Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820: Moved by Stone 9781350144026, 9781350144057, 9781350144033

Citation preview

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

i

Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception presents scholarly monographs offering new and innovative research and debate to students and scholars in the reception of Classical Studies. Each volume will explore the appropriation, reconceptualization and recontextualization of various aspects of the Graeco-Roman world and its culture, looking at the impact of the ancient world on modernity. Research will also cover reception within antiquity, the theory and practice of translation, and reception theory.

Also available in the Series: Alexander the Great in the Early Christian Tradition: Classical Reception and Patristic Literature, Christian Thrue Djurslev Antipodean Antiquities, edited by Marguerite Johnson Classics in Extremis, edited by Edmund Richardson Faulkner’s Reception of Apuleius’ The Golden Ass in The Reivers, Vernon L. Provencal Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage, edited by Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos Reading Poetry, Writing Genre, edited by Silvio Bär and Emily Hauser Sex, Symbolists and the Greek Body, Richard Warren The Classics in Modernist Translation edited by Miranda Hickman and Lynn Kozak The Thucydidean Turn: (Re)Interpreting Thucydides’ Political Thought Before, During and After The Great War, Benjamin Earley Translations of Greek Tragedy in the Work of Ezra Pound, Peter Liebregts Victorian Epic Burlesques, Rachel Bryant Davies

ii

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820 Moved by Stone Helen Slaney

iii

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Helen Slaney, 2020 Helen Slaney has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Pietro Antonio Novelli, 1729–1804, The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund/NGA Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3501-4402-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-4403-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-4404-0

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

For Frederick whose journey is just beginning

v

vi

CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: The Science of Sensuous Cognition

viii ix 1

Part One Approaches

19

1

Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

21

2

Herder’s ‘Feeling Imagination’

33

3

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

45

4

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

63

Part Two Apprehensions

83

5

Time Travellers

85

6

Frankenstein’s Venus

107

7

Belongings in Museums

133

Part Three Appreciations

155

8

Roman Novels

157

9

Forever Young

173

10 Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

193

Conclusion

207

Notes Bibliography Index

211 251 271

vii

FIGURES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

George Romney, ‘Lady Hamilton as Medea’ (c. 1786). Jenkins Venus, Newby Hall (photography © Heathcliff O’Malley). Johann Zoffany, ‘Charles Townley and friends in his library’ (1780s). Detail of chimneypiece at Parkstead House, Roehampton. ‘Le Beau Monde’, engraving by Henry Moses in Hope’s Designs of Modern Costume (1812). Souvenir fan depicting Pompeii (c. 1790). Wedgwood tobacco jar, ‘Temple of Flora’ (c. 1790). Antoine-Jean Gros, ‘Sappho à Leucade’ (1801).

25 112 115 118 121 128 130 180

Permission to reproduce material from the following publication has kindly been granted: Slaney, H. 2018. ‘In the body of the beholder: Herder’s aesthetics and classical sculpture’ in Purves (ed.), Touch and the Ancient Senses. London: Routledge.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea for this book initially arose from a visit to Kedleston Hall in 2013 arranged as public engagement training by the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama). I pitched it to the British Academy as a project examining embodied reception in the long eighteenth century, and was fortunate to be awarded a BA Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014–16) to conduct the groundwork. I cannot thank the British Academy enough for their generous support. St Hilda’s College, Oxford was a home away from home for the duration of the fellowship, and Fiona Macintosh a tirelessly supportive mentor. In 2016 I took up a post in the Classics faculty and Research Office at the University of Roehampton, and I would like to thank my managers there, Victoria Platt and subsequently Richard Keogh, for a generous allocation of research time, including the sabbatical in 2018 without which the book could not have been completed. While developing the project, I had the opportunity to pursue several fruitful avenues thanks to invitations to participate in workshops and conferences, including ‘Deep Classics’ (Bristol 2014, organised by Shane Butler), the ‘History of Distributed Cognition’ series (Edinburgh, 2015), ‘Embodied Cognition and the Goethezeit’ (Cambridge, 2015), ‘Ancient Pots and Social Class’ (KCL, 2016), ‘Imagining Apocalypse’ (Oxford, 2016) and ‘New Perspectives on Winckelmann’s Aesthetics’ (Oxford, 2018). The incentive of writing these papers, among others, and the feedback received from colleagues greatly enriched the relevant sections of the book, as well as enabling me to tie it into broader scholarly dialogues. The Sensory Studies in Antiquity Network, masterminded by Eleanor Betts, also provided a like-minded research community throughout. A number of libraries, archives, and museums assisted me en route. Jacob Moss from the Fan Museum in Greenwich and Lucy Lead from the Wedgwood Museum Archives went above and beyond to share the extraordinary material in their collections. The British School at Rome kindly hosted me in March 2016, providing access to sources in their library I could not otherwise have consulted. Special thanks to Lucinda Compton for personally introducing me to the gallery at Newby Hall. As always, the staff in the British Library, Senate House, and the Bodleian Libraries were outstanding. Sincere gratitude is due to my peer reviewers for their comments and of course to Alice Wright, Lily MacMahon and the team at Bloomsbury for their patience and professionalism. Finally, I would like to thank my fellow-traveller Julia, for bearing me up and for bringing me home.

ix

x

INTRODUCTION: THE SCIENCE OF SENSUOUS COGNITION

The past persists in material objects. In order to be perceived as relics or artefacts, and not simply as curiosities or obsolescent rubbish, they must be actively encompassed by a recipient’s imagination. Despite the sensory availability of telltale traces left by the passage of time, antiquity as a property cannot be perceived as such. Objects and their recipients coexist in the present moment. Nevertheless, the sensation of coming into personal, corporeal contact with an object understood as representative of the distant past will often prompt an attempt to articulate verbally, materially reproduce or otherwise (re)capture the experience. Some of the most experimental and influential attempts of this kind occurred in the late eighteenth century. Between the publication of Winckelmann’s seminal essay ‘Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works’ in 1755 and the repatriation of Italian antiquities in 1816 – coinciding with the British Museum’s acquisition of the Parthenon marbles – lies an extraordinary half-century of developments in European reception of the Graeco-Roman past. Many of these developments were predicated on the material aspect which antiquity was assuming: the increasing accessibility of sites and collections enabled new forms of interaction, and appealed to senses different from those which are activated by text alone. Reception is perception. The unprecedented re-emergence of ancient material culture that distinguished this period prompted new modes of relating to classical antiquity, and consequently new ways of conceptualizing the eras responsible for these representative artefacts. For northern Europeans, the idea of antiquity acquired a tangible presence like never before. It could be held in the hand or conceived as a place to be visited, locatable on the earth’s surface, a form of virtual time travel. This study attempts to recover the period’s predisciplinary, or perhaps proto-disciplinary, palette of responses to classical cultures and their material historicity. Prior to the establishment of archaeology as an independent field, prior to the institutionalization of Altertumswissenschaft,1 an exuberant plurality of untrained responses – creative, acquisitive, inquisitive, erotic, esoteric, exploratory, opportunistic, melancholic, devious, deviant, devout, ingenious, entitled – coexisted. Classical civilization, whether envisaged as utopian democracy or regulated republic, provided eighteenth-century reformers and idealists with aspirational blueprints for revolutionary endeavour.2 Those with less egalitarian ambitions turned to imperial Rome for iconographic precedent, borrowing, as Karl Marx would later put it, ‘names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language . . . in Roman costume and with Roman phrases’.3 But it is important to break down the construction of these rubrics, these apparently solid terms of reference, into the particular tesserae that came to comprise 1

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

them, the synecdoches standing in for these entities, for ‘Rome’, ‘the Greeks’, l’Antiquité, ‘the Ancients’, die Antike. Out of a mélange of fragments, phrases and sensations, from media both literary and material, worlds were created:4 not only the thought-worlds imagined on the basis of these remains, but material fabrications in the present, reconstructed on the basis of these thought-worlds. This transposition of the virtual into the material, an imagined past into a tangible present, reinforced the fantasy of completeness and restoration, filling in blanks in the historical record with contemporary sense-experience. Cognizance of an ancient (thought-)world is built up of sensory encounters. One kind of perception, the absorption of sense-data, leads to another: that is, it determines how the absent substance of classical antiquity was (and is) perceived. Joshua Billings has written eloquently and provocatively about the dynamics of desire which characterized the allure of classical Greece for the late eighteenth century.5 Not all desire is sexual in nature, but most, if not all, is aesthetic, concerned with the stimulation of the senses, with sensations and sensuality. One sense above all is implicated in this perpetual circuit of gratification and loss, closeness and distance, and that is touch. Touch is commonly understood as referring to impressions received externally on the skin such as pressure, texture and temperature, but the associated suite of haptic senses also includes intereoception, or awareness of one’s internal state; proprioception, or awareness of one’s bodily configuration; and kinaesthesia, or awareness of self-movement. The term haptics incorporates manifold fluctuating channels of sensation, not only shapes and surfaces, but also inward tremors, motion, balance, acceleration, bending joints, muscular effort and the moving vessel of your surroundings,each channel more or less salient depending on the imperatives of the moment.6 To make ‘sense’ of the haptic universe involves combining the various forms of information received into a usable mesh of the moving and movable body within a physical environment. It does not involve a ‘mental image’ of the body, but occurs through the medium of movement itself.7 Desire for touch, and not only the desire to touch with the skin and be touched in return but to feel a particular feeling or to stand in relation to a particular object, is a powerful motivator of human activity, especially activity performed in the sphere most commonly designated as ‘aesthetic’. In the same way that vision has long been established as a relational paradigm,8 touch provides a mode of experience whose cultural, epistemological and metaphorical ramifications run deep. Anthropologist Constance Classen has argued for a transition from a pre-modern fascination with tactility to a post-Enlightenment fetishization of vision, pointing to the museum collection as one arena in which this transition took place.9 Whereas visitors to early cabinets of curiosities expected to handle the objects they contained, the prevailing view by the early nineteenth century was that ‘touch had no cognitive or aesthetic use and thus was of no value in the museum’.10 As Fiona Candlin likewise points out, museums became educative public institutions, and ‘modern, rational knowledge was generated by eradicating multisensory information in favour of a purified visual learning’.11 Those who are permitted to touch, on the other hand, enact a privileged relationship to the objects in question, cast in terms of ownership or superior expertise.12 The re-evaluation of touch that has begun to occur in the last decade or so is now restoring its credibility as an epistemological vehicle. Mark Paterson, for example, writes 2

Introduction

of the need to develop a critical discourse capable of accommodating ‘the manifold meanings and implications of touching within lived experience’ and the consequent dissolution of conventional subject/object relations based on a visual paradigm.13 Tactility, then, provides a starting point for investigating interactions with objects that offer the prospect of holding or touching (such as coins and intaglio gems, such as one’s own possessions or souvenirs, such as utensils and garments). Another crucial dimension to the realization of haptic reception is that of kinaesthesia, or the sense of one’s own movement.14 Despite its essential role in mediating our experience of the world, kinaesthesia is rarely recognized as a unique modality, being most frequently subsumed into other forms of touch, elided with proprioception or ignored altogether.15 Deidre Sklar, pointing out that ‘kinesthesia, even more proprioceptive than touch, has been entirely omitted from the western sensorium’, attributes this omission to its inescapable intimacy and irreducible resistance to verbal communication.16 Although I will not be concentrating exclusively on kinaesthetic encounters, its rehabilitation as a sense in its own right has enabled self-movement to be identified as an important vector of reception. Kinaesthesia, in fact, is key to the relationship between touch and cognizance of antiquity, because it is through motion that one’s relationship to objects and surroundings becomes an embodied phenomenon. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has argued in her riposte to Merleau-Ponty The Primacy Of Movement, ‘Our tactile-kinaesthetic bodies are an epistemological gateway, our opening way of making sense of ourselves and the world through movement.’17 Sheets-Johnstone stresses that movement is the missing factor in many accounts of self-perception and consciousness, that often “bodies” tend to be treated as static entities whose default state is to be a body-at-rest, rather than dynamic sites of animation. This tendency, she argues, contributes to objectification, the division of a moving stream into subject/s and object/s, which can include on a personal level the Cartesian severance of brute organic matter from the subject-self. Reuniting mind (or brain) and body has been the project of much recent work in the cognitive sciences,18 but what SheetsJohnstone emphasizes above all is the crucial role played by self-movement in constituting perception and apprehension both of oneself (as a locus of corporeal feedback) and one’s physical environment (as a field of kinetic opportunity). Kinaesthesia, she writes, ‘is our point of departure for living in the world and making sense of it . . . It is in effect the foundation of our sense of ourselves as agents within a surrounding world. But it is even more basically the epistemological foundation of our sense of who and what we are. We literally discover ourselves through movement.’19 Movement produces knowledge. In extending this position to the production of abstract conceptualizations, SheetsJohnstone reveals a relatively unacknowledged debt to the theories of George Lakoff along with collaborators Mark Johnson and (later) Vittorio Gallese.20 In Lakoff and Johnson’s original study, Metaphors We Live By (1980),21 it was proposed that the vocabulary of abstract relationships, and hence their comprehension, is predicated on bodily structures and experiences. Concepts such as inside/outside, before/behind, and above/below (‘Entering into discussion’, ‘We have a long day ahead of us’, ‘This matter is beneath me’) are derived from the haptic experience of having a bodily interior and exterior, a front and a back, and so on. Spatial organization works in a similar fashion 3

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

(‘Let’s consider this from another angle’) as does the language of force (‘We could push the idea further’). In 2005, Gallese and Lakoff put forward a neurophysiological basis for this process, arguing that ‘Understanding is imagination . . . Imagination, like perceiving and doing, is embodied, that is, structured by our constant encounter and interacting with the world via our bodies and brains . . . Imagining is a form of simulation.’22 In other words, there is no separate area of the brain where abstract reasoning occurs, but rather the same neural clusters in the premotor cortex are responsible both for preparing what Gallese and Lakoff term ‘action concepts’ and for simulating their performance. Understanding what pushing involves, or entry, or rearrangement, depends on our prior haptic exposure to these activities. I would expand the epistemological implications of Gallese and Lakoff ’s findings from the structures of speech and reasoning to history, and suggest that the past – as an imagined concept, environment and/or experience – likewise comes into vivid being as a result of sensory, primarily kinaesthetic, perceptions. A few potential objections arise concerning the application of Sheets-Johnstone’s theory in this context, and as they pertain to general reservations about the theory, it will be useful to address them head-on. Sheets-Johnstone supposes that the acquisition of ‘tactile-kinaesthetic consciousness’ occurs essentially during infancy, and the adult body is in possession of a fully developed kinaesthetic faculty. There is little consideration given to the possibility that one’s relationship to movement might change, diminishing with age or acquired disability and/or augmented by the systematic acquisition of new motor skills such as learning a martial art, musical instrument, dance form or sport. If knowledge of the world is shaped by movement and the ability to move (SheetsJohnstone makes regular use of the Husserlian ‘I can’ as a unit of comprehension),23 then ongoing fluctuations in physical capacity and somatic attention must surely make a not insignificant contribution. Rick Kemp has shown how this applies to the craft of acting. On the basis of the contention derived from Lakoff that ‘physical experience in the material world shapes conceptual thought’,24 Kemp suggests that one can therefore deliberately cultivate psychosomatic associations through the repetition of exercises such as those developed by mime practitioner Jacques Lecoq. These are designed not just to improve basic flexibility, balance and stamina, but also to increase the range of physicalities available to a performer, the range of bodies his or her given body can impersonate, thereby increasing its responsiveness to scenarios or keywords: not just stretching, but reaching for the moon; not just hopping, but crossing hot coals; not just waving, but bidding adieu. Muscular exertion is invested with affect, or sometimes with impossible conditions such as sculpting the air or wrestling a nonexistent opponent.25 Kemp proposes that discovering and repeating these unaccustomed kinetic patterns results in an ‘altered sense of self ’ as everyday habits of movement are broken. It also means that the performer’s ability to imagine fictional worlds in terms of their kinaesthetic properties is enhanced to the point where embodying their inhabitants becomes conceivable. In contrast, Sheets-Johnstone’s account of participating in the ‘kinetic bodily logos’ of improvised dance ignores the extensive training required to attain the beatific state where one is able to suspend planning, insecurities and self-consciousness in order, as 4

Introduction

she puts it, to ‘think in movement’.26 Kinaesthesia may be the ‘primal sense’, but that does not make it unchanging. This leads to the second problem I anticipate arising from a wholesale adherence to Sheets-Johnstone’s argument: the charge of biological essentialism. How is it possible to re-create the sensorium, in this case the kinaesphere, of an individual from the past whose experiences are conveyed only by written accounts of dubious veracity and at best analogously reproducible by (say) attendance at the same site?27 ‘My altogether human form is indeed a cultural universal,’ Sheets-Johnstone states,28 summing up a chapter intended to demonstrate that in order for cognition to have its roots in kinaesthesia, the physiological bedrock of corporeal experience must precede and supersede the superficial trimmings of acculturation. This unnecessary rejection of constructivism,29 however, again assumes that all development of a ‘sensory-kinetic subjectivity’ takes place in infancy. On the contrary, the gendered body, the aging body, the body traumatized or trained all result in a kinaesphere continually open to modification. Having some form of corporeal experience is indeed held in common by all human beings, but it need not be the same corporeal experience. I cannot claim to occupy the sensory-kinetic subjectivity of a warrior, a paraplegic, Bettina the child acrobat or Baron d’Hancarville; and this resistance, this incommunicability, this incommeasurability is precisely why – respectfully, tenderly, imaginatively – this study seeks to transgress, but does not pretend to deny, the existence and specificity of individual kinaesthetic horizons. Moreover, although we all of us have in common the ability to perceive ‘brightness, coldness, darkness, warmth, texture, sounds’,30 we taste sweetness very differently depending on the flavours to which we have become accustomed; we feel the cold more keenly, being from the south; we can pick out our own child’s voice amid the hubbub. We are attuned by exposure.31 To ask how the worlds of others may have been apprehended in movement, particularly in relation to the historicity of those worlds, it is not necessary to resort to essentialist claims which obscure the very uniqueness that makes each overlapped but idiosyncratic world worth studying. Nevertheless, this does not preclude the use of scientific studies nor their terminology where such integration can illuminate and enrich. As Sheets-Johnstone points out, vocabulary derived from the cognitive sciences (her example is ‘sensorimotor’, for which she would substitute ‘sensory-kinetic’), does not capture fully the phenomenological richness of lived experience.32 But this, I would suggest, simply reiterates the ubiquitous opacity of all language, be it mathematical, philosophical or poetic. Scientific discourse isolates and specifies, providing a means of describing events which repeat predictably under controlled conditions, for example on a neurochemical level. It is not necessarily superior to the discourse of Richard Chandler, or Friedrich Hölderlin, or Charlotte Eaton when it comes to the textual reassembly of events. When set alongside, it can supply alternative, not mutually exclusive, pathways to a present-day understanding of eighteenth-century classical reception mediated by kinaesthesia. Theories of distributed cognition, in particular, offer a productive platform from which to pursue the effects of sense-experience on conceptualization. According to proponents of distributed cognition, thought-processes which could be (and have been) 5

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

regarded as taking place exclusively in the brain, such as recollection, calculation, comprehension, prediction, supposition and imagination, involve the participation of the thinking subject’s body and environment. The weaker version of the theory, in which cognitive processes are merely ‘embedded’ in their surroundings, in fact maintains the very distinction between mind and matter that the stronger version sets out to dissolve.33 This stronger version contends that cognition – thought – simply could not exist without the material milieu in which it takes place. From one point of view, the composition of this milieu is organic:34 the human body, its chemistry and physiology, provides an indispensable medium for cognitive activity. Thought-experiments such as the ‘brain-in-a-vat’ are realistically untenable as the putative disembodied brain has no frame of sensory reference, lacking in particular the feedback gathered from selfmobility.35 An alternative perspective incorporates external technologies, enabling cognitive operations such as memory or navigation to be effectively ‘outsourced’ to systems as diverse and dispersed as your calendar, your satnav, internet search engines and language itself.36 These organic and technological circuits need not be mutually exclusive, but rather come more or less into play depending on the activity in which a subject is engaged. Another major strand of distributed cognition, known as ‘enactivism’, deals primarily with object-perception, and is therefore perhaps the most pertinent when considering the interface between receiver and artefact. Its crucial factor is movement. Evan Thompson, for example, defines cognition as ‘embodied action’, realized via ‘sensorimotor coupling’ with the material environment that shapes the contours of understanding. Cognition, for Thompson, is dynamic and relational, perceptions of the world resulting from exploratory movement within it.37 Contemplation is impossible without the adoption of a bodily – that is, sensorimotor or sensory-kinetic – relationship to the object in question, whether the object is physically present or the product of a simulation. Objects, as Alva Noë concurs using a slightly different formulation, possess fluctuating ‘sensorimotor profiles’, that is, properties such as distance and relative size, based on our awareness of how their appearance would change were we to move them or move around them. ‘When we perceive,’ Noë writes, ‘we perceive in an idiom of possibilities for movement.’38 In this respect, Noë is drawing on the long-standing premise of object affordance. First suggested by psychologist James Gibson in 1977, this theory proposes that objects and environments are primarily perceived in terms of what they ‘afford’, or the types of physical interaction prompted by their configurations: soft surfaces afford sinking, flat surfaces support, handles afford grip and interiors concealment.39 Gibson’s basic notion of affordance, his valuable insight that ‘perception of the environment is inseparable from proprioception of one’s own body’,40 has since been expanded to include salient properties such as texture,41 and has been applied to account for responses to the spatial and even emotional appeal of artworks.42 Its neurological foundation has been investigated by Marc Jeannerod, who differentiates between our ‘semantic’ understanding of an object – what it is – and our ‘pragmatic’ understanding, or what it can do, the motor schemas (options for movement) that are activated by its arrival in our sphere of 6

Introduction

attention.43 One’s perceived environment, in other words, is composed not just of nouns, of static objects, but of verbs, a constant ebb and flow of prompts to action. Kinaesthetic perception, then, plays an integral but underestimated role in constituting the material world and the thought-worlds contingent upon materiality. This has implications not only for cognition, the passing carnival of data-processing, but also for cognizance or the formation of what come ultimately to be recognized as stable concepts: one’s accumulated knowledge of Homeric Troy, Cicero’s villa or a Propertian love-affair. These examples blend the textual and the material, a nexus of particular fascination to eighteenth-century cognoscenti for whom sensory encounters gave piquancy to ancient literature while literature conferred on ruinscapes their glamour. As Sheets-Johnstone remarks, ‘The epistemological object is not out there in the world such that it can be taken as it presents itself, factually given, for it is not only never altogether there to be taken as such, but, as indicated, it exists across the acts of perception through which we come to constitute it.’44 This recasts in sensory terms the premise that meaning is generated at the point of reception,45 that the meaning attached to material objects is bound up in the experiential qualia of each interactive encounter: reception is perception. Such interactive encounters might productively be figured as performances. Both museums and tourist destinations have been analysed as sites of performance, with a corresponding emphasis on the physical activities and practices conducted there, as opposed to the dynamics of spectatorship.46 While visual engagement and conscious display are undeniably components of visitor experience, the disproportionate emphasis placed on the gaze as the predominant mode of sensorial consumption has led the alternatives to atrophy; it is only quite recently that both the heritage industry and tourism studies have begun to reconsider this ocularcentric approach.47 Although Judith Adler took a crucial step in 1989 by analysing travel itself as an art-form, ‘an art that creates meaning through play with richly symbolic spaces’, she does not explore the sensory implications of this definition.48 If travel is an art, it is an art of enactment, its medium the performing body, and as such it would appear to have most in common with physical theatre, mime, or even dance. In an important position-piece from 2002, David Crouch set out to recover the ‘embodied poetics’ of tourism, arguing that ‘embodied knowledge of space . . . is profoundly different from the knowledge that is implicit in the gaze’, that the visitor’s comprehension of a location is not restricted to an appraisal of its visible features but rather incorporates an array of social and sensory transactions. As actor, rather than spectator, the visitor develops a relationship to the site which, Crouch argues, combines the material and the imaginative: ‘Embodiment presented as only a physical phenomenon is incomplete. It is necessary to relate that physicality to the imagination . . . and to a “making sense” of practice and space.’49 It is the epistemological implication of Crouch’s contention which is of most interest here, that the cognizance or knowledge acquired via the activity of attending a site (or, although Crouch does not mention museums explicitly, via exhibited object/s) depends not only on seeing but also on feeling. Under this rubric, Crouch gathers a full spectrum of (multi-)sensory and social experiences, but for the reasons outlined above, I wish to narrow its range to the 7

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

haptic and thereby to supplement his conjectures with a more detailed focus on kinaesthesia as a mode of knowing. Simon Coleman and Mark Crang, in their introduction to the volume in which Crouch’s essay appears, propose that performance shapes places as much as places stimulate performances. ‘The spaces of tourism do not comprise a Euclidian grid around which self-present actors move, but rather a crumpled space where people and events are in process.’50 In other words, we are back to Noë and Sheets-Johnstone: no space can be perceived except from a subjective standpoint, and all places – particularly the densely attended, affectively invested sites of tourism – are composed of a tissue of experiences, none of which is identical. This is not to suggest, anthropocentrically, that the Parthenon has no existence independent of human contact, but rather that any human knowledge of the structure (touristic, scientific, local, fictional) has been derived from and subsists in individual sense-experience. I have touched more than once on the way in which interactions with ancient sites and artefacts may be considered as a type of performance. Although the exchange of gazes is recognized as an important element in recasting visitors themselves as participants in a spectacle,51 these performances qua interactions do not need to be observed by anyone; indeed, the public “staging” of the encounter may take place only in its textual reconstitution after the fact. Moreover, while museums and heritage sites have been recognized as vehicles for social performances enacted in response to the quasiritual attitudes they encourage and the behavioural control they exert,52 this is not primarily the sense in which I wish to understand their performative dimension. Rather, it is with reference to the doubled identity of theatrical sets and theatrical props, the way in which material objects come to be endowed or invested with enhanced significance, as anchors for an imagined world, that ancient sites and artefacts – and their reproductions – will be analysed as components of performance. In this respect, the visitor relates to her material surroundings as an actor, not only in that she is undergoing the site as an embodied subject but also in terms of imaginative engagement. As museologist Susan Pearce remarks, ‘Collections lend themselves to make-believe and the construction of fantasies . . . In our imaginations, collections make other times and places open to us.’53 Pearce goes on to state explicitly that ‘each exhibition is a production, like a theatrical production’, although it should be noted that her approach to theatrical meaning-making is more semiotic than phenomenological,54 objects furnishing signs to be decoded rather than vectors for sense-experience. Nevertheless, the connection established by Pearce between the layout of museum displays and their epistemological function does make use, albeit implicitly, of the way kinaesthesia informs cognitive apprehension. Perceptions of the past are implicitly shaped by the arrangement of displays (linear or scattered? What is juxtaposed? What is omitted?).55 The museum visit may be approached as a form of role-play in that each exhibit compels the visitor to assume an embodied subject-position vis-à-vis the imagined past/s of which the object is an emanation, a residue. Georgina Guy identifies the features that make particular display conditions performative, as opposed to visual:56 they include duration, physical interaction, role-play and movement. Performative 8

Introduction

displays involve ‘tangible objects which . . . exceed the traditional status of the museological exhibit by incorporating durational and experiential actions’.57 Also pertinent is Nicholas Serota’s assessment of ‘the role of the curator . . . as a maker of mises-en-scène’.58 Serota, in charting the changing function of sculpture from figural to abstract to structural and finally to the installation (‘ “sculpture as place” ’),59 raises the possibility that in effect all sculpture could be regarded as a form of installation, a spatial intervention which the visitor attends as opposed to a visual image she regards. Certainly architecture preserved as artefact, the mise-en-scène of the ruin, operates in this way, its spatial ‘crumpling’ resembling the polymorphous affordances of the stage-set. The visitor becomes an actor, participating in an immersive experience that has been fashioned but not altogether determined by the curator-animateur. When the gallery is seen as equivalent to a set, the artefacts to props and the visitor to an actor, analyses of the phenomenology of theatrical performance such as those by Marvin Carlson and Bert States become intriguingly pertinent. According to Carlson’s theory of what he terms ‘haunting’, theatre operates by evoking all the prior appearances of each element in a given production. The text and its characters, the venue and the props are all enhanced by an awareness of any previous incarnations, intensifying their significance and thereby the web of connections perceived by any spectator conscious of these resonances. In the same way, museum exhibits can be experienced as haunted by their provenance, by their former contexts and former owners. This haunting, as in the theatre, is no less valid for being a product of the imagination, deriving its efficacy from the same governing principle of serial identities. Bert States makes a somewhat different argument regarding the ability of props to appear simultaneously in the literal field of the stage and in the fictional field of the dramatic scenario: the cardboard strip that is also perceived as a crown, or, more elusively, the velvet chaise-longue in a provincial church hall that is also perceived as a velvet chaise-longue in bohemian Paris. Again, it is the imagination of the actor, and to a lesser extent that of the spectator, that performs this conversion. Props, moreover, are at their most eloquent when handled, when in motion.60 Like artefacts, their function is at once literal, synecdochic and metaphorical; as Andrew Sofer remarks, ‘Props are haunted mediums . . . An object is plucked from the world and placed upon a stage, where it uncannily becomes at once itself and other than itself.’61 The traces they bear and the associations they conjure are just as integral to the ‘memory machine’ of theatre as those possessed by exhibited artefacts are to the performance of imagined historicity set in motion by the museum. If attendance at an artwork such as a sculpture or an aesthetically bracketed structure such as a ruin is considered as a performance, we could argue that the artwork itself, consisting in the embodied encounter between human actor and ‘haunted’ object, is restaged on each occasion. Like the nightly repetition of a given theatrical production, each of these performances is both unique and reproduced: the materials might be the same but their animation recurs anew. This holds true both for visitor-as-actor, whether casually improvising the scene known as the Medici Venus or playing it for the fiftieth time, and for the visitor-as-spectator, watching as those around him enact their own versions. Above all, this type of theatre is immersive, lacking a disembodied vantage 9

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

point from which one can observe without participation. Once you are in attendance, your role is cast. Taking this approach, some persistent dichotomies can be dissolved: discovery vs. cliché, original vs. copy, and authentic vs. artificial. From the point of view of performance, every encounter happens for the first time even as it also styles itself as a repetition. The narrative of being ‘first’ to appreciate the colonnade of Palmyra is as much a construct as that of ironic condescension towards tour groups in the Forum.62 The individual’s own performance even of a scene as scripted as The Colosseum By Moonlight or The Vatican By Candlelight – two stock scenes from the eighteenth-century tourist repertoire now no longer capable of being played – remains a valid, authentic and original experience: a first encounter every time, an unrepeatable work of art that happens again and again in the bodies of different actors. Authenticity is an issue that will arise throughout this book, particularly in Part 2 regarding the circulation and reproduction of antiquities, and some preliminary remarks will therefore help to frame the discussion. For Walter Benjamin, writing in 1936, an ‘authentic’ artwork is to be distinguished from its (mechanical) copies or images by virtue of ‘its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be . . . [and] the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence’.63 Benjamin’s example is ‘an ancient statue of Venus’.64 Synonymous with the artwork’s possession of this ‘authenticity’ or ‘unique existence’ or ‘essence of all that is transmissible’ is Benjamin’s term ‘aura’ (a direct translation of the German Aura); this he locates in the artwork itself, in its intrinsic identity. What Benjamin does not discuss, however, is how the statue’s aura is to be perceived or recognized, or the difference, in sensorial terms, between encountering an original and encountering a material reproduction of the artwork in the same medium.65 While I will argue that the situation of artworks is crucial to the scenes they enable visitors to play, I also propose that the impact of these scenes is not inherent in the artworks themselves. Aura, in other words, is an acquired attribute. A provocative study by Mengfei Huang has suggested that non-expert perceptions of works of art depend more on what viewers are told to expect than the artworks’ inherent characteristics.66 Participants placed in an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner were shown a series of portraits by Rembrandt and other contemporary painters of his school, labelled at random either as genuine Rembrandts or as ‘copies’. Patterns of brain activity in conjunction with follow-up interviews showed that it was the assignment of authenticity, rather than whether or not a portrait was actually by Rembrandt, which most strongly affected participants’ responses. The so-called ‘copies’ provoked critical evaluation, while the images of ‘authentic’ works were regarded as educative, to the point where some participants believed they had in fact learned to spot a fake Rembrandt on the basis of what they had seen.67 What Huang’s study lacks, of course, is precisely the three- or even four-dimensional dynamics of exhibition that for Benjamin are productive of aura; but it nevertheless relocates the definition of authenticity from the object in question to the visitor’s encounter. One can have a genuine experience in the presence of an imitation, provided one is capable of investing the imitation with authentic value, whether naively or through 10

Introduction

deliberate imaginative simulation. The actor’s tears are real, though Niobe is not. By the same token, if aura is taken to be the product of performative interactions, if its locus is shifted from the object to the delicate intersubjective rapport which is established and re-established with each visitor, then the artwork’s authenticity moves with it. The anthropocentrism of this account of contact with antiquity via antiquities may be modified by acknowledging the participation of nonhuman actants in each performance. ‘Actant’ is the term applied by neo-materialist philosopher Jane Bennett to the manifold factors impinging on a given event, operating on every scale from the atomic through the physiological, social and systemic to the macrocosmic ecologies within which all activity occurs.68 Causal responsibility, for Bennett, is dispersed across many interlocking networks, and is not the same as intent or even awareness. A trio of Rhodian sculptors carved Laocoön,69 but volcanism produced the marble millennia before, and the temporary accretion of matter that knows itself as ‘Goethe’ (for example) perceives the result in a flutter of electrochemical signals. Stone may be inanimate, as is electricity, but they are not inert. By attributing a measure of agency to nonhuman actors, Bennett dislodges the autonomous human subject from his position of assumed centrality. It is this disruption of subject/object relations that I wish to pursue in regard to predisciplinary interactions with ancient material culture. The artefact acts upon, or plays upon, the receiver as much as the receiver redefines the artefact. Sense-perception occurs which re-imprints the artefact in contemporary consciousness, reconstituting it as lived experience. The traveller is drawn to Italy by ruins, compelled to exertion, expense and even exigence in order that she may walk among them. The Colosseum has no physical need for human presence, but without human presence it would cease to be the Colosseum.70 Antiquities are performative acts. They are something which happens to and with a visitor, a collector, an artisan. As well as performative, these relationships are kinaesthetic. When we talk about embodiment, or an embodied reception, it is kinaesthesia that we mean, the sense of self-movement on which cognitive comprehension and aesthetic appreciation are founded. Kinaesthesia is a physiological given, but its specific manifestations are phenomenologically (experientially) unique, and accessible only obliquely via the accounts of the individuals concerned. Moreover, these accounts are necessarily embedded in contemporary discourses of sense-experience, which affect not only the representation but also the perception of one’s own sensory apparatus in action. For this reason, we turn now to a brief account of how touch and kinaesthesia were conceptualized in the eighteenth century via discourses of feeling, nervous sensation and aesthetic sensibility. *

*

*

The sense most commonly associated with the Enlightenment, with the crystal clarity of thought that enabled objective speculation, is vision: the sense most refined, most disembodied, most philosophical. At the same time, however, as Robert Norton points out, ‘there coexisted a subversive strain of thought . . . in which the prevailing conception of the superiority of vision was modified and eventually overturned by a re-evaluation of 11

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

the ideas we receive through our tactile sense.’71 The contribution of touch, supposedly the crudest and most carnal of the senses, to aesthetic sensibility and cognitive functioning seemed counter-intuitive, but nevertheless attracted serious consideration from philosophers and scientists investigating the relationship between sense-perception and abstract thought. Interwoven with these lines of enquiry was the common discourse of feeling, in which the physiology of the nervous system provided a new vocabulary for articulating the subjective tremors, aches, palpitations and flushes that afflicted the overstimulated body.72 As early as 1690, John Locke had proposed sense-experience including touch as the foundation of all knowledge, and it is the development of this empiricist tradition over the course of the eighteenth century that enabled the recuperation of tactility as epistemologically indispensable. In place of Descartes’ assertion that all one needs in order to exist is the mere belief in one’s existence, the motto of haptic reintegration bursts out in Johann Herder’s full-bodied cry, Ich fühle mich! Ich bin! (‘I feel! I am!’).73 Feeling – haptic sensation – could not be disregarded as the basis for rational thought if it provided the ratification of consciousness itself. Herder’s precursor Alexander Baumgarten defined aesthetics in 1750 as scientia cognitionis sensitivae, the ‘science of sensory (or “sensuous”) cognition’. Subsequently, philosophers Denis Diderot and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac would examine in greater detail the specific contribution of touch to cognitive faculties such as reason, memory, judgement and a sense of self. Condillac’s Traité des Sensations (Treatise on the Senses, 1754) performs an extraordinary thought experiment in which an initially inanimate statue is endowed with each of the five senses in turn, initially in isolation and then in various combinations: first smell, followed by hearing, taste, sight and finally touch. Condillac reflects throughout on the particular forms of knowledge which would be available under each set of sensory conditions. It is touch, he concludes, and emphatically not sight, which enables the statue to perceive that it is a solid body; that the world around it is similarly composed of solid bodies; hence that there is an external world beyond its own consciousness (something the other senses cannot independently disclose), and hence that what it has hitherto experienced as internal sensations are in fact attached to external phenomena and can therefore be manipulated as abstract ideas. It is able now to identify desiderata and act upon its desires. ‘All our cognitions come from the senses,’ states Condillac, ‘and particularly from touch, because touch is the sense which instructs all the others.’74 What distinguishes touch, according to Condillac, is the encounter between two parts of the same sensitized body: the collision of one solid object with another, hand with sternum, both of them simultaneously experienced as impermeable solids (as opposed to a single point of sensation with no reference). The hand, in a vividly sensual but curiously asexual passage, continues to explore the territory of the body: Now if the statue’s hand, in being carried from one part of the body to another, has always avoided touching the intermediary parts, it will find itself in each part as in so many different bodies and it will not yet know that altogether these parts form one body . . . But should it happen to run its hand along its arm and over its 12

Introduction

head &c without taking its hand off, then it will feel, to put it briefly, a continuity of itself under its hand.75 The hand is Condillac’s primary sense organ;76 it does not occur to him, for instance, that a foot might kick an ankle, a forearm brush against the ribs or one thigh rest on another. Although mentioning it briefly, Condillac understates the role of movement. The statue, like an infant, must learn by trial, error and repetition ‘how to guide its hand so as to put it on one part of the body, rather than another . . . [It] will form by degrees a habit of movements . . . Then it will be moved by its will’77 This connection of desire with outcome not only leads the statue to recognize cause and effect, but also endows it with a comprehension of agency, of volition. Whereas previously it had simply accepted incoming sensations as a passive recipient, it now begins actively to seek out new stimuli. Until ‘instructed’ by touch, Condillac argues, the eyes alone cannot perceive spatial relations, distance or depth, nor distinguish separate objects, nor even move themselves in order to focus correctly. The untouched world would appear as a film of flat colours, shapeless, indistinguishable from a mental image. Only after an empirical integration of sight and touch does Condillac’s statue learn to associate visual data with its physical affordances: how close, deep, large and/or fast the objects around it might be. However, as Condillac remarks, ‘It has become so natural for us to judge size, shape, distance, and situation by means of sight that we have some trouble in persuading ourselves that it is only a habit due to experience.’78 Citing the already-famous ‘Molyneux’s question’ – whether a congenitally blind individual whose sight was restored as an adult would be able to distinguish a cube from a sphere by vision alone – Condillac endorses John Locke’s negative conclusion, and indeed goes further, arguing that the newly sighted individual would be incapable not only of perceiving shapes but also the relative size, distance and possibly even the very presence of the objects without the mediation of touch. Molyneux’s question had recently been taken up by Diderot in his 1749 ‘Letter on the blind for the use of those who can see’, the first major philosophical backlash against ocularcentrism. Diderot speculates, on the basis of interviews with congenitally blind individuals, that material encounters via senses other than sight – and primarily touch – generate alternative modes of knowledge, a thought-world comprised of spatial relationships and tactile qualities without the interference of colour and light. Sight, for the blind, is for Diderot reconfigured as a form of touch which can extend to objects out of immediate reach. When asked if he would like to be sighted, Diderot’s blind interlocutor replies that he would prefer to have extremely long arms, as his hands would enable him to discover ‘more of what goes on in the moon than your eyes or your telescopes’.79 The acuity of tactile judgement is borne out in other anecdotes in which counterfeit coins and flawed pigments are identified by means of textural anomalies invisible to the eye.80 Moreover, the blind possess a superior memory for spatial layout and the placement of objects, and such sensitivity to currents of air that they can distinguish a narrow passage from an open space and perceive other people approaching. 13

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

The greatest advantage of blindness according to Diderot, however, is the facility it confers for conceptualizing abstract mathematical relationships, particularly geometric (as in calculus). Without having to ‘visualize’ them, the blind mathematician applies ‘such sensation as one derives from touch’ to his or her mental manipulation of figures solid or numerical. Diderot is fascinated by how this thought-world presents itself: ‘Was her [Mlle. de Salignac’s] cube formed from memories of sensations of touch? Had her brain become, as it were, a hand within which sensations were realised . . . What is the imagination of a blind man?’81 He conjectures furthermore that everyone possesses the capacity for haptic recall, hence haptic imagination, but that in sighted individuals it tends to be overridden by the accompanying visual impressions. A world conceived entirely through touch (supplemented, of course, by sound), however, enables a different array of simulations perceived in a different relationship to the embodied self. The study of aesthetics in regard to the mechanisms of perception intersected with the study of aesthetics as the analysis of taste; that is, how and why human beings perceive some phenomena as beautiful, particularly works of art, and particularly works of ancient Greek art. The solution proposed by William Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty (1753) was that beautiful objects possess what he termed the ‘line of beauty’ or, if applied to three-dimensional forms, the ‘line of grace’, an S-shaped ‘serpentine’ curve. In order to translate this line into three dimensions, Hogarth recommends envisaging ‘a fine wire, properly twisted round the elegant and varied figure of a cone’.82 The shape occurs naturally, in vegetation and the musculature of the human body, but its most exemplary manifestation is in the cornucopia. From a plane to a solid, the line of grace can be translated furthermore into ‘serpentine movements’. Its path, in other words, can be described in space, as when dancing a minuet, in which the ‘undulating’ step along with ‘the turns of the head, and twists of the body in passing each other, as also gentle bowing and presenting hands . . . display the greatest variety of movements in serpentine lines imaginable’.83 Hogarth is convinced that this principle accounts for ‘that peculiar taste of elegance’ inherent in Graeco-Roman sculpture ‘down to the most incorrect of their basso-relievos’. Their aesthetic appeal is ‘entirely owing to the perfect knowledge the ancients must have had of the use of the precise serpentine line’.84 His essay is addressed both to artists wishing to manufacture beautiful works and connoisseurs wishing to crack the secret of the beautiful, thereby rendering their aesthetic pleasure explicable and conferring a more authoritative – a scientific – method of discrimination. It is also addressed exclusively to the eye, which Hogarth calls ‘the great inlet of beauty’; the potential for taking kinaesthetic, as opposed to spectatorial pleasure in the performance of a minuet, remains unrecognized. In remarking that ‘the eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers’, whose meandering ‘leads the eye on a wanton kind of chase’,85 this latent possibility of haptic involvement is not pursued. The line of beauty is defined as a source of pleasure without attributing this pleasurable feeling to any sense other than vision. Edmund Burke, on the other hand, in differentiating between the effects of the beautiful and the effects of the ‘sublime’, has recourse to the haptic throughout his Enquiry (1757) even when ostensibly concerned with other sensory modalities. Unlike beauty, 14

Introduction

which ‘acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system’ and produces a state of pleasure in which the subject feels ‘softened, relaxed, enervated, dissolved, melted away’,86 sublimity (or greatness)87 has the opposite effect, provoking a frisson of horror by simulating proximity to pain or death. Sublimity results in muscular tension, alertness and affective responses such as shock, astonishment and awe. ‘The idea of suffering must always be prevalent’;88 when confronted by a phenomenon with the capacity to cause us physical harm – a sheer cliff, a conflagration, a tiger – or simply with evidence of power greater than our own, provided we are in no immediate danger, we are able to relish its painful or deadly potential. The prospect of infinity also has a sublime impact, either when realized in uniformity and vastness, such as the ocean or the night sky, or as a seemingly endless succession of identical stimuli such as the ticking of a clock or a row of Doric columns. These apparently visual and aural manifestations of sublimity, however, are argued by Burke to have a haptic foundation when it comes to producing their felt effect on the perceiver. In order to take in a large expanse, the ‘fine nerves and muscles’ which control the motion of the eyes ‘must be very much strained; and their great sensibility must make them highly affected by this straining’, thereby associating vastness with a species of actual pain, sustained exertion. The nerves of the eyes, Burke argues, are similarly strained by the effort to penetrate darkness, contributing likewise to the (sublime) state of tension and uneasiness produced by dim light. Sound can also be ‘brought just to the verge of pain’ if its vibrations against the eardrum are too powerful or too frequent.89 It is not simply the anticipation of imagined suffering, then, which produces the sensations of the sublime, but the physiological tension in our organs of perception as they are beaten or stretched or otherwise set in violent motion by the magnitude of certain stimuli. Beauty, however, charms and soothes. Its essential textural quality, which Burke regards as pertaining across all sensory modalities, is smoothness: seal pelts, verdant slopes, powdered skin, polished wood. In terms of shape, Burke concurs with Hogarth that beauty inheres in undulation, gradual variance, and ‘gentle oscillatory motion’, but probes further into the reasons why these qualities should be conducive to ‘that sinking, that melting, that languor, which is the characteristical effect of the beautiful’. Beauty’s key feature is that it encourages relaxation, the opposite of the nervous agitation provoked by the sublime: Now with respect to the sense of feeling, there can be no doubt that bodies which are rough and angular, rouse and vellicate the organs of feeling, causing a sense of pain, which consists in the violent tension or contraction of the muscular fibres. On the contrary, the application of smooth bodies relax [sic]; gentle stroking with a smooth hand allays violent pains and cramps, and relaxes the suffering parts from their unnatural tension . . . The sense of feeling is highly gratified with smooth bodies.90 In a remarkable analogy, Burke even proposes that the sense of taste is similarly gratified. Sugar crystals, he speculates, are experienced as sweet because they are spherical, so 15

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

rolling them on the tongue resembles, on a microscopic level, marbles rolled around in the hand. Nothing, he reflects, is ‘so pleasant to the touch as several globes . . . and that pleasure is greatly increased if the globes are in motion, and sliding over one another’.91 Sweetness is thus co-opted as another form of smoothness, and the taste of beauty assimilated, like the sight and sound of sublimity, to a haptic register. The sublime remained a dominant criterion of aesthetic evaluation into the nineteenth century, but was given a self-conscious twist into the concept of the picturesque. As articulated by William Gilpin in his essays ‘On picturesque beauty’ and ‘On picturesque travel’ (1792), the term denotes ‘such objects as are proper subjects for painting’, and for this reason retains an essentially visual prejudice. In a picturesque scene, it is necessary that elements of beauty and sublimity be combined; total regularity, total smoothness, is inimical. As such, ruins provide particular scope for this type of aesthetic experience, although Gilpin’s taste runs more to Gothic abbeys than pagan temples. Nevertheless, the ideology of the picturesque substantially informed not only the depiction of classical sites but also the way in which visitors prepared to approach them. Although the focus of the present study largely excludes painting and the visual arts, it should be noted that on-site sketching and drawing played a crucial role in tourist experience. Anticipation of picturesque vistas, and deliberate traversal of a site in order specifically to locate such an orientation, shaped the visitor’s quest for what Gilpin calls ‘the deliquium of the soul’ resulting from moments of aesthetic gratification. ‘The first source of amusement to the picturesque traveller,’ Gilpin writes, is the pursuit of his object – the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to his view. We suppose the country to have been unexplored. Under this circumstance the mind is kept constantly in an agreeable suspence . . . Every distant horizon promises something new; and with this pleasing expectation we follow nature through all her walks.92 Picturesque travel, in other words, is a restless, roving point of view in search of paths previously untrodden and prospects previously unseen. Motion plays a role, but its objective is primarily visual. Less concerned than Burke and even than Hogarth with the mechanisms of perception or the reasons why certain configurations of matter might appeal, Gilpin’s is a practical guide to training ‘the picturesque eye’ with a view to tasteful artistic (re)composition. Gotthold Lessing’s essay Laocoön (1766) takes the sculptural group of the same name as a point of departure for distinguishing between the techniques conducive to depicting beauty in the visual arts and those appropriate to poetry. Beautiful bodies, Lessing suggests, are difficult to represent poetically because ‘the co-existence of the physical object comes into collision with the consecutiveness of speech’,93 and if all contributory components must be enumerated, the result is a catalogue, not a coherent entity. Poetry is the medium of movement and action, of beauty in motion: Reiz (grace) ist Schönheit in Bewegung, and it is the smile on the lips, the glance of the eyes, the rise and fall of breath in the bosom that constitute, for Lessing, poetic beauty.94 Painting and sculpture, 16

Introduction

on the other hand, can only suggest the duration of action through the positioning of bodies in a moment of beautiful crisis. Goethe, in his own essay on the Laocoön group (1798), points out that the serpents have successfully immobilized their victims without at first harming them, and it is Laocoön’s sudden recoil from the bite that has produced the tableau.95 In order to perceive ‘a sense of movement’, Goethe recommends rapidly opening and closing your eyes to generate the illusion that the figures have only just arrived in their respective positions. This shutter-like blink, although different from the steady fascination of Lessing’s gaze, restores a sense of continuity to the sculpture’s isolated moment. Lessing is less secure in his sensory modalities when it comes to theatre. A practising dramatist, he picks apart the comparison earlier drawn by Winckelmann between Laocoön and Sophocles’ Philoctetes.96 The sculpted Laocoön, he argues, cannot raise clamores horrendos like his Virgilian counterpart, as this would entail facial distortions grotesque rather than pitiable if addressed to the eyes. Should the same not also apply to Philoctetes’ scripted shrieks of pain, which are not merely registered in poetic language, but rendered altogether literal by the actor? Here, Lessing takes issue with the remarks of Adam Smith, for whom the sobbing Philoctetes is despicable rather than sympathetic. ‘These attempts to excite compassion by the representation of bodily pain, may be regarded as among the greatest breaches of decorum of which the Greek theatre has set the example,’ Smith writes,97 maintaining that pain and other physical conditions such as hunger or sexual arousal do not automatically awaken sympathetic resonance in an observer. Much more moving, according to Smith, is the suppression of suffering, which permits the observer to imagine his own response to the circumstances which have caused it. On this point, Lessing concurs; it is Philoctetes’ situation – his isolation, his betrayal, his ‘otherwise steadfast bearing’ in intolerable adversity – that licenses his breakdown. None of this, however, could be encapsulated in a visual image. Immobilized in stone, a stricken Philoctetes would indeed repel, but embedded in drama, in motion, his suffering moves us to tears. For David Hume, writing in 1751, sympathy has distinctly kinetic effects. ‘Our breast heaves, our heart is agitated, and every humane tender principle of our frame is set in motion’ when we are confronted by the pain of others.98 This anticipated responsion informed the interrelated concepts of sympathy, sentiment and sensibility which featured, as John Mullan has shown, in mid-century novels and the associated critical discourse. ‘Sentiment,’ Mullan observes, ‘displays itself in a repertoire of conventionally involuntary signs – tears, sighs, palpitations. These signs of sensibility . . . are the most obviously distinct features of “sentimental” writing. One might call them symptoms.’99 By mid-century, the ‘hydraulic’ model of nerves as hollow tubes conveying ‘animal spirits’ to the muscles had been supplanted, as Joseph Roach has shown, by the idea of the nerves as strings, sensation resulting from the vibrations passing through them, analogous to the acoustical vibration of a stringed instrument.100 Sensibility, or the faculty of feeling, registered responses both to physical stimuli and to affective or ‘sentimental’ provocation. Indeed, the two were inseparable. Any impact on the nervous system, whether the actual shock of a thunderclap or the imagined caress of a fictional seducer, had psychosomatic 17

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

consequences. Immaterial ideas could thereby cause trembling in the muscles, or dilation of facial capillaries, via a chain reaction of minute vibrations transmitted by the nerves. Aesthetic encounters, then, acted on the physiology of the reader, consumer, visitor, collector or traveller through a process conceived in terms of movement. To be touched is to experience both a form of contact and an apprehension of poignance; to feel is to be plunged into pleasure or pain, whether haptic or emotional. To be moved, however, or to be stirred, is perhaps the deepest of the affective metaphors, arising from the essential sense of the embodied self which is kinaesthesia.

18

PART ONE APPROACHES

Part 1 sets up a series of programmatic touchstones to which we will return throughout. Each chapter functions as a reference point for identifying the role of kinaesthesia in classical reception. Chapter 1 examines the performance art of Emma Hamilton, whose tableaux vivants, created in the 1790s in response to South Italian red-figure vases, represent an alternative way of ‘owning’ and ‘knowing’ material culture. In place of the static collection or the flattened catalogue, her embodiment of the figures depicted on ancient pottery internalizes their physical characteristics, reinventing them in the process. I argue that far from being viewed as the passive plaything of her husband, Emma should be reassessed as a skilled cross-modal translator of ancient culture in her own right, and her choreographic fluency can be recuperated as the period’s instance par excellence of sensuous cognition. In Chapter 2, the focus shifts from practice to theory and two key essays on sculpture by Johann Gottfried Herder (1769 and 1778, respectively).1 Herder builds up a finegrained argument for treating sculpture – specifically classical sculpture – as an art-form most fully experienced not via the sense of vision but via the sense of touch (Gefühl). For Herder, however, ‘touch’ is not tactile, and does not involve literally running one’s hands over an artwork, but rather is realized in a whole-body sense that allows the visitor to perceive the work as a three-dimensional entity. I show how Herder’s ‘sense of touch’ anticipates recent formulations of embodied cognition, and suggest it provides a paradigm for haptic reception not only of sculpture but of all material artefacts. Moving from vases, to sculpture, to architecture, Chapter  3 presents a reading of Charlotte Eaton’s travelogue-guidebook Rome in the Nineteenth Century (1820). This introduces another important strand, namely the theatrical aspect of haptic reception. We have already touched on performance per se in relation to Emma Hamilton, but Eaton’s treatment of the sites she visits enables tourist activity also to be encompassed within the performative domain. For Eaton, movement through and around ancient sites, including tactile interactions, connects directly with her capacity for imagining – that is, simulating – their corresponding occupation in antiquity, which in turn informs her interpretation of the ruins in their capacity as vessels or vehicles for moving bodies. Eaton is fully aware of the inauthenticity of her conjectures, but like an actor fully aware that her set is a fabrication, she nevertheless enters wholeheartedly into the illusion of perceiving in place of the ruin the historical setting it represents. No account of haptic reception would be complete without Goethe’s exploration of Rome as an erotic topography which the narrator of the Roman Elegies, published in 1795,2 learns to ‘see with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand’. As Goethe casts a contemporary love affair in the tropes of Latin love elegy, he fuses the pursuit of sexual desire with a deepening passion for the city itself, poetic tribute figured as a re-enactment 19

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

of ancient practice. Chapter 4 focuses on movement in the Roman Elegies, both as an aspect of the narrator’s (re)performance, and metapoetically as inextricable from sound. No sound can occur without movement, and vice versa. For Goethe, the sonic fabric of the Roman Elegies, its rhythm and its onomatopoeia, is crafted in and out of bodily motion. Taken together, these paradigmatic approaches make manifest the inescapable contribution of kinaesthetic experience to perceptions of antiquity. Although the classical past had a particular value and valence for its recipients in the late eighteenth century, any historical period may of course be similarly accessed via kinetic interaction with its material remains, that is, not by simply presenting objects to the gaze but by making them explicitly available as stimuli for movement. Movement internalizes and personalizes. It translates object into subject while avoiding crude assimilation. Goethe is entirely aware that he is not Propertius; Emma is entirely aware that she is not Agrippina, Charlotte Eaton that she is not Cicero, and yet by adapting their own physical (kinaesthetic) selves to the stimuli of ruins and vases in a manner contrary to the everyday, each visitor temporarily occupies a different (version of their own) body. The kinaesthetic relationship is always performative – for the duration of the encounter, you are not yourself, but at the same time, you are not not yourself3 – but need not involve pretence. Herder, for example, trains the gallery visitor to feel a form of sensory heightening and aesthetic absorption without necessarily assuming a specific role. Nevertheless, in all four instances, it is the recipient who undergoes a transformation, as opposed to the artefact, and this transformation has its roots in kinaesthesia.

20

CHAPTER 1 EMMA HAMILTON’S ATTITUDES

In the stillness between two waves of movement, the arrest of arrival is inseparable from the gathering of preparation. Her stillness is a skilful illusion. There is a paradoxical interplay involved in the representation of marble draperies by billowing scarves and lifelike stone by immobilized flesh. It might look easy, this (re)pose, but holding oneself in graceful stasis takes sustained and considerable effort. Stretched out on the ground on her side, one knee slightly bent, both arms cradling a vase – antique? – too fragile to support her weight, neck twisted back so her swimming gaze is averted away down the length of her body, Agrippina mourns the death of Germanicus (cover illustration).1 Her tragic collapse is reminiscent, perhaps, of tragedienne Mlle Clairon’s innovative swoon as Electra, managing to fall full-length while retaining a firm grip on Orestes’ funeral urn.2 It is 1791, and the performer in this case is Emma Hamilton, talented and scandalous wife of Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples.3 While Sir William collected tangible objects – most notably Greek vases, but also coins, intaglios, paintings, miniature bronzes and geological specimens4  – Emma absorbed her antiquity via a different modality. In response to the ancient artefacts around her, primarily the figured vases, Emma practised a conscious adoption of physical attitudes, mirroring the female figures depicted in such a way as to render them recognizable characters from myth. Contemporaries regularly chose to characterize her as a prize acquisition, Sir William himself describing her as a ‘delightful object’ and other men seeing in her the embodiment of all his antiquities or his ‘gallery of statues’.5 The tendency has unfortunately trickled down into modern scholarship. Many studies of Emma’s Attitudes approach them from a spectatorial point of view, explicitly or implicitly endorsing what Gail Marshall calls the ‘impulse to Pygmalionism’ which casts Emma as passive material and Sir William as its animateur.6 This essentially Cartesian interpretation cleaves the bodily realization of the Attitudes away from their intellectual conception, endowing Sir William with creative responsibility while Emma remains his (our) exhibit. Instead, I suggest that Emma’s performances constituted a point of reception in their own right, and that recovering them in terms of kinaesthesia as opposed to spectacle sets up an alternative, haptic paradigm for interaction with ancient material culture. *

*

*

The Attitudes were first developed between 1786 and 1787, and Emma continued to perform them throughout the 1790s. Swathed in one or more floor-length shawls, she would adopt a sequence of iconic poses recognizable as belonging to figures from art or mythology. Each individual pose remained static, but the fluent transitions from one Attitude to another rendered each performance overall, each montage, a form of dance. 21

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

As well as involving more or less energetic gyrations, dance can also take place in stillness.7 The diversity of the passions assumed by Emma’s face and body was equally skilful. Her distilled realization of character (ēthos) and emotion (pathos) combined to evoke a medley of contrasting scenarios. As well as the historical personae such as Agrippina, the figures embodied by Emma included tragic heroines such as Medea or Cassandra, and generic types such as ‘a bacchante’ or ‘a water nymph’.8 Not all were classical; her repertoire, referencing Renaissance art, also included Mary Magdalene and other canonical saints. It may even have included male characters, although the evidence for this is flimsy.9 Among the specific roles mentioned by those who attended her recitals, she is recorded as playing Niobe and Galatea, both peculiarly apposite to her art-form. By the mid-eighteenth century, the sea nymph Galatea had lent her name to Pygmalion’s ivory beloved, an association unlikely to have escaped Emma’s contemporaries, especially in a context reliant on the effective identification of woman and statue. Niobe’s imminent petrification likewise resonates as she becomes Galatea’s tragic double, a figure in whom the process of metamorphic animation is reversed. The earliest account of Emma’s Attitudes is also one of the most detailed. Poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited Naples in the spring of 1787, later related his impressions of Emma’s performance in his Italienische Reise (Italian Journey): Dressed in this [Greek costume], she lets down her hair, and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety (Abwechslung) to her poses, gesture, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes (man zuletzt wirklich meint, man träume). He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations (Bewegung und überraschender Abwechslung) – standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break (eins folgt aufs andere und aus dem andern). She knows how to arrange her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress.10 Although Goethe’s is necessarily the perspective of a spectator, a number of the features he identifies can also be examined for their contribution to the performer’s own experience. The use of costume was evidently integral. As a precursor to the fashion for white muslin in Napoleonic Europe,11 Emma garbed herself in clothing specially made for the purpose, intended as a direct replication of the images on Sir William’s Greek vases. It seems also to have been mediated by figures in artwork from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of course by sculpture. In any case, Emma’s shawls, her drapery, required manipulation as skilful as that of her deportment and expression if the fabric was to contribute, as Goethe suggests, to conveying a desired emotional condition. Goethe also stresses the variety (Abwechslung) of the portrayals, repeating the word as if to underscore this defining property. Metamorphic plasticity is indicated by the observation that eins folgt aufs andere und aus dem andern (‘each one follows on into another and out of another’), perhaps producing the disorienting, dreamlike effect (man 22

Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

träume) of a body destabilized, able to pour itself into any shape. Each pose seems to emerge with apparent inevitability from its precursor before melting again and reforming, creating a sense of fluidity.12 Standing, kneeling, sitting, lying, Emma flows downwards, each station of her controlled descent suffused with a different passion. Goethe’s catalogue has no apparent emotional logic, and perhaps this virtuosic ‘variety’ is precisely the point. It recalls Diderot’s admiration for English actor David Garrick, whose partypiece consisted of running his face through a rapid succession of violent, decontextualized emotions.13 Garrick and Emma appear together in a drawing purportedly depicting amateur theatricals at Uppark, the estate of Emma’s former lover.14 Whether or not they actually met, Emma would almost certainly have watched Garrick onstage.15 Her transformations occur without preamble; they are for Goethe überraschend, which may refer to the rapidity of the transition but more probably signals once again the contrived contrast between ecstasy and contrition, menace and fear. Unlike subsequent witnesses to the Attitudes, Goethe does not mention any specific characters, focusing instead on the extraordinary versatility of the performer. Goethe’s Emma is the aspiration of artists (Künstler), the live expression of forms they dream of capturing on two-dimensional canvas. The association of Attitudes with painting is one important aspect of their embodied reception of antiquity. Goethe would later describe tableaux vivants as ‘a hybrid of painting (Malerei) and theatre’.16 It appears from another passage in the Italienische Reise that the Attitudes were indeed originally conceived for a more explicitly pictorial setting. In the store-room containing Sir William’s private treasures, Goethe is shown an upright cabinet, painted black inside and ‘large enough to hold a standing human figure’. It is framed like a picture with a heavy gold frame. Its purpose was to display Emma more overtly as ‘an inimitable painting; and so, standing against this black background in dresses of various colours, she had sometimes imitated the antique paintings of Pompeii or even more recent masterpieces’. Goethe then goes on to remark that ‘This phase, it seems, is now over’.17 If it was already over by the spring of 1787, it must have been one of Emma’s earliest experiments with re-creating ancient artworks in a new medium, and suggests a progression from painting to sculpture as her primary reference point. Previously known to Sir William from her appearances as a model in George Romney’s classical paintings, some of which he already owned or had commissioned,18 Emma expanded his collection in a virtual sense by posing live in this specially constructed frame. As the apparatus proved cumbersome to move and difficult to light, however, it was rapidly dispensed with.19 Liberated from the gilded casket, Emma brought her Attitudes out into the threedimensional air of the salon, and began discovering new applications for her mimetic talent. The precise genesis of the Attitudes remains obscure, but this is a more plausible sequence of events than those which insist on Sir William’s sole Pygmalionic agency and in doing so pass over the vital intermediate step of Goethe’s gold-framed box.20 Emma’s former career as a model for mythological and allegorical painting is sometimes (but not always) acknowledged as a significant factor in the development of the Attitudes.21 Between 1782 and 1786 she became the particular muse of George Romney, for whom she modelled more than sixty times, rarely depicted in propria 23

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

persona but rather in a range of roles, classical and otherwise. As Circe, as Cassandra, as a Bacchante, Medea and Thetis, Emma provided Romney with the anatomical, physiognomic and sartorial substance of his compositions. Artists such as Tischbein, Rehberg and Vigée Le Brun subsequently depicted Emma’s Attitudes in paint or other media. Although pointing out the similarity between posing for a painter and posing for spectators, historian David Constantine is reluctant to credit Emma with accomplishing the transition herself. He shifts sole responsibility away from Sir William only to pass over Emma altogether and instead appoint George Romney as the obligatory craftsmanfigure behind the living statue.22 Evidently, one way or another, Emma still needs a Pygmalion. If, on the other hand, we approach the Attitudes from Emma’s own standpoint, the continuity is obvious and the need for Sir William’s input to constitute anything more creative than patronage evaporates. He may indeed have desired to watch his exquisite mistress, this new acquisition, this ‘object’, undulating through role after role clad only in the clinging folds of his favourite Herculaneum frieze, but desire is not execution. ‘ “Let us assume, then, that he coached her,” ’ reiterates Lori-Anne Touchette, quoting from Flora Fraser’s 1986 biography of Emma.23 This unnecessary assumption, however, although it conforms to the familiar contours of the Pygmalion paradigm, is not in fact warranted by any contemporary accounts and underrates not only Emma’s own abilities but also the cognitive value of her act of reception.24 As Jean-George Noverre’s 1760 Letters on Ballet emphasize, to be an effective choreographer, capable of suiting gestures to character and emotion so as to be recognizable but not trite, impassioned but sincere, exaggerated but still natural, was a skilled profession; and although a renowned polymath, Sir William is not otherwise noted as a maître de danse. Between reading Lucian’s peri Orchēseōs in Greek and realizing its precepts in action there lies a considerable gulf. The connection to Roman pantomime identified by Touchette and Lada-Richards need not be attenuated, however. The symbiosis of visual arts and theatre during this period, especially the representation of passion in history painting and in drama or ballet with classical themes, provides sufficient basis for the connection, with Emma as the locus of a particularly wellinformed (even over-determined) realization. Artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who visited the Hamiltons in 1790 and painted Emma as a Sibyl, a Bacchante and Ariadne, attributes Emma’s skill in incarnating Grecian figures to her apprenticeship with Romney, but at the same time stresses Emma’s own creative innovation. ‘He had her adopt a thousand graceful poses [attitudes], which he pinned down in his paintings. It is there that she perfected her talent for the new art-form that made her famous.’25 Emma’s celebrity, for Vigée Le Brun, is predicated on her own ability, inventiveness, and audacity in converting the unrecognized virtuosity of the artist’s model into a performance in its own right. Elle perfectionna ce talent: during hours of establishing and holding what were deemed evocative positions, Emma became fluent in the body language of history painting, seizing the opportunity in Romney’s studio to refine aptitude into craft by dint of constant practice. It may not have been her first training experience, either. According to Vigée Le Brun, during her period of service 24

Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

Figure 1 George Romney, ‘Lady Hamilton as Medea’ (c. 1786). Norton Simon Museum (F 1965 1058P) © Norton Simon Foundation.

with a theatrical family Emma had ‘studied the gestures, the vocal inflection of the actors, and rendered them with prodigious facility’.26 Acting fed into modelling, which in turn fed into the Attitudes. In Romney’s paintings, Emma displays not only facial expressiveness but also a coherence in the disposition of torso and limbs, angle of head, placement of weight, position of hands and direction of gaze in order to render Circe suitably imperious, the Bacchante wanton, Cassandra haunted. These poses, these extended performances of stillness giving the illusion of interrupted movement, capture iconic points in their respective narratives. As Medea (Figure 1), Emma whips her head around, startled, to fix her gaze on something just behind the viewer. Her upper body, meanwhile, flinches protectively away. Her fingers are elongated, crooked like talons, but she seems to be cradling something invisible against her breast. Face, shoulder and eloquent hands float in the darkness. She might have been shielding a child from some impending horror, but there is no child, only a darker patch of shadow. Caught between the spectral approach of her revenge and the absent infant still shaping her embrace, Emma’s Medea is eerily transfixed. Or perhaps, resolved on murder (those skeletal, claw-like hands suggest), she has been recalled to conscience by children’s voices. Or contemplating Jason’s doom, she 25

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

realizes what will harm him most. Something, at any rate, is coming for her. Her hand, apparently of its own volition, beckons. This is not the expansive, heroic Medea of tragic actress Sarah Siddons as depicted in prints of her famous performance,27 tugging herself violently in two, fists clenched, defying the gods, but a Medea more intimately wounded, caressing her pain. Both Siddons and Emma are enacting a decisive moment in the drama, and although Siddons’ medium involves the integration of image and text (she is supported by a gloss below the plate, quoting line and scene), Emma’s non-verbal ultralong-exposure performances similarly participate in reinscribing a particular conceptualization of classical mythology. What, then, is gained by embodiment, by enactment? What more is known about (say) Medea by those who have lent her their bodies than by those who have looked at the pictures? Practitioner-theorists of reception such as Jane Montgomery Griffiths and Stephe Harrop dicussing the phenomenology of performance have shown that both character in the abstract and text on the page acquire different valences for the performer who must wrestle with accommodating them to her own physicality.28 Potential hardens into substance, conjecture to statement, langue into parole; each instance, each ‘utterance’ of Medea, whether verbal like Siddons’ or non-verbal like Emma’s, is the result of complex decision-making, the ruthless, partly intuitive, partly contingent foreclosure of options.29 Emma’s Medea turns her head, thus. Her hands curl, thus – and not otherwise. What she knows now, what you and I and Sarah Siddons do not, is how it feels to curl (but not clench) Medea’s empty hands in such a way. Unfortunately, Emma left no first-person accounts of being inside the Attitudes. Unlike Siddons, whose Memoirs detail the sympathy she cultivated in order to inhabit roles such as Lady Macbeth, Emma is silent about the degree to which emotional identification informed her performances. Recovery of any subjective insights her practice may have yielded must therefore be based on the circumstantial evidence of external depiction in conjunction with relevant findings regarding the cognitive effects of movement. Here we might draw on the observations of Rick Kemp regarding the psychosomatic alteration undergone by the performer when accommodating unfamiliar physicalities. Kemp’s contention that ‘using postures and gestures that are different from those we employ in everyday life is likely to create an altered sense of self ’ applies not only to a general, uninflected expansion of kinetic options but also, I would argue, to the dynamics of the specific relationship between the performer and the character she is conceiving.30 In Emma’s case, these characters consist either of fictional incarnations such as Medea or of anonymous roles based on iconographic types: the Dancer, the Bacchante, the Mourner. Even these more generic roles, however, involve the physiological conceptualization of women’s activity in an imagined ancient world. In bringing antiquity alive for her spectators, Emma’s Attitudes also reformulated it in a deeply private way within her own nervous system, a reformulation that could not occur without the sensorimotor feedback from limbs and skin interacting with ceramic and cloth and air. The Attitudes also represent an instance where we can apply Sheets-Johnstone’s theory of kinaesthetic epistemology, ‘making sense of ourselves and the world through movement’,31 to the particular category of sense-making known as classical reception. 26

Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

Poet Ted Hughes once remarked that ‘between the sitting or standing person and that same person dancing there gapes an immense biological gulf . . . The familiar person becomes, in a flash, an entirely different animal with entirely different body chemistry, brain rhythms and physiological awareness.’32 Hughes may be somewhat overstating the biological variance, but phenomenologically his account accords with Kemp’s: the body which, like Emma’s, puts itself through the arduous process of assimilating an alien manner of moving, especially if this transformation is in response to an external stimulus – in Hughes’ case, to poetry, but in Emma’s, to images – defamiliarizes its own substance. Jane Montgomery Griffiths has likewise discussed the process whereby the actor coming to grips with her character ‘both objectifies herself and reconfigures herself in a new subjectivity that is not hers’.33 Although Emma’s characters speak no dramatic text, they are nonetheless manifestations of the ‘besideness’ which Griffiths identifies as the performer’s phenomenological condition, the coexistence and interpenetration of source (script, picture, pot) and embodied self. Both are modified in the encounter. The other ancient source, albeit immaterial, utilized in Emma’s Attitudes was the dance form known as Graeco-Roman tragic pantomime (orchēsis), a form of solo storytelling through movement. More than one scholar has noted the correspondences:34 its plastic quality and resemblance of sculpture, the alternation of rapid motion with iconic poses, the transformations of character within one body, and the integral use of a scarf or shawl. For Lori-Ann Touchette, this correspondence is indicative of Sir William’s intervention, as his knowledge of textual accounts of pantomime such as Lucian’s dialogue On the Dance would have enabled him to coach Emma in the form.35 As already noted, however, there is a crucial difference between factual and embodied knowledge. Possessing the awareness that that such an art-form once existed is quite distinct from possessing the ability to put it into practice. A much more plausible route for Emma to have come into contact with ancient pantomime is via its revival on the contemporary stage. Far from an antiquarian cul-de-sac, orchēsis in the late eighteenth century was providing the inspiration for innovations in theatrical expression, feeding most directly into the development of ballet d’action but also heavily influencing popular derivations such as melodrama, and informing the portrayal of the passions in scripted drama and opera. According to Edward Nye, Lucian’s On the Dance was so widely cited that it became ‘almost a cliché’ among those who sought to elevate ballet into an independent art-form, particularly in the 1770s and 1780s as Jean-Georges Noverre’s Lettres sur le danse acquired canonical status.36 Ballets d’action or narrative ballets were popular throughout Europe, often performed alongside opera.37 David Garrick, whose physically expressive style of acting employed a similar vocabulary of gesture, was instrumental in integrating mime technique into text-based theatre as well as ballet. Emma would almost certainly have attended performances of this type in London while working at Drury Lane and sitting for Romney, as well as in Italy, where she was herself receiving dancing lessons from an Italian ballet instructor.38 Ballets d’action exhibited with particular intensity the prevailing association between theatre and the visual arts. This association was predicated on the premise that the attributes of beauty (or grace) and the physiology of the passions pertained across both media. Visual 27

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

artists were encouraged to study the deportment of actors, and actors to study the anatomical composition of sculpted or painted figures.39 The stage was treated as a pictorial art-form. Goethe in his ‘Rules for Actors’ writes that ‘the stage should be seen as a bare tableau in which the actors supply the living figures’.40 The actor should not step forward of the proscenium, as this would break up the effect of a single canvas shifting from one attractive grouping to another. Similarly, at the level of the individual actor’s body, manuals of gesture recommended that performances be choreographed throughout so as to appear at the same time graceful – that is, conforming to Hogarthian curves – and emotionally meaningful. This form of body language possessed no unspoken subtleties, no tics or twitches betraying interior conflict. Rather, it strove for an absolute unimpeded clarity of physical expression which would at the same time neutralize idiosyncratic behaviours and their off-putting triviality. The lineaments of the passions, as rendered in visual art and in pantomime ancient and modern, were distinct and readily legible. Gilbert Austin, for example, in his Chironomia of 1806, instructs his readers that ‘Grief arising from sudden and afflicting intelligence’ – such as Niobe’s bereavement, illustrated in Rehberg’s plate 12 – ‘covers the eyes with one hand, advances forwards, and throws back the other hand’. Shame, meanwhile, a variation on which is exhibited by Novelli’s Emma in her kneeling ‘Penitent’ poses, ‘sinks on its knee and covers the eyes with both hands’, while for added pathos she adopts Austin’s recommendation to ‘cast the eyes upwards, clasp the hands, and sigh’.41 These actions may appear simple, but as Goethe recognizes, the biggest challenge is eliminating personal mannerisms, the interference of one’s own awkwardness or angularity, in pursuit of the postural ideal. As Johann Jelgerhuis observed in 1827, this ideal could be attained by imitating works of art, ‘by repeatedly assuming, then dropping, then assuming again the attitude of a chosen model until it can be adopted at will, easily and exactly’.42 The muscles, nerves and somatosensory cortex must be trained to the point where the shape of the sculpted figure has been internalized, and then beyond, realizing a synthesis of multiple artworks as the performer moves from pose to studied pose, laid down through rigorous practice. *

*

*

Surrounded by newly discovered artefacts and encouraged by Sir William’s enthusiasm, Emma incorporated his vase collection into her performances. David Nolta makes the intriguing suggestion that Emma’s poses as depicted by Rehberg and others substantially resemble those of figures on the Hamilton vases, ‘the only difference being that the engraved Emma has turned 90 degrees from the lateral plane’, facing frontally rather than shown in profile.43 Nolta gives only one example, however, and it is taken from a vase in Hamilton’s first collection, which left Naples prior to Emma’s arrival. Tischbein’s catalogues of the second collection (1791–5) might perhaps be expected to contain more source material, but precise correlations between the images are in fact few. Emma’s seated Sibyl (Rehberg’s plate 1), her head turned to the right to create an elegant S-shaped twist, can be compared to a number of similarly seated female figures from both catalogues, although the cheek resting pensively on the hand is an innovation. Variants of the bacchante with a tambourine (Rehberg, pl. 8), the dancer with her flying mantle (Rehberg, pl. 6), and the 28

Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

priestess bearing libations (Rehberg, pl. 9) also recur on several occasions.44 More readily identifiable are smaller components such as the inclination of the head, the extension of a hand, the placement of weight on the front or back foot to suggest interrupted momentum, the posture of seated figures in larger scenes, and especially the ways in which the women interact with their own garments, wrapping them around or plucking them away. Emma does not directly reproduce particular designs. Instead, her process was one of synthesis and dramatization. As Adèle de Boigne comments, ‘She takes inspiration from antique statues, and brings them to mind without servile imitation’ (sans les copier servilement),45 the vases making a contribution without providing an exclusive resource. In some cases, such as the ‘bacchante’ holding a tambourine above her head (Rehberg, pl. 8), the stamp of authentic antiquity is somewhat overdetermined. In addition to Sir William’s corresponding vase-paintings, this pose references the frieze of dancers from the ‘Villa of Cicero’ in Herculaneum, which by the 1790s had become one of Europe’s most widely circulated neoclassical images.46 Another contribution from Herculaneum might have been the frescoes showing the deserted Ariadne collapsing in grief on the seashore as she reaches out for Theseus’ departing ship, a common theme in Roman art.47 Figures on Greek vases, unless symposiasts or deceased, rarely lie down. Emma, on the other hand, reclines in three of Novelli’s sixteen depictions and one of Rehberg’s twelve; she was also painted as Ariadne by Vigée Le Brun.48 This pose, moreover, appears to be associated with abject grief, although – as illustrated in Novelli’s series – a tilt of the head and a roll of the hips could transform it abruptly into intoxication.49 Investing neutral poses with narrative content was another of Emma’s techniques of translation. The tragic figure identified as ‘Sophonisba’ in Rehberg’s series rests her elbow on a plinth beside a lekythos (oil-jug) and Novelli’s plates contain two similar sketches in which a standing Emma embraces a larger urn, likewise arranged beside her on a plinth. Vessels on column-shaped stands and women leaning on similar miniature columns occur in d’Hancarville’s catalogue, as does a dancing maenad with the same outflung arm and backflung head as Emma’s Sophonisba, but it is only from her selective recomposition of these disparate elements that a moment of high drama can be forged. Pathos is rarely present in the gestures of individual figures on vase-paintings, arising more regularly from groupings, situations and context. As a solo performer, then, Emma could still use them as a touchstone, but her medium required them to be adapted substantially. Sculpture provided another reference point. Although the famous Uffizi group shows the suffering Niobe attempting to shield her last surviving daughter from Diana’s arrows, Rehberg’s Emma has chosen another moment in the narrative. The child is already dead, limp in her mother’s grip, bare foot dragging as Niobe surges forward with a cry of anguish and covers her eyes, already beginning to shed the tears that will become a rivulet. Rehberg’s drawing is partly corroborated and partly contradicted by the account of Adèle de Boigne, who visited the Hamiltons as a child and found herself conscripted as a human prop in one of Emma’s performances: One day she had placed me on my knees before an urn, hands joined in an attitude of pleading. Bending over me, she seemed lost in her grief, both of us were 29

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

dishevelled. All at once, straightening herself up and withdrawing a little, she seized me by the hair in a movement so abrupt that I recoiled in surprise and also in some fear, that made me enter into the spirit of my role, because in her hand she was brandishing a dagger. The passionate applause of the watching artists made itself heard with exclamations of ‘Bravo Medea!’ Then drawing me to her, clutching me to her breast and having the air of disputing me with the wrath of heaven, she received from the same voices the cry of ‘Vive Niobe!’50 De Boigne recalls being clutched to Emma’s breast, Rehberg that she dangled lifeless under Emma’s arm. The pleading, protective Niobe of the Uffizi group has more in common with de Boigne’s account, whereas for Rehberg it is Niobe’s despair that resonates. The moment before, or the moment after – in either case, iconic. De Boigne’s Emma has no hesitation in manipulating her young assistant, on this occasion quite forcefully, to produce tableaux which – to judge from de Boigne’s unfeigned shock – appear to have been unrehearsed. To move not only oneself but also another performer instantaneously and with such assurance from the extreme of infanticide to the extreme of bereavement indicates a highly developed sense of kinaesthetic awareness. Emma seems ‘lost in grief ’ while in fact preparing the execution of a rapid and complex transition. Her juxtaposition of the two characters, moreover, produces an uncanny syncretism, a blurring of the narratives: Medea’s crime becomes Niobe’s, and Niobe’s grief Medea’s. In terms of content, then, Emma’s practice related only obliquely to the Hamilton vases. The vases’ contribution was realized more concretely in the costume they inspired. Amelia Rauser has shown that ‘neoclassical fashion . . . first arose as artistic dress’, and Emma was pivotal in bringing the white muslin gown ‘from the studio into the salon’, making available to women a mode of dress previously confined to fictional space.51 A theatrical costume that continued to be worn after her performance venue had reverted to its domestic function, Emma’s drapery crossed the invisible boundary between a zone designated for performance and the coexistent zone, identical in every material respect, perceived as quotidian, contemporary and non-theatrical. Two-dimensional illustrations were realized in three-dimensional cloth,52 ochre slip translated into statuesque white folds, and this mode of dress fundamentally informed Emma’s practice. Her costume was more than an optional accessory, and more than an authenticating device. Like the pallium or silken cape worn by the virtuosic dancers of Graeco-Roman pantomime, it became an extension of her kinaesphere, incorporated into every movement and integral to every pose.53 It could even be suggested that Emma’s body served to animate the costume, rather than the costume serving simply to cover her body. Like a full-body mask, it prompted her to assume the bearing and physicality appropriate to its features,54 and she contrived positions that would show it off to best advantage. Emma’s shawl (or multiple shawls) figured prominently in her iconography of character and emotion, whether covering the head of a penitent or swirling behind a skipping nymph. Part of her task as a performer was also therefore that of a puppeteer, ensuring that these prosthetic components were invested with the same vitality and versatility, the same capacity for signification, as her own innervated flesh. 30

Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

In several of the illustrations by Rehberg and Novelli, Emma appears to be using antique vases as props. Novelli shows her embracing a large urn, a krater or amphora, on a plinth and on the ground, and staring myopically after it as it rolls away in her ‘intoxicated bacchante’ pose. As Rehberg’s ‘Sophonisba’, Emma toasts her death by poison in a kylix while the lekythos containing her liberation remains close at hand. One can almost hear her silent recital of the climactic speech from Thomson’s mid-century version of the tragedy: ‘My fears are air. / The hand of Rome can never touch me more. / Hail, perfect freedom, hail!’55 As a reclining Danaid or perhaps a river nymph, she holds by the handle an oinochoe, a jug, with distinct figural decoration (Rehberg, pl. 5). Her priestess (Rehberg, pl. 9) carries an oinochoe in one hand and a stemless kylix, a flat dish, in the other. The inclusion of vases could be dismissed as artistic licence or interpreted as Sir William’s possessive imposition,56 but is also attested independently by an anecdote in which Emma is reported as ‘lying down in the pose of a water nymph, her head resting on a Greek vase. “Don’t be afeard Sir Willum; I’ll not break your joug,” said the nymph.’57 Aside from the author’s sneer at Emma’s working-class accent, this vignette illustrates Emma’s need to reassure her husband, suggesting that she has appropriated an item of some value to him and that in all likelihood it was therefore one of his genuine antiques. Whereas Sir William and other collectors related to their vases as objective objets d’art, to be enjoyed through handling but not otherwise absorbed into one’s own kinaesphere,58 Emma approached them as a stimulus for enactment. For her, they signified not only the alien properties of ancient Greek (or ‘Etruscan’) culture,59 but a repertoire of associated movements and postures. As Marc Jeannerod points out, all objects can be understood both in ‘semantic’ or identificatory terms – this is an amphora, it is pottery, it is Greek, it is valuable – and ‘pragmatic’ terms, or what Sheets-Johnston calls the I-can: I can grip it, roll it, lift it (or not), take it tenderly in my arms or daintily between finger and thumb. I could drop it, and it would shatter.60 A related concept is Gibson’s ‘object affordance’, according to which we perceive our surroundings in terms of the potential actions they afford, in Emma’s case the salient characteristics of ceramics.61 This haptic perception occurred prior to any additional layer of making such gestures meaningful to an external spectator. Rather, Emma and her props, her pots, coexisted in a constantly shifting mesh of affordances, the vessels storing information about both South Italian burial practices and the way one’s fingers tighten around the handle. Several of Emma’s roles depended on interacting with pots of one kind or another, the shape of the objects shaping her movement around them. Form suggests modes of physical interaction.62 Enacting and curating these impulses to movement, whether such movement is corroborated by the historical record or entirely spurious, brings about in the present a different sensory relationship to antiquity, a subjectivization of the available material, a fundamental change in attitude. In addition to attracting connoisseurial appreciation, then, the pots in Sir William’s collection were reactivated in an alternative kind of tactile afterlife as Emma repurposed them for her performances. Her use of each vessel appears to be based on the vasepaintings themselves, which often show pots being handled within the depicted scenes. Lekythoi, for instance, depict mourners bearing identical vessels as funerary offerings. 31

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Amphorae and kylikes show symposiasts drinking. Women carry water both on and in hydriae. Rehberg’s ‘priestess’ (Rehberg, pl. 5) holds vessels identical to those that appear in a number of similar vase-paintings from Sir William’s catalogues. Showing a vessel in use on the side of the vessel itself is already a self-referential device. Emma gives an extra turn to the metatheatrical screw by re-performing actions suggested to her by the very vessels involved in their enactment. In doing so, she manufactures a version of Greek antiquity ratified by the material record, hence stabilizing and reinforcing the components she chooses to embody, but possessed of substance only in its performance. Just as animating her costume played a crucial role in Emma’s Attitudes, so too did the (re)activation of her props. There is an element of infinitely recursive fantasy, then, to these performances, these Träume (dreams) fabricated in the image of images. They do not, and nor do they pretend to achieve unmediated contact with individuals from the past, but rather their authenticity resides in the act of fabrication itself. As the premise for a mode of reception, the Attitudes represent an array of intriguing possibilities for both material and virtual encounters with ancient artefacts, which signify quite differently when approached as props in a living scenario as opposed to static components in the display of a world elsewhere. Although developing out of the visual arts, the Attitudes bring the perspective of the artist’s model centre stage, and in doing so disrupt the gendered relationship of subjectviewer and object-artefact. Allowing herself to be shaped and moved by the pots and the figures they present to her, Emma becomes her own exhibit. It could be objected that affordances are experienced as much by the collector or the viewer as they are by the performer. Acting upon them, however, following through with the interactive gestures that the artefacts prompt, inscribes them in the receiver’s kinetic – that is, procedural – memory, especially if the interaction is repeated many times over, as in rehearsal. Emma’s performances furnished her not with factual but rather with procedural knowledge about the handling of ancient ceramics. Ironically, most of the pots in Sir William’s collection were grave-goods, hence their survival, and so may never have been activated by handling in this way prior to Emma’s performances. Although of course touched in other ways during manufacture, entombment, disinterment, sale and display, these particular pots may never themselves have been previously incorporated into scenes such as those which they display in miniature. Emma’s Attitudes invent an antiquity in which the heroines of classical antiquity, Danaids and bacchantes and Electras, make copious use of red-figure ceramics and eloquent veils. In making this imagined past incarnate, Emma developed a cognitive relationship to her material that differed in kind from that of her spectators by virtue of her kinaesthetic apprehension. Not everyone, however, has the inclination or ability to articulate their receptive impulses so openly through dance. The following chapter moves from overt to covert enactment, from actions performed to actions suppressed. Nevertheless, even when the body appears to be motionless, kinaesthesia is still very much in operation. As a sense concerned with spatial dynamics, with apprehending the haptic possibilities cast by surrounding objects, it played an important role in aesthetic judgement, and thus in shaping how eighteenth-century antiquity was perceived. 32

CHAPTER 2 HERDER’S ‘FEELING IMAGINATION’

‘O Attic shape! Fair attitude!’ The speaker of John Keats’ 1819 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ addresses a fictional artefact, an imagined museum object selected precisely as a site of tension between the motion depicted on its surface and the immobility of its material.1 Heat and cold, transience and permanence, movement and stillness – realized also as the opposition between sound and silence – generate the poem’s sensory dynamics. The figures on one side of the urn are engaged in a ‘mad pursuit’ and ‘struggle to escape’, their ‘wild ecstasy’ suggesting a bacchic scene of dancing maenads evading their satyric pursuers. On the urn’s reverse side, a sacrificial procession advances towards a rustic altar, more decorous than the fleeing bacchantes but captured nevertheless mid-action. The running figures are ‘forever warm . . . for ever panting, and forever young’, their suspended Arcadian animation never collapsing into the merely human discomfort of ‘a burning forehead and a parching tongue’. Instead, the speaker turns on the vessel itself: ‘Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / as doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!’ he exclaims, frustrated by the urn’s ‘tease’, its resistance to his insistent questioning and his own fervid pursuit of the knowledge it appears to encode.2 The ‘sylvan historian’ turns out to be silent and remote, its signifiers empty, proclaiming only the tautology that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, or in other words, that meaning is exhausted in the sensory apprehension of its form.3 The imagination is stimulated, in particular by the haptic properties of the artefact, but the knowledge which is gained from this stimulus is subjective and aesthetic rather than objective and historical. For Keats’ museum visitor, the urn is more informative about his own embodied relationship to mortality and eternity, as cast in the object before him, than it is about Ancient Greece. The urn’s intimation of arrested desire, communicated through arrested motion, is not confined to vase-painting. Indeed, it was more commonly classical sculpture that provoked reflection on the illusion of frozen, yet perpetual, vitality. Anthropomorphic sculptures in bronze and marble came to populate Italian galleries over the course of the eighteenth century, with the Capitoline Museum opening to the public in 1734, the Uffizi in 1769, and the Pio-Clementino in 1771.4 Chapter  7 discusses in more detail the development and display of museum collections, but first we will concentrate on the visitor’s approach to individual artworks and establish a theoretical foundation for their sensory appeal. Although the most salient property of sculpture is precisely its immobility, its captivating imitation of arrested movement, this does not prevent kinaesthesia from being involved in its reception. As Mark Paterson puts it, ‘Whether representational or non-representational in form, the very physicality of sculpture is met with a physiologically rich, multisensory series of responses that correspondingly reveals the physicality and presence of the beholder’s body.’5 Proximity to any object prompts either a sense of 33

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

affinity, if the object is assimilated to one’s own body schema, or complementarity if it is perceived as inviting physical interaction. When these responses are brought to conscious awareness by the object’s formal designation as ‘artwork’, they account for visitors’ visceral reactions to sculpture that go beyond visual appreciation. As an account of the sensuality of sculpture, specifically of classical sculpture, Johann Gottfried Herder’s essay Plastik: eine Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (‘Sculpture: some observations on shape and form from Pygmalion’s creative dream’) provides an important critical touchstone.6 Although not published until 1778, Plastik revised ideas that Herder had developed in more detail in a previous essay, Kritische Wäldchen 4 (‘Fourth Critical Grove’) which remained judiciously unpublished due to its vilification of contemporary aesthetic philosophers, primarily Friedrich Riedel.7 Herder argues that just as painting is accessed through the eyes, and music through the ears, sculpture is die schöne Kunst des Gefühls, ‘the fine art [designated] for touch’.8 Its tactility arises from its three-dimensionality, its intrinsic properties of depth and volume, properties that cannot even be perceived, let along evaluated, by vision alone. ‘That statues (Bildsäulen) can be seen, no one doubts,’ he concedes, ‘but we are entitled to ask whether the originary determination of the notion of beautiful form can in fact be derived from the sense of sight.’9 He continues: The living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we can learn through sight (Raum, Winkel, Form, Rundung lerne ich als solche in leibhafter Wahrheit nicht durchs Gesicht erkennen). This is all the more true of the essence of sculpture, beautiful form and beautiful shape, for this is not a matter of colour, or of the play of proportion and symmetry, or of light and shadow, but of physically present, tangible truth (dargestellte, tastbare Wahrheit) . . . Sight destroys beautiful sculpture rather than creating it; it transforms it into planes and surfaces (Ecken und Flächen), and rarely does it not transform the beautiful fullness, depth, and volume of sculpture (das schönste Wesen ihrer Innigkeit, Fülle und Runde) into a mere play of mirrors.10 The essential attributes of sculpture are here defined as Innigkeit (depth, interiority), Fülle (fullness, plenitude, voluptuousness) and Runde (roundedness, convexity). Also essential, and key to the palpable difference between sculpture and painting, is sculpture’s delivery of dargestellte, tastbare Wahrheit (‘physically present, tangible truth’). Related in one sense to the contemporary view that the artisans of ancient Greece were possessed of unselfconscious formal integrity, this observation also expresses Herder’s conviction that co-presence with a three-dimensional solid triggers a sensory, hence aesthetic response fundamentally different to that of a flat surface, however beguilingly decorated. Herder’s definition of touch incorporates factors recognizable as integral elements of haptic perception: spatial dynamics, object affordances, kinaesthesia and motor memory. The somatosensory system processes a range of data from around the body, including proprioceptive information concerning the position of joints and muscles, and the closely related sense of kinaesthesia. In conjunction with vision, haptic awareness enables 34

Herder’s ‘Feeling Imagination’

an organism to judge object properties such as proximity, velocity and mass.11 The isolation of one ‘sense’ from another is somewhat artificial.12 Touch, as Herder realized, spreads throughout the entire body and suffuses every living moment. It also informs cognitive processing. Plastik opens with a summary of Diderot’s ‘Letter on the blind for the use of those who can see’ (1749), a defence of the sense of touch against the prevailing association of vision with abstract thought and ‘higher’ reasoning. Like Herder, Diderot subscribed to the empiricist position that human knowledge was acquired through sense experience, rather than generated by a disembodied faculty of reason.13 Diderot’s contention was that congenitally blind individuals conceptualize the world using tactile and motor representations that function like mental ‘images’ but differ in their modal content. He uses this hypothesis to address what is known as ‘Molyneux’s Question’, first posed in a letter to John Locke in 1688. Molyneux had asked whether a man blind from birth who had regained his sight as an adult would be able to distinguish a cube from a sphere by vision alone, or whether he could only tell which was which by handling them. Diderot, like Herder (and Locke), reached a negative conclusion: touch and sight register different properties, and ‘it is by experience alone that we learn to compare our sensations with what occasions them’.14 Herder sets out in Kritische Wäldchen 4 to develop an inductive theory of aesthetics, refuting the position expressed in Riedel’s Theorie der schönen Künste (‘Theory of the Fine Arts’, 1767) that the human mind possesses an innate sense of what is beautiful. On the contrary, Herder argues, beauty is an acquired taste, and taste ‘a habitual application of our judgement to objects of beauty’.15 Judgement is the product of long-term repeated exposure to a range of comparable stimuli, until the process of sensual apprehension becomes so abbreviated that the beholder is no longer aware it has taken place, and attributes his resulting aesthetic preferences to a nonexistent faculty of rational, natural discrimination.16 Such preferences can only be developed by making intensive, extensive comparisons between the objects in a given category, such as anthropomorphic marble sculpture/s, and extrapolating criteria for ranking these comparisons. Taste takes practice; practice makes both perfect and imperfect, as these values do not precede the studied application of perception. Your ability to perceive beauty, then, requires cultivation, and the instrument recommended by Herder as a tool for cultivating this sense within the body, carving it into the psyche, is antique sculpture, ‘the works of Phidias and Lysippus’.17 The habit of aesthetic discrimination can be developed to the point of becoming ‘second nature’ (wird Fertigkeit, wird Gewohnheit, wird Natur)18 because of the way in which our senses learn to grasp the world and convert its torrent of stimuli into meaningful data. This is the crux of Herder’s association of sculpture with touch. The medium’s intrinsic properties, those which distinguish it from other art-forms and in particular from painting, its volume and depth, solidity and mass, contour and curvature, its alteration of the space it occupies and the pressure its presence exerts on the matter around it, are held in common by all three-dimensional objects. We are only aware that these properties exist because we have previously experienced their tactile effects on our bodies. ‘It is only by a habitual abbreviation (Verkürzung),’ Herder writes, ‘that we see 35

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

bodies as surfaces and fancy that we recognize through sight what in childhood we properly learned very slowly, only by way of touch.’19 It appears, however, that the critical factor in learning to process the material world in early childhood is not tactile contact, but movement.20 Originally reliant on empirical experiments with reaching and grasping, dropping and fumbling, clutching and pulling – and, although Herder does not mention relationships to architecture in this context, climbing and slipping and scrambling and tunnelling – we begin progressively to assess material attributes such as function, scale and proximity through vision alone, without the need to confirm our assessments tactually. Nevertheless, it is important not to mistake abbreviation for substitution. Touch has not been supplanted, but rather reconfigured as embodied knowledge, a complex latent memory reactivated as the unrealized anticipation of movement: if I grip the cup, if I lower myself onto the chair, if I were to embrace this figure or clench these muscles or slide down this colossal limb . . . When the properties of three-dimensional matter have been organized into sculpture, it is then that this process of aesthetic response is allowed to telescope down (having undergone Verkürzung, ‘abbreviation’) into the apparently unmediated and disembodied recognition of Schönheit proposed by Herder’s opponent Riedel, who dispenses with the indispensable haptic filter. In Plastik, Herder applies his theory of sensory synthesis to its ideal subject, classical sculpture. Already practised by Italian collectors and connoisseurial Grand Tourists, appreciation of this sculptural canon had been rationalized by Johann Joachim Winckelmann into two texts that became seminal for the study of art history. Developing his ideas initially on the basis of casts and reproductions in the Dresden royal collection, Winckelmann refined these theories in Rome during his career as curator of antiquities for Cardinal Albani and subsequently at the Vatican. A brief essay, ‘Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture’ (1755), was expanded into the influential Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, or ‘History of the Art of Antiquity’ (1764).21 Winckelmann proposed a correlation between the characteristics of ancient societies – Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek – and the characteristics of the art produced by each culture at different stages. Previously, ancient artworks had been coveted, imitated and acclaimed for their aesthetic appeal. Winckelmann, by claiming the choicest artworks as representative of what he considered to have been the noblest and most enlightened period in human history, gave this appeal a socio-political rationale. Although in fact misplaced, as his cherished Laocoön and Belvedere Apollo date from considerably later, Winckelmann’s enthusiasm established them as the idols of the philhellenic ideal, emanating the ‘noble simplicity and serene grandeur’ appropriate to his conception of classical Greece. Winckelmann’s descriptions of these works disclose a viscerality of response at the heart of his analysis. He anticipates Herder in finding himself physically moved by the Belvedere Apollo, divulging that ‘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 . . . for the figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s 36

Herder’s ‘Feeling Imagination’

beauty’.22 Winckelmann’s posture and breath are affected by proximity to the sculpture, the dimensions of his body seeming to alter, becoming ‘elevated’ (erhabenen) and ‘swollen’ (aufgeschwellt). Both he and the statue take on feminine roles, Winckelmann stricken like one of Apollo’s oracular priestesses and the god himself compared to the Schönheit crafted by Pygmalion.23 The figure’s irresistibility, erotic and aesthetic, provokes a haptic response, affecting how Winckelmann perceives his own body and hence the body before him, to which this agitation is attributed. Apollo stands aloof but unresisting, ‘as if he were among the Muses as they seek to embrace him’. For Winckelmann, as for Herder after him, classical sculpture meant white marble. Whiteness signified purity, simplicity and commitment to form without the optical interference interposed by colours. ‘The essence of beauty consists not in colour but in shape,’ Winckelmann asserts. ‘As white is the colour which reflects the greatest number of rays of light, and consequently is the most easily perceived, a beautiful body will, accordingly, be more beautiful the whiter it is.’24 The polychromy of ancient Greek statues is now a well-known fact, that these warriors and goddesses were picked out in scarlet and gold, their eyes inlaid, their robes brightly patterned, their flesh blooming. Although Roman portrait statues were likewise painted, and coloured marble a popular material both in sculpture and architecture, Roman reproductions of Greek bronze prototypes tended to be made from unpainted marble, and it is these reproductions which Winckelmann claimed as the substantiation of his ideal Greece.25 Eighteenth-century historians embraced the supposed preternatural whiteness of ancient sculpture. Herder explores the aesthetic implications of the assumption that colour was a distraction alien to sculpture in its most perfected state. Unlike shape, dimension and weight, colour is a property that cannot be perceived haptically, and therefore should not affect the beholder’s judgement of a sculpture’s Schönheit. Becoming prescriptive, Herder’s argument approaches circularity: if sculpture only (properly) appeals to touch, touch is then the only way to recognize proper sculpture, and sculpture if properly done therefore suppresses all extraneous visual factors. Herder’s ideal, however, rested primarily on the chalky matt maquillage of plaster casts, and the Roman galleries behind them; antiquity stripped of its motley, muted to white. Garments likewise interfere with Herder’s preferred haptic response to the representation of human figures. This again derives from Winckelmann’s ascription of nudity in classical sculpture to the free and uninhibited lifestyle enjoyed by the inhabitants of democratic Athens, an argument which is given an aesthetic spin in Plastik. Clothing renders the human body inaccessible, confounding attempts to follow the form of the figure beneath and smothering physiological commonalities with sartorial idiosyncrasy. Modern dress, with its buckles and braid and corsets and hoops, presents an especially gross impediment. The only covering appropriate to the medium – incongruous in depictions of contemporary individuals, and hence appropriate only to the productions of antiquity – is what Herder refers to as ‘wet drapery’ (nasse Gewänder). This technique maintains the figure’s contours, ensuring that ‘the essence of sculpture remains the slender body, the rounded knee, the smooth hip, the swelling grape of the youthful breast’.26 37

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

The erotic paradox of the gallery, of course, is that while touch is implicitly invited (by the roundness, the smoothness, the ripeness), it is also resisted. Although restrictions on handling exhibits were considerably more relaxed in eighteenth-century museums, tactility was not condoned in public space in the way it might be indulged in the connoisseur’s closet.27 Touch implies ownership, and required regulation, and therefore, for the infatuated visitor, it was expedient as well as pleasurable to explore forms of haptic intimacy that might remain covert. The regressive impulse to follow through on promises of kinetic interaction is fulfilled in the fantasy of Ovid’s Pygmalion. It is the sculptor-amator alone who actually touches: saepe manus operi temptantes admovet, an sit corpus an illud ebur, nec adhuc ebur esse fatetur: oscula dat reddique putat loquitur tenetque et credit tactis digitos insidere membris. Often his hands went out to check if the work was flesh or ivory, and he swore it was ivory no more: he kissed, and thought his kisses were returned; he gave soft words and embraces and believed his fingers sank into the limbs they touched. Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.254–7 Whereas Pygmalion exercises the craftsman’s prerogative and lays proprietary hands on his work, the pleasure of beholding sculpture in the context of the public gallery, as in Herder’s account, resides in an indefinite deferral of the imagined action. It has been suggested that we only become conscious of an anticipated movement if the movement itself remains ‘covert’, i.e. unperformed.28 Ongoing resistance to performing the movement therefore etches it into the beholder’s consciousness with the clarity of frustrated compulsion. So if one has the opportunity to exercise this sensory faculty, once conscious of its operation, how to make the most of the encounter? How, in a gallery, constrained by both convention and physiology, might you conduct yourself to maximize the haptic rapport? Painting’s illusion of perspective can be enjoyed by the viewer who occupies a single standpoint, typically front and centre at a distance sufficient to take in the whole canvas at once. Sculpture in the round, however, the type treated by Herder, offers no such optimal vantage, and can only be absorbed if the visitor is prepared to incorporate movement into his appreciation of the artwork. He ‘circles restlessly’, moving around so as to take in every possible perspective. The angles from which a freestanding sculpture can be absorbed are infinite, and the most infinitesimal adjustments in the visitor’s orientation can produce entirely new configurations. Herder’s Liebhaber, the ‘art lover’, performs his circuits ‘sunk deep in contemplation’ (tiefgesenkt), alert to nuance, cultivating kinetic engagement as a deliberate alternative to static inertia.29 Once this freewheeling, mobile point of view has been attained, establishing what Zuckert terms a ‘nonperspectival grasp’ of the artwork,30 something more is needed 38

Herder’s ‘Feeling Imagination’

to convert the resulting fragmented visual images into a composite haptic entity. ‘When I have described the whole circumcircle, I have perceived nothing more than a polygon composed of many small sides and angles,’ Herder observes.31 Each individual facet might be very pretty, but their unintegrated compilation lacks cohesion, the very Innigkeit (interiority) and Fülle (fullness) that make sculpture a sensual medium. In order to synthesize this series of optical snapshots, the visitor must apply embodied knowledge to generate a three-dimensional compound based on sense memories of touch. It is perhaps in this phase that Herder’s gallery visitor, cast in the role of Winckelmann contemplating his beloved Apollo, ceases his circling. Although he seems to be standing still, his inner sense of movement continues to flow: He appears to stop at a single point, but nothing could be further from the truth. He adopts as many viewpoints as he can, changing his perspective from one moment to the next so that he avoids sharply defined surfaces. To this end he gently glides only around the contours of the body (gleitet er nur in der Umfläche des Körpers sanft umhin), changes his position, moves from one spot to another and then back again; he follows the line that unfolds and runs back on itself (er folgt der in sich selbst umherlaufenden Linie), the line that forms bodies and here, with its gentle declivities, forms the beauty of the body standing before him.32 Movement through space, which liberated the gallery visitor from a fixed position and showed him the sculpture as a body whose constant rotation mirrors his own, has given way to a virtual exploration of the statue’s topography. The gaze and the proprioceptive self, the kinaesphere, are elided: he glides (gleitet), he flows effortlessly all around the elegant lineaments of the figure before him. The performance of movement has been succeeded by the sensation of movement, as flight succeeds take-off, creating a giddy discrepancy between how the visitor appears to an external observer – pale and frozen, like a statue of himself – and the inward dance that sweeps him around the frictionless bodyscape of stone. He avoids sharp edges (scharfe, bestimmte Fläche) that might occasion a sudden skid or drop. Scale becomes warped. The Roman panegyrist Statius records a similar phenomenon induced by a statuette of Hercules, playing on the conceit that the superhuman muscleman has been compressed into a miniature figurine. Statius describes the piece as parvus videri, / sentirique ingens, ‘small to the eyes but felt as gigantic’ (Silvae 4.6.37–43). Statius crawls across the bulging bronze with a gaze that has shrunk him to Lilliputian proportions beside this tabletop colossus.33 Like Herder, he traverses the sculpture in kinaesthetic close-up at odds with the limiting frame of the rational gaze. Herder’s formulation is affirmed by the observations of Marc Jeannerod concerning neural activity during ‘object-oriented action’. When humans and other primates are presented with graspable objects, we perceive these objects not only in terms of their semantic identity (‘That is a spoon / a coconut / Apollo’) but also in terms of their 39

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

pragmatic affordance (‘Grip it / smash it / adore it’).34 What Jeannerod’s experiments reveal is that the same areas of the brain, such as the pre-motor cortex, show identical patterns of activation during the actual (‘overt’) performance of a motor task and the imagined (‘covert’) performance of these tasks. Both cases, Jeannerod proposes, involve the necessary neurochemical preparation for movement taking place, whether it is followed through into performance or inhibited before reaching the muscles: ‘Covert actions are in fact actions, except for the fact that they are not executed.’35 The significance of Jeannerod’s theory for Herder is twofold. First, if sculpture (like any other threedimensional object) is perceived not just as representational but as the goal of various kinetic affordances, the art-form’s haptic quality resides in its instigation of these covert actions. Second, as mentioned above, Jeannerod suggests that we become conscious of motor imagery only when the action is not carried out, otherwise the preparatory simulation is discharged and awareness transferred to the movement itself.36 Sculpture can stimulate a perpetual oscillation of actions anticipated and inhibited. I suggest that if the visitor’s somatic attention is focused on cultivating this oscillation, the result is Herder’s sense of virtual movement. As well as presenting abstract fields over which the kinaesphere can roam, anthropomorphic sculptures can also be approached as if they were another person, or even an alter ego. The sculpture possesses substance, requiring negotiation as a mutual occupant of space. ‘A sculpture before which I kneel can embrace me,’ Herder insists. ‘It can become my friend and companion: it is present, it is there.’37 Unlike a painting, which offers images of a subject matter which is, by definition, absent, the sculpture presents an intervention into the physical environment of the gallery or museum visitor; even if it is not touched, it could be, and into this chasm between actual and potential surges the suspended energy of a curling wave: the embrace performed again and again in unbroken stillness, never closing, the endless ‘companionship’ undissolved. Herder’s imagined orientation, on his knees as if anticipating a caress – and kneeling, not standing, implying veneration – contributes profoundly to the way in which his chosen sculpture is permitted to affect him. The physical attitude adopted by the visitor in relation to the artwork creates a pas de deux experienced not via the gaze of a spectator but via the internal proprioception of the performer. An alternative to approaching the sculpture as a companion to be embraced is to experience it as a replica of oneself, or rather to feel oneself taking on the attributes of the sculpted figure.38 What Herder in a passage alluding either to the Belvedere Torso or the Farnese Hercules calls the ‘feeling imagination’ (fühlende Einbildung) enables the sufficiently sensitized visitor to ‘feel Hercules in his whole body and this body in all its deeds’ (da fühlet sie den Herkules immer in seinem ganzen Körper und diesen Körper in allen seinen Taten.39 It is not only ‘the mighty contours of [Hercules’] body’ which swell the muscles of a sympathetic visitor, but all the labours imprinted in this present muscularity. Interiority now comes to signify not only the figure’s three-dimensional firmness, but also the well of mythological memory it taps. To an extent, of course, these memories belong to the visitor and the sculpture simply triggers them, but the feeling imagination, according to Herder, 40

Herder’s ‘Feeling Imagination’

. . . has no limits, knows no bounds. It has put out its eyes, as it were, so that it does not merely depict a dead surface; it sees nothing of what lies before it but instead gropes its way as if in the dark, is enraptured by the body that it touches, travels with it through heaven and hell and to the ends of the earth (wird begeistert von dem Körper, den sie tastet, und durchzeucht mit ihm Himmel und Hölle und die Enden der Erde).40 As a visitor absorbs the hero’s craggy weariness and begins to infer the battles that moulded it, its visible surfaces dissolve. Captivated, he merges and sinks into kinetic reverie, travelling with the superhuman body through a narrative taken from myth. Like an actor playing Hercules, the visitor’s kinetic self is haunted or possessed by the ancient heroic figure. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite offers identification and objectification, all in one: Whoever . . . has stood before the celebrated Hermaphrodite and has not felt in every curve and turn of the body, in everything that he touches and does not touch, a Bacchic dream (bacchischer Traum) of hermaphroditism; whoever has not been tortured by sweet thoughts and by a pleasure that courses through the entire body like a gentle fire; whoever has not felt or perceived (fühlte und in sich gleichsam) an involuntary resonance and echo of this same music (Saitenspiel) in himself – such a person cannot be made to understand.41 The sweet shock of arousal and the slow burn of desire suggest an autoerotic, or one could say narcissistic fantasy indulged at the expense of the slumbering figure, which vibrates in the visitor like a plucked string. Its attitude awakens complementary echoes of an inaudible music, and the possibility of dreaming the same bacchischer Traum. The Hermaphrodite depends precisely on a ‘nonperspectival grasp’ for its effects. Approached face-on (that is, from the rear), a coy corkscrew twist of the spine conceals the figure’s intersex characteristics, but if curiosity compels the visitor to follow the slope of the knee around to the front of the body (the back of the head), his attempt to resolve this teasing question of gender, and hence gauge the propriety of his own reactions, is playfully thwarted. Herder’s prose revels in the ambiguities: whose is the body in which the tipsy dream is felt, that of the figure or that of the visitor? While idealized figures inspire kinaesthetic emulation, the opposite occurs when the visitor is confronted by sculptural depictions of ugliness, death, monstrosity or even realism. Like clothing and colour, repellent subjects such as corpses can exert a perverse appeal in the medium of painting, which holds them at a visual distance in a similar fashion to Aristotelian mimesis. Herder uses his theory of tactility to explain why the same subjects realized three-dimensionally inspire not fascination, but revulsion. ‘A sculpture requires that I slowly and blindly feel my way forward, until I register a gnawing at my flesh and bones and the shudder of death along my nerves’.42 Just as the gnarled physique of Hercules draws the visitor through the Labours and up to the very threshold of Olympus, the liquescence of decomposition sickens him as he feels his own flesh 41

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

rotting on the bone. It does not appear that Herder had any particular sculpture in mind at this point, although it could be pointed out that celebrated works in Herder’s own canon such as ‘Paetus and Arria’ and the Pasquino group do depict corpses.43 Such works may be powerful, and their potency may indeed derive from something like the aesthetic process outlined in Plastik, but by Herder’s definition they cannot be beautiful. Death might be no less effective in arousing the haptic senses, but instead of hypnotically unfurling a Bacchic dream, the same slow perusal of sculpted nightmares makes the skin crawl. Decay is soft and implosive, whereas for Herder the essence of beautiful sculpture, or sculptural beauty, is tautness and wholeness, the kinetic surge that sustains its Fülle, its Innigkeit.44 For the same reason, Herder condemns realism in sculpture. Knuckles and kneecaps, interrupting sinuous limbs like bulbous outcrops, cause the sweeping gleitflug (‘glide’) to stumble. Likewise, prominent veins should be smoothed away, as ‘the silent sense of touch that feels things in the dark will register the veins as wriggling worms’.45 No reminders of mortality should spoil the ride, and no irregularities should warp the haptic senses such that they yearn for anything but harmony. Grecian sculpture, or those works which at the time were classified as Grecian sculpture, appeared to embody such harmony most fully. In Herder’s view, this was sufficient reason to affirm their centrality to an aesthetic education. Beholding sculpture in such a way as to cultivate haptic responses takes effort and practice. Herder’s method of reception via touch involves an initial period of approach during which the sculpture is scrutinized from every possible angle in order to set the visitor’s body in motion – a kind of warm-up – and to create a sense-impression liberated from a fixed-point gaze. This is followed by a period of stillness in which motion is suspended but the kinetic patterns developed continue to flow. From this state of awareness stem various affective possibilities: the visitor either identifies proprioceptively with the sculpted figure, as with the Hercules, or perceives it as a desirable other whose embrace is forever deferred. Although this leads Herder to draw prescriptive conclusions about the optimal type of sculpture to practice on, the process he outlines may be applied to any threedimensional object. If an object is approached with heightened somatic attention, it may be possible to dilate the moment indefinitely by repeating the pulses of covert motor response. The ready applicability of Herder’s approach to a gallery setting is immediately apparent. Visitors who may not feel comfortable with the overt performance of sweeping gestures or physical imitation of the exhibits have the more subtle option of attending to the minute interior adjustments wrought by their proximity to sculpture, or indeed to the very sensations provoked by their own immobility. Immobility, in fact, is the common ground that Herder shares with Emma Hamilton. Although kinaesthetic reception entails self-movement, movement does not have to be rapid nor complex nor arduous in order to be experienced as a powerful sensation. It is somatic awareness that is key. ‘He seems to be motionless,’ Herder writes of the visitor who is kinaesthetically attuned to the artwork before him, ‘and yet nothing could be further from the truth.’ A single swelling breath transports Winckelmann to Delos. Like Emma’s hard-won poses, the 42

Herder’s ‘Feeling Imagination’

visitor’s stillness is illusory. The trance-like state he has induced in himself can turn to an orgasmic bacchischer Traum or a waking nightmare of immanent decomposition. His normal boundaries of self dissolve (and still, he seems motionless). The other factor common to Herder and Emma is duration. No one caught up in the gallery shuffle or pausing barely to blink as they pass by is going to be entering Herder’s aesthetic trance; it takes time to unfurl. Of course, not all visitors desire this level of absorption, but for those who do, Herder provides a method for awakening the feeling imagination. Moreover, importantly, his method can be practised in public, and although undoubtedly enhanced by knowledge of the mythological characters and scenarios, such knowledge is not itself fundamental to the sensory mechanism deployed. Unlike the privileged appreciation cultivated by connoisseurs, this type of kinaesthetic (self-) consciousness requires in its purest form no particular expertise. Emma Hamilton has the additional challenge of translating her responses into re-enactments recognizable to external spectators, but Herder’s gallery visitor needs no training outside of the immediate immersive encounter. Repeated encounters can certainly increase facility and stamina, but each performance, each attendance is a separate, unique act, and the resulting Gefühl as individual as a yoga practice. The crowds recede, and alone in the presence of gods, entranced, I swell and I multiply. The longer it lasts, the further my apparent stillness travels from the truth.

43

44

CHAPTER 3 CHARLOTTE EATON’S ROME AS THEATRE

While Herder exercised his ‘feeling imagination’ on sculptural artefacts in the gallery, out in the more chaotic setting of an ancient site this sense played an equally vital role in processing architectural remains. Ruins surrounded the visitor, encompassing her, undeniably visible, like sculpture, but like sculpture also appealing powerfully and simultaneously to a haptic apprehension of the movement they afforded. These affordances, indeed, may be pursued as actual interaction more readily on site than in the gallery. The distinction between tourist and amateur archaeologist being somewhat blurred, eighteenth-century visitors frequently dwell on their physical interactions with the structures that they handle, climb on, stumble over, tunnel into, or simply wander among, allowing movement to unfold the manifold pragmatic properties of each ruin. Movement around a site enables it to be perceived in its capacity as a manipulator of bodies. It could also induce intense emotional responses. Anna Jameson describes the pantomimic despair of a young artist in 1820 unable to capture the Colosseum’s magnitude. Peering through a ‘gaping aperture’ into the ‘collossal [sic] corridor far below me’, she watches him ‘as if transported out of his senses by delight and admiration . . . making the most extraordinary antics and gestures: sometimes he clasped his hands, then extended his arms, then stood with them folded in deep thought; now he snatched up his portfolio . . . then threw it down and kicked it from him as if in despair . . . It was better than any pantomime,’ she giggles, and indeed the artist’s gestures, however spontaneous they seem, are characteristic of contemporary melodrama.1 The artist, however, did not anticipate an audience, and when in the process of casting an imploring glance to the heavens he catches sight of Anna watching him, he stops dead before fleeing the scene in great embarrassment.2 In the emotive poses he assumes vis-à-vis the monument, Jameson’s artist presents an analogue to the Romantic persona of her diarist, whose own declarations of affect are equally impassioned, and equally staged.3 The artist’s dance, his pantomime, exhibits with unusually candid corporeality the emotional transports more frequently expressed in retrospective prose. What most frequently strikes the eighteenth-century traveller to Rome, primed by ancient literature to anticipate the yeasty venality of Juvenal’s Satires spread thick through the noble metropolis of Plutarch and Pliny, is the discrepancy between the imagined geography of Roman antiquity and the mutilated state of its tangible remains. Two strands of meditation typically ensue: wonder at one’s own co-presence with the relics of the ancient city coupled with varying degrees of devastation, disillusion or simple irritation at its intractable inaccessibility. For Edward Gibbon, visiting Rome in 1764 as part of a year-long tour of Italy, confronting this ‘intoxicating’ paradox of presence and

45

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

absence prompted a colossal, paradigm-shifting re-evaluation of Roman history.4 While Gibbon’s memoirs offer an apparently transparent account of this decisive moment, he returns to it again and again in successive drafts, each revision reshaping the memory – if indeed there ever was a specific occasion underlying the retrospective fabrication – a memory reproduced repeatedly until consolidated and erased by the very act of repetition.5 According to the self-made myth of Decline and Fall’s inception, it was Catholic Rome’s occupation of the architectural vestiges of Rome’s imperial past that turned Gibbon’s attention towards seeking historical explanations for this phenomenon. In the official version of his autobiography, published posthumously by his literary executor, Gibbon records: It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.6 As has frequently been pointed out, transplanting the ‘barefooted friars’ to the Temple of Jupiter is a rhetorical conceit, and a later development in Gibbon’s conception of the incident.7 In earlier drafts, he is more literal, recording that he was sitting ‘in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars’, which he depicts implicitly as occupying the same ground as the vanished temple. Although located on the Capitol, however, the Franciscan Church of Santa Maria d’Araceli is in fact some distance from the temple foundations.8 Gibbon’s moment of inspiration, then, is a construct, but the terms in which it is expressed reveal how he understood physical proximity to ruins to have acted upon his intellectual perception of ancient Rome. Despite having spent months working through an essential reading list in preparation for his visit,9 Gibbon presents his epiphany as occurring not when seated in his study but out ‘amidst the ruins’ themselves, which authenticate his narrative of decline with their emblematic dilapidation. The time of day and year are likewise significant, the close of an autumn evening providing appropriate associations of twilight, fading, cooling, desiccation, melancholia: a gradual and inevitable termination. The ellipsis that displaces Gibbon’s friars to the Temple of Jupiter integrates two distinct temporal strata, as though the existing church had become insubstantial and the temple reinstated in all its pagan marmoreality around the chanting monks.10 The detail of the Franciscans’ bare feet indicates their destitution relative to their surroundings, the impoverishment (or voluntary abasement) of a city once architecturally sublime. In Gibbon’s autobiographical formulation, these two points in time coexist, fused by their shared occupation of space; but it is precisely in prising them apart, in reintroducing the chronological chain of events that led inevitably from one Rome to the other, that Gibbon discovers the subject matter for his history. Initially, as clarified in the C manuscript of his memoirs, Gibbon’s ‘original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire’.11 In keeping with the 46

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

attribution of his opus to personal immersion in the ruins, it is the fate of Rome as a physical entity, rather than as a political abstraction, that at first engages Gibbon’s attention. This attention, as a product of musing in situ, has a somatic component: it is predicated on orientation, attitude and approach. It is no accident that these terms might apply equally to the activity of the sensing body absorbing (absorbed in) impressions of the Capitol in 1764 and the cognitive motion that transfigures these impressions into historical analysis. As Gallese and Lakoff have shown, imagination is predicated on motor activity, and abstract relationships made conceivable – graspable – by their basis in physical action.12 The three metaphors typically applied to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall – that it is a journey, a monument and/or a performance – reflect its grounding in embodied knowledge.13 Brownley’s analysis of the work’s theatricality presents Gibbon as a dramatist, populating his history with characters who assume a repertoire of designated roles, alternating melodramatic action with picturesque tableaux.14 But Decline and Fall is also itself a performance, an ongoing repercussion of the deft and uncanny psychophysical manoeuvre that first brought its author to perceive the Eternal City on coexistent levels. The work translates an act of pilgrimage into an act of homage, an eternal return played out over the decade of the Decline’s composition with what Lionel Gossman has called ‘reverence for a “vacant space” ’;15 not only ancient Rome, but also the Rome once visited by Gibbon himself, has subsequent substance only in his own sensememory. As John Urry remarks in relation to the spatial embeddedness of tourist experience, Part of what is remembered are ways of sitting and standing, looking and lounging, hearing and hoping, ruminating and recollecting, which are embodied . . . The past is ‘passed’ on to us not merely in what we think or what we do but literally in how we do it. Places are not just seen, as in the scopic regime of the ‘sightseer’, but are understood through the diverse senses that make us ache to be somewhere else or shiver at the prospect of having to stay put.16 Rome stimulates in one and the same location the nostalgic ache and the morbid shiver. Gibbon, notwithstanding his self-dramatization in the Memoirs, may not have performed for any external audience on the Capitol, but his stance vis-à-vis his surroundings was nevertheless performative, an exercise in the imaginative occupation of space. It recalls Adler’s definition of travel as a genre of semi-scripted performance art.17 Over Gibbon’s authorial persona, Santa Maria d’Araceli casts the penumbra of an unreal double, the pagan temple it has supposedly displaced. Deliberate movement to and around the citysite of Rome and deliberate orientation within it led Gibbon to perceive the Capitol as a performance venue ‘haunted’ by its prior configurations,18 and the impact of his performative encounter with the site continued to reverberate throughout his historiographical reconceptualization of Rome. *

*

*

47

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

‘There is a charm in a name,’ declares Charlotte Eaton in her 1820 travelogue Rome in the Nineteenth Century,‘even when we know it is unreal.’19 Her sentiment echoes the historical sense of place ascribed to the young Quintus Cicero, remarking that even though the associations of Colonus are fictional, nevertheless he finds them profoundly moving (inaniter scilicet, sed commovit tamen, De Finibus 5.1.3). ‘Charm’ is Eaton’s preferred term for the sensation that strikes her when she comes into physical contact with significant locations. She and her sister stand and tread on ‘charmed and classic ground’, charmed precisely by Eaton’s own designation of it as ‘classic’.20 The fading frescoes in the Domus Aurea exert an ‘unspeakable charm . . . not only because they are beautiful but because they are ancient’. Similarly, the ‘charm’ of the Roman Forum, and of a nondescript block of masonry on the Caelian Hill reputed to come from the Rostrum, emanates from these monuments precisely by virtue of the background knowledge brought to them by Eaton.21 She uses the term in the sense not of delight, but of ‘enchantment’,22 a glamour by which the monuments persuade her to perceive them as other than they are, creating a form of augmented reality. Although this is a manufactured augmentation, it nevertheless depends on proximity to the objects endowed with such significance in order to be activated. Eaton herself is fully aware that the objects in question may lack authenticity, but her subversive rejoinder to antiquarian orthodoxy is that such authenticity, whether fictitious or genuine, is experienced as such through an exercise of the imagination. ‘Antiquarians’ are Eaton’s intellectual adversaries.23 She represents her perusal of their volumes in kinetic terms, as ‘like a labyrinth, [in that] the farther you go into it, the more you are bewildered; and its professors, who pretend to be your guides through its mazes, only lead you further astray’.24 The literal maze of architectural debris and repurposed structures through which Eaton picks her way ought, she feels, to be straightened out conceptually by the reference works she consults. In addition to Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, these are primarily Joseph Forsyth’s Remarks on Antiquities (1813) and John Chetwode Eustace’s Classical Tour of Italy (also 1813), the pre-eminent Anglophone guidebooks of the time, although she also cites Italian studies of Roman topography by Famiano Nardini (Roma Antica, 1665), Ridolfino Venuti (Accurata e succincta descrizione della antichità di Roma, 1763), Venanzio Monaldini (La Città di Roma, 1779 and/or Vedute antiche et moderne le più interessante, 1810), Giuseppe Vasi (Itinerario istruttivo di Roma, 1761 and reprinted in 1808) and others.25 Attaching labels to the anonymous rubble would erect a virtual city on the pattern of the ruins, thus pointing the way to a topographical solution of the conundrum their disposition presents. The so-called authorities, however, dispute and contradict each other, erasing the reputed identity of particular structures without restoring it, leaving a Rome composed instead of blank walls and interchangeable dead ends.26 In galleries and private collections of sculpture, connoisseurs replace antiquarians as her antagonists, as she peruses artworks ‘distinguished by names that have been proved with great learning and at great length, not to belong to them; and the names that do belong to them have not yet been found’.27 Venuti and Vasi were both popular with contemporary travellers. Although defined (like Nardini’s) as a ‘topographical description’, Venuti’s organization of his material is 48

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

easier to navigate. His starting point is the extant fabric of the city, whereas Nardini sets out to determine the location of all buildings mentioned by ancient authors, even if they no longer exist. Moreover, Venuti follows a user-friendly itinerary, starting on the Palatine with what is also conveniently thought to be the city’s most ancient edifice – the ‘Temple of Romulus’, now the church of S. Teodoro – and spiralling outwards through the Forum Romanum, the Capitol, the imperial fora, the Quirinal and so on. The language is frequently that of the guidebook: ‘Leaving the remains of the Circus Maximus, turn your eyes towards the Palatine, where we find the remains of Augustus’ palace.’28 Uncertainty such as Venuti expresses regarding the identity of various ruins appears to be what Eaton finds frustrating. Gli antiquarii sono discordi tra di loro a quali numi siamo stati tempi dedicati; chi dice al Sole e alla Luna, chi a Venere e a Roma, chi a Iside e Serapide (‘Antiquarians are in dispute among themselves as to which gods the temples were dedicated: some say the Sun and Moon, some Venus and Rome, some Isis and Serapis’).29 Nardini can be similarly unforthcoming: Varie ed assai fra di loro discordi sono le opinioni degli Scrittori intorno a questo tempio (‘Diverse and entirely incompatible with one another are the authors’ opinions concerning this temple’).30 Vasi’s Itenerario is much more approachable. A portable octavo volume, it could easily be consulted en route. The eight daily itineraries it proposes would require some stamina to complete in their entirety, but they are indicative of what a traveller might expect: arriving across the Milvian bridge, disembarking in the Piazza del Popolo, and proceeding up the Corso to the Capitol. Vasi’s main purpose is orientation. His prose also brims with superlatives: Rome is magnifico, stupendo, superbo.31 Unlike Venuti and Nardini, Vasi does not engage in antiquarian contention but rather reports the identity of baths, tombs and temples as general knowledge. In contrast to Nardini’s resurrection of a spectral topography, Vasi’s ancient Rome is situated firmly in the present, dispersed among the must-see churches and palazzi that also claim the visitor’s attention. His guidebook includes plates of Piranesi’s engravings, focalizing the ruins in a style that had become conventional. The publisher Venazio Monaldini was involved in the production of two possible sources. La Città di Roma ovvero breve descrizione di questa superba città (1779) consists of four volumes which present each district of Rome in turn in a guidebook format, followed by plates illustrating the major features. Ancient monuments such as the Baths of Diocletian (vol. 1) are represented using a combination of bird’s-eye view, reconstructed floor-plan and contemporary prospect. The later plates in his collection of Vedute antiche e moderne . . . della città di Roma (1810) also show the influence of Piranesi in their uniform presentation of ancient structures as romantic, overgrown ruins. Forsyth and Eustace are Eaton’s main competitors in the Anglophone travel-writing market.32 Each takes an idiosyncratic approach. Eustace reads Italy’s landscapes textually, advising that the works of Latin authors should be ‘the inseparable companions of all travellers’ and enthusing that ‘the scenery of Italy is truly classical’, its ground ‘truly poetical’.33 The contextual power of reading Horace and Virgil en route and in situ increases both the referential scope of the texts and the conceptual capacity of the environment. Sometimes the pleasure of this mutual supplementation is emotional, as 49

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

when Eustace ‘feels the full force’ of Aeneas’ arrival on the Capitol (Virgil, Aen. 8.347–54) as he himself ‘ascends the acclivity of the Capitoline Mount’; elsewhere it supplies the material for intellectual interrogation of the sources, as when the scenery of Virgil’s Eclogues is verified as that of the river Mincio, or the surroundings of the small town Vico Varo systematically assessed as corresponding ‘in every particular’ to Horace’s Variae. Eustace translates in italics the specific features that he picks out as Horatian survivals: ‘the little rills – the moss-lined stones – the frequent groves – the arbutus halfconcealed in the thickets’.34 He drinks from the stream and finds it so fresh and cool to the palate that, he reports, ‘nec frigidior Thracam nec purior ambiat Hebrus’ (Horace, Epist. 16.12–13). Eustace’s verbal presentation of these sites thus comes tautologically to incorporate the very terms his account has been striving to illustrate. His experience of the water is so Horatian that nothing but Horace’s own words will serve to convey it. Despite occasional interactive moments such as this, Eustace’s mode of sensory consumption is primarily visual.35 He advises appreciating ancient Rome by first of all taking it in as the view from the Capitol, ‘fixing’ his eyes on the Forum and having them ‘range over the storied plain of Latium’. Monuments like the Colosseum are then approached by a ‘spectator’ who places himself at the ideal angle for ‘viewing’, ‘beholding’ and ‘feasting [his] eyes’ on their picturesque exteriors. His favourite exhibit in the Capitoline Museum is the marble street plan of Rome.36 Movement is not absent from Eustace’s account, but it certainly does not play the integral role it does for Eaton. Eustace’s eyes, for the most part, float along as the Roman street ‘conducts’ him from one sightseeing vantage to another, his views of ruins interspersed with reproductions of the Latin text on the pages he is simultaneously perusing. If Eustace’s Italy is focalized through poetry, Joseph Forsyth’s is focalized through art and architecture. The author-traveller himself makes rare appearances, and then only strictly factual ones, remarking, for instance, that he found it still possible to drink from Egeria’s spring.37 His stated intention is to rationalize and supersede the existing antiquarian guides, organizing his objective discussion of the city’s monuments not by location, but rather by chronology, which provides (he claims) a more systematic approach for the traveller wishing not merely to see Rome, but to study it. Forsyth is one of the first to use the term ‘archaeology’ when referring to the practice of antiquarians, namely the identification of ancient artefacts, although in both instances he applies it disparagingly to practitioners who overstate the knowledge gained from taxonomic study of buildings or sculptures. Among Eaton’s sources, it is Forsyth whose pugilistic tone contributes most vehemently to her own assumption of an antagonist’s stance and the bravado to go up against Italian heavyweights like Vasi and Nardini. Unlike Eustace, who in general reports naively on the identity of structures, Forsyth repeatedly dismantles it. Unlike Eaton, however, he does not insert himself into the process of discovery. Eaton combines Forsyth’s independent curiosity with a reflexive authorial persona constantly alert to both the seductiveness and the unreliability of Rome’s material authenticity. Local guides, Eaton’s other resource, are on the other hand only too ready to slap illustrious names on every column and unearth colourful anecdotes from every subterranean chamber. Her party is assured, for instance, that the Palatine is covered in 50

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

the remains of Nero’s palace, and they are shown in particular ‘a little round place’ which their guide identifies, much to Eaton’s derision, as the very bath-house where Seneca committed suicide. ‘But a building, if it be round, is always called either a bath or a temple,’ she sneers.38 Similarly, the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica, a round two-storey building with a domed roof now identified as a fourth-century nymphaeum, has been assigned a succession of spurious functions: ‘In the days when it was the fashion to call every ruin a temple, this was called a temple; when baths came into vogue, this was called a bath; and now that basilicas are all the rage, it is called a basilica.’39 Late antique churches are propped up by classical prehistories, such as that of St Stefano Rotondo on the Caelian Hill which ‘lays claim to the title of Claudius, of Faunus, of Bacchus, of Jupiter Pellegrinus, and every other temple which ever stood upon this mount’.40 Every partial foundation on the hills around Tivoli is exhibited as belonging to the villa of a Roman luminary, among them poets Horace, Propertius and Catullus, statesmen Lepidus and Piso, and infamous general Quintus Varus. Eaton remarks on the local method for ‘discovering’ the names of ruins: on one trip, she asks their cicerone if he can show her the site of Cassius’ villa, but he cannot; then when she next visits, she finds he has incorporated into his tour of the district a pile of stones which he now claims is believed to be della Villa di Cassio.41 Popular opinion is responsible for constructing a factitious city which Eaton’s topographers systematically dismantle. ‘You are then led an ignis fatuus chase through quartos of uncertainty and folios of despond,’ she wails, ‘till at last, fatigued and bewildered, you desist from the ineffectual pursuit, and find yourself, after all your toil, exactly where you set out.’ Without the signposts of secure identification, Eaton cannot orient herself, wandering bewildered in what Byron similarly called the ‘marble wilderness’ of the Forum and Palatine. Eaton rejects both the groundless assertion of identities based on a garbled folk tradition, and the wrangling of self-styled experts whose denials in the end deprive material artefacts of their historicity altogether. She proposes instead a more playful and open-ended approach to her enigmatic surroundings. *

*

*

Like her attendance at the sites themselves, Eaton’s writing is a performance medium, a re-enactment of scenes which may or may not have taken place and which her reader is openly invited to reproduce, whether as overt or covert movement. ‘Some future day you will retrace our steps,’ she urges, ‘and therefore our footmarks may be useful to guide you on your way.’42 With Eaton as our cicerone, we are led on an itinerary around the city and its environs marked by regular reminders of the motion it entails: its speed, direction and quality; pauses and delays; affordances, textures and scale. We trudge laboriously the ‘duteous round’ of basilicas, find ourselves hurried through the Capitoline Museum only to be halted for an extended meditation before the Dying Gaul, and file cautiously down into the catacombs. When we ‘direct our steps’ to a site of interest such as the Baths of Caracalla, the exhortations and imperatives which form the route are succeeded by a first-person narrative dilation on Eaton’s own first encounter. Eustace in his popular 1813 guidebook introduces the Baths by reciting their measurements. ‘The length of the Thermae of Caracalla was one thousand eight hundred 51

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

and forty feet,’ he informs his reader, ‘its breadth one thousand four hundred and seventy six. At each end,’ he continues, ‘were two temples.’43 It is an accurate overview, but one that bears little resemblance to the visitor’s experience. Eaton’s arrival at the Thermae, however, is focalized through immediate haptic impressions. The Thermae’s ‘immense mass of frowning and roofless ruins’ are ‘powerfully calculated to affect the imagination’, achieving Burkean sublimity in their ‘almost immeasurable extent’. Eaton approaches the cliff-like walls from below, feeling them looming over her in a bulk both forbidding (‘frowning’) and impotent, as their attempt at intimidation surrenders in the end to empty air. Unable to take them in all at once, Eaton consumes them by moving. ‘We passed through a long succession of immense halls, open to the sky, whose pavements of costly marbles and rich mosaics, long since torn away, have been supplied by the soft green turf.’ Imagined contrasts of texture play an important role among Eaton’s mechanisms for eliciting affect. The limpid arch of sky where the vaults have collapsed into great boulders, and the conjectural polished surfaces now replaced by a ‘carpet’ of soft grass.44 In one courtyard, they come across a young English visitor who has found a deep well-shaft, and ‘in his ardour for antiquities, was on the point of descending in the bucket’. This type of vigorous, even arduous amateur investigation was not at all unusual.45 Having been assured that the mythic cave of Cacus, mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Fasti, was still accessible on the side of the Aventine Hill, some of Eaton’s companions go scrambling up the ‘perpendicular’ slope in search of it ‘among the thorns and brushwood . . . at the imminent peril of breaking their necks’. Unable to locate the entrance, they then propose lowering each other down on a rope from the grounds of the monastery above, but find the local monks less than receptive to this project. Eaton herself, while not possessed of quite such indomitable commitment, is nevertheless not satisfied with gazing passively at the better-preserved architectural specimens. She rummages in sloshing back alleys and glutinous refuse for what turn out to be ‘obscure vestiges’ of the Claudian family tomb and some ‘broken brick walls’ reputed to belong to the Portico Octaviana.46 Eaton regularly draws on her own haptic experiences in the present to infer the sensory properties of the Roman past. She is by no means the only traveller to remark on the benefit of fountains, ‘the true value of which cannot be felt but in such a climate as this’.47 The ancient Roman passion for channelling and curating water must have gratified a comparable haptic pleasure, coupling coolness and humidity with the mesmerizing chime of falling liquid. Full comprehension of the ‘true’ value of fountains is restricted to those who have felt for themselves the ‘voluptuous delight’ of plashing water in the treacly calm of a summer evening. Likewise, Eaton defends outdoor theatre performances as entirely appropriate and altogether preferable to the ‘stifling’ heat and stuffiness of a poorly ventilated indoor venue. Again on the basis of her own attendance at contemporary Italian plays ‘in that hour of delicious coolness which in summer precedes the setting of the sun’, she commends ancient practice for its exploitation of the same environmental advantages which have enhanced her own enjoyment.48 More morbidly, proceeding along the Via Appia, flanked by its double row of tombs, she declares that she ‘understood 52

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

the full force of the Siste Viator’ – the typical gravestone injunction to the passing traveller (viator) to stop (siste) and remember the deceased – ‘so appropriate here and so truly absurd, as applied in our little village churchyards, where no traveller ever does pass’.49 The context is all; not simply the abstract information that Roman tombs lined the roads outside the city, but embodied in the action of walking and pausing and reading and choosing to linger or carry on. Her own experiences of fountains, theatres and funerary monuments furnish Eaton with haptic analogies that act as entry points for sympathetic appreciation and starting points for reflecting on lived experience in antiquity. Major monuments are thoroughly explored from all angles. Eaton not only enters the interiors of Augustus’ mausoleum and the pyramid of Cestius, but also climbs the spiral staircase inside Trajan’s Column, tracing the same winding path as its external frieze.50 Climbing up onto as well as burrowing down into ancient structures forms part of tourists’ bodily engagement, sometimes ostensibly to measure or sketch but more frequently simply as a method of haptic absorption. Eaton mentions a ‘dilapidated’ staircase affording an ascent, ‘extremely perilous’, to the gaping roofscape of the Baths of Caracalla, but unlike Forsyth (and, famously, Percy Shelley) does not seem to have availed herself of the challenge.51 At the opposite extreme, she squeezes into the tomb of the Scipios on the Via Appia through a ‘narrow winding way leading to the interior of the vault’, where she crouches down to read the replica inscriptions left in situ when the originals were removed to the Vatican. Access to underground sites could be difficult, and their dankness unpleasant, producing a distracting (or at best, poignant) contrast with their antique luxuriousness. On the Palatine, her party are escorted into a suite of underground chambers which ‘still aver to the purpose of baths tolerably well; being so damp, that the water poured down copiously on our heads; and endeavouring to avoid these streams from above, we plunged up to the ankles in an unseen pool on the floor, by which our ardour for the fine arts . . . was effectively cooled’. Eustace also mentions the off-putting ‘chillness’ of underground sites, as does Mariana Starke, in her guidebook of 1801–2.52 Starke, as a nurse advising invalids and their companions, is especially sensitized to the potentially dangerous drop in temperature. The Domus Aurea (‘Baths of Titus’), on the other hand, renders Eaton ‘insensible of the penetrating damps and chilling cold’ as she cranes her neck to peruse the frescoes that flicker as the light from wavering tapers jumps and recedes. She is acutely conscious that the same moisture that causes such discomfort to visitors is equally detrimental to the artwork they have come to admire, bringing her into palpable contact with an ongoing process of disintegration and the atmospheric factors responsible. ‘How chill, how damp, how desolate are now these halls of imperial luxury!’ Eaton shivers, held fascinated by the ‘unspeakable charm’ of the fragile images on the barrel vault twenty feet up, festoons and birds and miniature deities vanishing drop by drop.53 Several of Eaton’s most intense aesthetic experiences take place underground. In the crypt of a Carmelite church on the Esquiline, she ‘trod on a fragment of the ancient black and white mosaic of the Thermae of Titus’, a sliver of tiles extant amid other materials whose very fragmentariness recalls to her (as to Gibbon) both a classical and a Christian history, a time when the same floor had ‘resounded to the tread of the proud masters of 53

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

the world’ overlaid by the centuries of praying knees that have worn it away to this remnant. Having served successively as the ‘scene’ of Roman pampering, the crucible of monastic asceticism, and now the resting place of the dead, the crypt resonates with a chorus of associations.54 Eaton specifies the sensory factors which contribute to its atmosphere,55 comprising the damp, the chill, the ‘deep gloom’, the bewildering chambers through which they have ‘ranged’, the mute tombs offset by the chanting of the monks in the church overhead, and the unthinkable remoteness of the antiquity brought to mind as her foot presses down on the mosaic shard. The emotions that grip her remain unnamed but they bring her to stillness, charmed once more by a ‘spell of feeling’ broken only when the orison above fades away. The catacombs of San Sebastiano furnish an even eerier presentiment of mortality. In a passage so crammed with gothic tropes that it could have been written by popular contemporary novelist Ann Radcliffe, Eaton’s party make their descent: Imagine us, then, assembled in the Church of Saint Sebastian’s, on the point of penetrating into these long and almost interminable cemeteries, summoning up all our courage to encounter their mysterious terrors, and prepared for every possible combination of gloom and horror amidst the chilling damps of these ancient receptacles of the dead. We descended a dark narrow staircase, each bearing a lighted taper, and at the bottom entered upon the sepulchral labyrinth, the low and crumbling roof above our heads almost threatening to crush us, and the rock on either side filled with cavities for corpses. The way was so narrow as only to admit a single person, so that we proceeded one after another in a long line, the echo of our footsteps sounding heavily on the ear . . . [their dark cloaks and white dresses] forming altogether such a striking procession through these subterraneous sepulchres, that I could not help observing we wanted nothing but the figure of Death at our head, to be taken for a company of ghosts.56 As well as replaying the scene enacted by this troupe of impressionable visitors, Eaton’s writing here is itself performative, employing the familiar vocabulary of gothic fiction in order to elicit a comparable response from the reader. The travellers’ impromptu performance is thus re-scripted as a prompt to sympathetic simulation.57 Instructed to imagine the scene she recounts, Eaton’s reader is assisted by the inclusion of evocative sensory detail, predominantly although not exclusively haptic. The scene is not static, but involves the narrator in motion: penetrating, descending and shuffling in single file through passages twice designated as ‘narrow’. The way through these passages is ‘almost interminable’, and their labyrinthine involutions defy straightforward navigation. Eaton’s description is corroborated by that of earlier traveller Anna Miller, whose ‘labyrinth of very narrow passages, turning and winding incessantly . . . branch out various ways like veins in the human body’.58 The coffin-like, vein-like, serpentine passages are not only narrow, but also low, their roofs close enough to touch and ominous both in their claustrophobic closeness and in their crumbling texture. The temperature plunges, below 54

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

ground. Eaton anticipates ‘gloom and horror’ and ‘mysterious terrors’, and is not disappointed. While they encounter nothing untoward in the catacombs, Eaton’s party themselves become ciphers of the dead. They themselves form a ‘striking procession’ to the imagined observing eye of the reader, performing in their tourist ritual the steps of an unconscious danse macabre. The terror of Anna Miller’s experience in the catacombs is rather more visceral. Her husband having gone on ahead with their guides, Miller finds herself alone, and does not dare to move in case she should lose her way. She tries to call out but her voice is swallowed by the damp and the close ceilings. Her candle begins to fail. She determines to go in search of her companions, but figure to yourself the horror that seized me, when, upon attempting to move, I perceived myself forcibly held by my clothes from behind, and all the efforts I made to free myself proved ineffectual. My heart, I believe, ceased to beat for a moment, and it was as much as I could do to sustain myself from falling down upon the ground in a swoon. She looks behind her, and can see nothing there; she again tries to move, and cannot. Such paralysis is a sensation from nightmare. Perhaps her companions are dead, perhaps she is dead and will never escape from what must surely be the unbreakable grip of spectral hands. Struggling and twisting more violently, she discovers at last that in fact her gown is caught on a broken iron grate behind her.59 Underground sites – catacombs, grottoes, caves, the tunnels of Herculaneum, the buried vaults beneath the Palatine and Esquiline – formed a substantial part of visitor experience at this time, presenting both sensory attributes and affective associations quite different from monuments on the surface. A secret, buried, uncanny Antiquity, a gothic classicism comprised wavering torches, dripping water, sinuous passages, and the clutch of skeletal hands spread veinlike under the noble proportions of the sun-baked monuments above. Once encountered, the awareness of this other space cannot wholly be shaken off. *

*

*

Although concerned retrospectively to ascertain the grounds for identifying particular structures, Eaton reports with an unusual degree of candour her on-the-spot willingness to suspend disbelief. One of her group’s recurring objectives, for example, is to find the remains of Rome’s Servian walls, reputedly constructed by pre-Republican ruler Servius Tullius. Their ‘transports’ of excitement when they scrape back the long grass to uncover a short stretch of tufa blocks in a plausible location are undiminished by the dubiousness of the discovery. ‘The original walls of Republican Rome!’ Eaton exclaims. ‘Did we see them? Nay more, actually touch them at last! The belief might be delusive, but that was no matter, it did just as well’.60 This acknowledgement on the one hand that the wall’s history might be spurious, but refusal on the other to relinquish the transportational power of associated narrative, is what sets Eaton apart. Other visitors, such as Sydney, Lady Morgan are dismayed by the impossibility of secure identification. Morgan, 55

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

‘unaffected by virtù and unsolicited by a factitious enthusiasm’, is unwilling to summon the self-delusion necessary to discover baths and banqueting halls in the ‘mouldering vaults’ beneath the Esquiline. She feels only the fatigue and the chill, and the difficulty of keeping her balance while picking her way over piles of loose rubble in the dark.61 Eaton, however, uses these same sensations as the channel through which external phenomena can take cognitive shape. Touching the Servian walls produces a more substantial frisson than merely viewing them, a sense of climax increased by the unpredictable outcome of their search and the physical action of searching. Touch ought to verify, but although it can affirm the solidity and co-presence of the walls, their fabric and their position, their designation as ‘Servian’ remains unsubstantiated. Touch represents attainment, but the emotional transport it brokers relies on Eaton’s maintenance of a belief she suspects simultaneously to be delusion. While certainly more comfortable possessing secure knowledge of her setting, she is also prepared to improvise. Her relief on an excursion to Mons Sacer that ‘for once, no doubt intrudes on the consciousness that we do indeed stand on this spot’ is quite emphatic as she borrows from the lexicon of pilgrimage to revel in ‘the unwavering faith, that the earth we trod was holy ground’.62 In the absence of trustworthy sources, however, Eaton applies her own intuition, as on a visit to ‘Roma Vecchia’, a small ruined town in the Campagna. Its ruins impose upon her the ‘impression’ of a violent invasion: ‘These walls seem to bear record of a time when a legion of remorseless barbarians filled these grass-grown streets . . . This may be fancy,’ she admits at the end of her sensational account of sack and slaughter, ‘but in these ruined habitations, and in the mystery which involves their history and their fate, there is something which does not address itself in vain either to the heart or the imagination’.63 In other words, as Eaton is in possession of no extrinsic facts concerning Roma Vecchia, she feels at liberty to concentrate exclusively on translating the sense-impressions generated by the site into affect (the heart) and narrative (the imagination). Fully aware of her own role as fabulist-fantasist, she nonetheless locates her inspiration in the material attributes of the town’s extant remains. Walking, touching, probing and tracing Vecchia’s disordered shape has equipped her with what she comes cumulatively to perceive as indices of sudden destruction. On her excursion to Tivoli, Eaton takes exception to the current theory, relayed by Vasi and Eustace but disputed by Forsyth, that the so-called ‘Sibyl’s Temple’ at the lip of the falls was in fact dedicated to the goddess Vesta. Among classical temples, Eaton argues that Vesta’s were not unique in having a circular form, and she therefore regards the alternative nomination of a nearby rectangular structure, now part of a church, both arbitrary and unnecessary.64 As any attribution is the product of fancy, Eaton sees no reason for depriving the Sibyl of her picturesque abode. Where the authorities disagree, Eaton’s default recommendation is to cleave to the possibility most evocative. Similarly, when visiting a mausoleum known as the ‘Tomb of Ovid’, Eaton is keen to demonstrate her knowledge that it cannot (according to the literary record) be the poet’s genuine tomb, as that would be in Tomis, his place of exile.65 ‘But,’ she continues, ‘there is a charm in a name even when we know it is unreal; though fancy alone invested this ruined sepulchre with the title of the Tomb of Ovid, we entered it with feelings of interest . . . 56

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

which we certainly should not otherwise have experienced.’ Her brief ecphrasis of the monument recalls passages of scene-setting in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti. There is an overhanging arch of rock artfully framing the tomb, and trees whose extended branches appear to be mourning over its derelict condition.66 Naming is an important part of conjuring up the aura to be conferred on a given site. Eaton’s party visit the ruins on the Esquiline known as the ‘House of Maecenas’, ‘a name so justly dear to every admirer of taste and literature, that we did not feel disposed too scrupulously to question the grounds of the belief, that we actually stood within the walls of a classic habitation, where Horace and Virgil, Ovid and Augustus, must so often have met’.67 Eaton stresses the tenuousness of the attribution, based on the historiographical fact that Nero erected the sprawling Domus Aurea over an area which included the site of Maecenas’ mansion,68 and the material fact that one of the walls in the Esquiline complex displays different, possibly older brickwork. She also stresses her own partiality, however, for the conjecture that lets her feel herself actually standing in, kinaesthetically occupying, the same space as long-dead celebrity poets. Desire for this sensoreality overcomes any intellectual scruples, but at the same time Eaton remains mischievously alert to the ambivalence of these ‘real or imaginary classic remains’, which might in fact be nothing more glamorous than the back end of a bath-house. Eaton deliberately manufactures sensations of wonder, nostalgia, melancholy, admiration and excitement which are predicated upon her attendance at and traversal of specific places. Traversal is an important factor. Unlike Eustace, whose consumption of Rome is all about establishing the ideal spectatorial prospect, Eaton’s ancient Rome unfolds as an apprehension inextricable from her own sense of movement: walking, standing and treading, as well as occasionally entering, climbing, descending or handling, are interwoven into her recollection and representation of the sites. These actions – these attitudes – give rise in conjunction with the objects around her to palpable fluctuations in affect. Their range of motion may not diverge very far from everyday activity, but even the smallest of gestures, down to stillness itself, can serve as a medium for focusing somatic attention. In the Forum, Eaton openly states that ‘the delightful delusion which entranced me when I fancied that I stood on the very spot rendered sacred by the eloquence of Cicero’ was based on a false identification of the columns known as the Temple of Concord, where Cicero is supposed to have delivered his fourth oration against Catiline. Reluctantly ‘compelled to acknowledge’ the columns’ current reinterpretation as a late antique temple dedicated to Fortuna,69 she finds the delusion no less entrancing for its false premise. Cicero is a favourite figure of Eaton’s. When informed that some rubble on the Caelian Hill was known as ‘Cicero’s Rostrum’, and the orator had once used it to address the people, she ‘scrambled up its broken walls, and stood on the green platform at the top, merely because the name of Cicero had attached to it a charm; for most certainly,’ she continues, immediately deprecating her own enthusiasm, ‘his voice never poured forth its eloquence here’.70 In this dual aspect of Eaton’s approach to ancient material culture, her conscious self-delusion and her exploitation of a site’s evocative properties in spite of (because of) its unstable credibility, there is more than a little theatricality. Many writers, 57

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

including Eustace, make casual reference to ‘theatres’ of historical action, or the ‘scenes’ where past events occurred,71 but for Charlotte Eaton this somewhat stale metaphor acquires fresh resonance and becomes essential for resolving the cognitive dissonance identified above. When she refers to the Forum as ‘the frequent theatre of frays, tumults . . . and bloodshed’, or to the Temple of Venus and Roma as ‘this scene of tremendous ruin’ (emphasis added),72 she is conceiving of the sites as the equivalent of empty sets, as mises-en-scène for prior actions, spontaneous or staged, which can be replayed in space that has been internalized by the imaginative tourist. The same conceit is articulated by Samuel Rogers, who kept a journal of his tour in 1814–15. Rogers likewise regards the Forum as: a vast theatre in which the human passions have acted. Here Caesar fell, here Cicero pleaded, here the Roman Matrons went in longa ordine. Here Brutus saw his sons die, here Virginia received the knife of her father, here Cornelia received her boys from school, & Sylla walked the streets after his abdication. Here Virgil & Horace wandered together & Scipio Africanus passed in triumph – & how many kings have ascended the Capitol to be strangled after the show.73 Whereas Rogers takes up the position of spectator, as the pageant or pompa passes by him in longa ordine, Eaton relates how her own body occupies the space as she imagined its revival, and in doing so reveals the contribution made by kinaesthesia. As when she brushes her fingertips along the Servian walls, scrambles up ‘Cicero’s Rostrum’ or places her foot on Neronian tesserae, so Eaton transforms the Forum into a stage for evocative motion. Judith Adler’s proposition that travel is ‘an art that creates meaning through play with richly symbolic spaces’ is fully borne out by Eaton’s performative practice.74 Sets are more than just backdrops.75 Whereas a backdrop provides a visual accompaniment to the action played before it, sets (like sculptural installations) are interactive and three-dimensional, consisting of objects that might be moveable, such as furniture, or fixed, such as walls or blocks or boulders. Individual components may be reinforced by their mention in the play’s spoken text and thus endowed with artificial significance for the duration of the performance, but even without this kind of verbal enhancement a set requires ongoing haptic negotiation on the part of its occupants. Sharing the space with human performers, its affordances and restrictions are incorporated into the play’s physical score, affecting the ‘blocking’ or choreography of the actors’ bodily movements.76 A backdrop, by contrast, largely serves the spectators – the actors may not even be able to see it behind them, while onstage – but the set is inescapable, the material scaffolding from which the fictional world of the drama must be constructed, the skeleton on which its tissue is strung. I stress the difference here between the spectator’s perspective and that of the performer because Eaton’s proto-archaeological use of space resembles the latter. Rather than gazing diligently at Roman monuments from a respectful distance, she scrambles over them, climbs onto and into them, and in walking among them, she occupies their arrangement like a stage. The fictions in which she indulges, treating a second-century 58

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

sepulchre as if it were Ovid’s tomb and some anomalous Esquiline brickwork as if it were Maecenas’ mansion, participate in the same knowing attribution of imagined characteristics as that of an actor whose spectral world-elsewhere is based on the present and tangible objects around her. In particular, it is the haptic properties of such objects which communicate affective force: that is, whether they are solid or yielding or crumbly or slippery, bulbous or precipitous, oppressive or inviting. Eaton rarely makes the whole chain of association explicit, but her methods of description coupled with her frequent recourse to theatrical metaphor strongly suggest that she would not be averse to defining tourism and its ensuing transports of ‘delusive’ belief – or rather, we could say, of simulated belief – as a form of enactment. More of the Forum Romanum remains than Eaton had anticipated. Just as for minimalist theatre-makers,77 an empty space would have sufficed as a vessel for her imaginative encounter with the Roman past, a bare platform charged with narrative where she might ‘stand on the grass-grown and deserted spot where Scipio had trod, where Cicero had spoken, where Caesar had triumphed, and where Brutus had acted “a Roman part” ’.78 The Brutus here envisaged by Eaton is in fact geographically dislocated; both in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, from which the quote is taken, and in its historiographic source-texts his suicide (Shakespeare’s ‘Roman part’) is performed in Macedonia following defeat at Philippi.79 The alternative reading is that Eaton is referring instead to tyrannicide, or possibly betrayal, as the ‘Roman part’ played by Brutus in the Forum. In any case, Eaton’s Brutus is a role. While the triumphing Caesar and the declaiming Cicero might be read here as historical individuals, albeit reductive caricatures engaged in what are already highly stylized or performative behaviours – the triumphal procession, the polished oration – whatever else ‘Brutus’ might be doing in the Forum, he is singled out by Eaton as acting. The Forum is his theatre.80 Caesar’s assassination, as relayed by Shakespeare, is a resource which also informs Eaton’s readings of other locations. Visiting the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, supposed to occupy the site of Pompey’s Curia, she finds the total absence of any material remains no impediment to recalling that ‘the blood of Caesar was poured forth on the ground on which we trod’, nor to a melodramatic condemnation of Brutus’ fanaticism as he ‘plunged his treacherous dagger’ into his mentor’s heart. ‘But we came here not to moralize over the death of Caesar, but to admire the frescoes of Domenchino,’ she rebukes herself, paraphrasing Antony’s ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’ (J.C. 3.2.73).81 Although nothing of the Curia remains in Sant’ Andrea, the statue in the Palazzo Spada identified as Pompey’s – before which Caesar was reputedly killed – inspires an even more vivid rendition of ‘the long passed scene’ in which ‘Caesar saw, at length, the dagger of his most trusted friend; and . . . exclaimed “Et tu, Brute!” as he folded his head in his robe, and sank to death’. The statue’s identity is disputed, but Eaton argues that as it was found in a plausible spot and the iconography does not correspond to any later emperor, she will continue adhering to the ‘irresistible’ conviction that it was at the foot of this very statue that ‘ “great Caesar fell” ’ (J.C. 3.2.184).82 Her frequent recourse to Shakespeare (rather than Suetonius or Plutarch, for instance) suggests that she perceives the fabric of Rome, whether sculptures, sites, or sets, in an implicitly theatrical guise. 59

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Also indicative that Eaton finds theatre a congenial reference point is her description of the Uffizi Niobid group as ‘a set of bad actors on the stage, throwing themselves into studied and affected postures, in order to expire with effect’.83 She remarks, however, that their ‘burlesque’ effect would be mitigated if the statues were assembled into a single tableau, rather than posed in a ‘stiff formal circle’, requiring the visitor to approach each individually. The effect as it stands is dispersed, not cumulative. Rather than contributing like the Laocoön group to one composite scene of pain, each sculpture must be scrutinized in turn, their twisting and straining too extreme for this more intimate, sequential appraisal. Eaton’s sense of the burlesque returns when confronted by the ‘modern ruins’ in the Borghese gardens, ‘tumbling about like bad actors, vainly trying to be tragical’.84 A genuine ruin may be a vehicle for genuine tragedy, but these faux-antique temples have not earned that distinction, and their ‘tumbling’ walls ape those of the Palatine like the clowns whose antics follow the serious matter of the drama. Instead of the ‘vacant space’ she expects, Eaton is thrilled to discover that the Forum Romanum consists of a more or less intact set, in the theatrical sense, whose capriccio of ‘Corinthian columns, ruined temples, triumphal arches, and mouldering walls, no less affecting in their decay’ could have come straight out of the designer’s workshop. Astonished, heart pounding, she steps into the setting of the events she has read about, and declares, ‘I stood in the Roman Forum! Amidst its silence and desertion, how forcibly did the memory of ages that were fled speak to the soul!’85 The atmospheric contrasts of a public space depopulated and monumental architecture shattered affect her with an intensity she experiences as involuntary, as a ‘forcible’ intervention into her nervous system. Her exclamatory syntax then becomes fractured and breathless: the long struggles for freedom and power – the popular tumults – the loud acclamations – the energetic harangues – the impassioned eloquence – and all the changeful and chequered events of which it had been the theatre . . . crowded into my mind, and touched the deepest feeling of my heart. Such to me is the charm of being where I have been . . . this moment in which I felt I stood upon the sacred soil of the Roman Forum.86 This passage illustrates fully the confluence of onsite presence (‘being where I have been’), reflexive proprioception (‘I felt I stood’), affective response (‘the deepest feeling of my heart’) and theatricality which pervades Eaton’s account of Rome. It is the action of placing herself in among the ruins, as opposed to viewing them from a distance, which stimulates the ‘charm’ that arises from live attendance and from the corporeal occupation of a designated space. Having prepared herself to be charmed in this way, Eaton unsurprisingly succeeds, not least because instead of a flat and featureless void, the Forum presents a sensorially exciting array of structures, exhibiting diverse heights, shapes, volumes and degrees of fragmentariness. The set is suddenly a complex one. Far from the blank space of Eaton’s expectations, its crowded apparatus permits a vigorous interchange between the disposition of the extant objects, Eaton’s proprioceptive consciousness and her in situ extrapolation of a past that is as fictional as the words of 60

Charlotte Eaton’s Rome as Theatre

Shakespeare’s Brutus. The Forum changed considerably over the course of the Roman Republic and early empire, its surviving monuments representing a mélange of periods from the first century ce onwards;87 it is the site, but not the set, of Cicero’s orations. Nevertheless, because Cicero is the star of Eaton’s Ancient Rome, she feels that ‘now I actually stood on the very scene of his glorious exertions and patriotic eloquence, and his spirit seemed in every object that met my view’. Just as she ‘actually stood’ in the reputed ruins of Maecenas’ domus, so again Eaton ‘actually stood’ on the same stage – the ‘very scene’ – where her protagonist’s voice had once rebounded from the surrounding stone. She then immediately draws attention to the discrepancy between the literal identity of her available set (Temple of Fortuna, late antique), and the fictional setting for which she has knowingly made it the surrogate (Temple of Concordia, famously used by Cicero when prosecuting Catiline). Just as an actor performs a historical role, his body standing in for the body of his character, so the portico of one building performs the portico of another. It may be useful to establish as a general principle the distinction between site, set and setting as three ways of perceiving the same space. The site of a past event refers to its permanent geographical location as preconceived by the visitor, regardless of how this location has altered in appearance over time. Its current configuration is the set, the extended cognitive apparatus (contrived as such, or accidental) on which visitors play out their drama of approach and apprehension. And the setting, then, is the event’s imagined historical context as represented by the contemporary remains, in the same way as the boards, struts and potted plants comprising what Issacharov terms the ‘scenic’, i.e. material, stage-space stand notionally in for the imagined fictional space (the setting) of the action.88 This imaginative rapport does not necessarily discriminate between the genuine artefact and the spurious, although the sensation when site, set and setting coincide can, as Eaton attests, verge on the mystical (‘I stood upon the sacred soil’, ‘the earth we trod was holy ground’, eliciting ‘emotions not born of this world’). Placed on the same stage, then, or on a set whose contours, scale and orientation suggest particular patterns or rhythms of movement – along the portico, up the steps, around the terrace – Eaton’s visitor feels herself to be replicating the kinetic attitudes of a previous era. ‘All the distant and romantic events of history are realized by the presence of the scenes in which they are acted,’ she observes. ‘The long interval of ages is at once annihilated, and we seem to live, and move, and think, with those who have gone before us’.89 The metaphorical distance of time is collapsed by the topographical continuity of the site. Eaton also slips casually from kinetic to cognitive resemblance. As we move with the ancient occupants of this set, so we follow in some respect the progress of their thoughts, as measured in footsteps or archways, uneven paving stones or soaring vaults. The ‘romantic events of history’ are conceived as a theatrical performance, ‘acted’ in ‘scenes’ and as such repeatable, re-enactable. Eaton’s position in relation to this historyplay is not that of a spectator, however, but rather that of a fellow actor, using the vestigial set in order to reconstruct the entrances and exits, the pacing and posturing of self-styled protagonists, the flurry of the crowds and the dramatic, isolated tableaux by moving herself through the affordances, multifarious but nonetheless structurally circumscribed, 61

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

which the arrangement of the Forum accommodates. As she realizes, all perception of historical events takes place in the present, historical ‘distance’ itself being a product of the feeling imagination. The relevance of Eaton’s approach to present-day visitor experience lies in its subversive recognition that historicity – that is, historical value, or significance – resides not in the monuments themselves but in the narratives accompanying them. Unlike other visitors, however, she chooses not to be perturbed by the scarcity of evidence, and instead develops a practice of cognitive dissonance that enables her to manufacture sincere enthusiasm even for relics she knows to be ‘unreal’. The contradiction inherent in Eaton’s ‘delusive belief’ enables her to escape the inflexible dualism of authentic/false (or fake). In her realization that any structure, under the right circumstances, can become the repository of ‘charm’, Eaton lays bare the mechanism of fetishization underpinning the serious business of antiquarianism. In pursuit of the psychotropic gratification of discovery, she then proceeds successfully to fetishize everything she can lay her hands on. Part of Rome’s appeal, of course, is in the celebrity of its actors. For Eaton, as for other visitors, it subsists in the fact that she can follow with her own feet and eyes and voice trajectories identical to Cicero’s. ‘It is this,’ she declares, ‘which gives enchantment to the scene, and stirs our hearts within us, as we fondly linger over every object . . . and cling to every wreck of the times that are fled . . . For this was the theatre of the world in its spring of youth and vigour’.90 This passage again combines several of Eaton’s leitmotifs. The ‘scene’ or the set/site exerts an ‘enchantment’ over the visitor, or an annihilation of imagined temporal distance by imagined material proximity, which could perhaps also be glossed again as ‘charm’. Its effect is powerfully emotional, and predicated upon the adoption of physical attitudes; it is in performing the acts of lingering and clinging that the heart is stirred. Whether or not this vocabulary pertains to overt gesture, it is nevertheless indicative of the relationship assumed by Eaton’s visitor towards the residue of antiquity: a voluntary suspension of progress (lingering) and a possessive refusal to relinquish (clinging). Fondness can make one both tender and foolish, but it is in Eaton’s strategy of framing her own touristic fondness as folly that she renders it ludic, a deliberate self-delusion, an act of play.

62

CHAPTER 4 GOETHE’S ‘SEEING HAND’

In his Venetian Epigrams of 1790, Goethe devotes a miniature cycle of poems to an acrobat named Bettina, a street performer whose supple limbs encompass both the dreamlike sublime and the lewdly pornographic. Her metapoetic function is stated explicitly towards the end of the sequence, encouraging a re-reading in which the art of the poet is fused with the art of the tumbler. Once he is better versed in the actions (Handwerk) of kings and nobility, Goethe will put them in song, ‘but until then, I will sing of Bettina, since street performers and poets (Gaukler und Dichter) / are closely related, readily seeking out and finding one another’. In part referring to the common status of the travelling player and the travelling poet, this equivalence of roles also prompts a reconsideration of the preceding epigrams as fusion texts where movement – at once virtuosic, bawdy, dangerous and captivating – stands in for poetry, and where poetry, equally technical and equally protean, seeks to capture the rhythms of movement. Bettina, like the dancers of ancient pantomime, renders her body so plastic it is capable of representing any creature. ‘I have known men and beasts, also birds and fishes,’ marvels the poet, ‘and swarming, crawling things besides [Gewürm], great wonders of Nature . . . But you are all of these together.’ Bettina appears to have no bones, only infinitely malleable flesh, the poet comparing her to a mollusc whose smooth muscle propels it effortlessly through the water, as Bettina seems to swim through the air. She is introduced initially as an artwork, a miniature masterpiece (liebe Figürchen) carved by the hand of an artist (von der künstlichen Hand geschnitzt), before the reader is aware that the subject of the poem is a living girl. In antiquity, dancers are frequently compared to sculptures,1 but the diminutive Figürchen is also suggestive of Goethe’s own epigram form. These, too, are miniature artworks crafted by a künstlichen Hand. The reflexive motif of the poet’s hand at work in composition recurs throughout Goethe’s Italian oeuvre, as indeed it is evident in his ancient models (Ovid’s epistolary Heroides, for example). The cross-reference to a cognate art-form alerts the reader to anticipate interchangeability. Goethe’s is the hand, in fact, which is literally responsible for shaping ‘Bettina’, the character who somersaults so briefly through the Venetian Epigrams but leaves the handwritten analogue of her movement deftly imprinted on the page. If the type of movement performed by Bettina and the effects it produces may be read as a reference point for Goethe’s own poetic practice, we have the option of understanding all of the corpus not merely as a body-double, but as the double of a body in motion. Although the Roman Elegies are less acrobatic than Bettina’s epigrams, in their defiance of social and sexual convention and their inscription of a subversive economy of time, they are in their way no less daring. ‘All [of Bettina’s body] is constructed according to measure [Alles nach Maβen gebaut],’ the poet observes, ‘and all of it moves according to her pleasure’ [alles nach Willkür 63

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

bewegt].’ These dual properties, matter and movement, balanced across the caesura of the pentameter line, align Bettina with the two complementary art-forms of sculpture (gebaut) and dance (bewegt). They also characterize her as resembling a poetic composition that conforms to strict metrical convention (nach Maβen) even as it takes libertine liberties with its subject matter (nach Willkür). By extension, the poet is producing an artwork that is not only ecphrasis of an object – static, a visual surrogate – but also mobile, a type of ecphrasis delivering movement, and doing so via its auditory factors: its rhythm and meter, syntactic and phonetic structure, and its assumption of temporal duration. As Lessing observed in his 1766 essay on Laocoön and the representation of pain, (dramatic) poetry takes place not only in space, but also in time, duration being the often unacknowledged container inseparable from the movement defined as comprising the dramatic event.2 Goethe’s epigrams on Bettina the dancer provide a clear articulation of this relationship, which can also be applied with considerable pertinence across the Roman Elegies. Rome is mapped in the Elegies not only through places and monuments, whether anonymous ‘churches and palaces and columns’ (2.19) or identified as the Capitoline or Cestius’ tomb (9.212,214), but also through personal movement. The routes that are taken over the course of the poet-amator’s love-affair define it spatially. The city is not a backdrop or a prospect, but rather a three- or rather even four-dimensional setting to be navigated if the sweet kernel of pleasure, the orgasmic Freude at its heart, is to be enjoyed. This navigation also entails an element of role-play. Goethe’s Dichter, the poet-lover responsible for the cycle’s internal narration, assumes various personae in pursuit of his objective, adopting the masks of mythological lovers, Roman love-poets, ancient gods and cult initiates. As in a theatrical performance, Goethe’s elegiac time runs on a separate track: it can be expanded and compressed, squandered and recalled. It is the site of Rome that makes this manipulation possible, where the physical presence of precedents inheres in the setting, rendering every present gesture a re-enactment. * 3

*

*

The second elegy in the cycle establishes several important equivalences: sound and movement, movement and time, ROMA and AMOR,4 love and secrecy, secrecy and holiness. Opening with an entreaty to the stones, streets and ‘high palaces’ of the city that they ‘speak’ to him (saget . . . sprecht . . . redet ein Wort), the Dichter recognizes that while the ‘holy walls’ of Rome are beseelt, alive, seething with inward vitality, the face it shows him presently is blank, silent (schweiget) and still. He has not yet encountered his beloved but anticipates the moment when the first Roman whisper will reach him and he shall glimpse her through a window to be erquickt, quickened and revived. For Rome to be properly experienced, it must contain a love-affair, otherwise it will remain a lifeless parade of façades (Kirch und Palast, Ruinen und Saulen). The palaces will only begin to speak, whispering their secrets (flüstert) as a prelude to admittance, when the Dichter has identified a woman to take on the role of his Lesbia, Cynthia or Corinna. Ohne die Liebe, the Dichter observes, wäre dem Rom auch nicht Rom: Rome, in the absence of love, is just not itself. 64

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

The affair is not at this point envisaged as involving the mingling of bodies. Instead, in keeping with the currently purely imaginary status of Goethe’s puella, it takes the form of the Dichter’s own movement through the streets of the city: ‘Do I not yet know the ways through which, again and again, / in passing to and from her, I sacrifice my precious time?’ he marvels (Ahn ich die Wege noch nicht, durch die immer und immer / Zu ihr und von ihr zu gehn, opfre die köstliche Zeit?). However, it is not lovemaking itself in this instance that consumes the hours, but the repetitious traversal (immer und immer) of the labyrinthine alleyways whose route is as yet unknown, the Wege that in time will become so familiar he could tread them blind, creating the typically elegiac pattern of approach/ anticipation and withdrawal/recollection of lost experience, the vanishing point. The passage of the Dichter’s feet, immer und immer up and down the hidden backstreets of Rome, is also the passage of his poetry, but poetry characterized as action or movement in itself, as opposed to a reflective process in conflict with Erlebnis, lived experience.5 In the following Elegy 3, the Dichter’s fantasy encounter is realized. Amor, as a personification of the Roman love-god, leads him (führte) past the palazzi, whose majestätschen Fassaden do not divert them (verführten), however seductive their romantic balconies and noble courtyards. Eilig ging es vorbei, the Dichter relates, making his first reference to haste (eilig), ‘we hurried on by’, until they reach a humble door that admits the postulant (Verlangenden) along with his divine or allegorical guide. The pathway which the previous elegy could trace only in the abstract has now become spatially fixed. As expected, it bypasses the city’s showy façades in favour of a more personal route. Unlike the doors of Latin elegy, resolutely closed against the unhappy exclusus amator, the door of the Dichter’s beloved opens easily, a portal to the inner Rome whose whispers the Dichter had been straining to hear in Elegy 2. Having attained the interior of Amors Tempel (2.22), the Dichter makes similarly short work of his next impediment, his lover’s clothing. Prior to its removal, however, the poem digresses to detail all the garments Faustina is happily not wearing, the jewels, brocades and layers of silken upholstery which would have to be laboriously discarded by a woman of higher status. Similarly, by detailing all the activities he himself is not performing during this time (‘Dinner and company, drives down the Corso, cards and operas and balls’), Goethe slyly defers and deflects the Dichter’s enjoyment (Glück) of the very simplicity he is ostensibly praising. The Dichter distracts his reader with the complaint that such distractions ‘rob Love of its most opportune time’ (Amorn rauben nur oft die gelegenste Zeit). His reader must trudge past all the palaces, fidget through the parties and curse the whalebone corsets before reaching the point where Faustina is divested of her smock (schon fällt dein wollenes Kleidchen, it is already coming off ), To make up for this teasing, however, he quickly (eilig, again) carries Faustina to the bed, where no more time is lost: ‘We delight in the joy of sincere, naked Love, / and of the rocking bed, its delightful creaking voice (knarrender Ton).’ The movement of lovemaking, in other words, as it shakes the bed (geschaukelten Betts), produces the Roman sound effects the Dichter has been longing for: no sonorous echoes, however, but in fact the comedy squeak of enthusiastic bedsprings. Again, the movement of the poem coincides 65

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

with the movement of the poet, a movement that correspondingly and obligingly generates onomatopoeic sound. Sensual pleasure as a principle of reception is articulated explicitly by Amor in Elegy 15 as the god attempts to persuade the Dichter that more inspiration is to be found in the creaking bed than in ancient ruins. Amor styles himself as tutor (Lehrer) to the ancient poets, insinuating that an imitation of their fictional lifestyle will furnish the Dichter with more than enough material (Stoff zum Lieder). ‘The school of the Greeks is still open!’ he proclaims. ‘The so-called “ancient” world was new, when those happy ones were living (jene Glücklichen leben) – / Live happily (Lebe glückliche) and the past will come to life in you.’ Glück is associated in the Elegies with the satisfaction of sexual desire.6 Goethe places in the mouth of Amor an argument for imitatio that goes beyond the literary. Despite his protestations against Amor’s ‘sophistry’, the Dichter nevertheless puts this principle into practice, modelling his lovemaking as well as its elegiac rendition on scenes from Ovid and Propertius. The haptic sensations of Glück, if Amor’s formulation is accepted, constitute an act of reception, if they are perceived as such. It is of course one’s own pleasure which is experienced, not that of the Propertian amator; but reperformance, not recapture, is the point of aemulatio. The motions of lovemaking, then, are another way in which Goethe’s Dichter establishes an embodied relationship with Rome and Roman antiquity. Sexual intercourse itself rarely occurs in the cycle as explicitly as it does in Elegy 3, but intimate sensations proliferate. Elegy 7, for example, similarly represents love as a learning process: ‘Is it not educational (behlehr ich mich nicht), when I investigate the shape / of her lovely breasts, stroking my hand down over her hips?’ Statuary now holds new meaning for a connoisseur who has been enabled to ‘see with a feeling eye, and feel with a seeing hand’ (Sehe mit fühlendem Aug, fühle mit sehender Hand). The same restless Hand taps out gentle hexameters on Faustina’s sleeping back, making her the unwitting recipient of a poetic beat without words. Their touching is generally mutual. Elegy 21.471–2 emphasizes the exchange of kisses, as breath flows evenly back and forth between the lovers; in 15.311, both communicate their affection with ‘glances, pressed hands, and kisses’. The Dichter awakens to feel the comfortable weight of Faustina’s head on his arm as it pillows her neck, and the profusion of her loose hair on the skin of his Busen (15.319–24); turning over in her sleep, her hand remains clasped in his own (lässt sich mir Hand noch in Hand). The Dichter discovers that he has a morning erection, which he refers to with conscious self-satisfaction as a ‘monument (Denkmal) to last night’s pleasure’, as though his body were transformed into one of the surviving structures of ancient Rome, his genitals a heritage site.7 If renewed, if refreshed (erquickt) in the re-performance, if Amor is to be believed, then, sexual pleasure is a Denkmal commemorating ancient Roman shenanigans with greater durability than bronze. When he is not passing the time in Faustina’s bed, the Dichter does visit other Roman attractions, notably sculpture galleries (7.143; 13.241–8) and the Capitol. Elegy 9, which opens with the reflexive exclamation O wie fühl ich in Rom mich so froh! (‘O, how happy I feel myself in Rome!’), elides the Capitol with Mount Olympus (9.211–12), both places being Jupiter’s ‘ambrosial home’. Although the temple of Capitoline Jove is no longer 66

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

extant, the Dichter re-imagines the site as a double setting,8 standing in not only for the lost Roman temple but also for the divine Olympian halls of which the temple itself was a material simulacrum. Träum ich? wonders the Dichter. ‘Am I dreaming?’ In the hallucinatory scenario that follows, the goddess Hebe has seized him (fässte) and borne him up to the heights where the gods are feasting. He begs Jupiter not to cast him back down to earth (hinab). As well as the sensory correlatives of height and depth, Elegy 9 also draws haptic contrasts with the Dichter’s former life in the dull, grey (graulicher) North using sensations of temperature, weight and contour. There, the clouded skies (trübe Himmel) pressed heavily upon him (schwer . . . sich senkte), instead of wafting him upwards to their pinnacle. Whereas the northern world smothered him in a formless, gestaltlos shroud, here in Rome the sun-god summons forth Formen und Farben, shapes and colours. Sunk in frozen melancholy, still in Betrachtung versank, the Dichter used to pace the gloomy pathways of his own restless soul (des unbefriedigten Gestes / düstre Wege zu spähn). On the Capitol, however, at the religious apex of Rome, this meaningless mental wandering ceases, and instead, exhaling (‘Ah!’), he assumes a single dramatic pose: ‘Here I lie, and stretch out to your knees / my supplicating hands’ (9.201). This gesture marks the turning point of the elegy from a recollection of deep depression to a giddy Traum of quasi-apotheosis. The Dichter does not, however, lose touch with his own mortality. In the closing lines, he petitions Jupiter to let him remain in this exalted realm until Hermes should come to lead him (führe) past Cestius’ tomb and hence down (hinab) to Orcus. A sacred topography, then, is mapped onto Rome and its monuments, the Capitol functioning as Olympus and the Pyramid of Cestius as the gateway to the Underworld. As Amor led him to Faustina’s chamber, Hermes will similarly act as the Dichter’s guide through the ensouled streets of Rome on the point of death. Just as Rome takes on the theatrical function of a set for the Dichter’s spiritual revival, so the Dichter himself also engages in role-play and disguise. Most overtly, in Elegy 8, he dresses as a priest in order to visit Faustina without suspicion, a ruse which backfires when the neighbours simply suspect her of having an affair with the randy Prälate. Wearing a dark surcoat with his hair bundled up, he chooses to adopt this geistliche Maske, this ‘spiritual disguise’, as a bit of a joke (scherzend), but it also provides him with a distinctively local Roman (Catholic) identity. The disguise does not appear to have been a success in any practical capacity, but as a Maske it allows the Dichter to engage in another layer of play. Masks recur in Elegy 22, the only exclusively mythological poem in the collection, which depicts an allegorical conflict between Amor and the strident goddess Fama (fame, repute, renown). Amor, in order to demonstrate his superior influence over even the most vainglorious of men, cross-dresses (vermummt) Hercules with the Lydian queen Omphale and exhibits the couple as a tableau to the assembled gods. The costuming is also referred to as a Scherze, a joke. Fama, outraged, will not at first believe that this is actually Hercules: ‘Those are just masks (Masken),’ she accuses them, ‘and these are just actors (Tragöden) trying to trick us!’ Although she is wrong in the sense that the man in the flowery headdress is indeed Hercules, she has correctly identified the activity as a performance, directed by Amor. 67

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Costume, like props and set, can be an important haptic stimulus to the historical imagination, but not all performances require a change of clothes. Masking can be verbal, or physiological. The masks that Goethe has the Dichter assume over the course of the Roman Elegies (including, of course, that of Goethe’s own persona),9 are less material than the prelate’s cloak or Hercules’ garland, although these costume items make manifest the leitmotif of role-play that runs through the cycle. In both instances, play has a serious motive – to divert suspicion and protect Faustina’s reputation, to assert Amor’s authority and discredit a rival deity – but it is also in both instances a comic Scherze. The ludic and the purposeful coincide in the Roman Elegies, enabling Goethe to disrupt the apparent opposition of these categories. *

*

*

The Römische Elegien use literary allusions to fashion their impersonation of a classical liber, many of which involve movement or touch. Both Elegy 7 (‘Now I find myself on classical ground, elated’, 135) and Elegy 9 (‘Oh, how happy I feel myself to be in Rome!, 189) explicitly celebrate the Dichter’s tactile interaction with the setting of his affair, as his ‘busy hand’ leafs through ancient sources – poets? – by day, and explores Faustina’s statue-like body by night. The cycle is set in modern Rome, but it is the haunted Rome of an antiquarian, as opposed to merely a backdrop for sexual pursuit.10 At the close of Elegy 7, following the gentle strum of hexameters on flesh, Amor trims the lamp and remembers performing an identical duty for ‘his Triumvirs’ (7.154). The ‘triumvirate’ of Roman love poets are commonly understood to be Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.11 In practice, however, the Roman poets with whom Goethe’s cycle has the closest relationship are Propertius, Ovid and the author/s of the Carmina Priapea.12 Casting the city as site of erotic intrigues rather than political clashes or militarism, Goethe’s narrator invokes the Rome of elegy and assumes the fictional identity appropriate to his generic setting. The virtual city-world where the Dichter’s immersive romance unfolds is the Welt fashioned by the Augustan poets (2.23–4), where mistresses draw secret signs on the table in spilled wine (Ovid, Amores 4.17–22 and Ars Amatoria 1.569–72), sleep in the attitude of Ariadne (Propertius 1.3.1–2) and seek reassurance for their rapid capitulation in the amorous precedents set by ancient gods. The Dichter’s affair is framed throughout as an act of classical reception. The two thematic features that the Elegien share with Ovid’s Ars Amatoria are its playful manipulation of elegiac tropes and its equally irreverent appropriation of Roman public space for erotic purposes. Ovid singles out specific buildings and monuments that conveniunt . . . amori (AA. 1.79). They include the porticoes of Pompey, Octavia and Livia, the temples of Apollo and Venus Genetrix, the theatre of Marcellus and the Saepta Iulia, all of which were commissioned or restored by the emperor Augustus or members of his immediate family. As A.J. Boyle has shown, by appropriating these symbols of imperial ideology as sites for illicit romance, Ovid’s text becomes politically subversive.13 Although the Römische Elegien do not politicize their Roman topography,14 the city nevertheless fulfils a comparable function as the tangible complement of a relationship that could not occur elsewhere. The Dichter has conquered a römischen Busen (84), and 68

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

in turn has become enmeshed (umwunden) in römischen Flechten (‘Roman braids’, 134); it is Faustina’s Roman-ness which shapes her as poetic material into an embodiment of the joyful Geheimnis discovered as part of an unfolding spatial interaction. The collection’s original title – Elegien. Rom 1788 – positions the city, rather than the Dichter’s human lover, as their subject.15 As in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), the beloved is a personification enabling the erotics of contact with the classical past to be articulated in familiar language. Goethe was reading Ovid’s exile poetry, the Tristia in very personal terms shortly after his return to Germany in 1788. In a letter to Herder, he writes of how much he misses Italy, lamenting: ‘I cannot say with how much emotion I repeat these verses of Ovid, cum subit tristissima noctis imago / quae mihi supremum tempus in urbe fuit. I feel so keenly what I have lost. . .’16 The closing passage of Goethe’s Italian Journal quotes Tristia 1.3. in anticipation of this loss, and Lind wonders if his attempted composition of a valedictory poem in the style of the Tristia represents the moment when the Roman Elegies were first conceived.17 The streets of Rome are also traversed elegiacally in Ovid’s Tristia 1.1 and 1.3, poems which themselves reference Propertius 4.1 (which in turn references Aeneid 8). These literary strata are at work beneath Goethe’s Elegy 18, a compound of poetic treatments of Roman prehistory. The speaker of Propertius 4.1 addresses a hospes, a newcomer to the city. This which you now see, maxima Roma, used to be grassy hillsides before Aeneas’ arrival; where Apollo’s Palatine temple now stands, cattle once grazed. The visitor is shown the golden shrines that have risen around ‘terracotta gods’, the impressive Curia where once the Senate used to gather in a meadow, and the lowly hut which originally belonged to Romulus and Remus, now approached by a flight of steps.18 Although proposing to write an aetiology of Rome, Propertius’s speaker is ultimately dissuaded from his project and advised to return to his customary genre, establishing a tension between patriotic and personal poetry that pertains throughout Book 4.19 Tristia 3.1 reverses the perspective of Propertius’ guidebook account. The hospes is now the speaker, footsore and limping hospes liber (3.1.20), the book of poems newly arrived in Rome and seeking sanctuary in a sympathetic library. It eventually finds a guide: He acquiesced, and leading me, he said, ‘This is Caesar’s Forum. This is the street they call the Sacred Way, this the Vestals’ shrine, who preserve the Palladium and flame. This was the humble court of old King Numa.’ Then turning right, he said, ‘This gate leads to the Palatine. Here is [the temple of Jupiter] Stator, the place where Rome was first founded.’ Admiring each of these, I saw a remarkable entrance-way gleaming with spoils, and a dwelling fit for a god.20 They ascend the Palatine to the Temple of Apollo, adjacent to the residence of Augustus Caesar, where hospes liber admires the laurel wreath adorning the emperor’s door and the fine courtyard of the library from which it is banned.21 Instead, it must seek out private 69

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

readers, lurking in seclusion (privato liceat delituisse loco, 3.1.80), until its author’s disgrace has been forgiven. Goethe’s Dichter similarly turns aside from the public monuments – Kirch und Palast, Ruinen und Saulen – to find a more welcoming reception in plebeian hands (plebiae . . . manus, Trist. 3.1.82). The other motif Goethe takes from the Tristia is the poet’s denial of his own ability to write. Ovid protests that exile to Tomis has destroyed his talent. His ability to speak and write in Latin, he claims, has deteriorated. His verse has become as rough and harsh as his surroundings, as miserable and unkempt as its author. It is now generally recognized that the language and structure of the Tristia display no such deterioration.22 The posture of decline is a poetic conceit. Goethe’s Dichter takes up an equivalent posture in Elegy 15, although his circumstances are reversed. Instead of a Roman poet exiled to the barbarian north and deprived of his beloved (city), supposedly paralysed by longing, the Elegien present a northern barbarian (nordischen Gastes . . . und der Barbare, 4.83–4) supposedly paralysed by consummation. Responding to Amor’s ‘sophistic’ arguments, the Dichter allows that his Roman dalliance has given him adequate subject matter (Stoff zu Gesängen): Ah! and robbed me at once altogether of my time, strength, and senses. Glances, pressure of hands, and kisses, murmuring words, Syllables precious in meaning whisper the loving pair. Then lisping, babbling, stuttering become the speech of love. Ringing out like a hymn – but without any metrical scansion! 15.310–1423 Like Ovid’s narrator protesting the loss of his language in flawless couplets, the Dichter renders the inarticulate sounds of lovemaking as poetry, achieving the very conversion he claims is impossible. As Bernhardt remarks, Elegy 15 is ‘an example of a poet writing a great poem about his inability to write poetry’.24 The same dynamic paradox drives the Tristia. Ovid’s bitter nostalgia for Rome is answered in the mirror image of Goethe’s future poet who, like the Tristia’s narrator among the Sarmatians, composes Roman elegy in a foreign tongue (Ex Ponto 4.13.19–20: et Getico scripsi sermone libellum). The Dichter’s self-characterization in Elegy 4 as a wealthy northern ‘barbarian’ whose generosity is pleasing to his mistress responds to Propertius 2.16 in a similar manner. Propertius’ amator complains that Cynthia has left him for a wealthy Illyrian: ‘Apparently anyone can buy her love with gifts!’ (2.16.15). Even a barbarus who dances with his groin thrust out (exclusis agitat vestigia lumbis) becomes attractive when he inherits a fortune (subito felix).25 The Dichter’s mistress has similar priorities: ‘She is glad that he takes money seriously, unlike the Romans’ (RE. 4.80). Nicht wie die Römer: Goethe signals both adherence to and departure from Latin elegiac convention.26 If the Dichter is to live in an elegy, his chosen mask is that of the wealthy foreigner who not only seduces a Propertian mistress with fine dining and expensive gifts, but also perhaps gives her more satisfaction with his Priapic exclusis / exutis / excussis lumbis than the dejected exclusus amator ever provided. 70

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

Propertius is mentioned by name in Elegy 17, along with Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. Lucretius was glücklich and Propertius selig (blessed) as they could live promiscuously without risking exposure to the modern curse of venereal disease (17.357–62). The scene where Propertius is most evident, however, is the conclusion to Elegy 15, immediately following the Dichter’s assertion that the enactment of love impedes its realization as text. Faustina asleep allows stillen Genuβ, ‘silent appreciation’ of her Formen and the disposition of her limbs, like those of the statue with which she was elided in Elegy 7. A mere touch of the hand (einen Druck der Hand) would be enough to awaken her, disturbing the tableau by introducing motion as Faustina stirs and opens her eyes. The Dichter hopes they will stay closed as their gaze makes him feel ‘confused and drunk’ (trunken). At this point, the scene slips into dialogue with Propertius 1.3. The Roman amator drags his drunken footsteps (ebria . . . traherem vestigia) into the sleeping Cynthia’s chamber, and compares her to Ariadne lying abandoned by Theseus, languida . . . desertis litoribus (1.3.1–2). The Dichter makes the same comparison: ‘Was Ariadne so beautiful in sleep? Theseus, how could you leave her? / A single kiss on those lips – O Theseus, run! / Look at her eyes! She’s awoken! – forever, now, she holds you fast.’ AriadneFaustina’s eyes have assumed a Medusa-like ability to stop a man motionless with their gaze. Whereas previously the Dichter contemplated his beloved’s body as a statue, the positions are now reversed, and it is as though he has been turned to stone himself. Propertius’ Cynthia possesses a similar power, prima suis miserum me cepit oculis, captivating the unfortunate amator with her eyes (Prop. 1.1.1). While the Dichter is not unhappy to have been so retained, it does mark the cessation of the poem, the flowing patter of hexameters which is permitted only by the suspension of Faustina’s physical motion. Nevertheless, there are reminders that Faustina’s awakening is itself a product of the poet and the poem. Internally, her awakening is prompted by the Dichter’s kiss, and more metapoetically, she indeed awakens due to einen Druck der Hand: not the pressure of the Dichter’s hand on her own, but rather the equally erotic pressure of the hand that imprints her actions (and his own) onto the page. One role or mask adopted by the Dichter is that of initiate into an ancient Mystery cult. In Elegy 2, the whole city of Rome is ‘holy’ (heiligen; cf. geheiligten Raum, 15.292), transformed into a temple, Amors Tempel, which will admit the consecrated devotee. It is the god of love who guides him in the following elegy through the winding outer ways of the temple-city and grants access to its inner sanctum, Faustina’s chamber. The bed of the beloved is later glossed as the ‘altar’ of Love (15.318); each new day they spend together is a festival (21.476) for which they are adorned with garlands of flowers. Goethe represents the Dichter’s love-affair most explicitly as a religious festival, and specifically a fertility rite, in Elegy 14, in which the lovers participate in the festival of Ceres. Ceres (Demeter), goddess of crops and the harvest, granted humanity golden wheat to supplement their meagre pre-agricultural diet (14.254).27 Although she no longer receives due recognition in modern Rome, the Dichter proposes that he and Faustina should celebrate the festival in ‘pleasurable privacy’ (im stillen freudig, 255), Freude (like its close synonym Glück) being a keyword in the Elegies denoting sexual satisfaction. Remarking that in this way ‘two lovers will stand in for an entire population’, the Dichter 71

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

anticipates Amor’s statement in the following poem that by living a life of pleasure (lebe glückliche), the ancient past can be revived in his actions (so lebe die Vorzeit in dir, 15.304). Ovid’s Amores 3.10 provides the Geheimnis which Goethe locates at the centre of Demeter’s festival. As in Elegy 4’s reply to Propertius 2.16, the frustrated desire of the Roman amator is answered with sexual consummation by the Dichter. Ovid’s narrator complains that the Cerealia obliges Corinna to sleep alone. Ceres, he protests, is a ‘munificent’ goddess who begrudges nothing to mortals, taking delight in the fertility of crops and in human prosperity. Indeed, she herself is not ignorant of love. The Cretan goddess saw Iasion under Mt Ida spearing the backs of beasts with a steady hand. She saw him, and as her tender heart took fire, love and duty dragged her this way and that. Love vanquished duty (victus amore pudor); you could see the furrows in the field, only the smallest part of the crop returned. [. . .] The goddess of the harvest lingered in the tall woodland; the woven cornstalks fell from her hair. Only Crete was fertile in that fruitful year; everything, where the goddess passed, became a harvest. Am. 3.10.25–36 Retold by Goethe’s Dichter, this myth becomes the aetiology of the festival itself, and as such the reimagined Cerealia becomes an occasion not for celibacy but for revelry, precisely as Ovid goes on to recommend (festa dies Veneremque vocat cantusque merumque, ‘A festival calls for lovemaking, songs, and wine’, Am. 3.10.47). The Mysteries which Elegy 14 purports to revive are a direct response to Ovid’s treatment of the same theme. The festival of Ceres, according to the Dichter,28 was a version of the Eleusinian Mysteries brought to Rome and observed by the resident Greek population (257–60). He imagines the nocturnal ritual during which a postulant (Neuling) is initiated into the cult: Wunderlich irrte darauf der Eingeführte durch Kreise Seltner Gestalten; im Traum schein er zu wallen: den hier Wandelt sich Schlangen am Boden umher, verschlossene Kästchen Reich mit Ähren umkränzt, trugen hier Mädchen vorbei, Vielbedeutund gebärdeten sich die Priester und summten. 263–7 The newcomer wandered through the fantastical circle: Strange images, as in a dream, seemed to flow round him; here Snakes slithered on the earth before him, and locked caskets, 72

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

Richly adorned with corn, were here borne past by young girls. With deep profundity, the priests made motions, and chanted. The ritual is a performance, complete with costumes – the Neuling wears a white robe, signifying his purity (262) – props, such as the caskets carried by the girls, a chanted script and above all the codified movement of the participants. The initiate trembles (bebte) in nervous anticipation. As he wanders (irrte), his steps erratic, he is encircled by figures that seem to flow and waver (wallen) as in a dream; the Dichter’s double vision of Olympus on the Capitol was similarly glossed as ‘dreamlike’ (Träume ich?, 9.199). Snakes writhe before him (wandelt . . . am Boden), and sealed caskets appear to float by of their own accord before their virgin bearers come gliding past at the end of the next line. The motion of the priests is recognized as deeply meaningful, vielbedeutund, but the gestures in themselves hold no meaning for the uninitiated. Similarly, the sound of their chanting is audible (summten), but not the words. The ritual is semiotically dense, but entirely unintelligible. The Dichter, however, skips over the ‘trials and tests’ to which the candidate is subjected and hurries straight to the moment when the great secret, the sacred Geheimnis at the heart of the cult, is disclosed to him, ‘that which the holy circle concealed (or ‘encoded’) in its strange images’. This sacrosanct Geheimnis, however, as divulged by the Dichter to Faustina and to his eavesdropping readers, turns out to be nothing more (or less) holy than the clandestine lovemaking of the goddess Ceres with a mortal, the Cretan king Iasion. In granting him her ‘hidden sweets’ (holdes Verborgne), she renders the island of Crete blessed (beglückt). The solemn ritual, the priests’ elaborate choreography, like the silent winding streets of Rome which the Dichter entered as an initiand of Amor, functions as the outer convolutions concealing the goddess’s Mystery; but just as the mystic voice of Rome, when heard, is a creaking bed, so the cult’s great secret is given out as a lusty rustic roll in the hay. Quis Cereris ritus ausit vulgare profanis? asks Ovid (Ars Amatoria 2.601). ‘Who would dare to make the rites of Ceres common knowledge?’ Like the mysteria of the bedchamber, it is forbidden to speak of them (AA 2.607–9). Goethe’s reader is left uncertain, then, as to whether this is another deflection – a profane answer to their profane curiosity, protecting the real Geheimnis – or whether in fact the secret is no secret, but hidden in plain sight, that the ‘holy place’ (14.281) behind all the obfuscation is occupied by two joyful naked bodies coupling, like a ribald cosmic joke. This latter interpretation is supported by the two poems opening and closing the elegiac cycle as prologue and epilogue. Not included when the cycle was originally published, they have been subject to censorship throughout its publication history.29 Critics are divided regarding their relationship to the rest of the collection, some arguing that they are integral, while for others they are expendable.30 These two poems focus on the ithyphallic Roman god Priapus, the prologue addressing him as patron deity and the epilogue taking the god himself as a speaking persona. Generically, they do not resemble the tone and content of the elegiac cycle proper. Thematically, however, their inclusion supports a reading of the Elegies in which sexual intercourse, religion and humour are inseparable. 73

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Transmitted as an appendix to the Virgilian corpus and now understood as the work of an anonymous author or authors dating from the early empire,31 the Carmina Priapea are a collection of short epigrams, approximately half of which are in elegiac meter, addressed to or spoken by Priapus. Typically, the speaker is a wooden statue of the god set up in a garden to ward off trespassers and many of the poems contain graphic threats of sexual violence against intruders. The speaker of Goethe’s prologue introduces the collection as ‘my garden’, fruits which he planted glückliche and now tends mit Freuden. Like other Roman gardens,32 it is protected by the guardian statue of Priapus, who is enjoined to ‘pound the backsides’ of disapproving readers with the red rod that springs from his thighs (1.10). Although not otherwise evident in the Römische Elegien, this type of sexual aggression is not uncommon in Latin lyric, albeit as part of invective discourse rather than elegiac.33 The epilogue to the collection is spoken by Priapus himself, or rather by a wooden statue of Priapus which has long been rotting away in a filthy corner of the garden, ‘foul and forlorn’ (24.590). Its neglected condition closely resembles the statue’s complaints in Priapea 63 that he must endure being cracked by heat, drenched by rain and encrusted with frost. Goethe’s Priapus suffers even worse indignities, shat on by birds in the winter and used as the gardeners’ latrine in the summer. As in the Priapea, he calls himself der letzte de Götter (581), the last of the gods (interque cunctos ultimum deos numen), rohegebildet (‘rough-carved’), or in the Priapea, manus sine arte rusticae dolaverunt (‘rough hands without skill fashioned me’, 63.10). Brought to the point of decomposition by the passage of time, Goethe’s Priapus is then restored to his rightful status by the labours of the modern Künstler, a passage with no equivalent in the source-text. The closing couplet of the Elegien emphasizes completion and satisfaction, underscored through a deliberate contrast with Priapea 63. Whereas the Latin god watches a girl depart unsatisfied from his grove because her ‘fuck-buddy’ (suo fututore) has failed to take her through all the positions in Philaenis’ sex manual, Goethe’s Priapus promises that the lover’s member will not droop ‘until you both have thoroughly enjoyed (durchgenossen) / the dozen routines (Figuren) which artistic Philaenis invented’ (601– 2). Philaenis, identified as künstlich herself and a composer of variations on a sexual theme,34 becomes (like Bettina) another metapoetic artist of the body, her legendary manual – unfortunately not extant – transmitting the choreography of her lovemaking to ardent readers everywhere. This painstaking restoration work has made Priapus fit to assume his place among the other gods of the pagan pantheon (gewinn ich / Unter Göttern den Platz, 592), a conceit anticipated by Elegy 13 at the centre of the main collection. Here the Dichter compares his poems to statues of the gods in a sculptor’s workshop (Werkstatt). Resembling the workshop of sculptor Antonio Canova or that of restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, the Werkstatt evoked by the Dichter as an analogue for his own poetry compares his project explicitly to that of his contemporaries in the visual arts. The assembly of gods as conceived in this elegy also recalls the way in which visitors to the Vatican Museums and other cabinets were surrounded by marbles whose attitudes gave the illusion of movement momentarily arrested. The artist, the Künstler, takes pleasure (freuet sich) in looking 74

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

around at the ‘Pantheon’ he has created. In Goethe’s ecphrasis of this pantheon, the gods are in motion. Apollo is captured mid-stride, tossing his hair, while Hermes turns to snatch a cheeky sidelong glimpse of Venus (‘Cythere’), who bends her own gaze upon dreamy Bacchus, her marble eyes growing misty (feucht) as she recalls the feel of his embrace. She asks Bacchus the whereabouts of their immortal son, the absent, unnamed god whose effigy ought to occupy the empty pedestal between them: Priapus. Priapus may not appear in marble in the Werkstatt itself among the more respectable Olympians, but his wooden likeness is instead given a voice with which to close the elegiac cycle, not with a romantic sigh but with a bawdy blessing and a thrusting erection. The phallic god has been revitalized35 – not preserved, like the marble figures of the workshop, but reincarnated in the active passion made so vigorously present by the text. *

*

*

At the thematic heart of the Elegien lies the apparent conflict between love and poetry, also expressed as the contest between Amor and Fama, contrasting leisure with labour, and lived experience with subsequent reflection. Most analysis takes the Dichter’s protestations at face value,36 concurring that as writing and lovemaking cannot be conducted simultaneously, the narrative of the Elegien is also the work’s compositional condition and the Dichter is silenced each time he resumes coitus with Faustina. This is certainly the conventional generic condition of elegy and other erotic lyric, wherein the absence of the beloved generates the text. In other respects, however, the puella of Latin elegy is the text: ‘Cynthia’ is the alternative title of Propertius’ Monobiblos.37 The affair is conducted not in the gaps between the poems but purely as a textual phenomenon. Although at times the dichotomy model persists in the Elegien – Elegy 15, discussed above, is the paradigmatic example – it nevertheless coexists with the alternative hermeneutic position in which matter and medium are identical. In the Elegien, it is less the case that the puella is textually constituted (as an entity) than that the movement of which the affair consists is textually constituted (as a process). ‘Love’ in other words, should be perceived in this context as a verb, and not a noun. ‘Text’ is perhaps a similarly misleading term. Although represented as a written medium, writing in the Elegien implies liveness and mobility. Conducted by the Dichter’s Hand, it is an action that continues, rather than interrupting his performance. Playing a poet, it is entirely in character that he should occasionally be found writing poetry. Certain key moments fuse the act of composition with a gesture that is part of the fictional relationship. We have examined some of them already, such as the hexameters fingered onto Faustina’s back that become in the process the hexameters that we are reading (7.150–1), and scansion which again becomes the reflexive vehicle for lovers’ murmurings ohne prosodiches Maβ (15.314). The other crucial sensory feature of poetry is its rhythm. At once aural and haptic, rhythm – in this case the tripping pulse of the couplets, the indrawn breath of the caesura – is what gives the Elegien not only their points of kinaesthetic contact but also their peculiarly ancient Roman shape. Elegiac meter is their Propertian mask. Rhythm is corporeal because it entails movement or the simulated sensation of movement. 75

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Discussing the relationship between rhythm and verbal content in poetry, Amittai Aviram defines rhythm as ‘the more or less regular repetition through time of a sensory experience, especially auditory or tactile [. . .] Rhythm is principally a physical experience, either in the sense of a bodily movement or of an imaginary readiness for or recreation of a bodily movement.’38 Aviram’s primary modality is auditory, however, rather than kinaesthetic, as he goes on to treat rhythm as the musical component of poetry, while words supply ‘dream images that represent allegorically the same forces that we can feel being carried through in the rhythm’.39 Rhythm is a force which ‘compels affect’ and its function, unlike that of language, is stimulatory rather than semiotic.40 Although convincing, Aviram’s analysis understates kinaesthesia as the sense to which the oscillations of poetic meter appeal most powerfully. Movement is implicit in any kind of rhythm. Its basis in bodily experience is not only psychological,41 but physical, and not only physical, but kinetic. The representation of movement in poetic narrative, then, is complemented by the palpable rhythms underlying the text; or according to Aviram’s stronger version of his argument, a poem’s narrative acts as a decorative delivery service for its primal beat. Although meter guarantees a formal regularity of motion, this operates in tension with the manipulation of speed, stillness and duration in the Elegien, or in other words their changes of tempo, as indicated by verbal signals. Speed, along with direction, duration and effort, is a property of self-movement and a component of haptic perception.42 At the outset, as we have seen, the Elegien associate love with hurry and impatience. Eilig (hurriedly), Amor leads the Dichter through Rome; eilig, the Dichter takes Faustina to bed. She is not to regret their precipitate intercourse (so schnell, 85) because heroic time, in der heroischen Zeit, was likewise in short supply. The Dichter worships an invented goddess, Gelegenheit (Opportunity),43 who must be seized (begriff) as she hurries past (die Eilende, 131). The transience of such moments and the eager need for haste – Freude, after all, is not to be expected hereafter (12.231–6) – is in contrast with the perceived Ewigkeit or endurance of their setting. This temporal dynamic reaches a climax in Elegy 18. In the first half of the poem, acting like a character from Roman elegy,44 Faustina arranges an assignation with her lover by drawing signs in spilt wine on the tabletop: With a dainty finger she drew circles of liquid on the wooden page. She intertwined (verschlang) my name within hers; eagerly I followed her finger, and she was well aware of it. At last, she quickly drew the Roman numeral V and a straight line before it. Swiftly, as soon as I had seen it, she snaked circle within circle (schlang sie Kreise durch Kreise) to erase the letters and numbers.45 The Dichter will have to wait until four hours after sundown. To pass the time, he turns to writing an encomium of Rome. Whereas the opening scene in the taverna was 76

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

introduced with a humorous reference to Hadrian’s epigram on fleas,46 this more elevated second half is framed as an updated Carmen Saeculare. Its composition, supposedly in real time, is inset into the narrative of waiting. The Dichter enjoins the sun-god to hurry (schnell, 421; eilig, 423), to set sooner than usual so night will fall more quickly,47 to shorten the hours and not to linger on Rome’s columns and obelisks. Painters might appreciate a protracted sunset (420), but poets do not. His impatience, however, gives way to a meditation on the centuries which the sun has seen pass over Rome, from wooded hills to a handful of huts to an empire to a ‘world in ruins’ (430), albeit all compressed into four couplets. In the same length of time it took Faustina to scribble on the table, the entire Roman empire rose and fell. At this point, interrupted by the striking clock, the Dichter returns his attention to the present: ‘So, dear Muses, you have again beguiled these long hours / which separated me from my beloved’ (437–8). Ostensibly, then, the activity of writing poetry is again set up in opposition to that of romance. Once the appointed hour arrives, the Dichter throws down his pen and rushes off to meet Faustina, his dutiful survey of Roman history at an end. Because of the way it is framed, however, the inset encomium is not in fact a poem about Rome, but rather a poem about writing – or the performance of writing – and the process of waiting. The Dichter is not the only writer in Elegy 18. Faustina’s finger moves on the ‘page’ of the tabletop like the Dichter’s finger on the skin of her back. She writes at first comprehensibly – names and numbers – but then disguises the secret of their meeting with serpentine curlicues (schlang sie Kreise durch Kreise) that recall the circling dancers in Ceres’ precinct concealing the Geheimnis of the goddess’s tryst. The Dichter may be able to make centuries pass like seconds within his fictional poem, but he cannot shorten the seemingly endless sunset. Poetry, unlike painting, has a durational aspect. The actions depicted necessarily occur in sequence, over a period of time.48 In this elegy, the action depicted is writing itself. The poem takes minutes to read, but we are to imagine that during that time-span, hours have passed (in the Dichter’s experience) and also centuries (within the eight-line history). The Dichter is playing the role of a poet – Virgil, Propertius, Du Bellay – writing a potted history of Rome. The inset verses are what we see when we peer over his shoulder, a prop like a stage letter, emergent as he writes. Both eternity and palimpsest are Roman illusions. Time, in fact, is motion, measured in the sinking of the sun and the writing that creeps across the page, a dance of fingers spooling out the minutes, ended by the clock. Paul Oppenheimer calls the Römische Elegien ‘time-defiant’,49 reading their embrace of what he calls ‘anachronism’ as a remedy for the sensual and economic alienation identified as the psychosocial condition of (early) capitalism.50 In other words, the Elegien disrupt conventional (capitalist) equations of value. This disruption occurs on two levels. One level is material. The presence or preservation of historical objects runs counter to the imperative for manufacturing new, mass-produced items in the interests of profit;51 indeed, counter-intuitively, the older the ruin or the designated antique, the more value it accrues. More obliquely, and with reference to Roman precedent, the Elegien subvert the apparent opposition of labour and leisure. Generally speaking, as Helmut Müller-Sievers shows, the substance of poetry or Empfindung (sensation) and 77

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Erlebnis (lived experience) can be accessed ‘only by silencing the noise of its production’: if we hear the labourious pen scratching, we no longer hear the leisured lover sighing.52 Converting personal, physical Empfindung into poetic text requires the forcible imposition of a significatory code in order to draw it from the secret places of the body and into circulation. In Rome, however, and particularly (albeit not exclusively) in elegiac Rome, the immediacy and primacy of any encounter is illusory. The textual repetition of tropes, including the trope of the ‘first encounter’, informs the visitor’s response and makes spontaneity a performance. In the same way, the performance of spontaneous feeling in Latin elegy takes place in a generic matrix that predetermines its configuration.53 As Müller-Sievers recognizes, Latin elegy creates a closed referential system in which the puella is the poem and the affair takes place in the coupling of the couplets, even as the poet wears away his valuable time composing it.54 Elsewhere, it is necessary to stop acting in order to write about it, presupposing that external reality is a precious, finite, timelimited resource. In Rome, however, where eroticism is played out in the act of writing itself and the site of the city is enriched by a history from which the dead no longer profit, everything is play. Playful activities need not be trivial. From Huizinga onwards, studies in play have shown how it is intrinsic not only to childhood development but also to adult well-being, albeit elaborated into pursuits such as games, sport, craft and performance. To be defined as play, activities must be non-essential for survival and undertaken for their own sake; they may include competition, pretence, risk, challenge and reward; they usually occur in a designated space and operate according to rules agreed upon by the participants, which may radically contravene external behavioural codes (I can slap your face onstage, but not in the street).55 For Daniel Smale, play is an evolutionary by-product, a form of ‘psychotropic mechanism’ activated in order to prompt the pleasurable release of neurotransmitters such as adrenalin and dopamine.56 Diane Ackerman proposes a state of mind which she terms ‘deep play’, involving heightened receptiveness and total immersion comparable to what is generally known after Csíkszentmihályi as a ‘flow’ state. It is not only extreme sports and religious rituals that constitute deep play, however, but any activity which consumes the attention and alters perceptions of oneself or one’s surroundings. The composition and consumption of poetry is one such activity.57 Rome, then, is the Dichter’s deep play-ground,58 the sacralized space where the rules of intercourse can be rewritten and elegiac topoi re-enacted. The Dichter spends his time in Rome passing back and forth along the alleys that lead to his ‘temple of Love’, rather than studying the monuments like a dutiful traveller. Two sensory paradigms are contrasted, and by extension two ways of knowing. The visual paradigm, according to which ‘ancient Rome’ is to be apprehended by an inspection of its surviving public structures, is overtaken by a kinetic paradigm in which the Dichter discovers a sensual reawakening of antiquity in the passage of (elegiac) feet and the motion of (an authorial) hand. With a touch of irony, the Dichter represents himself as distracted by romance from daily labours which are themselves a leisure pursuit, namely the dedicated investment of effort in tourism, and the otiose pastime of writing poetry. His models Propertius and Ovid characterize their poetry as the product of leisure or 78

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

otium, as opposed to hard work in the fields, Forum or army. Nevertheless, as Bernhardt points out, Fama (Reputation, Renown) ‘is always connected with work of one kind or another’, making Elegy 22 a dramatization of the conflict perceived between poetic productivity and erotic stasis.59 This apparent conflict, however, contains the seeds of its own resolution. Goethe splits apart the capitalist equation of time and money, or in other words, the attempted antithesis of productivity and pleasure. Time becomes expendable, expandable, elastic: it can be spent wantonly. In Rome, there is always more time. Sound, rhythm, movement and disclosure are fused in Elegy 23, the final poem in the cycle proper before its Priapic epilogue. The Dichter is tempted by Amor and the Muse – the two divinities co-operating, for once – to reveal the sacred Geheimnis of his pleasure, how Faustina’s love ‘delights me (erfreut) by day, and gives me pleasure (beglückt) at night’ (570). Like the comic secret of King Midas’ donkey-ears, whispered into the earth and retold by the reeds as they rauscheln und lispeln im Wind (561), the Dichter’s Geheimnis needs an outlet. He turns to the metrical components of his art: ‘To you, Hexameter, to you, Pentameter, will it be confided’ (569). Self-referential invocations of elegiac meter also occur when the Dichter fingers the Hexameters Maβ on Faustina’s back (7.150) and in similarly prosodisches Maβ attempts to capture the inarticulate sweetness of their pillow-talk (15.314).60 Whereas in the early poems of the cycle it was the Dichter who made his way to Faustina’s apartment, here (as in Elegies 16 and 20) he awaits her arrival, listening eagerly (lauschend begierig) for the sound of her approach. Faustina knows the way, kennet die Wege, to where he waits, the same winding Wege that the Dichter first traversed in his programmatic Elegy 2. As in Elegies 2 and 3, the movement of her passage is inextricably associated with sound. The wind is entreated to rustle (rausche) in the leaves to cover her footsteps (niemand vernehme den Tritt), although of course as soon as her ‘tread’ (den Tritt) is reported, it becomes audible as a virtual sound effect to Goethe’s readers. Sound has a similar function in Elegy 20: on one occasion, Faustina’s stealthy approach alerted the neighbour’s dog, which began to bark, almost giving away their Geheimnis; but now its barking gives the Dichter a pleasurable frisson of anticipation. A plainly audible sound thus acts as a private signal, disclosing a Geheimnis to those initiates who know how to listen. Even if Faustina’s Tritt itself is not heard, her movements are picked up and amplified in the form of other sounds. The barking dog (hör ich ihn bellen, 457) and the rustling leaves (Rausche, Lüften, im Laub, 576) have a presence in the soundscape of the text. Like the lovers’ babble (15.311–14), the arcane mumbling of Ceres’ priests (14.267) and the creaking bedsprings (3.56), these sounds are delivered to the reader of the Elegien through onomatopoeic language. This allows them to occupy an audible moment in the text, taking on rhythmic and phonemic substance. The imagined movement that generates an imagined sound is fabricated using actual sounds, and (if read aloud) prompts actual movement. Onomatopoeia as a technique is not of course unique to the Elegien, but Goethe gives it a particular metapoetic spin. In Elegy 23, it is the breath of the breeze (Luft) that causes the rustling leaves to disguise – and, like the barking dog, at the same time to announce – Faustina’s passage. It is also Luft that, breathing through the Dichter’s songs, 79

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

sets them in motion (wieget, 577) and turns them into informants like the gossiping reeds (Rohre geschwätzig) that outed donkey-eared King Midas. For the Dichter’s Lieder to vibrate like reeds situates them in the bucolic tradition, the reed-pipe being the musical instrument which typically accompanies pastoral love-songs.61 Reeds (Rohre) also sprang up in Elegy 18 on the banks of the Tiber, before the human history of Rome began (18.425). The erotic Geheimnis their quivering sings to the world is both the private joy of the couple in love and the goddess’s universal Mystery of regeneration. Bernhardt reads Elegy 23 as proleptic, proposing that ‘we, who have the cycle before us, are invited to witness its inception. The last elegy of a long cycle shows us the moment of the poet’s decision to create it.’62 While plausible in terms of narrative, in practice the promised revelation of the Geheimnis has already occurred, or rather, it occurs simultaneously with its disclosure to the listening ‘Quirites’ in this whispering, whistling, piping reeds of this poem. There is no delay, no time-lag between representation and referent because the speech-act of declaration makes them one and the same. The Geheimnis, in fact, comes into being only when its drama of concealment and disclosure is enacted, when a precious casket is fabricated to contain it. The same pertains to Roman antiquity, in Goethe’s elegy-cycle. Lebe glückliche, Amor instructs his initiate, und so lebe die Vorzeit in dir (15.304). An imagined past comes into existence when its recipients put on their antique masks. The movement depicted by poetry comes into existence when the words that mask the sounds that result from movement are spoken aloud, creaking rustling murmuring barking chanting whispering chattering, pressed into the regular pulse of you, Hexameter, you, Pentameter, creating real-time sensations unfolding the rhythm of Roman elegiac love. For Aviram, poetic rhythm is ‘an unreadable physical effect’. Because it is not semiotic, it cannot be decoded and it cannot be reduced to a medium of exchange.63 Unlike the language that comprises it, rhythm cannot be translated. It is a matter of movement, and as such inseparable from the action – the activity, the enactment – of the poem. Comprehension, or cognitive apprehension of a slice of the distant past, focalized through an individual’s psychosomatic experience – whether that of the elegiac amator, or that of the dancing Muse – is an embodied phenomenon. Knowledge acquires its architecture through the encounter of the moving body with landscapes, ruins, monuments, artefacts, affective stimuli and other bodies. When Emma Hamilton incorporates South Italian red-figure vases into dances derived from the vases’ own iconography, she is placing herself in a physical and hence a cognitive relationship to the material that differs profoundly and substantially from the attitude assumed by the collector. Its fulcrum is kinaesthesia, or the sensations of muscular effort and proprioception, as she habituates her body to a cultivated repertoire of action. Emma handles the vases in performance, but actual handling is not necessary for a kinaesthetic relationship to emerge. Vases, by their scale, design and function, readily afford handling, but anthropomorphic sculpture does not. While it appeals to the sense that Herder defines as that of touch (Gefühl), touch itself is not involved in the transactions he envisages. Instead, it is through self-movement that the Liebhaber, the sensitized beholder 80

Goethe’s ‘Seeing Hand’

of three-dimensional art, becomes conversant with its effects. This movement, indeed, can remain covert, or unrealized. Like Emma’s vibrant tableaux, it occurs in stillness. ‘He seems to be frozen in place, but nothing could be further from the truth,’ writes Herder.64 Charlotte Eaton plays on the value and evaluation of authenticity. Literary or historical narrative enlivens anonymous material remains. Eaton, however, walks a tightrope through the ruinscape between the opinionated antiquarians, her written persona at once romantically credulous and rigorously sceptical as she chips away apparently solid identifications only to turn back the next moment and embrace them regardless, in full consciousness of her artifice. ‘Charm’, or the perception of a site’s historical valence, is inherent not in the fabric of the monuments but rather in the imaginative resources at the disposal of the visitor as she explores the extant sets of Rome, treating them in the process as the setting of dramatic past events. Some visitors, like the Dichter, take their role-play somewhat further and convert the entire city into an immersive site-specific installation. The Roman Elegies might be fictionalized and stylized, as resistant as the Tristia to reductive biographical interpretation, but their internal narrative of composition presents a modern poet masking himself as an Augustan elegist, while Goethe’s choice to employ elegiac form performs a parallel act of mimesis. Again, it is movement – or rather, the sense of movement – that provides the fulcrum connecting inner and outer worlds. The corporeal interface of rhythm becomes the medium through which an imagined Vorwelt is (re) presented and (re-)enacted.

81

82

PART TWO APPREHENSIONS

More orthodox, but in their way no less playful apprehensions of antiquity were also predicated on perceptions derived from movement and touch. The feeling imagination was not limited to marginal or ephemeral applications. On the contrary, it informed mainstream responses ranging from geographical exploration to collecting and taxonomizing artefacts and crafting appropriate settings for their display. This section draws out the role of haptic reception in some of the period’s most iconic works and practices. Its unifying focus is haptic interaction with objects themselves, whether as possessions, reproductions or archaeological sources, acting in each case as apparatus integral to cognition in the form of knowledge-production. Although the profession of archaeology did not yet exist, various forms of protoarchaeological activity were beginning to set epistemological parameters for deriving knowledge from material remains. Between 1753 and 1776, the Society of Dilettanti published the results of several expeditions to Greece and Asia Minor. These publications introduced the landscapes and architecture of antiquity to their readers in a new medium, complementing the ancient authors whose works had previously been authoritative. Chapter  5 shows how study in situ of sites and monuments yielded new kinds of understanding, which ironically became alienated from experience through the very act of its communication. Edward Gibbon’s ‘monumental’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, continued the methodological revolution, making unprecedented use of and reference to Rome’s material remains. As a direct result of the Dilettanti publications, along with others such as Robert Adam’s Ruins of Spalatro (1764) and d’Hancarville’s catalogue of the Hamilton vases (Antiquités Étrusques, Grecques et Romaines, 1767–76), fashions in interior decoration among the British elite began replicating elements of the monuments depicted. Chapter 6 analyses various manifestations of this impulse, which extended to the settings in which collections of antique sculptures were displayed. The disposition of the gallery simulated the configuration of an imagined classical setting. On a smaller scale, objects such as Grand Tour souvenirs and Wedgwood ceramics could be handled and manipulated like theatrical props as a complement to the surrounding domestic set. This immersive performance practice reached a climax in the work (and homes) of architect John Soane and designer Thomas Hope. The domestication and miniaturization of classical architecture created playful spaces which made fantasies of antiquity kinaesthetically available to their occupants. The final chapter in this section moves from private to public acquisition and display, starting from the haptic experience of museum visits as relayed in contemporary accounts. It examines the cultural politics of acquisition on a national scale with reference to Napoleon’s 1797 re-enactment of a Roman Triumph when parading looted antiquities 83

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

through Paris. The production of Voltaire’s La Mort de César in Rome in 1798 provides a point of contrast, again converting the city into a mise-en-scène and showing how alternative use may be made of artefacts which remain in situ. The arguments of polemicist Quatremère de Quincy against the removal of artworks from their context are just as relevant today, as they provide an epistemological and sensory rationale for repatriation. As the Dilettanti discovered, the knowledge available to the visitor or traveller was altogether different to that which was absorbed at home.

84

CHAPTER 5 TIME TRAVELLERS

Wandering through groves of orange blossom, oleander and other Sicilian plant life hitherto unknown to him, Goethe suddenly realizes that he could find no better commentary on Homer’s Odyssey than these surroundings. He immediately buys a copy in order to read it in situ with ‘indescribable interest’. This sensory recontextualization of the poem reveals to him that the similes and ecphrases that previously seemed fanciful were in fact drawn from nature. Having absorbed from first-hand experience Sicily’s ‘coasts and promontories . . . islands and headlands . . . festooned vines, mountains wreathed in clouds’, he finds that the Odyssey no longer subsists solely in a textual format but has become for him a ‘living truth’, a verbal counterpoint to sensory, empirical experience.1 Goethe was not the only traveller to read classical texts in their geographical context and to find the conjunction enlightening. His contemporary Choiseul-Gouffier, author of the popular Voyage Pittoresque en Grèce (1782), likewise remarks in his preface on ‘the pleasure of crossing this famous and beautiful region, holding a copy of Homer or Herodotus in one hand, to feel more intensely the various beauties of the Poet’s images’.2 Homer’s texts became in this way interactive. By treating the poems as a script for approaching unfamiliar places and investing them with meaning, these geographically minded readers converted the Iliad and the Odyssey from free-standing works of literature into guidebooks to be supplemented by specific physical locations. Ancient texts were acquiring a new type of utility, a real-world interpretive application previously inconceivable and subsequently redundant. They provided an epistemological grid for curious travellers while at the same time becoming themselves conceptually enriched by the travellers’ conscious absorption of (and in) their settings. When Goethe calls Sicily a commentary on the Odyssey, he invokes the language of scholarship in order to capture an unexplored phenomenon, the translation of text into comprehension. This integration of text-based and material knowledge informed the protoarchaeological activities of the Society of Dilettanti. At one time little more than a glorified drinking club,3 the Dilettanti progressively refashioned themselves between the 1750s and 1770s into an instrument of artistic patronage and arbitration of taste.4 Dilettantism overlapped with connoisseurship, but avoided both the single-minded obsessiveness of the enthusiast and the dedicated bondage of the professional.5 As an epistemological approach, as a mode of apprehending and organizing knowledge, it flourished in the eclectic, rapidly expanding, but as yet relatively uncompartmentalized intellectual fields of the late Enlightenment.6 Dilettante knowledge was partial, embedded and porous. Non-specialist by definition, it admitted the lateral contingencies of personal experience and inclination. The pleasure taken by the dilettante in his object of study could at times be robustly sexual,7 but could also involve the subtler erotics of activities 85

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

such as acquisition or discovery, and the sensuality of haptic contact. The preference of the Dilettanti for empiricism, for the value of first-hand data-collection, placed a premium not only on accurate observation but also on the bodily presence it entailed. Accounts such as Richard Chandler’s Travels in Asia Minor (1775) focalize the region through a moving, sensing subject; in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767), Robert Wood confronts the impossibility of conveying to a distant reader the pleasures and privations of this subjective geography and its attendant processes of knowledgeformation. At the time, this type of interaction was the prerogative of the elite. Its enjoyment was restricted to a handful of wealthy white men with the resources or connections necessary to fund international travel and the purchase of antiquities (or expensive books about antiquities). Examining the sensory parameters of these highly privileged encounters risks reinscribing their historical dominance, along with accompanying narratives of entitlement and ‘discovery’. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the Dilettanti publications in the context of other contemporary responses, not as inevitably authoritative but rather as part of an emergent, multifaceted discourse under construction. Although the pleasure of encountering artefacts in this way was bound at the time to the privilege conferred by class, race and gender, it does not have to remain so. By concentrating on sense-experience, a field at once wholly common and wholly personal, we can subvert these associations and democratize what need not remain sensations that only the elite will ever be allowed to feel. The principles of dilettante epistemology – that knowledge is pleasure, that texts and their surroundings nourish one another symbiotically, and that there is no substitute for first-hand embodied presence – are readily available and translatable to enrich the experience of any modern visitor. Even the unwelcome rhetoric of ‘discovery’ can be recuperated. Part of the pleasure of encountering an ancient monument is of course re-covery, discovering for oneself the transpersonal human fabric of a site. There will be a first time in your lifetime that you have dwindled next to Didyma, crept into the catacombs, felt the sea-breeze lick your skin at Baiae. The fact that the ‘first encounter’ is a shared phenomenon enhances rather than diminishes its power, layering designated sites with what Eaton would call ‘charm’. Although the Dilettanti’s mode of reception extended the spectrum of approaches to ancient material culture, it did not arise spontaneously. Archaeology, yet to establish formal techniques or consistent objectives,8 had nevertheless begun to develop increasingly systematic methods of documentation. Excavation had been practised in the Papal States for centuries, swelling the stupendous collections of statuary owned by dynasties such as the Farnese and Barberini and stocking more modest cabinets of vases, coins and gems all over Italy.9 The first finds from the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum began to be published in Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte from 1757 onwards. This series of eight volumes, initially with a very limited circulation, contained engravings of and commentary on the frescoes (vols. 1–4 and 7), bronzes (vols. 5 and 6) and lamps and candelabra (vol. 8) that were recovered during the royal excavations conducted around the Bay of Naples.10 Its approach was typical of contemporary antiquarianism as manifested in publications such as Comte Anne-Claude de Caylus’ 86

Time Travellers

Recueil d’antiquités égiptiennes, etrusques, grecques et romains (1752–67), an influential antecedent to the study of classical archaeology.11 The frescoes are grouped by subject – for example, images of centaurs, bacchantes or Erotes – and accompanied by an introductory description supplying the relevant mythological references from ancient authors. Although colour is sometimes mentioned in the introductory text, the plates themselves are monochrome, and the context in which the frescoes and other objects were found does not feature. Instead, they are isolated and categorized according to form. The intellectual purpose of Le Antichità was to identify correspondences between the newly discovered material or pictorial objects and the textual sources that could elucidate their meaning; its social purpose was to demonstrate the wealth, erudition and authority of the King of Naples. The other main precursor to the type of investigation undertaken by the Dilettanti was the architectural and topographical study of Roman monuments, which had a long and distinguished history. In 1665, Famiano Nardini had published Roma Antica, which set out to establish, region by region, the position of every pre-Christian structure in the city.12 Topographical analysis of this type is necessary, Nardini explains in his preface, because Rome has undergone perpetual ‘metamorphosis’: Qual città è stata più di Roma esposta a mutazione? Nardini’s technique for recovering the lost city involves the meticulous compilation of ancient textual references to buildings and their location, rather than the contemporary aspect presented by the remains themselves. Following in 1682, Les Edifices Antiques de Rome by French academician Antoine Desgodetz took a somewhat different approach. As opposed to historical analysis, Desgodetz’s concern was formal and aesthetic. Although the monuments had been studied previously by prominent architects such as Palladio and Serlio, these treatments did not supply the ‘precision and exactitude’ necessary for a true ‘penetration’ of what Desgodetz calls the ‘mysteries’ and ‘secrets’ of classical proportions (Préface). Accurate measurement is the key. Unlike Nardini, Desgodetz concentrates on a few of the best-preserved examples of Roman architecture, in particular the Pantheon and Colosseum, investigating their contributory proportions at every scale from the overall elevation down to individual column capitals. The most prominent mid-century example of the genre was Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane (1756).13 Best known for his Vedute (‘Views’) of Rome, Piranesi applied similar representational principles in the more scholarly but still exuberant Antichità, which alternates simplified geometric diagrams with representations of the ruins in a style that became iconic. Looming, top-heavy masonry crumbles away under festoons of creepers, partial arches springing into nothing. Miniature human figures emphasize the scale. Half draped in shadow, half bleached to bone, Antichità’s aqueducts and mausolea manipulate perspective to situate the viewer looking up from below, creating the impression of overwhelming magnitude. Piranesi’s use of Sublime principles such as repetition, obscurity, abrupt contrasts and dizzying heights has been frequently observed.14 The Rome of the Antichita is gothic in its morbidity, dominated by literal tombs and columbaria but also subsuming less inherently emotive subjects such as bridges and city gates into their miasma of colossal decay. At intervals, Piranesi 87

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

includes a double-page spread depicting the objects discovered in particular locations, arranged as if on the shelves of a cabinet, spilling out of the frame to cast shadows across the labelling below. They exceed the space allowed, crowding the page, reliefs propped next to chunks of cornicing and frescoes with faces effaced, cracked inscriptions jostling lamps and cinerary urns in artful disorder. Antichità gestures towards scientific analysis in its labels and diagrams, but in essence its artefacts are curiosities, its monuments marvels. The expeditions sponsored by the Dilettanti formalized techniques for interpreting material remains as sources of information about classical antiquity, but did not invent them. It was the prevailing epistemological metamorphosis of phenomena from wonders into specimens that distinguished approaches such as Robert Wood’s from previous practices of reception.15 Analytical methods like those that Desgodetz applied to Rome were replicated in Athens and Asia Minor.16 The appeal of the Dilettanti publications for sensory history, and for a history of kinaesthesia, resides in their self-reflexion. They record a period of concentrated effort in sense-making – that is, in finding ways to represent and communicate the knowledge derived from embodied encounters. Not yet standardized, these experimental texts disclose the processs by which unfamiliar, highly subjective sense-experiences were folded back into discursive objectification. One useful frame for the proto-archaeological activity of the Dilettanti is Clive Scott’s definition of translation not as a language-to-language product but rather as an activity, a performance and an embodied extension of the reading experience. Scott defines translation as ‘the process of reading performed’, or ‘the re-animation of a text’.17 This translation process, as it operated in the minds and bodies of eighteenth-century travel writers, had two stages. Passages in ancient source-texts were mediated by personal traversal of the landscape: How many hours to walk eighty stadia? Is Mt Ida actually on your left or your right as you leave Sigeum? What does Pliny mean exactly by the ‘smooth glide’ of the Meander? The temple of Didymaean Apollo was indubitably big, but how big? Landscapes involved haptic qualia that eluded conventional strategies of mapping, such as the effort of climbing, the torment of mosquitoes, the relief of a pool in the heat of the day or the constant vigilance against attack. As Scott observes, ‘Performance turns a two-dimensional text, inert on the page, into a three-dimensional experience of a text in a vivid here and now.’18 In the second stage of their translation, these landscapes then had to be re-represented to readers lacking knowledge of their sensory properties, using excerpts from ancient texts as common ground. Passages from Homer, Pliny, Herodotus and others glossed the landscape, while this landscape in turn substantiated the ancient authors’ textual accounts.19 In 1749, two artists resident in Italy, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, received sponsorship from interested members of the Society of Dilettanti to undertake an exploratory trip to Athens, where they planned to sketch and record the architectural remains of classical Greece.20 It was a novel proposition. While a handful of travellers had ventured across the Adriatic before, the Grand Tour stopped at Venice. The Greek mainland lay under Ottoman rule, and Hellenic nationalism was yet to coalesce as a movement.21 Although culturally and linguistically distinct, there was no sense at this 88

Time Travellers

time that Greece might have a separate political identity. Modern Athens was neither extensive in area nor large in population.22 To northern Europeans, the idea of “Greece” evoked a fantasy world populated by swooning Arcadian shepherds and swashbuckling Turkish brigands.23 Stuart and Revett’s project was not strictly archaeological, in that their excavations were limited to clearing earth away from the walls of extant buildings, and they did not remove any portable objects.24 Rather, it comprised a survey of the monuments accessible above ground, in particular those on the Acropolis. Other prominent structures were also scrutinized, including the ‘Temple of Theseus’ (the well-preserved Hephaisteion) and Hadrianic Temple of Jupiter, the distinctive Tower of the Winds, and the influential Monument of Lysicrates, also known as ‘Demosthenes’ Lantern’, which inspired numerous replicas.25 The ruins were analysed architecturally and their proportions carefully transposed into scale diagrams and elevations which schematized the current remains and extrapolated their complete geometric structure.26 In the resulting publication, The Antiquities of Athens, elevations of the buildings are surrounded by close-up diagrams of individual features, isolating details of special interest such as capitals and cornices. Each diagram includes precise measurements, taken in practice with some difficulty by Revett using a brass yardstick and Stuart using a length of chain, but retrospectively calculated for the remainder of each monument according to trigonometric ratios.27 These schematizations are interspersed with Stuart’s gouache drawings, representing each monument from a selected vantage point, surrounded by modern structures and figures. The figures on occasion include the artists themselves, wearing local dress, engaged in the activity of drawing the monuments.28 Well-lit, untouched by shadows, cleared of encroaching vegetation and obstructive debris, Stuart’s plates profess to show Athens unadorned. By contrasting them with Le Roy’s contemporary treatment of the same monuments, Bruce Redford argues that these images could have been rendered in a more picturesque manner.29 Nevertheless, Stuart’s choice to embed his monuments in streetscapes populated by local characters is not neutral, any more than his decision to include himself and Revett, dressed in their Turkish outfits, as internal focalizers of the scene. The anthropological tone of their accompanying verbal descriptions serves to exoticize Ottoman culture, implying that authentic Athenian monuments – those which Stuart and Revett have singled out for inclusion in their architectural manual – persist beneath an Ottoman disguise as superficial as Stuart’s adoption of local costume. Stuart and Revett position themselves as ‘discovering’ the classical city embedded in, and in many cases repurposed by, its Ottoman successor. While the plates endeavour to convey Athens’ duality, the accompanying diagrams represent the draughtsman’s ingenuity in stripping away appearances to arrive at the building’s abstract mathematical form. They anticipate reproduction. Antiquities of Athens was intended not only as informative, but also as instructional, supplying authenticated templates for resurrecting the structures designed by the ancient architects of philosophy and democracy. What Stuart and Revett accomplished was the transformation of Greece from a literary phenomenon into a live, material landscape. On their return in 1755, the Society of Dilettanti agreed to finance the publication of their sketches, notes and architectural 89

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

studies. The first volume of Antiquities of Athens was published in 1762. Folio-sized, it functioned as a display piece in its own right, advertising erudition and taste (as well as wealth and connections). It was not a book to be read so much as consulted, or excerpted for prints, or included in a portrait.30 Publication of the remaining volumes was substantially delayed, but in the meantime James ‘Athenian’ Stuart began pursuing a high-profile and lucrative career as an interior designer. While Stuart and Revett were preparing their notes and sketches for the engravers, another expedition was setting out from Rome with a similar purpose. Professional architect Robert Adam had learned from his mentor Piranesi and from consulting seventeenthcentury Italian accounts that a considerable proportion remained extant of the lavish palace built for third-century emperor Diocletian. The palace was located in Austrian-occupied territory in the town of Spalatro (modern Split) in what is now Croatia. Inspired and intrigued by the remains in Rome of Diocletian’s immense public thermae,31 Adam set out on a self-financed expedition across the Adriatic in 1757. He found the remains of the palace to be extensive, built into the fabric of the modern town. He made a thorough surface survey, and his team also managed to dig a passage into the vaulted undercroft before the Venetian governor intervened and prohibited any further excavation.32 The period of comparative stability between 284 ce and Diocletian’s abdication in 305 found material expression in extensive building programmes, especially in the northern provinces.33 For his retirement, Diocletian commissioned a palatial waterfront villa near the town of Salona in his native Dalmatia. The complex combined the fortifications of a military camp with the decorum of a country estate, incorporating – in addition to apartments for the emperor, his entourage and Praetorian guard – three temples, several baths, a mausoleum, a portico for displaying his artworks and an ostentatious central peristyle.34 Making use of spectacular features derived from eastern architecture, the palace provided what Alicia Salter has called a ‘theatrical backdrop’ to the daily routines of an emperor who, by all accounts, appreciated obeisance and ceremony.35 Diocletian occupied this sumptuous property for only seven years, however, and the site was abandoned after his death in 312, not to be resettled until the seventh century.36 Robert Adam’s drawings and diagrams, primarily intended like those of Stuart and Revett for the practical use of architects wishing to replicate imperial Roman designs,37 are arranged in the form of a virtual tour around the site, beginning with exterior views and progressing through the gates to approach each of the temples from various angles interspersed with close-ups of capitals, cornices and bas-reliefs. The Ruins of Spalatro was published in 1764 and rapidly acquired a reputation to rival Antiquities of Athens. Adam’s enhanced prestige as an architect, particularly of interiors, promoted his version of neoclassicism, both in marble and in print. Whereas ‘Athenian’ Stuart traded on the authority conferred by his direct contact with classical Athens itself, ‘Bob the Roman’ guaranteed equally authentic and equally modified reproductions predicated on his own personal investigation of the architectural principles upholding Roman imperial splendour. Both laid claim to superior knowledge of their respective domains, and as a result to superior practical skill in the realization of their conceptions by virtue of having been physically present on these sites. 90

Time Travellers

Although eyewitness experience contributed to the professional credibility of both architects, the aura projected by each had an equal basis in the embodied – that is, haptic – knowledge they had acquired. Stuart had not only seen a Greek temple, but had paced out its floor-plan, had craned his neck and squinted up at its friezes, and had propped a ladder against the Propylaea. He had squatted by fallen capitals, taking meticulous measurements of every carved leaf. He knew the monuments’ relative dimensions, their situation, their situatedness, and how his moving body felt in passing amidst or around each structure. Attempting to quantify sensation, then, the diagrammatic translation of Athens’ antiquities ostensibly rendered their objective properties transferrable, but Stuart’s own moving body acted as medium for the sensory effects these properties produced. Similarly, while many contemporary artists and architects trained in Rome, Adam staked his claim on Diocletian’s palace as the only material evidence remaining for the magnificence of Caesarian residences. The Forum contained the shells of Rome’s public buildings, but the Palatine was an incomprehensible, impenetrable, inimitable mess. What Spalatro offered was an imperial palace still standing, still inhabited (albeit by an entire town), a worthy model for the empire-builders of Derbyshire and Yorkshire. Adam presented himself as uniquely qualified to convey to them the constituent parts of Roman grandeur. He had personally entered its imposing north gate and felt the impact of its central peristyle courtyard with its ‘theatrical’ façade, whose eastern influences he recognized from Robert Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra (1753).38 Diocletian’s mausoleum, also known as the ‘Temple of Jupiter’, exhibited similar stylistic fusion, a practice which Adam adopted as his trademark. Like Piranesi, he argued that a ‘Roman’ design was achieved not by imitating form, but by imitating attitude.39 The palace of Diocletian – the last preChristian, pre-Byzantine emperor – represented the culmination not only of his own reign, but also of Rome’s pre-eminence, soon to be eclipsed by Constantinople. The eclectic architectural tradition which Diocletian inherited had at the time its only extant representative in the site which Adam appropriated as his source-material. Greek architecture might stand for purity, decorum and harmony, but for Adam these qualities were no competition for hedonism, virtuosity and power. Stuart and Adam became the most iconic proponents of the technique, but were not the first to publish a systematic investigation of an ancient site. In 1750–1, Robert Wood and his associate James Dawkins had conducted an extensive survey of sites in Asia Minor and the Levant, traversing classical landscapes hitherto known in Western Europe only as textualized phenomena.40 Wood’s party travelled from the northern Aegean coast of Turkey as far as Egypt. On their return to England, the Society of Dilettanti sponsored publication of The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and The Ruins of Baalbek (1757). Wood’s Essay on the Original Genius of Homer followed in 1767. Like Goethe and Choiseul-Gouffier, Wood is adamant about the benefits of reading in situ: The life of Militiades or Leonidas could never be read with such pleasure, as on the plains of Marathon or at the streights of Thermopylae; the Iliad has new beauties 91

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

on the banks of the Scamander, and the Odysse [sic] is most pleasing in the countries where Ulysses travelled and Homer sung. The particular pleasure, it is true, which an imagination warmed upon the spot receives from those scenes of heroick actions, only the traveller can feel, nor is it to be communicated by description. But classical ground not only makes us always relish the poet, or historian more, but sometimes helps us to understand them better.41 On the approach to Palmyra, Wood introduces this otherwise at the time relatively obscure destination by quoting the relevant passage of Pliny’s Natural History in English and Latin, adding the justification that it ‘may be worth comparing with what we saw, as the only antient description we have of the city’: ‘Palmyra is remarkable for situation, a rich soil and pleasant streams; it is surrounded on all sides by a vast sandy desart [sic], which totally separates it from the rest of the world.’42 Wood goes on to assess Pliny’s accuracy, re-quoting in the process his own English translation of the terms: ‘its “situation” [Pliny’s situ] is fine, under a ridge of hills to the west; and a little above the level of a most extensive plain, which it commands to the east . . . What “soil” remains is extremely rich [from divitiis soli], and “its waters” [aquis, earlier given as “streams”] very limpid, rising constantly, and in greater abundance in summer than in winter, from rocks close to the town.’ He finds cause to correct the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy, who is not quoted directly but whose mention of a river at Palmyra is reinterpreted as the artificially channelled flow of the mountain streams. This method of filling out and shading in the sparse accounts of ancient authors with eyewitness reportage is one approach to their scientific translation and transmission. Another option, the composite paraphrase of sources, is elsewhere exercised by Wood concerning the reign and revolt of Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia. Strategically located on the desert trade route between Mesopotamia and the west,43 Palmyra became an immensely wealthy caravanserai in the second and third centuries, at the same time functioning militarily as a buffer state between the Roman and Parthian (later Persian) empires.44 Although nominally part of the province of Syria, the Palmyrene monarchy maintained their own army and levied their own duties on the goods that passed through their gates: jade and raw silk, ebony and myrrh.45 As Palmyra prospered, it expanded into one of the empire’s largest urban centres. Architecturally, the combination of Hellenic, Persian and Arabian elements produced ‘one of the most sumptuously decorated cities in the ancient world’.46 Colonnades a mile long swept up to its religious centrepiece, the monumental Temple of Bel. Unable to rely on Roman protection from Persian harassment in the 260s, Palmyra began building its own regional power-base under reigning warlord Odenathus and his successor, Queen Zenobia. In 270, Zenobia, already in control of Syria and Mesopotamia, occupied the neighbouring provinces of Arabia and Egypt. Now controlling the greater part of the eastern empire, she began to mint coins styling her son ‘Imperator’ and ‘Augustus’.47 Zenobia (unlike Boudicca, for example) was not rebelling against Rome, but making her own bid for imperial authority. The emperor Aurelian reacted to Zenobia’s challenge in 272. Following the capitulation of Antioch and Emesa, his forces besieged 92

Time Travellers

Palmyra, and captured Zenobia as she attempted to recruit support from Persia. Palmyra was sacked and its power decisively broken.48 Deprived of the Roman trade links that had been its primary income stream, the city became unsustainable. A handful of inhabitants remained, squatting in the wreckage of their diminished metropolis, and the ruin that had been Palmyra was abandoned altogether in the ninth century. Known otherwise only from a handful of late antique sources as the setting for Zenobia’s sensational career,49 the glorious doomed city was restored in Wood’s publication. Wood’s stated aim was to ‘satisfy public curiosity and rescue from oblivion the magnificence of Palmyra’ by documenting its architecture in the manner previously applied to the surviving monuments of Rome.50 The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) alternates schematic ground-plans of buildings and diagrams of their ornamentation with ‘views’ of the site’s present condition. While not unaware of Palmyra’s ‘magnificence’,51 Wood and his companions were nevertheless unprepared for the extent of the site that confronted them, and for the magnitude of its desolation. Having ridden for several ‘tiresome’ days through the arid hinterland, they had just deviated from their route to examine some interesting square tombs beside the road ‘when the hills opening discovered to us, all at once, the greatest quantity of ruins we had ever seen, all of white marble, and beyond them towards the Euphrates a flat waste, as far as the eye could reach, without any object that showed either life or motion. It is scarcely possible to imagine any thing more striking than this view’ (Ruins, 35). The stunning impact of Palmyra is also apparent in the comparable reaction of French diplomat Constantin-François Volney some thirty years later: After three days travel in a barren solitude, and having passed through a valley filled with grottoes and tombs, my eyes were suddenly struck, on leaving this valley and entering a plain, with a most astonishing scene of ruins. It consisted of a countless multitude of superb columns standing erect, which, like the avenues of our parks, extended in regular filed farther than the eye could reach. Among these columns magnificent edifices were observable, some entire, others in a state half demolished . . . After a walk of three quarters of an hour among these ruins, I entered the inclosure of a vast edifice which had formerly been a temple dedicated to the sun.52 This temple, now recognized as dedicated to the Levantine god Bel or Baal, is one of the structures documented in detail by Wood’s team, who comment (like Volney) on the incongruity of its massive scale relative to the poverty of the shepherds’ huts occupying its forecourt.53 As Jason Kelly observes, Wood’s views of Palmyra ‘function more effectively as romantic landscapes than as scientific topographies’ due to the alterations they make to the strictly archaeological record. He concludes that their purpose was ‘to present the effect of the ruins on the viewer rather than providing exact representations of the ruins’.54 This tension persists in all of the publications discussed here, affecting their respective depictions of Athens, Spalatro and Palmyra. Each publication had three 93

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

distinct and incompatible purposes, resulting in a hybrid rhetoric of representation: to document in a scientific fashion the composition of the sites; to capture, as Kelly notes, the sensory and emotive (not merely visual) effect of ruins whose aspect was hitherto relatively unknown to their readers; and most importantly, by synthesizing these approaches, to inform both taste and practice such that both architectural form and atmospheric effect could be reproduced. *

*

*

Wood’s Palmyra, along with Robert Adam’s Spalatro, helped to shape contemporary historiography. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Edward Gibbon took material, rather than moral attrition, as his starting point for Decline and Fall, focusing on ‘the decay of the City, rather than of the Empire’. While drawing on topoi that figured the expansion of sovereign territory as a harmful diffusion of Roman identity,55 Gibbon probes the issue further. One primary cause, perhaps the most pervasive, of Rome’s failure as urbs was its increasing geopolitical dispersal. Specific decisions and policies, rather than endemic turpitude, served to sever the Roman empire from its physical foundations. It was not until the late third century, when ruling Tetrarchs Diocletian and Maximian removed their imperial residences to Milan and Nicomedia, respectively, that ‘Rome ceased to be the capital of the empire’: The spot on which Rome was founded had been consecrated by ancient ceremonies and imaginary miracles. The presence of some god, or the memory of some hero, seemed to animate every part of the city, and the empire of the world had been promised to the Capitol . . . The form and the seat of government were intimately blended together, nor was it esteemed possible to transport the one without destroying the other. But the sovereignty of the capital was gradually annihilated in the extent of conquest.56 Reduced ignominiously to one seat of government among many, Rome’s semi-mythic claim on centrality was eroded by pragmatic considerations of imperial control and defence. Sidelined, ceremonial significance diminished, it was exposed as disposable, enabling Constantine to nominate Byzantium in 330 as his brand-new Christian capital.57 Gibbon uses the material conditions of contemporary Rome as an evidential basis for analysing the city’s history, complementing the written record. Although not archaeological in technique, this large-scale interrogation of material culture is not so far from adopting what could be called a proto-archaeological standpoint. Like a geologist reconstructing the forces that produced the formations beneath his feet, Gibbon applied the empiricism of contemporary natural historians to the equally solid yet equally contingent components of a manmade landscape.58 Confronting Rome’s decrepitude in all its tangible complexity enabled Gibbon to formulate a new historiographical method which was analytical rather than analogical, treating the Roman empire not as a collection of cautionary precepts but as the ongoing accretion and dispersal, decomposition and rearrangement of physical matter. 94

Time Travellers

A brief comparison with one of Gibbon’s historiographical sources, Montesquieu’s Considerations sur le grandeur des Romains et leur décadence (1734), shows how much more substantially Gibbon’s approach was informed by Roman architecture and topography. Despite having visited Italy on his own European tour in 1728–9,59 Montesquieu makes only a token mention of Roman architectural achievement in his history, and even then only to paraphrase Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the remarkable longevity of pre-Republican structures.60 The palaces, monuments and temples of the imperial era, making no contribution to the ideological program of Montesquieu’s narrative, play no part in the Considerations. As David Lowenthal demonstrates, Montesquieu’s essay performs an exercise in political philosophy rather than historiography proper, drawing maxims from the past applicable to modern regimes. Roman exempla alternate with sententious extrapolations (‘A wise republic should hazard nothing that exposes it to either good or bad fortune. The only good to which it should aspire is the perpetuation of its condition’, interspersed with what Charlotte Roberts terms ‘equivalency’, or explicit parallels with comparable events or circumstances in the modern world such as Spanish conquest in South America.61 Moreover, the political (as opposed to material) framework of Montesquieu’s analysis, or the focus on state as opposed to city, leads him to locate the commencement of Roman ‘decadence’ much earlier than Gibbon. For Montesquieu, as for his sources Sallust and Pliny,62 the rot set in with the defeat of Carthage, expansion eastwards, and consequent domestic destabilization. Imperial Rome and its Byzantine successor are merely symptomatic repercussions of the implosion that shattered the Republic, resulting in a thousand years of convulsive death-throes. The issues, according to Montesquieu, were systemic, and collapse inevitable given the flaws that had widened into fissures as Rome’s political resources were diverted away from the city to prominent individuals governing territory abroad. ‘If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato,’ he reflects, ‘others would have thought like Caesar and Pompey, and the republic, destined to perish, would have been dragged to the precipice by another hand’.63 This interpretation does share one point of congruence with Gibbon. Montesquieu likewise attributes Rome’s disintegration to the increasing dispersal of Roman citizens from the urbs itself, co-presence with its ‘walls . . . gods . . . temples . . . [and] graves’ supplanted by ‘a kind of fiction’: that is, remote citizenship.64 But whereas Gibbon locates the decisive enactment of this alienation just after his Antonine apogee in Caracalla’s 212 ce enfranchisement of provincial residents, Montesquieu locates it in 89 bce with the enfranchisement of Rome’s Italian allies,65 in line with his instructional evaluation of all post-Republican government as degenerate and hence inherently ineffectual. From a materialist standpoint, this is nonsense; the baths, temples, palaces, aqueducts and roads that signify Rome’s past ‘greatness’ are all products of imperial prosperity, not Republican virtus. Gibbon’s analysis, taking into account the evidence furnished by the city’s architectural remains, transfers the concept of deterioration from an abstract politico-moral domain to the material indices of power, and in doing so redraws the imagined trajectory of Roman history. Whereas for Montesquieu, Rome’s material collapse serves to illustrate the inevitable unreliability of 95

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

fortune or luxury or power, Gibbon seeks to elucidate the mechanism – the active, confluential human practices – whose operation constituted its ‘decline’. Ruins are not so much engines of melancholy as repositories of information. Gibbon’s historiographic method was shaped not only by his own encounter with the material afterlife of Roman antiquity but also by data concerning sites further afield that had been assembled by his contemporaries. While Gibbon’s seminality as an historian is assured,66 his innovations in utilizing material culture have not received comparable attention.67 Antiquarians since Scipio Maffei in 1730 had been asserting the scientific value and indeed superiority of material objects as tangible indices of long-past events, and it is this durability which Gibbon uses to anchor historiographic discourse in place.68 Although in terms of its scope Decline and Fall departs from the object-centred microhistories of antiquarian curiosity, there is nevertheless a marked epistemological resemblance.69 Numismatic evidence regularly contributes to his close-up analyses of imperial ideology,70 and it is via architecture that the overarching, parabolic trajectory of Rome’s fortunes may be reconstructed. This proto-archaeological approach furnishes Gibbon with microcosms in the shape of individual structures in which changing historical circumstances are inscribed. ‘Even the majestic ruins that are still scattered over Italy and the provinces, would be sufficient to prove that those countries were once the seat of a polite and powerful empire,’ Gibbon reflects.71 Surviving structures like the Colosseum, and the remnants in Rome and elsewhere of ‘amphitheatres, theatres, temples, porticoes, triumphal arches, baths, and aqueducts’ attest to the success and capacities of imperial Roman society. Conversely, the absence of once-celebrated monumental constructions such as the Temple of Diana at Ephesus is testimony to both the barbarism of those who destroyed it and the failure of those in authority to preserve it.72 Two sites in particular provide Gibbon with especially ample scope for exercising this methodology, perhaps not least because they had both received recent proto-archaeological treatment: Diocletian’s palace at Spalatro and the commercial hub of Palmyra. For his detailed description of the Spalatro palace, Gibbon acknowledges his reliance on Robert Adam’s observations in Ruins of the palace of the emperor Diocletian (1764). Adam is referenced explicitly on two occasions: a long introductory quote praising the region’s excellent climate and local topography, and a concluding evaluation in which Gibbon confesses himself ‘principally indebted to an ingenious artist of our own time and country, whom a very liberal curiosity carried into the heart of Dalmatia’, a journey which produced the ‘magnificent work’ now being ploughed back into the field of history.73 As part of his innovative methodology, Gibbon availed himself of the latest trends in dissemination and analysis of ancient material culture. The dimensions of the palace, and information regarding the likelihood of overhead light sources and central (hypocaust) heating, are likewise taken directly from Adam; but whereas Adam is enthusiastic about both measures, Gibbon marks them as ‘imperfections, very repugnant to our modern notions of taste and conveniency’ in an era of plate-glass and chimneypieces. He is similarly reluctant to concede genuine aesthetic achievement to Diocletian (or to the stonemasons the emperor employed). On the alternative authority of a contemporary Italian antiquarian, Abate Fortis, Gibbon pronounces that Adam has 96

Time Travellers

‘somewhat flattered’ his subject, and that the ruins of the palace complex are ‘not less expressive of the decline of the art than of the greatness of the Roman empire in the time of Diocletian’.74 Gibbon’s ambivalence towards Diocletian, then, is expressed in his assessment of Spalatro. Just as the Tetrarchy represent both the final, crumbling foothold of a (pagan) Roman imperium, a temporary if flawed restoration of the empire’s original vitality, and at the same time their power-sharing foreshadows their abandonment of Rome and their devotion to ceremony the Byzantine decadence to come, so Diocletian’s palace, his material legacy, embodies the same transitional qualities.75 It may be monumental, but its magnificence is hollow and its utility short-lived. Constantine’s triumphal arch, dedicated in 315, receives similar treatment. Likewise furnishing ‘melancholy proof of the decline of the arts’, its craftsmen recycled figures from the nearby arch of Trajan, including the emperor’s head.76 As an index of Constantine’s supposed inferiority with respect to his predecessors, and by extension that of the Byzantine empire to the Roman, his derivative arch stands at the turning point of Gibbon’s history, showing both the fragmentary presence of a past repurposed and the shape of things to come. Gibbon’s Palmyra is another example of historiography informed by protoarchaeological research. Based on Robert Wood’s account in The Ruins of Palmyra (1753), he is able to enhance his own treatment of Zenobia’s attempted coup with remarks on Palmyra’s sometime opulence, the factors driving its expansion, and its current state of destitution, all of which are derived from Wood’s Ruins, and all of which make Gibbon’s Palmyra a satisfying parallel to Rome. Gibbon cites Wood’s publication in complimentary terms, calling it ‘splendid’ and affirming that in his case, at any rate, it has achieved its stated aim of gratifying a reader’s ‘curiosity’.77 Wood assesses the location of Palmyra as particularly favourable for channelling eastern trade,78 an assessment repeated by Gibbon as the source of the city’s prosperity. Unable to discern distinctive phases in Palmyra’s architectural composition, Wood uses epigraphic evidence for dating the majority of its buildings to the 300-year period between the city’s first contact with Rome and its destruction by Aurelian. Gibbon reiterates: ‘It was during that peaceful period, if we may judge from a few remaining inscriptions, that the wealthy Palmyrenes constructed those temples, palaces, and porticos of Grecian architecture, whose ruins, scattered over an extent of several miles, have deserved the curiosity of our travellers’.79 In concluding his Palmyrene passage, Gibbon dwells on the melancholy situation of the erstwhile ‘rival of Rome’, the trade-enriched oasis that could have supplanted the empire’s capital, could have itself become the centre but instead was swept aside, even as Rome a generation later would be rendered peripheral by the itinerant Tetrarchy. ‘The seat of commerce, of arts, and of Zenobia, gradually sunk into an obscure town, a trifling fortress, and at length a miserable village,’ writes Gibbon, again echoing Wood. ‘The present citizens of Palmyra, consisting of thirty or forty families, have erected their mud cottages within the spacious court of a magnificent temple’.80 Wood’s Palmyra furnishes Gibbon with a cautionary presentiment of a time when cattle will graze again in the courts of the Caesars and monks pace oblivious over the temple foundations. *

*

* 97

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

The success of Antiquities of Athens led the Society of Dilettanti to commission a further Greek expedition, this time to the Aegean coast of Turkey, or the area known as Ionia. Richard Chandler and his team, who included Stuart’s collaborator Nicholas Revett, were instructed to visit every site of note within ten days’ journey of Smyrna (modern Izmir). Ionian Antiquities was published in 1769, Chandler’s journals following a few years later under the title Travels in Asia Minor (1775).81 In accordance with his brief, which stipulated that in addition to antiquities, he should report back on ‘whatever can fall within the notice of curious and observing travellers’,82 Chandler’s Travels record a vivid miscellany of phenomena. Alongside descriptions of the artefacts themselves, their locations and measurements, he includes observations on topography, weather, local customs, geology, flora and fauna, the logistics and anxieties of travel, the food they consume. He describes diverse sensory experiences: sunburn and mosquito bites, the ‘musky’ odour of snakes, the fragrance of citrus and jasmine, bird-calls, camel-bells, raucous music, coffee, honey, sour wine, brackish water, a vigorous massage in a Turkish bath, his awkwardness when dining cross-legged on a carpet. The group of travellers splash through creeks, clamber up rocks, crawl into caves. They pick their way along treacherous mountain trails and sleep rough in wet tents with their boots on. The heat is particularly enervating: ‘The languor of noon demanded sleep. The body, though arrayed as thinly and loosely as possible, was covered during the day with big drops of sweat, and dissolved, as it were, in a mighty and universal perspiration.’ At one point, a minor earthquake strikes, and ‘the sensation was such as would be felt, I imagine, if the earth were set suddenly afloat’.83 While these observations add texture, it is ruined cities that dominate. Frequently, Chandler’s prose switches from first-person travelogue to second-person guidebook: ‘You enter a narrow valley . . . You find broken columns . . . You come to the remains of a large edifice’.84 Volume 1 of Ionian Antiquities focuses on four temples: Bacchus on the island of Teos, Minerva at Priene, Apollo at Didyma and an appendix concerning a temple of Jupiter identified as the site of Labranda.85 Chandler’s verbal introductions to each location in this volume are followed by a discussion of each plate, an ink drawing of the landscape by artist William Pars, then Revett’s architectural plans and detailed measurements of each feature. The ancient author quoted most regularly by Chandler is Vitruvius, effecting the intermedial translation of ancient architecture into twodimensional images and back into modern structures using Vitruvius’ De Architectura as a verbal touchstone.86 In this respect, Ionian Antiquities follows the structural precedent set by Antiquities of Athens, and Chandler’s introductory essays resemble those of Robert Wood in Ruins of Palmyra: relevant passages excerpted from ancient authors are closely paraphrased in English, and a reference given to the Greek or Latin text, which in most cases is supplied in a footnote. The first-person perspective of Chandler’s more colloquial Travels provides a supplementary counterpoint. Human beings, as Judith Adler puts it, ‘come to know space through “motor projects”. An itinerary translates the spatial order of a map into a temporal sequence, defining proximity and distance in terms of time and feasibility. A traveller . . . draws significance to himself and takes possession of a world defined through that trajectory.’87 Distances that are immobile numbers in the works of 98

Time Travellers

ancient geographers become a span of time defined by striding on foot or creaking on horseback, thirsty and squinting into the heat-haze, reckoning up the miles. The expedition approaches the city-site of Priene from the acropolis above, and Chandler gives a hair-raising account of their descent: A winding track leads down the precipice from the acropolis to the city . . . but it soon became difficult and dangerous. The steps cut in the rock were narrow, the path frequently not wider than the body, and so steep as scarcely to allow footing. The sun shone full upon us, and was reverberated by the rugged side of the mountain, to which we leaned, avoiding as much as possible the frightful view of the abyss beneath us, and shrinking from the brink. The long continued descent made the whole frame quiver; and, looking up from the bottom, we were astonished at what we had done. We could discern no track, but the rock appeared quite perpendicular.88 The sheer cliff, as Chandler’s shaking muscles can attest, is an optical illusion. Although he then proceeds to a conventional survey of the ruins, what distinguishes Priene from the procession of virtually indistinguishable city-cites, and what stands out as its defining sensory feature, is this arduous arrival. The sensory terms in which the descent is delivered are almost entirely haptic, emphasizing the tense, intense concentration required to pick your way down the vertiginous staircase. Chandler is hardly admiring the scenery; when he does glance momentarily outwards, it is only to shrink back from the ‘frightful abyss’. There is heat on both sides as the sun rebounds from the cliff-face, and finally a rare contraction of attention to the body’s own interior as Chandler’s ‘whole frame’ quivers with adrenalin and effort. Priene is given an embodied, animated, anecdotal identity as Chandler communicates not only what he knows of its history from written sources and what he now knows of its material constitution, but also a highly personalized rendition of its haptic affordances. The steps in the rock are a human structure,89 and even if constructed later, presumably follow a route not unknown to Priene’s ancient inhabitants, making this spatial interaction simultaneously a form of re-enactment. Near the modern settlement of Iackli, attracted by the imposing remains of a nearby temple identified as dedicated to Jupiter, Chandler struggles to work his way around the perimeter wall of the abandoned ancient town: The thickets, which have overgrown the site, are almost impenetrable, and prevented my pursuing it to the top, but the lower portion may easily be traced . . . Within it, is a theatre cut in the rock, with some seats remaining. In the vineyards beneath are broken columns and marble fragments; and in one, behind the temple, two massy sarcophagi . . . They are raised on a pediment, and as you approach, appear like two piers of a gateway.90 The town is otherwise anonymous, but Chandler seizes upon evidence from Strabo to identify it as Labranda, ‘a village seated on a mountain in the road from Alabanda to 99

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Mylasa. This was stiled the Military Jupiter, and was worshipped by the people all around. The way was paved near sixty eight stadia or eight miles and a half, as far as Mylasa, and called Sacred from the victims and processions, which passed on it’.91 This passage is a direct, albeit abridged translation from Strabo’s Geography, and in the more scholarly Ionian Antiquities Chandler reproduces the full Greek text as justification.92 His confident identification of the site as Labranda was challenged by Choiseul-Gouffier, however, whose riposte is also printed (and disputed) in Antiquities. Choiseul-Gouffier proposes on the basis of a different passage from Strabo (14.1.8) that the site should in fact be identified with another town, Euromus, located inland of Miletus on the slopes of Mt Grion. Both modern travellers defend their application of Geography to landscape and vice versa on the basis of personal experience and empirical fieldwork. Like Priene, ‘Labranda’ has left vivid haptic impressions. It consists of a clamber through steep thickets, frustrated by their density and doubling back instead to negotiate dry vineyards strewn with marble chunks as large as boulders. Intimidating sarcophagi loom up to guard the visitor’s approach to the temple. He takes a seat in the empty theatre. Chandler also uses ancient Greek epic to inform his perceptions of local topography. He confidently identifies the tumuli near the town of Sigeum as belonging (‘if I mistake not’) to Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Antilochus, Peneleus, Aesytes [sic] and Telamonian Ajax.93 In the vicinity of Sigeum, Strabo mentions the memorial (mnēma) and temple of Aias, two different mnēmata of Achilles, one belonging to Patroclus, one to Antilochus, and later also the taphon of Aisyetes (Geography 13.1.32, 34). The anomaly is Peneleus, a fairly minor Achaean commander whose tomb (sēma) is mentioned explicitly only by the post-classical epic poet Quintus of Smyrna (Fall of Troy 7.159–60). These various terms for grave-marker, tomb or funerary monument are assigned indiscriminately by Chandler to the bronze-age barrows or burial mounds that confront him like a range of unnatural hills rising out of the Scamandrian plain. Chandler takes a different approach in Travels in Greece (1776), which includes a number of what he calls ‘Abstracts’ of Pausanias’ Periegesis. One example is the entry into ancient Athens from the Dipylon Gate, through the Ceramicus and into the Agora, finishing with the Temple of Hephaestus. Pausanias covers this ground in sixteen leisurely chapters or so, with frequent digressions into Athenian history and mythology. Chandler does it in just over one page.94 His interest is exclusively topographical. Taking the heading sentences from Pausanias, he has re-strung them into an itinerary, creating out of them a virtual walking tour. Jas Elsner has shown that Uvedale Price in his 1780 translation of the Periegesis excised ‘all that was “irrelevant” to antiquarian art-historical concerns, in order to turn the text of Pausanias into a kind of second-century ad guidebook to the museum that was Greece’.95 Chandler goes even further. His epitome of Pausanias’ Athens retains only a handful of references to artworks, and then only when they function as landmarks. His aim is to recover the layout of the ancient city subsisting beneath its modern surface, which he achieves by superimposing a Pausanian grid on the landscape.

100

Time Travellers

Kinaesthesia and other haptic senses contribute profoundly to the formation of ideas about place. Chandler’s Travels provide tantalizing snatches of the sense-data that fleshed out his understanding of the itineraries compiled by Strabo and Pausanias. As in Charlotte Eaton’s Rome, the coupling of anonymous sites with dislocated names enhances both landscape and text, and it is the historicity attributed to a site which endows it with antiquarian interest, channelling sense-perception into cognizance of place. Chandler’s Asia Minor comprises buildings, but also comprises actions and interactions, because place is dynamic, four-dimensional and dependent for its significance upon human imagination. The resulting text, Chandler’s Asia Minor, may be no more than a commentary on a commentary, as it neither captures nor conveys the infinite complexity of lived experience; but by contextualizing the acquisition of historical knowledge, it nevertheless exhibits proto-archaeological investigation as an embodied and contingent practice. *

*

*

Robert Wood’s deceptively simple objective in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767) was to show how not only appreciation but also interpretation of the Iliad was enhanced by first-hand exposure to the poem’s setting. It should be noted that his method had no archaeological component. Unlike Heinrich Schliemann a century later, Wood had no interest in treasure-hunting, nor even in identifying the precise location of Homer’s Ilium. He sketches the nearby Roman ruins of Troia Nuova, but adds that even in Strabo and Caesar’s day, few traces of the mythic city could be discerned on the surface. Wood’s concern is rather the relationship between textual representation and empirical experience, or in other words, what knowledge of the past might be gained from walking the present-day land, from mapping its contours, occupying its vantage points, and suffering its heat and storms. In conjunction with his accompanying map, Wood undertakes to describe those aspects of the region he considers especially pertinent to the Iliad. Guiding his readers around the map, Wood identifies the mythological substrata of modern landmarks such as defensive castles, one of which he reports was ‘founded upon the ruins of Abydus . . . so famed for the bridge of Xerxes, and for the loves of Hero and Leander’.96 The Asian shore, Wood observes, far ‘exceeds that of the European both in fertility and beauty’, rich in pasture and timber, natural advantages which had the commensurate drawback of attracting invaders. The coastline itself has evidently changed considerably due to annual deposits of alluvial sediment, a process that Wood is able to compare to the Nile delta and to the region around ancient Miletus.97 Wood and his party then set out to trace the river Scamander to its source, ‘which springing from the rock, distends itself into a shallow circular basin, of seven or eight feet in diameter, under the shade of a plane-tree’. These sensory details – the shape, the measurement, the evocative verbs of motion (‘springing’, ‘distends’), the welcome coolness – seek to make his first-hand contact with the Troad accessible via language, a paradox of which Wood himself is conscious. En route to the river’s source, they climb

101

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Mt Ida, whose ‘many summits’, pine groves and abundant streams are found to accord with Homer’s descriptions; and moreover, In a journey, which we made over part of it by night, the constant howling of jackals, and frequent brushings of wild beasts through the thickets, with the perpetual murmuring of rills, supplied by a constant succession of springs, gave us a very lively idea of the rites of Cybele.98 Again, what was previously a curiosity of ancient poetry, the cult of the goddess Cybele, is now fleshed out with ‘lively’ sensory correlatives, while at the same time it is their mention in ancient poetry that brings these particular factors to Wood’s attention. Although not explicitly referenced, Wood appears to have in mind Catullus’ Carmen 63, which recounts how the goddess’s devotee Attis reels through the forests of Ida in a delirious frenzy, castrating himself in order to join Cybele’s followers. Catullus’ opaca silvis . . . loca deae, the goddess’s shrine deep in the shadows of the wild groves (fera nemora) accords with Wood’s description, along with the ‘slopes of Ida watered green with snow-melt’ (viridis algida Idae nive amicta loca) which Attis is condemned to wander. The jackals Wood hears calling correspond to the lion Cybele looses to ‘make every place resound with bellowing roars’, and the rustle of passing beasts, invisible in the dark, evokes the pattering footsteps of the unseen initiates themselves as they dance their ecstatic measures far into the night, and farther into the mountain wilderness. Wood also brings his observations to bear on specific passages of the Iliad, arguing for instance that Achilles’ sulk in Book 1 should be placed on the Aegean shore, as the line θῖν᾽ ἔφ᾽ ἁλὸς πολιῆς, ὁρόων ἐπ᾽ ἀπείρονα πόντον (‘He stood by the white-capped saltsea, gazing out over the infinite deep’, 1.350) contains epithets (polios, white-capped and apeirōn, endless or infinite) that can only refer to the Aegean, as it would be absurd to describe the calm channel of the Hellespont in such terms. One of Wood’s main contentions is that Homer’s first-hand local knowledge of the region lends an accuracy to his descriptions that can be corroborated by the modern visitor’s own sense-experience. Observing the effect of the rising wind on the sea near Smyrna, ‘from the first dark curl on the surface of the water, to its greatest agitation’, Wood concludes that this characteristic weather-pattern, known as the ‘Imbat’, informs similes such as the comparison of an advancing battle-line to an increasingly turbulent sea.99 The plague which spreads through Homer’s Greek encampment likewise strikes Wood as inevitable ‘in a marshy situation like that of Troy, unwholesome at this day in the hot season’.100 Whether or not these sense-impressions in fact informed the poem’s composition is less revealing than the way they came to inform Robert Wood’s reading of Homer. The very idea that anything could be added to one’s comprehension of a classical author’s meaning by placing oneself in the work’s geographical setting was quite revolutionary. In its reliance on data gathered in the field, the Essay conforms to the crucial principle of Enlightenment empiricism that the evidence of the senses could be treated as the basis of rational thought (as opposed to the wisdom of the ancients, divine inspiration, 102

Time Travellers

deductive logic, etc.). From the mid-eighteenth century, as Noah Heringman has shown, empirical methods began to filter from the natural sciences into antiquarianism.101 History could be approached as a phenomenon whose material traces enabled direct apprehension of its architectural, artefactual and topographical components. In addition to the medium of language, the ancient world could be accessed through other sensory channels, especially the tactile and the kinetic. Vision of course comes into play as well, but as Evan Thompson points out, ‘If something appears perspectivally, then the subject to whom it appears must be spatially related to it. To be spatially related to something requires that one be embodied.’102 Robert Wood’s unique authority as a reader of Homer is predicated on his special embodied relationship with the Troad, a relationship he is quick to claim but nevertheless struggles to convey. Like Eaton’s, his treatment of space is theatrical, investing the contemporary set through which he moves with the imagined qualities of Homer’s poetic setting. At the same time, he feeds his perceptions of the site back into the fictional setting for which it stands. There are two main points on which Wood feels empowered to challenge orthodox readings of the Iliad. First, he rejects ‘allegorical’ interpretations which posit arcane symbolism behind Homeric nature imagery. Rather, he argues, all such imagery has concrete analogues in the local environment. ‘The scenery of his mythology is Grecian,’ argues Wood, showing how even passages involving the preternaturally rapid passage of Olympian gods maintain topographical consistency.103 Second, Homer’s most prominent contemporary English translator, Alexander Pope, gives a false impression of Iliadic landscapes by inserting what Wood calls ‘a florid profusion of unmeaning ornament’, rendering regions inappropriately ‘piny’, ‘flowery’, ‘sylvan’ or ‘stately’ more or less at random, and (worse) shifting geography around to fit his rhyme-scheme.104 Pope’s Iliad takes place in a free-floating fantasy land which Wood’s investigations have anchored back to terra firma. Although convinced of the critical utility of this approach, Wood expresses his frustration that its fundamental premise – direct sensory apprehension – is cancelled out by his very conversion of experience back into literature. If such knowledge is inherent in the topography of the Troad, it must be altered irrevocably both by its relocation to England and its reformulation as text: One of the objects of our Eastern voyages was to visit the most celebrated scenes of ancient story, in order to compare their present appearance with the early classical ideas we had conceived of them . . . Though our expectations from this object of our curiosity were by no means disappointed, yet I almost despaired of a satisfactory method of conveying to others a tolerable idea of the entertainment, we received from it on the spot.105 He elaborates later that this is partly due to the fact that it ‘arose as much from the investigation, as the discovery of the correspondence and resemblance’ between ancient texts and modern landscapes. We saw earlier how a similar concern affected him even as he recognized the benefits of empiricism in the introduction to Ruins of Palmyra: 103

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

The particular pleasure, it is true, which an imagination warmed upon the spot receives from those scenes of heroick actions, only the traveller can feel, nor is it to be communicated by description. But classical ground not only makes us always relish the poet, or historian more, but sometimes helps us to understand them better.106 This, then, is the essential paradox of experiential or performative translation. The full intensity of its illumination is available only to the translator themselves.107 For readers, unless likewise exposed to the sensory stimulations of Palmyra or Sicily, its verbalization represents yet another deferral of direct apprehension. Nevertheless, these translations also relocated the ancient world from the realms of fancy to the earth’s surface, and in doing so laid the foundations for a scientific approach to classical antiquity. The elusive ‘entertainment’ identified by Wood is the augmentation of his capacity to imagine the distant past through sensorimotor associations. As Gallese and Lakoff have shown, ‘Understanding is imagination . . . Imagination, like perceiving and doing, is embodied, that is, structured by our constant encounter and interaction with the world via our bodies and brains . . . Imagination is a form of simulation.’108 Although they are referring to the comprehension of abstract relationships generally, this structuring principle can likewise be applied to the historical imaginary. Wood is able to simulate activity he has performed as a somatic correlative to the language of Homer, and thereby imagine the Iliad as encoding particular spatial, topographical, even meteorological conditions. Acquiring this ‘very lively idea’ of the Homeric environment fundamentally altered his perceptions of the poem. Alongside Piranesi’s vertiginous sepulchres, the Dilettanti and the publications arising from their expeditions participated in transforming the perception of ancient material culture. This transformation occupied a specific cultural moment. The empirical methods applied by Stuart, Chandler and Wood to the study of ancient sites and structures would later be accommodated and superseded by the discipline of archaeology. Textual sources were still paramount, one key goal being the reciprocal integration of antiquity’s verbal legacy and its architectural remains. Authors like Chandler and Choiseul-Gouffier are deeply invested in the identification and naming of sites (there is, of course, considerable ‘charm’ in a name, real or unreal), and Wood places quotes from Pliny alongside his artist’s impression of Palmyra. A new kind of knowledge required new rhetorics of representation, often achieved through juxtaposing different styles, contrasting the schematic with the poetical. In doing so, these experimental publications exposed the epistemological fissure between haptic apprehension in the field and material reconfiguration in print. Their constituent elements – the diagrams, plates, measurements, maps, ecphrases and verbatim passages of Strabo – were an attempt to convey embodied experience in a medium that rendered it both useful and persuasive. If the pleasure of communing with ruins could not itself be communicated, at least the impossibility of such communication might tolerably be expressed.

104

Time Travellers

Chronology 1749

James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, expedition to Athens

1750–1

Robert Wood, Dawkins and Borra, expedition to Asia Minor and Levant

1753

Wood, Ruins of Palmyra

1755

Robert Adam, expedition to Spalatro

1757

Wood, Ruins of Baalbek

1762

Stuart and Revett, Antiquities of Athens (vol. 1)

1764

Adam, Ruins of Spalatro

1764–5

Richard Chandler, Revett and Pars, expedition to Ionia

1767

Wood, Essay on the Original Genius of Homer

1769

Chandler, Revett and Pars, Ionian Antiquities

1775

Chandler, Travels in Asia Minor

1776

Chandler, Travels in Greece

1784

Chandler, Revett and Pars, Supplement on the Temple at Iackli

1789

Stuart and Revett, Antiquities of Athens (vol. 2)

105

106

CHAPTER 6 FRANKENSTEIN’S VENUS

Although this kind of experience was untranslatable, it could be replicated. Reproductions on every scale permitted haptic interactions to proliferate after travellers returned home. They could even surpass their derelict sources, because whereas ancient sites afforded only partial ruins, the sets designed to imitate them afforded movement through complete environments identified as ‘Roman’, ‘Etruscan’ or ‘Grecian’. Fragmentary sculptures were imaginatively restored. Three-dimensional fabrications of ancient objects otherwise extant only in two-dimensional images also offered a means of entering into scenes from the ancient world. A vogue for miniaturization and domestication emerged as features of classical architecture were brought indoors. At the same time, ancient decorative motifs were transposed onto contemporary personal or domestic items such as snuffboxes, fans and inkwells. Users related to these items primarily through the haptic senses of touch and kinaesthesia, activating the pleasurable cognitive patterns – including perceptions of historical situatedness, participation and/or revival – that were prompted by sensorimotor interactions. Whether reproductions were large-scale and elite, such as private sculpture galleries, or as diminutive as buttons, their manufacture responded to a common desire for tangible contact with synecdochic representatives (or representations) of an imagined antiquity. The souvenir falls into this category;1 although covering a wide spectrum of authenticity, cost and scale, this mode of reception again has a common performative dimension. The collection of sculptures, casts or coins fulfils an aesthetic function comparable to the table or teapot designed as though it were made for use by a member of an ancient Roman household. This ludic or playful doubling of perception resembles that which Charlotte Eaton applies in Rome. Despite knowing perfectly well that the tomb is not Ovid’s, the statue a pastiche and that ancient Romans didn’t use teapots, the willingness to allow these objects free play in their capacity as a field for kinaesthetic involvement persists. *

*

*

We begin in the dark, with a woman’s headless torso, cold and immobile amid a boneyard of marble limbs that do not belong to her in a vault beneath the Barberini Palace. Her posture and her nudity suggest a Venus of the Medici type, so perhaps she might be reinstalled with some conviction in the gardens of a second-century elite Roman villa urbana, one of an elegant parade of echoes emanating from the famous Praxitelean Aphrodite of Cnidos, the one whose beauty reputedly drove at least one besotted admirer to attempt intercourse (you can still see the stain on her thigh, or at least you could if she were extant). Venus had her left buttock replaced, among other parts of her anatomy, by sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi when she was dusted off and prepared for sale in 1764 to 107

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

the highest bidder, who in this case happened to be a young milord from Yorkshire called William Weddell. The restoration of this Venus was a collaborative operation. Contemporary accounts disagree on the details, but it seems that resident antiquities dealer Gavin Hamilton was poking around in the trash-and-treasure trove that was the Barberini cellars when he stumbled on this almost-complete statue, missing a head, both arms and most of a leg, but in spite of these drawbacks it was a viable commodity for the insatiable English market, where aesthetic appeal outweighed authenticity. In this grimy, cobwebbed, mutilated fragment, Hamilton saw potential. He contacted Thomas Jenkins, another supplier responsible for facilitating numerous English acquisitions (including most of the Townley collection). Between them they commissioned a restoration project: one account credits Cavaceppi, another his rival Pietro Pacili, but the one undisputed fact is that somebody replaced Venus’ missing head with another head, also antique but from a different figure, which had been veiled but whose modest headdress was converted into a rippling cascade of hair escaping from its loosened bindings. The piece was then marketed as discovered complete.2 This was fairly typical of the art trade in Rome at the time. Writing to his patron in 1766, British artist James Barry describes the process with some exasperation: There are legs & thighs & feet & heads brought out of old houses, gardens & other places where they have mostly lain unheeded ever since the 15th century when they were thrown away as soon as they were found being wanting in every thing that could entitle them to a place in a repository . . . Those into whose hands they fall here & to whom their commissions are sent take care to provide heads with bodies & legs & vice versa, fragments of gods & Senators are jumbled into the same figure of furies & Graces, till it comes out a monster.3 During the 1760s and 1770s, the Roman market in marble sculpture flourished.4 Italian aristocrats discovered the profits lying latent in their unwanted assortments of damaged torsos and busts, or in granting permission for new excavations to be conducted on their land. The Vatican had first refusal: all excavations required a licence to be obtained from the office of the Papal Antiquary, a mutually beneficial system, as Jonathan Scott explains: The entrepreneur was able to extract and export the marbles that his customers wanted, while the state benefitted from what was, in effect, a production royalty on discoveries in its territory, but did not have to bear any of the high capital cost of excavations. In this way, during the second half of the century, the Museo Pio Clementino was able to fill gallery upon gallery without risk.5 Illegal, unlicensed excavations were rare, although concealing choice finds from the inspectors in order to sell them abroad – Gavin Hamilton candidly terms it ‘smugling’ – was not uncommon.6 Italian excavators accounted for approximately half of the digs undertaken during the 1770s. The other half were predominantly British, with Hamilton 108

Frankenstein’s Venus

responsible for more than forty sites, including the spectacular robba unearthed from Gabii, Monte Cagnolo, Ostia and Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.7 ‘I have just purchased a spot of ground,’ writes Hamilton excitedly of Monte Cagnolo, ‘where I hope to bring to light hidden treasures. It is a wood that has never been touched, full of ruins & parts of broken columns of porphiry &c &c.’8 The purpose of excavating was patently the extraction of commodities, rather than archaeological (dis)interest as it would later come to be defined, but it was not unsystematic. Each piece of stonework that was discovered, whether freestanding, architectural or relief, also provided new information about (for instance) Roman portraiture, decorative motifs or the taxonomy of sculptural subjects. Much of this data was then put to practical use in the restorer’s workshop. If Hamilton’s digging formed the start of a sculpture’s journey north, and Jenkins’ dealing dispatched it, in between occurred the process euphemistically known as ‘restoration’. Many sculptures sold by Jenkins passed through the workshop of prominent restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. Occasional miracles aside, most of what the excavators turned up consisted either of limbless torsos or unrelated heads. Clients had no interest in fragments, however. There was nothing authentic about a gallery full of decapitated lumps of rock. It was therefore obligatory to reunite the disparate body-parts, supplementing the resulting figure where necessary with attributes appropriate to its designated identity. Restoration methods could be quite invasive. Busts were cut down to fit bodies, heads hacked off reliefs, panels chipped out of sarcophagi. ‘Accidental’ cracks made clean breaks where new limbs could be fixed to the trunk with metal dowel. The intention, as Seymour Howard has shown, was to (re)produce a complete artwork, matching the material and the form of the source as closely as possible. Often, less than a third of a statue was actually antique, or it comprised a pastiche of numerous fragments.9 Cavaceppi’s characteristic additions included supports in the shape of tree-trunks and accessories such as a headdress, a scroll, a dagger or pan-pipes to indicate the character represented.10 These restorations were not fanciful, however. Cavaceppi took a rigorous, scientific approach based on close comparisons of countless examples. Again, we must shift our perception of ‘authenticity’. Evidently, these broken pieces were not supposed to exist in this form. The collective responsibility of archaeologist, artist and patron was therefore to return them to as pristine a condition as possible. Respect for their fabric and craftsmanship, and indeed their status as relics, was to be articulated not through preserving their degradation but by realizing their aesthetic potential. Once additional components had been cemented into place, the joints were smoothed over with a mixture of plaster, marble dust and egg yolk. To create a uniform texture, the surface of the ancient marble was scrubbed smooth with abrasives such as pumice or treated with acid, while the modern portions were rasped and stained, distressing them to match. The whole piece then received a final buff and polish ready for shipping, or for Cavaceppi’s showroom.11 Although dealers like Jenkins could be reticent about the extent of the restorations, this was not forgery. It was understood that statues, in order to regain their ancient characteristics, needed to completed; it was also understood that experts like Hamilton and Cavaceppi were applying the practical knowledge gained from years 109

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

of fieldwork, connoisseurship and artisanal practice in order to generate the best possible version. Restoration was a collaborative act, a form of three-dimensional editing in which the restorer supplied realistic conjectures to fill the evident gaps in the source material. The assembly of sculpture galleries in this way not only imitated contemporary Italian collections, but also what was understood as ancient Roman practice. James Dallaway, in Anecdotes of the Arts in England (1800), establishes the emperor Hadrian as a model: Having, for eighteen years, been engaged in visiting the most distant parts of the Roman empire, he [Hadrian] resolved to construct his villa at Tivoli; in which not only exact models of the most celebrated buildings he had ever seen, should be erected, but that they should be furnished with originals, or the finest copies, of the most admirable statues. His correct judgement in all works of art contributed more to the absolute superiority of this collection, than the mere power of expending unlimited treasures to procure it.12 Dallaway represents Hadrian as a gentleman returning from his own Grand Tour, commissioning replicas of the empire’s ‘most celebrated buildings’ to hold these same statues that would later come to be excavated for the English export market. Literary exempla also abounded. In furnishing his villa at Tusculum, his carefully cultivated retreat where a man might play the philosopher ad libitum in a setting conducive to contemplation, Cicero needs some sculpture for his portico. He sends to his friend and correspondent Titus Pomponius ‘Atticus’, resident at the time in Athens, a request to obtain on Cicero’s behalf some works of art appropriate for ‘you know where’. They should be gymnasiōdē, Cicero instructs him, dropping into Greek, of the type you would typically find in a gymnasion or (interchangeably, in Latin parlance) a palaestra.13 In such a space did Socrates converse with his disciples, pacing the colonnades in search of truth while young athletic wrestlers sweated golden under the sun. In such a space did Cicero complete his own education, strolling in the grounds of the Athenian Academy founded by Plato.14 Inspired by the Platonic exemplum, Cicero had a version of the Academy constructed at his Tusculan villa which along with its doublet, the ‘Lyceum’, transposed the public architecture of classical Greece into a more domestic environment; domestic but not altogether private, as the Roman rural villa functioned less as a holiday home and more as a showcase for lifestyle and values.15 Cicero’s villa was a theatrical set designed to accommodate a particular mode of discourse in symbiotic conjunction with a particular kinetic practice. Miranda Marvin uncovers the nostalgia in the foundations of Cicero’s architectural self-fashioning:16 He sought to create not a literal copy of Plato’s Academy but what he saw as its essential character as a place of philosophic discussion – what he remembered about his student days – the long porticoes, the walking up and down, the earnest conversation and a marble blur of statuary as they passed . . . It was not the appearance of the Academy that he wanted to reproduce but his feelings about it.17 110

Frankenstein’s Venus

This desire, Marvin argues, was what motivated Cicero to bypass the famous and the particular in favour of the unremarkable and generic when it came to selecting the artworks (ornamenta) to decorate his Academy. It is the subject matter that appears to be Cicero’s priority, as each piece needs to be a consonant component of a whole, harmonizing with its designated location rather than standing out as distinctive. Tusculum’s portico functions as a set conducive to staging philosophical discussion à la the Academia, a space translated from the Greek in the same way that Cicero translated Greek philosophy in his dialogues.18 The sculptures should therefore make a subliminal contribution to the atmosphere rather than intruding on the consciousness of the participant to such an extent that they invite attention or comment.19 While confident that their collecting practices replayed those of Cicero and Hadrian, English collectors were less concerned with imitating Roman display conditions as such. Rather, they sought to capture the mood or atmosphere created by a cluster of antique sculptures, adapting the scenery around them to convey the architectural attributes of pagan religion (Townley’s Dionysiac dining room, Weddell’s domed ‘penetralia’), the pastoral (Blundell’s ‘Garden Temple’) or the sepulchral (Soane’s ruin-scape, Bessborough’s ‘catacomb’). These fabricated sets each established a particular relationship between visitor and artwork, in which the conscious artifice of reproduction generated a virtual encounter that could never be mistaken for something unmediated, and yet derived its interest from the presence of authentic artefacts. To move through these specially crafted spaces made their contents kinetically and kinaesthetically available. As well as referencing Roman antiquity, English display choices reflected the modern Italian palazzi where early modern collections of antique sculptures originated and flourished. Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, four dynasties – the Medici, Farnese, Borghese and Ludovici – had been responsible for assembling the major collections.20 Alongside the Vatican and Capitoline museums, visitors to Rome absorbed the arrangements of the Villa Albani and the Villa Borghese, private residences overflowing with superb ancient artworks andunderstood as reproducing ancient Roman experience. Forsyth remarks that Cardinal Albani, ‘having spent his life collecting ancient sculpture, formed such porticoes and such saloons to receive it as an old Roman would have done’.21 Lady Morgan similarly compares the Villa Albani to ‘some pure and elegant Grecian temple – a little Pantheon! dedicated to all the rural gods, with whose statues . . . its marble colonnades and galleries are filled’.22 While the Italian aristocracy had been displaying ancient sculpture for centuries, usually as garden ornaments, a new preference had emerged for gesturing back towards antiquity in its display. Who, me? asks Venus (Figure 2), one hand brushing her breasts, the other hovering over her pudenda, clad only in the aura of pagan divinity and a pair of distinctive dolphin armbands, posed by Cavaceppi et al. in the characteristic attitude that both guides the gaze and pretends to thwart the desire it induces; a desire which nonetheless is perpetually thwarted, as Lucian’s would-be molester of Cnidian Aphrodite discovers, by the very materiality of the object he seeks to render incarnate; by its unflinching presence, and its mute retention of an inaccessible past. Who, me? asks Venus. Some of me? All of me? My 111

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Figure 2 Jenkins Venus, Newby Hall. Photography © Heathcliff O'Malley.

wet hair? My left buttock? Or perhaps none of this was ever actually me at all, because in a sense I was always already a fabricated simulacrum of femininity.23 Despite her piecemeal reconstruction, the Newby Venus was an extremely effective agent when it came to stimulating the imagination, both erotic and antiquarian, and thereby brokering a relationship between otherwise disconnected individuals. Like any woman trafficked between men, like any willing bride or dutiful daughter, Venus’ function was to ratify these homosocial transactions, to implicate interested parties in a transtemporal community united by desire.24 However, while sexuality undeniably figures in the economy of desire in which the Barberini/Jenkins/Newby Venus has circulated, it is not her exclusive referent. She also stands for antiquity, beauty, social status and cultural capital, all of which could be embodied in the possession of such an artwork. Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model can be somewhat modified to suggest that while those responsible for Venus’ eighteenth-century disinterment and circulation, historically speaking, were men, and while this mode of interaction certainly wears masculine features in terms of its voyeurism, objectification, and anatomization,25 these once-male prerogatives are now generally available – one could say even ubiquitous – in the reception of classical art and 112

Frankenstein’s Venus

artefacts. Her reception therefore involves at once reflective participation, assessment of these prerogatives’ cultural specificity, and consideration of possible alternatives. Venus does not touch herself. Her hands do not make contact. They linger within a fingertip’s reach, but do not connect, leaving instead an endless pause vibrating in the fractional space between self and self.26 For Merleau-Ponty, the perpetual fascination of self-perception was generated in one had touching the other, confounding the identity of subject and object.27 Condillac’s statue touches herself, and learns to feel, and learns, we understand, to feel at the same time transitively, to feel some-thing, to feel her body, to feel pleasure. Venus is a reminder that while the female body might classically be mined for interiors, hiddenness and cavity, its sites of pleasure are on the surface, and respond to touch. If Venus Pudica’s pose brokers a transaction between the female nude and the male gaze, she becomes all object, undesiring, exclusively recipient; but reconfigure it as autoerotic – incipient, interrupted or self-satisfactorily complete – and while the viewer’s voyeurism is undiminished, he can no longer flatter himself that he is integral to the sculpture’s sexual dynamic. His questing gaze might be impeded by those hands, one cupping her breast, the other not quite caressing her pudenda, but what he does not see (because female pleasure is invisible) is that these are the hands of a rival lover, a lover whose intimate knowledge of what gives Venus pleasure he can never hope to equal, since they follow without thinking the twists and turns, the tides and flux of her own desire, the most selfish and most pure. Venus Pudica needs no partner to complete her, and perhaps this ongoing parthenogenetic pleasure is the secret that gives her expression its impudence. Her hand never quite touches. She never quite makes contact, remaining in a state of suspension that in many accounts drives her viewers to a maddening pitch of sexual frustration. It is not only that her hands conceal, but that they cannot fail to be recognized as agents, as surrogates perhaps for the sweaty aching fingers of would-be Pygmalions but at the same time as cooler, more skilful substitutes. If Pygmalion’s statue had brought herself to life, like Narcissus in reverse, what might she have felt, there in the workshop, that niche or pedestal? How might she have completed herself? Purchased by William Weddell for an unspecified but reputedly astronomical sum, smuggled out of Rome as a piece of second-rate patchwork destined for the King of England, the Barberini Venus was installed in the custom-built statue gallery at Weddell’s country seat, Newby Hall. Unlike some English collectors like Charles Townley who made remote acquisitions piece by piece through their Roman delegates, Weddell acquired his entire collection from Jenkins’ showroom during his stay in Rome and shipped it back en masse. In 1764, Weddell was among the earliest English clients of the export market in Roman sculpture that Jenkins, Cavaceppi and Hamilton were beginning to corner. The Newby display setting was likewise an innovative departure from the corridorlike long gallery where indoor sculpture had typically been arranged. Unsatisfied with this, Weddell commissioned an update in 1767 from England’s foremost neoclassical interior designer, Robert Adam.28 Adam amended the plain long gallery into a complex of three separate but communicating spaces, ‘an interlocking sequence of two rectangular rooms flanking a central, circular one, all enlivened by apses, niches, and recesses of 113

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

various sizes’.29 The walls, painted warmly in dusky pink and rose, were richly decorated with friezes, medallions and stucco relief panels. The Venus herself, according to a sketch made by Charles Townley in 1779, stood on an elevated pedestal in one of the recesses in the central room. In Townley’s sketch, the collection is arranged around the edges of the three chambers, suggesting a frontal approach to each piece and ample room for individual examination. Its trio of chambers enticed visitors to linger and explore. Their design and decoration set the scene for an encounter with antiquity, producing a restoration not only of the statues themselves but also of what were understood as ‘Roman’ display conditions. One visitor in 1802 referred to the Newby gallery as ‘the penetralia of the temple’,30 responding with reverence (or mock-reverence) to the partial glimpses and progressive revelations afforded by Adam’s layout. Analysis of Adam’s architectural sources suggests eclecticism. Diocletian’s palace at Spalatro evidently contributed, along with the Baths of Diocletian in Rome and the socalled Temple of Minerva Medica. Illustrations by Piranesi and Desgodetz are also likely to have been influential in formulating Adam’s conception of a suitable gallery space. Translating these structures into a domestic interior, as Middleton points out, entailed a change in materials, so that ‘the solid, sculptural effect of the spaces is achieved by timber and lath and plaster’.31 Like a stage palace constructed from painted boards, Adam’s set acted upon the haptic imagination by creating a three-dimensional simulation of the composite space it was referencing. To contemplate the marbles in their setting at Newby was to participate in the realization of an immersive reconstruction. Many of Weddell’s contemporaries among the English elite also benefitted from the marble rush, resulting in the establishment of several substantial collections.32 As these collections and their collectors’ biographies have received ample scholarly attention elsewhere,33 I will focus on three examples that show how variation on the same reconstructive principle resulted in divergent realizations: Charles Townley’s house in Park Street, Lord Bessborough’s ‘catacombs’ at Roehampton and Henry Blundell’s pavilions at Ince Hall. Unlike Newby, none of these collections remains in context. Assembled at a particular point in time, in accordance with its transient motives and aesthetic rationales, they are now once again dispersed.34 A painting by Johann Zoffany (Figure  3) depicts Charles Townley and a group of friends in Townley’s library, surrounded by recognizable sculptures from his collection including Clytie, the Discoboulos, the drunken faun, the half-draped Venus and half a dozen others, crowded impossibly into the frame. Although the painting itself is a capriccio,35 Townley’s sculptures being much too heavy to be brought into this upstairs room, they did occupy the entire ground floor of his London townhouse, effectively converted into a suite of galleries. Michaelis, the nineteenth-century authority on eighteenth-century collections, catalogues the disposition of each room: Hall, staircase and parlour were adorned by preference with sepulchral monuments, inscriptions, and terracotta reliefs. The drawing-room contained a selection of the most beautiful busts . . . Other heads, such as that of Homer, with its pictorial mode of execution, served as appropriate adornments for the library. But the most 114

Frankenstein’s Venus

brilliant room was the dining-hall, against the walls of which stood the finest statues of the collection.36 Intended as educational, the house could be visited by members of the public as well as frequented by Townley’s inner circle. Just as the villa owned by Cardinal Albani exhibited an extensive private collection for appreciation and study for visitors to Rome, so Townley aimed to provide something of the same experience for the citizens of London. Townley made three separate visits to Italy (1765, 1772 and 1777), but many of the sculptures were acquired remotely and astutely through Jenkins and Hamilton in Rome. Upon his death in 1805, he left the entire collection to the British Museum, where it held pride of place until superseded (controversially) by the Parthenon marbles in 1816.37 Townley’s understanding of the function, and hence the appropriate curation and display of ancient art was heavily influenced both by Winckelmann and by the esoteric interpretations of scholar-in-residence ‘Baron’ d’Hancarville. D’Hancarville, fresh from cataloguing William Hamilton’s vases, appears centre stage in Zoffany’s painting posed with an open book, possibly the Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit et le Progrès des Arts de la Grèce (1785), which he wrote under Townley’s patronage. Townley wished his collection to instruct the visitor about the chronological development of ancient art as

Figure 3 Johann Zoffany, ‘Charles Townley and friends in his library’ (1780s). Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum (THA2288) © Bridgeman Images.

115

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

well as its religious significance. For d’Hancarville, as well as for his aristocratic patrons,38 all ancient art expressed primal fertility cult in a sublimated form. Sculpted figures had a power at once sensual and sacred.39 A sculpture showing Actaeon on the brink of transforming into a stag, for example, was interpreted as representing ‘the temporary dissolution or inaction of the generative spirit [d’Hancarville’s Êtrer Générateur], personified by this animal and by Actaeon’.40 Above all, it was Dionysus (Bacchus) who embodied the Êtrer Générateur, the primal creative force perceived by d’Hancarville beneath the polymorphous masks of ancient Greek polytheism.41 The rationale developed by d’Hancarville for the decorative scheme of Townley’s dining room, supported by columns whose capitals were ornamented with ivy, pinecones, sheaves and vines, was that it was ‘intended to characterize a building consecrated to Bacchus and Ceres, whose feasts and Mysteries were celebrated together at the famous Temple of Eleusis’.42 The artworks this pseudo-temple contained were congruent with the theme, consisting of fauns and bacchantes and reliefs with Dionysiac scenes. Townley’s museum represented not only an education in taste and the history of art, but also a spiritual journey. In contrast to Townley’s antiquarian and mystical approach was that of Henry Blundell. Blundell came to collecting late in life, but made up for inexperience with sheer enthusiasm. In 1777, he accompanied Townley to Italy, who recommended that he purchase a tasteful bronze statuette of a Greek philosopher. Blundell was hooked. He returned from Rome with eighty marbles, all obtained by Jenkins from a sale at the Villa Mattei.43 Over the next twenty years, Blundell amassed some 600 works of art, two-thirds of which were antique sculptures. By 1790, his collection had grown too large to be accommodated in his country house, Ince Blundell Hall near Liverpool, and he commissioned a specially designed ‘Garden Temple’ to contain it. Inscribed on the pediment was a quote from the laudes Italiae in Virgil’s Georgics, Hic ver assiduum atque alienis mensibus aestus – ‘as if ’, comments Jonathan Scott, ‘the marbles had the power to transform chill winds blowing off the Irish Sea into the mild zephyrs of Campania’.44 Inside, its decoration and arrangement resembled the Pio-Clementino’s Sala delle Statue. Like Townley, Blundell also admitted public visitors, who may not themselves have been able to undertake a Continental tour but could nevertheless experience in the Garden Temple a scaled-down version of Italian galleries transplanted to Britain. In 1801, Blundell added to his collection a number of purchases from English collections put up for sale. Prominent among them was that of the recently deceased Earl of Bessborough. A founding member of the Dilettanti, Bessborough had been on tour himself in the 1730s – and indeed, had travelled further afield, to the Balkans and Constantinople – but most of his collection was acquired following the construction of Parkstead House at Roehampton. Contemporary with Newby Hall, Parkstead was designed in exemplary neoclassical style by architect William Chambers, who also furnished it with garden temples and a curious underground feature known as the ‘catacomb’ or the ‘columbarium’.45 Several pieces in Bessborough’s collection were sepulchral, such as grave stelae, sarcophagi or funerary urns, so it is likely that these were housed in the catacomb, a vaulted passage with stucco ceiling decoration copied from Bartoli’s Antichi Sepolcri. Other pieces were mildly erotic, including the buttocks and 116

Frankenstein’s Venus

thighs of an otherwise unrestored Venus,46 Pan propositioning a youthful shepherd47 and the notorious Hermaphrodite. Blundell purchased between twenty and twenty-five pieces from the Bessborough sale,48 including the so-called ‘Hermaphrodite’, which he reviled as ‘unnatural and very disgusting’. The reclining figure was therefore converted into a less discomforting subject, a sleeping Venus, ‘by means of a little castration’. Three Erotes, which Blundell despised as ‘little brats crawling on its chest’, were also amputated.49 Violently re-gendered, and now also rid of her infants (another act of ‘castration’?), Blundell’s new acquisition was added to the others in a second outdoor gallery, the ‘Pantheon’, a domed rotunda complementing the nearby Garden Temple and designed to resemble the Uffizi Tribuna. In 1809, Blundell imitated Townley in producing a guidebook to his collection in which he explicitly rejected what he called the ‘mystical erudition’ imparted by d’Hancarville. For Blundell, classical sculpture was there to be enjoyed, not understood. For collectors of antique sculpture, then, both first-generation participants in the marble rush and second-generation beneficiaries of its dispersal at auction, classical artworks represented not only individual subjects, but also a collective scene. The practice of acquisition and display was a form of imitatio which constituted an act of performative reception. Like Cicero’s Tusculan Academy or Hadrian’s Canopic pool, sets such as Weddell’s gallery, Townley’s Dionysiac dining room, Bessborough’s columbarium and Blundell’s garden temple provided immersive contexts featuring statuary perceived as authentic, restored to what was considered to be its original perfection, as part of the scenery. This does not imply it faded into the background. On the contrary, it afforded visitors a material simulation of ancient Rome, approached and apprehended through kinaesthetic interaction. *

*

*

The object in Figure  4 appears at first to be an architectural feature, the capital of a pilaster from a classical or neoclassical façade, but it is in fact part of a fireplace in Parkstead House. The fireplace was designed by William Chambers in the mid-1760s to recall the façade of a temple with its flanking columns, figural frieze and decorated cornice. This is an early expression of the same impulse that would later find fuller expression in Thomas Hope’s tableware and furnishings. Elements of ancient material culture were reworked in such a way that they could be integrated into modern domestic interiors, or conversely, domestic interiors were remodelled to accommodate elements derived from ancient material sources. The Romans, as Piranesi observes, did not have chimneys and therefore did not need chimneypieces, but if they had, they might have looked something like the one from Parkstead. The English market for neoclassical chimneypieces, particularly those made in Italy, flourished during the 1760s and 1770s.50 In 1769, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, already famous for his etchings of Roman ruins, published a collection of designs entitled Diverse maniere d’ adornare i camini desunte dell’ architettura Egizia, Etrusca e Greca. Piranesi attributed the eclecticism of his designs to Roman practice. Rather than slavishly reproducing exclusively Greek models, he recommends blending the components of 117

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Figure 4 Detail of chimneypiece at Parkstead House, Roehampton. Author's photograph.

different cultures and periods in a form of imitatio that recombines them into something entirely original, yet true to the principle of synthesis that inspired the Romans themselves. In Roman art, Piranesi writes, The Tuscan and Grecian were mixed together, the graces and beauty of the one became common to the other, and the Romans found means to unite them both in one and the same work. That is what I likewise have pretended to do in these chimneys . . . The connoisseurs will easily distinguish what belongs to the Greeks and what to the Tuscans.51 This type of capriccio or fantasia – that is, a pastiche of diverse components – is one of Piranesi’s trademarks as an artist.52 Some of his fantastical chimneypieces, such as one surviving example in Burlington House, were realized in marble as well as on paper.53 This transferral to a three-dimensional medium created a tangible capriccio, a simulacrum of an antiquity that never was but has now been conjured into being, solid and irrefutably present.54 Robert Adam, who had been a close associate of Piranesi’s while training in Rome in the 1750s, also designed a number of similar chimneypieces for his aristocratic clients. Some (Hopetoun House and Osterley Park, for example) have caryatids holding up the mantelpiece, while others (such as Kedleston Hall and Rushton Hall) incorporate 118

Frankenstein’s Venus

Ionic columns, as if the fireplace were the frontage of a chest-high antique building emerging surreally from the wall. Piranesi and Robert Adam both drew on Roman sources for their designs, but Adam’s rival James ‘Athenian’ Stuart preferred his inspiration uncontaminated. Stuart’s claim to superiority was that unlike Adam, he had actually been to Greece, and his 1762 Antiquities of Athens – discussed above in Chapter 5 – was one of the few authoritative accounts of fifth-century architecture drawn and measured in situ. Stuart could therefore claim to base interiors directly on the classical Greek architecture he had been personally responsible for introducing to British consumers. Although ideologically opposed to one another, the two competing designers could nevertheless find themselves contributing different rooms to the same (less discriminating) clients.55 Moreover, despite their supposed authenticity, Stuart’s fireplaces – such as that in the ‘Great Room’ of Spencer House with its decorative relief moulding – participate in the manufacture of an antiquity just as fabricated as any of Piranesi’s hybrids. They perform the same miniaturization, scaling down monumental, public, exterior architecture and altering its function to serve a new purpose in the drawing room or dressing room. These statements of taste aestheticized the functional, surrounding the provision of warmth with a theatrical frame. Similar motives led designer Thomas Hope to attempt an even more tactile integration of classical motifs into items intended for everyday use. Hope remodelled his own house on Duchess Street between 1799 and 1803, converting the public rooms into a cross between stage-set, museum and temple. Visitors passed through a sculpture gallery, pinacotheca, four rooms displaying Hope’s extensive Greek vase collection, an Egyptian drawing room, a cabinet of relics termed the Lararium, and finally entered the stunning centrepiece called the Shrine of Aurora and Cephalus, a chamber dedicated to John Flaxman’s eponymous sculptural group, painted to resemble the dawn sky and swathed in rose-coloured satin drapery. As Ian Jenkins puts it, [Duchess Street] functioned as a theatre in which the make-believe lives of himself, his family, and their social set were acted out. Hope was actor, impresario, scenery and costume designer, who, in his books on dress ancient and modern, showed his guests what to wear.56 Existing items of furniture, tableware and apparel were to be modified in such a way that they would echo antique composition while remaining practical and embedded in a thoroughly modern lifestyle. Hope’s intention was that the formal properties of ancient art and design should ennoble even the most prosaic of objects: The union of the different modifications of visible and intellectual beauty which were desirable, with the different attributes of utility and comfort which were essential; the association of all the elegancies of antique forms and ornaments, with all the requisites of modern customs and habits . . . in objects of common and daily use.57 119

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

One example from his catalogue of furnishings is a fire-screen in the shape of a Roman shield ‘adorned with Jove’s fulmen as wrought by the Cyclops’. Hope continues with a quote from the Aeneid, pinning down with studious accuracy the precise source of the epic iconography here applied in a wholly non-Roman domestic context. The anachronistic disjunction irritated a critic in the Edinburgh Reveiw, who dismissed Hope’s publication as an ‘exquisitely bombastic, pedantic and trashy’ catalogue of ‘palty and fantastical luxuries’ both impractical and ‘effeminate’.58 Hope, on the other hand, was determined that his utensils should not appear purely decorative, remarking, for instance, on the pleasant sensation of muslin next to the skin or the relative convenience of using a columnar ice-pail. His ideal household, as realized in his own Duchess Street townhouse, may have constructed a classicizing fantasia, but it was a fantasia with practical sensebased foundations. The same critic also ridicules what he regards as a ‘chaos of symbols and effigies’ (p.  484) comprehensible only to the most committed of antiquarians. His derision, however, usefully illustrates the discrepancy between the bare materials of a set and its effect on a visitor prepared to invest them with imagined significance. Somehow, he scoffs, we are to perceive the ineffable essence of dawn represented by ‘satin curtains with black velvet binding! – a marble table with a rail! – a black chimneypiece and gilt furniture!’ (p. 485). Far from a scene of primal daybreak, the resulting tableau is compared to the clumsy impersonations performed by Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals. From Hope’s own description of the room, however, it is evident that those who enter are supposed to feel themselves surrounded by billowing flame-coloured clouds from which the statue group of Aurora and her lover emerge, as Night recedes to the skirting boards and the morning sky opens above. It is not realism, but a set of suggestive impressions. The choice of whether to indulge this fancy rests with the individual visitor. Hope was also influenced by the architectural theory of Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, who outlined a method for manipulating properties of space such as mass, proportion, scale, variation, and light or shadow to create a desired mood. Depending on its intended purpose, a room might provoke in its occupants tranquillity or gaiety, industrious concentration, amorous passion or sublime terror.59 Mézières frequently refers to these manipulations of atmosphere as theatrical. Just as scenography can inspire affective responses such as excitement, dread or admiration, can ‘make us shiver’ or ‘make us feel the burning heat of the sun’, so domestic architecture should create a similar sequence of moods.60 This theatricality reaches its climax in Mézières’ fantastical bathroom: Why not represent it as a grotto, worthy of Amphitrite, sparkling with all the riches of the deep? Why not create a chamber from Neptune’s palace? . . . The resulting splendour of openings and perspectives would have the finest possible effect, inclining the soul towards a sensation of delight. The chariot of the Sovereign of the Deep might serve as the bath itself, harnessed to sea horses whose nostrils would spout jets of water and lace the rocks with rivulets of silver to delight the eye; one might be in the midst of the seas. The bath itself would be served by taps dispensing hot and cold water, as is the custom.61 120

Frankenstein’s Venus

‘Let illusion reign supreme!’ Mézières encourages his disciples, again suggesting that inspiration might be sought in stage design. Crucially, however, it should be emphasized that Mézières’ bathroom produces this illusion for its occupant, as opposed to an external spectator watching the occupant take a bath. These architectural stage-sets are interactive; they serve users, not viewers. In this way, although undoubtedly possessing multisensory appeal – Mézières also recommends appropriate perfumes and sounds for his themed rooms – the theatricality of such spaces, or their capacity to stimulate the imagination, is activated by the user-performer’s own haptic and kinaesthetic presence. Nobody needs to observe me having a bath in Neptune’s chariot in order for the set to fulfil its theatrical function; equally, this function is latent until I enter the scene and immerse myself in its affordances. In a sense, Hope was engaging in a form of what would now be termed cosplay, or ‘costumed play’, a committed and deeply self-conscious configuration of identity through crafting or purchasing clothing and accessories pertaining to an otherworld scenario, whether historical (Steampunk) or fictional (Middle-Earth). Aileen Ribeiro and E. Claire Cage have discussed the strongly gendered dimension of this neoclassical cosplay.62 Whereas Regency men transformed their environments, Regency women transformed themselves. This is nicely illustrated in an engraving by Hope’s collaborator Henry Moses (Figure 5).

Figure 5 ‘Le Beau Monde’, engraving by Henry Moses in Hope’s Designs of Modern Costume (1812). Photography © British Library. 121

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

The couple sit surrounded by furniture and effects in the style of Hope such as the tripods, moulding, klismos couch and table supported by caryatids. But whereas the woman’s headband and flowing gown with its palmette border could have come straight out of Hope’s handbook, her partner looks decidedly awkward and out-of-place in his breeches and cut-away coat. In part, this division was economic – it was men, in the main, who had the capital to splash out on sculpture collections and large architectural projects – and partly aesthetic, in that it integrated women along with their garments into the seamless scenography that constituted a neoclassical interior, while male bodies remained aloof, apart, encased in restrictive clothing that marked them as European, elite and of their time. In practice, however, the contrast is not quite that simple. Many objects were used, worn, handled, possibly purchased and sometimes manufactured by women, so casting female cosplayers in a purely passive role risks reinscribing a hierarchy predicated on sensory involvement, masculine gaze versus feminine touch. Neoclassical dress had been fashionable since the 1790s.63 Aileen Ribeiro has charted its adoption and development in France, beginning with the portraits painted by David and Vigée Le Brun showing their sitters in a simple chemise with loose hair under a bandeau, abandoning stiff silks and powdered wigs in favour of a ‘functional simplicity’ which s’appelle à la democrate.64 During the Terror, commitment to this classical style intensified. One commentator, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, describes the frantic parties held in the shadow of the guillotine, young women dancing like bacchantes in floating white gowns, red ribbons twisted round their necks in defiance of the blade: Beauties dressed à la Cléopatre, à la Diane, à la Psyche . . . I know not whether the first of these dancers has any great affection for the republican forms of the Grecian government, but they have modelled the form of their dress after that of Aspasia: bare arms, naked breasts, feet shod with sandals, hair turned into tresses around their heads by modish hairdressers, who study the antique busts.65 After the establishment of the Directory, as the chaos subsided, classical dress remained à la mode, the low-cut high-waisted sleeveless silhouette becoming ubiquitous in women’s apparel on both sides of the Channel in the early nineteenth century. Thomas Hope, then, was tapping into an existing trend and in the process re-emphasizing its properties as costume; that is, garments worn in order to activate particular associations and facilitate the embodiment of a role. In 1810, architect John Soane began adapting his London townhouse to accommodate his growing collection of antiquities, paintings and other treasures.66 Like Hope’s, his house-museum was designed to provide a setting conducive to an evocative encounter with remnants of the classical past. Unlike Hope, however, Soane was intensely conscious of dramatizing not the simulated revival of this past, but rather the fact of its fragmentary afterlife.67 Like Townley’s, one of his primary motives was educational, anticipating that students of architecture would find both instruction and inspiration in the museum’s intoxicating miscellany. Crammed into every crevice of what eventually became three buildings, Soane’s collection included approximately 200 fragments of classical 122

Frankenstein’s Venus

architecture, more than 100 other marbles in various degrees of restoration and 442 plaster casts.68 Most of Soane’s marbles came from the aristocratic sales of the early nineteenth century, such as Bessborough’s. Originally assembled at Soane’s manor in Ealing, the collection was relocated to central London as the house-museum took shape. One striking feature of Pitzhanger Manor was the ruin which Soane had constructed in the grounds in 1801, shortly after acquiring the property.69 This folly, called the ‘Roman Temple’, differs from other contemporary garden temples such as those at Stourhead, Stowe or Audley End because it took the more picturesque form of a structure already in ruins, a trope more commonly associated with the gothic. What Richard Lukacher refers to as his ‘preoccupation with anticipatory ruination’, or acute consciousness of posterity, also emerges in two images by collaborating artist Joseph Gandy which depict Soane’s architectural magnum opus, the Bank of England, as a romantic ruin.70 In 1798, Gandy’s watercolour ‘Bank of England Rotunda in Ruins’ showed Soane’s first major renovation project, the Brokers’ Exchange Rotunda, as an ancient Roman site being excavated in the manner of Hamilton’s recent excavations at Tivoli. Gandy’s later, larger work, ‘A bird’s-eye view of the Bank of England’ (1830), also applies the conceit of imagining the nation’s newly minted Bank in the same condition as the ancient edifices from which Soane had derived his neoclassical designs. Also around this time, Soane began curating his ‘Model Room’ around a cork model of the excavated site of Pompeii, acquired in 1826.71 Although falling a little outside our period, Gandy’s painting and the cork ruins contained in the Model Room exhibit the same forensic reconstruction of architectural decay anticipated by the Roman Temple at Pitzhanger.72 Analysing what she recognizes as the sublime theatricality of Soane’s house-museum, Helene Furján argues that Soane ‘attempted to distil the affective properties of architecture’, stimulating the visitor’s imagination through ‘architecturally contrived emotions, sensations, and pleasure’.73 Despite briefly mentioning ‘haptic spatiality’ as a component, however,74 Furján’s primary definition of theatricality is synonymous with spectacle. Visual elements such as light and shadow, colour and mirrors create a series of ‘scenes’ which viewer-visitors glimpse, or by which they themselves appear framed to others. The pictorial aspect of the ‘scene’ or backdrop certainly accords with contemporary theatrical practice, but visitors can alternatively be considered as performer-participants affected corporeally, imaginatively and emotionally by their surroundings. The role of the haptic senses, particularly kinaesthesia, should not be underestimated. Furján demonstrates that ‘Soane’s sublime aesthetic . . . is an internalized and microcosmic materialisation of [Edmund] Burke’s theories’.75 As shown above in the Introduction, Burke’s Sublime appeals powerfully to senses other than sight, and many of the elements identified as Burkean by Furján – confusion, profusion, extreme height/depth, repetition, abrupt transitions, compression, apparent infinitude – in fact have haptic properties. Another Burkean principle exploited by Soane was the intimation of morbidity and the proximity of death. In one respect, this could involve the literal death of the individual. Soane’s collection included numerous cinerary urns.76 Destined originally for the basement space designated the ‘Crypt’ or the ‘Catacombs’, they were subsequently dispersed so that (as Millenson comments) ‘the stilled, haunting atmosphere of the 123

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Roman Campagna – formerly limited to the crypt – pervaded the entire museum’.77 The Crypt, with its chill flagstones and tunnel-like archways, its funereal niches and almost solid shadows, retained the sense of subterranean Rome. Furján mentions the catacombs and the Domus Aurea (‘Baths of Titus’) as reference points, but many other Roman sites were also visited below ground, notably the Palatine ‘Baths of Livia’, the remains identified as Maecenas’ house on the Esquiline and the vaults of his supposed villa at Tivoli, the cryptoportico of Commodus, the Sibyl’s grotto at Cumae and of course Herculaneum, not yet brought to the surface. Soane’s museum provoked not only the gothic melancholy of reflecting on individual death, but also the heart-stopping confrontation with entire vanished civilizations. The Rome evoked by Soane’s house-museum draws in several respects on Piranesi.78 In terms of its collocation of artefacts, it resembles the ‘piles of miscellaneous objects, top-heavy arrangements, strewn fragments’ found in the Vedute. Soane’s willingness to embrace hybridity and heterogeneity is also a Piranesian approach, as in Diverse Maniere. His use of long shafts, chiaroscuro and deep shadows has been compared to some plates in the Carceri.79 Reproducing the Grand Tour in miniature,80 Soane sought to activate the sensations of picking through the ruin-field or gaping at collapsed colossal monuments, not via formal accuracy but via sensory translation. The education an aspiring architect received from Soane’s house-museum was partly technical – how precisely to imitate a rosette, an acanthus – but also aesthetic, generating the psychosomatic effect of recombinant forms. *

*

*

This chapter has so far been examining how ancient ruins and artefacts were reproduced as sets: that is, manufactured environments designed to simulate antiquity and stimulate a haptic response, feeding back in turn into how the ancient source cultures were perceived. As well as architecture, furnishings and dress, reproductions could also take the form of props, hand-held objects whose primary mode of interaction is tactile, generating repeated patterns of motion and behaviour. Props also possess a duality conferred by the user’s imagination. By standing in for the identical item in a fictional scenario (or an imagined historical instance of handling), props enable users to reconfigure themselves in response to the form of the object. When objects with a recognized historical antecedent are handled, they activate not only the user’s perception of herself in relation to antiquity – a mourner, a participant, an heir – but also shape an inescapable sense of antiquity’s own haptic conditions. John Aubrey, an antiquarian from a somewhat earlier period, writes that coins, being ‘the very antiquities themselves . . . memorials of men and matters of elder times . . . persuade a man, that he now seeth two thousand years ago’.81 In handling objects which do not only refer to the past as printed texts do, but also make a portion of it physically present, Aubrey perceives himself as analogous to an imagined individual who formerly occupied his own position vis-à-vis the coins. While their semantic value to an ancient owner would be both more (they could be spent as currency) and less (they were not yet collectible), their pragmatic value, in Jeannerod’s sense of the term, remains consistent across time. 124

Frankenstein’s Venus

Stressing ‘the sensuous aspects of collecting’, Susan Pearce points out that ‘many collectors like to fondle or stroke the objects they own’.82 This is corroborated by another early commentator, seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn, who observes how ‘Virtuosi’ enjoy ‘ranging, marshalling, and placing’ their coins, gems, and other specimens, moving them in and out of cases and drawers, rearranging and sorting them in what Evelyn calls ‘a sort of polite game to be played with their Treasures’.83 In an ethnographic study of collecting, Bjarne Rogan affirms that ‘collecting is a process where the ludic aspect is clearly present’, and collecting is also mentioned by Ackerman as an activity conducive to entering a ‘deep play’ state.84 Fiona Candlin discusses the multivalent pleasure which is derived from handling small objects.85 One pleasurable aspect is purely sensory, the apprehension of texture, density and potential for manipulation; another is the articulation of ownership, the proprietary prerogative of touch. Ancient objects possess the additional status of relics, guiding the handler’s hands into a conscious re-enactment of ancient contact. Typical objects circulated and collated into collections included intaglios and cameos, coins, ceramics and statuettes; Richard Payne Knight, for example, had a predilection for miniature bronzes. Antiquarian collecting practice had evolved from the earlier curiosity cabinet, in which distinctive objects provoked wonder at nature’s diversity, into a more specialized passion of which the goal was a complete set of representative specimens.86 Touch came to play a crucial role for the connoisseur, for whom the weight, balance, surface features and even the temperature of an object could vindicate or vitiate its authenticity (and hence desirability).87 Value could be discriminated through the application of tactile knowledge. Collecting tended to be a gendered activity.88 In portraits of the Society of Dilettanti, as Viccy Coltman demonstrates, ‘the material culture of the ancients in the form of collectable vases and gems is gendered as female and [they are] encoded as objects of masculine desire’.89 This resulted partly from socioeconomic constraints on women’s disposable income and the homosocial networks supporting antiquarianism in the form of acquisitions. At the opposite end of the haptic spectrum, however, we find the souvenir. In one respect, inauthenticity is an intrinsic property of souvenirs, because at source, they are mass-produced commodities specifically intended for the tourist market. They have no history. They have no original, but are on the contrary infinitely reproducible. Their primary referent, then, is the traveller’s experience, but in this respect they act to authenticate a recollected encounter. Souvenirs are relics, too, but when handled their presence stirs personal memories rather than historical connections. If a gallery of marbles, or even one marble, or even a bronze statuette was beyond your price range, various alternatives were available. Novelist Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson), whose travelogue Italy was published in 1821, remarks on the workshops producing a scaleddown, feminized version of classical sculpture: The Scarpellini are workers in marble and pietra dura, who imitate in little the most exquisite forms and most noted monuments of antiquity . . . Not a square inch of rosso antico or of oriental alabaster is rooted up in the gardens of the 125

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Caesars, by the parasol of an English dilettante, but is instantly carried to the Scarpellini, who return it to the fair virtuosa, moulded into the form of some noted object of the Vatican or the Capitol; and it may happen that the fragment of a pedestal on which a Titus has leaned, will figure as a presse-papier on an English dressing table, or be preserved in the model of the tomb of Scipio, or the sarcophagus of Cecilia Metella.90 The materials used by the ‘Scarpellini’ (i.e. scalpellini, or stonemasons) are authenticated ancient Roman. In a sly feminine parody of archaeological excavation, the stone they are made of is ‘rooted up’ not by a shovel but by the tip of a dainty parasol. The restoration performed on these fragments results in a total and miraculous transformation as the scalpellini rework them into miniature masterpieces. The virtuosa in this transaction acts both as archaeologist-supplier and as client-consumer. What she receives appeals to amateur erudition, reproducing a recognizable work of art from one of the major Roman galleries, a Dying Gaul or Belvedere Apollo to adorn her dressing-table with his chiselled torso and melting gaze, or indeed, if preferred, a Capitoline Venus not-quite-touching her own breast. In Morgan’s account, it is the source of the material that excites interest as well as the object’s artistic referent. The purple marble or alabaster is envisaged as transmitting and transmuting Roman touch, noble pillars where ‘a Titus has leaned’ now reduced to paperweights. Anonymous blocks of stone that once supported statues have been promoted to famous monuments, but at the same time these monuments have shrunk into handheld, functional objects. Women like Sydney Morgan may not have had the same degree of access to the antiquities market – which in any case, no longer operated in the same way after the French occupation – but a process such as she describes could gratify a comparable desire for sustained haptic contact with the past. Tactile interaction with objects crafted from a substance conceptualized as conveying Roman antiquity enabled grand scenes from history (Titus, to save the empire, parting forever from his beloved) to be absorbed into the routine activity of daily life such as the toilette, the composition of a billet-doux, or fond memories memorialized in the shape of Caecilia’s tomb. Accessories also featured among the reproductions acquired as souvenirs. According to one account, Thomas Jenkins ran a thriving sideline in forged intaglios.91 Virtually indistinguishable from their ancient counterparts, modern intaglio rings and cameo brooches enabled the wearer to imitate the tactile as well as the visible experience of Roman jewellery. Seals ‘establish a close relationship between object and body’. Even when not in use, they would be worn on the person, set in rings or carried on chains or in pouches. The gesture of sealing is also very important as an act of physical ratification, a way to ‘extend the body’s influence beyond its natural reach by means of material surrogates’.92 Other adaptations resembled Thomas Hope’s fire-screens and ice-pails in that they applied antique designs to modern objects. Anna Miller, for example, records in her journal: ‘I have had a comb made for my chignon incrusted with gold, to imitate an Etruscan border, copied from an antique vase.’93 The comb references a specific object, realized in a different medium. It appeals directly to Anna’s sense of touch not only 126

Frankenstein’s Venus

through the raised (‘incrusted’) pattern but also through the familiar way in which she handles it. Small personal items decorated with classical motifs were also mass-produced in ceramic by manufacturers such as Wedgwood. Distinctly contemporary, these included scent bottles, snuffboxes, fan guards, opera glasses and chatelaines. Jasper-ware cameos, miniatures of the same scenes that appeared on wall plaques, could be set into rings, lockets and bracelets; as medallions a few inches across, they served as buttons or shoe-buckles. As a cameo form in low relief, jasper-ware also has three-dimensional tactile appeal, not only representing mythological scenes but also making them available to touch. Wedgwood’s catalogue of 1779 recommends that ‘The Intaglios in artificial Basaltes [black ceramic] are most excellent Seals, being exact Impressions from the finest antique Gems’.94 The catalogue emphasizes two features of Wedgwood’s reproductions, namely authenticity and affordability. Motifs were derived from identifiable sources, and prices – starting at sixpence – were advertised as ‘much lower than those of any other Ornaments in Europe, that can with Propriety admit of Comparison’.95 As part of everyday actions (buckling a belt, checking your watch, sealing a letter), these accessories were handled regularly. Like Hope’s homewares, they were designed to integrate fabrications of the classical into patterns of movement characteristic of contemporary life. While part of their performative function as props involved their social capital as visual signals of taste and hence identity, for the owner and/or wearer they also provided a point of contact with the imagined antiquity manifest in their designs. One portable and relatively inexpensive Grand Tour souvenir was the painted or printed hand-held fan. On an example from Naples, produced in the late 1790s (Figure 6), one side depicts a spectacular image of Vesuvius erupting and on the other is the Temple of Isis in Pompeii with a pair of tourists being guided around the ruins. In a sense, the fan served the same function as a postcard – a cheap, mass-produced alternative to a fullscale commissioned painting – but instead of merely possessing an image to be perused, the owner of a souvenir fan had acquired an object to be regularly carried, handled and deployed in social interaction. Like any souvenir, it functioned as a memento of personal experience while at the same time assimilating that experience to the scene depicted and compressing it into the bounds of its synecdochic representation. The object was thereby enriched by the sensory memories it triggers, and the memories reinforced by the object that triggered them. The iconography of Grand Tour fans reflected trends in contemporary design. One Roman fan, also from the 1790s, shows a depopulated Forum in its central frame surrounded by narrow panels evoking Pompeian frescoes and/or their reproduction in neoclassical drawing rooms. Again, a reduction in scale converts architectural structures into hand-held trinkets. Even monumental architecture could be miniaturized. On another fan, the Colosseum has been rendered likewise diminutive, surrounded by ‘Etruscan’ vases, Greek key edging and fresco decoration. Hester Piozzi remarks that during her visit to Rome in 1784, images of the ‘Baths of Livia’ (that is, the Palatine ruins) were ‘sold upon fans’.96 The manufacture of fans was also integral to their significance for a history of touch. Fans were made from extremely fine kidskin vellum, stretched to a papery thinness. This 127

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Figure 6 Souvenir fan depicting Pompeii (c. 1790). © The Fan Museum, Greenwich (HA77). was painted or printed with the requisite design before being pleated over a pre-measured template made of card and mounted onto the ribs. Diderot’s Encyclopédie contains an illustration of a fan workshop around 1770, and while it seems that both men and women could be involved in painting fans – ‘Athenian’ Stuart worked as a fan painter for a time – the artisans in this particular workshop are all women. Fans were a mass-produced commodity and could be purchased in Italy as cheaply as one sequin, or about one-third the entry fee to an attraction such as the Capitoline Museum. As well as completed fans, tourists could also buy ‘fan papers’ or flat unmounted designs which could then be transported easily and assembled back at home. Once acquired, fans would certainly be used. They were indispensable to any formal occasion, and although the ‘language of the fan’ may not have been quite as codified in practice as the pamphlet of French manufacturer Pierre Duvelleroy suggests,97 their manipulation could certainly communicate a great deal. Degrees of flirtation, displeasure, sexual availability, rejection, warning or embarrassment could be indicated by gestures such as touching the cheek or lips, covering the face, tapping or twirling or slowly unfurling the fan, or snapping it shut. In the Spectator of 27 June 1711, Mr Addison writes: There is an infinite variety of motions to be made use of in the flutter of a fan. There is the angry flutter, the modest flutter, the timorous flutter, the confused flutter, the merry flutter, and the amorous flutter . . . if I only see the fan of a disciplined lady, I know very well if she laughs, frowns, or blushes.98 The fan was an active participant in gestural dialogue. Although, like Hope’s modern conveniences, it had no ancient equivalent, its usage infiltrated polite society with 128

Frankenstein’s Venus

classical motifs. Unlike pieces of scenery such as reproduction vases or medallions, fans did not remain in the background but rather were handled as a prosthetic extension of the communicative body. That they simultaneously flashed up images of Roman ruins brought recollections of these ruins into the (mine)field of social and sexual interaction. Before my mouth I hold Vesuvius, spitting lava, or the temple of a goddess who keeps her secrets. Despite the increase in traffic to Italy, international travel remained a highly restricted privilege. For those unable to experience ancient material culture in person, simulacra abounded. One of Thomas Hope’s primary sources for ancient costume was his own vase collection, which he purchased from William Hamilton, as well as the catalogue of Hamilton’s vases compiled by d’Hancarville in 1767. These provided inspiration for another enormously successful design and manufacturing venture: Wedgwood jasperware. To make jasper-ware, you decorate a coloured ground of clay, typically stained pale blue but alternatively ranging from pastel sage-green to a dignified indigo, with lowrelief figures and patterns in white. These intricate designs are reproduced using prefabricated plaster-of-Paris moulds, cast from a model carved in beeswax (these days, lasered in resin). You spread a strip of damp, malleable clay into the shallow impression in the plaster, scrape off the excess, leave it to dry for a minute or two, then peel it out of the mould with a small wooden paddle. Attached to its vessel or plaque using water dabbed on with a finger, the clay of the figure is fused once more with the clay of the ground, as they are, after all, the same substance. Before firing, two shades of subtle and dutiful grey, but after the heat of the kiln works its alchemy, jasper appears to separate into the luminescence of marble against a cloudless Mediterranean sky. Still handmade, still clay on clay, still white on blue, this technique has not changed in essence since it was devised by entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood in the 1770s. Although initially applied to flat surfaces, to plaques and cameos and portrait medallions, the jasper dip technique later appeared on three-dimensional objects both useful and decorative. Most famously, the Portland Vase, a Roman carved glass vessel from the Barberini collection purchased by William Hamilton in 1783, was reproduced in jasper as a limited edition made available to subscribers in 1789–90.99 ‘Etruscan vases’ modelled on those in d’Hancarville’s catalogue were one of Wedgwood’s most popular manufacturing lines, to the extent that there was ‘no getting to the door for coaches, nor into the rooms for the Ladies and Gent.n’ crowding the company’s London showroom.100 Although these were luxury objects, their ownership was not limited to the elite, as massproduction had converted them into affordable ornaments for middle-class homes.101 Sometimes displayed only as a component of the decor, they were also often used literally as vases, stylish containers for the fresh flowers or dried pot-pourri that scented Georgian rooms. To mark the opening of the factory at the Staffordshire site he named Etruria, Josiah Wedgwood personally threw six commemorative vessels known as the First Day’s Vases, all of which were made of ‘black basalt’ – a local clay blended with iron oxide to produce a matt black background – and painted with encaustic red slip in scenes copied from d’Hancarville’s illustrations. The result closely resembled Hellenistic red-figure pottery.102 129

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

At the same time, Wedgwood was experimenting with the chemical composition of jasper, also formed of white clay stained with metal oxides, and the firing temperatures which would yield a consistent colour without splitting or blistering. His model was the antique cameo, and its enlargement into wall-mounted plaques drew on classical reliefs, marking a departure from direct reproduction and entry into a recombinant approach in which disparate ancient sources contributed to a modern fusion design. Applying the low-relief device of the cameo to the curved flank of the vase brought into conjunction two entirely separate but independently authenticated elements of ancient material culture. Vases remained more or less ornamental, handled only during rearrangement, cleaning or when a wilted bouquet was replaced. From the mid-1780s, however, Wedgwood began manufacturing a range of jasper ‘useful ware’ such as teapots and tea caddies, snuffboxes and patch boxes and scent flasks, candlesticks and inkwells, in addition to small personal accessories such as buttons, brooches and buckles. Here, rather than being grafted onto another object whose form if not its function was derived from the ancient world, the cameo was amalgamated into the fabric of everyday utensils. Once again these objects were luxury or novelty items, but items nevertheless whose availability and tactility placed them as fragments of an imagined classical past within easy, tempting reach of contemporary consumers. Two objects in particular illustrate the eccentricity of these composite adaptations, at once perfectly serious and delightfully kitsch. One is a tobacco jar decorated with a ‘Temple to Flora’ (Figure  7) and the other is an inkstand in the shape of a ruined column.103

Figure 7 Wedgwood tobacco jar, ‘Temple of Flora’ (c. 1790). © Wedgwood Museum (26.11). 130

Frankenstein’s Venus

Both of them incorporate miniaturized elements of classical architecture, the former crafted to appear restored to its original elegance and the latter crafted to appear in a perpetual state of picturesque decay.104 They also both imply regular handling in the course of activities intrinsic to early modern polite society, smoking loose tobacco and writing with a pen and ink. These activities were themselves affected by the shape of the objects. The novelty inkwell brings a particular attitude to the act of writing, which becomes not just the inscription of words – scratch of the nib, dip and scrape and tap and scratch – but a repeated, transformational transfer of ink from the cavity of the ruined monument into one’s own handwriting. Taking a pinch of tobacco involves raising the lid of the jar by closing your fingers around the figure at its apex and reaching into the fragrant interior. The action is rendered (mock-)ceremonial, enabling smoke to be inhaled like incense from a faux-pagan temple. Both items serve as containers, creating a pleasurable discrepancy between functional inside and fanciful outside, once again bringing architectural features indoors as well as exhibiting the playful miniaturization also apparent in columed fireplaces. Pseudo-antique environments, then, could be enjoyed precisely in their capacity as simulacra. From Mézières’ bathroom to Directoire ballgowns, contemporary fabrications provided a mechanism of interacting haptically with material receptions. Coltman has called neoclassicism ‘a style of thought’, but insofar as thoughts are shaped by their physical context, it was not a disembodied phenomenon.105 On the contrary, if there was one way in which antiquity literally re-materialized in the late eighteenth century, it was via these creative reproductions, restorations, and replicas, understood not only as repositories of taste and virtù in themselves but also as apparatus around which the actions and behavioural patterns of the ‘classical’ world could be repeated. The way in which marble sculptures, for example, were reassembled, refashioned and mobilized made manifest ideas about classical art. In the process, tautologically, these ideas were ratified and reified. In the private sphere, antiquity became commodified, entering popular consumer culture for the first time in the form of (moderately) affordable imitations. The haptic contact transacted by neoclassicism made an otherwise remote and unapproachable world seem more like home.

131

132

CHAPTER 7 BELONGINGS IN MUSEUMS

Some objects, like the fan or the buttons, are personal effects that belong to an individual owner. Such belongings are property, handled as theatrical properties are handled, and as well as communicating an identity to others, they subtly re-orient their owner’s own sensorimotor sense of self. The objects that we handle daily, our belongings, shape us.1 Rarely disputed, the ownership of these intimate possessions is articulated by their proximity and familiarity, and (except in exceptional circumstances) their ephemerality; my comb, my spoon, my pen are not expected to outlast me. The presence of personal effects in museums, then, brokers a particularly poignant relationship between the visitor and the sometime owner, whose imagined touch remains imprinted on what has now become an artefact. Early visitors to Pompeii, for example, remark upon the sensations provoked by the abundant domestic remains such as cooking pots and brooches, items which afford personalized contact with the everyday actions registered in their form. Differently stimulated but no less intense, as we saw in Chapter 2, were the sensations associated with contemplating objects designated as works of art. Ownership of these objects, as discussed in Chapter  6, is rather more custodial, as their value subsists precisely in their transpersonal longevity. Having outlasted all previous owners, they are preserved in order to be handed on. Unlike personal effects, then, artworks inherently beg the question of whether they can be designated as ‘belongings’, and the thornier related question of where they rightfully belong. The automatic retort ‘in a museum’ needs to be unpacked: which museum? Where? What is a museum, anyway? Who – and what – is it for? These questions can be addressed with reference to the experiences of visitors to the earliest public museums (as opposed to private collections) and the haptic conditions that elicited their responses. The establishment of public museums – the Louvre in Paris, and in London the British Museum – was used to justify the deracination of antiquities from their local context, a development generating powerful controversies that persist today.2 Economic and political factors notwithstanding, the impulse towards acquisition – changing the legal status of where and to whom belongings belong – is predicated, ultimately, on aesthetic desire. To be confronted by a relic is to be cast into a state of longing, to be longing for that which will always evade the grasp because it cannot be reinstated. No matter how many antiquities are acquired, antiquity itself remains elusive, because reception is not ownership, but a (haptic) state of mind. *

*

*

It is common for museum visits to be conceived as a type of performance. Susan M. Pearce, in her study of museum semiotics, writes that ‘Each exhibition is a production, like a theatrical production’,3 although she does not pursue the implications of this 133

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

analogy. Similarly, Tony Bennett mentions the museum’s ‘performative environment’ and proposes that we ‘view the narrative machinery of the museum as providing a context for a performance that was simultaneously both bodily and mental’, but his definition of the key term ‘performance’ derives from the vocabulary of cultural theory in which it designates actions that articulate power dynamics or indicate conformity to codes of social behaviour.4 Both Bennett and Pearce come close to suggesting that this live, improvised, participatory performance involves not only the activation of synchronic relationships – between, for example, the visitor and the guard who watches her every move, or the visitor and the curator responsible for the disposition of exhibits, or even the visitor and other, more seasoned visitors – but also the activation of complex diachronic relationships between the visitor and the objects surrounding her. Theatricality does not pertain only to exhibits which, through their manipulation of factors such as duration and interactivity, have been deliberately designed to blur the definition of performance and art.5 If the visitor is recognized as embodied participant rather than spectator, a shift which requires us also to recognize the core experience of theatre as acting as opposed to watching, all visitor encounters have a theatrical dimension. Often carefully curated to guide the visitor’s movement,6 the set that is the museum gallery supplies the choreographic and cognitive apparatus for the development of historical conceptualizations. Its configuration becomes the sensory material for imagined – that is, kinaesthetically simulated – firstperson interactions with the objects displayed, making manifest the historical setting they represent in the form of implicit sensations. Museum visits involve deep play. Artefacts, in phenomenologist Marvin Carlson’s terms, are ‘haunted’,7 or shadowed by the way in which they were crafted and handled in a former life. Like sets and props, they have a dual identity for those who move among them and crave to enter the world they propose, to feel the fierce embrace of the helmet or the swelling flank of the urn. Although not the first collection of antiquities in Rome to be opened to the public, the Vatican’s Museo Pio-Clementino became the idealized model for curating and displaying classical art. Prior to its establishment in 1771, a collection of minor artefacts such as vases, coins and cameos were housed in the small rectangular chamber known as the Museo Profano, a conventional Enlightenment display space, with the objects arranged on shelves in free-standing wooden cabinets.8 The neighbouring Octagonal Courtyard (the Cortile) slumped in a state of uninviting disrepair.9 Rome’s main sculpture galleries could be found at the Capitoline Museum, opened to the public in 1734,10 and at the villa owned by Cardinal Albani, although this retained the exclusivity of a private collection.11 In 1771, Pope Clement XIV, assisted by Cardinal Braschi (later to be elected Pius VI) opened what was originally called the Museum Clementium. Appointing Giovanni Battista Visconti as head curator, they began simultaneously to expand the collection and commission a refurbishment of the display space. One important motivation for the upgrade was the increased interest in ancient sculpture, Apollo and Laocoön in particular, following Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst, published in 1764. It was anticipated that the setting of these acknowledged masterpieces ought to bring visitors to realize the sublimity articulated by Winckelmann.12 Louis Ruprecht, in fact, argues for Winckelmann’s 134

Belongings in Museums

direct involvement in conceptualizing the new style of presentation, contending that Winckelmann was responsible for ‘the dramatic and performative reconception of “profane” [i.e., pagan, pre-Christian] sculpture as “art” ’,13 and that this reconception prompted not only expansion of the collection itself but also a radical redesign of its setting to stimulate interactivity. Ruprecht proposes that ‘Winckelmann’s most influential “publication”, the one we all still “read” but scarcely ever attribute to him, is in fact the complex of Vatican Museums in Rome . . . We gaze at such art in ways that are choreographed to elicit precisely the orgiastic responses Winckelmann imagined and the quasi-religious epiphanies he desired.’14 Work began on the Cortile under the direction of architect Michaelangelo Simonetti. Simonetti removed the statues of river gods from the middle of the courtyard, replacing them with a porphyry basin,15 and introduced a portico to enclose the niches containing the Cortile’s artworks. The effect, as Jeffrey Collins shows, was threefold. The portico encouraged visitors to move at a slower, more meditative pace around the perimeter of the courtyard, pausing at each niche in turn, as they could no longer cross it radially due to the central water feature. It brings the visitor to perform a pseudo-devotional circuit of the cloister and, more playfully, reproduces the rhythm of strolling through an ancient peristyle. As Collins explains, Simonetti’s peristyle replaces the axial focus . . . with a series of shifting vignettes that isolate the Vatican’s chefs d’oeuvre within a series of microenvironments. Contemporary illustrators accentuated these melodramatic effects to suggest how hidden oculi suffused the statues with overhead light and made the white marbles glow in their dark recesses.16 Upon his election as Pope in 1775, Pius VI (formerly Cardinal Braschi) continued expanding the museum with an extensive remodeling of the galleries around the Octagonal Courtyard and a corresponding rearrangement of their contents. Simonetti, again the consultant architect, employed the same principles of re-enactment. As Collins points out, ‘These were no longer modern rooms stocked with antiquities; they were, rather, full-size evocations of the baths, temples, palaces, and nymphaea in which these treasures were originally housed.’17 Mosaic pavements, for example, instead of being hung on the wall in frames like pictures, were laid down on the floor. Simonetti’s design for the sequence of galleries was at least partially based on the layout of Robert Adam’s design for Newby Hall, which Coltman points out was itself ‘a simulacrum of ancient display spaces’.18 Rather than directly reproducing (for instance) the Pantheon, the PioClementino participated in contemporary conventions of architectural referencing, using the shape and ordering of rooms to manage the spatial parameters of visitors’ contact with antiquities and consequently manipulating their perceptions. Mounting the grand staircase, visitors entered via the cruciform Sala a Croce Greca which contained Egyptian statues and two porphyry sarcophagi.19 They proceeded through the Pantheonesque Sala Rotonda, containing statues of the Olympian gods, and the more intimate Hall of the Muses, ‘a re-creation of an open pavilion on Mount Parnassos’.20 Flanked by 135

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

anthropomorphic figures on one side and the Room of Animals on the other, visitors passed at last through a narrow arch into the flooding light of the Cortile. The progress was processional, albeit episodic rather than narrative, each room crafting a particular experience building up to the carefully situated finale. It appears to have been effective. The curatorial collaboration of Braschi, Simonetti and Visconti developed a deliberate atmosphere, a theatrical setting where sensory elements were manipulated in order to make viewing these statues a suitably sublime experience.21 As Hester Piozzi remarks in her journal of 1789, ‘It is the fashion for every body to go see Apollo by torchlight.’ Mariana Starke elaborates: When travellers obtain permission to see the Vatican Museum by torch-light, they usually have four wax torches . . . placed within a reflector, fastened to a long pole; and the light, thus arranged, is most judiciously thrown on all the finest statues, so as to display and magnify their beauties, while their imperfections are left in shadow: and Laocoön, thus viewed, appears fine beyond conception.22 Alternatively, for visitors to the Pio-Clementino in daylight, a different method was employed to render an encounter with Apollo as much of an epiphany as possible. Anna Miller reports, ‘When the folding doors were thrown back of the nich which contains the Statue of Apollo, I started back in surprise.’23 Already in use during Miller’s visit in the mid-1770s, this mode of exhibition and was picked up again after the statues’ repatriation. Charlotte Eaton describes the climax of her Vatican tour in 1817: We paused for a moment in the court, and, by the murmuring fountain which had charmed me so much, a door was suddenly thrown open, and I beheld, standing in solitary splendor, the Apollo! . . . The god of light, and poesy, and imagination, stands confessed to our dazzled senses.24 She is so overcome and satiated that she begs their guide to leave Laocoön for the following day. This is a perfect example of how visitor experience could be scripted, how these artworks were not simply present in the courtyard but worked into a short performance repeated daily (and nightly), a drama involving suspense, revelation, surprise and awe. Both authors present Apollo through a chain of sensory effects: the murmuring fountain, the dazzling light, the startled jump. The resulting transports are the deliberate result of a set-up designed to help replicate the aesthetic intensity articulated by Winckelmann, whose absorption in the statue is such that he adopts an ‘elevated stance’ in front of it, chest heaving as though possessed like the Pythian oracle with the breath of the god.25 Facing Laocoön, his sense of identification is more painful that pleasurable, but no less intense, as ‘the agony, which reveals itself in all the muscles and fibres of his body . . . one comes to feel oneself, with one’s whole being, solely from the painful contraction of the abdomen’.26 Winckelmann’s ecphrases functioned as the script for an encounter that the gallery’s custodians repeatedly staged, an immersive performance for visitors who were also themselves the participating actors. 136

Belongings in Museums

Eaton’s rapture upon beholding the Apollo, and the cocktail of blood-curdling horror and ‘deep-shuddering sympathy’ provoked by Laocoön, conform altogether to the established tourist discourse.27 She also recounts an otherwise unattested anecdote about a visitor – female – whose attraction to the Apollo proves fatal: I am not the first person to go mad about the Apollo. Another, and a far more unfortunate damsel, a native of France, it is related, 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, until she became, like the marble, pale, but not like the marble, cold.28 Obsessive devotion to a statue is another common trope in eighteenth-century travel writing, but it is usually comic, often with self-conscious reference to Lucian, and the statue in question is usually the Medici Venus. The aggressive (hetero)sexuality of the connoisseurial gaze has been analysed by Coltman.29 In reversing the paradigm, Eaton gives it a tragic ending. Suffering unrequited desire for the ideal male form of Apollo, a young woman undergoes a metamorphosis that doubly reverses Ovid’s Pygmalion. Instead of the statue transforming into a living lover, it is the unfortunate protagonist herself who changes into something resembling marble; instead of bringing a sculpted woman to life, love across the material divide here turns a living woman into a cold, pale, inanimate corpse. There is also something of Ovid’s Narcissus in the way that she gazes enraptured at the illusion of flesh, the illusion of an other incapable of reciprocity, until she herself wastes away into immobility and death. Narcissus has also been identified as a mythological paradigm informing the terms of Winckelmann’s fascination with the Belvedere Apollo. As Alex Potts puts it, ‘The spectator’s identifying with the irresistibly dominating figure confronting him eventually reaches the point at which his sense of self is effectively annihilated.’30 Winckelmann describes his absorption in terms of physical mirroring, possession and an imaginative displacement to classical Greece: 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 honoured with his presence.31 The objectification inherent in the connoisseurial leer which treats statues as women and women, interchangeably, as statues, is replaced by a crisis of subjectivity in which the viewer folds their own sense of self, and their own self-image, into a fantasy of dissolution or possession by the godlike figure opposite. To evoke Narcissus in this context is not a pathologization of same-sex desire, but rather a gesture towards the polymorphous queerness at play in the eroticization of a body which is not only male, but also thousands of years old, made of stone, displayed in public and untouchable. 137

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

A similar impulse is at work in one of Charles Dupaty’s Sentimental Letters on Italy (1785). Dupaty is already playing one rhetorical role, that of sentimental art critic. On top of that, he adopts the persona of a fictitious ancient Greek sculptor named Polidore, responsible in this imagined historical scene for crafting the Belvedere Apollo: At break of day Polidore flies to a marble block. There he lies concealed, said he; I see him (his genius perfectly shewed it to him) . . . Every stroke detaches, and places at his feet, part of the veil that hides Apollo from him. – The noblest and the most harmonious body, between virility and adolescence, stands confessed before him; his limbs are free from human wants and imperfections, and rise one from another . . . Polidore’s chissel (ciseau) trembles as it approaches the divine head, and hesitates to animate it; but emboldened at last, no doubt, by the god himself, he gently runs the chissel over the forehead, and forthwith it proclaims the faculty of reflection; he carefully delineates the eye-brows – Behold! a look starts from Apollo, the forerunner of the arrow! – He lightly touches the lips at last, and indignation breathes against the serpent. – Such is the Apollo of the Belvedere!32 The fantasy of the perfect body progressively and effortlessly exposed is much closer, in fact, to a visitor’s experience than that of the artisan. The hard stone becomes nothing more than a (bridal) veil which falls softly away at a touch to reveal the nudity beneath. The expression of an ideal masculine physique, poised between the youth of Antinous and the maturity of Hercules – or, as Dupaty puts it, his ‘virility’ – ‘stands confessed before him’; an unusual phrase, but one which also occurs in Eaton’s travelogue when the shutters, like a veil, are thrown back and ‘the god . . . stands confessed to our dazzled senses’.33 Once the exquisite body is fully revealed, Polidore takes his phallic ‘chissel’ in his hand and begins, trembling, to caress the emergent face of the god. Not only the playful double-entendre of the exploratory ‘chissel’, but also Polidore’s actions use the language of seduction. He gently runs it over the forehead, strokes in the eyebrows and finally leans in for a surrogate kiss, or perhaps for something stronger, as he ‘lightly touches the lips at last’. Pygmalion returns; or possibly Narcissus, discovering in the statue a ‘faculty of reflection’ rebounding back and forth between readings of Winckelmann, travellers’ retrospective accounts, and performative encounters with the figure itself. Not all visitors were content merely to imagine handling the exhibits. Indeed, when the objects displayed were classified as artefacts or curiosities rather than fine art, touching could be an integral part of the visitor’s interaction. Sophie von la Roche, for example, a German novelist who recorded her encounter with objects in the British Museum in 1786, writes poignantly about the feelings that arose from their co-presence: With what sensations one handles a Carthaginian helmet excavated near Capua, household utensils from Herculaneum, lachrymary vessels from the graves of Magna Graeca . . . There are mirrors too, belonging to Roman matrons . . . With one of these mirrors in my hand I looked amongst the urns . . . Nor could I restrain my desire to touch the ashes of an urn on which a female figure was being mourned. I 138

Belongings in Museums

felt it gently, with great feeling, between my fingers, but found much earth mixed with it . . . I pressed the grain of dust between my fingers tenderly, just as her best friend might once have grasped her hand.34 The items handled by Roche invoke a range of experiences, fanning out from the items’ basic factual (or factitious) biographical details. The sensations attendant upon handling a helmet known to be Carthaginian, provenance Capua, and therefore presumably a relic of the Second Punic War, depend on the artefact’s ability to recall a particular military event as reported in the historiographical tradition. This Roche contrasts with the feminine, the domestic and the quotidian, accessed via the utensils disinterred from Herculaneum. Both objects represent their respective spheres of ancient activity, setting famous battles alongside the muted daily round of housework, the one bearing tangible witness to the works of Livy and Silius Italicus and the other emerging from relative obscurity. In taking up the mirror, Roche enters into a different relationship with the inhabitants of ancient Rome, seeking to touch the dust that remains of the now-invisible eyes that once looked back from its reflective surface, rising out of the apparent depth that is nothing more (or less) than an illusory repetition of the world in which she stands. Roche’s mirror, moreover, corroded and dulled, returns no image, only a ripple of light stumbling over imperfections in the bronze as she turns it this way and that in imitation of the ‘Roman matron’ whose position in space, vis-à-vis the mirror, she presently holds. Retaining the mirror, as if unwilling to let go of such as powerful talisman, Roche examines what she calls ‘the urns’ (Aschentruge), or William Hamilton’s vases, the melancholy task of memorialization prompting her to attempt another act of personal connection. Passing through the mirror, she has altogether left behind the masculine injunction to commemorate antiquity via written history and proto-archaeology. She stirs the ashes, and some of the grains adhere to her fingers. Playing the role of intimate friend, she elides herself with the mourner depicted on the vessel just as the mirror permitted her elision with its former Roman owner. The communion thus established is deeply personal, a close female friendship located within the household, at the bedside, transacted through the ephemeral currency of whispers privately exchanged and hands that press and clasp. Roche continues: Gently I returned the particle I had taken to the rest of the dust, murmuring to myself, ‘Forgive Hamilton and me for breaking in on your peace.’ I had become quite attached to that ash (Ich hatte mich an diese Asche gehestet) and would have liked to bury it somewhere, so as to prevent it being shaken up and fingered again.35 Roche’s longing does not manifest in the desire to possess the ash, but rather the impulse to return it to the earth. Touch has given way to a private performance of renunciation. Her ‘attachment’, paradoxically, is so strong that she feels the right action for these human remains would be reburial, placing them beyond any further disturbance, out of reach. On the other hand, there can be very good reasons for denying visitors the privilege of touch. One visitor who seems to have caused havoc wherever she turned is Lady Anna 139

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Miller, whose self-inflicted terror in the catacombs we encountered in Chapter 3. Miller’s relationship with ancient sites and objects is, by her own admission, extremely tactile. In the Capitoline Museum, she finds irresistible a mosaic representing four doves around a golden bowl: ‘one, in particular, is pluming herself and the hollow she makes, by dividing her feathers with her bill, [and] so imposed on me, that I could not resist the impulse of touching it, to convince myself that the surface was really smooth.’36 The mosaic remains intact, but Miller is less fortunate in the museum at Portici, which displays among the Pompeian finds ‘a piece of purple stuff folded, which when touched, falls to powder, and a great quantity of sewing silk of the same rich dye’. The custodian warns her not to touch it, but Miller cannot resist, and ‘placing my finger on it suddenly, it took a sufficient impression to prove the effect to be as above mentioned’.37 Undeterred by this misadventure, Miller and her husband continue to Pompeii itself. Her wandering attention is piqued by a house that is closed off for work but appears to contain interesting frescoes. I saw a ladder placed against a breach in the wall without side; and, as it was not very high, would go up to look in . . . When I had gained the aperture, I put my head in, and leaned upon the broken wall, which giving way, in I tumbled: the room was not above half full of ashes: I fell upon this bed, and did not receive the least hurt . . . I inwardly congratulated myself on being the first to enter this room, which had been closed up for many centuries.38 Elsewhere, in her craving for souvenirs, Miller combines the role of visitor with amateur collector. Sometimes this is relatively benign, as when she snaps off twigs from the bay tree by Virgil’s tomb. Pompeii, however, furnishes a vertebra lifted from what she understands to be the skeleton of a slave. At Cumae, as they crawl through the Sibyl’s tunnel with their torch beginning to gutter ominously, Miller stuffs her pockets with furtive handfuls of dirt. Turning them out later, she discovers to her delight ‘an abundance of antique bits of mosaic, broken agate, &c; and upon examination, found one intaglio of jasper; it represents the sign Scorpion, holding a crescent between the fore-claws, and has a star placed near the tail; it is perfect’.39 Because Miller’s treasure-hunting is illicit, it appears in one respect to constitute a disgraceful breach of visitor conduct, escalating from damage to demolition to outright theft. On the other hand, if we are prepared to condone William Hamilton breaking into tombs at Nola and Thomas Jenkins dealing statues from Tivoli, Lady Miller’s satisfaction of the same desire with a scrap of bone and a jasper seal transgresses nothing but gendered propriety. *

*

*

Sometimes, then, a momentary touch is not enough, and a more prolonged or even permanent rearrangement of matter is sought. On an individual level, this manifests in Lady Miller’s handfuls of purloined mosaic chips and the more or less elaborate reproductions explored in the previous chapter. On the level of the institution, however, or even the state, it resulted in the transposition of artefacts and architecture on a 140

Belongings in Museums

correspondingly massive scale. The establishment of national museums across Europe in the eighteenth century and the ways in which they consciously referenced classical antiquity have been the subject of much existing scholarship.40 Rather than attempting to cover this ground again, this chapter focuses instead on two interrelated performance events, both concerned with the (re)location and display of ancient artworks. Following the French invasion of the Papal States in 1796, two treaties were drawn up which included clauses pertaining to the requisition of artworks. The Treaty of Bologna stipulated that the defeated Italians were to surrender, among other treasures, ‘one hundred paintings, busts, vases, or statues’, continuing with the further specification that ‘Among the objects to be included are the bronze bust of Janus Brutus [sic] and the marble bust of Marcus Brutus that are on the Capitol’.41 While the two busts were singled out due to their subjects’ ideological importance for Revolutionary France,42 the remaining artworks were to be selected by a specialist Commission appointed by the Directory in Paris. The treaties were drawn up by the commander of the French forces in Italy, Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte was also responsible for financing and coordinating the work of the Commissioners and overseeing the logistics of transporting hundreds of items, some of them extremely delicate and most of them priceless, from the Papal States to their new home in the Republic of France. Ultimately, far more than the hundred artworks initially demanded made their way to Paris. The first convoy contained eightyfour pieces of antique sculpture alone, along with the most precious paintings, manuscripts, rare books and scientific specimens which had been hand-picked by members of the Commission.43 The Directory’s policy of seizing choice artworks from occupied states had already been exercised in Belgium,44 but the wealth of cultural capital available in Italy was off the scale. When the Louvre Museum was opened in 1793, it was with the objective of making art available to the people.45 Its nucleus was formed by the former royal collections, now collectively owned by the Republic. Augmented by Dutch and Flemish masterpieces, the Louvre could now aspire to possessing everything that had made Italy the destination par excellence of artists, antiquarians and connoisseurs. Liberated from the exclusive ownership of Popes and princes, fine art could be recuperated as a public benefit, a source of enrichment for the people and legitimacy for the state.46 Following a mimetic reflex, the layout of the Louvre’s new sculpture gallery imitated that of the PioClementino. Partly responsible for this was head conservator Ennio Quirino Visconti, who had accompanied the Vatican collection to Paris.47 Just as the Pio-Clementino recreated for its visitors the haptic sensations of walking around a Roman villa, so the Louvre re-created again at one remove the haptic experience provided by the PioClementino. As in the Octagonal Courtyard, the most prized statues were placed in recessed niches, with the Belvedere Apollo occupying one end of the main gallery and Laocoön the other.48 Visconti’s emulation of the Roman arrangement sought to reproduce key elements of visitor experience. Before taking up residence in the Louvre, the sculptures had to be dispatched on their arduous journey from Italy. Bonaparte did not accompany them, but took care nevertheless to ensure that he would be personally associated with their acquisition.49 141

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Controlling the movement of Roman relics was not only a statement of political dominance and military superiority, but also of cultured taste and virtù. Moreover, it signified translatio imperii, the transfer of imperial authority, in material form. For Bonaparte, as for the Louvre and the Directory, the right to handle, displace and relocate these objects ratified the otherwise intangible assertion of French cultural pre-eminence. ‘Rome is no longer in Rome – it is in Paris!’ crowed the refrain of a popular song composed to celebrate the convoy’s arrival in July 1797.50 Like the looting of ancient artworks, Napoleon’s political appropriation of ‘Roman costume and Roman phrases’ was in many ways the logical (if not necessarily inevitable) development of a mode of reception already established in Revolutionary France.51 At the same time, following the coup that brought him to power in 1799 to be crowned emperor in 1804, it coalesced around his imperial persona, making new parallels available, even if not always desirable.52 The material realization of Napoleon’s Roman imitatio involved a transformation of Parisian urban space, both the construction of monuments – the Arc de Triomphe (commenced 1806), the Column of the Place Vendôme (also 1806) and the Arc du Carrousel (1809) – and the planned demolition of existing streets which, as Diana Rowell observes, would have ‘bisected the capital and created a monumental triumphal way’.53 Rome itself was to have undergone a radical facelift of equivalent proportions. Scoured of all postclassical structures, the archaeological quarter was to become a passagiata pubblica, the Jardin du Capitole, complemented by a grand boulevard cutting through from the Colosseum to the Quirinal.54 Although the Jardin remained a fantasy, the French archaeologists who took over from the Papal team in 1810 made a start on the process, clearing tons of earth and rubble from the Forum, Palatine and Colosseum in order to expose the foundations of the extant monuments. In pursuit of recovering the authentic settings of imperial Rome, Camille de Tournon and the hundreds of Italian labourers employed on the excavations were irrevocably altering the accumulated topography of the Forum as a site.55 Napoleon’s affinity with imperial Rome was also articulated through portrait sculpture. In 1802, the sculptor Canova reluctantly agreed to produce a statue of the man who had overseen the systematic plunder of Italian art five years earlier. It is uncertain whether the resulting artwork – a colossal heroic nude obsequiously entitled ‘Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker’ – was intentionally subversive,56 but as a result of its conspicuous lack of any costume (Roman or otherwise), the unimpressed First Consul refused point blank to allow its display.57 This frosty reception did not deter Canova in the meantime from taking on two projects with a similarly risqué theme, depicting Napoleon’s mother in the pose of the Capitoline Agrippina, and his sister as a reclining ‘Venus Victrix’ (also mostly nude).58 The potentially offensive associations of these figures were offset by the prestige of participating in a recognizably antique practice, compensating for the goddess’s promiscuity and the notoriety of Nero’s mother. The insults underneath the panegyric could not be called out without admitting that they might be unfortunately apposite. Although the triumphant general was absent in person from the 1798 Entrée, the parade nevertheless set out to recreate the atmosphere of a Roman Triumph, a parallel made all the 142

Belongings in Museums

sharper as it signified a present-day Roman defeat. The ancient Triumph had served a range of purposes, at once military, religious and political. Spoils captured in battle or looted or seized as tribute were paraded along with enemy captives through the streets of Rome for dedication at the Capitol, escorted by the victorious general and his troops. Triumphs were spectacular occasions, making Roman power manifest to the citizens and foreigners who lined the processional way cheering and sobbing, brandishing branches of olive and pretending to know all the names of the conquered barbarian kingdoms.59 Famous Triumphs such as that of Aemilius Paulus over Macedonia in 167 bce, Pompey over the Eastern kingdoms in 61 bce and Titus over Jerusalem in 71 ce were well-known to the officials responsible for planning the Entrée Triomphale from their representations in historiography, literature and art.60 Their essential purpose was to encapsulate conquest in a medium at once mimetic and material. As a participatory ritual, the Triumph defined the abstract concept of ‘victory’ through a process of mimetic enactment. The procession also assembled an assortment of the material assets conferred by that victory: weaponry, bullion, inlaid tables, candelabra, pearls. Conquered territory could be represented by placards (tituli), dioramas depicting features of the landscape or regional personifications.61 As Östenberg and others have shown, the Roman Triumph was a collective performance event.62 Collective involvement was also important to the Entrée Triomphale.63 Although the procession was preceded by some token cavalry and military marches were played, the majority of participants were civilians; this was about celebrating the liberation of treasures from Papist Italy, not the return of an army. Preceded by the four bronze horses taken from St Mark’s in Venice acting as a mock quadriga, the procession consisted of three divisions: Natural Sciences, Books and Manuscripts, and Fine Arts. As Patricia Mainardi notes, ‘the organization of the march showed the Enlightenment emphasis on the encyclopedic organization of knowledge.’64 It has been similarly argued that the array of plunder exhibited in a Roman Triumph – from exotic animals and plants, to peoples (gentes) and provinces, to precious metals and works of art – resembles Pliny’s encyclopedic Natural History, compressing the world into metonymic specimens which signify the possession of knowledge and therefore control.65 Having disembarked from barges at the Port de l’Hôpital, the convoy travelled along the left bank of the Seine to the Champs de Mars.66 Numerous groups took part. The Books and Manuscripts division, for instance, was accompanied by ‘a choir of musician singing patriotic hymns, members of societies of arts and sciences, deputations representing theatres, libraries, technical schools, publishers, and the professors of the Collège de France carrying a bust of Homer’.67 Escorted by art students and museum employees, the Fine Arts division followed. Among the captive sculptures were Laocoön and Apollo, the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Gaul, Cleopatra/Ariadne, the Discobolus.68 One justification for their acquisition was that this was another act of aemulatio. Just as Rome had appropriated these sculptures from Greece, it was thought, so France was now outdoing its imperial predecessor in parading them as the spoils of Rome. A banner borne alongside proclaimed, ‘Greece surrendered them, Rome lost them – their camp has changed twice and it will never change again.’69 The procession as depicted in a contemporary engraving by Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, and later on a Sèvres vase in 1810 143

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

shows the sculptures displayed on open carts.70 It is clear from contemporary accounts that they were in fact for the most part still crated up at this point and identified only by banners,71 but excitement at what the crates concealed appears to have overcome any disappointment at its concealment. Upon arrival at the Champs de Mars, the bronze bust of Junius Brutus, which had been carried at the end of the procession, was placed on a pedestal in front of the ‘Autel de la Patrie’ and the Commissioners formally presented their inventory to the Minister of the Interior.72 After the festival, the convoy was dispersed and the antiquities installed in the Louvre.73 Officially, then, the Entrée was a popular success. Objections had been raised, however, ever since the requisition of artworks was first proposed. The provocative series of letters published by art theorist Quatremère de Quincy in July 1796, just after plans for the Commission were announced, outline the moral and aesthetic reasons for his opposition. De Quincy’s aesthetic rationale provides an insight into contemporary attitudes regarding the interpretive value of context.74 De Quincy’s principal rhetorical trope is completeness. Removal of sculptures from Rome constitutes a ‘dismemberment’ (démembrement) and a mutilation. His terms are violent: it is a dérangement, a dépareillement, a défleurement (pp. 87, 89, 91),75 raping and ripping apart the site where these works belong. ‘The country itself makes up a part of the museum that is Rome’ (Le pays lui-même fait partie du muséum de Rome), asserts de Quincy. ‘What am I saying, it makes up a part? The country itself is the museum!’ (pp. 115–16). Rome is a colossus, a single body from which fragmentary limbs can be barbarously broken off, but still the whole mass, comme celle du grand Sphynx du Memphis, remains attached to the earth (p. 101). There is, moreover, no intellectual advantage gained by the nation that appropriates these ‘fragments of a defaced artwork’ (un ouvrage dépareillé, p.  135). The ‘course of instruction’ in history and art that one can undertake in Rome would be rendered incomplete and incoherent elsewhere. ‘The decomposition of the museum that is Rome will be the death of all knowledge that depends on the principle of unity,’ de Quincy protests. ‘These objects when gathered together elucidate and explain one another’ (p. 101). In order to learn what is beautiful, and how to create beauty for themselves, artists must be able to make direct comparisons. Placing the excellent alongside the inferior is instructive in a way that viewing chefs d’oeuvre in isolation can never be, since only direct comparison makes it possible to identify what distinguishes them, and what faults to avoid (pp. 110–12). As it is still important anyway for artists to travel to Rome in order to visit the places that inspired its iconic works, and to examine those monuments that cannot be removed, the statues should remain where they can be understood as part of a continuous fabric, not freak events. The historical conditions of their production also emerge from systematic study. If the objective of research into antiquity is to gain as complete an idea as possible, breaking the remnants down still further is perverse. It is an error to believe that knowledge (science) of the ancient world could be cultivated anywhere except in the sites themselves and in the presence of their artefacts (sur les lieux mêmes et en présence des objets, p. 106). It is from the ensemble rapport of component parts that a coherent système of theoretical analysis emerges.76 144

Belongings in Museums

Context, moreover, is not limited to comparison between specific works. De Quincy recognizes that cognitive stimulus also results from a situatedness in the ‘veritable museum that is Rome’. This immersive museum is indubitably made up of portable objects like statues and inscriptions, and architectural features like theatres and arches, but ‘it comprises no less the places, the sites, the peaks and the pits, the ancient roadways, the respective positions of ruined towns and their geographical connections, [and] the relationship of all the objects between them’, along with the survival of local practices providing ‘parallels and links that could not occur in any country but this’ (p. 102).77 There are certainly aspects of de Quincy’s denunciation to which one could take exception, such as the casual elitism of the assumption that all aspiring artists possess the leisure and the means to immerse themselves in Rome, and the equally problematic ossification of Rome into a fetishized vessel that exists purely to preserve its classical heritage.78 The underlying premise, however, is sound: artefacts are experienced as a reflex of their context, and a holistic experience in situ differs radically from offsite appreciation. This experience has an important kinaesthetic dimension, as it is through self-movement that the visitor absorbs the topographical relationships de Quincy identifies in the passage quoted above, along with haptic factors such as the feel of the air, the climate and seasons, and other formes de la nature (p. 116). It is this composite set which enables the visitor to develop a sensually informed impression of ancient Rome, shaped not only by a few deracinated fragments but by a physical traversal and contemplation of the ‘colossus’ in its entirety. De Quincy attacks French rapacity using the parallel of Verres, the Roman governor of Sicily notorious for his unscrupulous looting and greed (p. 132). The ubiquity of Verres as a prototype in anti-acquisition discourse of the period has been thoroughly examined by Margaret Miles.79 As represented by Cicero, Verres illustrates moreover the consequences of an unrestrained desire to touch. Whenever he glimpses a desirable item, manus abstinere, iudices, non poterat, he cannot keep his hands off it (2.4.48). Even in the shadow of his impending trial, he surrenders to the libidinous impulse to fondle his host’s silver tableware, argentum tractaret et consideraret. How could a man enslaved to such cravings, Cicero asks, stop his hands from wandering over the plentiful silver of Sicily (putabit a Siculorum argento cupiditatem aut manus abstinere potuisse?, 2.4.34)? Although employing a pair of dubious experts as his oculi, deferring to their professional evaluation of an item’s quality, Verres nevertheless uses his own hands to commit the theft itself: iste in furendo manibus suis, oculis illorum uteretur (2.4.33). When an antique statue of Ceres is looted from the inner sanctum of her temple at Catena, which men were forbidden to enter, Cicero fulminates, ‘Had you no compunction about laying your hands (adferre manus) on that which the laws of religion prohibited you even from seeing?’80 Cicero’s Verres is a rhetorical construction, and his grasping ‘hands’ may serve more as a convenient metonym for theft than an index of tactile involvement, but these references nevertheless stake out a sensory orthodoxy which Verres transgresses. Verres’ great flaw as a consumer of art, in Cicero’s formulation, is his inability to resist touching it. Aesthetic pleasure perverted into avarice, he must use his hands to caress and possess, making the transition from covetousness to ownership via an assertion of the right to touch. 145

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Cicero draws his antithesis between the tactile and the visual (what men were not even supposed to see, Verres mauled and manhandled; the governor’s oculi appraised the works, but his manus made off with them). Within the domain of haptic reception, a similar contrast could be made between the tactile and the kinaesthetic. Touching or grasping an object tends to be either a prerogative of ownership, a circumscribed and time-limited prerogative conferred by the object’s owner, or an illicit act conducted in spite of imposed restrictions. Townley puts a familiar arm around ‘his’ bust of Clytie; Verres reaches for the silverware; Anna Miller pokes accidental holes in fragile silk. In all such cases, the object in question is objectified. Touch of this kind signifies attainment, gratification, leaving a mark, exercising a right, declaring a status, moving or changing or possessing to some degree the accretion of matter where the wandering hands have rested. The alternative to touching is what we might term ‘handling’. This is a subset of kinaesthetic contact. Instead of concentrating on the value of the object, or the value invested in one’s power to touch it, this type of interaction involves creating a rapport, redefining oneself, absorbing, transforming, being moved or changed or possessed by the material elements operating in the encounter. We have seen several such encounters: Emma pouring a motionless libation, Sophie von la Roche stirring grains of ash, Charlotte Eaton climbing onto ‘Cicero’s Rostrum’. Importantly, touch does not have to be involved in kinaesthetic transactions, but nor is it excluded. It is for this reason that non-tactile encounters such as Herder’s and Winckelmann’s also belong to the same sensory category. Like Cicero, historian Ken Arnold articulates the distinction as an opposition between touch and vision: Contrary to the unthinking assumption that allowing visitors to touch exhibits might somehow elevate their experience . . . it is the essential tease that guarantees the excitement of their imagination. Being able to get hold of things in museums would be a banal letdown . . . It is the tightly-sprung energy of objects close enough to touch, but crucially just-out-of-reach, that fuels the poignancy of the tales told about and through museum objects.81 The spectrum, however, is in fact more fine-grained. Just as vision can be (but is not always) subsumed as an auxiliary to activating die fühlende Einbildungskraft, so touching can become handling upon adoption of the appropriate attitude. The common sensory factor is awareness of self-movement. When Roche presses the grains of ash between her pensive fingertips, her gesture does not diminish the poignancy of the tale it tells; it is certainly no ‘banal letdown’. At the same time, however, Charles Dupaty does not have to touch Apollo for the erotic fantasy of unveiling the god to take hold. The sculptures paraded into Paris do not even have to be removed from their crates to send the crowd wild. In the 2011 study by Huang et  al., it was shown that appreciative responses to artworks were stimulated less by qualities in the works themselves than by their identification as ‘masterpieces’.82 In the same way, the devoted art students who hung the banners, ran alongside the procession and danced all night in the courtyard of the Louvre would have acted and felt the same had the crates been empty. The sensory and affective 146

Belongings in Museums

intensity of participating in the Entrée was predicated not on viewing nor on touching works of art, but on a consciously choreographed kinaesthetic experience. *

*

*

The French occupation of Rome was formalized in February 1798 with the declaration that the Roman state was now a Republic.83 On 22 September, the start of the new Republican year was celebrated with civic festivities that included two free theatrical performances, one of which was Voltaire’s tragedy La Mort de César. This production incorporated a notable piece of scenery. Giuseppe Sala, an acerbic commentator on the French occupation, gives the most reliable contemporary account: The theatres of Torre Argentina and the ‘Tordinona’, now called the ‘Apollo’, were opened free of charge. In the latter was played on the stage a tragedy called The Death of Julius Caesar. To make the production more realistic and more interesting, there appeared on the stage the famous colossal statue of Pompey, the same one which stood in the ancient Senate and before which Caesar fell dead. Its owner is the ex-Prince Spada, from whose palazzo it was transported to the theatre, and whence it will return, assuming the French are not themselves tempted by it. I have heard that it was once sold for the sum of 14,000 scudi. There was also brought in the wolf with Romulus and Remus, previously extant on the Capitol. In this way, the Festival was concluded.84 Sala provides no information about the actors, but they are likely to have been the resident company of the Teatro Apollo in a specially commissioned production.85 It is not clear why the Capitoline wolf formed part of César’s set, but it may have been a way of tacitly indicating the setting of the play while making an ideological statement, and may also have had a role in the play’s final scene (discussed below). Later accounts add further colourful touches. John Hobhouse, for example, in his Notes to Byron’s Childe Harold, transfers it to a more dramatic venue: The French who acted the Brutus of Voltaire in the Coliseum, resolved that their Caesar should fall at the base of that Pompey, which was supposed to have been sprinkled with the blood of the original dictator. The nine foot hero was therefore removed to the Arena of the amphitheatre, and to facilitate its transport suffered the temporary amputation of its right arm. The republican tragedians had to plead that the arm was a restoration: but their accusers do not believe that the integrity of the statue would have protected it.86 The title of the play as recorded by Hobhouse is a classic case of mistaken identity. Voltaire was indeed also the author of a much more famous tragedy entitled Brutus,87 but its protagonist is the Roman Republican paterfamilias Lucius Junius Brutus whose decision to execute his sons for the good of the state made him a paradigm of inflexible virtue. Marcus Brutus, César’s assassin, is troubled by his inability to play the tyrannicidal 147

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

role of his illustrious ancestor. The questions of who (or what) is ‘Brutus’, and how one properly becomes ‘Brutus’, preoccupy Voltaire’s young hero throughout.88 The play’s title is likewise given as Brutus by Eustace, whose Classical Tour of Italy (1813) also seems to be the source of Hobhouse’s two elaborations, the amphitheatrical venue and the amputation of the statue’s arm. According to Eustace, the French ‘erected in the centre of the Coliseum a temporary theatre’, although Sala’s first-hand account indicates that this was not the case. A number of other authorities, including Winckelmann, Lalande and Eaton, register doubts regarding the statue’s authenticity.89 Even if it does represent Pompey, there is no way to determine whether this was in fact the same statue that witnessed Caesar’s assassination. Nevertheless, with her characteristically complicit wink, Eaton concedes that ‘the conviction is irresistible; and in spite of all the antiquaries, I will believe it to be the Statue of Pompey – that very individual statue, at the foot of which “great Caesar fell” ’. Eaton quotes Shakespeare (J.C. 3.2.183–4), and we saw in Chapter 3 how her perception of this sculpture when visited in the Palazzo Spada was shaped by its imagined role in the historical Tragedy of Julius Caesar. This artefact thus becomes the focal point of various performances, both realized and counterfactual, taking place in diverse locations around Rome. It stands in for the artwork described by Plutarch as erected in the portico of Pompey’s theatre and relocated by Shakespeare to the Senate-house ‘before the Capitol’ (J.C. 3.1).90 The action of Voltaire’s play takes place nominally on the Capitol, but is represented by the stage of the Teatro Apollo in Sala’s account, and by the hugely evocative but unfortunately unsubstantiated hulk of the Colosseum in the scenario contrived by Eustace and Hobhouse. The statue itself is located, meanwhile, in a gallery of the Palazzo Spada, where visitors like Eaton can choose to indulge its fictional identity in the narrative of Caesar’s assassination, and visitors after Eustace can cast it in a pyrotechnic extravaganza called Brutus for which it was cruelly mutilated by the French and exhibited in the Colosseum. A mythology of performance has accumulated around the artwork. This was most vigorously reinforced by its documented participation in the theatrical production of Voltaire’s Death of Caesar, which marked the start of a new republican era, and the material fulfilment of the object’s imagined role as witness to tyrannicide. Voltaire composed Mort de César in the early 1730s as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which he had seen in London and considered thrilling but technically flawed.91 When first performed professionally in 1743 it was not a success, and remained in obscurity until well after the playwright’s death. In accordance with the French preference for unity of theatrical time and place, Voltaire condenses Shakespeare’s sprawling action into a few increasingly tense hours on the Capitol, a spiral of sequential encounters culminating in the dictator’s death.92 The scene is dominated by Pompey’s statue, which is enabled by the continuity in location to remain present throughout. Each exchange of dialogue, in fact, has this additional silent participant, who is sometimes addressed, and sometimes invoked, but even when only lurking in the background, the effigy of Caesar’s former rival brings a non-speaking persona onto the stage whose dramatic power cannot be ignored. Indeed, as the Spada sculpture is almost double lifesize, its effect in the 1798 production would have been correspondingly magnified. 148

Belongings in Museums

Aside from César’s highly concentrated action, Voltaire’s other significant innovation is to give credence to rumour and make his Brutus César’s biological son. Marcus Brutus’ dilemma thus becomes the mirror image of Lucius Junius’: in order to save the Republic, he must commit parricide. The secret of Brutus’ paternity is progressively revealed over the course of the play. Confided by Caesar to Antony in the opening scene, it is disclosed to Brutus himself in Act 2, shared with the rest of the conspirators and finally announced by Antony to the crowd as in the same breath he reveals Caesar’s bleeding corpse. Brutus suffers from a superfluity of father-figures, including the looming Pompey. As Cassius reminds him, he is ‘nourished by Scipio, Pompey’s protégé, adopted by Cato’, as well as now being (re)claimed by César.93 The statue behind them stands not only for Pompey himself but also for the principle of a hereditary duty to the state. It is a strictly patrilineal inheritance. Women are omitted altogether from Voltaire’s Rome; upon publication, Mort de César was recommended as particularly suitable for school productions as it contains no female characters.94 The father-son dynamic is its sole emotional axis.95 The plot develops, then, through a succession of disclosures and ironies. Brutus makes increasingly desperate attempts to persuade César to step down without betraying his fellow conspirators. Father and son play out the ideological conflict between passionate resistance to autocracy at all costs and weary Caesarian pragmatism. There is no place for old-fashioned Republican heroics in ‘our corrupted times, drenched in civil wars’, César tells Brutus bluntly (3.4.193). His leadership is all that stands between Rome and another bloodbath. Brutus concedes the point with the anguished recognition that Je ne me connais plus – I no longer know who I am – but it is too late to avert the assassination he has set in motion. In Antoine’s report of César’s (offstage) death, Brutus nevertheless wields one of the blades as César exclaims O! mon fils (3.7.391). As written by Voltaire, the play ends with Antoine swaying the crowd to avenge the père de l’Etat (Il demande vengeance, 3.7.393) and the prospect of a state dissolved once more into factional violence. Voltaire’s final word is venger. At the time of its composition, one objection to Mort de César was that it had the potential to incite sedition.96 César might be more noble than his Shakespearean counterpart, but the character as written was still a prince flawed by arrogance and his susceptibility to flattery, and the republican arguments voiced by the conspirators carry a certain weight. It was not until the pre-revolutionary 1780s that the play regained favour, re-staged at the Comédie Française every year between 1783 and 1788, and performed more than seventy times between 1789 and 1796, most intensively during the trial of Louis XVI in December 1792.97 Along with Voltaire’s Brutus, it became a classic of the Revolutionary repertoire. Ironically, however, it was now judged to be insufficiently republican. César was too sympathetic, Brutus too easily softened, the final scene too equivocal. To bring it into line with contemporary values, extensive revisions – including a whole new ending in which the reactionary Antoine is arrested as the people celebrate their liberty – were made by the Minister for Justice, Louis-Jérôme Gohier. As this version made the play more conducive to propaganda, it is likely to have been Gohier’s revised text that was performed in Rome. The production formed part of a festival designed to persuade a resistant local 149

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

population to embrace the ethical framework of French Republicanism. Although its popularity had diminished in Paris once the frenzy of the Terror receded, César represented an ideal choice of ideological vehicle, delivering back to a Roman audience an episode from their own history, replete with the virtues of secular citizenship. The decision to present Mort de César – and not the propaganda favourite Brutus – may in fact have been motivated by the local availability of the crucial statue. Gohier’s text concludes with a brief coda in which Brutus and Cassius kneel before a statue of Liberté and dedicate their lives to the Roman state. Vive la Liberté! shout the obliging crowd of stage Romans, presenting themselves as a reflection of how their spectating compatriots ought to behave. Vive la Republique! It is possible that the set included three separate statues, but as Sala specifically mentions the Capitoline wolf alongside Pompey, another possibility is that this iconic artwork was pressed into service as recipient of the conspirators’ vows. If this was the case, the resulting tableau juxtaposes the infant twins with the pair of comrades soon to be embroiled in a relapse of civil war, creating a visual parallel that cannot altogether be ignored. In statue form, Pompey fulfils several functions in Voltaire’s play. The statue is not inert or decorative, but involved by other characters in the actions they perform. Although deceased, or perhaps especially in the form of this colossal posthumous simulacrum, Pompey exists materially in the dramatic present. Silent and motionless, his stone persona nevertheless prompts interaction. As pointed out previously in relation to Emma Hamilton, there is nothing unmoving about stillness.98 Pompey in Mort de César is afforded the status of a character, albeit a character played not by a human actor but by an anthropomorphic sculpture, and in this instance a sculpture already invested with the same identity outside the theatre. Bert States has analysed the way in which items onstage possessing what he calls ‘abnormal durability’ disrupt the illusion of fictional space.99 The Spada Pompey creates a similar rift in dramatic space-time, reminding all participants that when their flimsy re-enactment is over, its stony testimony will endure. Whereas Shakespeare’s Brutus receives admonitory letters addressed to him at home, Voltaire stages their discovery at the feet of the statue. Brutus, mid-soliloquy, is already reproaching himself for not living up to the great men of the Republican past. Rome’s honour is at stake, and he is doing nothing to defend her. Pacing and fuming, he is suddenly stopped in his tracks: Que vois-je, grand Pompée, au pied de ta statue? (2.2.35). The letter may have been written by Cassius,100 but as Brutus reads its exhortations aloud, it is as if his exemplary predecessors are addressing him via the imposing figure of the last man to oppose César’s rise to power. ‘Tu n’es pas Brutus,’ he reads, and his determination is affirmed: Je le suis, he insists, or rather, je veux l’être (‘I am, I vow to be him’, 2.2.43). Voltaire uses a motif derived from the Roman playwright Seneca, and ultimately from Stoic ideas about the formation of the self, according to which an individual must conform to a set pattern of behaviour in order to fulfil their given identity.101 In this scene, comparison between the young man struggling with his conscience and the superhuman exemplar whose deeds have been immortalized in stone is made physically manifest. For Cassius, Pompey represents the courage of those who are prepared to die in resisting the establishment of a dictatorship. Proposing to imitate Cato and fall on his 150

Belongings in Museums

sword rather than accept Caesarian rule, Cassius turns to face the statue.102 Brutus intervenes: their duty is to avenge César’s victims, not to follow them. As the conspiracy unfolds, Pompey’s statue acquires two further overtones of meaning. It becomes the symbol of what Brutus now defines not only as an act of liberation and resistance, but also one of vengeance: Swear with me, swear on this sword – by the blood of Cato and that of Pompey, by the sacred shades of the true Romans who ended their lives on the battlefields of Africa – Swear by the gods, avengers of our fatherland that Caesar will end his life beneath our blows. 2.4.191–6103 Pompey stands for every death, and everyone who has suffered as a result of César’s megalomania. ‘True Romans’, citizens for whom the state is a collective body and rule by one man intolerable, fought alongside Pompey at Pharsalus and died with Cato in Africa. Assassinating César will make their sacrifice worthwhile, restoring equilibrium to the Senate and honour to the abused Roman people. The figure of Pompey becomes a focal point for Brutus’ rhetoric. Facing the statue and moving towards it (il s’avance vers la statue de Pompée), according to the stage direction, he continues: We swear by you, hero whose image inspires us with the courage to perform our present duty. We promise you, Pompey, at your sacred knees that we will give it all, for Rome. 2.4.207–10104 Brutus is explicit: it is the unspoken exhortation of this memorial which has given him the impetus to act. The statue is treated as Pompey’s funerary monument, recalling scenes such as the kommos from Aeschylus’ Choephori in which Agamemnon’s children invoke the spirit of their murdered father to fortify them for revenge against their mother. Brutus, meanwhile, caught between two father-figures, seizes on Pompey’s defeat as a justification compelling him to seek redress. César holds his old enemy in far less esteem. In the scene immediately following this ritualistic veneration of Pompey’s effigy and all it appears to stand for, he and Brutus confront one another in a dialogue overshadowed throughout by this ominous third party. Brutus accuses César of enslaving the craven Senate with funeste bonté (deadly clemency, fatal generosity), in an attempt to flatter the universe into submission. ‘Ah,’ César responds, You ought to condemn Pompey for that. You and yours were all deceived by his feigned virtue. 151

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

This puffed-up citizen, the downfall of Rome, could not bear even to have Caesar for an equal. Do you think such an arrogant spirit would have allowed Roman liberty to live for long? 2.5.235–40105 Carried away by their fervour, the conspirators have made Pompey a repository for their own ideals, idolizing his colossal likeness as a source of motivation and moral assurance. For César, the statue of his sometime ally, then rival, and finally defeated enemy shows only the fundamental interchangeability of the two former Triumvirs. Had Pompey been in César’s place, the outcome for Rome would have been the same. This recognition cuts the man behind the statue down to size. Yet Pompey seems to enjoy the final triumph, when César’s corpse lies at his feet and the Roman people, according to Gohier’s ending, celebrate the restoration of the Republic. The statue’s authenticity may be dubious in historical terms, but then again so is the recuperation of Pompey (or indeed Brutus) as the figurehead for a popular revolt. The casting of this statue in the 1798 production, and the scenes that were acted around it as a result, triggered powerful associations which remained live even after it was returned to the Palazzo Spada. In Voltaire’s drama, Pompey’s statue personifies a dream of liberty with greater influence than the man whom César recalls as a flawed individual like himself. In the same way, the artefact is both magnified and overshadowed by the imagined part it plays – or is received as having played – in Caesar’s death. Most of the antiquities paraded in the Entrée Triomphale were repatriated to Italy following Napoleon’s defeat in 1816. The Duke of Wellington’s smooth justification accuses the French of being motivated solely by ‘national vanity’ in their wish to retain artworks that ‘artists, connoisseurs, and all those who have written upon it agree . . . ought to be removed to their ancient seat’. Wellington makes it clear enough, however, that aesthetic considerations are secondary to his main objective of humiliating the French: The same feelings [i.e. ‘national vanity’] which induce the people of France to wish to retain the pictures and statues of other nations would naturally induce other nations to wish, now that success is on their side, that the property should be returned to their rightful owners, and the Allied Sovereigns must feel a desire to gratify them.106 The hypocrisy in Wellington’s virtue-signalling should be recognized. As Patricia Mainardi observes, the Parthenon Marbles – subject of intense controversy – were purchased by the British Museum ‘only after it was clear that England would not benefit from the dispersal of the French art loot’.107 Wellington’s ethics of repatriation only applied to artefacts appropriated by someone else. For Quatremère de Quincy, there would be no distinction. Artefacts make sense in (sensory) context, amid ‘the places, the sites, the peaks and the pits, the ancient roadways . . . and the relationship of all the objects between them’ (LM , p. 102). I have argued that 152

Belongings in Museums

this relationship is experienced less as a visual than as a kinaesthetic phenomenon. Site museums, of which the Pio-Clementino is the original paradigm, provide an immediacy and an immersiveness unavailable elsewhere. Visitor experience is performative. Like the actors in Mort de César pledging themselves to Pompey’s simulacrum, like student artists weeping deliriously over crates, like Sophie through the looking glass, commitment is all. Nothing further in this respect is gained by acquisition, and there is much to lose.

Chronology 1792 September

Republic of France established

1793 January

Execution of Louis XVI and start of the ‘Terror’

1795 November

Establishment of the Directory

1796 May

Invasion and defeat of the Papal States

1796 June

Treaty of Bologna signed

1796 July

De Quincy’s Lettres à Miranda published

1797 February

Treaty of Tolentino signed

1797 April

First convoy leaves Rome

1797 September

Commission formally completes its Italian requisitions

1798 February

Occupation of Rome; establishment of the ‘Roman Republic’

1798 July

Entrée Triomphale des objets de sciences et d’arts recueilles en Italie

1798 September

Performance of Mort de César

1799 November

Coup of ‘18 Brumaire’: Napoleon named First Consul

153

154

PART THREE APPRECIATIONS

Perusing the travels of others provided an access route for those who were unable or disinclined to visit the sites first-hand, enabling their impact to be apprehended in vicarious sensory detail. Yet as Robert Wood astutely observed in his exploration of Homeric landscapes, he found it impossible to convey to his sedentary readers the very premise of his expedition, namely the palpable verisimilitude which Homer acquired on the coastal plains of Asia Minor.1 Alternatively, armchair travellers might approach the mediated vestiges of the classical past fashioned into the substance of poetry or the setting of novels. Imagined geographies played a crucial role in shaping European understandings of a rapidly globalizing world,2 and made an equally profound contribution to the allure of an epoch distant in time but concentrated in specific geophysical locations, locations that were growing ever more accessible. Like Wedgwood homewares or John Soane’s cork models, fictionalized antiquity could appear either in idyllic reconstructions, the rebuilt temple being equivalent in this respect to the historical novel, or in picturesque presentday ruins. This conversion of history into topography, both manmade and natural, and the saturation of such topography with historical significance, added another essential dimension to the progressive materialization of ancient cultures. Chapter  8 considers two novelizations of Rome, one using it as a contemporary setting and the other historical. Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) became immensely popular, not only as a work of romantic fiction but also as a guidebook. The relationship between the passionate improvisatrice and her British lover develops as they tour the ruins of Rome and the Bay of Naples. Less well-known but equally wellinformed, Cornelia Knight’s 1791 novel Marcus Flaminius is an account of first-century Rome from the perspective of a young veteran officer negotiating the corruption of Tiberius’ court. Resident for many years in Italy, Knight also authored a non-fiction guidebook, A Description of Latium (1805), and although published after Marcus Flaminius, the intertexts between these works show that Knight, like de Staël, was concerned with grounding her romantic fiction in topographical fact. Greece also supplied an evocative setting for prose fiction. Chapter 9 examines four novels, two contemporary and two historical: Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion (1797–9), Lady Morgan’s Ida of Athens (1809), The Adventures of Sappho (originally Le Avventure di Saffo by Alessandro Verri, 1782) and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (1788). The setting of each is examined in kinaesthetic terms, not simply as a picturesque or symbolic backdrop but rather in those instances where it becomes interactive, when characters relate kinetically to their material surroundings. Where kinetic action is represented, such as Ida’s dancing or Sappho’s pantomimic conflict on the clifftop, it may be read as a means of engaging the feeling imagination and imagining the landscapes of ‘Greece’ less as static prospects than as embodied sets.

155

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Finally, the (post-)Romantic Rome of Mary Shelley’s dystopian novel The Last Man (1826) acts as something of an epilogue. Heavily and precisely based upon her own experience of Rome and the personal losses which the city came to signify,3 The Last Man makes ironic use of the tropes of mobility and solitude which had become characteristic of the Romantic attitude towards ruins, especially as manifest in Byron’s mock-epic Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Mary Shelley’s Lionel also assumes theatrical postures, performing for a posthumous audience, for reader-spectators either dead or unborn. The nostalgic hollowness of his fictional gestures can be read as representing their temporal displacement, as this performative way of relating to ancient sites, now a cliché, was rapidly being superseded in practice by professional expertise on the one hand and mass tourism on the other.

156

CHAPTER 8 ROMAN NOVELS

The imagined geography of Italy, in particular the sites and landscapes perceived as conveying impressions of the classical past or information about its inhabitants, provided an evocative set and setting for prose as well as poetry. Both of the novels discussed here, not unlike other contemporary prose literature,1 are generic hybrids, part fiction and part guidebook. The characters move through ancient sites – whether ruined or restored – that are recognizably, even ostentatiously identical to those which the authors themselves record visiting, and which readers may recall or anticipate (or, like Anna Jameson, Mary Shelley and John Chetwode Eustace, may in fact approach for the first time with their novelized analogues in mind).2 In both cases, there is a pedagogical aspect to the narrative. In Corinne, the inexperienced visitor is taught how to activate his haptic imagination in order to perceive the antiquity of structures designated as ancient; in Marcus Flaminius, the Roman protagonist is taken on a tour of the Bay of Naples, and himself conducts visitors around his city, while the author keeps up a running commentary in her copious footnotes, schooling her readers in modern archaeology while immersing them in historical fiction. In the disposition of bodies, in the cognitive effects of bodily movement through sites, sets and settings, and in their conversion of haptic sense-data into an imagined historicity, these texts take up and reformulate receptive practices similar to those we have already encountered. Although not historiographical, they seek to make past events present, but in the process interrogate the perceptual and representational strategies that deliver a sense of historical immediacy, and the paradox of historical immanence experienced as palpable in material remains. *

*

*

In Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807), a great deal is made of the transfigurative power of the imagination (l’imagination et le sentiment, 4.1, 91) when it is brought to bear on Roman ruins.3 Imagination plays a substantial role in crafting the city through which free-spirited diva Corinne guides her English lover, Oswald Nelvil, her commentary making the city’s treasures increasingly available both to him and to de Staël’s reader as their relationship unfolds and Roman architecture becomes a vehicle for seduction. They follow an itinerary not unfamiliar from contemporary guidebooks, and indeed de Staël interpolates long passages where the narrative voice switches to an impersonal mode, addressing the reader as tourist, and the tense shifts from past to present: ‘You can see on the right and on the left two churches built on the ruins of the temples of Jupiter Feretrius and Jupiter Capitolinus [. . .] There are still three columns (On y trouve encore trois colonnes) [. . .] On the other side of the square you can see the ruins of some monuments [. . .] Not far from there is Constantine’s arch’ (4.4, 109–13). 157

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Although these guidebook-style passages have been criticized as digressions inappropriate to the genre,4 they are in fact integral to the fabric of the novel and its strategy of involving the reader as participant, not merely as observer. As Corinne and Oswald proceed through the Forum from Capitol to Colosseum, their progress is obscured as de Staël takes over, tugging the reader along from monument to monument. Her directions indicate our assumed orientation: on the right, opposite, not far, further down, as we move systematically past temples and columns all carefully labelled until we enter the Colosseum and the fictional narrative resurfaces, temporarily blotting out our own guided musings. We cease to occupy the perspective of ourselves qua present-day tourists struggling to piece together or retrace our own pathways through the rubble of Rome, and sit back once again to let our nerves be stirred instead by sentiment as the romantic plot resumes. Their conventional itinerary articulates the progress of a deepening, unspoken intimacy between Corinne and the young man whose aesthetic education she has taken up. Before their first meeting, Oswald, enveloped in his habitual melancholia, has barely ventured out into the city at all. He has been greatly influenced by his travelling companion, Count d’Erfeuil. Taking a superficial turn through every town on their route, guidebook in hand, d’Erfeuil declares superciliously that none of it is a patch on his native France (1.5, 46–7). Corinne, however, is determined to awaken Oswald’s affection both for herself and for the ancient, many-splendoured city he has so far disdained. She offers her services as his cicerone, proposing to introduce him to ‘these ancient ruins whose history we come to perceive (apprennent) via imagination and emotion’ (4.1, 91). Initially a means of attracting his attention, Corinne’s programme of study through feeling becomes a means of delaying her lover’s inevitable departure. As nobody can leave Rome without visiting the Vatican sculpture galleries, she keeps this star attraction in reserve, the Belvedere Apollo acting as icon and index of her success in cultivating Oswald’s infatuation. Compared to Scheherazade deferring her death with tale after marvellous tale, Corinne throws monument after monument into the path of her lover until, along with de Staël’s tourist-reader, he learns to feel them as reservoirs of affective historicity. Vous me révélez les pensées et les émotions que les object extérieurs peuvent faire naître, Oswald tells her, and adds the supreme compliment: Vous avez réveillé mon imagination (5.3, 141). The orientalism underlying Corinne’s identification with Scheherazade is not accidental, and recurs elsewhere in de Staël’s portrayal of Italy.5 Corinne is attributed the opinion that the Italian way of life consists of une paresse orientale and that Italian women are indolentes comme les Odalisques du sérail (6.3, 164), performing a double orientalization. The stereotype that makes Corinne’s comparison possible, taking the luxurious East as a byword for idleness and sensuality, serves also to brand Italian culture as exotic and intractably carnal, assimilating it to existing tropes of otherness. It pushes Italy east and south into a torrid, fantastical zone in which the allure of the landscape itself is gendered feminine, its antiquity fetishized and its mysteries supposedly plumbed by the senses and not by the intellect, a seraglio of the arts. Introducing Scheherazade 158

Roman Novels

further personifies Italy’s feminine abstraction, concentrating it into the erotic figure of the ‘odalisque’. De Staël’s reduction of cultures and regions to symbols and tropes – not least the symbol of ‘Corinne’ herself, ‘the image of our beautiful Italy’ (2.2, 57) – creates a space where this desideratum takes amorphous shape in ‘a dream-filled sleep under a beautiful sky’ (6.3, 164). As well as being identified with Virgil’s Sibyl, the prophetess who guides the hero through the Underworld, Corinne also plays the role of Dido, the Eastern lover abandoned for the sake of pietas, duty, family and state.6 At her final performance, Corinne turns away from Oswald ‘like Dido when she met Aeneas in another world, impervious to human passions’ (20.5, 581), that is, implacable in the face of her sometime lover’s remorse. Borrowing the hyperbolic diction of tragedy, she attributes her doomed attachment to the blessure mortelle, the mortal wound of ‘Destiny’ (17.2, 476). Like Dido, she has surrendered her precious independence to a man whose commitment to patriarchal duty forbids him a reciprocal surrender to his own inclinations. She has seduced him, delayed and diverted him, enraptured him in the sensual mesh of tales that comprise her city, her domain. But this city is not Carthage; it is Rome. Dido’s foreignness, her embodiment of the luxurious East and the indolent South, has been displaced into de Staël’s female incarnation of Italy. If Oswald is Corinne’s Aeneas, this implies a translatio imperii that leaves Rome itself emasculated. Corinne may ride in Triumphal procession to be crowned for her poetry on the Capitol, but political and military victory resides elsewhere.7 Doris Kadish has read this as utopian, Corinne’s triumph of liberty and integrity supplanting that of Napoleonic tyranny,8 but it is still an equation that leaves Italy vulnerable to occupation, whether this involves the systematic plunder of antiquities or a more benign cultural imperialism that fetishizes the remnants of Italy’s distant ‘classical’ past. The paradisal balm of the Italian climate has been a literary topos since Virgil’s claim in Georgics 2.150 that Italy enjoys a double harvest thanks to its ideal situation. De Staël describes thermal awareness in negative terms as occasioning distraction and discomfort: When you look at a beautiful landscape in the North (on contemple un beau site), you are sensitive to the climate, and this always mars a little the pleasure you might feel. Those little sensations of cold and damp (sensations de froid et d’humidité), which more or less distract your attention from what you see, are like a false note in a concert, but when you come near to Naples, you experience such perfect wellbeing (vous éprouvez un bien-être si parfait) . . . that nothing spoils the pleasant feelings (les sensations agréables) it brings you. 11.1, 287 The afflicted body closes ranks. Its own miseries insist on their priority, haptic awareness shrinking to a vexed needle-point of irritation.9 In this instance, the example proposed is the contemplation of any beautiful place (un beau site), but in the context of Italy the majority of outdoor sites explored by Corinne and her companion have been classical 159

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

monuments or ruins, meaning that this sentiment applies not only to landscapes generally but to the sites of antiquity in particular. Temperature is an integral part of de Staël’s British/Italian, North/South binary. Corinne in England feels the enveloping ‘deadly cold’ of the place (le froid mortel dont j’étais entourée, 14.1 368) in two senses, the social as well as the physical. Just as the English weather is humide et froid, causing her depression whenever she ventures outdoors, so the climate is no better within at her stepmother’s interminable teatimes, where tentative conversational forays receive la réponse la plus froid (14.1, 368). The hostility of her surroundings compares unfavourably with idealized bienfaisance and douceur of her homeland. Whereas Italy stimulates imaginative activity, Corinne finds that tous ces moteurs de l’âme (14.1, 365) freeze up under the sad and frozen (triste et glacé) sky.10 Like Goethe’s Dichter, wandering the sterile tracks of a mind weighed down beneath the gloomy clouds, northern Europe stifles her. De Staël’s debt here to Ovid’s Tristia has also been remarked;11 poetic inspiration, like the imaginative appreciation of one’s environment, flourishes when the physical faculties are receptive. Corinne uses words with a haptic valence such as étroit, mécanique and étouffait  – cramped, mechanical, smothered  – to convey the oppressiveness of her English sojourn. Emotional dampening and relentless frigidity affect posture, contracting and hunching her shoulders, her abdomen knotted from holding herself in a state of perpetual tension, the muscular stiffness compounded by habit internalized, hence ever more inescapable. Endurance saps energy. This vocabulary of haptic restriction suggests how the exile’s experience is imprinted psychosomatically on her body, and why it is not therefore conducive to the kind of creativity practised by Corinne. The climate of Italy, in contrast, provides the sensory crucible in which her poetic imagination, her Sibylline insights, are able to take form. Ici les sensations se confondent avec les idées, Corinee declaims in her laudes Italiae on the Capitol. L’âme comme l’air occupe les confins de la terre et du ciel (2.3, 64).12 This sense of expansion, this relaxation of the borders of the perceptible self to the point where they seem to dissolve altogether seems to be associated, perhaps not surprisingly, with warmth. The soul (l’âme) may in certain respects be identified with the proprioceptive sense of self. In Herder’s Plastik (3.1, p64), for example, it is die Seele which reaches out to grasp the beauty of three-dimensional objects. When cold, l’âme remains clamped down and protectively enclosed, but as the ambient temperature rises, it unfurls. The skin no longer feels like wet clay but gauzy, a permeable membrane. De Staël observes a similar phenomenon in the passage on Naples quoted above. When thermal impediments to pleasure are alleviated, the resulting bien-être or absence of homeostatic disturbance enables the visitor to become absorbed in her surroundings, turning her finite somatic attention away from proprioceptive distress-signals to admit in their place the novel affordances of her surroundings. Self-consciousness, inimical to the roving imagination, diminishes. L’imagination, as de Staël presents it in Corinne, does not function in a disembodied vacuum. On the contrary, it is inextricable from sensory stimulus, including the haptic factor of temperature, withering when exposed to frost and flourishing in the sun.13 Corinne’s gifts as improvisatrice, then, are embedded in ambient conditions and the somatosensory bien-être that mediates her creative responses. The topics of her 160

Roman Novels

improvisations, prior to her decline – ‘The glory and happiness of Italy’ and ‘the memories aroused by those places [around Naples]’ – show how abundantly local historical fabulae and their material traces have nourished her artistic imagination. Imagination is a crucial concept in Corinne. Contrasted (perhaps erroneously) with knowledge acquired through reason and study, it inspires the poet, activates the magnetism of Italy’s ancient remains, instils historical understanding, and redeems the introverted traveller from melancholia as he turns his attention outward to discover his surroundings, which had been inert and superficial before but now are vibrant with significance and depth. As Oswald becomes aware of the ‘thoughts and emotions which external objects can arouse’, his cultivation of this responsiveness attests to the reciprocity of the dual revival transacted by the cognitive ability referred to in de Staël’s novel as l’imagination. Imagination restores affectivity simultaneously to the weathered sites of Rome and to the visitor’s own dulled senses. At the same time as concentrated exposure to Rome’s ruins puts Oswald back in touch with his dormant faculties of perception, the application of this enhanced perceptiveness reactivates the city’s latent glamour, recovering its fourth dimension. Corinne proposes introducing Oswald to Rome via les ruines antiques qui nous apprennent l’histoire par l’imagination et ses sentiments (4.1, 91). According to this formulation, the edifices themselves provide instruction, but not in the way they instruct the architect measuring the dimensions of column capitals, nor the archaeologist seeking to establish a stratigraphic floor-plan. Oswald is simply to attend the relevant sites, spend time there and reflect. In relation to the Forum, de Staël compares this reflective attendance to pilgrimage, commenting that ‘it is enough to see the places where great deeds took place to feel an indefinable emotion (pour éprouver une émotion indéfinissable). It is to this disposition of the soul (cette disposition de l’âme) that the religious power of pilgrimages must be attributed.’14 All famous sites for this reason exercent beaucoup de pouvoir sur l’imagination (4.4, 112). The correspondences between pilgrimage and modern secular tourism have been widely recognized, in particular the impulse to touch the relic or shrine (the artwork, the monument) and to bring back a tangible icon (a souvenir) of the encounter.15 Although no visible traces of Rome’s heroic Republican era remained in the Forum,16 it is enough for de Staël’s visitors to occupy the same strip of ground in order to experience the stir of emotions – awe, humility, devastation, a hint of Schadenfreude – evoked by the associations of such a place when the visitor threads her personal timeline into the vast warp of its history. For de Staël herself, as Lévèque and others have shown, the Rome of the Roman Republic exerts this quasi-religious fascination far more than the empire emulated by her political and intellectual adversary Napoleon.17 Although invisible to the naked eye, the once-performed grandes actions of Scipio, Cicero, Cato, the Gracchi and Brutus are what move republican heroine Corinne.18 But the ensuing emotional upheaval does not last, as its ultimate effect is to reconcile the visitor to the petty (and not so petty) tyrannies of current regimes by reminding her of their transience in the long term. One learns to be calm in Rome, writes de Staël the political exile, biting her tongue. It’s shameful, getting worked up over odious trivia in the presence of so many bygone centuries during which imperial pretensions met with inevitable catastrophe (l’on a comme une sorte de 161

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

honte de s’agiter, en présence de tant de siècles, qui tous ont renversé l’ouvrage de leurs prédécesseurs). This multifaceted ‘presence’ is predicated not on the imaginative supplementation of an absence, as in the Forum, but on the material coexistence of many successive periods, including the one represented by oneself, as ‘you cannot take a step in Rome without bringing together the present and the past and the different pasts between them’ (on ne peut faire un pas dans Rome sans rapprocher le présent du passé, et  les différents passés entre eux) (4.5, 121).19 Not everybody finds old stones enthralling. Oswald’s travelling companion d’Erfeuil, whose idea of cultural appreciation is to saunter round the highlights ticking them off in his guidebook, does not see any point in making further effort. ‘It is just a prejudice to admire those thorn-covered ruins (débris),’ he drawls. ‘There is not a monument intact in Europe today which is not worth more than those stumps of columns, than those basreliefs blackened by time that can be appreciated only with a lot of scholarly knowledge (qu’on ne peut admirer qu’à force d’érudition). A pleasure that has to be gained by so much study does not seem to me very great in itself (pas bien vif en lui-même)’ (6.1, 146). D’Erfeuil’s complaint, not altogether unjustified, is that in the absence of accompanying explanations it is hard to see any appeal in half-buried ‘debris’ and illegible inscriptions. Without interpretation, the ruins are mute. Sensory pleasure, for d’Erfeuil, must be readily accessible and not require any preparation, and he therefore surmises that because the ruins lack sufficient vitality (vif) to be impressive without explanatory apparatus, any pretensions to admire them must be an affectation. The need to be informed about their historical significance, in d’Erfeuil’s opinion, detracts from their aesthetic impact. Although d’Erfeuil is correct in two respects – that appreciation rewards effort, and that admiration can be anticipated, hence cultivated in advance – his reasoning rests on the flawed assumption, reinforced elsewhere in Corinne, that the intuitive knowledge furnished by l’imagination operates in opposition to the factual knowledge furnished by érudition. Passing the Mausoleum of Augustus at the end of their first day spent walking the city, Oswald remarks that ‘This kind of study is much more interesting (plus animé) than what is acquired in books. It is as if you bring back to life what you discover, and the past reappears from beneath the dust that buried it’ (4.5, 122). Similarly, as Oswald enjoys the prospect of the Forum from the Capitol, de Staël adds the authorial observation that ‘intellectual memories are acquired by study. Memories of the imagination stem from a more immediate, more profound impression (plus immédiate et plus intime), which gives life to our thoughts and makes us, as it were, witnesses of what we have learned’ (4.4, 111). Imagination as a strategy for comprehending the elusive mystère of Italy is also explicitly contrasted with the ésprit de jugement that the English education system instils in its alumni (1.5, 47). ‘Scholars who are concerned only to gather a collection of names which they call history are undoubtedly devoid of any imagination,’ scoffs de Staël (11.4, 302). So far, so Romantic;20 but this dichotomy is not as secure as it appears. For all that Corinne promotes the importance of direct aesthetic experience in absorbing Rome’s history (and historicity), she is evidently well-informed prior to Oswald’s educational excursions. The Museo Pio-Clementino offers a new way to 162

Roman Novels

understand Homer and Sophocles; Pompeii unlocks Plato; the area round Lake Avernus is only a thin crust stretched imperfectly over unseen caverns resonant with myth. Depth can only be perceived if the visitor is aware that it exists. The impression plus immédiate et plus intime afforded by presence on the spot can only involve us as ‘witnesses to what we have learned’ – témoins de ce que nous avons appris – if we have previously laid the groundwork by acquiring the text-based souvenirs de l’ésprit, the ‘intellectual memories’ that provide the scaffolding for the personal memory palace coalescing around them, or the skeleton giving recognizable form to phenomenological flesh. Corinne is aware of the importance of factual background in priming the imagination to respond. This principle is illustrated in the novel by an example from the visual arts, but is equally applicable to ancient sites. Among the paintings in Corinne’s gallery is one of a man in antique dress sitting by a statue in an attitude of dejection while two corpses are carried away (8.4, 232–3). Corinne teases Oswald gently: ‘No doubt when I told you it was [Junius] Brutus, your whole soul was attracted to this picture (toute votre âme s’est attachée) . . . but you might have seen it without realising its subject’ – in which case, she implies, he would have passed on obliviously. This, for de Staël, is the paradox of the fine arts (and historical locations): the jouissances they afford should surely be faciles, apparent even to the casual visitor; but how would you know sans explication that the subject of the painting was Junius Brutus condemning his sons to death? Sites such as Lake Avernus or Caecilia Metella’s tomb, no matter how atmospheric, will not move visitors unaware of the narratives they represent. It is for this reason that Corinne refers to her tour of Rome as consisting of ‘researches both scholarly and poetical, which appeal to the imagination as well as to the mind’ (4.5, 122, emphasis added). If, like d’Erfeuil, you expect the debris to do all the work, you will be disappointed; this is not a form of passive entertainment. Rather, as de Staël has Corinne recognize, exercising the imagination takes effort and practice, in addition to the infrastructure of study. Imagination is what enables the visitor to ‘delve into the past’ (pénétrer dans le passé), not merely to skim the surfaces presented to his gaze, and to approach literature in a similar way so as to saisir un fait par un mot; that is, to translate a nominal word (mot) into a verb, an action performed (fait) that can be apprehended, grasped (saisir) not just in terms of its factual designation but also in terms of its substance, its consequences, its associated sensations. Shaping, grasping, and holding this slippery phantasm in place long enough to subject it to contemplative reflection comes not without practice and skill: c’est un effort continuel de l’imagination (11.4, 302).21 For the visitor wishing to experience ancient sites as something more than debris, then, three attitudinal factors should be realized. The somatosensory system should not be distracted by niggling discomforts, but able to direct its full attention to the site’s kinaesthetic affordances. Second, the visitor should bring with them some preconceptions concerning the stories attached to the site (or receive them in situ, if one is lucky enough to be guided around by such a Scheherazade). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the visitor should be prepared for the site to affect them, inducing a form of self-hypnosis, or what neurohistorian Daniel Smail would term a psychotropic mechanism.22 D’Erfeuil is wrong to assume this involves neither rigour nor intellect, but he is right in a way to 163

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

denounce it as artificial. Exercising the imagination on ruins is a form of performance,23 and just because a successful performance is built on foundations of psychosomatic preparation does not make the experience inauthentic. Some examples from Corinne’s tour, such as Roman baths, Pompeian houses and the Borghese Gardens, illustrate what can be grasped through imaginative engagement. On the basis of the surviving vaults of the public baths built under the emperors Diocletian and Caracalla, de Staël surmises that sunlight could not have entered Roman bathhouses (4.5, 120).24 This she interprets as deliberate protection against the glaring rays of the high summer, which she can now adduce from personal experience as a sensory referent for the poetic phrase les dards d’Apollon. She proposes, on account of such protective precautions, that the climate in antiquity was even hotter than the present day. Moreover, with the sun shut out, illumination in the baths must have been supplied artificially by means of torches. As well as evoking the phosphorescent dance of flames on water, de Staël brings this conjecture into conjunction with her factual knowledge that sculptures such as the Laocoön group were unearthed in the Baths of Titus, thereby formulating a multisensory reconstruction of bathing in an imperial Roman complex. She and her protagonists are further inspired by making a torchlit visit to the sculptor Canova’s workshop, which demonstrates first-hand how marble figures seem to move, how their contours recede and re-emerge from the flickering shadows. Shaded by a dripping, mossy cavern and immersed in luminescent water, surrounded by mobilized sculpture, de Staël’s pampered Romans could enjoy toutes les pompes du luxe et les jouissances de l’imagination as they refreshed their bodies in la fraîcheur de l’eau, a pleasure particularly acute when taken as relief from the sun’s bombardment (4.5, 120).25 In mapping these various elements onto the waterless ruins, then, de Staël arrives at a sensorialization of antiquity projected onto – or into – the imagining body. Similar conclusions about first-century life can be drawn from Pompeian architecture. In contrast to the public monuments on offer in Rome, Pompeii presents an opportunity to connect with la vie privée des anciens (11.4, 300).26 As well as marvelling at the details preserved by the eruption, details which give the poignant impression that the inhabitants will return at any moment to resume their interrupted lives, de Staël also relates to Pompeian houses as sources of information about how these lives were conducted. She notes their cramped interiors, the absence of windows, in contrast to the elegant peristyle courtyards with their enclosed gardens and water features. ‘This type of dwelling,’ she surmises, ‘indicates clearly that the ancients nearly always lived in the open air, and that this was where they received their friends’ (11.4, 301–2). The accuracy of de Staël’s inference is less important than the manner in which she arrived at it. Based on firsthand sensory experience of surviving architecture, informed by a logic of spatial relations, she allows herself to imagine its use.27 Moreover, this sensory data enriches in turn her reading of classical texts: ‘You understand Plato’s dialogues better (on comprend mieux) when you see these porticoes, under which the peoples of the ancient world strolled up and down (se promenaient) for half the day’ (11.4, 302). It is left to her reader to infer how an embodied knowledge of colonnades, the alternating cool dip and hot swell of light to the rhythm of walking, might reconfigure Platonic philosophy. 164

Roman Novels

The narratives that are attached to a site do not require historical validity to inspire a response. The Borghese gardens, for example, although they are the grounds of a Baroque villa re-landscaped in the 1790s rather than an authentic ancient site,28 serve to make the classical world immersive and tangible. ‘There are naiads on the banks of streams, nymphs in woods worthy of them, tombs in Elysian shade,’ de Staël effuses, going on to speculate that ‘Ovid and Virgil could be walking in this lovely spot and think they were still in the Augustan age’ (5.3, 142). Like a theme park or a living museum, the Villa Borghese invites its visitors to act out the fantasy of time travel, of turning a corner and coming face to face with Venus or Virgil. Similarly, Corinne and her party visit the socalled ‘Sibyl’s Grotto’ by Lake Avernus and the equally dubious ‘tomb of Virgil’ at Posilipo.29 It is in Corinne’s Sibylline role as ‘Apollo’s priestess’, divinely inspired to chant extempore, that she penetrates the visible surface of the Cumaean landscape to bring its submerged ‘memories’ into the consciousness of her audience. ‘These hollow, resonant rocks are those that Virgil described,’ she sings. ‘If you strike the ground, the subterranean vault re-echoes. It is as if the inhabited world is now no more than a surface about to open’ (13.4, 350). This underground interior, like the Fülle of a sculpture, cannot be accessed visually. It is instead the haptic imagination, prompted by proximity and psychophysical attitude, which perceives and processes a landscape’s historicity. Corinne establishes a rationalized method for interacting with ancient sites that resembles Charlotte Eaton’s cultivated susceptibility to their ‘charm’. Opened and softened by warmth, the perceiver’s body becomes receptive to external sensations and acts as a responsive vessel for the imagination. Imagination invests débris with meaning and transforms sightseeing into absorption. Although this can only be practised in situ, the novel offers it to the reader in the form of a simulation by inviting sympathetic identification with the characters and the actions they perform. *

*

*

Corinne became the most famous hybrid novel/guidebook of the period, but it was not the first.30 In 1792, while resident in Naples, Cornelia Knight published the sentimental historical novel Marcus Flaminius, subtitled A view of the military, political, and social life of the Romans in a series of letters from a patrician to his friend. Knight’s novel follows the route of its fictional protagonist through an early Roman empire firmly rooted in material as well as historiographic (largely Tacitean) sources. Whereas de Staël uses prose fiction to analyse the process by which contemporary visitors formulated their impressions of antiquity, Knight transposes these impressions into a fully staged reconstruction, framed as fiction but comprehensively annotated, of Rome in its imperial heyday. Marcus, who opens the novel in Germania as a survivor of Varus’ defeated legions, makes the same journey as Knight herself south through Gaul to Massilia/Marseille, by sea to Genoa and overland to Rome. Subsequently, he travels to Baiae and the Bay of Naples in the attempt to track down his former mentor, Stoic senator Valerius. Persecuted by the paranoid Emperor Tiberius and his dangerous sycophant Sejanus, Valerius has been banished to a volcanic island near Lipari. Once Marcus effects his return he takes up residence in Praeneste (Palestrina). Knight, a long-term British expatriate resident in Italy, had spent 165

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

most of 1781 in Palestrina and moved to Naples in 1785 after passing the intervening years in Rome.31 On the basis of these familiar locations and their material remains, Knight’s imaginary Romans interact with their surroundings in a manner readily recognizable to her contemporaries: they visit monuments, commission sculptures, excavate Etruscan tombs and stroll in picturesquely landscaped gardens. Marcus Flaminius demonstrates how eighteenth-century treatments of material culture could not only provide the immediate substance of fiction, as in Corinne, but could also be retrojected into the past as activities ascribed to the inhabitants of ancient Rome. In terms of their cultural translation, Knight’s Romans are thoroughly domesticated,32 a process effected in part through how they are depicted as using the spaces and objects around them. The other major factor in Marcus’ domestication is the cultivation of sensibility among Knight’s characters. Marcus himself is particularly prone to outbursts of ‘transport’, ‘affliction’ and ‘melancholy’. Having departed, for example, from the island where Valerius is held prisoner along with his daughter, to whom Marcus has formed a passionate if unconsummated attachment, he writes to addressee Septimius ‘in the utmost agitation’: I alone am wretched; my perturbation increases as I approach the shores of Italy [. . .] A cloudy vapour has involved the nearest of the islands – I am once more a solitary being in the wide universe . . . Septimius, you will pardon the wild expressions of my despair; the wretch whose heart is lacerated with poignant affliction, looks on sleep and annihilation with longing eyes or with hopeless dejection. MF . 2.102–5 Marcus’ sensibility is not restricted to his own misfortunes, but manifests also in sympathy for the suffering of others. His emotional compass directs the novel, soliciting compassion not only for innocent victims such as Valeria and her father, but also for honourable enemies and morally compromised compatriots. Nevertheless, Knight’s firstperson narration foregrounds the sentiments of Marcus himself, availing her readers of an apparently candid insight into the emotional life of a historical individual,33 striking plangent notes to which their own nerve-strings could sympathetically respond. Just as Marcus’ inner life as reported in the letters focalizes through personal experience the events reported in Tacitus’ Annals, so ancient sites are similarly embodied and inflected via an individual’s perceptions. Like his expressions of heartache, however, the perceptual responses ascribed to Marcus do not substantially deviate from the generic. His participation in Germanicus’ Triumph, for example, is focalized through the haptic sensation of being pressed on all sides by crowding bodies, the ‘thronging populace’ whose crush brings the procession to an unscheduled halt. Upon arrival at the Capitol, the jostling is succeeded by ‘sensations of the most august and pleasing nature’ as Marcus and his comrades in arms take part in a collective ritual of dedication. His surge of patriotic fervour and religious awe arises explicitly from spatial and behavioural factors. 166

Roman Novels

The music that fills the temple accentuates its sublime architecture, while Marcus is swept up in the communal activity of devotion and the passage of trophies that represent his own endeavours in the field. Knight’s affective activation of a well-known tourist site provides a script for her readers to imagine its effects upon a Roman intermediary. After the Triumph, Germanicus leads his troops out along the Via Appia to perform another dedicatory ritual at the Temple of Jupiter Latialis [Latiaris] on Mons Albanus. Knight notes in her Description of Latium (1805) that it was typical practice for Roman generals to offer thanks at this temple following a victory. The paved road winding up to the temple site under the shade of oaks and laurels remains extant, and for Knight herself, ‘arriving at the summit of Monte Cavo [Mons Albanus], it is impossible not to experience sensations at once awful and delightful’, comparable, perhaps, to the ‘awful emotions’ felt by Marcus on the Capitol.34 The surviving section of a curved wall belonging to the temple and the laurel overgrowing it make her acutely conscious of the fact that the sacrifices performed on this site had marked crucial turning points in Roman history. ‘The form of the temple is circular’, Knight has Marcus remark,‘like that of the terraqueous globe’, and its situation ‘elevates the mind . . . to the purest and sublimest worship’. Having been uplifted by his participation in the ceremony, his commitment to Roman global pre-eminence reinforced, Marcus returns down the winding processional way, ‘shaded by oaks and laurels, which serve to dignify the scene’ (MF 1.400). Marcus can hardly play the tourist in his own city, so Knight instead takes him on a circuit to reconnect with his favourite locations – coincidentally, locations still extant in 1791  – in order to stimulate personal recollections and consolidate his homecoming (‘every object that recalls to my mind the pleasures of my infancy’, MF 1.382).35 These include the newly built Pantheon, which stokes his respect for Augustus, and the tomb of the Scipios, where he reflects on the decline of Republican values. Knight’s footnote here informs the reader that this tomb was identified in 1780, and that its associated ‘urns and inscriptions’ may now be found in the Vatican Museum.36 In the Temple of Minerva, now (Knight notes) the church of Maria-sopra-Minerva, Marcus meditates before a statue of the goddess (now relocated to the Palazzo Giustiniani),37 in whose aspect there is ‘a sober majesty, an unaffected delicacy, a calm serenity . . . that imprint forcibly on the mind a reverence for the empire of wisdom’ (MF 1.382). A modern visitor may be unable to replicate Marcus’ religious, patriotic or nostalgic attachment to Roman buildings and artworks, but in contemplating the nonchalant poise and serene visage of the Giustiniani Minerva, untroubled by the passing centuries, she might still approximate the veneration afforded the patron deity of classical philosophy. Sculpture, as well as architecture, plays an important role in creating Marcus’ Rome. Busts of poets and philosophers adorn the porticos of Valerius’ villas at Baiae and Praeneste, and public spaces exhibit statuary appropriate to their function.38 Artworks with more personal significance are commissioned from the sculptor Polydore, whose workshop incidentally also contains a Pythian Apollo and a Laocoön group  – not, Knight’s footnote assures us, the same pieces now displayed in the Vatican, as these are of somewhat later manufacture, but ‘it is well known that the same subject was often repeated with little variation by ancient sculptors’ (MF 2.182–3), so their presence in 167

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Polydore’s atelier functions as a touch of verisimilitude. Upon returning to Rome, Marcus commissions a memorial monument to the German chieftain whose intervention saved his life, consisting of a porphyry column rising from a cubic base with relief panels depicting allegorical scenes (MF 2.180). At the novel’s conclusion, Valerius commissions from the same sculptor a statue of Marcus himself ‘in the attitude of a reposing warrior with a Cupid at my feet’ to be placed in his gardens at Baiae (MF 2.328–9). These metafictional artworks punctuate and encapsulate the action of the novel, coalescing the flow of human activity into material artefacts and endowing material artefacts with narrative significance. It is not only sculpture that features in Marcus’ material world. En route through Etruria with Germanicus’ returning army, Marcus encounters a group of locals ‘digging out of the ruins of a decayed building several vases, which, like many others discovered in this country, as well as in the more southern parts of Italy, bear evident marks of their Greek original [sic]’ (MF 1.310). One shows two male figures at a tomb, which Marcus identifies according to eighteenth-century convention as Orestes and Pylades, and the other a group of women weaving, identified as Penelope and her attendants. ‘The form of these vases is simple and elegant, and the designs . . . expressive,’ comments Marcus, with connoisseurial appreciation not altogether anachronistic,39 although the proto-archaeological excavation of the pots belongs more to Knight’s time than to his own. Two scenes in Marcus Flaminius make particularly integral use of their settings: the battleground in the Teutoburg Forest where Varus’ legions were slaughtered, and Valerius’ villa on the Bay of Naples. Marcus returns to the battleground several years later in the company of Germanicus and his army. The plain, ‘white with the bones of our unburied legions’, still offers testament to the massacre that took place there, the bones of thousands of men lying entangled with the skeletons of their horses and rusted weapons. The disposition of these remains, Marcus observes, is indicative of their final moments, heaped together in evidence of futile resistance or scattered as a result of desperate flight. Marcus grieves, overwhelmed by survivor’s guilt. The intervening years collapse around him and his imagination transports him back to the night before the attack, repopulating the camp with his long-dead comrades, ‘and I, the only survivor, their companion and their friend, now wandering over a dreary space, where, at every step, I trampled on the bones of some fellow-soldier with whom, methought, I had passed the former evening’ (MF 1.182). He is roused from post-traumatic fugue by the arrival of Germanicus, whose approach to the nightmarish field of Teutoburg is more systematic: Germanicus led me round the field, and made me point out to him the place where the legates fell, where Varus received the first wound, and where he transfixed his own bosom with his sword. He enquired where the barbarians took possession of our eagles: I pointed to a mountain of bones whose owners had fallen in their defence . . . He next contemplated the wood where we still found the altars, at which the tribunes, and principal centurions, had been sacrificed. MF 1.184 168

Roman Novels

Germanicus treats the site of the Teutoburg massacre as something of an open-air museum, each landmark corresponding to an event, with a dispassionate objectivity that may seem unfeeling beside Marcus’ distress and disorientation. It also serves, however, to restore equilibrium to Marcus’ perceptions, reorganizing the chaos of the boneyard confronting them into a record of discrete events and imposing causal and spatial coherence on the otherwise abject horror. Marcus’ temporal displacement, his vertiginous sense of coming unstuck in time, is eased by Germanicus’ insistence that the scene around them be used to formulate a narrative.40 In his attempt to trace Valerius, Marcus’ first destination is the senator’s villa at the coastal resort of Baiae. To an addressee who happens conveniently to be unfamiliar with the area, Marcus offers a detailed passage through the landscaped gardens of the villa, introducing them as a representative microcosm which presents ‘an appearance not uninstructive for the neighbourhood’ (MF 2.14). Knight devotes a whole chapter of her Description of Latium to the numerous villa sites around Tivoli, just as invested in recovering the Horti of Maecenas or Lucullus as she is the buildings within them.41 Valerius’ grounds conspicuously reference the Borghese and Boboli Gardens, as well as the picturesque landscaping coming into vogue across Europe.42 Knight’s Roman villa constitutes a lavish composite of contemporary re-imaginings. Valerius’ garden takes the form of a first-person walk along an allegorical trail.43 It begins on a sweeping lawn planted with plane trees, where a stream winds between artificial slopes, beside a statue of the young Hercules choosing the path of Virtue. From this central point, two routes are possible. The first takes Marcus on a circuit of pleasure: ‘Beside the rivulet are serpentine walks . . . A path diversified by elegant seats, garlands of vine hanging from tree to tree, shady arbours, and statues of Fauns and Driads, leads to a theatre of sumptuous architecture, in which the Corinthian order is most conspicuous’ (MF 2.15). The theatre is followed by a banqueting hall, containing ‘a variety of beautiful statues’, and an enticing bower planted with roses and myrtle. On the far side of the bower, however, Marcus encounters ‘a fearful precipice ending in a vast cavity where no vegetation appears. The ground here is a pale yellow, and bears the marks of subterranean fire; it resounds hollow beneath the feet, while a dark smoke rises at intervals above the surface; and the natives give it the name of the Forum of Vulcan. Further, the eye commands a distant view of the Avernian lake’ (MF 2.16–17). In other words, the easy path of sensual and aesthetic delight ends in a sheer drop straight into Hell, albeit in pagan guise as the Forum of Vulcan [Solfatara] and the entrance to Virgil’s Underworld. Retracing his steps to the statue of Hercules, Marcus heads in the opposite direction, this time uphill. ‘The ascent is steep, and the entangled branches seem negligently left to embarrass the wanderer, through a way rocky and difficult of access’ (MF 2.17). This type of arduous scramble formed no part of Roman garden design, but serves instead as a haptic manifestation of the struggle to maintain a direct line towards virtue. The difficult path, moreover, has one more test in store. Crossing the source of the rivulet on a fragile, shaky bridge, Marcus comes to ‘a dark grove of lofty cypresses’ filled with sepulchral monuments commemorating quasi-mythical Roman heroes such as Regulus, Curtius, the Decii and finally – Marcus discovers with a shock – ‘a most beautiful urn of Parian 169

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

marble’ which turns out to be his own memorial. Supposed dead after Teutoburg, Marcus now confronts his own empty tomb. This is not quite the end, because after the grove comes a long avenue of cypresses leading to an Ionic temple on the hilltop dedicated to Immortality, its frieze depicting Virtue crowned by Fame. Knight gives no explicit exegesis of Marcus’ progress, but the episode functions as a self-evident translation of the spiritual into the topographic. Its components, if reassembled into a literal garden, become surreal, in particular the sudden and impossible spatial contraction that places the villa simultaneously on the coast at Baiae and inland overlooking Solfatara. Its imaginative geography primarily serves as apparatus for moral reflection, but at the same time creates an elaborate capriccio for readers taking the features of this imagined Roman landscape at face value. Septimius’ curiosity will be further satisfied by an account of Marcus’ tour around the Bay of Naples. Escorted by the affable Admiral Torquatus, he visits Misenum, Puteoli, Neapolis, Pompeii and Herculaneum, finishing with a sundown ascent of Vesuvius. Few details of each place are given, but Knight embellishes Marcus’ itinerary with footnotes informing the reader about the disposition of the current remains: that ‘some ruins in the sea [near Baiae] . . . are still called La Casa di Lucullo’; that Puteoli’s Temple of Augustus has been repurposed as a cathedral; that an ‘interesting bust of Plato’ then belonging to Nonnius Balbus is the very one now displayed in the Portici museum; and that the fate of Herculaneum, which Marcus finds ‘delightfully [and ominously] situated at the foot of Mt Vesuvius’, is ‘well known by Sir William Hamilton’s description’.44 While in the main text Marcus identifies sites of historical significance (such as Nola, distinguished for resisting Hannibal’s invasion), celebrity appeal (such as the villa of the Caesars), and natural interest (such as mineral springs), Knight’s running commentary below redoubles the landscape’s antiquarian dimension. The reader, immersed in Marcus’ narrative, is abruptly recalled by the framing device of the footnotes to an awareness of fictionality. Ironically, because the very points of material contact that lend the text its verisimilitude are those which disrupt its carefully crafted semblance of authenticity, the footnotes repeatedly pull Knight’s reader back to her own present. Like Corinne, the novel’s genre is unstable. It functions both as fictional narrative and as guidebook, additionally furnishing instructions both implicit and explicit for cultivating appropriate personal responses to the presence of history. Marcus’ own potential as a vehicle for tourist performance may be limited, but his expertise as cicerone can be exploited by visitors from out of town. His German friend Sigismar, for example, is escorted around Tiberius’ villa at Antium, where the sculpture collection includes ‘a dying gladiator, in whom the pangs of dissolution are expressed with such truth, as can only please the artist, or the tyrant’, to which Marcus’ own response is ‘a mixture of admiration and disgust’. Although adding minimal footnotes to this passage, Knight elaborates in A Description of Latium that many famous sculptural works, including the Dying Gladiator and the Belvedere Apollo, were discovered at Antium, which was surrounded by wealthy villas.45 Marcus also conducts Sigismar around Rome, pointing out among other attractions the Theatre of Marcellus (‘a great part of this edifice remains entire’) and the Mausoleum of Augustus (‘to be seen in the 170

Roman Novels

garden of Palazzo Correa’), before taking him on a day trip to Tivoli and ‘the sumptuous villa where Maecenas* was surrounded by the happiest votaries of the Muses’ (*‘the ruins of his villa are eminently picturesque’). A Description of Latium shows precisely which site formed the idea of Maecenas’ villa as imaginatively reconstructed by Knight. ‘The substructions of the villa,’ she notes, ‘are to be seen on the side of the hill to the north; they consist of vast rooms and arches . . . Above the foundations, as may easily be discovered from the remains, were two rows of columns, one of the Doric, and the other of the Ionic order, which formed the two porticos.’46 Knight’s proto-archaeological survey of the environs of Tivoli both reveals the material substratum of Marcus Flaminius and, if cross-referenced, permits the reader of both works to rediscover the ruins for herself, to import or impart or impute to mute stone the narratives Knight has embedded there. How to be an effective  – that is, a sentimental  – reader of ruins forms part of the novel’s conclusion. Marcus acts as diplomatic host to three British princes on a cultural tour, whose primary objective is ‘to enlighten and improve their native country by the knowledge they may acquire’ (MF 2.211). Another circuit of Rome and Latium ensues, each ancient attraction similarly augmented, or haunted, by its contemporary double in the footnotes.47 Marcus criticizes the usual practice of tour guides who distract from the immediate impression of a site by launching into ‘an ill-timed display of knowledge’. Instead, he recommends advance preparation, enabling visitors to absorb without verbal interruption the haptic traces of a history already committed to memory. Moreover, the superficial grandeur (or exiguousness) of a monument should be of less consequence than the event, individual, or moral it stands in for. The philosophic Valerius disparages Rome’s increasing taste for opulence, the mistaken substitution of scale for significance as imposing imperial construction projects obliterate the more modest material markers of the city’s past. ‘If we suppose that nothing is sublime but what is immense,’ Valerius complains, ‘a time may come in which the Pantheon may be thought only worthy to serve as a dome for some gigantic edifice’, rather than a temple, a gesture towards the numinous. Both of these positions may be disputed. A narrative read in situ can reverberate powerfully, as we have seen,48 and Edmund Burke for one would regard the sensorial apprehension of scale as inseparable from the condition of sublimity. For Knight, however, the principle of narrative (‘crumpled’) space is of paramount concern. It is with this object lesson for the princes of Britannia that she closes her novel, leaving open a route and a method for readers to follow in Marcus’ footsteps to Rome. Deeply embedded in the conventions of travel writing and heavily predicated on autobiography, these hybrid texts cut romance with non-fiction in order to function not only as novels but also as tourist scripts. Just as guidebooks construct and frame their readers’ expectations, so Corinne and Marcus create an imagined visitor experience and model the behavioural strategies of sentimental travellers attuned to the affective potential of ancient sites. De Staël places particular emphasis on the importance of the (feeling) imagination in shaping perceptions of ruins, acknowledging the role of scholarship but ultimately subordinating érudition to sensibility. Rather than being an end in itself, historical knowledge is the cognitive scaffolding which supports historical consciousness, or the imaginative re-placement of the visitor’s self en présence de tant de 171

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

siècles. To fill an arid shell with rippling water, or feel Avernus roll beneath your feet, the haptic imagination must be exercised, and in doing so the visitor discovers a connection to historicized space plus immédiate et plus intime. Whereas Goethe’s Roman Elegies set the city streets in motion through the hurrying footsteps and lingering handprints of lovers, these works of prose fiction invite a different form of somatic attention. The bodies of their protagonists are surrogates for a reader-visitor who approaches ancient sites in their capacity as affective stimuli. The reward for cultivating what contemporaries would have understood as a ‘sentimental’ or imaginatively enhanced response is the heightened awareness of one’s own place in time.

172

CHAPTER 9 FOREVER YOUNG

Authors of Roman romances could reasonably suppose an aspiration in their readers to visit the Eternal City and play out for themselves the proposed itineraries. As knowledge of contemporary Greece and the material remains of its classical past began to enter public discourse, however, and philhellenism began to gain a foothold in the public imagination, Greece became an attractive setting for authors exploring themes such as liberty and resistance, despite its relative inaccessibility. Compared to the vogue for Gothic, i.e. medieval settings, very few historical novels of the period take place in the classical past.1 As a contemporary fictional setting, on the other hand, ‘Greece’ could be used as a nom de guerre for the French Revolution (as by Hölderlin) or for the Irish independence movement (as by Lady Morgan).2 It is not the intention of this chapter to analyse the politics of these novels, but it is important to note how the concept of Greece was shaped in part through such literary appropriations, and how Hellenic specificity was eroded even as it became emblematic of post-Napoleonic struggles for nationhood. For many European authors, ‘Greece’ was signifier, not signified; an evocative sign, but not itself the referent. Its material heritage less securely known than that of Italy, its landscapes less well-trodden by artists and tourists, (Ancient) Greece was far more vulnerable to abstraction as an idea, an ideal, the ever-beckoning shore, the enchanted archipelago dreamed so fervidly by Hölderlin. *

*

*

For poet Friedrich Hölderlin, nourished on Schiller and crushed like so many of his generation by the corruption in practice of revolutionary ideals, Greece represented a theatre of disillusionment. His two-part novel Hyperion, written between 1797 and 1799 and set during the catastrophic Orlov Revolt of 1770, invokes a landscape emotionally charged, giddy with pastoral bliss (the ‘spirit of Beauty’) and vibrating with nationalistic fervour.3 Inspired and devastated by the perceived dereliction of his homeland, Hölderlin’s young protagonist embarks on a doomed mission of restoration, naively expecting to become the saviour of Greece. The formula of youthful idealism betrayed, or the man of (too much) feeling shattered by the implacable tide of current events was not uncommon in contemporary fiction,4 but Hyperion’s embeddedness in the Greek landscape and its history gives his failure a wider, quasi-mythic dimension. ‘The scene of the events which follow is not new,’ Hölderlin admits in his preface, ‘but I soon became convinced that it was the only scene appropriate to Hyperion’s elegiac character’ (pp.  1–2).5 Hölderlin himself never visited Greece, nor even Italy. His Greece is a bricolage, a fantasia fashioned from textual sources but delivered with a hyperbolic sensory vividness that verges on delirium. ‘Who can abide it,’ Hyperion asks, ‘whom does it not lay low, as a hurricane lays low young woods, when the terrifying splendour of Antiquity seizes him as it seized me, 173

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

when, as for me, the surroundings are lacking in which he might gain a strengthening of self-reliance?’ (p. 12).6 Hyperion typically defines himself by means of similes like this one, filtering his own experiences through natural phenomena or historical exempla. The image of the young tree uprooted captures with particular violence the force of Hyperion’s convictions. Gripped or seized (ergreift), he is torn down (umreisen). Unable to find purchase in the sterile soil of the present day, he finds himself susceptible to the hurricane blast, the Orkan of a nobility so unbearable in scale that it leaves him, he feels, prostrated. By far the most frequent of Hyperion’s kinaesthetic correlatives for his emotional turbulence is the contrast of height and depth, the soaring ascent to the ‘ether’ (Aether) and the headlong plunge into the ‘abyss’ (Abgrunds). ‘Everything is now up, now down in this world’ (p. 22), Hyperion declares with the bipolar extremism of adolescence (Es geht alles auf und unter in der Welt). The metaphor is not static, but often accompanied by explicit evocations of the movement entailed by his spiritual topography. The precariousness of the pleasure Hyperion takes in the company of freedom-fighter Alabanda, for instance, is ‘like a steep cliff where your travelling companion has but to touch you to fling you involuntarily over the jagged edge (über die scheidenden Zacken hinab) into the lightless depths’ (p. 22). The same pervasive image recurs in the most famous individual passage of Hölderlin’s novel, Hyperion’s Schicksalslied (‘song of fate’ or ‘Destiny-song’),7 in which the unfortunate Mensch falls blindly ‘like water dashed / from cliff to cliff / year-long, down into the unknown’ (Wie wasser von Klippe / zu Klippe geworfen / Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab). Unlike the gods, who meander timeless and torpid over the soft ground (weichen Boden) of heaven, stroked by the musical fingers of zephyrs, wretched humanity has no resting place whatsoever (keine Stätte zu ruhen), instead perpetually condemned to a bruising downward momentum. The haptic properties of Hölderlin’s contrast are pronounced, as are the parallels between the Schicksalslied and the similar spatialization of affect performed by Hyperion elsewhere. As well as identifying with elements of the natural world,8 Hyperion performs an ongoing role-play in which he morphs through a gallery of figures from history and myth. Roaming with Alabanda among the tumuli near Mt Ida, he compares their friendship to that of Achilles and Patroclus (p. 27). Later, his beloved Diotima remarks that in his desperate thirst for a better world, he is ‘seeking as [the river-god] Alpheus his Arethusa’, the pure spring (p. 54). Historical exempla underpin Hyperion’s determination to fight for Greek independence. Preparing for battle, he imagines himself as Pheidippides, ‘that Athenian youth . . . bearing news of victory from Marathon’ (p.  79). Hyperion’s versions of Marathon and Salamis, however, will repeat inspirational history as ignominious farce as his troops turn to looting and his ship is blown up. The heroic age apparently carved into the landscape now seems a treacherous illusion. Living on ‘Ajax’s island’ of Salamis, Hyperion had read about ‘the ancient, magnificent sea-fight that once blazed up’ there, and as he rides through the Peloponnese gathering an army, he can see only ‘deeds, past and to come’ swarming in the open spaces around him (p. 84). Greece is crowded with spectral heroism ripe for emulation. Even the failure of Hyperion’s venture does not deter him from further self-dramatization. He wishes for a new Thermopylae 174

Forever Young

where he and Alabanda might die together with honour, and goes ultimately into exile ‘humbly, like homeless, blind Oedipus [coming] to the gates of Athens’ (pp. 127–8). Hyperion’s education has prepared him to venerate certain aspects of classical Greece. It was while accompanying his tutor on a tour of the Peloponnese that he first learned to associate the landscape with selected points in its history as they travelled the ancient sites ‘like shades from a time long past, in pride and joy, in rage and grief ’.9 Hyperion’s is a tactile and kinaesthetic education, a bodily immersion in ruins. In Olympia, it is ‘leaning against a pillar of the temple of forgotten Jupiter’ that he comes to comprehend the magnitude of human transience. He makes an energetic exploration of the site, ‘scraping the moss from a demigod’s pedestal, digging a marble hero’s shoulder out of the rubble, cutting the brambles and heather from the half-buried architraves’ (pp. 8–9).10 Physical exertion – scraping, digging, cutting – inscribes Olympia in his muscles and fingers, discoveries coursing through his own developing body. While climbing the temple steps on Delos, making a literal ascent, the sunrise floods over him and instils an enduring sensory reference point for the metaphorical radiance of Hellas. Frequently, too, Hyperion’s landscape is textualized as the works of the Ancients are perused in locations appropriate to their content. Reading Herodotus on Salamis, Homer in a grotto on the banks of the Meles, and Plato with Alabanda ‘in the dark shade of an evergreen laurel’, Hyperion lays the groundwork for a lifetime of reading landscapes as emanations of literature.11 Shaped by such an education, his eventual arrival in Athens plays out a predetermined confrontation with the epicentre of his philhellenic dreams. Enraptured by the awareness that he is present on the site of the ‘eloquent Agora’ and the ‘Grove of Academe’, Hyperion initially addresses the monuments as though they were still flourishing. He attributes a miraculous independent agency even to the building materials of the ancient city, enthusing that ‘the marble cliffs of Hymettus and Pentelicus leapt from their slumbering cradle like children from their mother’s lap, and attained life and form under the loving hands of the Athenians’. It is as though the stones were responsible for carving themselves.12 ‘Can you thus transport yourself to ancient times?’ Diotima marvels. When she recalls his attention to the present, Hyperion’s animist cosmos drains away into a wasteland no less compelling in its desolation. The ‘forsaken pillars’ flicker in and out of focus, now perceived in the guise of a fleet of wrecked ships and now as a once-green forest consumed by fire (pp. 69–70). The trunks of the trees and the ribs of the ships multiply Hyperion’s vista of columns until Athens’ relatively modest remains seem more like the colonnades of Palmyra,13 devastation on a scale commensurate with the former glory sought by the young lovers. Their set-piece tour of the monuments consolidates Hyperion’s vague ambitions into a definite resolve. ‘I stood above the ruins of Athens like the farmer on the fallow field,’ he recalls, solemnly assigning himself at Diotima’s besotted instigation the responsibility of rescuing Greece single-handedly from oblivion. After this topographical turning point, Hyperion throws himself into the resistance movement with the same intensity as formerly he devoted to Diotima in their pastoral idyll. Greece, however, as Hyperion conceptualizes it, remains ultimately inextricable from the pastoral mode, a compound of responsive Nature, the ardour of youth, and the 175

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

myrtle-shaded islands of Daphnis and Chloe. Its genre in Hyperion’s present day is elegy, not epic, and his inability to recognize the impossibility of a material resurrection leads the novel to its ironically tragic (and tragically ironic) conclusion. Ancient Greece, throughout, is associated with youth. Athens in its fifth-century heyday had a ‘youthful bloom’, warmed by the ‘ever-young sun’; its temples clustered ‘like children’ at the foot of the Acropolis, the marble slabs likewise leaping up ‘like children’ to be worked. The heroic past was the province of ‘eternal youth’, a perpetual festival presided over by the ‘everyoung gods’. At Delos, ‘the youth of Hellas plunged into full tides of joy and exultation’. Hellas, in other words, becomes elided with Elysium.14 Unaware that their own youthful immersion in love and the beauties of Nature can be neither sustained nor passed on to others, Hyperion and Diotima mistake this ephemeral condition for a permanent one. Their attempt to translate pastoral bliss into political reality not only falls disastrously short but destroys in the process the original state of grace enjoyed by the lovers. Their conception of ‘Greece’, Hölderlin repeatedly warns, is synonymous with the land of youth, and as such it cannot be extended and it cannot be recaptured. For Hyperion, however, it is his entire world. The island of Calaurea (Kalavria) where Diotima and Hyperion meet is initially introduced in terms that are more haptic than visual. Hyperion, for whom walking the land is an essential process of internalizing it,15 sets out to explore his new home, and finds the island rejoicing with the approach of spring: As when a mother cajolingly (schmeichelnd) asks where her dearest pet has got to, and all her children come rushing to her lap and even the littlest reaches out its arms from the cradle, so every life flew and leaped and struggled out (flog und sprang und strebte . . . hinaus) into the divine air, and beetles and swallows and doves and storks circled together in joyous confusion in its depths and heights (tummelten sich in frohlockender Verwirrung unter einander in den Tiefen und Höhn), and the steps of all that were earthbound became flight, the horse charged (brauste) over the furrows and the deer over the hedges, the fish came up from the bottom of the sea, and leaped (hüpften) over the surface. The motherly air affected the hearts of all, uplifted all and drew them to her (Allen drang die mütterliche Luft ans Herz, und hob sie und zog sie zu sich). And men came out of their doors, and wonderfully did they feel the ethereal breeze as it lightly moved the fine hairs over their foreheads, as it cooled the sun’s ray, and happily they loosed their garments to receive it upon their chests, and breathed more sweetly, felt more gently touched (berührten) by the light, cool, soothing (schmeichelnde) sea in which they lived and moved and had their being (sie lebten und webten). p. 39 Hyperion experiences the island not as a series of views but rather in a giddy upsurge of movement as its creatures respond to the ‘motherly air’. Everything is in motion, erupting in a cascade of galvanic verbs than emphasize not only the end result but also the kinetic 176

Forever Young

effort involved: the struggle to defy gravity or break from a shell (strebte . . . hinaus), the pounding hoofs, the fish that gathers itself to leap, the tumultous swooping of birds for whom the heights and depths of the sky, Tiefen und Höhn, are indistinguishable. The air, maternal (mütterliche), compels this rising and striving with the gentlest (schmeichelnd) touch, opening up a warm lap to all her offspring who, once again implicitly infantilized, eagerly respond. The islanders, like Calaurea’s nonhuman residents, live in movement (sie lebten und webten), feeling spring stir in the temperate touch of the sea-breeze, schmeichelnde air-currents lightly stroking their hair. They likewise respond in a kinetic fashion, casting aside restrictive winter garments and releasing their own breath in turn. Calaurea, heartland of Hyperion’s idyllic ideal, is represented first of all as a haptic state of being. This is in keeping with Hyperion’s persistent habit of associating abstract ideas with his own bodily experiences of the Greek landscape. On his departure into exile, his farewell to his homeland makes these various associations apparent as he addresses, ‘You airs that nourished me in tender childhood, and you dark laurel woods and you cliffs by the shore and you majestic waters that taught my soul to surmise your greatness – and ah! you monuments of sorrow, where my melancholy began . . . you temple pillars and you rubble of the gods!’ (p.  127). The soft airs, as on Calaurea, are characterized as maternal and nurturing, a protective cradle or even a cocoon for the boy’s unformed body. The function of woods, cliffs and sea, as Hyperion ranges over and through them on his formative travels in Asia Minor and the Peloponnese, is pedagogical, implanting their sublime dimensions in his limbs as a metaphorical or cognitive analogue of ‘greatness’.16 The monuments of Athens consummate a passion originating much earlier in Hyperion’s philhellenic training, as he grubbed among the rubble of Olympia lounging on fallen columns and unearthing shattered statuary. It is upon his tactile and kinaesthetic relationship with the landscapes and ruinscapes of Greece that Hyperion attempts to build – or, as he and Diotima believe, to restore – a more beautiful world. *

*

*

A pastoral, youthful version of Greece also features in the 1803 novel Sappho: after a Greek romance, attributed to physician and amateur translator of classical poetry John Nott. The novel’s male narrator, an antiquarian, has travelled to Greece in order to supplement the sparse and contradictory accounts of ancient authors with knowledge acquired in the field. He claims to have discovered a memorial at Leucadia, and on Lesbos a statue and various commemorative inscriptions in addition to local records and oral history. From these sources, he professes to have compiled Sappho’s authentic biography. Weeping as he recounts her death, he declares that ‘I am he who, first revealing thy misfortunes to posterity, have been the first to feel them, and feel them truly’ (309 [2.328–9]), but this statement is particularly ironic because of the novel’s translation history. Nott’s treatment of Sappho is translated from the Italian novel by Alessandro Verri, Le Avventure di Saffo (1782), which had previously been translated into English in an anonymous parallel text edition of 1789, possibly by Verri himself.17 The 1803 translation is attributed to John Nott posthumously on the basis of his obituary in the Gentlemen’s Magazine in 1825; there is no author’s name printed on the title page, and no 177

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

mention of its Italian source-text.18 Verri’s novel itself contains a preface, patently fictional, claiming the work to be an Italian translation of a lost Greek romance. The Saffo of Verri, [Verri] and Nott dies young, cursed by Venus to suffer unrequited love for the goddess’s equally youthful favourite, the champion wrestler Phaon. Much of the first volume is taken up with an athletic competition which displays both Phaon’s skill and his physique to great advantage. Saffo, compared in her budding romantic susceptibility to ‘the rose in the early days of the lukewarm spring’, becomes infatuated, but her feelings are not returned. Her father, while not unsympathetic, regards Saffo’s passion simply as symptomatic of youth, consoling her with the commonplace that ‘were the wounds of Love as fatal as they are deep, we should all die while yet young’ (111 [1.242–3]).19 Saffo’s erotic dilemma, and the idyllic Greece she inhabits, conform like Hyperion to the pastoral mode of ancient Greek romances such as Leucippe and Clitophon or Daphnis and Chloe, which Verri later translated in 1812.20 Saffo travels from island to island, from Lesbos to Sicily, where she resides for a while in the Epicurean retreat of philosopher Eutychius before ending her life in Leucadia. The two defining features of the Sappho we know, her lesbianism and her career as a poet, are both erased. Verri rejects indignantly any insinuation that Sappho may have been ‘improperly’ attached to female companions, and insists that her poetry (even the notorious Fragment 31, ‘He is blessed, the man who gets to sit beside you’) was exclusively addressed to Phaon. Her compositions are depicted as arising spontaneously from ‘poetic phrensy’ and ‘instinct’, not deliberately from the mature cultivation of a craft. Clorinda Donato argues that Verri portrays Saffo as ‘a respected woman of letters’, an empowering recuperation of the female intellectual, but this is not the case.21 Unlike other contemporary Sapphos, she neither runs her own salon nor engages in politics, and nor have her relationships yet had the chance to mature into adult complexity. Her few poetic forays are the result of ‘instinct’, not craft, and as Joan DeJean points out, it is Phaon whose inspired eloquence stuns his audience – including a dewy-eyed Saffo herself – to silence.22 For all her precocious contributions to Eutychius’ symposia, Verri’s Saffo remains fundamentally an infatuated teenager, the pathos of her inexperience inspiring sympathetic affect in her narrator and ideally likewise in his readers. The narrator addresses us directly, exhorting us to identify with his heroine’s acute suffering and soliciting a parallel response. ‘Weep with her, ye whose souls are subdued by the tyranny of love! ye too who miserably languish, loving yet unbeloved! ye from whom accursed fate has torn the better portion of life, by depriving you of the darling object of your thoughts!’ (271 [2.249–51]). Employing the strategies of sentimental fiction, Verri cultivates the development of an emotional rapport, drawing out factors that might constitute common experiences, such as helpless devotion, frustrated desire, the absence or loss of a loved one. By reactivating imaginatively the emotional turmoil of these experiences, Verri’s readers can feel alongside Saffo, and if sufficiently sensitive, can weep with her. The melodramatic language applied to the reader’s condition, be it the ‘tyranny’ of an erotic attachment or the violence of ‘accursed fate’, validates a correspondingly impassioned response. As mentioned above in the Introduction, readers and authors of sentimental fiction anticipated that it would have a palpable effect on the 178

Forever Young

nerves, and while Verri’s novel is a late example of the genre, it nevertheless displays the rhetorical characteristics of writing that seeks explicitly to move. As well as overt appeals to readers’ sentiment, Saffo makes use of theatrical tableaux in which characters perform stylized gestures or strike poses physically indicative of particular states of mind. Alessandro Verri was himself a playwright and translator of Shakespeare into Italian, and despite Donato’s rather tortuous argument that his choice of the novel as a genre vitiates any apparent affinities with tragedy,23 cross-media influence is indicated by his retention of theatrical tropes.24 The climax of the novel, Saffo’s preparation to leap from the Leucadian cliff to her death or deliverance, is also the most extended passage in which emotion is pantomimically externalized. As Saffo vacillates, as she repeatedly resolves and retreats and appeals to Apollo, her body follows the movements of her thoughts (or vice versa): ‘She smote her panting breast; she tore off the veil which enfolded her; and without uttering a word, she walked toward the cliff . . . There, as though worked upon by divine fury, she tossed her head, and violently paced along the rocky beach on which the foaming surge broke itself ’ (301 [2.309–11]). Having reached the clifftop, she ‘remained for some time motionless as she considered the dreadful precipice’, but after a while, ‘cautiously approaching the brink of this abyss, with beating bosom she hung over it her pallid face; and saw, shuddering, that the long-continued force of the surf beneath had corroded the mountain’s base . . . The wretched maid shrunk with horror, and withdrew her trembling steps’ (303 [2.314–17]). She addresses the gods, ‘raising from the mountain’s top her hands and tearful eyes to heaven’, but even having consigned herself to Thetis, on the very brink, performs another withdrawal: ‘She . . . hastened to the verge of the rock, thence deliberately to plunge below: but, having reached it, on beholding the tremendous depth, she stopped as by an involuntary impulse’ (305 [2.320–1]). At this point, however, Venus stabs a golden hairpin into her heart, and Saffo, ‘goaded by its irritating point, like some poor beast touched by the gadfly’s sting’ (306 [2.322–3]), closes her eyes and on this third attempt casts herself like Io into the sea. Her dramatic pause on the clifftop has been anticipated earlier in the novel when she climbs up onto a Sicilian promontory to stand looking out to sea for Phaon’s ship, ‘like the soaring falcon on the topmost heights of snow-clad Caucasus’ (175 [2.46–7). The wind whips her hair and clothing around her but she does not stir from this ‘attitude’, straining on tiptoe to watch for the approaching vessel. Her ‘motionless’ stance on the Leucadian cliffs before her suicide recalls this very similar occupation of a highly visible vantage point above the crashing sea, emphasized also by the ineffectual presence below of her companion Rhodope. The motif is at once theatrical – indeed, melodramatic – and artistic, resembling Sappho’s depiction in paintings such as Antoine-Jean Gros’s Sappho à Leucade (1801, Figure 8). Another scene distinctive in its theatricality is Saffo’s visit to the enchantress Stratonica, who occupies a Sibylline cave in the mountains of Lesbos. Saffo and Rhodope enter through a long narrow tunnel encrusted by smoke and slippery with the residue of ‘subterraneous springs’. Inching through the dark passage towards distant torchlight, they finally emerge into ‘an immense cavern . . . in the middle of which was Stratonica celebrating her occult rites’, spinning in circles with her black wand outstretched and 179

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

Figure 8 Antoine-Jean Gros, ‘Sappho à Leucade’ (1801). Musée Baron Gérard, Bayeux © Getty Images.

murmuring spells that cause the earth to shake and groan (130, 145 [1.282–5, 318–19]). Stratonica’s performance of ritual before her small but overawed audience makes theatrically effective use of space, sound, silence, movement and images. Initially motionless as a statue, she suddenly breaks from ‘dread stillness into the most frantic delirium’, after which she proceeds to summon a series of visions: Eros, Pegasus, a chimera and Hecate. Like a phantasmagoria or magic-lantern show, Stratonica’s ‘spectres’ (spettri) first appear in the altar flame and then move around the room as she stage-manages this display purely for the purpose, as she tells Saffo, of testing her petitioners’ resolve. A different type of illusion is presented by the philosophers attending Eutychius’ symposium, in an incident that humorously undermines the supposed equivalence of internal and external attitude. While Eutychius and Saffo converse aside, the young men ‘all placed themselves on seats of polished marble around the spouting fountain’ (209 [116–17]), adopting postures indicative of thoughtful reflection ‘truly becoming of the school of philosophy, some resting their chin on the hand, some with their hand upon the forehead, others with their arms folded across the breast’ – all of which, the narrator points out, ‘are gestures denoting profound meditation’ (210 [118–21]). When Eutychius returns to address the members of this academic tableau, however, his protégé Nomophilus is forced to confess that despite their outwardly intellectual poses, none of them had actually been engaged in any form of cognitive activity.25 Nevertheless, 180

Forever Young

although on this occasion deceptive, it is the anticipated legibility of thought in the acts of the body which leads Verri’s readers as well as Eutychius to assume, until informed otherwise, that the symposiasts’ cogitations are genuine. The eighteenth-century novel, as David Marshall remarks, among its other antecedents ‘grew out of the theatre’.26 The theatre out of which it grew was pervaded by physical rhetoric,27 by bodies which sought like works of sculpture to communicate their passions through codified gesture: the bent head and furrowed brow denoting meditation, or the clasped hands raised imploringly. At the same time, novelized bodies are explicit in their internal agitation as they tremble, weep and blush. Verri’s Saffo, we are told, is ‘gifted unfortunately with an extreme irritability of the senses, which hurried her to the most dangerous extremes’ (114), rendering her reactions both spontaneous and exaggerated, at once highly volatile and highly legible. Saffo combines the strategies of melodrama and sentiment in a body which also invites sympathy because of its flower-like youthfulness (‘the rose in the early days of lukeward spring’) and vulnerability. Early works of historical fiction operated in conjunction with less fanciful works of historiography to provide their readers with a medium for intuiting past experiences.28 In the case of the sentimental novel, these experiences are scripted onto the febrile, labile, mobile bodies of highly strung protagonists so that the reader may reconstitute them in her own (body)-image. *

*

*

Possessing affinities with both Hyperion and Corinne, the 1809 novel Woman: or, Ida of Athens by Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan, also takes the prospective liberation of Greece as its subject,29 this time personified in the figure of Archondessa Ida Rosemeli. Young and passionately idealistic, Ida forms a romantic attachment to the equally unworldly Osmyn, doomed leader of a patriotic rebellion. Like Corinne, Ida is a brilliant and accomplished woman who supposedly embodies the qualities of her homeland; like Hyperion, she assumes a series of roles that establish her as the avatar of its illustrious past. Ida also makes this somatic connection explicit through performance, but whereas Corinne’s is primarily a spoken medium,30 it is Ida’s dances which punctuate and crystallize the action with meta-dramatic set-piece episodes. Osmyn’s uprising fails as disastrously as Hyperion’s;31 Ida’s exile in England recalls Corinne’s. Owenson’s persecuted heroine suffers the orientalizing melodrama of the seraglio, the gothic melodrama of dungeons and caves, and the domestic melodrama of debt and sexual coercion until she can finally be reconciled and reunited with Osmyn. Owenson’s conclusion is thus more optimistic than Hölderlin’s, but within the bounds of the novel the realization of Greek independence is no less remote. Greece provides Owenson with a picturesque, industriously researched backdrop for sensational scenes familiar from other contemporary fiction in similar genres.32 As a counterpoint to the novel’s visual scenery, the way in which Ida moves through and comprehends her surroundings also shows kinaesthesia informing the Greece which her body refracts. Brought up by her uncle, a philosopher who adheres to Locke and Epicurus in equal measure, Ida receives an education designed deliberately to shape her cognitive processes 181

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

by means of sensory stimuli. Her uncle, ‘considering the imagination as the mirror of the senses’, determines to expose her only to pleasurable and edifying resources, scouring the beauty of Greek nature and the sublimity of Greek ruins for the ‘impressions’, i.e. senseimpressions, that will form the basis of his niece’s ‘ideas’ (2.31). Ida’s ‘character’, then, or her sense of self and her understanding of the world, is presented as having resulted from a process of sensory sculpting, highly selective and steeped in philhellenic ideology. It has rendered her, like Hyperion, both resolutely committed to the cause of Greek independence and perilously naive. It is as sculpture that Ida is initially portrayed, first nude to the illicit gaze of the debauched (but ultimately, according to the narrative logic of melodrama, repentant) Englishman Lord B___, and afterwards more modestly attired in white drapery. Lord B___ observes her after bathing, asleep beneath a muslin canopy and resembling, as Owenson specifies, the veiled nude ‘Pudicizia’ by Baroque sculptor Antonio Corradini (1.23–5). There is also, in Ida’s recumbent figure, a suggestion of the sleeping Ariadne.33 As Ida moves in her sleep, each new disposition of her body is perceived as a new pose: ‘the variety of her gentle motions might have presented to the statuary the most beautiful, the most difficult models for imitation’, preserving with natural, native grace ‘the true line of beauty’. Withdrawing, Lord B___ reflects that ancient Greek artists Praxiteles and Apelles owed the beauty of Cnidian Aphrodite and Venus Anadyomene respectively to the woman reported to have been their model, the courtesan Phryne, reputedly the first to model nude (1.30).34 Later, when she is formally introduced to Lord B___ and through him to the reader, Ida appears in a ‘snowy tunic, which, in veiling her shoulders and bosom by the simplicity and grace of its folds, gave to her perfect form the air of a fine antique statue’, this time of a decently draped Thetis, Aurora or Atalanta rather than a titillating Venus (1.52). Although at first focalized and fetishized through Lord B___’s objectifying gaze, Ida’s identification with the model rather than with the artwork endows her with a more dynamic relationship to Athens’ classical past. The artist’s model has an agency of her own. Performers’ experiences – and the model is also a performer – resist transcription, but the transience which makes them irrecoverable does not deprive them of validity even when they must be accessed obliquely, in an observer’s verbal translation. Ida, like Emma Hamilton, is represented via the appearance she presents to a viewer, but this experience is not the sole nor even dominant side of the transaction. Phryne steps out of the sea, foam sliding from her thighs, and Apelles is transfixed. Matter in motion, Phryne continues calmly to wring the water from her hair. The commodities created in her image may be static and consumable, but the model is more than mere material. Ida’s occupation of Phryne’s role does not consist solely in physical resemblance. In an anecdote related in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, Phryne was prosecuted in court on a charge of impiety and would have been sentenced to death had her advocate not pulled her robe away and exposed her bare-breasted to the judges, appealing at once to their pity and to their awe at the apparent authentic epiphany of Aphrodite incarnate.35 In an alternative version, Phryne herself was responsible for persuading individual members of the jury to vote for her acquittal.36 This courtroom scene is adopted and adapted by Owenson, who retains its eroticism while muting its explicitness. When Osmyn is 182

Forever Young

indicted on capital charges following a scuffle with the Janissary guards, Ida bursts impetuously into the law-court and enters an eloquent appeal for his life. The magistrate, the Dizdar-Agha, is moved as much by her beauty as by her speech: The disdar beheld at his feet the prostrate form of a beautiful greek girl . . . Her veil had fallen off, and the disordered drapery of her panting bosom was remedied by the luxuriant profusion of black and shining hair, that fell in clustering tresses over it . . . Her white and rounded arms, glittering with jewels, were raised and clasped. 2.87 Again, Owenson has fashioned Ida into an unwitting tableau vivant. She does not remove her veil deliberately, but nor is it stripped from her; rather, the fabric itself falls away like the protective covering from a statue to reveal her finished pose in all its powerful persuasiveness. The reader has already been primed to connect Ida’s court appearance with Phryne’s by her repeated comparison to the artworks Venus Anadyomene and Aphrodite of Cnidus, most recently as she is intercepted by Osmyn’s arrest en route to the public bath-house. Also compared elsewhere to the Empress Irene, to a more ‘virtuous’ version of fifth-century courtesan Aspasia and to a less distraught Sappho (2.42–3), Ida’s unconscious occupation of the role of Phryne inscribes her in the material history of Greece, not only replaying a well-known biographical scene but also standing in as a living model for one of the country’s most famous sculptural synecdoches. As well as playing out in modern dress the courtroom drama of living statue Phryne, Ida performs dances on three occasions which link her somatically and kinaesthetically to a perceived Greek mythological past. At the close of Book 1, in the artfully reconstructed ‘Festival of the Seasons’, Ida leads a chorus of young women ‘in the graceful intricacies of the dance of Ariadne’, described by the narrator as staging ‘a true festival of Delos’. Even before the dance begins, its setting acquires the dual aspect common to the stage-set, the shrine and the ancient site: The portico [of Ida’s bath-house] had assumed the character of an ancient temple by the addition of some beautiful fragments of architecture artfully mingled with the original edifice, which formed the area, and which, with classical precision, contained the marble vase of pure water requisite for the performance of the lustration. The exterior room of the bath answered to the naos; and the dark, the cool, the mystic bath itself, formed the adytum. 1.158 The theatricality of the building’s transformation is evident from its assumption of a ‘character’; specific rooms correspond, in this alternative architectural designation, to the temple’s interior and its inner sanctum, perhaps not coincidentally where Ida was previously observed by Lord B___ after bathing. Original fragments, repurposed, enact their own antiquity. Musicians dressed as satyrs and erotes also contribute to the fantasia. The weather lends the scene an appropriate haptic ambience, the setting sun still ‘ardent’ 183

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

although its intense heat has ‘mellowed’ and the late-afternoon breeze endowing the air with the same ‘languor’ its lingering warmth induces in the festival’s human participants. As Ida, clad in a filmy white tunic, leads her companions in circular patterns that imitate ‘the harmonious movements of the spheres’,37 she is presented as concentrating not on the steps but on the imagery associated with them as ‘images of poetic illusion floated on her fancy, [and] visions of classical elegance recurred to her mind’. For Owenson, this trance-like self-hypnosis informs Ida’s movements, which are elevated above the merely ‘mechanical’ gestures of her troupe to become properly transformative: She appears to lose herself in a thousand gentle turns and graceful wanderings . . . her undulating form resembling the pure flame which air wafts from its aspiring direction . . . Sometimes, with a quickened step, a rapid flight, and a glowing smile, she darted like an herald Iris through the intricacies of the grove; and sometimes assuming the spirited dignity of a young Diana . . . she moves in a slow and gentle languishment . . . And now the dance is finished the charming group disappear as if lost in the profound depths of the labyrinth. 1.165–6 The mythological reference points of Ida’s dance allow readers to share the associations rising in the dancer’s mind as she performs the gestures, creating a pathway to kinaesthetic identification. Dominated by flame-like undulations and the serpentine windings of Ariadne through the labyrinth,38 the figures in Ida’s repertoire also include a darting, iridescent Iris and a fierce Diana struggling not to fall in love. Instead of spectatorial interpretation, Owenson focalizes the dance through Ida’s own internal thought-process, emphasizing the imaginative engagement that sets her apart from the chorus. The qualities of motion ascribed to the various mythological characters portrayed may be understood as Ida’s own self-perception, a cascade of conceptual referents which she realizes as self-movement. Towards the close of Book 2, Ida again leads a chorus of dancers, this time at their staging of the spring festival or Chelidonia. ‘She had indulged her classic fancy in assuming a costume purely antique’, which suggests an element of cosplay in Ida’s mode of dress. ‘Her drapery, pure and light as drifting snow, resembled in its folds that of the priestesses who form the procession in the Metopes of the temple of Minerva . . . The astropeplon, or embroidered scarf, caressed her neck and shoulders.’ (2.156) She carries a cithara as a prop. The scarf becomes an important component of the so-called ‘Ionian dance’ which Ida now performs, ‘as it floated on the breeze, sometimes enfolding her form, sometimes her brow, and sometimes waving in a thousand ways around her, was still less undulating and less graceful in its folds than her pliant flitting form, in all its mazy movements’ (2.161–2). Ida herself likewise floats, almost weightless like a ‘sylph’ or a ‘zephyr’, her body taking on the quality of drifting cloth. Whereas sculpted drapery discloses the limbs beneath, Ida’s body has been assimilated to its garments. What should be clear by now is how much Owenson’s conception of Ida’s Greek dances owes to Emma Hamilton, not only via the conceit of statuary brought to life but 184

Forever Young

also in her shifting of roles during performance and her choice of costume, particularly the versatile scarf or veil. It was the discarded veil which, during Ida’s courtroom scene, enabled her to assume the poses most effective for supplication, and it was a sheer muslin curtain through which Lord B___ scrutinized the marmoreal contours of her body, seeing in them the artist’s model and Muse behind canonical depictions of a classical goddess. In more ways than one, Ida’s performances resemble Emma’s, not least in the challenge they pose for recovering kinaesthetic relationships filtered for the most part through a desiring male gaze. Ida’s final, unfinished performance occurs at the end of Book 4. Having attended a masquerade in England, similarly attired in ancient Greek costume, she is pressed to perform a ‘storied dance’, specified as that of Ariadne, but this time as a solo involving the eloquent scarf of the Chelidonia. As the scarf, the thread, describes ‘the maze of Ariadne’s movements’, however, she becomes aware of Lord B___ among the spectators and her ‘poetic motions’ are momentarily suspended. Resuming, she again catches the eye of a man in the crowd, only to recognize him as Osmyn, present in the guise of a Russian officer: ‘She attempted to continue the dance, but her steps were tottering, her strength wholly failed, her foot became awkwardly entangled in the drapery of the scarf, and she would have fallen had not the hussar [Osmyn] . . . saved her in his arms’ (4.239). This failed performance of Ida’s, disrupted by the same cloth which has featured elsewhere, is paired with another, contrasting dance, a dance which ends not only in failure but with fatal injury to the dancer. Lewd and intoxicated, this dance is performed by the DizdarAgha’s daughter Jumeli, now reduced to begging and (implied) prostitution following her elopement and her own period of exile. Owenson has already established the interchangeability of Ida and Jumeli, stressing their parallel status in Greek and Ottoman society respectively, their mutual attraction to Osmyn and their complementary appearance. Ida watches, shocked, the ‘frantic exertions of the disgusting but singular bacchante’ whose manic capering becomes so wild that she eventually collapses, striking her head on the gutter (4.259–60). The demure Ariadne whose trailing veils precipitate her into the arms of her long-lost lover could easily have found herself in the place of the drunken, broken bacchante. Ida’s sanctioned, sanitized version of (ancient) Greek femininity has been embraced by English high society, but drunkenness and promiscuity – incidentally, two of the accusations that led the bacchantische Emma to be ostracized – do not fall among her animating precedents. The majority of Ida’s sensory encounters with Greek landscapes monuments are mediated visually, at a distance, usefully demonstrating how this visual mode of sensory representation differs from both Hyperion’s education and that of Corinne’s Oswald Nelvil. When Lord B___, for example, asks that Ida act as his guide to the site of Epicurus’ gardens, she merely points them out in the view from her gynakeion. Similarly, Ida’s preference is to show him the ‘prospect’ of Athens from Mt Hymettus, with close-up examination reserved for the antiquary whose technical commentary the pleasureseeking Lord B___ finds tedious (1.116–17). Departing into exile, Ida looks back at Athens for the last time, resplendent in ‘the first rays of dawning light’ and explicitly pictorial as ‘a thousand gradationary tints of light and shade lent their picturesque effect’ 185

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

(4.2–3). Immobile, two-dimensional, this is a Parthenon framed for canvas, untouchable and intractably set apart. Ruins, however, also serve as Owenson’s setting for romantic encounters, cruel imprisonment and dramatic midnight pursuits. In this capacity, they take on a role generally reserved for the castles, crypts and abbeys typical of contemporary gothic fiction. It was unusual at the time of Ida’s composition for classical architecture to present this aspect. Classical ruins could be equally breathtaking, and could certainly prompt equally morbid meditations, but even in a state of decay their well-proportioned lineaments were regarded as harmonious and melancholy rather than redolent of the chaos, darkness, and supernatural terrors adhering to their ‘Gothic’ cousins.39 Owenson, however, depicts the sunny monuments of Athens as uncanny sites, often traversed by her characters at night, where dangers might lurk and irrational forces prevail. She incorporates the Parthenon itself into the climactic, elemental encounter between Ida and Osmyn that forms the novel’s structural centrepiece. A thunderstorm approaches, and ‘the air had now thickened into an impenetrable mist . . . The atmosphere charged with sulphureous particles, was ardent and suffocating’ (2.251). As clouds roll in around them like the ocean and rain sweeps over them like spray, the lovers take shelter inside the Parthenon, their bodies becoming assimilated to parts of its architecture: ‘Ida leaned against a column of the temple – the hand of Osmyn pressed against the column also, and his arm formed an arch above her head’ (2.254). Thunder sends thrilling vibrations through ‘every nerve’, at the same time penetrating to ‘the deepest recesses of the earth’ and culminating in ‘a tremendous crash above the temple of the parthenon, sending a deathless echo amidst its wide and vaulted space, its avenues, and mighty columns’. Vision is rendered useless as the Acropolis is enveloped in darkness, split by blinding ‘sheets of living fire’. Clinging together amid the tumult of wind and thunder, the lovers are shaken along with the edifice around them: The mouldering ruins of different temples which crown the Acropolis . . . gave way in detached pieces to the influence of the hurricane, while the masses of stones, as they fell, mingled their noise with the deeper tones of the distant thunder . . . The ruins, the temple, the storm, and the lovers, finely harmonized with each other. 2.256 Terrified, Ida clings to Osmyn, and they sink down to the wet stone together. Reciprocal, their hearts ‘throbbed with responsive wildness against each other’s palpitations’ as ‘the temple of the parthenon was shaken to its foundations’, and in case the metaphor remains in any way unclear, ‘the emotion which seemed to agitate the creation, appeared to assimilate and mingle itself with that of love and nature’ (2.257). The correlation of sexual passion with violent storm is at least as old as the Aeneid,40 but equally crucial to Owenson’s use of the trope is precisely where she chooses to move her lovers’ bond from the Platonic (ideal, unconsummated, incorporeal)41 to the physical (tactile, material). Owenson emphasizes in the final sentence of Book 2 that Ida was ‘united’ with Osmyn ‘amidst the war of elements – amidst the ruins of antiquity’ (2.266). 186

Forever Young

The parallel syntax here suggests a triple correspondence and indeed a nested relationship in which the rumbling thunderclouds contain the shuddering temple, which contains in turn the palpitating lovers. The three levels, in fact, are ‘united’ by motion, by vibration. There is no stillness anywhere, within or without. This mutual vibration, haptic and acoustic, has a sympathetic function. As the nerves of the reader are themselves strummed by the echo of thunder in the temple’s vast vault and the reverberation of crashing masonry, Ida’s sensibility is amplified, and the merely human turmoil of the erotic becomes the all-consuming blast of the sublime. *

*

*

A similar storm assails Barthélemy’s ‘young Anacharsis’ and his companions during their visit to Poseidon’s temple on the nearby promontory at Sounion. The four philosophers take refuge in the temple as the tempest closes in: Quickly the thunder, with redoubled peals, broke the barrier of darkness and fire suspended over out heads, thick clouds rolled their heavy masses through the air, and descended in torrents on the earth, while the winds, unchained, rushed impetuously on the sea, and upturned its enormous billows. The united roarings of the thunder, the winds, the waves, and the re-echoing caverns and mountains, produced a dreadful sound, which seemed to proclaim the approaching dissolution of the universe. 5.39 The rolling, rushing bruit unleashes kinetic as well as audible force. Retaining from Barthélemy the shelter afforded by the temple porch from the violent descent of darkness, thunderbolts and torrential rain, Owenson transposes her scene to the Acropolis, amplifying it with the disintegration of the temple itself. Echoes create a nonverbal resonance that reverberates across and between both scenes, using the reader’s body as its sounding board.42 Unlike Ida and Osmyn, the response of Barthélemy’s protagonists to their predicament is literally Platonic: inspired by the apocalyptic commotion, Plato himself speculates calmly on the motives of the Supreme Being. Huddled in the damp marble cavity and pounded by elemental energy, Anacharsis listens to a lecture on metaphysics. Published in 1788, Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage de jeune Anacharsis en Grèce became an enormously popular work, running to more than forty editions and translated into eight languages.43 The narrative is framed as a retrospective first-person travelogue authored by Anacharsis, a young Scythian with philosophical aspirations visiting Greece in the mid-fourth century bce. Much of its substance consists of long digressions on historical or current events, customs and festivals, politics, geography and literature. Anacharsis also transcribes conversations on philosophy and natural science undertaken with celebrity interlocutors who include Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Xenophon. Indeed, many passages are direct translations from works such as Plato’s Laws and Republic, Aristotle’s Rhetoric or Xenophon’s Memorabilia, among others. Pausanias is another 187

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

major source, providing material for the narrator’s visits to sites of cultural interest. Poetic texts are also interwoven. In Thessaly, for instance, Anacharsis and his companions observe the local witch cast an erotic binding spell, quoted from Theocritus’ Idyll 2; an unseen singer serenades the romantic dusk with Sappho’s ‘Blessed is he who sits beside you’; Homeric hymns are sung at Eleusis and Delos; and attending a symposium in Athens, Anacharsis is treated to the performance of an Anacreontic pastiche. The Greece which is fashioned from Barthélemy’s farrago is as vivid and multifaceted as the sourcetexts he compiles, alternating styles and genres even as Anacharsis himself maintains a documentary demeanour. On occasion, he is moved to outbursts of sentiment. At the tomb of Theban general Epaminondas, he is ‘seized with an emotion so violent and painful that I was forced to tear myself from an object which I could neither look on nor leave . . . I was alive to sensibility,’ he exclaims (4.291). Moved by similar sentiments, he likewise prostrates himself before Militiades’ memorial at Marathon (5.30). Festivals, on the other hand, provoke tears of joy in sympathetic communion with ‘those affecting emotions which form the sublimest spectacle to a soul endowed with sensibility’ (2.375). In contrast with the dry 200-page technical exposition on drama that occupies half of Volume 6, Anacharsis’ own visit to the theatre (to see a revival of Sophocles’ Antigone) expresses the affective effects of tragedy in melodramatic terms: ‘Hurried along by the enchantment that surrounded me, I seemed to be in the midst of Thebes . . . I flew to the aid of the two lovers; I detested the remorseless author of their sorrows. The most violent passions rent my soul . . . Thirty thousand spectators, melting into tears, redoubled my emotion and delirium’ (1.362), and he spirals into quoting directly from Antigone’s dying lament. Rather than being shown what Anacharsis sees, the reader is immersed in what he feels. A copy of the stimulus, Anacharsis’ transcription of Antigone’s monologue, is then provided, enabling the reader to rehearse their own sympathetic response. Anacharsis is also susceptible to the charm of sites endowed with mythological significance. Although disappointed that nothing remains of Troy, he arrives at the Hellespont ‘full of Homeric passion’ (tout plein d’Homère et de ses passions) and aligns his own actions with episodes in the Iliad. At the point where he leaps ashore, implicitly channelling Protesilaus, he imagines Scamander flaming in battle against Achilles. Approaching the city gates, his heart is wrung by the tender parting of Andromache and Hector, and Mt Ida summons a vision of the goddesses judged by Paris. Oriented by features in the landscape, Anacharsis ‘sees’ (je vis) the action of the poem taking place immersively around him. He comments on a similar experience in the Peloponnese: The heroes themselves seem again to live in the festivals and monuments consecrated to their memory. The view of the places which were the scenes of their illustrious deeds, carries us back to the times in which they lived, realises fiction, and gives animation (mouvement) to the most insensible objects. At Argos, amid the ruins of a subterranean palace, in which it is said king Acrisius confined his daughter Danae, I seemed to myself to hear the complaints of that unhappy princess. On the road from Hermione to Troezen, I imagined that I beheld Theseus 188

Forever Young

raising the enormous rock beneath which were deposited the sword and other tokens . . . These illusions are a homage which we render to celebrity, and satisfy the imagination, which has more frequently need of such nourishment than reason. 4.296 Anacharsis’ experience at the theatre shares characteristics in common with his experiences as a sentimental traveller. Fully conscious that Danae’s laments are as illusory as Antigone’s, Anacharsis nevertheless feeds his greedy imagination on the sites presented to him, populating them with fictional figures whose emotions stir his own. Heroic history acts on him in the same way. At Thermopylae, ‘the memory of so many glorious deeds as it were presented to our eyes, at sight of the places which had been the scenes of action . . . Every object excited our admiration or sensibility’ (3.295). It is not vision alone which excites Anacharsis’ sensibility, however, but his embodied relationship to the dramatic setting as he feels un secret frémissement upon entering the narrow pass compressed (resseré) between the cloud-capped mountains and the restless sea. It is un foule de circonstances, the multitude of sensations crowding in on him, that stimulates Anacharsis’ emotional response. The haptic vividness of ancient Greece also emerges in some of Barthélemy’s set-piece episodes such as the Pythia’s prophetic derangement, an Olympic wrestling match and dance performances on Delos. Although involving the observation of motion rather than Anacharsis’ own interior sensations, these passages contribute kinetic detail to an otherwise disembodied delivery. The imagined ‘convulsions’ of the Delphic priestess, for example, draw on Lucan and Virgil to mobilize a sensational scene: We saw her bosom heave . . . All her limbs were agitated with involuntary motions; but she uttered only plaintive cries and deep groans. At length, with eyes sparkling, foaming mouth, and hair erect, unable either to support the vapour that overpowered her, or escape from the tripod on which she was held down by the priests, she tore the fillet from her head, and, amidst the most dreadful howlings, pronounced a few words. 2.401 Sound and motion dominate Barthélemy’s sensory palette. Tormented by the fumes she has inhaled and overpowered by the men who are holding her down, her limbs in spasm and her voice issuing involuntary groans and howls,44 the priestess’s distress culminates in the climactic gesture of tearing off her headdress, familiar from tragedy (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1264–70; cf. Lucan, Bellum Civile 5.165–224). Anacharsis responds with ‘pity and indignation’, mortified at having requested a prophecy which can only be delivered under such duress, and contrasting his horror with the callous indifference of the priests who cynically prolong their victim’s suffering. Equally animated is Anacharsis’ vigorous account of the wrestling match he attends at the Olympic Games: 189

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

[The wrestlers] began the contest by grappling with their arms. Now resting against each other’s forehead, they pushed with equal strength; then for a while seemed motionless, and again exhausted themselves with ineffectual efforts; now shaking their whole bodies with the most violent agitations, they intertwined their limbs like serpents, stretching them out and contracting them alternately, and now they writhed themselves into every attitude, backward, forward, and on each side, while a copious sweat flowed from their enfeebled limbs . . . They fall, roll in the dust, and each is uppermost in his turn. 3.456 Athletic contests, particularly wrestling, were an iconic component of the idealized Ancient Greece envisaged by eighteenth-century commentators. Like many such perceptions, it can be traced back to Winckelmann, who surmises that ‘the gymnasiums and other places where youths practiced wrestling and other sports naked, and to which one went to see beautiful youth, were the schools where the artists examined the beauty of the body’s build, and the daily opportunity to view the most beautiful naked youths heated the imagination’, prompting sculptural imitation.45 This was illustrated with apparent literalness by the Medici Wrestlers, a sculptural group showing two nude men grappling closely, their limbs interlocked in a dynamic ‘attitude’ which is reanimated in Barthélemy’s account.46 The serpentine writhing of their limbs also implicitly references Laocoön’s wrestling with the snakes that assail him. Dance performances also provide a kinetic conduit to Barthélemy’s Greece. At the panhellenic festival of Apollo on Delos, several dances are performed which anticipate those attributed to Ida by Sydney Owenson. Ismene, the daughter of one of Anacharsis’ friends, dances the role of Latona (Leto) at the head of a chorus of girls: Her companions accompanied her motions with the sound of their voices and lyres . . . Sometimes she fled from the anger of Juno, and then she seemed only to skim the ground; at other times she remained motionless; and this rest painted still more expressively the anguish of her soul. 6.361–2 Another choral dance follows in which the young people participate represents Theseus and his companions wandering through the Cretan labyrinth, also a subject performed by Ida and her friends. Like Ida, Ismene alternates rapid motion with a stillness that retains, or even intensifies, her emotional expressiveness. This oscillation between frantic speed and poised stillness that captures the dancer like an eikōn or agalma, like a statue, is characteristic of Graeco-Roman pantomime.47 Elsewhere, Barthélemy discusses figurative dance in the context of tragic drama, anachronistically retrojecting the properties of imperial-era pantomime – such as its illustrative, ‘eloquent’ gesture, comparison to sculpture, rivalry with oratory, and ‘succession of cadenced movements and expressive rests’ – back to a much earlier period.48 Barthélemy references secondcentury Greek authors Athenaeus and Lucian, whose treatments of dance are derived 190

Forever Young

very much from their own cultural milieu. Nevertheless, Ismene’s mode of performance became influential, informing both literary representations like Owenson’s and (albeit perhaps indirectly) live performances such as Emma Hamilton’s. The most full-bodied re-enactment of Barthélemy’s Greece was performed by artist and salon hostess Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in Paris in 1788. Inspired by a reading of the set-piece conclusion to Book 2 in which Anacharsis attends an Athenian symposium, Vigée Le Brun stage-manages what she represents in her memoirs as a spontaneous reconstruction. As Monique Mosser notes, it is a theatrical event.49 Vigée Le Brun creates her mise-en-scène by covering her dining room with hangings looped up à la Poussin’s historical paintings. She borrows authentic ‘Etruscan’ pottery from an antiquarian acquaintance and uses it to dress her set, laying it out on a bare table over which is suspended a single lamp. Her next concern is costume; fortunately, her own atelier furnishes plenty of fabric sheets of the type she uses for draping her models (ce qui me servait à draper mes modèles). When the first of her guests arrive, she ‘dresses them up’ (j’habille), transforming them (voilà toutes trois metamorphosées) into véritables Athéniennes. The men do not escape her cosplay makeover either, their powder being wiped off and their wigs discarded in favour of purple robes and laurel wreaths. Props are distributed, including more antique pottery for serving the wine and a guitar that someone has disguised as a gilded lyre. The food they consume is based directly on Anacharsis’ menu. Their entertainment involves a choral rendition of ‘Le Dieu de Paphos et Gnide’ from Gluck’s Echo et Narcisse and a recitation by Le Brun of some Anacreontic odes which he has translated. Two guests arriving late are treated to an astonishing tableau animé,50 as if one of the hostess’s own paintings had come alive; they themselves, meanwhile, etonnées and stupéfaits, stand like statues on the threshold for ‘an infinitely long time’ until they can be persuaded to join the revellers. Vigée Le Brun’s souper grec later became notorious for its supposed frivolity and expense, and pivotal to how she branded her own role in the neoclassical revival.51 As a performative conceptualization of classical antiquity, it embodies many of the themes that this book has been examining. Its indirect pathways to reception and heterogenous fusion of sources are typical: the set is based on Poussin, the soundtrack taken from Gluck, the costumes materially identical to those in Vigée Le Brun’s own artwork. An imagined textual scene, the symposium depicted in Barthélemy’s novel after Plato, Xenophon, Anacreon and especially Athenaeus, becomes an immersive and participatory event. The actors are shown forming a pictorial tableau, but it is their sensory reception experience, not that of an external viewer, which Vigée Le Brun explores. Moreover, although she acquires ‘Etruscan’ vases for use in her staged symposium, their authenticity does not appear to afford them special status. Rather, they provide another route to haptic and imaginative engagement, alongside the wreaths, the honey-cakes and the imitation lyre. They are consumables. Like all performances, the souper grec was ephemeral. In fact, despite popular demand, Vigée Le Brun refused to replay it, allowing it instead to assume the aura of a unique encounter of which any repetition would constitute, like Keats’ ‘Cold Pastoral’, froide parodie.52 In this context, the duration of the vases is immaterial. Their function was momentary. They 191

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

are assimilated to elements of the transient set on which Vigée Le Brun and her party act out their playful, irreverent reception of a reception, echoing the echoes of Anacreon in Anacharsis: L’avenir n’est point encore; le présent n’est bientôt plus; le seul instant de la vie est l’instant où l’on jouït. Amans, buvans, chantons Bacchus (2.473; cf. e.g. Anacreontea 8, 32, 38).53 Preservation is an illusion. Whether precious or banal, objects will outlast the hands that grasp them, but when taken up by the feeling imagination, their life resumes.

192

CHAPTER 10 MARY SHELLEY’S ‘DESART RUINS’

Fictionalized autobiography coexisted with autobiographical fiction. In both genres of travel writing, the spatial re-imagining of Rome played a significant role, the city providing both stage-set and haptic correlative to the dramas portrayed as enacted amid the ruins. We have seen how de Staël’s experiences of travel, for example, informed Corinne, and how Goethe and Knight transposed their own encounters into imaginative representations. When in 1825–6 Mary Shelley composed her post-apocalyptic epitaph for the English Romantic generation, The Last Man, it was to Rome that she brought her grieving survivor Lionel to take his final leave of her readers. As George Dekker has argued, The Last Man ‘marks the end of an era in the history of tourism and literature’.1 Ten years after Childe Harold and two decades after Corinne, Lionel’s almost ceremonial circuit of the ruins performs an elegy not only for Mary Shelley’s own past but also for a relationship to the ancient world now undergoing a substantial transformation. Increased tourist traffic, improved efficiency of travel, and standardized guidebooks meant a wider diffusion of information and greater accessibility as the heritage industry expanded.2 In the initial post-Napoleonic rush back to Italy, tourists in eager imitation of Corinne and Childe Harold still sought rapt communion with Avernus, but despite an enduring quest for the picturesque the spontaneity of Romantic travel was harder to achieve (or affect) in a crowd. Lionel’s inescapable isolation recaptures the idealized communion of the individual traveller with the ancient site, but delivers it with an almost parodic thrust of irony that underscores its unattainability.3 The Last Man’s temporal framing is contradictory and its proxy authorship overdetermined.4 Lionel’s first-person account of his idyllic early life and the plague which inexorably depletes the population of the earth is projected into the future, taking place in the final decades of the twenty-first century; before departing Rome for the last time, Lionel symbolically carves the date 2100, ‘last year of the world’, into the topmost stone of St Peter’s (LM p. 340).5 At this point, Lionel’s memoir catches up with his act of composition and becomes commentary: ‘I lift my eyes from the paper . . . A year has passed since I have been thus occupied’ – that is, in recording this history of humanity’s last days, which he dedicates with a fine sense of paradox ‘to the illustrious dead’. He then shifts to the future tense to outline his plan for embarking on an odyssey that will take him beyond the Pillars of Hercules, around the horn of Africa, and far off into the hazy geography of the South Seas. The Last Man’s memoir, then, breaks off at this juncture, consistent with Lionel’s fictional intent of leaving it in Rome as a record for any future visitors to ‘these prodigious relics of the ante-pestilential race’. This already establishes something of a temporal loop, as we find ourselves occupying the role of these future readers (or clothed in the even more uncanny habit of Lionel’s ‘illustrious dead’). In order ostensibly to account for the memoir’s publication as a 193

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

nineteenth-century text, Mary Shelley sets her readers up with a preface which has the effect of further complicating both its internal authorship and its point of composition. In this preface, along with an unnamed companion, she visits ‘the antiquities which are scattered on the shores of Baiae’ on 8 December 1818, the same date on which she and her husband Percy Shelley had themselves made the excursion. Towards late afternoon, having cruised by boat to Cape Miseno and back past Baiae, the Shelleys landed at Lake Avernus. ‘We passed thro’ the cavern of the Sibyl (not Virgil’s Sibyl),’ recalls Percy Shelley in a letter, ‘which pierces one of the hills which circumscribe the lake & came to a calm & lovely basin of water surrounded by dark woody hills & profoundly solitary.’6 This so-called ‘Sibyl’s Grotto’ was historically a communications tunnel connecting Avernus to the nearby Roman naval base at Lacus Lucrinus, but its fey atmosphere inspired even John Chetwode Eustace, author of the Shelleys’ main guidebook A Classical Tour of Italy, to invent for it a suitably mystical past. Eustace begins by speculating that although now blocked by a rockfall, the cave-system once contained the ‘whole scenery’ of Virgil’s Underworld. Their passage across an underground stream ‘represented the Acheron’, the red smoulder of torches on black water providing ‘infernal scenery’ amid the vapour and smoke, and immense vaults ‘closing over us and losing themselves in the darkness’. The modern cave represents to Eustace an imagined ancient cave, which is further imagined to have represented the metaphysical setting of Hades. The Cimmerians of Odyssey 11, he suggests, may also have dwelt in the same cave-system, and these ‘necromantic’ caverns used for communicating with the dead before the more rational Augustan age co-opted them to communicate with the Lucrine naval base. Eustace goes on to endorse the 1745 hypothesis of Bishop Warburton that Aeneas’ katabasis depicts an initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries, as ‘the scenery which now surrounds us’ would have supplied the ideal apparatus for initiations requiring sensory contrasts, adumbrations of secrecy and symbolic descents.7 Having entered the Grotto along with her real-life self, Mary Shelley’s narrator in The Last Man’s preface is shown a flooded passage leading off the main tunnel which brings them to ‘a large, desert, dark cavern’, identified by their guides as the Sibyl’s cave. On one side, however, the narrator spots a ‘small opening’ (LM pp. 1–2). Their guides refuse to accompany them, but the narrator and her companion seize a torch and proceed alone. Their progress is labyrinthine, reminiscent, perhaps, of the early underground excavations at Herculaneum: ‘The passage, which at first scarcely admitted us, quickly grew narrower and lower; we were bent almost double; yet still we persisted in making our way through it.’ The aperture opens out, but the draught extinguishes their torch. Attempting to locate the exit by touch – ‘we groped around the widened space’ – they take a wrong turn and find themselves in a different passage, ascending to yet another cavern where dim twilight filters down to them from a high archway. ‘With considerable difficulty we scrambled up,’ the narrator recalls, but the passages and caverns only multiply into an unnumbered ‘succession’ of identical slopes and scrambles. Finally, they reach the light-source, ‘a wide cavern with an arched dome-like roof ’ and an oculus resembling the Pantheon or the building known as the ‘Temple of Mercury’ at Baiae. Here they discover drifts of bark, papyrus and leaves, covered in writing in languages ranging from ancient Egyptian to modern English. ‘This was certainly the Sibyl’s cave,’ (LM p.  3) the narrator asserts, 194

Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

attributing any discrepancy from its Virgilian counterpart to the region’s volcanic instability. What Percy Shelley dismissed as nothing to do with Virgil’s Sibyl, yields upon further probing by Mary Shelley a parallel katabatic source of inspiration.8 It is from these ‘Sibylline pages’ that The Last Man’s author-narrator claims to have deciphered her text: ‘I present the public with my latest discoveries,’ she declares with an antiquarian’s detachment, before allowing her persona to confess with more autobiographical warmth that while ‘I have been depressed, nay, agonized, at some parts of the recital, which I have faithfully transcribed from my materials’ the process of ‘transcription’ has nonetheless proved cathartic (LM p. 3). Mary Shelley’s self-professed identification with Lionel is well-documented. ‘The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me,’ she wrote in her journal as she began work on the novel in 1824. The following day, news reached her that Byron had died in Missolonghi. Mary Shelley’s double framing of her fiction, both retrospectively as Lionel’s yet-to-be completed memoir and as a proleptic compilation pieced together out of Sibylline fragments exhumed from the distant past, serves in one respect to distance it from personal experience. At the same time, however, the physical exertions of the prologue, the convulsive, compulsive squeeze through cavern after cavern, tunnel after tunnel in a laborious alternation of contraction and expansion inscribes the landscape of Italy into the body of the writer, and vice versa.9 Nor are the resources of the Sibyl exhausted in a single instance, but rather they continue to reward repetitions of the endeavour. The narrator and her companion return to the cave on multiple occasions, repeating the arduous underground journey each time, or ‘sometimes alone, skimming the sun-lit sea’, she plunges in search of further inspiration deep into the cave that may become more familiar in time, but whose convolutions never grow less intricate. *

*

*

The Shelleys’ visit to the region of Naples between November 1818 and February 1819 provoked a cascade of reflections on historical events, including Mary Shelley’s sensorially informed apprehension of Cicero’s final days and Percy Shelley’s Hellenization of Pompeii. They also ventured down to the temples at Paestum, which Percy Shelley understood as ‘Etruscan’ but which nevertheless struck him as a manifestation of sublimity.10 En route to Naples, Mary Shelley detoured to the promontory of Gaeta (‘Caeta’) and the nearby ruins of a villa identified at the time as having belonged to Cicero.11 ‘The whole bay is sanctified by the fictions of Homer,’ she later wrote, but it was the idea of the site as the scene of Cicero’s execution that prompted a more detailed integration of historiography and sense-data: From his villa he beheld the sun rise behind one mountainous promontory to the left pass over the sea and set behind the mountains which form the promontory on the right . . . The waves of the sea broke close under the windows of his villa which was perhaps then shaded as it now is by an olive grove and sented [sic] by orange and lemon trees . . . After twice embarking and being twice driven to shore by the 195

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

wind – (such a wind as that of today which blew fiercely from sea to land) he was carried in a litter through the woods when overtaken by soldiers.12 The orientation of sunrise and sunset is determined by Mary Shelley’s own standpoint, facing out to sea. Some features of the landscape, such as the headlands, have remained unchanged; the sea may have encroached somewhat, but the waves, she infers, would still have provided a constant restless susurration. Occupying Cicero’s place – not his social position as wordsmith or power-broker, but simply his sensing body – she absorbs the shadows of the surrounding orchards. The strong wind blustering against her as she tramps the villa’s grounds she assimilates to that which she believes to have thwarted the orator’s flight by sea,13 and the nearby woods where his supposed tomb is located become the καταφύτων καὶ συσκίων περιπάτων through which he attempts escape in Plutarch’s account (Life of Cicero 48.2). These elements furnish Mary Shelley with a haptic map, a first-person simulation of Cicero’s last day: sunrise on the left, the pulse of the sea, implacable wind, the coolness of impending shade. A last day of another sort is envisaged by Percy Shelley on the basis of Pompeii’s ruins. Despite having recently read a detailed and evocative description in Corinne,14 he had ‘no conception of anything so perfect yet remaining’ and was astonished by the extent of the site. As a result of this first-hand encounter, he developed a vivid conception both of the living city and of its annihilation. ‘My idea of the mode of its destruction is this,’ he relates in a letter to Peacock. ‘First an earthquake shattered it & unroofed almost all its temples & split its columns, then a rain of small light pumice stones fell, then torrents of boiling water mixed with ashes filled up all its crevices.’15 The only accurate part of Shelley’s forensic reconstruction is the rain of pumice, because although Pompeii had suffered a damaging earthquake fifteen years earlier,16 its roofs in fact collapsed under the weight of volcanic ejecta. The pyroclastic surge which sealed Pompeii’s fate becomes ‘torrents of boiling water mixed with ashes’, which has more in common with the mudslide that buried Herculaneum. Nevertheless, it is evident that the sequence of events imagined by Shelley derived from the present excavations, a record of violent movement – shattering, bombardment, torrential submersion – discovered in their current disposition. At the same time, Pompeii yielded tantalizing impressions of a sensual lifestyle interrupted by the eruption. Shelley, like de Staël, observes that while the streets are narrow and the houses small, their peristyle design is ‘admirable . . . for this climate’. Running water was ubiquitous, and the inhabitants enjoyed strolling in shaded porticos across mosaic floors of ‘agate jasper porphyry’ marble or reclining on cushioned couches surrounded by images of gods and ‘small ornaments of exquisite elegance’, some of which had been replaced in situ. This aesthetically pleasurable environment, or what Shelley calls an ‘atmosphere of mental beauty’ meant, he believed, that ‘every human being caught a splendour not his own’, as though beauty were contagious and through its mere proximity would rub off on those immersed in it. Upon leaving their houses, Shelley’s Pompeians, ‘unlike the inhabitants of the Cimmerian Ravines of modern cities’, could witness such natural phenomena as clouds drifting across the stars, moonrise over Vesuvius and the sun setting, ‘tremulous with an atmosphere of golden vapour, between 196

Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

Inarime and Misenum’. This, too, is based on an observation of present-day conditions, namely the perceived openness and spaciousness of Pompeii’s situation. Percy Shelley, like Mary, anchors his description of ancient experience to extant features of the landscape and unchanging diurnal rhythms, likewise perceived from the standpoint of an individual occupying this identical location. Admittedly visual in part, Percy Shelley’s impressions of the ancient city are also haptic and aural. The day on which they visited was ‘radiant and warm’, but punctuated by palpable reminders that its serenity was illusory. ‘Every now and then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air & light of day which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen & tremendous sound.’ The rumble of the volcano is felt, as much as heard, in Pompeii’s streets. Shelley transposes this sensation into his Ode to Naples (1820): I stood within the City disinterred; And heard the autumnal leaves like light footfalls Of spirits passing through the streets; and heard The Mountain’s slumberous voice at intervals Thrill through those roofless halls; The oracular thunder penetrating shook The listening soul in my suspended blood; I felt that Earth out of her deep heart spoke – I felt, but heard not:— 1–9 The deep, subsonic speech of the earth, the ‘oracular thunder’ presaging eruption, produces sympathetic vibrations in the human body which it (inter)penetrates. Mark Lussier has identified the motif of oscillation or the wave-form as a pervasive device in Shelleyan poetics,17 and similarly in this instance it is the sound-waves emanating from Vesuvius that awaken a corresponding ‘thrill’ when they travel through animate matter. Tremors affect the entire landscape, rendering even air and light unsteady, wavering – ‘tremulous’ – and passing like a current through the perceiving bodies themselves. Vibratory motion is a persistent condition of Shelley’s Pompeii, the haptic equivalent of heat-haze or rippling water, creating an extra dimension insofar as it functions as the medium within which all other perceptual activity is conducted. According to Amittai Aviram, poetic language acts as the vehicle for poetic rhythm, the metrical pulse which is similarly oscillatory, moving in peaks and troughs through the resounding body.18 The sound-waves voiced by Vesuvius are too deep to hear, but can be felt. Shelley’s letter continues: ‘This scene is what the Greeks beheld. (Pompeii you know was a Greek city.) They lived in harmony with nature . . . If such is Pompeii, what was Athens?’19 While a Greek settlement did precede Pompeii’s absorption under Roman administration, the city at its point of preservation was culturally, linguistically and politically Roman, and had been so for some 400 years. For Shelley, however, it represented Hellenic antiquity, acting as a surrogate for Athens. Similarly, upon arrival in Italy, Shelley 197

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

immediately begins using its topography to fashion an idea of ‘Greece’ from the mountains around Lake Como, ‘which have glens and rifts opening one to the other such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus’.20 The composition of Prometheus Unbound ‘upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla’ likewise attests to Shelley’s developing habit of Hellenizing Rome. The ivy-cloaked, cavernous shell of Epipsychidion’s ‘pleasure-house’, it has been suggested, is also a version of the Thermae relocated to an Ionian island.21 Shelley’s interaction with the Thermae was not restricted to politely wandering the lawns beneath and watching ‘the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group into new combinations of effect’ with his shifting standpoint. Rather, he followed through on their affordances, scrambling (he claims) up the precipitous remains of an ancient spiral staircase and emerging onto a roofscape surreally reclaimed by ‘entangled wildernesses’ of myrtle, laurel and even fig trees.22 Seductive pathways wind between the peaks and crags of masonry ‘to every part of these immense labyrinths’, feeding the treacherous rifts in between. Shelley stumbles upon a secluded locus amoenus, a mossy glade thick with anemones where he rests, reclining in the shade of the stonework while the pathways continue their enticing meander over the suspended arches, ‘threading the perplexed windings – other labyrinths, other lawns, & deep dells of wood & lofty rocks & terrific chasms’.23 This indefinite multiplication of a route already traced in detail is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s imagined passage though the Sibylline caves in The Last Man’s preface. Like the cave system, Percy Shelley’s aerial labyrinth also involves upward motion rather than descent, and it likewise becomes a source of inspiration,24 the locus amoenus mythologized into the gestatory context of Prometheus Unbound just as the Sibyl’s grotto serves as the womb of Mary Shelley’s invention. In both cases, physical movement through the serpentine ‘perplexities’ of natural rock carved into tunnels, or manmade structures hollowed out by time, is represented as analogous to the processes of creative thought. Whereas Mary Shelley’s labours lead to the end of the world, however, Percy Shelley delivers a delirious paean to liberty and reconciliation. The mythic Greece of Prometheus Unbound had not yet come down to earth, but the Hellenism of both Shelleys became more tightly interwoven with current events over the course of 1820 through their acquaintance with Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a Greek political exile then resident in Pisa. Mavrokordartos became particularly close to Mary, whom he tutored in modern Greek, and it was to Mavrokordatos that Percy Shelley dedicated his verse drama Hellas, written following the declaration of Greek independence in 1821.25 With the outcome of the revolution still in doubt, Shelley borrowed the dramatic structure of Aeschylus’ Persians to promote the cause of Greek liberation from Ottoman rule. For Shelley, as for other European intellectuals, since freedom was synonymous with Greece, it was unthinkable that Greece should not itself be a free state, despite the slippage of these terms between their ancient and modern, literal and ideological, philosophical and geopolitical definitions.26 In Hellas, an overt plea to ‘the rulers of the civilised world’ to support the nationalist revolution, Shelley manages both to exhibit the cautionary tragedy of a Greek defeat and to universalize an unplaced, 198

Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

ahistorical, transcendent ‘Greece’, floating on ‘the chrystalline sea / of thought’ to safe harbour in the European cultural imaginary: If Greece must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble And build themselves again impregnably In a diviner clime To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime Which frowns above the idle foam of Time. Hellas 1002–7 Like the marble slabs that sprang up spontaneously to form Hyperion’s Athens, the conceptual fragments of Shelley’s wreck will reassemble themselves without external agency through the civilizing influence they will continue to exert. Although it was Thebes whose city walls rose to Amphion’s lyre, the synecdoche of Shelley’s Greece, the beacon of Liberty (681–3), is of course Athens. Despite soliciting sympathetic identification with the partisans of Greek independence (‘We are all Greeks’), Hellas also sublimates its own ideological substance to such a degree that the Greek connection to place is ironically undermined. Also published in 1821, the verses on ‘the Isles of Greece’ which Byron inserted into the third canto of Don Juan served a similarly philhellenic purpose.27 More stridently patriotic than Hellas, they are at the same time presented more circumspectly, placed in the mouth of a chameleonic performer assuming the accents of a Greek balladeer who ‘sang or would or could or should have sung’ this type of refrain (Don Juan 3.87). Byron, unlike Shelley, does not fully commit to the conflation of ancient and modern Greece performed by the singer. His narrator does not simply adopt the role of a balladeer, but the role of a man pretending to be a balladeer while making no secret of his pretence. ‘Isles of Greece’, meanwhile, is more firmly emplaced than Hellas: The mountains look on Marathon And Marathon looks on the sea, And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free. For standing on the Persian’s grave, I could not deem myself a slave. DJ, Canto 3 Like Hyperion, the speaker of these lines locates his ideological epiphany at a site particularly charged with historical significance. Unlike Shelley, Byron had himself spent time in Greece, during the unorthodox Tour conducted in 1809 and 1810 which had taken him from Portugal and Spain to Malta, the Greek mainland, Albania and the Ionian coast as far as Constantinople, and which informed the first three cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.28 199

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

The two defining characteristics of Byron’s Childe Harold are movement and solitude. Harold, ‘more restless than the swallow in the skies’, remains in perpetual motion throughout the Cantos as a necessary condition of their progress. The narrator’s climactic encounter with Rome (Canto 4), while more spatially contained than the Alps or the Adriatic, is no less mobile. The visitor is invited to ‘plod your way / o’er steps of broken thrones and temples’, over a world spread literally ‘at our feet’ that must be navigated with caution, as its mazes are treacherous: ‘stumbling o’er recollections’, we attempt to walk the fragmentary city, stubbing a toe on a buried capital or barking a shin on a monument half-remembered from a history book, or stuttering as we try to call its identity to mind. With less impediment, the narrator paces the silent galleries of the Colosseum, where ‘my steps seem echoes strangely loud’ in contrast to the vast, bloodthirsty mob who at one time ‘roar’d or murmur’d like a mountain stream / Dashing or winding as its torrent strays’, the swell and ebb of voices likewise conceived as a form of common movement, albeit one which has ceased. Solitude is Harold’s other defining condition, and again Rome is no exception. Typically, it is Nature where Harold turns for relief from the ‘crushing crowd’ of human society and the diversions in which he has hitherto overindulged. In Canto 3, he seeks the companionship of mountains and oceans, preferring ‘the desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam’. ‘To climb the trackless mountain, all unseen,’ remarks the narrator, ‘is not solitude: ’tis but to hold / Converse with Nature’s charms.’29 Nevertheless, despite this professed preference ‘to entwine / My thoughts with Nature rather in the fields / Than art in galleries’, the manmade edifices of ancient Rome still exert a powerful attraction. This largely results from their persistent characterization as ‘desert’ space, or a ‘void’ resistant to rational interpretation. Like Shelley’s conversion of the Baths of Caracalla into a mountain range, Byron’s approach to Rome emphasizes its emptiness: The Niobe of nations! There she stands, Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither’d hands, Whose holy dust was scatter’d long ago; The Scipios’ tomb contains no ashes now; The very sepulchres lie tenantless Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow, Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle her distress. 4.lxxix Personified as the epitome of maternal bereavement, Byron’s Rome is defined by lack, by her (childless crownless voiceless tenantless) negation. Deprived of succession, authority, and even the ability to speak, she is utterly disempowered. The aged (‘wither’d’) matriarch is caught frozen in an act of futile, semi-delusional mourning, her gesture persisting even when the urn is empty, her effusion an embarrassment to be discreetly veiled by the yellow mantle of the equally decrepit river god (‘Old Tiber’). ‘Distress’ implies both 200

Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

emotional suffering and euphemistic nudity. The obscene grief of Byron’s dishevelled, skeletal Rome has already been silenced, and now should be decently submerged. The cityscape through which the Tiber flows is both disorderly and vacant – a ‘marble wilderness’ – and consists entirely of stone, all organic materials having long since perished and even the very ashes and dust of its sepulchres dispersed. ‘Rome is as the desert,’ Byron asserts; but like other distress’d females, it is precisely her disregard for decorum that renders the ancient city vulnerable to circulation as a ‘chaos of ruins’ and a deliciously impenetrable ‘void’. Byron’s investment in representing Rome as ‘desert’ plays into his construction of the Romantic traveller’s intuitive apprehension of ancient sites. As Stephen Cheeke observes, ‘Hostility to connoisseurship, anti-antiquarianism, and scorn for archaeological knowledge were important parts of the sensibility of visitors such as Byron and Shelley in Rome.’30 Byron’s narrator positively revels in his factual ignorance of whether the debris of the Palatine was once ‘Temples, baths, or halls? / Pronounce who can; for all that Learning reap’d / From her research hath been, that these are walls’. Seeking such information only undermines the ruins’ moral lesson of inevitable human (and imperial) oblivion. Vision, moreover, provides only deceptive mirages in the ‘double night’ cast by the monuments’ annihilation and the visitor’s ignorance. Interpretation is fabrication. The illusion of complete, identifiable buildings arises because the eyes (the visual cortex), accustomed to making sense of comprehensible scenes, cannot cope with the sensory deprivation of desert, void and darkness.31 In the absence of visual logic, however, ‘we but feel our way to err’ (CHP. lxxxi): enveloped (‘wrapt’), enshrouded in doubt, all we can do is proceed by touch, groping through the labyrinth clutching at any hint of identity, any association, however misleading. Herder’s ‘silent sense of touch that feels things in the dark’ recurs here, albeit without any direct connection. In both instances, haptic apprehension is figured as taking place in darkness, even when the eyes are wide open. In apparent defiance of Childe Harold’s blind stumbling, Byron’s travelling companion John Hobhouse published a learned commentary to accompany Canto 4, helpfully illuminating the identity of the various architectural remains consigned by Byron to obscurity. Despite Byron’s later relegation of Historical Illustrations to the genre of popular guidebooks he affected to despise, its initial purpose, as Cheeke shows, was entirely compatible with Childe Harold’s meditative approach.32 Historical Illustrations is several times cross-referenced as a source of additional detail in the notes to Canto 4 on which Byron and Hobhouse collaborated. The commentary follows the structure of Canto 4, but coalesces around the material structures featured in the poetic text. Although Hobhouse makes a show of repeatedly correcting Edward Gibbon on minor points, his treatment owes a great deal in this respect to Decline and Fall, all the more so as its primary focus is not the ancient Roman history of each monument but rather the history of its dereliction and/or repurposing from late antiquity onwards. In this respect it also resembles Joseph Forsyth’s approach in his Italian guidebook Remarks on Antiquities (1813). By cataloguing false or mutually exclusive identifications, ruins such as those on the Palatine can be stripped of error (e.g. 193–4). The scarcity of authentic Republican 201

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

ruins is particularly disappointing. Regarding the three columns that may have once belonged to the Temple of Concord where Cicero assembled the Senate,33 Hobhouse remarks that ‘it is something to hope that we tread the site and may touch a fragment of the Porch’, but admits the edifice cannot be securely identified, and ‘the local sanctity of the Roman Forum is somewhat impaired by the doubts which obscure the greater part of the conspicuous remains’.34 The guiding premise of Historical Illustrations is that sacredness of place, or what Hobhouse terms ‘local sanctity’ ought ideally to be based on unshakeable factual ground, as ‘the man most willing to give scope to his imagination would hardly choose to have any foundation for his feeling than truth’. Only once authenticity has been established beyond question – as in the case of the Colosseum, or the tomb of Metella – should one give full rein to imaginative faculties. The reason for this caution is made explicit in one of the Notes pertaining to the statue of Pompey (CHP 4.87), which may not in fact depict Pompey at all, but nevertheless, so imposing is the stern majesty of the statue, and so memorable is the story, that the play of the imagination leaves no room for the exercise of the judgment, and the fiction, if a fiction it is, operates on the spectator with an effect not less powerful than truth.35 Whereas Charlotte Eaton is quite content to follow the example of the actors in Mort de César and allow these powerful fictions to coalesce around the statue in full consciousness of her own role in their manufacture, enhancing her aesthetic experience of the artefact, this cognitive dissonance agitates Hobhouse. As corroborated in the study by Huang et  al. described above in the Introduction,36 the inherent properties of an artwork influence its perception less than the narratives associated with it. Hobhouse concedes the futility of stripping Pompey’s statue of its historical costume. The educated traveller, or the traveller furnished with an appropriate guidebook, will arrive in Rome primed to apprehend everything around him as antique: ‘he will already have peopled the banks of the Tyber with the shades of Pompey, Constantine, and Belisarius . . . [the streets] will have imposed upon his fancy with an air of antiquity congenial to the soil’, and even beggars praying in scraps of ecclesiastical Latin ‘contribute to the agreeable delusion’. The best condition for experiencing what Hobhouse again calls the city’s ‘local sanctity’ is isolation: ‘the required solitude may be occasionally found amongst the ruins of the Palatine, or the columns of the great Forum itself . . . The present town may be easily forgotten amidst the wrecks of the ancient metropolis’; it is possible in the ‘fragments of the old city’ to ‘not behold a single human being’.37 This Romantic aspiration for unmediated communion with a location, for the imaginative investment facilitated by stripping away all modern distractions, is realized with ironic completeness when Mary Shelley’s Lionel reaches Rome. His isolation amid the city’s ‘desart ruins’ fulfils the desire expressed in Percy Shelley’s complaint that attaining full immersion in a quasi-fictional Italian past is impossible when bombarded by reminders of its present: ‘In Italy it is impossible to live contented; for the filthy modern 202

Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

inhabitants of what aught to be a desart sacred to days whose glory is extinguished, thrust themselves before you forever.’38 Contrasting a perceived contemporary degeneracy with the vanished marvels of classical antiquity is a well-trodden topos, but Percy Shelley’s fantasy of solitude is echoed with such pointed poignance that it acquires an alternative valence in Lionel’s all-too-literal enactment.39 The ‘sacred desart’ – that is, a site deserted by everyone save the lone initiand – relies on a heterotopic segregation from the everyday spaces that exercise no such hold on the imagination. If its boundaries dissolve, however, rendering the whole world an unpopulated, undifferentiated ‘desart ruin’, imaginative engagement ceases to be a pleasurable diversion and becomes instead an agonizing culde-sac of self-delusion. The privileged Romantic tourist exercises the prerogative of defining space, of apprehending the Colosseum as a ‘magic circle’ rather than a source of income; an ‘exhaustless mine / of contemplation’, not a literal quarry. Like Shelley’s Alastor, he fetishizes the geographical zone of classical history as ‘always already in ruins’.40 Its ideal condition is (has always been) emptiness. This orientalizing compulsion to supplant local occupation, interpretation, experience and usage with one’s own aesthetic values is accompanied by a corresponding desire to draw away from the herd, the swarm, the rabble of fellow tourists. I want it all to myself, whispers the Romantic traveller. This sacred waste, exhaustless. Mine. Lionel heads for Rome because the springtime indifference of the natural world to human depopulation has become unbearable. His itinerary traces that of every other Grand Tourist: travelling through the Campagna, he enters through the Porta del Popolo and proceeds along the Corso. He stakes out the Colonna Palace, another source of inspiration for the Shelleys, as his sleeping quarters, soothed by the reassuring density of manmade structures. The following morning he emerges onto the Monte Cavallo (the Quirinal Hill) beside the equestrian statues of the Dioscuri. His thoughts as he passes along streets ‘strewed with truncated columns, [and] broken capitals’, past walls comprised of fragments ‘which once made part of the palace of the Caesars’ (LM pp. 335–6), follow a track similarly familiar from tourist literature. He marvels at holding ‘familiar converse’ with the quasi-mythical city he has dreamed of visiting, and finds solace in allowing the ‘majestic and eternal survivor of millions of generations of extinct men’ to bury his personal sorrow in her common sepulchre. This consolation reaches its greatest intensity in the Forum. Here, Lionel summons figures from the ancient Roman past, ‘recalling to the haunted cell of my brain vivid memories of time gone by’, although these ‘memories’ are not his own, but those of the place. He imagines the Forum frequented by icons of the Roman Republic – Camillus, the Gracchi and Cato – followed by the imperial ‘heroes of Tacitus’, individuals such as Thrasea Paetus who resisted tyranny with philosophy. It is not just these famous characters who populate Lionel’s ‘scene’, however, but also their accompanying choruses, the ‘crowds of the unnamed’ also present in the Forum, babbling and mobile as they ‘honoured, applauded, or wept for’ those prominent men in the speaking roles (LM p. 336). The first crack has appeared in Lionel’s exemplary tourist façade. Although he exercises considerable imaginative willpower – ‘I strove, I resolved to force myself to see the Plebeian multitude and lofty Patrician forms congregated around’ – these ancient 203

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

inhabitants are replaced after a while by the ghosts of the more recently departed. Lionel instead begins to see in their place cowled friars attendant on the Pope, who blesses a congregation of the faithful, girls in traditional dress, and a herdsman driving his cattle through the now-abandoned Campo Vaccino. A ghostly modern Italy subsumes Lionel’s vision of ancient Rome. He spends a long time lost in this reverie, ‘hustled by countless multitudes’ until he can ‘almost hear the shouts of the Roman throng’, the same throng of modern-day inhabitants whose importunities Percy Shelley would have deplored (LM pp. 336–7). For Lionel, however, they are no longer a distraction. Rather, they have become the substance of his effort continuel de l’imagination. Lionel represents this activity as flight, as virtual motion, his ‘soul’ performing ‘wheeling circuits round and round the spot’ until, exhausted, it falters, and suddenly drops ‘ten thousand fathom deep, into the abyss of the present’ (LM pp. 337), returning Lionel to himself and sharpening the peak of his loneliness. This imagined flight resembles both Herder’s glide around the architecture of classical temples, soaring up columns and swooping down façades (KW4 2.12, p.  280), and Hyperion’s vertiginous seesaw between the Aether and the Abyss (e.g. pp. 33, 35, 48). Lionel’s flight and fall is both spatial and emotional, making use of the set of the Forum and its affordances to structure his affective condition. In other respects, the scene to which he returns is idyllic, performing an exact reversal of Percy Shelley’s recall from the sacred desert of ruinscape to the noisy bustle of conurbation. The deserted ruins slumber under open sky and gentle shadows; a single buffalo paces up the Via Sacra, and Lionel stands as the lone witness of this paradigmatically picturesque prospect of the Forum. But there is no delight in such isolation when granted it as a permanent condition. Similarly, Lionel is able to play out the fantasies of many visitors to the Vatican museums and spend hours alone in their galleries. The lifelike appearance of the sculptures both captivates and infuriates him as he perceives ‘unsympathizing complacency’ and ‘supreme indifference’ in their marble unresponsiveness. Almost convincing himself they are capable of movement, he has no scruples about touching them: ‘Often, half in bitter mockery, half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy proportions, and, coming in between Cupid and his Psyche’s lips, pressed the unconceiving marble’ (LM p. 338). The barren stone can neither return the touch nor even recognize that it is being touched.41 Once again, Lionel acts out in practice what tourists are frequently represented as covertly desiring, but finds no satisfaction in the enactment. Embracing the perfect limbs of classical sculpture turns just as hollow as having the Forum all to oneself, in the absence of human community. Charlene Bunnell has demonstrated how characters prone to self-dramatization in Mary Shelley’s fiction also exhibit a dangerous egocentrism that reduces fellow human beings to spectators, or at most to extras, who reinforce the protagonist’s self-centred and ultimately self-destructive sensibility. She shows how The Last Man employs both the trope of the theatrum mundi and the generic features of tragedy throughout.42 While predominantly concerned with characterization and language, Bunnell also observes that ‘Shelley’s characters know well the effect of setting and how to maximize a scene or tableau’.43 The earth, devastated by plague, becomes in Lionel’s own words ‘a vacant space, 204

Mary Shelley’s ‘Desart Ruins’

an empty stage – for actor or spectator there was no longer aught to say or hear’ (LM p. 223), and the icy plateaus of the Alps ‘gave as it were fitting costume to our last act’ (LM p. 309). In gravitating to Rome, Lionel selects the most apposite setting for the finale of his one-man show, and he makes use of it in such a way that his kinetic interactions with the space inform the way that he perceives it. With theatricality in mind, we can read Lionel’s movements, his body language, as stage directions indicative of a relationship being formed with this crumpled and multiplicitous set. The deserted shell of Rome is endowed with significance through the performance of action, much as Sofer has argued regarding the animation of theatrical props; and in the process Lionel’s own body-image is reshaped through the physical attitudes he adopts, along the lines proposed by Kemp.44 Entering the Piazza del Popolo, he ‘saluted with awe its time-honoured space’, suggesting a gesture of greeting combined with abasement in order to externalize veneration. Lionel’s need to mark performatively his passage through what would otherwise be ‘barren’ land is also signalled as he ‘hails’ the Tiber and the Campagna, renaming and reclaiming them with a human speech act (LM p. 335). His salutation of the Piazza del Popolo serves a similar function. The following day he embarks on what he calls ‘rambles in search of oblivion’, seeking to blunt the edge of his internal suffering with motion and distraction. His confrontation with the colossal Dioscuri at first modifies his body image such that he ‘shrunk into insignificance in my own eyes’ (LM p. 335). The scale of the statues and their superhuman longevity initially diminish Lionel in comparison, but his identification with their form restores his estimation of his own relative stature, as these massive, enduring and godlike figures are imitative of him and of his kind, the product of human skill dedicated to the glorification of bodies like his own.45 A similar phenomenon occurs when Childe Harold entered the Pantheon: Enter; its grandeur overwhelms thee not. And why? It is not lessened; but thy mind Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal. [. . .] This Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great Defies at first our nature’s littleness, Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate. CHP 4.cxlvi–clviii Byron’s poem may be Mary Shelley’s immediate intertext, but even closer perhaps to Lionel’s experience is Winckelmann’s attitude before the Belvedere Apollo, where the beholder ‘forgets all else’ and ‘adopts a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner’.46 Both mind and body expand. When standing before the Farnese Hercules or Belvedere Torso, Herder’s fühlende Einbildung likewise enables the sufficiently 205

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

sensitized beholder to ‘feel Hercules in his whole body and this body in all its deeds’ (KW4, 2.3, 219), appearing to experience the same enhancement of body schema that Mary Shelley allows to Lionel. In the Forum, Lionel’s contact with antiquity becomes more intimate. ‘I embraced the vast columns of the temple of Jupiter Stator . . . and leaning my burning cheek against its cold durability, I tried to lose the sense of my present misery (LM p. 336).’ It is not that Lionel would be incapable of summoning his pageant of ghosts in any other position, but rather that it is in the midst of this physical contact, clinging to the column like a sailor to a mast as time pitches giddily around him, that he actually succeeds in generating the illusion. The ‘storied precincts of Rome’ (LM p. 336)., densely ‘crumpled’ spaces enfolding manifold narratives,47 have a therapeutic effect, supplying ‘a medicine for my many and vital wounds’. The connection between performance and therapy has been explored, for example, by Karelisa Hartigan,48 and Lionel represents the ruins themselves, the ‘storied precincts’, as an apparatus for cognitive restructuring, for emotional rehabilitation: a psychoactive agent; a drug. His feverish skin is cooled by the marble that drains out its heat but at the same time nourishes a kind of conscious delirium, supplying the ground for a double (or even triple) vision of the site’s temporal plurality. After a while, Lionel adopts a more conventional sitting position ‘at the foot of these vast columns’ in order to act as spectator of what he calls ‘the Diorama of the ages’ (LM p. 336).49 He is no passive witness, however, but works his imagination hard as ‘I strove, I resolved, to force myself ’ to perceive the successive crowds of people thronging the ‘scene’, crowds who indeed seem tangible, jostling him as they pass. This is theatre of an immersive or participatory kind in which the attendee’s experience is intensified by his own psychosomatic commitment and the bodily attitude he assumes. Lionel’s selfhypnosis recalls Charlotte Eaton’s, similarly stimulated by physical presence on site, as well as de Staël’s effort continuel. Among the modern figures surrounding him, in fact, he even glimpses Corinne en route to the Capitol, history and fiction blending in a surreal ‘waking dream (LM p. 337).’ Enactment and re-enactment have been central to the relationships formed by individuals with artefacts throughout the period under discussion, identifying instances when moving bodies were deployed self-consciously as a perceptual medium. Lionel’s interaction with Rome marks the passing of this impulse, or rather futilely resists its increasing codification into the relational modes of the archaeologist, the tourist, the curator. Each of these roles has its own kinetic and kinaesthetic field, its own modus tangendi or manner of making embodied contact with material remains, and hence its own type of cognitive apprehension. Of course, the precise dimensions and composition of such receptions are as diverse as the individuals within whom they occur, but in a general sense, by the 1820s the free play of the feeling imagination no longer held sway as an approach.

206

CONCLUSION

Terminology such as ‘immersive’, ‘interactive’, ‘virtual’ and ‘simulation’ has recurred throughout this study. As digital technologies transform the reception of artefacts and consequently the perception of their source cultures, it is important to consider the senses that are brought into play at heritage sites and museums and the sensory paradigms which are privileged as a result.1 Vision establishes a different relationship to one which is created by sound, which differs again from one which emphasizes touch and/or selfmovement. Concentrating on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a formative period in the modern conceptualization of ancient Greek and Roman culture, this study has shown that the haptic senses, kinaesthesia above all, have the potential to make a profound contribution to our psychosomatic apprehension and appreciation of alien worlds. Some identifiable principles conducive to developing the haptic imagination are summarized here: preparation, attitude, handling, setting, fabrication and play. 1. Preparation Travellers of this period concur that it is literary connotation that invests the sites they visit with narrative, identity and interest.2 Ancient poets – Homer, Ovid, Horace, Virgil – and geographers such as Strabo provide one obvious set of reference points, but John Chetwode Eustace also recommends Corinne, which ‘inspires . . . that lofty temper of mind, without which we can neither discover nor relish the great and the beautiful in art or in nature’.3 The visitor remains oblivious to discoveries he has not been instructed to anticipate, and insensible to aesthetic tremors he has not been primed to recognize. De Staël herself makes the point that ruins are reanimated only through un effort continuel de l’imagination, without which they are simply débris. The imaginative filters applied on site, directing the visitor’s attention to particular aspects of the scene, are the product of prior literary exposure. Interpretation works both ways. Sicily and the Troad provide a sensory ‘commentary’ on Homer’s epics, while many visitors remark on the enhanced understanding produced by reading ancient literature in an associated location. Words and sense-experience flesh out one another, lending physical substance to written signs (the wind off the sea, long-awaited footsteps in the alley) and glamour – ‘charm’ – to tunnels, streams and scattered stones. 2. Awareness/attitude Imaginative encounters are conditioned by the way in which the recipient experiences the movement of her body. Her embodied relationship to structures or objects, whether or not 207

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

it involves direct contact, determines her affective and cognitive response. This may be articulated in terms of affordances, or the kinetic possibilities availed by elements of an environment, which the visitor might follow through upon or leave latent. Emma Hamilton follows through, choreographing elaborate routines around the vases in her husband’s collection and the figures they depict. Johann Herder, on the other hand, shows how a subtler form of somatic attention can be cultivated in the public gallery. Scaling the Baths of Caracalla, crawling into the Scipios’ tomb, pacing the triumphal route up to Monte Albano, tumbling off a ladder onto a bed of ashes, visitors record how haptic and kinaesthetic interactions with ancient sites affected their perceptions. It is important to note that the actual movement performed is less significant in this respect than the attention that is paid to its performance. Just as Gibbon’s preparatory reading is impressive but not essential, so Emma’s choreographic expertise need not be attained in order to acquire a haptic sense of place. The wild gesticulations of the artist observed by Anna Jameson in the Colosseum need not be emulated. Actions as simple as walking, leaning on a fallen column or fingering grains of dust can be invested with purpose. Stillness itself can be attentive.

3. Handling Chapter 7 established a distinction between ‘touching’ and ‘handling’. The Verrine practice of touching is invasive, exclusive, acquisitive and possessive, objectifying the artefact and treating it as subordinate to one’s own desires, or symbolic of one’s own success. Handling, conversely, is thoughtful, respectful. It establishes an intersubjective relationship, acknowledging that the recipient can be transformed in such encounters as much as the artefact, and in many cases even more so. Handling is as ephemeral as a pas de deux but touching yearns for permanence, by taking the artefact into one’s own possession or exercising an assumed right to change its location. Touching and handling may be externally indistinguishable, but the difference is apparent if the leering cunnyseurs of Rowlandson’s caricatures are contrasted with the tender pressure of Sophie von la Roche’s handclasp. There is undeniably a gendered aspect, although it should not be overstated. Anna Miller pocketing Pompeian vertebrae personifies touch as much as Herder’s beholder of sculpture exhibits the transience and aestheticism of handling. For those who touch, artefacts are an end in themselves, whereas for those who take the time to handle, they become the means and medium by which their past is accessed.

4. Site, set and setting This spatial taxonomy distinguishes the different levels on which a location with a historical and/or mythological dimension is imaginatively perceived.4 The term ‘site’ refers to the location itself, regardless of what remains there: its coordinates are known to have once been those of the plain of Marathon, Horace’s villa, the Trojan War, the Republican Forum, the entrance to Hades. By walking over this ground, the visitor 208

Conclusion

perceives himself as precisely retracing the steps of its ancient occupants, which gives his movement an uncanny frisson of repetition as he casts himself as their shadow. ‘Set’ introduces the theme of theatricality. The set is the site’s contemporary condition. It may take the form of ruins, or bare ground, or a completely different structure (such as the church of Santa Maria d’Araceli on the Captiol). In any case, it is this apparatus which the visitor uses to generate the kinaesthetic impressions which form the basis of his imaginative reconstructions. Like a stage-set, it supplies the material attributes via which the visitor-performer realizes the otherwise nonexistent otherworld of the setting. In theatrical performances, settings are fictional; on heritage sites, they are in the main historical, but nevertheless require the same degree of effort to construe. As we have seen, however, sets do not need to be constructed on site, and the settings the represent may be fictitious themselves, or composites, such as Blundell’s garden temple or Thomas Hope’s shrine to Aurora, giving access to an imagined version of antiquity derived from diverse sources and authentic only in terms of intended effect.

5. Fabrication This brings us to the penultimate principle of haptic reception, that of fabrication or the simulacrum. Through fabrication, something that never existed is given substance, acquiring in the process an artificial authority. I have argued that insofar as haptic effectiveness is concerned, the actual authenticity of the artefact is immaterial. Understood as examples of the finest Grecian art, the Vatican sculptures after the interventions of Winckelmann and Cardinal Braschi became the touchstone of aesthetic discourse for half a century.5 More self-consciously, John Soane’s house-museum captured in its capriccio sensations arising from the ruin-fields of Rome as depicted by Piranesi. Another example is the ‘restoration’ of marbles in Cavaceppi’s workshop. Eaton tips her readers a knowing wink as she informs us that ‘there is a charm in a name, even when we know it is unreal’,6 enabling her to engage imaginatively with structures designated as ancient monuments regardless of their provenance. The same playful cognitive dissonance also informs Thomas Hope’s fireguards and Wedgwood’s inkwells, making manifest a domesticated antiquity, translating the monumental into the miniature and bringing the palace of the Caesars to your dressing-table in the form of a porphyry statuette. The sensation of ‘antiquity’ is situated in the recipient, provoked by any identified stimuli with which he or she comes into contact. As well as material, these fictive simulations also take literary form, historical novels inciting interoceptive responses through what was understood as the sympathetic transference of nervous sensation.

6. Deep play It is in this ludic zone, then, where impressions of the ancient world are formed. Like pilgrims, like actors, travellers invested their surroundings with significance not 209

Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750–1820

appreciable to the naked eye. With the sacred logic of an esoteric ritual, debris was converted to ‘charmed and classic ground’ by the initiate whose preparation enabled him to perceive something deeper in the circling dance and the serpentine designs, and yet this perception is manufactured, self-generated, consciously double. In 1782, strolling in the Boboli Gardens, diarist William Beckford indulges in a fantasy of time travel. He passes through cypress groves and avenues of ‘luxuriant vines’ until he emerges before the palazzo, so far ‘enraptured’ that he anticipates hearing at any moment the voice of Roman voluptuary Lucullus summoning him to dine. Like Marcus Flaminius, Beckford reads the garden landscape doubly. Never unaware of the conceit he is developing, he portrays his passage as at once banal and mystical. It is an act of deep play, requiring simultaneous commitment and consciousness of illusion.7 His commitment – his investment, his effort continuel – has a kinaesthetic basis, a reflexive awareness of his own movement into the sinuous avenues and the way the resulting sensations are making him feel. Returning to the role of movement in cognitive processing, we can now reappraise in the context of classical reception Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s observation: ‘The epistemological object is not out there in the world such that it can be taken as it presents itself, factually given, for it is not only never altogether there to be taken as such, but . . . exists across the acts of perception through which we come to constitute it.’8 Objects – be they a castrated hermaphrodite, Ovid’s tomb, an imitation Etruscan hairclip, The Ruins of Palmyra or ashes in an urn – come into conceptual being as part of kinetic transactions that may or many not be tactile and may or may not involve an authentic artefact. Kinaesthetic reception involves the reconstitution of as many ancient worlds as there are recipients. Characterizing the acts of reception discussed in this study as fundamentally acts of performance or acts of play should not diminish their value or validity. Rather, having acknowledged that all perceptions of the past are necessarily embodied, in the way that all experience is embodied, and that embodiment entails self-movement, we can begin paying conscious attention to the ethical manipulation and personal practice of kinaesthesia in formulating our antiquities.

210

NOTES

Introduction: The Science of Sensuous Cognition 1. Calè and Craciun 2011 apply the term ‘predisciplinary’ to this period. Most 2002 discusses the three processes of professionalization, industrialization and disciplinization. See Marchand 1996 for a thorough treatment of the early development of archaeology and Grafton 1983–4 for more details on the early professionalization of Classics. 2. In a less extreme example, Ayres 1997 shows that both Whigs and Tories claimed affinity with Roman values. 3. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 1963 [1852], 15–16. 4. On the discovery of antiquity as a kind of colonization, see e.g. Heringman 2013 and Makdisi 2000. The conceit is not a new one: Goethe writes of Winckelmann that ‘like a new Columbus, he discovered a new world, long surmised, interpreted, and discussed – a world, we can say, which was previously known and had been lost’. Goethe 1986 [1805], 108. 5. Billings 2016 and 2010: ‘Classical receptions begin in a desire for what is absent’ (Billings 2010, 22). 6. In Candlin’s summary, the haptic senses include ‘kinaesthetic sensations (which originate in muscles, tendons and joints, and pertain to the movement of the body and limbs), and proprioceptive awareness (which connects to the vestibular system and our sense of balance, and concerns the position, state and movement of the body and limbs in space. As well as “touching”, the sensory modality of touch also includes gripping, moving, and balancing, as well as the perception of vibration, texture, weight, pressure, temperature, and pain, and relates to all parts of the body.’ Candlin 2010, 5. It also includes the vestibular system, responsible for maintaining balance and measuring acceleration, and the usually imperceptible regulation of body chemistry. See Damasio (1999), Berthoz (2000) and Millar (2008) on the components of the somatosensory system. For another definition of touch incorporating all haptic senses, see Paterson 2007, passim. On interoception, Craig 2002 demonstrates that temperature and pain should in fact be understood as interoceptive rather than exteroceptive – that is, processed by the same neural pathway that regulates other aspects of homeostasis. Bacci and Pavani 2014, 18–19 understand interoceptive sensation as a component of museum experiences. 7. Gallagher 2005, 24 distinguishes between the concept of body image and the operation of body schema, ‘a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring’. See also Thompson 2005, 411; Gallese and Lakoff 2005, passim; Jeannerod 1994, 189. 8. Kosofsky-Sedgwick 2003, 93; on vision and philosophy generally, see Jay 1993 and Norton 1991, 206–8. 9. Classen 2012. 10. Classen 2012, 136–46. 11. Candlin 2010, 60. 211

Notes to pp. 2–6 12. Candlin 2010; cf. Classen and Howes 2006, 216: ‘The increased concern over conservation is not a “natural” museological development, but is in itself the expression of a changing ideological and sensory model according to which preserving artefacts for future view is more important than interacting with them in the present.’ 13. Paterson 2007, 154–5; and cf. 164: ‘Touch engages with alterity by entering into a relation with another affective, empathic body’, creating a ‘dual subjectivity’. 14. This should be differentiated from kinesis, or the perception of moving objects other than oneself. 15. E.g. Coren, Ward and Enns 2004; Goldstein 1999; Epstein and Rogers 1995. An exception is Berthoz 2000. 16. Sklar 2008, 87. 17. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 219. 18. E.g. Gallagher 2005, Damasio 1994 and 1999, Shapiro 2004. Further discussion below. 19. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 116–18, emphasis original. 20. Lakoff and Johnson 1980 is briefly cited by Sheets-Johnstone on pp. 292–3. 21. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; the theory is developed in Johnson 1987 and Gallese and Lakoff 2005. 22. Gallese and Lakoff 2005. 23. On Husserl: Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 116–18 and 194–5. 24. Kemp 2012, 48. 25. Compare Butoh, where similar exercises ask the performer to perceive their body as composed of different substances such as petals, honey or ice. 26. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 45. 27. This was the main focus of discussion at the Sensory Studies in Antiquity conference held at the University of Roehampton in November 2015. Recent publications in the field of Classics include the Routledge Senses in Antiquity series edited by Shane Butler and Mark Bradley, and the essays collected in Betts (ed.) 2017. For an anthropological perspective on sensory history, see Classen 1993; for a general introduction, Smith 2007, esp. 93–116. Toner (ed.) 2014 and Vila (ed.) 2014 apply the principles of cultural history to sense-experience in antiquity and the eighteenth century, respectively. 28. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 315. 29. I cleave more in this respect to e.g. Bourdieu 1977 and Butler 1993 and 1999 regarding the social conditioning of subjective somatic experience. 30. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 313. 31. Sklar 2008, 103 calls for ‘an accounting of the way the sensations of kinetic vitality are socially structured, transformed, and mediated’. Compare Condillac, writing in the 1750s: ‘We all have the same sensations; but people occupied with laborious toil, men of the world abandoned to frivolous pursuits, and philosophers who have given themselves up to study, are conscious of different pleasures and pains, and from the same sensations they acquire very different cognitions.’ Condillac 1930 [1754], 220–1. Edmund Burke 1958 [1759], 16 makes a similar point in regard to developing a taste for bitter stimulants such as coffee and tobacco. 32. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 470 and 499. 33. As pointed out in the critique by Rowlands 2010.

212

Notes to pp. 6–9 34. Gallagher 2005; Damasio 1994 and 1999; Johnson 1987; Shapiro 2004, esp. 165–225. 35. For critiques of the Cartesian ‘brain-in-a-vat’, see Shapiro 2004, 175–81 and 217–18; Damasio 1994, 227–9; Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 354–85. 36. ‘Language appears to be a central means by which cognitive processes are extended into the world.’ Clark and Chalmers 2008 [1998], 225. For more discussion of language as a mechanism of cognitive extension, see Clark 2008, 44–60. 37. Thompson 2005, 407–8. 38. Noë 2004, 105. 39. Gibson 1977, 71–4. 40. Gibson 1977, 79. 41. Bora 1997, 94–5; 99–101. 42. Boden 2000, 295. 43. Jeannerod 1994, 197–8. 44. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 167. 45. Martindale 1993, 3. 46. On museum exhibitions as theatrical, see Guy 2016; Pallasmaa 2014; Bennett 2013. 47. John Urry, in the updated edition of The Tourist Gaze, devotes a chapter to performance (Urry and Larsen 2011, 189–216), but typically is more concerned with spectatorship than experience. See also Candlin 2010; Classen 2012; Classen and Howes 2006; the essays collected in Coleman and Crang 2002; Edensor 2000 and 2001. 48. Adler 1989, 1374. Adler lists the ‘aesthetic devices’ common to travel as to other art-forms: ‘framing, distancing, isolating, and emphasizing some senses at the expense of others, representing allegorically, and using metonymy’ (p. 1383). 49. Crouch 2002, 209–10. 50. Coleman and Crang 2002. 51. Edensor 2000, 326–7; Urry and Larsen 2011, 23, 205. 52. Pearce 1992, 108 describes museums as ‘ceremonial architecture . . . offering a space within which secular ritual activity of a kind appropriate to the museum can take place’; Arnold 2006, 92–3 and 255 makes a similar observation. Classen 2012, 176–7 and Bennett 1995, esp. 28 and 100–2 address the museum’s function as an organ of social control, Classen referring to it as a ‘house of correction’ taming the manners of the unruly. 53. Pearce 1992, 51. 54. Like that of Ubersfeld 1999 [1977], for example. 55. Pearce 1992, 47; a more explicit treatment of how layout enables visitors to absorb information ‘viscerally by walking, rather than only conceptually by reading’ may be found in Gould 1996 (quote on p. 253). See also Bennett 1995; Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Arnold 2006; Candlin 2010. 56. Guy 2016, 112–32. 57. Guy 2016, 132. 58. Serota 2000, 10. 59. Serota 2000, 33. See also Bennett 2013; Pallasmaa 2014. 60. Sofer 2003, 11–12. 61. Sofer 2003, 27–9. 213

Notes to pp. 10–16 62. Travellers such as Robert Wood and Constantin-François Volney use this rhetoric; for more on the “discovery” of Palmyra, see Ch. 5. Cheeke 2006 discusses Byron’s contempt for the very clichés he himself helped to form. 63. Benjamin 1999 [1936], 214. 64. Benjamin 1999 [1936], 217. Benjamin’s choice of this artwork is somewhat ironic given the questions surrounding the vocabulary of ‘originals’, ‘copies’, ‘replicas’, ‘aemulatio’ and so on in studies on Roman sculpture; see, for instance, Gazda 1995; Perry 2002. 65. Rather, Benjamin’s point is the political difference between articles crafted as one-off produtions and media such as film which are inherently predicated on reproducibility and mobile exhibition. 66. Huang et al. 2011. 67. Huang et al. 2011, 6. 68. Bennett 2010, 9. 69. According to Pliny 36.37, whose anecdote is repeated in guidebooks of the period. Haskell and Penny 1981, 243–7. 70. Compare Mitchell 2005, posing the provocative question of what pictures ‘want’ from their viewers, and Latour 1996 on dependence of apparently autonomous technological systems on human maintenance: they would not ‘notice’ or ‘care’ if they collapsed, but would cease in that case to function as a system. 71. Norton 1991, 206–7. See also Vila 2014, 1–2. 72. Mullan 1988. 73. Or the variant attributed to Rousseau, Je sens, donc je suis. 74. Condillac 1930 [1754], 236. 75. Condillac 1930 [1754], 86. 76. Condillac 1930 [1754], 130. 77. Condillac 1930 [1754], 90. 78. Condillac 1930 [1754], 167. 79. Diderot 1999 [1749], 151–3. 80. Diderot 1999 [1749], 171, 192. 81. Diderot 1999 [1749], 197. Cf 158: ‘He could imagine a solid as large as this terrestrial globe, if he were to imagine his fingers’ ends as large as this globe, and occupied by sensation.’ 82. Hogarth 1997 [1753], 42. 83. Hogarth 1997 [1753], 109. 84. Hogarth 1997 [1753], 74. 85. Hogarth 1997 [1753], 33. 86. Burke 1958 [1759 (2nd edn.)], 149. 87. Ryan 2012, 225–45 discusses Burke’s use of Longinus. 88. Burke 1958 [1759 (2nd edn.)], 65. 89. Burke 1958 [1759 (2nd edn.)], 137–40. 90. Burke 1958 [1759 (2nd edn.)], 150. 91. Burke 1958 [1759 (2nd edn.)], 152–3. 92. Gilpin 1792, 47. 214

Notes to pp. 16–22 93. Lessing 1949 [1766], 63. 94. Lessing 1949 [1766], 80. 95. See Richter 1992 and Billings 2016 on different interpretations of Laocoön. 96. Discussed in detail by Billings 2016. 97. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments 1986 [1759], 39. On the eighteenth-century discourse of sympathy, see in general Marshall 1988. 98. From Hume’s Enquiry concerning the principles of morals; quoted in Mullan 1988, 43. 99. Mullan 1988, 74. 100. Roach 1985, 93–107. Vila 2014, 7 describes sensibility as ‘a dynamic vision of the body’s interior, and an equally dynamic way of theorizing the interface between the inner and outer worlds of the human being’. Rousseau 1976 shows how the cult of sensibility in fashion and fiction emanated from the scientific paradigm shift that took place a generation earlier.

Part One 1. Although written in 1769, the Fourth Critical Grove was only published posthumously; however, as its relevant passages represent a fuller theorization of some of the same ideas that appear in Sculpture (1778), I treat them here as versions of the same work. 2. On its publication history, see Lind 1974, 15–16. 3. The formulation ‘not not me’, now commonplace in performance theory, goes back to Schechner 1985, 112, 123–7; compare also e.g. Montgomery Griffiths 2010 on the dual subjectivity of the performer in classical tragedy.

Chapter 1 1. Emma’s Agrippina is described in the Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1801, quoted in Touchette 2000, 143. Novelli’s engraving is from 1791. 2. Recounted in Holmström 1967, 24. 3. Some material in this chapter is also discussed in Slaney 2019 and forthcoming. 4. Constantine 2001; Jenkins and Sloan 1996. 5. Hamilton, writing to Emma’s former protector Charles Greville is pleased to possess ‘so delightful an object under my roof ’ (quoted in Touchette 2000, 131). Goethe 1962 [1816], 208 observes that ‘in her, he has found all the antiquities’; Horace Walpole remarks that Hamilton ‘has actually married his gallery of statues’. Walpole (ed. Lewis), XI.249. 6. Marshall 1998, 41. 7. Lepecki 2000, 57–8 identifies in what he calls ‘the still-act’ a critique of ‘modernity’s relentless kinetic interpellation of the subject’, or the erroneous assumption that (choreographed) movement equates to (aesthetic) productivity; Jones 2009, 35–6 comments however that even in classical ballet, stillness ‘does not refer to a passive or static pose. The musculature remains alert, in readiness to move; energy spirals through the body . . . These [still] moments . . . are not simply “pauses” emphasising the “fixity of the pose” but are both of the dance itself and are the dance.’ 215

Notes to pp. 22–24 8. The Bacchante is mentioned by Conte della Torre di Rezzonico, Giornale del viaggio, quoted in Jenkins and Sloan 1996, 260; Herder 1989 [1789], 361; and Vigée Le Brun 1984, I.201; Emma also sat as a bacchante for painters Romney, Reynolds and Vigée Le Brun (Jiminez 2001, 266). Elizabeth Holland mentions a ‘Water Nymph’. Both poses appear to be corroborated by images from the series by Novelli and Rehberg (further discussion below). 9. Emma’s erstwhile protector Charles Greville characterizes her as aspiring to ‘anything grand, masculine or feminine’, and ‘it would be indifferent, when on that key, whether she was Lucretia or Sappho, or Scaevola, or Regulus’ (quoted in Constantine 2001, 166). This identification with the heroic across gender, however, while it may have been part of Emma’s personal self-fashioning, is unlikely to have infiltrated the Attitudes themselves, based as they were on iconographic conformity in physicality and attire. When Fraser 1986, 122 claims that Rheberg depicts her in a short-sleeved tunic playing male roles, I believe this is confused with the second set of plates in Rehberg’s original publication, which show characters from Racine imagined as antique statues. 10. Goethe 1962 [1816], 208. Trans. Auden and Mayer. 11. According to Holmström 1967, 118–19, it was artist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who painted Emma several times, who was instrumental in introducing dress à la mode antique to Parisian fashion. For discussion of Emma’s role in this transmission, see Rauser 2015 and on Directoire fashion more generally, see Ribeiro 1995. Vigée Le Brun actually claims that Emma’s antique costume was her innovation. Vigée Le Brun 1984, I.201. 12. Lada-Richards 2003, 22–3 writes: ‘The moment of admiring contemplation does not coincide with the unveiling of the finished artefact but is coextensive with the inert matter’s ongoing transformation . . . we too marvel at the statue as it is still moulding itself, so much that our gaze becomes a close accomplice in the very process of creation.’ 13. Diderot 1992 [1778], 114. 14. Peakman 2005, 12. The drawing is by George Romney, but seems historically inaccurate, as Emma was resident at Uppark in 1781 and Garrick died in 1779. Nevertheless, it shows a perceived connection between the two performers. It is also possible that Emma had spent time at Uppark previously. 15. She is reported to have worked during the 1770s for a theatrical family with connections to Drury Lane. Fraser 1986, 128 remarks that she ‘belonged to the Garrick school of acting’. 16. Quoted in McIsaac 2007, 156. See also Schachenmayr 1997. 17. Goethe 1962 [1816], 315–16. 18. Jenkins and Sloan 1996. 19. As stated by Goethe 1962 [1816], 316. 20. As in Fraser 1986, 122–3; repeated by Touchette 2000, 132. 21. It is acknowledged in e.g. Holmström 1967, Constantine 2001, Rauser 2015; Rauser 2015, 472–4 also comments on the transition of Emma’s costume from the closed and formal space of the sitting to the social space of the salon. 22. Constantine 2001, 164. 23. Fraser 1986, 122–3; Touchette 2000, 132. 24. Fraser’s assumption arises from a statement made by Isaac Gerning (vol. 1, p. 291 of his Reise durch Oesterreich und Italien (1802) that ‘The attitudes arose out of an instance of a poor restoration of the arm of a Pallas’. Adèle de Boigne, quoted in Holmström 1967, 113 comments that she performed pour satisfaire au goût de son mari, but not that he was responsible for directing her. In a letter to Greville in the autumn of 1787, Emma recounts

216

Notes to pp. 24–29 that Sir William ‘made me put the shawl over my head, and look up, and the preist [sic] burst into tears and kist my feet’. Holmström 1967, 128 takes this as evidence for Sir William’s ‘active participation as régisseur’, but it appears more likely to have been intended as a joke at the expense of the priest. McIsaac 2007, 157 holds Goethe responsible for overwriting Emma’s creative input, but there is in fact nothing in Goethe’s account which explicitly credits Sir William with producing (as opposed to exhibiting) the Attitudes. 25. ‘Il lui faisait prendre mille attitudes gracieuses qu’il fixait dans ses tableaux. C’est là qu’elle perfectionna ce talent d’un nouveau genre, qui l’a rendre célèbre.’ Vigée Le Brun 1984, I.201. 26. Vigée Le Brun 1984, I.200 also quoted in Holmström 1967, 126. Vigée Le Brun is also the source of an otherwise unsubstantiated anecdote about Emma modelling nude in Dr Graham’s Temple of Health; some scholars are sceptical, e.g. Touchette 2000, 130 but for others, e.g. Schachenmayr 1997, this early exposure to sexualized classicism has become an essential part of Emma’s background. 27. See University of Illinois Theatrical Prints Collection no. S568s-57; British Museum Prints Collection no. 1933,1014.304; or Mary Ann Yates in the same pose, National Portrait Gallery no. D36244. 28. Montgomery Griffiths 2010; Harrop 2010. 29. Bogart 2001. 30. Kemp 2012, 138. 31. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 219. 32. Quoted in Harrop 2010, 238. 33. Montgomery Griffiths 2010, 228. 34. Touchette 2000, passim; Lada-Richards 2003; 21–9. 35. Touchette 2000, 133. 36. Nye 2011, 40. Cf. the presentation of pantomime in Diderot’s satirical dialogue Le neveu de Rameau. 37. Nye 2011, 123 and 156. 38. Anna Jameson 1826, 216 mentions attending a ballet performance of ‘Niobe and her Children’ while in Naples. See Nye 2011, 170–7 on the rivalry between Noverre and Milanese choreographer Gasparo Angiolini, both of whom claimed credit for inventing the genre. Fraser 1986, 132 and Peakman 2005, 53 both attest to Emma taking dancing lessons in Italy. 39. Barnett 1987, esp. 122–7. 40. Rule 83: ‘Das Theater ist als ein figurenloses Tableau anzusehen, worin der Schauspieler die Staffage macht.’ Goethe 1988 [1798–1806]. 41. Austin in Barnett 1987, 302 and 44. 42. Jelgerhuis in Barnett 1987, 135. 43. Nolta 1997, 112. 44. Rehberg’s plates can be viewed online via the British Museum’s Prints and Drawings collection, ref. 1873,0809.131–43. See more detailed discussion of the correspondences in Slaney forthcoming. 45. de Boigne quoted in Chard 2000, 182. 46. Rauser 2015, 467–8. 47. Recorded in Antichità di Ercolano vol. 2, plates 2.14, 2.15, 2.16. Volume 1, plates 17–23 also resemble some of Emma’s poses.

217

Notes to pp. 29–34 48. She is also independently recorded as lying down: in Goethe’s description of the Attitudes quoted above (liegend, pp. 21–2) and as a water nymph by Lady Elizabeth Holland quoted in Fraser 1986, 207. Vigée Le Brun’s Bacchante also reclines. 49. Jenkins and Sloan 1996, 258. Cf. Vigée Le Brun 1984, I.201: Emma transforms tout à coup from an animated bacchante to a penitent Magdalene simply by changing the look in her eye. 50. Quoted in Chard 2000, 164–5; translation mine. 51. Rauser 2015, 465. 52. On which transition see Petsalis-Diomidis 2014 (unpublished paper). 53. Wyles 2009 discusses the vital role of costume in ancient pantomime. 54. Comparing New Comedy and commedia dell’arte, Wiles 1991, 127 notes that ‘a mask can impose certain patterns of movement upon the actor’. Meineck 2011, 144 expands: ‘Masked performers must be acutely aware of their [body]-skhēma, ensuring that every part of the body accurately communicates the emotional state of the character . . . Therefore kinēsis, “movement”, encapsulates not only blocking, gesture, and dance, but the movement of the mask itself.’ See also Petrides 2013 on pantomime masks, although in arguing for a more ‘neutral’ mask for Roman pantomime, Petrides does not take into account Lucian, On the Dance 66, where the dancer has a separate mask for each of his five ‘souls’. 55. From Thomson, Sophonisba, Act 5 p. 60. 56. So Nolta 1997, 112. 57. Holland in Fraser 1986, 207. 58. Collecting and touch is discussed in more detail in Ch. 6. 59. On the history of the Greek vs. Etruscan controversy: Higginson 2011, 11–52; Lyons 1997. 60. Jeannerod 1994; Sheets-Johnston 2011, esp. 116–18. 61. Gibson 1977. 62. The original proponent of how touch can contribute to archaeological reconstruction is Tilley 2010; more recently see e.g. Graham 2017.

Chapter 2 1. Keats’ urn is a composite of different sources. Jack 1967, 214–24 identifies several possible antecedents including the Townley Vase, Borghese Vase and Parthenon Marbles for the processional frieze. 2. Aske 1985, 112. 3. Ferris 2000, 67–83: ‘The poet inquires into the relation between aesthetics and knowledge, or to use the poem’s own words for this relation, truth and beauty’, and the result is epistemological failure. Compare Byron’s deliberate resistance to identifying monuments in the Forum (on which see Cheeke 2006; Webb 2012). 4. As the Museum Clementium. 5. Paterson 2007, 96. 6. A version of this chapter has been published previously (Slaney 2018). Some of the same material is also discussed in Slaney 2016 and 2019. 7. On Herder’s positioning vis-à-vis contemporary philosophical schools, see Norton 1991. 8. KW4 2.5 in Moore 2006, 216. 218

Notes to pp. 34–38 9. Plastik 1.3 in Gaiger 2002, 40. All translations of Plastik are from Gaiger (2002) and all emphases original, unless otherwise noted. 10. Plastik 1.3 in Gaiger 2002, 40–1. ‘Dass man Bildsäulen sehen kann, daran hat niemand gezweifelt; ob aber aus dem Gesicht sich ursprünglich bestimmen lasse, was schöne Form ist?. . . Raum, Winkel, Form, Rundung lerne ich als solche in leibhafter Wahrheit nicht durchs Gesicht erkennen; geschweige das Wesen dieser Kunst, schöne Form, schöne Bildung, die nicht Farbe, nicht Spiel der Proportion, der Symmetrie, des Lichtes und Schatterns, sondern dargestellte, tastbare Wahrheit ist. . . Das Gesicht zerstört die schöne Bildsäule, statt dass es sie schaffe: es verwandelt sie in Ecken und Flächen, bei denen es viel ist, wenn sie nicht das schönste Wesen ihrer Innigkeit, Fülle und Runde in lauter Spiegelecken verwandle.’ 11. Noë 2004; Gallagher 2005. 12. Millar 2008, 43 and 113 on spatial intermodality; Berthoz 2000, 5 on kinaesthesia. See further Butler and Purves 2013 on cross-sensory experience in the ancient world. 13. For contextualization of Herder’s thought in eighteenth-century aesthetic and empiricist philosophy, see Norton 1991, esp. 155–232; Moore 2006, 1–30; Gaiger 2002, 6–15. 14. C’est l’expérience seule qui nous apprend à comparer les sensations avec ce qui les occasionne. (Trans. Adams 1999.) 15. KW4 1.6 in Moore 2006, 199. 16. KW4 1.5 in Moore 2006, 196–7. 17. KW4 2.12 in Moore 2006, 281. 18. KW4 1.5 in Moore 2006, 199. 19. KW4 2.1 in Moore 2006, 209. In the original: ‘Es ist bloss eine gewohnheitsmässige Verkürzung, dass wir Körper als Flächen sehen, und das durch das Gesicht zu erkennen glauben, was wir würklich in unserer Kindheit, nicht anders als durchs Gefühl und sehr langsam lernten.’ 20. Gallagher 2005, 74–5; Sheets-Johnstone 2011; Noë 2004. 21. On Winckelmann, see Potts 1994 and Harloe 2013, specifically 205–43 on his reception by Herder. On contemporary philhellenism more generally: Butler 1935; Marchand 2003. 22. Winckelmann 2006 [1764], 334; ‘Ich nehme selbst einen erhabenen Stand an, um mit Würdigkeit anzuschauen. Mit Verehrung scheint meine Brust zu erweitern und zu erheben wie diejenige, die ich wie vom Geiste der Weissagung aufgeschwellt sehe, und ich fühle mich weggerückt nach Delos. . . denn mein Bild scheint Leben und Bewegung zu bekommen, wie des Pygmalion Schönheit.’ 23. Potts 1994, 127–8 reads Winckelmann’s response as ‘overtly eroticized’, a form of masochistic self-annihilation. 24. Winckelmann in Irwin 1972, 118. 25. Jockey 2013, 66: ‘L’éffacement des couleurs originelles par les copistes romains, relayé à l’époque moderne par les commentateurs. . . constitue un premier pas décisif dans ce glissement progressif de la réception de l’art grec vers un “achromie” qui préfigure son blanchement futur.’ See also Hägele 2013, 65–118, esp. 102–3. 26. Plastik 2.1 in Gaiger 2002, 50–1. 27. On early modern museums, Candlin 2010 and Classen 2012. See Ch. 8 for more discussion. Coltman 2009, 174–86 discusses the eroticization of connoisseurship. 28. Jeannerod 1994, 190. 29. Plastik 1.2 in Gaiger 2002, 41. 30. Zuckert 2009, 288. 219

Notes to pp. 39–46 31. KW4 2.3 in Moore 2006, 217. 32. KW4 2.3 in Moore 2006, 218–19. 33. Cf. Martial, Epigrams 9.43. See further discussion of ‘Herakles Epitrapezos’ figurines in Bartman 1992. On the ecphrastic topos in Hellenistic epigram, see e.g. Männlein-Robert 2007. 34. Jeannerod 1994 and 2001; cf. Gallagher 2005, 8 for comment. Boden 2000, 295 applies the concept of affordances to sculpture (and painting). 35. Jeannerod 2001, 103. Cf. Berthoz 2000, 17–24. 36. Jeannerod 1994, 190. 37. Plastik 1.4 in Gaiger 2002, 45. 38. The neural mechanism underlying this response has been explained by Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004. 39. KW4 2.3 in Moore 2006, 219; Herder’s description of the figure in question, including its Arme, die den Löwen erwürget, suggests the latter. But if the Torso, then the phrase ‘in his whole body’ may refer to the fragmentary condition of this artwork, which consists of the trunk and upper thighs of a mature male. Both works were celebrated in the eighteenth century; see Haskell and Penny 1981, 229–32 (Farnese) and 1981, 311–14 (Torso). The Torso receives detailed attention from Winckelmann 1964, 292–3. 40. KW4 2.3 in Moore 2006, 220. The conceit that sculpture can be perceived in the dark recurs throughout both Plastik and KW4. 41. Herder, Plastik 4.1 in Gaiger 2002, 80–1. ‘Wer je am berühmten Hermaphroditen stand und nicht fühlte, wie in jeder Schwingung und Biegung des Körpers, in allem, wo er berührt und nicht berührt, bacchischer Traum und Hermaphroditismus herrschet, wie er auf einer Folter süber Gedanken und Wollst schwebt, die ihm, wie ein gelindes Feuer, durch seinen gazen Körper dringet – wer dies nicht fühlte und in sich gleichsam unwillkürlich den Nach- oder Mitklang desselben Saitenspiels wahrnahm, dem können meine nicht und keine Worte es erkläran.’ 42. Herder, Plastik 2.3 in Gaiger 2002, 56–7. 43. ‘Paetus and Arria’ is now more commonly known as ‘The Gaul and his wife’. On the eighteenth-century identification of this group, see Haskell and Penny 1981, 282–4. 44. However, twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists – Dieter Roth, for example – have incorporated decayed or decaying objects into their work. 45. Herder, Plastik 2.2 in Gaiger 2002, 54–5. This is typical of Herder’s period. A generation later, the Parthenon marbles would be extolled for precisely this reason, that they incorporated bones and veins into heroic physiology: see Rothenberg 1977.

Chapter 3 1. Barnett 1987. 2. Jameson 1826, 185. 3. On Jameson’s performativity, see Sikstrom 2015, 102ff; and Walchester 2007, 171–202, esp. 179: ‘Jameson emphasizes the sensitivity of her narrator through intense reactions’, and 173–5 on the fictional narrator’s unreliability. 4. ‘Several days of intoxication were lost before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.’ Gibbon 1984, 141. 5. The episode is not mentioned in Gibbon’s journal, which records nothing of his time in Rome. 220

Notes to pp. 46–49 6. Memoirs, draft E. In Bonnard’s 1966 edition, ‘In my Journal the place and moment of conception are recorded: the fifteenth of October 1764, in the close of evening, as I sat musing in the Church of the Zoccolanti or Franciscan friars, while they were singing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter on the ruins of the Capitol.’ 7. Roberts 2014, 50–2; Kennedy 1999, 32–3; Bann 1999, passim; Cheeke 2006, 522. 8. Bann 1999, 35; Watkin 2011, 161; Roberts 2014, 51. 9. Gibbon 1984, 140; Porter 1988, 5 and 58 on Gibbon’s reading. 10. The similarities to Freud’s palimpsestic Rome are discussed by Kennedy 1999, 20–1 and 30–4. 11. Gibbon 1984, 143. 12. Gallese and Lakoff 2005, esp. 456 and 463. The phrase ‘somatic modes of attention’ is taken from Csordas 1993, but I depart somewhat from its original application in concentrating on the body in relation to its surroundings, not as an intersubjective entity. 13. Kelly 1997, 48–9 (journey); Roberts (monument); Brownley 1977 (theatrical performance, developing Johnson 1967, 242–6 regarding Gibbon’s ‘tragic vision’; see also Porter 1988, 89–90). 14. Brownley 1979, 264–5, 274. 15. Gossman 1981, 69; the reference is to Belisarius visiting sixth-century Rome in XLI. 16. Urry 1995, 27–8. 17. Adler 1989, 1374: ‘an art that creates meaning through play with richly symbolic spaces’. 18. Carlson 2001. 19. Eaton 1820, 2.182. On Eaton generally, see Walchester 2007, 105–36, who discusses her politics and the gendering of her narrative voice. 20. Eaton was unusual in that she and her sister travelled to Italy unaccompanied, although they joined a group of fellow-travellers when touring the ruins. Walchester 2007, 107. 21. Eaton 1820, 1.97; 2.93; 1.123; 2.193. 22. Eaton 1820, 1.96 and 1.146. Eaton is not the only visitor to experience what Eustace likewise terms ‘the moment of enchantment’ when confronted by ‘the very scenes’ so familiar from literature; he further glosses the ensuing sensation as ‘an uncommon glow of enthusiasm’. Eustace 1813, 1.lii. 23. Walchester 2007, 109 observes that ‘Eaton promotes her own text as superior to those by male travel writers and antiquarian scholars’, her entry into this discursive field a deliberate transgression of gender norms. 24. Eaton 1820, 1.235. 25. Other works cited by Eaton include Martinelli, Roma ex ethnica sacra (1653); Maffei, Ars Critica Lapidaria (1724); Ficoroni, Le Vestigia di Roma Anticha (1744); and Zanchi, Veio Illustrato (1768). Also mentioned as sources are Lalande, Voyage d’un françois dans l’Italie (1769) and Middleton’s Life of Cicero (1741). 26. Eaton 1820, 2.73: ‘The contradictory assertions, and irreconcilable hypotheses, contained in these elaborate treatises, only tended to make “confusion worse confounded”. . . I consulted the professed antiquaries; but what one told me was contradicted by another, and the newly admitted belief of yesterday was chased out of my understanding by the later imbibed ideas of to-day.’ 27. Eaton 1820, 3.88. 28. Lasciate le vestigie del Circo Massimo, rivoltando gli occhi al Palatino, ove si vedono le vestigie del Palazzo Augustale (Venuti 1824 [1773], 17) 29. Venuti 1824 [1773], 56.

221

Notes to pp. 49–52 30. Nardini 1771 [1665], 109. 31. Vasi 1824 [1761]. 32. Thompson 2007, 49 remarks that ‘Eustace has a fossilized feel’, describing the Classical Tour as ‘anachronistic and reactionary’. 33. Eustace 1813: Pref. xix, Pref. lii, 1.465. 34. These all derive from Horace’s Odes. ‘Moss-lined stones’: cavis inpositam ilicem saxis, 3.13.14–15; ‘groves’: nemus, 1.1.30; lucus, 1.7.13 and 3.4.7; ‘arbutus half-concealed in the thickets’: per nemus arbutus / quaerunt latentis, 1.17.5–6; ‘little rills’: mobilibus rivis, 1.7.14; lympha fugax, 2.4.12; praetereunte lympha, 2.11.20; amoenae. . . aquae subeunt, 3.4.7–8; purae rivus aquae, 3.16.29. Water imagery is of course metapoetic, referring to the qualities of Horatian lyric itself. 35. Chard 1999, 2000a and 2000b treats Grand Tourism as synonymous with ‘sightseeing’; cf. e.g. William Gilpin, On Picturesque Travel (1792). The phenomenon of the ‘tourist gaze’ has been analysed by Urry and Larsen 2011; but contra see e.g. Edensor 2000 and 2001 and Crouch 2002 on the multisensory nature of tourist experience. 36. Eustace 1813: 1.213, 1.200, 1.340, 1.342. 37. Forsyth 2001 [1816], 80. 38. Eaton 1820, 1.227. Cf Forsyth 2001 [1816], 156: ‘The prevailing name for all round buildings being Bath’, the actual range of possible functions is obscured. 39. Eaton 1820, 1.363. Forsyth 2001 [1816], 74 remarks that similarly, ‘If you fix Vesta in the round temple on the Tiber, others will contend there for Hercules, or Portunmus [sic], or Volupia. If you assign the three magnificent columns in the forum to Jupiter Stator, others will force them into a senate-house, or a portico, or a comitium, or bridge.’ 40. Eaton 1820, 2.287. Forsyth 2001 [1816], 91 calls Stefano Rotondo ‘that ambiguous temple, or church, or bath, or market-place’. Eustace 1813, 1.222 is unsure whether it was dedicated to Claudius or Faunus, but settles on the latter. 41. 348. Forsyth 2001 [1816], 74 and 155 also relates his cicerone’s willingness to ascribe any name suggested to any available artefact. 42. Eaton 1820, 1.110. 43. Eustace 1813, 1.220. He similarly introduces the Pantheon (1.319) by systematically stating its dimensions: height, breadth, number and type of columns. 44. Eaton 1820, 2.80. 45. E.g. Chandler 1776, 74, verifying the so-called ‘Homerium’ near the river Meles: ‘I searched for this above the Aquaeduct, and in the bank on the left hand discovered a cavern, about four feet wide, the roof a huge rock cracked and slanting, the sides and bottom sandy. The mouth, at which I crept in, is low and narrow; but there is another avenue, wider and higher, about three feet from the ground, and almost concealed with brambles.’ 46. Tracking them down takes ‘pains and labour’, involving a ‘hunt on foot amidst inconceivable filth’. 47. Eaton 1820, 2.355, Smollett 2010 [1776], 243 also remarks on the quantity of public fountains in Rome. Chandler 1776, 20–1 comments that in Smyrna, ‘the method of obtaining the necessary supplies of water used by the ancients still prevails. . . The women resort to the fountains by their houses, each with a two-handled earthen jar on their back, or thrown over the shoulder, for water. . . And at those near the road, the traveller, sun-burnt and thirsty, after a scorching ride, finds cool water, the shelter of a plane or of some spreading tree, and a green 222

Notes to pp. 52–57 plat to repose or dine on; affording him a degree of pleasure not adequately conceived, unless by those who have experienced it.’ 48. Eaton 1820, 2.42. 49. Eaton 1820, 2.166. Cf. Addison quoted in Piozzi 1789, 2.70. 50. Eaton 1820, 1.315. Piozzi 1789, 1.419 and Jameson 1826, 159 also go up inside the column. 51. Eaton 1820, 2.84. Forsyth 2001 [1816], 86; Shelley 1964, 84–5, letter to Peacock dated 23 March 1819. Discussed further in Ch. 10. 52. Eaton 1820, 1.221; Eustace 1813, 1.307. Starke 1802, 341, 344, 347, 352, 359, 361, etc. On Starke, see Walchester 2007, 74–91, and Moskal 2000. 53. Eaton 1820, 2.96–7. 54. Cf. Carlson 2001 on the way in which theatre spaces are rendered ‘haunted’ by knowledge of their previous use. 55. Eaton 1820, 2.101–2. Böhme 2013 establishes the concept of ‘atmosphere’ as the synthesis of sensory factors that combine to create mood in a given location. 56. Eaton 1820, 2.193–4. 57. This recalls Adler’s distinction (1989, 1367) between ‘the art of travel’ and ‘the art of travel writing’. Performative writing receives further discussion in Part 3. See Marshall 1988 on theatrical sympathy. 58. Miller 2009 [1777], 207. 59. Miller 2009 [1777], 207–8. 60. Eaton 1820, 2.30–1. 61. Owenson 2009 [1821], 190–1. 62. Eaton 1820, 2.126. Her account of Mons Sacer in Roman history closely resembles Eustace 1813, 1.403. 63. Eaton 1820, 2.211–12. 64. Eaton 1820, 3.343. Eaton appears once again to have borrowed her reasoning from Forsyth, who argues that ‘antiquaries have now turned out the poor prophetess into a neighbouring fane, and given up her Corinthian rotondo, merely because it is round, to Vesta. Now Vesta is not recorded among the Tiburtine deities. . . But the Sibyl, it is certain, had a temple at Tivoli. . . Why then should tradition, which is called in to ascertain all the other antiquities of Tivoli, lose its authority on the Sibylline?’ Forsyth (2001) [1816], 139–40. 65. Eaton 1820, 2.182. See Trapp 1973, esp. 61–8 on the identification of the monument in question. Right from its discovery in 1674, it was recognized that Ovid could not have been buried there, as it was dated to the Antonine period. 66. In particular, Met. 2.333–66, in which Phaethon’s sisters are transformed into trees as they mourn over his tomb. 67. Eaton 1820, 2.90. Probably not Ovid, whose patron was not Maecenas, but Metellus; even when more or less in favour, Ovid was of a later generation, and never part of the Augustan poetic circle. 68. Suetonius, Nero 38.2: Nero watches Rome burn e turre Maecentiana prospectus. Tacitus, Annals 15.39 states more explicitly that Nero’s original palace (the Domus Transitoria) Palatium et Maecenatis hortos continuaverat. 69. The columns are those now identified as the Temple of Saturn. See Watkin 2011, 70. 70. Eaton 1820, 1.286–7 and 3.193.

223

Notes to pp. 58–64 71. According to Eustace, for example, the Forum Romanum was the ‘theatre of. . . glory and. . . imperial power’ (1813, 1.213; the Campus Martius a ‘superb theatre of glorious edifices’ (1813, 1.229); and the Campi Phlegraei ‘the theatre of the most sublime and most instructive fables that the human mind ever invented’ (1813, 1.558) (emphasis added). 72. Eaton 1820, 1.305 and 1.133. 73. Rogers 1956, 226. Rogers’ journal was not published until this 1956 edition; his poem Italy was first published in 1822. 74. Adler 1989, 1374. 75. Issacharov 1981 divides theatrical space into scenic (the set), fictional (the setting it represents) and diegetic (offstage, represented only in speech). See McAuley 1999 for some alternative taxonomies of theatrical space. 76. McAuley 1999 notes the effect of using different spaces for the same text. 77. Such as Brook 1968. 78. Eaton 1820, 1.123. 79. ‘By your leave, gods, this is a Roman’s part.’ 5.3.89. The quote, moreover, pertains not to Brutus but to fellow-conspirator Titinius. 80. Eustace 1813, 213 lists some instances of orators gesturing towards the Capitol, such as Manlius and Scipio in Livy’s De Urbe Condita, Gracchus in Cicero’s De Oratore and Cicero himself in the Catilinarians. 81. Eaton 1820, 2.333. 82. Eaton 1820, 3.32–4. The actual deployment of the statue for this purpose in Mort de César is discussed in Ch. 7. Eaton’s source for information regarding the statue is probably Eustace 1813, 1.271–2. On its contemporary identification, see Haskell and Penny 1981, 298. 83. Eaton 1820, 1.11. Hester Piozzi also compares Niobe (rather more favourably) to Sarah Siddons, England’s mid-century ‘Muse of Tragedy’. Piozzi (2009) [1789], 304; Forsyth (2001) [1816], 28 observes: ‘Like gladiators, they [the sons] seem taught to die picturesquely, and to this theatrical exertion we may perhaps impute the want of ease and undulation.’ 84. Eaton 1820, 3.99. 85. Eaton 1820, 1.124. 86. Eaton 1820, 1.124. 87. The oldest extant feature at the time of Eaton’s visit was the Temple of Castor and Pollux, dedicated in 6 ce. On the history of the Forum, see Watkin 2011. 88. Issacharov 1981. 89. Eaton 1820, 1.231. 90. Eaton 1820, 1.146.

Chapter 4 1. Libanius refers to the dancer explicitly as an agalma (64.116); and an eikōn (64.118). See Lada-Richards 2004, and further discussion in Ch. 1 above. Koortbojian 1995, 117–119 also discusses the crossover in iconography between pantomime dance and the visual arts. 2. Lessing 1949 [1766], esp. 54–5 distinguishes between the polarities of painting and poetry, drama occupying an uneasy middle ground; see above in the Introduction.

224

Notes to pp. 64–70 3. I follow the numbering scheme of Luke and Vaget 1988, which includes the Priapus prologue and epilogue, and numbers ‘Hier ist mein Garten bestellt’ as no. 1. Line numbers also follow this edition. 4. On wordplay concerning ROMA, AMOR and MORA (delay), see Müller-Sievers 1993, 442–5. 5. On the relationship of Goethe’s poetics to Erlebnis and what Bernhardt 1990, 141 calls ‘the paradox inherent in Erlebnisdichtung’, see (in addition to Bernhardt) Hillenbrand 2003 and Müller-Sievers 1993. 6. 1.4 Glücklich pflanzt ich sie an; 3.1 das Glück es ist mir geworden; 6.134 O wie war ich beglückt; 7.140 bin ich doch doppelt beglückt; 15.304 Lebe glücklich, und so lebe die Vorzeit in dir; 18.436 Glückliche! Hör ich sie schon?; 21.467 Faustine mein Glück; 21.477 Gönnet mir, O Quirites! das Glück. 7. This line has been extensively debated, censored and edited. It also relates to the two Priapic poems that bookend the collection, discussed further below. Luke 1988, 128–30 ad loc. 8. Compare Gibbon’s Capitol, discussed in Ch. 3 above. 9. Horst 2012, 405 interprets Elegy 4 as the Dichter’s escape from the persona of ‘Goethe’, famous author of Werther, and his assumption of a new identity. 10. Ziolkowski 2013, 356: ‘The city of Rome is as meaningful to the poet-narrator as is his mistress, the Rome of classical antiquity and not contemporary or even Renaissance Rome.’ 11. Rüdiger 1978, 183–4; Luke and Vaget 1998, xiv. 12. Horace also makes occasional appearances, such as the carpe diem sentiment of Elegy 12; the quotation which closes Elegy 22; and the direct reference to the Carmen Saeculare in 18.414–15. 13. Boyle 2003, 176–80; Edwards 1996, 24; cf. Zanker 1990 on the ideology behind Augustus’ building programme. 14. See Hofmann 1992, 40–5 on Goethe’s use of the Ars Amatoria more generally. 15. As observed by Ziolkowski 2013, 356 and Edwards 1996, 131. 16. Briefe, December 1788. Mandelkow (ed.) 1964, 106. Cf. letter to Meyer, September 1788: ‘Ich kann und darf nicht sagen wieviel ich bei meinter Abreise von Rom gelitten habe, wie schmerzlich es mir war das schöne Land zu verlassen. Mein eifrigster Wunsch ist Sie dort weider zu finden.’ Mandelkow (ed.) 1964, 103. 17. Lind 1974, 22–3. 18. Not necessarily the Scala Caci; according to Richardson 1977, 415, the stairs mentioned by Propertius are more likely to belong to the nearby temple of Quirinus. 19. Janan 2001, 15; Richardson 1977, 414–16; Hutchinson 2006, 59–64. The usual opposition is between elegy and epic (as in Ovid’s Amores 1.1). 20. paruit, et ducens ‘haec sunt fora Caesaris,’ inquit, / ‘haec est a sacris quae via nomen habet, / hic locus est Vestae, qui Pallada servat et ignem, / haec fuit antiqui regia parva Numae.’ / inde petens dextram ‘porta’ est ait ‘ista Palati, / hic Stator, hoc primum condita Roma loco est.’ / singula dum miror, video fulgentibus armis / conspicuos postes tectaque digna deo (Tristia 3.1.27–34). 21. On Ovid’s subversive treatment of the Temple of Apollo and adjoining House of Augustus, see Boyle 2003, 222–8. 22. See e.g. Tristia 3.14.25–52, where Ovid claims that verba mihi desunt dedidicique loqui (3.14.46). On the speciousness of the poet’s claims: Luck 1961; Stevens 2009; Williams 1994.

225

Notes to pp. 70–75 23. ‘Ach! und raubt mir die Zeit, Kraft und Besinnung zugleich; / Blick und Händredruck, und Küsse, gemütliche Worte, / Silben köstlichen Sinns wechselt ein liebendes Paar. / Da wird Lispeln Geschwätz, wird Stottern liebliche Rede: / Solche ein Hymnus verhallt ohne prosodisches Maβ.’ 24. Bernhardt 1990, 148. 25. Camps 1967, 134 ad loc.; Fedeli 2005, 488–90; exutis is proposed by Goold 1990. Another variant reading is exhaustis. 26. Horst 2012, 408: ‘The German poet’s relationship with his Roman predecessors is one of rivalry, since he has taken possession of what was formerly theirs, both the Roman woman and elegiac poetry.’ Horst also makes the point that this is another instance of role-play on the part of the Dichter: ‘The poet thus creates a new image for himself, not as a German in the context of Germany but as a German seen through Roman (both ancient and modern) eyes.’ Horst 2012, 405. 27. A commonplace in Latin poetry e.g. Virgil, Georgics 1.7–8 and 1.147–9, as well as esp. Ovid. Amores 3.10.25–36. 28. Ceres was syncretized with her Greek counterpart from the early Roman Republic, and the graeca sacra Cereris introduced in the late third century bce. Cicero, De Legibus 2.35–6 distinguishes between the women-only Thesmophoric/Sicilian cult of graeca sacra Cereris, celebrated publicly in daylight, and the nocturnal Eleusinian cult, which he feels encourages licentia unsuitable for Roman matronae. Although open to Romans during the imperial period, the Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated only at Eleusis until imported under Hadrian. Rome did have a temple dedicated to the triad Ceres, Liber [Bacchus] and Libera [Persephone/Proserpina], but the site has not been identified. Stanley Spaeth 1996. 29. Luke and Vaget 1988, xxiii–xxx and 123–4; Lind prints them separately along with the poems numbered 2 and 3 in Luke’s edition, under the heading ‘Withheld Roman Elegies’; comment by Lind 1974, 197–8. 30. They are deliberately excluded from the systematic discussions by Hillenbrand 2003 and Bernhardt 1990. For Barry 1990, on the other hand, Priapus is key to understanding the whole collection. 31. Parker 1988, 32–7; Hooper 1999, 26–31. 32. E.g. Horace, Sat. 1.8; on Priapus in Latin poetry, see Parker 1988, 10–31. 33. Goethe’s other source, the Priapea, is discussed below. Examples from Latin invective include Catullus 16; Horace, Epodes 8 and 12; and several of Martial’s epigrams, which Richlin 1990, 132 calls ‘the richest single source of Latin invective’. 34. Clement of Alexandria refers to Philaenis’s catalogue of schēmata (Boehringer 2015, 388 n. 23); the same term is used by Athenaeus in reference to dance steps (Deipnosophistai 629d–e). 35. Barry 1990, 422 attempts to sidestep the evident phallogocentrism of the Elegien. 36. For example, Hillenbrand 2003, 9 argues that Goethe seeks to maintain a ‘tension’ (Spannung) between the experience of love and its written recollection. Bernhardt 1990, 143 reads the whole cycle as dramatizing the poet’s struggle ‘to overcome the paradox inherent in Erlebnisdichtung’. Glockhamer 1985–6, 237–9 identifies a ‘dialectical framework’ for the Elegien in which Fama represents the shame and repression attached to modern sexual relations while Amor represents a more liberated pagan past. See also Rüdiger 1978, 188–93. 37. On the identification of elegiac mistresses with elegiac poetry, see McNamee 1993; Wyke 1987; Sharrock 1991.

226

Notes to pp. 76–79 38. Aviram 1994, 43 and 87. 39. Aviram 1994, 160. 40. Aviram 1994, 226. 41. Aviram 1994 examines the psychoanalytic perspectives of Freud, Kristeva and Nicolas Abraham, among others. 42. On haptic modalities, see Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 73 n. 13; Paterson 2007, 28. Damasio 1999, 52 refers to ‘the speed and contour of movements’. 43. Possibly based on the ancient Greek personification Kairos. 44. Ovid, Amores 4.17–22 and Ars Amatoria 1.569–72; Tibullus 1.6.19–20; Propertius 3.8.25–6. 45. ‘Und sie, mit zierlichem Finger, / Zog auf dem hölzernen Blatt Kreise der Feuchtigkeit hin. / Meinen Namen verschlang sie dem ihrigen; immer begierig / Schaut ich dem Fingerchen nach, und sie bemerkte mich wohl. / Endlich zog sie behende das Zeichen der römischen Fünfe / Und ein Strichlein davor. Schnell, und sobald ichs gesehen, / Schlang sie Kreise durch Kreise, die Lettern und Ziffern zu löschen.’ 46. Spartianus, Life of Hadrian 15. Luke and Vaget 1988, 131 ad loc. 47. Compare Elegy 16, in which the Dichter orders the lamps to be lit in over-eager anticipation of nightfall. 48. Discussed by Lessing in Laocoön, chapters 15–21. ‘The former [poetry] is a visible continuous action, the different parts of which occur step by step in succession of time; the latter, on the other hand [painting], is a visible arrested action, the different parts of which develop side by side in space. . . Consequently, bodies with their visible properties form the proper subjects of painting. . . [while] actions form the proper action of poetry. . . Painting can also imitate actions, but only by way of suggestion through bodies.’ Lessing 1949 [1766], 54–5. 49. Oppenheimer 1998, 99. 50. Oppenheimer 1998, 95. 51. This is not to suggest that heritage cannot be monetized, simply that it does not participate in the cult of productivity and built-in obsolescence. 52. Müller-Sievers 1993, 429–30. 53. Müller-Sievers 1993, 435: ‘It is precisely the suppression of immediacy by reading and re-reading. . . [which instigates] a new epoch of studied seeing in which reading always comes first.’ 54. Müller-Sievers 1993, 445: ‘Only in the extinct meter can an eroticism that is not always [already] dead and gone finally surface.’ 55. Taxonomy adapted from Danet and Katriel 1989. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens was the first serious analysis of play. 56. Smail 2008. 57. ‘Just as the world of deep play exists outside of ordinary life, the poetic world of humans exists within – but separate from – ordinary reality. . . We play through the art form we call poetry.’ Ackerman 1999, 123. The term ‘deep play’ was first used by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1972 essay ‘Notes on a Balinese Cockfight’. 58. Ackerman 1999, 65: ‘Sacred places are playgrounds for deep players. Or, to put it another way, whenever one is enraptured by deep play the playground itself becomes sacred.’ Foucault 1986 terms such spaces ‘heterotopias’. 59. Bernhardt 1990, 189.

227

Notes to pp. 79–88 60. Rüdiger 1978, 178–9 discusses Goethe’s choice of meter, and (p. 185) his synthesis of lateinischer Rhythmus und deutscher Klang. 61. E.g. Virgil, Eclogues 2.32–4; Longus, Daphnis and Chloe 2.33–5; Theocritus, Idylls 1.1–16. 62. Bernhardt 1990, 200. 63. Aviram 1994, 111. 64. KW 4, 2.3 in Moore 2006, 218–19.

Chapter 5 1. Goethe 1962 [1816], 236, 310. 2. ‘Le plaisir de parcourir cette illustre et belle région, un Homère et un Hérodote à la main, de sentir plus vivement les beautés différentes des tableaux tracés par le poète . . . en contemplant les lieux mêmes qui en avaient été le théâtre.’ Quoted in and trans. Guilmet and Asvesta 2007, 139. Richard Lassels in his Italian Voyage (1697) likewise calls travel ‘an excellent commentary upon histories’, quoted in Adler 1989, 1376. Barthélemy 1796 [1788], 278 has his protagonist remark, ‘It is in the countries which were the theatre of the events he [Homer] has immortalized, that we best can judge of the accuracy of his descriptions and the truth of his colouring.’ 3. Horace Walpole is credited with remarking that to gain membership of the Society, ‘the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, the real one being drunk’. Quoted in Cust 1898, 36. 4. Redford 2008. 5. On definitions of dilettantism, see Hibbitt 2006; Sweet 2004, 4 contrasts the dilettante and the antiquarian. Payne Knight’s dispute over the value of the Parthenon marbles has been recognized as a clash between amateur and professional appraisal of sculpture, on which see Rothenberg 1977. 6. Most 2002; Calè and Craciun 2011. 7. Coltman 2009, 159–90. 8. Marchand 1996. 9. Bignamini 2004; Lyons 1997. 10. Reale Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia 1757–92. 11. Other important antecedents include Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures (1724) and the works of Francesco Scipione Maffei, particularly concerning ancient Verona. On Caylus and Maffei, see Pomian 1990, 169–84; further on Caylus, Potts 2006, 23–7. Momigliano 1985a discusses the place of antiquarianism in intellectual history, on which cf. more recently Heringman 2013. 12. An updated edition with revisions by Antonio Nibby was published in 1818. 13. Redford 2008, 44–9 contrasts the sober-proto-scientific techniques of Desgodetz to the romanticizing hyperbole of Piranesi (and his protégé, Robert Adam). 14. Furján 2011, 39–42, 163–4; Wilton-Ely 2013, esp. 92–102; Millenson 1987, 96–7. 15. Heringman 2013 discusses this paradigm shift. Arnold 2006, 235 describes the transition in terms of the Wunderkammer becoming the museum: ‘By the middle of the eighteenth century, museum objects were felt to derive their meaning less from their intrinsic value than from

228

Notes to pp. 88–90 their relationships to the rest of the collection.’ See also Momigliano 1985a on the contribution of antiquarianism to historical consciousness. 16. Redford 2008, 45; see also Salmon 2007, 122. Constantine 2011 discusses travel to Greece prior to Stuart, e.g. Spon and Wheler’s observations undertaken in 1675; David Le Roy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758) was published earlier, but his expedition was undertaken after Stuart’s. 17. Scott 2012, 5 and 145. 18. Scott 2012, 65. 19. Compare Adler 1989, 1376: ‘Typically, the aim of the play [that is, travel] is the internalization and retention, through symbolic representation, of relationship to a real place that, having once been glimpsed and identified with cherished values, must be relinquished. In a double movement of projection and reinternalization, values are emblematically fixed in landscape and reappropriated through encounter with literal geography.’ 20. Cust 75–6; Watkin 1982, 17; Kelly 2009, 107–10. 21. Myrogiannis 2012; Greene 2015, 167–9. 22. Myrogiannis 2012, Brewer 2010, and Greene 2015. Even by the early nineteenth century, Athens had only around 10,000 inhabitants. 23. As still persisted in Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek (1819). Constantine 2011, 16 notes that even up until the 1670s, ‘Athens was widely believed among European scholars to have vanished from the face of the earth’. Brigandage (joining a klepht) was certainly common, as smallholders (mostly in fact ethnic Greeks) were driven off the land by increasingly intensive tax-farming (Brewer 2010, 156–8). See also Kelly 2009, 102–3. 24. Local workmen were employed to uncover the foundations of the Erechtheion and the Tower of the Winds. Salmon 2007, 128–30. Higginson 2011, 31 comments that Stuart and Revett had no interest in ceramics, for example. 25. For example, at Shugborough. The first (1762) volume contained the Monument of Lysicrates, Temple of Augustus, Tower of the Winds, the Stoa, the temple on the river Ilissus and the temple at Pola (in Istria). A replica of the Ilissus temple was constructed at Woburn Abbey in 1801 (Coltman 2009, 227). Stuart and Revett intended to make a second expedition to make further observations, which never eventuated; the Parthenon and other Acropolis monuments were eventually published posthumously in the second (1789) volume. 26. Salmon 2007, 119 discusses Stuart’s interest in mathematics and geometry. 27. Salmon 2007, 132, 28. For example, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, SD145/6, ‘View of the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheion’. 29. Redford 2008, 52–9. 30. In Reynolds’ portrait, Sir William Hamilton holds an open copy of Antiquités Etrusques, Grecques et Romaines in this way (Jenkins and Sloan 1996, 176–7). Open books serve a similar function in Zoffany’s painting of ‘Charles Townley’s Library’, where d’Hancarville is depicted with an open copy of what may be his own Récherches. See Coltman 2001 on the wall display of individual prints from AEGR . As Watkin 1982, 21 shows, subscribers to the first volume of Antiquities of Athens were ‘a small clique of noblemen and connoisseurs’ rather than other architects. 31. Salter 2013, 21; Graham 2009, 132. 32. Graham 2009, 147. 229

Notes to pp. 90–94 33. Williams 1985, 61 credits the Tetrarchy with ‘a radical transformation of the whole machinery of government’ resulting in ‘the return of real military and civil security for the first time in over a century’; but cf. Rees 2004, 88–9 for a more cautious evaluation of both the regime’s innovation and its stability. 34. Wilkes 1993, 42–3 (peristyle); 52–6 (temples); 56–8 (bath complex); 59–62 (private apartments). 35. Salter 2013, 37. On Diocletian’s use of ceremony to cement his regime, see also Rees 2004, 46–56. Wilkes 1993, 65–9 refutes the argument that the architecture is strictly ‘palatial’ but has to concede that it’s ‘imposing’. 36. Salter 2013, 48. 37. Adam 1764, 1 and 4. 38. Salter 2013. 39. One of these principles is ‘movement’. Adam 1959 [1778], I.v; cf. Harris 2001, 4–5; Beard 1978, 7; Wilton-Ely 2007; Lawrence 2007. 40. Wood and Dawkins were accompanied by John Bouverie (deceased en route), and draughtsman Giovanni Battista Borra; they also travelled with a retinue of some 200 Turkish guards, guides and attendants. 41. Wood 1753, ii. 42. Palmyra, urbs nobilis situ, divitiis soli et aquis amoenis, vasto undique ambitu harenis includit agros ac, velut terris exempta a rerum natura. Pliny, HN 5.21; quoted in Wood 1753, 5. 43. A route deliberately cultivated by the Palmyrenes themselves. Young 2001, 137–8; Winsbury 2010, 54. 44. The Persian Sassanid dynasty took control of Parthia in 226 ce. 45. Winsbury 2010, 44. 46. Zahran 2003, 105. 47. Zahran 2003, 31. 48. Initially, Aurelian left the city intact; but after the Palmyrenes made a second attempt to depose him, he realized they were too much of a threat. 49. Zosimus, Historia Nova 1.50–61; Vopiscus, Historia Augusta: Aurelian 22–31. 50. Wood 1753, iv. 51. Wood 1753, 14 mentions the account of some English merchants who visited the site in 1678. 52. Volney 1795, 2. 53. Wood 1753, 37; Volney 1795, 3. 54. Kelly 2009, 130. 55. The conceit of a global Rome is established by Ovid, Fasti 2.684: Romanae spatium est urbis et orbis idem. For writers of the early empire, this represented a destructive dilution of identity, in terms of both the city’s ethnic composition and its consumption of imported goods: e.g. Sallust, Cat. 37.5: ii Romam sicut in sentinam confluxerant; Juvenal, Sat. 3.63–4: iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes / et linguam et mores; and Sat. 6.292–300. Moral decline as a result of increased prosperity is asserted by Seneca, Med. 329–79; Petronius, Sat. 119; Pliny NH . 36.1–2, 37.29, 33.48 and 33.148–9. For comment, see Dench 2005; Earl 1967, 96–7; Edwards 1993, 147 and 177; Evans 2011. 56. Gibbon 1994 XIII, 1.384. Salter 2013, 29; Rees 2004, 27–9; Williams 1985, 67–8 discuss the Tetrarchy’s dispersal of power away from Rome.

230

Notes to pp. 94–97 57. Constantine selected the site in 324, and the formal dedicatio was performed in 330. Odahl 232–44. 58. Heringman 2013, 23 shows how eighteenth-century geology and antiquarianism operated as ‘cognate sciences of antiquity’, both providing access to ‘deep time’. 59. Montesquieu did record his Voyage d’Italie in a journal that remained unpublished until 1894, but his observations were mainly political and ethnographic. Barria-Poncet 2013, 239–77. 60. Montesquieu 1999 [1734], 24. Page references are to Lowenthal’s translation. 61. Montesquieu 1999 [1734], 92, 43, 75. Compare what Roberts 2014, 75 refers to as Gibbon’s strategy of ‘ironic equivalence’, e.g. comparing the Spanish conquest of Mexico to the Phoenician conquest of Spain with the identical motive of silver-mining (Gibbon 1994 [1776–89], 178–9). 62. Sallust, Cat. 10–11; Pliny, NH . 33.150. 63. Montesquieu 1999 [1734], 108. 64. Montesquieu 1999 [1734], 93. 65. Citizenship was granted en bloc to most Italian communities in 90–89 bce under the terms of the Lex Julia de civitate and the Lex Plautia Papiria, but the enfranchisement process may have continued until 84 bce. Sherwin-White 1973, 155. 66. Porter 1988; Craddock 1988; Momigliano 1985b. 67. Roberts 2014, 148–69 reads Decline and Fall itself as metaphorically a ‘marmoreal’ or ‘monumental’ rebuilding of Rome, but does not examine Gibbon’s treatment of particular buildings. 68. Zimmerman 1996, 234–5 quotes from Maffei’s ‘Comparison of the use of inscriptions and medals’, commenting that ‘To him [Maffei] the monuments are the past . . . not just a medium for its purveyance’ (emphasis original). 69. Momigliano 1985a, 18: ‘Armed with his treatises . . . on numismatics, diplomatics, epigraphy, and iconography, the eighteenth-century antiquarian could venture into old and new fields with a confidence that his predecessors lacked. He could turn himself into a historian . . . of a new kind.’ Momigliano 1985b analyses Gibbon, but does not mention material culture in this context. 70. E.g. Commodus (IV, 1.117); Caracalla (VI, 1.160); Constantine (XX, 1.727). The weight of material evidence is such that ‘if all our historians were lost, medals, inscriptions and other monuments would still be sufficient to record the travels of Hadrian’ (I, 1.37 n. 25). 71. Gibbon 1994 [1776–89], II, 1.151. 72. Gibbon 1994 [1776–89] X, 1.281. 73. Gibbon 1994 [1776–89] XIII, 1.397. 74. Gibbon quotes from Fortis: In generale la rozzezza del scalpello, e’l cattivo gusto del secolo vi gareggiano colla magnificenza del fabricato (XIII, 1.397). 75. ‘Like Augustus, Diocletian may be considered as the founder of a new empire.’ Gibbon 1994 [1776–89], XIII, 1.359. 76. Odahl 2004, 141–2 inteprets this reuse of Trajanic and Hadrianic components as part of a strategic ideological programme. Gibbon presents Constantine as imitative in every way: ‘The system of the Roman government might have been mistaken for a splendid theatre, filled with players of every character and degree, who repeated the language, and imitated the passions, of their original model.’ XVII, 1.604. 77. Gibbon 1994 [1776–89] XI, 1.317. 78. Wood 1753, 18–19. 231

Notes to pp. 97–107 79. Gibbon 1994 [1776–89] XI, 1.317 80. Gibbon 1994 [1776–89] XI, 1.319; cf. Wood 1753, 37. 81. A timeline of publication dates is provided at the end of the chapter. 82. See Kelly 2009; also Redford 2008, 49–51. 83. Chandler 1775, 257 and 277. 84. Chandler 1775, 122. 85. This was published as a supplement to Ionian Antiquities in 1784. 86. Cf. Petsalis-Diomidis 2014. 87. Adler 1989, 1369. 88. Chandler 1775, 161. 89. Hollinshead 2015 discusses the relationship between human movement and steps/ staircases. 90. Chandler 1775, 197. 91. Chandler 1775, 197–8. 92. Λάβραυνδα κώμη ἐστὶν ἐν τῷ ὄρει κατὰ τὴν ὑπέρθεσιν τὴν ἐξ Ἀλαβάνδων εἰς τὰ Μύλασα ἄπωθεν τῆς πόλεως: ἐνταῦθα νεώς ἐστιν ἀρχαῖος καὶ ξόανον Διὸς Στρατίου: τιμᾶται δὲ ὑπὸ τῶν κύκλῳ καὶ ὑπὸ τῶν Μυλασέων, ὁδός τε ἔστρωται σχεδόν τι καὶ ἑξήκοντα σταδίων μέχρι τῆς πόλεως ἱερὰ καλουμένη, δι᾽ ἧς πομποστολεῖται τὰ ἱερά (Strabo, Geography 14.2.23 (659). 93. Chandler 1775, 42. 94. Chanlder 1776, 89. 95. Elsner 2010, 220–1. 96. Wood 1769, 318. 97. Chandler makes similar observations regarding the area around Miletus. 98. Wood 1769, 322. 99. Wood 1769, 25. 100. Wood 1769, 227. 101. Heringman 2013. 102. Thompson 2005, 411. 103. Wood 1769, 134. 104. Wood 1769, 79–87. 105. Wood 1769, v. 106. Wood 1753, ii. 107. Zimmerman 1996, 3 points to this dilemma as common to Enlightenment science and historiography. 108. Gallese and Lakoff 2005, 456.

Chapter 6 1. On Roman souvenirs, see Benson 2004; cf. Stewart 1984.

232

Notes to pp. 108–112 2. Picon 1998, 48–51; Vaughan 1997, 195–6; Scott 2003, 99–100; Coltman 2009, 193–4; Guilding 2014, 153. Modern scholarship draws on the accounts by Michaelis 1882, 77 and Dallaway 1800, 349–50. 3. Boulton and McLoughlin (eds.) 2012, 268. 4. Correspondence is collected in Bignamini 2010 and Cassidy 2011; Coltman 2009 also makes extensive use of the Townley archive. 5. Scott 2003, 95. Cf. Dallaway 1800, 273–4. 6. Hamilton to Townley, 1778 (Letter 150 in in Cassidy 2011). 7. Bignamini 2004, 93–4 gives the statistics. On Hamilton’s digs, see also Cassidy 2011, 45–64; Scott 2003, 93–4; Bignamini 2010, 195–208. 8. Hamilton to Petty, 1773 (Letter 64 in Cassidy 2011). Dallaway 1800, 374 comments that ‘Mr H. esteemed the Monte Cagnolo to be one of the richest mines of antiquities which he opened while resident at Rome’. 9. Piranesi was especially notorious for this approach. Scott 1985. 10. Howard 1984, 224. 11. Howard 1984, 213–15; Coltman 2009, 84–116. 12. Dallaway 1800, 209. 13. Leen 1991, 240. 14. Cicero, De Finibus 5.1.1–6 recalls (or invents) an afternoon ambulatio to the Academy during which he and his companions discuss particular sites en route which bring to mind the philosophers and orators who practised there, encouraging emulation. As noted by Rawson 1985, 11, however, lectures no longer seem to have been conducted at the Academy itself in Cicero’s time. 15. Wallace-Hadrill 1988. 16. Leen 1991 reads the villas as a calculated expression of Cicero’s political self. Cf. Henderson 2003 on Pliny’s villa as a form of self-fashioning. 17. Marvin 1989, 32. Cf. Koortbojian 2002, 175: ‘What Cicero wanted . . . was a set of images conducive to the mode of life associated with the Greek gymnasion, where both body and mind were nurtured by paideia.’ 18. Striker 1995; Powell (ed.) 1995. Cicero’s philosophical Tusculan Disputations are set in the villa, as is his dialogue De Divinatione; De Oratore is set in a Tusculan villa belonging to Lucius Crassus. 19. On the selection of appropriate statuary, cf. Cicero, Ad Fam. 1.8.2 and 209.2. See Miles 2008, 192–3; Koortbojian 2002, 181–3. Discussions of the diverse motives for Roman sculptural aemulatio or reproduction include Bartman 1991, 74–7; Gazda 1995 and the essays in Gazda (ed.) 2002; Marvin 1989. For Leen 1991, the referent of the villa’s sculpture collection is Cicero’s own decorum. 20. Haskell and Penny 1985, 23–30. 21. Forsyth 2001 [1813], 123. 22. Owenson 2009–10 [1821], 224. 23. Salomon 1998; Barrell 1992. 24. Kosofsky Sedgwick 1985. 25. Bermingham 1995, esp. 495 and 502–9.

233

Notes to pp. 113–118 26. Dennis 1995 notes the autoerotic implications of the pudicitia gesture in Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ and Giorgione’s ‘Sleeping Venus’. 27. Merleau-Ponty 1962, 93. 28. Harris 2001, 63–5. 29. Guilding 2014, 79. On Newby Hall’s architecture, see also Middleton 1986; Boschung 2002; Coltman 2009, 195–9. 30. Quoted in Harris 2001, 64. 31. Middleton 1986, 52 and 56. 32. In addition to those discussed, prominent examples include Petworth, Wentworth Woodhouse, Lansdowne House, Syon House, Woburn Abbey, Shugborough, Appuldurcombe and Lyde Browne’s dealership at Broadlands. 33. Scott 2003; Coltman 2006 and 2009; Guilding 2014. 34. Some of the Townley marbles are displayed in the British Museum, with the majority currently in storage; Blundell’s are largely in Liverpool; the Bessborough collection was split up in the 1801 sale. 35. Coltman 2009, 167–9; Scott 2003, 204; Cook 1985, 29–37. 36. Michaelis 1882, 98. Dallaway 1800, 299–336 catalogues some eighty-nine individual pieces, including several cult statues of Isis and Bacchus. 37. On the debates surrounding the acquisition of the Parthenon marbles, see Rothenberg 1977 after Haydon 1816. 38. Notably Richard Payne Knight, who used d’Hancarville’s work as a basis for his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786). 39. Ruprecht makes a similar point in regard to Winckelmann’s conceptualization of a ‘Profane Museum’ for classical (as opposed to sacred) art: ‘We gaze at such art in ways that are choreographed to elicit precisely the orgiastic responses Winckelmann imagined and the quasi-religious epiphanies he desired.’ 2011, 16 (emphasis original). 40. From the 1795 catalogue, quoted in Cook 1985, 55; cf. p. 19. 41. Coltman 2006, 166. 42. Quoted in Scott 2003, 203. 43. Southworth 1991 and 2000; Vaughan 1989; Scott 2003, 147–54. 44. Scott 2003, 148. 45. Dallaway 1800, 153. On Bessborough’s collecting activity, see Finnegan 2005. 46. Also purchased by Blundell, now in the Liverpool Museum. 47. Now at Petworth. The youth is variously identified as Apollo, Daphnis or Olympos. 48. Southworth 1991, 225 gives the number as twenty-five; Scott 2003, 149 identifies twenty-two. 49. Southworth 1991, 219–20. 50. Stillman 1977. 51. Quoted in Lawrence 2007, 117. 52. Lawrence 2007. 53. Hope 1807, 8–9 comments on the difficulty of this intermedial translation. 54. In a similar act of material translation, some of Piranesi’s fantastical designs were realized using 3D printing technology in a 2014 exhibition at Sir John Soane’s House Museum.

234

Notes to pp. 119–125 55. The gallery and surrounding rooms at Newby Hall are an example. 56. Jenkins 2008, 109–10. 57. Hope 1807, 7. 58. Jeffrey (ed.) 1807. The review is anonymous, but Watkin 1968, 88 identifies the author as Sydney Smith. 59. Mézières 1992 [1780], 94; 96–7; 108. 60. Mézières 1992 [1780], 71; 88; 95; 110. 61. Mézières 1992 [1780], 124. (Trans. Britt, adapted.) 62. Ribeiro 2008; Cage 2009. 63. Ribeiro 1988 and 2008; Rauser 2015; Cage 2009. 64. Ribeiro 1988, 58. 65. Mercier quoted in Ribiero 1988, 124–5. Cage 2009, 205 stresses women’s agency in selffashioning through dress. 66. Eventually, Soane’s house-museum incorporated three adjoining houses. It was preserved intact after his death and is still extant. His room-by-room catalogue surveying the contents has run through multiple editions. 67. As argued by Furján 2011, 174: ‘Soane does not stage the past as such, but the idea of history, and the idea of reconstruction (and its limitations).’ 68. Millenson 1987, 77. 69. Millenson 1987, 10–13. 70. Lukacher 2006; Abramson 2005. 71. On the Model Room, see Elsner 1994. 72. Pitzhanger is extant, but at the time of writing undergoing renovations and not open to the public. 73. Furján 2011, 139. 74. Furján 2011, 8. 75. Furján 2011. 76. And, after 1824, the Egyptian sarcophagus that became its centrepiece. 77. Millenson 1987, 96. 78. Wilton-Ely 2013, esp. 92–102. 79. Millenson 1987, 97–8. 80. Furján 2011, 3; cf. Millenson 1987, 125: ‘This mélange and its architectural surroundings together evoked an ancient ruinscape.’ 81. Quoted in Arnold 2006, 82. 82. Pearce 1992, 52. 83. Quoted in Arnold 2006, 69. 84. Ackerman 1999, 18. See Rogan 1998 on ‘the ludic and aesthetic aspects of collecting’, following Danet and Katriel 1989. 85. Candlin 2010, 99–100; cf. Danet and Katriel 1989, 263. 86. Arnold 2006; Heringman 2013. 87. Candlin 2010, 95 and 101.

235

Notes to pp. 125–134 88. Danet and Katriel 1989. 89. Coltman 2010, 176. 90. Owenson 2009–10 [1821], 2.232–3. 91. Michaelis 1882, 77; the original source is Smith’s Life of Nollekens. 92. Platt and Squire 2018, 98–9. For more on eighteenth-century collections of intaglios, see Scott 109–14; Rudoe 2003. 93. Miller 2009 [1777], 2.57. 94. Wedgwood and Bentley 1779, 2–3. 95. Wedgwood and Bentley 1779, 52 and 61. 96. Piozzi 2009 [1789], 393. 97. Armstrong 1985, 124–5 discusses Duvelleroy’s contribution to codifying the language of the fan. 98. Addison, Spectator 27 June 1711. Items originally appearing in the Spectator remained in circulation throughout the century. 99. Blake-Roberts 2011, 39. The original Portland Vase is now in the British Museum. William Hamilton purchased it from dealer James Byers, who acquired it in 1780. 100. Quoted in Blake-Roberts 2011, 7. 101. Wedgwood and Bentley 1779. 102. On the contribution of the Hamilton collection to Wedgwood’s designs, Coltman 2001 and 2006, 65–96. Macht 1957 identifies the classical sources. Catalogues of Wedgwood from the period include Wood et al. 2007 and Bryding Adams 1992. 103. Many more examples may be found in Wedgwood Museum MS E54-30-19c (‘Shape Book’, 1802). 104. Elsner 1994 identifies a similar impulse informing Soane’s cork models. 105. Coltman 2006, 11.

Chapter 7 1. Merleau-Ponty 1962, 143–6, 152; on neuroplasticity, Doidge 2008. 2. See, for example, Cuno (ed.) 2009. 3. Pearce 1992, 136–7. 4. Bennett 1995, 33 and 179. 5. Such as the examples in Guy 2016. 6. Gould 1996; Pearce 1992. 7. Carlson 2001. 8. Pietrangeli 1993, 47; Ruprecht 2011, 69. 9. Springer 1987, 26; Collins 2012, 116. Pietrangeli 1993, 66 mentions that the statues were enclosed by ‘ugly shutters’. 10. On which see Paul 2012. 11. Springer 1987, 25. Private aristocratic collections such as that of the Borghese family could be visited only by those with the right connections. On the Villa Borghese, see Paul 2000 and 2008.

236

Notes to pp. 134–139 12. Collins 2000, 185 argues that Braschi was ‘responding to contemporary tourists’ aesthetic expectations as conditioned by writers like Winckelmann’. 13. Ruprecht 2011, 96. 14. Ruprecht 2011, 16 (emphasis original). Winckelmann’s role in the process may be overstated, however; Collins 2000, 183 refers to ‘Simonetti’s success in creating a Winckelmannian mood’ but (more plausibly) credits Braschi with being the prime mover behind the practicalities of renovation. 15. The basin was moved to the Sala Rotonda in 1792. Pietrangeli 1993, 68. 16. Collins 2012, 123. 17. Collins 2012, 125; cf Collins 2000, 177 and 182–3. 18. Coltman 2009, 217–18. 19. Pietrangeli 1993, 88. 20. Collins 2012, 132. 21. The Vatican’s specialist curatorial team, led by Visconti and his two sons, were responsible for the displays. The museum also had a ‘resident custodian’, Pasquale Massi (Collins 2012, 129; cf. Pietrangeli 1993, 113). In the Capitoline, the duties of the sottocustode included opening the museum, authorizing sketching and preparing a guidebook (Paul 2012, 27); Massi or his sottocustode may thus have been responsible for visitor movement and presenting the exhibits. 22. Starke 1802, 213. 23. Miller 2009 [1777], 2.218. 24. Eaton 1820, 3.166. 25. Winckelmann 2006 [1764], 334, trans. Mallgrave. 26. Winckelmann 2016 [1755], 20. ‘Der Schmerz, welcher sich in allen Muskeln und Sehnen des Körpers entdecket, und den man ganz allein, ohne das Gesicht und andere Teile zu betrachten, an dem schmerzlich eingezogenen Unterleibe beinahe selbst zu empfinden glaubet’ (trans. Ruprecht 2011, 95). 27. Miller 2009 [1777], 217 is typical: ‘The Laocoōn astonishes and terrifies; the subject is so horrible . . . that I could not contemplate it for any time together . . . My imagination almost caused me to fancy that I heard the piercing shriek of the sons.’ John Moore 1797, 138 observes that ‘The most insensible of mankind must be struck with horror at the sight of the Laocoōn’. ‘Laocoōn’s agonies torment one,’ agrees Piozzi 1789, 427. 28. Eaton 1820, 3.170. 29. Coltman 2009, 159–90. See also Guilding 2014, 230–46 on the connections between connoisseurship and libertinism; Chard 1999, 130–56 on male consumption of feminized antiquity; and Barrell 1992 on contemporary attempts to sublimate the Medici Venus. Bermingham 1995, 502 remarks that ‘The connoisseur’s power to aestheticize expresses a deeper need to fetishize’. 30. Potts 1994, 127. Narcissus is the ‘nightmare . . . unconscious’ haunting the Enlightenment dream of the absolute autonomy or self-sufficiency of the (masculine) subject. Potts 1994, 181. 31. Winckelmann 2006 [1764], 334, trans. Mallgrave. 32. Dupaty 1789 [1785], 2.6–9. Translation is the English version published in 1789. 33. The French is simply on voit briller. Eaton does not mention having read Dupaty, but the coincidence of phrasing suggests she may have done. 34. Roche 1933 [1786], 107–8; discussed in Candlin 2010, 71–5 Classen 2012, 141–2.

237

Notes to pp. 139–143 35. Roche 1933 [1786], 108. 36. Miller 2009 [1777], 167. The mosaic was discovered at Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli in 1737. 37. Miller 2009 [1777], 70–1. 38. Miller 2009 [1777], 99. 39. Miller 2009 [1777], 126. 40. For example, McClellan 1994; Paul (ed.) 2012. Candlin 2010 discusses the development in the context of sensory regimes. The classic study is Pomian 1990. 41. Quoted in Hanley 2005, 115. 42. Particularly Junius Brutus, on which see Herbert 1972 and Wiles 2011, 148–80. 43. Mainardi 1989, 156. On the Italian confiscations and their entry into Paris, see also Rowell 2012, 141–7; Miles 2008, 319–24; McClellan 1994, 116–23; Gould 1965, 43–66. 44. On which see Gould 1965, 30–40. 45. McClellan 1994, 91–123. 46. ‘Bontaparte’s Entrée triomphale of 1798, and [the spoils’] later display in the Louvre’s Musée Napoléon was used both to legitimize the regime and to disseminate Napoleon’s image as universal dominator.’ Rowell 2011, 161. 47. Son of Giovanni Battista, Ennio Visconti had taken over from his father as head Conservator in 1787. The galleries’ architecture was designed in 1797 by August-Cheval de Saint-Hubert and Jean-Armand Raymond, but Visconti directed the ultimate arrangement of the collection. McClellan 1994, 150–3. 48. McClellan 2012, 228. 49. Hanley 2005, 112–21, esp. 116. 50. Miles 2008, 133–4; Mainardi 1989, 155; Rowell 2012, 143. The refrain was printed in the Journal de Paris and Le Patriot Français. 51. The phrase is from Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 1963 [1852], 15–16. On Roman models in Revolutionary France, see Parker 1937 (on institutions and rhetoric); Herbert 1972 (on Junius Brutus); Leigh 1979 (on Rousseau); Ozouf 1988, esp. 271–8; Wiles 2011, 148–80. Grell 1995, 977–1173, esp. 1039–63 compares pre-Revolutionary representations of Greek and Roman history and identifies the associated moral responsibility of the historiographer: ‘l’historien avait pour tâche de former des citoyens’ (p. 1031). 52. Cheeke 2004 examines Hazlitt’s uncomplimentary use of Roman figures who provide parallels. 53. Rowell 2012, 70–1. 54. Vandiver Nicassio 2005, 184 quotes an 1811 letter from Tournon outlining the plans. The boulevard would have enabled Napoleon to enter Rome through the Porta del Popolo, proceed along the Corso (extended to the Forum), pass through both the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus, and march up the boulevard to his palace on the Quirinal. 55. Ridley 1992. 56. Johns 1998, 104 thinks not. On ‘Mars the Peacemaker’, see also Huet 1999, 58–9. 57. After Napoleon’s defeat, however, it was presented to the Duke of Wellington and may now be found in all its dubious glory under the stairs at Apsley House in London. Johns 1998, 106. 58. Johns 1998, 113–17. 59. A strategy recommended by Ovid, Ars Amatoria 119–28. 238

Notes to pp. 143–145 60. The main ancient source referenced by the Entrée was Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paulus, 32–4: ‘The first day [of the Triumph] barely sufficed for the exhibition of the captured statues, paintings, and colossal figures which were carried on 250 chariots.’ Other sources include Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.213–28 and Tristia 4.2, 19–56; Appian, Roman History 12.116–17; Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 7.132–52; and the reliefs on the Arch of Titus (on the contemporary visibility of the Arch, see Ridley 1992, 96–7). 61. Appian, HR . 117 (eikones of conquered kings in battle and in flight); Ovid, Trist. 41–6 (personifications of Rhine and Germania); Ovid, AA . 220–8 (representations of the Euphrates, the Tigris, Armenians, Persia, an Achaemenian city and various duces); Josephus, BJ . 139–47 (pegmata showing scenes from the sack of Jerusalem). Beard 2007 assembles the evidence, with a focus on Pompey’s Triumph of 61 bce. Triumphal representation in the visual arts is analysed by Brilliant 1999. 62. Östenberg 2009; see also Brilliant 1999, 221–5 on the performative (and participatory) nature of the Roman Triumph. 63. Ozouf 1988, esp. 15–21 on festivals as an expression of revolution. ‘Like the Revolution, the festival, which is universal, has no conquering hero’ (p. 20). 64. Mainardi 1989, 158. 65. Murphy 2004, 154–64; Carey 2000. 66. Hanley 2005, 120. The former Port de l’Hôpital is now the Quai d’Austerlitz. 67. Mainardi 1989, 158. Rowell notes that ‘citizens were invited to accompany the cortège; [the Journal de Paris] informs the chosen representatives exactly where and at what time they were to assemble’. Rowell 2012, 146. 68. See Pietrangeli 1993, 128–30 and Ruprecht 2011, 187–92 for the full list. 69. Quoted in Rowell, 144. Journal de Paris, 308, 26 July, pp. 1289–91 (see also Le Patriot Français, 312, 30 July 1798, p. 1290). 70. See e.g. Sèvres vase entitled ‘Arrivée à Paris des oeuvres rapportées d’Italie par l’armée de Napoléon’ (Sèvres Museum, inv. MNC1823); Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, ‘Entrée Triomphale des monuments des sciences et des arts’, 1802 (BNF Prints and Photographs RESERVE FOLQB-201 (141)). 71. Mainardi 1989, 158; Rowell 2012, 145. 72. Festivities included dancing in the courtyard of the Louvre until the early morning (McClellan 1994, 124). On the following day, the Minister presented the spoils of the Italian campaign to the Directory as the expression of a military (as opposed to cultural) victory. On the distinction, see Mainardi 1989. 73. The new galleries specially designed for them by Saint-Hubert and Raymond did not open until 1800, however. McClellan 1994, 152; Gould 1965, 72–3. 74. Fifty prominent artists signed the petition, which was disregarded. The petition is reproduced in Pommier 1989, 143–4. 75. Page numbers refer to de Quincy (ed. Pommier) 1989. 76. De Quincy approves of Winckelmann’s use of material evidence to construct historical theory as opposed to the virtual collections of Caylus or Montfaucon. De Quincy (ed. Pommier) 1989, 102–3. 77. ‘Il ne compose pas moins des lieux, des sites, des montagnes, des carrières , des routes antiques, des positions respectives des villes ruinées, des rapports géographiques, des relations des tous les objets entre eux, des souvenirs, des traditions locales, des usages encore existants, des parallèles et des rapprochements qui ne peuvent se faire que dans le pays même.’ 239

Notes to pp. 145–148 78. Comparable in fact to Tournon’s plans for Rome’s historic centre (Vandiver Nicassio 2005, 184). 79. Miles 2008, esp. 319–34. 80. iisne rebus manus adferre non dubitasti a quibus etiam oculus cohibere te religionum iura cogebant? (In Verrem 4.101.) 81. Arnold 2006, 100–1. 82. Huang et al. 2011. 83. For a summary of the events, see Vandiver Nicassio 2005, 16–23. 84. ‘Li Theatri di Torre Argentina e di Tordinona, ora chiamato di Apollo, furono aperti gratis. In questo secondo è comparsa in scena la Tragedia intitolata “La Morte di Giulio Cesare”. A renderne più viva e più interessante la rappresentanza, si vide sul palco la celebre statua colossale di Pompeo, quella stessa, ch’ esistiva nel’ antico Senato, e innanzi a cui Cesare cadde estino. Possessore della medesima è l’Ex-Principe Spada, dal Palazzo del quale venne transportata al Theatro, donde tornarà al suo posto, seppure le Francesi non se ne invogliassero. In altri tempi aveva trovato a venderla per la somma di 14/m scudi. Vi fu portata altresì la lupa con Romolo et Remo, già esistente in Campodoglio. Così e terminate la festa’ (Sala 1882–8 Vol. 2, 169–70). 85. Carlson 1981, 48 contextualizes the Teatro Apollo: ‘During the French occupation in 1798–1799, all three [major Roman theatres] produced dramas and musicals suiting Jacobin taste.’ 86. Hobhouse 1980 [1819], 250. 87. On which see Wiles 2011, 148ff. During the French Revolution, Brutus was among the most frequently staged of Voltaire’s plays: Sheu 2005, 16–20 provides the statistics (cf. Robinove 1959). Carlson 1998, 161–2 notes that Brutus was ‘one of a small group of plays . . . to be presented once a week at public expense to inspire revolutionary fervour’. Herbert 1972, 68–80 discusses the connections between Voltaire’s Brutus and David’s painting on the same subject. 88. Haskell and Penny 1981, 298 suggest that Visconti ‘must have been involved’ in arranging the statue’s onstage appearance. 89. Haskell and Penny 1981, 298. Eaton 1820, 3.32–3. Eustace 1813, 271–2 is convinced it is genuine, however; Hobhouse 1980 [1819], 250, while affecting a sceptical distance, nevertheless argues contra Winckelmann that neither the statue’s heroic nudity nor its find-spot detract from its identification. 90. Plutarch, Brutus 14.2. Beard 2007, 24 mentions that Pompey’s theatre included ‘a new senate house that stood at the far end of the complex’, and this is where Caesar was murdered. Haskell and Penny 1981, 299 propose on the other hand that ‘it was to the theatre that Augustus had the statue removed from the Curia after the death of Caesar’ (emphasis added). In Shakespeare’s Rome, ‘Pompey’s porch’ (portico) where the conspirators gather (1.3. 131 and 152) appears to be a different location from the public Senate-house where Caesar is stabbed. 91. ‘Avec quell Plaisir n’ai-je point vu à Londres votre tragédie de Jules César . . . Je ne prétends pas assurément approuver les irrégularités barbares dont elle est remplie . . . Mais, au milieu de tant de fautes grossières, avec quel ravissement je voyais Brutus, tenant encore un poignard teint du sang de César, assembler le people romain . . .’ From Discours sur la tragédie, 1730, in Besterman (ed.) 1967, 51. Elsewhere, Voltaire calls Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar both ‘sublime’ and ‘monstrous’. Cf. Fletcher 1988, 6–9 and 22–3; Carlson 1998, 25–6; Cranston 1975. 240

Notes to pp. 148–156 92. Besterman 1967, 29–30 compares the two plays in terms of their relative number of characters and settings. Behne 1872, 14 finds the truncated action risible and absurde. 93. Rumours regarding his paternity are recorded in Plutarch’s Life of Brutus 5.1–2, but cf. Tempest 2017, 102 demonstrating their implausibility. Cato was Brutus’ uncle and father-inlaw; Brutus supported Pompey’s faction at Pharsalus, although Pompey was responsible for the death of his biological father (Plutarch, Brutus 4.2, with comment by Tempest 24 and 60). 94. Agarez Medeiros 2013, 136–7. 95. Parricide was also the theme of Voltaire’s first – and very successful – drama Oedipe, first performed in 1718; on which see Vrooman 1970, 67–83; Carlson 1998, 9–14. 96. Carlson 1998, 161–2; Fletcher 1988, 97–8. 97. Fletcher 1988, 103–4; Robinove 1959, 534–8; Sheu 2005, 16–20. 98. Bennett 2010, 55 points out that even inorganic matter stone such as stone is subject to (very slow) alteration over time; cf. Lepecki 2000 and Jones 2009 on the illusion of the dancer’s stillness. 99. States 1985, 29–35. Examples include real fire, functional clocks, animals, children and ‘Molière playing Molière’. 100. This is the case in Shakespeare, but Voltaire ne donne pas même une allusion quelconque pour nous informer, si ces billets y on été poses par Cassius ou non. Behne 1872, 38. 101. The locus classicus for this is Seneca’s Medea, on which see Bexley 2016. 102. The text at this point mentions two statues, that of Scipio as well as that of Pompey, so it is again possible that the set likewise contained more than one. 103. ‘Jurez donc avec moi, jurez sur cette épée, / Par le sang de Caton, par celui de Pompée, / Par les mânes sacrés de tous ces vrais Romains / Qui dans les champs d’Afrique ont fini leurs destins; / Jurez par tous les dieux, vengeurs de la patrie, / Que César sous vos coups va terminer sa vie.’ 104. ‘Nous le jurons par vous, héros, dont les images / A ce pressant devoir excitent nos courages; / Nous promettons, Pompée, à tes sacrés genoux, / De faire tout pour Rome.’ 105. ‘Ah ! c’est ce qu’il fallait reprocher à Pompée: / Par sa feinte vertu la tienne fut trompée. / Ce citoyen superbe, à Rome plus fatal, / N’a pas même voulu César pour son égal. / Crois-tu, s’il m’eût vaincu, que cette âme hautaine / Eût laissé respirer la liberté romaine?’ 106. Wellington to Castlereagh, quoted in Miles 2008, 333–4. 107. Mainardi 1989, 160. Many contemporaries opposed the acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles. Eustace 1813, 1.334–5 protests, for example, that ‘such rapacity is a crime against all ages and all generations; it deprives the past of the trophies of their genius and the title deeds of their fame’. Lord Byron denounces it in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 2.XII–XV.

Part Three 1. ‘Though our expectations from this object of our curiosity were by no means disappointed, yet I almost despaired of a satisfactory method of conveying to others a tolerable idea of the entertainment, we received from it on the spot.’ Wood 1769, v. 2. Withers 2007. 3. Webb 2012.

241

Notes to pp. 157–163

Chapter 8 1. Mack 2009. 2. Jameson 1826, 110 buys a copy of Corinne to read on location; Eustace 1813, 33–4 recommends it as ‘the best companion a traveller can take with him’; and the Shelleys (PBS Letters, p. 68 [Dec 21 1818]) both read it prior to visiting Pompeii. 3. References are to the chapter divisions and page numbers in Balayé (ed) 1985. Translations are by Raphael 2008 unless otherwise indicated. 4. Gutwirth 1978, 183–9; Goodden 2000, 67. 5. On Orientalism in travel writing of the period, see e.g. Porter 1991, 13–14; Makdisi 2000, passim. 6. When she first appears, Corinne is dressed like the ‘Cumaean Sibyl’ as painted by Domenchino, a work which Oswald later encounters in Bologna in the company of his new wife. On Corinne as Sibyl, see Gutwirth 1978, 207; Levy 2002, 246. On Corinne as Dido, see Edwards 2012, 186; Gooden 2008, 169. Didier 1999, 194–5 discusses de Staël’s use of the Aeneid among other myths. 7. Gutwirth 1978, 212: ‘Modern Italy [in the novel] is a country stripped of all power save that of its artistic and spiritual traditions . . . Italy is Romanticism, England the Enlightenment. And as Italy is woman’s country, England is man’s.’ Cf. Kadish 1991, 117. 8. Kadish 1991, 119–21. 9. Urry and Larsen 2011, 199. 10. This reverses the stereotypical association of northern Europe with industrious activity and the indolent South with ennui and dolce far niente, on which see Chard 1999, esp. 119–25; 218–19. 11. Lévèque 1999, 146–7. 12. Cf. ‘Notre air serein, notre climat riant’ (p. 30); ‘on dirait que le souffle pur du ciel et de la mer agit sur l’imagination des hommes comme le vent sur les harpes éoliennes’ (45). 13. Goodden 2008, 158 attests to de Staël’s ‘instinctive feeling that sunshine fertilizes genius’. 14. Compare Gibbon 1994 LXXI, 3.1084: ‘The footsteps of heroes, the relics, not of superstition, but of empire, are devoutly visited by a new race of pilgrims from the remote, and once savage countries of the North.’ Gibbon also records in his Memoirs that ‘ROME is the great object of our pilgrimage’ (1984, 40). 15. Johnson 2002. See also Pomian 1990, 16; Arnold 2006, 92–3. 16. The Rostra is a reconstruction of 1904; the Senate House dates to late antiquity, and was also renovated in the twentieth century. Watkin 2011, 39–40 and 100. 17. Lévèque 1999; Kadish 1991. Goodden 2008, 5 calls her ‘the celebrant, outcast, and finally nemesis of Napoleon’. On Napoleon’s reception of imperial Rome, see Ch. 7 and Huet 1999. 18. For Kadish 1991, Corinne embodies the betrayed ideals of the French Revolution. 19. Rome as palimpsest is discussed by Kennedy 1999 with particular reference to Freud’s introduction to Civilization and its Discontents. The locus classicus is Gibbon. 20. Cheeke 2006, 524. 21. De Staël’s phrasing is possibly a response to Descartes’ mouvement continu et ininterrompu de la pensée (continuum et nullibi interruptum cogitationis motum). I owe this observation to Audrey Borowski. 242

Notes to pp. 163–168 22. Smail 2008. 23. Cf. Adler 1989, 1374. 24. On the enclosure and roofing of Roman bath-houses, see Vitruvius de Arch. 5.10.3; Nielsen 1993, 41–2 and 153–66 reviews the archaeological evidence. Seneca Quaest. Nat. 1.2.4 attests to artificial lighting (in balneis quoque circa lucernam tale quiddem aspici solet ob aeris densi obscuritatem); Statius Silv. 1.5.43–6 also describes baths illuminated by torches (ignis) and the unwary sun retreating, ‘burned’ (uritur) by the alio aestu within; Seneca de Vita Beata 7.3 depicts the thermae as dark, humid, and enervating. Nielsen, however, points out that enclosure was more to keep heat in than to shut it out. 25. ‘Inscrite dans la temporalité romanesque, chaque représentation de l’eau suggère en outre une vision différente du temps, associée à une forme particulière de réverie.’ Villeneuve 1999, 164. 26. Similar observations are recorded in De Staël’s journal: ‘Les monuments de Rome rappellent des faits, mais rien ne donne l’idée des générations disparues comme Pompéia; la vie privée, les actions de chaque homme sont là, sous vos yeux.’ De Staël 1971, 141. 27. This resembles the phenomenological approach to landscape archaeology (e.g. Tilley 2010, esp. 25–40); the field is summarized by Thomas 2006. 28. Paul 2000, 34–5. 29. Lalande 1769, vol. 7 pp. 2–5, who seems to be De Staël’s principal guide (Balayé 146 n. 20), cites ancient authorities, e.g. Donatus and Statius regarding Virgil’s tomb, but separates them carefully from local legends. He suggests (vol. 7, pp. 59–61, 71–2) that the Grotto supposedly linking Avernus to Cumae may have been a practical route constructed by the ancient inhabitants of the region and the Sibyl is an invention of the poets, even though the ambience of the place tempts you to believe ces idées fabuleuses. See also Eustace 1813, 1.506–10 on the disputed authenticity of Virgil’s tomb, and 1.530–3 on the Sibyl’s grotto. 30. Walchester 2007, 79 notes that Starke’s Letters from Italy (1802) similarly combine guidebookstyle commentary with the more personal epistolary form. 31. Luttrell 1965, 66 and 77. 32. According to Venuti 1995, 15, ‘fluent domestication . . . provides readers with the narcissistic experience of recognising their own culture in a cultural other.’ 33. Stevens 2010, 43; Mack 2009, 15–16. On sympathy as a novelist’s device, see generally Marshall 1988 and Mullan 1988. 34. Knight 1805, 153–4. 35. cf. Knight 1792, 1.324: ‘I crossed the Tiber with such emotions as I should in vain endeavour to describe. I saluted, from the Milvian bridge, the Sabine hills, the Fidenian plains, and every well-known object that recalled to my mind a train of circumstances long banished from my memory.’ 36. This is the same empty tomb into which Charlotte Eaton crawls on the Via Appia. Eaton 1820, 2.158. 37. Acquired for the Vatican collections in 1817. Haskell and Penny 1981, 269–71. 38. Valerius’ Baiae villa: Knight 1792, 2.11–14; Palatine library: 2.132–5; Forums: 2.140; Valerius’ Praeneste villa: 2.224–5. 39. Although figured ceramics were unknown in Marcus’ time, Roman consumers did have a taste for Greek-made pottery, with Pliny NH 35.46.160–4 attesting to the fame of workshops at Samos, Surrentum and Pergamum; however, these were not antiques, and were prized for their size or fragility, rather than any decoration. Antique Greek silver and bronze vessels were collected by Roman elites from the second century bce onwards (Sallust, Cat. 11 and Pliny 243

Notes to pp. 168–174 NH books 33 and 34, especially 34.3.6 on ‘Corinthian’ ware). Knight’s identification of the pots as Greek rather than Etruscan, however, shows knowledge of the latest theories. 40. De Vivo 2014, 167–73, esp. 170: ‘the strategies of narration work as coping mechanisms against the potentially traumatic experience of battle.’ 41. Knight 1805, 36–67. 42. Gurrieri and Chatfield 1972; Paul 2000. 43. A similar scheme operates in the landscape gardens at Stowe. 44. Knight 1792, 2.28–39. 45. Knight 1805, 110–11. The provenance of the Belvedere Apollo is uncertain, but Antium is one possibility. The Dying Gladiator was discovered in Rome during the construction of the Villa Ludovisi, on the site of the Gardens of Sallust. On the provenance of the sculptures, see Haskell and Penny 1981, pp. 224 and 148. 46. Knight 1805, 235–6. ‘Maecenas’ Villa’ is now identified as the Temple of Hercules Victor (Sciarretta 2010, 14). It was painted by numerous artists, e.g. Richard Wilson in 1765 and Jacob Philipp Hackert in 1783. 47. Knight 1792, 2.335–7, e.g. Pompey’s villa (*‘Magnificent ruins of this still remain at Albano’), and Tullia’s tomb (*‘A tomb in the vineyard Marzelli . . . supposed to be that of Tullia’). 48. Ch. 5, above.

Chapter 9 1. Stevens 2010, pp. 116–18 lists 85 Anglophone historical novels published between 1760 and 1820, of which Marcus Flaminius and John Nott’s translation of Saffo are the only ones with a classical setting. See Stevens 2010 on the development of historical fiction generally, and Mack 2009 on the negotiation of eighteenth-century historical consciousness via prose literature in various genres, generic hybridity being a feature of eighteenth-century prose. 2. As Constantine 1988, 103 concludes, ‘Its [Hyperion’s] relevance to the French Revolution and the upheaval excited in Germany is obvious.’ Hölderlin directs invective towards Germany using Hyperion as his mouthpiece. Cf. Güthenke 2008, 88 who analyses Hölderlin’s Greece as ‘the appropriate landscape to represent . . . the issues involved in the self-positioning of the [modern, German] artist’. Lady Morgan, who was herself half-Irish, is best known for her 1806 novel The Wild Irish Girl, and remained committed to Irish nationalism throughout her career. Newcomer 1990, 29 remarks in relation to Ida that ‘Just as Ireland was under the oppressive domination of England, so Greece was under the oppressive subjection of Turkey’; cf. Egenoff 2009, 105–28. 3. For details of the Orlov revolt, see Brewer 2010, 184–208. 4. Mullan 1988. The classic text is Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771); Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is another example of the genre. 5. Page references are to the English translation in Santner (ed.) 1990. 6. ‘Wer hält das aus, wen reißt die schröckende Herrlichkeit des Altertums nicht um, wie ein Orkan die jungen Wälder umreißt, wenn sie ihn ergreift, wie mich, und wenn, wie mir, das Element ihm fehlt, worin er sich ein stärkend Selbstgefühl erbeuten könnte?’ 7. Most familiar in the musical setting by Brahms (1871).

244

Notes to pp. 174–180 8. For example, as Hyperion prepares to leave Diotima (p. 82): ‘ “For a long time,” I cried, “O Nature! has our life been at one with you, and the world that is ours divinely young, like you and all your gods, through the power of love.” ‘ “In your groves we wandered,” Diotima continued, “and were like you, by your springs we sat and were like you, there over the mountains we went, with your children the stars, like you.” ’ And earlier, ‘I love all of this Greece’, exclaims Hyperion. ‘It wears the colour of my heart’ (p. 36). The reciprocity between Hyperion’s subjectivity and the landscapes of Hölderlin’s Greece is discussed in detail by Güthenke 2008; Güthenke, however, focuses on visual perception, i.e. landscape considered as prospect, rather than its haptic properties. 9. Nationalism predicated on historical consciousness is anachronistic for the 1770s, but had become prevalent by the time of Hyperion’s composition in the 1790s; see Myrogiannis 2012. 10. Güthenke 2008, 78–9 stresses the visual in this scene. 11. Hölderlin 1990 [1797–9]. ‘Up on my hill, I read of the ancient, magnificent sea fight that once blazed up at Salamis’ (p. 36); ‘I approached the nearby grotto where, they say, the old man sang his Iliad . . . I opened his divine poem, and it ws as if I had never known it, so differently did it now come to me’ (p. 14); and ‘in the dark shade of an evergreen laurel, looking at our Plato’ (p. 20). 12. Compare Bennett 2010 and Mitchell 2005 on the agency of matter. 13. As in Volney’s description of Palmyra: ‘It consisted of a countless multitude of superb columns standing erect, which, like the avenues of our parks, extended in regular file farther than the eye could reach.’ Volney 1795, 2. 14. Hölderlin 1990 [1797–9], 20; 8; 69; 81; 108. 15. Compare his farewell to Smyrna, from the ship: ‘My eyes traced my green walks along the shore, the path by which I climbed the Acropolis, I saw them and let them go.’ Hölderlin 1990 [1797–9], 29. 16. As one traveller to Sicily writes in 1792, while Etna certainly looks impressive at a distance, it is only when ‘you travel a whole day without getting more than half round him and begin to measure by surer indices than sight, the conception swells with the progressive discoveries’. Quoted in Black 2003. On the application of spatial analogies to abstract concepts such as ‘greatness’, see Lakoff and Johnson 1980. 17. Donato 2013, 121 n. 31. 18. Sappho: after a Greek Romance is listed in Nott’s obituary under his publications (Gentleman’s Magazine 1825, p. 566) and the copy held in the British Library is marked in faint pencil on the title page in a copperplate hand ‘By J[o]hn Nott’. 19. Page numbers cited reference the translation attributed to Nott, and those in square brackets refrence the parallel-text edition. 20. As Donato 2013, 107 points out, these romances correspond to the Avventure in Verri’s title. 21. Donato 2013, 91 and 97, 111. 22. DeJean 1989, 170. 23. Donato 2013, 106. 24. Contemporary operas on Sappho include Giardini (1778), Martini (1794) and Mayr (1794). McDonald 2001, 289, 304, 316. Maria Fortuna also composed a ‘pastoral tragedy’ entitled Saffo in 1776. 25. A situation lecturers everywhere will find all too familiar.

245

Notes to pp. 181–190 26. Marshall 1988, 39. Marshall shows how (eighteenth-century) sympathy is always already aesthetic and mimetic. 27. Barnett 1987; Roach 1985. 28. Mack 2009; Zimmerman 1996. 29. For ‘Greece’, read ‘Ireland’. See n. 2 above. Egenoff 2009; Newcomer 1990. 30. She does dance on various occasions, but is mostly famed as an improvisatrice/poetess. 31. Ida is set some twelve years after the Orlov Revolt. 32. Owenson’s sources are given in the notes at the end of each volume. They include DeGuys’ Voyage litteraire de Grèce (1771), Lady Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), ChoiseulGouffier’s Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782), Spon and Wheler’s A Journey into Greece (1682) and many other travelogues. 33. The Vatican ‘Sleeping Ariadne’ sculpture, also known as ‘Cleopatra’, is a likely source here. See Haskell and Penny 1981, 185–7. Emma Hamilton was painted as Ariadne in a similar pose by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. 34. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 13.590d–591f; on her career as a model, cf. Pliny, NH . 34.70. Quintilian, Inst. Orat. 2.15.9, on the other hand, makes Phryne herself responsible for exposing her own body as an act of persuasion: illa speciosissimum [sc. corpus] alioqui diducta nuderavat tunica. 35. Although this scene is later eroticised, the action of baring one’s breast occurs as a gesture of maternal supplication in tragedy, e.g. Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers (896–8), and the Nurse in Seneca’s Phaedra (246–9); Polyxena bares her own throat and breasts for the sacrificial knife in Euripides’ Hecuba 557–61. Exposing one’s assets in a forensic setting to win sympathy and admiration also has a parallel in Manius’ battle-scars (Cicero, Orator 2.195–6). Cooper 1995, 313 concurs that Athenaeus ‘more aptly describes a scene of supplication and mourning than of [erotic] disrobing’. On Phryne’s disrobing as a theatrical, specifically tragic gesture, see also Ziogas 2018, 80–3. 36. Also in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 13.590d–591f. 37. See further Csapo 2008 on cosmic choreography in ancient dithyramb. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 269d–e mentions ‘cosmic ekpyrosis’ among other schemata or recognizable sequences of steps. 38. In classical mythology, Ariadne does not in fact typically enter the labyrinth, nor in the traditional dance based on the myth, in which the lead dancer takes the role of Theseus. Owenson has taken some liberties with the scenario in order to allocate the lead role to Ida. 39. On the romance of ruins generally, see Macaulay 1966. On the generic attributes of gothic fiction, see Miles 2002, and Ranger 1991 on gothic settings in early nineteenth-century theatre. 40. Virgil, Aeneid 4.160–72. 41. Billings 2010 identifies this kind of Eros in Hyperion. 42. Compare Butler 2015, 59–88 on metatextual echoes. 43. Mosser 1983, 161. 44. Scarry 1985, esp. 48–51 defines torture as the erasure of vocal autonomy (subjectivity) through the application of physical pain. 45. Winckelmann 2006 [1768], 196–7. 46. Haskell and Penny 1985, 337–9. The statue itself is from the Roman Imperial period. 47. Libanius 64.116 and 118. For discussion, see Lada-Richards 2004. 246

Notes to pp. 190–196 48. Figurative dance was not unknown, but it was not typically part of theatrical or festival performance. See Garelli 2007 on proto-pantomime and precursors. 49. Mosser 1983, 159–60. 50. Tripier Le Franc, quoted in Mosser 1983, 160. 51. Ribeiro 1995, 138; Rauser 2017, 18–19. 52. Tripier Le Franc, quoted in Mosser 1983, 159. 53. Numbering according to Campbell 1988. Barthélemy does not translate any one particular ode.

Chapter 10 1. Dekker 2005, 249. 2. Black 2003; Walchester 2007; Buzard 1993. See also Cheeke 2006, 528 and 533 on Childe Harold as shaping the sensibility of travellers. 3. ‘His [Lionel’s] disposing of his historical romance – the skeleton of a fallen race – in the immortal city of Rome, now deserted and barren, constitutes both a tribute to Western humanism – and a slap in its face.’ Lokke 2003, 131. 4. On the circularity of the preface and the need for explaining the book’s nineteenth-century existence, see e.g. Thomas 2000; Paley 1993, 110–11; Wagner-Lawlor 2002, 769–72. 5. Page numbers refer to the 1985 edition. 6. PBS Letters, p. 61 (#488 to Peacock). 7. Eustace 1813, 530–3. Forsyth 2001 [1813], 157–8 confirms that the passage is blocked by a rock-fall. 8. Gilbert and Gubar 2000, 95–9. 9. On Mary Shelley and childbirth/maternal paradigm for authorship, see e.g. Gilbert and Gubar 2000; Moers 1976, 91–9; Hoeveler 2003, 46–7. MWS herself referred to Frankenstein as her ‘hideous progeny’. On the significance of repetition in a female authorial process (as opposed to, say, a single burst of inspiration), see for instance Winnett 1990, after Irigaray 1985. 10. PBS Letters pp. 78–80 (#492 to Peacock, 25 Feb 1819). 11. Eustace 1813, 468–9 visits some vaults by the sea which are supposed to have belonged to Cicero’s villa, and comments that ‘as long therefore as popular belief, or tradition however uncertain, attaches the name of Cicero to these ruins . . . so long will every traveller who values liberty and reveres genius, visit them with interest, and hang over them, though nearly reduced to a heap of rubbish, with delight’. 12. MWS Letters 241, 30 November 1818. 13. It is not clear where this idea originates. MWS read Plutarch’s Lives between 1815 and 1819, but Cicero is not detained by the wind in Plutarch’s Life (although the Etesian wind is mentioned as an asset of his Circaean villa). According to Appian, it was sea-sickness that made him turn back. Middleton’s Life of Cicero p. 290 relates that ‘the winds were cross and turbulent’, but according to Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, MWS did not read Middleton until 1820. 14. Both the Shelleys read Corinne about a week prior to visiting Pompeii. MWS in Feldman and Scott-Kilvert 1987, 243.

247

Notes to pp. 196–203 15. PBS Letters p. 71 (#491 to Peacock, 23 January 1819). 16. 62 ce. For accounts of the eruption and destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, see e.g. Lazer 2009, 81–3. 17. Lussier 2000, 146: ‘the full range of waves generated without (e.g. light, sound, electromagnetism) interact with the waves within the body (e.g. brain waves, cardial pulsation, respiration).’ 18. Aviram 1994. 19. PBS Letters p. 73 (#491 to Peacock, 23 January 1819). 20. PBS Letters p. 7 (#462 to Peacock, 20 April 1818). 21. Jones 1964, 84. 22. The existence of the staircase is corroborated by Charlotte Eaton 1820, 84, who calls it ‘extremely perilous’, and also Forsyth 2001 [1816], 86. 23. PBS Letters pp. 84–5 (#495 to Peacock, 23 March 1819). 24. Churchill 1980, 47: the setting provides ‘an idyllically conducive ambience for Shelley’s poetical work’. Churchill also notes a ‘Piranesian reference’ in Shelley’s ‘dizzy arches suspended in the air’. 25. Beaton 2013, 68–75; Ferris 2000, 108–33. 26. Güthenke 2008; Butler 1935; Myrogiannis 2012. 27. Beaton 2013, 53–65. Beaton argues that in 1821 ‘Isles of Greece’ ‘became topical . . . in a way that Byron could never have imagined’ when he wrote the stanzas in 1819 as a response to Italian nationalism. 28. Beaton 2013 notes that Byron’s Greek Tour inspired several of his major works including Childe Harold, The Giaour, Don Juan, The Bride of Abydos and The Siege of Corinth. For a political reading of Childe Harold, see Stabler 2000. 29. Rawes 2000, esp. 57 discusses the personas adopted by ‘Byronic’ Harold (brooding, voluptuary, cynical, tormented, self-centred) vs. ‘Wordsworthian’ Harold, who enjoys ‘trance-like communion with the natural universe’. 30. Cheeke 2006, 526. 31. Doidge 2008, 210. 32. Cheeke 2006, 530. 33. Now identified as the Temple of Saturn. Watkin 2011, 70. This incident took place when Cicero was prosecuting Catiline. Plutarch, Cicero 19.1; Sallust, Catiline 46.5. 34. Hobhouse 1818, 242. 35. Hobhouse 1980 [1819], 250. 36. Huang et al. 2011. 37. Hobhouse 1818, 49–50. Cf. pp. 212–13: ‘You may explore for hours either above or below, through the arched corridores [sic] . . . Your walks in the Palatine ruins . . . will be undisturbed, unless you . . . burst unawares through the hole of some shivered fragments into one of the half buried chambers.’ 38. PBS Letters 490 (to Hogg, 21 December 1818). 39. As Wagner-Lawlor 2002, 769 remarks, ‘The Last Man’s almost triumphal assumption of solitude can only be the most nightmarishly narcissistic version of romantic egoism.’ 40. Makdisi 2000, 243.

248

Notes to pp. 204–210 41. On this scene, see further McWhir 2001, esp. 170. 42. Bunnell 2002. 43. Bunnell 2002. See also Wagner-Lawlor 2002, who argues that the breakdown in tragic coherence experienced by Lionel is counteracted by Mary Shelley’s authorial framing, which restores the theatrical condition of interpersonal sympathy. 44. Sofer 2003; Kemp 2012. 45. Wright 2000, 143–4 connects Lionel’s appreciation of the Dioscuri to the contemporary impulse to ‘evade physical inadequacy’ through the transcendant ‘consoling mechanism’ of a boundless imagination. 46. Winckelmann 2006, 334. 47. Coleman and Crang 2002. 48. Hartigan 2009. 49. Wagner-Lawlor 2002, 767–8 argues on the contrary that the diorama symbolically excludes Lionel from historical, i.e. political, participation, thereby undermining the Romantic association of (theatrical) enactment with (political) activism. However, my focus is not on the relationship between actor and spectator/s, but rather actor and set.

Conclusion 1. Levent and Pascual-Leone (eds.) 2014, esp. Pallasmaa in this volume; Candlin 2010. 2. On tourists’ enduring fascination with the sites of authorial composition, see Goldhill 2011. 3. Eustace 1813, 1.34. On Corinne, cf. Jameson 1826, 110. 4. For relevant taxonomies of theatrical space, see Issacharov 1981; McAuley 1999. 5. As in Dallaway 1800, 199–200. 6. Eaton 1820, 2.182. 7. The passage is discussed in more detail in Slaney 2016. 8. Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 167.

249

250

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abramson, D. M. 2005. Building the Bank of England: money, architecture, society. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ackerman, D. 1999. Deep Play. New York: Random House. Adam, R. 1764. Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia. London: printed for the author. Adam, R. 1959 [1778]. The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam. London: Tiranti. Adler, J. 1989. ‘Travel as performed art’. American Journal of Sociology 94.6, 1366–91. Agorni, M. 2002. Translating Italy for the Eighteenth Century: women, translation, and travel writing 1739–1797. Manchester: St Jerome. Armstrong, N. 1985. Fans: a collector’s guide. London: Souvenir. Arnold, K. 2006. Cabinets for the Curious: looking back at early English museums. Aldershot: Ashgate. Aske, M. 1985. Keats and Hellenism: an essay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aviram, A. 1994. Tellling Rhythm: body and meaning in poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ayres, P. 1997. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bacci, F. and Pavani, F. 2014. ‘ “First hand” not “first eye” knowledge: bodily experience in museums’ in Levent and Pascual-Leone (eds.), The Multisensory Museum: cross-disciplinary perspectives on touch, sound, smell, memory, and space. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 17–27. Bann, S. 1999. ‘Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in dialogue’ in Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: receptions of Rome in European culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barish, J. 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnett, D. 1987. The Art of Gesture: the practices and principles of 18th century acting. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Barria-Poncet, E. 2013. L’Italie de Montesquieu: entre lectures et voyages. Paris: Éditions Classiques Garnier. Barrell, J. 1992. ‘The dangerous goddess: masculinity, prestige and the aesthetic in early eighteenth-century Britain’ in Barrell (ed.), The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 63–88. Barry, D. 1990. ‘ “Sollte der herrliche Sohn uns an der Seite nicht stehn?”: Priapus and Goethe’s Römische Elegien’. Monatshefte 82.4, 421–34. Barthélemy, J-J. 1796 [1788]. Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, during the middle of the fourth century before the Christian era. London: G.G & J. Robson. Bartman, E. 1992. Ancient Sculptural Copies in Miniature. Leiden: Brill. Beard, G. 1978. The Work of Robert Adam. Edinburgh: John Bartholemew & Son. Beard, M. 2007. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA : University of Harvard Press. Beaton, R. 2013. Byron’s War: Romantic rebellion, Greek revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behne 1872. Comparaison entre le Jules César de Voltaire et celui de Shakespeare. Gottingue. Benjamin, W. 1999 [1936]. ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ in Illuminations (trans. Zorn). London: Pimlico. 211–44.

251

Bibliography Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bennett, S. 2013. Theatre & Museums. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: history, theory, politics. London: Routledge. Benson, S. 2004. ‘Reproduction, fragmentation, and collection: Rome and the origin of souvenirs’ in Lasansky and McLaren (eds.), Architecture and Tourism: perception, performance, and place. Oxford: Berg. Bermingham, A. 1995. ‘Elegant females and gentleman connoisseurs: the commerce in culture and self-image in eighteenth-century England’ in Bermingham and Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: image, object, text. London: Routledge. 489–513. Bernhardt, E. D. 1990. Goethe’s Römische Elegien: the lover and the poet. New York: Peter Lang. Berthoz, A. 2000. The Brain’s Sense of Movement (trans. Weiss). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Besterman, T. (ed.). 1967. Voltaire on Shakespeare. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire. Betts, E. (ed.). 2017. Senses of Empire: multisensory approaches to Roman culture. Farnham: Ashgate. Bexley, E. 2016. ‘Recognition and the character of Seneca’s Medea’. The Cambridge Classical Journal 62, 31–51. Bignamini, I. (ed.). 2004. Archives and Excavations: essays on the history of archaeological excavations in Rome from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. London: British School at Rome. Bignamini, I. and Hornsby, C. 2010. Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press. Billings, J. 2010. ‘Hyperion’s symposium: an erotics of reception’. Classical Receptions Journal 2.1: 4–24. Billings, J. 2016. ‘The sigh of philhellenism’ in Butler (ed.), Deep Classics. London: Bloomsbury. Black, J. 1992. The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. Stroud: St Martin’s Press. Black, J. 2003. Italy and the Grand Tour. New Haven: Yale University Press. Blake-Roberts, G. 2011. Wedgwood Jasperware. Oxford: Shire. Boden, M. A. 2000. ‘Crafts, perception, and the possibilities of the body’. British Journal of Aesthetics 49(3): 289–301. Boehringer, S. 2015. ‘What is named by the name “Philaenis”? Gender, function and authority of an antonomastic figure’ in Masterson, Rabinowitz and Robson (eds.), Sex in Antiquity: exploring gender and sexuality in the ancient world. London: Routledge. 374–92. Bogart, A. 2001. A Director Prepares: seven essays on art and theatre. London: Routledge. Bora, R. 1997. ‘Outing texture’ in Kosofsky-Sedgwick (ed.), Novel Gazing: queer readings in fiction. Duke: Durham, 94–127. Boschung, D. 2002. ‘Die Antikesammlung in Newby Hall: ein Beispiel englischer Antikrezeption im 18. Jh’. IJCT 8.3, 359–74. Boulton, J. T. and McLoughlin, T. O. (eds.). 2012. News From Abroad: letters written by British travellers on the Grand Tour, 1728–71. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice (trans. Nice). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyle, A. J. 2003. Ovid and the Monuments: a poet’s Rome. Bendigo: Aureal. Bracciolini, P. 1993 [1448]. De varietate Fortunae: edizione critica con introduzione e commento (ed. Merisalo). Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Brewer, D. 2010. Greece, The Hidden Centuries: Turkish rule from the fall of Constantinople to Greek independence. London: I.B. Tauris. Brilliant, R. 1999. ‘ “Let the trumpets roar!”: the Roman triumph’ in The Art of Ancient Spectacle. Washington: Yale University Press. 220–9. Brook, P. 1968. The Empty Space. London: McGibbon & Kee. 252

Bibliography Brownley, M. W. 1979. ‘The theatrical world of the Decline and Fall’. Papers on Language and Literature 15.3, 263–77. Bryding Adams, E. 1992. The Dwight and Lucille Beeson Collection at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Alabama: Birmingham Museum of Art. Bunnell, C. E. 2002. ‘All the World’s a Stage’: dramatic sensibility in Mary Shelley’s novels. New York and London: Routledge. Burke, E. 1958 [1759, 2nd edn]. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful (ed. Boulton). London: Routledge. Burn, L. 1997. ‘Sir William Hamilton and the Greekness of Greek vases’. Journal of the History of Collections 9.2, 241–52. Butler, E. M. 1935. The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: a study of the influence exercised by Greek art and poetry over the great German writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. 1993. Bodies That Matter: the discursive limits of sex. London: Routledge. Butler, J. 1997. Excitable Speech: a politics of the performative. New York: Routledge. Butler, S. 2015. The Ancient Phonograph. New York: Zone. Butler, S. and Purves, A. (eds.). 2013. Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses. Durham: Acumen Press. Buzard, J. 1993. The Beaten Track: European tourism, literature, and the ways to culture. 1800– 1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byron, G. G. [Lord]. 1980. ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ in McGann (ed.), Byron: the complete poetical works (vol. 2). Oxford: Clarendon. Cage, E. C. 2009. ‘The sartorial self: neoclassical fashion and gender identity in France, 1797– 1804’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.2, 193–215. Calè, L. and Craciun, A. 2011. ‘The disorder of things’. Eighteenth Century Studies 45.1: 1–13. Campbell, D. (ed.). 1988. Greek Lyric in Four Volumes (vol. 2). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Campbell, I. 2004. ‘Rescue archaeology in the Renaissance’ in Bignamini (ed.), Archives and Excavations: essays on the history of archaeological excavations in Rome from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. 13–22. Camps, W. A. 1967. Propertius: Elegies Book II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Candlin, F. 2010. Art, Museums and Touch: a cultural study. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carey, S. 2000. ‘The problem of totality: collecting Greek art, wonders and luxury in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.’ Journal of the History of Collections 12, 1–13. Carlson, M. 1981. The Italian Stage from Goldoni to D’Annunzio. Jefferson, NY: McFarland. Carlson, M. 1998. Voltaire and the Theatre of the Eighteenth Century. Westport: Greenwood. Carlson, M. 2001. The Haunted Stage: the theatre as memory machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cassidy, B. 2011. The Life and Letters of Gavin Hamilton: artist and art dealer in eighteenthcentury Rome. London: Harvey Miller. Chandler, R. 1775. Travels in Asia Minor, or an account of a tour made at the expense of the Society of Dilettanti. Oxford: Clarendon. Chandler, R. 1776. Travels in Greece; or, an Account of a Tour Made at the Expense of the Society of Dilettanti. Oxford: Clarendon. Chandler, R., Revett, N. and Pars, W. 1769. Ionian Antiquities, published with permission of the Society of Dilettanti. London: Society of Dilettanti. Chard, C. 1999. Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: travel writing and imaginative geography 1600–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chard, C. 2000a. ‘Comedy, antiquity, the feminine, and the foreign: Emma Hamilton and Corinne’ in Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and beyond. London: British School at Rome, 147–69. 253

Bibliography Chard, C. 2000b. ‘Women who transmute into tourist attractions: spectator and spectacle on the Grand Tour’ in Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: discourses of travel 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 109–28. Chard, C. 2014. A Critical Reader of the Romantic Grand Tour: tristes plaisirs. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chard, C. and Langdon, H. 1996. (eds.). Transports: travel, pleasure, and imaginative geography, 1600–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cheeke, S. 2004. ‘The Sword “which eats into itself ”: Romanticism, Napoleon and the Roman parallel’. Romanticism 10.2, 209–27. Cheeke, S. 2006. ‘ “What so many have told, who would tell again?” Romanticism and the commonplaces of Rome’. European Romantic Review 17.5, 521–41. Churchill, K. 1980. Italy and English Literature 1764–1930. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Claridge, A. 2004. ‘Archaeologies, antiquaries and the memorie of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Rome’ in Bignamini (ed.), Archives and Excavations: essays on the history of archaeological excavations in Rome from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. London: British School at Rome, 33–53. Clark, A. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (2008) [1998] ‘The Extended Mind’ in Clark, Supersizing the Mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Classen, C. 1993. Worlds of Sense: exploring the senses in history and across cultures. London: Routledge. Classen, C. 2005. ‘Touch in the museum’ in Classen (ed.), The Book of Touch. Oxford: Berg. 274–86. Classen, C. 2012. The Deepest Sense: a cultural history of touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Classen, C. and Howes, D. 2006. ‘The museum as sensescape: Western sensibilities and indigenous artefacts’ in Edwards, Gosden and Phillips (eds.), Sensible Objects: colonialism, musuems, and material culture. Oxford: Berg. Coarelli, F. et al. 2000. The Colosseum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Coleman, S. and Crang, M. 2002. ‘Grounded tourists, travelling theory’ in Coleman and Crang (eds.), Tourism Between Place and Perfomance. New York: Berghahn. Collins, J. 2000. ‘The Gods’ abode: Pius VI and the invention of the Vatican Museum’ in Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and beyond. London: British School at Rome. Collins, J. 2012. ‘Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City: ideology and aesthetics in the age of the Grand Tour’ in Paul (ed.), The First Modern Museums of Art: the birth of an institution in 18th and early 19th-century Europe. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 113–44. Coltman, V. 2001. ‘Sir William Hamilton’s vase publications (1766–1776): a case study in the reproduction and dissemination of antiquity’. Journal of Design History 14.1, 1–16. Coltman, V. 2006. Fabricating the Antique: neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Coltman, V. 2009. Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press. de Condillac, E. B. 1930 [1754]. Treatise on the Senses (trans. Carr). London: Favil. de Condillac, E. B. 1984 [1754]. Traité des Sensations & Traité des Animaux. Paris: Fayard. Constantine, D. 1988. Hölderlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Constantine, D. 2001. Fields of Fire: a life of Sir William Hamilton. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Constantine, D. 2011. In the Footsteps of the Gods: travellers to Greece and the quest for the Hellenic ideal. London: Tauris Park. Cook, B. E. 1985. The Townley Marbles. London: British Museum. Cooper, C. 1995. ‘Hyperides and the trial of Phryne’. Phoenix 49.4, 303–18. 254

Bibliography Coren, S., Ward, L., and Enns, J. 2004. Sensation and Perception. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. Craddock, P. 1988. ‘Historical discovery and literary invention in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’. Modern Philology 85.4, 569–87. Craig, A. D. 2002. ‘How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body’. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3.8, 655. Crouch, D. 2002. ‘Surrounded by place: embodied encounters’ in Coleman and Crang (eds.), Tourism Between Place and Perfomance. New York: Berghahn. 207–18. Csapo, E. 2008. ‘Star choruses: Eleusis, Orphism, and new musical imagery and dance’ in Revermann and Wilson (eds.), Performance, Iconography, Reception: studies in honour of Oliver Taplin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 262–90. Csordas, T. J. 1993. ‘Somatic modes of attention’. Cultural Anthropology 8.2, 135–56. Cuno, J. (ed.). 2009. Whose Culture? The promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cust, L. 1898. History of the Society of Dilettanti. London: Macmillan. Dallaway, J. 1800. Anecdotes of the Arts in England: or, comparative remarks on architecture, sculpture, and painting. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies. Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes’ Error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: G. P. Putnam. Damasio, A. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Danet, B. and Katriel, T. 1989. ‘No two alike: play and aesthetics in collecting’. Play and Culture 2.3, 235–77. Dekker, G. 2005. The fFctions of Romantic Tourism: Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley. Stanford University Press. DeLaine, J. 1997. The Baths of Caracalla: a study in the design, construction, and economics of large-scale building projects in imperial Rome. Portsmouth: JRA supplement 25. DeJean, J. 1989. Fictions of Sappho 1546–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dench, E. 2005. Romulus’ Asylum: Roman identities from the age of Alexander to the age of Hadrian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennis, K. ‘Playing with herself: feminine sexuality and aesthetic difference’ in Bennett, ed. Solitary Pleasures. New York: Routledge. Desgodetz, A. B. 1969 [1682]. Les Edifices Antiques de Rome. Farnborough: Gregg International. Diderot, D. [1778] (1992). Paradoxe sur le Comédien (ed. Lojkine). Paris: Armand Colin. Diderot, D. 1999. ‘A letter on the blind for the benefit of those who see’ in Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, and Other Philosophical Texts, D. J. Adams (trans.). Manchester: Clinamen. Diderot, D. 1999. Lettre sur les aveugles. Paris: Librarie Générale Française. Didier, B. 1999. ‘Corinne et les mythes’ in Diaz (ed.), Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie: ‘l’âme se mêle à tout’. Paris: SEDES. Doidge, N. 2008. The Brain that Changes Itself: stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. Melbourne: Scribe. Donato, C. 2013. ‘Unqueering Sappho and effeminizing the author in early modern Italy’ in Mounsey (ed.), Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: in search of the normal, 1600– 1800. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Dupaty, C. 1789 [1785]. Sentimental Letters on Italy (trans. Povoleri). London: printed by J. Crowder. Earl, D. 1967. The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome. London: Thames & Hudson. Eaton, C. 1820. Rome in the Nineteenth Century, in a series of letters written during a residence at Rome in 1817 and 1818. Edinburgh: Constable. Edensor, T. 2000. ‘Staging tourism: tourists as performers’. Annals of Tourism Research 27.2, 322–44. Edensor, T. 2001. ‘Performing tourism, staging tourism: (re)producing tourist space and practice’. Tourist Studies 1.1, 59–81. 255

Bibliography Edwards, C. 1993. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, C. 1996. Writing Rome: textual approaches to the city. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, C. 2012. ‘The return to Rome: desire and loss in Staël’s Corinne’ in Saunders (ed.), Romans and Romantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 183–202. Egenoff, S. B. 2009. The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson. Farnham: Ashgate. Elsner, J. 1994. ‘A collector’s model of desire: the house and museum of Sir John Soane’ in Elsner and Cardinal (eds.), 1994. The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion. Elsner, J. 2010. ‘Picturesque and Sublime: impacts of Pausanias in late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth-century Britain’. Classical Receptions Journal 2.2 (special issue on Receptions of Pausanias from Winckelmann to Frazer), 219–53. Elsner, J. and Cardinal, R. (eds.), 1994. The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion. Epstein, W. and Rogers, S. 1995. Perception of Space and Motion. San Diego: Academic Press. Eustace, J. C. 1813. A Classical Tour through Italy. London: Mawman. Evans, R. 2011. ‘Learning to be decadent: Roman identity and the luxury of others’. ASCS 32 Selected Proceedings (ed. Mackay). ascs.org.au/news/ascs32/Author.pdf 18/8/15. Fedeli, P. 2005. Elegie Libro II / Properzio: introduzione, testo, e commentario. Cambridge: Francis Cairns. Feldman, D. and Scott-Kilvert, P. (eds.). 1987. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844. Oxford: Clarendon. Ferris, D. 2000. Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Finnegan, R. 2005. ‘The Classical Taste of William Ponsonby, 2nd Earl of Bessborough’. Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies: The Journal of the Irish Georgian Society 8, 12–43. Fletcher, D. J. 1988. ‘Introduction’ in Les Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire vol. 8, 5–166. Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire. Forsyth, J. 2001 [1813]. Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters During an Excursion to Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803 (ed. Crook). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Foster, S. L. 2008. ‘Movement’s contagion: the kinesthetic impact of performance’. In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, T. C. Davis (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. 1986. ‘Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias’ (trans. Miskowiec). Diacritics 16.1, 22–7. Fraser, F. 1986. Beloved Emma: the life of Emma, Lady Hamilton. London: Macmillan. Furján, H. 2011. Glorious Visions: John Soane’s spectacular theatre. London: Routledge. Gaiger, J. 2002. Sculpture: some observations on shape and form from Pygmalion’s creative dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gallagher, S. 2005. How The Body Shapes The Mind. Oxford: Clarendon. Gallese, V. and Lakoff, G. 2005. ‘The brain’s concepts: the role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge’. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3–4, 455–79. Garelli, M.-H. 2007. Danser le mythe: la pantomime et sa réception dans la culture antique, Louvain: Peeters. Gazda, E. 1995. ‘Roman sculpture and the ethos of emulation: reconsidering repetition’. HSCP 97, 121–56. Gibbon, E. 1984. Memoirs of My Life (ed. Radice, after Bonnard). London: Penguin. Gibbon, E. 1994 [1776–89]. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ed. Womersley). London: Penguin. Gibson, J. J. 1977. ‘The theory of affordances’, in Shaw and Bransford (eds.), Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: towards an ecological psychology. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 67–82. 256

Bibliography Gilbert, S. M. and Gubar, S. 2000. The Madwoman in the Attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press (2nd edn). Gilroy, A. (ed.). 2000. Romantic Geographies: discourses of travel 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilpin, W. 1792. Three Essays: On picturesque beauty, On picturesque travel, and On sketching landscape. London: printed for R. Blamire. Glockhamer, H. 1985–6. ‘Fama and Amor: the function of eroticism in Goethe’s Römische Elegien’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 19.2, 235–53. Goethe, J. W. 1962 [1816]. Italian Journey (trans. Auden and Mayer). London: Penguin. Goethe, J. W. 1974 [1795]. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams: a bilingual text (ed. Lind). Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Goethe, J. W. 1985. Sämtliche Werke 6.2: Weimarer Klassik 1798–1806 (eds. Lange et al.) Munich: Carl Hanser. Goethe, J. W. 1986 [1805]. ‘Winckelmann and his age’ [translation of ‘Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert’] in Essays on Art and Literature (ed. J. Geary, trans. E. and E. von Nardroff ). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goethe, J. W. 1986 [1798]. ‘On the Laocoön group’ in Essays on Art and Literature (ed. J. Geary, trans. E. and E. von Nardroff ). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goethe, J. W. 1989. Italienische Reise: Briefe und Tagebuchaufzeichnungen 1788–1789, ed. A. Meier and H. Hollmer. Munich: Beck. Goldhill, S. 2011. Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldstein, E. B. 1999. Sensation and Perception. London: Brooks/Cole. Goldstein, L. 1977. Ruins and Empire: the evolution of a theme in Augustan and Romantic literature. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Goodden, A. 2000. Madame de Staël: Delphine and Corinne. London: Grant & Cutler. Goodden, A. 2008. Madame de Staël: the dangerous exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goold, G. P. 1990 (ed. and trans.) Elegies / Propertius. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gossman, L. 1981. The Empire Unpossess’d: an essay on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gould, C. 1965. Trophy of Conquest: the Musée Napoléon and the creation of the Louvre. London: Faber & Faber. Gould, S. J. 1996. ‘Evolution by walking’ in Dinosaur in a Haystack: reflections in natural history. London: Jonathan Cape. 248–59. Grafton, A. 1983–4. ‘Polyhistor into philolog: notes on the transformation of German classical scholarship 1780–1850’. History of Universities 3: 159–92. Graham, E. J. 2017. ‘Babes in arms? Sensory dissonance and the ambiguities of votive objects’ in Betts (ed.). Senses of the Empire: multisensory approaches to Roman culture. London: Routledge, 122–38. Graham, R. 2009. Arbiter of Elegance: a biography of Robert Adam. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Greene, M. 2015. The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: the Ottoman Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grell, C. 1995. Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’Antiquité en France 1680–1789. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Guilding, R. 2014. Owning the Past: why the English collected antique sculpture, 1640–1840. New Haven: Mellon Centre. Guilmet, C. and Asvesta, A. 2007. ‘Concerning Anacharsis’ in Georgopoulou et al. (eds.), Following Pausanias: the quest for Greek antiquity. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 139–55. Gurrieri, F. and Chatfield, J. 1972. Boboli Gardens. Florence: Editrice Edam.

257

Bibliography Güthenke, C. 2008. Placing Modern Greece: the dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutwirth, M. 1978. Madame de Staël, Novelist: the emergence of the artist as woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guy, G. 2016. Theatre, Exhibition and Curation: displayed and performed. New York: Routledge. Hägele, H. 2013. Colour in Sculpture: a survey from ancient Mesopotamia to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press. Hanley, W. 2005. The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796 to 1799. New York: Columbia University Press. Harloe, K. 2013. Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: history and aesthetics in the age of Altertumswissenschaft. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, E. 2001. The Genius of Robert Adam: his interiors. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre, Yale. Harrop, S. 2010. ‘Physical performances and the language of translation’ in Hall and Harrop (eds.), Theorising Performance: Greek drama, cultural history and critical practice. London: Duckworth, 232–40. Hartigan, K. 2009. Performance and Cure: drama and healing in contemporary Greece and modern America. London: Bloomsbury. Haskell, F. and Penny, N. 1981. Taste and the Antique: the lure of classical sculpture, 1500–1900. New Haven: Yale University Press. Haydon, B. 1926 [1816]. ‘On the judgment of connoisseurs being preferred to that of professional men’ in Taylor (ed.), The Autobiography and Memoirs of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786– 1846). London: P. Davies. Henderson, J. 2003. ‘Portrait of the artist as a figure of style: P.L.I.N.Y.’s letters’. Arethusa 36.2, 115–25. Herbert, R. L. 1972. David, Voltaire, ‘Brutus’, and the French Revolution: an essay in art and politics. London: Allen Lane. Herder, J. G. 1969. Plastik. Einige Wahrnemungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygamlions bildendem Traume. Köln. Herder, J. G. 1990. ‘Viertes Kritische Wäldchen’ in Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelausgaben. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. Herder, J. G. 2002. Sculpture: some observations on shape and form from Pygmalion’s creative dream, J. Gaiger (trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herder, J. G. 2006. ‘Fourth critical grove’ in Herder: selected writings on aesthetics, G. Moore (trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Heringman, N. 2013. Sciences of Antiquity: romantic antiquarianism, natural history, and knowledge work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hibbitt, R. 2006. Dilettantism and its Values: from Weimar classicism to the fin-de-siècle. Cambridge: University of East Anglia Press. Higginson, R. 2011. A History of the Study of South Italian Black- and Red-figure Pottery. Oxford: Archaeopress. Hillenbrand, R. 2003. Goethes Römische Elegien als fiktionales Kunstwerk. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Hobhouse, J. 1818. Historical Illustrations to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold; containing dissertations on the ruins of Rome and an essay on Italian literature. London: John Murray. Hobhouse, J. 1980 [1819]. ‘Notes to “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” ’ in McGann (ed.), Byron: the complete poetical works (vol. 2). Oxford: Clarendon. Hoeveler, D. L. 2003. ‘Frankenstein, feminism and literary theory’ in Schor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hofmann, R. 1992. Goethes Römische Elegien: erotische Dichtung als gesellschaftliche Erkenntnisform. Stuttgart: M&P. 258

Bibliography Hogarth, W. 1997 [1753]. The Analysis of Beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste (ed. Paulson). New Haven: Yale. Hölderlin, F. 1979 [1797–9]. Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland. Frankfurt: Roter Stern. Hölderlin, F. in Santner (ed.). 1990 [1797–9]. Hyperion and Elected Poems. Trans. Trask and Schwarz. New York: Continuum. Hollinshead, M. B. 2015. Shaping Ceremony: monumental steps and Greek architecture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Holmström, K. G. 1967. Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: studies on some trends of theatrical fashion 1770–1815. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Hooper, R. W. 1999. The Priapus Poems: erotic epigrams from ancient Rome. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hooper-Greenhill, E. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Hope, T. 1807. Household Furniture and Interior Decoration. London. Hopkins, K. and Beard, M. 2005. The Colosseum. London: Profile. Hornsby, C. 2000 (ed). The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and Beyond. London: British School at Rome. Horst, E. 2012. ‘Masks and metamorphoses: the transformation of classical tradition in Goethe’s Römische Elegien’. The German Quarterly 85.4, 401–19. Howard. S 1984. Bartolomeo Cavaceppi: eighteenth-century restorer. New York: Garland. Huang, M. et al. 2011. ‘Human cortical activity evoked by the assignment of authenticity when viewing works of art’. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2011.5: 134. doi:10.3389/ fnhum.2011.00134. Huet, V. 1999. ‘Napoleon I: a new Augustus?’ in Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchinson, G. 2006 (ed.). Elegies: Sextus Propertius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irigaray, L. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One (trans. Porter). Ithaca; Cornell University Press. Irwin, D. G. 1972. Winckelmann: selected writings on art. London: Phaidon. Issacharov, M. 1981. ‘Space and reference in drama’. Poetics Today 2, 211–24. Iversen, E. 1968. Obelisks in Exile: the obelisks of Rome. Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad. Jack, I. 1967. Keats and the Mirror of Art. Oxford: Clarendon. James, F. (ed.). 1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon. Jameson, A. 1826. Diary of an Ennuyée. London: Henry Colburn. Janan, M. W. 2001. The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV. Berkeley : University of California Press. Jay, M. 1993. Downcast Eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jeannerod, M. 1994. ‘The representing brain: neural correlates of motor intention and imagery’. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 17(2): 187–245. Jeannerod, M. 2001. ‘Neural simulation of action: a unifying mechanism for motor cognition’. NeuroImage 14: 103–9. Jeffrey, F. (ed.). 1807. ‘Article 14: Household Furniture and Internal Decorations executed from Designs’ [review]. Edinburgh Review 10.20, 478–86. Jenkins, I. and Sloan, K. (eds.), 1996. Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his collection. London: British Museum. Jenkins, I. 2008. ‘Thomas Hope’s collection of antiquities’ in Watkin and Hewatt-Jaboor (eds.), Thomas Hope: Regency designer. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jiminez, J. B. (ed.) 2001. Dictionary of Artists’ Models. London: Routledge. Jockey, P. 2013. Le Mythe de la Grèce Blanche: histoire d’un rêve occidental. Paris: Belin. Johns, C. 1998. Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnson, G. A. 2002. ‘Touch, tactility and the reception of sculpture in early modern Italy’ in A Companion To Art Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. 259

Bibliography Johnson, J. W. 1967. The Formation of English Neo-classical Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, M. 1987. The Body in the Mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, F (ed). 1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon. Jones, S. 2009. ‘ “At the still point”: T.S. Eliot, dance, and modernism’. Dance Research Journal 41.2, 31–51. Kadish, D. Y. 1991. ‘Narrating the French Revolution: the example of Corinne’ in Gutworth, Goldberger and Szmurlo (eds.), 1991. Germaine de Staël: crossing the borders. New Brunswick: Rutgers. Karmon, D. 2011. The Ruin of the Eternal City: antiquity and preservation in Renaissance Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kelly, C. 1997. ‘A Grand Tour: reading Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall”. Greece and Rome 44.1, 39–58. Kelly, J. M. 2009. The Society of Dilettanti: archaeology and identity in the British Enlightenment. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre, Yale. Kemp, R. 2012. Embodied Acting: what neuroscience tells us about performance. London: Routledge. Kennedy, D. F. 1999. ‘A sense of place: Rome, history and empire revisited’ in Edwards (ed.), Roman Presences: receptions of Rome in European culture. 19–34. Knight, E. C. 1792. Marcus Flaminius: A view of the military, political, and social life of the Romans in a series of letters from a patrician to his friend. London: printed for C. Dilly. Knight, E. C. 1805. A Description of Latium; or, La Campagna di Roma. With etchings by the Author. London. Koortbojian, M. 1995. Myth, Meaning, and Memory on Roman Sarcophagi. Berkeley : University of California Press. Koortbojian, M. 2002. ‘Forms of attention: four notes on replication and variation’ in Gazda (ed) The Ancient Art of Emulation: studies in artistic originality and tradition from the present to classical antiquity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Kosofsky-Sedgwick, E. 1985. Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Kosofsky-Sedgwick, E. 2003. Touching Feeling: affect, pedagogy, performance. Durham: Duke University Press. Lada-Richards, I. 2003. ‘Mobile statuary: refractions of pantomime dancing from Callistratus to Emma Hamilton and Andrew Ducrow’ IJCT 10.1. Lada-Richards, I. 2004. ‘Mythōn Eikōn: pantomime dancing and the figurative arts in late antiquity’. Arion 12.2, 111–40. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lalande, J. J. 1769. Voyage d’un François en Italie fait dans les années 1765 et 1766. Printed in Paris. Latour, B. 1996. Aramis: or, the love of technology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lawrence, S. 2007. ‘Piranesi’s aesthetic of eclecticism’ in Lawrence (ed.), Piranesi as Designer. New York: Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, & National Design Museum. Lazer, E. 2009. Resurrecting Pompeii. Abingdon: Routledge. Leader, Z. and O’Neill, M. (eds.). (2003). Percy Bysshe Shelley: the major works. Oxford World’s Classics. Leigh, R. A. 1979. ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the myth of antiquity in the eighteenth century’ in Bolgar (ed.), Classical Influences on Western Thought ad 1650–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 155–68. Leen, A. 1991. ‘Cicero and the rhetoric of art’. American Journal of Philology 112, 229–45. Lepecki, A. 2006. Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement. London: Routledge. Lessing, G. E. 1949 [1766]. Laocoön (ed. and trans. Steel) London: Everyman. 260

Bibliography Levent, N. and Pascual-Leone, A. (eds.). 2014. The Multisensory Museum: cross-disciplinary perspectives on touch, sound, smell, memory, and space. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Lévèque, L. ‘Corinne ou Rome: une réécriture de l’histoire’ in Diaz (ed.), Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie: ‘l’âme se mêle à tout’. Paris: SEDES. Levy, G. A. 2002. ‘A genius for the modern era: Madame de Staël’s Corinne’. Nineteenth-century French Studies 30.3–4, 178–9. Lind, L. R. (ed.). 1974. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Roman Elegies and Venetian Epigrams: a bilingual text. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Lokke, K. E. 2003. ‘The Last Man’ in Schor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 116–34. Luck, G. 1961. ‘Notes on the language and text of Ovid’s Tristia’. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65, 243–61. Lukacher, B. 2006. Joseph Gandy: an architectural visionary in Georgian England. London: Thames & Hudson. Luke, D. and Vaget, H. R. (eds. and trans.) 1998. Goethe: erotic poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lussier, M. S. 2000. Romantic Dynamics: the poetics of physicality. London: Macmillan. Luttrell, B. 1965. The Prim Romantic: a biography of Ellis Cornelia Knight. London: Chatto & Windus. Lyons, C. 1997. ‘The Neapolitan context of Hamilton’s antiquities collection’. Journal of the History of Collections 9.2, 229–36. Macaulay, R. 1966. Pleasure of Ruins (2nd edn.). London: Thames & Hudson. McAuley, G. (1999). Space in Performance: making meaning in the theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McClellan, A. 1994. Inventing the Louvre: art, politics, and the origins of the modern museum in eighteenth-century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClellan, A. 2012. ‘Musée du Louvre, Paris: palace of the people, art for all’ in Paul (ed.), The First Modern Museums of Art: the birth of an institution in 18th and early 19th-century Europe. Los Angeles: Getty, 213–36. McDonald, M. 2001. Sing Sorrow: classics, history, and heroines in opera. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood. McIsaac, P. 2007. ‘Rethinking tableaux vivants and triviality in the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joanna Schopenhauer, and Fanny Lewald’. Monatshefte 99.2, 152–76. McNamee, K. 1993. ‘Propertius, poetry and love’ in DeForest (ed.), Woman’s Power, Man’s Game: essays on classical antiquity in honour of Joy K. King. Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci, 215–48. McWhir, A. 2001. ‘ “Unconceiving Marble”: anatomy and animation in Frankenstein and The Last Man’ in Buss, Macdonald and McWhir (eds.), Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 159–75. Macht, C. 1957. Classical Wedgwood Designs: the sources and their use and the relationship of Wedgwood jasper ware to the classical revival of the eighteenth century. New York: Gramercy. Mack, R. 2009. Literary Historicity: literature and historical experience in eighteenth-century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mainardi, P. 1989. ‘Assuring the empire of the future: the 1798 Fête de la Liberté’. Art Journal 48.2, 155–63. Makdisi, S. 2000. ‘Shelley’s Alastor: travel beyond the limits’ in Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: discourses of travel 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mandelkow, K. R. (ed.). 1964. Goethe’s Briefe (vol. 2). Hamburg: Christian Wegner. Männlein-Robert, I. 2007. ‘Epigrams on art: voice and voicelessness in ecphrastic epigram’ in Bing and Bruss (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram down to Philip. Leiden: Brill, 251–71. Marchand, S. L. 2003. Down from Olympus: archaeology and philhellenism in Germany, 1750– 1970. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 261

Bibliography Marshall, D. 1988. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and Mary Shelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, G. 1998. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: feminine performance and the Galatea myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, C. 1993. Redeeming the Text: Latin poetry and the hermeneutics of reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marvin, M. 1989. ‘Copying in Roman sculpture: the replica series’ in Preciado (ed.), Retaining the Original: multiple originals, copies and reproductions. Washington: Johns Hopkins University Press. 29–45. Marx, K. 1963 [1852]. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (ed. Dutt). New York: International Publishers’ Co. Mattusch, C. 2013 (ed.). Rediscovering the Ancient World on the Bay of Naples, 1710–1890. Washington: National Gallery of Art / Yale University Press. Meineck, P. 2011. ‘The neuroscience of the tragic mask’. Arion 19.1, 113–58. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Smith). London: Routledge. de Mézières, N. L. C. 1992 [1780] The Genius of Architecture; or, the analogy of that art with our sensations (trans. Britt). Los Angeles: Getty Centre. Michaelis, A. 1882. 1882. Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (trans. Fennell). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middleton, R. 1986. ‘The Sculpture Gallery at Newby Hall’. Architectural Association Files 13, 48–60. Miles, M. 2008. Art as Plunder: the ancient origins of debate about cultural property. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miles, R. 2002. ‘The 1790s: the effulgence of Gothic’ in Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 41–62. Millar, S. 2008. Space and Sense. Hove: Psychology. Millenson, S. F. 1987. Sir John Soane’s Museum. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan (UMI Research Press). Miller, A. 2009 [1777]. ‘Letters from Italy’ in Richardson and Dille (eds.), Women’s Travel Writings in Italy (vols. 4 and 5). London: Pickering & Chatto. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want?: the lives and loves of images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Moers, E. 1976. Literary Women. New York: Doubleday. Momigliano, A. 1985a. ‘Ancient history and the antiquarian’ in Studies in Historiography. Oxford: Blackwell 1–39. Momigliano, A. 1985b. ‘Gibbon’s contribution to historical method’ in Studies in Historiography. Oxford: Blackwell 40–55. Montesquieu, C. 1999 [1734]. Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans, and Their Decline (trans. Lowenthal). Indianapolis: Hackett. Montgomery Griffiths, J. 2010. ‘Acting perspectives: the phenomenology of performance as a route to reception’ in Hall and Harrop (eds.), Theorising Performance: Greek drama, cultural history and critical practice. London: Duckworth 219–31. Moore, G. 2006. Herder: selected writings on aesthetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moore, J. 1797. A View of Society and Manners in Italy, with Anecdotes Relating to Some Eminent Characters. Dublin: Pat Wogan. Moskal, J. 2000. ‘Politics and the occupation of a nurse in Mariana Starke’s Letters from Italy’ in Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: discourses of travel, 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 150–64. Mosser, Monique. 1983. ‘Le souper grec de Mme Vigée Le Brun’. Dix-huitième siècle 15, 155–68. Most, G. 2002. ‘Preface’ in Most (ed.), Disciplining Classics: Altertumswissenschaft als Beruf. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, vii–xi. 262

Bibliography Mullan, J. 1988. Sentiment and Sociability: the language of feeling in the eighteenth century. Oxford: Clarendon. Müller-Sievers, H. 1993. ‘Writing off: Goethe and the meantime of erotic poetry’. Modern Language Notes 108.3, 427–45. Murphy, T. 2004. Pliny’s Natural History: the empire in the encyclopedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Myrogiannis, S. 2012. The Emergence of a Greek Identity (1700–1821). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Nardini, F. 1771 [1665]. Roma Antica, con note ed Osservationi Storico-critiche. Rome. Newcomer, J. 1990. Lady Morgan the Novelist. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Nielsen, I. 1993. Thermae et Balnea: the architecture and cultural history of Roman public baths. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Noë, A. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Nolta, D. 1997. ‘The body of the collector and the collected body in William Hamilton’s Naples’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.1, 108–14. Norton, R. E. 1991. Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Nott, J]. 1803. Sappho: after a Greek romance. Printed in London. Nye, E. 2011. Mime, Music and Drama on the Eighteenth-century Stage: the ballet d’action. Cambridge University Press. Odahl, C. M. 2004. Constantine and the Christian empire. London: Routledge. Oppenheimer, P. 1998. ‘Goethe and Modernism: the dream of anachronism in Goethe’s Roman Elegies’. Arion 6.1, 81–100. Östenberg, I. 2009. Staging the World: spoils, captives, and representations in the Roman Triumphal procession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ouditt, S. 2014. Impressions of Southern Italy: British travel writing from Henry Swinburne to Norman Douglas. London: Routledge. Owenson, S. [Lady Morgan]. 1809. Woman: or, Ida of Athens. London: J. D. Dewick. Owenson, S. 2009–10 [1821]. ‘Italy’ in Richardson and Dille (eds.). Women’s Travel Writings in Italy. London: Pickering & Chatto. Ozouf, M. 1988. Festivals and the French Revolution (trans. Sheridan). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Paley, M. D. 1993. ‘The Last Man: apocalypse without millennium’ in Fisch, Mellor and Schor (eds.). The Other Mary Shelley: beyond Frankenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 107–23. Pallasmaa, J. 2014. ‘Museum as an embodied experience’ in Levent and Pascual-Leone (eds.), The Multisensory Museum: cross-disciplinary perspectives on touch, sound, smell, memory, and space. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 239–50. Parker, W. H. 1988. Priapea: poems for a phallic god. London: Croom Helm. Parker, H. T. 1937. The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paterson, M. 2007. Senses of Touch: haptics, affects, and technologies. Oxford: Berg. Paul, C. 2000. Making a Prince’s Museum: drawings for the late-eighteenth-century redecoration of the Villa Borghese. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Paul, C. 2008. The Borghese Collections and the Display of Art in the Age of the Grand Tour. Aldershot: Ashgate. Paul, C. 2012. ‘Capitoline Museum, Rome: civic identity and personal cultivation’ in Paul (ed.), The First Modern Museums of Art: the birth of an institution in 18th and early 19th-century Europe. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 21–45. Paul, C. (ed.). 2012. The First Modern Museums of Art: the birth of an institution in 18th and early 19th-century Europe. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. 263

Bibliography Peakman, J. 2005. Emma Hamilton. London: Haus. Pearce, S. M. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: a cultural study. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Pedley, J. G. 1990. Paestum: Greeks and Romans in Southern Italy. London: Thames & Hudson. Perry, E. 2002. ‘Rhetoric, literary criticism, and the Roman aesthetics of artistic imitation’ in Gazda (ed.), The Ancient Art of Emulation: studies in artistic originality and tradition from the present to classical antiquity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 153–72. Petrides, A. K., 2013. ‘Lucian’s ‘On Dance’ and the poetics of the pantomime mask’ in Harrison and Liapis (eds.), Performance in Greek and Roman Theatre. Leiden: Brill. 433–50. Petsalis-Diomidis, A. 2014. ‘Ancient Greek vases and modern British bodies’ [unpublished paper, APGRD seminar series, University of Oxford] Picon, C. A. 1998. Bartolomeo Cavaceppi: eighteenth-century restorations of ancient marble sculpture from English private collections. London: Clarendon Gallery. Pietrangeli, C. 1993. The Vatican Museums: five centuries of history. Rome: Quasar. Piozzi, H. L. 2009 [1789]. ‘Observations made in a journey through France, Italy and Germany’ in Richardson and Dille (eds.), Women’s Travel Writings in Italy (vols. 4 and 5). London: Pickering & Chatto. Piranesi, G. B. 1756. Le Antichità Romane. Rome. Platt, V. and Squire, M. 2018. ‘Getting to grips with classical art: rethinking the haptics of Graeco-Roman visual culture’ in Purves (ed.), Touch and the Ancient Senses. London: Routledge. 75–104. Pomian, K. 1990 (trans. Wiles-Portier). Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Polity. Porter, D. 1991. Haunted Journeys: desire and transgression in European travel writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Porter, J. 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: matter, sensation, and experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, R. 1988. Edward Gibbon: making history. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Potts, A. 1994. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the origins of art history. New Haven: Yale University Press. Potts, A. 2006. ‘Introduction’ in History of the Art of Antiquity, A. Potts and H. F. Mallgrave (trans.). Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Powell, J. F. G. (ed.). 1995. Cicero the Philosopher: twelve papers. Oxford: Clarendon. de Quincy, Q. 1989 [1796]. Lettres à Miranda sur le déplacement des monuments de l’art de l’Italie (ed. Pommier). Paris: Macula. Ranger, P. 1991. ‘Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast’: Gothic drama in the London patent theatres 1750–1820. London: Society for Theatre Research. Rauser, A. 2015. ‘Living statues and neoclassical dress in late eighteenth-century Naples’. Art History 38.3, 462–87. Rauser, A. 2017. ‘From the studio to the street: modelling neoclassical dress in art and life’ in De Young (ed.), Fashion in European Art: dress and identity, politics and the body, 1755–1925. London: I.B. Tauris. 11–35. Rawes, A. 2000. Byron’s Poetic Experimentation: Childe Harold, the Tales, and the Quest for Comedy. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rawson, E. 1985. Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic. London: Duckworth. Reale Accademia Ercolanese di Archeologia. 1757–92. Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte. Naples. Redford, B. 2008. Dilettanti: the antic and the antique in eighteenth-century England. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Rees, R. 2004. Diocletian and the Tetrarchy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rehberg, F. 1794. Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature at Naples [Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes]. London: S. W. Fores. 264

Bibliography Ribeiro, A. 1995. The Art of Dress: fashion in England and France 1750 to 1820. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ribeiro, A. 2008. ‘Fashion à l’antique: Thomas Hope and Regency dress’ in Watkin and HewatJaboor (eds.), Thomas Hope: Regency designer. New Haven: Yale University Press. 79–87. Richardson, L. (ed.), 1977. Elegies I–IV / Propertius. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Richlin, A. 1992. The Garden of Priapus: sexuality and aggression in Roman humour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richter, S. 1992. Laocoön’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Ridley, R. 1992. The Eagle and the Spade: the archaeology of Rome during the Napoleonic era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rizzolatti, G. and L. Craighero 2004. ‘The mirror-neuron system’. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169–92. Roach, J. R. 1985. The Player’s Passion: studies in the science of acting. Newark: University of Delaware. Roberts, C. 2014. Edward Gibbon and the Shape of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinove, P. S. 1959. ‘Voltaire’s theatre on the Parisian stage 1789–99’. French Review 32, 534–8. Roche, S. 1933 [1786]. Sophie in London: being the diary of Sophie von la Roche (trans. Williams). London: Jonathan Cape. Rogan, B. 1998. ‘On collecting as play, creativity and aesthetic practice’. Etnofoor 11.1, 40–54. Rogers, S. 1956. The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers (ed. Hale). London: Faber & Faber. Rothenberg, J. 1977. Descensus ad Terram: the acquisition and reception of the Elgin Marbles. New York: Garland. Rousseau, G. S. 1976. ‘Nerves, spirits and fibres: towards defining the origins of sensibility’ in Brissenden and Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century 3. Canberra: Australian National University Press. 137–57. Rowell, D. 2012. Paris: the ‘New Rome’ of Napoleon I. London: Continuum. Rowlands, M. 2010. The New Science of the Mind: from extended mind to embodied phenomenology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Rüdiger, H. 1978. ‘Goethes ‘Römische Elegien’ und die antike Tradition’. Goethe-Jahrbuch 95, 174–98. Rudoe, J. 2003. ‘Engraved gems: the lost art of antiquity’ in Sloan (ed.), Enlightenment: discovering the world in the eighteenth century. London: British Museum. Ruprecht, L. 2011. Winckelmann and the Vatican’s First Profane Museum. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryan, C. 2012. ‘Burke’s classical heritage: playing games with Longinus’ in Vermeier and Deckard (eds.), The Science of Sensibility: reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Dordrecht: Springer. 225–45. Sala, G. A. 1882–8. Miscellanea della Società Scritti di G. A. Sala, pubblicati sugli autografi da G. Cugnoni. Salmon, F. 2007. ‘Stuart as antiquary and archaeologist in Italy and Greece’ in Soros (ed.), James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, 1713–1788: the rediscovery of antiquity. Salomon, N. ‘Die Venus Pudica: eine Offenlegung der verborgenen Interessen und gefärlichen Genealogien der Kunstgeschichte’ in Wunder et al. Geschlechterperspektiven: Forschungen zur frühen Neuzeit. Königstein: Helmer, 79–99. Salter, A. 2013. Four Emperors and an Architect: how Robert Adam rediscovered the Tetrarchy. Exeter: Short Run Press. Scarry, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: the making and unmaking of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schachenmayr, V. 1997. ‘Emma Lyon, the Attitude, and Goethean performance theory’. New Theatre Quarterly 13, 3–17. 265

Bibliography Schechner, R. 1985. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sciarretta, F. 2010. Il santuario di Ercole Vincitore a Tivoli: problem e ipotesi. Tivoli: Tiburis artistica. Scott, C. 2012. Translating the Perception of Text: literary translation and phenomenology. Leeds: Legenda. Scott, J. 1985. ‘Some sculpture from Hadrian’s villa’ in Lo Bianco (ed.), Piranesi e la cultura antiquaria gli antecedente e il contesto. Rome: Multigrafica. 339–47. Scott, J. 2003. The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press. Serota, N. 2000. Experience or Interpretation: the dilemma of museums of modern art. London: Thames & Hudson. Shackleton Bailey, D. R. (ed.). 2001. Cicero: letters to friends. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Sharrock, A. 1991. ‘Womanufacture’. Journal of Roman Studies 81, 36–49. Sheets-Johnstone, M. 2013. The Primacy of Movement (2nd edn). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Shelley, M. W. 1987. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844 (eds. Feldman and Scott-Kilvert). Oxford: Clarendon. Shelley, M. W. 1985 [1826]. The Last Man. London: Hogarth. Shelley, P. B. 1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (ed. Jones). Oxford: Clarendon. Sherwin-White, A. N. 1973. The Roman Citizenship (2nd edn.). Oxford: Clarendon. Sheu, L. 2005. Voltaire et Rousseau dans le théâtre de la révolution française. Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Sikstrom, H. 2015. Performing the Self: identity-formation in travel accounts of nineteenth-century British women in Italy. Oxford: unpublished thesis. Sklar, D. 2008. ‘Remembering kinesthesia: an inquiry into embodied cultural knowledge’ in Noland and Ness (eds.), Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 85–111. Slaney, H. 2016. ‘Perceiving (in) depth: landscape, sculpture, ruin’ in Butler (ed.), Deep Classics: rethinking classical reception. London: Bloomsbury. 87–106. Slaney, H. 2018. ‘In the body of the beholder: Herder’s aesthetics and classical sculpture’ in Purves (ed.), Touch and the Ancient Senses. London: Routledge. 105–120. Slaney, H. 2019. ‘Eighteenth-century antiquity: extended, embodied, enacted’ in Anderson, Rousseau and Wheeler (eds.), Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Slaney, H. Forthcoming. ‘Pots in performance: Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes’. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 63.1 (special edition: The Classical Vase Transformed). Smail, D. L. 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Adam. (1986) [1759]. The theory of Moral Sentiments [Facs. 6th edn.] Ibis: Charlottesville. Smith, M. 2007. Sensory History. Oxford: Berg. Smollett, T. 2010 [1776]. Travels Through France and Italy. London: Tauris Parke. Sofer, A. 2003. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Springer, C. 1987. The Marble Wilderness: ruins and representation in Italian Romanticism, 1775–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stabler, J. 2000. ‘Byron’s digressive journey’ in Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: discourses of travel 1775–1844. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 223–39. de Staël, G. 1971. Les Carnets de Voyage de Madame de Staël: contribution à la genèse de ses oeuvres (ed. S. Balayé). Genève: Librarie Droz. de Staël, G. 2000. Corinne, ou l’Italie. Paris: Champion. de Staël, G. 2008. Corinne, or Italy. (trans. Raphael.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 266

Bibliography Stanley Spaeth, B. 1996. The Roman Goddess Ceres. Austin: University of Texas Press. Starke, M. 1802. Travels in Italy between 1792 and 1798; containing a view of the late Revolutions. Printed in London. States, B. 1985. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: on the phenomenology of theatre. Berkeley : University of California Press. Stevens, B. 2009. ‘Per gestum est res significanda mihi: Ovid and language in exile’. Classical Philology 104, 162–83. Stevens, A. H. 2010. British Historical Fiction Before Scott. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stewart, S. 1984. On Longing: narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stillman, D. 1977. ‘Chimney-pieces for the English market: a thriving business in late eighteenthcentury Rome’. Art Bulletin 59.1, 85–94. Striker, G. 1995. ‘Cicero and Greek philosophy’ in Segal et al. (eds.), Greece in Rome: influence, integration, resistance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Southworth, E. 1991. ‘The Ince Blundell Collection: collecting behavior in the eighteenth century’. Journal of the History of Collections 3.2, 219–34. Southworth, E. 2000. ‘A rejoicing virtuoso? Henry Blundell and his sculpture collection’ in Boschung (ed.), Antikensammlung des europäischen Adel sim 18. Jahrhundert als Ausdruck einer Europäischen Identität. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern. 110–14. Sweet, R. 2004. Antiquaries: the discovery of the past in eighteenth-century Britain. London: Hambledon & London. Thomas, J. 2006. ‘Phenomenology and material culture’ in Tilley et al. (eds.), Handbook of Material Culture. London: Sage, 43–59. Thomas, S. 2000. ‘The ends of the fragment, the problem of the preface: proliferation and finality in The Last Man’ in Eberle-Sinatra (ed.), Mary Shelley’s Fictions from Frankenstein to Falkner. London: Macmillan, 22–36. Thompson, E. 2005. ‘Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4, 407–27. Thompson, C. 2007. The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon. Tilley, C. 2010. Interpreting Landscapes: geologies, topographies, identities (Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 3). Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Toner, J (ed.). 2014. A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity. London: Bloomsbury. Touchette, L-A. 2000. ‘Sir William Hamilton’s “pantomime mistress”: Emma Hamilton and her attitudes in Hornsby (ed.), The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and beyond. London: British School at Rome. 123–46. Trapp, J. B. 1973. ‘Ovid’s Tomb: the growth of a legend from Eusebius to Laurence Sterne, Chateaubriand and George Richmond’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36, 35–76. Ubersfeld, A. (1999) [1977]. Reading Theatre (trans. Collins). University of Toronto Press. Urry, J. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Urry, J. and Larsen, J. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. Los Angeles: Sage. Vaget, H. R. 1988. ‘Introduction’ in Luke and Vaget (eds. and trans.), Goethe: erotic poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ix–xlvi. Vandiver Nicassio, E. 2005. Imperial City: Rome under Napooleon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vasi, G. 1824 [1761]. Itinerario Istruttivo di Roma Antica e Moderna. Rome. Vaughan, G. 1989. ‘Henry Blundell’s sculpture collection at Ince Hall’ in Curtis (ed.), Patronage and Practice: sculpture on Merseyside. Liverpool: Tate Gallery. 13–22. Vaughan, G. 1997. ‘Some observations and reflections on the restoration of antique sculpture in the eighteenth century’ in Lindley (ed.), Sculpture Conservation: preservation or interference? Aldershot: Scolar Press, 195–208. 267

Bibliography Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: a history of translation. London: Routledge. Venuti, R. 1824 [1773]. Accurata e Succincta Descrizione Della Antichità di Roma. Rome. Verri, A. 1782. Le Avventure di Saffo, poetessa di Mitilene. London: T. Cadell. Vigée-Lebrun, E. 1984. Souvenirs (ed. Herrmann). Paris: Des Femmes. Vila, A. C. 2014. ‘Introduction: powers, pleasures, and perils of the senses in the Enlightenment era’ in Vila (ed.), A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury, 1–20. Vila, A. C. (ed.). 2014. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury. de Villeneuve, R. 1999. ‘L’eau à Rome: magnificence et mélancolie’ in Diaz (ed.), Madame de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie: ‘l’âme se mêle à tout’. Paris: SEDES, 155–64. de Vivo, J. S. 2014. ‘The memory of Greek battle: material culture and/as narrative of combat’ in Meineck (ed.), Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 163–84. Volney, C-F. 1795. The Ruins: or a survey into the revolution of empires. London: printed for J. Johnson. Voltaire, F-M. 1988. ‘La Mort de César’ in Les Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire. Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire. Vrooman, J. R. 1970. Voltaire’s Theatre: the cycle from Oedipe to Mérope. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire. 1970. Walchester, K. 2007. Our Own Fair Italy: nineteenth century women’s travel writing and Italy 1800–1844. Oxford: Peter Lang. Wagner-Lawlor, J. A. 2002. ‘Performing history, performing humanity in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’. Studies in English Literary History 42.4, 753–80. Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1988. ‘The social structure of the Roman house’. PBSR 56, 43–98. Watkin, D. 1968. Thomas Hope 1769–1831 and the Neo-classical idea. London: John Murray. Watkin, D. 1982. Athenian Stuart: pioneer of the Greek Revival. London: Allen & Unwin. Watkin, D. 2011. The Roman Forum. London: Profile. Webb, R. 2008. Demons and Dancers: performance in late antiquity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Webb, T. 2012. ‘Haunted city: the Shelleys, Byron, and ancient Rome’ in Saunders et al. (eds.), Romans and Romantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 203–24. Wedgwood, J. and Bentley, T. 1779. Catalogue of Cameos, Busts, Intaglios etc. After the Antique, Sold at Their Rooms in Greek-Street, Soho. London: Cadel. Wiles, D. 1991. The Masks of Menander: signs and meaning in Greek and Roman performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiles, D. 2011. Theatre and Citizenship: the history of a practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkes, J. J. 1993. Diocletian’s Palace, Split: residence of a retired Roman emperor (2nd edn.). Williams, G. 1994. Banished Voices: readings in Ovid’s exile poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, S. 1985. Diocletian and the Roman recovery. London: B. T. Batsford. Wilton, A. and Bignamini, I. 1996. Grand Tour: the lure of Italy in the eighteenth century. London: Tate Gallery. Wilton-Ely, J. 2007. ‘Design through fantasy: Piranesi as designer’ in Lawrence (ed.), Piranesi as Designer. New York: Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, & National Design Museum. 11–90. Wilton-Ely, J. 2013. Piranesi, Paestum and Soane. Munich: Prestel. Winckelmann, J. J. 1964. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Weimar: Böhlaus. Winckelmann, J. J. 1972. ‘On the painting and sculpture of the Greeks’ in Winckelmann: writings on art, D. Irwin (ed. and trans.). London: Phaidon. Winckelmann, J. J. 2006 [1768]. History of the Art of Antiquity (trans. Potts & Mallgrave) Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. 268

Bibliography Winckelmann, J. J. 2016 [1755]. Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. Berlin: Hofenberg. Winnett, S. 1990. ‘Coming Unstrung: women, men, narrative, and principles of pleasure’. PMLA 105.3, 505–18. Winsbury, R. 2010. Zenobia of Palmyra: history, myth and the neo-classical imagination. Duckworth. Withers, C. W. J. 2007. Placing the Enlightenment: thinking geographically about the Age of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, J. M. 2000. ‘ “Little England”: anxieties of space in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’ in Eberle-Sinatra (ed.), Mary Shelley’s Fictions from Frankenstein to Falkner. London: Macmillan, 129–49. Wood, R. 1753. The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart. Printed in London. Wood, R. 1769. An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer. Printed in London. Wood, P. et al. 2007. Wedgwood: the Felix Joseph Collection of 18th century Jasper. Nottingham: Nottingham City Council. Wyke, M. 1987. ‘Written Women: Propertius’ scripta puella’. Journal of Roman Studies 77, 47–61. Wyles, R. 2008. ‘The symbolism of costume in ancient pantomime’ in Hall and Wyles (eds.), New Directions in Ancient Pantomime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 61–86. Young, G. K. 2001. Rome’s Eastern Trade. London: Routledge. Zahran, Y. 2003. Zenobia Between Reality and Legend (BAR International Series 1169). Oxford: Archaeopress. Zanker, P. 1994. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Zimmerman, E. 1996. The Boundaries of Fiction: history and the eighteenth-century British novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ziogas, I. 2018. ‘Law and literature in the ancient world: the case of Phryne’ in Dolin (ed.), Law and Literature. Cambridge University Press. 79–94. Ziolkowski, T. 2013. ‘German Elegies: from Baroque beginnings and classical culminations to twentieth-century Hollywood’ in Thorsen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 348–63. Zuckert, R. 2009. ‘Sculpture and touch: Herder’s aesthetics of sculpture’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67(3), 285–99.

269

270

INDEX

acting 4, 25, 27, 59, 134 see also performance, theatre Adam, Robert 90–1, 94, 105, 113–14, 118–19, 135 Ruins of Spalatro 83, 94, 96–7, 105 aesthetics 2, 12–16, 33–43 affordances 6, 9, 13, 31–2, 34, 39–40, 45, 51, 58, 61, 99, 121, 160, 163, 198, 204, 208 pragmatic affordance 6–7, 31, 39–40, 45, 124 Anacreon 188, 191–2 Antichità di Ercolano Esposte 86–7 antiquarianism 48–50, 62, 86–7, 96–7, 103, 116, 120, 125, 177, 191, 201 Aphrodite 107, 111, 182–3 see also Venus Apollo Belvedere (sculpture) 36–7, 40, 126, 136–9, 141, 158, 170, 205 archaeology 1, 45, 50, 58, 83, 85–9, 93–4, 96–7, 101, 104, 109, 126, 139, 142, 157, 161, 168, 171, 201, 206 Arch of Constantine 97, 157 Athenaeus 182, 190, 191 Athens 37, 88–91, 93, 100, 105, 110, 175–6, 182, 185–6, 188, 197, 199 attitudes 21–32 see also Hamilton, Emma Augustus 49, 53, 57, 68, 69, 161, 167, 170 authenticity 10–11, 19, 32, 48, 50–1, 62, 81, 89–90, 107–9, 117, 119, 125–7, 142, 148, 152, 164, 165, 170, 191, 201–2, 209–10 autoeroticism 41, 113 bacchante 22, 24, 25, 26, 28–9, 31, 32, 33, 87, 116, 122, 185 Baiae 86, 165, 167–8, 169, 170, 194 Barthélemy, Jean-Jacques Voyage du jeune Anacharsis 155, 187–92 baths 49, 51, 53, 56, 90, 95, 120–1, 124, 135, 164, 183, 201 Baths of Caracalla 51–2, 53, 198, 200, 208 ballet d’action 24, 27–8 Baumgarten, Alexander 12 beauty 14–16, 27, 33, 35, 37, 39, 42, 144, 160, 182, 190, 196 Beckford, William 210 Bessborough (Earl) see Ponsonby, William Blundell, Henry 111, 114, 116–17, 209 British Museum 1, 115, 133, 138, 152

Brutus, Junius 58, 141, 144, 147–8, 161, 163 Brutus, Marcus 59, 61, 141, 147–52 Burke, Edmund Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful 14–16, 52, 123, 171 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 51, 193, 199, 201 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 156, 200–1, 205 cabinet of curiosities 2, 74, 86, 88, 119, 125, 134 Canova, Antonio 74, 142, 164 capriccio 60, 114, 118, 170, 209 Caesar, Julius 58, 59, 69, 95, 101, 147–9, 151–2 Capitoline Hill, Capitol 46–7, 49, 50, 58, 64, 66–7, 73, 94, 141, 143, 147, 148, 158, 159, 160, 162, 166–7, 206 Capitoline Museum 33, 50, 51, 111, 126, 128, 134, 140 catacombs 51, 54–5, 86, 111, 114, 116, 123–4, 140 Cato 95, 149, 150–1, 161, 203 Catullus 51, 68, 102 Cavaceppi, Bartolomeo 74, 107, 108–10, 111, 113, 209 Ceres 71–3, 77, 79, 116, 145 Chandler, Richard 5, 104, 105 Ionian Antiquities 98, 100, 105 Travels in Asia Minor 86, 98–101, 105 Travels in Greece 100, 105 charm 48, 53–4, 56, 57, 60, 62, 81, 86, 104, 136, 165, 188, 207, 209, 210 chimneypieces 96, 117–19, 120 Choiseul-Gouffier 85, 91–2, 100, 104 Cicero 7, 20, 29, 48, 57–9, 61, 62, 110–11, 117, 145–6, 161, 195–6, 202 climate 52, 67, 96, 116, 145, 159–60, 164, 196 collecting, collections 2, 8, 21, 23, 28, 31–2, 36, 48, 80, 83, 86, 107–17, 119, 122–5, 129, 134, 140 Colosseum 10, 11, 45, 50, 87, 96, 127, 142, 148, 158, 200, 202, 203, 208 Condillac, Étienne Treatise on the Senses 12–13, 113 connoisseur 14, 38, 43, 48, 66, 85, 110, 118, 125, 137, 141, 152, 168, 201 cosplay 121–2, 184, 191 costume 22, 30, 68, 73, 89, 121–2, 142, 184–5, 191 dance, dancing 4, 21–32, 45, 63–4, 70, 77, 80, 102, 122, 183–5, 189–91, 210

271

Index Delos 36, 42, 137, 175–6, 183, 188–90 Desgodetz, Antoine 87–8, 114 Diderot, Denis 23, 128 Letter on the Blind 12, 13–14, 35 Didyma 86, 88, 98 Dilettanti, Society of 83–91, 98, 104, 116, 125 dilettantism 85–6 Diocletian 49, 90–1, 94, 96–7, 114, 164 distributed cognition 5–6 domestication 83, 107, 114, 117, 119–21, 166, 209 Domus Aurea 48, 53, 57, 124 drapery 22, 30, 37, 119, 182–5 Dupaty, Charles Sentimental Letters 137, 146 Dying Gaul (sculpture) 51, 126, 143 earthquake 98, 196 Eaton, Charlotte 5, 19, 20, 45–62, 81, 86, 101, 103, 107, 136–8, 146, 148, 165, 202, 206, 209 Elgin Marbles see Parthenon Marbles embodied cognition see distributed cognition enactivism see distributed cognition Enlightenment 2, 11, 85, 102, 134, 143 Entrée Triomphale 141–4 epistemology 2–4, 7–8, 12, 26, 83–6, 88, 96, 104, 210 erotics, eroticism 1, 19, 37–8, 41, 68–9, 71, 75, 78–80, 85–6, 112–13, 116–17, 137, 146, 159, 178, 182, 187–8 Etruscan 31, 36, 107, 126, 127, 129, 166, 191, 195, 210 Eustace, John Chetwode Classical Tour of Italy 48, 49–50, 51–2, 53, 56, 57–8, 148, 157, 194, 207 excavation 86, 89, 90, 108, 123, 126, 142, 168, 194, 196 fans 107, 127–9, 133 Forsyth, Joseph Remarks on Antiquities 48, 49, 50–1, 53, 56, 111, 201 Forum Romanum 10, 48, 49, 50, 51, 57–62, 69, 79, 91, 127, 142, 158, 161–2, 202–4, 206, 208 fresco 29, 48, 53, 59, 86–7, 88, 127, 140 garden 74, 107, 111, 116, 123, 125, 164–5, 166, 168, 169–70, 210 Garrick, David 23, 27 gesture 24–9, 31, 32, 42, 45, 57, 64, 67, 73, 75, 128, 146, 156, 179–81, 184, 189, 190, 200, 205 Gibbon, Edward Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 47, 48, 83, 94–7, 201 Memoirs 45–7, 53, 208 Gilpin, William On Picturesque Travel 16

272

von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 11, 17, 28, 193 Italian Journey 22–3, 82, 91 Roman Elegies 19–20, 63–81, 160, 172 Venetian Epigrams 63–4 gothic, the 16, 54–5, 87, 123–4, 173, 181, 186 Greece, ancient 2, 33–7, 89, 100, 110, 119, 137, 155, 173–92, 198 Greece, modern 88–9, 100, 155, 173–7, 181–7, 198–9 Hadrian 77, 89, 109, 110, 111, 117 Hamilton, Emma 19, 20, 21–32, 42–3, 80–1, 146, 150, 182, 184–5, 191, 208 see also Attitudes Hamilton, Gavin 108 Hamilton, William 21–4, 28–9, 31–2, 115, 129, 140, 170 d’Hancarville, (“Baron”) Pierre 5 Antiquités 29, 83, 129 Recherches 115–17 Herculaneum 22, 24, 29, 55, 86, 124, 138–9, 170, 194, 196 Hercules 39–42, 67–8, 138, 169, 193, 205–6 Herder, Johann Gottfried 12, 69 Kritische Wäldchen 19, 33–6 Plastik 19–20, 33–44, 45, 80–1, 146, 160, 201, 204, 205, 208 Hermaphrodite, Sleeping (sculpture) 41 historiography 94–7, 143, 181, 195 Hobhouse, John 147–8, 201–2 Hogarth, William Analysis of Beauty 14, 15, 16, 28 Hölderlin, Friedrich 5 Hyperion 155, 173–7, 181 Homer 7, 85, 86, 88, 92, 100, 101–4, 114, 143, 155, 163, 175, 188, 195, 207 see also Troy Hope, Thomas 83, 117, 119–22, 126–9, 209 Horace 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 207, 208 idealism 1, 28, 36–7, 41, 152, 160, 173–7, 181, 190, 193 imagination 1, 4, 7, 9, 14, 33, 40–1, 43, 47–8, 52, 56, 68, 83, 101, 104, 112, 114, 121, 123, 124, 146, 155, 157–8, 160–5, 168, 171–2, 182, 189, 192, 202, 203–4, 206, 207 intaglios 3, 21, 125, 126–7, 140 Italy 11, 45, 49–50, 69, 115–17, 128–9, 141, 143, 152, 155, 157–72, 173, 193, 195, 197–8, 202–3, 204 Jameson, Anna Diary of an Ennuyée 45, 157, 208 Jenkins, Thomas 108–10, 112–13, 115, 116, 126, 140

Index Keats, John 33, 191 kinaesthesia (definition) 2–5 Knight, Cornelia 155, 165–71, 193 labyrinth 48, 54, 65, 184, 190, 194, 198, 201 landscape 49, 80, 83, 88, 91–2, 100–1, 103, 155, 157, 158–60, 165, 169–70, 173–7, 185, 195–7 Laocoön (sculpture) 11, 36, 60, 134, 136–7, 141, 143, 164, 167, 190 Lessing, Gotthold Laocoön 16–17, 64 Louvre 133, 141–2, 144, 146 Lucian 24, 27, 111, 137, 190 Marathon 91, 174, 188, 199, 208 Merleau-Ponty, Marcel 3 de Mézières, Nicolas Le Camus 120–1, 131 Miller, Anna 54–5, 126–7, 136, 139–40, 146, 208 miniaturization 39, 63, 83, 107, 119, 124, 126, 127, 131, 209 Molyneux’s Question 13, 35 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis Considerations sur le grandeur des Romains 95–6 Museo Pio-Clementino 33, 108, 116, 134–7, 141, 153, 162–3 museums 2, 8–9, 33, 111, 122–4, 133–47, 153 mystery cult 71–3, 80, 116, 194 Napoleon 142, 153, 159, 161 Nardini, Famiano 48–50, 87 Narcissus 113, 137–8 nerves 15, 17–18, 28, 158, 166, 178–9, 186–7 Niobe 11, 22, 28, 29–30, 200–1 onomatopoeia 20, 66, 79–80 orientalism 89, 98–101, 158–9, 181, 203 Ovid 56–7, 59, 63, 66, 78, 107, 165, 207, 210 Amores 66, 68, 72, 78 Ars Amatoria 68, 73 Metamorphoses 38, 57, 137 Tristia 69–70, 160 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 125–6 Ida of Athens 181–7, 190–1 Paestum 195 Palatine 49–50, 51, 53, 55, 60, 69, 91, 124, 127, 142, 201–2 Palmyra 10, 91–4, 96–7, 104, 175, 210 Pantheon 87, 111, 117, 135, 167, 171, 194, 205 pantomime (ancient) 24, 27–8, 30, 63, 190–1 Parthenon 1, 8, 115, 152, 186–7 Pausanias 100–1, 187–8 Payne Knight, Richard 125 Phidias 35

Philaenis 74 philhellenism 36, 173–92, 198–9 Phryne 182–3 picturesque, the 16, 47, 50, 89, 123, 131, 155, 166, 169–70, 171, 185–6, 204 pilgrimage 47, 56, 161 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 49, 87–8, 90, 91, 114, 117–19, 124, 209 Plato 110, 163–4, 175, 187, 191 play 62, 67–8, 78, 83, 107, 125, 134, 209–10 Pliny Natural History 45, 88, 92, 95, 104, 143 Plutarch 45, 59, 148, 196 Pompeii 22, 23, 86, 123, 127–8, 133, 140, 163–4, 170, 195–7, 208 Pompey 59, 68, 95, 147–53, 202 see also Spada Pompey (sculpture) Ponsonby, William (Earl of Bessborough) 111, 114, 116–17, 123 Praxiteles 107, 182 Priapus 68, 73–5, 79 Priene 98–100 Propertius 20, 51, 66, 68–72, 75, 77, 78 proprioception 2–3, 6, 34, 39, 40, 42, 60, 80, 160 props 8, 9, 31–2, 68, 73, 83, 124, 127, 134, 191, 205 Pygmalion 21–4, 34, 36–8, 113, 137–8 Quatremère de Quincy 84, 144–5, 152, 153 reading in situ 49–50, 85–6, 91–2, 171 sentimental 17–18, 157–8, 165–6, 171–81 Rehberg, Friedrich 24, 28–32 restoration 2, 74–5, 108–10, 114, 117, 126, 131, 209 Revett, Nicholas 88–90, 98, 105 von la Roche, Sophie 138–40, 146, 208 Rogers, Samuel 58 Romanticism 45, 156, 162, 193, 201–3 Rome, representations of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 156, 200–1, 205 Corinne 157–65 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 47, 48, 83, 94–7, 201 Marcus Flaminius 155, 165–71, 193 Mort de César 147–52 Roman Elegies 63–81 Rome in the Nineteenth Century 45–62 The Last Man 202–6 ruins 9, 16, 45–62, 87–9, 93–9, 101, 123–4, 129–31, 155–6, 157–64, 171, 175–7, 186, 193, 195–6, 198, 201–6, 207, 209 Sappho 155, 177–81, 183, 188 Scipio 53, 58, 59, 126, 149, 161, 167, 200, 208 sculpture, sensory aspects of 33–43, 107–17

273

Index sentiment or the sentimental 17–18, 138, 157, 161, 165–6, 171–2, 178–81, 188–9 Shakespeare, William Julius Caesar 59, 148–9, 150 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 3–5, 7, 8, 26, 31, 210 Shelley, Mary The Last Man 193–5, 202–6 Shelley, Percy 53, 194–9, 201, 202–4 Sibyl’s Grotto 124, 140, 165, 194–5, 198 simulation 4, 6, 11, 14, 40, 54, 104, 114, 117, 165, 207 site/set/setting 61, 208–9 Soane, John 83, 111, 122–4, 155, 209 souvenirs 83, 107, 125–8, 140, 161 Spada Pompey (sculpture) 147–53, 202 de Staël, Germaine Corinne, ou l’Italie 157–65 Starke, Mariana 53, 136 stillness 21–2, 25, 33, 42–3, 57, 76, 81, 150, 190, 208 Strabo 99–101, 104, 207 Stuart, James “Athenian” 88–91, 98, 104, 105, 119, 128 The Antiquities of Athens 88–91 Suetonius 59

urns 21, 29, 31, 33, 88, 116, 123, 138–9, 167, 169, 200, 210 see also vases Varus, Quintus 51, 165, 168 vases 19–32, 80, 83, 86, 115, 119, 125–7, 129–30, 134, 139, 141, 168, 183, 191, 208 see also urns Vasi, Giuseppe 48–9, 50, 56 Vatican Museums 10, 36, 53, 74, 108, 111, 126, 134–6, 141, 158, 167, 204, 209 see also Museo Pio-Clementino Venus (sculpture) 9, 10, 75, 107–8, 111–14, 117, 126, 143, 182–3 see also Aphrodite Venuti, Ridolfino 48–9 Verres 145–6 Verri, Alessandro Le Avventure di Saffo 155, 177–81 Vesuvius 127, 129, 170, 196–7 Via Appia 52–3, 167 Vigée Le Brun, Élisabeth 24–5, 29, 122, 191–2 Villa Albani 111, 115 Villa Borghese 60, 111, 164–5, 169 Virgil 17, 49–50, 52, 57, 58, 77, 116, 140, 159, 165, 169, 189, 194–5, 207 vision 2, 11, 13–14, 19, 34–6, 103, 146, 189, 201, 207 Vitruvius 98 Voltaire Brutus 147, 149–50 Mort de César 147–52

tableau vivant 19, 23, 30, 183, 191–2 Tacitus 166, 203 Temple of Minerva Medica 51, 114 theatre 8–9, 17, 23–5, 27–8, 52–3, 57–62, 64, 99–100, 103, 110, 119–21, 123, 133–4, 147–8, 179–81, 183–4, 188–9, 204–6, 208–9 see also acting Thermopylae 91, 174–5, 189 Titus 126 Tivoli 51, 109, 110, 123–4, 140, 169, 171 Tomb of Caecilia Metella 126, 163 touch 2–3, 12–16, 19, 32, 34–42, 55–6, 66, 71, 80–1, 107, 113, 122, 125–8, 133, 138–40, 145–7, 161, 176–7, 194, 201–2, 204, 208 tourism 7–8, 47, 53, 55, 58–9, 62, 125, 127–8, 137, 156, 157–8, 161, 167, 170–1, 193, 203–4 Townley, Charles 108, 111, 113, 114–16, 117, 122, 146 Trajan’s Column 53 translation 29, 85, 88, 91–2, 100, 104, 177–8, 187 Treaty of Bologna 141, 153 Triumph 58, 59, 83, 142–3, 159, 166–7

walking 11, 14, 53, 56–8, 93, 101, 110, 141, 164–5, 169–70, 176, 200, 208–9 water 32, 50, 52, 53, 92, 101–2, 120–1, 164, 183, 194, 196–7 see also baths Weddell, William 108, 111, 113–14, 117 Wedgwood 83, 127, 129–31, 155, 209 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 1, 17, 36–7, 39, 42, 48, 115, 134–8, 146, 148, 190, 205, 209 Wood, Robert Essay on the Original Genius of Homer 86, 88, 91, 101–5, 155 The Ruins of Palmyra 91–4, 97, 98, 105 wrestling 110, 178, 189–90 Wunderkammer see cabinet of curiosities

Uffizi 29, 30, 33, 60, 117

Zenobia 92–3, 97

274

275

276

277

278