo is.”179 Following his banishment from Rome, Patch counted among his intimates Horace Mann, British minister in Florence, about whom one contemporary wrote, “I call these Fellows ‘finger-twirlers,’ meaning a decent word for Sodomites.”180 Clothed in a scarlet jacket and pictured to the left of the Venus in Patch’s painting, Mann offers an
apparently encouraging gesture to Patch, whose artistic déshabillé underscores the sartorial excesses that surround him. Across the foreground of the painting, which is large enough to have at one point been employed as a room divider, Patch has interspersed antique sculpture with male figures whose distinctive garb—from their toupée wigs down to their dainty heeled shoes, by way of their habits à la française, black silk wig bags, canes and swords, and exquisitely trimmed suits cut from fine continental textiles—announced their status as “macaronis,” men participating in what was, in the 1760s and 1770s, up-to-the-minute transnational fashion.181 This period witnessed the explosion of so-called macaroni imagery (fig. 41). Patch’s depiction of the macaroni strategically underlines the urbanity and cosmopolitanism of the men depicted, their physical itineracy worn, as it were, on their sleeves. Patch has trained considerable attention on the men’s fashionable accessories; yet another valence of the picture’s humor turns on the phallic punning constituted by the picture’s many precisely posed swords and walking sticks. Arranged in poses redolent of fashion plates, Patch’s macaroni men embody a refined sensitivity to self-presentation, with intimations of a vigorous and exclusive self-regard. By the 1760s, such enthusiasm for fashion—a ubiquitous feature in text and images devoted to the figure of the macaroni—was understood as running counter to normative heterosexual masculinity.182 As invoked in visual images, literary texts, and theatrical productions, macaroni legibility turned upon the elision of French and Italian fashion with effeminacy, making the macaroni into the ultimate gender-confounding specimen. In 1770, an article in the Oxford Magazine observed, “There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 77
Our understanding of Patch’s depiction of urbane, cosmopolitan male fashion—and the particular elements that constituted the immediately recognizable, transnational fashionability of the macaroni—is significantly amplified when set against contemporary discourses that brought together fashion, travel, and sexuality. In these decades, the male grand tourist was implicated in threatening ways through period discourses on sexual deviancy and national identity that focused particular attention to his border-crossing practices and his destinations in France and, above all, Italy, a site particularly associated with sodomy in the eighteenth century.186 Recognizable by his effeminacy, the macaroni was understood to have his cultural and geographic origins in Italy. The site of
Figure 41 Mary and
Matthew Darly, My Lord Tip-Toe, Just Arrived from Monkey Land, 1771. Engraving. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2011. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org. Figure 42 Philip Dawe, The
Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade, 1773. Engraving. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.
us. It is called Macaroni.”183 In some cases, macaroni caricatures alluded fairly unambiguously to sexual tastes. In a 1773 macaroni print by Philip Dawe, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade, the figure’s sexual proclivities are signaled by a decorative element on the cane chair of the background (fig. 42). Depicting a cat’s head, it references the common parlance for the younger, passive partner of a homosexual couple, the “catamite.”184 The vociferousness of Dawe’s print serves as a reminder that macaroni imagery took shape against the backdrop of high-profile sodomitical cases resulting in pillory, execution, and exile, alongside the acceleration of protohomophobic attacks in decades marked by a shift from the “gender play” that distinguished the earlier century to the “gender panic” on display in its final decades.185
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antique artistic achievement and cultural richness, Italy was thus at the same time a place where male beauty and its appreciation became particularly charged aesthetic terrain that threatened, all too easily, to signal perversion rather than ideality. Almost without exception, recent reflections on Patch’s Dilettanti have concurred that the centerpiece of the painting’s satirical thrust resides in the absence of interested looking at sculpture by figures who are “more interested in socializing and appearing fashionable.”187 But Patch is up to more here than simply indicting the immunity of the assembled group to the aesthetic lures on offer. Despite their effective erasure in scholarly accounts, Patch indeed depicts overtly interested, even riveted, viewers. While none of the men appear to take in the sight of the Wrestlers, the sculpture’s equivocatingly intertwined bodies preside over a trio of male couples organized at its base, rendering the sculpture a thematic anchor for the drama that transpires on the other side of the canvas (fig. 43). There, the Arrotino works as a kind of magnet for interested looking not unlike Zoffany’s cluster of dilettanti who regard the Venus de’ Medici with faces aflush with interest far more than intellectual. Lord Cowper leans against the Arrotino’s pedestal with a dreamy yet determined fixity of purpose, while to his right, a tourist unnecessarily augments his natural vision with a magnifying tool. The circuitry of admiration is rounded out on the left side of the sculpture by the diminutive figure of a young grand tourist accompanied by an older, and apparently disconcertingly wiser, Italian guide who directs his charge’s attention to the nude before them. Patch is at his most ruthlessly satiric in his invocation of the motif of the bear and bear-leader, familiar from literary and artistic accounts, such as Thomas Rowlandson’s watercolor Bear and
Bear-Leader Passing the Hôtel d’Angleterre (1776), in which tourists are satirized as equals to the trained bears that were familiar elements of urban entertainment in eighteenth-century Europe (fig. 44).188 This recognizable subject would have had particular resonance with an eighteenth-century recognition of Winckelmann’s interest in Greek pederastic culture, his lifelong commitment to teaching young men, and his insistence that an instinct for male beauty be cultivated in youth, not to mention his role as cicerone and his relationship to an Italian aristocratic, libertine milieu.189 In Patch’s painting, the bear and bear-leader motif ’s unpalatable associations come through in the guide’s grotesque, disconcertingly toothy visage. When paired with the miniature tourist and the gleaming marble sculpture, the guide’s mouth takes on a decidedly unsettling aspect. Is it the sculpture or the ephebic male tourist that is good enough to eat? Patch’s Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall stands as an ideal culminating point in this chapter’s attempt to outline an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique. A collector and dealer, Patch had a view onto canonical antique works that is explicitly framed in his painting in terms of mobility. Above and beyond the imaginative relocation of familiar sculptures, the picture frames Patch as intimately involved in the business of art’s movement—both that of “original” works and copies. Patch insists on this aspect of his identity in his compass-wielding self-presentation. Of course, mobility, differently construed, likewise subtends this and many others of Patch’s conversation pictures, which capture the movement of elite gentlemen in the age of the grand tour. Staging an episode of measurement in the service of reproduction, the picture announces that mutability is central among its preoccupations. This focus is further elaborated in the forms that
Figure 43 Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti in a
Sculpture Hall, ca. 1760–61, detail. Oil on canvas. Brinsley Ford Collection, London. Figure 44 Thomas
Rowlandson, Bear and Bear-Leader Passing the Hôtel d’Angleterre, 1776. Pencil, pen and brown ink and watercolor. Private collection. Photo: Christie’s.
toward an eighteenth-Century Ontology of Ancient Sculpture 79
give rise to the picture’s humor: Venus recoils, and the marble is muddied. And finally, and perhaps most significantly, in his satiric depiction of artists, tourists, and bear-leaders, each poised in relationship to canonical sculptural objects, Patch highlights the transformative potential—at once aesthetic and erotic—of encounters with ancient sculpture in the context of the grand tour. Exploiting prevailing anxieties about how the exterior envelope of fashion might signal deviant masculinity, the picture’s humor turns on its canny invocation of a central tension at the heart of eighteenth-century artistic culture and grand tour encounters: the fine line between the sensitive enactment and performance of taste and the dangerous absorption and occupation of the (homo) erotic sensibility that underwrote the Winckelmannian program. In this sense, the work’s satiric bite is only fully understandable when interpreted expressly as a reflection on the transformative potential of encounters with sculpture.
Chapter 2
Moving Shadows
I
direct you now to the much praised, but never sufficiently glorified, mutilated statue of Hercules—to a work which is the most beautiful of its kind and is to be counted among the highest creations of art which have come into our time. How will I describe it to you, since it has been robbed of the most graceful and significant parts of nature?” Thus begins Winckelmann’s 1759 “Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome,” representing a sculpture particularly noteworthy for its state of fragmentary ruin (fig. 45). Winckelmann, of course, aims to overcome the obstacle posed by the partial nature of the marble artifact. He continues, ratcheting up the stakes: “A first glance will perhaps allow you to see nothing but an unformed stone; but if you are able to penetrate the secrets of art, then you will see a miracle in it. . . . Then Hercules will appear to you as if he were in the middle of all of his labors,
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and the hero and god will simultaneously become visible in this work” (xiv). In the text that follows, Winckelmann systematically brings the sculpture to life according to this recipe, whereby an appreciative glimpse of a shoulder, or thigh, or flank sets into motion a chain of animation: the marble becomes flesh, itself alive with the memory of the hero’s exploits and conquests: “It seems to me that the back, which appears bent by lofty considerations, forms for me a head occupied with a cheerful memory of its astonishing deeds; and by raising such a head full of majesty and wisdom before my eyes, the remaining missing limbs begin to form in my thoughts, flowing forth and together from what is present and effecting, as it were, a sudden restoration” (xvi). As distilled here, the narrative tension staged by the text (and urgently felt by its author) resulted from the confrontation between marble as mere material, as “unformed stone,” and marble as worked artifact that invites animation and, with it, narrative extrapolation and ultimately identification for the viewer. As in the final passage of the History of the Art of Antiquity, Winckelmann concludes his reflections on the Torso by imagining himself in the guise of a Greek heroine: “Full of sorrow I stand still; in the same way that Psyche began to bewail her love, after having come to know it for the first time, I lament this irreparable damage done to this Hercules after having come to recognise his beauty. And art weeps with me.”1 The description of the Torso stands as a virtuoso demonstration of Winckelmann’s distinctive rhetorical style, in which formal scrutiny was leveraged for maximal affective impact: a quality that would ensure his exemplarity for subsequent thinkers like Goethe and Pater. At the same time, it attests to how a sculptural aesthetics informed Winckelmann’s literary expression.2 An essential element of the drama here as elsewhere
Figure 45 Belvedere Torso,
first century bce, likely a copy after a Greek bronze (first half of the second century bce). Marble. Museo
Pio-Clementino, Rome.
in Winckelmann’s writing on ancient art is his investment in the capacity for supreme sculptural achievements to transcend their materials. In the instance of the Torso, Winckelmann asserts, “One learns how the hand of a creative master is capable of animating matter” (xiii–xiv, emphasis added). This is a text that aims to shine a rhetorical light on what we might call the flesh of marble. It stands as something of a limit case insofar as the burden of proof—or imagination—was significantly weightier given the radically fragmentary nature of the sculptural form, which Reynolds described as “a defaced and shattered fragment.”3 This episode in what might be called a history of ekphrastic animation, or imagined sculptural animation rendered in words, is far from
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an invention of the eighteenth century. In his Descriptions of sculpture, Callistratus repeatedly emphasized the artistry involved in an artist’s ability to defy materials to evoke the fleshiness of marble or bronze; the trope of transformation and translation is again and again the sign of supreme achievement. Thus, reflecting on a statue of Narcissus, Callistratus declared, “Words cannot describe how the marble softened into suppleness and provided a body at variance with its own essence; for though its own nature is very hard, it yielded a sensation of softness, being dissolved into a sort of porous matter.”4 In Pliny the Elder, but also earlier in Lucien (Amores), Philostratus (Life of Apollonios), and Clement of Alexandria, we find many iterations on the theme, as in the case of the Venus of Cnidus and her progeny, notably the Venus de’ Medici, whose magnetic allure reportedly prompted men and women alike to “embrace” (a term that stands in for a range of more and less explicit encounters) the marble figure as if marble were flesh.5 At the threshold of the eighteenth century, Goethe registered his distaste for those “brutal human beings [who] were consumed by sensual desires for sculptural masterpieces.”6 Such instances—designated later in the nineteenth century as agalmatophilia or lithophilia, that is, the love of statues or stone, might well be imagined as limit cases of less readily pathologized relations, as recent work on “living presence response” demonstrates.7 Narratives like those focused on the Venus of Cnidus or the Venus de’ Medici take their place in a web of mythopoetic accounts of artistry centered on virtuosic depiction: from the verisimilitude of Zeuxis’s grapes to the conjuring and substitutive power of Dibutades’s daughter’s silhouette.8 In her recent Art, Agency and Living Presence, Caroline van Eck has observed that “reactions, in which works of art are treated in a
wide range of respects as living beings, [are] so well documented, and so wide spread, both chronologically and geographically, that [they] may even be considered as . . . closer to the default mode of engaging with art or images.”9 The unruly “flesh” of marble took on a distinctive and especially charged conceptual shape in the eighteenth century. And thus, inasmuch as Winckelmann’s writing on the Torso takes its place within foundational discourses, the urgency with which he struggled to ensure that the sculpture would become alive for its viewers and thereby turn into something more than dead stone turned on a distinctively eighteenth-century set of concerns and expectations about encounters with the antique and with art writ large. Taking off from the tension established in Winckelmann’s text between inanimate and animate, sculpture as mortified or as imbued with life, this chapter explores practices of animation at once museological, philosophical, and artistic that aimed to unsettle, or rather to warm and agitate, the chilly intimations of antique sculpture and particularly its quintessential material, marble. Winckelmann’s contemporary, Goethe, proved particularly sensitive to these dynamics. In his 1776 “Commentary on Falconet,” Goethe considered the entailments of artists’ study of marble and plaster, wondering about the two mediums, “Why do they need such a special light?” Goethe surmised, “Isn’t it because nature is in continual movement, continually created afresh, and marble, the most lively material [thanks to its qualities of transparency] is always dead matter? It can only be saved from its lifelessness by the magic wand of lighting.”10 Goethe’s invocation of the deadness of marble is a leitmotif that appears again and again in critical writing about sculpture, emerging with particular force and consistency by the mid-nineteenth century. Writing roughly one
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hundred years after Goethe, Zola described sculpture in 1868 as “a dead language.”11 Goethe inhabited a moment in stark contrast to that of Zola and Gautier, in which intimations of antique marble’s coldness and lifelessness were counterbalanced by a wide range of animating practices and imaginaries. Winckelmann’s project, which placed sensorial perception and affective experience in the foreground, represents a crucial node of (doubly) animating enthusiasms.12 Even as his procedure turned on scrupulous looking and description rooted in ekphrastic and antiquarian traditions, Winckelmann’s practice of immediate, deeply subjective engagement with art objects reflected a new set of priorities for viewing experience.13 And to this end, Goethe’s invocation of the “magic wand of lighting” was particularly timely, for as he wrote these words new strategies for viewing sculpture, which aimed to heighten viewers’ experience and understanding of sculptural objects, were emerging in and beyond Rome. Like many of his contemporaries, Goethe made nighttime excursions to the Capitoline and Museo Pio-Clementino collections, which were illuminated by torchlight for museumgoers’ viewing pleasure. Originating in academic study, the torchlit nocturnal view emerged as a particularly desired and popular mode of viewing sculpture in the final decades of the eighteenth century. A testament to the interweaving of torchlight-viewing modalities witnessed by the period, Joseph Wright of Derby’s 1770 Academy by Lamplight draws together artistic study and tourist enthusiasm around the spectacle of a sculptural figure’s shadow-casting capacities (fig. 46). Under the obscured glow of a fixed lamp, artists assiduously sketch the Nymph with the Seashell in the company of another figure whose admiration for the sculpture appears disconnected from explicitly
artistic study. With its diverse topography of onlookers, Wright of Derby’s canvas captures the expansion then underway from what had begun as an atelier practice for discerning the effects of shadow and light in the translation between three dimensions and two (from sculpture to drawing and, ultimately, painting). In the second half of the eighteenth century, these nocturnal illuminations became highly theatrical spectacles in which handheld torches revealed the shadows of masterpieces of figural sculpture that, in turn, appeared to glow with warmth and even movement. An eighteenth-century drawing of such an episode staged at the Museo Pio-Clementino thematizes the quasi-religious fervor of the spectators, who fall to their knees in deference to the Apollo Belvedere, glowing in the blaze of the torch (fig. 47). In this respect the drawing gives visual form to firsthand accounts such as that of a nighttime visitor to the Pio-Clementino in 1802, who described an encounter with the Apollo Belvedere in striking terms: “It was really Phoebus, Apollo, it was the sun god himself, striding rapidly . . . to spread with the waves of his light, life and fertility on the universe; it was the image of the first day that enlightened creation; the first morning of the world.”14 An altogether less reverential account of a torchlit view is provided in the thirteenth episode of the 1804 Nightwatches of Bonaventura, which recounts in a decidedly ghoulish register the nighttime illumination of a musée imaginaire of canonical statues by “connoisseurs and dilettantes.” An initial view reveals that “the stony gods stood as cripples without arms and legs; indeed, some even with missing heads.” Animation shifts from an archaeological allusion to the night of the living dead as “the whole heaven of a great sunken race, [was] dug up again from Herculanum and the bed of the
Figure 46 Joseph Wright of Derby, Academy by
Lamplight, 1770. Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Mellon Collection.
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Tiber as corpse and torso.” The episode ultimately is transformed from “an invalid’s home of immortal gods and heroes” into a festival of ghouls, “for in the deceiving shine of the torches the entire mutilated Olympus suddenly seemed to become animated.”15 As Oskar Bätschmann argues, the advent of the torchlight view was linked to emergent aesthetic theories that placed emphatic emphasis on the viewer’s role in the consolidation of the meaning of a work of art.16 Numerous visitors attested to the importance of the experience of the torchlight view, without which one could not fully see, not to mention understand, the antiquities in question. Thus Mary Berry asserted, regarding her torchlit view of the sculptures at the Capitoline, that “it is the only method of having a true idea of the beauty of these admirable statues.”17 Goethe described his memory of such visits as a “gradually fading dream,” and he transcribed in full Heinrich Meyer’s essay in which an exhaustive case is made for the phenomenon’s “beneficial effects on knowledge and understanding.”18 In referencing Meyer’s assertion that nocturnal visits by torch facilitated deeper appreciation of the details and nuances of the illuminated objects, Goethe’s text charts two ends of a spectrum of responses to an experience that could be imagined as an allusive dream or as a tool for more rigorous analysis and emphatically rational observation. Just what kind of knowledge and understanding the torchlit experience provided, then, was a matter of some complexity and contestation. A fairly constant theme nevertheless emerges across these accounts: the torchlight view served above all as an animating force, bringing sculptures—as well as their viewers’ imaginations and understandings of them—to life. This chapter explores the animating possibilities of shadow, summoned here by way of a range
Figure 47 Unknown artist,
Torchlight View of the Apollo Belvedere, late eighteenth century. Drawing. Photo: author. Figure 48 Charles Clément
Bervic, after Pierre Bouillon, Laocoön, ca. 1803. Engraving from Louis-Nicolas-Joseph Robillard-Péronville and Pierre Laurent, Le Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et basreliefs . . . (Paris: L. E. Hernan, 1803–12), vol. 4: plate 58. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: author.
of remarkably varied incarnations: from the embodied experience of torchlight views of antique sculpture, which were to be had in many European sculpture collections from roughly 1750 to 1850, to two-dimensional depictions of sculpture’s shadows in drawings, engravings, and paintings. Charles Clément Bervic’s engraving (after Pierre Bouillon) of the Laocoön, which was published in the Musée français (1803–12), attests to the fact that moving shadows unleashed by such torchlight views, beyond being projected on marble, also entered a relay of allied mediums, including plaster and engraving (fig. 48). Bervic’s engraving, itself a form of low-relief sculpture, magnificently captured, even as it stilled, the effects of flickering, mobile, night-time illumination of the famed group. In this way, the print served up for its viewer a dramatic reprise of the original event, even as this projection moved from sculpture to drawing and, ultimately, to print.
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Shadow projection functioned as a compelling and effective tool for stimulating experiences of beholding the antique that had as their aim the radical animation, transformation, and translation of ostensibly static sculptural objects. At the center of the analysis that follows is a suite of drawings made by Ingres after ancient sculpture and published in the multivolume luxury publication, the Musée français (1803–12). Wonderfully strange, ghostly, anthropomorphic shadows haunt Ingres’s work after the antique, in stark contrast to their relatively rare appearance in engravings of sculpture from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At the same time, however, Ingres’s shadows intersect with shadow enthusiasms high and low: from sciography (the geometrical projection of cast shadow), to museum practices of installation and display (from rotating bases to the torchlight view), and to the popular Parisian spectacle of Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s famed phantasmagoria, with its promises of necromancy. I consider these wide-ranging pictorial shadow plays in relation to debates about the paragone and to reflections by Herder and Hegel on sculpture’s distinctive properties. The disconcertingly mobile shadows rendered in reproductive engravings are likewise understood in dialogue with ancient sculpture’s actual volatility, in this instance in the guise of Napoleonic spoils ceremonially rolled through Paris and ultimately installed in the Musée Napoléon, an event recognized by Goethe as a turning point in the conception and experience of art’s literal volatility.19 Sculpture’s mobility and its transformative capacities thus took shape at a moment when the exhibition and reproduction of ancient sculpture was harnessed in service of national identity, whether in Rome, Paris, or elsewhere.
Antiquity, Engraving, and Experience Around 1800: Ingres and the Musée français In 1855, the year that Ingres enjoyed a retrospective exhibition in a private gallery at the Paris Exposition universelle, a disconcerting aspect of so-called sculptural painting took center stage. That year, the photographer, artist, and commentator Nadar described Ingres as “a painter whose chilliness hatches polar bears.”20 Later that same year, Nadar depicted the hilarious—if literally mortifying— viewer response to Ingres’s art in a caricature showing a man being carried, rigid, out of Ingres’s gallery at the Exposition universelle under the watchful eye of the Grande Odalisque. The caption proclaimed: “My God, what’s that?—It seems to be a gentleman who found himself frozen in the Ingres room. . . .” (fig. 49). Nadar’s understanding of Ingres’s painting as gelid and uncannily mortifying relied on a widely held judgment that art so bound to antiquity and remote ideality was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Nadar succeeded in at once conjuring the familiar alliance between Ingres and sculpture—the man has become something like a statue—and pushing the connection further to entertain its viral potential. If Ingres’s oeuvre bore the unmistakable trace of the artist’s antiquated allegiances, this infection might be transmissible from painting to viewer. Nadar’s lampoon thus turns on the imagined viewing experience. As Nadar portrays it, the unsuspecting visitor had been ensnared in a kind of Medusa relay—in the frozen thrall of Ingres’s canvases, which were themselves in the frozen thrall of the past. Nadar’s reverse-Pygmalion sculptural metaphor was by no means a novelty. Théophile Thoré had already observed in 1846 that Ingres, so entranced by his love of line and antiquity, seemed “perhaps a sculptor” since it was “surely the
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Figure 49 Nadar [Félix
Tournachon], caricature captioned “My God, what’s that?—It seems to be a gentleman who found himself frozen in the Ingres room. . . .” From Journal pour Rire, October 13, 1855.
procedures of sculptors that preoccup[ied] him in painting.”21 By the 1850s, the morbid associations of Ingres’s sculptural formal language were given seductive voice by supporters and detractors alike. The consistency of these associations should perhaps not be surprising since they map fairly neatly within an established nineteenth-century discursive topography defining the relations between painting and sculpture and between the antique and the modern. In her probing examination of the paragone in the long modern period, Lichtenstein tracks the art-critical and theoretical apotheosis of painting and the death of sculpture in the nineteenth century. Rhetorically wedded in the seventeenth century to touch, line, philosophy, and, perhaps most powerfully, the antique, sculpture’s fate was sealed when set against the competing associations identified with painting: sight, color,
and, significantly, the “modern.” According to this reading, sculpture’s demise was ensured at the time of the founding of the French Royal Academy, when its affiliation with the antique was consolidated.22 Nadar’s and Thoré’s criticism of sculptural painting thereby tapped into what were by the 1850s well-established rhetorical patterns attendant to the paragone; their objection to painting that invoked the priorities of sculpture echoed earlier critics. In 1765, Diderot characterized the art of sculpture as “severe, grave, and chaste.” In Diderot’s theory of art, artistic value turned on the ability to conjure and fully animate nature, so sculpture’s ponderous immobility and its associations with abstract philosophical reflection ensured its secondary position vis-à-vis painting. For Diderot, sculpture lacked eloquence and thus failed to touch viewers or move them to feeling.23 François Guizot extended Diderot’s consideration of the distinctive properties of painting and sculpture, though with quite different emphasis. In his Salon of 1810, Guizot praised Jacques-Louis David’s role in reorienting artistic training so that “painting takes its lead from [ancient] sculpture.”24 Nevertheless, Guizot fundamentally objected to painting so indebted to the study of antique statues that it failed to deploy the coloristic power special to its medium. In Guizot’s assessment, David and his school offered prime examples of such deplorable sculptural painting. In these pivotal texts, Diderot and Guizot helped to consolidate what would become the dominant narrative of painting’s privileged status—guaranteed by its ostensible links to ephemeral modernity—in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time Baudelaire published his Salon of 1859, sculpture’s associations with immobility and with cold, remote, ideal beauty were further overwritten with funereal
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metaphors. Baudelaire’s successors launched ever more vitriolic attacks on sculpture. The Goncourt brothers decried it as a sepulchral art that was effectively “decapitated.”25 The provocative and seductive accounts articulated by period art critics and theorists begs the rather more complicated and arguably more urgent question of how these critical and philosophical writings intersected with the world of art making in the modern period. How do we reconcile the “death of sculpture” with modern “classical” sculptural innovations around 1800, not to mention the enduring, and indeed often artistically generative, allure of the antique over the long nineteenth century? Furthermore, what are we to make of the dynamic interactions between painting and sculpture in the same period, evident whether we are looking at the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme or Édouard Manet? There is, in fact, much to be gained by reconsidering the dichotomous narrative of one medium’s eclipse by the other in order to better understand the dialectic logic of the eighteenth-century origins of the sculptural metaphor so familiar by midcentury. If mortification was one possible response, at an earlier moment, modern sculptural encounter entailed an opposing set of aesthetic imperatives that turned on bodily experience and vivification. Ingres’s early career and his largely overlooked participation in the luxury publication Musée français presents an especially productive case for exploring these dynamics. In 1801, having won the coveted Prix de Rome, Ingres left the atelier of his master, David, only to find himself not in the Eternal City but instead in a holding pattern in Paris. “Pensioner without a pension,” thanks to the government’s budget troubles, Ingres was forced to delay the moment when he could begin his years of state-supported study at
the French Academy in Rome.26 In the interim, the administration offered him a studio at a modest rent in the old convent of the Capuchins, founded in 1688 by Louis XIV. The nuns had been expelled in the wake of the French Revolution in 1790 and replaced by a number of artists and sculptors. Ingres took up residence there in a community of considerable artistic talent, remaining for five years. It was in this setting that Ingres undertook work for Le Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs (The French museum: Complete works of paintings, statues, and basreliefs). This luxury publication, overseen by editors Louis-Nicolas-Joseph Robillard-Péronville and Pierre-Louis-Henri Laurent, documented the treasures then housed in the French national collection. It appeared in eighty fascicules, or installments, released between 1803 and 1812, which contained engravings, descriptive texts, and four lengthy scholarly essays. The impressively scaled folios have been described as an “unrivalled achievement of the art of reproductive engraving” as they measured just over 2 feet high × 21/2 feet wide, with plates measuring roughly 14 × 10 inches.27 The four volumes were divided by medium, with the first three volumes devoted to painting and the last to antique sculpture. Twelve engravings based on designs by Ingres took their place in volume four, among the 343 engravings contained in the series as a whole. The first of these, Cupid and Psyche (fig. 50), appeared in the second installment of November 1803, and engravings based on Ingres’s designs continued to appear regularly through 1806, culminating in what seems likely to have been the final one, the Apollo Lykeios, circulated in 1810 (fig. 51).28 The allure of these images and the remarkable quality of the publication notwithstanding, Ingres’s participation in the Musée français project has gone
Figure 50 Auguste
Desnoyers [called BoucherDesnoyers], after JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres, Cupid and Psyche, ca. 1803. Engraving from RobillardPéronville and Laurent, Le Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs . . . (Paris: L. E. Hernan, 1803–12), vol. 4: plate 35. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: author.
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largely overlooked. Three years after Ingres’s death, Charles Blanc presumed that the artist’s work on the volume was merely an attempt to make ends meet.29 While Ingres’s drawings from which the engravings were created have yet to be located, Ingres himself ensured that his participation in the Musée français would not be forgotten, as he carefully inscribed a record of these “twelve antique figures” in his ninth notebook.30 A second passage, in his tenth notebook, seems also to refer to this work; he noted his “many drawings for Collections” not long after he inscribed the date of his arrival in Paris in the fall of 1797.31 In fact, Ingres’s arrival in the city was closely followed by an event that made possible his Musée français participation, the Fête de la Liberté, the Revolutionary festival celebrated in Paris on July 27 and 28, 1798. An eyewitness account tells us that the event, in the aftermath of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign, was designed as a suggestive re-creation of a page from ancient history.32 At the time, at least one commentator identified the Roman Republican triumphal procession of Aemilius Paulus as its inspiration. Celebrating Aemilius’s victory over the Macedonians in 167 bce, the threeday triumph featured prisoners, among them the captured King Perseus of Macedonia; Aemilius’s troops; identifying placards; and, at the head of the triumph, plundered art objects.33 Aemilius Paulus’s triumph found its eighteenth-century echo as Parisian onlookers bore witness to the unfolding scene identified by banners as the “triumphal entry of objects of arts and sciences gathered in Italy.” Marking the end to a long journey that began in Rome, the procession, composed of specially designed wagons and cages, rolled through the city along the Seine to its final victory lap before the crowd assembled on the Champ de Mars.34
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Figure 51 Félix Massard, after Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, Apollo Lykeios, ca. 1803. Engraving from Robillard-Péronville and Laurent, Le Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs . . . (Paris: L. E. Hernan, 1803–12), vol. 4: plate 10. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: author.
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Figure 52 Antoine Béranger, after A. Valois, detail from a
large Etruscan-style rouleau vase depicting the arrival at the Louvre of Italian works of art acquired at the end of the Italian Campaign, 1813. Hard-paste porcelain and gilded bronze. Musée National de la Céramique, Sèvres, inv. MNC 1823. Photo: Gianni Dagli Orti, provided by the Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.
A banner at the start of the third and final section of the parade proclaimed: “monuments of antique sculpture. Greece gave them up; Rome lost them; Their fate has twice changed; it will not change again.”35 No fewer than twenty-five wagons filled with sculpture trundled along behind this declaration. An Etruscan-style Sèvres vase manufactured in 1813 imagines how the procession might have appeared had the astounding contents of the crates been revealed to view (fig. 52). Safely enshrined inside them was an array of artifacts that included, among others, the Capitoline Venus, Cupid and Psyche, the Discobolus, the Dying Gladiator, the Apollo Belvedere, and the Laocoön. Having assembled a team of scholars and specialists poised to identify spoils once
his troops had prevailed, Napoleon left nothing to chance, guaranteeing that the most coveted artifacts would ultimately be legally transferred or, to use the rhetoric of the French government, “repatriated” to France, their “final home,” thanks to the Treaty of Tolentino of February 1797.36 Underlying Napoleon’s wish to acquire “all that is beautiful in Italy” was the idea that the art object—procured, crated, and paraded—would at last land in the Musée central des Arts, where it would participate in a new logic. The aesthetic fragment would communicate a new story of imperial and cultural power, one repositioned from Rome to Paris.37 While we cannot be certain that Ingres, recently arrived in Paris to study in David’s studio,
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Figure 53 Hubert Robert,
The Salle des Saisons at the Louvre, ca. 1802–3. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: M. Urtado, provided by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York.
was in the crowd that day, he would become well acquainted with these sculptural spoils, following the ceremonial inauguration of the Musée central des Arts and its Gallery of Antiquities on 18 Brumaire, Year IX (November 9, 1800). Initially called the Musée français, then renamed the Musée central des Arts, the collection was reinaugurated in 1803 as the Musée Napoléon. A painting by Robert depicts the main axis of the museum, looking from the Hall of the Seasons, through the Hall of Illustrious Men and the Hall of the Romans, culminating in the Hall of the Laocoön (fig. 53).38 Executed between April 1802 and August 1803, the canvas evokes the elegance of the installation whereby
antiquities were illuminated by natural light furnished by the ten windows that pierced the east wall at regular intervals. Housed in the Louvre, where, as it happened, David had obtained special studio space for work on his Intervention of the Sabine Women, the museum would surely have been a site of great interest for members of David’s atelier. Thanks to this commission and to the museum director Dominique Vivant Denon’s hearty endorsement of the Musée français project, which he praised as a “vast enterprise,” Ingres enjoyed special access to this space and these works.39 In turn, the Musée français publication provided Ingres the opportunity to see his drawings trans-
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Figure 54 Simon
Thomassin, Laocoön, 1755. Engraving from Thomassin, Delineatio statuarum et imaginum (Augsburg, 1755), plate 54. National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. Photo: National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. Figure 55 Farnese Hercules. Engraving from Johann
Joachim Winckelmann, Histoire de l’art chez les anciens (Paris: Étienne Gide, 1801), vol. 2: plate 11. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
formed by the burins of engravers, including Félix Massard and Auguste Desnoyers (called BoucherDesnoyers).40 Ingres thereby took his place in an esteemed genealogy creating print reproductions after ancient sculpture, a lineage that may be traced forward from important sixteenth-century exemplars. Engravings after the Laocoön by Nicolas Beatrizet, circa 1520–65 (see fig. 6), and by Simon Thomassin, from 1755 (fig. 54), were separated by roughly two centuries, yet the striking similarities of their approach suggest that the conventions of the genre were established fairly quickly and continued with remarkably consistency. In both Beatrizet’s and Thomassin’s prints, the Laocoön is represented in isolation, the sculpture’s form stretching to fill the rectangular format. The artists have taken care to invoke the sculpture’s existence
as a three-dimensional object by means of interior modeling, although there is no indication of the setting or architectural space in which it would have been viewed.41 The French edition of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity, published in Paris as Histoire de l’art chez les anciens in 1801, almost exactly contemporary with the Musée français volumes, attests to this remarkable consistency in representations of antique sculpture. The plates illustrating Winckelmann’s text likewise conform to the earlier models. Here, for example, the Farnese Hercules is captured in the familiar, privileged frontal view, its representation stripped of possible distractions of any kind (fig. 55). Like this volume, the Musée français project followed on the heels of what was, by the second half of the eighteenth century, an exponentially
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expanded European network of printmaking, print selling, and print consuming. This efflorescence of prints and printed volumes in which antiquities held pride of place guaranteed that ponderous marble objects would travel, with or without Napoleon, standing as a vivid instance of mobility, a crucial component of an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique. In an important sense, Ingres’s work on the Musée français may be seen as the artist’s maiden voyage navigating the boundary between original and its reproduction, a relation that he would explore throughout his career. In his work mediating between ancient sculptor and living engraver, Ingres endowed his efforts with theoretical importance. Prevailing contemporary theories asserted that copperplate engraving should not be understood as merely a technology of exact reproduction. The goal pursued by both the artist who furnished the drawing and the engraver was neither that of copying nor of translation but rather, in nineteenth-century commentator François-Étienne Joubert’s formulation, to “imitate their conceptions by a very different, very original art.”42 Engravings that might have been seen to include inaccuracies or deviations from the source material were often defended in these terms, since likeness was a less significant goal than “inspir[ing] and transmit[ting] the impact of the originals themselves.”43 The engraver’s imperative was thus solidly located in the realm of eliciting the experience of the original. This conception of engraving helps to explain how it came to pass that, after having won the Prix de Rome that certified his accomplishment as a painter, Ingres ultimately exhibited four of the Musée français engravings at the Salons of 1804 and 1806. Notably, the Salon of 1804 also featured a print that was drawn by Ingres, engraved by Boucher-Desnoyers, and eventually
published by Visconti of the celebrated Gonzaga cameo, an Alexandrian cameo from the third century bce depicting the profile portraits of the rulers of Egypt: Ptolemy II Philadelphus and Arsinoë II.44 These early efforts of Ingres are crucial for what develops over the course of his career as a curious, quite distinctive relation to questions of reproduction and seriality across the mediums of painting, drawing, and printmaking. As Stephen Bann has shown, the story of Ingres’s use of print mediums is complex and often reads against the usual grain. Not only did he tend to put prints to private use by distributing them to friends rather than aiming for public or commercial success, but even more remarkably, the artist also approached the process of creating a print from his paintings as an opportunity to revisit compositional choices in the “original.”45 Work with the engraver became one more stop on the potentially infinite loop of repetition and alteration, with results that challenged the engravers with whom he worked. In this sense, Ingres’s was a practice resonant with the mutability that was at the heart of an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique. Exploring the question of seriality in Ingres’s paintings, Rosalind Krauss struck a powerful blow to the idealist explanation so often favored in the historiography that Ingres worked “in pursuit of perfection.” Krauss stresses instead the iterative nature of Ingres’s work, in which “each repetition . . . is always a recontextualization of the model.”46 Certainly, it is the case that accounting for Ingres’s “repetition” in instances such as his extended work on the subject of Raphael and the Fornarina (which included five paintings, one signed drawing, and four prints supervised by the artist) requires a more muscular interpretive framework than that of the protophotographic
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transcription of an original.47 In his relation to painting and drawing, as in printmaking, Ingres returned again and again to the problem of “original” and “copy,” in which neither term could be considered static. What Bann and Krauss have described as the reproductive or iterative logic of Ingres’s practice has some fundamental distinctions from the Musée français project, which involved strictly defined subject matter and an explicitly expository imperative; that is, the designs would take specific antique sculptures as their subjects, and their representation would be bound by well-codified habits of representation. Nevertheless, Ingres’s work for the Musée français speaks to the organizing principles that would continue to shape his oeuvre. In one regard Ingres’s later work subscribed to the underlying premise of the earlier luxury volume: for Ingres, the determination to produce prints after his paintings was a signal of supreme accomplishment, a kind of litmus test for judging the merits of a work of art.48 The impact of the originals themselves was, it would seem, finally put to the test specifically via re-presentation. These distinctive aspects of Ingres’s practice may be productively considered relative to his experience of the antique and to its eighteenthcentury operations. Krauss’s analysis points to this connection in her assertion that the artist’s careerlong habit of returning to familiar compositions and subjects was shaped by “the very atmosphere that artists like Ingres breathed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . . . [in which] the antique existed in and through its copies.”49 The Musée français reveals the dynamics of mobility and mutability in Ingres’s work, even as it also points to the third essential strand in an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique: the capacity for transformative experience.
In Paris in the 1790s, questions about spectatorship took center stage in debates about sculptural spoils, as the specter of affective experience was conjured by detractors and supporters alike. In a 1796 letter to the Directory, advocates argued that French artists in training needed artistic models and asserted that these students had an “exquisite sensitivity” to sculpture.50 Friedrich Schiller, in his poem of 1800 “Die Antiken zu Paris” (The antiquities in Paris), registered his critique of the French seizures by evoking sculptures that would remain cold and unresponsive for their beholders, rather than yielding the warmth of quasi-life.51 On the other end of the sculptures’ odyssey, in the wake of the watershed Vienna agreement of September 1815, after which objects were quickly reclaimed and removed from Paris, English reporters took particular glee in describing French viewers moved to a fever pitch of emotion at the prospect of the sculptures’ departure. One such report commented on a group of French women who demonstrated “extravagant fits of rage and lamentation” as they gathered around the Apollo Belvedere “to take their last farewell, with a most romantic enthusiasm.”52 On the receiving end, Canova, dispatched from Italy to oversee the return of the sculptures and paintings, was said to have dissolved into tears (presumably of relief ) over the crating of the Venus de’ Medici.53 Ingres’s Musée français work took shape in a historical moment when the artistic deck was stacked on the side of the beholding experience. On the one hand, Ingres faced the imperative that his drawing after sculpture (and toward engraving) conjure something like a direct experience of viewing—that is, of presence. On the other hand, there was a shift of sculptural meaning, in which an altogether new value was placed on the viewer’s physical, sensual, aesthetic encounter. The primacy
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of the Pygmalion narrative, discussed in the previous chapter, likewise registered period fascination with the distinctions between warm flesh and cold marble, as with the creation and (re)animation of human figures, topics that the tale opened up for artistic and philosophical exploration alike. After years of drawing after engravings of just such ancient sculptures, Ingres faced the daunting task of rendering new drawings that would indelibly register his experience—in the flesh—of these objects. The artist’s physical encounter did indeed leave its traces in the visual record. For Ingres, “the flesh of marble” was the shadow. At work in the museum space, Ingres seized on the shadow as a powerful representational tool that would be suggestive both of the threedimensional presence of the sculpture and of his own physical navigation of it in space (fig. 56). All but one of Ingres’s engravings feature often remarkably elaborate, projected shadows. Two eighteenthcentury shadow interludes provide a means to take the measure of Ingres’s shadows and their resonance with a wide range of practices of representation and spectatorship. One might be called positivist, the other a ghost story.
Drawing the Antique: Academic Training and Shadow Projection Like legions of other artists educated in the French academic system, Ingres had been drawing after the antique since the earliest stages of his training. The sheet inscribed by the artist as “my first drawing, 1789” depicts a sculptural image: Head of a Niobid. It may be deduced that this work is a drawing after an engraving, but Ingres soon moved on to the next stage of academic training, the dessin en bosse, or drawing in the round.54 The striking
charcoal-and-black-chalk drawing of the bust of the Apollo Belvedere, found among Ingres’s belongings at the time of his death, is an exceptional example of artistic achievement in this arena, which, in the context of academic training, tended to refer specifically to drawing after plaster casts (fig. 57).55 William Pether’s 1769 mezzotint after Wright of Derby’s Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765) depicts just such a staging of the Borghese Gladiator, here seen in plaster reduction
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Figure 56 Auguste
Desnoyers [called BoucherDesnoyers], after JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres, Cupid, ca. 1803. Engraving from Robillard-Péronville and Laurent, Le Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs . . . (Paris: L. E. Hernan, 1803–12), vol. 4: plate 34. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: author.
Figure 57 Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, attrib., Apollo Belvedere, ca. 1791–93. Charcoal with stumping under black chalk on tan laid paper. Private collection. Figure 58 William Pether,
after Joseph Wright of Derby, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 1769. Mezzotint. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953. Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.
and dramatically lit by a candle whose flame, while obscured, effects a striking vision of the sculpture (fig. 58). The drawing that has resulted from this exercise in the observation of shadow and light appears on the right-hand side of the composition, where it serves as a repetition of the figure. Zoffany’s The Antique School of the Royal Academy at Somerset House (1780–83) depicts the practice on a larger scale in the context of an evening session at London’s Royal Academy, where famed antique sculptures, in their plaster incarnations, are studied by torchlight (fig. 59). As a student, Ingres was awarded three first and three second prizes in the dessin en bosse competitions.56 As the dramatic rendition of the famed
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head of Apollo attests, this academic exercise, which turned on the goal of translating three dimensions into two, featured sculpture lit from one side to emphasize the volume of the object under scrutiny. Shadows were of the utmost importance in this intermediary stage of training, where they were intimately linked to copying after the antique and to creating an illusionistic two-dimensional rendering of a sculpture seen in the round. Having successfully cleared this hurdle, Ingres would have advanced to the final stage of academic training: drawing from life (fig. 60). Ingres’s 1800 Académie, a virtuoso exemplar of the genre, bespeaks
his fluency with what was by then a long-familiar exercise.57 As much as the canvas centers on the portrayal of the male nude, a subject of instrumental importance and fundamental significance in the Davidian studio, it is likewise a serious and scrupulous study in shadows. Following Baxandall, at least two kinds of shadow can be discerned here. Passages like the deep V of the neck and the model’s upper left thigh are defined by “attached shadow,” shadows on the body, cast by the body. These shadows help to certify the figure’s three-dimensionality and clarify its varied topography, from toes to curly hair. A second category, “projected shadow,” is
Figure 59 Johann Zoffany,
attrib., The Antique School of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, 1780–83. Oil on canvas. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London (Prudence Cuming Associates Limited).
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Figure 60 Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, Académie, 1800. Oil on canvas. Musée Ingres, Montauban. Photo © Montauban, Musée Ingres (Marc Jeanneteau). Figure 61 Gérard de Lairesse, illustrations of shadows.
Engraving from Le grand livre des peintres . . . (Paris: À l’hôtel de Thou, 1787), 1:392, plate 15. National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. Photo: National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC.
evident on the surface of the elegantly draped white sheet, where the shadow’s undulating form reveals the body’s relation to light sources and vividly evokes the spatial envelope of the studio.58 In the eighteenth century, shadows were a source of fascination; recognized as critical to perception, they thus played a pivotal role in philosophical writing.59 Understood, moreover, to be essential for painting, shadows became the subject of numerous technical publications, and the accurate depiction of projected shadow was the focus of exhaustive technical analysis. First published in Dutch in 1712, Gérard de Lairesse’s Le grand livre
des peintres (1787) was a particularly important resource. In chapter after chapter, accompanied by illustrations, the book takes up varieties of shadows cast under many different light conditions (fig. 61). Plate 15 of Lairesse’s text, for instance, demonstrates different qualities of projected shadow and attached shadow: from the brightly reflective side of a house (plate 15, figure 1) to the relatively less reflective copse of trees (plate 15, figure 2). Texts like Le grand livre des peintres and, later, Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse’s Traité de perspective linéaire, à l’usage des artistes (1801) exemplify the vast apparatus available for learning to render the
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geometric projection of cast shadow, or sciography (fig. 62). Its own discipline, sciography was a subbranch of linear perspective that centered on the two-dimensional representation of the mathematically determined depiction of projected shadows.60 Illustrating Lespinasse’s discussion of the perspective of shadows, plate 25 provides a sciographic study of shadows cast by a lamp. Artists studying such texts and images would learn how to project the mathematically correct form of a cast shadow, working from the givens of an identified object and light source. Ingres, however, showed more interest in another kind of shadow work—what Baxandall calls “Rococo-Empiricist shadow”—an approach that bypasses questions of mathematical precision.61 Quite in defiance of the perspectival logic of sciography, Ingres’s projected shadows seem to take on a life of their own, concerned less with describing the body to which they ostensibly belong than with activating and drawing attention to the surface on which they are cast.62 In the 1800 Académie (see fig. 60), for example, the irregular fall of drapery allows for a wonderful exploitation of anthropomorphic shadow, an aspect evident again and again in Ingres’s Musée français designs (see figs. 50, 51, and 56). As the details from the shadow zones of the Cupid and Apollo Lykeios attest, these purported reflections at once draw attention to their identities as shadows, putatively related to the sculptures’ form, even as they operate independently as sinuous deconstructions— and, indeed, deformations—of the marble figures. Poised on the brink of becoming completely independent, they function as a kind of ghostly surtitle to the sculptural language of the foreground. Ingres realized the apotheosis of this impulse in Rome with The Dream of Ossian of 1813 (fig. 63). Engaging both the memory of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson’s 1801
Ossian and Ingres’s own experiences with the Musée français commission, the monumental painting imagines the phantom legions of the dreaming Ossian’s family, who, bathed in the light of the moon, suggest nothing so much as marble statues. Framed on the left by Ossian’s wife, Evirallina, and on the right by his son Oscar, the composition turns on the juxtaposition of the sculptural figures of Ossian’s dreamscape and the slumbering protagonist of the foreground. Here, Evirallina and Oscar take up equivocal positions in the interval between these spatial and imaginative poles, as emphasized by Evirallina’s hand, which extends forward to break the division between the spectral and the living, and by the shadows cast by the two sculptural figures onto their disconcertingly solid cloud banks. A chilling phantasmagoria of lunar illumination, Ingres’s Ossian brings the lessons of the Musée français into the orbit of his serious
Figure 62 Louis-Joseph
Masquelier, after LouisNicolas de Lespinasse,
“Perspective with Shadows; Finding Shadows by Torchlight.” From Lespinasse, Traité de perspective linéaire, à l’usage des artistes . . . (Paris: Magimel, 1801), plate 25. National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC.
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Figure 63 Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, The
Dream of Ossian, 1813. Oil on canvas. Musée Ingres, Montauban. Photo © Montauban, Musée Ingres (Marc Jeanneteau).
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Figure 64 Lejeune, after
Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Robertson’s Phantasmagoria. Engraving from Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute E.-G. Robertson (Paris, 1831–33), frontispiece. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Figure 65 Jean-Jacques Avril the Younger, after Pierre
Bouillon, Apollo Belvedere, ca. 1803. Engraving from Robillard-Péronville and Laurent, Le Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs . . .
painting, destined for the ceiling of Napoleon’s bedchamber at the Palazzo del Quirinale, to decidedly uncanny effect.
The Couvent des Capucines and Preternatural Shadows If we are on the trail of unruly shadows, we would be hard-pressed to arrive at a more apt location than the site of Ingres’s studio during his Musée français work: the Couvent des Capucines, near the Place Vendôme. An anonymous oil sketch from Ingres’s collection pictures it as a cavernous, less than welcoming space.63 A literary description by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, from her 1833 novel L’atelier d’un peintre: Scènes de la vie privée (A painter’s studio: Scenes from private life) set roughly between 1800 and 1810, evocatively summons up the locale as one dominated by still-crumbling stones and dark, labyrinthine passageways, often navigated through call and response.64
The Couvent de Capucines’s post-revolutionary reoccupation surely helped to consolidate its image as a site of mystery and barely contained menace. In 1799 and 1800, the Belgian entrepreneur Robertson staged his wildly popular theatrical illusions of ghosts and specters there. Capitalizing on the illusionism of the magic lantern and its projected images, Robertson’s phantasmagoria turned on the uncanny reanimation of the dead, from Diogenes to Rousseau. After going through the site’s high enclosure wall and traversing the graveyard, visitors arrived at Robertson’s main attraction, installed in the central hall of the convent, adjoining the cloisters where Ingres had set up his studio in a former nun’s cell (fig. 64). There, persuaded by the terrifying specters conjured by Robertson’s use of two magic lanterns projecting such subjects as “the Bleeding Nun,” visitors believed themselves “transported into another world and into other centuries.”65 Lejeune’s print after Robertson’s drawing depicts one of the performances at the Couvent des Capucines in
(Paris: L. E. Hernan, 1803–12), vol. 4: plate 9. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo: author.
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which projections of demons, threateningly animated optical illusions, float above the riveted crowd. Here, the shadows have truly been unleashed. Before a series of lawsuits ended Robertson’s extremely lucrative run, the phantasmagoria in the Couvent des Capucines harnessed the mystery of illusionism and the delight of immersive spectacle to the science of optics. The confluence of shadows, illusionism, and mystery at the Couvent des Capucines is pushed even further in accounts of Girodet’s work there.
The spectral effects of Robertson’s phantasmagoria have been compellingly linked to the pictorial logic of Girodet’s 1801 Ossian, even as the artist was himself imagined as a sort of solitary conjurer, most vividly in Louis-Léopold Boilly’s caricature.66 It was in this setting that Girodet refined his preference for working through the night, first with the help of students who held candles aloft to illuminate his canvases and later by utilizing an Argand light system.67 The setting of the Couvent des Capucines could hardly have been more evocative for an artist preoccupied with shadows. Of course, neither sciography nor phantasmagoria can provide a full explication for the remarkable shadows with which Ingres endowed his sculptures. Nevertheless, both of these shadow strategies illuminate the field within which Ingres’s curious projections materialized. If sciography and phantasmagoria represent something like the alpha and omega of shadow interest, together they underscore the affective, phenomenological valence of eighteenth-century shadow representation and suggest what may have been at stake for Ingres in their emphatic inclusion. The engraving of the Farnese Hercules in Winckelmann’s 1801 Histoire de l’art chez les anciens makes vivid just what a difference such shadows make (see fig. 55). Like that earlier example, the majority of the engravings included in the Musée français depicting antique sculpture were, like the Farnese Hercules, devoid of such shadows. Jean-Jacques Avril the Younger’s engraving, after Pierre Bouillon, of the Apollo Belvedere features the internal modeling more commonly deployed among the sixty-odd other plates not inspired by Ingres’s drawings (fig. 65). And yet, in his work with eight different engravers and in all but one of his designs (a depiction of Nero), Ingres took pains to include striking,
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projected shadows. When seen from a distance, the velvety gradations of these shadows—which range from gauzy to deep—call to mind the mezzotint process, the qualities of which may be seen in Pether’s print (see fig. 58). That such an effect could be achieved by Ingres’s exclusively burin-wielding interlocutors is noteworthy, at once attesting to the remarkable labor involved in the rendering of such shadows and showcasing the engravers’ extraordinary control and finesse. One might assume that Ingres’s careful staging of cast shadows would be harnessed in the service of the meticulous accuracy that characterized the overall approach to representing the sculptures depicted in these engravings.68 However, Ingres’s shadows instead assume a contradictory function: they secure their sculptural objects’ status in the three-dimensional realm of the “real” even as they enact curious deformations and distortions of the classical forms, a relation evidently at odds with the fundamentally descriptive goals of the Musée français enterprise.
Torchlight Views While Ingres’s shadows do not behave geometrically, they nevertheless fulfill an important function of shadows insofar as they insist on the material fact of a ground: the defining wall against which sculpture is displayed and upon which shadow is projected. Are these shadows visible traces of Ingres’s actual experience in the Musée Napoléon? While a definitive answer may be difficult to determine, it is clear that the shadows emphatically reference the primacy of encounter with a sculptural body, in space and perhaps in a particular space. In this regard, it is worth noting that the Musée Napoléon hosted its own shadow plays. Benjamin Zix commemorates one of the more famous of these
spectacles: after their wedding in the Louvre in 1810, Napoleon and Marie-Louise reportedly visited the Gallery of Antiquities by torchlight (fig. 66).69 Set in the Laocoön Gallery, Zix’s scene capitalizes on the dramatic effects produced as a pair of handheld torches brought the famed marble bodies to apparent life, shadows dancing, or writhing, behind them. Lit by the bright glow of the torches, the shadows captured by Zix offer a remarkably suggestive scenario for imagining how Ingres came to render such strikingly anthropomorphic, curiously sinuous, and suspiciously mobile shadow projections in his Musée français designs. As Zix’s image attests, while charged with similarly ghostly associations as those of the phantasmagoria, the Musée Napoléon shadow plays were nonetheless distinctive for their unequivocal materiality. The thrilling spectacle depended less, in this case, on the mystery of visual illusionism than it did on the transmutation of ostensibly immobile marble bodies through the flickering illuminations of the torch’s movement through space. This event was only the latest instance of a relatively new set of viewing practices that emerged roughly simultaneously with the burgeoning interest in the particular operations of sculptural aesthetics: the enthusiasm for nighttime viewings of sculpture by torchlight or lamp.70 The candle or torchlight view had a long history in academic training throughout Europe, beginning with the Accademia of Baccio Bandinelli; in the eighteenth century, Reynolds makes mention of the advantages of painting by night in his fourteenth discourse.71 In the domain of sculpture, Canova frequently attended evening drawing sessions at the academy on the Campidoglio, and Bertel Thorvaldson evidently staged torchlit views of sculpture in his studio.72 Canova appears to have pushed this
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Figure 66 Benjamin Zix, Emperor Napoleon and Empress Marie-Louise Visiting the Salle du Laocoön at Night, 1810. Pen, grey ink, graphite, and washed sepia on paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.
practice to new ends, as he reputedly achieved the exceptional finish his sculptures were known for by working their surfaces by the light of a single candle.73 This studio practice continued well into the eighteenth century, as Pether’s mezzotint after Wright of Derby’s Three Men Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight and Zoffany’s The Antique School of the Royal Academy attest (figs. 58 and 59). Wright of Derby and Zoffany each depict nocturnal sessions in which static light sources illuminate reproductions of famed antique sculptures. The images likewise indicate that the practice was primarily geared toward training artists to discern shadows and light effects on three-dimensional works in their rendition of them in two-dimensional mediums such as drawing and painting. In Wright’s composition, a plaster reduction of the Borghese Gladiator is compared to a drawn scale study, and in Zoffany’s painting, students of the Royal Academy
draw after the Belvedere Torso and the Apollo Belvedere, each of which is illuminated by standing lamps, their backdrops arranged so as to capture cast shadows to best effect. The practice of the torchlight view was apparently an innovation of eighteenth-century sculpture collections, one that endured only briefly, disappearing in the mid-nineteenth century. There was at least one documented mid-sixteenth-century case, but it was only after the establishment of the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome (founded by Pope Clement XIV in 1771 and officially unveiled by Pope Pius VI in 1784) that the practice became fashionable, taking hold wherever there were collections of antique sculpture: at the Capitoline, in Dresden, in Charles Towneley’s collection in London, and at the Musée Napoléon in Paris.74 Claudia Mattos notes that the brief but intense enthusiasm for torchlight views coincided with a shift, evident in both
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museum installations and art writing, from the baroque model of homogenizing total displays to a new focus on the singular art object and its autonomy, a transition that had profound effects on the display and conception of sculpture. These transformations in museum display in the later decades of the eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries likewise corresponded to an emergent focus on individual encounters with art objects in an age of aesthetic theory. As Mattos observes, the torch or flame allowed focused light to illuminate discrete sculptures, an effect that oriented the spectator’s gaze while simultaneously heightening a sense of intimate connection between the viewer and individual works of art.75 In light of these developments, it is perhaps not surprising that the myriad extant accounts of torchlight views do not concur about the value and importance of this practice. The torch’s capacity to radically alter viewers’ perception of surface effects was noted by many commentators. In Madame de Staël’s 1807 Corinne, or Italy, the torchlight view was appreciated because it ensured that “the uniform lustre of the marble was softened,” while Heinrich Meyer praised it for the welcome “end to troublesome reflections.”76 Karl Philipp Moritz admired the heightened sense of surface contrast yielded by the torch so that what had appeared “uniform” gave way to “infinite variety.”77 Insofar as it allowed for enhanced sensitivity to nuances of surface treatment, torchlight was often allied to touch, even functioning as a sort of quasi-touch in period discussions.78 Among other pragmatic cases made for torchlight viewing, Meyer extolled the flame’s ability to isolate individual statues and to properly illuminate poorly installed and badly lit objects, even as he admired the degree to which “shadows become more
definite” in torchlight.79 Writing in 1807, Madame de Staël described her protagonists’ visit to Canova’s studio by torchlight, observing that “statues improve much in their effect by being seen in this manner. The ancients appear to have been of this opinion, since they often placed them in their Thermae, where day [light] could not enter.”80 Reflecting on an evening visit to the Vatican in 1818, Henry Matthews similarly defended the necessity of a torchlight visit with recourse to the lure of authenticity, explaining that “many of [the statues] were found in baths, where light was not admitted. They were created therefore for torch-light as their proper element; and the variety of light and shade, which is thus produced, heightens the effect prodigiously.” Matthews concluded, “There is something of the same kind of difference between the statues by day and by torchlight, as between a rehearsal in the morning, and the lighted theatre in the evening.”81 Thus, the ideal presentation, the ultimate sculptural “performance,” was the nocturnal torchlight view. Not all shared Matthews’s sense of delight, even those who might have been compelled by historical echoes. Karl August Böttiger, archaeologist and keeper of the gallery of antiquities in Dresden, was singularly disappointed with torchlight’s quasi-scientific form of illumination. Böttiger gave numerous evening lecture tours of the collection, including for Caspar David Friedrich and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As Hans Christian Hönes observes, Böttiger was dismayed by the fact that torch illumination ultimately revealed too much of the truth of statues’ making and remaking. Under the glow of the flame, their surfaces revealed the sculptures to be “temporally multi-layered objects,” thanks to their ancient additions and modern restorations, which made them undeniably “anachronistic in themselves.”82
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Among the most effusive enthusiasts of torchlight views were those who were transported by the experience, their perception of sculpture opened in newly immersive and often fantastic ways. Johann Gottfried Herder recalled his experience of seeing the Museo Pio-Clementino by torchlight as a dreamlike state, in which sculpture became a “divine apparition,” while Karl Julius Weber invoked the “ghostly glow” of the illumination.83 Recollecting an extended torchlight tour of the Vatican collections led by the artist Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in 1825, one visitor wrote that the “eight hours passed like a dream, eight hours of rapture and ecstasy.”84 For others, the experience offered a more specific sort of immersion, namely in the time and place of the sculptures’ original making. This is “illumination . . . as a kind of time machine,” in Hönes’s apt turn of phrase.85 Weber articulated this sentiment, noting that “under torchlight you wander through the antiquities to Mount Olympus, as the Greeks once did.”86 Moritz likewise described a rupture in lived experience; for him, thanks to the nocturnal view, “all of a sudden our perception of time fades, and everything is condensed into a single moment, which seems to last forever.”87 Moritz’s formulation crafts a sort of symmetry between the operations of vision and time involved in the torchlit view: if the visual field is narrowed to a single point of light in the darkness, then so too does time contract to the immediate present captured in the flame’s flicker. If a sense of time itself vanished for Moritz, for others it was artistry that was erased insofar as what was observed was no longer recognizable as sculpture but rather appeared to be animate life. In a letter to his son August recounting his nocturnal visit to the Vatican collection, Herder wrote that Venus Rising from the Bath appeared as an animated woman, “turned round by the light of the
torch.”88 The virtual effect of turning was evidently literalized, according to Arsène Houssaye’s description of a torchlit visit to the Louvre’s Gallery of Antiquities in 1854, which culminated in a final spectacular episode in which the torch-bearers encircled the Venus de Milo, which, thus lit, was turned around twice on its rotating pedestal “to the applause [acclamations] of the visitors.”89 Friedrich Meyer recalled that “at the slow approach of the torches, one would have thought that the Pythian Apollo descended from his pedestal and approached us.” A no less affecting, albeit quite different sensation was produced by the illumination of the Laocoön, at the sight of which, Meyer wrote, “One feels struck by terror: one involuntarily recoils.” Terror here likewise hinges on animation; the light of the torches pushes verisimilitude to its limits: “When we slowly change the arrangement of the torches, veins swell more; the expression of agony becomes more terrible, the breath of death seems ready to escape from [the father’s] half-open lips.”90 Friedrich Sickler, visiting the Farnese Hercules in the Royal Museum of Antiquities at Naples, found that, in torchlight, “the demi-god, with aspect terribly sublime, seemed to advance half alive from amid the darkness, and the flames appeared to tinge him with the warm colouring of an animated gigantic body.”91 Despite differences in inflection, a strong theme of animation courses through period reflections. Herder captured this sentiment in a poem which took the torchlight view of sculpture as its subject: “How it quivers, when with glowing flames / The torch of life saturates the dead stone.”92 As in Goethe’s reflections on marble discussed earlier, Herder’s poem conjures the encounter between light and stone as the bringing to life of dead matter. Even as certain sculptural objects are endowed with beauty and morality
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under the sign of “art,” they nevertheless remain emphatically dead until the “torch of life” infuses them with movement and warmth. While Herder here stresses the animation of the sculptural material—“How it quivers”—others, like Weber, emphasize the effects of the torchlight view upon spectators—“One trembles.”93 An approximation of what these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors experienced has been captured by Bernard Frischer and a team of researchers who have crafted a digital re-creation of a torchlit view of the Laocoön. Their animation shows how a three-dimensional, digital model of the grouping, produced by combining numerous digital photographs of the sculpture in Rome, appears to writhe and twist under changing light effects.94 Frischer’s animation proves remarkably resonant with Goethe’s reflections on the Laocoön from over two centuries prior. In “Über Laokoon” (1798), Goethe invokes the sculpture’s disconcerting effects of movement when seen under specific lighting conditions: In order to fully grasp the sculptors’ intentions with the Laocoön, you must position yourself in appropriate distance from it with your eyes closed. When you open and immediately afterwards close them, you will see all the marble move, and you will fear, that as you open your eyes again, the whole group will have changed. I would say that as the work now stands, it is a lightning which has been fixed, a wave, petrified in the moment when it flows toward the shore. The same effect is achieved if you observe the group at night in torchlight.95
As in Goethe’s description, beholders of Frischer’s virtual torchlight view are challenged to accommodate a concept of a static monumental sculpture with what appears to be a resolutely moving image. This twenty-first-century approximation of an
eighteenth-century spectacle might help us understand the heightened interest trained on lighting effects, even in period sculpture collections where the vast majority of visitors may not have had the opportunity to experience objects animated by the torchlit view.
Ingres, the Paragone, and Sculpture in the Round Back in Paris at the Gallery of Antiquities, the question of how to suitably light sculptures, and not just at nighttime, so as to best reveal their threedimensionality was one of some delicacy. During the extensive Louvre renovations required to install the sculptural spoils from Italy, considerable attention was given to the question of how to illuminate the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön in order to show them to best advantage.96 The shadows with which Ingres endowed his Musée français sculptures cast a visual lure, their amorphous umbras and penumbras a vivid trace of the artist’s firsthand knowledge of these antiquities as they were installed in the Musée Napoléon. They seem to call for careful reconstruction through the evidence of their projection of the actual viewing conditions in the Louvre at the turn of the eighteenth century. These depictions appear to seductively suggest that an equation might be found, as in a sciographic diagram, that would explain these forms in relation to the angle of light sources and the situation of the statues within the museum walls. But the fascination of Ingres’s shadows hinges on their irreducibility to either the sciographic diagram or the phantasmagoria. Instead, both modes seem here to be in play in the rendering of shadows that are simultaneously descriptive and anti-descriptive. They both appear quintessentially shadowlike
Figure 67 Jean-Auguste-
Dominique Ingres, Phocion, undated. Graphite on paper. Musée Ingres, Montauban. Photo © Montauban, Musée Ingres (Marc Jeanneteau).
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insofar as they are at once an absolute testament to a “real material fact,” even while they function—like their eighteenth-century “shadow” synonyms—as uncanny chimeras, as ghosts.97 Animation cuts both ways, then, in Ingres’s vision of the antique around 1800: the shadow zones tap into the Pygmalion promise of sculpture as body-casting-shadow, even as they insist on the artist/viewer whose pulse likewise quickens before the sculptural spectacle. A group of extant drawings speaks unequivocally to the artist’s process on site and allows us to say more about Ingres’s work at the Musée Napoléon, including occasional drawings that recapitulate habitual views of antique sculptures. Ingres’s drawing of Phocion (fig. 67), for example, comes fairly close to repeating the perspective of its engraved rendering by Laurent in the Musée français.98 This particular drawing by Ingres has gone down in history thanks to its famous resurfacing in the painting that set the artist on his way. Newly familiar with the spolia from Rome, Ingres was able to put the sculpture to timely use, turning Phocion into Ulysses in his Prix de Rome–winning canvas of 1801, Ambassadors of Agamemnon at the Tent of Achilles. Lesser known by far are Ingres’s other remarkable studies after the Phocion sculpture in which he considers the figure from the rear and from the side, while zeroing in on the head from a vertiginously low angle (fig. 68). These drawings record Ingres’s experience circling the sculpture, all the while capturing vantage points that depart from the familiar frontal view. Ingres was not alone in this preoccupation. Arts administrators and politicians of the time shared his concern for viewing in the round. Even while cash-strapped, they insisted on cutting-edge installation practices and splurged on a lavish new base for the Venus de’ Medici, presumably seen in the
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left foreground in Zix’s rendering (see fig. 66). If a number of the sculptures in the Musée Napoléon were installed fairly close to the wall, records indicate that when at last the Venus de’ Medici arrived in 1803, it was unveiled “on its brand new rotating stand, designed by the architect Raymond.”99 In his studies after Phocion and Cupid and Psyche (see fig. 23), Ingres circled the sculptures, his multiple viewpoints capturing their shifting forms as if they were being rotated on a circular dais. In the striking case of Ingres’s studies of Cupid and Psyche (fig.
69), the perspectives seized are extraordinary, particularly when compared with the drawing Ingres executed of the figures that was engraved for the Musée français, a depiction that offers a thoroughly iconic view (see fig. 50). In these additional studies, Ingres is remarkably uninterested in fixing expected or even recognizable views. Instead, he has rendered the sculpture strange through its rotation in space, thus capturing an alien embrace less evocative of romance than of violent absorption. Cupid and Psyche’s typically saccharine aspect, here
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Figure 68 Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, four studies after Phocion, undated. Graphite on paper. Musée Ingres, Montauban. Photo © Montauban, Musée Ingres (Marc Jeanneteau). Figure 69 Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, two
studies after Cupid and Psyche. Graphite on paper. Musée Ingres, Montauban. Photo © Montauban, Musée Ingres (Marc Jeanneteau).
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out of alignment and seen anew, is utterly transformed, with arresting similarities to the jarring effects of Batoni’s earlier Cupid and Psyche from 1730, with its gesture of seeming recoil (see fig. 24). The Phocion and Cupid and Psyche drawings are of crucial importance, as they provide a fairly clear picture of the special attention the artist paid to three-dimensionality, even as they leave a trace of Ingres’s own observational and physical work in the museum. However, these studies undoubtedly suggest more than simply the desire to see in the round. What to make of these views from above, below, and beside that make the familiar strange and that do so through the distortion of bodies and bodily relations? Ingres’s drawings in the round merit consideration in terms of what Leo Steinberg describes as Pablo Picasso’s “lifelong obsession with the problem of all-sided presentment.” Steinberg situates the artist’s explorations of three-dimensional form—for Picasso, explicitly linked to the female body—within a pervasive tendency in Western art toward “the will to possess the full knowledge of what is depicted, the refusal to be confined to an aspect.”100 Ingres’s drive to circumambulatory viewing might furthermore be fruitfully reconsidered in relation to the contemporaneous events of the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, which triggered a series of reflections on the status of the antique and of the art object. Such reflections, whether visual or textual, were informed by a complex admixture of desire—for the past, for the antique, for a vision of its integrity—and unrequited longing. As the archaeological process continued, the “antique” was inextricably linked at once to desire and death, grounded as it was in this most vivid incarnation in the Bay of Naples by the catastrophic events of 79 ce. By the time of Ingres’s Musée français work, the question of antique sculpture’s link to the living,
particularly by way of artistic training, was hotly contested. The paragone debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were fundamentally concerned, on the one hand, with sculpture’s remove from the living and the natural and, on the other, with the potentially deleterious effects of painters’ exclusive reliance on antique sculpture as model. These disputes were further sharpened by early nineteenth-century debates on the nature of the ideal. By 1805, two poles had solidified, pitting Quatremère de Quincy and his formulation of the ideal as forged through the powers of the mind against Toussaint-Bernard Émeric-David and his more empirical model of truth to nature.101 It is impossible to imagine that Ingres, in Paris and absorbed in the project of depicting antique sculpture, was ignorant of the battle lines then being drawn between the beau idéal and the beau visible or beau réel.102 And it is therefore tempting to read his extraordinary shadows as a sign of the irruption of unruly, unnatural nature in the zone of antique ideality. Far from only breathing the rarified air of the austere modern museum, Ingres’s Musée français work tapped into a much wider Parisian network of shadow enthusiasms that spanned the realms of the academy, the museum, and mass spectacle: from sciography and the torchlight view to the phantasmagoria. Ingres’s curious projections took shape in a moment in which Paris, like Ingres, was in the thrall of shadows. Above all, these interludes begin to piece together a picture of the affective, phenomenological valence of eighteenth-century shadow representation and thus point the way to what may have been at stake for Ingres in his determination to include them. In 1778, Herder issued a judgment that would have struck a grave note for Ingres: “Engravings, drawings, and paintings can never
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succeed in representing [sculpture] or standing in for [sculpture].”103 In his studies in the Musée Napoléon and in his Musée français designs, it seems that Ingres was grappling with a similar sense of doubt, or restlessness, or compensation. These drawings pose the question: How can one fix an object defined by an experience in the round? How, to put it in Herder’s terms, can one give visual form to the artist’s corporeal feeling? Ingres’s Musée français project provides, I have argued, a sort of answer to this challenge insofar as Ingres is captured here as an artist at work, an artist constantly hounded by the impulse of corporeal feeling. This is an artist whose process, handed down to us in hundreds of preliminary drawings, bespeaks his desire to secure the total view and a desire to think and to see around the body.104 This is also an artist who formed the habit of thinking through the body: repeatedly imagining and even inhabiting the poses of figures in his compositions.105 Understood through the lens of a distinctly modern comprehension of sculpture’s unique aesthetic imperatives formulated in the eighteenth century, Ingres’s early encounter with antique sculpture in the context of the Musée français project helps us to refine our understanding of some of his most idiosyncratic and distinctive preoccupations. In this sense, far from an emblem of mortification, ancient sculpture was, in Ingres’s hands, decidedly modern insofar as it was always embodied—not just “of ” the body but also around the body and, finally, in the body.
Hegel’s (Torchlit) Antique Ingres’s work on the Musée français antiquities represents a particularly gripping episode of shadow enthusiasms, in which the artist was visibly grappling with “corporeal feeling.” Experiences of
torchlight views had afterlives that would continue to resonate in other realms—literary, philosophical, and indeed art-historical. In two visits to Dresden, in 1821 and 1824, roughly two decades after Ingres’s Musée français contributions, Hegel “reviewed antiquities” with the inspector general of the Antikensammlung, Böttiger, who “want[ed] to show us the antiquities in torchlight.”106 While we do not know precisely what Hegel made of these nocturnal revelations, his subsequent lectures and writings on ideal sculpture, particularly those concerning ideal forms represented by classical sculpture, suggest that he would have been a particularly avid viewer. In between Hegel’s two trips to Dresden, his thoughts about the antiquities he saw there, and about classical antiquities more generally, had been articulated in two series of lectures delivered in Berlin. While Hegel never published these lectures, two sets of lecture notes by his “disciple and defender” Heinrich Gustav Hotho were ultimately transcribed and amplified as Hegel’s Aesthetics, which appeared in 1835, four years after Hegel’s death.107 Aesthetics represents Hegel’s systematic account of the evolution of art, a model that owed much to Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity.108 Whereas Winckelmann had laid out a foundational argument and model for the historicity of ancient art, Hegel’s ambitious amplification lay, on the one hand, in substantially expanding a historicist and stylistic model to account for all of art and, on the other, in inscribing that chronological model with an altogether different sort of telos based on his overarching account of the emergence of the metaphysical category of the “Idea” in form. In Aesthetics, the formative drama of art hinged on its capacity to give sensuous form to the “Idea.” Hegel’s arguments about historical alignments— and misalignments—of form and concept, across
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time and place, produced the ground plan for his schema, which moved from art’s “Symbolic” early stages, epitomized by Egyptian architecture, to its “Romantic” manifestations in painting and music (and to its promised apotheosis in philosophy). At the core of Hegel’s tripartite schema, form and content were, for a while, in perfect equilibrium.109 This was the moment of the “Classical,” emblematized by Greek art, whose perfect medium was marble sculpture. Hegel’s lectures and their subsequent publication appeared at a moment marked by serious contestation over what constituted the classical ideal in sculpture. The landmark sculptural discoveries at Aegina (1811–12) and the transfer of the Parthenon marbles to London (1801/16) had shaken long-reigning agreements about ideal classical form in the guise of a familiar canon, among which figured the Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici.110 At the same time, a sense of the paucity of extant authentic works had begun to be strongly felt, and even the essential fact of antique sculpture’s whiteness was increasingly challenged by the publication and circulation of scholarly texts on sculptural polychromy and its ubiquity in antiquity. Nevertheless, Hegel doubled down on the centrality of Greek sculpture in a text that proved tremendously influential for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century formations of the academic discipline of art history. For Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, sculpture is axiomatic to what constituted the “Classical,” insofar as it represented the perfect union of content and form. In this sense, Greek sculpture had as its “objective foundation” the human figure, and indeed its goal was to portray “the divine figure itself ” (376, 214).111 In its portrayal of ideal sculpture, “the god indwells in its
own externality in a placid, blissful, immobile repose. Form and content are absolutely one and the same with neither aspect predominating; with the content determining form and the form determining the content: oneness in pure universality” (214).112 The marble envelope and the concept with which it was suffused—human freedom as manifest in self-possessed, austere beauty—were in perfect unison, at least for a time. In the end, the privileged forms of the idealized human body would be seen to push increasingly up against an idea of a spiritual life that could not be captured in bodily form.113 Prior to that tipping point, however, in his reflections on sculpture’s “universal oneness of content and form,” Hegel extolls the medium’s capacity to present “the beauty of calm, self-sufficient individuality” to a degree unparalleled by any other medium (216). However, this individuality does not carry “particular subjectivity” or “expression”: “Sculpture is the object as self-enclosed and complete, in independent repose, withdrawn from relation to something other, reposing within itself, blissful within itself ” (375).114 Greek sculpture during the second third of the fifth century bce, the period of Polykleitos and Phidias, represented the apex of past achievements in the medium, that point when Hegel’s sculptural ideal was most fully achieved. In Hegel’s view, in art of this age can be found the most powerful presentation of “the Divine as such [whether in representations of Gods or mortals] in its infinite calm and sublimity.”115 In sculpture like the Parthenon marbles, Hegel admires the rendition of the ideal human form, that sine que non of the philosopher’s conception of ideal sculpture. The body occupies center stage in Hegel’s sculptural imaginary since “the material shape in which human (and divine)
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freedom is incarnated in the world is that of the human body”; in short, “the shape can only be the human figure, because what is spiritual can reveal itself in the human figure alone.”116 What Hegel admires most about classical sculptural figures is their beautiful distillation of self-sufficient autonomy; the figures were unmoved by “the discord of actions and situations” and crafted without concern to appeal to a viewer, any sign of which would suggest the move away from the most privileged forms of Polykleitan and Phidian sculpture to that produced in the period immediately afterward, by such artists as Praxiteles and Skopas.117 The ramifications for such an inward-turning art were substantial. If, as Hegel concludes, “what remains unsatisfied in the sculpture of antiquity is the demand that a character should develop and proceed outwardly to deeds and actions, and inwardly to a deepening of the soul,” this reticence went a long way to explaining why contemporary beholders were left “cold” by classical sculpture.118 At the same time, ideal sculpture’s self-sufficiency, its place “apart from externality and contingency,” contributed to its sense of rest—”not static rest, but spiritual, thoughtful repose: the sublimity that has fused with beauty.”119 For this reason, thanks to its beautiful equipoise of form and content, Hegel considers “sculpture, more than every other art, [to be] indicative of the ideal.” In this sense, while it appeared in the middle of the historical-cum-dialectic chain that linked symbolic art to classical art and romantic art, classical art was nevertheless, for Hegel, “the consummate art form.”120 The central power and drama of art for Hegel was the fundamental transformation it effected, whereby “lifeless, inorganic matter” was suffused with spiritual significance. In this way, as Stephen Houlgate observes, art “transforms ‘dead’ matter
into meaningful expression of spirit, freedom, and life.”121 In his overview of Aesthetics, Hegel describes the transition from the symbolic to the classical stage in particularly striking terms: “Thus [in symbolic art] the temple is built for the god and stands ready as the god’s house; inorganic nature is reworked and suddenly the lightning flash of individuality pervades it, the god stands there within it, is portrayed there, the statues are erected in the temple. Now what is spiritual has completely taken over the material, infinite form has concentrated itself in corporeality, in the inert mass built up into infinite form.”122 Of all artistic mediums, sculpture particularly lent itself to these dynamics of transformation. We can imagine that observing the Dresden antiquities by torchlight, Hegel would have been struck by the animating dance of the light and shadows and their effect on the quintessentially sculptural—qua “monochrome” (einfarbig) and static—medium of marble.123 Indeed, we may well see traces of these formative visits in Hegel’s subsequent thinking and writing on classical sculpture, in which he returned again and again to metaphors of animation. Insofar as Hegel seems to have borrowed from Winckelmann his “watery metaphors,” the language deployed by Hegel in his description of ideal sculptural flesh resonates with the undulating effects of marble “skin” under the flickering light of the torch. In his thinking about sculpture in and beyond Aesthetics, Hegel invokes the impression of the skin’s “undulation” and its essential “fluidity.”124 In a remarkable description of sculpted flesh in its ideal form, Hegel writes, “One gets the feeling of an animated fluid [einer belebten Flüssigkeit] . . . in which each part has its particular form and differences and a distinction [Auszeichnung] that does not harm the whole.”125 Hegel’s disparagement of
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Böttiger for having “grop[ed] the soft marble parts of the female goddesses” takes on new meaning when set against the backdrop of his own emphasis on the animation of sculpture as moving flesh in ideal classical sculpture.126 Winckelmann before him had noted the curious fact that legions of artists had “fondle[d] [the Belvedere] torso, let their hands softly glide over its beautiful, serpentine bends, exclaiming, ‘Oh, isn’t it beautiful!’”— but without ever asking why—and he had spent months crafting his response, the “Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome.”127 For Hegel, who made the connection between ideal flesh and divine autonomy distilled in the form of the human figure, Böttiger’s response would have registered as nothing short of a desecration of art’s most vaunted values. Above and beyond possible connections between the fluid, undulating animation of sculptural skin and sculpture viewed by torchlight, Hegel would seem to invoke the torchlight view specifically as the best means of discerning classical sculpture’s distinct achievements. Reflecting on the perfection of the Greek sculptural ideal, Hegel observed that “the ingenuity they evidence is so refined that it strikes the eye not directly but only in various lighting and positioning.”128 In order to apprehend the “fine nuances” of sculpture’s rendition of flesh, viewers benefit from “a certain illumination where there is a stronger contrast of light and shade”—precisely, that is, the impression of sculpture provided by nocturnal torchlight views.129 “What matters most to us in the overall impression,” Hegel wrote, “is the allure of an animated surface, that all the bodily parts segue into one another in delicate specificity.”130 In his highlighting of the importance of specifically visual acuity relative to sculpture’s surface, Hegel starkly parted
ways with Herder’s reflections on the paragone. In his Plastik, Herder made a pronounced case for sculpture’s alignment with touch, in stark contrast to painting’s affiliation with sight. In this sense, sculpture necessarily involved its audiences in the embodied presentation of material to the sensate spectator. If the comparison of sculpture according to Herder and to Hegel reveals something like an art of the hand versus an art of the eye, in the final analysis, as Houlgate notes, Hegel moves closer to Herder as he considers the pragmatics of sculptural viewing. Even in the best (read: strongly lit) encounters, Hegel admits that the hand may be able to discern more information about sculptural surfaces than the eye.131 The torch could simulate, but in the end not entirely stand in for, touch. In their reflections on these dynamics, Herder and Hegel were in the excellent company of decades of spectators of torchlight views and of sculpture’s unruly shadows. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the fashion for torchlight views was on the wane.132 In fact, by the year of Ingres’s Exposition universelle retrospective in 1855, sculpture’s—and so too sculptural painting’s— vivifying capacities were, along with the torchlight view, fading from view. For precisely the terms by which Hegel heralded classical sculpture—its depiction of human figures distinguished for their calm self-sufficiency and for their lack of “particular subjectivity”—stood rather, by the 1860s, as certification that such an art was outside of the concerns and demands of modern art and modern viewers. In their call for expressivity, naturalism, and above all, subjective particularity, artists and critics renounced precisely those qualities that redounded both to classical sculpture and to sculpture as such, which had for so long been understood as a coextensive category.
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In its move from torchlit enthusiasms of the 1770s through the early decades of the nineteenth century, and in its account of attacks on sculptural painting and anxieties about sculpture as such, this chapter has explored key symptoms of broader shifts in thinking through the antique. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a structural frisson was evident between sculpture’s capacities for animation and mortification. By the middle decades of the following century, the
balance fundamentally shifted, insofar as the sense of the antique as morbid and cold dominated and indeed operated as a default assumption. The following chapters will turn to other crucial genealogies of this historical arc, with an inheritor of the torchlight view taking center stage first. The excavator’s lamp will be the guide in a chapter devoted to animation and mortification, sculpture and touch, as embodied and experienced at Herculaneum and Pompeii.
Chapter 3
From the Ash to the Fire
B
y the final decades of the eighteenth century and with renewed urgency in the decades after 1763, the Bay of Naples was the preeminent site where it was possible to enjoy an immersive experience of the antique. It was also a place where sculpture’s animating and mortifying capacities were brought into intimate contact. Even as figural sculptures were unearthed, so were all too recognizable traces of human bodies, whether by way of skeletal remains or as discerned through extant impressions in volcanic mud and ash. Among the most famous of these was the imprint of a female torso, discovered in December 1772 and quickly put on exhibition, first at the Herculaneum Museum at the Royal Palace at Portici and subsequently at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, soon becoming one of the most remarked upon of the city’s many discoveries. This chapter explores the
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Bay of Naples’s distinctively embodied and emphatically material antique, in an account that draws together the breast imprint unearthed in the eighteenth century, the revelations of bronze and marble figures that punctuated and fueled archaeological exploration, the literal “antique” bodily forms made possible thanks to the casting process developed by Fiorelli one hundred years later, and the enduring legacy of such phantom bodily imprints in Jensen’s 1903 novella, Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy, and Freud’s subsequent analysis of this text in 1907.1 The chronological scope of the chapter’s materials attests to the magnetic power and striking longevity of the unique Pompeian scenario of arrested time, miraculous discovery, and revival. The early excavations were fueled by the unearthing of artifacts, notably including statues, as Walpole’s pithy account of Herculaneum attests: “This underground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been discovered. It was found out by chance about a year and a half ago. They began digging, they found statues; they dug farther, they found more.”2 Marble and bronze forms emerging from the earth were soon joined by traces of human remains. Together, these artifacts helped move Pompeii, and the antique more broadly, from the shadows—from the obscure realms of narrative, song, and dream—to embodied, visible form. As Alexandre Dumas père observed of the excavations in 1843, “Pompeii emerges from her tomb, dead it is true, but still beautiful as the day when she descended into it. Until now we have evoked the shadows of men: from this moment we will conjure the ghosts of a city.” Antiquity, which had until this point been “narrated by historians, sung by poets, dreamed by scholars,” thanks to Pompeii, “has suddenly taken on a body: the past makes itself visible for the future.”3
The idea of Pompeian reanimation was a subject of immense popular appeal well before Fiorelli’s technique gave it positive sculptural form. From Francesco Piranesi and Louis-Jean Desprez’s archeological dessins coloriés to Edward BulwerLytton’s best-seller, Last Days of Pompeii (1834), artists and authors recognized Pompeii’s special promise of antique encounter, poised between the emphatically material and the ghostly. The tension between phantasmatic projection and archaeological trace are evocatively captured in Théodore Chassériau’s Tepidarium (1853), a painting that was the result of a painstaking project of reconstructing and reanimating Pompeian antiquity. Folding backward from the Tepidarium to Rousseau’s 1762 scène lyrique, Pygmalion, and Girodet’s Pygmalion and Galatea of 1819, as well as forward to Jensen and Freud, the chapter probes the Pompeian roots of a Pygmalion sublime of transformative identification. From the start, these are instances of double recovery, in which the city’s sculptural traces yield an archaeology at once of the past and of the self. From their beginning, the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii involved the fascinating revelations of bodies coming from the earth. After the initial discoveries of marble architectural fragments in Portici in 1711, which led to further excavation by Prince d’Elbeuf (Emmanuel-Maurice de Lorraine), explorations were famously punctuated by the discovery of figural sculpture. In his early account, Marcello Venuti reported, “Scarce had they begun digging into the Side of the Earth, when they found some beautiful Statues, among which was one of Hercules in Marble, and another thought to be Cleopatra.”4 By the time of d’Elbeuf ’s return to Austria in 1716, as many as eighteen life-size statues in marble may have been excavated.5 The Herculaneum Women, referred to as “the vestals” by
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Figure 70 Large
Herculaneum Woman (left), Roman, 40–60 ce; Small Herculaneum Woman (right), Roman, 30–1 bce. Marble. Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Ingrid Geske / Art Resource, New York.
Winckelmann, were among the remarkable early discoveries (fig. 70).6 By all accounts, major sculptural finds played a pivotal role in the continuing investigation underground. Indeed, J. de La Roque notes that without having found “les plus belles statues” in the Herculaneum Theater (a reference to the marble equestrian figures of the Nonii Balbi), the excavations may well not have continued.7 Early on, antique figural sculptural artifacts, whether marble or bronze, were physically and conceptually paired with the remains of their human analogues. In July 1760, a celebrated archaic sculpture of Diana was discovered in Pompeii in
what is now, thanks to the sculpture, called the House of the Archaistic Diana. The sculpture was famed for its extant polychromy, and its reputation spread quickly; the object was mentioned shortly after its discovery by Winckelmann in his 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity.8 An undated watercolor by Victor-Jean Nicolle (1754–1826) depicts the imagined scene of the work’s creation in an ancient sculptor’s studio (fig. 71)—a radically different vision from the situation on the ground in 1760, when the dig’s journals report that the sculpture was discovered on a site that likewise yielded the remains of two human corpses.9 Even as it would appear to
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thoroughly evacuate human life from its rendition of the sculpture’s originary scene, Nicolle’s picture, likely produced during one of his two extended Italian journeys, took shape at a moment when the conceptual categories of sculpture, the antique, and the body were fundamentally interwoven.10 An intertwining of sculptural and human remains extended beyond site journals and specialist knowledge to travelers’ experiences. Writing in early 1786, Hester Lynch Piozzi explicitly connected Pompeii’s “melancholy proof[s]”of human bodies arrested by death to the materials and objects of art. Piozzi identified “a woman’s foot, the print of her foot” as the most striking object offered up at Pompeii, describing it as a sort of commemorative “intaglio,” while she likened the bed, which retains “the impression of a sick female,” to plaster of Paris.11 The connections made by Piozzi emphasized the potency of the commingling of human and artistic remains witnessed in the key sites of excavation. Writing in June 1740, Walpole itemized the noteworthy finds at Herculaneum, including “some fine statues, some human bones, some rice, medals, and a few paintings extremely fine.”12 Seven months earlier, Charles de Brosses punctuated his expanded list of discoveries—which included “column bases and capitals; bits of burnt wood, the remains of partially melted bronze; inscriptions on some of which may be read the name Herculée”— with a vivid picture of that state of semi-internment in which statues were “partially immured in the earth.”13 Later, in 1766, in the midst of the excavations at Pompeii, a marble head, called the “Head of Isis,” was unearthed at the entrance to the Temple of Isis (fig. 72). The acrolithic remnants consisted of the head, a left hand, a right hand and arm, and a portion of the feet, together with traces of the body’s structure of wood and fabric, “whose impression in the ground was identified.”14 In its unusual conjoining of the
sculptural and the bodily, the acrolith and its impression at once echoed and anticipated other more celebrated efforts to discern and reconstitute lost bodies in and through sculptural forms. The discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii have been seen to catalyze epochal shifts in the understanding of the classical world and to precipitate the distinction, which would be solidified over the next century, between the work of the antiquarian and that of the archaeologist. Between 1750 and 1850, in British, French, and German contexts, these terms remained unstable and very much in formation during a period characterized by an increasing awareness of excavations and discoveries in the Bay of Naples. Heightened knowledge of these activities emerged thanks to the significant increase in “learned travel,” whether in the guise of the grand tour or expeditions launched by learned societies, the proliferation of scholarly publications, and the establishment of modern academic departments in university settings. Crucially, this period was likewise shaped by the radical reorientation that took place between 1800 and 1850, whereby “archaeology” came to be primarily identified with the analysis of physical artifacts rather than text.15 Debates were waged about the means and ends for studying the classical past, especially in Germany. Christian Gottlob Heyne’s Göttingen lectures on what he termed Archäologie der Kunst (archaeology of art) and Friedrich August Wolf ’s formulation of Altertumswissenschaft (antiquity science) in Halle staked out what would become two opposing approaches, one focused on the analysis of text in the guise of philology and the other on monuments in myriad material traces. Two key developmental narratives have characterized the shifting approaches to the antique that took shape in this crucial one-hundred-year period. According to one account, an eighteenth-century
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Figure 71 Victor-Jean
Nicolle, The Imaginary Studio of an Ancient Sculptor, undated. Watercolor. Musée Baron Martin, Gray. Figure 72 “Head of Isis,” ca. 50 to 79 ce, excavated in
1766 from the entrance of the Temple of Isis, Pompeii. Museo Archeologico, Naples.
aspiration for objectivity eventually gave way to an emergent nineteenth-century embrace of sentiment.16 The animating telos here—the apotheosis of romanticism’s emphasis on experience and sensation—runs up against other historical developments and a competing narrative. A second account, which has already been invoked, emphasizes the rise of the self-consciously scientific study of the classical world. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, initially in the German context, such inquiry was newly rooted in university departments rather than royal or princely collections. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s study of the nineteenth century rise of “objectivity” points the way out of this interpretive impasse. If, by the 1850s, the modern sense of “objectivity” as a fundamental
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epistemic goal had been consolidated in all domains of intellectual life, this achievement was intimately bound up with a sense of the “subjective self.” And in this way, the emphasis on “subjectivity,” long recognized as a key post-Kantian inheritance, should be understood less as antagonistic to the rise of “objectivity” than its inalienable twin.17 The Neapolitan setting produced a veritable laboratory in which new forms of antiquarian pursuit took shape, thanks to the work of such figures as William Hamilton.18 In Naples, Hamilton fashioned an antiquarianism in which philosophical and historical inquiry were intertwined with emergent ethnographic practices and with the sustained exploration of the natural sciences, evident in his pursuit of geology and vulcanology, no doubt stimulated by the region’s volcanic eruptions and catastrophic earthquakes. And yet, across a period marked by substantial transformations in the conceptualization of antiquarian and archaeological practices, accounts of generations of visitors evince a remarkable consistency. These reminiscences provide a particularly vivid demonstration of Daston and Galison’s contention about the fundamental doubling at the heart of the emergence of nineteenth-century “objectivity.” Giving the lie to any neat division between “reason” or “sentiment,” Pompeii, as travelers attested, elicited both.
Antiquity, Experience, and the Historical Fold in the Bay of Naples While visitors to Herculaneum and Pompeii were unable to feast their eyes on the famed Herculaneum Women, long since removed to Dresden by the 1740s, the royal collection at Portici, accessible from 1750 and formally inaugurated in 1758 as the Herculaneum Museum, quickly emerged as an
essential element of any trip to the Bay of Naples.19 Piranesi’s sketches of the museum in 1770 (subsequently published in 1806 by his son Francesco), when taken together with visitor narratives of tours of the collection, emphasize the centrality of figural sculpture to the museum’s floor plan. As visitors moved from the entrance, across the courtyard, and into the palace, they would have encountered the famous marble equestrian statues of the consuls Marcus Nonius Balbus (father and son) from the Herculaneum forum and the marble statue of the mother of Nonius Balbus; large bronze statues of emperors and empresses; colossal figures from the basilica; and on the spiral staircase leading to the museum, six bronze statues of women from the Villa of the Papyri. Once inside, viewers moved through rooms that were, in some cases, anchored by particularly striking sculptural finds such as the Drunken Faun, a statuette of Alexander on Horseback, the Sleeping Faun, and the Seated Mercury. Among other highlights were a panathenaic Athena, an archaic Isis and Dionysus from the Temple of Isis, runners from the Villa of the Papyri, and the archaic Diana from Pompeii. In his 1762 “Letter on the Discoveries at Herculaneum,” Winckelmann provided a virtual tour of the royal collections, along with wide-ranging reflections on the presence and quality of the figural sculptural finds then on view.20 Officially opened in 1758, the Herculaneum Museum was, at the time of Winckelmann’s “Letter on the Discoveries,” still very much in the process of being installed. By 1770, however, it would seem that the exhibition’s sculptural logic had been consolidated. Insofar as individual artistic finds, from largescale figural sculpture and wall paintings to tessellated floor mosaics, anchored the museum’s organization, as they likewise did descriptions and
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depictions of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the newly vivid picture of the daily life of the antique that emerged in the Bay of Naples in the decades following midcentury was equally gripping. Traveler after traveler was struck by the fulsome, uncurated view of the past available at these sites. Such a view of everyday life resulted, moreover, in a new sense of identification with the past and its inhabitants. Accounts attest to the experience of a sort of temporal fold whereby the lives of long-departed inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii seemed to be brought into intimate contact with those of the visitors. In 1785, writing from Naples, Piozzi was struck by the disconnect between Rome’s “childish display of empty splendour,” where “Royalty [was] demolished, Empire destroyed,” and her experience at Herculaneum and Pompeii where “the Business comes closer to our own Bosom.” Having recounted “the Bread left baked, the Meat put upon the dishes, the Wine petrified in the Decanters,” Piozzi invoked the shopkeepers, soldiers, and babies who perished, concluding, “We cannot all be Kings and Heroes; but we are all Men and Women.”21 Whereas Rome told the story of empire, Pompeii’s objects appealed to an imagined common humanity across the millennia. Such an acute connection was likewise registered even by those who experienced the most rudimentary early glimpses offered to the first travelers to Herculaneum. Brosses, who was among the first to visit and record his impressions in 1739/40, struggled to avoid getting bogged down in recounting his confrontation with the stuff of everyday life. Citing the “quantity of lamps, vases, instruments of sacrifice, of battle or the bath, urns, etc.,” Brosses singles out a marble table and notes “a bit of bread, some nuts and olives, still conserved their appearance even though reduced to carbon.”
By arranging all that has been excavated there, Brosses writes, “we would have without doubt the most singular collection of antiquities it would be possible to assemble.”22 Visiting almost four decades later, Henry Swinburne echoed Brosses’s observations, remarking upon “lamps in endless variety, vases and basins of noble dimensions, chandeliers of the most beautiful shape, pateras and other appurtenances of sacrifice, looking-glasses of polished metal . . . a kitchen completely fitted up . . . specimens of all sorts of eatables, retaining their shape though burnt to a cinder.”23 The common narrative tendency toward list-making is here joined to a fascination with the explicitly domestic; together, they are given a special poignancy thanks to the freeze-frame effect: this kitchen “completely fitted up” suggests the instant in which the eruption of Vesuvius froze the kitchen—and its inhabitants—for history.24 As these examples suggest, among the crucial, singular shifts in perspective offered up in the Bay of Naples was the impression of surveying a panoramic view of everyday life in 79 ce. The fruits of the digs included objects long recognized as artistically and culturally significant, such as the much remarked upon marble statues of Marcus Nonius Balbus and his son, life-size bronze sculptures of a Drunken Silenus and a Seated Hermes, or the wall paintings found at the Herculaneum theater, together with decorative arts, kitchen utensils, and remains of edibles.25 One effect of these new combinations was to bring ordinary artifacts into the orbit of the arts of sculpture, painting, and architecture. Writing in 1774, Pierre Bergeret de Grancourt emphasized the artistic accomplishment demonstrated in bronze lamps and utensils, which in his account implicitly surpassed the qualities of recovered sculpture and painting. Turning his attention to carbonized bread and figs,
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along with “all the instruments for (making) patisserie, molds, rolling pins, and many brands to put on bread or pastries,” the author concludes that at Herculaneum “beautiful things are rare, but antiquities very numerous.”26 In the collections at Portici, Bergeret de Grancourt’s text suggests, “antiquities” was capaciously construed. While the dizzying array of objects threatened to plunge Bergeret de Grancourt into an infinite accounting of details (a danger he recognized), the experience nevertheless prompted a moment of identification and connection across time. Surveying these finds, the author was struck by the poignant realization that the ancients, like their modern viewers, “satisfied the same needs as us, and that the forms and procedures were essentially the same.”27 A decade later, Dupaty directly addressed the special nature of the exhibits at Herculaneum, a collection that brought together “chirurgical, musical, warlike and religious instruments, intermixed with those of agriculture, the kitchen, and for other uses.” In their proximity in space and in their address to the viewer, they constituted “the oddest assemblage.” Nevertheless, this accumulation of objects functioned as a springboard for Dupaty’s turn to philosophical reflection: “Who would not be surprised, in examining the relics of Herculaneum, to meet with eggs preserved intire [sic]; as likewise bread, corn, oil, and wine? . . . One is astonished and delighted, that things of so perishable a nature have baffled the irresistible power of so many centuries as have passed over the buried town of Herculaneum. One likes to see a grain of corn triumphing over time, as well as the bronze statue, and gaining its share of eternity with it.”28 Dupaty, like many others, here proved responsive to the museological innovations staged at the Herculaneum Museum. In addition to glass vitrines containing myriad excavated objects, a fully
outfitted kitchen, complete with oven, dishes, and utensils, was assembled and presented as a full-scale, immersive diorama of the real.29 The poignant connection that this presentation effected for many visitors would undoubtedly have had a further echo in encounters with the negative imprint of the bodies of victims of the eruption, likewise on view in the space of the museum.30 If a grain of corn could trigger considerations of mortality at the Herculaneum Museum, this experience was heightened on site at Pompeii. There, encounters with wine casks, identifiable shops, and cobblestone streets still bearing the marks of carriage wheels left many a visitor struck by the fact that such objects had endured. If anything, this sense of witnessing time stopped in its tracks was heightened at Pompeii, which, thanks to its aboveground situation, proved significantly easier to excavate and to navigate by visitors. A typical eighteenth-century tour tended to include a cross section of lives stopped in an instant in the guise of unearthed skeletons of a laundress, gladiators, soldiers, priests in the midst of sacred rites, prisoners still in chains, and elite property owners, among others. In both locations, the special promise held out by the gradual exhumation of the buried cities hinged on their distinct ability to yield a view onto a previously unimaginable whole.31 For the first time, the past appeared as an integral, material ensemble, available for scrutiny by antiquarians and amateurs alike. A sense of disbelief couched in just these terms is summed up by Dupaty, who remarked apropos of his visit to Pompeii in 1785, “I am astonished when I reflect that I am walking from house to house, from temple to temple, from street to street, in a town built two thousand years ago, inhabited by Romans, disinterred by a king of Naples, and
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perfectly preserved.”32 Writing after the discovery of Herculaneum and just prior to the finds at Pompeii, antiquarian (and founder of an early public museum of antiquities in Verona) Scipione Maffei dreamed of systematic clearing—from the top down—by which “the extinguished city shall be born again, and after one thousand seven hundred years it will see the sun once more.” Far from simply satisfying the parochial interests of antiquarians, Maffei imagined that, by such excavations, “we shall learn many, many things about everyday life, and about architecture, and the arts, and erudition, which in the books we searched for but in vain.”33 Maffei’s Pompeii was doubly illuminating: as a reanimated antique site and as a means to shed light onto human lives, then and now. As Maria Teresa Caracciolo has recently emphasized, the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii stimulated “a dialogue between the buried cities and the eighteenth-century cities, between the ancient populations found buried under the layers of ash and lava and the modern inhabitants of the European cities.”34 And thus, archaeological finds held the potential to bring both distant and current situations newly into focus. Even as they promised to close the physical and imaginative gap between past and present, excavations in the Bay of Naples contributed to a sea change in a sense of the antique, broadly speaking. Chantal Grell has observed that the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, as integral, intact cities, incited a shift from the previously “fragmented knowledge [of ] a fragmented antiquity” to an enriched and enlarged sense of antique “civilization,” a term that was itself a product of the eighteenth century.35 This commanding new vision of the past that took shape in the decades immediately following the discoveries of Herculaneum and
Pompeii corresponds chronologically with a burgeoning tendency to locate works of art conceptually within the contemporary situation of their making—the seeds of the historical project that would be most famously embraced by Winckelmann. Indeed, for Winckelmann, a repeat visitor to Naples between 1758 and 1767, the radically expanded field of vision onto the antique that these sites made possible was key to his larger project, in which a desire to produce history “in the wider sense,” that is, as a system, rested firmly on the firsthand examination of existing artifacts and conceptually upon the promise of new discoveries that would certify past conjectures or reveal them to be erroneous.36 Winckelmann’s approach, which modulated between the scrutiny of artifacts and the systematization of those objects into a broader history, was shared by others, notably Goethe. Developments in the Bay of Naples stimulated Goethe’s comparisons between the long-buried past and the stillvibrant present in the guise of contemporary Neapolitans. Goethe was struck by the resonances between the vision distilled by recently unearthed remains of the antique and what he described as the “living antique” in the Bay of Naples. His observations resonate with other emergent anthropological accounts, notably those of William Hamilton, Richard Payne Knight, and Andrea de Jorio, for whom contemporary uses of the body, its gestures, and its uncanny doubles (for example, in the guise of wax phalluses) in the Kingdom of Naples were thought to provide a link to, and window upon, ancient pagan rituals.37 As Goethe explored the “mummified city” of Pompeii, he simultaneously imagined connections between past and present: in the scale of habitations and in the “habits, tastes, amusements and style of living” of
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the region’s inhabitants.38 Goethe’s account and those of others make us alert to the dynamics of the historical fold that opened up in the Bay of Naples. If the artifacts were familiar, the habits and customs of life were likewise recognizable not only as those echoed in the lives of contemporary Neapolitans but in the lives of the visitors, too. The view from above, in short, was inevitably accompanied by a view from below and finally also by something like a view in the mirror. This sense of unwitting time travel, of seeing oneself echoed or implicated in the lives of those long past, was informed by the specific conditions of embodied experiences at Herculaneum and Pompeii. In the years following 1738, visitors to the Bay of Naples had access to a distinctive encounter with the antique when they toured Herculaneum and Portici. At that time, the royal collection at Portici was the richest venue for viewing artifacts, as the bulk of finds deemed especially meaningful had been put on exhibition there. It was common to pair a visit to the Herculaneum Museum with a trip to investigate firsthand the ongoing explorations deep below ground.39 Notably, Herculaneum provided a profoundly subterranean experience, much remarked upon by visitors.40 The thick lava that had covered Herculaneum (aptly described by Anne-Marie Du Bocage as “liquified lead, as it were”41) made for slow progress in clearing the space, which resulted in a range of mechanisms to provide access to visitors over the course of the eighteenth century. In the first scholarly account of the discoveries, Venuti described having been lowered down (by “a Rope about [his] Middle”) into the theater of Herculaneum, and shortly thereafter, in 1739, Brosses portrayed his descent as if he were entering into a mine shaft.42 In 1740, Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray evoked the long, oppressively constrained passages
at Herculaneum where visitors “may walk the compass of a mile,” but “the path is very narrow, just wide enough and high enough for one man to walk upright.”43 By the time of their trip, Gray reported that it was possible to “descend . . . conveniently to the depth of about 30 foot by the stone Steps of a Theatre, that they have found.”44 Bergeret de Grancourt reported of his descent “80 feet below ground” that “one must be provided with coats for the great cold, and for the number of torches.” The chilliness and darkness, together with the workers’ concern to provide adequate structural support for the earth above their heads, conspired to produce what was for Bergeret de Grancourt (as for others) an altogether disappointing experience.45 With key finds having been removed to Portici, a visit to Herculaneum yielded accounts focused on its unique impression and atmosphere, shaped by the ubiquitous “flambeaux” or torchlit view. Despite the differing levels of submergence of the two sites, descriptions of visits to Pompeii likewise echoed the experience of subterranean darkness and a sense of more or less clear threat.46 An overarching sense of secrecy and prohibition likewise loomed large at both sites. Beginning at Herculaneum, visitors experienced a rigorously enforced policy constraining them from any notetaking whatsoever. The policy, aimed to ensure the royal monopoly on (glacially slow) publications of the key finds, Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (8 volumes, 1757–92), seems to have been enforced with great consistency for visitors in the decades between 1740 and the 1770s.47 Winckelmann’s famously frustrated efforts to be allowed to make notations seem to have been shared by many less illustrious visitors.48 There were exceptions to this rule: notably William Hamilton, British envoy to the Neapolitan court, with artist Pietro Fabris, who produced views
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of Pompeii later engraved to accompany Hamilton’s 1776 Campi Phlegraei and 1777 Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii; and Dominique Vivant Denon, who reported bribing the guards and working at night in order to realize the documentation ultimately published in Voyage pittoresque.49 In Pompeii, Lady Anna Miller described a culture of surveillance and risk that framed visits to the archaeological sites and collection spaces of the Bay of Naples in the eighteenth century.50 Indeed, part of the frisson of such visits seems to have turned upon threats, both imagined and real. Subterranean dangers loomed at both sites in the form of the potential structural collapse of Herculaneum’s underground pathways, the “unwholesomeness” of its air, and the “dangerous vapours” arising from a staircase at the Temple of Isis at Pompeii.51 Of course, a more direct and literal danger was recognized by a vast majority of visitors, one that had laid waste to these sites in 62 ce and more definitively in 79 ce: Mount Vesuvius itself. During his April 1774 visit, Bergeret de Grancourt evocatively described the volcano that was still actively erupting throughout the eighteenth century as “continually vomiting its flames.”52 The hazard was felt to be urgent enough that the Portici museum holdings were transferred to Naples following what was termed the “century eruption” of 1779. The fact that Vesuvius remained in a fairly constant state of eruption provided further fodder for visitors to project a visceral connection with the ancient citizens of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Writing in 1785, Dupaty framed his visit to the Bay of Naples by way of a panorama of threat: “Herculaneum, Vesuvius, and the sea, threaten to swallow Portici—the volcano in its lava, the sea in its waves, and Herculaneum in the midst of its ruins.”53 Piozzi described her amazement at the volcano’s
soundscape, which made a powerful impression “when in the silent night, . . . one listens to its groaning.”54 Thirty years later, Vesuvius represented a major preoccupation for Goethe, who repeatedly summited the volcano over the course of his visits to Naples, where he pushed the limits of safety. Though overcome by smoke and forced to turn back in the course of a hike in early March 1787, he eagerly returned for a close view onto the “hellish fumes” and the “lava gushing forth” from the crater later that month. In a letter closely following his first ascent, he enclosed “the envelope of [his correspondent’s] last letter, with a smoke-blackened corner as evidence that [he] took it along with [him] up Vesuvius.” More than simply an evocative souvenir, Goethe’s bit of charred envelope underscores the degree to which the physical trace of destructive natural forces was vital to the affective power and delight of this place.55 A similar urge to capture an experience of the Vesuvian sublime led to the development of a new genre of landscape picture, in which catastrophe was figured by way of the erupting volcano. Jacob More’s Mount Vesuvius in Eruption (1780) is exemplary of the genre, in which direct observation of contemporary eruptions is merged with historical reconstruction, here by way of the inclusion of the figures in the foreground inspired by Pliny the Younger’s description of the destruction of Pompeii that resulted in the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder (fig. 73).56 Many more such images proliferated in the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, including Pierre-Henri de Valencienne’s Eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August 79 AD Under the Rule of Titus of 1813 and Karl Bryullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii of 1833. Another Vesuvius enthusiast was Hamilton, who famously made the volcano the subject of
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Figure 73 Jacob More,
Mount Vesuvius in Eruption, 1780. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, presented to the RI by Sir John James Steuart of Allanbank 1829; transferred 1859. Photo: Antonia Reeve.
prolonged firsthand scrutiny over the course of thirty-five years, summiting the volcano in the daytime and at night at least sixty-eight times and even acting as guide for royal visitors.57 Hamilton’s extended study ultimately took the form of the luxury folio Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies (Naples, 1776), accompanied by fifty-four hand-colored engravings by Fabris (who was commissioned by Hamilton to create gouache drawings to accompany the text).58 Here, Hamilton’s rigorously empirical observations of volcanos and volcanic rocks in the Bay of Naples opened onto larger questions about the earth’s history and geological age. While this project would seem to be far removed from Goethe’s celebration of his deeply subjective and intensely
felt experience of the landscape, Hamilton elsewhere demonstrates that empirical observation could lead to affective encounter. Hamilton’s Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii provides a strikingly clinical description of the excavations, even as it is notably punctuated by key episodes in which empirical exposition competes with the urge to create narrative, occasionally veering into the realm of the personally embodied and even the miraculous (10). In one such episode, Hamilton recounts the exhumation of a skeleton in the vicinity of the Villa Rustica (also known as the Villa of Diomedes). Moving closer to in order to encourage “the labourers to remove the skull and bones gently,” Hamilton writes that he “perceived distinctly the perfect mould of every feature of the
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face, and that the eyes had been shut. I also saw distinctly the impression of the large folds of the drapery of the toga, and some of the cloth itself still sticking to the earth” (15). Hamilton connected the impression to its famous analogue: “In the Museum at Portici a piece of . . . hardened mud is preserved; it is stamped with the impression of the breast of a woman, with a thin drapery over it.” Redoubling the emphasis on his role as witness, Hamilton concludes with his sense of the miraculous nature of the artifact’s integrity: “The skeleton I saw dug out was not above five feet from the surface. It is very extraordinary, that the impression of the body and face should have remained so entire from the year 79 to this day, especially as I found the earth so little hardened, that it separated upon the least touch” (15–16). Touching earth is likewise earth made touching, in the sense of rendering Hamilton and his audience of subsequent readers sensible to the dizzying passage of historical time and the necessarily transitory nature of human life by way of the body rendered as sculpture. Piozzi, who recounts being overwhelmed by “the Bread left baked, the Meat put upon the dishes, the Wine petrified in the Decanters,” is, like Hamilton, awestruck by the human traces left in Pompeian earth and volcanic material. Piozzi’s encounter with “the impression of a Fool in the Act of escaping, and of a Female who being confined to her Bed could not try to escape, but has left the print of her Person— and light—in the hot Liquid which suddenly surrounded her” was so moving that she concludes, “There is no Comparison between one’s Sensations at home and those one feels at Naples.”59 Notably, for Hamilton as for other visitors, human remains in Herculaneum and Pompeii occupied a privileged position relative to the overwhelming breadth of the material traces of the past.
Mary Beard observes that the “sheer bulk of what survives” at Pompeii poses new problems of interpretation since “the material evidence cannot speak for itself.”60 At the same time, and as eighteenthcentury accounts attest, against this obdurate “muteness” of objects, the discovery of skeletons or the frozen negative traces of bodies in mud stimulated the creation of narrative as visitors wound time backward, imagining, and often imaginatively identifying with, the identities and experiences of long dead Pompeians. Hamilton’s uncharacteristic descriptive pause to attend to the discovery of fragile human traces is echoed in Miller’s travels. Coming across a skeleton at Pompeii, Miller yields, as so many before and after her, to the impulse of narrative, extrapolating from the remains “a poor slave, who probably had been employed in heating a bath, near which his skeleton remains, having been stifled in that occupation at the same time that the town was destroyed.” Struck by the whiteness of the burnt bones, Miller confides to the reader, “I brought away with me one of those [bones] which form the neck, or vertebrae.”61 Such vivid experiences of bridging the historical gap could, however, prove unsettling. Having witnessed a fellow tourist pocket a human bone at Pompeii, Piozzi observes: “How very horrible the certainty, that such a scene may be all acted over again to-morrow; and that we, who to-day are spectators, may become spectacles to travelers of a succeeding century, who mistaking our bones for those of the Neapolitans, may carry some of them to their native country back again perhaps.”62 As Piozzi’s reflection attests, the lure of identification held out by Pompeii’s human artifacts could lead to a mise en abyme of the historical fold experienced at the excavated site, often to disconcerting effect.
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Ruin and Reverie: The Temple of Isis and the Skeletal Laundress Despite the avidity expressed by travelers like Miller and Piozzi, to some visitors Pompeii proved a source of disappointment, which often turned on questions of scale.63 The idea of Pompeii’s and Herculaneum’s perceived monumentality was more an impression understood conceptually than a function of the site’s physical grandeur or of the outstanding qualities of their architectural structures and artifacts.64 In 1787, Goethe famously remarked on the “small, cramped size of Pompeii,” where even the major finds evoked comparison to “models and doll houses” rather than buildings.65 One effect of the sites’ relatively diminutive scale was a transformation in the status and, to some extent, function of the ruin. While the notion of the ruin had, in the Renaissance tradition, been directly linked to grandiosity, the sites in the Bay of Naples prompted a shift in this understanding. Unexceptional in size and absent from the ancient literary record, the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii encouraged, by necessity, a new kind of relationship between traveler and site, one that put pressure on the here and now of the encounter rather than on the erudite evocation of appropriate textual citations. Witness Brosses struggling with just this challenge in his 1739 account of his visit to Herculaneum, wherein a palpable sense of relief is evident when the author’s ability to identify a group of statues as the family of Nonius Balbus allows him to shift to a more familiar philological mode.66 If the sense of ruin took on a new inflection in the Bay of Naples, from the 1770s onward, encounters with its artifacts stimulated striking flights of reverie. Between 1773 and 1774, Bergeret de Grancourt discussed a range of viewer responses to Pompeii’s spectacle of death (via skeletons) and life
interrupted: “I have seen people more ecstatic than I; some are overly so, others not enough. You may partake of this pleasure in the dose you desire.”67 Piozzi’s assertion that “there is no Comparison between one’s Sensations at home and those one feels at Naples” likewise speaks to the region’s distinctive affective charge for travelers.68 Bergeret de Grancourt’s and Piozzi’s accounts attest to the new emphasis on sentiment and affect that characterized this period when, as Grell observes, “Antiquity is no longer the source of the model, nor the object of study and knowledge. It becomes pretext for flânerie, escape, reverie.”69 Across both written accounts and pictorial records of travels to Pompeii, the Temple of Isis and the so-called Skeletal Laundress emerge as two especially salient flash points that speak to encounters with poignant remains and attest to the productive power of reverie that could be stimulated by ruins in the Bay of Naples, home to irruptions of past and present. In 1777, the thirty-four-year-old, newly minted Prix de Rome–winning architect Desprez traveled, in the company of Denon, to the south of Rome, having been commissioned by the Abbé de SaintNon to create illustrations for his monumental Voyage pittoresque ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, published in four volumes from 1781 to 1786.70 His work for the project provided Desprez the opportunity to conjoin an archaeological impulse with the desire for imagined reconstruction, a productive tension inscribed procedurally in his approach. He began with the careful measurement and study of existing sites, work that was subsequently harnessed as fodder for imagined reconstruction and restoration.71 This method is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Desprez’s depictions of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii. Discovered in 1765, the Temple of Isis had emerged by the
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time of Desprez’s visit to the site as a focal point of trips to Pompeii. In Saint-Non’s estimation, it was arguably “the most curious Monument of the Ruins of Pompeii.”72 The temple was one of the first structures to be excavated there, and its fame was due both to its unusually intact state of preservation and its fascinating evidence of the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis, which connected the traditions of ancient Egypt to Greece and Rome.73 The temple stood within a colonnaded courtyard, which also included an altar and a purgatorium, likely related to ritual cleansing. Desprez’s interest in the Temple of Isis is recorded in a number of works executed during his visit in 1778. Desprez’s work at Pompeii may be productively considered in relationship to that of architects Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who produced drawings on site in the years just prior, and his son, Francesco. While Desprez may well have worked directly with Giovanni, his relationship to Francesco is more clearly documented.74 In addition to making prints of contemporary eruptions of Vesuvius and collaborating with Desprez on Grands desseins, a series of engravings of views of Rome, Naples, and Pompeii released in 1783, Francesco Piranesi produced a broadly circulated general site plan of Pompeii in 1792 that included two vignettes based on drawings by Desprez, one of which depicted the Temple of Isis.75 Giovanni Piranesi likewise made numerous drawings of the site. If all three artists were drawn to Pompeii, the Temple of Isis figured as a significant point of contact for the trio. In addition to drawings Desprez made for the Voyage pittoresque, which ultimately included four prints after the artist’s drawings on the subject, he issued three related aquatints together with Francesco Piranesi (fig. 74).76 Giovanni Piranesi’s early ink drawing is characteristic of his approach to the site, which has been
termed “architectural” thanks to his careful delineation of extant structures (fig. 75).77 Temple of Isis at Pompeii evokes the complex’s spatial dimensions, from its colonnaded courtyard to the ruins of the temple at its center, even as the inclusion of visitors subtly establishes the building’s relative scale. Elsewhere Piranesi zeroes in for more detailed treatment of discrete aspects; the Egyptian temple’s unusually well-preserved ornamentation is emphasized in his vivid depiction of stucco decoration (fig. 76). Despite such carefully rendered details, Giovanni Piranesi’s work in the Bay of Naples has supported claims that he was “the first to observe the ruins of Pompeii not just with the objective eye of the architect and the vedutista of the Age of Enlightenment, but also with the eye of the imagination.”78 John Pinto has amplified our understanding, observing of Piranesi’s “speaking ruins” that “it was precisely their physical incompleteness that allowed architects to enter into the surviving works and exercise creative abilities.”79 By comparison, images produced by Francesco Piranesi would seem to go further than his father in terms of the primacy given to imaginative reconstruction. Whereas Giovanni refrained from reconstructive efforts, Francesco routinely included Roman figures in togas.80 The resulting images are rife with curious historical discontinuities produced by pairing accurate depictions of ruins, as they appeared in the eighteenth century, with “ancient” figures, bringing questions of time to the forefront in a strategy that has been evocatively described as “adding a fourth dimension to the engravings.”81 Desprez’s approach to Pompeii resonates with the Piranesis’ double orientation to the archaeological record and to imaginative, even fantastical, reconstruction and animation. Captured in pen and ink with watercolor, Desprez’s first compositional
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study of the Temple of Isis provides a careful rendition of the excavations, including even the protective scaffolding that somewhat obscures the temple and the adjacent sacellum (fig. 77). Viewed from an elevated position, the Temple’s scale appears emphatically diminutive, an effect enhanced by the thatched roof of the temporary protective structures and by the relative size of the human figures who stand at the base of the temple steps. The inclusion of figures instantly recognizable as connoisseurs further underscores the visual acuity that loomed large, both
thematically within the picture and in terms of the observational skills brought to bear by Desprez.82 In the final pen, ink, and gouache drawing, Desprez shifted the perspective in order to capture the structure frontally, seen from a relatively distant, worm’s-eye view (fig. 78). Emphatically symmetrical, the temple here takes on a comparatively grand mien as it looms on the horizon and is accompanied by markedly attenuated figures of tourists/connoisseurs. Desprez further refined these juxtapositions in several recapitulations of the composition, all of
Figure 74 Louis-Jean
Desprez, etched by
Francesco Piranesi, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii, 1788. Aquatint. Cleveland Museum of Art, John L. Severance Fund, 2001.19. Photo: Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Figure 75 Giovanni Piranesi, Temple of Isis at Pompeii, 1776. Pen and brush in brown ink. From Aernout Vosmaer’s album amicorum (1781), 2:197. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 76 Giovanni
Piranesi, View of the Egyptian Temple in the Precinct of Isis at Pompeii, undated. Black pen and brown ink on paper. Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, inv. HdZ. Photo: bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Dietmar Katz / Art Resource, New York.
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Figure 77 Louis-Jean
Desprez, The Temple of Isis
at Pompeii, undated. Pen with brown ink on pencil and red chalk preparation, brown wash, and watercolor. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMH 1805/1875 recto. Photo: Cecilia Heisser / Nationalmuseum. Figure 78 Louis-Jean
Desprez, Temple of Isis at Pompeii, undated. Preparatory drawing for Pierre Gabriel Berthault’s engraving in Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (Paris: Imprimerie de Clousier, 1782), 1.2:114, cat. no. 74. Pen with grey and black ink on traces of pencil, grey lavis, traces of gouache. Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon. Photo © Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, 2009.
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Figure 79 Louis-Jean
Desprez, The Temple of Isis in Pompeii: Imaginary Reconstruction, 1779–80. Preparatory drawing for Berthault’s engraving from Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (Paris: Imprimerie de Clousier, 1782), 1.2:118, cat. no. 75bis. Pen with grey ink, grey lavis, watercolor, traces of gouache on paper. Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon. Photo © Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, 2009.
which underscore the evidentiary assertion of the drawing. This emphasis was ultimately spelled out in the plate’s accompanying inscription, “View of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii in its current state, drawn in frontal view.”83 Enhancing the text’s testament to le vrai, the views combine telling details, from the articulation of the individual bricks of the architectural structures and the disconcerting impression of the trees looming above the excavated cityscape on the horizon line to episodes depicting people exploring the ruins, notably including a tourist at the far left who appears to scribble an illicit note. Whereas Desprez’s exacting observations seemed to mirror the archaeological enterprise itself, his subsequent work on the Temple of Isis shifted definitively to the mode of fantastical
reanimation, an “oscillation” that Régis Michel has observed was characteristic of Desprez’s Pompeian work between “an architect’s rendering (caught by history)” and “grand spectacle (haunted by the imaginary).”84 Two such images are among those published in the Voyage pittoresque: one captures a lateral view of the temple in daylight, the other imagines the temple ablaze in a scene of nighttime illumination (fig. 79). In this second drawing, Desprez extends his earlier commitment to detail while replacing the earlier mood of polite curiosity with a scene of dramatic ritual, complete with sacrificial fire, moonlight, and atmospheric clouds. In these two works, Desprez effects a phantasmic resurrection of the lost city and its inhabitants. Viewing such images, it did not seem far-fetched to imagine, as the caption prompts readers to do,
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that the picture was the result of Desprez’s travel across time.85 Desprez’s striking pictorial depiction finds its literary counterpart in Beckford’s recollections of his roughly contemporaneous visit to Pompeii in 1780. Beckford writes that, while “lingering alone” at the Temple of Isis, he “fell into one of those reveries . . . transporting [himself ] seventeen hundred years back.” Conjuring the scene of the eruption in 79 ce, Beckford is transfixed by what his imagination brings to life: “the tremendous spectacle of the eruption, its enormous pillar of smoke standing conically in the air, and tempests of liquid fire, continually bursting out from the midst of it, then raining down the sides of the mountain, and flooding this beautiful coast with innumerable streams of red-hot lava.” A second light source countermands this scene of darkness: “the blaze of the altars,” which issued forth from “the court and precincts of the temple [of Isis].” Beckford’s text homes in on the temple precinct, animated by “a long-robed train of priests, moving in solemn procession, to supplicate by prayer and sacrifice, at this destructive moment, the intervention of Isis.” Carrying objects and images sacred to the cult of Isis, the priests prepare themselves for a ritual sacrifice. The celebrants purified, the sacred fire sprinkled with holy water, and the victims arranged upon the altars, the moment of ritual violence appears imminent. Only an interruption by one of Beckford’s traveling companions “put an end to [his] strange reverie.”86 For Beckford, as for Desprez, the ruins of the Temple of Isis provided a platform for extraordinarily imaginative reconstruction and reanimation. It is tempting to observe in the sequence of Desprez’s images of the Temple of Isis a trajectory from painstaking precision to depictions in which an archaeologically correct structure is transformed
into an elaborate, amplified scenography for the artist’s theatrical flights of fancy. However, while the first study seems primarily to aspire to providing an exacting rendition of the excavation (see fig. 77), it is also more than solely illustrative and is thus generally representative of Desprez’s approach to Pompeii. As Michel observes, in rendering the Temple of Isis as “nothing more than an object of excavation,” the ruined structure’s fragility is set in contrast to the more robust forms of both the temporary protective structure and the site’s vegetation, dramatized by the trees billowing above the scene. In this way, the picture reflects what Michel identifies as Desprez’s overarching strategy vis-à-vis Pompeian ruins: “In fact, all of Desprez’s work on the ruin ends up neutralizing it: the gaze distances it, the fragment abstracts it, the vestige liberates it.” Taking shape at the moment when, “in the wake of the Enlightenment, ruin becomes tomb,” Desprez’s work at Pompeii may be seen as a form of resistance.87 Demystifying and subversive in its depiction of the ruin in the age of the museum, Desprez’s Pompeian imagery offered subtle critiques of the anticomania of the day by pointedly stimulating extra-archaeological associations. At the same time, Desprez’s Pompeian scenes provoked an artistic exercise in the reverie of ruins, here miraculously made complete and repopulated with human life. To adequately take measure of the formidable new charge of the concept of “ruin” in the context of Pompeii, it is essential to consider the remnants of the built environment and move beyond them, shifting from the realm of the architectural to that of the body. Touristic and antiquarian itineraries of the site were at once punctuated by the unearthed structures of the past, such as the Temple of Isis and the Gladiators’ Barracks, as well as by those other evocative ruins: the skeletal remains of Pompeii’s
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Figure 80 Engraving after Peter Fabris, from William Hamilton, Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii: Communicated to the Society of Antiquaries of London (London: W. Boyer and J. Nichols, 1777), plate 4. British Library. Photo © The British Library Board.
inhabitants.88 These two modes of encountering ruins reverberate through eighteenth-century textual and pictorial evocations of the site. The texts and images attest to the power of human remains, despite the fact that it would take roughly another century, until 1863, when Fiorelli would perfect the technique that could transform human traces into positive sculptural forms. Beginning in the 1760s, under Francesco La Vega’s direction of the site excavations, there were many opportunities to encounter skeletal remains, and one particular skeleton emerged as a special focus of narration, depiction, and fascination. Hamilton’s Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii offers an early description of the “washer-woman,” a figure who would thereafter punctuate travelers’ accounts. Hamilton describes a female skeleton, the remains of a woman who evidently perished while trapped in the room where linen for the adjacent
baths was likely washed. Extrapolating from the “attitude of the skeleton,” Hamilton asserts that the woman appears “to have waited for death with calm resignation, and true Roman fortitude.” “At my instigation,” Hamilton reports, “the bones were left untouched on the spot where they were found.”89 In the engraved plate (after Fabris) accompanying Hamilton’s text, the skeleton takes its place as letter E, one more noteworthy artifact in a landscape of objects requiring identification: room, well, washing vessel, fireplace, skeleton (fig. 80).90 Quite a different invocation of the skeletal laundress is offered by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in his 1774 pencil-and-ink drawing and its subsequent engraving by Claude-Mathieu Fessard in Voyage pittoresque (figs. 81 and 82). The image is framed on the left side by a tight cluster of tourists and a guide (recognizable by his gesture of demonstration and by the large key he wields) who facilitates their visit, and on the right by the elevated washbasin. A faintly rendered skeleton is revealed in the middle ground, a ray of sunlight piercing the gloom of the interior to illuminate this unequivocal focal point of the image. That Fragonard has envisioned the encounter as a scene of revelation is made clear by the light beam and the contemplative expressions of the two viewers in the foreground. Staging something like a shared look between the standing male visitor and the skeleton, Fragonard’s vision of the scene cannily mediates between living and dead. While the visitors on the left are set apart by their expressivity (a quality more fully articulated in the Voyage pittoresque engraving), the skeleton is framed pictorially by Fragonard to maximize its resemblance to a reclining, perhaps sleeping, human. Annotated with an inscription that attests to its basis in firsthand observation, Fragonard’s drawing appears to depict an entry in the travel diary of
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Figure 81 Jean-Honoré
Fragonard, Discovery of a Skeleton in a House in Pompeii, 1774. Black pencil and black ink diluted on paper. Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs, Lyon. Photo © Lyon, Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs (Pierre Verrier). Figure 82 Claude-Mathieu Fessard, after Jean-Honoré
Fragonard, Travelers Viewing a Skeleton at Pompeii. Engraving from Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque (Paris: Imprimerie de Clousier, 1781), 1.1:88, cat. no. 89. National Gallery, Washington, DC. Gift of Ivan E. and Winifred Phillips in memory of Neil Phillips. Photo courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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Figure 83 Gian Lorenzo
Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–52. Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Joaquim Alves Gaspar).
Fragonard’s travel companion, Bergeret de Grancourt.91 In the mode of archaeological sleuth, Bergeret de Grancourt extrapolates from the visual clues—“all the utensils, oven, wash basin, etc.”—to reconstruct the skeleton’s identity as a washerwoman, while simultaneously projecting from the skeleton’s physical disposition to imagine the laundress’s efforts to save herself and her eventual capitulation, as she fell backward to her death. In a final move, however, Bergeret de Grancourt shifts from his more clinical description to conclude: “The [skeleton’s] whole attitude is perfectly in the movement which indicates all of [the analysis above], and one remains in ecstasy for 1700 years.”92 Even if Bergeret de Grancourt did not explicitly intend to summon to mind Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (fig. 83), his text implicitly conjures the skeleton as a living woman reclining not in death but in ecstasy.
Like Fragonard’s image, then, Bergeret de Grancourt’s memory of the encounter with the skeletal laundress highlights the continuities between the dead and the living, as between human remains and sculpture—an uncanny and miraculous proximity as well as fluidity that were essential aspects of a distinctively Pompeian experience of the antique. From the outset, visits to Herculaneum and Pompeii were described as—and presumably were eventually already anticipating—opportunities for visceral, powerfully affective contact with the past. Beckford describes “cast[ing] one lingering look back on the whole affecting scene of ruins,” as he was poised to return to Naples.93 An eighteenthcentury “Pompeii effect” comprised a set of expectations, practices, and experiences of a newly material antique, which, from its origins, married the sculptural and the bodily. In its thrall, reveries of completion were married to fantasies of destruction. Again and again, direct, immersive encounter with daily life in the ancient world was brokered by the sculptural traces of human bodies. Far from falling by the wayside in subsequent decades, this “Pompeii effect” endured with a vengeance, both in the realms of artistic practice and in cultural thinking about Pompeii, straight through the nineteenth century.
Afterimage of the Eruption: Chassériau’s Tepidarium The tension between archaeological trace and phantasmatic projection are evocatively captured in a painting completed more than seven decades after Desprez, the Piranesis, and Fragonard were active in Pompeii. Chassériau’s Tepidarium was the result of a painstaking project of reconstructing and reanimating Pompeian antiquity (fig. 84). A monumental picture (measuring roughly 51/2 × 81/2
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feet) thirteen years in the making, the painting’s genesis dates to 1840, when Chassériau visited the active archaeological site of Pompeii.94 The artist’s experiences there fueled a complex pictorial undertaking that drew upon antiquity in myriad guises: as encountered in the dusty ruins of ancient streets, homes, and baths; as traced through objects of archaeological scrutiny; as indexed in relics housed in museum vitrines in Naples; and as reincarnated in a “living antique” the artist later encountered in North Africa. By the time of Chassériau’s travels, almost one hundred years after the discovery of Pompeii, the excavations at the site were well established, even as
discoveries continued to be unveiled.95 Far from remote and arcane events, new revelations were the subject of highly acclaimed omnibus publications that kept audiences across Europe up to date on the breaking news from Naples. The ongoing work of archaeologists and antiquarians was disseminated by way of publications like those supported by Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister Caroline Murat of Naples and authored by François Mazois, the French architect who tirelessly documented the excavations from 1809 until his death in 1826. Each of Mazois’s four volumes of Les ruines de Pompéi (The ruins of Pompeii), published between 1812 and 1838, was announced to great acclaim to audiences
Figure 84 Théodore
Chassériau, The Tepidarium:
The Room Where the Women of Pompeii Went to Dry Themselves and to Rest After Leaving the Bath, 1853. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
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in Paris.96 Others joined in these efforts, notably including the English archaeologist and topographer William Gell, who published the first installment of his Pompeiana between 1817 and 1819.97 Chassériau was doubly connected to Mazois. They were second cousins, and his cousin Frédéric Chassériau (1802–96) worked on Les ruines de Pompéi and appears to have executed a final drawing that served as a model for one of the plates.98 In 1853, commentators repeatedly remarked upon Chassériau’s knowledge of Pompeii. And certainly, the Tepidarium unabashedly announced the artist’s familiarity with the site by drawing upon a single specific and identifiable Pompeian interior: the tepidarium of the Forum Baths (fig. 85). These baths had been unearthed in 1824, and the excavations were completed in 1828. Mazois’s third volume, published by François Chrétien Gau in 1829, was the first to provide an account of the baths, its text accompanied by four plates. Orienting readers to the site, the plan depicted in the first plate identified the tepidarium (a moderately warm [tepid] room) located between the caldarium (hot bath) and the frigidarium (cold bath). Two additional plates introduced readers to essential elements of the tepidarium’s interior decorative program. One illustrated the bronze brazier and banquettes, both of which were decorated with cow’s feet and heads, a clever reference, as both Mazois and Gell note, to the inscribed donor’s name, “Marcus Nigidius Vaccula,” or “heifer” (fig. 86).99 The last plate featured a section view of the tepidarium along with multiple depictions of the distinctive terra-cotta figures lining its walls. The setting of Chassériau’s painting has frequently been misidentified in the art-historical literature as the Stabian Baths or the Baths of Vénus Génétrix, the latter the result of an
annotation made by Chassériau on a drawing of what may well have been a different interior space at Pompeii or its vicinity.100 However, Chassériau’s Tepidarium recalls many of the key details depicted by Gau and Mazois, especially the room’s back wall and its distinctive decorative elements, the brazier and the banquettes. Alongside such scrupulously recorded details, noteworthy modifications emerge. The terra-cotta figures, described variously as Telamons, Herculeses, and Atlases in the nineteenth-century literature, are transformed into female figures reminiscent of the Acropolis’s Erechtheion maidens, or caryatids (421–405 bce), a model in wide circulation from 1762 thanks to James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens.101 Chassériau knew this particular interior from on-site observation.102 An impressionistic watercolor study executed by Chassériau at the Forum Baths provides a rudimentary sense of the interior space and features the key details of the brazier and benches (fig. 87). While Chassériau included these elements in the finished work, there is a considerable gap between that and the degree of detail recorded in the study, which suggests that Chassériau’s painting likely depended not only on his familiarity with the site but also on Mazois’s publication. Another potential reference may be found in the 1832 volume of Gell’s Pompeiana.103 When compared with the view of the tepidarium reproduced by Gell, Chassériau’s crisp, perspectivally correct composition would seem to have a clear pictorial source (fig. 88). Indeed, this plate is singled out in Gell’s text, where it is attributed to Wilhelm Zahn, the author of several volumes on the wall paintings at Herculaneum and Pompeii, whom Gell describes as an “architectural painter to the Elector of Hesse Cassel.” Gell reported that Zahn used a camera lucida, as did Gell himself, to render the
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Figure 85 Tepidarium of the
Forum Baths, Pompeii. Photo courtesy of Maurie McInnis. Figure 86 François Mazois, Details of the Baths.
Engravings from Mazois, Les ruines de Pompéi: Dessinées et mesurées pendant les années 1809, 1810, 1811, ed. François Chrétien Gau (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1829), vol. 3: plates 49 and 50.
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Figure 87 Théodore
Chassériau, Tepidarium at Pompeii, 1840. Graphite with watercolor highlights on paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York. Figure 88 Engraving after
Wilhelm Zahn, Tepidarium. From William Gell, Pompeiana: The Topography, Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii; The Result of the Excavations Since 1819 (London: Jennings and Chaplin, 1832), vol. 1: plate 29. Photo: author.
relative scale and perspective of the interior as accurately as possible.104 Chassériau appears to have replicated Zahn’s depiction with the utmost care. And if he did rely upon Gell’s text, Chassériau was drawing upon the work of the most painstaking of topographers, whose practice reflected his special investment in exactitude. In his painting, Chassériau, like Gell but unlike Mazois, imagines the tepidarium populated.105 But Gell, unlike Mazois (who concluded that women and men shared these spaces sequentially), insisted that this tepidarium was an exclusively male space, quite distinct from a contiguous sequence of rooms that he identified as the women’s baths. Zahn’s plate, which features a semiclothed male bather, reinforces this assertion.
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Chassériau’s painting could be understood as a kind of perverse foil to Gell in the sense that it monumentalizes precisely the aspect of bath culture in Pompeii that most troubled Gell: women bathers and the threat of sensual pleasures. While Gell’s chapter on the male spaces of the Forum Baths proceeds untroubled by concerns over questions of propriety, his chapter on the women’s baths is framed by anxious bookends. The chapter opens with a dramatic précis: “The abuses of promiscuous bathing had become so flagrant, that Spartianus says Hadrian ordered the separation of the sexes, which had, however, been done ineffectually before. Eunuchs were appointed to attend in the women’s baths, as Lampridius observes, and a Roman law makes the offence of forcibly entering the women’s baths by a man capital.”106 Toward the chapter’s conclusion, the troublesome question of bathers’ morality reappears: “It is probable that the thermae often became the favourite resort of the vicious and the profligate, and, as such, liable to the animadversions and reprehensions of the fathers of the church, whence the name of bagnio has become synonymous with brothel in our own language.”107 Gell manages to suggest that the sexual practices of antiquity were an important aspect of what was being revealed—or rather, worked through—in the archaeological record.108 The fact that in these passages Gell abandoned his otherwise painstaking historicism to conjure the chronologically later reference to Hadrian (and to the church fathers) should be understood as a symptom of his anxious desire to defend his moral ground. Chassériau’s painting certainly mirrors Gell’s scrupulous attention to archaeological detail, and the structural and spatial scaffolding of the work echoes the explanatory aims of projects like Mazois’s and Gell’s. The full title Chassériau gave
the painting reinforces the descriptive impulse by articulating a sort of learned floor plan in words: The Tepidarium: The Room Where the Women of Pompeii Went to Rest and to Dry Themselves After Leaving the Bath. However, Chassériau has made the architectural setting more complete than it was in Zahn’s representation, transforming it, in the process, from a ruin to an anti-ruin. This impulse to completion links Chassériau with an illustrious lineage of archaeologists and artists, including Desprez and the Piranesis, who worked between archaeological exactness and the fantasy of restitution. In addition, and even more significantly, Chassériau strategically embeds this architectural space within a dense stratigraphy of women’s bodies. If the Tepidarium is the artist’s love letter to antiquity, the Pompeian antique conjured up here takes, unambiguously and emphatically, female form.
Pompeii as Woman This impulse was surely not new in 1852, when Chassériau began work toward the final painting. At the Salon of 1850–51, Gérôme had exhibited his Greek Interior (The Gynaeceum), a painting in which the antique setting of the title served as erudite scenography for the provocative display of female bodies in the foreground (fig. 89).109 Gérôme’s polychromed Greek Interior includes a visual roll call of such famed antique artifacts as the bronze tripod with satyrs in the right foreground (the figures here relieved by Gérôme of their phalluses and their apotropaic gestures).110 But perhaps the painting’s most distinctive conceit is Gérôme’s use of the historical setting as an alibi for the unambiguous depiction of a brothel. In this sense, the artist’s antiquarian labors might be understood to suggest a degree of intellectual control that stood
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Figure 89 Jean-Léon
Gérôme, Greek Interior (The Gynaeceum), 1850. Oil on canvas. Collection of Lady Micheline Connery. Photo © Sotheby’s.
in contradistinction to the scene of unleashed sensuality unfolding within the picture’s spatial confines. Gérôme’s Greek Interior thereby demonstrates why an antiquarian orientation, associated with the term curiosité, began to be anxiously regarded at midcentury as evidence of inappropriate or indiscriminate attention that flew in the face of “timeless values.”111 Here, the subject is unabashedly salacious: while women stretch languidly in the foreground, a procuress points a potential customer in their direction. A final gloss on the nature of the exchange is offered by a pair of
intertwined figures partially obscured by a curtain in the left background. In 1853, the link was made between Gérôme’s Greek Interior and Chassériau’s Tepidarium on explicitly formal (and implicitly thematic) grounds; one of the rare criticisms of Chassériau’s painting objected to the artist’s too obvious borrowing of the central standing figure’s pose from Gérôme.112 Having taken the measure of Chassériau’s debt to Mazois, Gell, and Zahn, it may be tempting to write off his “archaeological impulse” as essentially source seeking or, less generously, composition
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Figure 90 Théodore
Chassériau, A Room with a Staircase; A Trace on the Wall (sketch from the House of Diomedes, Pompeii), 1840. Rose wash, graphite, and white highlights on greybeige paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.
copping. However, his work on the Tepidarium was clearly shaped by his visit to Pompeii and his sense of connection with the traces of the past he found there. A sketchbook study offers a remarkable account of the artist’s response to seeing the charred remains of a group of women etched on a wall at the Villa of Diomedes (fig. 90). A passage inscribed along the top right-hand edge of the sheet and continuing along the middle bottom register reveals the artist overcome by the traces he encountered there, even as it records his effort to translate the experience into a picture of his own: All the women were along the wall terrified; the outline engraved on the wall of the wife of Diomedes was the one in the middle surrounded by the entire family—the father arrives and everything must have been touched by the cinders—there a lone small corner of a terrified figure who was carrying a torch and keys—in order to make the
impression of all the women squeezed along the wall the painting must be audaciously oriented lengthwise—the breast mark conserved in the museum shows thus that that which remained on the wall was strongly [imprinted] . . . the composition is absolutely ripe for painting—I kissed these sorrowful and incredible traces—the walls in white stucco and the ground of earth—it was the lower level—the cinders entered everywhere—it was above all them that suffocated and afterwards the lava came—the family of Diomedes.113
Here once again, we witness how an encounter with Pompeian traces elicits a turn to narrative. In this remarkable passage in which historical summary is merged with “poetic reverie,” Chassériau’s notations vividly communicate the sense of immediacy and access to the past brokered by that Pompeian wall.114 The sketch is also notably anchored by way of a particular “sculptural” trace familiar
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from eighteenth-century travel accounts: a fragment of a woman’s torso that Chassériau saw in Naples and which was identified as having come from the Villa of Diomedes (“the breast mark conserved in the museum”). Chassériau here summons up that same, famed “impression of the breast of a woman, with a thin drapery over it,” invoked by Hamilton in his 1775 Account. Discovered by La Vega in December 1772, this natural cast was one of a number of evocative remains excavated at the Villa of Diomedes, where traces of some eighteen adults, together with a boy and a baby, were found. Struck by the vivid preservation made possible by the “inundation of highly fluid matter” that eventually “enveloped the bodies on all sides,” La Vega was moved to preserve this evidence and “decided to cut no less than sixteen pieces of the impressions of these bodies.” La Vega singled out for description only one of these pieces: “the breast of a woman, covered by her dress.”115 Quickly put on exhibition, first at the Herculaneum Museum at Portici and subsequently at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, the imprint became one of the most remarked upon of the city’s many discoveries. By 1785, Dupaty described having seen at Portici “one of the most curious monuments of this renowned cabinet . . . the fragments of a crust of ashes, which . . . surprised a woman in an instant, and wrapt her up entire.” From a series of these exquisite fragments— “half a breast, which is of perfect beauty,” “the form of a shoulder,” “part of the back &c.”—Dupaty conjured an imagined sculptural positive: a woman who was “young, tall, and finely shaped.”116 As these accounts begin to attest, visitors embraced the fragment as a quintessential trace and emblem of the city, from the time of its discovery until well into the mid-nineteenth century.117 In 1852, just one
year prior to the exhibition of the Tepidarium, this very same fragment inspired the protagonist of Gautier’s short story Arria Marcella: Souvenir of Pompeii. Having been struck by the beauty of the impression of a woman’s breast and hips frozen in volcanic ash in a museum vitrine, Octavian, a young visitor to Pompeii, witnesses the nighttime animation of the breast, along with the rest of the beautiful body attached to it, in the form of the Pompeian woman Arria Marcella.118 At the end of the night, Gautier’s “antique” woman (in another sense of giving up the ghost?) reveals herself to be a specter, crumbling to dust in the light of day. For both Gautier and Chassériau, antique materiality, by way of the breast imprint, was intimately connected to the possibility of animation. This is undoubtedly due in part to the particular indexicality of the object, a quality evocatively summoned by René de Chateaubriand, who wrote in 1804, apropos the breast impression, that “death, like a sculptor, moulded its victim.”119 Like Chateaubriand, Chassériau, too, linked art and death over the sign of the female body at Pompeii. But even as he seemed overcome by the struggle to transform the disastrous remnant—what Victor Burgin has termed the “catastrophographic image”—into Art, into the re-presented and intelligible, into the narrativized, something remarkable happens. Chassériau reaches out to make a connection with the women “squeezed along the wall,” writing, “I kissed these sorrowful and incredible traces.”120 In this sense, the notes in Chassériau’s sketchbook suggest a powerful continuity with Gautier’s later writing, wherein viscerally conjured female bodies, commingled with eroticism and death, define this lost and found city. But if morbidity seems the inescapable refrain, Chassériau’s “Pompeii” ultimately parts ways with that of
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Gautier. On the margins of an early study for the Tepidarium, likely made in Pompeii, Chassériau described his idea for a scene of women after the bath and then further annotated the drawing: “Faire vivre”—“Make it come alive.”121 From its first intimation on the ground, as it were, the Tepidarium is a picture that turned on animation. Chassériau’s project, like Gautier’s, took off from the revivification of Pompeii as effected through the female body. But what is most obvious and distinctive about Chassériau’s fantastic bringingto-life is that it does not unfurl a narrative in which Pompeii, as woman, is viewed and inevitably lost by the male lover/artist. As in the earlier eighteenthcentury instances, Chassériau’s encounter with Pompeian traces provokes the experience of a historical fold, effectively collapsing time by way of a kiss. In the painting, Chassériau winds time backward, freezing it preeruption, and “Pompeii” emerges in the Tepidarium as woman endowed with the warmth of living flesh, sensuality, and “her” own desire. Like Gautier’s Arria Marcella, Chassériau’s Tepidarium is riddled with mystery. But it is not the mystery of the ghost story, of the lost trace, of the dream. It is instead the mystery of women’s sensual self-sufficiency: Chassériau’s Pompeii-as-woman is defined by embodied desire, female desire, directed in its literal hothouse (or rather, warm house) setting toward other women. And thus, even the potentially disruptive heterosexuality of the baths is excised, to be replaced by rows of framing female figures.
Tepidarium as Harem It is remarkable, given Chassériau’s creation of a vision of Pompeii that privileged the affective and sensual bonds between women, how often the art-critical response in 1853 finessed this aspect of
the painting, creating from it a work that was exclusively understood to address an absent male artist/viewer. Writing in the year of its initial exhibition, the critic Henry de la Madeleine noted that the Tepidarium “gave [Chassériau] a pretext for exhibiting all kinds of women: blondes, brunettes, redheads, Greeks, Romans, Africans, and Gauls. There is something for everyone.”122 In this description, the painting serves up the goods for any potential male viewer qua brothel-goer. That same year, in a somewhat different version of de la Madeleine’s impulse, Gautier filled in what was for him the obvious missing piece of the visual and narrative puzzle, writing, “These figures have a doleful serenity and a haughty passivity that recall the beautiful Greek slaves held captive at the court of some barbarian king who adores them, but whom they scorn, all the while enduring his love.”123 These two critics thus make Chassériau’s painting over into Gérôme’s by filling in the presumed absent subject. Thus, the male “customer,” carefully included by Gérôme, is conjured in the critical record as the organizing, indeed determining, subject of the painting, albeit off-screen. In the critical literature of 1853, Chassériau’s Tepidarium was often, in short, a harem.124 By 1853, Chassériau had himself begun the first of three canvases devoted to this subject: his Bath in a Seraglio (1849) (fig. 91) was followed by Oriental Interior and Moorish Woman Leaving the Bath in the Seraglio (both 1854).125 These paintings share with the Tepidarium the compositional centrality of the female nude (or seminude) figure and a thematic preoccupation with the stages of dress and undress associated with bathing. A final commonality is fundamental: all four paintings attest to the artist’s interest in a wide range of skin tones. The earliest of these pictures, the 1849 Bath in a Seraglio, is the
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Figure 91 Théodore
Chassériau, Bath in a Seraglio, 1849. Oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.
most emphatic in this respect, allocating to its three figures hues that range from ebony to alabaster. While Chassériau’s earlier female nudes bore the traces of his distinctive interest in exoticizing features, it is clear that the artist’s travel to North Africa in the summer of 1846 played a vital role in this aspect of his developing aesthetic project. Sketches and notes from the period confirm the artist’s engagement with the visual language of ethnography and physical anthropology as it took shape in the colonial context. Chassériau’s sketchbooks attest to the artist’s efforts to represent variations between North African subjects, whether Jewish, Arab, or Kabyle, identities made legible in art not only by an attention to physiognomy but also by the study of the subtle variations of skin pigmentation.126 Painted in the years following
Chassériau’s visit to North Africa, the Tepidarium’s inclusion of varied physiognomies and subtle modulations in the women’s skin tones—from the gleaming white of the central figure to the decidedly darker hues of women carrying perfume burners (on the left) and water (on the right)— coalesce to demonstrate the artist’s enduring “anthropological consciousness.”127 Chassériau’s visit to North Africa was certainly essential to the development of what has been described as his “alternative genealogy of classicism.”128 Chassériau celebrated his discovery of a “living antiquity” there, famously declaring, “One sees Arabs and Jews as they were on their first day.”129 The Tepidarium bears the traces of his North African experience in another sense; in the case of the two “carrying” figures mentioned above, Chassériau quite literally imported studies of female figures made in situ.130 In this sense, Chassériau conjured a new and differently oriented historical fold. While the Tepidarium reflects Chassériau’s embrace of an expanded Mediterranean geography of antiquity, shaped in part by his travel to North Africa, this approach to envisioning the antique was no doubt likewise informed by Pompeii’s important role in transforming a vision of the classical world. After its discovery in the eighteenth century and thanks to the revelations provided by ongoing excavation, Pompeii took on special importance in the theorization of an expanded antique whose past was understood to bring together the disparate histories of the GrecoRoman and Egyptian.131 Set against this backdrop, Chassériau’s scrupulous reconstruction of Pompeii’s Forum Baths worked hand in glove with the rhythmic deployment of beautiful bodies of different hues as an architectural and figural demonstration of a heterogeneous antiquity.
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Of course, those female figures function as more than pictorial arguments for Chassériau’s vision of antiquity. Indeed, the body and its senses are at center stage in the Tepidarium. Following the arc of women from left to right reveals the strategic deployment of sight and touch, sound and smell, within the canvas. On the far left side of the composition, a water carrier and a perfume carrier suggest the ablutions of the bath and the application of fragrant oils. Two women who appear deep in murmured conversation further along the wall invoke sound. One standing and one seated woman around the seminaked woman in the left foreground suggest touch and almost-touch as they caress and smooth back the central figure’s glossy hair. Finally, sight frames the left and right sides of the composition in the dark-haired figures who stare out to meet the spectator’s look amid clusters of languid animation. As the brazier pours heat into the room, casting the glow of fire, light, and shadow onto the assembled figures, so too do Chassériau’s subtle rhythms of the senses emphasize the life and warmth of the subjects depicted, particularly in the guise of touch and almost-touch, the very senses that were given special emphasis in visitors’ accounts of Pompeii. The culmination of this theme appears in the composition’s center foreground, in the figure group that might be understood as the key to the painting. Much rests upon this central pair of women, the last aspect of the composition Chassériau worked out, as a late study attests. As the artist no doubt recognized, the addition of the seated figure fundamentally transformed how the picture worked; with the focus of the image newly centered upon the physical proximity and visual exchange between the women, the frisson of the picture came to rest upon the psychological and compositional tension that defines their relationship.
Figure 92 Théodore
Chassériau, study for Apollo and Daphne, 1845. Graphite and stump on paper. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Marc Jeanneteau / Art Resource, New York.
Chassériau’s invocation of thematic and compositional prototypes for the central pair helps to clarify the nature of their interaction. The relationship of the two figures, their postures and affects, are strikingly reminiscent of the artist’s Apollo and Daphne of 1845.132 A study for this canvas provides a particularly strong point of comparison for the Tepidarium: as Daphne lifts her arms upward, Apollo kneels at her feet, left arm lowered and right arm extended toward the object of his desire (fig. 92). The 1845 painting dramatizes the climax in Ovid’s tale during Apollo’s pursuit of the nymph Daphne: the moment when she is transformed into a laurel tree rather than succumb to the god’s ardor. But, quite unlike the beautiful yet ultimately inaccessible figure of Daphne, Chassériau has taken pains to craft the Tepidarium’s standing figure to highlight her role as seductress. Even as the central figure’s expression underscores the charged nature of the exchange between
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stretching central figure is modeled on antique sculpture, whether construed as archaeological trace by way of the breast imprint or as artistic masterwork by way of the Venus de Milo, then it is, therefore, antique sculpture animated. This identification establishes the situation of her beholder—both the seated woman and, in turn, the painting’s viewer— as that of Pygmalion. At the heart of his monumental vision of antique reanimation, then, Chassériau has given pride of place to the bodily and sculptural associations that were vividly articulated in accounts by earlier visitors to the site.
Figure 93 Aphrodite, known as the Venus de Milo, Greek, ca. 100 bce. Marble. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The Pygmalian Sublime
women, the body itself is framed as an object of seduction. Dominating the composition, this spectacular female torso merges the sculptural and corporeal—mediated by the breast imprint and likely also by the Venus de Milo (fig. 93), a largescale cast of which Chassériau kept in his studio.133 On close examination, this central figure, despite significant modifications of the pose, bears more than a passing resemblance to the muscular ideal of the Venus captured in studies by Chassériau likely dating from 1840. Sculptural traces, both archaeological and artistic, are thus harnessed to give form to a Pompeian fantasy scape of female bodies. Looking at the central pair, it is tempting to conclude that in providing the beholder front and rear views, something is effectively served up for everyone and that the point here is simply about visual delectation. However, careful consideration of the pair points instead in the direction of potent myths of artistic origin and to another Ovidian tale. If the
Chassériau’s addition of a seated, and apparently overwhelmed, admirer at the feet of the central figure offered a compelling nod to the familiar subject of Pygmalion and Galatea, a subject popularized in French painting by the likes of Lagrenée (1781) and Girodet (1813–19). In Lagrenée’s canvas, the sculptor kneels before the beautiful object of his creation at the moment when his deepest wish has been granted by Venus, and his ideal ivory sculpture (rendered here as marble) exchanges its marmoreal form for “her” living flesh (fig. 94).134 Girodet’s famed 1819 painting of the subject is perhaps an even more useful counterpoint (fig. 95). Finally exhibited, after seven years of labor, at the Salon of 1819 (in the year of Chassériau’s birth), Girodet’s Pygmalion was conceived by the artist as his last potentially career-redeeming, reputationmaking painting.135 Monumental in scale, it was the painting of the 1819 Salon, after which it continued to be available for viewing in Paris in the gallery of Count Sommariva until the collection’s liquidation in 1839. On the eve of Chassériau’s departure for Italy, a writer for L’Artiste visited Sommariva’s
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galleries and commented: “Here is Girodet’s Galatea; but someone needs to light a stove for this woman; she is trembling, she is cold, she is green. It is not blood animating marble that becomes flesh, it is flesh becoming marble.”136 Here, Pygmalion’s failure— invoked as a cadaver at the morgue—is, by extension, Girodet’s failure. What this reviewer would certainly have appreciated was that, by representing the Pygmalion narrative, Girodet was intervening in a long tradition of the paragone: serious aesthetic debate on the limits of painting and its relationship not only to sculpture but also to poetry. And the philosophical reflections on offer might be extended, since by the second half of the eighteenth century the Pygmalion narrative had emerged as particularly apt for post-Lockean empiricist and epistemological concerns: the statue’s coming to life provided a ripe opportunity for reflections on sensation in the absence of innate ideas.137 It would be easy to dispense quickly with Girodet’s canvas as a potent shorthand for artistic aspiration, or to see it as simply an exemplary scene that necessarily figured on the short list of heroic artistic narratives, an allegory of creation stressing the godlike abilities of the artist and the instrumental role played by “his” desire. As J. Hillis Miller observes, the Pygmalion narrative “embodies a male fantasy whereby a woman cannot be the object of sexual desire and cannot desire in return unless she has been made so by male effort.”138 In fact, Girodet called upon a more contemporary interlocutor than Ovid as he worked on the canvas: Rousseau, whose Pygmalion, scène lyrique was written in 1762 and performed to great acclaim at the Paris Opera beginning in 1772. Almost without exception, reviewers of Girodet’s painting in 1819 noted its relationship to Rousseau’s Pygmalion, which, as Carr notes, offered a new departure: a novel focus on
experience, in which “the almost religious delirium of the sculptor’s passion sets the stamp upon an internal drama vastly different” from what had come before.139 To this stress on an “internal drama” of authorial experience, we should add Paul de Man’s argument that perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Rousseau’s version of the Pygmalion tale is its thematization of a sublime crisis of selfhood. Calling attention to the remarkable passages in which Pygmalion vacillates between the desire for Galatea and the desire to be Galatea, de Man understands
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Figure 94 Louis Jean François Lagrenée,
Pygmalion and Galatea, 1781. Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society Purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Long Fund, Miscellaneous Gifts Fund and City of Detroit Insurance Recovery Fund. Figure 95 Anne-Louis
Girodet-Trioson, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1813–19. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Thierry Le Mage).
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Rousseau’s lyric scene to be an anxious reflection on the self. On the one hand, the artist’s identification with the object of his masterful creation carries with it the potential for a complete identification or self-immolation: “Ah! let Pygmalion die in order to relive in Galathea!” On the other, he is brought up short by the absolute otherness of the goddess before him. The complexity of this situation is beautifully articulated by Rousseau’s Pygmalion: “Ah! let Pygmalion die in order to relive in Galathea! . . . Heavens! What am I saying! If I were she, I would not see her, I would not be the one who loves her. No, let my Galathea live, and let me not be she. Ah! Let me always be another so that I may always wish to be she, to see her, to love her, to be loved by her.”140 This complex circuitry is crucial in de Man’s reading, for it reveals Pygmalion in a state evocative of the Kantian sublime. Here, the encounter with Galatea triggers a sublime circuitry wherein “the awesome element in the work of art is that something so familiar and intimate could also be free to be so radically different.”141 Dichotomies of subject and object are dissolved, replaced instead by the work of art that suggests the permeability of self and other. By invoking de Man’s reading of Rousseau’s Pygmalion, I hope to suggest a somewhat different understanding of how Chassériau’s invocation of Pygmalion might function in the Tepidarium, as at once inside and outside the canvas. Having “kissed sorrowful and incredible traces” in Pompeii, Chassériau’s self-appointed task was nothing short of Pygmalian in nature: “Make it come alive.” And so, in the Tepidarium, the artist appears as a Rousseauean Pygmalion and thus also as a woman, locked in the heat of sight, smell, and almost-touch. The care with which Chassériau has rendered the encounter between the seated figure and the
object of her attention casts the shadow of yet another myth of artistic origin on the painting. The shadow projected by the seated woman’s hand and head onto the pale torso of the standing figure, together with the apparent instrumentality of her raised hand (which could easily be that of an artist), suggests that Pliny’s tale of the origin of drawing might indeed lurk at the center of the picture (fig. 96). The representational history of Pliny’s account of the origin of drawing, found in the daughter of Dibutades’s shadow trace of her lover, likewise conflates cast shadow with desire and artistic inspiration (fig. 97). The Pygmalion narrative mirrored that of Pliny’s tale insofar as, for Pliny, “love was the inventor of drawing,” as Rousseau was the first to note.142 Only here, the “artist” is at once lover and shadow-caster and “her” reflection is cast not on a wall but instead on the female body at the canvas’s heart. The female admirer as Pygmalion/Dibutades, like the viewer, confronts the superb torso of the standing figure, just as Chassériau had earlier confronted the remarkable remnant at Pompeii that bore the imprint of life—and literally, of antique beauty—lost. “Faire vivre”—“Make it come alive”—was not only Chassériau’s direction for a representation aimed at resurrecting the lost women of Pompeii but also a deeply felt artistic identification. As the brazier pours heat into the room, casting the glow of fire, light, and shadow onto the assembled figures, Chassériau’s subtle rhythms of the senses—especially touch and almost-touch—likewise emphasize the life and warmth of the subjects depicted. Here, the strong outlines of the past are fully rounded out, enlivened with the flow of blood. Taking his place in a rich and expansive tradition of artists who explored the affective, transformative potential of encounters with the antique,
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Figure 96 Théodore
Chassériau, The Tepidarium: The Room Where the Women of Pompeii Went to Dry Themselves and to Rest After Leaving the Bath, 1853, detail. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 97 H. Dupont, after
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, Dibutades. Engraving from Oeuvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson (Paris: J. Renouard, 1829), vol. 1. Photo: author.
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Chassériau faces down the Medusa/Pygmalion dialectic in an image that emphatically pledges its troth to fantastic—perhaps even phantasmagoric— animation. The Tepidarium brings back to life a fantasy of the Pompeian past buried under the ash of Vesuvius in 79 ce, here reanimated in a picture informed at once by Chassériau’s memories of encounter with antiquity in the Bay of Naples, by archaeological and antiquarian publications, and perhaps, above all, by the dream of a Pygmalion transformation of sculpture to flesh but with a twist. Mortality is not just held at bay but undone in a picture that visualizes the historical fold, winding time backward: out of the ash, into the fire.
Recovery and Loss Redoubled: Plaster, Photography, and Fin de Siècle Plaster Love As the case of Chassériau’s Tepidarium attests, the sense of Pompeii’s distinctively embodied and emphatically material antique that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century continued to be formative one hundred years later. In the decade following Chassériau’s monumental canvas, new developments at Pompeii reignited the long-standing fascination with the bodily and the sculptural forged in this site. These associations animated artists’ work in dialogue with the Bay of Naples, from the first decades of its archaeological revelations through the mid-nineteenth century. Roughly one hundred years after the discovery of the famed breast imprint, newly material “antique” bodily forms came into being thanks to a casting process developed by archaeologist Fiorelli, director of excavations at Pompeii from 1860 to 1875. In 1863, Fiorelli experimented with a new technique, pouring liquid plaster into the air pockets left in the
wake of decaying flesh, which thus rendered threedimensional forms of individuals, family groups, and even dogs (fig. 98). Installed in the site museum just inside the main entry, Fiorelli’s casts were among the first glimpses of Pompeii afforded to visitors.143 Just as crucially, pictures of these casts circulated in photographs by Giorgio Sommer, Michele Amodio, Roberto Rive, and others. They remain to this day among the most iconic images of Pompeii, powerfully consolidating a vision of the site in which death meets reanimation over the sign of sculpture.144 Thus mediated by Fiorelli’s casts and photographs of them, the site became even more literally the province of the embodied antique to a degree that Alexandre Dumas père could not have imagined when, in 1843, he described Pompeii as having moved the antique out the realm of shadows to finally give it “a body.”145 Fiorelli’s casts at Pompeii at once registered the enthusiasm for centuries of plaster casts after the
Figure 98 Giorgio Sommer,
Plaster Casts of Bodies, Pompeii, ca. 1870.
Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Harriet Ames Charitable Trust Gift, 2012. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org.
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Figure 99 Michele Amodio, Pompeii, Human Cast from the Excavations, 1863, ca. 1876. Photograph. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (91.R.2).
antique and marked a radical departure from their logic. Whereas plaster casts offered close approximation of their referents without doing harm to them, Fiorelli’s technique necessarily required the destruction of precisely the fragile indexical traces whose evocative power had been embraced for one hundred years. Although the imprints were negative reliefs of vanished bodies (and textiles), as casts of traces, Fiorelli’s plaster forms operated at an additional and oftentimes striking remove from their corporeal origins. Amodio’s early print of the first achieved cast attests to the roughness of the original Fiorellian gesso form (fig. 99), whereas another print depicts a later cast of considerably more
accomplished execution. Known as the “Young Woman,” Fiorelli’s tenth cast was greatly admired for its beauty and was notably installed in a glass case at the top of a set of stairs in the Pompeian Museum so that it could be viewed from below and above (fig. 100).146 When viewed from above, the recumbent form was redolent of the pose of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, and like that sculpture, Fiorelli’s cast was admired for the refinement of its features, above all for the smooth shapeliness of its bared buttocks. Nevertheless, fundamental distinctions separate a plaster cast after the Venus de’ Medici and that of the celebrated “Young Woman.” Like a
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Figure 100 Michele
Amodio, Cast of a Young
Woman, 1878. Photograph. Reproduced in Pompei la fotografia (Milan: Electa, 2015), cat. no. 66.
death mask, the cast of the Venus de’ Medici depended upon contact (albeit typically mediated by wax) with an extant three-dimensional object. The origins of Fiorelli’s “Young Woman,” on the other hand, resided not with the young girl of the title but rather with the void left in her body’s stead.147 Chateaubriand’s evocative remark about the breast imprint made four decades earlier— that “death, like a sculptor, moulded its victim”148— seems to describe Fiorelli’s technique, which had the effect of transforming the negative trace of impressions into plaster forms in the round. Crucially, in so doing, Fiorelli’s process undermined and ultimately extinguished the power of direct touch. Whereas the breast imprint was an index of the body’s contact, albeit after the carbonization of its flesh, a redoubled loss resulted when this trace, the
imprint, was overwritten and dispersed to dust in Fiorelli’s plaster casting. Since it entailed the destruction of the primary index—all of those bodily imprints by necessity were obliterated in the production of positive casts—Fiorelli’s technique foreclosed upon the direct mode of embodied identification made possible in the sculptural ashes. And in this sense, 1863 marked a breaking point for a certain charged bodily encounter, whether by touch or kiss, in Pompeii. At the same time, the translation into plaster facilitated the antique remains’ final ascension into the realm of art. Despite their conceptual and formal distance from sculpture as an art form, Fiorelli’s casts were nevertheless habitually compared to works of art and most regularly to ancient sculpture in marble. As early as 1812, the connection
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was made between imprints of human remains of three bodies at Pompeii (interpreted as a mother and her three children) and the sculpture of Niobe known from antiquity: “[The three children] closely embraced their mother as they breathed out their last sigh, and in this situation they remained—In the same way has a successor of Phidias depicted Niobe, who embraces her last remaining children, turns her face to the heavens, and expires in pain with them.”149 In 1858, gazing upon Fiorelli’s “Young Woman,” visitor Ferdinand Gregorovius found “the figure as graceful as that of a slumbering Hermaphrodite.”150 In 1899, this same cast was described as “[the impression of ] a young woman who competes with Venus for the epithet Kallipygos.”151 This dual heredity, cast after death but experienced as an artful, even alluring, sculpture, informed encounters with Fiorelli’s casts in word and image. Photography’s participation in the circulation of these images was understood, from the earliest moments of their production and publication, as an especially effective means to widen the circle of viewers able to encounter “one of the most appalling catastrophes that ever overtook the inhabitants of any part of the world, ancient or modern, as vividly and undeniably as if the calamity had occurred but yesterday.”152 Writing in 1868, John Werge observed that, when looking at photographs of Fiorelli’s casts, “it is very difficult to divest the mind of the idea that they are not the works of some ancient photographer who plied his lens and camera immediately after the eruption had ceased.” While Werge explicitly lauded photography’s ability to “forcibly . . . carry the mind back to the time and place of the awful immurement of both a town and its people,” clearly the synergies of verisimilitude uniting the casts and the photographs were not lost on the
author.153 Photographs of Fiorelli’s casts obscured the distinction between the casts and their referents (in their apparent depiction of actual dead humans), even as their photographic language of verisimilitude seemed to close the gap between the now of the late nineteenth century and the then of 79 ce. Despite being dependent upon new presentations of antique artifacts, the plaster cast and the photograph, the “Pompeii effect” endured in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus, while the “skeletons filled out in gesso” were perceived by some as “cold and petrified like statues,” they and their photographic doubles stimulated identificatory flights of reanimation reminiscent of the first travel narratives in the Bay of Naples: “There is no doubt that the skeletons filled out in gesso are the most singular, the most affecting, and altogether the most curious objects of the Pompeii Museum. . . . in the midst of all these dead things, one might say that they impart some motion and a certain feeling of life. They are really human bodies. . . . Look at them, holding the same poses as when the ashes buried them!”154 If the plaster casts occasioned the loss of direct contact with Pompeian bodies, they brought into being a three-dimensional vision of the city’s past inhabitants. This creation entailed a shift between two very different modes of encounter: from identification by way of the void and the invitation to touch to reception of the cast, which made the past into an object for sight. Tracing these connective tissues reveals how these new departures took their place within an established discourse of Pompeian sculptural experience.155 Yet, even as Fiorelli’s technique functioned as a curiously inverted scenario of the breast imprint and to some extent liquidated the power of direct touch, photography proved uncannily capable of capturing the ostensibly immediate and unmediated revelations of Pompeian
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experiences, seizing even that most transient of events: Vesuvius’s eruptions, pictured by Sommer in 1872 in half-hour increments (fig. 101).156 By the final years of the nineteenth century, Fiorelli’s casts had begun to leave their mark on a literature devoted to examining their unsettling allure. Douglas’s 1899 Nerinda places Fiorelli’s plaster casts front and center in a novella tracking an (unnamed) narrator’s vertiginous decline into single-minded obsession. As in earlier eighteenthand nineteenth-century precedents, the text concentrates on the tension between artistic creation and grim, fatal trace. Fiorelli’s “Young Woman” emerges as a veritable character in Douglas’s plot, functioning as the object of the protagonist’s unhealthy desires (see fig. 100). At the start of the story, readers come to understand that the narrator is taking a curative break in southern Italy in the company of his widowed sister, Bertha. Emotionally vulnerable and in recovery from what are only obliquely invoked “episodes” (a “Dr. N” is mentioned), the narrator has been instructed not to read or to engage in any other activity that might stimulate strong emotion. While in Capri and Sorrento, sites of much foreshadowing, the narrator proves perhaps a bit too susceptible to the beauty and mystery of the natural settings. On their final night in Sorrento, he gives in to the desire to unpack his books and ultimately breaks the prohibition on text to read Plato’s Symposium. As brother and sister depart for Pompeii, the narrator has clearly become exercised, and perhaps already to some extent haunted, by the platonic model in which “each of us is continually looking for his other half. And this desire of union is called love.”157 In Pompeii, the narrator’s health takes a sharp turn for the worse. In the site museum, he was
struck by “the wonderfully intact plaster casts taken from the hollow mould formerly occupied by the actual bodies of those who perished in the catastrophe.” One cast in particular, that of “a young woman, with her eyes half closed as though in pain,” fascinates Bertha, at whose insistence they return the following day. Standing before Fiorelli’s plaster figure, the siblings reflect on the strangeness of realizing that “she is no artistic creation, but an actual human being like ourselves,” an observation that leads to Bertha’s unthinking stream-of-consciousness declarations: “I wish she could speak. I am sure I should love her, poor girl! And so would you. Perhaps you would want to marry her! Perhaps she is the ideal you have been seeking!” (30). Bertha quickly comes to regret these words, as her brother becomes fixated on the plaster figure and on the thought that she is indeed his longed-for Platonic other half, for whom he has been searching.
Figure 101 Giorgio Sommer, Vesuvius Erupting, 26 April
1872, 3 pm, 1872. Photograph. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
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In a precipitous series of events, the narrator returns day after day, at dawn and at night, insisting that Francesco, the live-in guard assigned to the museum, allow him to see the figure. The narrator becomes preoccupied by a sleeping-beauty fantasy that if he were allowed to touch the figure, she “would feel [his] touch and . . . open her eyes with a look of thankfulness” (43). Shortly thereafter, confined to his bed with a headache, the narrator dreams that he hears the plaster figure’s voice, imploring him to save her and identifying herself not as a Greek or Roman but rather as Nerinda, “the daughter of an ocean king.” Awakening from this dream, he successfully contrives to lure Francesco out of the museum, leaving the narrator alone with the figure whom he covers with prayers and tears: “Nerinda, my heart’s desire, my other self—a sign!” Having thus implored the cast, the narrator reports, “It happened even as I expected. Her cheeks coloured and her curved lips quivered slightly, ever so slightly, like an anemone flower trembling in the breeze. Life, for one short moment, flowed through those delicate veins” (47–48). With this quasi-Pygmalion moment, the die is cast, and the narrator’s single focus turns to liberating Nerinda from the glass case that encloses her. Faced with a stubbornly rule-following Francesco, the story arrives at its violent culmination, communicated by way of subsequent newspaper reports. In addition to the brutal murder of Francesco, the papers further reported that “one of the gems of the collection [at Pompeii], Case No. 12, containing the plaster cast of a young woman reproduced according to the ingenious process of our immortal Fiorelli, is completely shattered. . . . This chef d’oeuvre, with its clinging draperies and delicately-formed limbs, is now reduced to a mass of shapeless fragments” (63). To this is added the
“tragic concomitant” of the other crimes: Bertha reads that the body of her brother has been found, drowned, in the harbor of Castellamare, his body bearing the traces of a struggle (64–65). Douglas’s narrative is anchored by familiar motifs, notably the transformative potential of encounters with the antique. As in the case of Chassériau’s Tepidarium, the narrator’s encounter with Pompeii is overlaid with a distinctively Pygmalion inflection. It likewise bears the signs of new departures. Here too, Pompeii allows for a Pygmalian sublime, a finding of the self in the other. But in Douglas’s hands, Pompeii functions as a stage set for decidedly creepy, fundamentally unhealthy relations. Here we observe the author’s mobilization of the archaeological site and its long-standing associations with sculpture, trauma, and death in the service of a new and distinctively late nineteenth-century plot, the fulcrum of which was the protagonist qua patient. Jensen’s 1903 Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy was by far the most famous of Pompeian narratives to take shape in a fin de siècle moment in which there was considerable synergy between scientific communities oriented to archaeology, medicine, psychology, and ultimately psychiatry.158 Jensen’s text, together with Freud’s subsequent analysis of it in 1907, speaks to the enduring legacy of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fascination with Pompeian (phantom) bodily imprints and (as) antique sculpture. As in Nerinda, the trace of the antique that wields remarkable power over Jensen’s protagonist takes the form of a plaster cast. Indeed, the first sentence of the novel establishes the chain of connections linking the protagonist, German archaeologist Norbert Hanold, to an encounter with an antique bas-relief in Rome that he found “exceptionally attractive” and which he was delighted to discover
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he could acquire in the form of a plaster cast. Hanold becomes fixated on the young woman depicted in the marble relief, going so far as to call it “Gradiva,” Latin for “the girl splendid in walking” (15). In Jensen’s time as now, the relief in question was housed in the Chiaramonti Gallery in the Vatican (fig. 102), but Hanold becomes certain that the girl was a native not of Rome but of Pompeii. Having dreamed of Gradiva’s final night in Pompeii during the eruption of 79 ce, Hanold embarks upon a precipitous trip to Pompeii, where he imagines he sees a specter of Gradiva walking in the excavated streets of the city. Jensen’s text circles again and again around the tropes of animation and mortification. The extended ekphrasis of the story’s first paragraph establishes that Hanold’s fascination with the relief was not a result of its “plastic beauty of form” but rather hinged on the object’s unusual promise of animation, its “realistic, simple, maidenly grace which gave the impression of imparting life to the relief ” (14). Later, the young woman in the bas-relief is conjured to life in Hanold’s dream only to return, in the form of Gradiva’s supine submission to the falling volcanic ash, to an immobile sculptural form. Pursuing her through the streets of Pompeii in his dream, Hanold cries out to Gradiva in warning, only to witness her uncomprehending face “[become] paler as if it were changing to white marble” (21). Having ascended the portico of the Temple of Apollo, Gradiva is found by Hanold “stretched out . . . as if for sleep, but no longer breathing, apparently stifled by the sulphur fumes,” the “red glow” of the volcano illuminating her features, “which, with closed eyes, was exactly like that of a beautiful statue” (21). The reverse-Pygmalion scene of the dream finds its counterpart in the pivotal scene of Pompeian animation that takes place during Hanold’s
visit to Pompeii “to see if he could here find trace of her—and that in a literal sense—for, with her unusual gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a footprint different from all the others” (50). When other tourists had withdrawn for lunch, Hanold spends the noonday hours on the evacuated site, where, under the intense rays of the sun, he has a revelation that science, into which he had “submerged himself completely,” “taught . . . a lifeless, archaeological view and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language” (48).159 As he is struck by his desire for “comprehension with soul, mind and heart,” “a glowing thrill passed through [the old stones],” and “Pompeii began to live again” (48). So, too, apparently did Gradiva, whom Hanold perceives as a sculpture come to life among the ruins. In the end, a living Gradiva is revealed to be none other than Hanold’s childhood friend, Zoë Bertgang. In the Villa of Diomedes, Hanold grapples with the realization that he has constructed an elaborate fantasy and that there is no Gradiva, only the real Zoë, whose reacquaintance in the ruins promises to transform Hanold’s previously dissatisfied, solitary, and somewhat misanthropic existence into one of engaged sociability, sensation, and heterosexual satisfaction. This pivotal scene of dénouement takes place in the Villa of Diomedes, adding a further sculpturally resonant element to the story. For of course it was here that those originary imprints, “the bodies of the unfortunates . . . preserved in the hardened ashes” had been discovered. While no mention is made of Fiorelli’s casts in the text, the exposition of the Villa of Diomedes and its artifacts is key insofar as it is the origin of the ur-sculptural imprint: “the exact impression of the neck, shoulders and beautiful bosom of a young girl clad in a fine gauzy garment” (95). In the breast imprint, an echo of the foot imprint Hanold
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Figure 102 “Gradiva,”
Roman relief of the so-called Horae and Aglaurids, second century ce, probably from a Greek original (fourth century bce). Marble. Vatican
Chiaramonti Museum, Rome.
hoped to find at Pompeii, lies the foundations for “Gradiva, rediviva Zoë Bertgang” (148). In Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva” (1907), Freud, himself an avid collector of antiquities (and visitor to Pompeii), explored the archaeological metaphor for psychoanalysis, which turns on the association of archaeological and psychological excavation. In the text, Freud hails Jensen’s observation that Zoë’s “childhood friend . . . had, in a way, also been excavated from the ashes,” observing that, with these words, “the author . . . [has] put into our hand the key of the symbolism which the delusion of the hero made use of in the disguise of the
repressed memory.”160 In his return to the question in 1930 in Civilization and Its Discontents (Unbehagen in der Kultur), Freud deployed an “analogy from another field” offered by the built fabric (and ruins) of ancient Rome in order to emphasize the limitations of the archaeological (and architectural) metaphor. If in Rome “there is certainly not a little that is ancient still buried in the soil of the city beneath its modern buildings,” this situation does not adequately capture the operations of the mind, in which “what is primitive is so commonly preserved alongside evidence of the transformed version which has arisen from it.”161 In Jensen’s
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Figure 103 Sigmund Freud’s study in Vienna with a cast of
“Gradiva” on the wall at right, 1938. Photograph. Photo: Freud Museum Library.
Gradiva, with its Pompeian situation, Freud found “no better analogy for repression, which at the same time makes inaccessible and conserves something psychic, than the burial which was the fate of Pompeii, and from which the city was able to arise again through work with the spade.”162 Like Hanold, Freud was evidently fascinated by the bas-relief at the center of Jensen’s novel. In the year of Gradiva’s publication, Freud received from the distinguished classicist Emanuel Löwy a postcard showing the photographic reconstruction by archaeologist Friedrich Hauser of the relief, which likely depicted three young women dancing, figures understood as the Horae, or goddesses of the seasons.163 Four years later, Freud encountered the actual “Gradiva” relief in Rome.164 Mary Bergstein has amplified our sense of what may have been at stake for Freud in this particular object and its role in Jensen’s narrative. In her analysis, Bergstein traces the degree to which Freud identified with the character of Gradiva/Zoë, as a particularly intelligent, loving, and effective analyst: “Gradiva is Freud’s adopted daughter and disciple, executing a
perfect analysis, with precisely the mentality that Freud recommended in his greatest metaphor, that of an archaeologist.”165 And thus: the all too fitting fact of “Gradiva”’s installation over the famed couch in Freud’s Vienna consulting room (fig. 103).166 This chapter has explored the contours of a newly embodied antique as it took shape in the mid-eighteenth century in the Bay of Naples. It has traced the instrumental role played by sculpture, from imprint to cast, and its mediation in two dimensions: in drawing, printmaking, painting, and photography, spanning the beginning of the eighteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of excavations, as we have seen, archaeological discoveries, practices, and publications made possible new affective connections that so often turned on plastic form. As we saw in chapter 1, the eighteenth century saw a resurgence of artistic and philosophical interest in the Pygmalion narrative, most frequently inspired by Ovid.167 Beyond the statue’s development from bone (ivory) to flesh, Ovid emphasized the physiological aspects of the Pygmalian scene of
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transformation. As Hersey observed, Ovid we find “a new category of artistic effect . . . an effect of livingness that is felt, neurologically, muscularly, in the blood, by the viewer.”168 The Ovidian Pygmalion thus lends itself to the Rousseauian Pygmalion narrative, with its emphasis on self-recognition and intersubjective encounter. According to Ovid’s telling of the tale, animation is at once located in the ivory girl and in Pygmalion himself. With this in mind, we might return, once more, to Chassériau’s Tepidarium, remembering the artist’s visceral sense of connection in his Pompeian encounter. Remarkably, the language of animation that ran through the critical literature in 1853 extended not only to the women of Pompeii, but in perfect realization of the Ovidian Pygmalion circuitry, the artist himself was also seen to be brought (back) to life. Gautier, Chassériau’s primary supporter, who had unfavorably assessed Chassériau’s exhibited paintings at the Salon of 1852, wrote that upon looking at the Tepidarium, “we experienced one of the greatest satisfactions of our life as a critic, a feeling akin to the one brought about by . . . the return to health of a friend we had thought doomed.”169 By the beginning of the twentieth century, new scrutiny was trained on the processes by which affective meaning was understood to take shape. At the same time, a more robust articulation of the potentially antagonistic relations between the
antique and archaeological, on the one hand, and the contemporary and living, on the other, emerged. In Jensen’s hands, antique sculpture was invested with animating power, only to be supplanted (along with archaeological science) by Zoë, the living object of Hanold’s affection. For Freud, as for Hanold, the talismanic power of the basrelief was not anchored in its form but rather in the revelation in Jensen’s story of an alternative genealogy of making meaning, wherein the primacy, even precedence, of the antique is displaced. Glossing Jensen’s revelation of the linguistic mirror between “Gradiva” and “Bertgang” (a name that Jensen asserts “has the same meaning as Gradiva, and signifies ‘the one splendid in walking’” [103]), Freud observes that even the sculpture’s name “shows itself to be a remnant, really a translation, of the repressed family name of the supposedly forgotten beloved of [Hanold’s] youth” (146). Thus, the repressed memory of Hanold’s childhood friend Zoë is the point of origin for the entire Gradiva circuitry. The sculpture comes afterward. As metaphor (for psychoanalysis) and as stand-in (for repressed desires) in the hands of Freud and Jensen, the special resonance of the sculptural antique and Pompeii fundamentally depended upon their role for and by the beholder: that is, in the excavation of the human subject. The earlier stages in this crucial genealogy form the point of departure for the following chapter.
Chapter 4
In the Round
There were a lot of children in the Vatican this morning: small barbarians scarce out of the nursery. . . . Some were left to their own devices, and scampered . . . through the gallery; jumping up three steps at a time, clambering up to windows, running round isolated statues, ferreting into all the little nook and corner rooms, peeping into the lidless sarcophagi and the great porphyry baths. . . . The others were being led by their elders: talking in whispers, or silent: demure, weary, vacant, staring about with dreary, vague little faces; these, who were not permitted to rush about like the others, seemed chilled, numbed by a sort of wonder unaccompanied by curiosity, oppressed by a sense of indefinable desolation. And, indeed, it is a desolate place, this Vatican, with its long, bleak, glaring corridors; its half-lit, chill, resounding halls; its damp little Belvedere Court, . . . a dreary labyrinth of brick and mortar, a sort of over-ground catacomb of stones, constructed in our art-studying, rather than art-loving times . . . 1
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T
hus begins Vernon Lee’s essay “The Child in the Vatican,” which appeared in her 1881 collection Belcaro. In the pages that follow, Lee (born Violet Paget) further explores what we might now call the problem of the modern art museum in general and the more specific issue of encounters with ancient sculpture therein. “We ask ourselves,” she writes, “overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? We shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least” (23). Why, she wonders, is it so difficult to connect with these objects? And, in the age of painting’s apotheosis, how might we imagine the story otherwise? These and other questions are posed by Lee and answered by way of a hybrid text, aptly described by Stefano Evangelista as at once fairy tale and aesthetic treatise.2 No small part of these problems, as Lee frames them, is the physical and conceptual space of the museum itself. The Vatican conjured here is “a dismal scientific piece of ostentation, like all galleries; a place where art is arranged and ticketed and made dingy and lifeless even as are the plants in a botanic collection.” The word “scientific” is essential in the binary Lee constructs between, on the one hand, dry, archaeological knowledge that most often blinds spectators to the works of art before them and, on the other, an unruly, embodied aesthetic experience, in this case emblematized by the children. Lee here links the emergence of the modern museum directly to the consolidation of “scientific” approaches to art objects, namely, the archaeological and art-historical. For Lee, these institutions have the unfortunate effect of deadening all of the agents and quasi-agents involved. The gallery visitors are not the only ones who are numbed to art. Thanks to the yoke of “knowledge,” this Vatican is “eminently
a place of exile; or worse, of captivity, for all this people of marble: these athletes and nymphs and satyrs, and warriors and poets and gods.” While Lee admits that “galleries are necessary things, to save pictures and statues (or the little remaining of them),” she finds that “they are evil necessities; and the sense of a sort of negative vandalism always clings to them, specially to the galleries of statues, so uninhabited, so utterly sepulchral” (18; emphasis mine).3 Insisting on the morguelike aspect of the galleries of antiquities, Lee taps into what was a familiar and seductive discourse by the second half of the nineteenth century, when sculpture’s gelid, uncanny out-of-time-ness was definitively and closely associated with the threat of mortification. Such a view of ancient sculpture, and indeed of sculpture in general, came to dominate nineteenthcentury formulations of the paragone, the competition between the arts of sculpture and painting.4 By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the very possibility of an enlivened and enlivening antique, which had been at the core of an eighteenth-century ontology of sculpture, was increasingly under threat. This chapter tracks interconnected attempts to reckon with sculpture’s associations with morbidity, which nonetheless kept the flame of antique animation alive. Writing in 1880, Lee’s friend and colleague Pater argued that despite its current dislocation “from the clear Greek skies, the poetical Greek life, in our modern galleries,” “Greek sculpture could not have been a cold thing.”5 Pater had been preoccupied with classical sculpture’s relative coldness or warmth, accessibility or remoteness, unity or fragmentation, as well as debates regarding its monochromy or coloration, since 1867, when he began exploring these issues in a biographical essay on Winckelmann. From that time and in subsequent essays on Greek sculpture, first published in
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1880, Pater continued to refine his answer to these questions. Pater’s distinctly personal response to these preoccupations were shaped by three critical interlocutors: Goethe, Hegel, and, above all, Winckelmann himself. According to Pater, “the air of our galleries and museums,” with “their too intellectual greyness,” inhibited the visitor’s ability to recognize and respond to the energy and passion that gave sculpture form.6 He shared with Lee a preoccupation with the modern museum’s defining role in consolidating a view, at once spatial and ideological, of ancient sculpture as cold and remote. Nevertheless, Lee’s work likewise attests to her enduring exploration—often in the space of the museum—of sculpture’s special capacity to vivify. Lee’s intimate collaboration with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson between 1887 and 1898 produced the “Gallery Diaries,” which provide remarkable accounts of their scrupulously recorded responses to works of art at the Capitoline, the Vatican, and elsewhere.7 Lee was engaged with the tenets of aestheticism even as she formulated an early articulation of empathy or, in her term, “Aesthetic Empathy.” Sculpture stands at the heart of Lee’s art-theoretical explorations precisely for its ability to render the viewing subject aware of his or her subjectivity through physicality—a matter of absolute centrality for her overarching interest in empathy and aesthetic response. Pater’s and Lee’s writings came on the heels of new archaeological revelations, particularly in the 1870s, at sites such as Olympia, Troy, and Mycenae. Around the same time, the German approach of Altertumswissenschaft (literally, the science of the antique) increasingly, if belatedly, encouraged an emphatically scientific study of the classical world and its artifacts in England. There, scholars were
also influenced by the consolidation of anthropological approaches to the antique. In addition, the influence of psychology on the interpretation of objects and on the study of Einfühlung (empathy) yielded new considerations of ancient sculpture. In the arenas of archaeological and art-historical inquiry, the question of sculpture’s Vielansichtigkeit (the degree to which sculptural objects did or did not insist on multiple points of view) came to be of vital importance to the historiography of ancient art, notably in the writing of Julius Lange, Adolf von Hildebrand, and Emanuel Löwy.8 Pictorial representations of ancient sculpture raised especially pointed concerns about sculpture’s aspectivity. How should one freeze a view of an object meant to be seen in the round? Or, rather, how should one capture the experience of sculptural sidedness in the necessarily constrained domain of two-dimensional picturing? This chapter takes up this problematic as it took shape in early engravings after the antique, the pictorial practices of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sculptors Bouchardon and Canova, and formative late nineteenth-century photographic representations. In Pater’s dialogue with Winckelmann, Goethe, and Hegel; in Lee’s decades-long commitment to thinking through the terms of aesthetic response; and in pictorial explorations of sculptural sidedness, the powerful legacies of an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique resonated in new efforts to revitalize encounters with classical sculpture at a moment when such a possibility was often thought to have been eclipsed.
Pater, Lee, and the Antique Remarking in 1867 that “breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are the marks of Hellenic culture,” Pater went on to ask, “Is such a culture a
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lost art?”9 The larger challenge, as Pater framed it, had to do with the fact that the art of Greece was illuminated solely by “the reflected, refined light which a great education creates for us” and which stripped the art of Greece of “the local, accidental colouring of its own age,” along with all that is “slight and vulgar.” Following Goethe, Pater wondered, “Can we bring down that ideal into the gaudy, perplexed light of modern life?”10 In texts written between 1867 and the early 1880s, Pater made major contributions in this domain, troubling conventional accounts of Greek art even as he articulated a powerful case for understanding Winckelmann (by way of Goethe and Hegel) as an exemplary interlocutor in the pursuit of “aesthetic criticism.”11 In this work, as has been recently demonstrated, Pater played a key role in the institutionalization of classical study in the British context, a fact that bears upon his writing about classical sculpture, both in the sense of its crafting and subsequent reception.12 In the culminating chapter of The Renaissance, based on an earlier essay of 1867 titled “Winckelmann,” Pater reflected on the challenges and possibilities for animating the antique—conceived primarily as figural sculpture—and acknowledged Winckelmann as a vital predecessor. Even as it made a certain chronological sense, Winckelmann’s appearance as the culminating figure in The Renaissance befitted his enduring significance for Pater.13 For Pater, as for Goethe before him, Winckelmann’s intimate and history-defying connection with Greek aesthetic and erotic sensibilities was precisely what ensured his exemplary status—a connection forged crucially, in Pater’s account, in relation to the forms of antique bodies. A close reader of Hegel, Pater cites Hegel’s arguments throughout his essays on Greek sculpture
and recapitulates key aspects of the Aesthetics, in addition to metabolizing the treatment of Greek sculpture in the Phenomenology of Mind.14 The observation in Pater’s “Winckelmann” essay that “the Greek ideal expressed itself preeminently in sculpture” is later situated within a larger Hegelian schema: “We have seen that the development of the various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts of man concerning humanity, to the growing revelation of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world” (167).15 For Pater, as for Hegel before him, Greek art was distinctive for the equipoise it manifested between form and thought. Pater writes that the Venus de Milo “is in no sense a symbol, a suggestion, of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. . . . [The spiritual] motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the sensuous form, as its meaning to an allegory, but saturates it and is identical with it” (164).16 Although Pater proves altogether more interested than Hegel in the evidence of polychromy in classical sculpture, his account echoes Hegel’s in its emphasis on sculpture’s “pure form” (169), its “gleaming surfaces” underscored for their lack of color and background information (172).17 This art of whiteness is fundamentally an art of abstraction. Nonetheless, in a marked shift, Pater’s essays from the 1880s in Greek Studies place less emphasis on Greek sculpture’s stasis and monochromy than on its volatility, color, and actively worked materials. Pater here renounces the philosophical model that tended to emphasize the abstract and ideal aspects of classical sculpture at the expense of the sensuousness of its materials and of the broader object world of the Greeks. He goes on to mount a vigorous critique of
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those “students of antiquity” who have “for the most part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture . . . as elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, as embodiments in a sort of petrified language, of pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in connection with the development of Greek intellect.” In such accounts, the artist is understood as exclusively preoccupied “with forms as abstract almost as the conceptions of philosophy” (188–89). In direct rejoinder to this prevailing tendency— and by contrast with his earlier account in the “Winckelmann” text—Pater unfurls a starkly different concept of Greek art in his essays of the 1880s, rooted instead in “the material order” and considered “as results of a designed and skilful [sic] dealing of accomplished fingers with precious forms of matter for the delight of the eyes” (188).18 With palpable relish, Pater summons up a vision of the Greek artist consumed by the “tone, fibre or texture, of his marble or cedar-wood, of that just perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like surface of the Venus of Melos” (189). While Pater recognizes, and to some extent endorses, the view that “the works of the highest Greek sculpture are indeed intellectualised,” he emphasizes that “they are still sensuous and material, addressing themselves, in the first instance, not to the purely reflective faculty, but to the eye” (190). In his multipart chronological account, Pater’s “aesthetic historicism” oscillates between historical anecdote and immersive sensual description.19 Although shaped by Hegel’s thinking, Pater was also starkly aware of the problems it precipitated for a sense of classical sculpture’s place in modern life.20 Hegel’s theorization of classical art was, in fact, built on Winckelmannian foundations. And yet in his essays of the 1880s, Pater would begin to dislodge the sense of classical sculpture’s chilly, remote ideality consolidated by Hegel while retaining
Wickelmann’s centrality. In an artful two-step, Pater populated his writings on Greek sculpture with new artifacts unknown to Winckelmann, while crafting an appreciation of them inherently at odds with Winckelmann’s historical schema and the formal criteria he isolated in his mapping of ideality. At the same time, Winckelmann endured as an exemplary and distinctly passionate model for a deeply felt connection with the ancients, from which, Pater intimates, new accounts might indeed be articulated. As privileged interlocutor, Winckelmann provided the model for Pater’s new understanding of Greek sculpture. Pater’s work to extract Winckelmann from his association with an overly narrow, universalizing, and idealizing view of classical art was already underway in his 1867 text “Winkelmann.” There, Pater described Winckelmann’s move in 1747 to Dresden, which gave him access to important collections of antiquities and enabled him “to escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch” (147). Able to make “contact with that life [of the Greeks],” Winckelmann functioned as a stand-in for prior rediscoveries of the antique; he “reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it!” (146). While Goethe ultimately emerged as a hero in Pater’s text for having merged Hellenism and romanticism, Winckelmann’s key contribution was his intimate connection to the art of the Greeks, enacted by way of both touch and sentiment. Winckelmann “fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands,” an ability that stemmed, Pater explained, from his ability “to deal with the sensuous side of art in the pagan manner” (147).21
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Intimations of Winckelmann’s “paganism” were by no means novel; Pater cited Madame de Staël who reportedly remarked that “no one [before Winckelmann] had . . . made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity” (152). For his part, Pater emphasized Winckelmann’s “enthusiasm,” which “within its severe limits . . . burn[ed] like lava” (148). This quality was key to Winckelmann’s “divinatory power over the Hellenic world” and manifested itself physically as “the quick, susceptible enthusiast . . . apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch” (154). In an extraordinary passage, Pater conjured Winckelmann engaged in revelatory sculptural looking: “catch[ing] the thread of a whole sequence of laws in some hollowing of the hand, or dividing of the hair” (155). Here Pater conjures an emphatically corporeal connection to the antique, at once anchored in figural sculpture and channeled through Winckelmann’s own exquisitely sensitive bodily responses to its represented forms. Winckelmann’s ability, first heralded by Hegel and later by Pater, to “[open] a new sense for the study of art” was above all due to his extraordinarily sensitive scrutiny of sculptural form and his appreciation of its sensuous aspects. Significantly, Pater stressed the fortuitous alignment between Winckelmann and the artists of classical Greece in their shared appreciation of male beauty, built upon bonds between men: “This enthusiasm, dependent as it is to a great degree on bodily temperament, has a power of reinforcing the purer emotions of the intellect with an almost physical excitement.” But Winckelmann’s “affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual”; rather, “that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent
friendships with young men” (152; emphasis mine). Here Pater closely followed Goethe, who had, in his 1805 biographical essay, Winkelmann [sic] und sein Jahrhundert in Briefen und Aufsätzen (Winckelmann and his century in letters and essays), emphasized the fundamental centrality of the body for Winckelmann’s conceptions of the antique. When Winckelmann moved to Rome, Goethe asserted that there he “saw his ideas in corporeal form around him.”22 Elsewhere, Goethe characterized Winckelmann’s passionate friendships with men as an integral part of his deep connection with the ancient world, which Goethe explicitly linked to the imitative circuitry that drove Winckelmann’s aesthetic and historical project insofar as he sought to “[transform] all of the worthy people who sought his company into friends on this model.”23 It is in this sense that, despite the remoteness of his time and place relative to the classical world, Pater could write that Winckelmann “feels after the Hellenic world” (158; emphasis mine). For Pater, the central challenge was to discern the complexity—both the richness and darkness— that lay beneath and indeed conspired to give form to the Greek ideals of self-sufficiency, unity, and integrity. Winckelmann was able to crack this code as a result of his receptivity to and even complicity with the sensuous form of classical sculpture, together with the life forms that gave it shape and meaning. Pater’s own efforts to reckon with Greek art were modeled on Winckelmann’s intuition, his refusal to ascend to the realms of abstraction, and his embrace of the concrete. Nevertheless, Pater recognized crucial limitations in Winckelmann’s understanding of classical art (141). Namely, his orientation to the qualities of “unity and repose” typical of certain forms of Greek art, together with his inhabitation of “a world of exquisite but abstract
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and colourless form,” led to a lopsided “conception of art” insofar as it “exclude[d] that bolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil” (178). In his subsequent writing on Greek art, Pater would emphasize Winckelmann’s fundamental blindness to what Pater conceived as the proto-romanticism of Greek art.24 Pater’s radically reformulated vision of the ideal is clearly articulated in “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture—I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art.” Rejecting conceptions of Greek art as abstract and intellectualized, sculpture is presented instead as sensuous and material; indeed, Pater goes to great lengths to foreground the working of metals, the luster of gold and bronze. In Pater’s telling, “the heroic age of Greek art is the age of the hero as smith,” and this age is redolent both of extraordinary visual lures, like the treasures only recently unearthed at Troy and Mycenae, of which Pater was acutely aware, and of violent deaths associated with a material culture of metalwork that took shape in swords, shields, breastplates, helmets, and chariots.25 This picture of a world of myriad accomplishments in the “tectonic crafts”—“a world of material splendour, moulded clay, beaten gold, polished stone” (233)—provides the foundation for subsequent artistic developments. This first chronological stage is punctuated by a vision of animation, whereby “the informing, reasonable soul” takes root in these materials, “reclaiming the metal and stone and clay, till they are as full of living breath as the real warm body itself ” (223). This duality of material form and spirit is heralded as a constant in Greek art of subsequent eras: “From period to period, [it is] its true philosophy” (223). Having traced the material experimentation and impulse to naturalism that gave rise to the emergence of the “intelligible human image and human story,” Pater continues in “The Beginnings of Greek
Sculpture—II. The Age of Graven Images” to invoke the “vague belief, the mysterious custom and tradition,” which developed into “elaborately ordered ritual[s]” with the result that “one by one these new gods of bronze, or marble, or flesh-like ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous shrine” (240–41). Austere marble gods and goddesses are hereby anchored by Pater to cultic rituals, summoned as the antithesis of tranquil intellection. Even as Greek art becomes associated fundamentally with human form and with named makers, Pater roots its meaning in cultural practices that would seem to run counter to an image of self-sufficient, serene ideality. Pater presaged these historical dynamics in his earlier “Winckelmann” essay. “The wilder people have wilder gods,” he wrote, continuing, “Greek religion too has its mendicants, its purifications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered to the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its exaggerated superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its addolorata, its mournful mysteries!” (162). Over the course of his writings and their periodization of Greek sculpture, Pater’s emphasis is as much on development as it is on essential continuities between the two tendencies he identifies as the “Dorian”—redolent of “a certain inward, abstract, intellectual ideal” associated with “a love of order,” “severe composition,” and the religion of Apollo—and the “Ionian” (or “Asiatic”)—“delighting in brightness and colour in beautiful material,” associated with “undirected imagination” and the patron god Hephaestus, its signal mode being chryselephantine sculpture.26 This distinctive admixture of carefully wrought images, mysterious beliefs, and uncontrolled passions surfaces again and again in Pater’s account.27 In a particularly telling instance, as he considers the new excavations in “The Marbles of Aegina,”
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Pater moves easily from description of the Parian marble figures’ “humanism,” realized “with complete mastery of hand,” to Homer’s supremely violent images of death and destruction (245, 264–66). Thus, even as the essay would appear to celebrate the inexorable movement toward the Dorian mode, the specter of the Ionian casts its shadow. These traces are at once allusive, as in Homer’s images conjuring human dismemberment, and material, insofar as Pater diagnoses a “lurking spirit of metal-work” in the Aegina marbles. This connection is attested to by “the little holes . . . bored into the marble figures for the attachment of certain accessories in bronze,— lances, swords, bows” and by “a certain slimness and tenuity, a certain dainty lightness or poise in [the sculptures’] groupings,” which reveals that “they have their reminiscences of work in bronze” (263–64). Thus, not unlike the residue of red and blue polychromy spotted by Pater on their marble surfaces, the Aeginan sculptures bear the traces of an essential duality between the Dorian and Ionian (263). As Potts has observed, Pater’s account provides something quite different from Nietzsche’s contemporaneous assault, in The Birth of Tragedy, on a received idea of a pure and serene Apollonian vision of Greek antiquity. Like Nietzsche, who emphasized disruptive Dionysian elements, Pater offered a significant revision of Greek antiquity.28 However, even as Pater’s developmental narrative unfurls, the countervailing tendencies remain, enduring through to the final stage. In the last essay of Greek Studies, “The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” Pater summoned up the figure of a standing Discobolus, originally wrought in bronze, whose marble copy suggested “a blast of cool wind” that “congealed metal” (287). Here again, Pater conjures the key “duality” that gives form to his concept of Greek art. As Potts aptly observes, “In Pater’s complex and shifting
vision of the heroic male body of early classical Greek culture, it emerges as beautiful, alluring, and desirable, yet also subject to ‘the grotesque indignities of death’ to which the logic of its own inner impulses involuntarily, yet implacably, leads.”29 In this way, the destabilizing core at the heart of Pater’s conception of the Greek ideal drew together the Dorian and Ionian tendencies, at once constituting ideal human form and entailing an essence fundamentally shaped by “the teeming, still fluid world, of old beliefs.”30 For Greek art not to be stripped of its vitality and relevance for the contemporary world, Pater suggested, it must continue to be understood relative to what Potts describes as “the darker and richer resonances of earlier cultural forms associated with practices such as the Dionysian rites and sacrifices.”31 In his rejection of radical philosophical abstraction and his emphasis on Greek sculpture’s serene balance between form and content, Pater proved himself to be a careful reader of Hegel, who observed, in Michael Squire’s admirable distillation, “the more perfectly ancient sculptors attempted to embody the spiritual life of the gods in the human form of their statues, the more they revealed it to lie beyond bodily, sensuous expression.”32 Likewise, Pater’s essays of the 1880s on Greek sculpture reflected the inherent instability of Greek art embedded in Hegel’s account. Such a disposition toward instability and fragmentation is reflected in Pater’s descriptions, which emphasize losses and partial traces (as in his return to the Venus de Milo), as well as in his keen attunement to archaeological discoveries and to the resulting volatility of ongoing revisions to knowledge about antique artifacts. Pater’s anthropological interest in the cultural forms and practices associated with archaic religions and rites marks such a vivid departure.
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What remained constant for Pater was the possibility that encounters with ancient sculpture could break open their beautiful, seemingly serene, and inward-turning contours. In his extended discussion of a standing Discobolus in “The Age of Athletic Prizemen,” Pater’s careful ekphrasis proposes that the work is exemplary insofar as it looks beyond and outside of itself. Through this observation, Pater extends an invitation to the spectator: “Take him, to lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the Greek world” (298).33 The Discobolus is positioned here as a crucial artifact, one that had the power to move its modern spectator beyond the glacial inwardness of ideal form. In imagining sculptural encounter as an invitation, Pater seems to have responded to the concerns Hegel poignantly articulated in Aesthetics. In terms strikingly resonant with those of Lee, Hegel reflected on classical sculpture’s apparent inability to connect with “a person’s own subjective inwardness, the life of his heart, the soul of his most personal feelings,” concluding, “This is the reason why the sculptures of antiquity leave us somewhat cold.”34 Even while gesturing to the possibility of pleasure in beholding Greek sculpture, Hegel finds that “what remains unsatisfied in the sculpture of antiquity is the demand that a character should develop and proceed outwardly to deeds and actions, and inwardly to a deepening of the soul.”35 In his emphasis on the unruly passions and mysterious rituals undergirding Greek life, Pater took up the gauntlet thrown down by Hegel. His vision of an urgent and vivid connection between contemporary viewers and Greek sculpture was nevertheless definitively forged in an eighteenth-century mold: that of Winckelmann. Both Pater and Lee were preoccupied with how ancient sculpture could be made vital for a contemporary world, and their work was similarly recursive
insofar as they shared a tendency to circle back to eighteenth-century models in order to push their thinking in new directions. As much as Pater and Lee oriented their projects historically, Lee ultimately advanced a quite distinct proposition for and exploration of a way to bring sculptural encounters into modern life and to animate aesthetic experience for contemporary viewers. For her, too, Winckelmann loomed large. But a more profound, if uncited, interlocutor for Lee was Herder, whose thinking about sculpture and experience resonated deeply with Lee’s experimentations in sculptural seeing, which were similarly invested in viewing in the round. Published in 1881, the year after Pater’s essays on Greek art began appearing in Fortnightly Review, Lee’s “The Child in the Vatican” similarly diagnoses and considers a disembodied, distanced, and scientifically driven mode of viewing as an all too pervasive condition of her time. In a text whose title itself functioned as a resonant echo of Pater’s 1878 essay “The Child in the House,” Lee repeatedly asserted her antipathy to her eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury predecessors, who are described as a lineage of “systematic excavators” and faulted for their limited understanding.36 However, Lee was deeply engaged with select inheritors: from Winckelmann to Charles Robert Cockerell, whose 1818 proposed reconstruction of the Niobid group featured prominently in “The Child in the Vatican,” and classicist Sellers, whom Lee counted among her intimates. In 1886, Lee met Sellers, who, together with Jane Harrison (another of Lee’s acquaintances), was one of the first women classicists to graduate from Cambridge. Lee’s friendship with Sellers, who later reflected in a letter to Lee that her own interest in classical “pictures and statues” had been inspired by Harrison, galvanized Lee’s study of the classical world and its artifacts.37 Whereas Lee had by 1887
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begun to register serious reservations about what Evangelista terms “the Greek matrix of Paterian aestheticism,” her relationship with Sellers reignited her interest.38 While Sellers would eventually leave London to devote herself to the distinctly scientific approach to the classical world available in Germany, her friendship with Lee endured.39 Lee’s measured, if fraught, relations with the scholarly discipline of archaeology is vividly captured in her 1895 review of Sellers’s English edition of Furtwängler’s Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture. In her enthusiastic discussion, Lee carefully situated Furtwängler’s (and Sellers’s) accomplishments relative to a broader archaeological literature treating works of art, particularly as it addressed a “mere unarchaeological outsider” such as herself (221). She praised the text for maintaining a fundamentally Winckelmannian legacy insofar as it “does actually increase enormously the possible pleasure of the unlearned by bringing them straight into the presence of antique art” (221). Thankfully, the reader is not left with “the impression of having been made to listen to quotations from documents, or to chains of arguments, but of having been for happy hours in a splendid gallery—nay, in some happier land and time, before galleries had been invented, when marble gods and goddesses and bronze heroes and athletes rose in the clear air on pediments or stood free under the trees and at cross roads” (221). In this passage, Lee’s antipathy to philological approaches to the study of antiquity is laid bare. Following the scholarly methods that distinguished the work of Harrison and Sellers, Lee’s deep commitment was to classical art; the ancient world could be accessed, its remote pleasures opened up for contemporaries, by way of encounters with ancient sculptures. Lee appreciatively recognizes Furtwängler’s approach as that of an “artistic morphologist,” one
who applies Giovanni Morelli’s approach to archaeological artifacts through “the instinctive application of loving and reverent attention, the passionate looking at the work of art and learning its most intimate details.” Lee admired Furtwängler and Sellers, like Winckelmann before them, for having revealed the limitations of disinterested, scientific analysis. In their hands, archaeology instead took a more promising hybrid form as “a science uniting the methods of the naturalist with those of the student of human thought and emotion” (222). As her review attested, Lee recognized Winckelmann as a sympathetic historical interlocutor, committed, like her, to works of art as “originally and in the last resort, a matter of perception and sentiment.”40 Without refuting that art could be “regarded as so much matter for scientific investigation . . . treated by historical methods and employed as historical evidence,” she considered the encounter with the art object as primary (221). Like Winckelmann and his inheritors, Lee was invested in antique figural sculpture’s exemplarity. Again and again, her writing is anchored by sculptural luminaries familiar then as now: the Niobid group and assorted Apollos and Venuses, among others. If the museum functions as a villain of sorts in Lee’s “The Child in the Vatican,” it is nevertheless there—in the Belvedere courtyard—that the child grows enchanted by the “statue demons” and then comes to love Rome and its sculpture. Against all odds, the museum becomes the site of enchantment, as it is for Lee herself. Her remarkable “Gallery Diaries” provide a striking view onto something like her own extended version of the fairy tale, undertaken with her companion and collaborator Anstruther-Thomson (known as Kit). Between meeting in 1887 and the end of their relationship in 1898, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson enjoyed the
Figure 104 Subiaco Niobid (now Subiaco Ephebe), first
century ce, Roman copy of a Hellenistic bronze (fourth century bce). Marble. Museum Nazionale delle Terme, Rome. Photo: Mondadori Portfolio / Electa / Sergio Anelli / Bridgeman Images.
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rhythms of their cosmopolitan existence, scrupulously recording their responses to works of art at the Capitoline and the Vatican, among other collections throughout Europe.41 Lee continued this work independently, returning to these observations in numerous articles and books. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s project fundamentally depended on access to public art collections, albeit with the aim of unsettling the effects Lee described in “The Child in the Vatican.” The “Gallery Diaries” poignantly attest to the women’s shared work to reclaim the deeply personal contours of immediate encounter—an experience that would ideally be unencumbered by scholarly analysis or reigning conventions of taste. An entry describing the Subiaco Niobid is typical (fig. 104): April 15. Terme Museum. Subiaco Niobid. (Fine day, soon after lunch, very good spirits, state of happy, not at all impatient expectancy. Very slight palpitations from walking rapidly and stairs, only running as a faint rapidity of life, unlocalised, breathing through nose, mouth shut.) I see very well, easily, have no sense of seeing, but a strong, full sense of it (the Niobid). It is the only nominative. Despite the bad architectural building-up the figure is delightful. It seems to be swinging about, thrusting forward, pressing down, furling up, with a total delightful spiral movement. Oddly this impression is irrespective of the point of view, and exists equally in that total impression. I take it the total impression is one of pushes and pulls and of this unstable equilibrium, which has the same exciting intellectual quality as good Gothic. I am perfectly aware of the remarkable ugliness of the line in many positions.42
Lee here invites the reader to return with her to April 1903 and to the raw data that provided inspiration for her theoretical proposals laid out in the
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sprawling 1912 volume, coauthored with AnstrutherThomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. As the passage above suggests, for Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, attentively embodied movement was an essential antidote to the dulling and deadening effect of modern sculptural encounter, imagined at once in terms of the spectator’s body moving through space and in terms of the sculpture’s form. That the Niobid was one of the sculptures selected by Lee in her project geared to heighten bodily alertness is particularly meaningful given her interest, expressed in “The Child in the Vatican,” in another figure of Niobe that represents marble petrifaction.43 Taking the full measure of objects like the Subiaco Niobid necessitated an experience in the round and the attentive viewer’s perception of the sculpture—and themselves—in a full 360-degree perambulation.
Seeing and Sculpting Sidedness By the time Lee and Anstruther-Thomson were circling sculptures like the Subiaco Niobid or the Venus de’ Medici, the question of sculpture’s sidedness had developed into a central preoccupation for scholars of Greek art, even as it plagued visual representations of ancient sculpture. How to capture an object meant to be seen in the round in a single view? The issue of aspectivity emerged much earlier, as a centerpiece of the paragone debates in the sixteenth century. In 1546, sculptor Benvenuto Cellini wrote to Benedetto Varchi in response to an invitation for artists to weigh in with their thoughts about the arts. Cellini’s letter was a sharply worded critique of the art of painting, whose impoverishment was clear in comparison to sculpture: “I say that the art of sculpture, among all the arts in which ‘disegno’ is involved, is seven times greater [than
painting]: because a statue must have eight views, and all must be of equal quality.”44 In Cellini’s estimation, sculpture’s superiority was confirmed mathematically and experientially, thanks to its three-dimensionality, its call to ambulant spectatorship, and the resulting imperative that a sculptor create multiple and equally excellent views. Whereas Cellini’s freestanding figural works, such as the Apollo and Hyacinth (ca. 1550) and Perseus (1545–54), suggest the degree to which he absorbed the imperative for multidimensionality into his sculptural vision, extant preparatory drawings have not allowed scholars to find direct echoes of Cellini’s assertion in his own pictorial (as opposed to modeling) practice.45 Such traces have survived in the work of Cellini’s contemporary, Michelangelo. In what may be the earliest instance of this practice, preparatory drawings for the figure of Saint John the Evangelist for the Tomb of Pope Julius II show Michelangelo considering what appears to be the same figure from two separate vantage points.46 Giambologna, who was perhaps the first artist to design sculptures destined for public squares and therefore was attentive to the experience of beholders moving in space, likewise seems to have emphasized a “revolving view” in his nude sculptures of the dwarf Morgante, possibly conceived as a rebuttal to Agnolo Bronzino’s paragone throwdown in the form of a doubled-sided portrait of the nude Morgante.47 Thinking through sculptural sidedness and its relations to pictorial imaging was a key aspect of Renaissance art making. In the course of their study, painters commonly executed drawings from the front, the rear, and the side of their sculptural model.48 This practice seems to have been common in studies of antique sculpture during this same period. Willem van Tetrode, active in Cellini’s workshop in 1549, evidently had in mind the
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question of aspectivity in his drawings made after the Puttos Bearing a Vase (ca. 1560) in the Villa Medici, in which he depicted the work from two slightly different points of view, perhaps with an eye to capturing the preferred contour (fig. 105).49 And in a drawing dated 1576, Pierre Jacques juxtaposed three perspectives of the Venus de’ Medici, evidently prior to the restoration of the figure’s arms (fig. 106).50 Cellini’s logic and Michelangelo’s practice find their echo in the work of the eighteenth-century sculptor Bouchardon. During his Prix de Rome pensionnate and early career in Rome (1723–32), Bouchardon executed numerous studies after
Figure 105 Willem van
Tetrode, Puttos Bearing a Vase, ca. 1560. Black chalk on paper. Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna. Figure 106 Pierre Jacques, Venus de’ Medici, 1576.
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Estampes, fol. 41v.
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antiquities, including his celebrated model of the Barberini Faun, a work so admired that Cardinal Barberini, who then owned the classical sculpture, had a plaster copy produced after Bouchardon’s figure (fig. 107).51 In his commitment to copying esteemed work of the classical past, Bouchardon was in excellent company, focused as he was on the emulative practice encouraged by the Academy, particularly in its Roman setting at the Palazzo Mancini.52 Notable, however, in Bouchardon’s many drawn copies are the traces of the sculptor’s exquisite sensitivity to faciality. Again and again he moved around static objects to capture them from multiple angles. In drawings of the Apollo Belvedere, executed in Rome, likely between 1726 and 1732, Bouchardon observed the figure of Apollo from three strikingly different perspectives: oriented frontally to the figure’s torso and two threequarter views from the left- and right-hand sides (fig. 108).53 In fact, traces on the reverse of two of the sheets suggest that Bouchardon first worked out the desired silhouette before committing to the study. Bouchardon continued his multiaspect drawings after antique figures years after his return to Paris, in studies after casts. In a series of large drawings, the sculptor rendered an extraordinary eighteen sanguine studies of the torso of the Laocoön and seventeen views of the Venus de’ Medici.54 Bouchardon’s commitment to seizing myriad views of exemplary finished works likewise informed his working method with life models. In between his two campaigns of drawing after antique figures, Bouchardon employed a similarly mobile procedure in his work with studio models. In extant studies for the allegorical figure of Autumn, two of four Geniuses of the Seasons for his rue de Grenelle fountain project (1738–45), the sculptor completed at least six large red-chalk drawings that register his
Figure 107 Edme
Bouchardon, The Barberini Faun, 1726–30. Marble. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (René-Gabriel Ojéda).
movement around the posed model.55 But the most remarkable trace of Bouchardon’s methods in this vein is evident in his work after Eros Bending His Bow (fig. 109). In this instance, Bouchardon’s practice of drawing in the round, both after the antique and the life model, is trained on a Roman rendition of a celebrated statue attributed to Lysippos. While in Rome, Bouchardon made six redchalk drawings of a classical torso.56 Though fragmentary, the statue was clearly of the Eros, complete with phantom traces of missing wings. An inscription on the mount of one of the extant studies indicates that the drawing was made in Rome, after the statue in the collection of Cardinal Albani, who owned this Roman rendition of Lysippos’s famed Eros the Archer.57 Conceived on the heels of his return from Italy, Bouchardon’s sculpture project, Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club, was evidently informed by his earlier extended scrutiny of the figure in Albani’s
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Figure 108 Edme
Bouchardon, Apollo Belvedere, two studies after the antique, 1726–32. Red chalk drawings. Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 23999 and inv. 23998. Photos © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Laurent Chastel /Adrien Didierjean). Figure 109 Edme
Bouchardon, Eros Bending His Bow, two studies after the antique from front and from back left. Red chalk drawings. (left) École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. EBA 580. Photo © Beaux-Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York. (right) Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon, inv. D890. Photo © Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, 2014.
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Figure 110 Edme
Bouchardon, composite of
five studies for Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club. Red chalk drawings. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Adrien Didierjean, Laurent Chastel, Christophe Chavan, Thierry Le Mage). Figure 111 Edme
Bouchardon, composite of four studies for Cupid
collection. Once again Bouchardon moved around the figure, now in the guise of a studio model, whom Bouchardon represented in an extraordinary series of red-chalk drawings almost double the size of the Roman studies (figs. 110 and 111).58 In drawing after drawing, Bouchardon examined the model’s silhouette, ultimately depicting nine different perspectives. These remarkable studies resonate fruitfully with Summers’s evaluation of sculpture as an art of “personal space” insofar as it depends upon, and has significance in light of, such fundamental aspects of embodied human life as “sizes, uprightness, facing, handedness . . . tangibility, manipulability, portability, possessability, and their opposites.”59 The resulting sculpture (fig. 112) was exhibited as a terra-cotta model at the Salon of 1739 before being commissioned by the Directeur des
Bâtiments du Roi on behalf of the king, with the plaster model exhibited at the Salon of 1746. This work is distinctive for what Guilhem Scherf has evocatively described as the “amazing twirling motion of the figure, leading the viewer to move around the marble statue.”60 It is tempting to draw a direct line from Cellini’s assertion of sculpture’s eight views to Bouchardon’s practice almost two hundred years later. Bouchardon apparently threw down the gauntlet in representing nine.61 What Cellini and later Herder, albeit with a somewhat different emphasis, isolated as sculpture’s distinct imperative to seeing in the round found its traces in early prints depicting multiple views of celebrated antiques. In his landmark 1638 Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum, Perrier presented one hundred engravings of celebrated
Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club. Red chalk drawings. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN–Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Adrien Didierjean, Laurent Chastel, Christophe Chavan, Thierry Le Mage).
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Figure 112 Edme
Bouchardon, Cupid Carving
a Bow from Hercules’s Club, 1750. Marble. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN–Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski / Art Resource, New York.
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Figure 113 François Perrier,
three views of the Venus de’ Medici. Engravings from Perrier, Segmenta nobilium signorum e[t] statuarum, quaetemporis dentem inuidium evasere Urbis aeternae ruinis erepta . . . (Rome, 1638). University of Virginia Special Collections.
antique sculptures, along with a single modern example.62 Like his contemporary Nicolas Poussin, Perrier was a French artist who spent a significant portion of his career in Rome. Prior to the 1638 compilation, Perrier had printed engravings of six celebrated sculptures of ancient and one of modern vintage.63 Parting ways with the earlier model in which the sculptures were constrained by roughly identical niches, Perrier radically reimagined the settings for many of the sculptures in Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum. But this was not the only transformation. Remarkably, Perrier devoted multiple plates to ten of the assembled works in order to capture additional perspectives. The Borghese Gladiator, depicted from four different points of view, was the most amply represented, followed by the Venus de’ Medici and the Farnese Hercules, each with three views (fig. 113). The Apollo Belvedere and six other figures benefited from two vantage points.
The logic of Perrier’s multiples has been understood to hinge on the illustriousness of the works depicted.64 However, the fact that only a single plate in the Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum showed the celebrated Laocoön group disputes this notion. Neither does a sense of a work’s sidedness seem to have been the decisive factor in the choice to render multiple perspectives since the final sculpture in the volume, the famously spiraling, complexly multifacial Farnese Bull, was depicted by a sole plate. In addition to significantly earlier traces of artists studying antique sculpture in the round, Perrier would surely have been aware of Goltzius’s engravings after the antique, produced shortly after his return from Italy around 1592 and printed in 1617.65 Among Goltzius’s prints were his representations of sculptures like the striking Farnese Hercules observed from the rear. Nevertheless, Perrier’s prints, which circulated widely in original and
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Figure 114 Peter van Lint, Venus de’ Medici, two
studies after the antique, 1640. Black chalk, brush, and grey wash, white heightening on blue paper. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1964. Photo: author.
pirated editions and which very quickly inspired imitators (like Bisschop’s Signorum veterum icones, La Haye, 1668–69), no doubt helped formalize the practice.66 In one of the more vivid testaments to Perrier’s posterity, Peter van Lint executed two striking views of the Venus de’ Medici in 1640 (fig. 114). Evocatively pairing the female figure with a skull, Van Lint further amplified the sculpture’s dangerous allure by way of inscriptions at the base of each engraving, in which Venus warns, “Those who loved me here too much lost their health, belongings and soul.” The preoccupation with seeing and sculpting in the round endured into the nineteenth century, both in the work of sculptors and in the domain of reproductive prints after sculpture. Like Bouchardon before him, the sculptor Canova appears to have begun the practice of sketching statues in the round during his first Roman stay, between October 1779 and June 1780. Canova studied the Quirinal
group of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux), for example, in extraordinary detail. Of this classical group, Canova reportedly said: “On reflection it seemed that more than anything else those statues might provide the true precepts for a full geometrical understanding of the general forms of man. I resolved, therefore, to go there in the early morning to sketch out the contours from all points.”67 As in the case of Bouchardon, an analogous emphasis on faciality animated Canova’s work from studio models. In his drawn studies for The Three Graces, the sculptor rendered in two dimensions myriad points of view, in what has been described as his “meticulous study of all possible formal combinations.”68 In the case of the version of The Three Graces commissioned by John, sixth Duke of Bedford, for Woburn Abbey, viewers would enjoy an analogous experience of viewing in the round thanks to the sculpture’s installation on a plinth with a rotating top.69 While such a revolving
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mechanism had been used earlier, for example, in the installation of antique sculptures such as the Capitoline Venus in Rome or the Apollino at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Canova upped the ante to ensure that his sculpture would be seen, even virtually, from multiple points of view.70 In this sense, Canova’s emphatic orientation to seeing in the round persisted straight through the sculpting process and into the subsequent stage of reproductive engraving, a process that likewise involved sculpting, albeit in low relief. A master of self-promotion, Canova carefully oversaw the creation and production of his prints from start to finish.71 And indeed, Canova often stipulated that his sculptures be engraved from multiple perspectives. While these prints typically provide the front view and back view on separate sheets, in some instances a profile view was substituted for the back view. In rarer cases, sculptures were depicted from three or more perspectives. While these views were usually consigned to individual plates, less frequently, multiple views were captured on a single engraved plate, as in the three views of the Penitent Magdalene, engraved by Angelo Bertini, or the two views of the Ideal Head, engraved by Bernardino Consorti.72 The mobility of prints ensured that the artist’s comparatively immobile works in sculpture would be seen by a significantly wider viewing audience. Canova’s considerable investment in this process is evident in the engravings produced after the first version of The Three Graces. In 1814, Canova commissioned engravings by Domenico Marchetti (after drawings by Giovanni Tognoli) of the front and back of the group (fig. 115). Since work on the marble had yet to be completed, the drawings were executed after the plaster model and were published in 1815. This state of the print was soon rendered
obsolete. In 1817, upon the completion of the second version of The Three Graces, Canova employed a different engraver to make “various alterations to the copper-plate of the group of the Graces.”73 The new engraving featured a rear view of the sculpture and thus captured the substantial modifications that had been made to the base of the statue, including,
Figure 115 Domenico
Marchetti, after drawings by
Giovanni Tognoli of Antonio Canova’s sculpture The Three Graces, 1814. Engraving. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. Courtesy Musei civici di Bassano del Grappa.
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three-dimensional terra-cotta and plaster studies (or bozetti), only to finally then be translated into marble. As Baker has observed, in the case of the engravings after The Three Graces, the remarkable attention to surface effect, together with the engravings’ unusually luxurious scale, suggest that they were imagined by Canova to emphasize the most noteworthy aspects of the marble group, whose celebrated finish and smoothness interpellated keenly observant viewers.74 Even as they spanned the gap between three and two dimensions, the plethora of engravings that Canova insisted include multiple perspectives vigorously emphasized that a full understanding of his work necessitated multidimensional seeing. By way of these engravings, something like a quasi-three-dimensional experience would be enacted.
Lee, Löwy, and Lysippos
Figure 116 Bernardino Consorti, after Antonio
Canova’s sculpture The Three Graces, 1820. Engraving. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. Courtesy Musei civici di Bassano del Grappa.
notably, the elimination of the altar, which was replaced with a column (fig. 116). As this episode attests, multiaspect engravings like these functioned as more than merely a means of certifying the final stage in a remarkably extended and multimedia sculptural process. For Canova, this process typically originated in drawing, moved into work in
In the late nineteenth century, the question of sculpture’s sidedness, which had shaped the thinking and making of artists like Cellini, Bouchardon, Perrier, and Canova, became a subject of sustained scholarly attention. This focus was particularly the case for classical sculpture, still that most canonical of forms. Lee’s work provides a striking example of the animated debates that emerged over aspectivity. Like Herder, in his celebrated passage devoted to “a lover of art sunk deep in contemplation who circles restlessly around a sculpture,” Lee was especially interested in the question of sculpture’s sidedness.75 In Beauty and Ugliness, Lee’s thoughtful reading of classical archaeologist and theorist Löwy signaled her fluency with contemporary scholarship on the topic. Löwy’s 1900 study, Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (translated into English in 1907 as The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art),
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spurred a vigorous round of Lee’s gallery research in Rome the following year. Moving around the Subiaco Niobid, Lee had in mind Löwy’s theory, “according to which Greek statues were at first composed from three separate points of view [Dreiansichtigkeit], and did not acquire absolute continuity of planes and consequent continuity of points of view [Vielansichtigkeit] until the time of Lysippus.”76 Among Lee’s interests, as she and Anstruther-Thomson undertook their firsthand research in their “Gallery Diaries,” was the testing of Löwy’s model. In The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, Löwy laid out a developmental scheme that ran counter to many extant explanations of the relative development of the pictorial and spatial arts. Whereas earlier scholars such as Alois Riegl and Mortiz Hoernes had posited that sculpture in the round was the most primitive form of art, and sculptor and theorist Adolf von Hildebrand, in his 1893 Problem of Form, asserted that “sculpture has undoubtedly evolved from drawing,” Löwy’s account of Greek art shifted the terms of analysis by proposing a system that encompassed all art forms.77 Hildebrand reasoned: “The three-dimensional relations of the different aspects of the figure can scarcely be decided beforehand. Therefore, a preparatory roughing out of the total form is impossible. One way alone stands open: to start with one view in mind and let the others arrange themselves as necessary consequences of this main aspect. The sculptor is accordingly forced to base his three-dimensional conception on a visual or pictorial conception and to lay out his work with this only in view.”78 Hildebrand’s schema, which would prove powerfully influential for analyses of sculpture in general and Greek art in particular, departed from
Löwy’s in its telos of planarity in the guise of relief. In Löwy’s telling in The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, the earliest forms of representation oriented primarily to archaeological and psychological considerations, such as drawing and low relief “bound by the law of Frontality,” depended upon the most primitive and spontaneous “memory pictures” or “conceptual imaging” (Erinnerungsbild) formed in the human mind (45).79 In the case of sculpture in the round, archaic works likewise reflected artists’ “mental conceptions” of a representation conceived for axial frontal viewing and were thus resolutely unifacial in their presentation, even if they technically entailed all-around modeling. From these images, meant to be viewed from a single vantage point, gradually developed plurifacial forms, oriented to more than one viewing angle. Such images attested to the “peculiar domain of statuary,” which Löwy identified as “the rendering of the round in the round” (52). Even works like the Charioteer of Delphi and the Aegintan pediment sculptures, whose rounded edges and suppression of contour suggest a move toward plurifaciality, seemed, in Löwy’s view, to be based upon a conception that was “no more than trifacial” since the sides and the back were really not intended to be viewed.80 It was only much later that more “drastic rounding out” was observed and the long-reigning “test of the parallel planes” would be broken.81 For Löwy it was only in the middle of the sixth century bce and primarily in the hands of the sculptor Lysippos (to whom Löwy devoted a study in 1884) that more radical and decisive stages in a “process of transformation and separation” were evidenced (75).82 Having broken away from “the dominion of the mental image,” Lysippos and his followers achieved “the specific perfection of statuary” (74, 88). Such perfection was to be
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observed “in the natural rounding of his forms,” where, Löwy writes, “there flow in and out of one another endlessly different views; there is no reserve, no perceptible division between one view and another” (87). And thus the “Greek revolution” was achieved, announced in figural sculpture by plurifaciality, the promise of animation telegraphed by contrapposto and foreshortening.83 In asserting Lysippos as a watershed figure in the rise of naturalistic free-standing sculpture, Löwy followed Pliny the Elder to chart a path that continues to inform art writing. In this view, Lysippos’s approach offered a distinctive deployment of torsion to create compositions that require viewers’ movement around the sculptural body. A fundamental aspect of his work is its resistance to a singular point of view. In turn, the sculptor tends to break through planar compositions to allow limbs to project into the space of the viewer. Löwy’s assertions have been frequently repeated, not least in Franklin Johnson’s assertion that Lysippos’s break from the habitual planar logic of Greek statues was the contribution that “most distinctly affected the course of Hellenistic art.” Whereas sculpture had long been created to be viewed from a single perspective, “however perfectly rounded the figure, with the arms crossing the body and extending to the front—straight out of the picture—and the body twisted forward or back,” Lysippos compelled the viewer to move around his figures in order to take in multiple views. The achievement described here is very much in line with Cellini’s remarks about the special requirements of sculpture. As a result, Lysippos has been credited with originating a new and extremely influential conception of the sculptural as a work of art conceived in three dimensions, rather than in two; according to Johnson’s
gloss, “Lysippos may be regarded as the representative of a conception in which the difference between sculpture in the round and painting or bas-relief is for the first time fully recognized and frankly utilized as the basic consideration in design.”84 This defining distinction between the sculptural and the pictorial would set the fundamental terms for the paragone debates and their rearticulation in the late nineteenth century. The most celebrated examples thought to express Lysippos’s distinctive approach included the Apoxyomenos (or Athlete Scraping Himself with a Strigil) and the Eros Bending His Bow, both celebrated exemplars established long before Löwy’s intervention (figs. 117 and 118). In the case of the sculpture of Eros, which captures the god in the process of unstringing his bow, a comparison with the earlier Praxitelean depictions of the subject reveals the degree to which the sculpture is imbued with a new sense of movement and spatial dynamism, aspects of what J. J. Pollitt terms Lysippos’s “theatrical mentality.” In works such as the Eros, “the viewer is made to adapt to the statue’s space rather than vice versa.”85 With this sense of Lysippos in mind, Bouchardon’s rigorous studies of multiple masterworks’ faciality, inspired by a Lysippian model, takes on an added resonance. Pliny’s account of Lysippos further emphasizes viewer engagement on the part of the artist, who, in crafting his colossal statue of Zeus at Tarentum, reportedly made it possible for the massive figure to “be turned round by a touch of the hand.”86 Pliny tells us that Lysippos “often said that the difference between himself and [older artists] was that they represented man as they were, and he as they appeared to be [quales viderentur esse].”87 This passage has been considered in terms of its implications for understanding the operations of mimesis
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Figure 117 Apoxyomenos,
ca. 50 ce, Roman copy after Greek bronze by Lysippos (ca. 320 bce). Marble. Vatican
Museums, Rome.
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Figure 118 Eros Bending His Bow, Roman copy after a
Greek bronze by Lysippos (fourth century bce). Marble. Musei Capitolini, Rome, inv. MC0410.
in Lysippos’s practice, particularly in relationship to the notable modifications he made to the bodily proportions of his figures, especially the distinctively slender bodies and smaller heads of his sculptures, both mentioned by Pliny.88 Johnson suggests that “‘quales viderentur esse’ may well refer to the appearance of reality in a general sense; to expressiveness, vividness, the quality of being ‘animosa,’ which was added to (not substituted for) the accurate physical representation
of the older artists. To this effect various factors would contribute: a free and elastic posture, treatment of the arms and legs which make their action conspicuous, and expression of emotion in the face or position.” The net result of these efforts is evident in the qualitative difference between Lysippos’s figures and those of earlier artists, which, in comparison, seem relatively devoid of expressive subjectivity: “The Lansdowne Herakles [by Praxiteles] is Herakles the hero: the Lysippian figures of Herakles express pathos or the joy of wine. The Doryphoros is an athlete: the Apoxyomenos is a pensive athlete.”89 Understanding that Lysippos’s figures, including his Hercules type, are noteworthy for their poignant “emotional expressionism” further clarifies what was at stake in Löwy’s recognition of the sculptor as a watershed figure.90 These Lysippean qualities created sculpture that overtly interpellated the viewer as an engaged observer, setting the stage for the kind of reciprocal viewing experiences that Lee spent decades exploring. The degree to which Lee and AnstrutherThomson had taken on an essentially Löwyan approach in their gallery experiments is evident in their 1924 publication, Art & Man, especially in Anstruther-Thomson’s extended exposition of the Venus de’ Medici (see fig. 113). The drama in her account literally turns on the viewer’s circumnavigation of the sculpture in space, in the course of which the inauspicious, and notably frontal, first encounter, described by Anstruther-Thomson as “baffling and disappointing,” shifts considerably once she explores the figure in the round. As she explains, “It is necessary to walk round statues in order to see what they are about, as each view shows us a different part of the movement of the whole, so we get the whole plot interest only by going right round” (328). From successive vantage points, the marble
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form is scrutinized for revelations about its organization and logic. Notably, this second step is founded upon an essentially intuitive knowledge of the human body: what it means to be a body in space and to see bodies moving in space. As she rotates around the sculpture to gaze at the Venus over her right shoulder, AnstruterThompson perceives the figure “leaning tremendously forward” and notes that “her right foot is not pressing its weight down on the ground . . . it resists the free play of the upper part of the body” (337). These careful observations form the basis for new revelations, namely that “this Venus is of course a creature both of the air and the water, and the lower half of her is moving against the weight of the sea, while the upper half of her is moving freely in the air.” By attending to the sculpture’s invocation of human physicality, ostensibly accessible to any viewer, Anstruther-Thomson leads her reader to recognize the sculptor’s intended representation. In moving to view the figure from behind, the illumination of Venus’s watery position is certified: “We move slowly round the back of her till we come round the corner of the Dolphin and we find ourselves looking at her full face over her left shoulder. And here the movements we have been vaguely noticing as we walked round her suddenly concentrate themselves into something we can understand, and we see her with seeing eyes, and she is no longer a riddle, but a very complete and delightful work of art. The statue evidently represents Aphrodite rising up from the sea” (328–29). Thus, movement around the sculpture offers a transformation of the initial impression, which Anstruther-Thomson characterizes as “silly,” “affected,” and “shambling” (328). This shifting vantage point is nothing less than revelatory, yielding as it happens, an utterly
fantastic coming to grips with the thing—the brief account of which is that Venus is partially submerged and motoring through the water “like a yacht” (340). As the now-informed viewer passes again and again around the figure, the pleasure of narrative command (recall the invocation of “the whole plot”) is reanimated with each view: “Each time, as one looks at her again, the thing happens afresh. One doesn’t get used to it; the charm doesn’t wear out. . . . It would be impossible to imagine anything more beautiful than this arrangement of balanced movements, the outcome of which is a beautiful woman” (339). As Lee makes clear in her introduction to the chapter, evocatively titled “The Sailing Aphrodite (A Fantasia in Restoration),” Anstruther-Thomson’s text is situated squarely in dialogue with Löwy’s proposals. In a footnote clarifying Anstruther-Thomson’s assertion that sculpture must be seen in the round to be understood, Lee fully assimilates Löwy’s model, observing, “This is true only of sculpture after Lysippus. Earlier statues are composed for separate and very definite points of view, from each of which, usually corresponding to full-face torso and two profiles and back view, they constitute the equivalent of reliefs. This Venus is later” (329).
Sculpture and the Movement of Aesthetic Empathy The “Sailing Aphrodite” reflection suggests that the implications of the “Gallery Diaries” and the work these passages would be called on to perform was multifaceted. Lee (and Anstruther-Thomson) understood these narratives as a particular sort of evidence, quite different from that provided by philologists, despite their shared investment in text.
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Having begun the Venus de’ Medici reflections by acknowledging her ignorance of the “archaeological literature,” Anstruther-Thomson concluded with a declaration of her intention “to learn all I can about this statue, so as to gather from the authorities on Greek Art what she really represents” (341). Gamely accepting that it is possible that the figure “may prove to be an orthodox dry-land Venus,” Anstruther-Thomson writes that “if this should prove to be the case, we must, of course, renounce our hypothesis and look at her for the future as we ought to look at her under the ruling of the higher Powers,” but “in any case, I believe that we shall never regret this lawlessly spent half-hour in which she has held us under her spell as the Venus of the Sea” (342). In this instance, the object lesson would seem to be a sort of live-and-let-live rule of interpretation, one that privileged embodied, emotive, and associational perception as well as narrative drama. In other instances, however, Lee and AnstrutherThomson fully engaged with scholarly discourse in order to clearly state their strongly held views about what they took to be errors of restoration, such as Bernini’s restitution of the Venus de’ Medici’s hands.91 Elsewhere in the text, their gallery research is mobilized to support original hypotheses that could inform revised and more appropriate restoration. For example, after having carefully circled the head of the Athena Lemnia (the so-called Bologna head), Anstruther-Thomson concluded that “the Bologna head is so little in harmony with the body on which it has been placed, that I believe that if Prof. Furtwängler had lived longer he, who was the first to join them together, would also have been the first to separate them” (230).92 Extrapolating from her careful observation of the Athena Lemnia’s head, she produced a working
sketch for a more satisfactory accompanying—and laterally reversed—body. As Lee and AnstrutherThomson’s writing on the Subiaco Niobid, Athena Lemnia, and Venus de’ Medici makes clear, the idea of movement was at the center of both their on-site methodology and their resulting theorization of aesthetic empathy. For them, movement was, moreover, conceived expansively to encompass at once the ancient sculptor’s depiction of bodily movement; the imagined reciprocal movement, or “mental image,” of movement on the part of spectator’s body; and critically, the observer’s own spatial circumnavigation around the sculpture. At the heart of their project, as Anstruther-Thomson’s writing telegraphs, is the desire to catalyze a lively, responsive encounter with art, one that, not incidentally, saves sculpture from the deadening effects so vividly invoked by Lee in her review of Furtwängler and Sellers and in “The Child in the Vatican.” Movement, understood and experienced on multiple levels, was the crucial ingredient for their aesthetic theory. The motor animating Lee and AnstrutherThomson’s project turned on pleasure and embodied encounter. Their collaborative work was also a means of engaging, by way of experiences explicitly undertaken as research, with another fertile domain of scholarly analysis at the time, namely empathy theory. As the title of their 1912 volume Beauty and Ugliness begins to attest, in addition to working in the orbit of Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds and being intimately aware of emergent developments in classical scholarship, Lee likewise counted among her interlocutors Theodor Lipps and Oswald Külpe, in addition to Harrison and Sellers. She was thus in sustained dialogue with the tenets of aestheticism, classical art, and archaeology at the same time that she was deeply engaged with
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early articulations of Einfühlung (empathy), which Lee, for her part, termed “Aesthetic Empathy.”93 In Art & Man, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson queried, “What is a work of art? What does it do for us, or rather do with us? And since whatever it can do with us must be in the process of seeing it, what is happening when we do see it?”94 These questions animated the women’s research and writing, refined collaboratively over many years. Lee laid out her understanding of “empathy” in a chapter of that same title in her 1913 The Beautiful. Using the example of the mountain, which we say “rises” before us, Lee explains that, when we look at that mountain, “the rising of which we are aware is going on in us” (62, emphasis mine). It is only since we are thoroughly engrossed in our looking at the mountain that we elide our physiological experience with the subject of our beholding: “Our awareness of rising . . . coalesces with the shape we are looking at” (63). Our memories, observations, imaginings, and future projections of “risings, done by ourselves or watched in others, actually experienced or merely imagined, have long since united together in our mind.” The current, or new, experience of viewing the mountain thus triggers a preexisting sort of ur-notion, or ur-image, of rising in our minds. The harnessing of current perception to this ur-notion “thickens and enriches and marks that poor little thought of a definite raising with the interest, the emotional fullness gathered and stored up in its long manifold existence” (64–65). Lee cites key figures who contributed to the rise of empathy theory at the turn of the century, including Rudolf Lotze, Robert Vischer, Theodor Lipps, and Wilhelm Wundt. However, she emphasizes that empathic operations are foundational to human cognition, an observation that wryly undermines the import of such philosophical
figures’ more recent inquiries. Already in the preface to Beauty and Ugliness, Lee registered her distance from the experimental psychology of Oswald Külpe (whose lab at the university of Bonn Lee visited in 1911 and who in 1907 had reviewed the “Gallery Diaries,” which were first published in the Revue philosophique in 1903 and 1905). If Külpe’s approach represented “the future way of studying aesthetics,” Lee emphasized that this was far from her practice: “My aesthetics will always be those of the gallery and the studio, not of the laboratory.” In light of the endeavors of Külpe and his followers, Lee imagined her work with Anstruther-Thomson rather in the guise of “travellers and antiquarians of the old school (dilettanti they called themselves . . . ), as compared to the systematic excavators of our own day” (viii). In a final dry observation in The Beautiful, Lee remarks, “If Empathy is so recent a discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our thinking; so that we are surprised to learn of its existence, as Molière’s good man was to hear that he talked prose” (69). Even as she engaged with current debates, Lee evidently felt a deep connection to the eighteenth century. Having made her mark in 1880 as the author of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, one contemporary asserted that she was as “at home . . . in the eighteenth century, as a mechanic is in the repair-shed, among the spark plugs. She had breathed that air all her life; it was native to her.”95 Her project, which turned on the attentive awareness of her body’s physiology as she encountered works of art, was likewise very much in line with the protoempathic path charted by Herder, a key voice for thinking through the terms of sculptural encounter and the distinctive eighteenth-century ontology of the antique that is the subject of this book.
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Herder was likewise a crucial figure in the history of empathy. Parting ways with Kant and his contemporary transcendentalist aesthetics, Herder insisted instead upon the centrality of the senses and the nervous system; as Summers has observed, Herder’s is an aesthetics “from below.”96 Following in the footsteps of Locke, who notably posited the interrelations of sensation and reflection, Herder pushed further to propose that individual physiology sat at the core of cognition. At the foundations of what it meant to be human, for Herder, was embodied, physiological perception. Like Herder, for whom touch reigned supreme, and Pater, for whom touch operated as a crucial complement to vision, Lee was interested in a fulsome sensorial encounter with sculpture. Indeed, a tension between “seeing” as vision itself and “seeing” in a fuller sense is front and center for Lee. In her “Gallery Diary” entry on the Subiaco Niobid, for instance, she remarks, “I see very well, easily, have no sense of seeing, but a strong, full sense of it (the Niobid).”97 Taking note of her overall psychological state, her pulse, the rapidity of her breathing, and the body (or perhaps bodies?) in motion, Lee takes her place in a lineage of art-theoretical writing, firmly rooted in the eighteenth century, that probed how beholders apprehend art, in terms and through models of exploration that reached emphatically beyond the visible and beyond eyesight alone. While the capaciousness of Lee’s interests, spanning architecture, poetry, and music in addition to painting and sculpture, has often been noted, sculpture was not only the rhetorical center of Lee’s project, but it also functioned as the defining fulcrum for her work to anchor abstract thinking about aesthetic empathy in episodes of embodied encounters with art objects. Above all, sculpture
yields the sort of perception privileged by Lee; that is, experiences that justify her insistence upon movement, broadly construed. In her introduction to Art & Man, Lee asserts that “the explanation of aesthetic Empathy consists precisely in the fact that there always is movement going on whenever such Empathy takes place, whenever we attribute motion to something motionless.”98 Even in the absence of “massive movement[s] of altered breathing and balance,” of the sort observed by Anstruther-Thomson in their work together in the 1890s, there is nevertheless movement: Movement of eye and neck muscles in the act of looking; movement, sometimes too minute to be recognized for what (and where) it is, but sufficient to produce a sense of moving which, not being thought of as in ourselves, is added by us to the other qualities themselves rarely thought of as in our sensory organs and never as in our brain) which belong, as we think, solely to the object we are looking at. Indeed, a part of what we think of as that object’s intrinsic qualities, the amount and the dimensions of space which it occupies, the relative position of its various parts, and especially the direction in which it extends, cannot be perceived by us without either actual movements or the remembrance of movements implied in the measuring and comparing; without what we call mental activities of relating and holding in memory; and without thinking in terms of up, down, through, round, backwards, forwards, etc.99
For Lee, there is no aesthetic empathy and no substantive encounter with art that takes place without movement. This is the case whether that movement is literal—enacted by the body in the real time of “seeing”—or whether, in the case of the absolutely still observer, it is invoked by physical memories of the body’s movement in space.100 In
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this way, Lee effectively displaces the primacy of vision by recourse to movement. “Seeing,” in this sense, is situated in relationship to the body’s lived physicality and an awareness of one’s body in relation to other bodies (in motion).101 Setting aside Herder’s particular critique of painting, since Lee had much more expansive investments across painting, sculpture, and an even wider range of artistic mediums, there is compelling common ground between the two projects. Herder and Lee both develop a powerful polemics of an aesthetics “beyond sight,” even as they craft fundamentally reciprocal models for the relations between objects and viewers. Likewise, and crucially for Lee, Herder’s sculptural model revealed the necessity of seeing in time and in space: seeing, that is, in the round. Inasmuch as Lee engaged contemporary scholars, her elaboration of the terms of empathic encounter parted ways in crucial terms from reigning models. In The Beautiful, she took pains to refute the conventional idea of empathy “understood as metaphysical and quasi-mythological projection of the ego into the object.”102 Such a projective model would have effectively erased the formal qualities of the object itself, which came increasingly to occupy a pivotal position in Lee’s dialogues with Anstruther-Thomson. A practicing artist, Anstruther-Thomson was credited by Lee with the revelation that form itself played a role in aesthetic encounter. In the wake of these revelations, Lee insisted upon the significance of, for instance, sculptural form, understood in terms of its materials, balance, and so on, rather than merely its capacity to stimulate “inner imitation” on the part of the beholder. In this sense, Lee’s conception of empathy gave new centrality to the work of art, conceived, as Davis emphasizes, not just
iconographically but formally.103 Revisiting Lee’s exposition of the mountain from this vantage point reveals that her empathic encounter involves a heightened degree of reciprocity between object and observer. In the case of figural sculpture, an embedded bodily knowledge would be stimulated by art objects, whose form would open onto embodied insights about the works’ meaning and sentiment. This process would, in fact, be dialogically enacted in the (quasi-reciprocal) encounters performed and experienced by Anstruther-Thomson and Lee. While the Venus stands as the model for Lee and Anstruther-Thomson’s concept of ideal beauty, they take care to clarify that the sculpture does not engage the viewer in a scenario of invitation. “She” does not set out to be alluring. Rather, the figure radiates the calm self-possession identified with ideal classical sculpture and codified by Hegel as “the object as self-enclosed and complete, in independent repose, withdrawn from relation to something other, reposing within itself, blissful within itself.”104 Anstruther-Thomson notes that “another extraordinary point in this goddess is her indifference to all outside influences except the influences of sun and the sea-wind which she is breathing in.” She is like “a sailing yacht,” whose beauty is simply “an accidental result” of its functionality.105 Anstruther-Thomson returns to the figures’ eyes to buttress her assertion of a selfsufficient mien: “She is seeing everything far ahead, though her suffused, veiled look seems only to see inward; her eyes are set at a wide angle, for she catches no one’s glance; things must come to her; she has no wish to please; on the contrary, she is a goddess, and things must please her.”106 Given the stress placed by Anstruther-Thomson on the circumambient experience of the Venus—and with
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the promise of pleasure and threat of desire having been placed at the center of her reflections—it is worth considering the degree to which a desire for capturing the female figure in the round has tended to be harnessed to the desire for possession: whether sensual, cognitive, or otherwise.107 That said, pleasure in art, as theorized by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, is emphatically chaste. In
fact, we might go so far as to sense in their project an almost prophylactic impulse against the imagined threat of erotic response or its sculptural invitation. In this sense, Lee and AnstrutherThomson take their place in a longer genealogy of images and makers, from Patch to Ingres to Chassériau, who engage with and are transformed by ancient figural sculpture’s dangerous allure.
CODA
Photography, the Rise of Relief, and Nachleben
T
aking off from a series of interlocking transformations in the eighteenth century, this book has sought to trace an alternative history of the afterlives of the antique in the long modern period. The animating belief underwriting this study has been that this approach, anchored in an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique, with its essential features of mobility, mutability, and the capacity for transformative encounter, equips us to think differently about what was at stake in beholding and in picturing the encounter with ancient figural sculpture. The resulting account also opens up new avenues for thinking about the connectivity of periods, materials, and ideas that have traditionally been separated. Recognizing the fraught nature of the Nachleben, the survivals or afterlives, of the antique in the period between 1750 and 1900 allows us to appreciate the distinctively modern aspects of
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its appeal. Far from simply a story of transfers and repetitions of ideal form, conceptions of the antique were quite literally volatile, in the sense of the movement of artifacts, ideas, and representations and in terms of their seemingly animating and mortifying capacities. Two final episodes attest to a sea change in fin de siècle thinking about antique sculpture even as they reveal the enduring power of the intellectual and aesthetic genealogies traced in the previous chapters. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the quintessentially modern technology of photography was increasingly placed in the service of the reproduction and circulation of images of the antique. In the domain of scholarship, such photographs emerged as a vital aspect of publications devoted to the exposition, formal analysis, and classification of classical sculpture. Even as a new set of mediumspecific expectations were brought to bear in the photography of ancient sculpture, the creation and deployment of these images nevertheless opened onto long-standing questions about sculpture’s sidedness. The rise of this imagery also corresponded to the consolidation of a newly powerful model of sculpture’s (ideal) planarity. Far from simply facilitating accurate illustration, an artifact’s significance was understood by the 1890s to hinge on its presence within the growing photographic record of ancient sculpture. An 1891 article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts claimed to be the first publication devoted to the Subiaco Niobid, the very sculpture Lee would describe so vividly roughly a decade later, as the previous chapter discussed. Although the sculpture had been discovered three years earlier in 1888, art historian Marcel Reymond (1849–1914) noted in this article that its relative absence in the critical record may well have
been the result of prohibitions on photographic reproductions that had been only recently lifted.1 By this time, photographs of sculpture were being mass-produced by publishing houses first founded in the mid-1850s and that, by the final decades of the century, were actively generating vast numbers of prints for a wide audience—tourists, artists, collectors, and scholars alike.2 Such photographs largely conformed to well-established conventions: captured in their entirety, sculptures tended to be shot frontally, with light effects manipulated to best capture surface modeling.3 Such photographs as those reproduced in Reymond’s text cleaved quite closely to a documentary (as opposed to “aesthetic”) mode of photography, which borrowed its conventions from earlier traditions of engraved reproduction.4 These photographs operated following what Joel Snyder calls a “rhetoric of substitution,” whereby pictures were understood to function as quasi-equivalents of the sculptures they depicted.5 Classicists like Furtwängler and Löwy privileged images that reflected reigning conventions of tonally rich and technically clean views. In publications like Furtwängler’s Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture of 1895, photography featured prominently. The title page proudly emphasized the volume’s “nineteen full-page plates & two hundred text illustrations.” In her editor’s preface, Sellers highlighted the inclusion of “45 fresh illustrations”—such as the three views of the famed Berlin Athena Lemnia, featured as plates I, II, and III—for the most part made anew for the volume (xii). Sellers’s sense of the value of the photographs was twofold. In her emphasis on their ability to “bring to notice new or almost forgotten monuments,” we hear an echo of Reymond’s Niobid text. However, Sellers considered photographs fundamental to Furtwängler’s demonstration of the power of the “inductive
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Figure 119 Illustration of
Youth Tying His Sandal in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. From Emmanuel Löwy, Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (1900), fig. 27.
method,” based on scrupulous “observation and comparison.” This morphological attunement formed the basis for Furtwängler’s development of Kopienkritik (copy criticism), which assumed that Roman sculptures were copies of Greek originals, knowledge of which might be gleaned from the
copies, and thus they worked in tandem with an analysis of history and philology. These methods allowed the book to stand as “the reproduction of a development, not merely the recension of a catalogue” (xiv). In 1907, John Fothergill noted in his translator’s preface to the English version of Löwy’s 1900 Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (published as The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art) the inclusion of “twenty illustrations which did not appear in the German edition,” along with a note of thanks to “Mrs. Strong” (that is, Eugénie Sellers, who married Sandford Arthur Strong in 1897) for her help securing them (vii). The selection of photographs in the original German edition included a strikingly foreshortened frontal view of the Lysippean Youth Tying His Sandal (fig. 119). The photograph perfectly captured the gist of Löwy’s analysis of the figure by Lysippos, who “freely exhibits foreshortened aspects, not only in the trunk, that bends and turns in every direction, but in the whole figure, which throws its arms and legs vigorously into space” (87–88). Despite the fact that it entailed only one view of the work, the photograph helped make Löwy’s case for Lysippos’s distinctiveness. In its gripping sense of stilled dynamism, the photograph beautifully shows the artist for whom, at last, “sculpture truly fulfilled all the conditions,” in which, “in the natural rounding of his forms[,] there flow in and out of one another endlessly different views”(87). In the English edition, among the amplifications to the original thirty images were two additional photographs of the votive offering of Nikandre from Delos (fig. 120). The added photographs, along with the original image of the front view, allowed for a more insistent visual anchoring of a key moment in Löwy’s argument. With the
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photographs as reference, Löwy identified the Nikandre votive as exemplary of a whole “class of very archaic figures,” which, while “undoubtedly . . . a class of sculpture in the round,” nevertheless must be conceived as “excluding plurifaciality” since the style is “content with giving only one view” (53–54). Such images as the Nikandre votive stood in stark contrast to the multifaciality of the Lysippean Youth Tying His Sandal (92). There is a curious logic of inversion in play here, whereby the Youth Tying His Sandal, the sculpture celebrated for the achievement of plurifaciality, is depicted with one photograph, and the Nikandre votive sculpture, which Löwy posits must be understood as fundamentally unifacial, is depicted with three views. Considered in relation to these examples, Reymond’s 1891 publication appears markedly precocious. Not only was it the first systematic account of the Subiaco Niobid, but at this relatively early date, Reymond’s article was also distinguished for featuring no fewer than four views of the sculpture, which are identified as engravings after photographs taken by the author: a frontal view, a rear view, and two oblique views from the front right and left sides (fig. 121). In addition to these perspectives, in a footnote Reymond alerts the reader that the article’s “reproductions were engraved following photographs that I took myself with M. Moscioni” and that Moscioni (from whom it is possible to purchase prints at 10, via Condotti, Rome) “has eight different views of the Subiaco statue.”6 The terms of Reymond’s praise of the lifelikeness of the Niobid’s depiction—heralding the “softness of the epidermis, the suppleness, the mobility of the flesh” together with its “complicated” bodily attitude, which finds the body elongated and folded in on itself, full of “grace” and “agility”—suggest that he would have concurred with the developmental logic
Figure 120 Back and side
views of the votive figure of Nikandre in the National Museum, Athens. From Emmanuel Löwy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, trans. John Fothergill (London: Duckworth, 1907), figs. 22 and 23.
of sculpture moving ever more toward verisimilitude and three-dimensionality articulated by Löwy and others.7 Hildebrand’s 1893 Das Problem der Form included a view of the Subiaco Niobid that was identical to one of those reproduced by Reymond. However, Hildebrand articulated a radically divergent sense of sculpture’s faciality than the arguments advanced earlier by Lange and shortly thereafter by Furtwängler and Löwy. Since Pliny, movement toward sculpture that fully embraced its existence in the round had been celebrated as the watershed development in the history of sculpture,
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Figure 121 Four views of the
Subiaco Niobid. From Marcel Reymond, “Le Niobide de Subiaco,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, June 1891, 470.
and in the case of Löwy, it would be seen to represent the culmination of sculpture’s realization as a discrete medium. In his 1893 text, subsequently published in English in 1907 as The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, Hildebrand crafted a narrative that emphasized instead the apotheosis of relief as a defining feature of Greek art.8 Strongly objecting to the “barbarous” antique group called the Farnese Bull and the associated lineage of freestanding sculpture, Hildebrand reserved special antipathy for what he described as what “sculpture to the modern man signifies”: “some figure in the round, destined to be standing in the center of a public square” (116).9 Such a concept of sculpture, which emphasized its sidedness, was antithetical to Hildebrand’s values. Having “neither front nor rear,” freestanding sculpture, made to be seen in the round, “counteracts the pictorial effect of the figure,” with the result that “as the spectator circles about the statue he has at least four views to take in,” an experience that “can be to the advantage of only a very few works” (117). Even those few he deemed successful adhered to an overarching planar
logic according to which “the figure represented shall, from various aspects, satisfy the demands of relief—indeed, express itself as relief ” (92). Even as Hildebrand wrote at length and in some detail about sculptural process, the pictorial model remained the shaping force. In the case of figures in the round, one way alone stood open for the sculptor: “to start with one view in mind and let the others arrange themselves as necessary consequences of this main aspect.” As a result, “the sculptor is accordingly forced to base his threedimensional conception on a visual or pictorial conception and to lay out his work with this only in view” (126). Perhaps not surprisingly, in his exposition of sculptural process, Hildebrand advocated for a first step in which a drawing would be made upon the main, and preferably the flattest, surface of the stone. Marble would become something like the “ideal plane” of drawing, and from this “pictorial impression,” the “side views, and, at length, the back view develop as necessary consequences” (134).10 Whereas Herder and Hegel had emphasized distinctions between the arts of painting
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and sculpture, Hildebrand posited a fundamental continuity of process and values: “The painter gives on a plane a visual impression of a three-dimensional form, while the sculptor forms something threedimensional for the purpose of affording a plane visual impression” (34).11 In both instances artistic practice hinges on translation, but the centrality of the plane remains. In this context, the photograph of the Subiaco Niobid, captioned “Ancient Sculpture. Illustrates the Conception of a Layer of Uniform Depth,” serves a starkly different purpose than it did in Reymond’s article (fig. 122) (39).12 Appearing early in Hildebrand’s text, the Niobid’s caption sent readers to the start of a chapter entitled “The Conception of Relief.” Here, Hildebrand encapsulated his model of ideal sculptural planarity in the form of a gripping visual analogy:
Figure 122 Illustration of the Subiaco Niobid. From Adolf
von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907), fig. 9.
Think of two panes of glass standing parallel, and between them a figure whose position is such that its outer points touch them. The figure then occupies a space of uniform depth measurement and its members are all arranged within this depth. When the figure, now, is seen from the front through the glass, it becomes unified into a unitary pictorial surface, and furthermore, the perception of its volume, of itself quite a complicated perception, is now made uncommonly easy through the conception of so simple a volume as the total space here presented. The figure lives, we may say, in one layer of uniform depth. Each form tends to make of itself a flat picture within the visible two dimensions of this layer, and to be understood as a flat picture. (80; emphasis mine)
This passage establishes Hildebrand’s fundamental privileging of the emphatically pictorial qualities associated with relief sculpture. This signals a significant shift from Hegel, for whom “the basrelief is specifically for filling in the surfaces, and it
forms the proximate transition to painting,” and in whose account bas-relief thus represented a categorically less sophisticated category of sculptural achievement.13 Hildebrand, by contrast, posited that relief, with its definitional pictoriality and planarity, occupied a position of exemplarity for all sculpture, including that in the round. Whereas movement and “kinesthetic ideas” were understood by Hildebrand to sit at the origins of artistic practice, he insisted that ideal artistic achievement in sculpture, as in painting, should not necessitate “kinesthetic sensations, or movements producing such.”14 If freezing a pictorial aspect was the originary and vital scaffolding for the sculptor’s work, a still, immobile viewer was presumed in the primal scene of viewing. Standing in starkest juxtaposition to Herder’s and Lee’s celebration of
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perambulating sculptural spectatorship, Hildebrand stipulated that there was one privileged viewing perspective, even of a figure that offers multiple “plane pictures” and therefore allows “more than one position from which to view it.” It is the viewer’s responsibility to discern the primary impression, the perspective that best captures “the virtual visual idea underlying the plastic representation which dominated the artist’s mind when he created the work.” While there may be satisfactory alternative views, they will all be secondary to “this one” and “are indeed mere physical consequences of its bodily existence” (94). In this key passage, there is no room for uncertainty: even in sculpture in the round, there exists a single primary view, flowing from one primary “relief concept.” And thus, insofar as Hildebrand’s Niobid photo was nearly identical to one of those reproduced by Reymond, its conceptual situation could not have been further removed.15 The art historian Wölfflin took up key aspects of Hildebrand’s arguments three years after Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form. Wölfflin’s conception of sculpture and photography’s relation to it, articulated in a series of essays titled “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll” (“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”), was informed by photographic conventions of the time even as they cited and channeled a contemporary understanding of the historical development of sculpture and encounters with it. A curious intellectual genealogy emerges in these texts, in which Wölfflin rehearses an evolutionary developmental scheme that moves from unifaciality to plurifaciality, that is, in alignment with Lange’s and later Löwy’s account of Greek art.16 At the same time, and more significantly, Wölfflin’s thinking through sculpture and photography was deeply informed by the values
articulated in Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form. That these two models were ultimately incompatible becomes clear in a text that was shaped by the tension between the two systems. In these essays, Wölfflin announced at the start that his intervention stemmed from his frustration with the difficulty of procuring “good illustrations” for the history of sculpture. Wölfflin criticized the apparent arbitrariness of existing photographic views, all too often misaligned with the “particular main view” or the “main silhouette,” an expectation fully anchored in Hildebrand’s writing. Dismayed at the many failures to properly reproduce sculpture in accordance with this principle, Wölfflin bemoaned the resulting viral spread, a “corruption” of “false impressions.” The short answer to the promised lesson offered by Wölfflin’s title, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” could be: “Read Hildebrand.” Just such an exhortation appears early on in Wölfflin’s first article (53–54). Wölfflin described a public of consumers ignorant of the “criminal carelessness” (57) of “wretched handyman-photography” (54), unwittingly supporting in their purchases the violence done to the artist’s conception of the work of art—the “artistically-willed view” (57). In such pictures, “one destroys the silhouette on which the artist has set himself.” This offense was of no small significance since “great artistic effort was expended precisely in laying out the entire sculptural content in one plane and that which in nature has to be comprehended through individual successive perceptions is presented [in the sculpture] with effortless ease to the eye all at once.” The negation of this view meant the loss of the sculpture’s “best quality” as well as the viewer’s ability to partake in a pleasurable sculptural experience (58). As Wölfflin explained, “When coming face to face
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with the original, . . . one will find a particular relish in moving from the inferior views to the completely convincing [view], and one does not tire, when repeating the experiment, of allowing from inadequate appearances the purified image to emerge, which stands calm and clear and in the true sense is felt to be a liberation. This is a pleasure that painting cannot give us” (59). For Wölfflin, by moving around a work of sculpture and by ultimately discerning the privileged view, spectators enjoyed an experience axiomatic to the medium; this revelatory seeing was sculpture. Wölfflin seemed to recognize that in emphasizing the single view, he risked inciting critics who would insist on sculpture’s irreducibility to its experience in the round. And thus Wölfflin allowed that sculptures may have “good side views,” even as he invoked a developmental model by then advanced by Lange and Löwy, according to which “sculpture has in fact developed so that it has advanced from a one- or two-sided plane-style to a multisided composition (with turns and rotations).” However, Wölfflin’s greater debt to Hildebrand is revealed in his resolution of these considerations: “There must always be only one comprehensive main view if one does not want to be endlessly driven restlessly around the figure” (58). That these schemes are not easily integrated is attested by Wölfflin’s account of Lysippos. While he acknowledged Lange’s developmental model, Wölfflin would not embrace Lysippos, who stood as the watershed figure in related accounts, from Pliny to Löwy. In a passage of particularly vehement antipathy to negative models, one rich with Hildebrandean echoes, Wölfflin at once called out the Farnese Bull, which he deemed a “monstrous example of an ancient lapse of good taste,” along with earlier examples of “singular brutality” (60). The case in
point: “the Scraper by Lysippus,” that is, the Apoxyomenos in the Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino, a statue that, being “composed of two views,” is marked by “a deficiency that cannot be entirely denied” (60). What had been embraced as the sign of Lysippos’s achievement by Pliny and later Löwy is here perfectly inverted and deemed a sign of the sculptor’s failure. Wölfflin’s analysis is riven by a structuring tension between his (Langian, Herderian) acknowledgment of the necessity for sculpture in the round to be seen—and to anticipate being seen—from all sides and, at the same time, his repeated (Hildebrandean) insistence that, with only few exceptions, classical sculptures entail a single, privileged view.17 Again and again, a resistance or antipathy to perambulation surfaces in Wölfflin’s writing. Thus, he praises sculpture “in the good [old] tradition [that] provides one main view, and the educated eye feels it is a virtue that here the figure explains itself all at once and becomes completely understandable, so that one is not driven around it in order to grasp its content, but rather that it informs the beholder about its viewpoint right from the start.”18 Throughout Wölfflin’s essays on photographing sculpture, a particular anxiousness surfaces around the potential for unfettered, aimless viewing in the round. Only grudgingly does Wölfflin admit the invitation of circumambulation in the Young St. John the Baptist, which “wants to be seen from various sides.” However, the viewer “puts up with this most willingly since the path is marked by nothing but way-stations of beauty” (56). Elsewhere in his text such movement is accompanied by something very much like dread. This element of Wölfflin’s analysis suggestively dovetails with broader organizing terms for his art-historical project. In the foundational, organizing dyad for his work, the “baroque”
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was differentiated from the Renaissance in part thanks to the kinds of experiences beholding baroque works of art elicited; this art was the domain of “experiential immediacy,” “violent, overwhelming experience, unleashed on the extremities of the body.”19 These terms and associations mapped neatly onto the corporeal—and specifically tactile—physicality associated with sculpture since well before Herder’s Plastik. For Wölfflin, sculpture that cast the dangerous lure to unresolved viewing in the round was, in short, deeply associated with the realm of the baroque. Wölfflin, moreover, associated the baroque with photographic imagery, and he preferred the distillation and ideation of line engraving to the haphazard, anecdotal, and all too often “painterly” qualities of photography.20 What emerges, then, in the essays on the photographing of sculpture was the specter of “painterly” photographs of “painterly” sculpture— or, the threat of the baroque to the second power. Written in a period when the teaching of art history became increasingly reliant upon photographic imagery and as Wölfflin himself emerged as a formidable model for the savvy use of photography in teaching and publishing, these were matters of real and personal importance. In the darkened lecture hall, the bright, disembodied photographic projections cast by the sciopticon threatened to provide an all too close approximation of the immersive spectacle of Robertson’s phantasmagoria, inviting students into immediate experience. At the same time, Wölfflin’s slide presentations entailed a new form of animation: “It was reported that when [Wölfflin] spoke in the darkened lecture hall, he became invisible and his disembodied voice created the illusion that the artwork itself was speaking immediately through him.”21 Against the backdrop of contemporary
explorations of “kinaesthetic knowing,” “a form of knowledge that could be gained through phenomenal familiarity with the world alone,” Zeynep Çelik Alexander posits that Wölfflin deployed dispassionate formal analysis and instituted his famed “comparative vision” in order to mediate the baroque power of the photographic image.22 Something like a reconciliation of the tension between planar logic and sculptural experience in the round was at last achieved in the final installment of Wölfflin’s tripartite text, published in 1915. Here Wölfflin recapitulated the general outline of his arguments in something like a have-yourLöwyan-cake-and-eat-it-with-a-Hildebrandeanfork-too formulation: All sculpture in the round should be seen from various sides, otherwise it will have failed its calling. Only between one view and another view are there differences: some have little to offer, others more, [but] usually there is one view that through beauty and clarity makes itself felt to be the leading one. One can then also vary the other views, but in all of them the main view will continue to resonate like a base tone. One comes back to it again and again, and it is a particular pleasure precisely when the incoherent and misaligned suddenly regains coherence and harmony. (62)
The experience of seeing in the round is embraced, but only insofar as it is punctuated by the revelation of the primary, unified view. An example of just this kind of rotation into clarity is afforded by Wölfflin’s discussion of the Capitoline Venus, which he saw installed on a rotating base. However, while “one certainly has the right to savour each individual view” of the Venus, the angle from which the figure should be depicted in illustration is made abundantly clear since “the base says
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completely categorically how the body should be seen.” Likewise, in the rare example of the Callipygian Venus, where the crucial view is designed from the side rather than from the front, careful looking will yield this determination. The correct vantage point should be evident to the casual observer since “the artist also tells the viewer clearly enough where he should position himself: not for nothing are the drapery masses in the main orientation gathered wall-like into a ground plane” (60). If Wölfflin conceded that perhaps the Callipygian Venus ought to be placed against a wall “or possibly in a niche” in order to ensure that the primary view be recognized, in other instances museum installation is seen to actively foreclose upon the ability to properly see even the most canonical figures. The Apollo Belvedere is called out by Wölfflin as representative of “present day confusion about the sculptural sense” (59). “Displayed in the Vatican in such a way that one must press oneself hard up against the wall in order to partake of the original view,” the fact of its mis-exhibition aligns with the sculpture’s myriad “false, intolerable” presentations via reproduction. Whereas the sculpture should, in Wölfflin’s view, be viewed such that “the outstretched arm with the cloak [is oriented to] the wall plane, parallel to the viewer,” time and again (as Wölfflin notes, “in all modern photographs”), the sculpture is depicted from the view staged in its Vatican installation. That the images circulating of the Apollo Belvedere depict the figure as “insecure, brittle, [and] disturbing” is, however, “not the fault of the figure, but rather the fault of the installation” (59). With Wölfflin as our guide, we return once again to the Vatican courtyard and to the specter of the deadening—and here perversely transformative—effects of sculptural encounter in the museum setting.
Wölfflin’s anxieties about fixing the correct view must be understood as simultaneously a function of the age of photographic reproduction and a symptom of the rise of an iconographic interpretive tradition. Inasmuch as this book has involved a certain degree of attention to iconographic matters in the repetition of form, in the cases selected for inclusion here, the emphasis has been upon conceiving Nachleben at once on the level of morphology and in terms of the belief in the capacity for certain forms to allow for a highly charged experience of beholding. That is, even as I have pointed attention to the recognizable form of the Venus de’ Medici in, for instance, the hands of Patch or the prose of Anstruther-Thomson, my interest has been to chart episodes of charged encounter that appear to hold open the possibility of disrupting historical sequencing. Thus, in the analysis of Chassériau’s Tepidarium, an orientation to forms—the famed breast imprint or the Venus de Milo—allows a new understanding of how the painting itself makes good on the promise that the encounter with ancient sculptural remains might open the possibility of winding time backward. This promise of transformative encounters with the antique likewise informs a final historiographic episode. In work spanning the breadth of his career and giving form to the library that bears his name, art historian Aby Warburg distinctively brought together aspects of an iconographic procedure with the more expansive question of how the antique was understood to survive—in the sense of inform and indeed act—in later periods. Beginning with his thesis on Sandro Botticelli from 1891, he took up the central question that would animate his work until his death: how to understand the afterlife or survival of the antique in subsequent historical periods, above all in the Italian
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Renaissance? Nachleben was specifically conceived by Warburg as the artistic revivals in the picturing of expressive formulae to be found in ancient works of art and, at a fundamental level, the living on after of the antique. Distinct from previous invocations of the term, such as that articulated by Anton Springer in his 1867 Bilder aus der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Images from modern art history)—the first chapter of which is entitled “The Survival of Antiquity in the Middle Ages”—Warburg’s Nachleben was animated by a dialectical logic, containing within it both the sense of “continued life” and “continued death.”23 Warburg’s engagement with antiquity’s “survivals” also bore a distinctly anachronizing charge, running counter to other deployments of Nachleben in terms of periodization, cycles, and sources.24 For Warburg, as for Baudelaire and Quatremère de Quincy before him, sculpture was conceived as the most primitive form of art, and therein, for Warburg, lay its power.25 Warburg’s answer to the question of antiquity’s survival would ultimately turn on its head the habitual rhetorical and associative patterns that still largely dominated in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In Warburg’s hands, the antique and, above all, ancient figural sculpture would be transformed into sources of vital, even potentially dangerous, expressive power. Like so many others encountered in this book, Warburg grappled with Winckelmann’s valuation of the supreme forms of classical sculpture and, in particular, the enduring celebration of its restraint, ideality, serenity, and poise, which we have tracked in subsequent evaluations by Hegel, Nietzsche, and others. In his work on Florentine art of the fifteenth century, Warburg first formulated what he understood to be a crucially distinct Renaissance
conception of the antique as a source for violent and passionate movement. It was in the ability to balance what Warburg ultimately came to describe as the “polarities”—between restraint (associated by him with the North and particularly with Flanders) and unrestrained expressivity (the origins of which he located in the classical world and identified with Florence)—that an artist like Leonardo was singled out by Warburg for special praise. The sources of what Warburg would term “pathos formulae”—a primitive vocabulary of passionate, expressive bodily gesture—were to be found on ancient sarcophagi, relief sculptures, Greek vases and coins, and other artifacts. And thus, Warburg’s research both was and was not rooted in antique sculpture as such. Nevertheless, his orientation to iconic classical figural and relief sculpture seems to have been shaped early on. Warburg’s thinking about the challenges posed to passionate expression in the plastic arts grew out of a formative reading of Lessing’s Laocoön as a young man. Warburg’s early research on and analysis of ancient relief sculpture clearly informed his subsequent work to trace the recurrence of resonant motifs in what would ultimately become his final “gigantic fragment.”26 Ultimately, like Wölfflin, for whom photographs proved a crucial (albeit fraught) element of his analytic procedure, which famously turned on what would become the ubiquitous art history “slide comparison,” Warburg depended upon photographic representations, especially in his final years, dedicated to the Mnemosyne “picture atlas” left unfinished at his death in 1929. Among the nearly one thousand photos that constitute the Mnemosyne picture atlas were many pictures of ancient sculpture, including the Laocoön, the Vatican Ariadne, and figures from the Niobid group, bas-reliefs, and Greek vases (fig. 123).
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However, even as sculpture occupied a crucial node in Warburg’s genealogies of expressive form, its materiality or aspectivity seems not to have been in play in his analysis. Sculpture, as captured in photographic depictions, took its place among the hundreds of other pictures of what were, for the most part, two-dimensional works of art. Quite differently from the archaeological research of Furtwängler and Löwy, with which Warburg would no doubt have been familiar, or indeed Lee’s gallery practice, Warburg’s thinking through the power of antique sculpture did not depend upon, or even engage questions of, sidedness. As Wölfflin’s texts from 1896 to 1917 attest, by the final years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, the sense of what made sculpture sculpture had shifted profoundly and was no longer irreducible to a body encountered in space and time. And thus, in Warburg’s work too, we may perhaps witness another sign of the rise of Hildebrandean planarity. On the other hand, we might understand Warburg’s deployment of black-and-white photographs in somewhat different terms. Recall Wölfflin’s description of coming “face to face with the original” upon experiencing the pleasure that only
the discernment of the one “purified image” could provide.27 While an experience of “in the round” does not seem to have figured in Warburg’s approach to the antique, this disjunction might be better understood in relation to his thinking about the power of antique forms. In a notebook entry on “Grisaille” from 1929, Warburg remarked that “the style of simulated classical sculpture (grisaille in an engraving or drawing) confines the coinages of the revenants in the distant shadowy realm of the explicit metaphor.”28 Warburg recognized this deployment of grisaille—painting in shades of grey or in restricted tonal ranges—by Renaissance artists like Domenico Ghirlandaio and Andrea Mantegna as an essentially protective strategy aimed to insulate these works from immediate encounter with or invocation of the antique sources of “pagan frenzy” by way of a rhetoric of depiction that operated with something like scare quotes announcing, “This is a painting of sculpture.”29 At first blush we might be struck by the vast gulf that separates Bervic’s engraving (after Bouillon) of the Laocoön published in the Musée français (1803–12) (fig. 48) from the photograph in Warburg’s files. Bouillon’s rendition of the Laocoön
Figure 123 Aby Warburg,
Mnemosyne Atlas, 1927–29, plates 4, 5, and 6. Warburg Institute Archive, London.
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would seem to utterly refute Löwy’s later assertion that the sculpture should be understood as effectively planar. Portrayed with a rich black surround making the sculpture appear as if glimpsed by torchlight, this singular depiction summons up the spectacular reanimation of the work and the viewing conditions that would have given the lie to the single, static view with its dancing, writhing outlines and planes. How different the evidently static, insistently two-dimensional photographic representation of the Laocoön in plate 6 of Warburg’s
Mnemosyne atlas. But upon reflection, when we consider Warburg’s thoughts about the function of grisaille as a necessary protective, distancing effect for the powerful relics of the past, the picture takes on a new cast. And as we imagine Warburg’s fraught handling, his pinning and repinning of these black-and-white photographs in the many configurations of his picture atlas, might we not catch, after all, another glimpse of the Nachleben— the living on after—of an eighteenth-century ontology of the antique?
Notes
All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
Introduction 1. Pater, “Winckelmann,” 142. See ØstermarkJohansen, Walter Pater, 214, 255. 2. Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi inediti, 1: pl. 180; 2:235–37. 3. Pater, “Winckelmann,” 155. 4. Syson et al., Like Life. 5. See Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 234, and Michel, “Pittore francese a Roma,” 485. 6. Bacon, “Of the Advancement of Learning,” 82. 7. Key contributions include Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter”; Griener, République de l’oeil; Lichtenstein, Blind Spot; Marshall, Frame of Art; and Podro, Manifold in Perception. 8. Summers, Judgment of Sense, 319. 9. Kristeller, “Modern System of the Arts.” Baumgarten’s first use of the term appears in his 1735 master’s thesis, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, which informed his later publication, Aesthetica. 10. Ashfield and de Bolla, Sublime, 1. 11. The term “aesthetic turn” is inspired by Lichtenstein, “Specificity of Aesthetic Theory.” Cassirer offers a superb account of these developments in Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 275–360. 12. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 1757. This gloss is offered by Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 306. 13. Baumgarten, Aesthetica. That this was a period of active formation is suggested by the fact that the term “esthétique” did not appear as an entry in Diderot’s Encyclopédie; it only appeared in his 1776 Supplément. See Becq, “L’Encyclopédie et l’esthétique.”
14. Ashfield and de Bolla, Sublime, 2. 15. Kristeller, “Modern System of the Arts.” See also Crow, Painters and Public Life; Guichard, Amateurs d’art à Paris; and Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur. 16. Lichtenstein, “Specificity of Aesthetic Theory.” 17. Lichtenstein, Blind Spot. 18. An important outlier in this regard is Honour, Neoclassisicm. 19. Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 1. 20. Goethe, Italian Journey, 163, and Beckford, Dreams, 245. 21. West, quoted in Galt, Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, 1:105. See also Prown, “Benjamin West,” and Michaud, “Was die moderne Anthropologie,” 115–26 and 280, cat. no. 96. 22. Smentek, “China and Greco-Roman Antiquity”; Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur; and Smentek, Rococo Exotic. 23. The Uffizi (Florence), the British Museum (London), and the Royal Cabinet of Natural History (Madrid) were rare exceptions to the rule, their eighteenth-century installations redolent of earlier cabinets of curiosity. See Paul, First Modern Museums of Art, and Zanardi, “Artful Nature and Material Splendor.” 24. See discussions in Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” and Potts, Sculptural Imagination. 25. Bottari and Foggini, Del Museo Capitolino. See Gallo, “Musea,” and Minor, Culture of Architecture, 210–13. 26. Montfaucon, Antiquité expliquée, 1:vi (emphasis mine). 27. Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 66. See also Minor, Culture of Architecture, 213–15. 28. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Anti-
quarian,” 286. See also Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur, 3. 29. Winckelmann’s attunement to sculptural form and surface quality was shaped by his friendship and collaboration with Anton Raphael Mengs. Potts, “Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies.” 30. Winckelmann, Reflections, and Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity. The essential account is Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, esp. 11–46. 31. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, and Furtwängler, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture. 32. Freedberg, Power of Images, and Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence. Other key landmarks in a burgeoning literature include Belting, Likeness and Presence, and Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 33. A. Gell, Art and Agency. 34. Pliny, Natural History. I thank David Summers for having pointed me in the direction of Callistratus’s Descriptions. 35. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 77. See also Morgan, Molyneux’s Question. 36. Marshall, Frame of Art, 5–6, 10. 37. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry. Boileau and Pseudo-Longinus, “Traité du sublime.” See, for instance, the discussion in Ashfield and de Bolla, Sublime, and in Eck, “Living Statues.” 38. Falconet, “Réflexions sur la sculpture,” 25, translated and discussed in Eck, “Living Statues,” 655. 39. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 205. Daston and Galison’s discussion has been indispensable for my thinking; see also ibid., 17–53, 191–251. 40. Belting, Invisible Masterpiece, 39–40. See also Eck, “Living Statues.” 41. Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales; translated in Belting, Invisible Masterpiece, 40.
218 Notes to Pages 16–30
42. Diderot, “Salon of 1765.” See also Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 55–98. 43. Here I extend Marshall’s provocation, “that some of the most interesting thinking about the experience of art in the Enlightenment takes place in the realm of fiction,” to picturing (Frame of Art, 3). 44. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 103. 45. Barry to Dr. Sleigh, November 1867, in Works of James Barry, 1:139. 46. The terminology is Löwy’s, from Lysipp und seine Stellung and Rendering of Nature. 47. In situating the end point of this study at the fin de siècle—at a turning point both in a sense of archaeological knowledge of the diversity of the ancient Greek world and in terms of an art-theoretical orientation to planarity—I part ways with the historical logic undergirding Prettejohn’s important account in Modernity of Ancient Sculpture, otherwise largely complementary to this one, which culminates in the 1920s and ’30s and with twentieth-century artistic modernism. 48. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, x. 49. Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 53. 50. See Redford, Dilettanti; Davis, Queer Beauty; Hönes, Kunst am Ursprung; and Siegel, Desire and Excess. 51. Pop, “Sympathetic Spectators,” 944. 52. Herder, Plastik, 97; translation in Pop, “Sympathetic Spectators,” 945. 53. Richter, “Winckelmann’s Progeny.” See also Potts, Flesh and the Ideal; Ettlinger, “Winckelmann”; Howard, Antiquity Restored, 162–74; and K. Parker, “Winckelmann and the Problem.” 54. Pater, “Winckelmann,” 159. 55. Davis, Queer Beauty, 23–50. 56. Ibid., 29.
Chapter 1 1. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes.” See also Freedberg, Power of Images, 317–44. 2. Diderot, “Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot.” 3. Krauss, “You, Irreplaceable You,” 158. 4. Quatremère de Quincy, Jupiteur olympien, i; cited and translated in Luke, Quatremère de Quincy’s Role, 3.
5. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 191. 6. See Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence, and Eck, Gastel, and Kessel, Secret Lives of Art Works. 7. Jaucourt, “Sculpture en bronze.” I have learned much about the ubiquity of bronze from David Summers and his paper “A Short History of Bronze.” 8. Diderot, “Salon of 1765.” Sculpture is also de facto marble and figural in Herder, Plastik, 45. Joshua Reynolds echoed Diderot’s sentiments in “Discourse 10” of 1780 (Reynolds, Discourses, 173–89). 9. Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 7. 10. Lothar Müller, “Achsendrehung des Klassizismus,” 59; cited in MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 35. See also MacLeod’s discussion of Goethe, in ibid., 5. 11. See, for instance, Baudelaire, Salon of 1846. See Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, esp. 150–53. 12. Ovid, Metamorphoses 10, translated in Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, 91 (emphasis mine). See also Stoichità, Pygmalion Effect, 111–60. 13. The same holds true for theatrical versions of the myth, as in Rousseau’s Pygmalion, written in 1762 and first performed in 1770, in which both marble and carving tools figure prominently in the narrative. 14. Stoichità, Pygmalion Effect, 10. 15. Sheriff, Moved by Love, 159; and on the elision of Galatea and Venus, ibid., 187. 16. Stoichità, Pygmalion Effect, 11–13. See also Barolsky and d’Ambra, “Pygmalion’s Doll,” fig. 1. 17. D’Holbach, “Marbre,” 10:70; Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 195. Winckelmann here draws on Newton’s Opticks, published in 1704, especially his observation that white light is a mixture of all of the colors of the spectrum. I thank David Summers for this observation. 18. Jockey, Mythe de la Grèce blanche, 171, 137. 19. See Bindman, Warm Flesh, Cold Marble; Bindman, Ape to Apollo; Caticha, “Étienne-Maurice Falconet.” 20. Reynolds, Discourses, 189 (emphasis mine). 21. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:776. 22. Ibid., 2:777, and Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 62.
23. Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, and J. Richardson, Essay on the Theory of Painting. See Potts, “Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies,” and Marvin, Language of the Muses, 121–67. 24. Visconti, Il Museo Pio-Clementino, 1:20–23; cited in Marvin, Language of the Muses, 129–30. In this Visconti followed Maffei (Raccolta di statue, 1704) and Winckelmann (History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764), who likewise relied on ancient textual accounts in their understanding of marble statues as copies of lost bronze originals. See Potts, “Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies,” 163. See also Winckelmann’s poignant observation, in the final paragraph of the History of the Art of Antiquity, that “we examine the copies we have with greater attention than we would if we were in full possession of the originals” (351). 25. This situation was the case of the Apollo Belvedere, as reported by John Flaxman, in Report from the Select Committee, 73; cited in Marvin, Language of the Muses, 130–31. Visconti was joined by Knight, who by 1791 viewed the Apollo Belvedere and Belvedere Torso, among other iconic works, as Roman copies. See Penny, “Collecting, Interpreting, and Imitating Ancient Art.” 26. See Potts, “Greek Sculpture and Roman Copies”; Haskell and Francis, Taste and the Antique; Siegel, Desire and Excess; Davis, “Did Modernism Redefine Classicism?” 27. Foundational contributions to literature on sculpture polychromy include Blühm, Colour of Sculpture; Syson, “Polychrome and Its Discontents”; Brinkmann, Dreyfus, and KochBrinkmann, Gods in Colour; and Friborg, “Colour, Skin and Stone,” 292. On the Diana, see Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 160–61. The statue was described in detail by Quatremère de Quincy, Jupiteur olympien, 35. See also Primavesi, “Artemis, Her Shrine, and Her Smile”; Stuart and Revett, Antiquities of Athens; Semper, Four Elements of Architecture, 57; Watkin, “Impact of Stuart”; Quatremère de Quincy, Jupiter olympien, 31–2. 28. Quatremère de Quincy, Jupiter olympien, 37, and Primavesi, “Colorful Sculptures in Ancient Literature?”
Notes to Pages 30–37 219
29. Semper, Vorläufige Bemerkungen; Klenze, Versuch einer Wiederherstellung; Hittorff, Architecture antique; O. Jones, Grammar of Ornament. See also Van Zanten, Architectural Polychromy. 30. Watkin, “Impact of Stuart,” 534, and Nichols, Greece and Rome, 17–19. See also O. Jones, Apology for the Colouring. 31. Jockey, Mythe de la Grèce blanche, 155–223, 163, 168. 32. O. Jones, Apology for the Colouring, 17; Bindman, Warm Flesh, Cold Marble; Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, Sculpture Victorious, 185–88. 33. Even as the scientific basis for understanding ancient polychromy has been further elaborated by the Glyptotek Tracking Colour Project, the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung Polychromy Research Project, and others, the racialized stakes of the conversation are in stark evidence. Particularly virulent recent discussion of the subject was ignited by Talbot, “Myth of Whiteness”; Bond, “Whitewashing Ancient Statues”; and Bond, “Why We Need to Start.” 34. “Le nud est le principal objet de l’étude du sculpteur” (Falconet, “Sculpture,” 836). 35. Lafont, “How Skin Became a Racial Marker”; Lafont, L’art et la race, esp. 5–42; Bindman, Ape to Apollo. See also Michaud, “Was die moderne Anthropologie.” 36. D’Holbach, “Marbre,” 10:70. 37. Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, 2:58. For an opposing account, see Falconet, “Réflexions sur la sculpture,” 23. 38. See Ennio Quirino Visconti, writing in 1814, in Hamilton, Memorandum, appendix D; cited in Potts, “Impossible Ideal,” 104. Visconti here echoes Callistratus, Descriptions. See also Körner, “Epidermis der Statue”; Davis, “Did Modernism Redefine Classicism?,” esp. 77–78; and Betzer, “Canova, 1816.” 39. Reynolds, Discourses, 175 (“Discourse 10”). Reynolds’s assessment echoes that of Diderot, who described sculpture as “severe, grave and chaste” (“Salon de 1765”; quoted in Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 73). 40. Rousseau, Pygmalion; cited in Sheriff, Moved by Love, 182. 41. MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 28–29. 42. Guizot, “Salon de 1810,” 37.
43. Gérôme, 1892, quoted in Friborg, “Colour, Skin and Stone,” 304. 44. See Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 135–63. 45. For relative thermal conductivity values, see “Thermal Conductivity of Selected Materials and Gases,” https://www.engineeringtoolbox .com/thermal-conductivity-d_429.html (accessed June 21, 2018). I am grateful to Jerry Floro, my colleague in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UVA, for enlightening conversations about thermal conductivity. 46. Diderot, “Salon of 1765,” 282; translated in Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 75. 47. Rousseau, “Pygmalion, scène lyrique,” 1227 (emphasis mine). 48. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” 250, 253. 49. Ibid., 253. 50. Ibid., 252–54. 51. See Gaiger, introduction to Sculpture, by Herder, 1–28, and Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 70–72. 52. Herder, “Studien und Entwürfe zur Plastik,” 88; cited in Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter,” 6. 53. Gaiger, introduction to Sculpture, by Herder, 18. 54. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, 95 (emphasis mine). Ovid’s use of the second person amplifies this effect by drawing in the viewer as a kind of voyeur. Stoichità, Pygmalion Effect, 9. 55. Key landmarks include La Mettrie, Hommemachine; Condillac, Traité de sensations; Rousseau, Pygmalion; Herder, Plastik. See also Stoichità, Pygmalion Effect, 113, and Potts, “Male Phantasy and Modern Sculpture,” 38. 56. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 334. See also Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter,” and Potts, Sculptural Imagination. 57. Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 1:xx. Rome’s centrality in active networks of the antiquities trade constituted a “a vast ‘Marble Empire’ extending from the Vatican to Scandinavia, from Russia to Portugal, later reaching the east and west coasts of North America.” See also Furlotti, Antiquities in Motion.
58. See the “Calendar of Excavations” in Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 1:35–37. See also Coutu, Then and Now, 4. 59. Paul, First Modern Museums; Paul, “Capitoline Hill”; Pasquier, “Musées du Capitole,” 369–70; Minor, Culture of Architecture, 187–215; and Collins, “Nation of Statues,” 187–98. 60. See Collins’s account of Pius VI’s inauguration of new museological practices, with new rooms functioning as “full-size evocations of the baths, temples, palaces and nymphaea in which [the antiques exhibited there] were originally housed” (“Museo Pio-Clementino,” 125). 61. Among other Roman “speaking statues” are Il Pasquino, Babuino, and Madama Lucrezia. 62. Humbert, Pantazzi, and Ziegler, Egyptomania, 106, fig. 1. See also Caviglia-Brunel, CharlesJoseph Natoire, 415–16. 63. On regimes of control and the need for authorization, see Paul, “Capitoline Museum,” 21–45. 64. Natoire to Marigny, June 22, 1757, cited in Caviglia-Brunel, Charles-Joseph Natoire, 124. Natoire was director from 1752 to 1775, during which time he focused on pedagogical reform; see Benhamou, Charles-Joseph Natoire. 65. The first mention of the garden dates from 1755; Natoire made three drawings of “La Villa Natoire” between 1760 and 1762. CavigliaBrunel, Charles-Joseph Natoire, D652–54, 448–49; Gallo, Donato, and Polignac, Fascination de l’antique, cat. no. 83, 104. 66. Macsotay, “Plaster Casts and Memory Technique,” 189. The cast collection became an important destination for an international cohort of artists. Michel, “Formation des artistes étrangers.” 67. For the sculptures depicted and Hubert’s related drawings, see Victor Carlson in Couturier, Drawn to Art, 22, and Beau, Collection des dessins, nos. 26–27. See also Humbert, Pantazzi, and Ziegler, Egyptomania, cat. no. 43, fig. 2, 107. 68. Carlson, Drawn to Art, 22. 69. For the Agrippina, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 133. For Antinous Osiris and Cupid and Psyche, see Pietrangeli in Botti and Romanelli, Sculture del Museo
220 Notes to Pages 39–59
gregoriano egizio, 138; S. Jones, Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures, 185; and Gallo, Donato, and Polignac, Fascination de l’antique, 89–90. 70. Michel, “Formation des artistes étrangers.” See also Pietrangeli, “Accademia del nudo.” 71. Arenhövel, Berlin und die Antike, 96, cat. no. 142. 72. Barthélemy to Comte de Caylus, February 10, 1756, cited in Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 64; discussed in Collins, “Nation of Statues,” 187. See also Minor, Culture of Architecture, 204. 73. Ingamells, Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers, 1006, and Brigstocke, Masterpieces from Yorkshire Houses, 73, cat. no. 34. 74. Batoni returned to the composition two years later on an even more sumptuous scale in Count Kirill Grigoriewitsch Razvmovsky (private collection). See Bowron and Kerber, Pompeo Batoni, 83–84. 75. Witton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, 248. 76. Collins, “Gods’ Abode,” and Collins, “Museo Pio-Clementino,” 122–23. A description of the cases appears in Galt, Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, 105. For their suggestive rendering, see the drawing by Hubert Robert, La statue mis à l’abri, 1774, inv. D 51 (in Cayeux, Hubert Robert, 262–63). 77. Collins, “Gods’ Abode,” 183. 78. Myrone, Bodybuilding, 48. 79. Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 123–63. Coltman observes that “the kind of image that Batoni represented on canvas [in the portrait of Dundas], itself a summary of highlights of the Vatican collection, was recreated throughout the eighteenth century in British country house interiors using casts and copies of ancient sculptures acquired in Italy” (130). 80. J. Richardson, Account of Some of the Statues, 2. 81. This terminology is that of Chard and Langdon, Transports. 82. Coquery, Idea del Bello, 42–43. See also Cuzin, Gaborit, and Pasquier, D’après l’antique, 280–82. 83. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 21–22. Key afterlives include the Society of Dilettanti’s Specimens of Ancient Sculpture (1809) and the Musée français (1803–12). 84. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 21.
85. See Gallo, “Musea,” 279–94, and Minor, Culture of Architecture, 210–13. 86. Canova’s annotations are transcribed in Pavanello, Antonio Canova, 106. The engraving appeared in Volpato, Principii del disegno, pl. 35. 87. Baker, “Consommation de l’antique,” 69–77. See also Witton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, 280, and Jackson-Stopes, Treasure Houses of Britain, cat. nos. 281–82, 284–86, 289. Luigi Valadier’s work presents an important parallel; see González-Palacios, Luigi Valadier. 88. On Volpato, see Witton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, 282. 89. Marchand and Frederiksen, Plaster Casts. Also see Schreiter, “Moulded from the Best Originals,” and Laboury, “Dans l’atelier du sculpteur Thoutmose.” 90. Jockey, Mythe de la Grèce blanche, 134–182; quote on 135. 91. Travelers were often struck by the material difference between their encounter with plaster casts and with marble “originals.” Coltman, Fabricating the Antique. 92. Gaiger, introduction to Sculpture, by Herder, 2–3. See also Falconet’s assertion of the primacy of plaster relative to original sculptural materials, including bronze and marble (Observations sur la statue, 1:271, 315; see also Jockey, Mythe de la Grèce blanche, 176–77. 93. See Baker, “Consommation de l’antique,” 69. 94. Winckelmann, Briefe, 2:95 and 4:258; cited and discussed in Vermeulen, Picturing Art History, 263. Vermeulen examines the eighteenth-century explosion of prints and its imbrication in Winckelmann’s art history (ibid., 91–176). See also Potts, introduction to History of the Art of Antiquity, by Winckelmann, 7–8. 95. Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi inediti, 1: pl. 180; 2:235–37. 96. Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 57. 97. Cavaceppi, Raccolta d’antiche statue, 1: pl. 13. 98. Howard, Antiquity Restored, 98–116. See also Piva, “Restoring and Making Sculpture.” 99. Collins, “Museo Pio-Clementino,” 127–28. 100. Barry, Works of James Barry, 1:70–71. 101. Gradara, Pietro Bracci, 99. 102. Minor emphasizes other inventions related to
the architectural setting in Grandjean’s drawing (Culture of Architecture, 206–8). 103. Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 190. 104. Ibid. 105. Marshall, Frame of Art, 5–6. 106. J. Richardson, Account of Some of the Statues, 55–56. Gibson-Wood notes that Richardson senior owned a number of casts and copies (Jonathan Richardson, 214). 107. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 11. 108. Entry from December 25, 1786, in Goethe, Italian Journey, 123–24. 109. Herder to Siegmund August Wolfgang Herder, Rome, October 28, 1788, in Herder, Briefe, 6:71–72. 110. Dupaty, Sentimental Letters, 1:105; cited in Chard, “Nakedness and Tourism,” 18. 111. Eaton, Rome in the Nineteenth Century, 1:166; cited in Chard, “Nakedness and Tourism,” 25. 112. Chard, “Nakedness and Tourism,” 22. 113. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 334. 114. Goethe, Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, 1:363. Winckelmann, Reflections. On Winckelmann’s intersubjective aesthetics, see Davis, “Winckelmann Divided”; Davis, Queer Beauty, 23–50; and Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. 115. Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 55–98. 116. Important discussions of this literature appear in Lichtenstein, Blind Spot; Podro, “Herder’s Plastik”; Potts, Sculptural Imagination; and Gaiger, introduction to Sculpture, by Herder, 1–28. 117. I opt here for Podro’s translation of Gefühl as “corporeal feeling” (“Herder’s Plastik,” 34). 118. Herder, Plastik, 80–81 (emphasis in original). 119. Ibid., 40. 120. Ibid., 41. A passage in Herder’s Critical Groves indicates that he had Winckelmann’s writing on the Apollo Belvedere in mind when he imagined this experience of the “lover of art.” See Herder, Sämtliche Werke, 4:65–66; observed by Gaiger in Herder, Plastik, 107 n. 18. 121. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 97–126. 122. See the extended discussion in Lang, “Dialectics of Decay.” 123. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 8. 124. An original source for the head of a youth has not been identified.
Notes to Pages 59–71 221
125. Ingamells, Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers, 738. 126. Bowron and Rishel, Art in Rome, 327–28. See also Garnett, Ireland, and Dodd, At Home with Art, 16–17. 127. Adam clearly conceived of grisaille painting as a design type, as attested by a drawing for the west wall of the library at Kedleston, likely dating from about 1765, where he indicated the inclusion of a painting in “Chiaro oscuro.” See Harris, Robert Adam and Kedleston, 42. 128. Michel sees in Blanchet’s “chiaroscuro” paintings “perhaps the sign of relations with Robert Adam,” although he does not justify or explore this potential relationship (“Pittore francese a Roma,” 481). I have found no record of Blanchet’s connection to Adam in Rome. 129. Gore notes that their subjects suggest that the pictures were “intended as part of the decoration of a classical room” and that “there is some evidence that the old dining room at Saltram (the eastern half of what is now the library) was their original location” (Saltram Collection, 39). 130. I am indebted to Sheila Crane for this observation. 131. The posthumous inventory of Blanchet’s studio and home included drawings of four “large statues” and of six “of Rome’s most famous statues measured and marked with all the drawing rules” (Michel, “Pittore francese a Roma,” 485). 132. Walpole, Essay on Modern Gardening, 69. I am grateful to Michael Lee for sharing his thoughts on the significance of dead trees. 133. Laing, “Louis-Gabriel Blanchet,” 114. 134. British Library, Add. MS 48218, fol. 58, contains a letter from Anne Robinson, September 12, 1780: “Sir Joshua is with us at present . . . he is in great spirits & I never saw him better, he has touched up all the Ghosts in the Eating Room & has improved them very much.” Gore suggests “the Ghosts” referenced Blanchet’s series (Saltram Collection, 39). 135. See also Laing’s consideration of the Borghese Hermaphrodite as a Pygmalion encounter (“Louis-Gabriel Blanchet”). 136. Also in the collection at Saltram were a set of five bronzes—including reductions of the
Vatican Menander and the Capitoline Seated Agrippina—by Giacomo and Giovanni Zoffoli. Honour, “Bronze Statuettes,” 201; cited in Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 161. 137. In these terms, the series strongly resonates with the contemporaneous shift from the display of sculpture in “lived-in” domestic spaces to the creation of designated gallery or museum spaces within elite urban and rural residences (Coutu, Then and Now, 197). 138. Barry to Edmund Burke, Rome, n.d., in Barry, Works of James Barry, 1:98; and Barry to William and Edmund Burke, Rome, November 8, 1769, in Barry, Works of James Barry, 1:167. 139. Barry to Burke, Rome, n.d., in ibid., 1:98. 140. Barry to Dr. Sleigh, November 1767, in ibid., 1:139. 141. Barry to Burke, Rome, n.d., in ibid., 1:117. See also Barry to Burke, April 8, 1769, in ibid., 1:159. 142. Barry to Reynolds, May 1769, in ibid., 1:108. 143. Barry to Edmund and William Burke, Rome, n.d., in ibid., 1:174. Murray dates this correspondence to February 1770 (“‘I am forming myself,’” 33). 144. Barry, Works of James Barry, 1:368, 443–44, 447. See also Pressly, “Barry’s Self-Portraits,” 62, and Lenihan, Writings of James Barry, 114–16. 145. In 1781 Baretti described this space as “the Second Room of the Academy of the Antique, intended also for the general Meetings of the Academicians, or Council” (Guide Through the Royal Academy, 25). 146. As attested by Baretti (ibid., 25). 147. Ibid., 28. On Barry’s portrait, see Pressly, James Barry. 148. Pressly, Life and Art of James Barry, 13 and 16. Louis-Gabriel Blanchet’s Portrait of James Barry (ca. 1767) is in the collections of the Royal Society in London. 149. The figure of Hercules seems to have functioned as a personal touchstone for Barry, as attested by his Self-Portrait as Timanthes, completed after Barry’s expulsion from the Royal Academy. See Lenihan, Writings of James Barry, 153–54, and Pressly, “Barry’s SelfPortraits,” 72–74. 150. There has been debate about the two figures’ identification; I concur with Ingamells that
the sculptor Paine is closest to the Torso, whereas the painter Lefèvre appears in the foreground with a palette (National Portrait Gallery, 37). 151. Pressly, “Barry’s Self-Portraits,” 62. 152. Here I diverge from Pressly and Leniham, both of whom have emphasized the painting’s ambiguity and lack of finish. 153. Murray, “‘I am forming myself,’” 31. 154. Winckelmann, “Description of the Torso,” xiii–xiv. 155. Barry, whose consideration of the Torso’s muscles suggests his familiarity with Winckelmann’s writing, discussed the “curious systems of Abbate Wincleman [sic]” in a letter to Edmund and William Burke from Rome, dated February 13, 1767 (Works of James Barry, 1:81). 156. A very different invocation of the Torso’s affective power, with a considerably more anxious view onto its status as an object of male artistic enthusiasm, appears in Gérôme’s 1849 Michelangelo Being Shown the Belvedere Torso. See Doyle, “Groping the Antique.” 157. Whitehead notes that during this period the Uffizi’s collection experienced a “radical change of character” thanks to the elimination of everything but painting, sculpture, drawings, and antiquities (“‘The Noblest Collection of Curiositys,’” 306–7). 158. The first three had been moved in 1677 from the Villa Medici in Rome to Florence, where they were joined by the Dancing Faun by 1688 and the Mercury by 1734 (Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 155, 205, 325, 338, 266). 159. Three figures in Patch’s Dilettanti may be identified with certainty through comparison with Patch’s engraved caricatures: Sir Horace Mann, gesturing toward the Venus de’ Medici; Patch himself, who stands on steps in the center foreground; and Lord Cowper, who leans against the base of the Arrotino. See Ford, “Thomas Patch: A Newly Discovered Painting,” 172–76. See also Belsey, “Caricature of Thomas Patch,” 229–31. While little is known about the sitters depicted in Patch’s painting, the vast majority of the figures who populate Zoffany’s canvas have been identified, including Patch, who appears in the foreground.
222 Notes to Pages 71–84
160. Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 138–48. See also Pressly, “ Self-Portraits of Johan Zoffany.” 161. For a fuller account, see Betzer, “Patch, Walpole, and Queer Complicity.” 162. Ford, “Thomas Patch: A Newly Discovered Painting,” 176. See also Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 144. 163. Johns discerns a soupçon of humor in Batoni’s treatment of Dundas’s “rather balletic pose” (“Portraiture and the Making of Cultural Identity,” 385). 164. Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway, 29. See also Betzer, “Patch, Walpole, and Queer Complicity.” 165. Redford, Dilettanti, 144. 166. Barrell, “Dangerous Goddess,” 127. 167. Watelet, Art de peindre, 13–14. See also the entries for “Antique” and “Proportion” in Watelet’s 1792 Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, 1:83–84 and 5:223. 168. According to inventories prepared after his divorce (in 1793) and death (in 1805), Greuze owned a “bust of Venus de’ Medici, in bronzed plaster”; cited in Diderot et l’art, 242. 169. Hale, “Art and Audience,” 47. Reynolds’s 1751 parody of The School of Athens also deployed a measuring device to humorously telegraph misapprehension. 170. Smiles, “Thomas Patch.” Patch knew Blanchet, who provided a statement of certification for Patch’s sale of Claude Lorrain’s monumental Landscape with Apollo Guarding the Herds of Admetus and with the Muses (1652) (Russel, “Thomas Patch”). 171. Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 144. 172. Thomas Mann, the closest English minister, wrote to Cardinal Albani, who wrote in turn to the bishop of Tivoli on Patch’s behalf. In his response, glossed by Watson, the bishop “hint[ed] at some unnameable crime so gross that the Bishop’s conscience forbad him to allow its perpetrator to remain in his domains” (letters between Cardinal Albani and Placido Pezzancheri, Bishop of Tivoli, 1751, Vienna State Archives), cited in Watson, “Thomas Patch,” 18. See also the account inscribed by Richard Hayward: “Patch Banish.’d Rome by order / of the Inquisition in 24 hours / for Crime well known to the / Holy Office, tis
said to have / proceed’d from some Confession / his poor boy Girolamo made at his / Death for ye Ease of his Conscience Christmas 1755” (see Stainton, “Hayward’s List,” 10–11). 173. Haggerty, “Queering Horace Walpole,” 552–53. Pointed allusion is made to Patch’s erotic orientation to men, and/or disinterest in women, in Ford, “Thomas Patch: A Newly Discovered Painting,” 172. See also Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 144; Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlot, 247; Blake, George Stubbs, 95; Belsey, “Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti,” 160; Watson, “Thomas Patch,” 29. 174. Bonnard, Gibbon’s Journey, 198; cited in Smiles, “Thomas Patch,” 58. See also the strong intimation of Patch’s impropriety in King George III’s response to Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi, reported in Garlick, Macintyre, and Cave, Diary of Joseph Farington, 6:241; cited in Smiles, “Thomas Patch,” 57–58. 175. Winckelmann, Monumenti antichi inediti, 2:50. 176. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 333. Potts presents the definitive analysis of these points in Flesh and the Ideal. 177. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 334. For the identificatory operations of Winckelmann’s project, see Davis, “Winckelmann’s ‘Homosexual’ Teleologies,” and Davis, Queer Beauty, 23–50. 178. Chard, “Effeminacy, Pleasure and the Classical Body,” 146, 148, and 152. 179. Temple, Short Ramble, 34–35; cited in Chard, “Effeminacy, Pleasure and the Classical Body,” 150–51. 180. Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi, cited in Haggerty, Men in Love, 553. 181. I have benefitted from McNeil, Pretty Gentlemen. 182. Ibid., 152. 183. Oxford Magazine, 1770, quoted in Preposterous Headdresses. See also Macaroni, Scavoir [sic] Vivre, and Theatrical Magazine (March 1774): 241; cited in McNeil, “That Doubtful Gender,” 431. See also Ribeiro, “Macaronis”; West, “Darly Macaroni Prints”; Rauser, “Hair, Authenticity, and the Self-Made Macaroni,” 21; and McNeil, Pretty Gentlemen. 184. McNeil, “That Doubtful Gender,” 426. The
185.
186. 187. 188. 189.
etymological root for the term “catamite” is “Ganymede.” Janes, Oscar Wilde Prefigured, 26, 44–47. For Wahrman, the abrupt disappearance of the figure of the macaroni at the end of the eighteenth century is a symptom of this larger shift (Making of the Modern Self, 63). G. S. Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment, 176–77, and Janes, Oscar Wilde Prefigured, 32. See Kelly, Society of Dilettanti, 57; Belsey, “Thomas Patch, A Gathering of Dilettanti,” 160; Belsey, Lure of Italy, 135. Witton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, 102–3. See Davis, Queer Beauty, 23–50; Pelzel, “Winckelmann, Mengs, and Casanova”; Ettlinger, “Winckelmann,” 509–10; Marchand, “Winckelmann und der Kunstmarkt,” 129–39.
Chapter 2 1. Wincklemann, “Description of the Torso,” as translated in Wyss, Hegel’s Art History, 31. 2. Kurbjuhn, “Winckelmann Exzipiert um sein Leben,” 164–66, cat. no. 12. 3. Reynolds, Discourses, 177 (“Discourse 10”). 4. Callistratus, Descriptions, 393–95. 5. Gourevitch, “Quelques fantasme érotiques,” and Bussels, “Da’ più scorretti abusata.” See the case, published in the journal L’Evenement (March 4, 1877), of a gardener “who fell in love with a statue of the Venus of Milo, and was discovered attempting coitus with it” (KrafftEbing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 396). 6. Goethe, “Diderots Versuch über die Malerei,” 1.18:569; translated and discussed in MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 5. 7. Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence, and Eck, Gastel, and Kessel, Secret Lives of Art Works. 8. Bussels has come to similar conclusions in “Da’ più scorretti abusata.” 9. Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence, 16. 10. Goethe, “Commentary on Falconet,” 17 (emphasis mine). 11. Zola, “Mon Salon,” 225; cited in Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 151. 12. Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 143. 13. A. Müller observes that Winckelmann contributed to establishing “new patterns of ideal perception” thanks to the prominence of immediate sensorial experience in his descrip-
Notes to Pages 84–99 223
tions of statues in the Belvedere (“Winckelmann als Cicerone,” 143). 14. Meyer, Voyage en Italie, 32. 15. Bonaventura, Nightwatches of Bonaventura, 94–97. 16. Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter.” 17. Berry, Extracts of the Journals, 1:114. See also Heinrich Meyer, cited in Goethe, Italian Journey, 353. 18. Goethe, Italian Journey, 352. Meyer originally planned to include his essay on the torchlight view in Die Propyläen, the periodical he published with Goethe from 1798 to 1800 (ibid., 473 n. 132). 19. Goethe, introduction to Propyläen (1798); quoted in Siegel, Desire and Excess, 173. 20. Nadar [Félix Tournachon], “Salon de 1855,” Le Figaro, no. 73, August 19, 1855, 2; quoted in Ockman, Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies, 100. 21. Thoré, “Études sur la peinture française.” 22. Lichtenstein, Blind Spot. 23. Diderot, “Salon de 1765”; quoted in Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 73; see also ibid., 137. 24. Guizot, “Salon de 1810,” esp. 5–8; quote on 7. Lichtenstein notes Guizot’s echo of de Piles’s earlier critique of Poussin (Blind Spot, 119–31). See also Bordes, Jacques-Louis David, 59, 185. 25. Goncourt and Goncourt, Journal, 1:816 (entry for May 13, 1862); translated in Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 155. 26. Blanc, Ingres, 8. 27. McKee, “Musée Français,” iii, 83. ÉmericDavid’s texts were reprinted in periodicals and as freestanding publications (72, 69). 28. Ibid., 133–39. See also Betzer, “Ingres’s Shadows.” Ingres’s drawings may have been completed prior to October 1802, at which point two hundred drawings, enough for the next five years of publication, had been assembled. 29. Blanc, Ingres, 8. 30. Ingres’s list, titled “Mes Ouvrages jusqu’a 1847–1850,” was included in “Cahier IX,” unpublished manuscript, 123; reproduced and transcribed in Vigne, Ingres, 325. 31. Ingres, “Cahier X,” unpublished manuscript, 22; reproduced and transcribed in Vigne, Ingres, 327. 32. Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter
BnF) Collection Deloynes, pièce 1376: Collection de pièces sur les beaux-arts (1673–1808). Pommier, L’art de la liberté, 443–66. 33. Mainardi, “Assuring the Empire of the Future,” 155–63. I am grateful to Mary Beard for her insight that Aemilius Paulus’s triumph marked the acme of his career; the two events thus commemorated quite different turning points for their two respective generals. 34. BnF, Collection Deloynes, pièce 1376, fol. 987: “l’éntrée triomphale des objets des Sciences et d’arts recueillis en Italie.” Saunier, Conquêtes artistiques; Gould, Trophy of Conquest; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique. 35. BnF, Collection Deloynes, pièce 1376, fol. 993. See also Fêtes de la liberté, 7. 36. Pommier, L’art de la liberté, 403 and 412, respectively; see also Marrinan, Romantic Paris, 68–74; Blumer, “Commission pour la recherche des objets”; McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. 37. Napoléon to the Directory, February 19, 1797, cited in Baring-Gould, Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 143. See also Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 37; Gallo, “Antiques au Louvre”; Belting, Invisible Masterpiece. 38. Malgouyres, Musée Napoléon. 39. David maintained his Louvre accommodations until the beginning of 1805. Schnapper and Serullaz, Jacques-Louis David, 604. In his role as director of the Musée Napoléon, Vivant Denon lauded the collections in Le Moniteur, 21 Fructidor, year XI [August 21, 1803], 1547–58; quoted in McKee, “Musée Français,” 64. 40. Cupid and Psyche and Cupid were engraved by Boucher-Desnoyers, Nero by Jacques-Louis Pérée, Euterpe and Terpsichore by Urbain Massard, Calliope and a Bacchant by AntoineAlexandre Morel, Urania by AntoineLouis Romanet, Mercury and Antinous as an Egyptian Idol by Henri-Guillaume Chatillon, Posidippus by J. B. H. Bourgois, and an Apollo Lykeois by Félix Massard. 41. Beatrizot’s and Thomassin’s plates thus depart from those by François Perrier (Segmenta, 1638), who often represented antique sculptures in natural settings without pedestals. 42. Joubert, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, 1:126; cited in McKee, “Musée Français,” 10.
43. McKee, “Musée Français,” 8 (emphasis mine). 44. Ingres contributed the drawing for the Gonzaga cameo to Visconti, Iconographie grecque, 2.3: pl. 53, fig. 3; reproduced in Picard-Cajan, Ingres et l’antique, pl. 16. Ingres also provided a drawing for the cameo of Livia: Visconti, Iconographie romaine, 2: pl. 19, cat. no. 3. 45. See Bann’s foundational work in: Parallel Lines, 141–68; “Ingres et les graveurs”; and “Reassessing Repetition.” See also Condon, Cohn, and Mongan, In Pursuit of Perfection, 10–33. 46. Krauss, “You, Irreplaceable You,” 157. 47. Van Liere, “Ingres’ Raphael and the Fornarina”; Toussaint, “Ingres et la Fornarina”; Krauss, “You, Irreplaceable You”; Siegfried, Ingres, 177–91; Betzer, “Artist as Lover.” 48. Marjorie Cohn makes this argument in Condon, Cohn, and Mongan, In Pursuit of Perfection, 20. 49. Krauss, “You, Irreplaceable You,” 158. 50. Quynn, “Art Confiscations of the Napoleonic Wars,” 439. The petition was signed by thirty-seven artists and public figures and was published in Le Moniteur universelle in October 1796 (Pommier, L’art de la liberté, 438–39). 51. Schiller, “Die Antiken zu Paris”; cited and discussed in MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 10. 52. Quynn, “Art Confiscations of the Napoleonic Wars,” 454. 53. Ibid. 54. Inscribed “Mon 1er dessin, 1789,” the drawing is reproduced and discussed in Hattis, Ingres’ Sculptural Style, 12–13. The date of 1789, when the artist was nine years old, seems likely to have been a retrospective—and perhaps questionable—inscription (Vigne, “D’Ingres à Reverdin,” 110). 55. Although the attribution and dating of this drawing has been the subject of debate (in Vigne, “D’Ingres à Reverdin,” 105–17, and Hattis, Ingres’ Sculptural Style), the Apollo sheet itself testifies to the object’s history of use: the upper and lower corners bear numerous tack marks. 56. See Hattis, Ingres’s Sculptural Style, 11–14, 34 n. 22. One such drawing by Ingres, his Dessin d’après l’Appoline antique, exhibited in Montauban in 1862 and dated by Armand
224 Notes to Pages 100–110
Cambon to 1795, was quite close to the Apollo Belvedere study in subject, technique, and dimensions (Vigne, “Premières oeuvres d’Ingres,” 23). 57. Vigne dates this work to 1800, identifying it as the canvas Ingres completed for the second of two trial tests (or épreuves d’essai) that preceded participation in the Prix de Rome that year (“Premières oeuvres d’Ingres,” 33–35). 58. Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, 4. 59. Ibid., 17–31. Equally germane here is Stoichità’s argument that it is in shadows that the history of artistic representation and a philosophy of representation converge (Short History of the Shadow). 60. Lespinasse, Traité de perspective linéaire. On sciography, see Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, 84. On its fraught history in the French context, see Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 145 n. 44. 61. Here I propose that Ingres belongs among the ranks of artists Baxandall had in mind when he wrote that “much of the richest Enlightenment shadow-watching is quite pre-mathematical” (Shadows and Enlightenment, 80). 62. Baxandall categorizes this genre of shadow as “Waltzian shadow” (ibid., 60, 132). 63. Bequeathed by Ingres to his hometown of Montauban in 1851 (Musée Ingres, inv. no. 867.60), the sketch is reproduced in Ternois, Peintures, cat. no. 255. 64. Desbordes-Valmore, Atelier d’un peintre, 27–28. For further discussion of DesbordesValmore’s text, see Bann, “Studio as a Scene of Emulation.” 65. Grimod de la Reynière, March 1799, quoted in Mannoni, Great Art, 162. That the chapel was the site of the tombs of Louise de Lorraine, queen of France, and the marquise de la Pompadour would no doubt have lent a further ghostly frisson to the performances held at the Couvent des Capucines. 66. Louis-Léopold Boilly, Caricatures de Girodet et de Gérard, ca. 1820–25, graphite, pen and ink, and watercolor on paper (Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris); in Weston, “David’s Alexander, Apelles, and Campaspe,” 146. See also Burns, “Girodet-Trioson’s Ossian,” and Levitine, “Ossian de Girodet,” 44.
67. François-Louis Dejuinne’s Girodet Painting Pygmalion (1821) depicts this practice. The Argand lamp, invented around 1784, was used in Robertson’s phantasmagoria performances beginning in 1798. Weston, “David’s Alexander, Apelles, and Campaspe,” 151 n. 28. 68. I owe this observation to Peter Parshall. 69. Gérard, “Napoléon,” 171; cited in Whiteley, “Light and Shade,” 772 n. 29. Other similar events included Josephine’s torchlight visit to medieval statues in the Musées des Monuments français (Wildenstein, “Visites royales et princières dans les musées,” 2). 70. See Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter.” 71. Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 145–46. Reynolds, Discourses, 251 (“Discourse 14,” 1788). 72. Canova, Quaderni di viaggio; cited in Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 146. “Thorwaldsens Werkstätte zu Rom”; cited in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 7. 73. Padiyar, Chains, 125–31, and Honour, “Canova’s Studio Practice.” 74. Cellini, Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, 280–87, and Whiteley, “Light and Shade,” 768–73. See also Mattos, “Torchlight Visit.” 75. Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 141–45 and 149–50. See also Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter”; A. Müller, “Winckelmann als Cicerone”; Steuben, “Museo Pio-Clementino,” 154–55; and Collins, “Gods’ Abode,” 173–94. 76. Staël, Corrine, 1:224. Meyer, quoted in Goethe, Italian Journey, 352 and 437 n. 132. 77. Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien, 155. 78. Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 150 n. 64. 79. Meyer, quoted in Goethe, Italian Journey, 352. 80. Staël, Corinne, 1:223–24. Berry also extolled the torchlight view at the Capitoline, where the sculptures were otherwise “ill-placed as to light” (Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence, 114). 81. Matthews, Diary of an Invalid, referenced in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 6. For a competing account, see, for instance, Meyer, Voyage en Italie, 403. 82. Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 15, 19. 83. Herder to Siegmund August Wolfgang Herder, Rome, October 28, 1788, in Herder, Briefe, 6:72. Weber, Deutschland, 3:178; cited in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 6.
84. Chrétineau-Joly, “Vatican,” 17. See further discussion of this event in Wildenstein, “Visites royales et princières dans les musées.” 85. Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 6. 86. Weber, Deutschland, 53; cited and translated in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 7. 87. Moritz, Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien, 155; cited and translated in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 7. 88. Herder to Siegmund August Wolfgang Herder, Rome, October 28, 1788, in Herder, Briefe, 6:71. 89. Houssaye, cited in Wildenstein, “Visites royales et princières dans les musées,” 2. 90. Meyer, Voyage en Italie, 403–5. 91. Sickler, “Account of the Regj Studj,” 131; cited in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 7. 92. Herder, cited in Mattos, “Torchlight Visit,” 140: “O welchen Schatz des Holden and des Guten / Hast Du, o Kunst, in manchen Stein gesenkt! / Wie quillt’s hervor, wenn mit den Flammengluten / Den todten Stein die Lebensfackel tränkt!” I thank Kristin Schroeder for her help discussing and refining this translation. Böttiger employed the poem as an epigraph to his account of a torchlight view in “Dresdner Antikengalerie”; cited in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 2. 93. Weber, Deutschland, 178; cited in Hönes, “Enlivening and Dividing,” 6 n. 14. 94. Frischer’s extraordinary digital re-creation of a torchlight view using a three-dimensional model of the Laocoön was a revelation for my thinking about such experiences. Frischer used photographic stills based on the threedimensional photographic model of the Laocoön that was created with different lighting solutions, which were then edited together with Camtasia, a video-editing software package. See Frischer and the University of Virginia Virtual World Heritage Laboratory, Laocoon Sculpture 4M, and Frischer, “Laocoon by Torchlight.” 95. Goethe, “Über Laokoon”; translated in Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater, 75. 96. Gallo, “Antiques au Louvre,” 183 n. 16, and McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, 149 n. 99. See also Potts’s account of discussions about lighting that took place in 1815 at the Munich
Notes to Pages 111–123 225
Glyptotek (“Classical Ideal on Display,” 30 n. 13). 97. Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment, 144. 98. Petit-Radel, Monumens antiques du Musée Napoléon, pl. 65. See also Jean-Luc Martinez in Picard-Cajan, Ingres et l’antique, cat. no. 173. 99. Gallo, “Antiques au Louvre,” 184 n. 28. See also Malgouyres, Musée Napoléon. 100. For Picasso, the pictorial desire “to confirm a known fullness of body” tended toward picturing under the sign of “circumspicuous or circumambient sight” (Steinberg, “Picasso,” 46, 53). 101. Émeric-David, Recherches sur l’art statuaire, and Quatremère de Quincy, “Sur l’idéal dans les arts.” See also Michel, Beau idéal; D. Johnson, Jacques-Louis David, 153–62; and Bordes, Jacques-Louis David, 185. 102. Further discussion appears in Betzer, Ingres and the Studio, 74–75. 103. Herder, Plastik, 91. 104. This impulse is evident in the mirrors included in major portraits such as Comtesse d’Haussonville (1845) and Madame Moitessier (1856). See Betzer, Ingres and the Studio, 17–67. 105. Siegfried, “Ingres and the Theatrics of History Painting,” and Siegfried, Ingres, 291–337. 106. Hegel to his wife, Dresden, September 7, 1824, and September 20, 1821, both in Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, 610; cited in Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 83 n. 13. 107. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, quoted in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 9. 108. Hegel acknowledged his debt to Winckelmann throughout his discussion of classical sculpture (Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 378, 380, 382). See also Peters, “Hegel on Spirit.” 109. For consideration of the ephemerality and fragility of this equipoise, see Squire, “Hegel and Art History,” 36–7, and Peters, “Hegel on Spirit,” 115. 110. Prettejohn, Modernity of Ancient Sculpture, 44–52, and Siegel, Desire and Excess, 40–72. 111. See also Peters, “Hegel on Spirit,” esp. 114–21. 112. Thus, “in some sense, in classical art, the form is the content and vice versa. One may therefore say that the subject matter––the content––of classical art just is the unity of form and content” (ibid., 114).
113. Despite its ideality and striking alignment of content and “sensuous expression,” Greek art thereby held within it the “seeds of its dissolution”—structural feature in keeping with Hegel’s account of art history more broadly. Squire, “Hegel and Art History,” 36–37. 114. See also Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 58. Schlegel anticipated Hegel’s articulation of sculpture’s closed-off interiority in a 1799 essay “Die Gemälde”; see MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 28. 115. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:712; translation modified in Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 58. 116. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 314; translated in Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 60 (emphasis in original); see also Peters, “Hegel on Spirit,” 114–24. 117. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:712. For this reason, Hegel conformed to period taste in not celebrating the Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici. Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 76. 118. Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:485, 2:797, and Squire, “Unser Knie beugen wir doch nicht mehr?,” 127–28. These considerations are amplified by Peters’s observation that Hegel’s formulation of classical sculpture entails its “curious position . . . standing in between passivity and activity,” a result of its “twofold origin” in the “given forms of nature” and their modification by the artist (“Hegel on Spirit,” 122). See also Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts, 68. 119. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 324. 120. Ibid., 375–76 and 311. 121. Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 59. 122. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 216. 123. Hegel emphasizes the importance of the “pure and monochrome” material that characterizes classical art (ibid., 216, see also 215, 374). See also Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 62. 124. Hegel explicitly invokes Winckelmann’s metaphor of the sea (e.g., in his description of the Laocoön, Reflections, 33) as he considers the sculptural flesh of youth and childhood (Aesthetics, 2:756).
125. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik, 176; cited in Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 65. 126. Hegel’s critique of Böttiger, whose “fondling of the voluptuous parts of marble statues of female goddesses has nothing to do with the contemplation or enjoyment of art,” appears in Aesthetics, 2:621. 127. Winckelmann, Schriften über die herkulanischen Entdeckungen, 2:65; translated and discussed in Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater, 96. 128. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 381. 129. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:725; discussed in Houlgate, “Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture,” 63. 130. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 381 (emphasis mine). 131. Certain fine perceptions of sculpture “may be recognizable only by touch” (Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:725). 132. Among the last was staged in 1854 by Nieuwerkerke, who was no doubt alert to its Napoleonic echoes (Wildenstein, “Visites royales et princières dans les musées,” 2).
Chapter 3 1. Freud, Delusion and Dream ( Jensen’s Gradiva is reprinted therein). 2. Walpole to Richard West, Naples, June 14, 1740, in Lewis, Lam, and Bennett, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 13:231. See also Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity, 24, 59. 3. Dumas, Impressions de voyage, 166. 4. Venuti, Description of the First Discoveries, 49. 5. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity, 23. 6. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works, 29. In early 1713, d’Elbeuf clandestinely sent the three statues to his cousin, Prince Eugene of Savoy, in Vienna (Daehner, Herculaneum Women, 19). 7. La Roque, Voyage d’un amateur des arts, 3:53; cited in Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 46. See also ibid., 45, and Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity, 44. 8. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, 7, 6, 3; cited in Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 26. See also Primavesi, “Discovery of the Polychromy,” and Pfotenhauer, “Ausdruck, Farb, Kontur.” 9. These finds are itemized in Fiorelli, Pompei-
226 Notes to Pages 124–130
anarum Antiquitatum Historia, addendum 4, 140–41; cited in Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 22–23. 10. The dates of Nicolle’s Italian travels, though uncertain, have been hypothesized as 1787 to 1799 and 1806 to 1811. Boucher, “Victor-Jean Nicolle,” cited in Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 160. 11. Piozzi, Observations and Reflections, 2:36. 12. Walpole to West, Naples, June 14, 1740, in Lewis, Lam, and Bennett, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 13:232. 13. Brosses to M. Le Président Bouhier, “Mémoire sur la ville souterraine d’Ercolano,” Rome, November 28, 1739, in Brosses, Président De Brosses en Italie, 1:417. See also Brosses, Lettres sur l’état actuel, 8. 14. Osanna, Caracciolo and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 87 (catalogue entry by Sara Matilde Masseroli). See also Beard, Pompeii, 305. 15. P. N. Miller, History and Its Objects, 97. 16. Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 48, 53. Dwyer credits Emperor Joseph II’s extended contemplation of a skeleton during his 1769 visit to his sister, Maria Carolina (queen of Naples), with having “introduced a new sensibility between the living and the dead in Pompeii” (Pompeii’s Living Statues, 8). 17. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, esp. 17–53, 191–251. 18. This terminology is adopted from Schnapp, “Antiquarian Culture,” 13–34. 19. The museum’s title, “museo herculanense,” was inscribed on an iron gate at the entrance. For clarity, I will refer to this collection as the Herculaneum Museum. See AllroggenBedel and Kammerer-Grothaus, “Das Museo Ercolanese in Portici,” 196 (fig. 10), 199, and Sampaolo, “From the Herculanense Museum.” 20. Winckelmann, Letter and Report, 65–159. 21. Hester Piozzi to Samuel Lysons, Naples, December 31, 1785, in Piozzi, Piozzi Letters, 1:176–77. 22. Brosses to M. Le Président Bouhier, “Mémoire sur la ville souterraine d’Ercolano,” Rome, November 28, 1739, in Brosses, Président De Brosses en Italie, 1:428. Presumably Brosses had in mind Montfaucon’s Antiquité expliquée (1719) when he invoked a “recueil d’antiquités” in 1739/40.
23. Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, quoted in Trevelyan, Shadow of Vesuvius, 63. 24. See Peter Gunn’s provocative reflection that in Naples one is distinctly oriented to the instant, “a sense of sensuous immediacy” (“Some Thoughts on Time in Naples,” 124). 25. Allroggen-Bedel and Kammerer-Grothaus, “Das Museo Ercolanese in Portici,” and Winckelmann, “Letter on the Herculanean Discoveries,” in Letter and Report. 26. Bergeret de Grancourt, Bergeret et Fragonard, 321. 27. Ibid. 28. Dupaty, Sentimental Letters, 2:131–32 (letter 94, Portici, 1785). On travelers’ feelings of identification in the face of the intimate and mundane objects of everyday life, see also Roberts, “Living with the Ancient Romans,” esp. 63–65. 29. Cantilena, “Herculanense Museum,” 81. See also Sampaolo, “From the Herculanense Museum,” 30. 30. Allroggen-Bedel and Kammerer-Grothaus, “Das Museo Ercolanese in Portici.” 31. An inscription, found in the theater on December 11, 1738, identified the city as Herculaneum. In Pompeii, no such inscription was found until 1763. See Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 25. 32. Dupaty, Sentimental Letters, 1:196 (letter 108, Pompeii). Subsequent commentators have, to the contrary, stressed the partial nature of Pompeii’s artifacts. See, for instance, Beard’s emphasis that “what survives [in Pompeii] is emphatically not a frozen moment in the life of a community going about its normal business, but the traces of a city abandoned and already half-stripped” (Beard, “What Might Have Happened Upstairs.”). 33. Maffei to Bernardo De Rubeis, November 10, 1747, in Maffei, Tre lettere, 26–40; translated and discussed in Caracciolo, “Turnaround in European Taste,” 40. 34. Caracciolo, “Turnaround in European Taste,” 40. 35. Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 67. 36. Winckelmann, preface to History of the Art of Antiquity, 71. On Winckelmann’s visits to Naples in 1758, 1762, 1764, and 1767, see
Winckelmann’s “Letter on the Herculanean Discoveries” and “Report on the Latest Discoveries at Herculaneum,” published together with an introduction and commentary by Carol Mattusch, in Winckelmann, Letter and Report. 37. Hamilton’s letter, published in London in 1786, described his encounter with phallic exvotos in Isernia and was included in Knight, Account of the Remains; de Jorio, Mimica degli antichi. Reversing Hamilton’s and Knight’s logic of “fossilization,” de Jorio argues that Neapolitans had, in Schnapp’s apt description, “conserved a culture of bodily expression invented in classical times” (“Antiquarian Culture,” 30). 38. Goethe, Italian Journey, 16 (entry of Sunday, March 11, 1787). Goethe traveled to Pompeii in February and March 1787. Alexandre Dumas père echoed Goethe’s description of Pompeii as a mummified city in his account of Herculaneum (which he visited in 1835) as “cette momie de ville,” invoking the subterranean experience as a sort of peeling away of layers of a corpse, complete with partial glimpses of “incomplete, mutilated” traces of the ancient world (Impressions de voyage, 2:166). 39. Both destinations required letters of permission. See Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 36–37. 40. See, for instance, from 1763, Fougerous de Bondaroy, Recherches sur les ruines; cited in Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 46–47. 41. Du Bocage to her sister, Naples, October 15, 1757, in Du Bocage, Recueil des oeuvres, 3:278. 42. Venuti, Description of the First Discoveries, 51. Brosses to M. Le Président Bouhier, “Mémoire sur la ville souterraine d’Ercolano,” Rome, November 28, 1739, in Brosses, Président De Brosses en Italie, 1:415. See also Brosses, Lettres sur l’état actuel, 4. By 1763, there was a long, sloping tunnel, and finally, from 1776 to 1778, stairs were added: Fougerous de Bondaroy, Recherches sur les ruines, 19; Roland de la Platière, Lettres écrites de Suisse, 4:246. See also Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 47–48. 43. Walpole to West, Naples, June 14, 1740, in Lewis, Lam, and Bennett, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 13:222. See also Thomas Gray’s account in his “Notes of Travel,” reprinted in Tovey, Gray and His Friends, 254.
Notes to Pages 130–135 227
44. Tovey, Gray and His Friends, 254. 45. Bergeret de Grancourt, Journal de voyage, 319. See also Du Bocage’s 1757 reflections on Herculaneum, the “habitation of the Gnomes,” Letters Concerning England, 1:89, 91, and Du Bocage to her sister, Naples, October 15, 1757, in Du Bocage, Recueil des oeuvres, 3:284–85. 46. A. Miller, February 9, 1771, in Letters from Italy, 1:207 (letter 36); Brosses, Président De Brosses en Italie, 1:417; Hamilton, Account of the Discoveries, 9. A largely positive evocation of the torchlit view appears in Goethe, travel journal entry of March 18, 1787, in Italian Journey, 173. Cochin and Bellicard’s “subterranean excursion” produced their immensely popular Observations upon the Antiquities. See also Gordon, “JérômeCharles Bellicard’s Italian Notebook.” 47. Carcani, Antichità di Ercolano esposte; see Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 60–61. Among noteworthy discussions of the prohibition, see Brosses, Président De Brosses en Italie (Venuti organized Brosses’s permit in 1740); Winckelmann, Letter and Report (published in 1762); and Lalande, Voyage d’un français en Italie (based on his visit in 1765–66). See also the account of Cochin and Bellicard’s “archaeological espionage” in Observations upon the Antiquities; cited in Gordon, “Subverting the Secret of Herculaneum.” 48. See, for instance, Winckelmann, “Letter on the Herculanean Discoveries,” in Letter and Report, 98; Cochin and Bellicard, Observations upon the Antiquities, 53; and Lady Anna Miller’s discussion of subterfuge required in order to take notes or sketches in Pompeii (February 9, 1771, in Letters from Italy, 1:216–17 [letter 36]). 49. Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, 168. On Denon’s account, see Michel, Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, 79, 82. 50. A. Miller, February 9, 1771, in Letters from Italy, 1:211, 214–15 (letter 36). 51. Ibid., 207–8, 215–16. 52. Bergeret de Grancourt, Bergeret et Fragonard, 291. 53. Dupaty, Sentimental Letters, 2:129 (letter 94, Portici, 1785). 54. Piozzi, Observations and Reflections, 2:4.
55. Goethe, travel journal entry of March 3, 1787, in Italian Journey, 156. 56. More’s “faithful transposition” of Pliny the Younger’s description of the destruction of Pompeii and the death of his uncle Pliny the Elder was recognized by contemporary critics in 1784 (Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 62 [entry by Campo]). 57. Hamilton, “An Account of the Late Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in a Letter from the Right Honourable Sir William Hamilton, K.B.F.R.S., to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart, P.R.S.,” Philosophical Transactions 85 (1795): 94–95; cited in Roberts, “Living with the Ancient Romans,” 79. 58. After the eruption of 1779, Hamilton published a supplement, also with colored plates. See Thackray, “‘Modern Pliny,’” 66–70, 165–70. 59. Piozzi to Samuel Lysons, Naples, December 31, 1785, in Piozzi, Piozzi Letters, 1:176. 60. Beard, “What Might Have Happened Upstairs. 61. A. Miller, February 9, 1771,” in Letters from Italy, 1:210 (letter 36). For another temptation to theft, see Miller’s discussion of her visit to Portici (ibid.). See also Denon’s account, in the course of his voyage to Naples, of having given in to his desire to secret a skull of “a roman lady” in his large coat as a souvenir (Voyage au royaume de Naples, 118). 62. Piozzi, Observations and Reflections, 2:35. 63. Damage inflicted by the major earthquake in 62 ce, together with subsequent looting, likewise hindered the site’s ability to represent a full picture of the Roman world (Beard, “What Might Have Happened Upstairs”). 64. For instance, Dupaty, Sentimental Letters, 2:198. In his description of the Temple of Isis, the most “monumental” of discoveries, Bergeret de Grancourt describes it as “a small temple” (Journal de voyage, 316). Lalande’s description of the Temple of Isis suggests a dollhouse more than an ancient monument (Voyage d’un français en Italie, 7:208). 65. Goethe, travel journal entry of March 11, 1787, in Italian Journey, 162. 66. Brosses to M. Le Président Bouhier, “Mémoire sur la ville souterraine d’Ercolano,” Rome, November 28, 1739, in Brosses, Président De Brosses en Italie, 1:419–21.
67. Bergeret de Grancount, Bergeret et Fragonard, 317. 68. Piozzi to Samuel Lysons, Naples, December 31, 1785, in Piozzi, Piozzi Letters, 1:176. 69. Grell, Herculanum et Pompéi, 120. Grell identifies a decisive turning point in the tone of travelers’ accounts in the 1770s. See also Caracciolo, “Turnaround in European Taste.” 70. Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, vol. 2, on Pompeii. See Michel, Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, and Lamers, Il viaggio nel sud, 188–284. 71. Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 84. For Desprez’s work at Pompeii, see Michel, Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, 79–83. 72. Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, 2:115; cited in Lamers, Il viaggio nel sud, 199. 73. Ibid. See also Beard, Fires of Vesuvius, 308. Dwyer observes that the Temple of Isis was the first site excavated at Pompeii “without being intended for reburial” (Pompeii’s Living Statues, 4). 74. Pinto, “‘Speaking Ruins,’” 243 n. 11. Pinto shares the view that Desprez likely met Giovanni and Francesco Piranesi in 1779. 75. Olausson, “Desprez et Piranèse fils,” 47–50. Francesco Piranesi and also published, with his brother Pietro, the Antiquités d’Herculaneum. See Gardner Coates, Lapatin, and Seydl, Last Days of Pompeii, 194. 76. See also F. Piranesi, Antiquités de la GrandeGrèce, which included more than two dozen images related to his father’s depictions of the excavations. See also Pinto, “‘Speaking Ruins,’” 237, and Gardner Coates, Lapatin, and Seydl, Last Days of Pompeii, 194. 77. Pinto, “‘Speaking Ruins,’” 233. 78. Caracciolo, “Turnaround in European Taste,” 67. 79. In 1743, Giovanni Battista Piranesi wrote, “Speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings could never have succeeded in conveying.” Piranesi, Prima parte di architetture; cited and discussed in Pinto, “Speaking Ruins,” 231. 80. See Pinto, “‘Speaking Ruins,’” 240. Nevertheless, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s depiction of the Gladiator’s Barracks involves the imaginative return of helmets that were by 1770 installed at the royal museum at Portici, and it
228 Notes to Pages 135–151
seems also to include depictions of “ancient” prisoners. 81. Lapatin, “Piranesi’s Antiquités,” 194. 82. Michel, Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, 83. 83. This claim to veracity was reiterated on Bertault’s print’s annotation: “Represented here faithfully and as they were discovered.” See Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, 2:112, cat. no. 74; reproduced in Lamers, Il viaggio nel sud, 199, figs. 172 and 172. 84. Michel, Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, 82. 85. Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque, 2:118; cited in Lamers, Il viaggio nel sud, 202. 86. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts, 241. Beckford’s description of Pompeii borrows heavily from Hamilton, Account of the Discoveries. 87. Michel, Chimère de Monsieur Desprez, 83. 88. Pucci has observed that “being moved before the human dramas envisioned in the poor remains of the victims . . . became the topical moment of every visit to Pompeii” (“Cadaveri eccellenti,” 71; cited in Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 63). 89. Hamilton, Account of the Discoveries, 7. 90. Hamilton’s account was illustrated by thirteen black-and-white engravings after drawings by Fabris now held by the Society of Antiquaries. Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, 43. See also Saiello, “Painters Travelers at Pompeii,” 48. 91. The drawing is inscribed in pen: “fait en 1774. pompeia près de portici, ville découverte. chambre ou on voit une feme qui s’est trouvé surprise par les cendres du Vésuve. [“Annoté au verson de la main de Alexandre Lenoir (who acquired the drawing in 1815) à la plume.”]. Lamers, Il viaggio nel sud, 287–88. 92. Bergeret de Grancourt, travel journal entry of May 6, 1774, in Journal de voyage, 315. See also catalog entry for Fragonard, Discovery of a Skeleton in a House in Pompeii, in Osanna, Caracciolo, and Gallo, Pompeii and Europe, 63 (by Sgarbozza). 93. Beckford, Dreams, Waking Thoughts, 245. 94. Chassériau’s sustained work is attested to by the over fifty preliminary studies for the composition; see Prat, Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 1: cat. nos. 625–76. 95. Perhaps the least studied of all eras of archae-
ological work at Pompeii, the period of the excavations supervised by Francesco Avellino (1839–50) and S. Spinelli (1850–63) nevertheless resulted in the clearing of roughly onethird of the total urban area of the ancient city. See Foss, “Rediscovery and Resurrection.” 96. See the biographical notice by Chevalier Artaud in Mazois, Ruines de Pompéï, 4:i–vi, and Lance, Dictionnaire des architectes français, 2:125–28. In July 1825, Mazois introduced colleagues at the Académie des BeauxArts to his study of Pompeii (Archives des Beaux-Arts, Paris, “Académie des Beaux-Arts, procès-verbaux de ses séances,” SE16, July 16, 1825). After Mazois’s death, architect François Chrétien Gau published the third and fourth volumes in 1829 and 1838. 97. William Gell’s first volume of Pompeiana was first published with John P. Gandy in 1817–19. The second series, also entitled Pompeiana, covered the excavations undertaken between 1819 and 1832, was authored by Gell alone and appeared in two volumes in 1832. 98. Mazois, Ruines de Pompéi, 2: pl. 38. See also Mertens, “Drawing by Chassériau.” 99. Mazois, Ruines de Pompéi, 3:76–77 and pl. 49; W. Gell, Pompeiana, 1:107. 100. Following Bénédite’s Théodore Chassériau, Prat asserted that Chassériau’s watercolor depicted the Stabian baths (Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 1:290, cat. no. 629), the location reiterated in Peltre (Théodore Chassériau, 195). Lacambre correctly cites the Mazois plates but incorrectly locates the baths near the Porta di Stabia (Second Empire, 269). 101. Stuart and Revett, Antiquities of Athens, 2: chapter 2. 102. For Chassériau’s Italian sketchbooks from 1840–41, see Prat, Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 1:1092–572. 103. See Betzer, “Afterimage of the Eruption.” Chassériau may well have discovered Gell by way of Mazois (Ruines de Pompéi, 3:68). 104. W. Gell, Pompeiana, 1:109. Wilhelm Zahn (1800–1871) published Die schönsten Ornamente with Otto Jahn and Ornamente aller klassischen Kunstepochen. On Gell’s use of the camera lucida, see Wallace-Hadrill, “Roman Topography,” 293–95.
105. Indeed, it is tempting to compare the relationship and poses of the two female figures at the rear of Gell’s plate, Frigidarium and Piscina, in the Women’s Baths (Pompeiana, 1: pl. 33), to those of the central pair in Chassériau’s painting. 106. W. Gell, Pompeiana, 1:131–32. 107. Ibid., 1:139. 108. Siegel’s emphasis on the unruly, sexualized antique exhumed in the Bay of Naples is germane here (Desire and Excess, 64–71). 109. Exhibited at the Salon of 1850, Gérôme’s painting was purchased by Prince Napoléon. Ackerman, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 216, cat. no. 20. Reproduced as a photogravure, it was later copied by Cezanne (Chapuis, “Cézanne dessinateur”). 110. Gérôme seems to invoke the celebrated tripod with ithyphallic satyrs from the Praedia of Julia Felix at Pompeii, made famous in the eighteenth century (Saint-Non, Voyage pittoresque; Durand, Recueil et parallèle, pl. 75; and Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités). Formerly exhibited in Portici, the tripod is now in the collections of the National Archeological Museum in Naples (inv. no. 27874). 111. House, “Curiosité”; House, “History Without Values?”; Blix, From Paris to Pompeii. 112. For two such critiques, see Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 369. 113. Chassériau, quoted in Prat, Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 1:543–45, cat. no. 1487 (RF 25.209). 114. Prat, “Théodore Chassériau,” 119. 115. Francesco La Vega, excavation notes dated December 12, 1772, published in Fiorelli, Pompeianarum Antiquitatum Historia, 1:268–69; cited in Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 9–10. 116. Dupaty, Sentimental Letters, 2:135 (letter 94, Portici, 1785). 117. Moorman, “Literary Evocations,” and Moorman, Pompeii’s Ashes, 180–85. The breast imprint was published after its discovery and was first exhibited in Portici, then incorporated into the National Archeological Museum in Naples. By 1958, any trace of the imprint had vanished, as attested by Maiuri, Pompei ed Ercolano, 39–42; cited in Moorman, Pompeii’s Ashes, 180. 118. Gautier, “Arria Marcella,” 2:287.
Notes to Pages 151–166 229
119. Chateaubriand, Voyage en Italie, 1474; cited in Moorman, “Literary Evocations,” 25. See also Pompéi: Travaux et envois, 48 and 212, and Hales, “Re-casting Antiquity,” 106. 120. Burgin, “The Shadow and the Ruin.” Chassériau’s text appears as part of an extended annotation on a sketch made at Pompeii (Prat, Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 543–45, fig. 11). 121. Chassériau, Women at the Tepidarium, RF 26.442. 122. Madeleine, “Salon de 1853,” 280; cited in Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 367. Paul de Saint-Victor likewise noted the painting’s encyclopedic array of female types, approving of the “mélange charmant et superbe de femmes de toute race et de tout climat,” (“Musée du Luxembourg,” 433; cited in Chevillard, Peintre romantique, 175). 123. Gautier, “Salon de 1853”; translated in Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 369. 124. See Lindheim, “Re-Presenting Sappho,” 242–60. 125. Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 304–9. 126. P. B. Miller, “Théodore Chassériau,” 116–92. 127. Ibid., 65. This aspect of the painting was much remarked in 1853. 128. Lindheim, “Re-Presenting Sappho,” 253. 129. Chassériau to Frédéric Chassériau, June 13, 1846, in Bénédite, Théodore Chassériau, 271. 130. Prat, Dessins de Théodore Chassériau, 1:300, cat. nos. 663 and 664. 131. Swetnam-Burland, Egypt in Italy, and Sampaolo, “Iseo Pompeiano.” 132. Guégan connects the central pair to the religious and mythological iconographies of the Noli me tangere and Apollo and Daphne, concluding that in a crucial inversion “everything here suggests––and leads to––blasphemous touching and forbidden embraces” (Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 369). While I concur with these iconographic resonances, I come to a significantly different understanding of their ramifications. 133. Ibid., 369 n. 11. Chassériau reportedly owned a “large model,” likely in plaster (Vente Chassériau, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, March 16–17, 1857, no. 104). Prat has dated the artist’s studies of
the Venus de Milo to 1840 (Cuzin, Gaborit, and Pasquier, D’après l’antique, 443 [entry by Prat]). 134. A likely source for Chassériau’s seated, twisted central figure comes from the antique bas-relief, the so-called Bed of Polyclitus, available for Chassériau in Rome by way of its iconographical echo in the seated figure of Hebe that decorates one of the spandrels of Raphael’s Villa Farnesina frescos. See Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 151. 135. Exhibited at the 1819 Salon, the painting was subsequently reproduced in an engraving. Bellenger, Girodet, 464. 136. L’Artiste, 2nd ser. (1839), 185; cited in Wettlaufer, Pen vs. Paintbrush, 134. 137. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” 253. 138. J. H. Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, 7. Miller has observed that Ovid’s narrative places particular stress on the autoerotic nature of Pygmalion’s encounter with Galatea, with a resulting emphasis on the “bodily, tactile, and affective” (6). 139. Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” 243. For the critical response to Girodet’s painting, see J. Rubin, “Pygmalion and Galatea,” 517–20. The title alone signaled Girodet’s debt to Rousseau, as his Pygmalion inaugurated the tradition by which the statue came to be named “Galatea” (Carr, “Pygmalion and the Philosophes,” 242). 140. Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1:1228; cited by De Man, Allegories of Reading, 185. 141. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 177. For Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime,” see Critique of Judgment, 97–140. 142. Stoichità, Short History of the Shadow, 153. 143. Beard, “Taste and the Antique,” 219, and Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues. 144. This point was made early on by Werge, who observed, “Only a few can look upon those casts of the dead Pompeians in the Museum of Naples, but the whole world may view the photographs taken from them” (“Photography and the Immured Pompeiians,” 307). See also Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 97; Pohlmann and Cogeval, Voir l’Italie et mourir, 227; Gardner Coates, “On the Cutting Edge.” 145. Dumas, Impressions de voyage, 166.
146. Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 55–60, 91–96. Fiorelli gave the cast this title in 1877 with the publication of his Pompeian Museum guide. See Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 93. Dwyer mentions the location of the cast and reproduces a number of early photographs of it, attesting that the desire to see in the round extended to photographic campaigns as well as to exhibition design (see figs. 30–33, 37–38). 147. See discussion in Gardner Coates, “On the Cutting Edge,” 48. 148. Chateaubriand, Voyage en Italie, 1474. 149. Bonucci compared the finds to the affecting forms of antique sculpture in a guidebook entry (Pompéi descritta, 67–68; quoted in Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 16). 150. Gregorovius, Roman Journals, 212 (entry from Naples, August 15, 1864); cited in Dwyer, “Science or Morbid Curiosity?,” 186 n. 31. 151. Sogliano, Guide de Pompéi, 7; cited in Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 92. 152. Werge, “Photography and the Immured Pompeiians,” 304. 153. Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 97–98. 154. Pozzolini-Siciliani, “Gita a Pompei,” 80–81; cited in Dwyer, Pompeii’s Living Statues, 94. 155. Archaeologists such as Pietro Rosa and John Henry Parker made early use of new photographic technology; Parker commissioned photographs of Pompeii beginning in 1865, and his twelve-volume Archaeology of Rome included 3,391 photographic motifs. See Desrochers, “Giorgio Sommer’s Photographs of Pompeii.” See also Betzer, “Traces, Shadows, Sculpture.” 156. Sommer’s series of photographs of the eruption of Vesuvius on April 26, 1872, taken at 3 pm, 3:30 pm, 4 pm, 4:30 pm, and 5 pm, are reproduced in Pohlmann and Cogeval, Voir l’Italie et mourir, 252–55. See also Weinberg, Photographs of Giorgio Sommer, 40. 157. Douglas, Nerinda, 23 (emphasis in original). 158. Jensen, Gradiva; reprinted in Freud, Delusion and Dream. See Bergstein, “Delusions and Dreams.” 159. Freud offers this gloss: “Destined by family tradition to be an antiquarian, [Hanold] has later, in isolation and independence, submerged himself completely in his science, and
230 Notes to Pages 167–177
has withdrawn entirely from life and its pleasures. Marble and bronze are, for his feelings, the only things really alive and expressing the purpose and value of human life” (Delusion and Dream, 139–40). 160. Freud, Delusion and Dream, 148–49. While citations throughout are to the first English translation by Downey, I opt for the title of the work given in Strachey’s later translation: Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva.” 161. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 30–32. Having reflected on the usual dynamics by which structures are demolished and replaced in the course of a city’s evolution, Freud concludes that “a city is . . . a priori unsuited for comparison . . . with a mental organism” (34). 162. Freud, Delusion and Dream, 149. 163. The postcard is reproduced in Bergstein, “Delusions and Dreams,” 120. The poignancy of the Gradiva touchstone clearly lived on: Freud’s copy of Löwy’s Neuattische Kunst (Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 1922) was inscribed “to Sigmund Freud for Gradiva from the author” (ibid., 135). 164. Ibid., 119. 165. Ibid., 129. 166. For others of Edmund Engelman’s 1938 photographs of Freud’s office at Berggasse 19, see Gamwell and Wells, Sigmund Freud and Art, 26–28. 167. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, 90–110. 168. Ibid., 95 (emphasis mine). 169. Gautier, “Salon de 1853,” translated in Guégan, Pomarède, and Prat, Théodore Chassériau, 369.
Chapter 4 1. Lee, “Child in the Vatican,” 17. 2. Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 57. 3. Useful here is Siegel’s analysis of “the museum as mortuary” (Desire and Excess, esp. 3–9). 4. See Lichtenstein, Blind Spot. 5. Pater, “Beginnings of Greek Sculpture—I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art”, 188, 191. Lee and Pater met in 1881 when Lee came to London to oversee the printing of Belcaro, the book that marked the beginning of their dialogue (Brake, “Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle,” 41, 46). 6. Pater specifically invokes the Louvre and
British museums in this discussion (“Beginnings of Greek Sculpture—I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art,” 188, 191). 7. The “Gallery Diaries” were first published by Lee in the Revue philosophique in 1903, titled “Psychologie d’un écrivain sur l’art (observation personelle),” and in 1905, titled “Essai d’esthétique empirique: L’individu devant l’oeuvre d’art.” In 1912, the “Gallery Diaries” were republished with minor modification and commentary by Lee and Anstruther-Thomson in Beauty and Ugliness. Excerpts from that edition have recently been published in Lee, Psychology of an Art Writer. On Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, see Colby, Vernon Lee. 8. Lange, Billedkunstens Fremstilling af Menneskeskikkelsen (1892); Hildebrand, Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (1893); and Löwy, Rendering of Nature (1900). See Davis, Visuality and Virtuality, 121–42; and Davis, “Did Modernism Redefine Classicism?” 9. Pater, “Winckelmann,” 181. 10. Ibid., 181–82, 184. My discussion builds on important insights in Potts, “Walter Pater’s Unsettling”; Evangelista and Harloe, “Pater’s Winckelmann”; Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater; and Prettejohn, “Pater on Sculpture.” 11. Pater’s first considerations of classical sculpture appeared in his reflections on Winckelmann, published anonymously in 1867 in the Westminster Review and reprinted in 1873 as the final chapter of The Renaissance. Three other essays devoted to the art of the Greeks, based on Pater’s lectures of 1878, appeared in February, March, and April 1880 in the Fortnightly Review. Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater, 214, 255. 12. Prettejohn, “Pater on Sculpture.” 13. Key to Winckelmann’s position here is that Pater did not conceive the “Renaissance” as a discrete historical period but rather as a “mode of reception” (Evangelista and Harloe, “Pater’s ‘Winckelmann,’” 64). 14. On Pater as reader of Hegel, see, most recently, Davis, “Eternal Moment,” and Prettejohn, “Pater on Sculpture.” These connections have previously been explored in Inman, Walter Pater’s Reading, 49–58, 130–42; Inman, Walter
Pater and His Reading; and Shuter, “History as Palingenesis.” 15. See also Pater, “Winckelmann,” 168, 173–74, 184. Prettejohn notes that Pater’s 1867 essay forcefully placed classical sculpture in a central, rather than secondary, role (“Pater on Sculpture,” 221–22). 16. Pater similarly describes Greek art as “this ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond the proper range of its sensible embodiment” (“Winckelmann,” 165). 17. On whiteness, see ibid., 170. 18. Potts has demonstrated that Pater’s account constitutes a radical reformulation of the Greek ideal, whether compared to that of Hegel or those of Pater’s contemporaries (“Walter Pater’s Unsettling”). Prettejohn concurs and develops this assessment in “Pater on Sculpture.” 19. Østermark-Johansen has described this modulation as moving between Vasarian and Winckelmannian modes (Walter Pater, 88). 20. Germane here is Prettejohn’s observation that Hegel essentially established a ground plan for “the modernist rejection of classicism as a universal principle of art” (Modernity of Ancient Sculpture, 104–5). 21. Pater is quite clear on the question of relative priority, noting, “[Winckelmann] is infinitely less than Goethe” (“Winkelmann,” 181). See also Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater, 72, 74, and Evangelista and Harloe, “Pater’s Winckelmann.” 22. Goethe, Winkelmann [sic] und sein Jahrhundert, 407–8; translated in Nisbet, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, 244; cited in Evangelista and Harloe, “Pater’s Winckelmann,” 76. 23. Goethe, Winkelmann [sic] und sein Jahrhundert; translated in Nisbet, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, 398–99. 24. Pater observed that “a sort of preparation for the romantic temper is noticeable even within the limits of the Greek ideal itself, which for his part Winckelmann failed to see” (“Winkelmann,” 178). 25. Archaeological finds from excavations at Troy and Mycenae are invoked throughout the text; see, for instance, Pater, “Beginnings of Greek
Notes to Pages 177–189 231
Sculpture—I. The Heroic Age of Greek Art,” 210. Inman documents Pater’s consultation of Heinrich Schliemann’s writing (Walter Pater and His Reading, 409–13, 433; cited in Prettejohn, “Pater on Sculpture,” 238 n. 20). 26. Pater, “Marbles of Aegina,” 251–53. 27. See, for instance, Pater, “Winckelmann,” 162. 28. See Potts, “Walter Pater’s Unsettling,” 107–12. 29. Ibid., 113. 30. Pater, “Study of Dionysus,” 34. 31. Potts, “Walter Pater’s Unsettling,” 114–15. 32. Squire, “Hegel and Art History,” 36–37. In this sense, the “classical” stage in Hegel’s art history “contains within it the seeds of its dissolution” (36 n. 51). 33. See also Potts, “Walter Pater’s Unsettling,” 116–17. 34. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:797; cited in Squire, “Unser Knie beugen wir doch nicht mehr?,” 127 n. 6. See also Hegel, Aesthetics, 1:485. 35. Hegel, Aesthetics, 2:797. 36. On Lee’s relationship to Pater’s “The Child in the House,” see Østermark-Johansen, “Life Is Movement,” 65. Lee uses this terminology in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, viii. The complexity of Lee’s relationship to archaeology has been explored by Evangelista, British Aestheticism, and Psomiades, “Still Burning.” 37. Sellers Strong to Lee, 1886; cited in Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong, 38 n. 45. The women’s letters spanned the early 1900s; Lee and Sellers shared an apartment in 1893. See Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 79. 38. Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 73. See Lee’s scathing indictment of Pater’s aestheticism in Juvenilia, 1:10–11. 39. Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong, 57. 40. Lee wrestled with, and ultimately refuted, Winckelmann’s identification of a bas-relief in “Orpheus and Eurydice.” See ØstermarkJohansen, “Life Is Movement,” 67. 41. Psomiades, “Still Burning,” and Davis, Queer Beauty, 175–85. 42. Lee, “Being Extracts from Gallery Diaries of Vernon Lee, 1901–4,” in Lee and AnstrutherThomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 301–2 (emphasis in original). 43. Østermark-Johansen, “Life Is Movement,” 65.
44. Benvenuto Cellini to Benedetto Varchi, January 28, 1546, in Cellini, Opere, 1002–3 (letter 4). In his subsequent description of how an artist makes a figure in wax or clay, Cellini increased the number of necessary views to “more than forty” (Discorso sopra l’arte, 851; discussed in P. Rubin, Seen from Behind, 160). 45. For allied practices of emphatically multisided views in sculpture, drawings, and prints, see Larsson, Von allen Seiten gleich schön. For a broader consideration of drawing’s relationship to sculptural process, see Cole, “Why Did Sculptors Draw?” 46. Louvre 12691 recto and Uffizi 233F recto, reproduced in Bambach, Michelangelo, 64–65. I am grateful to Michael Cole for drawing my attention to these instances and for very stimulating conversations about sculptural practices in the Renaissance. 47. Cole, Ambitious Form. For discussion of Bronzino’s and Giambologna’s depictions of Morgante, see P. Rubin, Seen from Behind, 156–58. 48. P. Rubin, Seen from Behind, 184. 49. Cole, “Why Did Sculptors Draw?,” 30. See also Larsson’s discussion in Von allen Seiten gleich schön. 50. Gasparri, “Collection d’antiques,” 2:457, fig. 11. 51. Unable to study a cast of the antique, Bouchardon made his Faun by examining the original. Decades later, Caylus effused about the work that “it in no way feels like a copy” (Vie d’Edme Bouchardon, 33–34; translated in Desmas et al., Bouchardon, 80). 52. Shortly after Bouchardon’s arrival in Italy in 1723, the French Academy was moved by Nicholas Vleughels from the Palazzo Capranica to Palazzo Mancini, where the pensionnaires helped install the Academy’s collection of plaster casts after antique statues. See Demas, “Edme Bouchardon in Rome,” 34–36. 53. Desmas et al., Bouchardon, 75. While Bouchardon would have had access to the Roman statue in the Belvedere courtyard, the form of the socle depicted and the shadows cast on the wall behind the figure suggest that the drawings may have been made after a plaster cast at the Palazzo Mancini (Trey, Edme Bouchardon, 61–62).
54. Upon his return to Paris, Bouchardon covered the walls of his studio and lodgings with Roman studies. See Caylus, Vie d’Edme Bouchardon, 13; cited in Desmas et al., Bouchardon, 74. Small thumbtack holes have been observed at the top of Bouchardon’s copies after the Farnese Hercules and Farnese Flora. 55. Trey, Edme Bouchardon, 195–97. Multiple studies, including engravings after drawings now lost, likewise exist for Summer. See Desmas et al., Bouchardon, 250–51. 56. On the six sanguine studies originally in the collection of Pierre-Jean Mariette, see Desmas et al., Bouchardon, 358–59, and Rosenberg, Dessins de la collection Mariette, 1:121–27. 57. Lysippos’s statue, created between 228 and 335 bce, was made for the sanctuary of Thespiae and was mentioned by Pliny; see Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age. Scherf speculates that the sculpture Bouchardon copied might be the one now housed in the Louvre, having been purchased from Albani for the French royal collections ( “Cupid Carving a Bow,” 358–59). 58. Scherf, “Cupid Carving a Bow,” 361–66. 59. Summers, Real Spaces, 43. 60. Scherf, “Cupid Carving a Bow,” 354. 61. These studies, which evocatively attest to Bouchardon’s circling the studio model, evolved into a sculpture whose equivocal reception was shaped by the challenge of its shifting vantage points (Scott, “Under the Sign of Venus”). 62. In addition to Michelangelo’s Moses, another modern sculpture was inadvertently included. Plate 84, a Venus Anadyomene, from the Borghese collection, was then attributed to Praxiteles, but in 1796 Visconti declared that it had been created in the sixteenth century (Laveissière, “Antique selon François Perrier,” 62). 63. Clark, François Perrier, fig. 14a. 64. Laveissière, “Antique selon François Perrier,” 54. 65. Ibid, 52. See also earlier instances of multiple perspectives onto ancient figural sculpture, all by Marten van Heemskerk (Larsson, Von allen Seiten gleich schön, 125). 66. Jan de Bisschop acknowledged Perrier as an exemplar in his Signorum veterum icones, while Perrier’s continuing popularity is attested to
232 Notes to Pages 189–208
by an 1863 edition of his plates. See Laveissière, “Antique selon François Perrier,” 59–60. 67. Este, Memorie di Antonio Canova, 107; cited in Pavanello and Romanelli, Canova, 102. 68. Pavanello and Romanelli, Canova, 152. 69. Baker has compared this installation to the turning in the hand of a bronze or ivory figurine (Figured in Marble, 166). 70. See also Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 240–41; Larsson, Von allen Seiten gleich schön, 69–70; and for the critical implications of these practices, MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 23–24. 71. Canova, Epistolario, xxiii. Canova’s correspondence is filled with references to prints. 72. See Pezzini Bernini and Fiorani, Canova e l’incisione. 73. Canova, cited in Clifford, Three Graces, 43–44. 74. See Baker, Figured in Marble, 166. 75. Herder, Plastik, 41. 76. Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 252. 77. Donohue, Greek Art, 111–17. Donohue’s foundational account demonstrates how questions of sculptural sidedness intersected with the psychology of perception and new narratives about the origins of Greek sculpture. See also Davis, Visuality and Virtuality, 111–42. 78. Hildebrand, Problem of Form, 125–126. 79. For Löwy, the mental image—the starting point for all image creation—was “no other than the Platonic Idea of the object, namely, a typical picture, clear of everything individual or accidental” (10). His conception was indebted to Ernst Wilhelm Brücke’s 1881 essay on the memory image (Erinnerungsbild). See Davis, Visuality and Virtuality, 128–30. 80. Löwy seems here to strategically modify Roman commentators who had remarked upon the “foursquare” nature of, for instance, Polykleitos’s Doryphoros. See Davis, Visuality and Virtuality, 132. 81. While Hildebrand’s Problem of Form is elsewhere cited by Löwy, it is curiously not referenced in his discussion of what he later referred to as “the test of the parallel planes.” This involved evaluating whether the forms of a sculpture in the round were “confined within two parallel planes, before and behind,
through which even advanced archaic art hardly ever ventured to break with more than the fore-arm or lower leg and accompanying part of the thigh” (66–67). Löwy would here appear to follow quite closely Hildebrand’s formulation in Problem of Form, 80–82. 82. Löwy, Lysipp; cited in Davis, who references an 1884 version of the study, in Visuality and Virtuality, 332 n. 25. 83. Davis, Visuality and Virtuality, 131. Davis observes that Löwy’s scheme was less removed from that of Hildebrand than it might appear insofar as it included, on the far side of coherent vielansichtig sculptural achievement, a return to relief, and with it, planarity, as is demonstrated in Löwy’s discussion of the Farnese Bull (Rendering of Nature, 134–35). 84. F. Johnson, Lysippos, 258. 85. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age, 48–49. 86. Pliny, Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art 34.40, 31. 87. Ibid., 34.65, 52–53. 88. See also Sjöqvist, Lysippus, 11–13. 89. F. Johnson, Lysippos, 259, 260. 90. Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age, 50–51. 91. Anstruther-Thomson returns throughout the text to the problem of the restored hands, which in her view fail to capture what must have been the sculpture’s original disposition and gesture. 92. See Davis, Queer Beauty, 178. 93. Lee, Beautiful, 133, and Burdett, “Subjective Inside Us.” See also Davis, Queer Beauty, 175–85. 94. Lee, introduction to Art & Man, by Anstruther-Thomson, 28. These are questions Lee attributes to Anstruther-Thomson. 95. Baring, Lost Lectures, 87–88; cited by Fraser, “Vernon Lee,” 182. 96. I thank David Summers for having generously shared portions of his unpublished book manuscript on empathy. 97. Lee, in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, 301–2 (emphasis in original). Østermark-Johansen makes a compelling case for including Lessing among Lee’s significant eighteenth-century interlocutors (“Life Is Movement,” 65). 98. Lee, introduction to Art & Man, by Anstruther-Thomson, 78 (emphasis in original).
99. Ibid., 78–79 (emphasis in original). 1 00. Lee significantly modified her thinking about what constituted movement in subsequent decades after her work with Anstruther-Thomson. See Davis, Queer Beauty, 179. 101. On the complex social and erotic circuitries involved in Lee’s work with AnstrutherThomson, see Davis, Queer Beauty, particularly 179, 182–83. 102. Lee, Beautiful, 66–67. 103. Davis, Queer Beauty, 177. 104. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 375. 105. Anstruther-Thomson, Art & Man, 340. 106. Ibid., 341. 107. See Steinberg, “Picasso,” and Davis, Queer Beauty, 183.
Coda 1. Reymond, “Niobide de Subiaco,” 470. 2. Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture.” 3. Ibid., 29. 4. Potts, “Sculpture in Photography,” 49. See also Pinet, “Musée idéal,” and Batchen, “Almost Unlimited Variety.” 5. Snyder, “Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture,” 33. See also Hatt, “Eakins’s Arcadia.” 6. Reymond, “Niobide de Subiaco,” 478. 7. Ibid., 474. 8. “This common mode of artistic imagination as above developed is no other than the conception of relief so prominent in Greek art” (Hildebrand, Problem of Form, 83). 9. Here Hildebrand condemned the fact that “this barbarous mode of rendering an idea of action through figures in the round rather than expressing it naturally in a relief is often met with nowadays” (ibid., 116). 10. While Hildebrand’s account of modeling in clay differs, insofar as “a main aspect is not given” (ibid., 130), the secondary place of this mode of work is clear, since “the process is not adapted to the development of a work of art which will be harmonious as a pictorial representation” (135). 11. See also Davis’s examination of the broader ramifications of the dialogic reverberations
Notes to Pages 208–214 233
between the evolving knowledge of Greek art, in the domain of classical art and archaeology, and modernist artistic practice (“Did Modernism Redefine Classicism?”). 12. Whereas the first German edition of Hildebrand’s text included no photographs, the third revised edition of 1907 included thirty illustrations. 13. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 2:388. 14. Hildebrand, Problem of Form, 23–24, 82, respectively. 15. Melius’s analysis, which emphasizes Hildebrand’s keen awareness of the possibility of reciprocity between beholder and sculpture in the “charged field of empathic copresence that comes alive between them,” provides another means of understanding these two very different Melius, approaches to faciality (“Sculpture from Behind,” 72).
16. Lange, Billedkunstens Fremstilling af Menneskeskikkelsen. 17. A broader framing of these tensions is elaborated by Whitney Davis (Visuality and Virtuality, 121–42, and “Did Modernism Redefine Classicism?”). 18. Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 53–54 (emphasis mine). 19. Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing, 65, 67. 20. Ibid., 71–73. 21. Ibid., 95. 22. Ibid., 94–96. 23. Goldschmidt, “Nachleben der antiken Formen”; discussed in Didi-Hubermann, Surviving Image, 53. 24. Following Warburg, Edgar Wind understood the critique of historicism as contained in the very hypothesis of “survival” (DidiHubermann, Surviving Image, 52, and broader discussion, 46–54).
25. Unlike Baudelaire, for whom sculpture, with its primitivizing, remote, historical affiliations, stood as other to modernity, Warburg’s model turned on the enduring experiences and responses connecting those earlier sculpturemaking (and -venerating) people with their living twentieth-century counterparts. See Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence, 188. 26. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 282. 27. Wölfflin, “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” 59. 28. Warburg, “Grisaille,” notebook, 1929, 32; cited and discussed in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 247. 29. Ibid., 246–47. In Warburg’s view, Mantegna was successful at holding such sentiments at bay, whereas Ghirlandaio was not. See also Warburg, “Römische Antike in der Werkstatt,” and Schoell-Glass, “Warburg über Grisaille.”
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Index
Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. académie, 84–85, 85, 100–102 Académie des Beaux-Arts, 10, 89 Accademia del’ Nudo, 39, 69 Accademia di San Luca, 39 Accademia of Baccio Bandinelli, 106 Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings and Painting in Italy (Richardson), 42 Adam, Robert, 221n127, 221n128 Ceremonial Scene from the Long Gallery at Croome Court, 59–60, 60 Addison, Joseph, 9, 29 Aegina marbles, 13, 116, 192 Pater’s account of, 177–78 See also Temple of Aphaia Aemilius Paulus, 91, 223n33 aesthetic theory and beholder’s share, 3–4, 8, 14–16, 20–34, 42, 53–57, 74, 79, 86, 97, 173, 179 and eighteenth-century thresholds, 8–17, 26 and experience, 42, 70, 90, 108, 172 See also Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Lee, Vernon (born Violet Paget); Pater, Walter Aesthetic Empathy. See empathy; Lee, Vernon (born Violet Paget) agalmatophilia, 83 Agrippina, 37 Albani, Cardinal Alessandro, 34, 50–52, 184, 222n172, 231n57 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 25, 27, 32 Alexander on Horseback, 126 Alexander, Zeynip Çelik, 211 Algarotti, Francesco, 15 Altertumswissenschaft, 124, 173 Amodio, Michele, 13
Cast of a Young Woman, 161–62, 162 Pompeii, Human Cast from the Excavations, 1863, 160–61, 161 anatomical polysemy, 5–6 ancient sculpture academic training and, 98–102, 110–14 chryselephantine, 28, 30, 177 ekphrastic animation, 55–56, 81–84 eighteenth-century ontology of, 4, 6, 8–19, 23–79, 172–73, 198, 203, 215 and mobility, 17, 25, 34–49, 65, 78, 88, 96, 97, 190 modernity of, 4, 7–8, 17–18, 90, 174, 179, 203–4 and mutability, 17–18, 25–26, 49–53, 63, 78, 96–97 ostensible coldness of, 4, 6, 8, 97, 117, 119, 144, 163, 179 and photography, 160–64, 203–15 and relations with contemporaneity, 1–4, 8, 114, 118, 129–30, 169, 179 reproduction of, 3–4, 11–12, 25, 29, 42–43 46, 48, 52, 67, 78, 96–97, 99, 204–12 (see also plaster) and restoration, 17–18, 25, 49–52, 183, 196–97 and rotating pedestals, 88, 109, 112, 189–90, 211 serial production and replication within, 29, 43, 178, 191 transformative encounters with, 4, 7, 17–19, 53–57, 70–79, 212–15 (see also aesthetic theory; Pygmalion) and viewing in the round, 5, 7, 19, 171–201 See also archaeology; whiteness androgyny. See anatomical polysemy Anstruther-Thomson, Clementine, 4, 13, 19, 21, 173, 180–81, 192, 196, 212 on the Athena Lemnia (“the Bologna head”), 197 on the Venus de’Medici (“the Sailing Aphrodite”), 195–201 L’antiquité expliquée et represéntée en figures (Montfaucon), 13–14 Le antichità di Ercolano esposte, 130
Antinous Antinous Osiris, 37 Antinous Bas Relief, 1, 3, 49 Belvedere Antinous, 42 Capitoline Antinous, 18, 26, 40, 46, 50, 51, 54, 76 antiquarian, 12, 20, 40, 50, 73, 84, 124–26, 129, 198 Apollino, 55, 190 Apollo Belvedere, 10, 67, 93, 104–5, 105 116, 212, 218n25, 225n117 depicted by Batoni (Portrait of Thomas Dundas), 40–42 depicted by Blanchet, 18, 58, 58–65 depicted by Bouchardon, 184–85, 185 in bronze miniature, 46, 48 descriptions of, 12, 55, 70, 76, 84, 97 described by Goethe, 54 described by Herder, 54, 220n120 depicted by Ingres, 98–100 installed in the Musée Napoléon, 110 depicted by Perrier, 62, 62–63, 188 viewed by torchlight, 84, 86, 100, 107 installed in the Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino, 34–35, 42 depicted by Volpato and Morghen, with notations by Canova, 17–18, 46–47, 47, 62 described by Winckelmann, 34, 55–56, 75–76 described by Wölfflin, 212 Apollo Lykeios, 90, 92, 102 Apollo Sauroktonos, 29 Apoxyomenos, or Athlete Scraping Himself with a Strigil, 193–95, 210 archaeology, 11–13, 29–30, 34–38, 49, 121–69 and antiquarianism, 12, 124–26 and Bay of Naples, 11–12, 114, 121–69 and conceptual volatility of the antique, 12, 29–30, 116, 124, 129, 178 as a dead or deadening science, 166, 172, 179–80
252 index
archaeology (continued) and embodied, material antiquity, 12, 126–33, 121–69 excavation and transformation, 49–52 as metaphor for psychoanalysis, 165–69 and reverie, 134–60 Archaic Isis and Dionysus, 126 Archäologie der Kunst, 124 Armstrong, John (“Lancelot Temple”), 76 Arria Marcella: Souvenir of Pompeii (Gautier), 151–52 Arrotino, 44, 71, 72, 75, 78 Arsinoe, 35 Arsinoë II, 96 Ashfield, Andrew, 9 aspectivity, 5, 19, 110–15, 171–201 See also ancient sculpture: and viewing in the round Athena Lemnia, 197, 204 Athena, panathenaic, 126 Athena Parthenos, 28 Audran, Gérard, Medici Venus, 73 Aventine Hill, 37, 52 Avril the Younger, Jean-Jacques, after Pierre Bouillon, Apollo Belvedere, 104–5, 105 Bacon, Francis, 6 Baker, Malcolm, 46, 191 Bann, Stephen, 96–97 Barberini (cardinal), 184 Barberini Faun, 184 Baretti, Joseph, 67–68, 221n145 Barkan, Leonard, 10 baroque exhibition practices, 13, 108 as conceived by Wölfflin, 210–11 Barrell, John, 73 Barry, James, 18, 26, 50, 65–70 Birth of Pandora, 68 Education of Achilles, 68 Self-Portrait as Timanthes, 68 Self-Portrait with James Paine and Dominique Lef èvre (with the Belvedere Torso), 18, 65–70 Barthélemy, Abbé Jean-Jacques, 40 Bassae, 29 Bassano del Grappa, 46 Baths of Vénus Génétrix, 145 Batoni, Pompeo, 40–42, 57, 63–64, 71–72 Cupid and Psyche, 25, 52–53, 53, 114
Portrait of Thomas Dundas, 40–42, 57, 63, 70–72, 220n79, 222n163 Portrait of Humphry Morice, 63–64, 64 Bätschmann, Oskar, 86 Baudelaire, Charles, 31, 89–90, 213, 233n25 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 9, 217n9 Baxandall, Michael, 14–15, 17, 100, 102 Bay of Naples, 4, 12–13, 34, 59, 114, 121–69, 228n108 and antiquarianism, 122–26 and “historical fold,” 130, 133 and panorama of everyday life in antiquity, 126–30 Royal Collection at Portici, 126 (see also Herculaneum Museum, Portici) See also Herculaneum; Pompeii Beard, Mary, 133 Beatrizet, Nicolas, Laocoön and His Sons, 10, 95 Beckford, William, 12, 140, 143 Béranger, Antoine, after Valois, Vase depicting the arrival at the Louvre of Italian works of art acquired at the end of the Italian Campaign, 93 Belting, Hans, 16 Belvedere Antinous. See Antinous Belvedere Torso, 18, 26, 35, 54, 65–70, 75, 81–83, 107, 118, 218n25, 221n156 Benedict XIV (pope), 52 Bergeret de Grancourt, Pierre, 127–28, 130–31, 134, 143, 227n64 Bergstein, Mary, 168 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 6, 63, 143, 197 The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 143 Berry, Mary, 86 Bertini, Angelo, 190 Bervic, Charles Clément, after Pierre Bouillon, Laocoön, 86–87, 87, 214 Bignamini, Ilaria, 34 Bisschop, Jan de, 43, 189, 231n66 Blanc, Charles, 91 Blanchet, Louis-Gabriel, 4, 18, 20, 26, 40, 57–65 The Apollo Belvedere Among Dead Trees, 18, 58, 58–63 The Borghese Warrior, 59, 61, 63–64 The Dying Gladiator, 59, 60, 60–61, 63 The Farnese Hercules, 59, 61, 63 Portrait of Henry Willoughby, Later Fifth Baron Middleton, 40, 57, 59, 70 The Sleeping (Borghese) Hermaphrodite, 4–6, 61, 63 The Venus de’Medici Among Dead Trees, 18, 59, 60–63
Boileau, Nicolas, 15 de Bolla, Peter, 9 Boilly, Louis-Léopold, 105 Borghese Gladiator, 43–44, 44, 46, 59, 61, 63–64, 67–68, 68, 98–99, 99, 107, 188 Borghese Hermaphrodite. See Sleeping Hermaphrodite Borghese Warrior. See Borghese Gladiator Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, 13, 37–38, 38, 44 Botticelli, Sandro, 212 Böttiger, Karl August, 108, 115, 118, 225n126 Bouchardon, Edme, 19, 173, 183–87, 189, 191, 193 Apollo Belvedere, 184–85, 185 Autumn, 184 The Barberini Faun, 183–84, 184 Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club, 186–87, 187 Eros Bending His Bow, 184–85, 185 Laocoön, 184 Studies for Cupid Carving a Bow from Hercules’s Club, 184, 186 Venus de’Medici, 184 Bouillon, Pierre, 86–87, 87, 104–5, 105, 214 Bracci, Pietro, 50 Brettingham the Younger, Matthew, 49 British Museum, 29, 217n23, 230n6 Bronzino, Agnolo, 182 de Brosses, Charles, 124, 127, 130, 134 bronze, 17, 32, 42, 83, 145, 148, 180 artifacts discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum, 122–24, 126–28 eighteenth-century sculptural reductions, 46, 73, 221n136 as originary material for sculpture, 27–29, 177–78, 218n24, 220n92 Bryullov, Karl, The Last Day of Pompeii, 131 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 122 Burgin, Victor, 151 Burke, Edmund, 15, 67, 75 Callipygian Venus, 163, 212 Callistratus, 14, 83 Campiglia, Giovanni Domenico, 37–39, 44 Artists Drawing the Dying Gladiator in the Capitoline, 37–39 Dying Gladiator, 44–45, 45 Canova, Antonio, 17, 19, 30, 46, 62, 97, 106–8, 173 Ideal Head, 190 Penitent Magdalene, 190 The Three Graces, 189–91, 191
index 253
Capitoline Antinous. See Antinous Capitoline Museum, 52, 54, 65, 69, 173, 181 establishment of, 11, 34, 50 depictions of, 13, 17, 26, 35, 35–40, 44 visits by torchlight, 84, 86, 107 See also Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino Capitoline Venus, 212–13 Caracciolo, Maria Teresa, 129 Carr, J. L., 32, 156 Cassirer, Ernst, 9 Cavaceppi, Bartolomeo, 49–50 Caylus, Comte de, (Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières), 12, 14, 40, 231n51 Cellini, Benvenuto, 19, 182–83, 186, 191, 193 Apollo and Hyacinth, 182 Perseus, 182 Chiaramonti Gallery, 166 Champ de Mars, 92 Chard, Chloe, 55, 76 Charioteer of Delphi, 192 Chassériau, Frédéric, 145 Chassériau, Théodore, 21, 143–60, 201 Apollo and Daphne, 154 Bath in a Seraglio, 152–53, 153 Moorish Woman Leaving the Bath in the Seraglio, 152 Oriental Interior, 152 A Room with a Staircase; A Trace on the Wall, 150, 150–51 The Tepidarium, 18, 122, 143–60, 165, 169, 212 Tepidarium at Pompeii, 145, 147 Chateaubriand, René de, 151, 162 chryselephantine. See sculpture. chromophobia. See polychromy; whiteness Clement of Alexandria, 83 Cleopatra, 122 See also Vatican Ariadne Clement XII (Lorenzo Corsis) (pope), 34, 40, 50 Clement XIV (pope), 42, 107 Cockerell, Charles Robert, 179 Collins, Jeffrey, 42, 50 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 16, 32, 56 Cort, Cornelis, 43 Cortile Belvedere, 42, 171, 180, 212 See also Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino Cortile delle statue. See Cortile Belvedere Cosway, Richard, 73 Couvent des Capucines, 90, 104–6, 224n65
Council Chamber (Somerset House), 67–68, 68, 221n145 Consorti, Bernardino, 190–91, 191 Cowper, Lord, 78, 221n159 Croome Court, 59 Crystal Palace, 30 Cupid and Psyche, 25, 37, 52, 53, 90–91, 91, 93, 112–14 Dancing Faun, 71, 221n158 Darly, Mary and Matthew, My Lord Tip-Toe, Just Arrived from Monkey Land, 76, 76–77 Das Problem der Form [The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture] (Hildebrand), 206–11 Daston, Lorraine, 125–26 David, Jacques-Louis, 89–90, 93–94, 100 Intervention of the Sabine Women, 94 Davis, Whitney, 21, 200 Dawe, Philip, The Macaroni: A Real Character at the Late Masquerade, 77 Del Museo Capitolino (Bottari), 13, 37–38, 38, 44 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 94, 131, 134, 223n39, 227n61 Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline, 104 Boreau-Deslandes, André-François, 32 Desnoyers, Auguste (called Boucher-Desnoyers), 95–96 after Ingres, Cupid, 98, 98–99 after Ingres, Cupid and Psyche, 91 de Man, Paul, 156, 158 desire, 8, 114 artistic creation and, 25, 152, 154–58 (see also Pygmalion) encounters with the antique and, 19–21, 52, 55, 70–79, 83, 114, 164–65, 200–201 sculptural form and, 52–53, 78–79, 200–201 Venus de’Medici as object of, 73–75 Desprez, Louis-Jean, 122, 134–40, 143, 148 The Temple of Isis at Pompeii, 134–39 The Temple of Isis in Pompeii: Imaginary Reconstruction 139, 139–40 dessin en bosse, 98–99 dessins coloriés, 122 d’Holbach, Baron, Paul-Henri Thiry, 28, 31 Diana, archaic statue of, 29, 123–25, 125, 126 See also Pompeii Dibutades, 83, 158–59, 159 Diderot, Denis, 16, 25, 27, 32, 56, 89 dilettanti. See grand tour; Patch, Thomas
Diogenes, 104 Dioscuri [Castor and Pollux], 189 Discobolus, 93, 178–79 Doryphoros, 195 Douglas, Norman, 18, 164–65 Drunken Faun, 126 Du Bocage, Anne-Marie, 130, 227n45 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 9, 15 Dumas père, Alexandre, 122, 160 Dundas, Lawrence Sir, 46, 48 Dundas, Thomas, 40–42, 63, 70–72 Dupaty, Charles, 55, 128, 131, 151 Dupont, H, after Girodet, Dibutades, 158–59, 159 Dying Gladiator, The, 37–39, 45, 54, 59–61, 63, 93 Eaton, Charlotte, 55, 70 Eck, Caroline van, 14, 83 Egremont, Second Earl of, 49 Einfühlung. See empathy d’Elbeuf, Prince, [Emmanuel-Maurice de Lorraine], 122, 225n6 Elgin marbles. See Parthenon sculptures Émeric-David, Toussaint-Bernard, 114 empathy, 19, 173, 196–200 and movement, 197–201 See also Lee, Vernon (born Violet Paget) Erechtheion (Acropolis), 145 Eros Bending His Bow, 184–85, 185, 195 Evangelista, Stefano, 172, 180 exhibitions of ancient sculpture deadening effect of, 3, 171–73, 212 and lighting effects, 18, 42, 83–88, 94, 106–10, 115, 171 (see also torchlight views) Exposition universelle (Paris), 88, 118 Fabris, Pietro [Peter], 130, 132, 141 faciality: multifacial, unifacial, plurifacial. See ancient sculpture: viewing in the round; aspectivity Fagan, Robert, 34 Falconet, Étienne, 15, 30, 32, 83 Farnese Bull, 188, 207, 210, 232n83 Farnese Hercules, 43, 57, 59, 61, 64–65, 65, 75, 95, 105, 109, 188 Fede, Count Giuseppe, 52 Fessard, Claude-Mathieu, after Fragonard, Travelers Viewing a Skeleton at Pompeii, 141–42, 142 Fête de la Liberté, 91, 93 Fiorelli, Giuseppe, 18, 122, 141, 160–66
254 index
Foggini, Niccolò, 13 Forum Baths. See Pompeii Fothergill, John, 205 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, Discovery of a Skeleton in a House in Pompeii, 141–43 fragment, 6, 12, 25, 36, 42, 50, 93, 140, 172, 178, 184 Belvedere Torso as, 81–82 and excavations in the Bay of Naples, 122, 129, 151, 165 and the Kantian sublime, 57 Warburg’s Mnemosyne as, 213 Francis I (king), 46 Frederiksen, Rune, 46 Freedberg, David, 14 French Academy in Rome, 36, 65, 90 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 122, 165, 167–69 Sigmund Freud’s study in Vienna, 168 Friedrich, Caspar David, 108 Frischer, Bernard, 110 Furtwängler, Adolf, 13–14, 29, 180, 197, 204–6, 214 Fuseli, Henry, 20, 70 Gaiger, Jason, 33 Galatea. See Pygmalion and Galatea Gallery of Antiquities (Musée central des Arts), 94, 106, 109–10 Galison, Peter, 125–26 Ganymede with an Eagle, 49–50, 50 Gau, François Chrétien, 145 Gautier, Théophile, 31, 84, 151–52, 169 Gefühl, 56, 220n117 See also Herder Gell, William, 145 geology, 126 See also Bay of Naples Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 30–31, 90, 221n156 Greek Interior (The Gynaeceum), 148–49, 149, 152 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 75 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 214 Giambologna, 182 Gibbon, Edward, 75 Gibson, John, 30 Giotto, 75 Girodet-Trioson, Anne-Louis, 105, 224n67 Dibutades, 158–59, 159 Pygmalion and Galatea, 122, 155–57, 157 Ossian, 102, 105 Gobineau, Arthur, 30 Goessaert, Jan, 43
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26, 27, 30, 88, 109–10 on the Bay of Naples, 12, 129–32, 134 and the effects of lighting on sculpture, 84–86, 109–10 on marble and plaster, 54, 83–84 on Winckelmann, 20, 56, 82, 173–76 Goldin, Nan, The Hermaphrodite Sleeping, Le Louvre, 4–6 Goltzius, Hendrick, 43, 188 Goncourt brothers, 90 Gradiva: A Pompeian Fancy ( Jensen), 122, 165–69 Gradiva [Roman relief of the so-called Horae and Aglaurids], 166–68, 168 grand tour, 15, 59–60, 76–79, 124 depictions of grand tourists, 25–26, 40, 40–42, 57, 59–60, 70–79 and encounters with ancient sculpture, 8–9, 11, 25, 53, 55 and erotics of travel, 76–79 and fashion, 40, 76–77 Grandjean, Jean, M. Hviid Pointing to the Restoration of the Albani Antinous in the Capitoline Museum, 17, 26, 50–52 Gray, Thomas, 130 Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 163 Gregory, Carlo, after Campiglia, Dying Gladiator, 44–45, 45 Grell, Chantal, 129, 134 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, Portrait of Claude-Henri Watelet, 73–74, 74, 222n168 grisaille, 4, 18, 20, 26, 59, 63, 214, 215 See also Blanchet, Louis-Gabriel Guérin, Pierre-Narcisse, 109 Guizot, François, 31, 89 Hadrian, 148 Hadrian’s Villa, 25, 37, 49–50, 52 Haskell, Francis, 43, 52 Hamilton, Gavin, 34, 49 Hamilton, William, 126, 129–33, 141 Account of the Discoveries at Pompeii, 131–33, 141, 151 Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies, 131–32 Harrison, Jane, 179–80, 197 Hauser, Friedrich, 168 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 54 Head of Isis, 124–25, 125 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12, 16, 18, 88, 173
on marble, 28–29, 117 and the sculptural ideal, 115–18, 174–75, 200, 207, 213 and torchlight views of antique sculpture, 108, 115–18 WORKS Aesthetics, 28–29, 115–18, 174–76, 178–79 Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, 116–17, 200, 207–8 Herculaneum, 4, 11–12, 14, 18, 32, 114, 121–69 Herculaneum Museum, Portici, 121, 126–28, 130, 133, 151, 226n19 Herculaneum Women, 122–23, 123, 126 Hercules, 69–70, 122, 145, 184, 195, 211n149 See also Belvedere Torso; Farnese Hercules Herder, Johann Gottfried, 16, 26, 88, 114–15, 179, 186, 198–200, 207–11 Plastik, 20, 32–33, 56–57, 118, 191 and the reproduction of ancient sculpture, 25, 48, 54 and the torchlight view of ancient sculpture, 54, 109–10 and transformative potential of encounters with art, 54 Hermes, Seated, 127 Hersey, George, 33, 169 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 124 Hildebrand, Adolf von, 16, 19, 173, 206–11, 214 Problem of Form, 192 Hittorff, Jacques Ignace, 30 Hoernes, Moritz, 192 Holkham Hall, 190 Hönes, Hans Christian, 108–9 Homer, 3, 178 Hornsby, Clare, 34 Hotho, Heinrich Gustav, 115 Houlgate, Stephen, 117–18 Houssaye, Arsène, 109 Hume, David, 9 Hviid, Andreas Christian, 17, 50–52 Ingres, J.-A.-D., 18, 20–21, 88–106, 110–15, 118, 201 Académie, 100–102 (attrib.), Apollo Belvedere, 98–100 The Dream of Ossian, 102–4 Grand Odalisque, 88 Head of a Niobid, 98 Phocion, 111, 113–14 Raphael and the Fornarina, 96
index 255
Studies after Cupid and Psyche, 112–14 Studies after Phocion, 111, 111–14 ivory, 27–28, 155, 168–69, 175, 177, 232n69 Jacques, Pierre, Venus de’ Medici, 183 Jaucourt, Louis de, 27 Jenkins, Thomas, 34 Jensen, Wilhelm, 18, 122, 165–69 Jockey, Philippe, 28, 30 John, 6th Duke of Bedford, 189 Johnson, Franklin, 193, 195 Jones, Owen, 30 Jorio, Andrea de, 129 Joubert, François-Étienne, 96 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 21, 56–57, 126, 158, 199 Kaufmann, Angelica, 59, 67 Kedleston Park, 59, 221n127 Kent, William, 62 Klenze, Leo von, 30 Kopienkritik, 29, 205 Knight, Richard Payne, 12, 20, 120, 226n37 Krauss, Rosalind, 96–97 Külpe, Oswald, 197–98 Lafont, Anne, 31 Lafreri, Antonio, Speculum romanae magnificentiae, 12 Lagrenée, Louis-Jean-François, 69 Pygmalion and Galatea, 155–56, 156 Laing, Alastair, 62 Lairesse, Gérard de, Le grand livre des peintres, 101 Lampridius, 148 Lange, Julius, 173, 206, 209–10 La Roque, J. de, 123 Last Days of Pompeii (Bulwer-Lytton), 122 Laocoön group, 10, 10–12, 35, 42, 57, 65, 67, 93–95, 95 depictions of, 10–11, 86–87, 87, 95, 184, 188, 214 as discussed by Goethe, 54, 110 as discussed by Herder, 54 as discussed by Lessing, 33, 213 viewed by torchlight, 106–7, 107, 109–10, 224n94 in Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas, 213–15 as discussed by Winckelmann, 31, 225n124 Laurent, Pierre-Louis-Henri, 111 La Vega, Francesco, 141, 151 Lee, Vernon (born Violet Paget), 16, 18, 179–80 on antique sculpture’s affective capacities, 4, 21, 173, 179, 197
and aspectivity, 181–82, 191–92, 195–97, 200–201 collaboration with Clementina AnstrutherThomson, 4, 13, 173, 180–81 and empathy, 19, 173, 196–200 on the exhibition of ancient sculpture, 3, 19, 171–73 and Pater, 172–73 and Winckelmann, 14, 179–80 WORKS Art & Man, 195–96, 199 The Beautiful, 200 Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics, 182, 191 “The Child in the Vatican,” 3, 171–72, 180–82 “Gallery Diaries,” 4, 18–19, 173, 180–81 Review of Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, 180 Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, 198 Lef èvre, Dominique, 18, 65, 66, 68–69, 221n150 Lejeune, after Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Robertson’s Phantasmagoria, 104 Lespinasse, Louis-Nicolas de, 101–2, 102 Les ruines de Pompéi (Mazois), 144–46, 146 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoön, 33, 213 Lichtenstein, Jacqueline, 9, 27, 56, 89 Lint, Pieter van, Venus de’ Medici, 189 Lipps, Theodor, 197–98 lithophilia. See agalmatophilia Locke, John, 14–15, 17, 32, 56, 156, 199 Longinus, 15 Lotze, Rudolf, 198 Louis XIV, 90 Louvre Museum, 5, 11, 13, 16, 94, 106–7, 107, 109–10 torchlit visits to the Gallery of Antiquities of, 106–7, 107, 109 See also Gallery of Antiquities (Musée central des Arts); Musée central des Arts; Musée Napoléon Löwy, Emanuel, 13–14, 168, 173, 214–15 Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art), 191–96, 204–7, 209–11 Lucien, 83 Ludwig I of Bavaria, 29 Lysippos, 184, 191–96, 205, 210 Apoxyomenos, or Athlete Scraping Himself with a Strigil, 193–95, 210 Eros Bending his Bow, 184–85, 193, 195 Youth Tying His Sandal, 205 Zeus (Tarentum), 193
macaroni, 76–77, 77, 222n185 de la Madeleine, Henry, 152 MacLeod, Catriona, 27 Maffei, Scipione, 129 Manet, Édouard, 90 Mann, Horace, 76 Mantegna, Andrea, 214 marble 6, 27–29, 52–54, 63, 78, 122, 177–78 as flesh, 25, 27–28, 31–33, 53–54, 81–83, 98, 117–18, 156 gelid and morbid associations of, 23, 55, 31, 83–84, 109, 166, 172, 182 as “ideal plane” of drawing, 207 thermal conductivity of, 31–2 as medium of serial production and replication, 29, 43, 178, 191 movement of, 96, 106, 110 (see also torchlight view) as ur-sculptural material, 3, 27–28, 33, 81, 116, 172 (see also polychromy; whiteness) See also ancient sculpture Marchand, Eckart, 46 Marchetti, Domenico, 190 Marforio, 35–36 Mariette, Pierre-Jean, 12, 14 Maron, Anton von, Portrait of Winckelmann, 1, 2, 3–4, 49 Marshall, David, 15, 53 Masaccio, 75 Masquelier, Louis-Joseph, after Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse, “Perspective with Shadows; Finding Shadows by Torchlight,” 101–2, 102 Massard, Félix, after Ingres, Apollo Lykeios, 92, 95 Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, 29, 180, 204 Matthews, Henry, 108 Mattos, Claudia, 107–8 Mazois, François, 144 Medusa, 88, 160 Mengs, Anton Raphael, 40, 217n29 Menzel, Adolph, Storage Room During New Construction in the Altes Museum, Berlin, 39 Mnemosyne Atlas, 214, 214–15 Mercury, (Portici) 126 Mercury, (Uffizi) 71 Meyer, Friedrich, 109 Meyer, Heinrich, 86, 108 mezzotint, 98–99, 99, 106–7 Michel, Régis, 139–40 Michelangelo, 19, 43, 67–68, 182–83 Miller, Lady Anna, 131, 133–34, 227n48, 227n61
256 index
Miller, J. Hillis, 156 Mogalli, Niccolò, Antinous Bas-Relief, 3 Molière, 198 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 14 monochromy, 3, 28, 69, 117, 172, 174, 225n123 See also polychromy; whiteness Montaigne, Michel de, 30 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 13 More, Jacob, Mount Vesuvius in Eruption, 131–32, 132 Morelli, Giovanni, 180 Morgante, 182 Morghen, Raffaello, Apollo Belvedere, 17, 46–47, 47 Morice, Humphry, 63–64, 64 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 108–9 Moscioni, M., 206 Murat of Naples, Caroline, 144 Musée central des Arts, 93–94 Musée français, recueil complet des tableaux, statues et bas-reliefs, qui composent la collection nationale (Robillard-Péronville and Laurent), 86, 88–115 Musée Napoléon, 88, 94, 106–7, 110–12, 115 Museo Clementino, 35 See also Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino Museo Pio-Clementino, 29 Mycenae, 12, 173, 177, 230n25 Myrone, Martin, 42 Nachleben, 203, 212–15 See also Warburg, Aby Nadar, “My God, what’s that?—It seems to be a gentleman who found himself frozen in the Ingres room. . . .” 88–89, 89 Napoleon Bonaparte, 91, 93, 96, 104, 106–7, 107, 144 Narcissus, 83 National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 121 Natoire, Charles, 36 Artists Drawing in the inner Courtyard of the Capitoline, 17, 26, 35, 35–36, 39 Nerinda (Douglas), 164–65 Newton, Isaac, 14 Niobe, 163, 182 Niobid group, 179 Nicolle, Victor-Jean, The Imaginary Studio of an Ancient Sculptor, 123–25, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 19, 178, 213 Nightwatches of Bonaventura, 84–86 Nikandre, votive figure of, 205–6, 206 Nonii Balbi, 123 Nonius Balbus, Marcus, 126–27, 134
objectivity, 16, 125–26 Olympia, 30, 173 Ossian, 102–3, 103, 105 Osterley Park House, 59 Ovid, 25, 27–28, 33–34, 69, 154–56, 168–69 See also Pygmalion Palazzo dei Conservatori (Capitoline Hill), 37 Palazzo del Quirinale, 104 Palazzo Mancini, 36, 69, 184, 231n52 Palazzo Nuovo (Capitoline Hill), 34 Palazzo Zuccari, 72 Paine, Jr, James, 18, 65–66, 66, 68–69 paragone, 10, 27, 29, 32, 48, 63, 110, 114, 118, 156, 172, 182, 193, 207–8 death of sculpture and, 88–90 sculptural painting and, 31, 88–90, 119 sculptural planarity and, 19, 192, 196, 207–9 Parker, Earls of Morley, family, 63 Parker the Younger, Robert, (later Lord Boringdon), 59, 64 Parthenon sculptures, 13, 29–31, 116 Patch, Thomas, 18, 20–21, 26, 70–79, 201, 212 A Gathering of Dilettanti in a Sculpture Hall, 21, 26, 70–79 Pater, Walter, 1, 12, 16 on an enlivened or enlivening antique, 172, 174 on the exhibition of sculpture, 173 as reader of Hegel, 174–76, 178–79 on the origins and development of Greek art, 19, 173–79 and Vernon Lee, 3, 179–80, 197, 199 on Winckelmann, 3, 14, 16, 19–20, 82, 172–77 WORKS Greek Studies, 174 The Renaissance, 174, 230n11 Paulson, Ronald, 75 Pécheux, Laurent, Pygmalion and Galatea, 23, 24, 24–26, 28 Penny, Nicholas, 43, 52 Pergamon, 12 Perrier, François, 19, 25, 36, 49, 61–63, 186, 188, 188–89, 191, 223n41 Apollo Belvedere, 61–62, 62 Arrotino, 43–44, 44 Borghese Gladiator, 43–44, 44, 188 three views of the Farnese Hercules, 43, 43–44, 188 Venus de’Medici, 61–62, 62, 188, 188–89 Wrestlers, 43–44, 44 Perseus (king), 91
Pether, William, 98–99, 99, 106–7 Petworth House, 50 phantasmagoria, 102, 104, 104–6, 110, 114, 211, 224n67 Phidias, 30, 116–17, 163 Philostratus, 83 Phocion, 110–14 Picasso, Pablo, 114 Pigmalion, ou la statue animée (Boreau-Deslandes), 32 Piles, Roger de, 27 Pinto, John, 135 Piozzi, Hester Lynch, 124, 127, 131, 133–34 Piranesi, Francesco, 122, 126, 135, 143, 148 after Louis-Jean Desprez, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii, 135–36, 136 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 6, 126, 135, 143, 148 Campus Martius antiquae urbis, 6 Ichnographiam Campi Martii, 6–7, 7 Temple of Isis at Pompeii, 137 View of the Egyptian Temple in the Precinct of Isis at Pompeii, 135, 137 Pius VI (pope), 35, 107, 219n60 plaster, 25, 27, 48, 86, 186, 190–91 and academic study, 67, 69, 73, 98–99, 107, 231n52, 231n53 casts at Pompeii, 13, 18, 124, 160–65 casts of antique sculpture, 11, 17, 37, 39, 42–43, 46, 48–49, 52, 54, 64–65, 166, 184 as a medium, 54, 83, 220n91, 220n92, 222n168 Plastik, Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (Some Observations on Form and Shape from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream) (Herder). See Herder, Johann Gottfried Plato’s Symposium, 164 Pliny the Elder, 14, 83, 131, 158, 193, 195, 206, 210 Pliny the Younger, 131, 227n56 Pollitt, J. J., 193 polychromy, 12–13 29–30, 116, 123, 148, 174, 178 Polykleitos, 116–17 Pompeiana (Gell), 145, 147, 147–49, 228n97 Pompeii, 4, 11–12, 14, 18, 32, 114, 121–69 and expanded Mediterranean geography of antiquity, 152–53 as woman, 148–53 ARTIFACTS breast imprint, 18, 121–22, 133, 150–51, 155, 160, 162–63, 166–67, 212, 228n117 Diana, archaic sculpture of, 123–25, 125, 126 SITES Forum Baths, 145–48, 153
index 257
Gladiators’ Barracks, 140, 227n80 Skeletal Laundress, 133–34, 141–43 Stabian Baths, 145 Temple of Apollo, 166 Temple of Isis, 131, 134–41 Tepidarium of the Forum Baths, 145–48 Villa Rustica (Villa of Diomedes), 132–33, 150–51, 166 See also Bay of Naples; Herculaneum Pop, Andrei, 20 Potts, Alexander, 20, 57, 178 Poussin, Nicolas, 188 Praxiteles, 29, 54, 117, 193, 195, 231n62 Lansdowne Herakles, 195 Pressly, William, 68 Primaticcio, Francesco, 46 Prix de Rome, 65, 90, 96, 111, 134, 183, 224n57 Les proportions du corps humain, mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité (Audran), 73 Psyche, 82 See also Cupid and Psyche Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 35, 96 Pygmalion, 16, 55, 122, 155 Pygmalion and Galatea, 25–28, 31–34, 53, 98, 111, 155–60, 168–69 depicted by Girodet, 155–57, 157 depicted by Lagrenée, 155–56, 156 Ovid’s account of, 25, 27–28, 33 depicted by Pécheux, 23–24, 24 reverse-Pygmalion effect, 74, 88, 165–66 Rousseau’s scène lyrique, 31–32, 156, 158, 169, 218n13, 229n139 Winckelmann’s deployment of, 55–56, 76 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostôme, 12, 16, 25, 114, 213 and sculptural polychromy, 29–30 Le Jupiter Olympien, ou l’Art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue, 29–30 Raccolta d’antiche statue, busti, teste cognite ed altre sculture antiche (Cavaceppi), 50 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 43 Raoux, Jean, 27 Raphael, 11, 66–67, 72, 96, 229n134 Redford, Bruce, 73 Regnault, Jean-Baptiste, 27 relief, 30, 59, 166–68, 193, 213
Antinous Bas-Relief, 1–2, 2, 49 engraving as low-, 86, 190 “Gradiva,” 165–69 and sculptural planarity, 19, 192, 196, 207–9, 232n83 Reni, Guido, 69 Revett, Nicholas, 145 Reymond, Marcel, 204, 206–9 Reynolds, Joshua, 28, 31, 67, 72, 82, 106, 218n8, 222n169 Richardson, Jonathan, 29, 42, 53–54 Riegel, Alois, 192 Rive, Roberto, 160 Robert, Hubert, 11, 17, 26, 36–39, 220n76 Antiquities at the Capitoline Museum, 37–39 A Draftsman at the Capitoline Museum, 36–37, 37 The Finding of the Laocoön, 11 The Salle des Saisons at the Louvre, 94 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard, 88, 104–5, 211, 224n67 See also phantasmagoria Robillard-Péronville, Louis-Nicolas-Joseph, 86, 90, 92, 99, 104 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12, 16, 31, 104 Pygmalion, scène lyrique, 31–32, 122, 156, 158, 169, 218n13, 229n139 Royal Academy, 28, 67–68, 89, 99–100, 107, 221n149 Royal Museum of Antiquities at Naples, 109 Rowlandson, Thomas, Bear and Bear-Leader Passing the Hôtel d’Angleterre, 78–79, 79 ruins, 6, 134, 143, 167 and affect, 12, 143 as fragmentary remains, 81, 131, 144, 166–67 and phantasmatic projections, 134–41, 148 understand of antiquity via, 12, 25 Runciman, John, Self-Portrait, 68 Saint-Non, Abbé de, 134–35, 138–39, 142 Salon exhibitions, Paris 69, 96, 148, 155, 169, 186 Saltram House, 26, 59–61, 64–65, 221n129, 221n136 Sandrart, Joachim von, 43 Santi Bartoli, Pietro, 43 Scherf, Guilhem, 186 Schiller, Friedrich, 97 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 31, 225n114 sciography, 88, 101–2, 102, 105, 110, 114 sculpture death of, 27, 88–90 and mimesis, 23, 193–95 as a plastic art, 6, 19, 27
and philosophical reflection, 16, 28, 54, 89, 174–75 and planarity, 4–6, 19, 192–93, 203–15 and/versus the pictorial, 6, 193, 207–9 See also ancient sculpture; paragone Seated Faun, 126 Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum (Perrier), 43–44, 44, 62, 186, 188, 223n41 Sellers, Eugénie, 12, 14, 179–80, 197, 204–5 Semper, Gottfried, 30 Shaftesbury, Lord, 9, 15–16 Sickler, Friedrich, 109 Simonetti, Michelangelo, 35, 42 Singleton, Henry, The Royal Academicians in General Assembly, 67 Skopas, 117 shadows depiction of, 98–104 (see also sciography) and experience, 97–119 preternatural, 104–6 See also phantasmagoria; torchlight view Silenus, drunken, 127 Sleeping Faun, 126 Sleeping Hermaphrodite, 4–6, 5, 20, 26, 59, 61, 63, 161, 163, 121n135 Sleigh, Fenn, 67 Smentek, Kristel, 13 Snyder, Joel, 204 Society of Dilettanti, 20 Somerset House, 67, 99–100, 100 See also Council Chamber Sommariva, Count, 155 Sommer, Giorgio, 13, 160 Plaster Casts of Bodies, Pompeii, 160 Vesuvius Erupting, 26 April 1872, 3 pm, 163–64, 164 Spartianus, 148 Spinoza, Baruch, 32 Springer, Anton, 213 Squire, Michael, 178 Staël, Madame de, 108, 176 Steinberg, Leo, 114 Stosch, Baron von, 49 Stuart, James, 145 Subiaco Ephebe, 180–82, 192, 197, 199, 204, 206–9 Subiaco Niobid. See Subiaco Ephebe Summers, David, 9, 186, 199, 218n7, 218n17 Swinburne, Henry, 127 Sydenham, 30 Symonds, John Addington, 197 Symposium (Plato), 164
258 index
Taine, Hippolyte, 31 Temple of Aphaia, 29 Temple of Isis, Pompeii. See Pompeii. Tetrode, Willem van, Puttos Bearing a Vase, 182–83, 183 Thoré, Théophile, 88–89 Thomassin, Simon, Laocoön, 95 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 106 Titian, Venus of Urbino, 75 Tivoli, 49 Tivoli, bishop of, 75, 222n172 Tognoli, Giovanni, 190 torchlight views. See exhibitions of ancient sculpture Torchlight View of the Apollo Belvedere, 84–86, 86 Towneley, Charles, 107 Treatise on the Sensations (Condillac), 32 Treaty of Tolentino, 93 Tribuna of the Uffizi, 53, 71–72, 72, 217n23, 221n157 trompe l’oeil, 6, 59 Troy, 173, 177, 230n25 Ulysses, 111 Valencienne, Pierre-Henri de, Eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August 79 AD Under the Rule of Titus, 131 Varchi, Benedetto, 182 Vasi, Giuseppe, after Campiglia, Artists Drawing the Dying Gladiator in the Capitoline, 37–39 Vatican Ariadne, 42, 214 Vatican Chiaramonti Gallery, 166 Vatican Museo Pio-Clementino, 13, 17, 29, 46, 50, 66–67, 166, 210, 212–13, 220n79 establishment of, 11, 34–35, 42 described by Vernon Lee, 3, 171–73, 179–82, 197 torchlight visits to, 84, 107–9, 109 See also Capitoline Museum Venus, 28 Venus de’Medici, 25, 67, 97, 116, 212, 222n168 described by Anstruther-Thomson, 195–97, 200–201 depicted by Blanchet, 18, 59, 59–63 depictions of, 73, 183, 183–84, 189 descriptions of, 53, 76, 83 depicted by Patch, 71, 71–76, 78–79, 221n159 depicted by Perrier, 61–62, 62, 188–89 plaster cast after, 161–62 rotating base for, 111–12 depicted by Zoffany, 71–72, 72, 73, 75, 78
Venus de Milo, 109, 155, 174–75, 178, 212, 222n5, 229n133 Venus of Cnidus, 83 Venus Rising from the Bath [Standing Venus], 109 Venuti, Marcello, 122, 130, 227n47 Vesuvius, Mount, 127, 131–32, 132, 135, 160, 164 Vielansichtigkeit, 19, 173, 182–96 See also aspectivity; antique sculpture: viewing in the round Vien, Joseph-Marie, 65 Villa Albani, 1, 49 Villa Borghese, 4 Villa Farnesina, 65, 229n134 Villa Medici, 183 Villa of the Papyri, 126 Vischer, Robert, 198 Visconti, Ennio Quirino, 29, 96, 219n38 Visconti, Giovanni Battista, 29 Vleughels, Nicolas, 36, 231n52 Volpato, Giovanni, Apollo Belvedere, 17, 46–47, 47 Voltaire, 32, 56 Voyage pittoresque (Saint-Non), 131, 134–35, 138–39, 141–42 vulcanology, 126, 132–33 See also Bay of Naples; Campi Phlegraei; Hamilton, William Walpole, Horace, 62, 122, 124, 130 Warburg, Aby, 212–15 Watelet, Claude-Henri, 73–74, 74 Weber, Karl Julius, 109–10 Werge, John, 163, 229n144 West, Benjamin, 12, 220n76 whiteness, 27–31, 33, 63, 116, 153, 166 and abstraction, 28, 174–76 and construction of “antiquity,” 28–31, 48, 116 and trope of marble as skin, 27, 30–31, 63, 117 See also marble; monochromy; polychromy Willoughby, Henry, 40, 42, 57, 59, 70 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1, 2, 12, 18, 57, 130 account of ancient art by, 14, 18, 20–21, 26, 42, 55, 84, 115, 129 art historical afterlives of, 14, 20–21, 26, 175, 179–80, 213 and the Bay of Naples, 122–23, 126, 129–30 and ekphrastic animation, 55–56, 81–84 Goethe’s writing on, 56 Hegel’s metabolism of, 56, 115, 117, 175 and ideal antique bodily form, 1–3, 19, 55–56, 75–76, 176
and intersubjective theory of imitation, 55–56 Pater’s biographical essay on, 1, 19, 172–77 and trope of Pygmalion, 34, 55, 75–76, 220n120 and trope of Psyche, 82 and queer sensibility of, 19–21, 55–56, 75–79, 174–76 and reproductions of antiquities, 1, 2, 3, 25, 43, 48–49, 95, 105, 220n94 and whiteness, 28–31 Vernon Lee’s views on, 179–80 WORKS “Description of the Torso in the Belvedere in Rome,” 70, 81–83, 118 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst [Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture], 48–49, 55, 122–23 Histoire de l’art chez les anciens, 43, 95, 105 The History of the Art of Antiquity, 14, 28, 55, 82, 95, 123 “Letter on the Discoveries at Herculaneum,” 126 Monumenti antichi inediti, 1, 3, 49 Woburn Abbey, 189 Wolf, Friedrich August, 124 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 19–20, 49, 209–14 Wrestlers, 43–44, 44, 71, 75, 78 Wright of Derby, Joseph, 98 Academy by Lamplight, 84–85, 85 Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 98–99, 99, 107 Wundt, Wilhelm, 198 Youth Tying His Sandal, 205, 205–6 Zahn, Wilhelm, Tepidarium (Pompeii), 145, 147, 147–49 Zeus (statue at Olympia), 30 Zeuxis, 23, 83 Zix, Benjamin, Emperor Napoleon and Empress Marie-Louise Visiting the Salle du Laocoön at Night, 106–7, 107, 112 Zoffany, Johann, 78, 221n159, 222n174 attrib., The Antique School of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, 99–100, 100, 107 Sir Lawrence Dundas and His Grandson, 46, 48 Tribuna of the Uffizi, 71–72, 75 Zoffoli, Giacomo, 46, 221n136 Zola, Émile, 31, 84