Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After 0198858000, 9780198858003

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Material Inspirations

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

Material Inspirations The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After J O NA H SI E G E L

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jonah Siegel 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940108 ISBN 978–0–19–885800–3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Silvia Luna Siegel-Yousef

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Preface What Goes Without Saying “That is a table,” we might say, or “that is wood that has been made into a table.” We consider those statements generally to belong to a different category from the following: “that table is sacred,” or “that table is beautiful,” or “the maker of that table was a genius.” Or, even, “I am moved by the beauty of that table.” These latter assertions about the table do not seem fundamental to its being in the way that the material from which it is composed or its condition of being a particular kind of object are. We may even take some comfort in the existence of this difference because we sense that each of the latter instances entails not just a different cat­ egory of judgment, but relies on implicit claims that are immediately vulnerable to disagreement. Someone else could easily say some version of the following: “No, that table is not sacred, or beautiful, and whoever made it is no genius. The maker is not especially original. The design is conventional and practical. It was put together under orders, or following a model that he or she could not help but follow, and purely with the intention of being sold so that the maker could live on his or her earnings.” This disagreeable interlocutor could even differ openly on the bases of our fundamental claims: “A table does not belong to the category of things I could ever call sacred.” “I would not call that kind of thing beautiful, at all.” Or even, “I don’t believe anything is sacred,” or “Beauty is a meaningless cat­egory—especially in contrast to something recognizable and real, such as a table is.” I have emphasized the tendentious nature of one set of claims, but it bears say­ ing that we may disagree about the first claim—indeed, it is the sort of statement that only makes sense if there is room for disagreement (who, in the normal course of events needs to be informed that something is a table?). The object in question may have been found after centuries or millennia underground, or other­wise lost to sight. It may belong to a culture we do not understand well, or at all. Looking at a flat surface collapsed in the dust, or lying awkwardly against a wall, with fragments nearby that may be assembled into something resembling supporting members, we may say after a moment of intuition, “that is a table.” But a skeptic may reasonably answer, “We don’t know that. All we know is that those are pieces of wood.” The poles around which the analyses in this book revolve have names that shift disturbingly, or at least one pole does. On the one side there is matter, that which, in the world of cultural argument—though not in science, of course, and

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viii Preface sometimes not in philosophy—we may call the unanalyzable or self-evident. On the other we have whatever we are calling its opposite: the ideal, the spiritual, the artificial, categories that clearly have to be argued for or explained by culture. Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After is a study of the power of evocations of the material in influential reflections on art. It does not propose to stabilize the category on the other side of matter precisely because it is interested in the varied alternatives that the attempts to use matter to conclude arguments will tend to produce. I will argue in the book as a whole that a number of historically specific mani­ fest­ations of the relationship between matter and its opposites shape the devel­ opment of the concept of art in the period in which the modern category was consolidated into the form it holds today. My claim, at its barest, is that the nineteenth-century culture of art is a place at which the period negotiated a stillunresolved relationship to the material world. But I am also interested in the ways in which evocations of the material world intended to ground arguments (in the sense of giving them a basis), or to stop arguments from moving forward (bring­ ing them to ground, stopping their flight), as our hypothetical interlocutor just did (it’s just a table, it’s just wood, it was made for money), are themselves ul­tim­ ate­ly shaped by claims that are in fact unavoidably conceptual. The “After” in my title is not intended to suggest the endless extendability of my concerns, but to indicate that the project of this book is shaped by arguments about matter that are still current, part of the long aftermath of the nineteenth century. Each chapter may be read as an attempt to take an influential, even conventional idea about the place of matter in relation to the arts and to track it back to a number of im­port­ ant manifestations of that relationship in the nineteenth century. My goal is not simply to trace sources of complex ideas to their more fundamental mani­fest­ ations, nor to claim that late returns of a concept are somehow deluded because of their ignorance of predecessors. I am certainly interested in demonstrating the richness and sophistication of nineteenth-century formulations that later periods have tended to stint for various reasons. But it is my hope that this study will enrich our understanding of later analyses by illuminating the pressures shaping work then and now—in the nineteenth century and after. Institutions work hard to settle issues, to project a sense of stability and clarity, but the modern relationship to the fine arts has never been fully stabilized. Looked at even from a quite short historical perspective, the most stolid-seeming museum, or clear convention about art (its originality, say, its ideological function in a society) becomes fascinatingly dynamic. And this quality has implications both for the pasts of the nineteenth century and its futures. The nineteenth cen­ tury built on ground the twentieth and twenty-first would proceed to develop. And so, structures that emerge in these later periods not only reveal much about the natural features of the terrain, but also about the overgrown foundations left by earlier builders. The space is never fully cleared before culture starts its new

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Preface  ix constructions; neither is it the case that new structures will be identical when they adapt to the footprint of earlier ones, or when they make use of their remains. We may note the curved run of buildings in a street that took its shape from a Roman amphitheater long gone, or find fragments of ancient temples embedded in the walls or even supporting new houses of worship. Neither amphitheater nor temple remains, but we cannot say the new structures have broken free of the elements that shape them or which they carry, any more than we can pretend that their presence in these new matrixes is a simple matter of continuity. The fact that this study of the nineteenth century is motivated by concerns that have in many cases received their most familiar expression in later eras has important implications for the method and scope of the project, which I will touch on briefly below and develop more fully in my Introduction. But, it will be useful if I lay out a few of the current conceptual concerns driving the arguments in Material Inspirations, some of which are topics of such familiarity that my reader may greet them as old friends or tiresome acquaintances. The role of ori­ gin­al­ity in art, the effect of mediation on culture, and even the place of the figure of the artist in the reception of work are all subjects that have received conven­ tional and innovative treatment in the fields of literary studies and art history (not to say conventionally innovative treatment). Other issues that can seem even more settled include the place of individual benefit in the creation or reception of art, the power of commodification as a concept, the historical emergence of that quality that is sometimes called (following Walter Benjamin) the aura of the art object, and even the social work of institutions such as museums and other sites of exhibition. These topics, which have been so important in reflections on the cultural work of art for the last fifty years or more, help frame the issues dealt with in Material Inspirations. This is not a study of the materiality of art objects in the nineteenth century, and not only because many of the works of plastic art on which I touch were pro­ duced well before the nineteenth century, and many were encountered in the era of my study in media (and so in material) quite distinct from that of their original creation. This latter fact in no way makes them less material, but it sets up im­port­ ant challenges to later (though surprisingly still-current) concepts of originality and historical embeddedness that art history itself has been putting into question for some time now. I mention these limits not simply with the usual aim of saving my reader’s time and preventing misunderstandings about my goals, but because I want to emphasize that one of the methodological contributions I see this book making arises in consequence of its insistence on the complex implications that arise from engaging with the conceptual force of matter. The constant temptation presented by materialisms of all sort is to suggest that there may be an escape from conceptualization in substances, a sanctuary from the endless unsatisfac­ tory movements of thought, or perhaps of text. Evidently that cannot be the orien­ta­tion of a project such as this one, in which the ongoing influence of the

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x Preface ways the nineteenth century thought and wrote and visually represented moments of encounter with the material world is a driving concern. If the scope of this project is in large measure shaped by provocations that came after the nineteenth century, a formative pressure also comes from the past. The historicist commitments of the nineteenth century familiar to any student of the period are particularly marked when it comes to the fine arts. Much of the writing in this area takes as its subject the productions of earlier periods. Even such champions of contemporary artists as John Ruskin, whose career was sparked by his advocacy for Joseph Mallord William Turner, or Charles Baudelaire, committed partisan of Eugène Delacroix, could only imagine the achievements of their most admired artists in the frame of a carefully conceived art history. From its first volume of 1843, the title of Modern Painters, the central book of Ruskin’s career, openly advertises a full commitment to the art of his day. But, as I will discuss in Chapter  3 of this book, the historical claim advanced in the work’s subtitle—Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters—becomes of pressing interest as the critic develops the surprisingly nuanced historicist sensibility that characterizes the volumes produced in the decades that followed (1846–1860). Baudelaire’s “Salons” are among the most sophisticated writings on art in the nineteenth century because of his engagement with the history of art. But it may be most economical to simply cite his location of the achievement of Delacroix, his preeminent modern, in a long art-historical context in the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). “Les Phares,” or “The Beacons,” is a poem that shares a great deal with the various pantheons, literary and otherwise, in which nineteenth-century culture enjoyed arranging its heroes and models in ranked order or categories. But it is also something like a record of a walk through the Louvre, evoking artists from Rubens (“river of forgetfulness”) to Leonardo (“deep and somber mirror”), Rembrandt (“sad hospital crowded with murmurs”), Michelangelo (“rage of the boxer”), Watteau (“carnival”), Puget (“melancholy emperor of galley slaves”), and Goya (“nightmare full of unknown things”), before finally landing on Delacroix (“lake of blood, haunted by bad angels”).1 This extraordinarily grim celebration of tradition (was any context ever more likely to evoke for the reader the original meaning of “carnival?”) is a reminder that all the most interesting avant-gardes are powerful reflections on the past before they are guides to a future that may or may not come to be. The nineteenth century addressed in this book is dynamic, unsettled. Every one of the fields shaping the relationship to art in the period is in the process of consolidation, from art history, to archeology, to curatorial practice itself. And institutions themselves are no less in flux, from the organization and form of museums and other sites of exhibition to the various aspirations of their or­gan­ izers and publics. And so, the nineteenth-century culture of art will not provide a fixed matrix against which any specific cultural manifestations take shape. It is shifting in every way, from the objects with which it deals (and to which it

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Preface  xi responds) to the ideas with which it addresses those objects. A methodological premise of this volume is that it is more valuable to include the unresolved nature of these circumstances in my analysis, rather than to pretend that there is a stable situation against which specific writers or artists orient themselves. This principle has an important effect on the materials with which Material Inspirations deals, and on my treatment of those materials. While I touch on the well-known genres in nineteenth-century letters, its novels and poems, at the heart of this study is that great and inchoate set of projects that is largely known by the vague name of non-fiction prose—a classification as unclear as any purely negative def­in­ition will tend to be, and even more inaccurate than many. In the writings of critics such as John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee, we find extraordinary supple­ ness of expression based on never-completed projects of self-analysis (even selfrevelation) that are also sophisticated projects of cultural reflection. The inglorious category into which we place this kind of writing (as though what was most interesting or even most true about it were the lack of fiction!) manifests a desire to believe that it describes settled states about which it is the role of later critics to discover their unsettled nature. A few years ago there was some debate in the field of literary studies about how we ought to read, whether we should do so from a distance or from up close, whether it behooved critics to see themselves as suspicious investigators looking for the telling self-betrayals of the text, or as kinder sorts of therapists, repairing the gaps within a work, or healing breaches that earlier critics had opened up between works and readers. In the case of many of the texts I discuss in Material Inspirations, reading the works at all would be a start. Given the decades-long tendency to understand the payoffs of literary analysis to be the insights texts provide into the social conditions or cultural predispositions of a period, it is puzzling that—some important exceptions aside—these often subtle and subtly self-conscious reflections on culture have received relatively little attention out­ side of specialized circles, aside from those moments when complex and some­ times unwieldy volumes are mined for excerpts to illustrate ideas about the period held to be self-evident.2 It appears to me that to make strong claims about a cul­ ture by extrapolating from its fiction, while largely neglecting its non-fiction prose is to carry out an analysis that begins at a surprising level of distance from the subject, and one bound to encounter a number of puzzling methodological impasses. To evoke the metaphor of the analyst, which comes up so often in dis­ cussions of reading practices, it would be as odd to try to carry out the work of the session without knowing why the patient thinks they came through the door, and by ignoring most of what they try to tell you about themselves. When I promote that inglorious category, non-fiction prose, for the insights it is liable to provide into nineteenth-century culture, I do not mean to suggest that that kind of instrumental value is its sole virtue, nor even that it is easily arrived at. In their suppleness, their ability to reflect on themselves, their creativity and

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xii Preface even their beauty, works that have their source in urgent and immediate forms of address such as the essay, the lecture, the sermon, the newspaper or journal art­ icle call out for readings that stay with the text and that reflect on its figurative work as much as the more widely read canon of literary studies. Sometimes staying with the text requires engaging with material that fits with difficulty into language for formal or historical reasons, such as works of art carrying varying degrees of cultural cachet into later eras, or episodes in the history of the institu­ tions of art that we think are long past—or that we never think of at all. Material Inspirations is meant to illustrate the value of these kinds of engagements. In an extraordinary sequence in his “Salon” of 1846, Baudelaire suggests first that “the best account of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy,” an assertion that reflects the characteristic tendency to move quickly between literature and  the fine arts in the period, but which is driven in this instance by a claim about criticism, by the poet-critic’s sense that “the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling.” Baudelaire does not think these characteristics, which he associates with verse, are limited to poetry. When he goes on to address “criticism proper,” he insists that “to justify itself ” it needs to be “partial, passion­ ate and political,” a set of tendencies he glosses with the following open paradox about point of view: “that is to say, it must adopt an exclusive point of view, pro­ vided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizon.”3 It is my hope in Material Inspirations to do some justice to the kind of criticism that was in fact written in the era: urgent, immediate, responsive to a network of cultural deter­ minants, unsettled, and—as Baudelaire suggests—of a wide amplitude precisely because of its commitment to an individual point of view. As society shifted and shifted again in this time of epochal change, and as it invented and reinvented institutions that reflected its ongoing metamorphoses, the writers addressed in this book uncovered in their own troubled affective responses to changes in the culture of art and in the society in which those changes took place tools for insight and reflection as fluid, shifting, and unstable as the world in which they found their being.4 I have indicated so far that Material Inspirations is a study of nineteenth-century culture shaped by theoretical reflections that came to the fore in later eras. It is also, as I have been suggesting, interested in looking closely at the passionate and complex prose in which the period itself reflected on its culture. For this reason, much of the material I address has to some degree been lost to taste—not just the prose works the power of which I hope this book will go some way toward demonstrating, but also the art objects in relation to which the writing finds its forms. These objects often present practical and intellectual challenges to later reflection because their status has seen such remarkable shifts since the period of their first making. Items later eras might dismiss as kitsch or ironically embrace

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Preface  xiii as such are in a way easier for our era to place than the troubling work of students or emulators, or of the producers of reproductive engraving. If these are difficult because later eras view them as so fundamentally different from what we have allowed ourselves to call art, or art that matters, the authors whose works are addressed in Material Inspirations also write with a now lost historical sensitivity about things that we admire largely by forgetting the conditions of their original making or reception, such as sculptures of ancient gods, or about things that are still able to move in and out of quite distinct roles, such as paintings of sacred subjects. Art historians have done subtle and illuminating work with all of these topics, and I cite much of it in the pages to follow. But, at least at this point, I believe it is still the case that much of what is interesting about the place of these works in culture remains to be addressed, notably how they might be said to articulate with literature on the one hand, and with later theoretical accounts of the role of matter on the other. I have been trying to suggest some of the disjunctions that shape this project and therefore its scope and methods. Nineteenth-century British texts are at the heart of Material Inspirations. But, my concern with the treatment of art and its institutions means that there is a doubled temporal dislocation in my analysis: my authors are often discussing their own period by addressing work of the past, and many of the works they discuss, whether of their own day or earlier have been lost to sight by contemporary taste. A further apparent disjunction shaping this study is that I do not hesitate to bring continental texts and works of art to bear in my discussion of largely British authors. The reason for this is simple, though some­ times neglected in our more provincial day: the nineteenth-century culture of art was of necessity international. Images, texts, and ideas, as well as individual crit­ ics and artists crossed the channel with great facility in this period. It is not simply the case that British writers were very often looking at foreign art, ancient and modern; they were also following the achievements of philosophers, his­tor­ians, and curators abroad, authors whose works were translated and engaged with at a level of detail that really should embarrass the contemporary. * * * I should note that my claims generally run two ways. My interest is not only how a fuller account of material claims may enrich our understanding of art and of the history of its reception, but also how the nineteenth century found in art a place to talk about the emotional and intellectual force of matter. I will turn in the Introduction of this book to the intersecting traditions that have helped shape the affective power of arguments coming back to the material nature of human existence. But it bears saying up front that I take our constant need to insist on the power of the material to be an attempt to do something peculiar: to remind us of something we already know. It is true that we differentiate ourselves from the world around us at every turn and as a matter of course, but no one who has ever

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xiv Preface used a hammer and missed the nail, or raised the head too quickly and found an open shelf door waiting above it, or who has spent time in the hospital with a loved one, can have any doubt of the condition of our often melancholy place in the world of material facts. The act of reminding others, of reminding oneself, of something that is unfor­ gettable, is evidently neither practical nor strictly necessary. I started this preface with a brief discussion of how we might talk about tables, but evidently that piece of furniture—which comes up almost as often in the literature about the relation of self to world as ceramic vessels—is best understood to be a proxy for more troubling objects to which the attention may address itself, the material nature of selves, of bodies. It is easier to talk about tables or wood than to talk about the needs, vulnerabilities, desires, and limits attendant on our lives as physical beings. As the centrality of the material world in which we at once perceive and have our being pretty much goes without saying, it might seem only appropriate and to be expected that it should inevitably consume by far the largest part of the attention of those selves for which it constitutes the greatest and most unavoidable part of an existence that comes into being and is dissolved in the course of a sadly brief span. Still, given that not just our lives, but all our certainties can seem purely material, it bears asking why it is that we are so frequently reminded that our ideas are bound to a world they can never truly leave behind. And, of course, we are prompted to the recognition of the power of that fundamental material elem­ ent, not by the inchoate manifold which, while it does so much, and is so much, cannot speak. What keeps telling us what goes without saying is the element we consistently recognize to be the weaker part of the dyad that culture calls nature and culture, or selves refer to as world and self, and that our ideas describe to us as material and idea. Baudelaire concludes “Voyage to Cythera,” a poem based on an evocative painting by Antoine Watteau at the Louvre, with a prayer that god will give him the strength to contemplate his own body and heart without disgust.5 It is a remarkable ending for a text created in response to the painter’s calm procession of lovers embarking for the island sacred to Venus (or perhaps preparing to return from it). But, the difficult associations that lead from Watteau’s sinuous band of complacent couples to Baudelaire’s wrenchingly personal final formulation are precisely the ones that concern this book. As I will suggest at various times in Material Inspirations, not only is it the case that the erotic life, the satisfaction of which travelers go to Cythera to seek, is one characteristic location at which the force of the material makes itself pressingly known and so a vital resource from which culture draws when it fills its emblematic registers, but the same is true of the vulnerability of the body Baudelaire’s voyager finds hanging from a gallows on the island (the only thing he sees standing there), the distressing vision that pro­ vokes his prayer. The distinct evocation of both body and heart in that appeal is evidently meant to indicate that the experiences written into the carnal allegory

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Preface  xv Baudelaire discovers in the painting combine the affective life and the most base and fundamental instincts in a way that is itself perhaps even more troubling than the inevitable decay of our mortal frame. Disgust is not always the response to the reminder of what goes without saying about our place in the physical world. But it is the aim of this book to suggest some of the ways in which the network of vulnerability, desire, fear, and realization Baudelaire identifies on the island of Venus toward which he has been inspired to sail by Watteau’s canvas shapes the fascination with matter in the nineteenth century and after.

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Acknowledgments you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856) At the heart of this project are two distinct but related concerns, on the one hand the emotional power of our ideas about the material nature of our place in the world, and on the other, the manifestation of that power in the forgotten or lost remains from one era as they are found and placed in new systems of meaning distinct from those of their original making. I write the last words of these acknowledgments as the world confronts the effects of a global pandemic, the outcomes of which are difficult to predict, largely because of the pressure the med­ ic­al crisis has put on the political and economic systems around which our world has been organized for some time. And so this book, like so many of our current activities, becomes one more project launched into a future the uncertainty of which is its main characteristic. It was impossible to anticipate that Material Inspirations might enter quite so quickly the kind of sequence of crisis, oblivion, and possible recovery that it discusses, but the prospect makes my gratitude to all  who have contributed to its making—both in situations of relative security that  seem so distant right now, and currently, in the midst of the alarms that characterized our present situation—all the more acute. My father, Larry Siegel, died a few months after I sent this manuscript to the press. I’d like to acknowledge here my gratitude for his boundless and un­com­ prom­is­ing passion for art, and—although he often set himself against critics—for the experience of his implacable critical sensibility. I would have been glad to have been able to give Steven Marcus a copy of this book, especially as “Interesting” was originally conceived for an event celebrating his career. But, sadly that is no longer possible. Instead I will take one more opportunity to thank him publicly for the blend of intellectual seriousness and ethical commitment he modeled for all his students—and for his good-humored support of a kind of work that never manages to arrive at the elegance of expression that is so typical in his writings. I am glad, at this time of crisis, to commemorate two very different New Yorkers, both of the old school. Frank men, lovers of beautiful things, of ingenuity and humor, and of a culture they treasured because its acquisition was a deeply per­ sonal project, never to be taken for granted, and never complete. They lived through a depression and a global conflagration in the same constantly changing city in which I write this, for the moment a place of bird song and ambulance

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xviii Acknowledgments sirens. Their example is a reminder that those sounds will at some point be replaced by the more characteristic hubbub of a great metropolis. Material Inspirations would have been impossible without the year I spent at  the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize and ACLS/Burkhardt Fellow over a decade and a half ago. I am grateful for the imagination and confi­ dence of the committees at the ACLS and the Academy that sent me to that extraordinary site of scholarship and creativity. My fellow participants in the Relics Discussion Group at the Academy have been very much on my mind in the course of this work, and especially conversations on relics and remains with Walter Cupperi, Mary Doyno, Maria Elena Gonzales, Elizabeth Marlowe, Richard Neer, Andrea Volpe, and Justin Walsh. Closer to home, the support I have received over the years from colleagues and chairs at the English Department at Rutgers University—and even from several Deans of Humanities—has been a consistent and powerful resource on which I am grateful to have been able to depend. It is a pleasure for me to mention with gratitude a few of the scholars who have been supportive of this endeavor and especially of its author over the years. I only regret that so much thoughtful engagement, so many memorable individual acts, have to be registered in a list of names. My thanks go to James Eli Adams, Isobel Armstrong, John Belton, Lynn Festa, Kate Flint, Billy Galperin, Colin Jager, Jonathan Kramnick, John Kucich, George Levine, Meredith McGill, Barry Qualls, Elaine Scarry, Michelle Stephens, Helen Vendler, Rebecca Walkowitz, Cheryl Wall, Lynn Wardley, and Carolyn Williams. Individual chapters were improved through the insights of the following generous readers: Marshall Berman, Nicholas Gaskill, David Kurnick, Jonathan Loesberg, Garrett Stewart, and Carolyn Williams. The manuscript as a whole bene­fit­ed from the perspicacity of two anonymous readers at Oxford University Press, and especially from the incisive engagement of Billy Galperin. This project is written within a department of English, and has the study of texts at its core, but it would have been impossible to carry out without recourse to the work of people in other fields. I want to register here my gratitude to colleagues in art history who have consistently welcomed an interloper. I have learned a great deal from Caroline Arscott, Tim Barringer, Pamela Fletcher, Vivien Greene, and Stephan Wolohojian. Above all, I have had the good fortune to look at art with them, in person and in their writings. I especially regret—and not only in this context—that I do not have their eyes to see with, which would have improved this work immeasurably. This book benefited from Caolan Madden’s imaginative, sensitive, and careful work as a research assistant and original copy editor. Sandy Garel at Oxford University Press was a resourceful and responsive picture researcher. It was a pleasure to collaborate with both of them, and with Jen Hinchliffe as the final editor of the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to Jacqueline Norton at the Press for her consistent and long-standing interest in this project, and her calm and supportive work getting it between covers.

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Acknowledgments  xix I am very grateful to audiences at the following institutions for their thoughtprovoking responses as I worked to refine material now in this book: American University; the Bard Graduate Center; The Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies; the University of Birmingham; Brown University; the Cooper Hewitt Museum; the CUNY Graduate Center; Harvard University, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana; University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne (Équipe d’accueil, Histoire culturelle et sociale des arts); University of Paris 8, Paris Nord (Maison des Sciences de l’Homme); and Princeton University. I am glad to acknowledge friends of long standing who inspire and sustain my work and its author: Tim Dowling, Molly Finnerty, Maria Elena Gonzales, Jane Harvey, Oliver Herring, Kamron Keshtgar, Jonathan Kramnick, Peter Krashes, Julian Loose, Meredith McGill, Rachel Porter, and Kate Teltscher. As always I am immensely grateful to my brother Stefan Siegel for his good-humored and unstinting support. The person who lived with this project throughout all the phases of its develop­ ment and its various recastings is also the one who has done the most to sharpen its claims and tighten its prose. I am so grateful for the patience and rigor of Nancy Yousef that it is an ongoing wonder to me that that is not what I am most grateful for in our lives together. This book is dedicated to our daughter, with boundless admiration and love, and in grateful recognition of the joy that comes to me simply from her presence in my life. Brooklyn, April 2020 * * * Earlier versions of material in some of the chapters have seen publication in jour­ nals and edited collections. I am grateful for the work of the original editors, and for permission to publish revised versions of the following: “Art, Aesthetics, and  Archeological Poetics,” The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume 4: 1780–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), which is adapted for Chapter 4; “The Material of Form: Vernon Lee at the Vatican and Out of It,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (2013), 189–201, which is revised and in­corp­or­ ated into Chapter 5; “Black Arts, Ruined Cathedrals, and the Grave in Engraving: Ruskin and the Fatal Excess of Art,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no. 2 (1999), 395–417, which is revised as Chapter  8; and “Art and the Museum,” Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, eds. Elicia Clements and Lesley Higgins (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), which is adapted for Chapter 9. A few brief formulations and several images that appeared in my book, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), return in this volume. I trust the new context will justify their recurrence.

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Contents List of Illustrations

xxiii

Introduction: Feeling for Things, or What Really Matters 1. What Matters in Theory

a. Demystification b. The Experiential School (i): Philosophical Sources and Sentiments c. The Experiential School (ii): Feeling for Things in Theory d. The Experiential School (iii): Encountering Things/Displaying Objects e. Realism: Art Works/Art Objects/Commodities 2. (How) Art Matters in the Nineteenth Century 3. A Note on Scope and Method

1 5

11 16 21 26 31 35 38

PART I.  INTERESTING 1. Transfiguration

49

2. Desire and the Body of Inspiration 1. “To neutralize ordinary urgencies” 2. How the Painting was Finished: Representations of Old Masters and the Case of Raphael 3. The Origin of Painting 4. The Promise of Happiness and the Death of an Old Master 5. Hesiod or Orpheus

64 64 70 85 92 114

3. “Strange Aphrodite”

122 PART II.  REMAINS

4. Matter, Form, Abstraction: Mediation and the Reception of Antiquities 1. Stone on Paper 2. Collection and Copy 3. Compendia: Image into Word 4. Blake 5. Mysterious Antiquity (Two Urns) 6. Nature in History: From Abstraction to Form

145 145 152 156 171 180 185

5. The Experience of Form (Bewilderment at the Vatican in George Eliot and Vernon Lee)

203

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xxii Contents

6. Failure and Revision at the Vatican: Some Evidence from the Baedeker (an Interchapter)

222

7. Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin

228

PART III.  THINGS, PERSONALLY 8. The Ruined Cathedral, Black Arts, and the Grave in Engraving: Ruskin and the Fatal Excess of Art 1. The Ruined Cathedral 2. Black Arts 3. The Grave in Engraving

249 249 261 264

9. Pater at the Museum/Raphael’s Fortune 1. The Nineteenth-Century Museum (Parnassus or the Dispute of the Sacrament) 2. The Museum as Medium (Apollo or the Discobolus) 3. The Museum as Emblem (The Most Religious City in the World) 4. Raphael’s Genius

275

Endnotes Index

295 347

275 283 288 291

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List of Illustrations I.1 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Magi, 1488. Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

12

1.1 Raphael Morghen, after Raphael, Transfiguration, 1811. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

51

1.2 Display of the Transfiguration at the Vatican in 2016. Photo by the author.

60

1.3 Studio del Mosaico Vaticano, the Transfiguration (1767), Altar of the Transfiguration, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

61

2.1 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina, 1814. Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge Massachusets. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

71

2.2 François-Guillaume Ménageot, Death of Leonardo da Vinci, 1781. Musée de l’Hotel de Ville, Amboise, France. Photo © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

72

2.3 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Francis I Receives the Last Breaths of Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1818. Petit Palais, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

73

2.4 Luigi Rubio, The painter Rubens persuades young Van Dyck to leave the Flemish village of Saventhem, where he had stayed for the love of a young woman, 1851. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

74

2.5 Frederic Leighton, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1855. National Gallery, London. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

74

2.6 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, 1852. Private Collection. Photo © Painters/Alamy Stock Photo.

75

2.7 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Quartier Latin. The Modern Raphael and La Fornarina (1845). In: William E. Fredeman (1982), “A Rossetti Gallery,” Victorian Poetry 20, no. 3/4: 161–86. Published by West Virginia University Press.

76

2.8 William Brockedon, Raphael and the Fornarina. In: George Hamilton (1832), The English School: A Series of the Most Approved Productions in Painting and Sculpture from the Days of Hogarth to the Present, volume 2 (London: Charles Tilt/Paris: Fain), 17.

77

2.9 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Betrothal of Raphael and the Niece of Cardinal Bibbiena, c. 1813–1814. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0). Public Domain Dedication, https://creativecommons. org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.78

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xxiv  List of Illustrations 2.10 Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, Raphael Correcting the Pose of His Model for His Painting of the Virgin and Child, c. 1820. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

79

2.11 Raphael, La Fornarina, c. 1520. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

80

2.12 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina, 1846. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Bequest of Frederick W. Schumacher.

82

2.13 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and la Fornarina, c. 1827. Photo © Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

83

2.14 Pablo Picasso, Raphaël et la Fornarina X, 1968. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2019.

84

2.15 Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, c. 1782–1785. National Gallery, Washington, DC. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

86

2.16 Thomas Rowlandson, The Modern Pygmalion, c. 1812. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

87

2.17 Henry Fuseli, Zwei Lesbierinne, mit erotischen Spielerein beschäftigt, in einen Toilettenspiegel blickend, 1810–1820. Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825 (Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus; Munich: Prestel, 1973), 1619.

88

2.18 Paul Delaroche, Filippo Lippi et Lucrezia Buti, 1822. Musée Magnin, Dijon, France. Photo © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

91

2.19 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia, 1820. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

93

2.20 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (detail), 1820. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

94

2.21 Venus de’ Medici, c. 1st century BC, Uffizi, Florence, Italy.

96

2.22 Antonio Canova, The Penitent Magdalene, c. 1790. Musei di Strada Nuova, Genova, Italy. Photo © Ian Dagnall/Alamy Stock Photo.

97

2.23 Fulchran-Jean Harriet, The Death of Raphael, 1800. Collection of Wheelock Whitney III. Photo: Graham Haber.

104

2.24 “Portrait of Raphael with the Marriage of Mary and Joseph.” Wood engraving. “Essays on the Lives of Remarkable Painters,” No. XXXI. The Penny Magazine, November 9, 1844.

105

2.25 “The Entombment.—Raphael.” In: Anna Jameson (1859). Memoirs of Early Italian Painters, and of the Progress of Painting in Italy from Cimabue to Bassano (London: John Murray), 260.

107

2.26 Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, Honors Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed, 1806. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio.

108

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List of Illustrations  xxv 2.27 Giambattista Borani, after Vincenzo Camuccini, Raphael’s Skeleton at the Opening of his Tomb, c. 1833. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk. Distributed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.109 2.28 John Henry Robinson, after Thomas Stothard, The Death of Raphael. In: Samuel Rogers (1830). Italy, a Poem (London: Cadell), 144.

112

2.29 Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muses, 1862. Musée Moreau, Paris. Photo © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

116

2.30 Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1857. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bequest of David P. Becker.

117

2.31 John Flaxman, Homer Invoking the Muse, engraved by William Blake, The Illiad of Homer, 2nd edition, 1805. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

118

2.32 Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1858. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC3.4.

119

2.33 Gustave Moreau, Head of Orpheus, 1865. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

120

3.1 Giorgione, Madonna and Child between St. Francis and St. Nicasius, c. 1503–1504. Duomo, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

130

3.2 Joseph Mallord William Turner, London from Greenwich Park, 1809. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Artepics/age fotostock.

133

3.3 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Angel Standing in the Sun, 1846. Tate Britain, London. Photo © The Artchives/Alamy Stock Photo.

134

3.4 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Crypt of Kirkstall Abbey (Liber Studiorum, part VIII, plate 39). The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Gift of William Loring Andrews, 1883, transferred from the Library.

135

3.5 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Lecture Diagram 10: Proportion and Design of Part of Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” c. 1810. Numbered Perspective Diagrams. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate, London, 2019.

136

3.6 Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Lost Sailor, c. 1819. R. 084, proof. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Francis Bullard. M23221. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

138

3.7 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

139

4.1 William Blake, “Sculpture,” Plate III. In: Abraham Rees (1802–1820). Cyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. London, 1816.

146

4.2 William Blake, “Sculpture,” Plate IV. In: Abraham Rees (1802–1820). Cyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. London, 1816.

149

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xxvi  List of Illustrations 4.3 William Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at Park Street, Westminster, 1794–1795. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

153

4.4 Archibald Archer, The Temporary Elgin Room, 1819. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

154

4.5 Louis Peter Boitard, Apollo Belvedere. In: Joseph Spence (1774). Polymetis, Or an Enquiry Concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Antient Artists. Being an Attempt to Illustrate them Mutually from One Another. Third Edition (London: J. Dodsley), Plate XI.

160

4.6 “Apollo.” In: Andrew Tooke (1787). The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, and Most Illustrious Heroes in a Short, Plain and Familiar Method, by Way of Dialogue. For the Use of Schools. Twenty-eighth Edition: Revised, Corrected, Amended, and Illustrated with New Cuts of the Several Deities (London: Rivington et al.) 29.

169

4.7 “Apollo.” In: Andrew Tooke (1838). Tooke’s Pantheon of the Heathen Gods, and Illustrious Heroes. Revised for A Classical Course of Education and Adapted for the Use of Students of Every Age and of Either Sex. Illustrated with Engravings from New and Original Designs (Baltimore, MD: William and Joseph Neal), 38.

170

4.8 William Blake, Laocoön, c. 1826–1827. Collection of Robert N. Essick. © 2020 William Blake Archive.

173

4.9 William Blake, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, c. 1805–1809. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate, London 2019.

175

4.10 William Blake, The Overthrow of Apollo and the Pagan Gods, c. 1815. Illustration 4 to Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

177

4.11 William Blake, Title Page of Milton, A Poem, c. 1811. Courtesy of The New York Public Library.

179

4.12 William Blake, “Portland Vase.” In: Erasmus Darwin (1791). The Botanic Garden, Part I: The Economy of Vegetation (London: J. Johnson).

182

4.13 Marble statue of Demeter seated on a throne, c. 350 BC–330 BC. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum.

195

4.14 James Basire, “Hippa Phigalensium” [Demeter]. In: Jacob Bryant (1774). A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, volume 2 (London: T. Payne), Plate XIII.

197

4.15 “Head of Demeter Crowned with Corn,” Messene, 369–330 BC. From John Ruskin, “School of Athens” (lecture 1870, published in Aratra Pentelici, 1872). In: The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912). E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen). Ruskin, 20: Plate XVIII, detail.

197

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List of Illustrations  xxvii 4.16 “Hercules of Camarina,” c. 410 BC. From John Ruskin, “The Hercules of Camarina” (lecture, published in Queen of the Air). In: The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912). E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen). Ruskin, 19: Plate XVIII, detail.

199

4.17 “Heracles and the Nemean Lion,” Heraclea, c. 390–180 BC. From John Ruskin, “School of Athens.” In: The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912). E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen). Ruskin, 20: Plate XVII, detail.

201

5.1 Museo Chiaramonti, the Vatican. In: Mary Knight Potter (1902). The Art of the Vatican (Boston, MA), 273.

211

5.2 Galleria delle Statue, the Vatican. In: Mary Knight Potter (1902). The Art of the Vatican (Boston, MA), 277.

212

5.3 John Marriott Blashfield, Niobe and Her Daughter. Terra-cotta, 19th century.

217

5.4 Charles Robert Cockerell’s proposed arrangement of the Niobe Group (1816). In: Galerie Impériale et Royale de Florence (Florence: Imprimerie du Giglio, 1844).

217

5.5 Niobe Room, the Uffizi, Florence. In: John L. Stoddard (1901). Florence, Naples, Rome (Boston, MA: Balch Brothers, 1890), 29.

218

7.1 Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of the Cross (detail), 1685. Vatican Museums, Vatican, Rome. Nick Fielding / Alamy Stock Photo.

231

8.1 “The Art-Treasures Exhibition Building. Manchester: Exterior.” Wood engraving. Illustrated London News, May 2, 1857.

250

8.2 “The Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition. The Grand Hall.” Wood engraving. Illustrated London News, May 9, 1857.

253

8.3 “Christ delivering the Keys to St. Peter.” Wood engraving after Raphael. The Penny Magazine, December 1, 1832.

256

8.4 “Titian, and Group from his Venus and Adonis.” Wood engraving. “Essays on the Lives of Remarkable Painters,” No. 40. The Penny Magazine, June 14, 1845.

258

8.5 “Patent Vertical Printing Machine, in the Great Exhibition.” Wood engraving. Illustrated London News, May 31, 1851.

259

8.6 A burin. In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), 348.

266

8.7 John Tenniel, “Astræa Redux!!” Wood engraving. Punch, November 2, 1872.

267

8.8 John Tenniel, “Astræa Redux!!” (detail of cross-hatching). In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), 359.

268

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xxviii  List of Illustrations 8.9 Hans Holbein, “The Two Preachers.” Dance of Death, 1538. Facsimile from woodcut. In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), facing 352.

270

8.10 Hans Holbein, “The Last Furrow.” Dance of Death, 1538. Facsimile from woodcut. In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), facing 352.

271

8.11 Cover of Library Edition of The Works of John Ruskin.272 9.1 Raphael, School of Athens, c. 1510–1511. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. Photo © Italy Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

276

9.2 Raphael, Disputation over the Most Holy Sacrament, c. 1509–1510. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

276

9.3 Raphael, Parnassus, 1511. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

277

9.4 Belvedere Apollo, c. mid-2nd century AD. Vatican Museums, Vatican. Livioandronico2013/CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.284 9.5 Roger Fenton, Discobolus, 1857. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Introduction Feeling for Things, or What Really Matters

What is meant by “reality?” It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given a more intense life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

“Really?” asks my six-year-old about some ridiculous fact I have just made up to amuse her, and which she suspects is not true. “Really?” she demands again with added emphasis, and because she has no other term available. Already she has learned that the bedrock on which truth lies is something we agree to call real, something we often affirm by simply repeating the term ever-more forcefully as we seek certainty in moments of doubt. Really is so common an adverb that it is easy to forget what a peculiar one it is: it has res at its root, meaning thing in Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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2  Material Inspirations Latin. To try to identify things does not always clarify matters, however, though it may express feelings, as it does in the case of a demand for truth such as my daughter’s insistent desire to clarify just how real the thing I said in fact is. Res is also closely related to reification, of course—to the act of turning something that should not be a thing into a thing, and this too carries with it an emotional charge.1 The old but still forceful Chinese insult, which is to ask a person “What kind of thing are you?” reminds us that reification has often been understood as a kind of offense. And certainly, the identification of instances of reification has typically been carried out in tones of indignation. “Sunt lacrimae rerum”—“there are the tears of [or for] things”—exclaims Aeneas in Book I of Virgil’s Aeneid, moved by his sudden encounter with a series of reliefs by Carthaginian artists showing events he had lived through during the fall of Troy.2 The phrase is notoriously difficult to translate because rerum can be objective or subjective, meaning that the tears can be of the things or about the things in question. But the matter is clearly more than grammatical. “The beautiful word ‘reality,’ ” Bruno Latour observed in “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: How to Make Things Public” (2005), “has been damned by the too many crimes committed in its name.”3 While Aeneas himself might be taken as one of the great criminals of realism in literature, at least as far as Dido is concerned, the famous Virgilian phrase—“tears of [or for] things”—is really difficult to translate precisely because of our mixed feelings about things. It might be that things are inherently sad—in fact, we know this is the case, because things are either not going our way and we are unhappy, or they are going our way and we know that state cannot last. Things, in this understanding of the idiom, stand for a reality that is the name for our actual experience, something that has more than an idiomatic relationship to objects because it is built on the memory of a long-standing distinction between selves and those elements in the world around which selves organize their feelings. But this is to follow a Romantic reading of the passage, one in which things are bound to let selves down (as though selves were not a typical source for disappointment as well). Perhaps we are even less sure today where the feelings of and for things reside. In the recent past it was still widely thought impossible that things should have feelings; now it can seem that one of the few things we are sure of is that the only things that are are things. And so we ask what we call the hard question: how does a thing come to consciousness? or how do things rise to the level of the thoughts or feelings we associate with selves? “Sunt lacrimae rerum” is followed by “et mentem mortalia tangut.” “[A]nd mortal things touch the mind” would be a good literal rendering of the relatively straightforward second clause. Of all things that might be vague or ambiguous in the passage, the faculty affected by mortal things—mentem—should not be one of them. And yet translators consistently identify it with the organ we associate with the feelings, not thought. Robert Fagles renders the line as “The world is a world of tears, and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.” In Robert Fitzgerald’s

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Introduction  3 translation “They weep here / For how the world goes, and our life that passes / Touches their hearts.” Kenneth Clark proposes in the first episode of Civilisation that “These men know the pathos of life, and mortal things touch their hearts.”4 This lodging of the emotions in the heart and not the mind indicates that each translator feels a need to separate the realm of the rational from the affective—a separation that the poem itself eschews. Another striking element in the passage liable to be lost sight of when it is cited out of context is the nature of the objects that are moving Aeneas. These are not things at all according to many common uses of the term today, but representations of things. It is not paint or stone that moves Aeneas to tears, evidently, but the images of events at Troy those materials have been manipulated to represent. Indeed, the text itself tells us that Aeneas is feeding his soul on “unsubstantial scenes,” “a mere image,” or “what is nothing but a picture.”5 And how real is that? When Gertrude instructs Polonius to speak “more matter, with less art,” we  understand her request because it is based on a long-standing suspicion of  rhet­oric­al distraction from substantial meaning.6 We know that there is something about artful speech that can be irritatingly distant from what, as we say, “matters,” that may even cover it up. That matter is what we really want, and that art may only partially represen­­­­t what is truly significant, are notions premised on the idea that a creative production may only be as good as its ­ability to get out of its own way in order to reveal something that lies below it (say, dead Troilus being dragged by his own horses, destroyed before the eyes of his city). Less art is supposed to leave room for more matter. Unsurprisingly, Gertrude’s matter-obsessed son does not see things so simply. Hence this famous exchange: polonius:  What do you read, my lord? hamlet:  Words, words, words. polonius:  What is the matter, my lord? hamlet:  Between who? polonius:  I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.  (2.2.188–92) The prince’s humor, which often emerges as a perverse literalism, wrong-foots his interlocutor by shifting the registers of meaning. Hamlet’s quips are built on the difficult ground that opens up between language and the matter of a world that words cannot fully capture. This, we may remember, is the scene that leads Polonius to posit that there may be a method in Hamlet’s madness. The oppressive presence of matter, which Hamlet associates with Gertrude—that which made his own flesh feel too solid or sullied, the world an unweeded garden—is everywhere around us, but never free of a conceptual element, an argument. * * *

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4  Material Inspirations Material Inspirations is a study of the inextricable relationship between matter and idea that shaped the nineteenth-century culture of art, and also of a topic that is closely related but not identical: the ways in which those who reflected on that relationship so often returned to art in order to give shape to their thinking. To focus on the relationship between matter and art as it never quite stabilized in nineteenth-century culture is to uncover a number of rich and productive instances in which the aspiration toward the real does not overcome, but rather expands, the sense of a gap that is in any case largely notional. When, in one of those quiet provocations characteristic of his work, Walter Pater writes about “objects in the solidity with which language invests them,” he intimates that words come with us even when we raise our eyes, as from a book, to gaze out the window, say, at the solid world we believe to be outside of us (or, as Pater puts it, “without”).7 The tendency is to see an interest in matter as a reaction to all the virtual, notfully-real forms of experience with which we live.8 We place a hopeful emphasis on really, as if to claim that here or now we encounter some thing that makes experience real. It is a premise of this book that the question of the virtual does not arise at the encounter of an otherwise stable world with any one technology or set of technologies, whether steel engraving, the steam-powered printing press, the still or movie camera, the computer, or the internet. The instances analyzed in Material Inspirations demonstrate that the nineteenth-century culture of art took shape in response to a dynamic and constantly changing situation in which both distinct objects and forms of mediation came to the fore at different times, meaning that developments in technologies of display and reproduction were ­frequently integral to the emergence of concepts, including some they have at times been understood to challenge.9 The authors and artists considered in this book, like Aeneas, see things in pictures. They look at statues in museums and at paintings in exhibitions of various degrees of duration, and they see reproductions of these objects in the pages of compendia or reference books. The real encounter with art in the nineteenth century took place in all these mediated contexts and more: gazing at a modern print of an Old Master or of an antique statue; visiting a new kind of exhibition of recently discovered artifacts or taking in a display of admired pieces only known previously from description; perhaps reading an art historian’s account of the documentary evidence for and against a certain attribution. Even as the proliferation of museums and other forms of exhibition made admired works available to view, the consolidation of art history and archeology as fields shaped and reshaped the meaning of the encounter with things that both disciplines valorized. Throughout the century each of these systems for the organization of knowledge was subject to dramatic reversals in methods and values. As many of the admired objects around which their methods evolved underwent radical revaluations, the nature of institutions and media designed for display and for the disposition of viewers were also liable to change.

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Introduction  5 It is characteristic of institutions that they project a sense of permanence, as though they existed in a realm apart from those parts of culture we know to be prone to transformation. Even when we recognize that museums and other modes of encountering art are inevitably formed and reformed in relation to prevalent social facts, the fantasy that it could or should be otherwise is not thereby dissolved. In the period of this study, as is demonstrated in every instance in this book, neither institution nor viewer nor even admired object exists in a steady state. The richest collection of one decade might be gone the next, or simply fall out of favor; the prized masterpiece might fade into decorative insignificance. Lost museums, vanished exhibitions, aesthetic conventions shifting to the point that they no longer offer support to the works which originally shaped the dis­cip­ line, attributions lost, even artists whose identities are consolidated for a moment before finding themselves at risk of dissolution: as Marx suggested not just about the case of art, the material experience of the nineteenth century is not of a solid, but of a melting kind.10 Throughout the period, it was as much by means of as in spite of these highly mediated and always changing kinds of encounters that the material nature of art itself became ever-more pressingly and sometimes ­worrisomely apparent. This book is intended to demonstrate just how much the forceful resurgence of interest in matter and things in our own day is dependent on varied nineteenthcentury efforts to grapple with the complex feelings for and of things aroused by material forms of culture.11 To argue in this way is not only to make a historical claim, but to characterize a set of relationships that are sometimes taken to be just the opposite of personal or individual as only significant because they are charged with affective force. Thing, matter, materialism, reification, object (and objectification), commodity (and commodification): these terms connote solidity and neutrality, but have in fact always been freighted with forceful conceptual and emotional implications.12 To acknowledge the desires driving characteristic approaches to matter in contemporary cultural theory is to recognize underlying and important commonalities that link apparently distinct intellectual orientations, especially the shared effort to stabilize the relationship between thought and the world that houses it. Not infrequently, the theoretical attempt to ground such stability results in agitated yet partly skeptical tautologies of the sort my daughter is driven to when she seeks clarification (really!).

1.  What Matters in Theory Matter has typically been identified in contradistinction to idea, or, more neutrally, it has been understood as describing the thing or things which form shapes, that which is acted on in the process of formation (hence: raw material). And yet, in spite of what is clearly a close and necessary relationship, there has been a

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6  Material Inspirations recurrent tendency in culture to think of matter not simply as the thing required for either ideas or forms to come into being, but as somehow opposed to ideas, or as the necessary antithesis of form itself, as though wood were the antithesis to table.13 Through much of its history, matter has been given the role of despised other—not only in various early schools of idealist thought, and in a number of ethical systems influenced by those schools, but, perhaps most interestingly, in intellectual projects aiming to get beyond ideas or idealism and reclaim the world in the name of matter itself. The long history of materialism in cultural theory presents as many contradictions as tricky continuities (the contradictions often emerging in the form of apparent or actual continuities). In this, it is not unlike other important cultural concepts, except for one complicating factor: ma­teri­al­ism has claimed much of its power in modernity by resisting its very status as concept. Originally, and for many centuries, materialism derived its cultural force largely through its association with or resistance to religion, or through its links to nascent scientific ideas, a mixed foundation that suggests why we cannot be surprised to find its manifestations often pulling in different directions. From at least the eighteenth century, and without losing its first associations, materialism was part of a powerful reaction to philosophical idealism. This reaction inevitably took on a complicated relationship to the great late-Enlightenment systemizing project that is Immanuel Kant’s compelling account of the subject’s limited access to the world at the moment of perception. While the philosophes might have embraced materialism as a powerful alternative to theological claims, the epis­ temo­logic­al challenge posed by Kant was a mixed boon. It is hard not to feel it is a loss when the smell of the rose and the taste of the wine are forcefully removed from the realm of things in themselves, as the philosopher declares, “objects in themselves are not known to us at all.”14 But this is to address the history of materialism as though it were largely an episode in the development of philosophy. Evidently the pressures on concepts through which individuals orient themselves toward the material world are never likely to be purely intellectual. And, indeed, one of the most important traditions shaping reflection on these topics is precisely the one against which materialism was often understood to have emerged. As will become clear at key instances addressed in this book, both the conditions in which matter was found to be most meaningful, and some of the most important models for thinking about the force of matter, arise in responses, explicit and disguised, to developments in the history of religion.15 Given the centrality of incarnation in Christianity, the im­port­ ance of the church as a patron of art, and as a location for its display, given also the fear of idolatry that characterized so many Christian controversies and the historical vulnerability of its sacred objects during periods of social upheaval, it is little surprise that religion in its popular and more recondite manifestations is an ongoing presence when it comes to European reflections on the significance of matter, not least in periods such as the nineteenth century, when secularizing

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Introduction  7 tendencies were only more likely to generate important new variations on the relic, and new concepts with which to identify their significance.16 Nevertheless, the mystery of incarnation is evidently a particular case. It may inflect, but it does not do away with or replace the fundamental wish to encounter the real in the world around us, or at least to do without its opposites. In Gertrude’s impatient demand for more matter we hear a characteristically reductive materialist desire, the wish for less art. We know that art may proliferate and take on all kinds of forms, but surely—the school of Gertrude holds—the ground on which all that palaver rests is more stable, more fundamental, not a site where we will find further elaboration but one at which we may establish a firm footing for all claims and forms. And yet, the explanatory substrates on which materialists have based their claims have seldom yielded the resolutions they have been taken to promise. It is hard to sustain the claim that matter really presents a conceptual solid ground free of the distractions of art. Much as one encounters the abject fragment of a saint’s body or the sliver of prized wood or strip of cloth associated with the canonized person not in itself, but in the reliquary built to house it, or even hidden within an altar that obscures it from view while ratifying its significance, the serious engagement with matter will seldom take place in a space cleared of representation, so much as at a structure at which more art will not infrequently make itself known. Recent years have seen claims for the force of materiality proliferate in what W. J. T. Mitchell has termed “an unprecedented fascination with material things” in both high and low culture.17 From the re-emergence of Spinoza and Lucretius as major figures for understanding modernity, to the centrality of Darwinian models for human behavior, or of brain science in attempts to understand phenomena that were once taken to be entirely products of culture, to the insistence on economic models centered on self-interest in explaining almost every form of human behavior, and even to the recent vogue for writing histories that take their shape as explanations of particular objects from the past—it will only be news to say that materialism is back with a vengeance in the sense that it has so swept the boards that some might be surprised it ever wasn’t the chief explanatory model for human life. Nevertheless, this book shares in the sentiment expressed by Bruno Latour when he calls for a politics that recognizes that materialism itself is, as he exuberantly puts it, “up for grabs,” and can no longer be taken for the solid bedrock for thought it has sometimes been understood to be. “To be materialist,” he notes, with a knowing bow to a great artificer, “now implies that one enters a labyrinth more intricate than that built by Daedalus” (“From Realpolitik,” 14). The figure of the labyrinth—abstract thought made concrete and dangerous, a murderous animal-man at its heart—may remind us of the improbability of ever finding a clear dividing line between art and matter. What we usually have to aid our movements is something between the clue of Theseus that only offers an escape via recapitulation and the wings of Icarus— designed to escape the island of the maze, but always as vulnerable to the melting

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8  Material Inspirations point of beeswax as to the exuberant overreach of the mind that brings together feathers, wax, and electromagnetic radiation in unfamiliar flight. In literary studies the place of the material, especially in the realism-dominated nineteenth century, is vital but vexed—both as a problem of representation and as entailing reflection on a complex set of ethical concerns. On the one hand we have the basic question that has received increasing attention in recent years (in part because of an ever-more materialist relationship to the mind itself): how does a pattern of words manage to capture and relay the experienced object world? On the other we have a network of social determinants both in and out of the text: What do particular objects mean? What does it mean to own, to acquire, to see, or be associated with specific things? What is the significance of having or not having wealth? Recent work has addressed itself compellingly to both cat­ egor­ies of question, the cognitive and the social, even as it has instantiated various forms of value judgments about them—in particular about the conceptual centrality of matter, whether it derives from the interests of a class, or the gray matter behind the eyes, or the desiring body, or issues uncannily from a world more real than the one we encounter in our everyday lives.18 Although art history has sometimes followed a trajectory related to that traced by literary studies, distinctions are quickly evident, in part because the material nature of the objects the field is devoted to elucidating can appear so obvious a fact as to obviate the need for justification. Whereas most books are read in editions of negligible commercial value, contemporary notions of art typically require (with some ironic exceptions that prove the rule) that the real experience of an art object be of the singular unique thing, the irreplaceable original. And, of course, when we speak of an art market we are talking about the trade in particular valued goods, not in endlessly reproducible text.19 Still, the economic arena is only one source for materialist approaches to the history of art, which have proliferated in recent years, as the varied points of departure from which they arise determine distinct methodological innovations and conceptual turns. Thus, while an important line of feminist scholarship has focused on the pressure of the body as an object of representation, the undeniable power of the raw materials out of which art is wrought has also received a great deal of compelling attention, especially since the publication of Michael Baxandall’s groundbreaking The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Germany (1980). Caroline Arscott’s richly detailed studies of nineteenth-century art in Interlacings (2008) achieve new critical insights by bringing together a pre­occu­ pa­tion with the human body (itself understood in relation to contemporary developments in science and technology) with the material form of specific ­created objects. In the French intellectual context, we might cite Georges DidiHuberman, whose career-long concern with the challenging place of matter in the history of art is evident from arguments published in La Peinture Incarnée in

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Introduction  9 1985 to “Viscosities and Survivals: Art History put to the Test by the Material” from 2008.20 Even the gaze, that frequently incorporeal category, receives a newly material history in Pascal Griener’s Pour une histoire du regard: L’expérience du musée au xixe siècle (2017). Griener’s title balances a tendentious claim on either side of its colon: the history of the gaze as the experience of the museum in the nineteenth century. The body of the viewer returns into consideration in spite of its location within the very institution in which a whole tradition of theorists has encountered largely disembodied deracination.21 Caroline van Eck’s scholarship also should be cited in this brief survey meant to just suggest the variety and richness of recent material approaches to art history, notably, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object, a set of studies from 2015 that participates in a promising new tendency to link nuanced accounts of episodes in the history of art and its institutions with such anthropological topics as magic and religion. In that volume, and in her edited collections, van Eck compellingly demonstrates the promise of a non-reductive materialism in which attention to concrete specificity and to the forms of mediation come together with an acutely sympathetic responsiveness to the forms of human longing.22 The complex nature of the response to the material experience of art in the nineteenth century is the burden of this book because, although the arts have consistently played a special role in written accounts of the aspiration to find oneself in relation to things—and never more so than in the period with which this book is concerned—what that role is has never been fully stabilized in culture. Does art provide access to a higher level of experience (more marked, more intense, or simply more real)? Or is it the opposite of experience, what must be cleared away in order to get back to a world we may feel we have lost? An even more chal­len­ging uncertainty in the modern era has been the one that arises with the realization that every encounter with art is itself at once mediated and mediating. Is this insight liable to foster a sense that such experiences are encounters with the real (real art, even a more real, fuller, experience of life) or does it provide yet another occasion to mourn its loss? Is art a thing or its opposite is an easier question to ask than whether mediation is reality or art. Recent work on forms of mediation in which the labor of the maker is highly marked—by the presence of his breath, say, as in Isobel Armstrong’s Glassworlds, or by the painter’s relationship to the manipulated pigment in David Peters Corbett’s The World in Paint—has challenged the more reductive tendencies in concepts of me­di­ ation.23 But the sophistication of such groundbreaking studies may well remind us how difficult it is to value something that may be felt to stand between the subject and the world. Is the experience of mediation (Aeneas before the art that makes him weep, say) an experience of reality (as Virgil’s text suggests) or a reminder of the unbridgeable space between the viewer and a world that is irrecoverable? Although they are not the real thing, we can project all kinds of

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10  Material Inspirations fantasies of creative achievement or cultural significance onto the objects decorating the temple to Juno in Carthage in which Aeneas is moved to discover the painful records of his own recent past. The materials with which Material Inspirations has to do, however, are of an entirely different order, having typically been stripped of  much of their cachet in our own period. Even when their making involves remarkable forms of creativity and labor, reproductive prints, copies of statues, and other adaptations of admired forms have entered into the register of the kinds of productions modern taste hesitates to admire, and toward which critical reflection has directed little focused attention. * * * I will be discussing three kinds of modern relationships to matter in the balance of this Introduction, so it will be helpful for me to name them and to lay out some representative instances of each. Demystification, experience, realism: the cat­egor­ies I will propose are not parallel, and they are intended to stand less for fully worked out and contending methodologies or concepts than for distinct as­pir­ations. For this reason, plenty of apparent and actual overlap in practice will soon make itself evident, and differences among members of the schools of thought I link under each heading are easy to find. The analytical claims of demystification will often present their force not just through argument, but through the suggestion that following their lead will result in that closer intimacy with the real to which I give the name experience. But then, if what I call the school of experience seems to proffer an unmediated encounter with things, beyond or outside habitual systems of thought, it is nevertheless also the case that the experience described depends on an elaborate network of arguments seldom free of either the reductive aspirations of demystification or of the inextricable set of relationships built into the approaches I group under the term realism. My goal in what follows will be to identify some important intersection points of these approaches because it is at these junctures that the force of their affective and conceptual claims becomes most vividly clear. The surprising centrality of the experiential will be manifested structurally in my argument by the length of time that category claims in my discussion, not because recourse to experience manages to provide a resolution for the restless relationship between concept and matter, but on the contrary because the claim of immediate experience becomes such a crucial point of departure and return throughout the period of my study. I am less interested, I think, in identifying the most accurate school of thought— though my preferences in this regard will doubtless be quite evident in what ­follows—than I am in registering the related affective drives shaping all of these approaches. Still, I will begin with the category that has the most recognizable intellectual pedigree, and in which the desire is not so much a fuller experience as a clearer account of causality.

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Introduction  11

a. Demystification Demystification is the name we give efforts to explain the nature of objects by linking them back to the social–material matrix from which they are said to have arisen, typically an economic or economically shaped interest understood to have been obscured by ideology, or by constraints in our day-to-day perception, or by some other phenomenon that effectively hides an underlying truth. Much of the excitement written into the causal claims of demystification is derived from the condition in opposition to which it comes into being: a mystery, and even a system that keeps things obscure—mystification. The meteoric rise in the use of the term tends to camouflage its surprisingly recent history. Demystification first entered common use in the 1970s, but it soon became widely diffused. The approach is now easily recognizable even when the term is not cited. For a characteristic and influential example of the materialist demystificatory tendency, consider Michael Baxandall’s disarmingly straightforward proposition, in his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, that “Money is very important in the history of art.” The style and the claim of the opening to this much-read book from 1972, which is still widely used as an introduction to the field, are characteristic of the critical orientation that tends to make its points by reference to the economic conditions governing at the moment of creation. The first chapter, with its boldly deflating title, “Conditions of Trade,” develops the promising proposition that “A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship” with a sad equation. “On one side there was a painter who made the picture, or at least supervised its making,” writes the art historian, in a prose style that toes a thin line between generously lucid and condescending. “On the other side there was somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for him to make it and after he had made it, reckoned on using it in some way or other.”24 It turns out the deposit in “deposit of a social relationship” is more of a financial than a chemical or otherwise material remnant, because what Baxandall means here by “social relationship” is mercantile exchange. Even the patron’s reflections on what to do with the painting are described as amounting to a kind of reckoning. And indeed analysis of financial documents is the source for all claims about value in the book. Baxandall’s deeply influential analysis of the Adoration of the Magi that Domenico Ghirlandaio produced for the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence around 1488, a painting of exceptional beauty and invention, is motivated not by anything represented on the surface of the panel, but by the fact that the contract for its making allows the historian to reflect on two material topics: the question of authorship (whether by the master or the workshop), and most especially on the significance of the raw materials used to create the piece, its pigments. The adoration of the Magi, that homage of the material world to incarnated divinity, offers the painter an occasion for the representation of sumptuous beauty. And Ghirlandaio’s

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12  Material Inspirations

Fig. I.1  Domenico Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Magi, 1488. Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

work is exuberantly copious; his Eastern potentates are ac­com­pan­ied by an astonishing number of people and things: horses, saints, sumptuous fabrics, gifts of gold and crystal, but also brick walls, lovely flowers, and horrible massacres, not to mention angels and other divine figures, many indifferent ships going about their business, and at least one town in the distance, if not two (fig. I.1). Here is what Baxandall focuses on: Ghirlandaio’s contract insists on the painter using a good quality of colours and particularly of ultramarine. The contracts’ general anxiety about the quality of

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Introduction  13 blue pigment as well as of gold was reasonable. After gold and silver, ultramarine was the most expensive and difficult colour the painter used. There were cheap and dear grades and there were even cheaper substitutes, generally referred to as German blue. (Ultramarine was made from powdered lapis lazuli expensively imported from the Levant; the powder was soaked several times to draw off the colour and the first yield—a rich violet blue—was the best and most expensive. German blue was just carbonate of copper; it was less splendid in its colour and, much more seriously, unstable in use, particularly in fresco.) To avoid being let down about blues, clients specified ultramarine; more prudent clients stipulated a particular grade—ultramarine at one or two or four florins an ounce. The painters and their public were alert to all this, and the exotic and dangerous character of ultramarine was a means of accent that we, for whom dark blue is probably no more striking than scarlet or vermilion, are liable to miss.  (11)

The blue of the altarpiece undeniably gains substance at such a level of magnification, but it does so at some cost. The pleasures of Baxandall’s slim volume reside in the discovery of a remarkable power; the text allows us to look through all the distracting men, women, angels, children, and animals, past the stone columns and brick walls that might take up our gaze and keep it, to look through all that and find something that feels far more solid. If the art historian removes from consideration some of the more obvious charms of the painting, clearly what he leaves us with must have its own compensations, which are not solely analytical. The notable popular success of this form of analysis, and of the ambitious claim about the “period eye” toward which it is moving, is based on qualities it shares with an intellectual project with which it is closely contemporary, another attempt to identify the social bases of perception, and so of reception of art—ultimately, to find in aesthetic objects the material for a critical social history with implications for our own time. Art and Experience was the fruit of years of lectures at the Warburg Institute, starting in 1965, which makes the period of its conception precisely overlap with the time in which Pierre Bourdieu developed and carried out the research into the taste of the French museum-going public that was eventually published in Distinction, possibly the most influential version of the demystificatory argument produced in the twentieth century.25 I will address the claims of that extraordinarily effective project of research and popularization in Chapter 2 of the present work, but I mention it here to just suggest that the related strategies of two very distinct contemporary projects are not only traceable to their common aspiration, but in no small part responsible for their success. Bourdieu proposes his undertaking as A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Baxandall identifies his as A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. The shared adjective in the subtitle of each volume is a fulcrum on which each leverages not just an analysis, but a claim about the place of the broad world in relation to topics from which that world has sometimes been shut out (critique, judgment,

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14  Material Inspirations taste, style). Erudite engagement with the material conditions of artistic production has the double attraction of the positive historical knowledge it brings to bear and of the pleasure attendant on participating in the act of demystification that is the peculiar charm of the kinds of analyses Bourdieu and Baxandall pi­on­eered in their distinct fields. It is no more than simple description to identify Baxandall’s analysis in the first chapter of Painting and Experience as participating in a demystificatory line of materialist thought, one that aims to bring the admired object to the level of the viewer or student by the expedient of presenting it not as a manifestation of rare skill or even of recondite knowledge, but as an instance of a recognizable social structure shaped ultimately by quite familiar human drives. To the question why something is the way it is, this kind of analysis answers, with a matter-of-fact simplicity, “follow the money.” Why is it like this, you ask? Well, someone had the wherewithal to pay, and so a contract was drawn up that made it just as expensive as the buyer wanted it to be, a desire that in turn was formed around a matrix of financial and class advancement. The achievement of Baxandall’s book is far richer and more nuanced than this bald causality would suggest. But it is hardly surprising that the afterlife of the work has tended to be shaped by the compellingly reductive claims of its bold opening chapter rather than by the more tentative arguments later in the study that draw on religious culture, textual analysis, and even on the careful tracing of gesture.26 More matter, less art is the burden of an analysis which offers even more than the promise of seeing past things. There is, after all, an art to evoking the pleasures of matter. The demystificatory materialism of the argument (its talk of contracts and wealth) often slides into an evocation of the experiential fascination with matter itself. The pleasure of Baxandall’s text is a doubled one; the sense of power he provides for the novice student who feels able to see beyond the surface of a painting almost overfull of represented subjects that might otherwise arrest the eye or baffle the mind is accompanied by a wonderfully developed romance of things. Surely shopping for art supplies has rarely been made as exciting as it is in the long passage cited above, with its anxiety, danger, and its exoticism. Consider just the parenthesis on color: the details that are the warrant for the authority of the historian are enlivened by the concrete particulars expertise lands upon without explaining (perhaps because the unspoken fantasy is that common one that holds that once we reach its component parts matter explains itself, or requires no explanation, or just escapes elucidation). The pleasure of craftsmanship is evoked in the language of elemental things—rock, water. While the drawing on the panel goes unaddressed, the “drawing off” of the color opens the door a crack to a world of technique it does not then illuminate so much as it brings right to the edge of our consciousness and allows us to imagine as a lost place of real substance. When the Levant is mentioned, it is not as the setting for the birth of the Messiah, nor even as that romantic realm further east from whence the Wise Men—those Magi

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Introduction  15 carrying gifts of unelaborated matter (resins from trees, elem­en­tal metal) in beautifully adorned receptacles—have come. The art historian references that source of exotic treasures only as it is the provenance of an expensive pigment. Baxandall’s Hemingwayesque ability to evoke material pleasure from the equipment of specialized practices allows him to finesse certain turns as his description moves from the concrete to the impossible: How does that look? one finds oneself asking. Powdered lapis lazuli: must be beautiful. And the just in “just” carbonate of copper—the adjective is a masterful invitation to feel included in a knowledge that I suspect most of the students attending Baxandall’s lectures, like his later readers, did not have unless they were painters themselves. The reader finds a pleasure in the sense that someone (Baxandall, if no one else) knows just what that is and just what it looks like and why it is nowhere near as worth having as powdered lapis lazuli. It is merely a performance of expertise, after all, to mention fresco in the context of this discussion of a work in tempera on wood. But that performance itself contributes to the pleasures of the text. To reflect as I have been doing on the satisfying features of Baxandall’s apparently plain style and openly reductive arguments is also to consider the possibility that demystificatory approaches to culture owe more to a human desire to cut through artifice so as to approach a deeply valued experience of matter (and even ma­teri­al­ism) in order to feel the relief of believing one is coming closer to the real than they do to Marx’s account of the class sources of mystification and ideology. Follow the money and you will know why that blue is there, Baxandall tells us. Follow it again and you will know why you are looking at the painting at all, says Bourdieu. It is doing no more than taking these projects at their word to note that though consistently compelling in their application and claims, they offer a willfully limited approach even to the material. As Bruno Latour has recently pointed out, ostensibly materialist approaches may best be understood to provide not the fuller engagement with the world they seem to promise, so much as a “highly politicized interpretation of causality.”27 The modern force of the material emerges between the attempt to establish a newly clarified and compelling relationship to causes shaped around recognizable human interest on the one hand, and the pleasure of reaching something more solidly real than the representation under consideration, than even the social matrix on which we originally find it resting. Powerful though the drive toward the material may be, its heterogeneous sources are always vulnerable to two fundamental challenges: the unpredictable and uneven relationship between the political desires of the critic and the mute nature of matter on the one hand, and the generally unstated and always unexamined relationship between pleasure and the fantasy of access to unmediated ex­peri­ence on the other. If the assumption that reaching the realest parts of the world will of necessitate validate our political hopes is bound to say more about our desires and hopes than about unmediated matter, evidently the same and more will be true about fantasies involving the encounter with the most real forms of experience. It will be useful,

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16  Material Inspirations therefore, to lay out with some care the nature and some of the sources of the experiential school, before turning to its manifestations in theory and practice.

b.  The Experiential School (i): Philosophical Sources and Sentiments What I will be describing as the experiential school can seem at first glance closely related to the demystificatory one, especially because both depend on a generally untheorized and by and large unacknowledged relationship to pleasure in the encounter with what they understand to be the real. But the experiential school does not aim to identify the material substrate in order to find a royal road to interpretation so much as to enjoy the real thing as a relief from the process of reflection tout court. Though in contradiction at the level of concept (as a more powerful “interpretation of causality” should be difficult to align with an as­pir­ ation to interrupt the process of thought itself), these approaches, nevertheless, will often be found to intersect within the course of a single argument. Bourdieu, for one, is quite open about finding in Baxandall “an opportunity to get rid of the traces of intellectualism” (Rules of Art, 313). Both theorists seem driven by the hopeless desire to bring the process of ratiocination to a halt in the face of a power­ful reality (a reality so powerful we want to believe it stops the otherwise endless flow of “intellectualism”), which is why their conclusions are less opposed than one might expect, even though one is studying fifteenth-century Florence and the other twentieth-century France. The demystifier’s aspiration to find a layer of bedrock from which the apparently shifting sands of culture take their form is not free from a visceral fondness for the (imagined) rocks themselves. And so, when we turn to the experiential school, we do not in fact leave the demystificatory one completely behind. Nevertheless, despite all they share, it is important to recognize the different sources from which the demystificatory and experiential approaches arise. Karl Marx’s German Ideology of 1845–1846 (first published in 1932), as its title indicates, is intended as a challenge to a particular strand of post-Hegelian idealist thought. “Empirical observation [empirische Beobachtung],” writes Marx, “must in each separate instance bring out empirically [empirisch], and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production.”28 The tautological reiteration of empirical is a form of insistence characteristic (not to say symptomatic) of efforts to establish the real on material foundations. In Marx’s case, this insistence leads directly to a classic formulation of the demystifier’s creed: The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination [Vorstellung], but as they really [wirklich] are; i.e. as

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Introduction  17 they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.  (46)

Reality is material, but it is precisely not what appears to us at the moment of perception. Since its use by Kant, Vorstellung, what Marx’s translator gives us as “imagination,” has had a more fundamental meaning than the second order of reflective play the English term can suggest; more typically rendered as “representation,” it indicates in Marx a perception of the world that must be corrected by analysis.29 It is in relation to, but also in sharp contradistinction from, this diagnostic mode of demystification that I want to place what I characterize as ex­peri­en­tially driven approaches to the materially real, or really material. Both approaches aim to return to something lost or depreciated because unperceived. The thing is always waiting to be discovered, which suggests it is at once always missing and inevitably there to be found, like the lapis lazuli in the cloak of a Wise Man. Like Stephen Dedalus speculating on the ineluctable modality of the visible by taking a few steps with his eyes closed on the beach, when we open our eyes again we can say “See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”30 We look up from our book, and a quick glance out a dusty window onto the most unremarkable prospect, or down to even the neatest desk, shows us the world in a textured contingent detail words have no hope of providing. Our gaze wanders from the scattered provisional ideas on our computer screen and finds a table in which every screw and nail has a history, each nick and scratch speaks to the inescapable effect of time on us and all things. It rains and the red wheelbarrow that carried the chicken feed gets slicked with water; the fowls gather near it, waiting out the weather. Window, table, and wheelbarrow, like broken hammers, old shoes, and vessels of various description (jug, vase), are just some of those recurrent discoveries of the power of the world, a small trad­ ition the persistence of which suggests something of the conventional quality of the contingent processes they are sometimes taken to illustrate. In what sense have we lost the world when it is as easy to find again as it is for what I am calling the experiential school? Although the question has acquired new urgency with the emergence of a virtual world online, it was anticipated substantially before the ubiquity of networked computers by the anxious response to the proliferation of images and texts evident in writings dating back to at least the early years of the nineteenth century. The worry that the immediate experience of the world itself was becoming every day more attenuated became a conventional concern that served as a proxy for (when it wasn’t taken to be evidence of) two other kinds of losses: the alienation of the individual from the social world by class division on the one hand, and the divorce of the subject from the world at the moment of perception postulated with such force in Kant. And so it is that in spite of his ready gestures

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18  Material Inspirations toward technology as a cause for the difficult condition in which modernity finds itself, for Martin Heidegger—the founder of the most sophisticated lines of ex­peri­en­tial speculation on things—the problem goes back to philosophy, not to modern industry; not to the mechanization of industrial practices, but to the systematizations of Enlightenment thought. Kant stands behind Heidegger’s dire sense that the thing is not available to us and yet is also nevertheless strangely proximate—“much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves.”31 The limits of proximity will become an important issue in reflections on the topic, both sign and cause of the problem with things. And, as we will see, the attempt to identify and describe the possibility of a sudden encounter with the world from which we are usually (or perhaps just recently) shut out keeps coming back not to raw matter, but to art. But first the problem: “All distances in time and space are shrinking,” Heidegger notes, at the opening of “The Thing” (1950). “Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness.” It is contact, or at least proximity to something (some thing) that concerns the essay, and it is things that will provide the nearest possibility of approximation: “Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly. We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things. But what is a thing?” (166). Heidegger’s immediate answer to his own query is not a definition. In its stead (and this is, unsurprisingly, a characteristic move in a line of thought so uncomfortable with concepts) he provides an instance—the famous jug out of which he will develop the important distinction between object and thing. But that distinction is itself founded on a serious engagement with his philosophical antecedents; object provides the point of contrast to thing in the experiential line of thought that emerges as a kind of never fully committed resistance to Kantian categories: The thing-in-itself means for Kant: the object-in-itself. To Kant the character of the “in-itself ” signifies that the object is an object in itself without reference to the human act of representing it . . . “Thing-in-itself,” thought in a rigorously Kantian way, means an object that is no object for us, because it is supposed to stand, stay put, without a possible before: for the human representational act that encounters it.  (177)

Heidegger’s dense account of the thingness of the jug is shaped not by the contours of a familiar ceramic object, but by a complex response to Kant that combines a striking discomfort with even imagining the unavailable noumenal world posited in transcendental philosophy with a resistance to the centrality of the subject at the moment of perception:32 As the self-supporting independence of something independent, the jug differs from an object. An independent self-supporting thing may become an object if

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Introduction  19 we place it before us, whether in immediate perception or by bringing it to mind in a recollective re-presentation. However, the thingly character of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object, nor can it be defined in any way in terms of objectness, the over-againstness, of the object.  (166–7)

Objectness is what is overcome when we identify a thing (“When we take the jug as a made vessel then surely we are apprehending it—so it seems—as a thing and never as a mere object” (167)). And yet even this relatively simple distinction— seeing the jug as a made thing—cannot achieve the goal of proximity toward which Heidegger aspires because “as soon as human cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world’s nature, and falls short of it” (180). “Thinging is the nearing of the world”: Heidegger’s idiosyncratic formulation is characteristic of the experiential line of thought, wherein forms of reflection on the thing-ness of the world offer a kind of protection from thought itself. But the tenuously achieved connection between things and ourselves paradoxically attests to the vulnerability of the thing itself. It is as though a thing we can barely touch were at risk from our grasping it: “If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing’s presence in the region from which it presences” (181). Because the thing is not accessible to rationalization, and seldom present to perception, it is only nearness that we can experience, and that only in flashes akin to those moments of sudden insight Gerard Manley Hopkins calls instress. Bill Brown identifies himself as a follower of this line of thought when he writes in an important early essay on the topic of “the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power.”33 The assertion Brown describes, that forceful material declaration of presence and power, is mollified by its seeming nature. Evidently, when things suddenly declare themselves to us, it is not because an inanimate object has acquired a mouth, but because our sensibility is lending some of the things in the world a power we desire them to have. Brown is clear on the way this paradoxical sudden assertion is a manifestation, above all, of an always belated desire shaped around ideas (after ideas): “we want things to come before ideas, before theory, before the word, whereas they seem to persist in coming after: as the alternative to ideas, the limit to theory, victims of the world” (16). The kind of powerful encounter described by Brown has a precedent in an important section of Hegel’s Aesthetics that addresses the vast gap between object and self that is crossed in admiration. “As finite intelligences,” the philosopher writes in a text that deserves to be better known, “we sense . . . objects, we observe them, we become aware of them through our senses, we have them brought before our contemplation and ideas, and, indeed, before the abstractions of our thinking understanding which confers on them the abstract form of universality.”34 Hegel’s attention to the dynamics of encounter necessarily includes analysis of the perceiving subject (the one to whom things seem to assert their presence), a cat­ egory often occluded or diminished in experiential theories. For the phil­oso­pher,

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20  Material Inspirations the error of imagining that there could be things without subjects is in fact the first step in a dialectic: finitude and unfreedom . . . lies in presupposing things to be independent. Therefore we direct our attention to things, we let them alone, we make our ideas, etc., a prisoner to belief in things, since we are convinced that objects are rightly understood only when our relation to them is passive, and when we restrict our whole activity to the formality of noticing them and putting a negative restraint on our imaginations, preconceived opinions, and prejudices.

Commitment to the independence of things demands a surrender of the liberty of the perceiver: “With this one-sided freedom of objects,” Hegel continues, “there is immediately posited the unfreedom of subjective comprehension . . . Truth in that case is to be gained only by the subjugation of subjectivity.” The next turn in the dialectic, however, involves a willing relationship to the object world, one in which the subject seizes upon and shapes objects: Interests, aims, and intentions lie in the subject who wills to assert them in face of the being and properties of things. For he can only carry out his decisions by annihilating objects, or at least altering them, moulding them, forming them, cancelling their qualities, or making them work upon one another, e.g. water on fire, fire on iron, iron on wood, and so on.

While it is unsurprising to find that the object’s loss of freedom is written into its becoming of use, it is important not to miss the fact that freedom is indeed a quality belonging to objects as well as subjects in this argument. Hegel himself reminds us of this symmetrical condition (the nature of which is generally revealed in its loss): Now it is things which are deprived of their independence, since the subject brings them into his service and treats and handles them as useful, i.e. as objects with their essential nature and end not in themselves but in the subject, so that what constitutes their proper essence is their relation (i.e. their service) to the aims of the subject. Subject and object have exchanged their roles. The objects have become unfree, the subjects free.

We are used to claims that the instrumentalizing of the world makes the things in it unfree objects. However, the bold symmetrical structure in which Hegel’s treatment of instrumentalization is placed ascribes a like freedom to the subject and object, making his account at once clearer and more sophisticated than that of Heidegger, which is structured on the only partial recognition of elements in the dialectic, or on a moralized and historicized account of a process that in Hegel is

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Introduction  21 never liable to stabilization, and so not available as a measure of historical crisis. Similarly, while for both philosophers it is the work of art that effects the rec­on­cili­ ation of subject and object, Hegel is bolder in laying out the role of the beautiful: “the consideration and the existence of objects as beautiful is the unification of both points of view, since it cancels the one-sidedness of both in respect of the subject and its object alike, and therefore their finitude and unfreedom” (1:112–13).35 Hegel’s lovely and tendentious treatment of paradoxes, which are ultimately traceable to challenging elements in Kant’s account of beauty, especially as they were developed into a theory of freedom and constraint by Friedrich Schiller in the Aesthetic Education (1794), provides the occasion for a far richer vision of art (call it the object-form of beauty) than was available to either of those important antecedents. He is characteristically elaborate in his presentation of what would become a central tenet of a major strand of nineteenth-century thought, though one that literature typically takes up not in the long, minutely detailed passages of exposition of the philosopher, but in forms that enact the speed and symmetry of the relations described. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats’s Grecian Urn tells the viewer in a phrase the compactness of which is part of its argument, all elab­ or­ations being gestures back to that fundamental claim. (Out of the eighteen words that comprise the final declaration of the vase, only three are not repeated, leaving “earth” as the place in which the mirroring work of beauty and truth and knowledge take place: “—That is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”) “Things are because we see them,” argues Vivian in Oscar Wilde’s “Decay of Lying” sixty years after Keats, “and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.” Perhaps Hegel, if not Keats, will allow us to recognize the intellectual sources of Wilde’s claim that “To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.”36 To run the matter in a different direction may allow us to recognize the aphoristic quality in the philosopher’s formulations, such as “In this [beautiful] object the self becomes concrete in itself ” (Hegel, 1:113).37

c.  The Experiential School (ii): Feeling for Things in Theory The English language stumbles over thing as a verb not simply because it is impossible to see it as an action, but because it is inconceivable to link it with a subject shaping it or giving it meaning. One can object and objectify, and people or things may matter to a person, so gerunds come readily to mind in association with these nouns. But thinging is not generally available to thought, any more than to thing is. The thing might thing for a Heideggerian, but that heady activity is so ungeneralizable an experience as to make it available only in sudden encounters that evanesce even as they are felt, and vanish well before any true reflection is possible, much less a clear shareable statement.

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22  Material Inspirations By far the most gripping moment in Jane Bennett’s influential Vibrant Matter (2010) is her evocation of an epiphanic occasion before a storm sewer in Baltimore where she sees flung together a rubber work glove, a mat of oak pollen, a dead rat, a white plastic bottle cap, and a stick of wood. She dates the vision (“On a sunny Tuesday morning on 4 June”) and locates it with care in a contingent modern world that includes natural formations largely in relation to the artificial supplements through which we usually come across them (“in the grate over the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring Lane in Baltimore”). And when she lays out what she spotted it is in the form of a list that could be a poem, though of course the whole passage evokes a tradition of American verse we might associate ultimately with Walt Whitman as mediated by Allen Ginsberg: one large men’s black plastic work glove one dense mat of oak pollen one unblemished dead rat one white plastic bottle cap one smooth stick of wood Glove. pollen. rat. cap. stick.38

Like Ginsberg thinking of Whitman and his own poetic vocation (“In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!”) Bennett finds emotion in the things of modernity, but her things do not, like Ginsberg’s, shade into human relations (“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families / shopping at night,” “Wives in the avo­ cados”).39 Indeed, Bennett wants her things to not be associated with human desires or actions other than her own. And she does not see herself as shopping for, but as suddenly confronted by, an unsought vision: As I encountered these items, they shim­mied back and forth between debris and thing—between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success) and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects.

It is this being in excess of the human that leads to the “stuff,” as she puts it, exhibiting “its thing-power,” a quality Bennett experiences as a call that emerges through other affects the matter elicits. The mind is not untouched by these feelings for and of things: I was repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but I also felt something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible

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Introduction  23 singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal mass­produced plastic water-bottle cap.  (4)

Less a Whitman or a Ginsberg, then, for whom the heterogeneous experience of the world so often has a seductive human call, and more like a William Carlos Williams setting himself the impossible project of marking the sensation of meaning provided by the encounter with the world of things, Bennett wants us to feel that so much depends on these objects, on the experience of having seen them, much as so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.40

Bold hyperbole shapes the opening of Williams’s poem, as it does Bennett’s text, because it is the mode necessary to generate the affective charge on which both poet and critic depend. Hyperbole also subtends the unwillingness to analyze the powerful emotion that each text insists upon without clearly explaining. How much? and Why? or even What do you mean? would be natural queries provoked by “so much.” But the force of the verse, its narrow lines, its apparent objectivity (and, even paradoxically, the quality of unelaborated wonder that apparent ob­ject­iv­ity promotes), leave no room for the sorts of questions that would require at least a little hesitation on the part of the reader, most especially the one the verse most clearly begs: to (or for) whom do these things matter? I am suggesting an unresolved quality will always make itself known in instances such as Williams’s poem or Bennett’s epiphanic account of the detritus at  the storm drain. While the sudden pressures of the world seem to upend the balance between material experience and perceiving subject, the claim for the af­fect­ive charge of the encounter makes ample room for—indeed, demands—the presence of the very subject who is the only one available to see what has come together at this moment, to feel the feelings a particular combination might provoke. This point is only worth stressing insofar as it complicates the participation of Bennett’s project in the leveling drives evident in much recent work on ma­ter­ iality, the aspiration to bring the living human being and the material world into a proximity so close as to swerve into identification. Hegel may be understood as indicating one basis for this kind of conflation. Claims grounded on the equitable

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24  Material Inspirations achievement of freedom of subject and object of the sort I discussed above may seem to imply a commensurate status for each element in the dyad. But the ­phil­oso­pher does not share the desire to place on a level the mind and the objects on which it reflects characteristic of a number of materialist strains of thought. And, indeed, it is as difficult for the perceiving subject to fully reconcile itself with the position of undifferentiated modesty before the object world, as it is uncertain that this insistence on the self ’s undifferentiated place in nature is ultimately and in all cases the fundamentally materialist position. After all, the claim that we are dust and will return to dust is most forcefully advanced in Genesis 3:19, a text not typically associated with materialism. It bears saying that even though the drive to identify the vibrant force of things is often accompanied by the suggestion that what is being proposed is a radical kind of modesty whereby the mind is allowed to approach the level of the world it observes and on which it reflects, when everything counts equally distinction is lost not only between humans and things, but also between things themselves. It ought to be difficult to sustain the drama of a particular moment in the context of a broad commitment to viewing existence from so distant a perspective as to ironize even the most pressing of occasions. Pausing to reflect on an instance of charged sensory experience that is also entirely quotidian, the feeling of cool water on a hot day, Walter Pater quickly arrives at a surprisingly depersonalized set of insights. “[A]nd birth and gesture and death and the springing of the violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations,” he writes in a key passage early in the Conclusion to The Renaissance (1873), his version of the topos I have been discussing including in its sweep the essential milestones of human individuality (birth and death) as well as the fertilization of transient vegetation by the decomposing body (186). And yet, the critic’s prose is so calm and undifferentiating at this juncture (that modest chain of “ands” linking events while muffling their distinctions, the bunch of humble flowers rising at a speed unseeable by the human eye, and then the close on an abstract general claim) that readers seldom stop to mark his chilling theme, nor the difficult relationship of the subject to the “combinations” he proposes. The sense that ten thousand combinations are occurring at any given time is hardly likely to result as a matter of course in an encounter with the world in which a great deal depends on a specific wheelbarrow, one occasion in the rain, a particular group of chickens, or other accumulations or gatherings that circumstances might precipitate out of the vast manifold. For Pater, at least, the identification of such moments is a project requiring engaged individual discrimination. And, indeed, while plastic glove, bottle cap, rain drop, rat’s body are all ultimately fungible, they are given an unwonted uniqueness (“singularity” is Bennett’s term) at the point when she takes them in or registers their co-existence. A space is opened by the emotion of the subject who feels things so deeply that she recognizes either the exceptional quality of the

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Introduction  25 experience, or the elements that are out of place, not just in the company of items belonging to an indifferent non-living world, but in conditions more suitable for undifferentiated accumulation, as in the heterogeneous water-borne debris gathered by chance (out of more than ten thousand possible combinations) in a storm drain. The qualities Bennett’s passage shares with Williams’s poem distinguish the experiential approach to things from that of demystificatory materialists, who are prone to losing the object altogether, as the kind of attention they cultivate is designed to flatten out differences. The price of lapis lazuli will be the same whether it is used for a painting of no great interest or for one we are desperate to see; taste, when, understood as a matter of class-based convention, does not develop out of a particular occasion of encounter with the vibrancy of things, but from a lifetime of training in which one’s responses come to be like that of another of the same class (like others belonging to my category I find photographs of coiled rope compelling, those of cute cats tacky, or at least I know enough to say I do).41 Nevertheless, what the experiential line of thing-oriented writers typically commemorates is not matter, or even things themselves (their texts are often focused on instances that are, in the regular course of things, difficult to admire— the body of a dead rat, a bottle cap, a broken tool, old shoes), but the moment of newly rich encounter with the world, when what George Eliot describes as the “stupidity” in which “the quickest of us walk about” well wadded is overcome and we are afforded an experience that if it were to occur regularly would be overwhelming. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” the novelist reminds us in a well-known but still astonishing simile, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”42 Experiential thing-theorists aspire to a brief glimpse of this vast whole, though typically the risk is mitigated for these authors by the brevity of the encounter: the diaphragm closes before too much damage is done; stupidity quickly resumes its protective role. Two threads of thing theory that can give the appearance of being antithetical come together in the experiential strand, and give affective support to the project of demystification. One develops out of the insistence on the similarity between things and people (as we all come to dust, how significant can our differences be?). The other is motivated by the desire to challenge the structures that create the sense of a gap between things and people. A further distinction sometimes emerges in practice. When broad ethical claims are at stake, the tendency is to align the space between our habitual relationship to the world and the especially charged experiences on which so much depends with the distinction between objects and things. When the stakes are political, one part of the dyad acquires a more apparently technical term, and the distinction is made between commodities and things. Use tends to overlap, depending on whether the critic is prioritizing the ethical claim subtending the political or the economic structure shaping the

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26  Material Inspirations ethical. In both cases, the aim is to identify, preserve, or celebrate what is taken to be the resistant part of the pair, the one that cannot be subsumed into a common system of perception (objectification) or exchange (commodification). “Objects are the way things appear to a subject,” is how Mitchell puts it in a frequently cited formulation: “that is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template.” A Thing, on the other hand, is precisely what escapes identity, gestalt or template. It is an important part of the claim—and the principal way the relationship between the experiential and demystificatory is mutually supportive—that the recognition of thingness is not a function of the subject, but inherent in the thing itself. Things not only stand outside, but impede, circulation; they “have a habit of breaking out of the circuit, shattering the matrix of virtual objects and imaginary objectives.” But how is the relationship between lived experience and a category that stands outside the determined and constrained one of objects to be articulated or understood? If the actual thing in question does not change in its material content or in its form, then what shifts are the relationships in which the perceiver understands that entity to exist: the thing may be mysterious (nebulous, obdurate, and vague), but for Mitchell it nevertheless “signals the moment when the object becomes the Other” (156). Evidently there is no ontological metamorphosis taking place in the course of this becoming. The butterfly does not become a caterpillar, much less a mysterious chrysalis, just because our thought has assimilated the life cycle of the Lepidoptera. The alteration described in a formulation such as Mitchell’s takes place within the disposition of a perceiving self attempting to think itself out of a system it has come to feel the need to escape. We might credibly allow ourselves to imagine this development as shattering one of the many mental constructs shaping our ideas, but it is a difficult proposition to sustain that seeing or understanding something in a different way takes us outside of our systems of thought.

d.  The Experiential School (iii): Encountering Things/ Displaying Objects In this book I hope to demonstrate that the kind of relationship between object and thing that Mitchell lays out with such declarative certainty is an issue being negotiated time after time in the nineteenth-century culture of art. We might say that any work of art constantly oscillates between thingness and objecthood in his sense of the terms, and that these oscillations are what is being tracked and analyzed by writers on art. Given the unbridgeable historical and cultural gaps that divide the great period of collection and museum building that runs from the late eighteenth century to today from the eras in which prized art objects were created (say, classical antiquity or the Renaissance), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the pieces gathered with such effort in the later period were originally destined to

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Introduction  27 be objects for subjects other than the people gathering them for the newlyproliferating places of display. As we will see, it is a premise of the experiential school when it enters the museum that the effect of the experience of the gap between these things and ourselves as viewers is perpetually to be making us newly objects for ourselves, and sometimes things. It is paradoxical, then, that it is so commonly proposed that the museum makes things into objects by putting them within a system of interpretation. As I have just begun to suggest, the literature on places of exhibition is characterized by an unsteady interplay between the expression of wistful regret for the imposed condition of alienated objecthood in theory and evocation of the amazed experiences of thingness in practice. This structural bad faith is in some measure unavoidable and even historically overdetermined. After all, if we follow the premises of the experiential school as laid out by Mitchell, at their point of origin, works on display need to be understood as having been objects, given their existence within the systems that led to their creation. Thingness is conferred by the gap instantiated in the modern condition of encounter—the one associated most typically with the museum. As we will see, one influential way to resolve the foundational paradox is to rely on the assumption (not to say fantasy) that an entire culture in the past might have managed to exist in a condition of unalienated coherence that made even its systems somehow stand outside of the subject/ object divide. For much of the nineteenth century and in Heidegger this realm had one name. It was called ancient Greece.43 Other historic places and periods with similar functions will be posited throughout the twentieth century, suggesting the important heuristic function of the fantasy. “Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibility,” Bill Brown claims in a formulation that needs to be understood as axiomatic rather than circumstantial or accidental, and which is characteristic of the sense of constraint on which the experiential approach depends. One reason it is necessary to return to things, to be shocked by them (rather than, say, to live among them), is that they are so hard to reach—always beyond, outside, etc. Indeed, the experiential approach tends to associate the opportunity of regular encounter, which is the fundamental promise of the museum, with an unavoidable loss of thingness. Institutions of display are the foster homes or forcing houses of objecthood as Brown understands it, which is what motivates him to write about “the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects.” The space between object in the museum and thing outside it maps so precisely onto the space between thought and thing as to require no argument to establish their relationship. And so, immediately following the passage just cited, Brown suggests that “if this is why things appear in the name of relief from ideas (what’s encountered as opposed to what’s thought), it is also why the Thing becomes the most compelling name for that enigma that can only be encircled and which the object (by its presence) negates” (“Things,” 5).

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28  Material Inspirations In the course of his summary of the limits of sociological approaches to the study of the museum, Pascal Griener notes the tendency to neglect the objects on display and to “consider the actors of this story as pure sprits moving through or engaged with spaces reduced to Cartesian dimensions,” a reminder of the intellectual conventions that allow the idea of a “grid of museal exhibition” to make sense.44 And, indeed, a long tradition stands behind the concept Brown evokes with such quick shorthand, making it comprehensible and even compelling, though perhaps reducing the scope it had in its original formulations. In John Dewey’s Art as Experience we find fully developed the claim that the emergence of institutions for the display of art has rendered objects on view somehow less significant: “When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance.”45 While Dewey’s emphasis on continuities between aesthetic objects and the objects of general experience leads him to arguments that share some of the tendencies of the demystificatory school, his aim is profoundly different. Dewey’s paradoxical project is to reconnect art and everyday experience in order to recognize what is special or distinctive about art and then broaden its scope, not in order to identify it as a particularly mystified mani­fest­ ation of the most venal pressures or motivations that shape our quotidian existence. The task for the philosophy of art, Dewey explains, is “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized” (3). As art provides the model for an intensified experience that may well be available even outside of its limited ambit, to restore continuity in the way Dewey describes is to recognize the pervasive luster of art, not to dim it. “Art exists,” argues Jacques Rancière in a surprisingly similar vein in Aesthesis, “in the very difference between the common form of life that it was for those who made the works and the object of free contemplation and free appreciation that it is for us.” This is an argument in which the grid of museal exhibition is in no way to be escaped—or at least one will not leave carrying a work of art with one if one does: “museum works are art, they are the basis of the unprecedented reality called Art, because they were nothing like that for those who made them.”46 Like Dewey, I think, Rancière is describing a paradoxical situation in which we stand to gain something by recognizing the remnants of common forms of life preserved by the objects within the museum, but that recognition must always cross a gap. It is not our common forms of life understood in any simple way we find in the museum. But then again, our own common life may not be as simple as all that. For many influential critics, the “restoration of continuity” toward which Dewey and Rancière may be said to aspire finds its consummation not in a power­ful harmonizing of the intense and mundane, but in a broadening out of the scope of alienation. And so, even as movements in the art world committed to

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Introduction  29 shortening or entirely vanquishing the distance between art and lived experience proliferated in the 1960s, we find the struggle to understand the relationship between art objects and the things that make up that experience shaping a number of important polemics of the period. Arthur Danto coming to terms with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes is one well-known and productive crisis of this sort.47 But the controversy that touches most closely on the themes of this introduction is one that emerges between two influential programmatic statements of the era shaped precisely around the question of what it means to experience an object. “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried’s well-known essay from 1967, attempts to arrest the progress of Minimalism—what he calls literalist art—at the expense of artists he favors by identifying in the movement an unfortunate tendency to promote kinds of subject–object relationship he understands to be the very opposite of the ones art is meant to instantiate. And so, the conjunction at the heart of “Art and Objecthood” is misleading. Either art or objecthood is the prop­os­ ition Fried is advancing, art being the opposite of objecthood in that its aim is precisely not to promote the sense of subjecthood inevitably entailed in the creation of objects.48 Donald Judd had proposed in “Specific Objects,” the 1965 text that provoked Fried’s response and gave him a key term to work with, that the material in the world we live in, industrial paint, say, or industrially processed metals, need not— ought not to—be lost to art. Judd’s attempt to recover the specificity of even massproduced material objects is meant to expand the range of experiences art recognizes and values, and in that sense to reconnect us to the world around us. The adjective in the title of his brief manifesto anticipates the text’s suggestion that particularity, or specificity, might indeed be understood as an important quality of objects—even though claims of specificity can seem hardly applicable to things produced largely by machines, and in vast numbers, or even to art works that emulate these things.49 The difference between the inherent specificity of Judd’s title and the conditionality implied in Fried’s (specific objects as opposed to the condition of being an object, or objecthood) is central to their disagreement. If the artist draws attention to the power inherent in particular objects, the critic is concerned with a condition that will only be manifest in the presence of subjects. Judd’s approach, with its democratizing impulse to create the possibility of a newly charged experience of materials that, in our everyday encounters, we slight, or engage with, with no real recognition, evidently shares a great deal with the aspirations of Dewey, and even Rancière, not to mention Williams. “One is always surrounded by things,” writes Fried, by contrast, the irritation of this observation only given its full flavor by the exasperated italics with which he closes his point, “But the things that are literalist works of art must somehow confront the beholder—they must, one might almost say be placed not just in his space but in his way” (154).

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30  Material Inspirations Fried is troubled by two related features of the movement that came to be known as Minimalism and for which Judd’s text is an important programmatic statement: its emphasis on material presence and on the situation of viewing (the putting of things in our way). He proposes the term theatricality to describe (and resist) the creation of situations in which the effect of an art work depends on establishing a relationship in which the subjecthood of the viewer comes to the fore. Fried and Judd both agree, then, that the new movement is interested in bringing objects into view. But for Judd it is possible to do this in a way that makes us recognize anew the presence of the materials in our lives, and so of situations we experience every day without feeling their power. For Fried, the new movement buys its vision of objecthood at the cost of establishing a relationship for the ­subject that is not new at all, but quite old and ultimately not what he looks for in the plastic arts. While “modernist painting,” Fried claims, “has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood,” Minimalism “aspires not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such” (151). The crux of the debate resides in the difference between “specific objects” and “objecthood as such,” because in the turn to the experience of the material world around us Fried sees not a new commonality between subjects and objects, but the val­or­ iza­tion of a subjecthood he holds it is the role of art to resist (or “suspend”). The aspiration to make or experience objects is antithetical to the project of art because it reduces the significance of each specific encounter, even as it pulls the viewer into reflection on that encounter, and so, paradoxically, away from the thing itself that is the art work in Fried. In this argument the material drives of Minimalism identified by Judd—its tendency to emphasize the presence of specific materials in particular—will actually reduce the relationship with the art object into a repeated experience of subjecthood. Fried is poignant and clear in identifying the power of Minimalism (the growing significance of which his essay in no way prevented) as arising from its “expression of a general and pervasive condition” (149), which may be the reason he and Judd agree on so much, aside from their premises and conclusions. I have suggested that the distinction between thing and object upon which the experiential school relies is a compelling but ultimately limited hierarchization of modes of encounter with material in the world. Object is a term that draws attention to the existence of a subject, and possibly to the social event of seeing—as in Baxandall’s argument leading up to the period eye, and as Fried insists in his analysis of Minimalism. Thing tends to be preserved for material that we believe has somehow moved beyond or outside what we understand to be the system that creates the relationship of subject and object in the first place. Thing is matter when it is not for us, which is paradoxically why thing so often is matter when it is most important for us, because we feel the encounter as an escape from a constraining system (of perception, of values, of thought), if only for that moment.

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Introduction  31

e.  Realism: Art Works/Art Objects/Commodities While the experiential school tends to emphasize the shock and brevity of an encounter with something to which we can never have full access, and the demystificatory school in some measure also depends on the eye-opening realization (oh yes, I thought it was the design, but I see now it was the cost; I thought I myself loved this object, but I see now it was class interest that was driving that feeling!), more recent work has been trying to close the sense of a gap on which both these lines of analysis depend. For my purposes I have given the name of realism to this later tendency not without misgivings, and with much less certainty than sometimes accompanies the term. I propose realism as a term borrowing some of its energy from its use to describe in novels an orientation toward the world, not a claim to fully comprehend it. What I am calling realism combines something of the commitment to registering experience with an inability to believe that experience at its most significant ever exits the processes of systematization, imagination, and sometimes even conventionalizing characteristic of thought itself. The main theoretical representative of this approach—which takes its particular energy from rebutting the extremes of the other two, is Bruno Latour. Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (or ANT) provocatively denies the primacy of the social as the location at which to find the material logic of cultural phenomena because it refutes the existence of a gap between what we call ma­ter­ ial and what we call social. The routing of causality back to material determinants for Latour is inadequate because it fails to grasp the inextricable (already existing) connections between the reductive binaries on which the preponderance of ­hitherto existing materialisms have been constructed.50 Latour mounts a forceful critique of the aspirations driving the experiential and the demystificatory approaches I have been discussing simply by insisting on the foundational relationship of material facts and the institutions established for analyzing them. I favor realism as a term over network because I am not yet comfortable with the tendency to see networks as distributed systems which plane out distinctions among elements or that may miss out the individual responses that I find interesting. But the terminology matters less here than the fundamental opportunities for renewed reflection on what is compelling about the actual relationships between the perceiving subject, the institution, and the art object. And the challenge to established approaches is open in Latour. His description of Actor–Network Theory attacks two crucially important dyads simultaneously. The subject–object dichotomy of post-Kantian concepts of perception is dispatched in the course of an argument that lays out the inanity of working to establish ties between the material and the social after artificially splitting them off from each other: To get the right feel for ANT, it’s important to notice that this has nothing to do with a “reconciliation” of the famous object/subject dichotomy. To distinguish a

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32  Material Inspirations priori “material” and “social” ties before linking them together again makes about as much sense as to account for the dynamic of a battle by imagining a group of soldiers and officers stark naked with a huge heap of paraphernalia— tanks, rifles, paperwork, uniforms—and then claim that “of course there exists some (dialectical) relation between the two.”  (87)

Latour’s bracing account identifies several influential schools of analysis as constrained by their reductive premises: “It would be incredible,” he writes with forceful common sense, if the millions of participants in our courses of action would enter the social ties through three modes of existence and only three: as a “material infrastructure” that would “determine” social relations like in the Marxian types of materialism; as a “mirror” simply “reflecting” social distinctions like in the critical sociologies of Pierre Bourdieu; or as a backdrop for the stage on which human social actors play the main roles like in Erving Goffman’s interactionist accounts.  (84)

For Latour, all three of these approaches “are only primitive ways of packaging the bundle of ties that make up the collective. None of them are sufficient to describe the many entanglements of humans and non-humans” (84). Latour argues that sociological analyses need to be revivified by becoming newly attentive to the networks linking objects and people, rather than postulating a prior existing social realm to which networks then conform. “Social,” in his words, “is the name of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it gathers together into new shapes” (65). Actor–Network Theory suggests that the relationship between things and human beings is more varied, of far longer duration, and of a deeper reach than anything that might come down to the relatively simple structures involved in the organized exchange of commodities or the struggle for social dominance within a hierarchy.51 The approach proposed by Latour offers a dynamic model for reflecting not simply on the difference between art objects and other things, but also on the ways in which the experience of those objects was negotiated and renegotiated throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The historical underpinnings of this argument quickly suggest themselves to a student of the nineteenth century, a time in which the drive to establish the nature and value of art was more than coincidentally connate with the attempt to stabilize new kinds of political or­gan­ iza­tions, to create new societies. To use one phenomenon as the base for the other would be to pick one wave in a choppy sea and pretend that it is the solid ground around which all the other waves are taking their form. To be critically alert to the complex dynamics shaping the relationship between structures in formation that include society itself and its cultural institutions is not only a matter of historical responsibility, as far as Latour is concerned, but also of keeping alive

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Introduction  33 forward-looking political possibilities. In this argument it is precisely because things are always coming into being along with the social conditions in which they participate that the possibility exists that they may be reassembled otherwise. “They insisted,” Latour writes, as he attempts to describe the political limits of major sociological theorists, “that we were already held by the force of some society when our political future resides in the task of deciding what binds us all together” (8). Material Inspirations asks what happens if we imagine the nineteenthcentury culture of art to be doing work toward binding understood in this sense, rather than bound to reflect an already established or fated set of material or social conditions. Mercantile exchange takes pride of place among the systemic explanations typically adduced to explain the nineteenth-century culture of art, both because of its simplicity and because of the undeniably broad effects of its claims in demystificatory systems. And this is one place where the aspirations of the demystificatory approach and the experiential may part company. As we saw in Baxandall, it is not just the case that the interests built into profit and loss (not to mention the paperwork merchants generate) make it among the easiest forms of causality to identify, but that the simplifying structures of commerce will tend to obscure the qualities of particular things. Both (the motivations of) agents and (the status of) objects seem to become readily graspable when placed within a world of financial exchange. And yet, this approach gains its considerable ana­lyt­ic­al force at some cost. After all, modern systems of trade cannot rely on one individual’s idiosyncratic response to a specific object; trade is a matter of multiples. And then, everything comes down not to the object itself, but to the power or wealth it takes to acquire it, or that its acquisition bestows on the owner. In the demystificatory materialist line, it is always the social milieu that subtends the force of the object, rather than anything inhering in the object itself, the status of which is made an accident of its social condition rather than a quality derived from its own charisma or the responsiveness of a subject. In a moment reminiscent of Baxandall, Arjun Appadurai quickly follows the claim in The Social Life of Things that “a commodity is a thoroughly socialized thing” with this “definitional question”: In what does its sociality consist? The purist answer, routinely attributed to Marx, is that a commodity is a product intended principally for exchange, and that such products emerge, by definition, in the institutional, psychological, and economic conditions of capitalism. Less purist definitions regard commodities as goods intended for exchange, regardless of the form of the exchange. The purist definition forecloses the question prematurely. The looser definitions threaten to equate commodity with gift and many other kinds of thing.52

Appadurai’s principal concern is that commodities might be placed in relation to categories of objects that he wants to preserve as distinct (especially those, such as

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34  Material Inspirations gifts, that he understands to emerge to the side of capitalism). Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the claim requires him to bracket off other categories in order to do so, Appadurai argues for the primacy of economic models of understanding value and the movement of things in the world. “Economic exchange,” he declares, “creates value.” As that value is embodied in commodities, attention to things “makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly” (3). The ringing clarity of Appadurai’s statements is part of an attempt to stabilize relationships and forms of value that are anything but clear. Moreover, when he turns to art itself in later work, Appadurai’s reflections on the ways in which a painting can be a commodity are ultimately so consistent with Fried’s earlier account of objecthood as to suggest the important ambiguity of the category of commodification in this context: One thing cannot be a commodity, for once it is a commodity, something is lost about its singularity. The minute you put a thing—be it a piece of clothing or food, a tool, a person, anything—on the market, you have to believe there could be others of its kind. Consider the great paintings that command incredible prices at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. Of a single painting on the auction block, you might be tempted to say that it commands such a huge price because it is unique. But if it is a real singularity, what makes it marketable? Are you, for example, buying a Picasso? A piece of Picasso? A piece of that set which is all of Picasso’s paintings, but a piece we can buy because it’s on the market? As these questions imply, something that appears totally singular—one-of-a-kind—is also totally a commodity—one of a set. Picasso himself is part of a set: the set of “great painters who are very expensive to buy.” The painting on the block is general in a hundred ways. Its singularity has been eroded.53

The cultural mysteries hidden in buying and selling tobacco, in acquiring and consuming tea, in purchasing and processing lumber: the shape of each of these processes will conform to its particular determinants. But even if we are to believe that as each is a commodity basic structures will apply with some consistency across individual instances, can we truly believe that the pattern of purchase and sale of bulk items ready for further processing is the model followed at every point of financial exchange? Does the sale of one Picasso really erode its singularity? Is there something about the fact of purchase that makes the work of art akin to a log, or a shipment of sugar or tea? The operating assumption of Material Inspirations is one that materialist explanations have sometimes resisted—that the matter of art stands to the side of many of our most common accounts of the value and circulation of things and objects. While it would be absurd to imagine an art world past or present that is free from much that we associate with commerce, there is every risk of missing the point by reducing specific cases.

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Introduction  35 Uniqueness and the vulnerability attendant on particularity (on being ir­re­place­ able) are qualities shared by a small set of commodities, and the difficulty and contingency of acquisition, preservation, and display, as well the vicissitudes of taste that drive these practices, are evidently not best reduced to the forms typ­ic­ al­ly useful for thinking about buying and selling in bulk.54 The Italian economic historian Guido Guerzoni has recently argued that conventional models of exchange are such a poor fit when it comes to markets for art because of the unsophisticated brand of economics that students of culture have tended to adopt in their interdisciplinary efforts. As Guerzoni puts it, “the avantgarde of art-historical studies has let itself be seduced and abandoned by the rear guard of economic historians.” While Guerzoni’s bold work identifying the con­ tinu­ities between the Italian economy’s current dependence on the sale of luxury goods and that nation’s long-standing role in shaping taste and art markets would certainly be difficult to replicate for England, his arguments should make us wary of the utility of superannuated models of commodity exchange (what Guerzoni calls “obsolete theoretic structures tied to old industrial concepts of mass-market and standard products”) for understanding the particular case of the fine arts.55 In literary studies efforts to account for the significance of objects and things in circulation necessarily proceed on different grounds than have been common in art history. For example, Elaine Freedgood’s brilliantly developed metonymic tracing of how and why specific objects make an appearance in literature newly vivifies an array of things that had by and large escaped the notice of previous critics. The humble objects that catch Freedgood’s eye—the kind of tobacco a character smokes, the fabric that covers a table—are details shaping the world of a novel but never themselves the focus of the reader’s attention. Indeed, these objects are not infrequently felt to be in excess of the text, perhaps char­ac­ter­is­tic­ al­ly so in a cluttered Victorian way. What Freedgood terms a “thing culture” is one in which “apparently mundane or meaningless objects can suddenly take on or be assigned value and meaning,” and her argument is driven by the effort to demonstrate how “objects that we do not usually interpret can be convincingly stripped of randomness.”56 Material Inspirations undertakes a complementary project in attending to objects that come to us “stripped of randomness,” though not for that reason fixed in their meanings. If Freedgood’s things have been camouflaged as insignificant or trivial, art objects come to us overdressed with signification, especially in the nineteenth century. The interpretive challenge is to be at once attentive to and undistracted by that splendid excess.

2.  (How) Art Matters in the Nineteenth Century Throughout this Introduction I have suggested that the turn to things and to materiality in cultural theory assumes not only the efficacy, but also the

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36  Material Inspirations conceptual possibility of fulfilling Gertrude’s demand for more matter with less art. The distinction upon which her desire is based was, however, untenable for the nineteenth century. Material Inspirations is an attempt to take seriously the period’s varied, recurrent, and anxious efforts to negotiate between matter and the something else that never quite resolves into matter. Art itself, at many im­port­ant junctures and in every one of the settings in which it is encountered, turns out to be a ground upon which that negotiation is attempted. The social forms of the experience of art, both actual (who is with you?) and psychological (who has shaped this moment of attention, immediately and at a distance?), are current and constant preoccupations in the nineteenth century, as I will demonstrate in one quick instance touching on the institutional heart of the relationship to art in nineteenth-century Britain. The 1832 decision to locate the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square was a political one, intended to support the aspiration of the promoters of the museum to establish a place at which social reconciliation might be effected even as the nation lived through the turmoil that accompanied the First Reform Bill. Robert Peel, himself a great collector, argued for Trafalgar Square over other sites because its centrality would be most likely to conduce to the social harmony between classes, “cementing of those bonds of union between the richer and the poorer orders of the State.”57 While the material fact of economic inequality determined the selection of an accessible site, however, that decision in turn opened the way to other no less material concerns, such as the effects on the paintings of the particulate matter ubiquitous in a vast and rapidly growing city heated with coal, and the effects of the bodies of the unwashed poor as they gathered in the rooms containing the precious canvases. Just sixteen years after the opening of the building in Trafalgar Square, a Select Committee on the National Gallery would hear testimony about the impact on the paintings of the numerous and various visitors who came as Peel had hoped. The Chairman of the committee expressed his unease about “the evils arising to the pictures from . . . the crowds who go there in cases of bad weather, and who go there without any regard for the pictures.” Thomas Uwins, Keeper of the Gallery, concurred, reporting the habitual presence of school children lunching in the Gallery in order to get out of the rain, country folk arriving at the museum with packed picnics and gin, and shadowy figures entering for assignations of an unclear nature.58 In the same year, the great German art his­ tor­ian Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the preeminent authority on British collections and director of the Royal Gallery in Berlin, offered his own “Thoughts on the New Building to be Erected for the National Gallery of England.” Aimed at improving a museum whose size and design had been found inadequate from the day it first opened, Waagen’s influential essay explicitly acknowledges the tension between accessibility and the threat to conservation posed by ready ­public access:

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Introduction  37 The site of the Gallery must lie beyond the London atmosphere and smoke; other­wise the pictures will suffer certain destruction at no very distant time, as is shown by the injured condition of the pictures in the National Gallery since its opening. It is, however, requisite that the spot should be easy of access, and therefore as near as possible to London; otherwise the principal object of the gallery—that of serving for the enjoyment and instruction of the community at large—will be lost.59

The article evinces a deeply material anxiety not just about the insalubrious atmosphere surrounding and penetrating the museum, but about the people roaming its galleries—babies as well as adults “whose filthy dress tainted the atmosphere with a most disagreeable smell.” Though Waagen claims the issue is more than a matter of personal distaste, it is hard to miss that element in what he writes: The exhalation produced by the congregation of any large number of persons, falling like vapour upon the pictures, tends to injure them; and this mischief is greatly increased in the case of the two classes of persons alluded to.  (210)

It is tempting to understand the art historian to be simply instantiating an elitist ambivalence toward the actual bodies of the subjects meant to be edified by the encounter with art (the breath of a baby, after all, is unlikely to be more damaging to canvas or pigment than that of a grown adult, though their crying has been known to break the concentration of the art lover). But rushing to this easy claim should not lead us to neglect two other closely related elements in the passage: not simply the vulnerability of the material object, but also the sense of a profound interpenetration of thing and person in a situation in which our physical presence is not without consequences on the apparently unaffected matter on which our eye falls. No curator needs to be informed of any of these characteristic concerns of their practice: that light on drawings must be controlled though it is  necessary for proper viewing, that the touch of a finger ­aching to feel cool stone carries troublesome oils, that human bodies threaten the objects the people have come to see, that preservation and display are frequently countervailing mandates.60 The place of others in a museum, like the placement of an object within the institution, is not the end of a story, but its beginning. There is plenty of the sweat and breath of others and of oneself in what Brown called the “grid of museal ex­hib­ition.” The nineteenth century, like the twentieth, offers many examples of works preserved for millennia by the physical conditions that prevented them from being viewed; once these conditions are violated, the objects themselves are at risk, even outside the walls of the museum. Indeed, turning the pages of a recent article in The New Yorker touching on the damage the mere presence of

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38  Material Inspirations tourists has caused the tomb of Tutankhamun, one comes across a moment that would have surprised neither Uwins nor Waagen, when the offense to the nose of the responsible official becomes evidence for the threat the public presents to the vulnerable object: When the British archeologist Howard Carter unsealed the burial vault, in 1923, turning the obscure Tutankhamun into the modern icon of ancient Egypt, the yellow walls remained dazzlingly intact . . . Since then, tens of millions of tourists have crowded inside the living-room-size chamber, exuding a swampy mist of breath and sweat, which has caused the plaster to expand and contract. Bahaa AbdelGaber, an Egyptian antiquities official, told me recently that the temperature inside the Luxor tombs sometimes exceeds a hundred and twenty degrees. “Oh, the smell on a busy day!” he said.61

3.  A Note on Scope and Method My discussion has been moving between the nineteenth-century and later developments anticipated in that era in part to suggest the kinds of continuities that interest this book, but also in order to indicate some of the challenges likely to face any attempt to look back at materials and ideas from the earlier period, given the range of associations that museums have generated over the years, but also given dominant, though often unspoken, ideas about what one should expect from the experience of art shaped by pressures derived from influential, if not fully settled, conventions about objects, museums, and experience itself. Ben Lerner’s 2011 novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, begins with a sequence set at the Prado Museum in Madrid that evokes with good-humored sympathy and not a little pathos the unsettled conditions that might be said to shape the modern experience in the museum. Adam Gordon, the anhedonic would-be poet, who is the protagonist and narrator of the novel, has been carrying out something he calls research by standing in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross every morning, day after day. But when he arrives at his usual location he finds someone has taken his place. His irritation at being supplanted, and various narcissistic fantasies the usurpation provokes, are interrupted and turn into something close to panic when the man begins to sob uncontrollably. Adam’s distress, which is exacerbated as this unknown figure proceeds to weep before other masterpieces, arises from the suspicion that what the man is undergoing is what he describes (in italics) as “a profound experience of art.” The neurotic but recognizable anxiety the narrator feels is provoked by being made to witness something he thinks he should probably prize but of which he suspects himself to be in­cap­ able. The tears of the other man are powerful but inconclusive evidence for a faculty or condition about which he feels doubts and fears, along with a complex

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Introduction  39 interested skepticism: doubt about the existence of such a thing as a true aesthetic experience is both a source of misgivings within him and a potential source of relief from the suspicion that his inability to recognize this experience in himself might be symptomatic of his own creative failings.62 Lerner’s set piece brilliantly captures the paradoxical quality inherent in dom­ in­ant concepts of aesthetic experience; the tendency to view each instance of the encounter with art as deeply personal and individual and yet always vulnerable to judgment is liable to raise a number of questions, most of them calling for italics as they toggle uncertainly between accidental and necessary qualities. Is what I am feeling (or what some other person is feeling) the result of an aesthetic judgment? Is it a profound aesthetic judgment? If it is not profound can it be an aesthetic judgment? Is the object provoking this feeling worthy of the emotion I am ascribing to it? Am I? Is the profundity of this experience traceable to its unique nature (it is fully mine), or to its transitive quality (it will be felt by others, so I should feel it too)? It is typical (and hardly wrong) for texts aiming to instruct novices in how to engage with the visual arts or with literature to begin with, and continue to emphasize the importance of, simply looking closely and patiently at the object in front of one. Recognizing one’s own experience is a challenge that will seem easy only to those who have not struggled with it—or with watching others try to do it. Still, this basic advice about looking is typically charged with a surprising number of associations, and it is evidently more than a practical pedagogy for neophytes. Personal but nevertheless available to evaluation by others, the work of faculties we prize and judge but cannot quite explain: the sense of the aesthetic, which holds its responses to be always at their most pure and effective when most uniquely individual has sources going back to eighteenth-century concepts of taste with even earlier roots. But it has dominated in our own era. This sensibility has been overlaid with elements from the experiential school that suspect that even in—or especially in—the grid of museal exhibition we might be surprised by one of those moments in which the real briefly glimmers out to us and tells us something of fundamental importance that is galvanizing and not-infrequently humbling (we must remake our lives, the world is big and our pain is small, or the like). Such an overdetermined set of elements is liable to place a great deal of pressure on the individual in the museum, which in turn is what makes for the thrilling shock of propositions, such as Bourdieu’s, which hold that our taste is not in fact our own—an insight at once scandalous and liberating. The commitment to the individual encounter is also one reason why it is difficult to engage, at the level of detail they merit, with some of the most compelling elements of the nineteenth-century culture of art. Between the two extremes we may call the natural experience of the person of taste and taste as a sociologically determined fiction, it is hard to find room for the kinds of informed relationships to the fine arts that are everywhere in evidence in the nineteenth century. The

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40  Material Inspirations distortions inherent in the experiential model of art-appreciation are not in fact corrected by simply seeing taste as, of necessity, determined by exterior forces such as class or education. Whether the sentimental viewer holds that the value of the encounter with art is purely internal to the self, or the sociologically minded critic says that it is shaped by interests that come back to an individual’s membership in a group, the moment of aesthetic judgment will have a pretty similar shape. Experience that believes itself to be personal, but is in fact mystified about the interests that shape it and experience that is understood to be based solely on a uniquely individual sensibility: both will look and feel the same to the subject in the museum. Modern concepts of the relationship between viewer and art object as essentially consisting of so many moments of unique experience will still miss the intersection of individual judgment with education and cultural predispositions that characterizes the nineteenth-century version of this encounter. If we smile as we hurry past the mobs of tourists crowding around the Mona Lisa to take a picture, the suggestion carried in our condescending grins is that we ourselves have a more original, less hackneyed sensibility than the group holding up their phones to commemorate their arrival before the august presence, restrained and organized by the barrier that is a reminder that each unique ex­peri­ence taking place at that juncture is a new version of something that has been going on day after day, month after month for decades, an event so predictable and massive that it requires the equipment for crowd control. But it is hard to escape the suspicion that the power of such a response comes from its deflection of an anxious relationship to our own motivations and drives. Have we done something more original when we have stopped for longer, and in more select company, in front of Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist, say, or when we have paused for a space over the fantasies of creativity or power we may project on to a Titian, or when we have skipped the Old Masters altogether, and instead spent our time reflecting on a fragment from a lost civilization the existence of which we were unaware of until the moment we entered the museum? The narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station splits the difference by looking at a Flemish masterpiece in a museum that is at once one of the greatest in the world, and always offcenter in the way Spanish collections can be when it comes to conventional accounts of the history or experience of art—revolving, as those tend to do, around Italy and France. But evidently the mystery of the “profound experience of art” does not become any easier to plumb when we have found somewhat more recondite corners of the artistic canon to explore. To come to terms with the creative achievement of nineteenth century writers on art requires the reader not to project onto their texts the relatively simple version of encounter entailed in later concepts of art and of experience in the museum. While it is possible and even desirable to have one’s own experience of the Apollo Belvedere, or the Laocoön in the nineteenth century, that encounter is unlikely to be free of the influence of current ideas of Greek culture, and indeed,

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Introduction  41 of the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann himself. To recognize the richness of the nineteenth-century culture of art is not merely a matter of historical accuracy. It has important implications for understanding continuities that run through the period and have a notable purchase in later periods. To take an ex­ample that is particularly salient for Material Inspirations, the evidence is every­ where clear that to talk about a painting by Raphael in the nineteenth century is seldom to talk about anything so simple as the effects of an individual fully independent response to a particular work. As I will be discussing at various times in this book, the legend of the divine painter understood at a very high degree of specificity helps to shape the returns of that figure, and of his productions in culture, in ways that are more than, and different from, what an individual ex­peri­ ence of a specific canvas would entail. To speak about Raphael in the period becomes a way to talk about fundamental questions having to do with the place of the body in art, the possibility of a creative relationship to art of the past in modernity, and even about the relative achievements of students and masters. Material Inspirations brings together material from three fields: literary studies, the history of art, and the history of institutions. I have been grateful to the exemplary writers from those areas I cite in my notes. But as I come to the close of this project, I have found myself reflecting on whether it is possible or even helpful to think of this book as interdisciplinary, given that the term is one of those that ratifies the very borders it commemorates crossing. Texts produced in a period such as the one addressed in Material Inspirations, a time in which the disciplines were undergoing a process of consolidation characterized by a constant recalibration of essential claims, are bound to have a more-than-disciplinary reach. Indeed, the writers and institutions I discuss were all addressing non-specialist publics. It bears emphasizing, too, that the artists themselves were part of a conversation that included more than the elite makers and consumers with which the fine arts came to be associated in the twentieth century. It would be easy, then, to account for the heterogeneity of the materials brought together in this study by pointing out that, at the moment of their making, these texts do not belong to the kind of technically distinct, professionally policed realms of knowledge into which we might be tempted to divide them today. More than this, I might emphasize that the relationship between literature and the visual arts was a constant concern at the very point when the field of art itself was emerging as such an important social preoccupation that it led to the creation of thousands of public museums around the world in just one century (a remarkable success for so elaborate and new an undertaking). But all this, while true, somewhat misses the point. The reason that the literature of the fine arts in the nineteenth century is of more than historic interest is because it allows us to think about basic methodological concerns that are also questions of principle, not to say pressing calls on the emotions. What does it mean to own something? What does it mean to see something? What is the difference between looking at something one owns and at something

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42  Material Inspirations one can never imagine possessing? What is the effect of loving something one has never seen? These strike me as questions of enduring significance, both personally and politically—and I see them worked through in levels of detail and ma­ter­ ial force that are uniquely compelling in the writings on art of the long nineteenth century. Material Inspirations is divided into three parts, each one advancing claims about fundamental material issues in the nineteenth century that have been difficult to address in later periods because of the shifting nature of the various fields involved. Part I is about interest. My treatment of this topic, which is the well to which demystifiers are always sending down their buckets, has at its heart a simple claim intended to encourage the drills to fall silent, the dowsing rods to remain where they lie. The interested nature of the nineteenth-century im­agin­ ation of creativity is too much on the surface to require elaborate machinery of detection or penetration, or any kind of sorcery. The critical tools that push past the open interest expressed everywhere in the period in order to get to what is hidden will tend to neglect what is generative about the topic when it is recognized not as a secret fact, but as no secret at all. It will hardly be surprising when it is expressed as baldly as I do here and in the chapters that make up the first part, titled “Interesting,” that what we find in the nineteenth century is a complex rerouting of the very basest desires (for pleasure, for money, for fame) into and out of artifice. The mystery needing elucidation is not the presence of interest, but the vulnerabilities of the affective and erotic life so often entailed in that term. As passionate desire slides into embarrassment in visual and literary representations of artists, and the erotic claims of the body become recognized for their affinity to various kinds of vulnerability, the proposition of “Interesting” is that reflection on the nature of art needs to begin with interest, not end there.63 Part II, “Remains,” is concerned with the ways we might be able to identify the creative force of the experience of antique objects in the nineteenth century if we recognize the shaping power of the specific, if constantly changing, ways in which the period encountered those objects.64 Today, as in the past, the fine arts are more often imagined than seen, and when they are seen, the experience is typ­ic­ al­ly one of reproduction or out-of-context display (our sense of the latter depending, of course, on what we think the natural context of art in fact is). Indeed, the fantasies of immediate and full experience provoked by simulacrum or fragment seem fated to depend on a productive amnesia that loses the phenomenon of the actually real (the print before us, the cast, the photograph, the scan) in the dream of a greater, though always inaccessible, reality. This book demonstrates that the nineteenth century is typically less mystified about the complex interplay of fantasies of the real and the experience of simulacra than later eras have tended to be.65 From this perspective, the celebration of the simulacrum that recurs at various stages in avant-garde practice and critical thought should be understood as evidence of a constitutive and generally incurable commitment to the primacy of

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Introduction  43 the original, rather than an open and full embrace of the copy, a reminder of something we seem unable to keep forgetting.66 And so, the argument of “Remains” is at once material and conceptual; it traces changes in the relationship to the accumulation and experience of classical an­tiqui­ties from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth, but it also emphasizes that among the most consequential relics on which the imagination of the period worked were the fragments of its own not-quite-superseded earlier accounts of the nature or value of material from the past. To appreciate the force of the nineteenth-century culture of art will require the reader to develop an interest in the power of failure, in the afterlives of dead ends. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, the field of art history comes into being, the importance of public collections is established, and the principal institutions that will stand as models for later eras are founded. But, there is a productive unevenness in the relationship of the elements that make up the nineteenth-century culture of art. Important, innovative, influential collections of one period become embarrassing relics of bygone taste even before they are complete. Institutions built to celebrate one kind of glory are retrofitted so as to make sense to another. Texts, works of art, institutions themselves show more than trace elements of the shifts that make the period so fascinating. In the imperfect match between newly valorized (and sometimes newly despised) remains from the past with the texts that set out to explain them, and even with structures built for their display, emerges a relationship to a past that is inspiring because it is unsettled. The constant, never-stabilized movement between objects ascribed various degrees of originality and forms of mediation that themselves are constantly changing results in a nascent formalism that never shakes itself free from the complex relationship to matter that provoked its rise. Part III, “Things, Personally,” consists of a pair of case studies on the place of display and mediation in the writings of John Ruskin and Walter Pater. Given how influential both critics were, and how responsive to developments in culture, their works inevitably feature in the first two parts. But in this final set of studies I give sustained attention to the ways in which the critical self that emerges in the nineteenth century combines the passionate desiring presence described in Part I and a responsiveness to the dynamic conditions experienced by the reflexive viewer and thinker addressed in Part II. Voiced and unvoiced emotions shape the material inspirations of the nineteenth-century culture of art, affording the reader the opportunity to feel the affective charge that is never far below the surface in the encounter with the thing in this period. This book identifies in the nineteenth-century culture of art the principal sources for its own illumination, a starting point that may strike some readers as naïve or methodologically constraining. While it has been a tendency of material explanations (and in particular of the demystificatory school) to emphasize causes for cultural phenomena that are to some degree exogenous to the

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44  Material Inspirations phenomena they are taken to explain (say, the nature of class interest, the form of ideological structures), and while the experiential school will often gesture toward a space outside of the one that is shaping the experience deemed inadequate (leave the lecture hall, abandon your book, turn your eyes outside the window, escape the grid of museal exhibition!), Material Inspirations is premised on the idea that central questions driving later debates find expression within nineteenthcentury sources, in themselves interesting, and pressingly important when they are recognized for their role in later controversies. Jacques Rancière’s argument that the concept of art that arose in the second half of the eighteenth century was bound to, and supported by, an equally novel concept of history is an integral part of his brief against various claims about aesthetic autonomy. While it is no innovation to trace the founding of art history to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s epochal History of Ancient Art (1764), Rancière’s account of that work addresses a methodological issue with profound long-term implications when he insists that both of the key terms in its title—art and history—are given radical new meaning when they are brought together as they are in Winckelmann’s study. Specifically, Rancière argues that the art historian’s in­nov­ation is to link two kinds of writing that had been until that point distinct, the biographical approach to the progress of art pioneered in the writings of Giorgio Vasari and Giovanni Pietro Bellori in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the antiquarian analysis of objects that he associates with Bernard de Montfaucon in the eighteenth, and which was devoted to understanding antique monuments as illustrations of the lives of peoples in distant eras. This argument occurs early in Aesthesis because it is a central part of Rancière’s claim that, rather than being an autonomous concept either resistant or vulnerable to the practices of the world, art has been shaped from the outset by its relationship to heterogeneous elements. Heterogeneity is evident at this moment of foundation, as before Winckelmann there was no natural relationship between the collection and ana­ lysis of antiquities and the biographies of artists with which Vasari and Bellori had told a tale of the rise and development of art in Florence, Bologna, and elsewhere. It was Winckelmann’s innovation to link these two elements, thereby putt­ ing into play a new idea of history even as he established the concept of art as inextricably dependent on that idea.67 While I did not write this book to illustrate Rancière’s claims, I find in them some warrant for the distinct kinds of material this volume brings together. The nineteenth-century culture of art takes its form from both kinds of relationships to the past the philosopher finds at the heart of the project of art history at its inception. The imagination of maker, object, and institution is reconfigured again and again throughout the period, but the formulations of antiquarians and the lives of artists indeed determine much of the landscape on which those new configurations come to be established. The embodied ex­peri­ences of artists or viewers will become a constant shaping pressure on thought throughout the period of this study. But it is between the lessons

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Introduction  45 suggested by the legends of admired artists and the mysteries hidden and revealed by reflection on venerable masterpieces that these experiences take their shape. * * * Materialism will tend to push toward conclusions that ground arguments or evade them altogether. But, as I tried to suggest in the long, yet still too cursory, account of some characteristic instances with which I opened this Introduction, if we look attentively at the projects of material explanations we find more arguments rather than fewer. We also find a great deal of desire, which is, of course, seldom an end to anything. It is precisely because so much of the power of ma­teri­ al­ism is traceable to the vestigial or actual sense that it is not an idea at all but the fundamental idea or even an escape from all ideas, that it is worth emphasizing how often its presence indicates less the arrival of a full explanation of causes and more the presence of a set of restless irreconcilable longings. Viewed from this angle, the drives of materialism are revealed to share a great deal with those characteristic of the two arenas in which culture has typically negotiated the relationship between material experiences and something beyond them: religion and art. While the latter is my topic, I will be making continuous reference to the former in this book, because it is still the original and most powerful source for imagining that most impossible thing, the full and harmonious intersection of the ma­ter­ial world with something that charges it with meaning. Muses, angels, demons, and even gods that have walked on earth keep returning in nineteenthcentury imaginations of art, for reasons historical as well as conceptual. A third element that will recur in my discussion is one that comes in and out of focus in reflections on the material elements of both art and religion: that is, desire itself. The passions of the erotic life share a great deal with those associated with the incarnation of spirit, in particular the vulnerability inevitably revealed when the condition of being human meets its material limits at the point of aspiring beyond them. The arguments in the following chapters tend to take literally the figures proposed in texts. Whether their arguments revolve around graves, ruins, sculptures, engravings, or paintings, nineteenth-century authors show a keen awareness of the ways in which real things become emblematic without fully leaving behind the material qualities that have made them evocative. The place at which the formal and thematic meet most often in this project is the juncture where matter passes into idea and vice versa. In the long passage from “A Room of One’s Own” that I placed as the epigraph to this chapter, we find Virginia Woolf proposing that it is the particular gift of the writer to perform “a curious couching op­er­ ation” that removes from the senses a film that prevents a fuller engagement with the world, much like a cataract is removed from the eye in the operation of that name. Woolf ’s awkward figure puts an uncomfortable amount of weight on the eye, as reading paradoxically opens that organ of perception to the world. It also

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46  Material Inspirations suggests a routing of selves back to reality through the artifice of art of the sort I have cited various times already in this Introduction. The place of the material world in Woolf ’s hopes and aspirations is only made more poignant and vul­ner­ able by her insistence on the deeply material foundation of art itself, her reiterated insistence that having the financial freedom to establish oneself in a room of one’s own is a precondition to even attempt the couching operation. In that sense, the artist needs one kind of material support in order to achieve another, to return the world to us as a newly real presence. I began this Introduction with reference to my young daughter’s efforts to find a ground that might satisfy her desire for confirmation of a fact from the adult world that she could not quite credit as true, and so asking for relief from the very source she doubts. I suggested that we might take her impulse and the term she reiterated at the moment of uncertainty as typical of cultural responses to similar challenges. In the hope she placed on the real as a location at which important uncertainties might be laid to rest, I identified a primitive urge children learn as early as they learn that some things are to be doubted. The burden of this book is to demonstrate not only that the nineteenth century often manifests its desire for the real in relation to a range of activities and productions that by some measure might be taken as its opposite, but that the culture of art was fundamentally shaped by this kind of reiterative unresolved relationship that moves from the real to something beyond it—and back again.

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PART I

IN T E R E ST I NG In his Transfiguration the lower half of the picture, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, and the frightened, helpless disciples, shows us a reflection of the eternal, primal pain, the only ground of the world; here “semblance” is a reflection of the eternal contradiction, the father of all things. From this semblance there now rises, like some ambrosian perfume, a vision-like new world of semblance, of which those who are trapped in the first semblance see nothing—a luminous hovering in purest bliss and wide-eyed contemplation, free of all pain. Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we see before us that Apolline world of beauty and the ground on which it rests, that terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we grasp, intuitively, the reciprocal necessity of these two things. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy (1872)

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1

Transfiguration Things we don’t want are bound to take up the most space. Years ago, as I wandered through a dim corner of a slick modern library at a distinguished old university, my eyes fell on a book that looked impossibly large and awkward, especially given the context in which I found it. The glossy blonde table on which it rested and the bright lights above it found no reflections on the rusty brown leather covers of an extravagantly sized volume that appeared incongruous, uncommitted, and as withdrawn as old luxury can get, like an overdressed exile sitting at the quiet edge of a busy office, lost in his memories and not really caring that nobody believes he is doing any work, that his way of being in the world is unrecognizable by the generations toiling around him. The size of a small coffee table, it appeared at once unwieldy and forlorn. Its awkward format, which showed a complete indifference to the standard dimensions one has learned to anticipate from printed things, like the decayed luxury of its binding, evoked borrowed memories of things one has never really known, of settings gone (as we say) for good: of the artisan’s workshop, of libraries with gentler illumination, of sturdier furniture, of smaller but more loved collections than the vast one all around me (and the even larger one that beckoned from nearby screens). For a student of the nineteenth century, the very size of the thing inevitably evoked thoughts of fundamental changes in social conditions. Its bulk suggested the regular presence of strong-backed servants available to help shift awkward objects for the contemplation of others. This last fact, the object’s unavoidable relationship to human labor not just in its making but in its use, also made it seem out of place in the space in which I found myself, which—as is our modern habit, and not only in libraries—hid much of the work involved in keeping all that might be needful ready to hand. The thick leather covers of the book had been closed decades before by hands now lost, perhaps with some wistful memory of the person to whom the object had once meant so much. Or perhaps the last to see its contents was an indifferent heir, someone only able to marvel—and probably not for the only time as affairs were put in order—at the things an earlier era had found to treasure. Whatever the case, the item had now been taken up by an institution where it was bound to be a burden to store more than a luxurious pleasure to open. Intrigued by the incongruous object, I spent a few minutes shifting the assortment of folios piled on its dark surface so I could make myself privy to its secrets. Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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50  Material Inspirations When I opened the outsized book, I discovered that, large as its covers were, in some cases they were too small to contain its pages. As I unfolded the oversized sheets, I found myself gazing in ignorant stupefaction at a collection of beautifully realized prints of famous paintings. (I knew they were famous even when I did not recognize most of them, much as I was pretty sure the reproductions were admirably done even though I am no connoisseur.) I remember lots of Poussin, probably some Rubens: there were chariots and sea horses and goddesses, and at least one classical procession pulled by panthers. The elaborate images were engraved on sheets of luxurious thickness, sewn together at the top, and bound between the leather covers that had drawn my attention. It was printed work I was looking at, then, and yet as a whole the volume was unique: an elaborate collection of reproductions, but nothing one might associate with mass production. My review was inevitably at once cursory and a little anxious. It was pretty clear, as I held the sheets open one by one, that the objects I was handling unseen in that untended corner of the library belonged to the kind of awkward category the bound volume had suggested to me: once luxurious now unwanted. So I had a moment of wondering if my touching what I now understood were individual pieces bound together for the ease of contemplation of some long-dead collector was the right thing to do, given their age. Still, I could not take my own worry all that seriously, as the feel of the paper, supple yet strong, gave me the sense that it would easily outlast the hand with which I held each item, as it had every previous owner. And, in any case, these were just copies of works of art, after all; perhaps it was just a reflexive sentimental nostalgia about old things that was leading me to exaggerate my sense of their likely value and fragility. The whole episode took minutes, but, uncertain as I was about touching the things, I did not want to close the volume too quickly. I knew I would never open it again, and suspected nobody else would any time soon. It had meant so much at some point, and there was no place now where what it had meant could be  properly acknowledged or remembered. So I spent an inadequate period of time in a kind of homage to what I could not do for the object, before I laid down the last heavy sheets and restored the leather covers with a movement that felt more like shutting a door than closing a book. There was one image from the set that stayed with me, however, even after I left the library (see fig 1.1). I knew I had seen it in the original, but also that I had encountered a similar print, framed and hanging on a wall at a house museum, possibly Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home in Salem, Massachusetts. The original was an important work, an Italian masterpiece, showing a peculiar biblical scene. I knew that much, and I also knew—as I have known each time I have seen Raphael’s Transfiguration—that it was something that I would never love. By my lights the painting the engraver had so meticulously reproduced is both too carefully conceived and disconcertingly incoherent. The image, divided

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Fig. 1.1  Raphael Morghen, after Raphael, Transfiguration, 1811. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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52  Material Inspirations between two unreconciled registers, is a challenge to developments in taste since at least the eighteenth century that had gone into forming my own sensibility. To my eyes, the figures the painting contains are too agitated in the lower register and too complacent in the higher. A taste shaped by twentieth-century developments in art will tend to see too much movement in the canvas and too much rest, and certainly far too much dramatic gesticulation. The reproduction that I looked at that day at the library brought out these challenges more clearly, the reduction in size highlighting what I could not help seeing as unresolved busyness, and the unsparing accuracy of line and evenness of lighting bringing out the elaborate detail of gesture and expression that had had to be traced by the engraver’s burin. Thinking about the original through the experience of the reproduction, it remains hard for me to say if the deeper problem with the work, given my aesthetic formation, is that its form feels too tendentiously devoted to the illustration of its theme, or that it feels to me like it fails to adequately capture its deepest aspirations as it loses itself in the abundance of images it presents to the eye. * * * This book will return repeatedly to the Transfiguration. The legend of its making, the religious themes it represents, its immediate afterlife, and the history of its reception in the nineteenth century will all be of interest—and all will stand out with greater clarity when they are placed in relation to the challenge to taste it has represented for centuries. I have framed my own earliest significant encounter with the piece in this elaborate way in order to highlight the kinds of mediations that interest this study. Reproductive engraving; a sumptuous and deeply personal collection that is also at every turn conventional; the mystique of old masters largely forgotten by modern taste; institutions that preserve objects the value of which they cannot fully endorse: these are some of the elements that the attempt to engage with the question of the material in the nineteenth-century culture of art opens up to reflection. Students of the history of culture are prone to claiming that their projects are acts of recovery or rescue—that they are driven by the goal of speaking to the dead, finding new ways to valorize people or things disdained by a history that has moved on. Material Inspirations has somewhat different as­pir­ations because I am uncertain the objects I discuss are liable to be rescued, in part because I am also unclear that they have died or that history has fully left them behind. Indeed, as a student of taste, I am interested as much in the mismatch between admiration and affection provoked by the encounter with for­mid­ able works of art we cannot fully like, as I am in the ways in which works of art become newly visible as culture changes. Inefficiency is possibly the most im­port­ ant source of power for institutions of culture. The library, the museum: these establishments came into their own in the nineteenth century as foils to the onslaught of change that characterized the period; it is not that they are immune to transformation when everything that is solid melts into air, but that their

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Transfiguration  53 in­abil­ity to move too quickly, the drag presented by the established collection, the limits inherent in sites of display, these impediments to easy change serve to make them ideal locations for reflection on the power of material things, especially when those things stand at an angle to the amnesiac drives of modern culture. Between not quite remembering and being unable to fully forget, the crises of taste that mark the nineteenth-century culture of art provide important op­por­ tun­ities for analysis. The print I saw may or may not have been the storied piece produced between 1801 and 1811 by the improbably named Raphael Sanzio Morghen, but it is almost certainly one of the several that were brought out in the first half of the century.1 In that sense at least it may be described as a nineteenth-century interpretation, even as a nineteenth-century work of art. Still, as I will be returning to the history of the original painting several times in the course of Material Inspirations, it will be useful to lay out the particular challenges this work has always presented to its viewers—some of which I have already claimed as my own. It bears saying too that while this book holds that the experience of a work of art is always shaped by contemporary concerns, any robust concept of me­di­ ation must include the distinct formal and representational challenges set by the original, as well as the associations, legends, and general frameworks of reception determining the afterlives of notable works. Indeed, in the nineteenth century—a period before conventions about the centrality of formal value and about the primacy of immediate individual experience had come to dominate ideas of the aesthetic as they do today—prior knowledge of the legends of particular artists and works of art played an important role in shaping responses to works, whether in reproduction or in the original. In the next chapter, I will address the place of the imagination of the figure of Raphael himself in the nineteenth century, but for the balance of this introduction to the Transfiguration I want to suggest the ways in which the tradition of ambivalent response to the piece is a useful way to think about the particular ways in which the painting formally reflects the themes that concern this book as a whole. Doing so will allow my discussion to begin to fold in a topic that may seem at this point both accidental and overdetermined, but which will ultimately manifest itself as central to Material Inspirations: the force of religious crisis in shaping the long and unresolved history of nineteenth century reflections on the relationship between the material world and something beyond it. The fundamental distinction on which the Transfiguration should be structured, the dividing line between the profane and the divine crossed by Jesus at the moment of exaltation, is not sharply maintained on the canvas because of the other distinctions that proliferate within the image. The work notoriously brings together—or is divided between—the distinct upper and the lower registers. But even within each of its sections further divisions become quickly evident. While a white-robed, bearded Jesus rises into the sky between two other airborne figures,

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54  Material Inspirations his arms wide not in an embrace, but in an ecstatic gesture of self-realization, a pair of saints stretch out awkwardly on the ground below the exalted trio, covering their eyes though they appear to be occupying the same high sphere, as though human sight cannot bear to see the very thing the men are there to witness. Jesus floats at an uncertain height, manifesting an absence of connection with those around him that seems not quite right for the central figure in so elaborate a composition. Still, the most challenging part of the image, what has always made it irrecoverably alien to my taste, is not the uncertainty of its upper section, nor its tendentious sublimity, but the agitated lower register which, in a more somber light, shows a number of adults gesturing at a hideous child. I learned in the years since I spent those moments poring over the print that what I was ­seeing in the lower half of the painting was something quite different from the exalt­ation taking place above; a failed exorcism is the grotesque project engrossing all attention down below. But then, the more I came to know about Raphael’s Transfiguration, the stranger the work became.2 Commissioned in Rome by the Bishop of Narbonne in 1516, along with another painting, The Raising of Lazarus (1517–1519), which was to be designed by Michelangelo but executed by his student, Sebastiano del Piombo, the Transfiguration was to become one fruit of an improbably dramatic competition between the two greatest artists in Rome and their circles, though one that came to an inconclusive end. Each large canvas was designed by a master and brought to completion by a prized student—though the degree of p ­ articipation by Raphael’s studio has been a matter of debate. In that sense reception of the pieces is shaped at every turn by elements typical of popular legends of great artists going back to Vasari and surprisingly important in our own day. While a rivalry approaching direct contest of this sort can seem a puerile way to imagine the relationship among contemporaries, it is given some warrant in the sources. And certainly the idea that the measure of the achievement of an artist is to be taken by the creation of successors is still a surprisingly active one—though it is seldom manifested in so direct a form as we see it in the context of responses to the Transfiguration.3 Raphael died before completing his work, and the painting never reached Narbonne. These accidents of history are fundamental to the critical destiny of the canvas because of the way they articulate with the legend of Raphael himself on the one hand, and with the themes of his work on the other. If the fate of the canvas is made incoherent by various disappointed hopes, of which its noncompletion and then its non-delivery are only the beginning, this destiny is surprisingly anticipated by the topic represented within the canvas itself, an account with inevitable human failure as its deepest ground. If we simply start with the first mediation that needs to be recognized for any account of the image to make sense—the adaptation of a New Testament narrative into a two-dimensional work of art—the theme of human fallibility is unmissable. While Michelangelo and

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Transfiguration  55 Sebastiano produced a relatively straightforward manifestation of divinity in the The Raising of Lazarus, Raphael brings together two related but distinct events from the Gospel in his piece, both strikingly awkward. As the story of Jesus nears its crisis in Matthew, evidence of His true status becomes more marked, and with it comes the inevitable realization of the space separating the human and divine realms He uniquely occupies. It is this gap that the painting thematizes in its divided program, and so each part must be thought of separately, though they may be said ultimately to add up to one thing. Here is Matthew’s account of the sublime moment captured in the top register:  nd after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and A bringeth them up into an high mountain apart,  nd was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his A raiment was white as the light.  nd, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias [Isaiah] talking A with him.

The biblical text is not simply a record of the mystical event, however; by far the longer part is about the attempts of the disciples to make sense of what they are experiencing:  en answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if Th thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.  hile he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a W voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid. And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.  nd as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Tell A the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead.4

The moment of revelation is hedged by confusion. While the absolute clarity about the presence of divinity is unmistakable, the manifestation of this condition in the world leads to a limited kind of knowledge for even the most privileged mortals. Peter’s “answer” is not a response to a question raised in the conversation; it is an expression of admiration and an indication of a confusion that is never clarified in the suggestive non-sequiturs that follow. Nobody will ever know what Jesus spoke about with Moses and Isaiah. Three tabernacles are proposed,

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56  Material Inspirations but it is not clear they are built. Instead, God himself verbally declares the divinity of Jesus, providing evidence even more directly compelling than the company He keeps, which revelation leads the apostles to throw themselves on the ground, abasing themselves, and acknowledging the impossibility of seeing what they know to be true (the very thing the painting is illustrating). Even if the men had not been enjoined to keep their knowledge to themselves until after Jesus’s death and resurrection, they would have had little more to report other than the ex­peri­ ence of being overwhelmed. Transfiguration, a complicated theological proposition to start with, un­avoid­ ably raises fundamental challenges for any attempt at representation. How might the artist capture the moment of approaching a condition unavailable to mortal experience: the material human body taking on a quality indicating its divinity without yet leaving the human realm? As he wrestles with what is inherent and what is transient on an occasion when Christ’s sacred nature is manifested but not fully assumed, Thomas Aquinas finds a visual analogy, arguing that “in Christ’s transfiguration, splendor flowed from his divinity and from his soul into his body, not by an inherent quality of his body, but by way of a transient passion, as when the air is lit up by the sun.” He cites Jerome: “Let no one think that Christ, because it is said he was transfigured, thereby lost his original form and coun­ten­ ance or laid aside his real body and took up a spiritual or ethereal body.”5 Attempts to safeguard the fundamental materiality of Christ’s human body (“his real body”) are bound to lead to complications that have as much to do with the challenging nature of His substance as with the very idea of witness. The analogy to “air . . . lit up by the sun” is meant to be about states of being (“original form and coun­ten­ ance”), but, it only makes sense if one imagines someone there to perceive the brightening atmosphere. Figure is at the heart of transfiguration. And indeed, Aquinas needs to address the term, as he reflects on an event that needs to be understood as a performance of an ontological condition entailing an experience of change for the witness, but not for the dazzling object of perception. The essential nature of Jesus that is manifested in that exalted and yet necessarily circumscribed moment when splendor flows from His own divinity into His own body is only meaningful as a moment of observation, and so as an exterior manifestation: Figure has to do with the outline of a body, for a figure is that which is encom­ passed by a boundary or boundaries. Therefore whatever has to do with the outline of a body seems to pertain somehow to the figure. Now the splendor, just as the colour of a non-transparent body is perceived on its surface, and so the assumption of splendor is called transfiguration.  (91)

The challenge to Raphael is to represent a fundamental change whereby the boundary of Christ’s human body is intact, but something splendid occurs on its

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Transfiguration  57 surface that indicates a truth about the fundamental nature of that body (the fact that God then ratifies: “this is my beloved son”). It is little wonder, given the impossible task the artist has taken on, that the piece does far more work with the contrasting lower register than with the overwhelmed upper one. The painting is simply following the Gospel in giving its rarified theme a human ballast. After the transfiguration itself, and a brief discussion of John the Baptist (that figure for a recognition of the divine in the world so absolute and yet so alienated that it manifests as prophecy), Matthew presents a more mundane vision of the gap separating knowing from unknowing, faith from doubt, recognition from confusion, than that written into the encounter on Mount Tabor:  nd when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man, A kneeling down to him, and saying,  ord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he L falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.  en Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long Th shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.  nd Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was A cured from that very hour.  en came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast Th him out?  nd Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, A If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. (Matthew 17:14–21)

The difficult story told in the bottom register of the painting is an all-too-human one of hope and failure, of embarrassment at the moment of attempting to act in the world. Even as Jesus is being revealed in a process that at once obviates and demands faith (how much faith is required when one has seen someone conversing with Moses, when God himself stands surety?), those who are not up the mountain fail to be able to put His powers into practice. And so, in the lower half of the painting the possessed boy who is at constant risk of burning and drowning is still and forever unsaved. In spite of the powerful consummation in its upper register, the culmination looked for in the bottom part of the work is perpetually deferred: all those gesticulating arms and intense eyes are indicating an urgent need that will not be satisfied until the being who is absent returns.

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58  Material Inspirations A distinguished tradition finds a formal challenge in reconciling the diverse elements of the work, an issue laid out clearly in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s fragmentary but forceful remarks in the first decades of the eighteenth century. “No  one principal, no subjection, subordination, unity or integrity: no piece: no  whole. All disposition and order sacrificed in this transfiguration work.” Recognizing its posthumous nature, and the role of Raphael’s studio in the production of the work (both factors which have shaped its reception since it was first displayed), the philosopher goes as far as to suggest that Raphael himself would have disdained the finished product: “his Transfiguration, called the first picture of the world (this Raphael would have judged otherwise: being mixed, a double piece, not a whole).” Goethe, on the other hand, tries to save the coherence of the painting in terms that are themselves constantly rediscovered in subsequent years: “It is remarkable . . . that any one has ever ventured to query the essential unity of such a composition. How can the upper part be separated from the lower? The two form one whole. Below the suffering and the needy, above the powerful and helpful—mutually dependent, mutually illustrative.” Emerson admires the work, which he calls, in language like Shaftesbury’s but without his hesitations, the first in the world. He brought a print of it back from Europe and hung it in his Salem home, admiring in particular the benign representation of Jesus. But Roger Fry, even as he tries to rehabilitate the canvas in 1920, ac­know­ ledges the challenge of doing so, describing the work as “a hundred years ago . . . perhaps the most admired picture in the world, and twenty years ago . . . one of the most neglected.” The critic traces the challenge of the work to what we must recognize as a particularly modern preoccupation. It is “our difficulty in recognising the nature of our own feelings” that makes modern viewers “liable to have our aesthetic reaction interfered with by our reaction to the dramatic overtones and implications.” The train of discussion I have been summarizing might be given a temporary terminus with Michael Fried, who draws on Fry’s formalist analysis as evidence of the antitheatrical sensibility of the earlier critic.6 As the concept of theatricality Fried develops from his account of Diderot takes its meaning from the contrast with an antithetical condition, a state of absorption that may be represented, but is certainly fostered by a work of art, so we may take this ­discussion as yet another return to the challenging character of a piece that often rebuffs the formal coherence for which later viewers come to art.7 It is impossible not to imagine that the boldly divided nature of the work Raphael produced has to be linked to the complex religious thematic evident in the New Testament source itself, and which I have only partly suggested with my brief reflections on Matthew and on the question of transfiguration in Aquinas. As I have proposed in my quick survey of the criticism, and as I will illustrate at greater length in the next chapter, formal analysis keeps rediscovering the gap Raphael placed in the work, and sometimes even being motivated to reconcile the elements on either side of it. It bears saying, however, that the religious question is

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Transfiguration  59 overdetermined in the work, that while its subject goes back to events at the beginnings of Christianity, and to foundational arguments from late antiquity and medieval theology, these are both inevitably given new urgency by contemporary concerns when Raphael was painting. A compelling recent line of analysis of the Transfiguration finds a link between its challenging themes and its difficult form in the foundational cultural crisis that was the Protestant Reformation. Leopold and Helen Ettlinger note that the disciples in the mundane realm are not only without Jesus; Peter is also absent. The rock upon which Jesus would build his church, and to whom was traced its divine authority in the world, is the missing transitional element in the crisis at the bottom of the canvas. The Ettlingers cite in this context the challenge Martin Luther’s epochal ninety-five theses of 1517 presented to the power of the Pope as Peter’s successor, speculating that the scene of the possessed boy “may have been intended as an exhortation to unquestioning and unswerving faith in the Church at the very moment that the unity of western Christianity was disintegrating.” In this account the awkward split quality of the painting is indicative of a fundamental gap separating the confounding lived world of our experience from divine bliss, a space uncrossable without the aid of the church.8 But, of course, the suggestion that unity is to be argued for by the representation of a split condition may well provoke an antithetical idea, that the painting captures the feeling of schism itself, or perhaps that the only way to address that feeling is to represent it as a rift or set of rifts established and made productive at the very point of foundation of the religion. The period of the Reformation is one in which the mystery of the trans­fig­ur­ ation, as laid out by Aquinas—the mystery of the nature of the figured material human body of Christ and the transfiguration by divinity—maps onto the kind of complex problems of representation provoked by the challenges of Luther and others. “The images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints,” the Council of Trent would declare a few decades after Raphael’s death, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and . . . due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honour which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent.9

Nothing is to be asked of images of divinity, the Church declares as it wrestles with new challenges to long-established conventions. Indeed, they are not to be trusted. But, nevertheless, true honor and veneration is their due. The authors of the decree are inevitably driven by the kind of concern we saw in Aquinas, to avoid confusing the vision of divinity with a more fully actualized experience of that state, mistaking perception for an encounter with divine being:

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60  Material Inspirations And if at times, when expedient for the unlettered people; it happen that the facts and narratives of sacred Scripture are portrayed and represented; the p ­ eople shall be taught, that not thereby is the Divinity represented, as though it could be seen by the eyes of the body, or be portrayed by colours or figures.  (235)

Since at least the Council of Trent, a painting of holy subjects does not just hang at an altar. It is also perched at a risky nexus where experience, the real, the more than real, and the inauthentic come together. But this unstable condition is not resolved when the painting leaves the church. Today the Transfiguration continues to illustrate what it always has, and its relationship to religion and its institutions is still important but (or because) unsettled. Raphael’s last work no longer hangs in an altar precisely, but in a large, dark, and climate-controlled room at the Pinacoteca, or Painting Gallery of the Vatican, between Raphael’s Crowning of the Virgin (1502–1504) and his Madonna di Foligno (1511), assuming a particularly clear role in the story of the history of art and of Raphael’s place in it, as told by tour guide after tour guide standing before the three pieces (see fig. 1.2). Still, it is likely more people have seen the work in the form of the remarkably accurate mosaic reproduction that was built into the wall of Saint Peter’s in 1767, when the canvas still adorned the small church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome where it was first hung (see fig. 1.3). Just below that carefully produced eighteenth-century adaptation in the Altar of the Transfiguration, the visitor today finds the remains of Pope Innocent XI, who died in 1689, but whose body, when his casket was opened during the process of beatification, was found to be free of any corruption 267 years after his demise. The saint’s glass and bronze sarcophagus, which exposes to view the body with its silver-covered face and hands, has been moved to various locations at Saint Peter’s

Fig. 1.2  Display of the Transfiguration at the Vatican in 2016. Photo by the author.

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Transfiguration  61

Fig. 1.3  Studio del Mosaico Vaticano, the Transfiguration (1767), Altar of the Transfiguration, Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Basilica over the years. But as of 2011 it has come to rest under the mosaic reproduction of the painting, setting up for the viewer a thought-provoking res­ on­ance between vulnerability and permanence, between fallible matter and the power of the divine to transfigure it, and also evoking the situation in which nineteenth-century culture kept finding the Transfiguration, rising up from the body of a dead man (a topic to which I will turn in the next chapter).

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62  Material Inspirations I will return to Raphael’s painting several times in the pages of this book because its illustration of an unresolved relationship between divinity and a world that cannot fully know it (or that cannot fully reconcile its witness to the situation in which that witness takes place) proved to be such an important one for a period in which Raphael was still—if never unproblematically—the ideal painter. Still, my project is to demonstrate that the difficult fit between matter and idea or ideal is manifested not only in the story the painting retells, but also by the phys­ic­al circumstances underlying the anecdote of my encounter with the print in the library with which I began. The effort to make the print and protect it has left us one trace of two passions: for the original painting and for the treasured copy so painstakingly created by the engraver’s hand. And both material manifestations present characteristic challenges: The merits of the copy, I have only begun to suggest, are nearly as difficult for modern taste to fully recognize as it is for that taste to reconcile with the thought that the masterpiece captured in the print was itself the work not of a lone genius but also of a workshop he had trained. As we will see in the chapter to follow, the challenge presented to view by the unresolved conditions bodied forth in the painting came to be put into relation with the legend of Raphael himself, at once faultless and overly passionate, master of ideal form and incontinent lover. Throughout the nineteenth century, Raphael’s legend is subject to revision as culture attempts to establish its own relationship to those paradoxical things, the interests of the desiring body of an ideal artist, and to an art that might or might not be understood to leave those desires behind. I noted above that things we don’t want will seem to take up the most space. At this point I would add to my opening observation that that feeling will often be most pressing when we encounter things that were once much desired, but which have become detached from their affective supports. The indifference of time gathers most thickly just where the residue of the passions of others has fallen; the markers of lost love bulk into obstacles for sympathy. Although we are unlikely to share the original passion, we are oppressed by difficult feelings when we come near the recognition that love can die, when an object feels less like a relic of an emotion with which we may or may not sympathize, and more like a reminder of the transience of even the most well-established and accredited ardor. A knowing condescension expands the size of the unloved object, inflated by an unvoiced panic about our own relationships to things we hold dear. The forgotten print, like the neglected volume in which I found it, is a reminder that the moment of encounter with art is never only a matter of representation. The self looking at art is a body in space, in a quiet library, it may be, where the eye lights one day on a large disused book. The materiality of the self is manifested as it meets the medium that carries an image forward from the nineteenth century that loved it and gathered it in company with so many other relics of a taste that we cannot say still exists the way it once did, but which has left us so many signs of its affections. I have from time to time asked art librarians and

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Transfiguration  63 curators about reproductions of the sort that filled the volume I found that day, and I have discovered that even in this era, when it seems like everything has been catalogued and scanned and indexed, it is frequently quite difficult to search for these items, though I know they are present in many collections. Renewed scholarly interest in mediation notwithstanding, the databases typically do not have a space for art of this sort because when it comes to art we want (to know about, to love) what we consider to be real things.10 And, a small number of col­ lect­ors and connoisseurs aside, or barring a very small number of famous engravers, it would be unusual today to think of reproductive prints as works of art. These objects, which still regularly hang in house museums interested in ­preserving the decoration of the nineteenth century, may seem not art enough to be loved today, but they were the form in which the nineteenth century knew and loved art most intimately.

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2

Desire and the Body of Inspiration 1.  “To neutralize ordinary urgencies” A pile of jewels shines before the beloved on a parapet overlooking a golden city, the pleasure she takes in the gift a measure of the giver’s current achievement, her joy a promise of his future happiness. A king entrusts a treasure in bullion to an admired painter, the mark of the respect in which the artist is held. The same monarch sits on the deathbed of another genius, holding the expiring body in his arms like a parent, or perhaps like a distraught lover. The mind finds its measures of satisfaction in the generally unspoken visions of unquestionable achievement that we call fantasies, and it can return to these unembarrassed because they are private and they are pleasant, featuring as they do the successful conclusion of so many struggles we fear will never end as we wish. Rank, wealth, love, even sexual pleasure itself: these are all good in themselves and incontrovertible markers of accomplishment because they are fantasies of experiences of an absolute benefit. And so, they are immediately recognizable by us and by others—by us, often, because by others. And yet, every fantasy finds its warrant in its distance from reality. The scope of our desires is defined by our lacks. While Freud’s proposal that at the heart of every dream we find wish fulfillment may or may not be true about our sleeping life, it is unquestionably right about our fantasies, suggesting the human vul­ner­ abil­ity at the heart of each of them. I have opened with a few brief anticipations of the instances that will follow in this chapter just to suggest some of the character­ istic forms with which artistic achievement is manifested in the nineteenth cen­ tury in relation to what are undeniably the most basic human passions. And as these instances make clear when laid out in this bald form, there is something embarrassing about the topics of this chapter. Sexual pleasure, wealth, social advancement: these can seem like such clear boons (perhaps even the clearest of all boons) that they leave little for analysis to latch onto and explain. Not the superstructure of our interests, they can seem to form the very base, a location at which we may feel it unlikely we will find resources for reflection. This chapter proposes otherwise, but it will not be able to avoid some of the discomforts at­tend­ant on dwelling on the fantasies of others, including the fantasy that the  recognition of interested desires might satisfy the hope for an escape from analysis itself. Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  65 The return of beauty into critical conversation over the last couple of decades was eventually followed by attention to another important nineteenth-century concern: disinterestedness.1 Although beauty and disinterestedness are evidently closely related topics, they have not typically been addressed together of late in any degree of detail. Perhaps that is because of a widespread sense that we always already understand their relationship. Indeed, important accounts of the history of taste depend on the emergence of disinterestedness as a value, while other con­ ceptual models remove disinterestedness from history, and present it as a neces­ sarily transhistorical component of beauty. Still other influential approaches avoid the topic of disinterestedness because it is seen as an impossibility, or something between an imposition and an ideological mystification. “Is anything disinterested?” is a rhetorical question for materialists of the left and right, the only real issue to be determined by analysis being an entirely different question that assumes the answer to the first: cui bono?—in whose interest is beauty made or identified as such? My aim in this chapter is to slow down the speed with which the gesture toward interest forecloses analysis.2 In particular, I hope to show that some of the locations toward which the claim of interest has typically driven arguments— notably sexual pleasure, material benefit, and even social advancement—offer further scope for critical analysis than they have sometimes been taken to do. Addressing that topic will involve my argument in a number of awkward situ­ ations, including what may appear to be the perverse project of identifying what more there is to say about fantasies of creative achievement shaped around mas­ culine sexual fantasies, or—what amounts to a symmetrically related idea—what the limits are of arguments based on escape from sexual desire. The inspiration mentioned in the title of this book may seem an old-fashioned, even quaint, theme among the more self-evidently serious considerations driving the aesthetic topics I have cited so far. While beauty these days bears the scandal­ ous charisma of a pleasure hovering unsteadily between the conventional and the illicit, and interest can seem the all-in-all of a number of current systems of value, inspiration may strike the ear as a term that is embarrassing without the charm of being scandalous, carrying with it perhaps an unreconstructed suggestion of individual creative agency, or even complicity with what may appear to be an out­ dated and pernicious idea of human genius. Still, I wonder if it might not be pos­ sible to breathe some life into the topic by addressing the ways we find it linked to a set of concerns that may seem more self-evidently current. What does in­spir­ ation look like? What does it not look like? With what may it be associated? These are some of the basic questions I will address as I develop my anachronistic theme, which is how attempts to represent inspiration in nineteenth-century art coincide with, but also complicate, efforts to conceptualize art as disinterested. My hope is not so much to identify the conventional nature of recent influential claims about the place of interest in the arts, but to open up for renewed

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66  Material Inspirations consideration the richness and sophistication of a historically located but deeply conceptual set of relationships that have typically been manifested in a fairly impoverished form in even quite sophisticated accounts of the hidden and actual force of material pressures in culture. Since at least the 1970s feminist art historians and students of sexuality and aesthetics have established an important network of interpretative approaches for examining the relationship between fundamental ideas of beauty and the nature of desire and its objects. The insights of feminist criticism and scholarship and of queer theorists have also opened up the topic of sexuality in profoundly gen­era­ tive ways by identifying the complexity of its manifestations in the world, a devel­ opment that has helped shift the topic of the interests, erotic and otherwise, beyond a simple explanatory category ratifying conventional forms of gratifica­ tion.3 And yet, as I think will become clear in the discussion of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in this chapter, there is still some value in pausing on arguments or ideas that, at first blush, are manifested as fantasies of gratified desire. Interpretative models based on insights into unconscious or unspeakable motivations have a long history, of course, and have accustomed readers to critical approaches that emphasize the fact of material determinants not recognizable in their own time but evident to us today. Indeed, some years back it seemed that criticism had reached a point at which fatigue had begun to set in when it came to these approaches, hence the emergence of challenges to critique, to what Eve Sedgwick identified as “paranoid reading,” and the emergence of a desire to engage in alternative forms of reading that might be understood to trace surface meanings rather than plumbing greater depth.4 The argument of this book is, however, that while the claims of materiality do indeed typically run along the surface of culture, it will be important not to be limited to a metaphorics of surface and depth in an analysis that will of necessity find its evidence in the transitions between levels. My sources for this chapter will include e­ lements sometimes identified as in themselves having a more material quality than high art. Thus, I will touch briefly on the popular press and popular verse, both of which were deeply important to the development of nineteenth-century culture. But the central part of my discussion will be devoted to a form that uncomfort­ ably straddles the line between high culture and something that will not feel at all high to contemporary taste: the nineteenth-century vogue for paintings devoted to the lives of the Old Masters. This chapter will attempt to put that genre into conversation with related developments not only in popular verse and journalism, but also in philosophy and art history, in order to illuminate the important association between erotic desire and inspiration in the nineteenth century. It is an affiliation that, I hope to demonstrate, is camouflaged by the projection onto the nineteenth century of later conventions about the place of interest in the appreciation of art, and about the stark divide between high and mass culture.5

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  67 “Interest” and its antithesis, “disinterestedness,” are terms that tend to carry with them the suggestion of accusation or vindicatory self-defense. “What is your interest in this?” we ask when we think some personal contingency is being kept hidden. “I am a disinterested observer,” we protest, when we sense doubts about where we stand on a controversial issue. The disinterested observer is not only a fantasy that hovers over disagreements, or a necessary intellectual horizon of the sort so well identified by Amanda Anderson in her work.6 It is also a requirement for long-lasting and still-influential concepts of art. It is in that sense that I am hoping to talk about what is not disinterested, or disinteresting, but its opposite: of interest, the interesting. Inevitably, however, sexual pleasure becomes the fig­ ure for personal interest because of its outsized role in the modern imagination of individual desire and satisfaction. Even when other issues are at stake—say eco­ nomic or class interests—sexual desire tends to come to the fore, as the clearest vision of what it means to have an interest, even (or especially) one that remains unacknowledged or disavowed.7 The testimony of a certain line of post-Kantian responses to art is clear on the antithetical relationship between individual autonomy and desire in the response to beauty. From this point of view, the pursuit of one’s own interests is a kind of subjugation, a failure to be free. Hence the robust claims of Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction (1979): “The aesthetic disposition,” the sociologist writes, entails “a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies.”8 A generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary urgencies, also known as sublimation, is not only vital for the creation of high art, but most especially for its reception: “Pure pleasure,” notes Bourdieu, “ascetic, empty pleasure . . . implies the renunciation of pleasure, pleas­ ure purified of pleasure.”9 The paradoxical gesture toward ascesis in this formula­ tion begins to suggest the presence of sexual preoccupations within a certain tradition of aesthetic speculation, an idea brought home in the following discus­ sion of the place of nature in Kant’s argument: The world produced by artistic “creation” is not only “another nature” but a “counter-nature,” a world produced in the manner of nature but against the or­din­ary laws of nature—those of gravity in dance, those of desire and pleasure in painting and sculpture, etc.—by an act of artistic sublimation which is predis­ posed to fulfill a function of social legitimation. The negation of enjoyment— inferior, coarse, vulgar, mercenary, venal, servile, in a word, natural—implies affirmation of the sublimity of those who can be satisfied with sublimated, refined, distinguished, disinterested, gratuitous, free pleasures.  (491)

Bourdieu’s “etc.” ought not camouflage the tendentious character of the list he proposes in that apparently casual clause dropped between two dashes. Is the temporary overcoming of gravity by a graceful dancer in any way similar to the  overcoming of pleasure in making or perhaps seeing a painting? Indeed,

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68  Material Inspirations while  the dancer is always present in the dance—and so the clear agent of any overcoming—the inclusion of forms generally experienced in the absence of the artist raises more questions than it answers. Whose pleasure, it seems important to ask, and in any case, are we entirely clear on the ways pleasure may relate to desire? While we will immediately recognize the relationship between a jump and the laws of gravity, can we say we are as clear on that between a work of art and the laws of desire, of pleasure—can these even be said to be laws in the same way? The open goal of Distinction is to provoke a crisis in the politics of taste by bringing claims for the fundamentally disinterested nature of the aesthetic as­pir­ ations said to be characteristic of elite society up against the tastes of various other levels of society of the same time and place, themselves understood to be interested insofar as they participate in a project of individual class advancement. (I like this thing because I understand liking it to establish or support a link between myself and the class to which I feel I belong or wish to belong.) Still, it bears remembering that, even though the instruments allowing this analysis to take place were questionnaires filled out in France between 1963 and 1968, the historical reach of Bourdieu’s arguments is far larger than what might be encom­ passed in that brief span, in that limited location. That such a narrow frame is felt to be sufficient support on which to build so vast a structure, we may understand as part of an implicit polemic of the project, an indication of the perceived ­vulnerability of the system Bourdieu aims to attack.10 Bourdieu’s goal is to break apart distinctions between kinds of pleasure— valorized high-cultural (understood as a commitment to form, or formalism that denies the pressures that shape more mundane pleasures) and disdained low (with its ostensibly simple responses to the actual represented object)—by show­ ing both to be part of a system of social hierarchy. The title of his book is meant to  emphasize that the maintaining of social distinctions is in fact the principal social function—or interest—of high culture (196). It is in the analytical challenge it presents to both categories of distinction (kinds of pleasures and social ranks) that the political charge of the work is meant to emerge. The transgressive project of abolishing the frontier dividing what he calls “legitimate culture” from the lived experience of taste, has a powerful moral claim at its heart—nothing less than the definition of humanity: This barbarous reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of or­din­ ary consumption abolishes the opposition, which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant, between the “taste of sense” and the “taste of reflection,” and between facile pleasure and pure pleasure, pleasure purified of pleasure, which is predisposed to become a symbol of moral excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation which defines the truly human man.  (6)

Bourdieu’s aim in his self-described barbarity (barbarism and vulgarity are terms of pride in this work) is to confront or put on the same plane the “taste of sense”

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  69 and the “taste of reflection,” the division of which he understands to have been necessary not simply for establishing a theory of aesthetics, but for formulating a moral—not to say existential—question with evident political ramifications: who is what he calls “the truly human man”? By challenging the hierarchization of forms of taste he hopes to challenge a system of judgment that he understands to have shaped vital ethical determinations for centuries. How is it possible, we might ask, for analysis of a questionnaire about the pref­ erences of a group of French people in quite a narrow slice of the twentieth century to seem liable to challenge the concepts of the eighteenth-century ­philosopher?11 We might ask, except we know the answer and we feel its force: the absolute autonomy for which Kant is said to stand needs to be transhistorical, and it requires a complete separation between any kind of interest and what is found to be beautiful. More than this, we suspect that the revelation of desires hidden to the subjects who hold them is the characteristic and most powerful form of social analysis. The questions Bourdieu raises are designed to solicit answers that will give him ammunition to use against two of the most apparently vulnerable elem­ ents in Kant’s system: the claim of universality and that of disinterestedness. Both claims are thrown into question by the particularity of the judgments revealed by the instruments of the sociologist, and their interested nature is insisted upon in his analysis. The Critique of Judgment demands universal assent to an austere ascetic notion of beauty: “Everyone must admit that a judgment about beauty in which there is mixed the least interest is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste.”12 Kant proposes interest, understood even—or rather, especially—as desire, as precisely what needs to be absent in a pure judgment of taste (that absence is what keeps it pure): “The satisfaction that we combine with the representation of the existence of an object is called interest. Hence such a satisfaction always has at the same time a relation to the faculty of desire” (90). It is what Kant calls “the agreeable,” and not the beautiful, that “pleases the senses in sensation” (91). “Hence,” the philosopher goes on to explain, “one says of the agreeable not merely that it pleases but that it gratifies. It is not merely approval that I give it, rather inclination is thereby aroused” (92). Desire, gratification, inclination: these are some of the elements that are contrary to the judgment of beauty, which is made by a person feeling “completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object” (97). And so, we may find license for Bourdieu’s own description of what he identifies as the “barbarous practice” of reintegrating “aesthetic con­ sumption into the world of ordinary consumption” in Kant’s declaration that “taste is always still barbaric when it needs the addition of charms and emotions for satisfaction” (108). Still, Bourdieu’s argument would be more powerfully compelling if we could identify a clear continuity between Kant’s claims and the period in which Bourdieu carried out his researches, if we found an allegiance to disinterestedness to predominate in that span. And yet, as I hope to indicate in the balance of this  chapter, that is far from what the evidence shows. Indeed, interest is an

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70  Material Inspirations embarrassingly central element in the imagination of art in the nineteenth ­century, at least when it comes to its makers.

2.  How the Painting was Finished: Representations of Old Masters and the Case of Raphael In order to imagine a being who can create outside of the realm of interest, Kant enlists a popular eighteenth-century concept: the genius, a figure whose natural creative ability routes the artifice of making back to the structures of nature. Theorists from Hegel to Derrida and beyond have identified the circularity of this concept, which describes a being who emerges from nature to create an artifice that naturally reconciles us to the world. But nineteenth-century culture was quite willing to give the idea its run, though in doing so the category—and even the work—of genius becomes notably domesticated.13 Some years ago, the late art historian Francis Haskell identified an intriguing and characteristically nineteenth-century development: the vogue for the repre­ sentation of Old Masters in painting.14 One manifestation of the growing im­port­ance of the aesthetic for European culture from the eighteenth century on was the surge of popular interest in art and its makers, a passionate engage­ ment that was by no means constrained by the kind of stringent values sug­ gested by Kant and given new life by Bourdieu. Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina from 1814 (fig. 2.1) is certainly the most famous of the group Haskell identifies, and my discussion will keep returning to it and some variations by Ingres and others.15 But every Salon from 1804 to 1886 had its canvases show­ ing scenes from the life—or death—of a famous artist. François-Guillaume Ménageot may have set a trend with his Death of Leonardo in 1781 (fig. 2.2), but Ingres was still working in the same vein nearly forty years later, in 1818 (fig. 2.3). And it wasn’t only a matter of Salons; many of the works were sold as relatively inexpensive reproductions, like Luigi Rubio’s fanciful representation of Van Dyck being led away from a heartbroken girlfriend by Rubens, leaving behind a painting of Saint Martin he had evidently produced during the period of his time with her (fig. 2.4). The genre, Haskell demonstrates, grew in importance throughout the first half of the century. While only two or three paintings of Old Masters were on display at the Salons that took place between 1804 and 1817, the 1820s saw up to ten displayed annually. For the next thirty years each Salon featured up to twenty. It was not until the 1860s that a marked decline becomes evident. These paintings would typically show a particularly well-known anecdote from the artist’s life, usually one emblematic of some notable characteristic of the ­artist’s work or temperament, or a moment of recognition, achievement, or even triumph. In these images, in which artists themselves represented the ma­ter­ial fantasies shaping the artistic career, two distinct elements predominate:

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Fig. 2.1  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina, 1814. Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusets. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

the markers of success—represented as either the acquisition of wealth or ­intimacy with the powerful—and the erotic lives of the Old Masters. But beyond incidents evidently selected either for their representative quality or their celebra­ tion of achievement, examination of the visions of the Old Masters that so fascinated the period reveals a consistent preoccupation with two poles of ­ ­corporeal existence: the relation of the artist to physical passion is a recurrent theme, but so is the artist at the moment of death.16 Frederic Leighton’s well-known 1855 representation of a laurel-crowned Cimabue accompanied by a young Giotto joining in the triumphant procession transporting in state the Ruccellai Madonna from his studio in Florence to Santa Maria Maggiore (fig. 2.5) is a relatively staid manifestation of the genre, but it will remind us of the importance of the tradition in the English-speaking world, and of the public recognition that is at the heart of the form.17 (Continuing the train of glory it represents, the piece was acquired by Queen Victoria on the first day of the Royal Academy Exhibition at Prince Albert’s urging—for 600 guineas.) Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s responsiveness to the intersection of literature and the fine arts is manifested in his various attempts to capture Giotto painting Dante, in the 1850s (see fig.  2.6). In a more modest register, we might cite a casual piece by

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Fig. 2.2  François-Guillaume Ménageot, Death of Leonardo da Vinci, 1781. Musée de l’Hotel de Ville, Amboise, France. Photo © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

Rossetti, in which he plays with the erotic situation of Raphael and the Fornarina by translating the pair into a modern bohemian couple (1845, fig. 2.7). Discussion of these images in a popular vein would have to take into account not only the oil paintings on which Haskell focused, but the reproductions that diffused them to a wider public, such as William Brockedon’s 1833 “Raphael and the Fornarina” (fig. 2.8) from The English School: A Series of the Most approved Productions in Painting and Sculpture from the Days of Hogarth to the Present, which was printed with the following caption: “This subject has reference to the mutual attachment of Raphael and the beautiful female known as La Fornarina, the Baker’s daughter. Besides painting her portrait, and introducing her figure into many of his pictures, his fondness at one time was carried to such an excess, that he could not study without her company.”18 Raphael, with his fondnesses and his studies, was such a favorite that an entire graphic narrative could be made of his life using images from this genre, espe­ cially toward its end. He might be shown becoming engaged (fig. 2.9)—an event I’ll return to below—or adjusting the placement of the hand of a model who may or may not be the Fornarina posing as the Virgin Mary (fig. 2.10). But, above all,

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Fig. 2.3  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Francis I Receives the Last Breaths of Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1818. Petit Palais, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

painters and illustrators returned to two themes, his relationship with La Fornarina and his death.19 For a student of nineteenth-century letters there is a number of contexts in which these kinds of works might be placed: from Honoré de Balzac’s “Unknown Masterpiece” (1831) to the artist poems of Robert Browning of the 1840s and 1850s to the “Two Boyhoods” chapter of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters V (1860) to much in Walter Pater and elsewhere in this art-obsessed period. But it will be useful to dwell for the moment on what I understand to be the conceptual interest of these representations, and to focus on the sources and implications of the Ingres, as the only one of them that has had an extended afterlife. Although, as I have indicated, representations of the Old Masters clearly mani­ fest shared concerns, individual painters were also seen to stand for distinct orien­ta­tions toward the world. Raphael was a particularly fascinating subject because of the rich interplay between his twin emblematic functions: as the ideal painter and as the careless and titillating protagonist in a life as notoriously incon­ tinent as it was glamorously successful. Here is Vasari on the maker of the Transfiguration:

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Fig. 2.4  Luigi Rubio, The painter Rubens persuades young Van Dyck to leave the Flemish village of Saventhem, where he had stayed for the love of a young woman, 1851. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 2.5  Frederic Leighton, Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1855. National Gallery, London. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Raphael also painted portraits of . . . very many other courtesans, including his own mistress. He was indeed a very amorous man with a great fondness for women whom he was always anxious to serve. He was always indulging his

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  75

Fig. 2.6  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante, 1852. Private Collection. Photo © Painters/Alamy Stock Photo. sexual appetites . . . When his close friend Agostino Chigi commissioned him to decorate the first loggia in his palace, Raphael could not give his mind to the work because of his infatuation for his mistress. Agostino was almost in despair when with great difficulty he managed . . . to arrange for the woman to go and live with Raphael in the part of the house where he was working; and that is how the painting was finished.20

The painting Raphael could only finish in the company of his beloved was the famous decoration of the Loggia of Galatea at the Villa Farnesina, the first part of a classicizing yet sensuous decorative scheme by Raphael and his studio of such importance that—to pick an example from a major nineteenth-century work—the failure to appreciate it becomes one indication for the reader of the emotional chasm at the heart of Casaubon that blights Dorothea’s experience of Rome.21 The result of Raphael’s passion-inspired labor (and of the Cardinal’s for­ bearance) was available to any traveler to the eternal city, most of whom, evi­ dently, visited with the expectation of a more acute experience than that imaginable by Dorothea’s husband. And the human interest of the experience was given a further charge by the fact that art lovers in the period had a vivid sense of who the woman in question in the passage was—or at least of what she looked

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Fig. 2.7  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Quartier Latin. The Modern Raphael and La Fornarina (1845). In: William E. Fredeman (1982), “A Rossetti Gallery,” Victorian Poetry 20, no. 3/4: 161–86. Published by West Virginia University Press.

like: tradition identified her with La Fornarina, the woman represented in a painting at the Barberini Palace (fig. 2.11). Two stanzas from a poem by Letitia Landon published in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book in 1835 and inspired by the anecdote in Vasari will give a sense of the ways in which the historian’s Raphael was received in nineteenth-century literary culture right around the time Middlemarch is set. In the explanatory head­ note provided to Landon’s poem (texts that demonstrate the reach of Vasari into popular culture well before he was fully translated into English at mid-century), beauty, at first an it, and then a presence, soon becomes an indispensable individual: This celebrated Italian was essentially the painter of beauty. Of the devotion with which he sought its inspiration in its presence, a remarkable instance is recorded. He either could not or would not paint without the presence of his lovely mistress, La Fornarina.22

The headnote and a few preliminary lines which I will omit are designed as the setting for the heart of the poem, which is an attempt to give voice to the object of

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Fig. 2.8  William Brockedon, Raphael and the Fornarina. In: George Hamilton (1832), The English School: A Series of the Most Approved Productions in Painting and Sculpture from the Days of Hogarth to the Present, volume 2 (London: Charles Tilt/ Paris: Fain), 17.

the painter’s affection, in a passage of verse Leigh Hunt entitled “The Fornarina to Raphael” when he reprinted it in The London Journal:23 Not without me!—alone, thy hand forgot its art awhile; Thy pencil lost its high command

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Fig. 2.9  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Betrothal of Raphael and the Niece of Cardinal Bibbiena, c. 1813–1814. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD. Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0). Public Domain Dedication, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. Uncherish’d by my smile. It was too dull a task for thee To paint remember’d rays; Thou, who wert want [sic] to gaze on me And colour from that gaze. . . .  Ah! let me linger at thy side, And sing some sweet old song, That tells of hearts as true and tried As to ourselves belong. The love whose light thy colours give, Is kindled at the heart, And who shall bid its influence live, My Raphael, if we part? (Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrapbook, 75–6).

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Fig. 2.10  Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, Raphael Correcting the Pose of His Model for His Painting of the Virgin and Child, c. 1820. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

With a few important exceptions, influential critics have tended to look away from the passions that were at the heart of early nineteenth-century representa­ tions of Raphael. They have tended, not without reason, but narrowly, to identify the popularity of representations of Old Masters with the emergent historicism that characterized the period of their efflorescence. Haskell somewhat bloodlessly describes the phenomenon as “among the more curious and attractive reflections of the new attitude to the past which we find in painting towards the end of the eighteenth century and during the first half of the nineteenth” (90). He also points out that the representations of Old Masters were typically in some measure tri­ umphant—whether showing artists comfortable in the studio or deeply mourned at the moment of death—and that in this they ran counter to standard nineteenthcentury views of artists as “disreputable, quarrelsome and crippled by poverty” (105). This seems reasonable enough, but then the art historian proposes some­ thing I would resist: that “the notion of inspiration from a source outside the art­ ist’s control, so fundamental to most nineteenth-century theory on creation, is only rarely explored” in these images (108). The issue that will preoccupy me for the rest of this chapter and which I will address largely through a focus on the

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Fig. 2.11  Raphael, La Fornarina, c. 1520. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

most durable manifestations of the genre—that is, on the many passionate returns to Raphael of Jean-August-Dominique Ingres—is the intersection of artistic tri­ umph and inspiration with the vision of the embodied artist, whether com­fort­ able in the studio or deeply mourned. The genre will emerge as more than an indication of culture, having reached an inflection-point between the historical self-consciousness of the first half of the nineteenth century and the drive toward abstraction of the second half. Or, at least I hope to suggest ways in which inter­ est, erotic and otherwise, needs to be worked back into the story of that develop­ ment in the history of art. In The Invisible Masterpiece (1998) Hans Belting emphasizes the way the cat­ egory of paintings of Old Masters reflects an emerging artistic self-consciousness closely related to the rise of the museum. Belting convincingly links these works to the epochal opportunity to reflect on so many instances of Raphael’s canvases when they were brought together at the Musée Napoléon in the early years of the century, opening up the possibility for what he describes as “art looking in its own rear-view mirror.” When he turns to Ingres’s most famous 1814 Raphael (fig. 2.1), he focuses not on its erotic or amorous content, then, but on the melancholy ­nostalgia he understands it to evince for what has been lost since the French

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  81 Revolution (79).24 For Belting, the kind of self-consciousness evident in these images is important in particular because it becomes a precursor for an emergent formalism that will sweep the boards by the beginning of the following century. There is a great deal to Belting’s argument, especially given Raphael’s emer­ gence in this period as the ideal model for the use of earlier achievements in Italian painting as well as in antique art—as, paradoxically, the best possible mod­ ern because of his own effective emulation of the past. As Schlegel found when visiting the Musée Napoléon, in Raphael the contemporary artist discovered a paradigm for the kind of response to the history of art called for in modernity. “His attachment to the earlier schools of painting” is the source of the extraordinary variety and artistic universality that is an essential property of Raphael’s genius. The philosopher’s account is built on a set of overlapping paradoxes: the im­pos­ sibly perfect relationship to art history of a figure utterly of the present because so closely connected with the past resolves into the vision of an artist who is the preeminent contemporary because he is so entirely a figure of transition: although so many of his compositions belong completely to the epoch in which he lived, we trace, even in them, the genius of the old masters: their spirit and style present themselves occasionally almost pure, and thus, in a certain sense, mark out the transition from the old style to that of the modern schools. It is, therefore, in the highest degree worthy of notice, that the painters of that time, from whom he had almost seceded, chose him pre-eminently as their leader, because all his works and peculiar ideas, if rightly understood, must unavoidably lead them back to the right source; namely, to that old school which we have no hesitation in pronouncing infinitely preferable to the new.25

Raphael’s role as a point of inflection in the history of art, which is laid out here and elsewhere in Schlegel’s writings with such clarity, becomes key to his ­reception. It is this long-lasting association of the artist with a crucial moment of ­transition, the quality which makes his work include at once modern and antique perfection, that will give the term Pre-Raphaelite its complicated force later in the century. Belting’s identification of Raphael as a crucial figure in the nineteenth-century transposition of religious impulses into a newly abstracting tendency in art may also be read as part of the long and continuing aftermath of what Schlegel describes: a figure who marks most perfectly the transition of forms from one period to another. Perhaps such an analysis has so much to do that it is bound to neglect elements that are not merely historic. Haskell is per­ haps clearest on what must not be recognized in order to advance a certain line of criticism: “It is curious,” he writes, in a gesture that cannot hide the very deflection it is trying to perform, “that even Ingres should have paid so much more attention to Raphael’s relationship with the Fornarina than with his work, though admittedly in his many versions of the scene the artist is always por­ trayed turning away from the former to the latter, from Nature to Art” (96).

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82  Material Inspirations To describe Ingres’s painting as representing a turning away from the Fornarina only makes sense if all that joins people is the exchange of glances. She is, after all, warming his lap as he looks at her representation, which is evidently depicted as a joint result of his skill, her beauty, and their passion. The embrace is in the painting; his bright red chalk is where it is because of the way her body fills his arms.26 In a later and less reserved version of the theme from 1846 (fig. 2.12) it is not only the portrait of the Fornarina that issues from their union: the Transfiguration rises at the junction of their bodies, the movements of this final canvas being as important for our understanding of the painter’s legend as is the presence of his rival, Michelangelo, who, improbably, stands gazing impassively in two of the later versions and in the highly finished drawing at the Louvre (see fig. 2.13). I’ll return to both elements that complicate the simple intimacy at the heart of the image (the presence of the posthumous masterpiece and the disturbingly dis­ connected rival/voyeur), but before I do, it will be useful to cite one source that makes it clear just how unconvincing the claim is that these works illustrate anything like a turning away from the model—or from nature, for that matter.

Fig. 2.12  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and the Fornarina, 1846. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Bequest of Frederick W. Schumacher.

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Fig. 2.13  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Raphael and la Fornarina, c. 1827. Photo © Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

As Norman Bryson argued decades ago, Picasso had no problem recognizing in the Ingres the eros and physicality shaping the relation of artist, model, work, and even patron, which is left unaddressed by Belting and Haskell.27 These are the elements highlighted in the variations on the theme he produced in a series of prints in the 1960s (fig. 2.14). When he removes the drapes covering the figures— including from the painting of La Fornarina—he uncovers the passion running not very far below the surface of the legend and the canvas it inspired. The lines moving from glance to sexual organs to work of art, and even the characteristic erotic investment of the prude gazing impassively on a passion he wants to control, are brought out with unmistakable frankness in the series which also, nevertheless, captures the subtler erotic aspects of the original canvases in the impassive demeanor of the Pope, the expressionless bound gazing of the lovers, and the bold parallel and contrast of the exaggerated phallus and slender paint brush, both apparently caught in motion. The pope himself may be understood to stand in for Michelangelo, if not for the meddlesome Cardinal Bibbiena. I will turn to the topic of the art lover as voyeur in my discussion of Nietzsche below. But I will suggest here that the clear function of the transposition Picasso effects in giving the role of impassive onlooker to the Pope, rather than to

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Fig. 2.14  Pablo Picasso, Raphaël et la Fornarina X, 1968. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2019.

Michelangelo is to open up that topic. Picasso’s flamboyant reconfiguration per­ forms an analysis both boldly vulgar and compelling when it finds in the figure of Michelangelo, in the shadows gazing blankly at the lovers who in themselves form a self-sustaining vision of passion, an image of the viewer of Ingres’s canvas. Like Picasso’s Pope, the painted artist and the viewer of Raphael’s work both regard with alienated pleasure the love in art, a passion in which they can only participate as fascinated witnesses. Landon, characteristically, emphasizes the loss, the gap during which the Fornarina was not present, but it does not take much effort to identify something of the erotic charge Picasso boldly represents underpinning Landon’s text, especially the quick movement from eyes to warm and lively creation: . . . thou did’st pine for me, my love, Aside thy colours thrown; ’Twas sad to raise thine eyes above Unanswer’d by my own: Thou who art wont to lift those eyes, And gather from my face The warmth of life’s impassion’d dyes, Its colour and its grace.

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  85 Haskell and Belting do so much that it would be wrong to fault them for largely neglecting the self-evident sexuality of the theme (the passionate creativity) that is so vividly brought out by Picasso and Landon. But the gap in their analysis is ultimately traceable to a surprisingly widespread resistance to the quite evidently material nature of concepts of inspiration in the period. Without the context of the genre of Old Master paintings out of which it  emerges, Ingres’s series of paintings of Raphael and the Fornarina can seem like  the expression of a largely anecdotal and personal concern, or even tritely vulgar— the erotic intimacy between painter and model having a predictability that makes consummation somewhat less interesting than the projective fantasies the relationship might provoke in painter or writer. I want to argue, however, that in the dis­pos­ition of his figures, Ingres references another popular genre, one that makes the generalizable quality of the relationship of passion and inspiration all the clearer.

3.  The Origin of Painting The prehistory of the Ingres is to be found in that characteristic eighteenth-­century image, “The Origin of Painting,” a popular theme in the period, though one that represents not the emergence of one painting, as the French painter’s visions of Raphael’s studio do, but of the art as a whole. The motif builds on the story in Pliny of a young woman, known to the eighteenth century as Dibutade, who loves a young man who is going away. She draws the outline of her beloved on the wall, to have after he is gone (see fig. 2.15). Her father, a potter, then casts the silhouette in clay, and somewhere between outline and casting painting was said to have had its origin.28 The theme, which combines the era’s preoccupation with origins and its love of silhouettes, intrigued the eighteenth century. It also allowed painters the op­por­ tun­ity to show a moment of suggestive emotional or erotic closeness fusing the idyllic enervated eroticism characteristic of the rococo with an increasingly robust physicality owing a debt to those statuesque forms that came to the fore in neoclassicism. The topic, which was explored at length in a seminal article by the art his­tor­ian Robert Rosenblum, who finds the era’s love of outline given a history in these works, has been enriched by evocative recent studies in a number of fields. In earlier work I myself connected the theme to the emphasis on absence characteristic of eighteenth-century accounts of art.29 But, as I argued at the time, absence is hardly without its erotic charge—as is clearly the case, for example, in the theories of Winckelmann, in which inspiration for a nude statue may be found in the outlines left in the sand by two handsome wrestlers. Painters, in any case, have never been satisfied with remaining at the silhouette; it is typically the embodied circumstances of its production that are of interest.

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Fig. 2.15  Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, c. 1782–1785. National Gallery, Washington, DC. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Rowlandson’s “Modern Pygmalion” (c. 1812, fig.  2.16) removes every veil in order to create an erotic vision of passion in the studio in which the lust at the heart of the more muted images is boldly embodied and in which the desiring figure is herself a work of art. By means of a set of simple reversals this erotic fan­ tasy vividly brings out the energies implicit in the traditional subject: rather than representing the moment of inception taking place in a poignant interlude of post-coital lassitude in which one lover perhaps sleeps, while the other wistfully projects forward to the moment of departure and beyond—toward the loss for which the art object will be a compensation—the Rowlandson watercolor im­agines the passion the artist has aroused in himself by the act of his making, an experience that at once excites and overwhelms him. As in the Picasso print series, though perhaps without the cool overtones the later artist picked up from the Ingres, in such a representation lust accompanies art so closely as to suggest their inextricable coexistence. The loss of distinction as model and art object merge into sexual partner puts into a visual register the inextricable bonds linking creative and erotic energies in the nineteenth century. It is a confusion that Henry Fuseli evokes in his own turn on this subject, a remarkable erotic drawing from sometime between 1810 and 1820 (fig.  2.17). The passion of the studio was bound to be a titillating

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Fig. 2.16  Thomas Rowlandson, The Modern Pygmalion, c. 1812. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

convention, of course—given the intimate situation in which model and artist found themselves, and also emergent conventions about artistic dissipation. The Fornarina at the Barberini Palace in Rome was an overdetermined instance of the combination of model and erotic partner that was a constant point of refer­ ence for work ranging from the sentimental to the pornographic throughout the

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Fig. 2.17  Henry Fuseli, Zwei Lesbierinne, mit erotischen Spielerein beschäftigt, in einen Toilettenspiegel blickend, 1810–1820. Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825 (Zurich: Verlag Berichthaus; Munich: Prestel, 1973), 1619.

nineteenth century, though it was provided a veneer of respectability by the authority of Vasari and the prestige of Raphael. Still, as we trace out the intersec­ tion connecting fantasies about the studio with conventions about art history, Fuseli’s drawing stands out as a striking revision of “The Origin of Painting” theme. “If ever legend deserved our belief,” the painter had declared in 1801, early in his first lecture at the Royal Academy in a passage that the nineteenth century enjoyed citing, and that moves quickly from the legend to claims about technique, “the amorous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade of her departing lover by the secret lamp, appeals to our sympathy, to grant it; and leads us at the same time to some observations on the first mechanical essays of Painting, and that linear method.” The lecture then proceeds to attempt to describe the fairly obscure technique for Greek painting given in the classical sources that Fuseli identifies as linear. But the drives of the argument, as of the image he produced decades later, involve moving within the lines in order to enrich their meanings, the whole passage having a notably sensuous character: In, or rather through this thin inky ground, the outlines were traced with a firm but pliant style, which they called Cestrum; if the traced line happened to be

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  89 incorrect or wrong, it was gently effaced with the finger or with a sponge, and easily replaced by a fresh one. When the whole design was settled, and no far­ ther alteration intended, it was suffered to dry, was covered, to make it per­man­ ent, with a brown encaustic varnish, the lights were worked over again, and rendered more brilliant with a point still more delicate, according to the gradual advance from mere outlines to some indications, and at last to masses of light and shade.30

That the figures involved in an intimate embrace are both women inevitably brings to the fore the centrality of the feminine in representations of inspiration. Fuseli’s pornographic same-sex reimagining of the legend erases all misdirection—there’s no expectation of absence here, no sleep, no possibility of sex as procreation, but also no remaining only on the outside or at the outline of the beloved.31 This is an image of full and fully-alert erotic contact and inter­pene­tra­tion; the kind of disin­ genuous surprise we see in the Rowlandson plays no part in the erotic frisson of the viewer and the knowing open-eyed pleasure of the represented subjects. Indeed, the drawing—which, as the title it is given in the collected works indi­ cates, suggests as much a boudoir as a studio, a brush loaded with make-up more than with oil paint, a mirror as much as a canvas—seems entirely committed to erasing all periphrasis or gaps between subject and object as between a moment of erotic intimacy and of art-making. Fuseli’s fantasy is the antithesis of sublimation: both women look the same way at the mirror/canvas; one points while the other holds the brush. The woman sitting on her lover’s lap is the painter in my reading— as in the story of Dibutade—but it seems she is drawing herself along with her object of desire, who is so much like her as to be herself a mirror. While one of the lover’s hands gesture toward the painting that might be a mirror, the erotic explorations of the other find on the body of the beloved a site where pleasure and potential generation might meet—but at which pleasure alone reigns. In this masculine fantasy of feminine pleasure, Fuseli is uncovering in the full­ est possible way the erotic drives we might say underpin both the creation and the enjoyment of the Origin of Painting motif. We find a related instinct, I have begun to suggest, in his lectures. Following his evocation of the Corinthian maid, when Fuseli turns to the mysteries of Greek painting, he describes the materials used by Greeks artists, drawing on ambiguous classical sources: “a style or pen of wood, the materials a board, or a levigated plane of wood, metal, stone” (13). Might we read a memory of these objects in the drawing, in the object that might be taken for a brush, in the one that might be a mirror or a portrait, or a plane of some kind of matter the eye can’t make out? The gentle work of the hands suggested in the brief history I have cited is part of his sensual imagination of the process of the classical artist: “if the traced line happened to be incorrect or wrong,” he notes with a projection to practices long lost, but which he clearly recognizes from his own experience, “it was gently effaced with the finger or with a sponge.” But even the systematic achievement of rounded forms—“the gradual advance from mere

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90  Material Inspirations outlines to some indications, and at last to masses of light and shade”—is laid out with a quiet sensuality we don’t have to look hard to find in his drawing. The shading of the woman on top, for example, the strong dark lines along her left arm, neck, and the left side of her body fill in a form that her position, and the loving modeling of belly and thigh, makes the very opposite of a silhouette or outline, culminating in the network of thicker lines that are neither shade or out­ line, but pubic hair and pubis where a hand finds opportunities to lose itself. Contemporary women artists have done much to reclaim the masculine fantasy of female desire that drives the theme of the Origin of Painting, discovering within it the fundamental elements it tries to domesticate or claim for male achievement, but which the legend inevitably associates with women: agency, desire, creativity, innovation, and an imagination of love that combines the anticipation of absence as well as the vivid response to presence into new art. Sometimes it is the vision of confident feminine agency that comes to the fore in these appropriations, some­ times it is a new mutuality in the sexualized vision of inspiration. In a recent piece by the French painter Francine Van Hove the shadow seems to express even more desire than the already desirous subject, and the artist and subject find themselves aligned on the wall, in degrees of dishabille at once provocative and domestic. I am suggesting little more than that we see what is clear in these images—in the physicality of the dying artist I will turn to below as well as in the erotic qualities that Rowlandson and Fuseli, and of course Picasso and Van Hove, make it difficult to miss—something that it seems to me it would be silly to describe as a claim because it is so obvious: that we recognize in these images the centrality of the body and of desire in the artistic self-imagination in this important period. Such a recognition of the self-evident will prove a surprisingly rewarding step toward rec­ ognizing the stakes of material interests and interests in the material characteristic of art in the nineteenth century. We may remember in this context that Fra Lippo Lippi is discovered leaving a quarter of ill repute at the wrong time of the night, that the substance of Robert Browning’s 1855 poem is the painter’s self-justification as a desiring being—“The world and life’s too big to pass for a dream,” he declares, “This world’s no blot for us, / Nor blank; it means intensely” (lines 313–14).32 Paul Delaroche’s 1822 canvas showing Lippi interrupting his painting to seduce his beloved nun and model (fig. 2.18) predates the Browning. That the place of the world or worldly in the self-imagination of artists is not a matter of apparently simple pleasures like those of monks or nuns avoiding the constraints of their vows is richly illustrated by Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto,” published the same year as “Fra Lippo Lippi,” in which the masochism of the painter is closely linked to his productivity and ultimately to a complex kind of failure that is deeply material, though not in a predictable way, as lust, greed, and betrayal become inextricably bound in the figures Andrea finds for his creative process. “Let my hands frame your face in your hair’s gold,” Andrea says, his lan­ guage evoking a caress and the creative act that will make his beloved’s face

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Fig. 2.18  Paul Delaroche, Filippo Lippi et Lucrezia Buti, 1822. Musée Magnin, Dijon, France. Photo © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

frameable, his possessive adjectives losing her as he holds her (your hair, your hair’s gold), “You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine!” (lines 175–6).33 The gold in the poem is also the mortar that holds their home together, wealth embezzled from Francis, the king who loved him, the patron he betrayed (“When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, / The walls become illumined, brick from brick / Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold” (lines 214–16). The physical loca­ tion of the beloved in relation to the painter is the main burden of the poem: near Andrea, away from him, by his side. The creative intimacy and anticipatory long­ ing of the “Origin of Painting” is rewritten in a darker key that I think owes more than a little to the particular case of the Fornarina and Raphael (possibly even to the lament Landon had put in the Fornarina’s mouth): “If you would sit thus by me every night,” Andrea explains to Lucrezia, “I should work better, do you com­ prehend? / I mean that I should earn more, give you more” (lines 206–7). “The negation of enjoyment” that Bourdieu identifies is evidently not a charac­ teristic of the nineteenth-century artistic culture illustrated in these instances, any more than the “violation of the laws of desire in painting and sculpture.” Enjoyment proliferates; the laws of desire are strictly followed while those of

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92  Material Inspirations propriety are flouted. Jacques Rancière suggested some years ago that Bourdieu can only bring his surveys of late-twentieth-century Frenchmen to bear against Kant’s eighteenth-century formulations by ignoring the place of Kant’s argument in history. I’d add what is implicit in Rancière’s claim—that Bourdieu assumes for the one element in Kant that preoccupies him more than any other an accuracy and relevance not borne out by the long years that intervene between the his­tor­ ic­al poles of his argument. Bourdieu is not alone in seeing the escape from desire as necessarily leading to formalism—in claiming that stripping away the intrinsic interest of the content leaves form as the only thing to motivate attraction. What is being gestured to in such accounts is the development in culture required for the transition to concepts of autonomy that came to predominate in advanced taste in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.34 But nineteenth-century representations of the artist take us elsewhere. These can seem quite representative of their day, as much in their celebration of admired figures (a trend evidenced elsewhere in cultural artifacts ranging from Thomas Carlyle’s lectures on heroes and heroism in 1840 to the 169 life-size statues of great men decorating the frieze on the Albert Memorial) and in their material explanations of the cre­ativ­ity of artists—tracing Madonnas to lovers, angels to familiar children.35 But it may be possible to go further in recognizing the deeply physical nature of the selves that proliferate in nineteenth-century representations of artists. For one thing, while several of the images from the lives of the Old Masters represent vignettes that might be found in any genre scene, or show famous episodes of triumph, the fascination with the intense physical experiences of figures of genius suggests a preoccupation with more than simple pleasure or success.

4.  The Promise of Happiness and the Death of an Old Master The arguments for the social—not to say sociological—value of disinterestedness for concepts of art are familiar: I made or enjoy this not because I benefit or because I profit from doing so or because it excites me to see this thing, but because of my aspiration to see myself as existing beyond the reach of certain drives (to enjoy or profit, to be excited), an aspiration which in itself sets me apart from the usual run of needy humans, or at least from my own baser human instincts, which are the faculties that link me to my weaker brethren. These kinds of sociological claims about disinterestedness are on their face entirely opposed to the philosophical tradition in which the beautiful is defined as entailing that form of experience that arrives from contemplating something that has no purpose. Only because it is stripped of all interest to me as a viewer can I experience some­ thing as an admirable object of aesthetic contemplation. The key sources for the claim are indeed Kant, though he is anticipated in some measure in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics (1711), and Hegel represents his own rich variation on the

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  93 argument in the Aesthetics (1818–1829, published 1835)—a range and distinction in sources indicative of the power of the idea.36 I began this chapter by noting how Bourdieu and others have challenged the idea of disinterestedness with the aim of revealing it to be a mystification of real hidden interests, say in profit, rank, or contingent material pleasures. Derrida, his generally subtle engagement with Kant notwithstanding, partici­ pates in this line of analysis in “Economimesis” when he points out that the treatment of disinterestedness in Kant’s third critique is framed by a discussion of salaries (4). Any demystifying project, I take it, depends on the claim that some particular form of mystification is a common enough condition that it needs to be challenged. And yet the evidence of the paintings of Old Masters should make us pause before going too far with a diagnosis of nineteenth-century culture that includes interest as a mystified element. Take a huge Turner canvas exhibited in 1820: Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaele, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (fig. 2.19). Its long title says a good deal—but so do the jewels fascinating La Fornarina at roughly the center of the image (fig. 2.20). Contemplating the human exchange at the heart of the work, one thinks of the bargaining of Browning’s Andrea del Sarto I have already cited, but also of the golden hues that color his ambition (in the face of the “common greyness that silvers everything”): “If you would sit thus by me every night / I should work better, do you comprehend? / I mean that I should earn more, give you more.” A golden city below him, his works around him (rendered by Turner as canvases, not frescoes, so he can show Raphael musing on their placement), the privileges attendant on the artist’s

Fig. 2.19  Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia, 1820. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

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Fig. 2.20  Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (detail), 1820. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate.

achievements are multiplied; the painter complacently reflects while at the heart of this material display of his work we find the pleasure of his beloved, which is a different, but evidently not unrelated, boon. Certainly, the insistence on sealing the aesthetic off from much that motivates liking in daily life (a desirable lover, a rich gift, pride in creation) is bound to be a vulnerable point in Kant’s aesthetics, and it is there that Bourdieu goes, as does Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals. The sociologist and the philologist both identify the ascetic drives behind Kant’s aesthetics, because both of them view the earlier philosopher through Schopenhauerian glasses.37 “Kant intended to pay art a tribute,” notes Nietzsche, “when he singled out from the qualities of beauty those which constitute the glory of knowledge: impersonality and universality.” It  is the drives that motivate celebration of these qualities that the philosopher goes on to address in the essay on asceticism in Genealogy of Morals, in a brilliant long sequence built out of a network of quotations from The Critique of Judgement, a great deal of irony, and a number of cheerfully vulgar gestures toward Kant’s notorious personal chastity. Nietzsche’s account of Kant’s claims is not inaccurate, but it is fully tendentious, in part because it identifies the absence of actual ma­ter­ial experience (by which he means an acquaintance with artists and with sex) of philosophers in general (by which he means Kant) as the source of their tendency to abstraction, figured unsurprisingly as a kind of impotence (“a fat worm of error”):

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  95 Whether or not this was essentially a mistake is not what I am dealing with here; all I want to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, just considered art and beauty from the position of “spectator,” instead of viewing the aesthetic problem through the experiences of the artist (the creator), and thus inadvert­ ently introduced the “spectator” himself into the concept “beautiful.” I just wish this “spectator” had been sufficiently known to the philosophers of beauty!— I  mean as a great personal fact and experience, as a fund of strong personal experiences, desires, surprises, and pleasures in the field of beauty! But as I fear, the opposite has always been the case: and so we receive definitions from them, right from the start, in which the absence of more sensitive personal experience sits in the shape of a fat worm of basic error, as in that famous definition Kant gives of the beautiful. Kant said: “Something is beautiful if it gives pleasure without interest.”

At this point the quoting ends and Nietzsche’s commentary takes off, with a s­ imple but eloquently incredulous re-statement: “Without interest! . . .” Quickly the example of artists themselves—as opposed to the denatured fantasy of the spectator or  watcher (“Zuschauer,” with its implication of uninvolved spectatorship)—is brought to bear against the weight of Kant’s disinterest. Nietzsche cites Stendhal’s famous description of beauty from On Love, as “a promise of happiness.” “Here, in any event,” notes Nietzsche about the words of this admirer and artist, “precisely that which Kant exclusively emphasized in the aesthetic condition is rejected and canceled: le désintéressement.” “Who is right,” he asks, “Kant or Stendhal?”38 Nietzsche’s citation opens up for his argument a rich vein of analysis combin­ ing the historical nature of taste and the complicated nature of happiness. The well-known and suggestive tag from On Love, “Beauty is only the promise of happiness,” does not simply eroticize the aesthetic by making it more and less than an end in itself, though it does do that: a promise is by its nature never an ultimate goal, but a step toward the satisfaction of a desire, which is that for which the promise is a warrant or anticipation. While citations of On Love seldom include the historicizing claim and historical evidence that follow immediately after the truism, both entail an understanding of the aesthetic at some distance from the Kantian tradition while linking the claim of beauty not simply to the affective life (to love), but to a quite concretely imagined and specific work of art that evokes a surprising vision of what pleasure might include in its ambit. When Stendhal invites the reader to compare a classical statue to a modern one, the Medici Venus (fig. 2.21) to Canova’s Penitent Magdalene (fig. 2.22), at the time a widely admired work on display in a private collection in northern Italy, he does so in order to make a historical claim. “The happiness of a Greek,” he pro­ poses, in a reflection that doesn’t remove his argument beyond the realm of the erotic so much as expand its scope to include the pleasures of melancholy, “was different to that of a Frenchman of 1822.”39

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Fig. 2.21  Venus de’ Medici, c. 1st century BC, Uffizi, Florence, Italy.

Nietzsche’s polemic is designed to move quickly, however. He does not dwell on the nuances of his citation, nor hesitate to wonder what it might mean to find pleasure in so despondent a work of art as Canova’s downcast Magdalene. He will not stop to belabor his points because his aim is to illustrate how immediately Kant’s claims pale and wither in the face of a world more completely encountered. In contrast to the full-blooded promise of happiness, which is beauty, or the form of desire, Nietzsche cites the professional philosophers: Our aestheticians never weary of weighing in on Kant’s side, saying that under the charm of beauty, even naked female statues can be looked at “without inter­ est,” I think we are entitled to laugh a little at their expense:—the experiences of artists are “more interesting” with regard to this tricky point and Pygmalion, at all events, was not necessarily an “unaesthetic man.” (74; emphases in the original)

Nietzsche displaces the ideal of disinterestedness in ways not unrelated to the paintings of Old Masters I have cited so far, if with a polemic edge foreign to those works. As he points out, in Kant disinterest is the appropriate, or rather necessary

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Fig. 2.22  Antonio Canova, The Penitent Magdalene, c. 1790. Musei di Strada Nuova, Genova, Italy. Photo © Ian Dagnall/Alamy Stock Photo.

attitude for receiving or contemplating the beautiful, not for making it. (And, after all, Kant is almost always thinking about nature when he brings up an object of aesthetic contemplation.) However, the imbrication of erotic engagement and artistic activity evident in nineteenth-century representations of the Old Masters makes disinterested reception seem almost comically unsuitable—not least because such images, like Ingres’s Michelangelo or Picasso’s Pope, necessarily con­ struct the viewer as voyeur. And I don’t have in mind only the openly obscene works I have cited when I suggest that there is more than a little merit in following Nietzsche’s lead and thinking of the comic figure of the erotic voyeur as standing in for the subject in post-Kantian aesthetics, contemplating the pleasure of another on which he loves to gaze, but in which it is part of his fantasy that he will never fully participate. It is the kind of sensibility Ingres paints into several of his visions of artistic inspiration; the form of the Michelangelo gazing impassively from the shadows of a represented world in which he does not belong mirrors that of the viewer of the intimacies of Raphael and the Fornarina outside the painting. At the center of Ingres’s painting of the engagement of Raphael to Maria Bibbiena stands Cardinal Bibbiena, his significance further highlighted by his gestures. Taking the painter’s hand in an affectionate but forceful grip, the patron’s

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98  Material Inspirations eyes glint with what looks like affectionate insistence, especially when compared to the bland indifference of Raphael himself (his free hand recoiling back toward himself, seeking the comforting sensation of the fur trim of his cloak; see fig. 2.9). Thinking of the Cardinal’s role in the scene especially in relation to the reti­ cence of Maria Bibbiena, Sarah Betzer has recently suggested the painting shows a gesture of presentation rather than certification.40 The niece’s eyes look down modestly, or do they land on that play of hands coming in her direction, with so much agency on the part of the intermediary, such reserve on the part of the reluctant fiancé? Her own restraint suggests, in any case, that her will plays no role in an event that marks the consummation of passions not really her own. Between these two uncertain figures, the Cardinal’s clarity as to the right direc­ tion in which the artist’s drives should be moving, and his commitment to placing the desires of another in relation to himself, makes him a perfect vision of the voyeur who has broken through the space separating him from the object of his interest in order to take the matter in hand. In that sense, this painting, though it lacks the figure of the Fornarina, is one of the most interesting in the series, repre­ senting the viewer’s overidentification with the passions of the artist that led to the interest in the theme in the first place (the theme is emphasized by the presence of an uncanny watcher at the back of the canvas). This is a painting capturing a moment of loving commitment, and so both elem­ents are present in the work, but they are not distributed to the individuals who will soon plight their troth, but to the figure who wants them to do so. It is not so much that desire is confused as that it is rerouted, its sources transferred outside of the personages who convention tells us should be feeling its emotional charge. To recognize this as a representation of the relationship of art lover to art and to the imagination of artists in the nineteenth century would allow us to identify the links between a work such as this one and Robert Browning’s imagination of the unstable triangulation characteristic of Andrea del Sarto’s erotic life and artistic imaginary. I’d like to suggest that the bold triangulation of affect in Ingres’s painting is reminiscent of the way in which the jealous despair of Browning’s del Sarto, his preoccupation with the cousin to whom his wife wants to run off, comes to be of a piece with his fantasies about what people will say about him and the wife he makes available to sight in his paintings. “My every­ body’s moon,” he declares, with another of those awkwardly doubled possessives with which he indicates his role in making his wife available, “Which everybody looks on and calls his / And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn” (lines 29–31). What I am moving toward arguing is that in the battle between Kant and Nietzsche—between the ideal and the body, to put it in the stark terms with which Kant’s critics frequently like to confront his own more nuanced distinc­ tions—we find Bourdieu to be oddly committed to the powerful effectiveness of the simple Kantianism his critique requires. Unlike Nietzsche, he does not chal­ lenge Kant’s premises, nor does he dwell on his ambivalences or on the complex

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  99 results of his arguments as they do and do not have an effect in the world. The sociologist needs culture to have accepted the Kantian premise in a way at once very full and (or because) very narrow, in order to barbarously blow it up. I also want to suggest that written into the mockery implicit in Bourdieu and boldly laid out in Nietzsche we find an opportunity to think about the ways in which Kant in fact produces for the nineteenth century not a long and effective trad­ ition of disinterested relationships with the arts, but a relationship that might lead  directly to the kind of sensual engagement he identified as foreign to the aesthetic—and on which his would-be opponents not infrequently predicate their claims.41 It is easy to mock Kant’s emphasis on disinterestedness. But that ready possibil­ ity of knowing amusement probably should make us hesitate. Rather than confi­ dent certainty, we may find in such moments a chance for reflection on the sources of our ready confidence that Kant is silly for missing the evident central­ ity of interest at some of its most obvious points. The tone of Derrida’s interven­ tion in this area cuts in two directions at once, finding perhaps even more self-indulgent simplicity in the conventional nature of the criticisms it has pro­ voked than in the original formulation: “a disinterested pleasure: the formula is too well known, too received, as is the refusal it has never ceased to provoke. Anger of Nietzsche and Artaud: disinterest or uninterestedness are supereroga­ tory. Meditative murmur from Heidegger, at the end of The Origin: pleasure is superfluous or insufficient.”42 The sense of the palpable absurdity of claims for disinterestedness that Nietzsche and Bourdieu depend on for their arguments is traceable to a generally unreflected-upon tendency to identify a fairly narrow spectrum of underlying causes for human determinations. It is easy to credit the quest for wealth or for sexual pleasure as a cause for individual actions, as those are the two most easily recognizable kinds of material drives. (Sometimes the pair is muddled by the addition of the desire for status, but that category is easily reduced back to one of the other two, especially when status is equated with the possibility or certainty of achieving more wealth—or when “cultural capital” is understood as something easy to exchange for capital tout court.) But one reason why these kinds of ex­plan­ ations are designed to rebuff analysis is because they do not hold up well in the light of close inspection. Reflection quickly demonstrates that it is impossible for either greed or lust to be the fundamental wellsprings for action they are some­ times taken to be, or at least that they are never absent some further layers of conceptualization that must be accounted for. Indeed, it is not difficult to recog­ nize that unresolved tension between ideas about sex and the experience of the act might not merely be traceable to the ignorance or anxiety of the prude. In the line of critique I have been discussing, either Kant feels desires and denies them, in which case he is a prude, or he does not feel them, and he is an unnatural man. It bears saying that for all its ostensibly self-evident nature, the

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100  Material Inspirations question of desire looks quite different when raised by Nietzsche (for whom it means pleasure) as opposed to Bourdieu (for whom it is law). And yet, whether it is a question of pleasure or a law only one answer is really admissible (something like yes! or of course, or inevitably), which might make the topic a rich one for discussion (a law that is a pleasure and that allows only one response would be an interesting topic), but definitely makes it an excellent blunt instrument with which to bludgeon an opponent. No matter how clear we might be theoretically on complex nature of desire, the kind of utter predictability and centrality of the longing Bourdieu and Nietzsche believe Kant misses consistently distorts its use in polemic. And so, we find even the deeply subtle Adorno reaching for meta­ phors of sexual failure or even mutilation when he describes Kant’s aesthetics as a “castrated hedonism” (14). “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to conclude when it’s a matter of pleasure,” Jacques Derrida archly advises in response to this tendency, evoking the gap between the speed of desire and the dilation of time associated with actual enjoyment, as he identifies the hastiness in most responses to the paradoxical idea of disinterested pleasure (46). Derrida’s discussion of Kant’s claims in the Critique of Judgment is perhaps the most generous among modern theorists. He does not hesitate to point out the paradoxes impinging on the philosopher’s key exclusions (intention without intention, pleasure without interest), but he attempts to trace out the conceptual and psychic drives shaping those paradoxes. What emerges in the long and elaborate reading of Kant in Truth in Painting are not the frightened reticences of an in­ex­ peri­enced prude, but the poignant contradictions bound to accompany a project attempting to move beyond the obvious pressures shaping pleasure. Generations of theorists notwithstanding, it is evidently difficult to move beyond thinking of sexuality as an epitome of essentially interested and personal (meaning individual) motivations. It can seem silly to ask whose interests are served by sex. Still, it is the inherently generalizable nature of sexual desire and practices, coming up alongside the felt particularity at each instance, that determines the fundamentally humorous character of the erotic, that quality that makes ­sexual knowingness perhaps the chief source for unexamined self-certainties and cruelties of the sort Nietzsche wields with his characteristic abandon. But the kind of easy mockery, which in both Bourdieu and Nietzsche is used to mobilize an assent that is designed to rise from a realm beyond abstract ideas, to be grounded on the frankest expression of a common-sense relation to the world, is in fact symptomatic of a tendency to be partial in the stories we tell about sexual­ ity, art, and the material interests involved in both.43 Indeed, if—as Kant himself indicates—the nature of the truly human is at stake in our aesthetic de­ter­min­ ations, the further challenge is to recognize the way that claim places humanity against some of its most distressing limits. The limit cases where the body comes to the fore and makes our humanity something inescapably constrained and material are sexual desire in the first instance and mortality in the last. It will

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  101 remain an undeveloped claim of this book that other forms of material benefit— notably those to be found in wealth or in those vaguer categories involving repu­ tation, glory, or social status—are so many ways to talk around these two most frightening material facts. The power of Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” comes from the recognition of these contending elements combined with the refusal to resolve them. The poem ends with Andrea imagining himself in heaven, dead, still painting competitively, but fated to constant loss because of his choice to still have Lucrezia by his side—his impossible fantasy being both that his talent will inevitably save the two of them and that the passion she provokes in him (by provoking it in others) will inevitably damn them to a repetition he experiences as failure. The spectator Nietzsche finds Kantian aesthetics to have introduced into the experience of beauty—like the voyeur in Ingres and Picasso (or, we may say, the one implied in every nineteenth-century representation from the private life of an Old Master)—converts the preoccupation with the faculties of perception that had been the fundamental question in The Critique of Judgement into the op­por­ tun­ity for the emergence of displaced lust we may think of as definitional of porn­ og­raphy. The promise of happiness, which must always be individual and personal in Stendhal (and for that reason is always historically bound), in Nietzsche’s Kant becomes the inconceivably abstracted experience of the beautiful that manifests in the world as either an untenable hyperattenuated disinterestedness or, more credibly, as the hypertrophied lust of the voyeur, never fully participating at the moment of experience, Adorno’s castrated hedonist. Like Ingres, we may remember, Browning makes incongruous use of Michelangelo as a figure for displaced desire when he has Andrea del Sarto exclaim to Lucrezia, “I want you at my side / To hear them—that is, Michel Agnolo— / Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. / Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend” (lines 231–4). The energy circulating on the perimeter of the over­ lapping affective triangles in this poem moves at a peculiar speed, covering a great deal of ground to get back to the same place: the art is made for the beloved, next to the beloved, of the beloved, in order that the beloved will be able to hear from the art rival that the work is worthy. The result of—or the opportunity for—such a fantasy is the satisfaction of the erotic rival (the “friend”), which at its climax occurs at the moment of witnessing by the artistic rival. By Nietzsche’s lights both Kant and Schopenhauer are ascetics, but he admires the recognition of need that drives the later thinker. He insists in Genealogy of Morals that the disinterestedness that was for Kant a tribute to art, a way to lend it the qualities “which constitute the glory of knowledge: impersonality and univer­ sality,” is traceable to more directly personal drives in (for) Schopenhauer. And so, just a few lines after the mention of Pygmalion (“Pygmalion, at all events, was not necessarily an ‘unaesthetic man’ ”)—in a turn almost as undeveloped as the one I  am making, marked as it is by a dash and a conjunction—we return to

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102  Material Inspirations Schopenhauer, the figure who allows Nietzsche to recognize the complexities inescapably present in the passions he faults Kant for stinting: And now we come back to Schopenhauer, who stood much closer to the arts than Kant and still could not break free of the spell of Kant’s definition: why not? The situation is very odd: he interpreted the phrase “without interest” in the most personal way possible, from an experience which, in his case, must have been one of the most frequently recurring.

This regularly recurring experience of Schopenhauer’s, Nietzsche makes clear, is the agitation of sexual desire: There are few things about which Schopenhauer speaks with such certainty as the effect of aesthetic contemplation: according to him, it counteracts sexual “interestedness,” rather like lupulin and camphor, and he never tired of singing the praises of this escape from the “will” as the great advantage and use of the aesthetic condition. We might even be tempted to ask whether the basic concep­ tion of “will and representation,” the thought that redemption from the “will” could only take place through “representation” might not originate in a gen­er­al­ iza­tion of that sexual experience.  (75)

Nietzsche is quite accurate in his description of Schopenhauer, a man who identi­ fied that vexed category, the “eternal, free, serene subject of pure knowing” with the brain, but the all-important will with the genital organs.44 It is the identifica­ tion of this troubled nexus of concept and bodily need by the earlier philosopher that allows Nietzsche to locate the inescapable role of desire and fear in artistic culture: creation is never autonomous in his account, but always bound to in­spir­ ations derived from the very things that speak to interest in the world—be they individual advancement or erotic pleasure, both of which will of necessity be bound to the imagination of beauty and fear. In their introduction to an important volume on the place of Venus in art in the nineteenth century, Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott emphasize that “The unruly and contradictory nature of Venus in her absolute enthralling beauty . . . seems to indicate psychic territory that cannot easily be contained in the scope of objectcentred desire or the logic of eros.”45 In her own chapter in the volume, “Venus as Dominatrix,” Arscott describes a process in which, in the mid-nineteenth ­century, “notions of artistic identity were reworked to produce a specifically perverse sub­ ject position for the male artist.” It is a claim that she is doubtless right in arguing “has interesting implications for our understanding of the phenomenon of art for art’s sake and the claims for the autonomy of art in the modern period” (109). What would it mean to let this kind of evidence into our histories of autonomy and formalism? It was Pygmalion that fascinated the nineteenth century, not Galatea. Caroline Arscott’s magisterial treatment of the theme highlights the

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  103 masochism written into the theme, notably in Burne-Jones’s representations of the Pygmalion legend.46 Her account of masochism, like Freud’s, encompasses something well beyond pleasure, including as it does a fatal quality associated with the fundamental drives that shape our passions. “Paradoxically,” Arscott and Scott conclude, “the encounter with a goddess of the erotic and of pleasure takes us beyond the pleasure principle, and beyond eros to the realm Freud designated thanatos, or the death drive” (“Introducing Venus,” 21). As Georges Didi-Huberman has reminded us, the story of Pygmalion in Ovid is a central part of a long sequence centered on Orpheus (who largely recites it), a figure whose legend combines irresistible artistic achievement, marked as power over the constraints of the material world, with a repeated failure in the face of mortality. We find the legend of Pygmalion at the precise mid-point of the story of Orpheus, framed on one end by the triumph and catastrophe of the rescue of Eurydice and on the other end by the poet’s dismemberment by Maenads enraged by his erotic indifference.47 Pygmalion, Orpheus: any attention to these figures will find in them an un­stable commingling of creative power with abjection and ultimately with drives that, as Arscott insists, take us well outside of the realm of individual satisfaction. It is a complex very much in evidence in the case of Raphael, in whose legend a poignant early death plays such an important part. The interplay of mortality and desire in accounts of his passing serves as one useful indication of the more than comic ways in which nineteenth-century culture negotiates the material interest out of which art arises, though the theme itself is never without a significant erotic charge.48 Vasari’s account of Raphael’s passion features more than the painter’s inability to paint with­ out his lover (as Haskell might have said) by his side. The pleasure-loving artist’s death is caused by the very erotic impulses that shaped his existence. Indeed, Vasari’s life of Raphael closes with the attempt and signal failure to contain the painter’s desires. His patron, Cardinal Bibbiena, tries to marry Raphael off to his niece (hence the betrothal Ingres painted), but Raphael delays the event for so long that, in a Jamesian twist, the fiancée dies. His own subsequent demise is marked by an un­stable combination and recombination of passion with the need to keep it under wraps: Raphael kept up his secret love affairs and pursued his pleasures with no sense of  moderation. And then on one occasion he went to excess, and he returned home afterwards with a violent fever which the doctors diagnosed as having been caused by heat-stroke. Raphael kept quiet about his incontinence and, very impru­ dently, instead of giving him the restorative he needed they bled him until he grew faint and felt himself sinking. So he made his will: and first, as a good Christian, he sent his mistress away, leaving her the means to live a decent life.  (320)

This scandalous account of the death is captured by David’s student Fulchran-Jean Harriet in an extraordinary unfinished drawing from 1800 (fig. 2.23), in which the brush that was not released even at the moment of greatest intimacy falls from the

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Fig. 2.23  Fulchran-Jean Harriet, The Death of Raphael, 1800. Collection of Wheelock Whitney III. Photo: Graham Haber.

hand as death and sexual ecstasy arrive at the same time. In the background one more voyeur figure rises up, apparently a doctor preparing to bleed the dying man. His finished hand emerges from the sketch, disrupting the lovers’ embrace. The transfigured Jesus rises behind the bed. Inevitably, the sober study of archival evidence allowed historians to put the legend into question in the nineteenth cen­ tury. The insights of the new documentary art history laid out in Passavant’s Rafael von Urbino in 1839 were relayed to the readers of the Penny Magazine by Anna Jameson in a series of articles in 1844 (fig. 2.24).

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Fig. 2.24  “Portrait of Raphael with the Marriage of Mary and Joseph.” Wood engraving. “Essays on the Lives of Remarkable Painters,” No. XXXI. The Penny Magazine, November 9, 1844.

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106  Material Inspirations Jameson’s concern to revisit the terms of the artist’s death, which she does at least three times in the course of the series, becomes all the clearer when the texts are read together in her Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters of 1845. “There was a vulgar idea at one time prevalent,” Jameson writes, “that Raphael was a man of vicious and dissipated habits, and even died a victim to his excesses; this slander has been silenced for ever by indisputable evidence to the contrary, and now we may reflect with pleasure that nothing rests on surer evidence than the admirable qualities of Raphael; that no earthly renown was ever so unsullied by reproach.”49 Jameson’s commitment to his admirable qualities leads her to a wholesale recasting of the demise of her ideal painter: In possession of all that ambition could desire—for him the cup of life was still running over with love, hope, power, glory—when, in the very prime of manhood and in the midst of vast undertakings, he was seized with a violent fever, caught, it is said, in superintending some subterranean excavations, and expired after an illness of fourteen days. His death took place on Good Friday (his birthday), 1520 . . . Great was the grief of all classes; unspeakable that of his friends and scholars. The pope had sent every day to inquire after his health . . . and when told that the beloved and admired painter was no more, he broke out into lamentations on his own and the world’s loss. The body was laid on a bed of state, and above it was suspended the last work of that divine hand, the glorious Transfiguration . . . his remains were laid to rest in the Pantheon near those of his betrothed bride, Maria de Bibbiena, in a spot chosen by himself during his lifetime.  (258)

The connection to Christ suggested by the date of Raphael’s birth and death is further underlined by the last image reproduced in Jameson’s work, entirely out of any chronological order: his relatively early Deposition, or Entombment, which is identified with the ambiguous caption “The Entombment.—Raphael,” and evi­ dently echoes the lamentations after the painter’s death that Jameson highlights (fig. 2.25). Not satisfied with giving him an extraordinarily distinguished afterlife, Jameson also works hard to deny the well-known legend of Raphael’s end. And so it is that even though analysis will quickly reveal the shadow of lust darkening the language in which she attempts to weave a virtuous end for her admired painter (subterranean excavations leading to a violent fever as the cup of life runs over), she still manages to do what Chigi and Bibbiena couldn’t: to efface Raphael’s stor­ied beloved. “The portrait called the Fornarina,” she writes, working to dis­ appoint generations of sentimental art lovers in a quick clause preceded by a turn to architectural drawings, “is supposed to represent a young girl to whom Raphael had attached himself soon after his arrival in Rome, but this appears very d ­ oubtful” (260). It is in his death, then, not his love life, that Raphael comes to have a material existence that signifies for Jameson. In this she is following a tradition as im­port­ant

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Fig. 2.25  “The Entombment.—Raphael.” In: Anna Jameson (1859). Memoirs of Early Italian Painters, and of the Progress of Painting in Italy from Cimabue to Bassano (London: John Murray), 260.

in the period as his passionate relationship to his model. Out of many representa­ tions of his death, we may cite Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret’s Honors Rendered to Raphael on his Deathbed, which was shown at the Salon of 1806 to much praise and acquired by the Emperor Napoleon. This canvas again shows the artist on a bed, but now it is at the Vatican. The Pope strews him with flowers; Michelangelo enters with Giulio Romano to render him homage; and the crowd around him appears to merge with that at the foreground of the Transfiguration (see fig. 2.26). A print of the image was on display at the Salon in 1822, and saw wide sales.50 So important is this admirable demise well into the nineteenth century that Jameson’s biography,

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Fig. 2.26  Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret, Honors Rendered to Raphael on His Deathbed, 1806. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio.

like others of the period, ends perversely in the nineteenth century with a second funeral, an event that took place as the aftermath of an exhumation itself under­ taken to resolve a dispute that arose for no clear reason among antiquarians about a skull held at the Academy of St. Luke in Rome said to be that of the painter.51 In 1833, the Pantheon is dug up before authorities ready to ascertain the truth of the matter and with artists on hand to document the scene (see fig. 2.27). Raphael’s remains are found in a suitably august resting place—“in a vault behind the high altar” (after all, he was born and died on Good Friday)— and “certified,” Jameson writes, as his “by indisputable proofs.” On October 18, 1833, a second funeral ceremony is held. The reigning pope (Gregory XVI) provides a marble sarcophagus, and, in an event it is difficult to read as any­ thing other than the nineteenth century correcting the historical record to reflect its fantasy of the values that should have existed when Raphael died, the body is re-interred, in the presence of more than three thousand spectators, “including almost all the artists, the officers of government, and other persons of the highest rank in Rome” (258–9). Evidently, for Jameson, mortal remains present an acceptable occasion for the representation of glory, but sexuality needs to be shunted to the side—or perhaps we can say that the dead body replaces the living sexual one, evocation of the corpse doing work the body of the lover can no longer do in culture. We may be tempted to read in such work a class-determined prudishness, the middle-class author focusing on what is good for readers from the laboring classes to know. After all, the magazine was brought out by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and it would be a complicated form of usefulness to learn that Raphael might have died from too much love-making. But such an analysis would

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Fig. 2.27  Giambattista Borani, after Vincenzo Camuccini, Raphael’s Skeleton at the Opening of his Tomb, c. 1833. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark, www. thorvaldsensmuseum.dk. Distributed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication; https://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

not adequately account for the complex response to the Old Masters that I have been tracing in various media, or, rather, such a class-based cloaking might best be understood as another sign of the pressure the figure of the artist brings to bear on culture. Ultimately, evidence as wide-ranging as the representations of artists on canvas or in verse, and Nietzsche’s open critique in Genealogy of Morals, makes it clear that the dominance of the idea of disinterestedness in the nine­ teenth century can be exaggerated, that the project of artistic autonomy that has so often been seen as the necessary tendency of art by both those who disapprove of the notion and by those who see its emergence as necessary, is not reflected in the artistic imaginary, or the critical imagination of artists, in the very period when one might expect to find it most clearly manifested. It probably makes sense to understand the recurrence of the elements I have been emphasizing—of sensuality shading into sexual desire on the one side and into a memory of death on the other—as suggesting a fundamental irresolution, even an irresolvable condition. The shuttling between the material and the ideal evident in the replacement of the libidinal form of Raphael’s material inspiration with something more fatal, though no less intimate—the bed of passion becom­ ing the deathbed—may best be understood as a manifestation of an unresolvable

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110  Material Inspirations dialectic rather than as an instance of historical development. After all, the ­complex of ideas that emerges in the nineteenth century returns in more recent reflections on creativity. One might cite Cindy Sherman’s 1989 insertion of her own body into the place of the Fornarina as one attempt to evoke the play between fallible flesh and artifice provoked by the work of the Old Master, but the idea is already present in the combination of human presence and staged artifice of the Untitled Film Stills with which she first made her mark. More recently, Joel-Peter Witkin’s appalling practice of including human cadavers in his recreations of Old Masters allows him to fold into his 2003 restaging of Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina at once the sexuality and the morbidity of the legend inherited from an earlier period, and to make newly pressing the shock created when the basely material intrudes onto the surface of the art object. Jameson’s account of Raphael’s Transfiguration is transcribed verbatim from Franz Kugler’s 1842 Handbook of the History of Painting, and it links the work with the legend of the painter’s death in ways typical of the period. Though Kugler directs the viewer to the “divine bliss” of the upper part of the canvas, his descrip­ tion dwells on the dangerous earthly (even subterranean) elements below—the part of the canvas he describes as filled with “the calamities and miseries of human life, the rule of demoniac power, the weakness even of the faithful when unassisted.” It is this dark realm that leads above: “look on high for aid and strength in adversity. Above, in the brightness of divine bliss, undisturbed by the sufferings of the lower world, we behold the source of consolation and redemp­ tion from evil” (498).52 The question of the place of human desires in relation to the fine arts is an issue of long standing. When Hegel posits that art “has the capacity and the vocation to mitigate the ferocity of desires” (48), he is evoking a cheering convention that predates him and that will be cited well into the twentieth century in arguments for the value of the arts. But the Aesthetics does not present this claim as a conclu­ sion so much as the occasion for reflection that makes the force of art phe­nom­ eno­logic­al, not simply moral. The challenge of desire as Hegel understands it, in an elaboration of Kant, is the loss of freedom entailed in the moment of apparent license. Any kind of artistic representation, even of the very passions driving the artist, involves a kind of externalization that establishes the conditions for the  possibility of reflection tending inevitably toward freedom (48–9). “Art,” he argues, “by means of its representations, while remaining within the sensuous sphere, liberates man at the same time from the power of sensuousness” (49). Which is to say that while ascetics of every stripe typically imagine a vast chasm separating the sensuous realm from the spiritual, that is not in fact what the nine­ teenth century shows us at its most thoughtful. When Hegel writes that “the sen­ suous aspect of art is spiritualized,” it is precisely because “the spirit appears in art as made sensuous” (39; emphases in the original). That the spiritual is present in art only as a sensuous fact or experience leads Hegel to the very question inherent

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  111 in all of the representations of artists I have been discussing: “in what way the necessary sensuous side of art is operative in the artist as his subjective pro­duct­ ive activity” (39). The resolution Hegel offers to the complex paradox he posits is to recognize that the sensuous is precisely what allows the emergence of some­ thing beyond itself, and that therefore even art created in response to various sensuous drives may afford a path toward freedom that is on the other side (but always on the other side) of human representation rightly understood. Hegel understands not as a claim of philosophy, but as philosophy’s inheritance from culture, the tendency to identify an unbreachable distance between on the one hand “the common world of reality and earthly temporality, borne down by need and poverty, hard pressed by nature, enmeshed in matter, sensuous ends and their enjoyment, mastered and carried away by natural impulses and passions” and on the other “eternal ideas . . . a realm of thought and freedom . . . universal laws and prescriptions.” He presents a vision of the advent of abstraction that is as violent an occurrence as the most committed Heideggerian might have proposed, a condition or event that strips the world of its “enlivened and flowering reality” as a kind of retaliation for “the distress and violence which it [nature] has suffered from it itself.” Hegel is not interested in arguing for the existence of a relationship between abstraction and the world of human experiences that he understands to be self-evident. He is concerned with describing art’s particular relationship to this structure, which is to provide the experience of the two elem­ents as in some measure reconciled. The externalization of the world of ex­peri­ence through art, along with the subsequent possibility of reflection upon the nature of that experi­ ence, mean that a number of common explanations for the value of art are no longer valid: “other ends, like instruction, purification, bettering, financial gain, struggling for fame and honour, have nothing to do with the work of art as such, and do not determine its nature” (55). Few writers come anywhere near Hegel in their commitment to truly engaging the elements that go into the dialectic, to fully keeping alive both parts, but one finds a surprisingly similar sensibility at play even among authors of quite differ­ ent intellectual dispositions. And so it is that while Jameson, like Kugler, aims to point the attention of her readers to the upper register of Raphael’s Transfiguration, the brightness of the divine bliss, evidently a great deal of the fascination of the canvas and its maker has always resided in what lies below. I am suggesting that to look past the lower edges of the canvas, to the body the nineteenth century was always ready to find extended below it, will allow us to recognize the subtlety of what Kugler describes as “the twofold action contained in this picture, to which shallow critics have taken exception.” The death of the artist was no less present to the popular imagination than his love life, especially after Rogers’s evocation of the moment in Italy (1822, 1828), which gained new popularity in 1830 when it was republished with illustrations by Turner and Stothard, including a vignette of the very scene (fig. 2.28), by the

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Fig. 2.28  John Henry Robinson, after Thomas Stothard, The Death of Raphael. In: Samuel Rogers (1830). Italy, a Poem (London: Cadell), 144.

latter artist, accompanying the sensually morbid “A Funeral,” and illustrating the following passage: And when all beheld Him where he lay, how changed from yesterday Him in that hour cut off, and at his head His last great work; when, entering in, they look’d Now on the dead, then on that masterpiece— Now on his face lifeless and colourless, Then on those forms divine that lived and breathed, And would live for ages—all were moved. And sighs burst forth and loudest lamentations.53

Ruskin owned not only this volume, which was seminal in the creation of his taste, but also Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy: Including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria, which from its first edition in 1843 also quoted the passage as a culmination and seal on an account of the Transfiguration that presented that work improbably enough as a response by its maker to the vitiation of his reputation by the proliferation of works by his

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  113 s­ tudio—and therefore of necessity as his autograph and unique work, at least at the moment of his death: It was undertaken, as Vasari tells us, to redeem his reputation, which had suf­ fered from the numerous works whose execution he had intrusted [sic] to his scholars and which were naturally inferior to those executed entirely by his own hand. The Transfiguration was painted for the cathedral of Narbonne by order of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, archbishop of that city, afterwards Clement VII, and was not completed when the illustrious artist was cut off by death at the early age of 37. It was suspended over his corpse for public homage, while the last traces of his master-hand were yet visible upon the canvas.54

Even Ruskin, who disliked the painting, was moved by the combination of the forceful dialectic it made visible and its biographical association with the death of the artist enforced by so many elements shaping the reception of the work. Here he is in the 1870s: And it is necessary, at least for the understanding of Christian art, and I think also not disadvantageous to your understanding of human life, that you should learn the piece of elementary theology written for you in the picture which of all others became most renowned as the work of man’s hand in the Church— Raphael’s Transfiguration. That picture represents, above, the strength; under­ neath, the weakness of apostolic power. That Raphael chose rather to dwell on the agony of the demoniac than the glory of the vision on the Mount, was the evil of his day. Take at least the final good of his life in the interpretation of the picture from which his hand sank to the grave.55

* * * What is the interest in pointing out that when we search in the fantasies of artistic creativity left us by artists, visual as well as literary, we find not autonomy, but heteronomy, or—as that quality is experienced in life—dependence; not disinter­ est, but its opposite? It seems to me that once we move away from believing not simply the premise that the absence of base desires is in fact characteristic of great art (and how many today would be willing to own that claim and all it entails?), but that the idea was ever fully adopted in the nineteenth century, we are left with a number of questions about art culture, desire, and materiality. Is it a class dis­ tinction that determines the uneven relationship to the erotic in art? On this view, the erotic passions written into Raphael’s legend would need to be cleaned up for the lower-class readership of the Penny Magazine and the middle-class audience of Jameson’s popularizations of art history, the public vision of the corpse lying in state taking over from the private one of the sexualized body. Or do changes in

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114  Material Inspirations emphasis in the accounts of Raphael (from the focus on the Fornarina in the first quarter of the century to the growing emphasis on the artist’s death from the ­middle years of the century) indicate a change in culture, perhaps a greater ­conceptual sophistication that can be moved by the troubling sentiments entailed in death and not by the titillating ones of romance? What these apparently contra­ dict­ory and clearly inadequate explanations have in common is that they indicate a richer relationship between matter and idea in the nineteenth century than is suggested by the narrow but influential line initiated by Kant and sustained by the demystifying fantasies of the twentieth century: they both stand against the ten­ dency to try to separate base desires from high culture, to understand the erotic as entailing a personal license that makes it distinct from the abstraction often associated with principles: Hegel’s “common world of reality and earthly tem­por­ al­ity, borne down by need and poverty, hard pressed by nature, enmeshed in mat­ ter, sensuous ends and their enjoyment, mastered and carried away by natural impulses and passions” opposed to “eternal ideas . . . a realm of thought and free­ dom . . . universal laws and prescriptions.”

5.  Hesiod or Orpheus The original impulse that drove me to reflect on the material in this chapter was a fairly limited and negative one: to demonstrate that the disinterestedness that was mooted by Kant and that Bourdieu presented as such a central if vulnerable pillar of modern aesthetics had never been the prop to concepts of art it was sometimes taken to be, so much as a counterintuitive provocation. I still believe that argu­ ment is fundamentally right and important to make, but the claim can seem pretty thin, even impoverished, in relation to all that is interesting in the period, not least because it still accepts an inadequately stark binary relationship between desire and its opposites. What we find in the nineteenth century is less of a mysti­ fied resistance to desire, needing twentieth-century liberation, than a set of extremely sophisticated arguments about history and modernity, and about the role of relics from the past in establishing that relationship. The issues at stake will  only emerge with the recognition of the richness and complexity of the nineteenth century’s own responses to historic breaks and to the force of material remains. So that the conclusions of twentieth-century commentators won’t obscure the generative uncertainties of earlier eras, it is necessary to push beyond influential claims (themselves with clear nineteenth-century sources), in order to allow ourselves to more fully encounter what is still vibrant and unresolved in the period. Jacques Rancière’s challenge to Pierre Bourdieu’s extraordinarily influential formulations, which will be addressed more fully in the next chapter, provides a helpful source for reflecting on the topics that concern this book, not only because

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  115 of the subtlety of Rancière’s account of class and the historical-placedness of his argument, but because of the way in which both the role of class and of history come together in a nuanced, sympathetic account of the dynamic situation of art in the nineteenth century. Rancière’s engagement with the period in The Philosopher and his Poor (1983)—which receives a fuller though less polemical development in Aesthesis (2011)—is premised on what he compellingly identifies as a not yet determined relationship between politics and culture at a time, “when,” as he puts it, “philosophers believe in the future of equality and proletar­ ians in the inspiration of poets.”56 Rancière’s approach, which develops a far more interesting relationship between ethics and aesthetics than was available to the main lines of progressive thought for most of the twentieth century, is also bound to open up a better ground from which to engage with the qualities of art at a time when it has “detached itself from its old functions and judges but still has not closed itself up in its autonomy” (199). To imagine the nineteenth century not as participating in a process premised on a deluded autonomy, but as in fact end­ lessly negotiating between lost limits and a freedom that never arrived, is to open up discussion to a probing, questioning, unsettled culture of art that includes the dynamic relationship between inspiration and the material promises and disap­ pointments of life and death. Throughout the century we see authors and visual artists returning not only to these fundamental issues, but often to the very forms in which they had been typically formulated before them, to the inherited repre­ sentations of the relationship between the world and something more. In the sec­ ond half of the century, we find both the new subtlety bound to come to the fore when ideas become sufficiently established to provoke self-conscious reflection, and a number of vivid new imaginations of the relationships linking desire, pleasure, and death with inspiration. Gustave Moreau returned to the topic of Hesiod several times throughout his career—that primal Greek poet loved by the muses (fig. 2.29). His most moving representations, however, are not the paintings showing the apotheosis of the poet accompanied by one or more of the admiring figures of the muses, but a set of drawings that attempt to capture a far more vulnerable moment of transition, the astonishing turning point when the shepherd is singled out and first provided the unsought gift of inspiration (fig. 2.30). The Theogony opens with a celebration of the divine existence of the muses, their lovely bodies bathing in sacred streams or dancing, their role singing of deities. The shift to earth, and so to Hesiod, is sudden, and unmotivated, and moves quickly from third- to first-person, as it has to: And one day they taught Hesiod glorious song while he was shepherding his lambs under holy Helicon, and this word first the goddesses said to me—the Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus . . . “Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as

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116  Material Inspirations though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things.” So said the . . . daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvelous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of ­themselves both first and last.57

Fig. 2.29  Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muses, 1862. Musée Moreau, Paris. Photo © The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Fig. 2.30  Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1857. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bequest of David P. Becker.

Moreau’s 1857 drawing of this momentous event has a number of sources, but none more important than the hugely influential illustrations of Homer by John Flaxman, which themselves index an earlier source (fig. 2.31). Which is to say, the print of Homer and his Muse demonstrates that what the French painter is d ­ iscovering in the story of literary beginnings is a new version of that other erotic legend, the “Origin of Painting.” Indeed, Moreau takes the stylized and notably not interactive representation Flaxman borrowed from Greek vase painting and makes it much more intimate, especially in a slightly later version (1858, fig. 2.32), in which the interaction of the muse and poet is even closer: his right hand—languid in the earlier version—seems to point to his lap, while the highlighting in white chalk suggests the agitation that his blooming staff so effectively represents. Hands, staff, leaves, cloth: everything moves toward the same end, the representation of a gentle but thoroughgoing sexual agitation. Inevitably, as the lips of the muse approach, they suggest as much a kiss as whisper; her limbs appear to pause just at the point of an ­intimate caress.

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Fig. 2.31  John Flaxman, Homer Invoking the Muse, engraved by William Blake, The Illiad of Homer, 2nd edition, 1805. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The nineteenth-century vogue for representing the Old Masters belongs in a  tradition in which the representation of pleasure and even of the loss of self in the moment of inspiration provide figures for an aesthetic sensibility in which autonomy is not necessary, and certainly nor defining. Understood this way, as a manifestation of the attempt to represent the difficult negotiation between world and creation, the tradition may be said to include not only Moreau’s representa­ tion of Hesiod’s fecund pleasure, but also darker visions, such as his 1865 painting of Orpheus as a head washed up on the coast of Thrace after being torn to pieces by the Maenads, a work in which the body is evoked by its absence, and by its supplement, the beautiful figure holding the poet’s remains (fig. 2.33). The rem­in­ is­cence of the absent body implied in this image in turn opens up without resolv­ ing into representation the memory of the bacchanal at which the poet was torn limb from limb in a divine frenzy. Hesiod was a shepherd, a country boy associated with the most material cares—a mere belly, as the muses say. He is transformed into a poet, but his work opens with the memory of the earlier state, with the memory of transformation, or even transfiguration. The trace of the muses of which he is meant to sing first and last is the memory of inspiration, which will always be a memory of the prior condition—of the mere belly—and of becoming something more. I have noted

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Fig. 2.32  Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1858. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC3.4.

how easy it is to mock the simple version of Kant that can seem like prudishness to Nietzsche or mystified elitist interest to Bourdieu. While it is not difficult to understand sexuality as an emblem of absolutely interested and personal pleas­ ure, however, this in itself is only part of the story. Although Bourdieu, like Nietzsche, evokes Schopenhauer as the ultimate manifestation of the ascetic drives both take to underlie Kantian aesthetics, Schopenhauer’s treatment of sex, as at least Nietzsche well recognizes, is fraught with an anxiety that makes it something different from simple pleasure. It is the ultimate source of both hedonistic fantasy and moralist censure to imagine that we own ourselves most during the act of sex—that our choices in that realm at least are free, even au­tono­ mous.58 Certainly Schopenhauer, like Freud after him, was not under this par­ ticular illusion. “It may be said that man is concrete sexual impulse,” writes the philosopher in The World as Will and Idea, “for his origin is an act of copulation, and the desire of his desires is an act of copulation, and this impulse alone per­ petuates and holds together the whole of his phenomenal appearance.” This vision of sex has a purpose (or purposiveness) beneath it that is chillingly imper­ sonal: “It is true that the will-to-live manifests itself primarily as an effort to

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Fig. 2.33  Gustave Moreau, Head of Orpheus, 1865. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

maintain the individual; yet this is only a stage towards the effort to maintain the species . . . The sexual impulse is therefore the most complete manifestation of the will-to-live” (2:514). Schopenhauer’s tortured response to desire is hard to miss. Alexander Nehamas writes of the philosopher’s serious attention to sexuality as premised on a need “to denounce it with an almost desperate determination.”59 But it is worth noting how disinterested the sex-drive is in his articulation. Its apparent aims—to repro­ duce the self or even please the individual—are ultimately screens for a far more fundamental drive to maintain the species. But then, I imagine we don’t have to go as far as Schopenhauer did in order to imagine sexuality to entail something more and less than pleasure and individual interest. In the chapter to follow I will be tracing the vicissitudes of death as a fundamental inspiration in Ruskin, tracking the movements of the figure he identifies as a “strange Aphrodite.” In my discussion of the loves of the Old Masters I hope I have indicated some of the ways in which the link between the foam-born goddess of love and the processes leading to new human creation might be forged out of an alloy including at once

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Desire and the Body of Inspiration  121 desire and something fatal. While this is interesting enough as a vision of ­individual creativity, I will be arguing in the next chapter for ways in which a looming sense of death can be understood as more than a personal matter, how the concept of a strange Aphrodite opens up into an ethical project of broad social scope, though not for that reason free of the shaping force of individual passions or experiences.

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3

“Strange Aphrodite” When Ruskin, toward the close of the “Two Boyhoods” chapter of Modern Painters, identifies a haunting, spectral Aphrodite as an inescapable figure for the unavoidability of death in the productions of his most admired artist, he is developing a line of argument about Turner and about destruction and haunting the complexity of which has yet to receive its full due—not simply because of the intricate network of historical and art-historical reference it entails, but because it has proved difficult to attend sympathetically to the exercise in cross-class reflection in which it emerges. Although Ruskin’s explanation of what he means by death gestures at a long period including the Greeks, he has in mind a particularly nineteenth-century phenomenon, or set of phenomena, including not only the military conflict that had characterized the continent during the long epoch of Napoleonic struggle but also the economic violence typical of the unbridled cap­ it­al­ism of Britain in his day—a lethal combination that shapes Turner’s achievement even when he appears to be looking away from it. “What were the robber’s casual pang, or the rage of the flying skirmish,” Ruskin asks rhetorically, thinking of a new era of global conflagration, “compared to the work of the axe, and the sword, and the famine, which was done during this man’s youth on all the hills and plains of the Christian earth, from Moscow to Gibraltar?” Looking back on the Napoleonic era, Ruskin does not see simply the period of military prowess or inevitable British success so many of his contemporaries did, but a brutal, blooddrenched, era. “He was eighteen years old when Napoleon came down on Arcola,” Ruskin writes (stretching the chronology a little in order to make a point), “Look on the map of Europe, and count the blood-stains on it, between Arcola and Waterloo.” Death is a shaping pressure on all art for Ruskin. But the English death is specifically modern in its violence and in its relation to social misery—and so, a particularly material phenomenon between figure and fact (and it is typical that the stains move from the map in which they are emblematic, to the field of battle as he proceeds): “Not alone those blood-stains on the Alpine snow, and the blue of the Lombard plain,” he writes of the young Turner: The English death was before his eyes also . . . the life trampled out in the slime of the street, crushed to dust amidst the roaring of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into howling winter wind along five hundred leagues of rock-fanged shore. Or, worst of all, rotted down to forgotten graves through years of ignorant Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   123 patience, and vain seeking for help from man, for hope in God—infirm, imperfect yearning, as of motherless infants starving at the dawn; oppressed royalties of captive thought, vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair.1

Blood, slime, dust, and the rock-fanged shore that will finish off the damage after brutal winds and indifferent waters have done their worst. Lives trampled, crushed, tossed away or rotted. The work of this extraordinary passage is in the first instance to put into relation quite concrete material forms of damage that are sometimes kept apart: the bloodstains of war take on a different meaning when linked to the cold-blooded inglorious injuries Ruskin associates with the indifference of capitalism: the sudden accident in the modern city or factory, or the fate of the body of the sailor drowned in the course of international trade. Ruskin, in fact, exaggerates Turner’s youth in order to make the period of Napoleonic struggle overlap at least in part with his formative years. Turner was born in 1775, fully twenty-one years before the 1796 campaign in northern Italy during which the Battle of Arcole took place, which marked the advent of Napoleon’s inter­nation­al military career. But, really, his point is not to recall the decades of continental struggles so much as to vivify the English death, for which violent episodes during the campaigns of the French are simply a more vivid stand-in. The last horrific image in the passage, with its suggestion of myriad storm-tossed sailors coming to further harm around the rocky coast combines both trade and warfare—the tossing action capturing the irresponsible agency of men who send sailors to their deaths, as well as the indifferent power of the sea which has the last and most distressing power over their bodies. The question of responsibility for damage to others that comes to the fore in the early parts of the passage is not lost when Ruskin turns to the psychic injuries that will result from the condition he describes. The absence of human aid or divine hope eventuates in a mental condition that manifests as a social crisis involving at once those who suffer unselfconsciously (with “ignorant patience, and vain seeking”) and those who attempt to reflect (“oppressed royalties of captive thought”), making both categories of response into manifestations of unrealized “bleak, amazed despair.” Between what needs to be read as two extremes of social existence, and serving to link those who suffer in patience with those who reflect in despair, Ruskin identifies a crisis of unsatisfiable compensatory desire, as the yearnings of starving children who have lost their mother becomes a figure combining a painful sense of material lack (starvation) with an irrecoverable emotional void impossible to repair (the loss of a mother in childhood). I spent a great deal of time in the previous chapter discussing a work with a relatively modest place in the history of art: a painting of a woman sitting on a man’s lap that I have proposed we understand for what it shows us, for both the desire and human warmth produced at the juncture of the two bodies, and the inspiration that desire and warmth contribute toward the making of art. I have

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124  Material Inspirations found a source for the subject, and made some propositions about its afterlife, and I have insisted both matter. Unsurprisingly the other painting that has figured in  this argument—the one that rises over the artist’s deathbed, that features incongruously at the junction of Raphael and the Fornarina in most of Ingres’s paintings of the two in the studio—had itself an important and more widespread presence in nineteenth-century attempts to establish the relationship between the material world and something beyond it. The kind of cultural work done each time the painting is displayed above a dead body is a continuation of what Nietzsche was not alone in finding in the image itself: “a reflection of the eternal, primal pain” that he identified as “the only ground of the world.” His bold account of the piece in The Birth of Tragedy is typical of analyses throughout the nineteenth century (and beyond) in its focus on arriving at a conceptual rec­on­cili­ ation of the gaps left open within the painting: here “semblance” is a reflection of the eternal contradiction, the father of all things. From this semblance there now rises, like some ambrosian perfume, a vision-like new world of semblance, of which those who are trapped in the first semblance see nothing—a luminous hovering in purest bliss and wide-eyed contemplation, free of all pain. Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we see before us that Apolline world of beauty and the ground on which it rests, that terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we grasp, intuitively, the reciprocal necessity of these two things.2

Nietzsche’s allegorization of Raphael’s painting prioritizes the lower register, and reverses the logic of the piece. Instead of being a record of human failings when faith proves insufficient in the world, the pain and unresolved suffering down below is the source of the need for the emergence of a figure of bliss up above. The philosopher had laid out the wisdom of Silenus, three pages earlier, a starkly bleak account of existence. “The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach,” this oxymoronic blend of natural and divine insight, philosophy and inebriation, tells King Midas, who has had him captured him for the precise reason of gaining his knowledge, “wanting to not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon” (23). In Raphael’s work Nietzsche identifies an irreconcilable blend of misery as the ground from which a fantasy of bliss arises. The failure of desire, knowledge, and help provokes a vision of relief, if one available only to the viewer of the painting, not to those within it. And, of course, in such an analysis the painted bliss stands revealed as a doubled “semb­ lance,” a fiction better suited to illustrate the failings for which it tries to compensate than to provide any kind of relief from experience. I emphasized in the previous chapter the return of figures for erotic desire and for death—generally in close proximity—as so many ways in which artists reflected on a set of relationships that never could be experienced or imagined as

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   125 fully resolved. The weight of the lover on the lap, the body in the throes of passion or death: by evoking such fundamentally physical experiences in relation to the process of art making, paintings of these sort emphasize the place of the material world on the creative imagination of makers. Raphael’s Transfiguration had a special place in the complex I have been describing, because it provided an open invitation to reflect on the inescapable relationship between ideal perfection and the fallibly mundane. For this reason it became—alongside the life of Raphael itself—a site to which the nineteenth century returned repeatedly when thinking about the challenging, unresolved relationship between the pressures of material and the hope for something beyond it. As I suggested in the previous chapter, discussion of the intersection of ma­ter­ ial interests and creativity is bound to be distorted by two distinct but not unrelated forms of pressure. On the one hand we find what I have argued is a recurrent tendency to look to the pressures of the body to simplify the nature of the force of material drives and experiences. On the other hand we find what I think is not an unrelated phenomenon though one that often appears more academic or bloodless than the kinds of knowing evocations of the passions I touched on above— that is, the projection onto the nineteenth century of the inevitable ascendancy of tendencies that later periods have come to feel they require to have existed in order to believe that they have been overcome. The drive to imagine that the natural tendency of nineteenth-century culture was toward a greater degree of artistic autonomy is of long standing (indeed it begins in the nineteenth century), but the force in culture of that idea has largely been sustained by students of later periods, who need it in order to tell important stories about the unavoidable rise of formalism, or the inescapable force of mystified claims of disinterestedness. Whether the emergence of formalism is highlighted in such arguments, or the dominance of the claim of disinterestedness, both tendencies typically work together, supporting each other in setting limits for the study of culture. It is not that the instances I have been discussing are unknown to students of the nineteenth century, but that the idea of an inevitable drive toward disinterestedness or abstraction will tend to limit their status to being so many examples of bad faith or confusion. Jacques Rancière’s work is helpful precisely because it does not over-emphasize a telos, and instead offers a salutary conceptual subtlety in his description of an era in which older dispensations are no longer available, but new ones have not yet become fully established, in which the culture of art has separated itself from its sources in earlier traditions and yet has not closed itself off in a hermetic autonomy. It is a historical claim closely allied to his insistence that there is something in the astonishing rise of interest in art as a category that makes the topic politically pressing. And so it is that Rancière’s response to Bourdieu is sharpened by methodological challenges that find their energy in disagreements that are fundamentally historical because they are political. “The sociologist claims to

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126  Material Inspirations offer a ‘vulgar’ critique of this ‘denegating’ aesthetics that is totally ahistorical, like all philosophical thought worthy of the name,” notes Rancière, playing on Bourdieu’s terms even as he rebukes his assumptions about the deracinated nature of philosophy. “As ahistorical, assuredly,” he goes on, turning his own charge back on Bourdieu, “as the ‘vulgar’ sociologist pretending to ignore the date of the Critique of Judgment the better to reduce its problematic to a multisecular conflict between erudite people and those from the court. Kant, however, gives the question of ‘aesthetic common sense’ a larger and more precisely dated theatre.”3 Rancière’s challenge to the oddly untextured culture Bourdieu requires to have existed in the period between Kant’s writing of his critiques and the 1960s begins with his attention to a fundamental historical marker, Kant’s publication of the first critique in the context of the social and political crisis that was the French Revolution. Even in The Rules of Art, a text in which Bourdieu has the nineteenth century directly in his sights, the historical processes that interest him are only those that he can claim illustrate the bad faith relationship between the drive toward autonomy and the interested practices of the world of art.4 Rancière makes it clear, however, that what is at stake in his challenge to this approach is more than a question of historical accuracy. The animus motivating the philosopher is traceable to a fundamental disagreement with historical as well as ethical sources: his resistance to the tendency in Bourdieu to think of politically dispossessed classes as permanently cut off from the possibility of a relationship to art that is more than a poor emulation of the taste of their social betters is closely linked to his sense of the fundamentally historical nature of aesthetic claims. Rancière’s arch reminder that the first critique came out just one year after the French Revolution is intended to suggest that we should hesitate before im­agin­ ing that intellectual projects emerging out of that revolutionary period in history are liable to be working to consolidate elite power by ratifying elitist taste. Perhaps unsurprisingly—and with ever more detail in his later work—Rancière works to recover formulations developed in the nuanced and unresolved literature of the nineteenth-century middle class, the subtleties of which are bound to be lost in the static concepts of class or class-interest he finds in the Bourdieu of Distinction. And, indeed, the archaic sound of the “erudite people and those from the court,” from whose conflicts the aesthetic might be thought to arise in Bourdieu, captures the sociologist’s puzzling tendency to gesture toward feudal structures, even though his concern and his readership is generally the middle classes. “The Aristocracy of Culture,” “The Titles of Cultural Nobility,” and “Cultural Pedigree” are the first three chapters in Distinction.5 Rather than the kinds of stark contrasts Bourdieu borrows from the age of chivalry, however, Rancière proposes an analysis that keeps alive a historical period characterized by  an inconclusiveness it is not at all clear we should despise—and that we are less  likely to misunderstand when our historical sense has not been distracted by  descriptions that seem too simple because that is in fact what they are.

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   127 “The ‘vulgarity’ of the sociologist,” Rancière notes, insisting on one of Bourdieu’s favorite terms of self-praise even as he offers a historicizing critique of his own “is only the disenchanted banality of the learned opinion of his time, which, with an amused eye, regards the witnesses of that age when philosophers believe in the future of equality and proletarians in the inspiration of poets” (200–1). Among the most interestingly abrupt transitions in the works of Walter Pater— an author who often works through unelaborated conjunctions—is the move from the general issues touched on at the opening of the Conclusion to The Renaissance (the inconstant modes or fashions that form the bases of all things) to the very concrete appreciation of Rousseau that provides the odd opening to his most frequently cited passage. “One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau,” he writes in a transition between paragraphs apparently unprepared for by anything that preceded it, “is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense.” While “an un­defin­able taint of death had clung always about him,” Pater notes about this crucial point of coming into self-knowledge as an author, “now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease.” It is death that creates the possibility of—not to say necessity for—the creative life of the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse and the Confessions, considered here not as a philosopher, but as an artist: He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biased by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve . . . we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us.6

Disinterested or otherwise is not, needless to say, an accidental formulation. Indeed, it picks up on the terms that had just preceded Pater’s account of Rousseau: “The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us” (189; my emphasis). The interest into which we cannot enter is the abstract theory that does not belong to us, that is conventional, disinterested or otherwise. The characteristic understatement of Pater’s formulation should not disguise the fact that its apparent languid

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128  Material Inspirations indifference contains (if it doesn’t constitute within itself) a fundamental challenge to a whole tradition of critical abstraction. Death, as that thoroughgoing Paterian Wallace Stevens would put it, is the mother of beauty. And it is as Rousseau’s need to write emerges with the dread of a fatal illness that beauty comes to be figured in Pater as an individual experience akin to, if not identical with, seduction. While it will not be surprising to any reader of Pater to find seduction, art, and the claim of beauty coming together in response to the fear of death, it may be easier to recognize that Pater is addressing, in a decadent idiom, concerns that are also pressing in authors of apparently quite different predispositions if we consider the ways in which Ruskin negotiates a related dynamic in his great mid-century works. And really the gap between early and late Victorian closes quickly when we reflect that Ruskin took up the challenge of representing the lives of men of genius at the close of Modern Painters V in 1860, just eight years before Pater tried out the ideas and much of the language that would go into the conclusion to The Renaissance in his review of the poetry of William Morris (1868).7 This topic will take us back to the Transfiguration as source, though full recognition of that antecedent will require a kind of historical sympathy that has seen much resistance in recent decades, which is one reason I have been highlighting the polemics of French critics, the battle between Rancière and Bourdieu which is ultimately about the base and superstructure of the heart of working people. Rancière’s outrage is motivated by his aggrieved sense of all that Bourdieu takes away from the lower classes when it comes to the twinned benefits of the experience of beauty and of hope for solidarity. The philosopher sees the sociologist essentially removing the hope (the promise, perhaps) that shapes both, in part because his system is designed chiefly to register the movements of taste that trickle down from a high point. The nineteenth century, however, was rich in attempts to imagine more complicated, and less unidirectional, relationships among the classes, none more densely textured than that which emerged from Ruskin’s lifelong meditation on the achievement of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s Cockney roots were never forgotten by his greatest admirer, the middle-class connoisseur so often mocked by a posterity almost as confident about the meaning of his social status as about his erotic failings. Rancière’s work is driven by a rare sympathy for the Kantian aspiration to unite “freedom and equality with compulsion (rather of respect and submission . . . than of fear) in the aesthetic.”8 These concerns, which Rancière develops from a thoughtful reading of Schiller, lead him to recognize a moment when art presents the possibility (if it doesn’t identify the necessity) of “offer[ing] itself as the aim and privileged support of strategies of reappropriation; the denegating aesthetic gaze can now take, among the intellectuals of the proletariat, the full force of an ‘other’ gaze [d’un regard autre] upon the propriety of the other that becomes an

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   129 ‘other’ gaze [qui devient regard autre] upon the proletarian’s dispossession” (199). In a bold set of formulations that unhesitatingly repurpose terms typically wielded by schools of thought concerned to identify the subjection of the disenfranchised—appropriation, gazing, propriety, dispossession, and even “other” (stripped of the tendentious definite article it acquires as a matter of course in French)—Rancière re-orients the vision of self and of other in order to imagine a situation in which the aesthetic becomes a key element in a politics of recognition rather than negation or appropriation. “This is the game,” he writes, “in which working-class pathos transforms itself into an aesthetic and militant passion for reappropriation” (199). Somewhere in these terms, I am suggesting, we may find a license in theory for what Turner, the Cockney artist, needed to do with landscape, at least as far as his champion, the religiously displaced son of a prosperous Scottish Presbyterian wine merchant, came to understand the matter. It is in a network of textual and visual references combining at once the fascination with the lived experiences of artists I have been tracing throughout this section and the memory of transfiguration, along with the inevitable yet galvanizing figure of death, that the force of Turner emerges for Ruskin. It is with that complex that I will close this discussion. The multi-volume work that determined the shape of Ruskin’s career, Modern Painters, culminates in an attempt to reconcile the two fundamental forces shaping the critic’s taste: the admiration for the landscapes of Turner that had driven him to undertake the project in the first place, and the passionate response to Venetian painting that he came to feel in the decades of composing the many volumes of the work. In the “Two Boyhoods” chapter of Modern Painters V, Ruskin gives himself the opportunity to address the distinct ways in which the material circumstances of the artistic life might shape creative achievement. The fifteenth-century splendor of the city that dominated the Veneto and to which Giorgione went for his apprenticeship inevitably informed that painter’s work. “Have you ever thought what a world his eyes opened on?” he asks rhet­ oric­al­ly at the beginning of the chapter, before proposing his own vision of that sight: “What a world of mighty life, from those mountain roots to the shore;—of loveliest life, when he went down, yet so young, to the marble city—and became himself as a fiery heart to it?” Physical environment, community, and art come together in a powerful continuum Ruskin presents with a hyperbole that carries in its flow a great many incommensurate features. The prose boldly evokes elem­ ents in the great altarpiece the painter created for his home town, Madonna and Child Between St. Francis and St. Nicasius (see fig. 3.1) as it proposes an impossible harmony of material conditions, social cohesion, and beauty: “Deep-hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea,—the men of Venice moved in sway of power and war; pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mothers and maidens; from foot to brow,

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Fig. 3.1 Giorgione, Madonna and Child between St. Francis and St. Nicasius, c. 1503–1504. Duomo, Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

all noble, walked her knights; the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armour shot angrily under their blood-red mantlefolds” (7:374). This bold opening devoted to a fantasy of an absolute and inevitable harmony of maker and source is designed to set off a more complex kind of influence, the role of the misery of Turner’s London, his England, his century, in making the later artist what he became. Though the stories appear designed to offer a parallel of a sort fairly conventional in the nineteenth century (a Puginesque “Contrast,” even), Ruskin soon moves to indicate the conceptual force of the fundamental distinction between the historical circumstances that formed the artists. Continuity between context and achievement is what Ruskin finds in Giorgione’s career, formed as it was in the plenitude of Renaissance Venice. An artistic temperament developed out of a condition of lack, or worse, out of an unavoidable intimacy with death, is bound to route itself a different way. Here is a sense of the contrast—starting with Giorgione:  e saw only strength and immortality, could not but paint both; conceived H the form of man as deathless, calm with power, and fiery with life.

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   131  urner saw the exact reverse of this. In the present work of men, meanness, T aimlessness, unsightliness: thin-walled, lath-divided, narrow-garreted houses of clay; booths of a darksome Vanity Fair, busily base. . . .  s the strength of men to Giorgione, to Turner their weakness and vileness, A were alone visible. They themselves, unworthy or ephemeral; their work, despicable, or decayed. In the Venetian’s eyes, all beauty depended on man’s presence and pride; in Turner’s, on the solitude he had left, and the humiliation he had suffered.

It is the brutality and pain of nineteenth-century culture that makes Turner a landscape painter, and the death that determined this development becomes at once the most important figure and fact shaping his work:  nd thus the fate and issue of all his work were determined at once. He must A be a painter of the strength of nature, there was no beauty elsewhere than in that; he must paint also the labor and sorrow and passing away of men; this was the great human truth visible to him. Their labor, their sorrow, and their death.  (7:385–6)

Disinterestedness is as inconceivable in the network of historic reference and moral phenomenology shaping Ruskin’s argument as it is in the reserved ­skepticism of Pater. In both authors the incitement to art arrives in the form of an erotic figure combining beauty and mortality into a seductive blend. Death comes to Turner in Modern Painters as beauty does to the self of the Conclusion of The Renaissance, a foam-born Aphrodite uniting the promise of her splendor with the reminder of an inevitable end. In Ruskin, the recognition of the power of death is a constant in any art that matters, but the phenomenon is inevitably manifested in historically contingent forms. Indeed, the unanswerable question of mortality takes on a new horror in modern England, which leads the critic to important claims about art history and about modernity, and to a remarkable figure for inspiration. It is impossible to summarize the sequence which culminates in Turner becoming a landscape painter, which I have begun to cite above, an extraordinary figural–historical tour de force leading from the grimmest darkest figure of obscure tempestuous fatality to the soft white clouds of heaven, which must be quoted in full. And here the work of contrast is shaped by turning from the sumptuous world and canvases of Giorgione to the sober and often melancholy work of Dürer. The question of death goes back as far as Ruskin can imagine—and is, of course, unanswerable. What the historian and moralist can track is simply how it emerges and then how it is or is not addressed in culture. “Their labor, their sorrow, and their death”

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132  Material Inspirations were the three fundamental elements unmissable by Turner. Ruskin gives a brief paragraph to each of the first two before turning to his main theme: And their Death. That old Greek question again;—yet unanswered. The unconquerable spectre still flitting among the forest trees at twilight; rising ribbed out of the seasand;—white, a strange Aphrodite,—out of the sea-foam; stretching its gray, cloven wings among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood. This has to be looked upon, and in a more terrible shape than ever Salvator or Durer saw it. The wreck of one guilty country does not infer the ruin of all countries, and need not cause general terror respecting the laws of the universe. Neither did the orderly and narrow succession of domestic joy and sorrow in a small German community bring the question in its breadth, or in any unresolvable shape, before the mind of Durer. But the English death—the European death of the nineteenth century—was of another range and power; more terrible a thousand-fold in its merely physical grasp and grief; more ter­rible, incalculably, in its mystery and shame.

The transhistorical phenomenon that is death takes on a network of grim qual­ ities, at once concrete and emblematic, in the modernity that Ruskin ­identifies as English. And it is this condition his criticism is designed to bring out and explain—because it forms the key to Turner’s significance. It is what makes the painter’s engagement with landscape when he leaves the city poignant and urgent:  is was the sight which opened on the young eyes, this the watchword Th sounding within the heart of Turner in his youth. S o taught, and prepared for his life’s labor, sate the boy at last alone among his fair English hills; and began to paint, with cautious toil, the rocks, and fields, and trickling brooks, and soft, white clouds of heaven.9

What Ruskin proposes is more than an explanation of how a man born and bred  in the city becomes the painter of London from Greenwich Park (1809, fig. 3.2). He also indicates how the passionate attention to nature shaping such a view is related to the human misery that in fact makes the work something less and more than sublime—a topic that will bring us back yet again to the afterlife of Raphael’s Transfiguration. Elizabeth Helsinger has convincingly traced Ruskin’s powerful but elusive language in the passage on the “strange Aphrodite” to the critic’s response to late paintings by Turner, especially The Angel Standing in the Sun (fig. 3.3), a canvas Ruskin never addresses in his criticism, but refers to in his 1857 catalogue of the painter as part of a set of late works indicative of “mental disease” (13:167), which I suppose makes its influence on his own prose all the more poignant.

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   133

Fig. 3.2  Joseph Mallord William Turner, London from Greenwich Park, 1809. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Artepics/age fotostock.

Helsinger links the strange Aphrodite that stands for death to the Archangel Michael appearing on the Day of Judgment, his flaming sword in hand. But it is the whole piece she has in mind, a work that evokes the violence before and after Jesus—Old Testament crimes and apocalyptic judgment—in an appropriately overwhelming setting including not only Old Testament scenes of violence and pain in the form of Adam and Eve with the body of Abel, and Judith standing over the beheaded Holofernes, but a distraught risen skeleton standing in (or attempting to flee) a vortex punctuated by a sun whose light is distended in the kind of long watery reflection typical of the painter’s work. Figures, setting, and mode of representation evoke a sense of human history repeating itself even as it comes to an end on a desperate strand.10 To recuperate what is powerful and strange about Ruskin’s achievement would mean fully facing what his extraordinary powers of observation find in Turner, and so breaking the crust of expectation and preconception that has frequently prevented a fuller engagement with Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists, especially from those of J.M.W. Turner. The key terms of the full title of Ruskin’s book are the adjectives, Landscape and Modern, the second of which occurs twice. Both the celebration of landscape (as opposed to other genres) and of modern painters as

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Fig. 3.3  Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Angel Standing in the Sun, 1846. Tate Britain, London. Photo © The Artchives/Alamy Stock Photo.

better in any way than the Old Masters are bold claims in a period still substantially shaped by systems of value that put history painting at the apex, and the works of the Old Masters unquestionably above all others, at least in theory. But the argument is one thing, not two. There is something about landscape painting now that makes its excellence modern, something that was unavailable or different in earlier periods. In that sense, the book develops a historical claim and not simply a formal one—or perhaps it is best described as a historicoformal claim, so closely connected are the two elements. It is only as part of a long and carefully developed argument about the place of landscape in history that Ruskin’s much cited discussion of the pathetic fallacy in Modern Painters III (1856) is really interesting. Ruskin is not arguing for a dispassionate relationship to the natural world (how could he be?); he is arguing that the projection of emotions onto nature is unavoidable in—because symptomatic of—our era.

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   135 By the time the project of the book is completed in 1860, it is clear that the love of landscape mentioned in the title, and the superiority of modern painters in rendering it, is the bright light hovering over a great deal of human misery. It is the engagement with misery, Ruskin argues, that makes the brightness: The English death—the European death of the nineteenth century— . . . of another range and power; more terrible a thousand-fold in its merely physical grasp and grief; more terrible, incalculably, in its mystery and shame.  (386)

Ruskin draws on Turner’s work as he looks for language to describe the inspiring force of this particular kind of death, finding in the astonishing and disturbing richness of his late paintings language with which to describe a situation and a sensibility Ruskin wants to claim is also driving much calmer earlier work. And so it is that in his discussion of “Crypt of Kirskstall Abbey” (fig. 3.4), an ambitious print produced by Turner around 1806, based on a composition the Londoner had made on his first trip to Yorkshire in 1797, ultimately published in Liber Studiorum in 1812, Ruskin does not want the viewer to miss the pool of dark water gathered at the foot of a column, the broken masonry, and the loss of a community of monks who should be eating in this tranquil place slowly collapsing back into nature.

Fig. 3.4  Joseph Mallord William Turner, Crypt of Kirkstall Abbey (Liber Studiorum, part  VIII, plate 39). The Metropolitan Museum, New York. Gift of William Loring Andrews, 1883, transferred from the Library.

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136  Material Inspirations Turner had seen Raphael’s Transfiguration for the first time at the Musée Napoléon when he rushed to Paris in 1802, during the year-long peace of Amiens that was a brief pause in the decades of armed hostility between Britain and France from 1793 to 1815. He made a number of studies there that demonstrate his interest, but he would also have seen the piece in various forms of reproduction, including at Lulworth Castle, which he visited in 1811 and in the 1820s, and of course he would have sought out the original again in Rome when he was there in 1819–1820.11 The archive of the painter includes both a mysterious set of annotations from the trip to the Louvre said to be about the color scheme of the work, and a drawing, probably based on an engraving of the Transfiguration, for a lecture on perspective from 1810, indicating the focused attention he had given this widely admired masterpiece (fig. 3.5). Raphael is also at the center of Turner’s own vision of artistic success (discussed in the previous chapter), Rome from the Vatican (1820). The divine figure rising up from a fallen world that is given such a complete treatment in Raphael as to be almost unbearable to modern taste returns in Turner’s

Fig. 3.5  Joseph Mallord William Turner, Lecture Diagram 10: Proportion and Design of Part of Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” c. 1810. Numbered Perspective Diagrams. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate, London, 2019.

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   137 Angel in the Sun, no longer as Jesus revealing his divinity as a salvation to the world, but as the sword-bearing angel coming to judge and punish a fallen world. The piece was exhibited in 1846 accompanied by the following paired extracts from Revelation and from Samuel Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory: “ And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and be cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; “ That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.”—Revelation xix. 17, 18. “The march of arms, which, glittering in the sun, The feast of vultures ere the day was done.”—Rogers.

The divine figure inviting the birds to feast on the flesh of human greatness and pettiness is a grotesque version of the high brought low, of a connection with the divine that reveals the fallible fleshliness of all human creation, its inescapable vulnerability. The relationship to death, at once figural, spiritual, and entirely concrete, is fundamental in Ruskin’s account of art both as historical fact and as individual achievement. And the elements he finds in Turner—the ribs, the ocean, the sun— recur in his analyses of what is beautiful and disturbing. They comprise that which must be looked upon: ghost, specter, angel standing in the sun. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this lethal vision is at one self-evident and difficult to keep in view. Hence Ruskin’s confession that he fails to develop it as he should have: I have not followed out, as I ought to have done, had the task been less painful, my assertion that Turner had to paint not only the labour and the sorrow of men, but their death. There is no form of violent death which he has not painted. Pre-eminent in many things, he is pre-eminent also, bitterly, in this. . . . Flood, and fire, and wreck, and battle, and pestilence, and solitary death, more ­fearful still.

Ruskin offers one example he claims will stand for many, and indeed, few of Turner’s works have the bare fact of fatality at their heart the way the instance he selects does: The noblest of all the plates of the Liber Studiorum, except the Via Mala, is one engraved with his own hand, of a single sailor, yet living, dashed in the night against a granite coast,—his body and outstretched hands just seen in the trough

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Fig. 3.6  Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Lost Sailor, c. 1819. R. 084, proof. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Francis Bullard. M23221. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. of a mountain wave, between it and the overhanging wall of rock, hollow, ­polished, and pale with dreadful cloud and grasping foam.  (7:437n)

The “Via Mala” is a view of a precipitous Alpine gorge Ruskin associates with Dante’s inferno in Modern Painters III, but (5:293–4), but it is clearly the figure of the drowning sailor, unique as it may seem to be in Turner’s oeuvre, that calls out to him as particularly representative. That work is evidently the print that he was most likely to have had in mind as he wrote of lives “tossed countlessly away into howling winter wind along five hundred leagues of rock-fanged shore.” This gruesome image (fig. 3.6), Ruskin claims, shows us the dark face we can see looking out from every work of Turner’s hand. * * * Raphael is more difficult to do justice to. Snatched away right in the middle of an overwhelming effort. The possibilities indisputable, the actual production too much that of a disciple.  Paul Klee, Diaries, Rome, October 1901–May 190212

Eighty years after Ruskin’s powerfully dark response to Turner’s work, Walter Benjamin proposed another figure from the fine arts as his own emblem for the apocalypse, though this one is neither coming nor judging.

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   139

Fig. 3.7  Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (fig. 3.7) is identified in Benjamin’s theses on history as being blown backward into the future by a catastrophic fall: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.13

Ruskin’s figure is not an angel, or messenger, of course, but an unconquerable specter, a strange Aphrodite, death itself, that which must be looked at. But it

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140  Material Inspirations seems worth asking whether or not the specter Ruskin finds in Turner interpolates the viewer in ways similar to Klee’s Angel (who may or may not need to be looked at, but looks at us). Or, to reflect on the address to the viewer of Raphael’s Jesus, who gazes out at what we can imagine should be a religious viewer with what appears to be a kind indifference (“in purest bliss and wide-eyed contemplation,” as Nietzsche would have it), but from within a painting which, with its helterskelter sight-lines and gestures, its hidden eyes, and its benign but vaguely ­self-involved divinity, foretells not its first centuries in a church, but its subsequent ones at the museum. The passion and clarity of Benjamin’s figure, the moral legibility he ascribes to Klee’s image, makes it difficult to gainsay his compelling ekphrasis. Though it has generated a rich line of responses, his account has constrained the options for later readers. I’d like, however, to suggest that the evident legibility of the image Benjamin has brought before our eyes—not a famous masterpiece, but a work he himself owned, whose association with the melancholy figure of the critic makes it what it is—is in part dependent on what the painter leaves out. The fallen world is missing from this image; it is only made present by the language of the critic, in terms at once violent and not subject to visual representation, like a destructive wind the presence of which is only marked by what it moves in its passage. Oddly enough, the materialist mystic envisions a very narrow range of motion for his angel, which is part of the unusual vulnerability resulting from its tragic inability to act. It is separated from the fallible world not by its place in another register, but by the very energies being expended by that world, a location too awful for representation, though it is the one in which we find ourselves. That Benjamin is aware of what is being left out of the painting of the angel is suggested by a moment in his work on the German tragic drama that evokes the Raphael without mentioning it. And we may remember here the crisis of ­representation provoked by the Reformation touched on in the first chapter of this book, and which is a crucial context for any discussion of the Baroque (and certainly for Benjamin’s sense of the period).14 Citing Wilhelm Hausenstein on Baroque art, Benjamin notes that in paintings of apotheoses, the foreground is usually handled with exaggerated realism so as to allow the visionary objects farther away to appear more reliably as such. The drastically rendered foreground works to gather all worldly happening into itself, not only in order to heighten the tension between immanence and transcendence but also in order to secure for this tension the greatest imaginable rigor, exclusivity, and inexorability. It is a gesture of unsurpassable poignancy when, accordingly, even Christ is thrust into the midst of the provisional, the everyday, the precarious.15

We cannot find ourselves truly in a figure who is defined by precisely what does not characterize us, the ability to rise from the circumstances that are at every

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“ Strange Aphrodite ”   141 point impinging on our existence because they are what makes up our existence. So, what is our point of reference when faced by a figure who isn’t us, when we find ourselves in a gaze that may recognize us so fully that we would not know ourselves within its scope? I have been working toward suggesting that the compelling nature of Klee’s Angel is to be found in all that is not shown around it. It is a vision of a victim made powerful only by contemplation, by silent witness of something unrepresentable. In that sense it works by modeling inaccessible conditions: pure experience, pure judgment. As a visual phenomenon I have to admit that the image inevitably makes sense to me in ways the split realms of Raphael’s Transfiguration or the violent centrifugal excesses of Angel in the Sun cannot. Still, I find myself wondering how much of my comfort with the one image is itself symptomatic, and if it is even possible to acknowledge how much is missing from this characteristically modernist being that Benjamin brings to our attention. Responsibility and agency are absent in the existence of this angel, who is all eyes and wings. Pure witnessing is bought at the expense of permanent shock, unending mourning. Part II of this book will conclude with a chapter on Benjamin’s work on the Baroque as an opportunity for reflection on the material force of the remains of antiquity. Suffice it to say for the time being that the kind of full sep­ar­ation at the moment of representation—or at the moment of reflection on representation—strikes me as characteristic of a modernist sensibility. In that sense, it is precisely not what we find in the nineteenth century or in earlier periods. When Ruskin discovers figures for the prose that will describe his century in Turner’s apocalyptic vision, as when Turner finds a great antecedent for that vision in Raphael, they are building on a critical relation to the world that is insistently implicated, not moving toward abstraction or disinterest, but always, even at the moment of rising, unable to avoid the attempt to capture a vision of what is left behind.

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PART II

R E MA I NS SCULPTURE. English is from the Latin, sculptura; and the verb sculpto, I carve or engrave . . . Sculpture is the art of imitating visible form by means of solid substances, either modelled, as clay or wax, or carved, as marble. The principles of sculpture and of painting are both the same; till painting divides itself into a distinct branch by the imitation of colour; while sculpture is expressed by form alone. John Flaxman, “Sculpture,” Rees’s Cyclopædia (1816)

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4

Matter, Form, Abstraction Mediation and the Reception of Antiquities

1.  Stone on Paper In pauses from my writing I sometimes look over at a sheet of images purchased decades back from a now vanished dealer in prints and books in what used to be a disreputable part of New York City. Cut from a late edition of the Cyclopædia Abraham Rees brought out originally between 1802 and 1820 by a merchant who did not scruple to destroy books in order to extract their decorative elements, and  protected by nothing more glamorous than the loose plastic bag in which I acquired it originally, the item sits on the lintel of a brick fireplace we never use in my office at home, waiting for a frame I never seem to find. The pleasures of the collector aside (the memory of the find, of the locations in which I have placed the print in other homes, etc.), the thing is not exceptional in any way as an object: an old, slightly yellowed sheet of good quality paper of some weight, lines of ink lightly stippled to suggest the contour of the carved stone. It is the associations of the piece that make it resonant. The illustrations to John Flaxman’s entry on sculpture in the Cyclopædia (fig.  4.1) may stand for a number of other relatively conventional moments in William Blake’s career, reminding us that the visionary genius was always also a craftsman. Brought in to illustrate his friend’s article, he places three images on the page called “Sculpture.” On the upper left a nude woman looks over her left shoulder, her arms brought across her body in a protective gesture. The young man standing in her line of sight is also nude except for a cloak draped around the neck and held open by his left arm, which moves away from his body in the expansive gesture that also opens his lithe frame to view. His right hand is bent away from his body, the fingers spread; his left holds an object of indeterminate form, perhaps tubular. While she is apparently still, aside from her arms, which she may be in the process of bringing protectively toward her, he is possibly caught in mid-stride (though, in truth the rendering makes their lower limbs fairly similar). The most extraordinary image, on the sheet, however, is the one at the bottom of the page, which shows a muscled older man struggling against two snakes that have him and two boys in their fatal grip. The fight is unequal: the limited strength Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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Fig. 4.1  William Blake, “Sculpture,” Plate III. In: Abraham Rees (1802–1820). Cyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. London, 1816.

of the children will never be able to remove tightening coil from leg or midriff; the teeth of one of the serpents close on the side of the man, forecasting the futility of his valiant resistance. It is an image of implacable destruction and vain resistance. (Flaxman will write of the “hopeless agony” shown in the work.1) It is

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  147 also a study (though such a mild word makes little sense in this context) of the varieties of the male body in action, the powerful central figure contrasting with the slight boys who will never reach the size of their father, Laocoön, the Trojan priest who angered the gods by speaking against taking in the wooden horse left by the Greeks outside the walls of the city. Its current isolation from its original context notwithstanding, the interest of the sheet only fully emerges in relation to the text it was designed to illustrate. And yet, the two are somewhat at angles to each other. “The first motive for the encouragement of sculpture in Greece,” Flaxman asserts, “was religious.” But the religion that interests him is not one that we can ascribe to the objects Blake was commissioned to illustrate. He begins with a careful review not of the Greek pantheon that would include Venus and Apollo as well as the deities who sent the snakes to destroy the priest and his offspring, but of the place of sculpture in the Bible, specifically with an account intended to demonstrate that prior to the idolatrous excesses of Solomon: it was “not only allowed, but encouraged and employed in the service of religion, in the representation of divine attributes or the symbols of divine Providence.” Evidently the pieces produced by Blake do not reflect this period of biblical creativity his friend calls out from the earliest moments of divine history. The text itself indicates as much when it mentions the prints. “[T]he engravings which are distinguished by the word Sculpture,” it points out “consist of select specimens of the sculpture of different ages and  nations; particularly the finest examples of Greek and Roman sculpture” (Flaxman, np).2 Insofar as the engraved images represent deities, they do not belong to any religious system to which those who commissioned them subscribe. They are reproductions of what any reasonably educated individual at the time Flaxman wrote would have been able to anticipate: “select specimens,” “finest examples,” meaning well-established, instantly recognizable classical pieces. Blake’s illustrations serve as a reminder that for much of the period running from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth classical sculpture means more a canon of works than a particular medium or set of processes, that as a phenomenon the concept has more of a life on paper or in other forms of reproduction than in the material experience of what might be called originals. Unsurprisingly, then, accounts of sculpture in the period tend to be occasions for the expression of a number of broadly held, even conventional, notions rather than records of unique individual encounters—or, perhaps, we may describe them as occasions for reflection on unique encounters with conventional experiences. Among the characteristic cultural aspirations typically made evident in the play between image and text is the desire to identify a relationship between written history, especially sacred history, and a canon of works that may bear little relation to that history. This chapter is concerned with the place of mediation in the emergence of formal accounts of the value of sculpture. That the unresolved

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148  Material Inspirations religious, historical, and social fantasies that run beneath—and often inspire the drive toward—formalist explanations are seldom fully articulated is not surprising, given that escape from the irresolvable contradictions among and within these currents is very often the aim of such accounts. The success of narratives based on the inevitability of the emergence of formalism toward the end of the century has tended to leave later periods ill-equipped to identify not only the importance of countervailing elements within this powerful trend, but also of some elements that were central in its emergence, such as the role of mediation.3 The antipathy toward mediation that characterizes dominant elements in twentieth-century culture at nearly every turn is the inevitable result of the tendency to prize encounters with the world that can be imagined to have a kind of doubled seal of legitimacy—the authenticity of the object being the warrant for the uniqueness of the individual’s experience. Mediation was fated to be a difficult concept for periods in which the fantasy of direct, unmediated, entirely personal encounters comes to predominate. Still, the force of this development results in a foundational paradox with implications for the student of culture—not to say for experience itself: the quest for real encounters inevitably leads to disdain for the far more common experience of reproductions. Somewhere between a chaperone with out-of-date principles monitoring the intimate negotiations of a long engagement, and a bawd negotiating the terms for an encounter in which she is understood to play no part, mediation shapes encounters that are always (improbably but inevitably) imagined as far more direct and driven by personal longings unavailable to the very entity facilitating the encounter. Walter Benjamin, whose influential account of the power of reproduction in modernity is anticipated by his ambitious historical analysis of the force of material remains in his earliest work, is an important figure to cite on this topic, and he will return various times in my analysis. But the extraordinary prescience of Benjamin—as I think will become clear in the course of this section—is made possible by his deep engagement with the culture of art that formed him, and to which his work was developed in response. By modern standards Blake himself never saw any of the admired works he was commissioned to illustrate. He was limited to working from either earlier illustrations, or from casts of the statues at the Royal Academy of Art. This circumstance is typical; the influence and prestige of these pieces in Europe depended on their widespread reproduction and their use as models in academic art education. To know them was to know copies, whether in two dimensions or three.4 The well-established, not to say conventional, nature of most of the objects selected for re-representation did not preclude Flaxman’s article from including images not only of Egyptian, Persian, and Etruscan pieces, which advanced arthistorical knowledge could place in a developmental continuum with the Greek productions, but of more exotic pieces, from India and China (fig. 4.2), which is

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  149

Fig. 4.2  William Blake, “Sculpture,” Plate IV. In: Abraham Rees (1802–1820). Cyclopædia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. London, 1816.

just one reminder that the response to the classical canon of artworks in the nineteenth century was accompanied at every point, and sometimes even inspired, by challenges from alternative traditions, some linked to received ideas about the history of Greek and Roman art, but many not.5 Blake’s illustrations therefore demonstrate three fundamental characteristics of the period’s relationship to the remains of antiquity: its fundamentally canonical nature, the mediated form of the encounter with the canon, and the constant pressure from non-canonical

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150  Material Inspirations (or not-yet-canonical) works. Flaxman’s text is shaped by all three characteristics. Its  project of reconciling assumed systems of values (including religious ones) with objects which may not fully support those values is no less interesting for being typical. We find in Flaxman signs of one convention that was to have an important life well into the twentieth century and beyond, in part because of the way it enriches the challenge of mediation itself, notably the identification of a gap between an earlier era, when the products of the fine arts were understood to have been profoundly enmeshed with the sacred reality of a culture—when sculpture was “encouraged and employed in the service of religion, in the representation of divine attributes or the symbols of divine Providence”—and the actual con­tem­ por­ary experience of the object, which was never religious in the galleries and museums or paper compendia in which it was usually encountered in his day. Flaxman’s words, for all that they are intended to establish the long-standing influence of a divine heritage for sculpture, are inevitably founded on the story of a fall in status. As we will see, the change from being part of the ritual or liturgical service, to being the representation of the elements of divinity, to finally serving in an ever-more abstract allegorical capacity is a trajectory that developed throughout the century, one in which the gains attendant on more adaptable forms of transhistorical meaning entailed the acceptance of the loss of values more robust than the abstractions of symbolism. To project a closer relationship to material reality in earlier periods than is possible in our own, to feel that we have uniquely lost contact with the experiences that matter, is to create a past that never existed in order to find a home for a particularly modern form of nostalgia. Sculpture can seem to be the most ma­ter­ial of artistic practices: its making requires from artists the fullest engagement with the physical world, and the experience for the viewer is of a simulacrum that approaches an actual experience of the non-artistic world more closely than any other medium; from every angle, the Apollo Belvedere is at once a stone and the shape of a man. And yet, the epigraph at the head of this part reminds us that, for the nineteenth century, engraving is closely related to sculpture (“sculpto, I carve or engrave”).6 Still, while in that passage Flaxman emphasizes the medium of the practice (“the art of imitating visible form by means of solid substances, either modelled, as clay or wax, or carved, as marble”), he makes a turn that would be surprising, if it weren’t, as I hope to show in this chapter, characteristic: “sculpture is expressed by form alone.” And that is the long-lasting paradox of the medium’s place in history: if it is always an opportunity to experience matter, it is also— particularly because of the association of Greek work with ideal perfection in execution—the location for important reflections on form.7 The term remain indicates a doubled historical claim, the identification of a lost condition and of a persistent object belonging at once to the period of its making and to the moment in which it is identified as still present. To say remain

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  151 is to say that a thing has stayed behind, and so has been projected forward from a lost prior moment of completion. The word differs from the closely related term relic, not only because of the implication of continuity suggested in the latter term, even of a connection to the divine and to an ongoing system of worship, but also for more material reasons: relics tend to be composed of contingent and fra­ gile substances. Human bone or cloth, fragments of wood, drops of blood: their association with the infinite rescues relics from what we know to be their natural fate—which is to disappear unremarked. Though sometimes formed at the moment of martyrdom, a relic is not a reminder that a greater whole has been lost, but just the opposite; it is a constant demonstration that small particulars may find a continued existence and meaning by reason of their association with something (the only thing) that is eternal. “As a physical object,” Patrick Geary writes, “divorced from a specific milieu, a relic is entirely without significance.”8 The ruin, like the antique statue, on the other hand, is a remain, an object the material nature of which has allowed it to survive beyond the point at which its connection to what matters is truly self-evident.9 The kinds of remains that this project addresses—for all that they were understood to be possessed of a self-evident splendor by the nineteenth century—typ­ ic­al­ly emerged to view after long periods of neglect. If in the nineteenth century we find sculpture to be consistently a highly valorized remain, it is precisely because it is the substantial manifestation of a hope for (often figured as a memory of) something of great importance no longer available. The object in this case serves as evidence and witness of a loss, and so it is only ever a partial compensation. The intersection of two horizons of time within the object is never complete. A space remains that can never be bridged. The images with which I opened this chapter are ink on paper: sculpture in idea, not in fact. If sculpture were to be found at all in the object it would be by reflection on its making, by not forgetting the carved metal plate that held the ink forced into contact with the fibers of the paper at extraordinary pressure. But as to the images themselves, it is less the modest stippling of the lines that allows them to rise from the page, than the pressures, eddies, and whirlpools running between the contemporary moment and a fantasy of the past that Flaxman’s text itself keeps in motion. Evidently, for me the experience of the material presence of the object I have described is shaped by a further set of dislocation and gaps for which the sheet of paper is an aide-mémoire—reminding me when my eye falls on it of a time when New York still had small idiosyncratic shops, before they were swept away by the homogenizing power of unbridled international capital, when the small crimes and misdemeanors of the city shaped the experience of residents who could participate in them in ways impossible now that the crim­ inals hide behind shell corporations, in homes miles away from the scenes of their crimes, when antique objects, like other commodities (including the city itself) were not simply available to anyone with a computer and sufficient funds.

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152  Material Inspirations Like all souvenirs, the poignancy of this item resides also in the way it links the viewer to an earlier self—one with time to rummage in dark corners, say, but with no interest in regularizing his relationship to what might be found in those places. The gaps are the experience; this is the difference between a souvenir and a relic: one reopens the sense of distance, the other suggests a realm in which no gap will exist—in which the piece will stand for a whole—or an eternal present in which piece and whole may escape time altogether. For the nineteenth century the force of classical work is based on the com­bin­ ation of two kinds of claims, one historical and the other formal. The unreachable model of perfection presented by the ancient Greeks, which arguably is a tech­ nical matter, and certainly a formal determination, always links back to another kind of perfection, whether it be that entailed in the representation of divinity or the evocation of a now-lost social harmony. It is the passage of time, the distance between the condition of their making and the moment of their modern appreciation that makes classical work precious. But the vulnerability to the vicissitudes of time of stone and metal, as of the social systems in which those materials were shaped, makes these elements, for all their apparent solidity, into particularly poignant emblems of transience. As the remain is mediated into culture it becomes as subject as all the other categories of human relationship to the ­passage of time. Perhaps it is just because susceptibility to change is more often experienced in human time scales as the vulnerability of weaker matter, such as paper or the human body itself, that the evidence of the decay of hard substances can be so moving.

2.  Collection and Copy The widespread affection for copies evident in all periods prior to the twentieth century is just one reminder that the distinction between object and reproduction is no more to be taken as a given than the love for one over the other or even the preoccupation with originality that tends to drive attempts to maintain the distinction. Casts of major statues were common in museums until well into the twentieth century, and the admiration for copies evident from the seventeenth century forward is just one reason that the differences separating compendium and collection, works on paper and on display, would be less marked in the nineteenth century than today. Much of the experience of the antique in the period took place while turning the pages of illustrated books of various sorts, but the material experience of works themselves was no guarantee that one was in the presence of what more fastidious eras would call an antique object. Indeed, it bears saying that the contents of an art museum and of an illustrated history of sculpture were far more likely to be similar in the past—when the display of casts was common—than today, when most museums have banished or destroyed

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  153 their collections.10 But even the presence of warm marble was no warrant of access to the products of antiquity, as we would understand the matter today; from the earliest days of the vogue for antique statues, restorers had been at work putting new arms, legs, heads, and other accoutrements on antique torsos, and on polishing away the damage caused by millennia of hostility or indifference. Perhaps the only change in the history of the reception of antique objects more marked than the turn away from restoration is the cultural amnesia about the fact that restoration ever was an entirely unremarkable part of the experience of antiquity. People consistently loved objects that today we might call fakes, and paid vast sums for (or received with great gratitude as gifts) sculptures now relegated to the cellars of museums. The unevenness of the transition from one system of values to another provided the opportunity for important reflections on the conceptual force of material and of material experience itself. In 1780 the most impressive location at which to view the finest sculpture in London was the home of the collector Charles Townley in Westminster, a sumptuous, tastefully displayed and much-admired assembly of objects now largely recognized to be Hellenistic works restored (or assembled) in the modern era (fig. 4.3).11 By 1807 the avant-garde in taste had turned its affections forcefully to the Parthenon sculptures owned by Lord Elgin, which in 1816 were purchased for

Fig. 4.3  William Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at Park Street, Westminster, 1794–1795. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 4.4  Archibald Archer, The Temporary Elgin Room, 1819. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

the nation, and were soon on their way to becoming the chief classical treasures of the British Museum (fig. 4.4). The aesthetic change entailed in the shift from admiration of the smooth, generally complete works gathered by Townley and other connoisseurs to the love of the broken, irreparable, pitted forms of the pedimental statues of the Parthenon is impossible to overstate. Keats describes a feeling of sublime pain and confusion arising at the mingling of “Grecian grandeur with the rude / Wasting of old Time” when he records his first view of the Parthenon sculpture in a poem in which simple lucidity and unresolvable obscurity emerge on the surface of the pitted stone: “Such dim-conceived glories of the brain / Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; / So do these wonders a most dizzy pain.”12 It is the condition of the works, their broken fragmentary nature, that makes their glories “dim-conceived,” the feud they provoke “undescribable,” and which provoked most controversy at their accession. The testimony in Parliament during the discussion of their acquisition, and polemical pieces such as William Hazlitt’s essays, capture the turn away from the values driving the celebration of ideal nature and from the assumptions associated with academic art more broadly that had shaped advanced taste and the admiration of classical antiques, such as those in the Townley collection not long before. We read in the uncertain, irresolvable quality of Keats’s sonnet on the experience of seeing the Marbles, vivid

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  155 evidence of the conceptual and aesthetic challenges they presented even to those who admired them.13 Still, the accession of the Elgin Marbles was just one moment in a period of extraordinary growth for the British Museum, in which the acquisition of antiquities played a major part. Out of a great many instances, we might cite the extraordinary Assyrian statues acquired with much publicity by Austen Henry Layard in the 1850s, antiquities from Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and elsewhere that came to the Museum by way of Charles Newton’s researches in what is now Turkey in the 1860s, and eventually the extraordinary remains of Mycenaean civilization, which—as we will see—would inspire Pater with visions of a fragile golden antiquity.14 It was not only the museums that presented new occasions for the experience of admired works of art. After the long period of revolutionary and Napoleonic struggle during which Britain had been relatively isolated from the continent, developments in the technology and infrastructure of travel coincided with a changing political situation in Europe—and in Europe’s relationship to the United Kingdom—to make the continent ever-more available to British travelers. The practice of long journeys undertaken for cultural edification, a privilege reserved for the wealthy, had reached its high-water mark in the eighteenth century. This growing interest in traveling to sites of culture is characteristic of a period when an advanced aesthetic sensibility is emerging as a mark of social distinction among the upper classes but when almost every significant work of art is either in a private collection abroad or, if an antiquity, still in situ. By contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century a network of railways linked Europe, allowing the emergence of middle-class tourism, and museums, which had consolidated into the kinds of institutions we know today, had proliferated throughout the world. Travel around the continent achieved in a relatively short span of time a new level of ease and convenience to the point that laborious movement is a consistent marker of historical distance in the novelists—and that as early as 1853 John Ruskin could refer nostalgically to his own youthful experience of the continent as taking place in “the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil.”15 If new possibilities of movement had been opened up for art lovers by a number of social developments, the works of art themselves were also subjected to dislocations that can appear quite extraordinary to modern sensibilities, which have been formed in a much more tranquil epoch in the lives of masterpieces. It was in the period addressed in this study that many works began a long pere­grin­ ation that in many cases has never been fully completed, a dynamic condition that—as we will see in later chapters—may well be taken as foundational for the modern museum. A number of European conflagrations in the nineteenth century shaped this development, notably the revolutionary and Napoleonic struggles; the very processes that had constrained travel to the continent by the British had initiated a long period of turmoil during which a remarkable number of

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156  Material Inspirations works—many with long-standing links to particular locations—such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, and the Medici Venus—spent decades at the Louvre (eventually the Musée Napoléon) around the turn of the century. Some pieces never made it home again. Collections and the values available to understand them were subject to constant, though often uneven, change throughout the nineteenth century, and not simply because new discoveries demanded new responses. New conceptual ­models emerged in the period, notably in the fields of archeology and art history—both of which developed as scientific disciplines in this period—and in the display practices and the social role of museums, which were undergoing fundamental revision throughout the century.16 It is a paradox that will surprise only those who have not studied the vicissitudes of culture that in spite of the longstanding tradition of admiration for a fairly narrow canon of sculpture, the list of popularly admired objects was subject to change throughout the nineteenth century. The Elgin Marbles have already been mentioned; other newcomers that became classics in a very short time include the Venus de Milo, only found in 1820, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, discovered in 1863, the fate of each work associated in important ways with the fortunes of war.

3.  Compendia: Image into Word The emergence of what is sometimes called “Romantic Hellenism” is generally associated with the diffusion of important antiquarian texts from the second half of the eighteenth century.17 And indeed, poetic references to Greek gods and nymphs take on a particularly statuary quality in this period, and they tend to express a growing sense of melancholy loss in relation to classical glory, itself the textual manifestation of a broader cultural tendency evident in the sculpture of Flaxman and the architecture of Robert and James Adams and others influenced by works documenting ancient sites. The extraordinary effect of the spread of classical taste by epochal volumes such as Robert Wood and James Dawkins’s Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of  Athens (1762–1816), as well as subsequent works such as William Gell’s Pompeiana: the Topography, Edifices and, Ornaments of Pompeii (1817–1832), was bound to reach beyond the fields of design and architecture. Still, the importance of these volumes is shaped by the fact that they entered a culture already primed to receive a textual and graphic experience of antiquity by other works going back at least a century, texts with a more checkered career. The distinguished efforts of the intrepid travelers and ambitious scholars who shaped neoclassicism and its romantic inheritance are best read as part of a network of texts of various (and shifting) levels of prestige designed to establish a relationship between the cultures of Northern Europe and the art of antiquity. It is to these volumes that we

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  157 must look for a fuller sense of the cultural role of remains, of prized objects that kept suggesting so much more than they could deliver because they did indeed provide so much.18 Bernard de Montfaucon’s epochal 15-volume L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1719 and 1724; English version, 1721–1725) is the great antecedent volume. Part miscellany, part antiquarian speculation, the imposing scale, as well as the heterogeneous nature of this attempt by the distinguished monk and scholar to illustrate objects in order to give material form to a past that was fundamentally conceptual—“antiquity”—makes it both a model of the ambition of the form, and an early instance of the fundamental challenges projects of this nature were bound to face. If the production of a compendium of such a size bears witness to the commitments of a vast network of European antiquarians, it is also an indication of the difficulty of carrying out its project of explanation by illustration, which is traceable to at least two fundamental incongruities. The methodological difficulties inherent in the attempt to place into a productive relationship texts and objects of plastic art or handicraft—or their illustrations—were exacerbated by a more fundamental issue: how to reconcile concepts of antiquity the basis of which was centuries of reflection on a limited set of texts, with the miscellaneous objects the vicissitudes of history had allowed to survive and brought to the attention of antiquarians. Sustained attention to works of this nature—most of which have been substantially more modest than Montfaucon’s— has been rare. Their cultural effects have been difficult to fix with clarity, coming to later centuries, as they do, with all the challenges attendant on any mani­fest­ation of middle-brow culture, including in many cases a mixed reception in their own day, a complicated relationship to originality (both in the derivative nature of particular instances and in their commitment to reproduction), and their varying quality as objects—ranging from the cheapness we might associate with relatively popular culture to the kind of costliness bound to limit an audience to the most wealthy. And so, to fully engage with the topic of remains in the nineteenth century, would mean placing the erudite volumes of exploration and illustration I have cited in the context of a tradition in which they participated, but which was not always as precise or original as these works of archeological research, that of the illustrated compendium, a form of ever-growing influence in the period precisely because of the wide social range included in its ambit. Authors and critics drew on a number of works of greater and lesser erudition that helped shape the poetics of the fragment and of classical antiquity in spite—or possibly because—of their less precise claims to knowledge. Years ago Jean Hagstrum suggested that “The English poet of the eighteenth century carried about in his head what Malraux has called a musée imaginaire, composed of recollections of some of the leading masterpieces of European art.”19 But, as he goes on to point out in the same passage, these “recollections” were inevitably not of the actual masterpieces themselves: “There is some point to Shaftesbury’s remark that the invention of

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158  Material Inspirations prints was to English culture during the eighteenth century what the invention of printing had been earlier to the entire Republic of letters.”20 Hagstrum is citing a subtle claim Shaftesbury makes in the course of demonstrating the sources for modern encouragement of the arts in his fragmentary Second Characters, or the Language of Forms, a discussion in which the philosopher describes a hierarchy of reproductive arts, with high-quality original works—those he described as having an effect similar to the printing press—at the top, and a more debased popular form at a substantially lower point on the social scale. His association of cheapness with a combination of ease of access and loss of quality, and ultimately of both with a pernicious debasing of the taste of the public, is clear even in this incomplete fragment on the topic: Invention of prints, etchings (which are original) answerable to printing in the commonwealth of letters. Hence eye of the public framed; though injured by the false (French and Flemish) taste, and ill cuts in books of learning: always ill because of cheapness of the impression.21

This fragment lays out an extraordinarily nuanced account of the class basis for the phenomenology of the experience of art. The public eye is “framed” in the interplay of image and text in sources of popular instruction. Rather than a museum of masterpieces of European art, the minds of the poets (who of course, were learners before they were writers) were stocked with a network of re­pro­ duct­ive engravings of various degrees of excellence, the quality of the reproduction and the nature of the accompanying text inevitably becoming part of the shaping (framing?) experience of classical art. The association of Flemish art with a vulgar popularity shaped by the easy sensuous pleasure it was said to provide is conventional from the eighteenth century to well into the nineteenth (the place of France in the charge is more unusual, though perhaps it is Rubens who is in Shaftesbury’s sights). What is more striking in the passage is the philosopher’s sensitivity to the cultural effects of re­pro­duct­ ive prints—and his sense of the effect on the public imagination of the style of reproduction adopted for a popular market. It is an issue not limited to the representation of paintings. Shaftesbury might have had in mind Andrew Tooke’s 1698 translation of François-Antoine Pomey’s 1659 Pantheum mythicum seu fabulosa deorum historia, which, originally published without its author’s name, came to be naturalized in England with a far more plebeian title: Tooke’s Pantheon of the Heathen Gods and Illustrious Heroes. Brought out, as its title page indicated, “For the use of schools,” the text was typically illustrated with low-quality plates, whose artists well into the nineteenth century did not bother to emulate classical styles or copy antique statues when representing classical divinities. The Pantheon was a

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  159 key text for Keats and other students of antiquity. Here is the testimony of Leigh Hunt about his school days: there were three books which I read in whenever I could, and which often got  me into trouble. These were Tooke’s “Pantheon,” Lempriere’s “Classical Dictionary,” and Spence’s “Polymetis,” the great folio edition with plates. Tooke was a prodigious favourite with us.22

Hunt was not alone in his passion, as Charles Cowden Clarke indicates in a much-cited reminiscence of Keats’s youth in which Clarke’s italics emphasize the difference between using a text for reference and for a more profound level of self-instruction: “The books . . . that were his constantly recurrent sources of attraction were Tooke’s ‘Pantheon,’ Lempriere’s ‘Classical Dictionary,’ which he appeared to learn, and Spence’s ‘Polymetis.’ This was the store whence he acquired his intimacy with the Greek mythology.” Byron’s well-known letter to John Murray on Keats’s death places this passion in a class context when he proposes that the young poet was “spoilt by Cockneyfying, and Suburbing, and versifying Tooke’s Pantheon and Lempriere’s Dictionary.”23 A pantheon, a dictionary, and a mysterious proper name: as the unparallel nature of their titles suggest, each one of the compendia mentioned by Hunt, Byron, and Cowden Clark had a distinct form and its own particular associations, so it is not obvious they should be run together.24 Still, our authors evidently see them as participating in a related cultural phenomenon, one involving at once pleasure and edification.25 Probably the most characteristic example of the tendency of the genre in the eighteenth century is Joseph Spence’s 1747 Polymetis, a work which had a long-standing influence in later periods and about which Lessing’s contempt less than twenty years after its publication is particularly telling. The importance of the compendium, which the German would describe in 1766 as “altogether intolerable to any reader of taste,” is at once material and conceptual: its representation of important classical statues made them known to a wider readership, while the claims the text made about the nature and evidentiary force of those works, along with the style of the prints, of necessity shaped their reception.26 The engravings in Spence in which Keats immersed himself notably soften and naturalize the originals, imbuing them with a combination of sensuality and sens­ ibil­ity that will be familiar to any reader of the poet’s verse.27 Behind Keats’s improbable use of statuary to convey vivacity in “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill” (1817), an early meditation on poetic inspiration, are the kinds of illustrations to be found in Polymetis. The Apollo Belvedere (fig. 4.5) and the Venus de Medici would be odd similes for people strolling on a pleasant summer evening, unless one has some surprisingly

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Fig. 4.5  Louis Peter Boitard, Apollo Belvedere. In: Joseph Spence (1774). Polymetis, Or an Enquiry Concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Antient Artists. Being an Attempt to Illustrate them Mutually from One Another. Third Edition (London: J. Dodsley), Plate XI.

human associations with the Marbles; it is in the illustrations to Polymetis, I am suggesting, that Keats found license for such associations: The evening weather was so bright, and clear That men of health were of unusual cheer; Stepping like Homer at the trumpet’s call, Or young Apollo on the pedestal: And lovely women were as fair and warm, As Venus looking sideways in alarm. (lines 215–20)

Leigh Hunt’s tone when dealing with classical compendia reminds us that part of their fascination resided in their function as a resource for erotic reveries. He is quite clear on the ways in which the force of illustrations might work against the grain of text, might deliver a vision of quite human pleasure: “Venus, very

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  161 handsome, we thought, and not looking too modest in ‘a slight cymar.’ It is curious how completely the graces of the Pagan theology overcame with us the wise cautions and reproofs that were set against it in the pages of Mr. Tooke” (Hunt, 372). Later Tooke is the agitating cause of his passionate attraction to his cousin: Fanny was a lass of fifteen, with little laughing eyes, and a mouth like a plum. I was then (I feel as if I ought to be ashamed to say it) not more than thirteen, if so old; but I had read Tooke’s Pantheon, and came of a precocious race . . . It was enough for me to be with her as long as I could; to gaze on her with delight, as she floated hither and thither; and to sit on the stiles in the neighboring fields, thinking of Tooke’s Pantheon.  (344)

Keats is less forthright in his verse than Hunt is in his reminiscence. Indeed, his use of classical work will tend to evoke a kind of sensuous chastity, perhaps more reminiscent of the more exclusive and reserved Spence than of the Tooke. “Polymetis was not so easily got at,” Hunt confesses, in a line that combines an indication of the price and quality difference between the works and of the distinct relationship between visual and textual representation each contained, “there was also something in the text that did not invite us; but we admired the fine large prints” (372). The quality that rebuffs Hunt, that results in admiration rather than titillation, but which fascinates Keats, is characteristic of a work meant to shelter the im­agin­ ation of the body from the erotic charge always liable to be felt before the ­beautiful naked form, a natural association only made more pressing by the well-documented romantic adventure of the Greek deities. Not many decades before Keats and Hunt’s warm responses to the representations of antiquity in the compendia, in “His Majesty’s Birth-Day, June 4th, 1785,” Thomas Warton had been clear on the chastening effects identified with classical work, as simplicity and naïveté were held to calm the passions of nature’s heat: Sculpture, licentious now no more, From Greece her great example takes, With Nature’s warmth the marble wakes, And spurns the toys of modern lore: In native beauty simply plann’d.28

While simplicity and clarity, along with the tracing of both qualities to their ul­tim­ate source in nature, are characteristic preoccupations of the neoclassical drives that shaped Spence’s project, the evidence of Keats’s poetry and Leigh Hunt’s reminiscences demonstrates that the texts and images designed to relay the knowledge on which these values were thought to depend might themselves provoke rather than restrain passion.

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162  Material Inspirations As the testimony of the various romantic memoirs I have cited indicates, the interplay between text and image in these volumes framed (in Shaftesbury’s sense) the views of their publics. And indeed, authors in this period are particularly clear on the relationship between the form of the illustrations and the aspirations of particular texts, a concern that informs the interplay between matter and idea on which the works depend. It will be useful in order to bring out the often polemical nature of these issues to trace out how thinkers on the relationship of the visual and the textual reflected on the combined effect of word, subject, and approach to reproduction in these deeply influential publications. When Spence needs to justify his work, given the existence of his great predecessor, Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, the argument he puts in the mouth of his collector—the eponymous Polymetis—is based on the promiscuous nature of the earlier antiquarian’s compendium; the exhaustive nature of that volume is the source of its weakness: I have always admired your collection, says Philander; but might not one who has no such collection, make a shift with father Montfaucon? That father’s work, replied Polymetis, is largely stockt with figures; and perhaps too largely, to be of service in the design we are talking of. We are much obliged to him for his industry: but his choice is rather too loose and unconfined. He has taken in all the different figures he could meet with; of whatever age, or country.29

The new stringency evident in the items Spence chooses to display is of a piece with the aspiration to narrow the range and rationalize the significance of the deities represented in the prints from antique sculptures. Polymetis is on the losing side of cultural history, however. The work is remembered, if at all, less for the fascinated attentions of Keats or Hunt to its prints, than for taking the brunt of Lessing’s attack on an unreflective commitment to what is sometimes called the sister-arts tradition, the tendency to assume an ease of movement or readiness of translation between forms, a topic to which I will return below. Spence’s project ultimately coheres around the desire to find in the heterogeneous objects of antiquity principles of organization that would overcome the two biggest challenges presented by the remains of ancient culture, and of ancient religion in particular: how was a proliferating amount of disparate material to be displayed and explained so as to illuminate rather than confuse the viewer, and ultimately, how was pagan sensuous antiquity to be harmonized with more acceptable modern values, notably with the Christian faith? Spence insists on the association between object and text as a methodological and conceptual necessity: “how should we at all understand the greater part of the remains of the antient artists, if it were not for what we are told by the antient authors?” In a fateful turn, he notes that the Laocoön group would be incomprehensible “without the help of what Virgil, and one or two more of the Latin writers, have said on

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  163 that subject” (290). The certainty that textual sources would yield greater clarity about admired antiquities was a cultural commonplace, but one that would come under significant pressure in advanced circles in the later years of the eighteenth century. It will be useful, therefore, to pause a moment on this topic, and its close relationship to the compilation of images. Spence, Winckelmann, and Lessing provide telling points of contrast for the project of establishing what it might mean to gather together classical art and put it in relation with literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. Polymetis is quite clear on his goals: My principal view in making this collection was to compare the descriptions and expressions in the Roman poets that any way relate to the imaginary beings, with the works that remain to us of the old artists; and to please myself with the mutual lights they might give each to the other.

More than mutual illumination is at issue, however; the project is resolutely committed to the fungibility of the literary and visual imagination on which it is predicated and on which it insists: When you look on the old pictures or sculptures, you look on the works of men who thought much in the same train with the old poets. There was generally the greatest union in their designs: and where they are engaged on the same subjects, they must be the best explainers of one another.

Spence imagines a perfect musée imaginaire of antiquities, of which Polymetis (with its images and citations) is the reflection. As a compensation for the lack of opportunities for direct observation of prized objects, his alter ego creates an open-air museum in which copies of various Roman works of art are displayed by category, accompanied by informative materials likely to illuminate them: As we lie so far north from this last great seat of empire, we are placed out of the reach of consulting these finer remains of antiquity so much, and so frequently, as one could wish. The only way of supplying this defect to any degree among us, is by copies, prints, and drawings: and as I have.

The dialogue itself supplies the explanations from literature that the illustrations of the volume—like the statues themselves—require. We hear in Spence the urge toward a new kind of specificity, which is of a piece with the narrow canon of particularly prized works of antiquity with which he is concerned (hence his criticism of Montfaucon). His practical project of visual-literary illumination is part of a broader commitment to the harmonization of sources that makes sense only if the number of works included in the process is severely constrained (preferably to works or artists mentioned in the few extant sources from antiquity, so that the

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164  Material Inspirations lines linking text and original object are in no way obscured). The impossible his­tor­ic­al project is driven by the desire to understand the pagan gods as not a dis­par­ate and arbitrary grouping of personalities and desires, but as ultimately cohering (given proper organization) into a set of values assimilable by the Enlightenment mind: It is a perfect mob of deities, if you look upon them together: but they are re­du­ cible enough to order; and fall into fewer classes, than one would at first imagine. I have reduced them to six; and considering their vast number, it was no little trouble to bring them into that compass.  (2)

That Spence is participating in a broader cultural trend is demonstrated by the fantasy of a related but quite distinct volume, that seminal work of neoclassicism published less than a decade after Polymetis, Johann Winckelmann’s “Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” (1755). Winckelmann not only envisions a compendium that will organize all antique knowledge for the artist, he suggests that it is only the existence of such a volume that will allow the kind of allegorically meaningful creative work he is committed to promulgating. His principles of selection for that im­agined work are at once formal, historical, and ethical—an amalgamation that was to prove as long-lasting in practice as it was unstable in theory: The artist would require a work, containing every image with which any abstracted idea might be poetically invested: a work collected from all myth­ ology, the best poets of all ages, the mysterious philosophy of different nations, the monuments of the ancients on gems, coins, utensils, &c. This magazine should be distributed into several classes, and, with proper applications to peculiar possible cases, adapted to the instruction of the artist. This would, at the same time, open a vast field for imitating the ancients, and participating of their sublimer taste.30

The ultimate goal of representation in this argument is an ethical one: to aid in effecting an escape from the quotidian or contingent toward a “sublimer taste” the historian associates with the past. Classical work in Winckelmann’s telling is a repository of a more refined (“abstracted”) vision of nature, so that by imitating it the modern artist is more likely to reach a realm of values untrammeled by the limited and local. The art historian does not have the connoisseur in mind, of course, but the artist. He also does not aim to reconcile ancient religion to con­ tem­por­ary values as directly as Spence does. But, there is a commonality linking the two projects that emerges as Winckelmann proposes two fundamental relationships to the Greeks. The first, for artists, is imitation, the central theme of his essay. The second, for the viewer, is a kind of identificatory stoicism. It is in the

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  165 latter that Winckelmann grounds the ethical value he famously identifies with the formal achievement of classical art: the last and most eminent characteristic of the Greek works is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in Gesture and Expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures.

The kind of tranquility Winckelmann praises (a characterization of the Greeks that will itself come under great pressure late in the next century), becomes a form of aesthetic restraint best illustrated by the Laocoön, the group that had been at the Vatican since 1506 and which represents the hopeless struggle of a father and two children against the serpents sent by the gods to destroy them. Unlike Spence, Winckelmann sees a distinction between the literary source and the subject in marble: “He pierces not heaven, like the Laocoön of Virgil, his mouth is rather opened to discharge an anxious overloaded groan, . . . the struggling body and the supporting mind exert themselves with equal strength, nay balance all the frame” (30). A direct line runs between the idea that art represents more than the sensual world around us (itself an ascetic value not unrelated to the putative stoicism of the struggling priest) and the argument that the value of a compendium of antique art resides in its promotion of the creation of al­le­gor­ies. The paradoxical claim is that the accumulation of instances will lead to an escape from the conviction that particular classical works are repositories of inescapable materiality, rather than just the opposite: Painting goes beyond the senses: there is its most elevated pitch, to which the Greeks strove to raise themselves, as their writings evince . . . Such a representation owes its possibility only to the allegorical method, whose images convey general ideas.  (57–8; emphasis in the original)

General ideas arise from the combination of particulars and move beyond them in this argument. And yet, Winckelmann himself keeps opening the door to the material elements that, as I will discuss in Chapter 7, Walter Benjamin will discover hidden in plain sight in allegory. The desire to make art able to convey general ideas leads directly to the need for a compendium of earlier work: “The painter who thinks beyond his palette longs for some learned apparatus, by whose stores he might be enabled to invest abstracted ideas with sensible and meaning images” (58). The mob of deities resolves itself into a thesaurus of virtues, and the collection and representation of objects becomes, as in Spence, not a contingent and unsolvable program of organization but an opportunity to narrow variety down to clear limits, to transform the boundless accumulation of objects into either the clearer forms of allegorical signification or the wide but

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166  Material Inspirations undifferentiated horizons of the ideal. While at first sight Winckelmann might appear to be describing a process quite different from that which Benjamin will uncover in the Baroque drama, both critics illuminate the challenges entailed in the impossible struggle to span the unbridgeable gap between concept and thing. While Winckelmann’s strategy finds meaning in mute stones by the simple expedient of putting it into them through the creation of allegories, we certainly do not see anything so relatively clear and seamless as a symbol (as Benjamin will imagine the term) in this elab­or­ate process of construction—or in the debate about the ways in which m ­ arble objects may or may not cohere with written texts and the values they instantiate.31 The project of creating a digest of literature that would provide models for the fine arts, the role Winckelmann proposes for his imagined analytical compendium, is evidently the aspiration behind the series of influential works the Comte de Caylus published right before and after “Reflections.” The six volumes of Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises brought out by the antiquarian from 1752 to 1755, with the goals of clarifying obscure details in classical authors and demonstrating the progress of the arts, was accompanied by Nouveaux sujets de peinture et de sculpture (1755), a text describing new subjects for contemporary artists drawn from classical sources, and ­ultimately supplemented by Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée, et de l’Enéide de Virgile (1757), the whole amounting to a curriculum based on the ready movement between antique model text or illustration and new art. Behind the efforts of Caylus and Winckelmann we may identify the consolidation of an ambition to make the visual arts a branch of the liberal arts, to ensure the worth of painting in particular by making it relay clear moral lessons, and to guarantee its cachet by linking it to classical learning. The key element underpinning this project is belief in the kind of direct relationship between the visual and literary arts asserted by Spence and largely assumed by Winckelmann. It is at this vulnerable juncture that Lessing will launch his devastating assault in 1766 in Laocoön. Lessing’s challenge to the assumption of a ready interchange between literature and the visual arts that is so central to the work of Winckelmann, Spence, and Caylus is at once practical and conceptual.32 Because he focuses on the formal disparities bound to follow from the use of fundamentally different materials, his project immediately identifies distinctions where others saw continuities. In his argument, the restraint of Laocoön is famously not a matter of noble serenity, but “due entirely to the peculiar nature of Art and its necessary limits and requirements” (Laocoön, 23). The irreconcilable distinction Lessing identifies is the role of time in different media. Because literary modes of representation are able to develop in time, they have available to them possibilities absent from the visual arts, which are limited to representing one instant: “Painting . . . must wholly renounce time . . . she must content herself with actions set side by side, or with mere bodies which by their attitudes can be supposed an action” (77). On the

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  167 other hand, “nothing requires the poet to concentrate his picture on one single moment” (23). When Lessing argues that the confusion of the registers appropriate for each medium leads to symmetrical distorting errors—in poetry, the rage for description that feebly attempts to emulate the work of painting, in painting the passion for allegorizing that attempts to coopt the meaning-making work of literature— he has Winckelmann’s account of allegory in his sights, as his chief instance makes clear. While the suffering body of a doomed father and his children becomes an emblem for where the significance of art may be said to reside for both men, for Winckelmann Laocoön’s reserve is an ethical issue; for Lessing it is material. What Lessing’s intervention illuminates is the power of two overlapping desires: to identify at once the continuities between the literary and plastic arts and between modern and ancient values. His insistence on tracing aesthetic achievement to the successful negotiation between formal and material pressures was not to find compelling echoes for a century. But when the echoes came, they drowned out many other voices. Still, the ultimate success of the line of argument we may identify with Lessing can obscure the fact that the tendency we may broadly associate with Winckelmann and Spence had the longest-lasting influence. Study of the nineteenth century does not reveal a steady progression toward a clearer sense of the formal constraints entailed in the use of various media so much as the repeated manifestation of an anxious wish, never successfully realized, to make the fragments of a lost antiquity cohere into a whole that would reflect values acceptable to the day. This aspiration is ultimately traceable to the uneasy sense that what Spence called the “perfect mob of deities” thrown up by archeology and connoisseurship needed to be imagined as organizable into a limit­ed set of values, into something clearly divine or clearly inspirational. Walter Benjamin, like Aby Warburg, and like Walter Pater before both of them, is fascinated by the idea that the gods of classical antiquity become satanic forces in later times, wielding the cultural power of deities even at a time when the broader system of values and belief to which they belonged had been lost. All three of these accounts (like that of Heine which precedes them all) may be read as responses to eighteenth-century attempts to offer a number of rationalizing responses to the pressures of admired remains associated with a depreciated or abjected religious system.33 Even though the meaning they ascribe to specific objects varies absolutely, the canons of Spence, Winckelmann, and Lessing do not substantially differ, and the prized objects on which these authors tended to focus were not simply admirable aesthetic achievement, they were representations of pagan divinities or divine actions (the goddess of love, of light, the divine punishment of a priest acting against the interests of a god, and so on), and as such they would always contain a doubled challenge: to reason and to religion. It was in the interplay of text and visual representation that the effect of compendia in establishing the meaning of antique remains for the modern era took

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168  Material Inspirations place, and the resonances set up or avoided in this relationship varied from text to text and over time. For example, the emphasis in Polymetis on illustrating the classical deities by fine reproductions derived from noted classical works is quite distinct from the indifference to antique art in the illustrations typical of the many editions of Tooke produced well into the nineteenth century, which tend to feature divinities in the form of various stock rococo beauties, and identifiable simply by the presence of a few of their characteristic attributes (see fig. 4.6). In Tooke we find a broad style of characterization likely owing more to the popular theater or even puppet plays than to more erudite antecedents. Typically produced by undistinguished illustrators with little interest in evoking classical form, the barest suggestion of a reference to antique material comes into these prints late in the eighteenth century, in the shape of coins roughly adapted and placed around or below the deities. The kind of casual undifferentiated forms of representation we find in the images from earlier periods serves to remind us of the fact that the idea of a concept of classical culture linking text and art object is a late and uneven cultural development. It is not until the 33rd edition in 1810, after gen­er­ations of images being reused or recut more or less identically, that the publisher J. Rivington has new images produced, “a set of new and beautiful outlined plates . . . drawn from antique statues, and engraved by an artist of considerable reputation.” Both the quality of the new engravings, and the new use of antique statues as models is evidently part of the attempt to “supersede others that were much worn, and in the execution of which there was certainly a deficiency of taste, that ill corresponded with the improved state of the arts.”34 The new plates would become standard in the nineteenth century as an emergent sense that the interest in antique gods was linked to the achievement in art of the same period (see fig. 4.7). Nevertheless, in the indifference to classical style and the visual remains of antiquity evidenced by more than thirty editions, in which figures that could as easily be wearing one outfit as another are identifiable purely by the accessories around them (the bow on one side of Apollo, the lyre on the other), the text offers a visual analogy to the ready transposition of pagan de­ities to biblical figures advanced in the text itself. What Pomey calls the “Historical Sense” (Sensus Fabulæ Historicus) is a kind of one-for-one translation of figures well illustrated by his section headings: “The Historical Sense of the Fable. By Saturn is meant Noah,” or “The Historical Sense of the Fable. Bacchus an Emblem either of Nimrod or Moses.”35 Panofksy’s account of the “principle of disjunction” might be useful in thinking about Tooke, though the art historian is addressing an earlier period: Wherever in the high and later Middle Ages a work of art borrows its form from a classical model, this form is almost invariably invested with a non-classical, normally Christian, significance; wherever in the high and later Middle Ages a work of art borrows its theme from classical poetry, legend, history or

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Fig. 4.6  “Apollo.” In: Andrew Tooke (1787). The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, and Most Illustrious Heroes in a Short, Plain and Familiar Method, by Way of Dialogue. For the Use of Schools. Twenty-eighth Edition: Revised, Corrected, Amended, and Illustrated with New Cuts of the Several Deities (London: Rivington et al.) 29. myth­ology, this theme is quite invariably presented in a non-classical, normally con­tem­por­ary, form.36

This would be an extremely late manifestation of a principle Panofsky develops in relation to the Middle Ages, but it is a suggestive analogy, in part because it

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Fig. 4.7  “Apollo.” In: Andrew Tooke (1838). Tooke’s Pantheon of the Heathen Gods, and Illustrious Heroes. Revised for A Classical Course of Education and Adapted for the Use of Students of Every Age and of Either Sex. Illustrated with Engravings from New and Original Designs (Baltimore, MD: William and Joseph Neal), 38.

indicates the conceptual atavism of Tooke’s project. Still, the pressure to identify a continuity between antique material and contemporary concerns was a constant in the compendia. What varied was the ways in which that continuity was identified, whether by means of a type of direct translation (Saturn is Noah, Bacchus Moses), or through a higher abstraction of the sort we find in Spence. It is typical

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  171 of the kinds of volumes, of which Spence and Tooke are instances, to attempt to locate the hidden or lost meaning of objects that, absent such an interpretative key, were too disparate and disturbing to sensibilities shaped either by traditional religious systems or by the rationalizing forms of belief that came to the fore in the eighteenth century. For this reason a number of apparently more arcane works need to be added to the list of influential compendia or analyses of antiquities in the eighteenth century that would be influential in later periods, including Bryant’s A New System; Or, an Analysis of Ancient Mythology: Wherein an Attempt is Made to Divest Tradition of Fable, and to Reduce the Truth to its Original Purity (1774), which Blake helped illustrate in the days of his apprenticeship, as well as a set of interrelated and notorious texts composed by two of the most highly influential connoisseurs of their day: Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit et les Progrès des Arts de la Grèce; sur leur connexion avec les Arts et la Religion des plus anciens peuples connus: sur les Monumens Antiques de l’Inde, de la Perse, du reste de l’Asie, de l’Europe et de l’Egypte (1785), by the disreputable Baron d’Hancarville, was followed by Richard Payne Knight’s Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786), and ultimately by the same author’s Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818). Knight, developing his ideas from d’Hancarville’s notorious speculations, traced the emergence of world art (including the cross) to the attempt to represent not simply the fundamental powers of nature, but the very organs of human reproduction. The line between connoisseurship and speculation was very close; thus it is that Knight’s 1818 essay was originally conceived as a preface to yet another compendium, the luxurious second volume of the Society of Dilettanti’s Specimens of Antient Sculpture (published after many delays in 1836, well after the Preface it was meant to accompany). Far from an incongruous juxtaposition, the combination of reproductions of antique objects with wild speculation is characteristic of these manifestations of the desire to make admired fragments yield up their secrets, whether those were understood to be a higher conceptual synthesis available to rational analysis (say a response to the changes of the seasons or a reminder of human fecundity) or a lost but recoverable historical-theological antecedent (Bacchus as Moses).37

4. Blake The desire to negotiate a modern relationship with the remains of classical an­tiquity is manifested not only in the habit, to be found in Tooke, of equating figures from the Judeo-Christian tradition with pagan deities (itself a vestige of a far more sophisticated tradition of analysis traceable at least as far as the Renaissance). The same aspiration leads to efforts to look even further back and discover in both categories of divinity, the classical and the biblical, the remnants of yet earlier cults

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172  Material Inspirations or values. Apparently idiosyncratic work by Blake fits into the latter tradition as it had been developed by writers such as Bryant, Warburton, d’Hancarville, and even Richard Payne Knight. And so Blake’s extraordinary 1820s re-engraving of the Laocoön enmeshed in a sinuous web of language made up largely of aphorisms about the true nature of creativity and inspiration (fig. 4.8) takes an object charged with art-historical weight and reshapes it as a lesson about the intersection of the divine and human creativity dependent on the ready transition between classical and Old Testament divinities. “The Gods of Priam are the Cherubim of Moses & Solomon: The Hosts of Heaven.” The ecstatic euphoria of Blake’s piece notwithstanding, we can detect in the bare copula that stands between two sublime categories (“The Gods of Priam” on one side, the Cherubim on the other) what is also evident in all the arguments the colon leaves out, a drive to reconcile incommensurate material of the sort that shaped Tooke as it did Bryant, a process that works by simplifying, by declaring away otherwise irreconcilable differences. During his apprenticeship as an engraver Blake had helped illustrate Bryant’s bold re-theorizing of the meaning of classical antiquities, but he is motivated by his own particular needs to identify the artistic force of the works—to link the religious to the creative. The key to Blake’s extraordinary re-visioning is right below the plinth: “‫[ הי‬Jah] & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomon’s Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium.” As Ruthven Todd pointed out decades ago, Blake adds to the emphasis on finding true sacred origins a visionary commitment that moves his observations outside the realm of time altogether (Tracks, 42). Although he was deeply skeptical of Joshua Reynolds (whom he notoriously described as a man “hired to depress art”) Blake was a friend of such passionate and erudite Academicians as Fuseli and Flaxman, and I am suggesting—following the lead of recent critics—the value of reading his response to main lines of ­art-thought in his period as deeply enmeshed in the institutional and intellectual structures in which they arose.38 As Blake’s relationship to the remains of classical antiquity is shaped by an artistic training for which that antiquity was formative, the poet’s engagement with works in the canon is fated to differ in fundamental ways from that of art theorists such as Winckelmann and Lessing. And then, his religious ­sensibility gives him access to another line of influence bound to shape his thinking about the meaning of the idols of antiquity. What might it mean to find fundamental value in certain works of art, but to believe that that value was not fully recognized (or recognizable) by the authors of those works? That is the premise of Blake’s claims in his revised Laocoön, which are ultimately traceable to fundamental tenets of the revisionist account of the evidentiary value of Greek texts going back to Bryant: I shall deduce from their own histories many truths, with which they were totally unacquainted, and give to them an original, which they certainly did not

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  173

Fig. 4.8  William Blake, Laocoön, c. 1826–1827. Collection of Robert N. Essick. © 2020 William Blake Archive. know. They have bequeathed to us noble materials, of which it is time to make a serious use. It was their misfortune not to know the value of the data which they transmitted, nor the purport of their own intelligence.39

Bryant evidently takes us quite far from the kind of ready movement between text, object, and meaning we saw in Spence, Winckelmann, and even Lessing. “From their own histories . . . truths, with which they were totally unacquainted”: Bryant solves the apparent contradiction of noble truth being relayed through representations of disreputable deities by pushing to the side the themes and

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174  Material Inspirations t­opics of his authors. In the course of an extraordinary campaign of ground clearing Bryant denies the legends of foundational figures such as Deucalion and others, and of “the supposed heroes of the first ages,” who—as he notes in a remarkably democratic gesture—“in every country are equally fabulous.” “No such conquests were ever achieved as are ascribed to Osiris, Dionusus, and Sesostris,” he declares, before going on to propose that “the histories of Hercules and Perseus are equally void of truth” (x). His bold argument leads the historian to deny the existence of central figures from a number of traditions (“I make as little account of the histories of Saturn, Janus, Pelops, Atlas, Dardanus, Minos of Crete, and Zoroaster of Bactria”) not because his aim is to activate a thoroughgoing skepticism about the past. Far from it; Bryant’s goal is to recast the stories of these legendary founders in order to reveal the secret knowledge that in fact underlies them; to transform them from mysteries into bearers of a secret: “Yet something mysterious, and of moment, is concealed under these various characters: and the investigation of this latent truth will be the principal part of my inquiry.” The trick to plumbing these momentous mysteries is—as it will be for Blake—to identify more stupendous originals than the ones tradition recognized: After having cleared my way, I shall proceed to the sources, from whence the Grecians drew. I shall give an account of the Titans, and Titanic war, with the history of the Cuthites and antient Babylonians. This will be accompanied with the Gentile history of the Deluge, the migration of mankind from Shinar, and the dispersion from Babel. The whole will be crowned with an account of antient Egypt; wherein many circumstances of high consequence in chronology will be stated. In the execution of the whole there will be brought many surprising proofs in confirmation of the Mosaic account: and it will be found, from repeated evidence, that every thing, which the divine historian has transmitted, is most assuredly true.  (xi)

Biblical legend is confirmed, but only through elucidation of a far older story. Bryant’s revision of sources is intended to reveal the real nature of relics from the past, to recover things those objects suggest but cannot fully reveal. The objects themselves no longer offer clear and straightforward insights into a prized lost antiquity also available in classical texts, but something less and more. We may compare Bryant’s sensibility, which understands even the most im­port­ant remnants of antiquity as barely effective means for relaying knowledge of the central mysteries of the past to claims by Blake in the descriptive catalogue he published in 1809, a text which, for all its evident strangeness, is driven by an aspiration that is at its heart characteristic of the neoclassical period: the need to support great projects of historical painting through reference to earlier models. Like Bryant’s foundation myths, Blake’s models hearken back to a time beyond the earliest eras traditionally recognized. “The two Pictures of Nelson and Pitt,” he writes incongruously of two of his visionary paintings of contemporary

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  175 statesmen, “are compositions of a mythological cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo, and Egyptian Antiquity, which are still preserved on rude monu­ments, being copies from some stupendous originals now lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.”40 Blake’s imagination is as indelibly shaped by those as Bryant’s is by the Greek material; if we see a gesture to styles Blake might have been able to associate with eastern art around the main figure, clearly in Nelson himself we find yet another vision of that most dynamic god, the Apollo Belvedere (see fig. 4.9). Still, the crucial Blakean element in the account he gives of creativity is that it is not necessary

Fig. 4.9  William Blake, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, c. 1805–1809. Tate Britain, London. Photo © Tate, London 2019.

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176  Material Inspirations for the artist to develop his form by a careful analysis of the literary and visual sources. To be an artist is to be far-seeing enough that one may be afforded views of fundamental (and still extant, because always visionary) antiquities: The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia, has seen those wonderful originals, called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on walls of Temples, Towers, Cities, Palaces, and erected in the highly cultivated States of Egypt, Moab, Edom, Aram, among the Rivers of Paradise—being originals from which the Greeks and Hetrurians copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvedere, and all the grand works of ancient art. They were executed in a very superior style to those justly admired copies, being with their accompaniments terrific and grand in the highest degree. The Artist has endeavoured to emulate the grandeur of those seen in his vision, and to apply it to modern Heroes, on a smaller scale.

A passionate admiration motivates Blake’s need to deny the originality of classical achievement. It is precisely the strength of the work he loves that makes it inconceivable to him that its sources are in the cultures he takes to have been dominant in ancient Rome and Greece: No man can believe that either Homer’s Mythology, or Ovid’s, was the production of Greece, or of Latium; neither will any one believe that the Greek statues, as they are called, were the invention of Greek Artists; perhaps the Torso is the only original work remaining; all the rest are evidently copies, though fine ones, from greater works of the Asiatic Patriarchs . . . Those wonderful originals seen in my visions were some of them one hundred feet in height; some were painted as pictures, and some carved as basso-relievos, and some as groups of statues, all containing ­mythological and recondite meaning, where more is meant than meets the eye.  (531)

While Blake redraws the Laocoön as an exploration of the complex network on which inspiration develops, it is the Apollo Belvedere that tends to recur when he is thinking more directly about his own poetic ambition. When Blake represents the overthrow of the pagan gods in the series of watercolors he painted twice to illustrate Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the central figure for the deities whose dominion is lost on the birth of Christ is an Apollo clearly based on the famous work at the Vatican that Blake had illustrated for Rees’s Cyclopædia.41 “The Oracles are dumb.” Milton had written, capturing at the fall of the gods the moment when the meaning of their symbols disappears: No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  177 Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.42

While one of the two versions Blake produced to illustrate the moment features a fairly direct adaptation of the statue at the Vatican, including the bow that Apollo was believed to be holding in the original marble (fig. 4.10), the other appears to

Fig. 4.10  William Blake, The Overthrow of Apollo and the Pagan Gods, c. 1815. Illustration 4 to Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, California.

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178  Material Inspirations gesture also to the Laocoön by providing the god with a snake (likely a reference to Python, the serpent Apollo defeated before assuming control at Delphi). It is noteworthy that Milton’s poem is itself at once a well-known document of the poet’s coming to creative power, a compendium of pagan gods and their at­tri­ butes, and a deeply material imagining of the transition from one set of values to another. Their all-too-human response to the birth of Jesus reveals the idols to be not divine at all, but grossly material. Status lost, the carved stone that should stand for inviolable permanence instead confesses a vulnerability that links it to the basest mortal conditions—not just death, but something like nervous per­spir­ ation is manifest as the end of their time of significance approaches: In Urns, and Altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the flamens at their service quaint; And the chill Marble seems to sweat. While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat. (lines 192–6)

Blake’s doubled association at once with the god of music and with the poet he saw as his own most important antecedent is inevitably present in Milton, a text in which the great English epic poet becomes incorporated in Blake’s own body even as he is enmeshed in the later poet’s own rewriting of Miltonic cosmology. Among the wonders of Milton is the opening of its Preface, where the forceful attack on “The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all Men ought to contemn” are opposed to “the Sublime of the Bible.” Milton is presented as a victim of the desire to achieve literary greatness by wielding classical form (“Shakspeare and Milton were both curb’d by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the Sword”). All artists are equally addressed in the declaration of independence of a preface the polemical flavor of which would not be seen again in English letters for another century: “Painters! on you I call, Sculptors! Architects! . . . We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.” The Preface then ends, astonishingly, with “Jerusalem,” a poem that takes the argument for the unlocatability of ideal art a step further by nationalizing the divine itself. “And did those feet in ancient time,” Blake asks rhetorically, “Walk upon England’s mountains green” (Complete Poetry and Prose, 95). The attention to feet, walking, and location in the Preface forecasts events in the text and illustrations of the poem: not only does Milton become absorbed into Blake via his foot, but the representation of the figure of Milton himself (fig. 4.11) is a revitalization of the Apollo Belvedere—come off his plinth and striding through eternity.

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  179

Fig. 4.11  William Blake, Title Page of Milton, A Poem, c. 1811. Courtesy of The New York Public Library.

The special poignancy of Blake’s relationship to antiquity, the way his work is often shaped around his desire to extricate himself from precisely what he has learned to admire, inevitably determines his return to the Laocoön over a decade after he first illustrated it. The resulting print may be read as a bold confession of an inability to simply move away from certain stupendous models. The group represents a moment of beauty achieved in danger, an inextricable threat to the self and its beloved productions. The return is notable, as is the form the response takes, the act of repetition itself to begin with, and the precipitation of a number of snaky unresolvable aphorisms, as though words that challenge, inspire, and correct might take the place of the threatening serpents binding the piece together and destroying the pagan priest and his offspring. “The antiquities of every Nation Under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews,” Blake writes in his Catalogue: “They are the same thing, as Jacob Bryant and all antiquaries have proved.” The poet wants to make a historical argument about the original existence of a shared culture—“All had originally one language and one religion”—but ultimately this is not his principal claim. After a brief disquisition on the limits of history, and especially on the failings of the ­

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180  Material Inspirations Enlightenment revisionist tradition that includes Gibbon and Voltaire, Blake turns to his real topic, the challenge to his creativity built into the system of ad­mir­ation into which he was trained: It has been said to the artist, take the Apollo for the model of your Beautiful Man, and the Hercules for your Strong Man, and the Dancing Faun for your Ugly Man. Now he comes to his trial. He knows what he does is not inferior to the grandest antiques. Superior it cannot be, for human power cannot go beyond either what he does or what they have done; it is the gift of God, it is inspiration and vision. He had resolved to emulate these precious remains of antiquity; he has done so, and the result you behold; his ideas of strength and beauty have not been greatly different. Poetry as it exists now on earth in the various remains of ancient authors, music as it exists in old tunes or melodies, painting and sculpture as they exist in the remains of antiquity and in the works of more modern genius—each is inspiration and cannot be surpassed: it is perfect and eternal. Milton, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Raphael—the finest specimens of ancient sculpture, and painting, and architecture, Gothic, Grecian, Hindoo, and Egyptian—are the extent of the human mind.  (543–544)

Blake’s genius manifests itself in his ability to make a new world of creative meaning out of the universe of received images in which he lived. The achievement of the classical objects he represented for Rees’s Cyclopædia is as important evidence for what really matters as the Asian objects he also engraved. Both are mani­fest­ations of a creative energy that stands outside of time, being purely visionary.

5.  Mysterious Antiquity (Two Urns) By the close of the eighteenth century the remains of antiquity have come to be too many things at once. They are perfect works of art or they are proof of the power of art to make gods. They stand for beauty itself when they don’t present clear evidence of the transience of all human endeavors. They are idols unless they are mere stories. Sometimes they inhabit remarkably recondite systems of analysis, remainders of mysteries that themselves are traces of earlier analyses of the power of nature, a circle that moves from the evidence of the senses to hidden things, and ultimately back to the world. The heterogeneous antiquity manifested within antique textual sources, and instantiated by classical things, resulted in an unstable combination of inspiration and challenge that the compendia at once exacerbated and helped to address. From the promiscuity of Zeus, to the grotesque horse-headed manifestations of Demeter, the variety of the gods and the

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  181 ways they made themselves known challenged at once canons of taste and of moral and religious value. It does not make Blake any less of a visionary poet to recognize his connection to a number of well-established cultural preoccupations, including those motivating debates about the place of classical antiquities in relation to modern creativity or shaping the bold re-interpretation of myths of which Bryant’s account is only one example. That Erasmus Darwin, typically associated with an emergent ma­teri­al­ism, provides a striking example of the ready availability of speculative responses to ancient objects is just a further indication of the tendency in late eighteenth-century culture to respond to material things by looking past them, toward historical and natural tendencies they may be said to illustrate (which themselves may be understood as manifestations of deeper or higher forms of materialism). His account of the Portland Vase in The Botanic Garden (1791) draws on a long tradition of allegorical and mystical accounts of the relics of antiquity going back to Bacon and including Bryant and others, in order to make the art object a representation of ancient Mystery cults, though they themselves are rationalized as evocations of natural processes, including the one that combines unavoidable mystery and the utterly material nature of human existence: the coming of death.43 As far back as the earliest cabinets of curiosity, and in Montfaucon, whose illustrations included a wide range of heterogeneous objects, the fascination with the past was not manifested solely in the obsession with canonical works, the interpretation of which could appear fairly self-evident whether to visionary eyes or to readers familiar with the classics. Throughout the period of our study, objects entered culture the very nature of which was in dispute, as is the case with antique vases. These were discovered in increasing quantities in gravesites from the eighteenth century on, so they inevitably came to be associated with funerary practices. Their original identification as Etruscan also linked these objects to the mysterious glamour of an earlier and little-understood antiquity—and one, in any case, largely known through its funeral monuments. The vases were also prized for providing a rare opportunity to see classical painting, almost none of which had survived; hence the Europe-wide enthusiasm to the publication of two collections assembled by Sir William Hamilton and published by d’Hancarville in the 1760s and 1790s. The transcription of the decorations of these objects into two dimensions provided a vocabulary for artists that would be drawn on for much of the century to follow.44 The Portland Vase was neither ceramic, nor Etruscan, nor even Greek, though it was thought to be the last for decades.45 Adding to its mystery were two facts: the subjects it represented on its surface were indeterminate and the technique by which the object had been produced was irrecoverable. Owned for centuries by

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Fig. 4.12  William Blake, “Portland Vase.” In: Erasmus Darwin (1791). The Botanic Garden, Part I: The Economy of Vegetation (London: J. Johnson).

the Barberini family, it had been acquired in Italy by Hamilton in 1778, who sold it to the Duchess of Portland in 1784. The piece was subsequently copied by Josiah Wedgwood in Jasperware, a process that took years to accomplish and that itself contributed to the vase’s fame. It is a Wedgwood copy that Erasmus Darwin owned when he wrote The Botanic Garden, and that Blake copied when he illustrated that poem (fig. 4.12). Indeed, it is its material existence as a reproduction that provides the occasion for the work to enter the poem—which it does as part of an account of the revival of ceramics in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, interest quickly turns to what is represented on the surface of the vase, itself a scene of evocative ruin: bid Mortality rejoice and mourn O’er the fine forms on Portland’s mystic urn.— Here, by fall’n columns and disjoin’d arcades, On mouldering stones, beneath deciduous shades, Sits Humankind in hieroglyphic state, Serious, and pondering on their changeful state; While with inverted torch, and swimming eyes, Sinks the fair shade of Mortal Life, and dies.46

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  183 Darwin follows the rationalizing lead of Spence in Polymetis, while anticipating the focus on the place of nature in the reception of classical antiquity that was to be a recurrent focus of later writers. If a key component of Romantic Hellenism was the identification of Greece as a natural home to beauty and creativity, it was an easy step to naturalize the faith of the ancients and see that overdetermined subject represented in the objects it had created. Darwin’s extensive notes not only develop an account of the ways in which the vase’s “hieroglyphics” illustrate the Eleusian mysteries—“invented in Egypt, and afterwards transferred to Greece, and flourished more particularly at Athens, which was, at the same time, the seat of the fine arts”—they make a claim for the intersection of the visual arts and literature that aligns his work closely to that of Spence (1:353n22). Indeed, Darwin’s account of the mysteries perversely makes the visual arts the likely site for the representation of rites not meant for public display: “Now, as these were emblematic exhibitions,” he writes of the rituals, “they must have been as well adapted to the purposes of sculpture as of poetry.” Darwin’s debt to Bryant’s wilder speculations, and especially the earlier author’s bold claim that sacred texts carry know­ ledge unavailable to their own authors, becomes evident in the ease with which he moves from the evidence of a moment of textual ekphrasis (in Apuleius’ Golden Ass) to a social claim about the emergence of an artistic tradition unconsciously keeping mystical knowledge alive: “And it is very probable that the beautiful gem representing the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, as described by Apuleius, was originally descriptive of another part of the exhibitions in these mysteries, though afterwards it became a common subject of ancient art” (1:354n22). For all their speculative quality, Darwin’s erudite conjectures have certainty at their core, and a confident relationship to the passage of time; they do not suggest the unclear future of a lost antiquity, so much as they identify a long tradition of attempts to make sense of both the past and eternity. Pagan Mysteries, when correctly understood, become so many insights into the nature of existence, moving with admirable comfort between the divine and the scientific: Many of the important operations of Nature were shadowed or allegorized in the heathen mythology, as the first Cupid springing from the Egg of Night, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, the Rape of Proserpine, the Congress of Jupiter and Juno, the Death and Resuscitation of Adonis, &c.  (1:xvii–xviii)

Culture in this view becomes a hidden scientific inheritance, like religious know­ ledge in Bryant, passed on by unknowing generations, unwittingly reproducing facts of great significance in the form of misunderstood emblems: The Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry, before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic

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184  Material Inspirations paintings of men and animals; which, after the discovery of the alphabet, were described and animated by the poets, and became first the deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome. Allusions to those fables were therefore thought proper ornaments to a philosophical poem, and are occasionally introduced either as represented by the poets, or preserved on the numerous gems and medallions of antiquity.  (1:xviii)

The poet could be describing his own practice of erudite allusion and ornament. Darwin, like Spence and Bryant, participates in a long-standing tradition aiming to identify continuities that will overcome the distance of time either by naturalizing what the objects of the past stood for (natural processes such as birth, reproduction, and death being universal and not time-bound events) or by identifying the objects with a transhistorical mystical realm that ultimately also comes back to nature. And so we arrive at the difference between Keats’s vase and Darwin’s. It is, of course, more than an accident that Darwin has a particular vase in mind. The history of the piece and its reception allows him to present it within a powerful material matrix. The account of ceramics out of which the lines on the Portland Vase emerge include mud itself. The many pages of notes (which move from flint and clay to enamels, before reaching the Portland Vase, and subsequently turning to coal) are part of the object lesson of the poem, while the absence of such an apparatus is a necessity for Keats. Darwin’s poem answers questions one might not have even imagined raising; Keats is only conclusive on the limits of what we know on earth—and what we need to know. And whereas everything in Darwin’s project is designed to draw lines of continuity between antiquity and today, Keats’s work, like his sonnet on the Elgin Marbles, is committed to marking the passage of time, the irreparable traces it leaves, the paths it indicates but does not let us follow: Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” lines 44–50)

The power of Keats’s archeological uncertainty is linked to his naturalizing of romantic desire in the poem. Not reaching what one loves is precisely the pleasure that an engagement with antiquity may provide—the admired realm tan­tal­ izes its lover from a point impossible to access. And, after all, longing itself might be the most natural thing in the world.

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  185 We may read Blake’s visions as a compensatory attempt to transcend the kind of temporal separation that is unbridgeable in Keats: in spirit he is able to visit periods anterior even to the lost antique he has been taught to admire. The fact that Blake’s ambition and his account of the possibilities of creativity are both shaped in response to the culture of art that formed him seems a reasonable turn of events for a master craftsman whose career developed between the studio and the Academy. The force of remains is all the more notable, however, in the case of someone like Keats, who, in early poems such as “I stood tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry,” creates fantasies of naturalized classical creativity reminiscent of the one assembled by Polymetis as models for his own ambition. “Was there a Poet born?” Keats asks at the conclusion of the lines in which Apollo, Venus, and Homer himself become implausible similes for life. But he refuses an answer, and ends with bathos and a dash: “but now no more, / My wand’ring spirit must no further soar.—” (“I stood tip-toe,” 241–2). Keats becomes a model for the way in which classical things may inspire a poetic ambition shaped by those characteristically Keatsean elements: unanswered questions concluding in passionate irresolution.

6.  Nature in History: From Abstraction to Form The sense that ancient objects might offer the possibility of access to a realm where culture and nature are reconciled, to a site of fundamental knowledge or experience now lost, is a hopeful one. And yet, the fear that we might find the remain to be little more than a broken thing testifying to the inexorable ironizing power of time is never far at the moment of encounter, requiring little more than a slight change in perspective to open up vast vistas of loss to the imagination. Both parts of the romantic inheritance come into play in the response to classical antiquity in the middle years of the nineteenth century, often in the same text. And so we consistently find a strand of anxiety woven through even foundational texts of Romantic Hellenism. Schiller’s much-excerpted lines from Wallenstein “The Gods of Greece” (1788), have been identified as an important source for Coleridge and Wordsworth, a beautiful manifestation of an impossible nostalgia, the projection on to antiquity of a sense (utterly lost to the modern) of an unalienated communion with the divine through a direct relationship with a nature still understood as sacred: The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty, That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and wat’ry depths; all these have vanish’d.

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186  Material Inspirations They live no longer in the faith of reason! But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names.47

Coleridge’s 1800 translation captures the longing characteristic of the text, the way in which the vacuity of the modern experience of nature may be contrasted to a plenitude that includes religion, the visual arts, and poetry all at once: “The intelligible forms of ancient poets, / The fair humanities of old religion.” Still, probably the most influential British expression of this sensibility is to be found not in the measured exposition of Coleridge’s Schiller, but in Wordsworth’s passionate expression of the desire to have experienced pagan worship, not because of any actual faith in classical divinities, but as an indication of a modern condition in which nature has been stripped of any real significance for the viewer: Great God, I had rather be A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.48

The influential lines of thought and feeling (thought about feeling) expressed in Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” combine a concern with nature and time with a poignant response to the ways in which nature is liable to (not) mean in modernity, a response drawing on the long tradition suggested by Schiller while bringing out the personal pathos implicit in the earlier lines; the careful impersonality of “the heart doth need a language” gives way to an ejaculation in which we find not the divine evoked in prayer, but simply the expression of a hopeless desire. * * * When, in 1854, John Ruskin describes the Elgin Marbles as “a public nuisance” in a letter to his friend, the eminent archeologist (and eventual keeper of classical antiquities at the British Museum) Charles Thomas Newton, we may hear in his hyperbole evidence of the inevitable reaction against the taste of an earlier era (36:61). But to stop there would be to miss the surprisingly nuanced response to the place of classical antiquity that emerges at key points in Ruskin’s major works, notably in his simultaneous attack on academic art and mass production in the seminal “Nature of Gothic” chapter of Stones of Venice II (1853), and in the four chapters on landscape in Modern Painters III (1856) that identify the historical phenomenon Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy. Ruskin makes the case for medieval art as much by his description of the power­ful foundational inadequacy of Renaissance art as by his celebrations of Gothic workmanship and the context in which it arises. The moral, aesthetic, and historical failure of the later period has at its core a dangerously abject

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  187 relationship to classical antiquity Ruskin develops on the basis of a bold but effective reversal: the self-regarding egoism at the heart of Renaissance art paradoxically manifests itself in a slavish imitation of classical forms founded on a desperate desire to avoid imperfection. Ruskin’s argument in Stones of Venice is that the repeated imitation of Greek motifs is not simply an impoverished aesthetic practice within architectural decoration, but one that of necessity crushes the creativity of the laborer who carries it out. Thus it is that while the celebration of Greek art since at least Winckelmann had linked its creative achievement with political freedom, Ruskin identifies in classical aspirations a process materially linked to slavery: “If read rightly,” he declares of perfectly achieved molding in the Greek style, “these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek” (10: 193). Later in his career Ruskin would return to Greek topics, and especially Greek myth, with a renewed sympathy. But in these works of the middle of the century it is the symptomatic nature of the interplay between modern and classical culture that drives his aesthetic analysis.49 The pathetic fallacy described in Modern Painters, as a fundamentally modern phenomenon, is closely linked to a failed exercise in necromancy: “those curious vacillations which brought us to the modern temper while vainly endeavouring to resuscitate the Greek” (5:316). The impossible challenge of revitalizing Greek sculpture without reanimating the relationship to nature at the core of the Greek religion emerges in the course of a complexly material kind of historicism, one at once conceptually rich and deeply committed to recognizing the force of the object. Ruskin’s problem is not with antiquity itself, of course, but with its reception. He is preoccupied by a crisis of meaning bound to arise in the course of a relationship with forms based on the confused desires developed around a weak historic sense he discovers in modern taste: I do not think we ever enough endeavour to enter into what a Greek’s real notion of a god was. We are so accustomed to the modern mockeries of the classical religion, so accustomed to hear and see the Greek gods introduced as living personages, or invoked for help, by men who believe neither in them nor in any other gods, that we seem to have infected the Greek ages themselves with the breath, and dimmed them with the shade, of our hypocrisy; and are apt to think that Homer, as we know that Pope, was merely an ingenious fabulist; nay, more than this, that all the nations of past time were ingenious fabulists also, to whom the universe was a lyrical drama, and by whom whatsoever was said about it was merely a witty allegory, or a graceful lie, of which the entire upshot and consummation was a pretty statue in the middle of the court, or at the end of the garden.  (5:228)

Early in the century, Flaxman’s claim that the initial impulse for Greek sculpture was religious does not eventuate in any engagement with the religious traditions

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188  Material Inspirations of the Greeks; instead it opens up a bifurcated discussion of the sculpture mentioned in the Old Testament on the one hand and of antique sculpture (thought to be Greek) on the other. It is left to Ruskin to shine a light into the obscure links suggested between faith and works, and to show the distance between the two. Indeed, the absence of faith is diagnostic, both sign and symptom of modernity, a phenomenon that results in the trivializing of classical divinities of the sort Ruskin illustrates with his evocation of the statue of a divinity with no sacral function placed in a minimizing perspective in order to create aesthetic interest at the end of a garden vista. The argument characteristically doubles on itself when Ruskin presents this debased form of decorative neoclassicism as one of the ­reasons we cannot really appreciate the relationship of the Greeks to nature or the divine. It is paradoxically this failure to find anything fully sacred that leads to the unsteady wistful admiration for an antiquity with which modernity cannot fully engage: nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands . . . Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant, (Tennyson, Carlyle); one or two, anchored, indeed, but anxious or weeping, (Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning); and of these two, the first is not so sure of his anchor, but that now and then it drags with him, even to make him cry out,— “Great God, I had rather be A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.” (5:322–3)

In Wordsworth’s plea Ruskin hears a confession of a failing that is historical (of “this age of the world”), although it is experienced as a personal crisis. Evidently Wordsworth does not worship Poseidon, Zeus, or Demeter; he does not know of any local deity or sprite to whom he might sincerely offer his supplication. It is the loss of a relationship to nature that Wordsworth figures in his wish for a glimpse of happiness. In that sense—as Ruskin recognizes—the lines are a declaration of failure and of a sensibility in which not only nature, but the deities themselves are emptied of meaning. Abstraction hides in plain sight in an argument linking two apparently dis­par­ ate, but actually closely allied tendencies, the rationalizing aspirations of the eighteenth century and the formalist ones that come to the fore toward the end of

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  189 the nineteenth. It is easy to miss, given not only the passion in Ruskin’s words, but also the suggestion of concreteness that the idea of nature characteristically brings in its train, but while Ruskin’s longing for the idea of worship absent the actual cult borrows much of its force from its imputed relationship to nature, the full force of that relationship is felt solely as an anguished vision of irretrievable loss. In this context, the recourse to nature is at every turn a deeply rational and abstracting one, an attempt to vindicate the classical pantheon of the sort we find described in Polymetis and carried out in every text I have mentioned so far in this chapter. Unable to find transcendent value in the stories of a squabbling aristocracy of divine beings driven to interfere in human affairs by their jealousies and desires, and cut off from a living relationship to worship and even to know­ ledge of the rites of veneration, culture finds a location from which to view the gods of antiquity by making them emblems for natural processes. I have mentioned the tradition that honored their superhuman particularity by reimagining the gods as demons. But, running alongside and counter to this tendency we find another one, also going back to antiquity, and receiving new validation in the modern era, the transformation of the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome into elements in that richly textured abstraction called nature.50 The process of abstracting values from the figures of the gods, which saw an important revival and development in the Enlightenment, presented an ongoing challenge to later periods because of the anxious relationship to the phenomenon of abstraction itself that we see manifested in Wordsworth as in Ruskin’s response to him. While authors in the eighteenth century consistently arrived at an ethical validation for their fascination with gods and goddesses by translating the peculiar and heterogeneous deities of antiquity into manifestations of fundamental natural occurrences, Ruskin sees in this very process a confession of the failure of a full relationship with either divinity or nature. And he is not alone; the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century was notably responsive to the gains and losses entailed when the value of ancient divinities was stabilized at such a cost, when statues were no longer to be understood as the home of nature’s best self, much less of divinity, but as the location at which the loss of a relationship to both might be identified. Ruskin understands Wordsworth’s cry in “The world is too much with us” as provoked by—and therefore evidence of—the recognition of a sense of loss of relationship to the divine in nature, hence the place of the argument in the great middle section of Modern Painters III, with its bold historicist reconfiguration of what landscape might mean. The critic knows that Wordsworth’s outburst is the sign of a confused longing, of the desire to re-enchant the world, which is the very thing that makes the pathetic fallacy so characteristically modern. But the tendency of the century was away from enchantment. And, of course, Ruskin participates in one of the characteristic responses to the longing he identifies, one going

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190  Material Inspirations at least as far back as Schiller, which was to turn to art itself as the last great hope for the meaningful experience of the material world, the compensation for what could no longer be found in nature itself. Henry James captures the uncertain place of classical sculpture as a model for meaningful unalienated representation in the nineteenth century in an 1875 aesthetic debate that owes a great deal to Wordsworth, but in which the lost source of the experience of awe is not nature, but the created object itself. “There was a sensation once common, I’m sure, in the human breast,” posits Roderick Hudson, the passionate young sculptor, “a kind of religious awe in the presence of a marble image newly created and expressing the human type in superhuman purity. When Phidias and Praxiteles had their statues of goddesses unveiled in the temples of the Aegean, don’t you suppose there was something more than a cold-blooded, critical flutter?”51

Roderick Hudson’s interlocutor, Miss Blanchard, stands for a facile version of the hopeless Wordsworthian desire to re-enchant the world: “Phidias and Praxiteles,” Miss Blanchard remarked, “had the advantage of believing in their goddesses. I insist on believing, for myself, that the pagan mythology isn’t to be explained away by a ruthless analysis, and that Venus and Juno and Apollo and Mercury used to come down in a cloud into this very city of Rome where we sit talking nineteenth-century English.”

The cynical modern sculptor, Gloriani, historicizes the argument, insisting the representation of the divine has nothing to offer since the high watermark of neoclassicism reached by Canova in the early years of the nineteenth century: “ ‘But, my dear fellow,’ objected Gloriani, ‘you don’t mean to say you are going to make over in cold blood those poor old academic bugbears, the prize bores of Olympus . . . Canova has so thoroughly shown them how that there’s nothing left for you’ ” (243). The first edition leaves out Canova and is more direct in its challenge of the classical deities: instead of “the prize bores of Olympus,” Gloriani rejects “those poor old exploded Apollos and Hebes.”52 But in both editions Roderick moves to what we might understand to be the next stage in the argument for admiration, not Miss Blanchard’s sentimental paganism, but a higher level of abstraction: “Ah, I think I could have shown Canova how,” Roderick gaily rejoined. “It won’t matter a rap what you call them—you’ll just know them for more than mortal. They shall be simply divine forms. They shall be Beauty; they shall be Wisdom; they shall be Power; they shall be Genius; they shall be Daring. That’s all the Greek divinities were.”

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  191 The young sculptor rushes back to an Enlightenment level of abstraction that is itself inadequate for a period demanding post-Romantic plenitude, a sentiment nicely captured by Roderick’s interlocutor in a brief deflating challenge: “ ‘That’s rather depressingly abstract, you know,’ said Miss Blanchard” (Novels, 244). The great rescue of one period becomes the disappointment of another. If the eighteenth century praised classical work because of its ideal form, the nineteenth century found in the abstraction that was at the heart of the concept of ideal nature both large categories of meaning and the absence of the kind of plenitude for which it discovered itself to be longing. Ruskin presents the issue as one instance of a fundamental historical change in values, and that certainly was a vital line of thought in the period, one given special impetus by influential the­or­ies about the development of the aesthetic in time going back to Schiller’s Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Aesthetics (1835). The most influential, because most vividly personal and sophisticated, manifestation of this sensibility in English letters is certainly the work of Walter Pater, a classical philologist always preoccupied with rebirths. His well-known vision of a Renaissance portrait troubling a Greek Venus allows the critic to identify abstraction from life as essential to Greek sculpture, and therefore as the quality that distinguishes it from modern forms, such as painting. In his 1869 essay on Leonardo, Pater envisions a cross-historical contrast— itself a museal conceit—to illustrate the development in art instantiated in the Mona Lisa: Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.53

Giving Hegel a passionate gloss and remarkable concreteness, Pater moves to reconcile the concept of the ideal beauty of the Greeks with a progressive view of development that acknowledges classical achievement even as it recognizes the impossibility of real emulation because of the movements of history itself.54 Although in his earliest writings Pater is more ready than he will be in later work to accept the idealizing vision of classical antiquity, he nevertheless finds it inadequate for modernity. As he writes in the most Hegelian of his productions, his essay on Winckelmann, in 1867: The longer we contemplate that Hellenic ideal in which man is at unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world, the more we may be

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192  Material Inspirations inclined to regret that he should ever have passed beyond it, to contend for a perfection that makes the blood turbid, and frets the flesh, and discredits the actual world about us. But if he was to be saved from the ennui which ever attaches itself to realisation, even the realisation of perfection, it was necessary that a conflict should come, that some sharper note should grieve the perfect harmony, in order that the spirit, chafed by it, might beat out at last a broader and profounder music.  (177–8)

The sharper note Pater is imagining is the one sounded by Greek tragedy, which is the form to which, he argues, Winckelmann himself was unable to turn. Sensitive as he is to the interplay of history and personality in the process of reception, Pater suggests not simply a historical transition from the classical ideal to a more melancholy modernity: the vision of antiquity Winckelmann has bequeathed to later eras becomes a manifestation of his own desire, a fantasy dependent on looking away from the darker sides of the classical tradition: His conception of art excludes that bolder type of it which deals confidently and serenely with life, conflict, evil. Living in a world of exquisite but abstract and colourless form, he could hardly have conceived of the subtle and penetrative, but somewhat grotesque art of the modern world.  (178)

Pater found in his reading of German philosophy a way to reconcile the concept of the ideal beauty of the Greeks with a progressive view of history. By placing perfection itself on a historical continuum, Hegel, who owed a great debt to Winckelmann, had moved beyond the constant pressure of emulation involved in the art historian’s aesthetics. Indeed, in this early essay we find the seeds of Pater’s later assertion that all art aspires to the condition of music, a claim which, when placed in historical context, adds a new sharpness to a distinction that was only formal in Lessing; the limits of Greek perfection are the limits of uninflected beauty, which are those of sculpture itself understood as the perfect manifestation of one element of classical culture: “Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world” (182–4). The aspiration toward music is a longing toward pure form for which sculpture will only ever provide a limited satisfaction. The archeological poetics of the eighteenth century had been fundamentally shaped by the lack of direct access to admired objects. It was the power of the copy, the longing for the original, or even something beyond it, that drove Blake as much as Keats. The later nineteenth century had that tradition to draw on, as well as the pressure of an ever-more material and therefore more nuanced and textured experience of the thing itself. While early in his career, such as in the seminal essay on Winckelmann, Pater evokes a fairly conventional sense of the

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  193 significance of classical statues as residing in the ways they testify to a kind of perfection as distinguished from a more troubled, contingent form of modern beauty only anticipated in tragedy, by the time of his pioneering lectures and essays on Greek sculpture later in the century, he has substantially shifted his emphasis.55 “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” of 1880 opens with an observation about reception touching on important historiographical and aesthetic ram­ ifi­ca­tions. Pater emphasizes the ways in which the limited range of art-objects remaining from the period, and the context in which they have been viewed, have distorted responses to antiquity: “What we possess, then, of that highest Greek sculpture is presented to us in a sort of three-fold isolation; isolation, first of all, from the concomitant arts . . . from the architectural group . . . from the clear Greek skies, the poetical life.”56 What Pater refers to later in the page as the “falsifying isolation” of the contemporary display of Greek sculpture separates prized an­tiqui­ties from the productions of weavers, carpenters, and goldsmiths— company the recognition of which would serve to make sculpture a craft product, rather than the personal expression of a solitary artistic genius: “it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for instance, is but a supremely well-executed object of vertu” (234). Lene Østermark-Johansen notes that “Pater’s sculptural universe” expands in his later works as “the thinning of form, the etherealization of marble and the atmospheric play of light and shade” and gives way “to a world of ­coloured and tactile sculpture: wood, terracotta, bronze, chryselephantine.” More than this, what she calls his “sculptural scale” comes to include “anything from coins and hand-held oil lamps to colossal statues of Zeus.”57 The misunderstanding of the material context of antique sculpture has more than historical implications. Pater suggests it is one of the causes for the tendency toward abstraction in the modern reception of classical work: It has encouraged a manner of regarding it too little sensuous . . . Students of antiquity have for the most part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture, rather as elements in a sequence of abstract ideas, as embodiments, in a sort of petrified language, of pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in connexion with the development of Greek intellect, than as elements of a sequence in the material order, as results of a designed and skilful dealing of accomplished fingers with precious forms of matter for the delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come to be regarded as the product of a peculiarly limited art, dealing with a specially abstract range of subjects; and the Greek sculptor as a workman almost exclusively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental connexion with the material in which his thought was expressed.  (197)

“Forms of matter” as opposed to “elements in a sequence of abstract ideas,” “ma­ter­ial,” not “exclusively intellectual,” the passage reiterates the same contrasts at each sentence as Pater works to indicate the effect of mediation on the

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194  Material Inspirations experience of antiquity and therefore on the imagination of antiquity itself. “The student must always remember,” he notes in a passage the tenor of which would not have been strange to Shaftesbury, and which might easily have been written with the young Keats in mind, “that Greek art was throughout a much richer and warmer thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the illustrations of a classical dictionary might induce him to think” (233). As I will discuss further in Chapter 9, Pater is notably sensitive to the ways that the past is inevitably marked by the manner in which we come to know it, whether in the line engravings of a text for students or “within the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum” (196). The deracinating quality of the museum that becomes something of a cliché in advanced circles from the later nineteenth century forward is a complaint only liable to arise when the infrastructure that makes possible the regular movement of people and objects has reached the point at which an alternative (more variegated and sensuous) Greek world has become available to the museum-goer and reasonably intrepid traveler. Pater finds points of comparison to put up against the pale ideal of long standing in the discovery of ancient polychromy, which interests him not so much for its indication of the vibrant colors of the past, but for a more modern phenomenon: the disturbing eruption of a carnal red into a world otherwise and up to that point shaped around muted tones. In “Winckelmann” he writes of the deep joy of the modern rediscovery of antiquity as like that to be felt at digging up a beautiful body with lips “still red with life in the grave” (Renaissance, 167). We hear a similar pleasure and set of associations in his account of the sumptuous gold uncovered in recent archeological digs at Mycenae: Here, those sanguine, half-childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in dead men’s graves, which seem to have a charm for every one, are more than fulfilled in the spectacle of those antique kings, lying in the splendour of their crowns and breastplates of embossed plate of gold; their swords, studded with golden imagery, at their sides, as in some feudal monument; their very faces covered up most strangely in golden masks. The very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick with gold-dust—the heavy gilding fallen from some perished kingly vestment; in another was a downfall of golden leaves and flowers; and, amid this profusion of thin fine fragments, were rings, bracelets, smaller crowns as if for children, dainty butterflies for ornaments of dresses, and that golden flower on a silver stalk—all of pure, soft gold, unhardened by alloy, the delicate films of which one must touch but lightly, yet twisted and beaten, by hand and hammer, into wavy, spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long undulating arms appearing frequently. (Greek Studies, 221–2)

Surface rather than depth, spirals, undulating cuttle-fish arms—Pater’s Greece is sensuous, manifold, decorative, no longer austere or formal; it is also very much

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  195 time-bound and vulnerable, “unhardened,” “delicate,” “twisted,” liable to crumble into a golden dust after millennia, his language suggesting that even kingly vestments can die. When he turns to the religious traditions behind the representations of div­in­ ities Pater emphasizes the human mysteries at the heart of Greek work, a topic that places his analysis somewhere between anthropology and psychology. “One of the interests of the study of mythology,” he says in a moment of understatement, given his commitment to this approach, “is that it reflects the ways of life and thought of the people who conceived it” (222). Pater’s account of the imposing statue of Demeter that Charles Thomas Newton had brought back from Cnidus in the 1860s (fig. 4.13) emphasizes the place of sculpture itself in the process of cultural reflection that includes myth—while reminding the reader that even marble cannot escape the ravages of time. This discussion revises that stark contrast he had made between the work of Leonardo and classical statuary in his essay on the painter ten years before: The seated figure, much mutilated, and worn by long exposure, yet possessing, according to the best critics, marks of the school of Praxiteles; is almost

Fig. 4.13  Marble statue of Demeter seated on a throne, c. 350 BC–330 BC. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum.

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196  Material Inspirations undoubtedly the image of Demeter enthroned . . . Here she is represented in her later state of reconciliation, enthroned as the glorified mother of all things. The delicate plaiting of the tunic about the throat, the formal curling of the hair, and a certain weight of over-thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose characteristics is a very sensitive expression of the sentiment of maternity.  (150–1)

As a whole, the essay on Demeter and Persephone is a beautiful return to the Mysteries that had preoccupied writers on antiquities the previous century. But with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (discovered late in the eighteenth century) in mind, and especially with the stately statue of Demeter available to him both at the British Museum and in the luxurious volumes Newton published of his researches in 1862, Pater is able to change the focus from the thrill of the ineffable evoked by Darwin when dealing with the mysteries broadly, to the manner in which (as he had begun to suggest in the essay on Winckelmann), sculpture itself is an instrument for taking the darker drives of the Greek myths into a register where they become humanized without falling into the realm of bodiless abstraction: For the myth of Demeter, like the Greek religion in general, had its unlovelier side, grotesque, unhellenic, unglorified by art, illustrated well enough by the description Pausanias gives us of his visit to the cave of the Black Demeter at Phigalia. In his time the image itself had vanished; but he tells us enough about it to enable us to realise its general characteristics, monstrous as the special legend with which it was connected, the black draperies, the horse’s head united to the woman’s body, with the carved reptiles creeping about it.  (141)

The grotesque account of Black Demeter in Pausanias was not unknown in earlier periods.58 In fact, the monstrous image that Bryant had had produced for New System in 1774 attempted to illustrate the very description Pater cites (fig. 4.14). But Pater has more than textual sources to work with. Putting into practice his resistance to viewing Greek art in isolation, he makes use not only of the ancient historian, but of a coin for evidence of what the visual arts could offer as alternatives to the disturbing vision of the human in nature written into the myth of Demeter and Persephone even when the former is not represented as part beast (see fig.  4.15, which is the coin as reproduced to illustrate Ruskin’s account of the piece). Pater does not hide his sense of the relief to be found in looking at the calmer vision of feminine power stamped on a thing he can imagine holding in his hand (a “trifling object” he calls it), rather than reflecting on the uncanny figure in the text before which his mind quails. In an argument intriguingly analogous to Nietzsche’s contemporary identification in Birth of Tragedy (1872) of the Apollonian and Dionysian qualities of classical culture, the restraint of Greek art becomes part of a dialectic including (and confessing to) darker drives:

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  197

Fig. 4.14  James Basire, “Hippa Phigalensium” [Demeter]. In: Jacob Bryant (1774). A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, volume 2 (London: T. Payne), Plate XIII.

Fig. 4.15  “Head of Demeter Crowned with Corn,” Messene, 369–330 BC. From John Ruskin, “School of Athens” (lecture 1870, published in Aratra Pentelici, 1872). In: The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912). E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen). Ruskin, 20: Plate XVIII, detail.

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198  Material Inspirations If, with the thought of this gloomy image of our mother the earth, in our minds, we take up one of those coins which bear the image of Kore or Demeter, we shall better understand what the function of sculpture really was, in elevating and refining the religious conceptions of the Greeks. Looking on the profile, for instance, on one of those coins of Messene, which almost certainly represent Demeter, and noting the crisp, chaste opening of the lips, the minutely wrought earrings, and the delicately touched ears of corn,—this trifling object being justly regarded as, in its aesthetic qualities, an epitome of art on a larger scale,— we shall see how far the imagination of the Greeks had travelled from what their Black Demeter shows us had once been possible for them, and in making the gods of their worship the objects of a worthy companionship in their thoughts. Certainly, the mind of the old workman who struck that coin was, if we may trust the testimony of his work, unclouded by impure or gloomy shadows. The thought of Demeter is impressed here, with all the purity and proportion, the purged and dainty intelligence of the human countenance. The mystery of it is indeed absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked for in so slight a thing, intended for no sacred purpose, and tossed lightly from hand to hand.  (141–2)

It will not be surprising, of course, that the path back to a vision of classical achievement through myth, handicraft, and coins afforded a far more nuanced and textured vision of antiquity than that possible earlier in the century. But, the tendency of this approach was not limited to the cultural, even anthropological, preoccupations we find in Pater. It could move toward some surprisingly formal claims. Thus, although we find a related sensibility in Ruskin’s late lectures on Greek sculpture, such as those he delivered in 1869, and published as Queen of the Air, the same year, and Aratra Pentelici (delivered in 1870 and published in 1872), Ruskin’s presentation deploys his characteristic hyperbole to make claims about jaded modern taste as a way of pushing an ambitious claim about the ethics of form manifested as pleasure. “And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, bores you,” he writes with provocative insinuation, “(and you know it does,) is that you are always forced to look in it for something that is not there; but which may be seen every day, in real life, all round you; and which you are naturally disposed to delight in, and ought to delight in” (19:413). Ruskin’s argument goes to the heart of the new insistence on seeing the object in front of one (as opposed to a training in looking “for something that is not there”). And indeed, he is strikingly precise and specific on the locations of the images he illustrates for his lectures, which are notably uncanonical (e.g., “a patera lately found at Camirus, authoritatively assigned by Mr. Newton, in his recent catalogue, to the best period of Greek art” (20:335)). The ideal is not denied in his argument, but its fundamental claims to value are nullified when it is made relative and contingent, when it is simply a type one has learned to appreciate: “You may take the Venus of Melos as a standard of beauty

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  199

Fig. 4.16  “Hercules of Camarina,” c. 410 BC. From John Ruskin, “The Hercules of Camarina” (lecture, published in Queen of the Air). In: The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912). E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen). Ruskin, 19: Plate XVIII, detail.

of the central Greek type. She has tranquil, regular, and lofty features; but could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl” (19:499). Like Pater, too, Ruskin is sensitive to the pressures of learned values in creating the experience of the work of art, in preventing the viewer from seeing what is in fact there (fig. 4.16): Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first, because the face is like a face. Perhaps you think there is something particularly handsome in the face, which you can’t see in the photograph, or can’t at present appreciate. But there is nothing of the kind. (19:412)

For all his claims about the real (the photograph is showing exactly what there is of interest in the coin), and the apparently ethical claims of so much of his ana­ lysis, Ruskin is ultimately concerned with the formal achievement of Greek work, which is what makes him an interesting intermediary figure between the Enlightenment aesthetics of a Winckelmann and something far more modern. A Winckelmannian claim for the restraint evident in classical work (for “a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur”) returns in Ruskin, but the critic places his emphasis on the passions of the artist, rather than on the subject: Then, what are the merits of this Greek art, which make it so exemplary for you? Well, not that it is beautiful, but that it is Right. All that it desires to do, it does, and all that it does, does well. You will find, as you advance in the knowledge of art, that its laws of self-restraint are very marvellous; that its peace of heart, and contentment in doing a simple thing, with only one or two qualities, restrictedly desired, and sufficiently attained, are a most wholesome element of education for you, as opposed to the wild writhing, and wrestling, and longing for the

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200  Material Inspirations moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony of eyes, and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out of one’s soul into fiddlestrings, which constitute the ideal life of a modern artist.  (19:414)

Ruskin’s prose works hard to make the connection between formal achievement and ethical life, but ultimately the balance it is designed to keep is very difficult to maintain. His argument is distorted because of the shifting nature of subjects and objects involved in what is also a historical claim—hence the confused play with number (beginning with the one or two qualities that are the indications of a simplicity particular to wholesome art) and pronouns that characterizes the passage. Greek art (the work before “you”) is the object perceived by its viewer, while the vision afforded by modern art is not of the object at all, but of the artist’s interiority (“one’s soul . . . which constitutes the ideal life of a modern artist”). An ethics of form emerges from the rich and overlapping set of contrasts that become manifest as he contemplates the coin and discovers a number of otherwise unresolved topics: Whatever else Greek work may fail of, you may be always sure its masses are well placed, and their placing has been the object of the most subtle care. Look, for instance, at the inscription in front of this Hercules of the name of the town— Camarina. You can’t read it, even though you may know Greek, without some pains; for the sculptor knew well enough that it mattered very little whether you read it or not, for the Camarina Hercules could tell his own story; but what did above all things matter was, that no K or A or M should come in a wrong place with respect to the outline of the head, and divert the eye from it, or spoil any of its lines. So the whole inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually diminishing size, continuing from the lion’s paws, round the neck, up to the forehead, and answering a decorative purpose as completely as the curls of the mane opposite. Of these, again, you cannot change or displace one without mischief: they are almost as even in reticulation as a piece of basket-work; but each has a different form and a due relation to the rest, and if you set to work to draw that mane rightly, you will find that, whatever time you give to it, you can’t get the tresses quite into their places, and that every tress out of its place does an injury. (19:414–15)

Assumptions about artistic period, the practical challenges of achieving a complex design on a small surface, the concerns of artists (“the sculptor knew well”) and of viewers come together as Ruskin boldly engages with this modest piece at an extraordinary level of detail. And out of this engagement with the relatively trivial classical instance emerges a forceful emphasis on the virtue of form. For earl­ ier authors an object such as a coin might serve to date a work of real significance.

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Matter, Form, Abstraction  201 To give the quotidian, the apparently trivial thing, such attention is part of a new dispensation.59 Hair, basket-work, script that is nearly meaningless, or the meaning of which is of little interest when compared to its formal qualities—the critic i­­s looking at a small thing (one, as Pater reminds us, whose fate was to be “tossed lightly from hand to hand”) and finding within it the tiniest details to  commemorate because his aim is to offer a corrective to the tendency to imagine that what matters in Greek work is not what is in front of the viewer, but an ideal realm only suggested by the object. It is an object lesson in close looking to move with such care over a surface that had been so much more often in the course of its practical existence transferred from place to place with little reflection, part of that great fungible phenomenon we call money. Not a hair out of place is a trivial claim for order, but that is the formal standard on which the critic insists. Again and again Ruskin evokes an earlier tradition of ethical analysis, only to shift its terms to form. I will close this long treatment of the vicissitudes of the reception of classical antiquities and of concepts of antique culture with one last coin representing Hercules (see fig. 4.17); this one comes up the year after Queen of the Air, in “The School of Athens,” a lecture he delivered at Oxford ostensibly on Greek sculpture, which he then reprinted in Aratra Pentelici (1870). “No good Greek artist,” Ruskin proposes in what we may read as a complete rebuttal of the premises for the admiration of the Laocoön that nevertheless preserves the very values identified in that work by Winckelmann, “would have you behold the suffering either of gods or heroes; nor allow you to be apprehensive of the issue of their contest with evil beasts, or evil spirits.” The stoicism of the hero is now entirely absorbed in the restraint of the artist and viewer, which

Fig. 4.17  “Heracles and the Nemean Lion,” Heraclea, c. 390–180 BC. From John Ruskin, “School of Athens.” In: The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912). E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen). Ruskin, 20: Plate XVII, detail.

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202  Material Inspirations qualities, when put together, add up to the centrality of form viewed as the only criteria for judgments, aesthetic or ethical: “All such lower sources of excitement are to be closed to you; your interest is to be in the thoughts involved by the fact of the war; and in the beauty or rightness of form” (20: 339). The fact even of war is a question of accurate and full representation, which is where beauty will reside in this argument—in the rightness of form.

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5

The Experience of Form (Bewilderment at the Vatican in George Eliot and Vernon Lee) Imposing palatial staircases, vast noisy vestibules crowded with bodies moving to uncertain rhythms in paths that may cross or join one’s own. Long hallways that may be one’s destination or then again may be the route to something one believes one needs to see, passages crowded with others making different decisions about what calls out to the attention and what can be passed over. Or perhaps the halls are empty and echo one’s own steps as one moves, making one wonder why nobody else is here, what has brought one to such a desolate place. To find oneself in a museum is to be in a space outside of the routines of daily life, a location intended for the transient visitor, and seldom particularly comfortable. But, of course, the vast spaces to be covered are not the principal challenge of the institution, nor even the lesser or greater presence of other people. The objects on display present the fundamental opportunity and test. The things we are there to take in call to our hopes and to our anxieties with uncertain self-born suggestions like those that may strike someone arriving at a party already underway: it is possible that a new adventure awaits in that room buzzing with conversation, someone we don’t yet know may just be coming out of a back room or kitchen, rounding the corner as we arrive, unknown, but ready to greet us with the surprising glint of recognition that anticipates the beginning of a life-long bond. On the other hand, the exchanges most likely to take place are liable to be stilted, unsatisfactory: predictable when we want originality, strange when we are looking for comforting clarity. Chances are we will leave as we entered, dissatisfied with others, perhaps with ourselves. And, as objects are more difficult to blame for our own failings than individuals, they tend to throw us back on ourselves. Do I understand this thing? We may ask ourselves at the museum. We may try to project our incomprehension outward and ask not why don’t I understand this, but what does it mean? Still, self-doubt will find a way back: Who am I that I cannot understand what this thing is or why it should matter? How is all of this connected? Is this the masterpiece that was supposed to move me, or is it the work (of a student, of a later era, of a reprehensible hack, and so on) that I am meant to ignore? As the unspoken questions proliferate, we try to remember what we learned in conversations, or in our reading, or perhaps even in a classroom, about why any art object Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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204  Material Inspirations matters, or why this one before us does. Or, like a poor student at a meditation class returning from other anxious ruminations to focusing on one’s breath, we force our minds back to the thing before us. We tell ourselves to concentrate on the formal values we can identify without knowing anything about the period or artist. We tell ourselves what we believe we know to be true, that those are the elements available in any experience of an aesthetic object, to any viewer. In the last chapter, I touched on the changes of taste registered in Henry James’s 1875 imagination of the passion of the provincial American artist faced with the power of antique fragments, the opportunity the figure of Roderick Hudson gives the novelist to reflect at once on the limited possibilities available for modern enchantment and on the ways in which the vicissitudes of taste are experienced unevenly depending on distinctions in class and national origin. This chapter will turn to two works in which an unresolved relationship to antique statues demonstrates the affective force shaping the turn to form toward the end of the century. Both of my instances revolve around the naturalization of the experience of art through the representation of a naïf brought before classical work, an encounter bound to be neither clear nor comfortable, as it is shaped by the intersection of half-recognized desires and systems of knowledge, which neither fully satisfactory on their own, nor entirely harmonious in their interactions, can seem monstrous and strange when confronted with the raw human needs they evoke without resolving. Analysis of two moments of crisis at the Vatican will serve to indicate an important phenomenon in nineteenth-century culture; the consolidation of a trad­ition of responses to art of the past was so significant a development in this period that authors could use its history (including shifts in relatively recent arthistorical concepts) as a way of reflecting on changes in the values the classical was said to represent (stasis, the ideal, a closer relationship with nature or the divine, etc.), and ultimately on the meaning of those values themselves. I touched in the last chapter on some of the extraordinarily varied responses that even the fairly limited sources that went into shaping the imagination of a writer when it came to the remains of the past could lead to. If much of the power of the response to antiquity coming from the eighteenth century and even earlier depends on the sustaining force of fantasies of continuity (Jupiter is Moses, works of art carry ancient mysteries into the future, etc.), nineteenth-century writers are particularly moved by the experience of the discontinuous, including breaks in the reception and mediation of classical material in modern culture. As the canon develops and changes, its very vicissitudes were bound to provide the occasion for reflection, hence the responses to new kinds of material in the work of critics such as Ruskin and Pater discussed above. But the shock of new knowledge does not come simply from visits to the museum; received claims

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The Experience of Form  205 about the culture of the past themselves become objects of reflection as they are seen to shift. Pater offers a notably subtle and historicizing account of the apparent contrasts between a calm classical past and a troubled modernity he had inherited from various earlier thinkers, notably Hegel. In his work, established dichotomies dissolve into far more intimate relationships than mere opposition. Interested as he is in cultural distinctions only insofar as he can illustrate the constitutive interpenetration of apparent contraries, in his work even Christianity— in a full inversion of Tooke and the line of thought he represents—is formed around a classical core. The idea will be given its fullest treatment in Marius the Epicurean (1885), but it’s already important in “Winckelmann”: “Christian art was still dependent on pagan examples, building the shafts of pagan temples into its churches, perpetuating the form of the basilica, in later times working the disused amphitheatres as quarries.” In this telling, the drives of the Renaissance manifest “an aspiration towards that lost antique art, some relics of which Christian art had buried in itself, ready to work wonders when their day came.”1 As Pater’s experiments in narrative will suggest, fiction has at its disposal resources for the representation of contradiction, debate, and even the felt ex­peri­ ence of historical change that can be great resources for the critic. For the author of Imaginary Portraits (1887) and Marius all phenomena of any interest are at once personal and historical, so accounts of representative lives are the core of much of his work. But cultural change will not always be experienced as congruous with the drives of the individual, as tends to be the case in Pater. It is more often liable to be registered as shock or confusion. Middlemarch (1871–1872), published just a year before The Renaissance and three years before Roderick Hudson, is set decades earlier, which allows George Eliot to present an extra­or­din­ar­ily subtle reflection on the responses to antiquity of an earlier time. Eliot shapes the bleak honeymoon of Dorothea in such a way that she can situate in Rome a debate about the relative merits of the written word and the visual arts going back to Lessing, but she is quite precise and specific about the location of the particular exchange I want to highlight. It is at the Vatican in the 1830s that two creative young men consider a beautiful young lady at rest next to the Ariadne (then known as the Cleopatra).2 For the German painter, Adolf Naumann, the vision presents a perfect antithesis of modern and classical beauty as Hegel might have understood the contrast: “What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?” said the German, searching in his friend’s face for responding admiration, but going on volubly without waiting for any other answer. “There lies antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom.”3

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206  Material Inspirations His friend’s proposal is intolerable for the Englishman, because the pressures of his own desires do not allow such dispassionate reflection. Still, Will Ladislaw does not confess his feelings directly in his response, but rather deflects them into a formal reflection on medium developed along lines familiar since Lessing, though evidently filtered through Hegel: “Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.”  (186)

Will’s claims are all the stronger for their incorporation of the limits of language (“all the better for being vague”), and indeed, the novel evidences its own inability to be fully precise on the issues at stake when it presents three versions of the same significant moment: once as narrated event, another time as reflective dialogue or debate, and a third time as a narratorial meditation on a character’s psychic life. In the disagreement between Will and Naumann we may find warrant to suggest that this kind of thoroughness is an indication that while the narrator is doing her best, the author is demonstrating the limits of the kind of illustration Naumann proposes. I have cited the beginning of the debate. Here is what precedes it, what we might call the beginning of the scene, set at “the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness” (183–4). The location is identified with the errors of an earlier era (indeed, the name of the statue is a marker of the different temporality inhabited by the narrator and her characters), and it is a place which as a matter of course puts into play the very kind of contrast Naumann wishes to undertake in oils: They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. She was not looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor. But she became ­conscious of the two strangers who suddenly paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at them, immediately turned away to join a maidservant and courier who were loitering along the hall at a little distance off.  (184)

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The Experience of Form  207 This is a lovely vision of opacity. Dorothea does not look at what is around her. She “probably” is not thinking of the sculptures on display. Her gaze is fixed— meaning in this case appearing attentive but not quite taking things in—not on the masterpieces around her, but on a transient beam of Italian light. She does not even fully perceive her cousin or his friend, though they precipitate her sudden departure. How much better a representation is this than Naumann’s would have been, this evanescent view of someone not seeing, rushing away before she is fully seen? But it is nothing we might call insight that is captured. The most forceful argument for the power of the written word is not Will Ladislaw’s impassioned claims, nor even this scene of description I have just cited, however, but the two moments combined with a later paragraph in which the novelist makes the reader privy to Dorothea Brooke’s interiority. In the com­bin­ ation we find an object lesson on the power of language as a means of representation that goes well beyond Will’s sentiment, as well as a thoughtful historically bound account of the challenge of assimilating antiquity to the modern religious sensibility, of finding the historical keys that make the jumble of Rome more than an exhausting challenge. The city and its art become at once actual facts for the visitor and emblematic experiences, Dorothea’s creation of future memories entirely her own is shaped by the memories of others we call culture and built out of the intersection of this city of antique remains with a consciousness determined by a knowledge as limited when it comes to the fine arts as it is about the erotic life she has failed to discover with her husband: To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the handscreen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of know­ ledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.

And so Naumann is not wrong about the juxtaposition of modern and classical sensibilities he identifies with Dorothea at the Vatican. But he is unable to capture from the outside the meaning to the individual of the experience he witnesses (not to say simplifies) as picturesque juxtaposition. Dorothea on her honeymoon has not found ideal consummation at the center of classical culture, but rather phantasmagoric incoherence:

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208  Material Inspirations Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange as­so­ci­ ations which remained through her after-years.  (188)

Eliot is explicit in historicizing the art-historical claims deployed in the text, in locating them in a specific period. And so, the trip to Rome is dated not simply with political period markers, to the time “[w]hen George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister,” but to an era when “[t]ravellers did not often carry full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter’s fancy” (183).4 Looking to the 1830s from the vantage of nearly a half century, George Eliot provides a vision of the shock of arrival at the much-desired destination, one that illustrates by contrast the manner in which the mediated forms of classical knowledge could be so much more inspiring than the distressing experience of the thing itself. Dorothea’s superannuated husband, Causabon, is an antiquary on the model of Bryant, if substantially shallower in his aspirations: his researches into earlier trad­itions for a single key to all mythologies, like the prints and other souvenirs Dorothea’s uncle brought back from his Grand Tour, are all remnants of a more titrated, filtered, sporadic relationship to the things of antiquity.5 As Eliot suggests, by 1830 the weakness of such strategies for dealing with the accumulation of antique objects was becoming clear; by the 1870s it was inescapable. Ultimately, the argument of the novel at this juncture comes down to the dynamic, timebound, and contingent truth of the realist novel, a project building on the kinds of claims about language made by Will, but taking them much further because of the textured representation available to the writer of fiction: “No; nonsense, Naumann! English ladies are not at everybody’s service as ­models. And you want to express too much with your painting. You would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against. And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them. Language is a finer medium.”  (185–6)

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The Experience of Form  209 The debate between Naumann and Will engages with a fundamental aesthetic question: the relative value of two media in representing the world. Will’s argument is against a generalized concept of interpretation built on a preliminary gesture of abstraction. The novel concretizes a conceptual claim by making it about his cousin, the woman he loves. But it is a general argument about the power of specificity we hear in the losses of particularity entailed in the two indefinite pronouns in his question (“And what is a portrait of a woman?”). The novel gives Will particular reason to resent the proposition that the woman toward whom he already feels a passionate attachment should become a category (a portrait of a woman) that in turn will be an occasion for reflection on her as a symbol. But, as we have seen, this tendency toward a formalizing abstraction has more general currency in the period than this one novel. The close relationship between location and crisis is easy to lose sight of, given that the reader of Middlemarch can well understand that marriage to Casaubon would likely make any young lady miserable. Still, Eliot’s elaborate introduction of the scene in the context of the difficulties presented by Rome itself cannot be ignored. Indeed, the action at this juncture directly follows on and develops the logic of its introduction. Arriving at the fundamental source of a relationship to antiquity, at the city Winckelmann spent his early years wishing desperately to reach, and which he died trying to return to, the city whose antiquities Spence most wanted to capture and organize for those unable to get there, at the museum that holds the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön that Blake could only know in reproductions and visions (works stolen by Napoleon in 1798 and only returned in 1815) Dorothea enters the scene, takes in nothing, and hastens away. The failure of the Catholic religion to fill its objects with a meaning recognizable to the modern Protestant becomes a figure for the failures of classical work in mod­ern­ ity (the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city), and both are emblematic of the sterile erotic frustration Dorothea has also found in her marriage. But it is as interesting to run the structure in the other direction, to read the unspeakable gap between admiration, love, and sexual pleasure on the one hand and disappointment, sterility, and frustration on the other as a figure for the modern relationship to antique material. It is an easy matter for Dorothea to leave after seeing the Ariadne, a work displayed near the entrance to the Museo PioClementino. But the account of her crisis suggests that her tourist visit has been of a relatively long duration prior, that this moment at the sculpture galleries is preceded by a visit to the nearby Sistine Chapel, the prime location in which one might witness what a Puritan sensibility (or even a particularly severe PreRaphaelite one) might see as “the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings.” It is possible Eliot has in mind the Stanze di Raffaello, the set of frescoed rooms associated with Raphael and his followers that includes the Stanza della Segnatura as its most sedate achievement, a set of works largely on

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210  Material Inspirations religious themes, but absent much reverence. The lack of informed clarity is part of the point. Eliot divides with a semi-colon the religious failure of the institution (“superstition divorced from reverence”) from the more physically marked challenge of the frescos at the Vatican (“eager Titanic life gazing and struggling”), themselves inevitably presenting a vital challenge for the unsatisfied bride ravished by a passion that quickens nothing. The pleasureless erotic experience of an unwilling or unready subject is suggested in the language that introduces the phantasmagoria of Rome: “The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions.” Dorothea’s experience of palaces and colossi, of a sordid present, of an unsteady blend of the sensuous and spiritual, of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, has the quality of coming to a partial realization of a half-fascinating, half-repulsive assault. The discomfiting and unresolvable blend of concrete and figural language captures the forced sense of uncomfortable unwarranted guilt, of innocence arriving late at a confused luxurious bacchanal in which she will not participate but which she cannot ignore. The pleasures and beauties around Dorothea amount to nothing more than pain and disease (“a disease of the retina”). Nothing quickens within her in a fecundating moment of inspiration, but she is also oppressed by the weight of this unsought lover she is unable to resist (gigantic, thrusting), but whose pressures would apparently lie more lightly on bright indifferent nymphs. The mismatch of the desire to understand with the desire to admire, or even to love is the crisis at the heart of Dorothea’s story, of course. But I am suggesting that this elaborate section in Rome indicates that we limit the reach of what Eliot is doing if we read the crisis of the understanding or of admiration as simply a confused misdirection of desire. Benjamin, we will see in Chapter 7, links erotic guilt and remains in the creation of a resonant because unsatisfactory allegory. I think we see something similar in the Rome to which Eliot has brought her protagonist, the site for a tantalizing but dismayingly irreconcilable play between sensation and value, that the text suggests Dorothea experiences as a disturbingly sexualized encounter in which guilt and something like new erotic experiences (qualities one might readily associate with a failed honeymoon) become figures for the chaos bound to develop when overwhelming fragments of culture are encountered in a highly developed but unresolvable form. A Puritan innocent who has stumbled into something that looks like an orgy just at the moment that she might have expected some more mild and intimate encounter with the erotic life, Dorothea’s immersion in the elaborate and full physicality of the art in Rome leaves her with a sensation the narrator describes as dis-ease in the organ of perception. Why would Eliot locate this crisis and this debate about representation at the Vatican galleries? What might it mean to take the brief pause and quick escape Will and Naumann witness as more than an episode in the crisis of Dorothea’s

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The Experience of Form  211 predictably failing marriage? The asymptotic nature of the encounter with the epicenter of classical art suggests a fundamental change in the cultural im­agin­ ation of antiquity. It will help to recognize the ways in which the Vatican makes sense as the location for the kind of crisis Dorothea is experiencing to cite a gloss on the place written by Vernon Lee just six years later, another account of a disconnected antiquity suggesting meaning, but not providing it, evoking forms of life emptied of human comfort or pleasure: And, indeed, it is a desolate place, this Vatican, with its long, bleak, glaring corridors; its half-lit, chill, resounding halls; its damp little Belvedere Court, where green lichen fills up the fissured pavement; a dreary labyrinth of brick and mortar, a sort of over-ground catacomb of stones, constructed in our art-studying, rather than art-loving times.6

Desolate, bleak, glaring, dreary, and damp, a labyrinth that does not fascinate, or a resting place for the dead—surely it makes sense to leave such a grim scene as soon as possible! Vernon Lee is being provocatively hyperbolic in this passage. Still, the mere possibility that such negative affects might be generated by the experience of these sites of display that had been the goal of so many earlier artistic pilgrimages demonstrates a striking cultural change (see figs 5.1 and 5.2).

Fig. 5.1  Museo Chiaramonti, the Vatican. In: Mary Knight Potter (1902). The Art of the Vatican (Boston, MA), 273.

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Fig. 5.2  Galleria delle Statue, the Vatican. In: Mary Knight Potter (1902). The Art of the Vatican. (Boston, MA), 277.

While euphoric joy was by no means ever to vanish as a likely response to the first experience of the longed-for south, by the time Middlemarch was written, the experience of Europe was far from the sporadic event it had been in the days of Spence or Keats. The consolidation of the modern culture of travel and tourism was well advanced, and it was far from rare for the British to live abroad for financial or other reasons. The case of Vernon Lee—of British parents, but raised on the continent—is one telling example of the social changes underlying cultural developments, and of the new possibility for intimacy with the art of southern Europe that new social and even technological conditions made possible. She grows up in the land where Winckelmann longs so desperately to go, and she has ready access to the world of culture, the absence of which is the precipitating cause of Polymetis. And yet Vernon Lee offers not a passionate celebration of the art objects among which she is raised, but one of the most uncompromising turns to formalism of her day, albeit one still needing to express its emancipation from the critical tradition that had shaped earlier responses to classical objects. Lee’s “The Child in the Vatican” is autobiographical, of course; the muffled, arch quality of partial confession is part of the charm of the piece, and it plays an important role in the arguments of an essay that carefully evokes an actual ex­peri­ence of place, even as it pushes the ambivalence toward sites of display we see in Ruskin and Pater (see Chapters 8 and 9) toward what would become a

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The Experience of Form  213 characteristically modernist romance of lost authenticity and alienation at institutions built for “art-studying rather than art-loving times.”7 The essay puts into play a double kind of realism—about the experience of the art objects where they are currently housed, and about the loss of an original location by works that once were to be found in a site natural to them, not placed in a group for display: Each in happy independence, against a screen of laurel or ilex branches, or on the sun-heated gable of a temple, where the grass waved in the fissures and the swallows nested, or in a cresset-lit, incense-dim chapel, or high against the blue sky above the bustle of the market place.  (“Child,” 18)

For Lee, the project of going to a museum involves re-isolating the work of art from its company, and then imaginatively placing it in its original location. It is a process of fantastic restitution responding to a number of cultural developments Lee captures in the figure of the infant wandering the halls of the museum. The conceit of the child in the museum is at once elegant and excessive, combining as it does an impossible blend of ignorance, experience, and the possibility of instruction. As we will see, the figure allows Lee to historicize the response to sculpture in a way that follows from Pater, but vividly personalizes the experience of modern estrangement from the medium. The emotions of the child trying to find pleasure (or just to move beyond baffled confusion) in an elaborate institution set up to satisfy desires with which it can never identify is evocative of the alienated boredom and confusion with which Ruskin and Eliot might associate the kind of classical art housed at the Vatican.8 Beyond these two bold and idiosyncratic forebears, the figure of the child allows Lee to also address the challenges to taste presented by the emergent field of art history itself, specifically its production of new knowledge that may not usefully inform or even support the experience of the viewer confronted by the actual object. The honest indifference to what it does not find immediately appealing makes the baffled infant a useful contrast for the over-informed modern connoisseur trying to find a balance between experience and informed judgment: For, strange as it may seem, this clear and simple art of sculpture, born when the world was young and had not yet learned to think and talk in symbolical riddles, this apparently so outspoken art is, to the childish soul of our days, the most silent art of any. To the child, the modern child, it is speechless; it knows not a word of the language understood by the child's fancy. For this fancy language of our modern child is the language of colour, of movement, of sound, of suggestion, of all the broken words of modern thought and feeling: and the statue has none of these.  (20)

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214  Material Inspirations The child who loves only color, movement, and sound, whose passion is all for the fragmented and suggestive, is a Paterian vision of the modern subject (with sources ultimately in Hegel), so it is no wonder that such a subject finds classical sculpture mute. But Lee does not even offer the historicizing sympathy of a Pater: if “we ask ourselves,” she writes, not about the child, but about the adult, “overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential?” Her answer is perhaps even more brutal in its claim of historical puzzlement than in its stark declaration of indifference: “we shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least. But could it ever have been?” (23). The statues will ultimately speak to the child in the Vatican, but their language will be not historical, but purely formal. When Lee cites, in a breathless ironic sweep, not only the long tradition of historical claims about the value of classical art, but also the quick turns that characterized even quite recent developments in the burgeoning field of art history, her aim is evidently to identify the limited value of this unstable train of forceful yet inaccurate claims in order to liberate her readers to hear clearly what these objects have to say for themselves. This is why her summary cannot really end, but merely runs aground in an ellipsis followed by an expression of fatigue: You think perhaps, like the people of the sixteenth century, that there is only one kind of antique statue; know, most impudent of ignoramuses, that there are innumerable sorts of statues and antique statues, there are good statues and bad statues, and early statues and late statues, there are Dedalian statues and Æginete statues, and immediately pre-Phidian and Phidian, and immediately post-Phidian and Praxitelian statues, and statues of the school of Pergamus, and statues of the school of Rhodes, and Græco-Roman statues, and statues of the Græco-Egyptian revival under Hadrian, and statues . . . Enough, enough! (29; ellipsis in the original)

This passage of flamboyant erudition presents formal similarities to many eighteenth-century antecedents. But while for a Bryant or a Blake the controversies of the historians indicate the need to strip away error in order to reach the lost truth about admired historical periods, what Lee identifies in the proliferation of art-historical claims is an efflorescence of categories that amounts to so much evidence of the ongoing failure to actually look at the object: We have been talking of the teachings of the statues themselves, of the lesson which they, with their unchangeable attitude and gesture, their lines and curves and lights and shadows of body, their folds and plaits of drapery, have silently, slowly taught to a child; and the statues themselves, who have never read Winckelmann, nor Quatremère, nor Ottfried Müller, do not know all these

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The Experience of Form  215 wondrous classifications of schools of which (with their infinite advantage of teaching us to admire only one or two schools, and abominate all the others as barbarous, decaying, Græculan, etc., without even looking at them) we are so justly proud.  (29)

Lee is particularly sensitive to the complex relationship between knowledge and art appreciation. The canon of statues her child loves are inadequate given contemporary concepts of value (which had turned forcefully away from longadmired objects at the Vatican), which she in turn ironizes by referencing the checkered history of admiration itself in another long list of erudite categories: Oh, yes, the statues which taught the child were a very mixed company, such as the carefully-trained of our day, who can endure only Phidias, and next to Phidias, only Clodion or Carpeaux, would scarcely like to know at all. Not Phidian, all of them, nor even, alas, Praxitelian; they were not the Elgin marbles nor the Venus of Milo, sole objects of the feeble love of us good, learned folk; they were those extremely harum-scarum statues of the Vatican: a few of them copies of lost, irreproachable originals, like the Doryphoros, the Minerva, the Amazon, the Satyr; a certain number of impostors of now exploded reputation, the Apollo, the Laocoön, the Antinous, and a whole host of quite despicable ­others, of every degree of lateness of epoch and baseness of work.  (29–30)

The example on which Lee ultimately chooses to focus for her illustration of the power of a formalist approach to antiquity is, perversely enough, the group of Niobe and her children in Florence, a work analogous to the Laocoön (that impostor of exploded reputation) in its representation of family and death, and one the story of which Byron had famously used as a figure for Rome itself (“The Niobe of Nations, there she stands / Childless and Crownless”).9 Vernon Lee painstakingly makes this tragic vision of a family destroyed by the cruel jealousy of divinity into a formal, not a representational, object of perception. In Lee’s telling, this group, based on the death of children and on a mother’s woe, becomes a kind of fugue, thereby moving the work closer to the condition of music that Pater had identified as the aspiration of all art, while also modernizing its effect (as music is associated with a later period in art than sculpture). In order to see how far Lee is willing to go in her revisionary approach, it will be useful to remind the reader about Niobe’s sad fate after she made the mistake of offending Leto, the mother of Apollo and Diana, in the course of bragging about her many children. In retaliation the two gods slaughtered her entire family, leaving Niobe weeping. Here is a fragment from Bulfinch’s 1855 Mythology, which comes fairly directly from Ovid, picking up the story toward the end of the massacre, after the gods have slain the boys, her husband has killed himself out of grief, and all but one of the girls have been picked off as they mourn:

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216  Material Inspirations only one remained, whom the mother held clasped in her arms, and covered as it were with her whole body. “Spare me one, and that the youngest! O spare me one of so many!” she cried; and while she spoke, that one fell dead. Desolate she sat, among sons, daughters, husband, all dead, and seemed torpid with grief. The breeze moved not her hair, no color was on her cheek, her eyes glared fixed and immovable, there was no sign of life about her. Her very tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth, and her veins ceased to convey the tide of life. Her neck bent not, her arms made no gesture, her foot no step. She was changed to stone, within and without. Yet tears continued to flow; and borne on a whirlwind to her native mountain, she still remains, a mass of rock, from which a trickling stream flows, the tribute of her never-ending grief.10

Never-ending grief: that is Niobe, hence Hamlet’s simile: “like Niobe, all tears.”11 If Lee’s indifference to the emotional content of this representation of massacre is striking, no less so is the fact that the group does not in fact reside at the Vatican. It is on display at the Uffizi in Florence, where it has been since the late eighteenth century. Indeed, Lee doesn’t even discuss the objects in Florence, but rather encourages the reader to visualize far smaller terra-cotta reproductions placed on a modern structure (see fig. 5.3). By means of this unpredictable set of swerves whereby the discussion of the powerful effects of the experience of one location lead to a close treatment of work at another venue that reflects nothing about the experience of actual objects at their current site, Lee develops an object lesson on the fundamental deracination of institutions built for “art-studying rather than art-loving.” As she makes clear at the outset of the piece, the objects in the museum are already in a company that falsifies their intended effect. Reducing their size allows Lee to reproduce in the imagination the pedimental display of the group that the architect Charles Robert Cockerell had proposed decades earlier (fig. 5.4) as an alternative to the widely despised arrangement at the Uffizi (fig. 5.5).12 Under Lee’s careful guidance the viewer is not taken back to Greece, but to an entirely conceptual space that has just enough materiality to help one imagine the original arrangement of the elements in the group in order to recognize a formal harmony. “Come and stand at a little distance from the table,” she says about the arrangement that does not exist anywhere but in her text, on which the wooden gable and statues are set. So, now we can get an idea (which in the gallery we cannot) of the general effect of the group. It seems so simple, but it is not: it is in sculpture something like what a fugue is in music: it is a homogeneous form due to the extremely skilful co-ordination of various forms; it is a harmonious whole, because the parts are combined just at the point where their diversities coalesce. For, as the various voices of the fugue, some subtly insinuating themselves half whispered, while the others are thundering their loudest or already dying away into silence, meet and weave together

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The Experience of Form  217

Fig. 5.3  John Marriott Blashfield, Niobe and Her Daughter. Terra-cotta, 19th century.

Fig. 5.4  Charles Robert Cockerell’s proposed arrangement of the Niobe Group (1816). In: Galerie Impèriale et Royale de Florence (Florence: Imprimerie du Giglio, 1844).

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Fig. 5.5  Niobe Room, the Uffizi, Florence. In: John L. Stoddard (1901). Florence, Naples, Rome (Boston, MA: Balch Brothers, 1890), 29. various fragments of the same melody, so also do the figures of the group, some standing, some reclining, some kneeling, some rising, some draped, some nude, meet our sight in various ways so as to constitute in their variety, one great pattern; balance each other on opposite sides of the gable, slope and taper.  (32)

Lee goes well beyond Lessing in her insistence on the necessary limitations of particular media, coming to deny an entire tradition of using literature to il­lu­ min­ate the fine arts, a strategy that shapes important affective transpositions in her argument. The kind of stoicism celebrated in the Laocoön as far back as Winckelmann returns, not as a virtue belonging to the represented figure, but as the analgesic experience of any viewer engaged with form. Still, much of the fascination of her essay resides in its suggestive acknowledgment of the losses entailed in the turn to formalism she is making: But by the side of this overwhelming positive sense of beauty there creeps into our consciousness an irritating little sense of negation. For the more intense becomes our perception of the form, the vaguer becomes our recollection of the subject; the strong imaginative realization of the story of Niobe, conjured up by the mere mention of her name, dwindles to nothing in the presence of the group representing the chief incident of history; the shrieks and desperate scuffling of feet, which we had heard in our fancy, gradually die into silence; our senses cease to shrink with horror, our sympathies cease to vibrate with pity, as we look upon this visible embodiment of the terrible tragedy. We are no longer feeling

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The Experience of Form  219 emotion; we are merely perceiving beauty. How has this come to pass? Shall we look into ourselves and analyze in the darkness of our consciousness? Nay, rather first look for an explanation in the materially visible, the clear, easily examined work of art. Come and look at the group once more: this time not to understand its beauty, but to understand why there is in it nothing beyond this beauty. (34)

Lee knows that she is choosing a scandalous instance (“what is the idea, the abstract intellectual conception of the Niobe group? Merely the fact of the slaughtering of the Niobides by Apollo and Artemis in the presence of their mother” (37–8)), but it is evidently the contrast between poignant theme and formal ex­peri­ence that interests her as she makes the case that the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible or audible.  (48)

With her bold and unsentimental insistence on the force of the actual experience of the art object, Lee brings us fully to a modern realm in which what are understood to be the formal qualities of art works will be the measure of their achievement. It is an argument anticipated by Ruskin and Pater, and one that participates in trends also evident in main lines of art-critical thought, particularly in the work of Aby Warburg, but most boldly stated by Lee, the future author of “Anthropomorphic Aesthetics” (1912).13 The turn to a not quite stable (and never to be stabilized) combination of abstract form and experience may have been an inevitable development in response to the abstraction that the nineteenth century had uncomfortably inherited from the eighteenth. As inevitable, perhaps, is the emergence of a revised relationship to canonical sculptures and the structures built to house them (whether museum or book of illustrations), a measure of the distance traveled from the longing of an earlier era, to the apparent plenitude of a later one. As nineteenth-century culture aspired to an ever-closer engagement with objects of experience felt to provide a readier access to reality than day-today life, or even than the reproductions that had satisfied earlier periods, literature was destined to respond with increasing force to the material experience of classical things. Still, for all of the writers of this period, that sense of what it might mean to approach the material was consistently inflected by earlier forms of mediation of the object, and the hopes and fantasies provoked by the interplay between admiration and mediation, between idea and experience, hopes and fantasies liable to be set in motion when the memory of an inherited desire confronts the fact of something that does not feel like satisfaction.

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220  Material Inspirations As Bulfinch points out, the story of Niobe “furnished Byron with a fine illustration of the fallen condition of modern Rome.” He cites lines from Childe Harold IV that would have been familiar to any educated reader of English literature in the period: The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her withered hands, Whose holy dust was scattered long ago. (IV.79; quoted in Bulfinch, 159)

We might take this well-known reference as an explanation as to why Lee leaves the Vatican to find her example of a significant statue, or we may use it as a reminder that the formal argument evidently does not escape a fascination with the tragic figure of Niobe—in spite of Lee’s attempts to translate her to music. The essay, we might say, summons back the very child whose loss Niobe was forever mourning, and gives new life (even “voice”) to works of art to which history has been perhaps more polite than Lee, but in no way more kind. * * * The crises of Dorothea Brooke and Vernon Lee’s child in the Vatican are a reminder that the question of mediation is not answered by what we might be tempted to call real presence, and that the remains in any museum are more than material; they include the networks of ideas that have validated the development of any collection. A newly sophisticated sense of the psychology of art ap­pre­ci­ ation comes to the fore in the work of Eliot and Lee, but part of its sophistication is the way it includes in its affective register a critical engagement with the history of reception itself. That ideas about objects cannot limit the feelings those objects may or may not provoke may be understood to demonstrate the weakness of those ideas, or it may suggest the close links between the drives that create fiction and those that shape historical claims about objects. The excesses of both texts (the trebled account of Dorothea’s crisis, the manifold fantasies and gaps of Lee’s essay) suggest the productive inadequacy of influential concepts. My claim is not for the fictive nature of historical narratives demonstrated by these inadequacies, but that historical narratives about art of the past play an important role in the response to those objects, even as they are seen to fail. It is even possible that it is in their inadequacy that they come closest to reflecting what is truly poignant about the modern relationship to the antique. The encounter with objects in Eliot as in Lee calls out for more fiction, in part because received accounts of those objects are recognized as transient claims with little purchase on the ex­peri­ence of the viewer, which is ultimately shaped by a dynamic complex made up of

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The Experience of Form  221 private concerns and associations and only partially adopted half-understood and partially remembered ideas. The failure of concepts to be adequate to the objects they address (which is nothing more remarkable than the unavoidable failure that shapes the history of ideas) is more than analogous to their failure to be adequate to the subject (to be fully understood, to matter). I have tried to suggest that in placing Dorothea’s crisis in the context of Will and Naumann’s debate about the forms appropriate for modernity on the one hand, and in a reiterated structure that highlights the power and weakness of forms of representation on the other, George Eliot illustrates something that is certainly much clearer in the Vernon Lee essay I have also discussed: that the emergence of formal concerns in the museum is best understood not as a new discovery of the real presence of objects, but as a powerful conceptual claim that arises at crisis points where unstable ideas about the meaning of remains intersect with the emotions provoked both by the failure of ideas and by the material presence of objects. In Lee’s reiterated never fully satisfactory negotiations with the statues she claims to be addressing so directly, as in the movement in and out of focus of the melancholy theme of the works she has chosen to emphasize, we see evidence for the emergence of formalism in an inherently unstable blend of affect and experience never likely to fully shake itself free from the relationship to past conventions it might seem intended to leave behind.

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6

Failure and Revision at the Vatican Some Evidence from the Baedeker (an Interchapter)

I don’t of course mean, beloved child, to enumerate the contents of the Vatican. Broadly, until you’ve trod these glorious halls you don’t know what sculpture is. They are immense in content and crowded with different specimens: even the really interesting things, of course, being of various degrees of merit. Henry James, Letter to Alice James, Rome, 18691

The dispassionate scientistic flavor of “crowded with different specimens” in Henry James’s letter to his sister is not what we might have expected just a few decades earlier from an American visitor to Rome, nor is the related evaluative sifting tone of “even the really interesting things, of course, being of various degrees of merit.” If there is an oblivion more thorough than the one in which old taste is buried when new taste takes over, it is that in which the values taste has used to validate its claims may disappear. There are practical reasons for this. The once-admired work of art that is moved to a basement gallery or relegated to a storeroom, the episode in the history of art that is found to be so inaccurate or premised on such absurd assumptions as to become either a warning about poor judgment or nothing at all to younger scholars brought up in a later dispensation, the aesthetic experience that is now not just impossible but unthinkable: each one of these may find some remedy (through revived interest in an artist or movement provoked by new developments in contemporary art, say, or in an unexpected turn in scholarly predispositions or assumptions, or even when the creative imagination of a curator repurposes or recontextualizes an object found in deep storage). But, while experience teaches us to anticipate many kinds of returns in culture, recovering the intersection of idea, historical claim, and taste characteristic of the nineteenth century presents unique difficulties (some of which are addressed in the Introduction to this volume). I will close the discussion of the complex interplay of text, concept, and institution shaping the reception of the art of antiquity in the nineteenth century that has been my topic in “Remains,” with a brief reflection on the influence of this network of cultural Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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Failure and Revision at the Vatican  223 determinants on Walter Benjamin’s early work. But on my way to that argument, intended to demonstrate the afterlife of these concerns in the twentieth century, and especially their ongoing theoretical significance, I offer this brief interchapter as an example of how the difficult relationship between art history and the ap­pre­ci­ation of once-admired objects was negotiated in what is probably its most influential textual manifestation. A work explicitly designed to help navigate the terrain between knowledge, experience, and admiration, Baedeker’s Italy: Handbook for Travellers: Second Part, Central Italy and Rome was subjected to a number of telling revisions toward the end of the century as its editors tried to account as best they could for the eroding of value of the very things it was teaching travelers to see. The ebbing of admiration for the sculptures at the Vatican that Vernon Lee laid out with such bold panache and that George Eliot wove into the melancholy displacements of Dorothea’s honeymoon in Rome becomes visible in a work that reveals more directly, and with a poignancy all its own, the distance traveled by the receding tide of admiration over even just a brief period, a small and late manifestation of an extraordinary revolution in the history of European taste so successful that the dramatic transformation it marks is easily lost to sight. Starting in 1875, and for decades to follow, the entry on ancient art, which was translated from the German of Professor Reinhard Kekulé (eventually Kekulé von Stradonitz), was preceded by a much-cited passage from the great historian of Rome, Barthold Georg Niebuhr: As the streams lose themselves in the mightier Ocean, so the history of the ­peoples once distributed along the Mediterranean shores is absorbed in that of the mighty Mistress of the World.  Niebuhr2

While the oceanic imagery and soaring viewpoint of this passage from the very first page of Niebuhr’s magisterial history is intended to signal greatness, it is in fact the beginning of a complex acknowledgment of multiple weaknesses: on the part of the viewer, of the collection, of the relationship between collection and city, and ultimately (in later editions) of the objects themselves. The simple question raised by the Niebuhr quotation is this: if Rome is understood as an epitome of nations, a vast ocean composed of other streams, what is one looking at when one encounters a Roman object?3 The traveller who would not wander through the galleries of Rome in mere vacant wonderment may bear in mind these words of Niebuhr. As a preface to the following pages, they will not only help the intelligent observer to a worthy appreciation of the masterpieces presented to him, but enable him to invest them with appropriate historical associations.  (xxxii)

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224  Material Inspirations The invitation to be an intelligent observer is an acknowledgment that the objects on display will not on their own offer more than vacant wonderment—something like the quality captured in the young Henry James’s unfocused effusion to his sister. The problem, to start with, is that the relationship of place to admired classical object in Rome is not like that which obtains in any other major city famed for art on the peninsula: Amongst the crowd of statues which fill the galleries and chambers of the Vatican and Capitol of Rome are to be seen the noblest examples of Antique Sculpture. These do not, however, stand in the same relation to Imperial Rome as, for example, the frescoes of Fiesole in the Cloisters of St. Mark, or those of Andrea del Sarto in the Church of the Annunziata to Florence, or as the masterpieces of Raphael and Michael Angelo to mediaeval and pontifical Rome. These latter originated, so to speak, with her, were her peculiar attributes, the fitting emblems of her ecclesiastical supremacy. The genius which created them, she inspired, fostered, and rewarded. On the other hand, Rome, the mistress of the World, the Rome of ancient history, though attracting to herself the accumulated treasures of entire epochs of Greek art, though through her interposition names, which otherwise must have remained mere phantom sounds, survive to receive individually the homage due to their transcendant genius, had nevertheless as little influence on the marvellous development of Greek art, as London had upon the Italian Renaissance, on Giotto and Masaccio, on Raphael and Michael Angelo. In fact, those particular works, which, while they fill the mind with a wonder akin to awe, minister to our noblest gratification, and in the presence of whose marvellous perfection all subsequent efforts are dwarfed into insignificance, occupied in Rome, ages ago, and still occupy a place corresponding to that which the master-pieces of the Italian and other schools of painting fill in the galleries of London, Paris, and Dresden.  (xxxii–xxxiii)

Perversely enough (or perhaps with greater accuracy than is often found in discussion of these matters), the great collections of Rome become less the sources for access to a prized antiquity, than models for that most modern of institutions, the museum itself. By the time of the twelfth edition of Italy: Central Italy and Rome in 1897, the Niebuhr solution is no longer satisfactory. Another element comes in to challenge the already weak relation between the objects in the museum and the city that surrounds them identified in earlier volumes. In a long and singularly aggressive passage that is simply dropped into the prior text, the material nature of the objects themselves is identified as presenting an insurmountable problem. Here is the opening passage again, with the new material in Roman script: The traveller who would not wander through the galleries of Rome in mere vacant wonderment may bear in mind these words of Niebuhr. As a preface to the

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Failure and Revision at the Vatican  225 following pages, they will not only help the intelligent observer to a worthy ­appreciation of the masterpieces presented to him, but enable him to invest them with appropriate historical associations. But this is not so easy as it may at first appear; and, strange as it may seem, the present condition of our knowledge of the history of antique art makes it more difficult than ever. No one who is accustomed to use his own eyes, or has learned to do so in Rome, can have failed to observe a fact in connection with most of the statues in the Roman museums, in many cases the statues that have been most celebrated for centuries, which seriously interferes with the enjoyment to be derived from them; the fact, namely, that they have been ruthlessly bathed with mordant acids, trimmed, retouched, smoothed, polished, and restored in a fashion that is always arbitrary and frequently senseless. This pernicious practice, which was applied without exception to everyone of the earlier discoveries that attracted any attention at all, began in Rome and has maintained its ground longest there; indeed, is not yet by any means extinct. Its object was to adapt the works of art for the drawing-room, to render them more suitable as ornaments for the villa and the palazzo. But it robbed the ancient sculptures which fell victim to it of all their original freshness and charm, and it has irrevocably injured their artistic significance. Apart, however, from this external treatment, the crowd of statues that fills the Vatican, the Capitol, and the other Roman galleries bears to us a different relation from that which they bore to Winckelmann and his immediate successors, such as Goethe and Herder. To the latter they represented the inexhaustible source whence they drew, with ever-fresh admiration, all their conceptions of Greek art. But we have access to other and purer sources. Goethe himself was keenly alive to the revolution in the conception of art that was created by a closer acquaintance with the sculptures of the Parthenon. Such a wealth of Greek works of art has been yielded by the soil of Greece and Asia Minor during the 19th century, that the material which was at the disposal of Winckelmann seems in comparison almost miserably scanty, and certainly not genuine enough nor trustworthy enough to serve as the basis for a history of art. Even Raphael Mengs, the friend of Winckelmann, had observed that many of the celebrated masterpieces in the Roman galleries were merely copies of earlier Greek works. And even those that are not copies do not stand in the same relation to Imperial Rome as, for example, the frescoes of Fra Angelica in the Cloisters of St. Mark, or those of Andrea del Sarto in the Church of the Annunziata to Florence, or as the masterpieces of Raphael and Michael Angelo to medieval and pontifical Rome. These latter originated, so to speak, with her, were her peculiar attributes, the fitting emblems of her ecclesiastical supremacy. The genius which created them, she inspired, fostered, and rewarded. On the other hand, Rome had as little influence on the marvellous development of Greek art, as London had upon the Italian Renaissance, on Giotto and Masaccio, on Raphael and Michael Angelo. In fact, those particular works, which, while they fill the mind with a wonder akin to awe, minister to our noblest gratification, and in the presence of whose

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226  Material Inspirations marvelous perfection all subsequent efforts are dwarfed into insignificance, occupied in Rome ages ago, and still occupy, a place corresponding to that which the masterpieces of the Italian and other schools of painting fill in the galleries of London, Paris, and Dresden. A comprehensive general idea of the epochs during which Greek art sprang up, flourished, and decayed, is now better and more easily obtained in Greece, London, or Berlin than at Rome. Only a single epoch is represented with any completeness there—that in which Greek art entered the service of Rome and became Roman. Students of the antique at Rome, especially in beginning their studies, naturally follow the example of Winckelmann, Herder, and Goethe, in searching mainly for authentic Greek works.

At the close of this astonishing passage there is an attempt to return some reason for looking around to the poor traveler who has come all the way to Rome and found everything on view to be so deeply compromised, but it is a faint gesture given what has come before it, and in any case the passage ends on a bathetic note: Though complete presentments of the great Greek epochs are not to be found at Rome, the galleries of that city contain nevertheless an abundance of marvellous works of art invested with imperishable splendour. There is still, as there has always been, inexhaustibly rich material for the investigators into particular works of art or individual artists. We are dependent upon Rome for whole series of statues, without which our conceptions of Greek art would be sadly imperfect; without the interposition of the Mistress of the World, who attracted to herself all the elements of ancient art, the names of many celebrated Greek sculptors would have remained mere phantom sounds. At no period, not even the earliest, can Rome have been absolutely and entirely beyond the influence of Greek culture and art; but at first this influence was felt only faintly and indirectly.4

The guide that tells us to mistrust what we are seeing becomes something of a convention in advanced circles from the mid-century (and, in its own way it is a description that would apply to even so distinct a work as Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851–1853)), though the sensibility is more familiarly rendered in novels and memoirs than in those volumes devoted to shaping the desires and experiences of travelers.5 As the nuanced but dramatic evocation of the museum in Eliot’s Middlemarch and Lee’s “Child in the Vatican” indicates, the most thoughtful authors were able to use not just the existence of admired objects, nor even the fact of their admiration, but also the vicissitudes that characterized their reception and the values by which their fortunes came to change, to do interesting work on desire, the history of taste, and even the emergence of those formal aesthetic values that would continue to make themselves known by the way their partisans kicked against the very matrix that allowed them to come into being.

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Failure and Revision at the Vatican  227 Ideas shaped by passion but manifesting themselves as erudition; new know­ledge battling against old certainties made untenable by recent discoveries or simple shifts in taste: the uneven nature of the relationship between understanding and desire makes it so that the cultural life of remains will generally map onto the history of their reception only at an angle. Travel itself allows long-held values to be put in question by actual experience, a crisis that may be felt to present a challenge to perceiving subject or object of perception. Even more influential than the physical structures built to contain and display admired objects, the structures that shape the lives of those objects in the imagination remain standing even when they no longer entirely fit what they were meant to display, or even when we no longer want what they contain. Visitors keep flocking to what James in 1869 calls the “glorious halls” of the Vatican, seeking and finding a splendor in which the merits of individual statues plays a very small role. But the intellectual aftermath of the process of wrestling with the significance of these works was bound to move beyond the walls of any structure.

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7

Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin The challenge faced by the compilers of the Baedeker when it came to explaining the value of objects at a moment when fundamental premises on which that value had been based had evaporated might easily be dismissed as simply a practical matter, something for the tourist agency or the manufacturer of national brands to attempt to resolve with a fresh new approach to marketing. But, we probably should hesitate before accepting at face value the interpretative crises characteristic of the history of the reception of antique art, before seeing the supersession of prior models as simply the inevitable result of progress from lesser knowledge to greater, or even from historical fantasies to formal certainties. This chapter addresses the disjunctions and fated failures of the modern relationship to an­tiqui­ties as developed in seminal work by one of the most sophisticated and self-reflexive inheritors of the nineteenth-century culture of art. To think about allegory in Walter Benjamin is to reflect on the place of matter awkwardly in­habit­ ing an unstable position between idea and thing, oscillating without cease between subject and object, as the distinction between those categories is sometimes understood (see the Introduction to this book). The conservative function of the museum, viewed in this light, results not in establishing a perpetually vulnerable collection of objects the value of which is subject to the vicissitudes of later taste. It presents, rather, an opportunity to reflect on conditions of in­ter­pret­ ation, even of feeling, that we misunderstand when we take our institutions of collection and display to map in any simple way onto changes in the progress of knowledge. The imperfect match between idea and object is, after all, built into the very concept of the remain, the thing or object that is left over from a system that can no longer support it as it was (say, as an object of ritual worship for a vanished cult), but which has become newly important because of the memories a new system discovers it to instantiate (say, of perfection of form or evidence of an admirable social order). Benjamin develops this topic directly out of the tradition that concerns Material Inspirations, but he routes his discussion through a literary form, Baroque German drama, and he emphasizes not the disjunctions between classical antiquity and modernity, but between rival religious dispensations, in particular between Catholicism and Protestantism. As at other moments in this book, we find the crisis of the Reformation standing behind and giving energy to the gaps and crossings that shape the history of remains. This chapter, then, is an attempt to engage with the rich theoretical inheritance of the nineteenth-century Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  229 culture of art in the first quarter of the twentieth century, but it is also an occasion for fuller acknowledgment of the centrality of Christian violence and remorse in shaping the history of concepts and periods that are still frequently addressed as though they were free from both. Benjamin allows us to identify the possibility that a more painful and immediate source is hiding behind the fantastic nostalgia we call the classical tradition. With important exceptions, arguments about the continuities and breaks that shape culture have tended to see the epochal traumas that attended the rise of a new kind of Christian faith as distinct from the topics involved in the history of the imagined connections spanning the gulf separating northern Europe from developments in the Mediterranean more than a millennium earlier. While any serious student of the Baroque needs to reckon with the force of the CounterReformation, clearly the forward-looking proposals of the Council of Trent are only part of the story. By insisting, as his great inspiration Aby Warburg did, on the ways in which art objects carry within them without fully assimilating the relics of earlier religious sources, Benjamin realigns some powerful conventions of periodization, and recognizes the Baroque to be shaped by pressures we may take to be running beneath, and to some extent determining the turn to, the classical in later ­periods.1 This approach has the virtue of filling in gaps at once historical and intellectual. To recognize the place of religion in shaping the reception of remains in its earliest moments adds a new force to Winckelmann’s own surprising ­preoccupations with allegory. It also may serve to locate the deepest historical sources for some of the wildest speculations I touched on in my discussion of Blake and his precursors in Chapter 4 of this book: might we identify in the attempt to integrate classical idols with the Bible as a historical document some attempt to repair the rift between faith and material representation opened up at the Reformation? Ruskin insists, in passages I cited in Chapter  3, that Turner’s fundamental lessons about the meaning of ruins were learned not at classical sites, but at ruined religious structures in northern England. Raphael and Martin Luther intertwine provocatively in the thinking of Walter Pater, who never forgets the two world-historical figures were born the same year.2 I mention these instances simply to remind the reader that the link between antiquities and the history of Christian religious conflict made in Benjamin’s treatment of allegory is relevant for a central nineteenth-century tradition of thought. Still, it will be helpful to illustrate the compelling historical element of the argument by opening with an instance of the overlap of relic and religious crisis drawn from the period of the Reformation itself, an instance that will return us to a location at which this book has already spent a great deal of time. * * * Visitors who look up at the right moment at the Vatican, on the way to see the Laocoön, perhaps, or returning from contemplating the Apollo or the Torso

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230  Material Inspirations Belvedere, may find their view briefly arrested by a fresco that can seem out of place in the crowded mannerist frescoes decorating the Hall of Constantine, but which, in any case, presents what at least on the surface appears to be an entirely different relationship to the relics of antiquity from that entailed in the museal display of those storied works in marble. The painting (fig. 7.1) shows a broken statue lying in pieces in front of an altar bearing a golden crucifix, all in a very different kind of space from the one the viewer occupies while pausing in the crush of tourists and painted figures, a fictive room the scrupulous emptiness of which is only emphasized by the emphatic depth and narrowness of a forceful perspective that tantalizes the eye with its restraint. It is hard for the visitor to stop, but certainly worth a pause to consider what appears to be a plinth become altar, as one symbol of the divine made ma­ter­ ial rises up to replace another, which when toppled is revealed to be nothing more than stone. A celebration of the supremacy of the new religious dispensation that should have made idols no more meaningful than the stones from which they were carved, or significant only in the fact of their supersession, Tommaso Laureti’s Triumph of the Cross (1585) looks back to the era of Constantine, but it is nevertheless inescapably a seventeenth-century work, its existence traceable to the attempt to reconsolidate the cultural power of the church in the face of the challenge of the Reformation. In the memory of one triumph we find the assertion of (or hope for) the certainty of another.3 But, of course, statues did not stop being broken after the triumph of Christianity, and their power was no more vanquished by fragmentation than the misery and death commemorated by the crucifixion marked the end of the Christian dispensation. The nineteenth century found itself negotiating the return to serious reflection on antique objects that had never been fully lost, but which were confronted with new kinds of values that themselves were subject to change. The confrontation between fallen idol and triumphant new religion may seldom have been manifested in culture with the clarity with which we see it in the stark contrast Laureti stages so dramatically in the invented space of his fresco. One imagines the statues were cleared away before the altars were put in, and—in any case—the form of the crucifix is evidently not intended to signal archeological accuracy, any more than that wonderful Renaissance vision of a pagan temple. Still, the image is a reminder that cultural systems built on supplanting an earlier dispensation will never find themselves able to work clean of the things they cele­ brate having left behind. When it came time to reflect on the objects on glorious display at the Vatican galleries, the destruction of which Laureti commemorated on the ceiling of the Hall of Constantine, critical thought could draw both on the period of triumph celebrated in the fresco and on the long moment of crisis during which it was painted, which saw an important return to the difficult but inescapable topic of material inspirations. Remains has touched on some of the main lines that were followed in response to the remains of antiquity in the nineteenth century, but the most sophisticated

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  231

Fig. 7.1  Tommaso Laureti, Triumph of the Cross (detail), 1685. Vatican Museums, Vatican, Rome. Nick Fielding / Alamy Stock Photo.

theoretical account of the issues at stake is that laid out by that great student of the period, Walter Benjamin, in a work that does not advertise itself as being about classical antiquity, or—indeed—about the fine arts, his Habilitationsschrift,

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232  Material Inspirations Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama, or more recently as Origin of the German Trauerspiel. Benjamin cites Joseph Görres’s rich account of the difference between symbol and allegory as it appears in a letter in George Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie (1810–1812). A symbol, for Görres, is “a sign of ideas—a sign closed on itself, concentrated, persisting in itself unchanged.” But discussion of this kind of selfsufficient mode of representation is of interest to the noted student of the history of myth, as to Benjamin himself, only because it allows for the contrast with the relationship to time of allegory, which offers “a successively advancing, dra­mat­ic­ al­ly mobile, fluid image of the same, one that has taken on the flux of time itself.”4 The Trauerspiel, those largely despised Baroque dramas full of derivative ­fig­ur­ation, carrying to the future written evocations of visual emblems and past conventions, offer Benjamin an opportunity to reflect on a topic that is at once historical—fundamentally shaped as it is by the religious crises that shook Europe from the sixteenth century—formal, and conceptual. The critic’s treatment of this network of elements is—as I think I will amply demonstrate in this chapter— shaped by the nineteenth-century culture of art, about which it also advances a number of fundamental insights. Looked at from the point of view of desire, antique works celebrated in the nineteenth century are instances of the constantly unsatisfied aspiration to identify and acquire symbols. But remains are unavoidably marked by the signs of time, not just by the traces of material damage with which we typically encounter them today, the umbilical scars evoking an absent source and the trauma of separation, but by the network of shifting interpretations that have determined their place in culture. The vicissitudes of reception and reputation, the contingency of discovery and appreciation—at every turn, remains remind us of their place in time. Keats’s vase, we will remember, was fostered by time itself. For Vernon Lee, as for George Eliot, with their granular knowledge of innov­ ations in the rapidly developing fields of art history and archeology, the memory of what objects have been plays a fundamental role in establishing a relationship, which is liable to be as evocatively personal and as potentially uncomfortable as a difficult family relation. The remain can seem charged with the self-enclosed, unbounded, timeless potential of the symbol. But—the undeniable and shaping pressure of that impression notwithstanding—it is best understood as functioning in an allegorical time-bound way. But, both appearance and function are important in Benjamin’s account. “Whereas the symbol draws man into itself,” Benjamin writes, personifying a subtle but bold conceptual distinction between aspiration and experience in order to illustrate the dynamic nature of the category, “allegory surges out of the ground of being to intercept the intention on its way down and therewith derail it” (OGT, 195). The conflict suggested in this description of desire (for the symbol) frustrated by the inevitable experience (of allegory) is based on associations developed by Görres, who linked the symbol with nature understood as an unspeaking

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  233 sublime experience—“the mute, vast, and powerful nature of mountain and vege­ ta­tion”—as opposed to allegory, which is part of “living, advancing human history” (quoted in OGT, 173). These are not parallel but distinct phenomena in Benjamin, so much as two modes of recognizing and valuing admired objects; while one mode finds greatness—and silence—in what stands outside of time, the other identifies the power of participation in a living and therefore vulnerable human history (183). Far more than a project of historical contextualization was at stake when, in the course of his seminal 1938 essay, “Figura,” Erich Auerbach identified allegory with the epochal crisis in which it emerged, that is, with the appropriations of Hebrew texts and traditions at the emergence of Christianity itself.5 Allegory is the form of reading required at a moment when the creative reuse of material from an earlier cultural dispensation becomes central to a newly dominant trad­ ition, which is what makes the relationship between the allegorical mode and remains so close, both conceptually and historically (conceptually because historically). Allegory, understood as the name for an inevitable tendency in response to remains, depends both on the presence of broken things and on an unmoored but urgent sense that they matter, hence the fundamental role played by the intersection of history and religion at the emergence and re-emergence of the concept. Admired art object, remnant of a rejected religion, evidence of the nature of an revered culture: as Flaxman’s article on sculpture for Rees’s Cyclopædia suggests, for the nineteenth century, the reception of a significant classical work is always shaped by an overabundance of identities. The multiple, incomplete, and uneven rejections shaping modern thought on the antique began with the turn away from the social and religious structures Christianity would come to call paganism. But even a partial list of elements determining the nature of the response of later eras to the remains of antiquity would have to include unresolved developments from within the history of Christianity itself, including especially the place of iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm, that battle from the early days of the new religion that was rejoined in the Reformation, and of which we find a nostalgic memory in Laureti’s Triumph.6 The half-remembered foundational but only ever partial rejections underlying Western culture left an uncatalogable number of powerful conceptual remainders and physical remains, and both have served as a resource for European culture at times of crisis ranging from the Reformation to the violent revisions of values of the French Revolution, and even to the challenges to aura sometimes associated with the emergence of the most modern new media. “It is not possible,” Walter Benjamin writes in recognition of the historical selfconsciousness shaping the past itself, “to overestimate the importance for the baroque of the knowledge of the Christian origin of the allegorical outlook.” Benjamin insists that it is not antiquarian curiosity that drives him to take his analysis of seventeenth-century drama back to medieval sources. He is motivated

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234  Material Inspirations by the force of what he identifies as a perpetually inadequate type of signification, the frustration of which, like its power, is determined by the traces of the past it carries on its surface. His argument puts into relation both antique religion and the humanism sometimes taken to be its antithesis: The relation between the concerns of Baroque and medieval Christianity has three main aspects. The struggle against the pagan gods, the triumph of allegory, and the martyrdom of the flesh are all equally necessary to both. These motifs are intimately connected to one another. From the perspective of the history of religion, accordingly, they are one and the same . . . [T]he dissolution of the ancient pantheon plays a decisive role in this origin.  (OGT, 239)

While there is nothing surprising in holding that the development of the modern (or romantic) concept of symbol borrows key elements from religion as it participates in attempts to harmonize interdependent but incommensurate elements such as part and whole, matter and transcendence, it is worth emphasizing this fact precisely because of the ways in which allegory may be understood to be doing something quite different. In Benjamin we find that allegory’s relationship with religion is not associated, as it might be, with the aspiration to escape time. The connection comes from the opposite direction, from very specific, concrete, and time-bound manifestations of the force of religion in history. It is in the gap between the hopes of the spirit and the actual experience of life that allegory arises, which is what makes it such a useful term for thinking about material remains. The gap itself is a historical fact, not just because of the great interval the world inhabits while awaiting the arrival or return of the messiah, but because of the specific and quite worldly crises of religion that shape the value of allegory. The awkward forms of Baroque drama arise, as far as Benjamin is concerned, from the historic fact of the Reformation, out of the loss of a clear and certain relationship to the church and its systems of representation and values. While Benjamin’s account of the disappearance of aura entailed in the sep­ar­ ation of the work of art from its ritual sources has been much discussed, there is a tendency to focus on the modern technological forces shaping such changes. Benjamin himself, however, is clear on the long historical process of which mass reproduction is only the latest shaping manifestation.7 To argue as Benjamin does that “the uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition,” is not to imagine, as is sometimes done in the most sentimental version of this argument, that the loss might be reversible if the object were (or could be) returned to the original site of its making. After all, Benjamin’s claim is not that the tradition in which a work finds its meaning has itself been spared the effects of a dynamic historical process. A steady changeless state is not what he means by life in the passage as a whole:

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  235 The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the context of tradition. Of course, this tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for instance, existed in a traditional context for the Greeks (who made it an object of worship) that was different from the context in which it existed for medieval clerics (who viewed it as a sinister idol). But what as equally evident to both was its uniqueness—that is, its aura.  (“Work of Art,” 105)

Benjamin identifies in the foundational force of the break between object and idea a power that is more productive than the harmony and coherence which— following a main line of nineteenth-century thought—Benjamin understands to be typically ascribed to the symbol (which borrows these qualities from the religions for whose losses it is compensating).8 The instances Benjamin cites in this passage from “The Work of Art” comprise the two clearest manifestations of meaningful reception for the statue of Venus: when it is a goddess and when it is an idol. But, if these are the situations when the aura of the object is most clearly marked, they are also the conditions least available to modern knowledge or sens­ ibil­ity, which can identify aura only in its absence. It is the sense of loss and transformation that modernity lives with. If our Venus is neither god nor demon, what is she? If “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility” is remarkably precise in the dating of the crisis that has shaped the modern reception of art, that is certainly the case because a number of nineteenth-century forebears had done much of the work of establishing the force of a claim that will sound strangely familiar to any reader of Ruskin: “The secular worship of beauty,” Benjamin notes in an evocative turn in the passage I have been citing, “which developed during the Renaissance and prevailed for three centuries, clearly displayed that ritualistic basis in its subsequent decline and in the first severe crisis which befell it” (105). If we take the hint and count back 300 years from 1900, the year around which, Benjamin claims, “technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes,” it is not quite the Renaissance we arrive at (“Work,” 102). It is rather the Baroque period we find at that juncture, an aesthetic crux closely related to a political point of inflection with which it is contemporary: the epochal conflict of values that culminated in that other great cultural legacy of the Reformation, the devastating violence of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The idea that a cultural turning point in the history of the production and reception of art coincided with the emergence of Protestantism and the reaction it provoked is fundamental to Benjamin, as it was for many of his predecessors in the nineteenth century. But, much of the complexity of his work arises from the

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236  Material Inspirations attempt to describe the situation in which the line between reception and production came to be attenuated as new art was created out of the boldly displayed, unassimilated fragments of the past. The discomfort of later eras with allegory becomes recognizable in Benjamin as a reflection of the unstable and still unresolved situation of the period of its emergence, a time that saw not only the on­going consolidation of the humanist recoveries of the Renaissance alongside the emergence of new anxieties about representation demonstrated by the dec­lar­ ations of the Council of Trent, but also—and most urgently—all of Europe engaged in a brutal struggle for religious supremacy. As a memory of uncertainty, trauma, and violent change, allegory is unlikely to provide the timeless harmony between part and whole proposed by the theorists of the symbol with whom Benjamin takes issue. Hence the understatement in Benjamin’s identification of allegory (using as always the symbol as his point of contrast) as “a late formation, resting on very productive cultural debates” (OGT, 213). Benjamin’s is a complicated form of historicism, as the conflicts of Christianity in the seventeenth century that still resonate in later periods evidently have sources of great antiquity. The cultural significance of the struggles that took place around and after the time of the Council of Trent are traceable to the fact that there is no major issue at stake in the religious disputes of the day that is not present in the religion from the outset. The challenging relationship between representation and faith evidently has its ultimate source in the fundamental relationship between the material and the divine at the heart of the religion. And both the triumph of Christianity in late antiquity and its violent recasting in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation entailed breaks with the past that created significant remains while leaving their nature impossible to fully determine. As Miguel Tamen reminds us in his important discussions of iconoclasm and anti-iconoclasm during the foundational years of Christianity, the new universal religion that created paganism as its opposite made all the idols useless or worse. When Paul writes to the Corinthians that “we know that an idol is nothing in the world,” we may feel that he is going on perhaps a little too much about nothing, especially when the next clause in the sentence seems both redundant and forceful “and that there is none other God but one.”9 What is this nonbeing of which the apostle needs to speak, and how is its condition of vacuity related to what we know and to the divine? Benjamin emphasizes the ways in which the emptying out of an original meaning could become an occasion for a new rapport between viewer and object, but Christianity’s relationship to matter is, of course, far more than ocular. Or it may be more useful to recognize the ways in which the visual manifests a challenge that is ultimately theological. The paradoxical relationship to the material world at the heart of a faith based on incarnation manifests itself in a visual field that is also a memory of its separation from the earlier religions from which it arose. “In the West, from the time of the Greek fathers to Tertullian,” writes the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, “the mystery of the

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  237 Incarnation has designated the ambiguous and fascinating place within which Christianity had to pose, or rather pose again, the problem of the image, in its concrete and theological meaning, in relation to biblical Judaism and ancient paganism.”10 “In relation” is a vague term for a form of negation that bears within it the memory of what it leaves behind, so Didi-Huberman needs to specify the ways in which earlier religious dispensations are evidenced in the negations of Christianity (at once historical and theological) that make visual evidences so consistently necessary, but inevitably troubling: In relation to biblical Judaism, this meant affirming God’s visibility as Christ, who is both God in person and the image of God; in relation to ancient paganism, it meant affirming an image that could escape the maleficent seductions of idolatry. Between the two, the problematic of the Incarnation opened up the image to what I have termed a visual operation—something that attempted to draw the gaze beyond the eye, the visible beyond itself, into the terrible or ad­mir­able regions of the imaginary and the phantasm.  (4)

The uncomfortable fit between the desires of the body and the ascetic drives of religion are typically registered as the inevitable failings of lust before the pro­hib­ itions designed to rein it in. And guilt is the name we give the manifestation of that discomfort. When Didi-Huberman, like Benjamin before him, suggests that the longings shaped within Christianity itself may be something different and even more powerful than those addressed by mosaic proscription, they identify a wider scope for the failures that might register as guilt. If it is necessary to affirm of an incarnation of divinity that its representation is not idolatrous, that is because the actual relation between subject and representation will constantly run the risk of falling away from the nuance the affirmation works so hard to sustain. The escape from idolatry, a non-sensuous yet perfect incarnation: these are affirmations that will only work if the specter of their opposite is allowed within the picture. And, indeed, the history of Christianity—notably in the period of its foundation and around the time of the Reformation—is rife with instances of the violent failure to sustain the relation at the right degree of negation. The religion carries with it the memory of what it needs to remind worshippers it is leaving behind, most notably in the sustained relationship to antiquity and the body. Guilt drives the creation of allegory, which then provides the only hope for the salvation of a fallen world, but only by drawing from material whose source is that very world (OGT, 245–7). The never resolved conflict between the iconoclastic and the anti-iconoclastic drives of Christianity that returned with such violence in the Reformation is at once a part of the institutional history of the church and a manifestation of a fundamentally unresolvable element in the faith, the paradoxical and unstable relationship between a vividly material world and a divinity that is always beyond it

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238  Material Inspirations yet always responsive to (and responsible for) that world, and whose fundamental ontological truth was revealed by making Himself vulnerable to the vicissitudes of existence. When Benjamin proposes that “even the story of the life of Christ lent itself to that turning of history into nature that is fundamental to the al­le­gor­ ic­al,” his point is that the poets of the Baroque period are simply pushing to a point beyond its usual limits a tendency already inherent in that story. It is this that makes the story of Jesus so compelling to a period committed to allegory: the secularization of elements from the life of the messiah by authors of the seventeenth century is a manifestation of a fundamental dialectical movement whereby an object of representation becomes newly available to aesthetic reflection as it is stripped of its original meaning. And no story is as liable to a bathetic fall into nature as that of a deity become sufferingly human. Like a real emotion provoked by reflection on someone else’s souvenirs, the significance of remains in culture can appear to be driven by an uncertain, because retrospective, and always somewhat alienated passion. However, Benjamin’s sophisticated account of allegory proposes something distinct from nostalgia by identifying the power of alienated retrospection itself. His argument, which is concerned with the emergence of a relationship to the past shaped by contemporary urgencies, depends on the work of many antecedents, including most immediately Aby Warburg, who himself may be taken as a culminating figure summing up and crystalizing a number of developments anticipated in the prior century. Thus, a passage Benjamin cites from Warburg’s unfinished (and probably unfinishable) “Pagan Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920) reads like a transposition into a historical register of Nietzsche’s treatment of Raphael’s Transfiguration. But the difference between the claims is as important as the similarity. Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” describe transhistorical conditions, the illusion of calm power captured by the latter term emerging in reaction to the terror attendant on the experience of an incoherent primal state of being encapsulated in the former. We know from Nietzsche’s own development of the topic that—the names of Greek divinities notwithstanding— the phenomenon was as likely to be captured in a painting of the late Renaissance as in Greek tragedy itself. Warburg is not interested in transhistorical states of being, however, but in the return of earlier elements into later cultural moments. And so, when he dates his Nietzschean revision to a very precise year, the one in which Raphael died and the Transfiguration was completed, he is doing so not because this historical moment is still experiencing a structure identical to one that shaped earlier eras, but because it was experiencing something different: The formal beauty of these figures of the gods, and the exquisite taste with which the artist reconciles pagan and Christian belief, must not be allowed to obscure the truth that even in Italy around 1520, at the time of the greatest artistic freedom and creativity, the antique was—as it were—revered in the form of a

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  239 Janus-faced herm. One face wore a daemonic scowl, exacting superstitious awe; the other face was Olympian and serene, inviting aesthetic veneration. (Benjamin, OGT, 240)11

In Warburg’s text, this passage is framed on one side by a brief discussion of Raphael’s design for Agostino Chigi’s tomb at Santa Maria del Popolo—meant to illustrate the posthumous commitment to astrology of the noble patron—and, on the other by the opening of an extensive treatment of Martin Luther’s response to astrology. What stands out in the evocative jumble that Warburg educes as evidence for his claim that the fascination with astrology in the period, is itself part of a complex return of antique concerns and figures, is the identification of a profoundly antithetical response to the past with a moment that is at once a watershed in the history of art (a period of “the most free and creative artistic activity”) and of religion. To prophesy is to propose insights that are not available to the understanding of the moment in which they are uttered, because only the future will reveal their true meaning (indeed, their status as true). In that sense Warburg’s association of prognostication with the rebirth of antiquity is particularly rich, suggesting as it does an unusually sophisticated sense of the relationship between a past that cannot know the value of what it sends forward to the future, and of a future that is the only chance for the real meaning of what has remained from the past to find its place.12 The social crisis of the Reformation entailed a number of powerful returns to foundational moments in the history of Christianity, not only its break with earlier forms of religion, which is what made the objects of antiquity a constant conceptual challenge, but also the foundational negotiation between matter and the divine that is always at once about representation and about incarnation. Benjamin’s focus on art from the seventeenth century and beyond is part of his project of addressing not the drama of new discoveries typically associated with the Renaissance, but a later and more clearly self-reflexive phenomenon. The interest of antique things, in his analysis, resides not in the fact that they are garnering new attention, but that in some ways they have always had it—that they come with a tradition of wonder and fear and love that must be renegotiated each time they are re-encountered. They are, after all, remains. “Allegory,” Benjamin notes, “corresponds to the ancient gods in the deadness of its concrete tangibility” (226). The ancient gods are tangible because they are objects and because they are deeply material imaginations of the divine. They are also at once dead and concrete because the divine dispensation with which they were associated has been removed. These are the reasons they come to serve as the repertoire of images on which culture draws for emblems—for luck, for fear, etc. The figures of antiquity become available to culture because their earlier meanings no longer obtain. Like prophetic words, their significance is only revealed in a future their makers could have never anticipated, indeed one in which utter reversals are possible, such as

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240  Material Inspirations that which made the divinities of the Greeks and Romans into the demonic ­figures of the sixteenth century. It is striking that in the course of his study of Baroque drama Benjamin should be moved to link Winckelmann with a line of allegorical thought going back to the literature of the seventeenth century. In spite of the art historian’s long-standing association with a vision of ideal antiquity, Benjamin insists that it is his treatment of the Torso Belvedere that makes the object what it in fact is, “a fragment, a rune,” the farthest thing from a symbol, in that it could never include within itself the promise of any whole. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Winckelmann’s Torso could only keep gesturing toward an imagination of such a whole without offering any access to it beyond the myopic focus on the particular that is at the heart of the art historian’s project and process.13 In contrast to the harmony of idea, which it offers, classicism proclaims “the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful nature” (176). Apparently outmoded responses to antiquities inform Benjamin’s concept of allegory not only because of the way they model the continued power of objects even as the original system of values that supported those objects is put in question, but also because the materiality of antiquities helps the critic characterize the vulnerability that allegory confesses at every turn. “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts,” Benjamin argues, “what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the baroque cult of the ruin” (178). Allegory is not fundamentally concerned—as it is often said to be—with creating figures for abstractions, so much as with identifying abstractions that will save things at risk of vanishing, “for an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory” (223). Benjamin’s reminder that the sensibility of the founding father of neoclassicism and of art history was formed in an era characterized by the conflict between theological and artistic intentions helps to explain the centrality of the theme of allegory in “Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture.”14 Benjamin’s historical argument is far more complicated than the straightforward fall from religious plenitude to aesthetic loss remembered in popular accounts of the concept of aura because it is not limited to the fairly recent and relatively uncomplicated crises of secularization (much less to the banal accident of history that is the rise of a particular technology). In Benjamin’s argument the loss of harmony and fullness of signification in which the modern relationship to art emerges is indeed linked to religious crisis. But the most power­ful and long-lasting catastrophes for the religious life are those that take place within the history of religion itself. It is in that sense that the most fundamental challenge to aura emerges not from the loss of faith, but from the displacement we might best associate with its superabundance, from forms of faith in contention. Thus, the object nature of the idol, the fact that it is no more than brute matter, is the burden of Tommaso Laureti’s Triumph of the Cross. It is a later,

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  241 more secular age that lifted the statue back on its plinth, reassembled its broken pieces, and set about finding a reason for worship. That the material manifestations of Christianity itself were as vulnerable to being voided of meaning as the idols of Greek and Roman religions had been, was evident to culture well before historical developments usually associated with the deracination of what came to be called aesthetic objects, such as the violence of the French Revolution and the period of museum building that followed quickly on the heels of that long event. The Thirty Years’ War, that great watershed in the history of European religious violence in the seventeenth century, is a key component in the history of allegory for Benjamin for this reason. While allegory is shaped by a break between significant objects and the systems in which their significance was originally established, the phenomenon requires more than the kind of intellectual reflection Benjamin traces to the “intensive preparation for allegory” in late antiquity (OGT, 243). It was not even the Middle Ages that saw the full manifestation of elements required for the emergence of allegory, a cul­ min­ation that could only take place in the aftermath of the crisis in religious values experienced in the Reformation: In the early Middle Ages there was nothing in either art, science, or the state that could be set beside the ruins that antiquity had left behind in all these domains. At that time, awareness of mutability sprang from an ineluctable perception, just as several centuries later, at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, the same awareness impressed itself upon European humanity. It may be remarked at this point that the most overwhelming devastations forced this experience on people no more bitterly, perhaps, than did the change in legal norms that had been endowed with a claim to eternal validity, a change that was particularly evident at these times of transition. Allegory is most abidingly there where transience and eternity most nearly collide.  (243)

Allegory emerges starkly to view, in this account, at moments when the claims to permanence of an earlier dispensation are at an end. The objects that remain in place or are recovered when the system of values gave them meaning is lost may go back to antiquity, but the emotional and conceptual force that drives them into the shape of allegory requires a more immediate crisis. Like any important event in the psychic life, the confrontation of transitoriness and eternity is overdetermined: the fallen divinity in Laureti’s 1685 Triumph of the Cross, broken into incoherent stone before the powerful divinity that has supplanted it on the plinth, is at once a memorial to a historic triumph and a moment in an ongoing argument about signification, representation, and the church. The claim that something happened to the mind of Europe in the seventeenth century has a conservative flavor in the Anglo-American tradition, where its most influential manifestation is T.S. Eliot’s description—advanced in his 1921 essay on

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242  Material Inspirations the “Metaphysical Poets” (just seven years before Benjamin completed his Habilitationsschrift)—of a dissociation of sensibility dividing verse from early in the century from that produced late. In the later period (and forever afterwards) poets—in ways Eliot could describe memorably but not fully explain—became unable to link thing to idea as they once had. They had thoughts and they had impressions of the world, but the two categories were no longer as closely connected in the poetic mind as they had been in the past.15 It has always been difficult to avoid the sense that the line of demarcation suggested in Eliot’s influential essay but not named had to be the epochal event, with which it is contemporary, and in which the Reformation made its most significant mark in British history: the English Civil War that culminated in the execution of Charles I in 1649. While Benjamin’s historical argument may be compared to the one advanced by Eliot—and certainly the latter’s engagement with unassimilated fragments of earlier texts in his poetry evokes fundamental turns in the critic’s claims— Benjamin evidently discovers the possibility of a progressive energy arising out of the crisis of sensibility both men identify as having its source in a conflict within European Christianity. The difference, I think, comes down to Benjamin’s recognition (aided by Warburg, but with sources ultimately in Nietzsche) of the power of the dialectic form of reception itself (Warburg’s Janus-faced herm). The psychological force of antiquarian revival is determined by its inevitable reawakening of the prior struggle between the Pauline antipathy to the body and the sensuality entailed in the pagan religion that shaped the objects that came to fascinate Europe from the Renaissance on: The allegorical way of seeing has its origin in the confrontation between the guilt-laden physis instituted by Christianity and a purer natura deorum em­bodied in the pantheon. Insofar as the pagan took on new life with the Renaissance, and the Christian with the Counter-Reformation, allegory as the form of their confrontation, likewise had to be renewed.  (OGT, 247)

The attempt to distinguish between “physis,” an ethically charged concept of nat­ ural order that recurs in the writings of Paul, and natura, the more neutral term, used to identify character or inherent way of being, captures at a linguistic level the struggle between the ascetic drives of Christianity and the apparent comfort with the natural world of the classical pantheon it overcame in antiquity but of which it never fully disposed. The return of what had been suppressed within a Christian context itself, wrestling to find anew the balance between representation, materiality and the divine, is liable to manifest itself as monstrous in the way Warburg suggests, to shape itself around a sense of guilt. There is nothing new in seeing in the recovery of pagan antiquity in the Renaissance a challenge to conventional Christian values including in particular its tradition of antipathy to the pleasures of the flesh. The interest of Benjamin’s

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  243 argument resides in the way that his reading of Warburg allows him to suggest the crisis within classicism that the encounter also provoked: To become aware of the lack of freedom, the imperfection and brokenness of the sensuous of the beautiful physis, was something forbidden to classicism by its very nature. But this is precisely what Baroque allegory, beneath its mad pomp, proclaims with unprecedented insistence.  (OGT, 186)

It is to allegory Benjamin suggests we need to turn for a vivid sense of brokenness or collapse of nature that he will go on to describe (not without reason, and with tactical anachronism) as opposed to what he calls “neo-Kantian” thought (187). But in this collapse something is liberated for Benjamin: “Just as earthly sorrow belongs to allegoresis, so is infernal mirth a part of its longing, which is brought to naught in the triumph of matter” (OGT, 248). “Allegoresis,” the reading of texts as allegories, is driven by a longing that is earthly, infernal, and doomed to failure because the matter that shapes it is the very thing least liable to be fully made into an idea. The notorious difficulty of Benjamin’s text is traceable to its attempt to address a set of overlapping crises, each of which is bound to eventuate in a productive form of failure, the impossibility of a full reconciliation of classical material in a Christian culture, of the pleasures of the body in an ascetic system. But each instance also challenges the projects of the apparently victorious system. The body will not be shunted aside, any more than Christianity can ever work itself free of its classical legacy. The crisis of representation entailed in allegory—and which Benjamin places in close relation to the social crises in which it arises—is equally rich: a work of visual art does not go into text without leaving a surplus, and materiality itself cannot enter in any full way into the network of language against which, nevertheless, it keeps up a steady pressure. Benjamin proposes a dialectic that does not eventuate in the peace of a reconciliation, but in a sporadic cessation of hostilities, a treuga dei, or “truce of God” (188). Even when textual matters are at issue, Benjamin keeps returning to the ruin: “[W]hat antiquity left behind,” for Baroque poets, Benjamin proposes, “are the elements from which, piece by piece, the new whole is compounded. No: constructed. For the consummate vision of this new thing was—ruin” (189). Working always with broken things was bound to shape the efforts of the writer, who is constantly revealed to be putting together pre-existent elements: “The writer is not supposed to conceal his combinatory practice, since it was not so much the mere whole as its manifest construction that was the center of all intended effects” (190). The Baroque writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, but it is an act dependent on earlier forms and variations (so that the inherited forms are clearly from elsewhere, but so is the process that has put them together). The process amounts to a deep commitment to

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244  Material Inspirations repetition with a rich relationship to interpretation itself. The project of the Baroque Trauerspiel is of interest for Benjamin because it is a critical one: “It is the object of philosophical criticism to show that the function of artistic form is precisely this: to make historical material contents, such as lie at the basis of every significant work, into philosophical truth contents.” It will be by the ­separating out of elements that stand the risk of being lost in a well-designed whole that the content—always material because always historical in Benjamin— will be revealed: This transforming of material contents into truth content entails the weakening of effect whereby the attractiveness of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, providing the basis for a rebirth in which all ephemeral beauty completely falls away and the work asserts itself as ruin. In the allegorical construction of the Baroque trauerspiel, such ruined forms of the redeemed work of art have always stood out clearly.  (OGT, 194)

Benjamin draws an awkward contrast between the aspiration toward in­ter­pret­ ation as a form of totalization and the broken condition of the objects on which interpretation needs to work. He identifies in Winckelmann’s insistence on the individual human figure as the best summation of allegorical drives, “the will to symbolic totality, as humanism venerated it in the human figure.” By contrast, he insists it is “as patchwork . . . that things stare out from the allegorical construct” (OGT, 199). Both the will to totality and the imperfection of the object are ideas, of course, but the tendency the critic associates with allegory results in a recognition of unassimilable difference that is particularly germane to (because it was formed in relation to) the concept of the remain in nineteenth-century thought: at once object, idea, and reminder of a network of historical failures of which object and idea are both symptom and (therefore) evidence. The meaning of the thing in allegory, writes Benjamin, always comes from the allegorist, not from the thing itself, which is what makes its pleasures so melancholy. Ultimately, the severely limited nature of the significance he describes amounts to a knowledge that manifests as a kind of absolute projection: The allegorist lays meaning into it and sustains it from below: this is to be understood not psychologically but ontologically. In the hands of the allegorist, the thing becomes something other; the allegorist speaks of something other through it, and it becomes for him a key to the realm of hidden knowledge. (OGT, 196)

The play between concept and matter in Benjamin is constant and fundamental; the idea of matter shapes the material force of objects on ideas. But the speed of the dynamic play among elements, and the complexity of relationships it keeps

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Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin  245 alive, will prevent the topic from resting on any easy binary, and will certainly not make the interactions between object and idea in any way straightforward. Canon, reproduction, vulnerability: these are not just accidental, but related issues in the history of the reception of remains. It is the fact of reproduction that allows the possibility of canon formation on the one hand, and the emergence of challenges from alternative canons on the other. While the ruin is the preeminent instance in Benjamin’s account of allegory, its force is less dependent on the rare experience of material presence than it is on the constant encounter with reproduction. The gap that allows for the challenge of the real, whether by a new canon or from a particular manifestation of an established one, is opened up in the first instance by the experience of simulacra. Constant reiteration is characteristic of the process the critic describes. “[I]t is a common feature of,” Baroque literature, he writes, “to heap up fragments uninterruptedly, without any well-defined idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle to pose stereotypes for intensification” (189). As will be the case with the compendious projects devoted to the nineteenth century Benjamin will take up later in his career, the whole is composed of fragments made available by emergent technology and urgent by historical developments. The interplay between history, matter, and simulacra that is at the heart of Benjamin’s argument emerges out of a nineteenth-century culture in which the inevitable exchange between these elements was perhaps more vividly clear than it was to become in later periods because the productive nature of the relationships entailed was so much more evident than it was fated to become.

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PART III

T HINGS, PE R S ONA LLY Profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component, which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain un­affect­ed by our modern knowledge and power. Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” (1928)

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8

The Ruined Cathedral, Black Arts, and the Grave in Engraving Ruskin and the Fatal Excess of Art

1.  The Ruined Cathedral Throughout this book I have returned to the topic of the reproductive engravings that played such a pivotal role in shaping the reception of art in a period that saw an ever-expanding public engaged with art and its institutions. The importance of mediation was bound to grow as technology made it ubiquitous. But ubiquity itself, as well as the specific forms of dissemination, inevitably affected the range of possible responses to printed images. Like the sites of exhibition with which they were closely associated, the images circulating in the increasing number of popular illustrated journals available for public consumption created new relationships to the objects they displayed.1 The uncanny figures for engraved reproduction in the work of John Ruskin, which will be addressed in this chapter, are signs of (and responses to) the public’s complex relationship to a modernity in which excess and impermanence are key challenges. I will begin my account of the figures Ruskin uses to evoke these challenges not with prints, but with his words at a site of display that provoked im­port­ant reflection from him on both topics, and that picks up on the tension between permanence and transient cultural event.2 The ruined cathedral in my title occurs in the course of an 1857 lecture with a central place in Ruskin’s career—and one produced in response to a notable occasion. Invited to speak at Manchester on the occasion of the Art Treasures Exhibition, at the height of his fame as a critic, Ruskin responded to the moment with two lectures challenging much the exhibition stood for. With astonishing diligence and remarkable organizational acumen, objects had been gathered from collections all over Britain into another vast palace of glass, a process followed closely and with admiration in the press. But the achievement provoked a forceful response from the critic, including a passage of such extraordinary reach that it demands close attention. The apocalyptic description of an Italian ruin Ruskin lays out in the course of his remarks—at once about art and about identifying the responsibility for its blighting—is designed to bring to the attention of his listeners the situation of a site of great cultural significance but far from the self-congratulating festival, and Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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250  Material Inspirations

Fig. 8.1  “The Art-Treasures Exhibition Building. Manchester: Exterior.” Wood engraving. Illustrated London News, May 2, 1857.

utterly distinct from the immense temporary structure built to house the Art Treasures Exhibition (fig. 8.1). The moment is of a piece with Ruskin’s characteristic challenge to the various temporary palaces of art that proliferated in the nineteenth century, but it does more than suggest that these modern cathedrals are inadequate at their core, that lacking a sense of permanent value they offer repetition as a weak compensation. Ruskin suggests something that needs to be recognized as bold and strange for its power to truly register. The critic argues that his listeners share some responsibility for kinds of damage to which they might reasonably be surprised to hear they bear any relation, for injuries in distant places and times. “Fancy what Europe would be now,” he invites his listeners to imagine, “if the delicate statues and temples of the Greeks,—if the broad roads and massy walls of the Romans,—if the noble and pathetic architecture of the middle ages, had not been ground to dust by mere human rage.” As his topic ­gathers pace, his focus on agency comes to the fore: You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm—we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish—ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame, and the soul of man is to its own work as the moth, that frets when it cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that blasts where it cannot illumine. All these lost treasures of human intellect have been wholly destroyed by human

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The Ruined Cathedral  251 industry of destruction . . . The walls and the ways would have stood—it is we who have left not one stone upon another, and restored its pathlessness to the desert; the great cathedrals of old religion would have stood—it is we who have dashed down the carved work with axes and hammers, and bid the mountaingrass bloom upon the pavement, and the sea-winds chaunt in the galleries.3

It may seem that Ruskin is overstepping more than a little, that his audience of industrialists and merchants of the British Midlands, whatever their faults, are hardly to blame for the pathlessness of the desert, the sea-winds blowing through ruined cathedrals.4 But, the aim of Ruskin’s words is evidently to identify a far broader sense of responsibility than the relatively limited one entailed in identifying, collecting, and displaying art masterpieces from collections around the United Kingdom. Indeed, this identification of a broad human responsibility for the destruction of art is rare to find outside of the provocation of particular moments of crisis. Who allowed the roof of the picturesque Abbey to collapse? Who left the sublime temple in the parlous state we find it, a set of toppled columns, pediments, and capitals piled on pitted bases? These can seem more like the kinds of idle questions that might strike a tourist, not moral challenges to the modern art lover liable to be provoked by visiting a temporary exhibition. Ruskin’s claim is urgent, however, and it does not exempt anyone when it comes to the condition of a ruin. His hyperbolic challenge has two distinct component parts, one historical and one of immediate application. Epochal religious change is the original cause of the damage, or course—what reduced Parian stone to rubble or lime and tore down the ancient cathedrals is the profound cultural shift from pagan faith to Christian, and then the incomplete but even more violent developments at­tend­ ant on the emergence of Protestantism. It is a modern sensibility that links these events in an undifferentiated chain of violent change, that suggests that what is interesting about them is the fact of destruction rather than what an earlier era might have seen, the victory of the right side, say, or even the inevitable human development entailed in the change from one system to another. For this reason, I suppose, the originality of Ruskin’s position will be harder to recognize than the hyperbole of his prose.5 In our own day, when the violent destruction of the idols of a faith in which we do not believe, in a nation we will probably never visit, can easily rise to the level of a moral catastrophe, it may be difficult to miss the novelty of the other element that follows from the general sense that the violence attendant on historical change is to be reprobated more than that change is to be celebrated or justified, which is the emergence of a general sense of (always failing) responsibility or caretaking. A great exhibition foregrounds the work of gathering and display, and—as any curator can testify—puts pressure on the other role of institutions of culture: the protection of irreplaceable objects. Evidently Ruskin is not trying to prevent his

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252  Material Inspirations listeners from attacking cathedrals or reducing ancient statues to lime, so what remains in his analysis is a boundaryless sense of responsibility. The question is how this novel concept of international artistic caretaking articulates with the occasion of its presentation. Ruskin’s aim is to evoke a dynamic process involving the practical effects of the modern psychology of art in subjects understood to be not only witnesses to the beauty of admired objects, but agents determining their fate. The public’s relationship to art will evidently determine the care it is liable to give to, or withhold from, things it may or may not treasure. But, the care for which Ruskin is arguing is itself shaped by material experiences in the first place, which is where the site of Ruskin’s lecture becomes germane to his remarks. The fundamental premise of the organizers of the Art Treasures Exhibition is that accumulation is a certain good. However, at this locus of indigestible accumulation and the self-satisfied love of art, Ruskin launches an uncompromising attack on accumulation itself and the network of ideologies and assumptions supporting it. Something about the temporary palace of art in Manchester makes Ruskin think about other palaces never meant for impermanence but reduced to that condition. The Art Treasures Exhibition, assembling as it did an extraordinarily large collection of work and as impressively massive an audience, was an ideal place for Ruskin to draw attention to the threat presented by plenitude itself. Ruskin shares with the organizers of the exhibition the desire to make art more widely meaningful, but the pressure resulting from a thronging audience as well as from the accumulation of art inspires in the critic a fear of losing value in quantity (see fig. 8.2). And there were concrete reasons for the concern to which Ruskin gives voice. Season tickets were sold in order to allow repeated visits, and a train line was built to bring visitors as near as possible to the exhibition. But it was widely held that the exhibit in itself was impossible to take in in its entirety.6 The account of a contemporary conveys the overwhelming volume of material on display: one can study there all the arts of design from their beginnings to the present: painting, engravings, numismatics, goldsmith work, damascening, ceramics, delicate carving, fine cabinetmaking, inlaying, the art of enameling pottery, of doing repoussé work with metals, of cutting crystals . . . Imagine a palace all of glass, in which would be found gathered the great gallery of the Louvre, the Cluny Museum, the cabinet des Médailles, the reserve deposits of the Cabinet d’Estampes . . .—and you will still have only an imperfect idea of this exhibition.7

Ruskin gave the remarks he delivered at the Exhibition two titles: “The Political Economy of Art” became, on its reissue in 1880, “A Joy Forever (and its price on the market).” The titles taken together (and including parenthesis) suggest what is extraordinary in Ruskin’s response to the event that provided the immediate occasion for his talks. He himself identified these lectures as the beginning of the second part of his career, when he turned most fully toward social questions, but

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The Ruined Cathedral  253

Fig. 8.2  “The Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition. The Grand Hall.” Wood engraving. Illustrated London News, May 9, 1857.

the titles suggest the continuity between his aesthetic and economic concerns. The specifically curatorial topic of how art might be usefully administered when it is no longer experienced as a highly punctuated and infrequent event, but as a boundless stream of goods needing conceptual organization, is developed in relation to the exhibition, which is a prime instance of the very problem he has set himself.8 A fragment of the first line of Keats’s Endymion—“A Joy Forever”—had indeed been engraved on the principal archway over the entrance to the exhibition. Ruskin is concerned enough with this circumstance to draw attention to it many years later; in the opening to the preface of the 1880 reissue of the lectures he underlines the point of the new title. By sending his readers back twenty-three years, Ruskin invites them to consider the relationship between event and argument, that is, between forgetting and returns—a theme that recurs in his discussions of the Crystal Palace and its aftermaths. The irony of endless time—of forever— crowning the transient structure housing an impermanent phenomenon, itself likely to be a vague memory in the reader’s mind at the moment of reading, is central to his discussion. The question may reasonably be asked: why should the collection of Art Treasures in Manchester make Ruskin think about ruined cathedrals? Why does this great demonstration of the love of art and of organizational prowess on the part of his contemporaries lead him to the problem of impermanence? The

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254  Material Inspirations answer is at once fundamentally material and deeply conceptual: Ruskin’s theme is the direct relationship between the accumulation of aesthetic objects and the destruction of the possibility of their enjoyment. The argument comes together at the figure of the audience; he is talking about that difficult thing, the responsibility of the public in relation to its own aesthetic pleasure or fatigue. Ruskin responds to the gathering of art and people about which he has been invited t­o speak by challenging the premises of the event, by presenting accumulation itself as fundamentally dangerous to the appreciation of art. I have largely been quoting from “The Accumulation and Distribution of Art,” the second of the two lectures in The Political Economy of Art, and a text in which the critic develops at length the problems raised by the mammoth exhibition, an argument that has at its heart Ruskin’s sense that the material form of the presentation of art has a crucial effect on the consciousness receiving it: the amount of pleasure that you can receive from any great work, depends wholly on the quantity of attention and energy of mind you can bring to bear upon it . . . If you see things of the same kind of equal value very frequently, your reverence for them is infallibly diminished, your powers of attention get grad­ ual­ly wearied, and your interest and enthusiasm worn out; and you cannot in that state bring to any given work the energy necessary to enjoy it.  (16:56–7)

The response of an audience to art is bound to be shaped by its presentation in a crowded, but disconnected, jumble. Ruskin reflects on whether it is better to scatter a small amount of attention over many pictures than it is to focus a great deal of attention on one: the question is not a merely arithmetical one of this kind. Your fragments of broken admirations will not, when they are put together, make up one whole admiration; two and two, in this case, do not make four, nor anything like four. Your good picture, or book, or work of art of any kind, is always in some degree fenced and closed about with difficulty.  (16:58)

At the heart of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” is the suggestion that a great deal of the power of art in earlier periods was due to its distance from its audience, its role in worship creating an ineffable relationship between intimacy and unbridgeable distance, the closing of this gap being an integral part of modernity’s relationship to art. Benjamin, like Ruskin, includes both reproduction and exhibition in his treatment of the experience of art in modernity; indeed, it is exhibition which provides the model for the crisis he anticipates from technological reproduction: A painting has always exerted a claim to be viewed primarily by a single person or by a few. The simultaneous viewing of paintings by a large audience, as

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The Ruined Cathedral  255 happens in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis in painting, a crisis triggered not only by photography but, in a relatively independent way, by the artwork’s claim to the attention of the masses.9

Benjamin traces “the social basis of the aura’s present decay” to a desire for in­tim­ acy with the art object that is part of mass society’s tendency to destroy the individual character of any particular thing. The process Benjamin describes is a poignant one involving something like the desire for an experience of closeness that is stripped (as a desire and as an experience) of the quality of difference that should be the particular promise of intimacy itself. The decay of aura is shaped by a desire for the constant encounter of the same. What Benjamin identifies as “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things,” is matched by “their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction” (105; emphasis in the original). Benjamin and Ruskin are preoccupied by the urge toward closeness that Benjamin, following Valéry, identifies as characteristic of modernity, towards the “Conquest of Ubiquity” that gives its title to the essay that inspired Benjamin’s own: the amazing growth of our technologies, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component, which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.10

Valéry’s “ubiquity” is a condition that affects the valuation of all objects, not only those being acted on directly either by reproduction or public inspection. The question for Ruskin throughout his career, and increasingly toward the end of the century, is whether accumulation and reproduction will come to play a positive part in the production of work, or whether they need to be understood as participating in a process—at once sign and cause—inevitably tending toward chaos and decay.11 The reasons for the urgency of Ruskin’s attack on a debased experience of art become all the more visible in those cases when his response is provoked not by the unique event of an Exhibition, but by a far more widespread and related phenomenon: the ubiquity of engraved reproductions of art, particularly in the popu­lar press. But both issues are closely related in the period, and in his thought.12 Benjamin and Ruskin are both responding to a cultural complex that always includes the two sites of display: the halls of exhibition and the pages of the popu­lar press. While art lovers in previous centuries had had to rely on expensive forms of reproduction which, as a matter of course, limited the experience of art to a relatively small number of people and even to a fairly limited repertoire of images, Thomas Bewick’s epochal invention of wood engraving in the early nineteenth century soon led to the proliferation of periodicals which made the image—quite

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256  Material Inspirations literally—cheap.13 The illustrated papers of the nineteenth century not only followed developments in the arts, they often included reproductions meant for display. And the interest they showed in exhibitions was a fundamental part of the cultural influence of those transient events. Henry Cole, the principal organizer of the Great Exhibition and founder of the South Kensington Museum that would become the Victoria and Albert, is clear on the ways in which technological developments in reproduction were destined to have an effect closely related to that which was aimed at by those structures of exhibition, but exponentially magnified: “The great end of the whole art of engraving,” he notes in 1838, “is to render the spirit and genius of a great artist accessible to the thousands, or the millions, by embodying them in cheap and portable forms. Wood engraving, professedly the cheapest and most portable of all the representations of great pictures, excels equally in fulfilling the highest mission of its art.”14 The Penny Magazine, which blazoned its cheapness in its title, was established by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1832 with the express aim (as formulated in the preface to the first volume), “to gratify a proper curiosity, and cultivate an increasing taste, by giving representations of the finest Works of Art, of Monuments of Antiquity, and of subjects of Natural History, in a style that had been previously considered to belong only to expensive books.”15 A footnote in the same volume referring to a print of one of the most famous of these works of art in England, “Christ Delivering the Keys” from Raphael’s Cartoons at Hampton Court (fig. 8.3), makes clear the ambitions such an image satisfies. “The

Fig. 8.3  “Christ delivering the Keys to St. Peter.” Wood engraving after Raphael. The Penny Magazine, December 1, 1832.

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The Ruined Cathedral  257 Cartoons,” it notes, “are shown, with the other pictures, to visitors, upon payment of a fee to the person who goes round the apartment. We hope, when the new National Gallery is finished, that they will be removed to London, so that the public may be delighted and improved by their contemplation without the exaction of sixpences and shillings” (349n). The circulation of The Penny Magazine reached 200,000 in its first year, a success soon matched by the various periodicals that followed closely on its heels. As my argument is about the speed of change and the problem of excess, it may be as well to list some of these notable successors. The Penny Magazine was followed by Punch in 1841 and the Illustrated London News in 1842. On the con­ tin­ent, 1843 saw the establishment of a number of titles, which also proclaimed their commitment to the distribution of images right on the masthead: L’Illustration, Die Illustrierte Zeitung. Throughout the middle of the nineteenth century, the pace of founding of new magazines did not slacken: Harper’s Weekly began publication in 1857, and Cornhill Magazine in 1860. The proliferation I am trying to illustrate was not simply a matter of variety of journals, but of copies printed; by 1863 the Illustrated London News had reached a circulation of 300,000.16 As the passage I have quoted from the first issue of The Penny Magazine makes clear, from the very earliest point of this boom in publishing, it was not lost on art boosters that a new era in mass access to the image had arrived. In 1846, an anonymous author declares in the Art Union that “engraving on wood is destined to do far more for ‘the million’ than it had yet done; if our artists will aid our wood engravers, they will effect great things for the mass” (quoted in Fox, 9n). And indeed, The Penny Magazine featured regular articles on “The Lives of Remarkable Painters,” accompanied generally by a portrait of the artist and a reproduction of at least one of his works, engraved in wood (see fig. 8.4). (It is in the course of this series that Anna Jameson undertook the moral rehabilitation of Raphael discussed in Chapter 2.) During the development and run of the Art Treasures Exhibition The Illustrated London News followed the pattern of promotion and response established with the Great Exhibition, recording in vivid detail the planning, construction, and opening of that event, as well as its reception by the public.17 But already in 1851 the Illustrated London News offered its readers a wonderful mise-en-abyme acknowledgment of the relationship between exhibition, illustration, and the press: an image of the journal being produced, to the fascination of onlookers, on a “Patent Vertical Printing Machine” running within the confines of the Crystal Palace itself during the Great Exhibition (fig. 8.5). When Ruskin’s challenge in Manchester comes, then, it does so in the midst of the cheerful exhibitionism that characterized the era. And it is worth noting the balance between material and conceptual issues driving Ruskin’s concerns. The prints from which so much was expected were not only inexpensive and easy to

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258  Material Inspirations

Fig. 8.4  “Titian, and Group from his Venus and Adonis.” Wood engraving. “Essays on the Lives of Remarkable Painters,” No. 40. The Penny Magazine, June 14, 1845.

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The Ruined Cathedral  259

Fig. 8.5  “Patent Vertical Printing Machine, in the Great Exhibition.” Wood engraving. Illustrated London News, May 31, 1851.

produce in huge numbers, they were also of a dramatically lower quality than the kinds connoisseurs had admired for centuries. Still, it is not on the grounds of connoisseurship that Ruskin declares himself disturbed by the decline in quality of these reproductions; his real concern is for the loss of what Benjamin would call aura that is the result of the presence (the omni-presence) of such work in culture.18 In A Joy Forever Ruskin takes the occasion of the Arts Treasures Exhibition to launch a forceful attack on the values in culture which support the event, and which it instantiates: of one thing you may be sure, that art which is produced hastily will also perish hastily; and that what is cheapest to you now, is likely to be dearest in the end. I am sorry to say, the great tendency of this age is to expend its genius in per­ish­ able art of this kind . . . There is a vast quantity of intellect and labour consumed annually in our cheap illustrated publications; you triumph in them; and you think it so grand a thing to get so many woodcuts for a penny. Why, woodcuts, penny and all, are as much lost to you as if you had invested your money in gossamer. More lost, for the gossamer could only tickle your face, and glitter in your eyes; it could not catch your feet and trip you up: but bad art can, and does; for you can’t like good woodcuts as long as you look at the bad ones. If we were at

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260  Material Inspirations this moment to come across a Titian woodcut, or a Durer woodcut, we should not like it—those of us at least who are accustomed to the cheap work of the day. We don’t like, and can’t like, that long; but when we are tired of one bad cheap thing, we throw it aside and buy another bad cheap thing; and so keep looking at bad things all our lives.  (16:41–2)

Ruskin’s diagnosis is evidently more than a simple complaint about taste. The lived experience of the failure of aura is symptomatically manifested as an absolute loss of the possibility of attention. The modernity the critic describes is not satisfied with plenty; it is driven, instead, by an inescapable perpetual disappointment. As the appetite cannot be sated by cheap images, constant change is the only recourse for the jaded sensibility, though it merely results in that deadening proliferation that is at once cause and symptom of a crisis in culture. When he turns his attention to the human effort that is expended in order to feed the desire for disposable images, Ruskin traces the fatal implications of so much cheap art in two directions: it is pernicious to the sensibility of the public and damaging to the lives of those laboring to produce ephemeral work that will never satisfy an inexorable appetite. Attention, a key word in Ruskin’s lexicon when he attempts to address the psychological challenge presented by the modern relationship to art, describes an experience that is compensatory, but never fully sufficient. The flawed modern relationship to art becomes diagnostic of a social crisis it cannot in fact solve. Moments that feel like a fuller experience may come to be understood as in some measure compensating for a lifetime of unsatisfactory social exchanges, but the love of art will not be able to patch over the psychic or affective damage attendant on the conditions that determine the decay of aura. The problem is structural as well as practical: the fantasy of a vanished ritual or even salvific relationship toward the art object is, after all, not one of full-on complete aesthetic encounter (whatever we understand that to be), no more than any kind of in­tim­ate relationship we rely on for support is chiefly characterized by full knowledge or even reiterated gazing. Arm’s-length can be a good distance from which to take in an object; an embrace offers the opportunity of full contact and the experience of more elements of the beloved, but is rarely the occasion for thoughtful informed reflection. The altarpiece still in the church for which it was always intended, before which the priest has performed sacramental rites for centuries, below which generations of church-goers have burned candles in the hope of gaining some divine favor: it is not just that such a sacred object is materially obscured by the conditions in which it is found, but that worship itself, or even the simple fact of familiarity, shares very little with the conditions that shape the modern love of art. The first use of “aesthetic” in the modern sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (“Of or relating to the perception, appreciation, or criticism of that which is beautiful”), dates to 1812 and, indeed, it describes something that either was not experienced, or had no need to be named in an earlier era. The situation

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The Ruined Cathedral  261 imagined when aura is evoked—that state of unalienated unselfconscious relationship—is precisely what is irrecoverable in modernity. The modern experience of art is fundamentally an experience of a loss with sources not to be found ul­tim­ate­ly in the aesthetic. And so, it presents an opportunity for reflecting on the nature of what is missing or currently unavailable because of an ongoing social crisis. It is “we” who threaten the ancient cathedrals of old religion not in the sense that we may inherit some complicity in earlier acts of violence, but in that the relationships possible with objects we claim to admire are distorted by the play of attention and inattention that characterizes the modern engagement with art.

2.  Black Arts If Ruskin is prescient in his analysis of the psychological effects of cheap massproduced art in 1857, thirty years later he is remarkable in his treatment of a problem which evidently had only become more urgent. The onslaught of images did not abate, of course; it increased at an astonishing rate as new technologies came to the fore, wood engravings eventually being supplemented and then overtaken by photographic processes. Ruskin’s response to photography is complex; it was a medium he often used with pleasure and fascination to document buildings at risk or to bring to England images of central importance to his aesthetic ideals. Nevertheless, he chose a remarkable title for the article on reproduction he published in the Magazine of Art (1888): “The Black Arts: A Reverie in the Strand.” Black arts is, of course, another term for the practices of magic, or even necromancy. They are black because they are forbidden or hidden. It is just Ruskin’s joke, however, that the arts he has in mind are black because they are precisely the contrary of forbidden, and not hidden at all. In reproduction these arts are also literally black, because they reduce everything to the black lines of ink making up the image. The essay’s pedestrian subtitle is also important: “A Reverie on the Strand.” Reproduction has had a special relation to the city since at least the eighteenth century; the representation of print lovers gazing with fascinated attention at the merchandise of a print-seller has allowed artists as distinct as Rowlandson and Daumier to evoke the forms of attention of a diverse middle-class urban population.19 Ruskin reminds us of this tradition by the purposefully incongruous juxtaposition of archaic and modern—the black arts reflected on in a busy London street. And, indeed, the text of the brief article locates us vividly in the city, alongside Ruskin, who paints himself as a bewildered, superannuated flaneur overwhelmed by the pace of change in the metropolis: I don’t know London any more, nor where I am in it—except the Strand. In which, walking up and down the other day, and meditating over its wonderful displays of etchings and engravings and photographs all done to perfection such

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262  Material Inspirations as I had never thought possible in my younger days, it became an extremely searching and troublesome question with me what was to come of all this literally “black art,” and how it was to influence the people of our cities.  (14:358–9)

As Ruskin identifies the effect of the black arts with the modern life of the city— with its changeability and its expansion—the uncertain steps of an old man in a burgeoning metropolis become emblematic not only of the experience of change, but of its exhausting effect: What is it all to come to? Are our lives in this kingdom of darkness to be indeed twenty times as wise and long as they were in the light? The Answer—what answer was possible to me—came chiefly in the form of fatigue, and a sorrowful longing for an old Prout washed in with Vandyke brown and British ink, or even a Harding forest scene with all the foliage done in zig-zag. (14:359)

It is not lost on Ruskin that the exhaustion provoked by his walk in this crowded city of reproduction is a challenge to his career-long celebration not only of art, but of the faithful reproduction of nature: No one has pleaded more for finish than I in past time, or oftener, or perhaps so strongly, asserted the first principle that a good picture should look like the mirror of the thing itself. But now that everyone can mirror the thing itself—at least the black and white of it—as easily as he takes his hat off, and then engrave the photograph, and steel the copper, and print piles and piles of the thing by steam, all as good as the first half dozen proofs used to be, I begin to wish for a little less to look at.  (14:360)

Ruskin is disingenuous when he suggests that the desire to see less is a new one for him: I begin to wish for a little less to look at describes a feeling of long standing—or, perhaps surfeit always feels like a new experience, and so is best described that way. As far back as his inaugural lecture as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford in 1870, Ruskin had presented the problem as arising from what the modern public demands of its art: There is a continually increasing demand for popular art, multipliable by the printing-press, illustrative of daily events, of general literature, and of natural science. Admirable skill, and some of the best talent of modern times, are occupied in supplying this want; and there is no limit to the good which may be effected by rightly taking advantage of the powers we now possess of placing good and lovely art within the reach of the poorest classes. Much has already been accomplished; but great harm has been done also,—first, by forms of art

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The Ruined Cathedral  263 definitely addressed to depraved tastes; and, secondly, in a more subtle way, by really beautiful and useful engravings which are yet not good enough to retain their influence on the public mind;—which weary it by redundant quantity of monotonous average excellence, and diminish or destroy its power of accurate attention to work of a higher order.  (20:26–7)

The Ruskin of “The Black Arts” is evidently not confronting a new challenge, but developing ideas underlying central works in his oeuvre, Stones of Venice and Modern Painters principal among them. Seeing in modernity the triumph not only of mass production, but of the mass experience of the image, Ruskin cannot help but identify the inescapable effect of such phenomena on the making of new art. Thus, his review of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1875 ironically returns the art to its source, making the principal artists of the day into mere colorists of the illustrated papers, the annual exhibition into a particularly colorful edition of a journal; indeed he refers to the prestigious event itself as a periodical, “an annual publication”: Before looking at any single picture, let us understand the scope and character of the Exhibition as a whole. The Royal Academy of England, in its annual publication, is now nothing more than a large coloured Illustrated Times folded in saloons,—the splendidest May number of the Graphic shall we call it?20

Patricia Mainardi has emphasized the often forgotten role of drawing in discussions of reproductive technologies in later periods.21 Because he does not ever forget the work of the hand that goes into making things, Ruskin is able to insist on continuities that run in two directions: between the activities of makers that later periods might put in entirely different categories (such as salon painters, illustrators, and wood engravers), and between laborers and consumers. It is more than irony that drives Ruskin to propose that the productive work of the illustrators may ultimately be more impressive than what he takes to be the feeble colored forms of the Exhibition: Yet observe, in saying that Academy work is now nothing more, virtually, than a cheap coloured woodcut I do not mean to depreciate the talent employed in it. Our public press is supported by an ingenuity and skill in rapid art unrivalled in any period of history; nor have I ever been so humbled, or astonished, by the mightiest works of Tintoret, Turner, or Velazquez, as I was one afternoon last year, in watching in the Dudley Gallery, two ordinary workmen for a daily newspaper finishing their drawings on the blocks by gaslight, against time. (14:264)

Dark images made as day fades, gaslight and hurry: the conditions of modern production are linked to the darkness of the art produced. Being against time,

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264  Material Inspirations means working to get the image finished even as dark falls and yet another technology is brought to bear to extend the hours of labor, one which interrupts the darkness it cannot end and forms the setting of the illustrators’ work. The workmen draw, cut, and ink in order to produce dark lines in a hurried and penumbral modernity. And hurry is, of course, the other side of impermanence; the en­gravers need to rush because the transient value of the images they illustrate mean they must be brought out as soon as possible in order to ensure whatever brief value they are destined to have.

3.  The Grave in Engraving In the ruined cathedral and the black arts Ruskin finds two archaic, ­self-consciously gothic images to describe a fundamentally modern problem: the challenge of the proliferation of the image provoked by the developments of new technologies of reproduction. It is a third and paradoxically yet more lethal figure—“the grave in engraving”—that Ruskin offers as a form of recuperation of the reproductive image and the techniques of reproduction. The observation that the root of engraving is grave comes in Ruskin’s most sustained treatment of reproduction: lectures he delivered originally at Oxford in 1872 as “Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Schools of Engraving,” because he expected to center his discussion on a set of works he wrongly thought to be by the Florentine artist, and which he ultimately published as Ariadne Florentina (1873–1876).22 I will address the change of name below, but in order to recognize the danger for which Ariadne’s clue may present some relief it is important to first establish the threat and the promise of the process of engraving that Ruskin posits together by his use of the term grave, a word that allows Ruskin to speak about three fundamental elements involved in printmaking: the serious, the deadly, and the carved—to speak about them together because they are the component parts of an inescapable, though generally neglected, set of relationships. Ruskin supports his premise that “engraving, and the study of it, since the development of the modern finished school, have been ruinous to European knowledge of art” (22:463) by describing a process that not only challenges the ability to love art by jading the sensibilities and fostering the appetite for pointless change, but also deadens the worker who carves designs he had no role in making, trapping audience and art producer in a deadening cycle of mutual unsatisfiable need: In the miserably competitive labour of finding new stimulus for the appetite— daily more gross—of this tyrannous mob, we may count as lost beyond any hope the artists who are dull, docile, or distressed enough to submit to its demands; and we may count the dull and distressed by myriads;—and among the docile, many of the best intellects we possess.  (22:470)

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The Ruined Cathedral  265 As always in Ruskin, consumption and production are deeply intertwined. Hence his description of what he calls the “entire illustrative art industry of the modern press” brings together the darkness of the black arts with the fated and hopeless speed that is the complement to their impermanence: “industry enslaved to the ghastly service of catching the last gleams in the glued eyes of the daily more bestial English mob,—railroad born and bred, which drags itself about the black world it has withered under its breath, in one eternal grind and shriek, gobbling, staring,—chattering,—giggling,—trampling out every vestige of national honour and domestic peace” (22:469–70). Still, the grave qualities involved in reproductive technologies are more than simply lethal for Ruskin, a writer for whom tombs are so often places of beauty modernity has forgotten how to love. Sites of interment and their associated memorials are central to Ruskin’s analyses of art; from the sepulchers of Venetian Doges to the funeral effigy of Ilaria del Carretto in Lucca, they recur in his writing as the measure of the effectiveness of art in sustaining memory, in giving praise while marking out something more than an end. “[T]he power of all Christian work,” he notes in Val D’Arno (1874), “begins in the niche of the Catacomb and depth of the sarcophagus, and is to the end definable as architecture of the tomb” (23:25). The conclusion of a well-known passage in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) is worth citing in this context because it contains an interplay between apparently incongruous language and images (sowing, the grave, and time) to which Ruskin returns in his lectures on engraving: it is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fullness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.  (8:233)

Ruskin recuperates the act of engraving in Ariadne Florentina with the audacious claim that the real essence of this serious art is precisely the most material action entailed in its making: the scratch, the carving, the en-graving. His play on words, a reminder at once of linguistic and of actual facts, allows the lecturer to propose that rather than being naturally suited to its current function, engraving itself has been debased by being made a mere instrument of reproduction. Ruskin carries out an astonishing transvaluation of the medium, turning it from an essentially secondary reproductive form to “the first of the arts” (22:305). His account raises the fundamental act of engraving, when rightly understood and correctly practiced, to the status of a precondition for art, no longer the simple record of

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266  Material Inspirations architecture and sculpture: “engraving, though not altogether in the method of which you see examples in the print-shops of the High Street, is, indeed, a prior art to that either of building or sculpture, and is an inseparable part of both, when they are rightly practiced” (22:304). Ruskin’s account identifies the work of the engraver not as the making of the copy, but as the carving of the plate. To engrave, he insists, is to make “the most permanent of furrows.” He repeats this definition for emphasis: “a permanent cut or furrow.” It is not lost on Ruskin that what he proposes reclaims engraving from its later and more common meanings. In his definition, it is “essentially the cutting into a solid substance for the sake of making your ideas as permanent as possible, graven with an iron pen in the Rock for ever. Permanence, you observe, is the object, not multiplicability;—that is quite an accidental, sometimes not even a desirable attribute of engraving” (22:320). Ruskin’s emphasis on material conditions of making include his illustration of the chief tool of the trade, the graver or burin (see fig. 8.6), as well as his insistence on describing it not just as a chisel (which magnifies the instrument and emphasizes its links to sculpture), but, repeatedly, as a ploughshare, as though seeds might be sown in the gap in the metal cut by the burin: “a solid ploughshare, which, instead of throwing the earth aside, throws it up and out, producing at first a simple ravine, or furrow . . .” (22:348). As we will see, this is an image that will resonate to the close of the piece, one linking death and carving in a surprisingly fruitful way. Picking up on the central argument of the “Nature of Gothic” chapter of Stones of Venice, Ruskin demonstrates that the ever-increasing technical perfection of engraving is not only pernicious for the consumer, but for the producer as well. I have mentioned how, in his review of the 1875 Royal Exhibition, Ruskin made the paintings on display into illustrated prints (with apologies to the printmakers).

Fig. 8.6  A burin. In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), 348.

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The Ruined Cathedral  267 In the course of the lectures that became Ariadne Florentina, he held up “Astræa Redux,” a political cartoon by John Tenniel taken from a recent issue of Punch (fig.  8.7). Giving this ephemeral piece the focused attention generally reserved for the highest art, he finds in it passages of real but dangerous achievement. He damns the picture with high praise for containing “as high qualities as it

Fig. 8.7  John Tenniel, “Astræa Redux!!” Wood engraving. Punch, November 2, 1872.

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268  Material Inspirations is possible to find in modern art” (22:357). Social and aesthetic analyses come together as he addresses himself to the rich dark passages in the cartoon, comparing them to those in images from an entirely different kind of work, Hans Holbein’s wood cuts for The Dance of Death (1538). Ruskin’s point is complex because he has in his sights not only the artist of the design, but the carver who transferred that original onto a wood-block and the reader whose eye passed over the reproduced image without a thought to the workmanship involved. He focuses on the dark parts of the engraving to call attention to the fact that the number of cross-hatchings the artist’s pen has made in the course of drawing this entirely ephemeral sketch calls for an unconscionable quantity of precise cuts on the part of the men employed in reproducing it (fig. 8.8), which in itself is symptomatic of the alienation between concept and execution in modern art: “the rapid work, though easy to the artist, is very difficult to the woodcutter; so that it implies instantly a separation between the two crafts, and that your woodcutter has ceased to be a draughtsman” (22:356). Holbein, on the other hand, has kept himself to a limited number of cuts—suggesting the intimate link between his work and that of the craftsman, or that, in fact, he himself was the carver of his own design. Ruskin’s analysis will be familiar to any reader of “The Nature of Gothic.” He celebrates the variety and roughness which is indicative not of destructive mass production, but of a craftsman thinking and engaged with his work. On the other side is the mere repetition of line, as deadening for the worker as the perpetual onslaught of image is for the viewer. Ruskin recovers the primacy of engraving and makes it a serious matter, but not for this reason any less deadly, and this is the reason why the counter-example of Holbein’s Dance of Death becomes so important to his argument. “Engraving

Fig. 8.8  John Tenniel, “Astræa Redux!!” (detail of cross-hatching). In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), 359.

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The Ruined Cathedral  269 means, primarily, making a permanent cut or furrow in something,” Ruskin notes, before going on to indicate the difficulty presented by this recovered def­in­ ition: “The central syllable of the word has become a sorrowful one, meaning the most permanent of furrows” (22:306; my emphasis). In this telling, the sorrowful implications of the grave are a modern development. The fear of the grave and the inability to see it as productive are foundational errors of modernity. Ruskin’s lectures function, much in the manner of Holbein’s images, as a kind of memento mori, as the attempt to reclaim the value of the graven becomes part of a bold transvaluation of the power of the grave. That both terms have become indicators of transience and meaningless consumption is part of the critic’s diagnosis of the modern condition. The recognition of death as a limit or boundary adding significance to life, of the carved line aiming at permanence by means of difficult work on hard material (stone, metal, wood)—these are elements that make the recuperation of the grave possible. Modernity responds to impermanence with reiteration, with the proliferation of disposable reproduced work. Ruskin proposes instead a challenge to impermanence at its base, arguing that the artistic work evident in modernity and the appetite which it whets and leaves unsatisfied combine into a death in life to which an actual end might serve as a reprieve rather than a sorrowful final surrender. The grave in Ruskin offers rest rather than constant change, and the possibility of permanence in memory or tomb. Holbein’s Dance of Death runs through the lectures like the skeletons run through that cycle of woodcuts, a reminder to think of ourselves as never far from the end that will mark the period of our actions. These German works, it bears saying, are shoe-horned into a lecture originally advertised as focusing on Italian themes—“Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Schools of Engraving.” The incongruous presence of Holbein’s images is justified by the part they play in advancing Ruskin’s grave theme. Like all memento mori, Holbein’s work is at once out of place and just where it should be as it calls attention not just to the proximity of the grave, but to the serious implications of its imminence. The plates with which Ruskin introduces the series resonate with the themes of his lecture, which are those that motivate his analysis of reproduction generally. What he describes as “two of the best wood engravings ever produced by art” (22:352) are woodcuts showing Death approaching or harassing a priest as he delivers his sermon and Death driving the oxen which move the plow of a weary farmer (figs. 8.9 and 8.10). As Ruskin’s attempt to celebrate Italian work that he identifies with a lost purity and healthiness of execution is overtaken by grimmer topics, Holbein becomes a far more important figure than Botticelli. In a kind of historical argument we have already seen suggested by critics of Raphael, and most powerfully developed by Benjamin and Warburg, Ruskin identifies the German engraver’s work as deeply responsive to the cultural crisis of the Reformation, and as therefore having far more in common with Ruskin’s desperate moral project than with the confident

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Fig. 8.9  Hans Holbein, “The Two Preachers.” Dance of Death, 1538. Facsimile from woodcut. In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), facing 352.

productions of a more harmonious period. Tracing Holbein’s critical sensibility to the effect of living during an era of spiritual turmoil, Ruskin describes a work of art that is in itself a kind of engaged social analysis: “always melancholy . . . and entirely furious in its indignation against all who, either by actual injustice in this life, or by what he holds to be false promise of another, destroy the good, or the energy, of the few days which man has to live” (22:354). A quotation from Psalms (23:4) takes on special resonance in the context of Ruskin’s discussion of the engraver as someone driving a furrow: like the critic in modern England, Holbein finds himself in deadly darkness, in “the valley of the shadow of death” (22:416). If it is easy to locate a connection between Ruskin’s critical aspirations and those he finds in Holbein, it is no less clear that Ruskin discovers analogous figures

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The Ruined Cathedral  271

Fig. 8.10  Hans Holbein, “The Last Furrow.” Dance of Death, 1538. Facsimile from woodcut. In: John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina. The Works of John Ruskin (1903–1912), volume 22. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (eds.), 39 volumes, Library Edition (London: George Allen), facing 352.

for himself within the prints. Indeed, in a fascinating moment of self-conscious reflection, Ruskin identifies at once with the preacher in Holbein’s engraving and with the death-figure who approaches him, leading to a confusing passage of quotation, non-quotation, and a haze of uncertain pronoun reference, in which the lecturing Ruskin ventriloquizes the figure of Death that has come to interrupt the preacher (citing in the process Hebrews 8:1): “Death comes quietly: I am going to be preacher now; here is your own hour-glass, ready for me. You have spoken many words in your day. But ‘of the things which you have spoken, this is the sum,’—your death-warrant, signed and sealed. There’s your text for to-day” (22:355, emphasis in the original).

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272  Material Inspirations The link Ruskin has established between graver and plow makes the analogy between the work of the plowman “pressing the iron into the ground” and that of the engraver at his craft readily identifiable. And this is another moment in which the voice of the image is the voice of mortality ventriloquized by the lecturer. In Ruskin’s interpretation, Death is a comfort and help to this carver in the soil. And of course, Ruskin was speaking these remarks, so the pronominal ambiguity in his discussion of “The Last Furrow” includes not only himself, but the audience he is addressing: “ ‘It is a long field,’ says Death; ‘but we’ll get to the end of it to-day,— you and I’ ” (22:355). Much of what is tortuous or figurative in Ruskin is motivated by a historicizing sensibility that made it impossible for him not to see himself as implicated in the disturbing modernity he was interested in challenging. To-day, the key term in Death’s statement, was embossed by the editors on every volume of the Library Edition of Ruskin’s work because it is Ruskin’s selfchosen motto, adopted, as he tells us in Praeterita, “tacitly underlined to myself with the warning, ‘The night cometh, when no man can work’ ” (35:391; see fig.  8.11). Ruskin could not help but be preoccupied with the presentation and

Fig. 8.11  Cover of Library Edition of The Works of John Ruskin.

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The Ruined Cathedral  273 diffusion of his own work. His self-imposed and widely influential role was to encourage the knowledge and admiration of art. And yet, particularly late in his career, he became ever-more uncomfortable with the nature of publicity and publication, and sought out new forms in which to make his ideas known, novel means of diffusion that might overcome the challenges presented by more conventional methods. He began to publish his own works; he undertook the letterperiodical addressed to the working-men of England, Fors Clavigera, in the hope that not just the content but the dissemination of his works should instantiate his values.23 In the grave death-haunted preacher, Ruskin presents to his audience a more organically integrated, traditional, and aura-filled form of communication than the transient importunings of a venal mass media. I have noted that an important theme in Ariadne Florentina is that the grave—like the graven—need not be a sign of spiritual death. Hence the further presentation to his students of the image of the plowman from Holbein—preserved forever, though ac­com­pan­ ied by death who is whipping his team to a speedier end—a cut image of a grave man, carving a fruitful furrow in fertile earth. In the course of a complaint about his inability to conclude a variety of projects in Fors Clavigera, Letter 60 (December 1875), Ruskin attributes his slow completion of Ariadne to the inhibition caused by his imperfect ability when faced with the medium, especially given the achievement of the masters he admires. He writes of the “ashamed censorship of the imperfection of all I have been able to say about engraving,” noting in the same sentence that; “if I take up my Bewick, or return to my old Turner vignettes, I put my Appendix off again—‘till next month,’ and so on” (27:461). And indeed, the lectures do not conclude, so much as end with two long passages from the Memoir of Thomas Bewick (1862), the famed inventor of wood engraving. In the first, Bewick insists on the social importance of the continued existence of a class of landowners who farm their own land. In the second, Bewick describes the virtuous life of his acquaintance, Gilbert Gray, a book-binder who abandoned his early training for the priesthood in order to devote a life of frugal modesty to producing “books of an entertaining and moral tendency, printed and circulated at a cheap rate” (22:460). Bewick’s account of this upright man ends with his friends accompanying him to the grave. With these extracts Ruskin picks up on the resonant images from Holbein—of priesthood, death, and plowing—that he had offered his students early in the lectures. His own final brief paragraph is a simple comment on the tomb of Gilbert Gray: “And what graving on the sacred cliffs of Egypt ever honoured them, as that grass-dimmed furrow does the mounds of a Northern land?” (22:460). It is difficult to cut hard matter with a sharp implement. Each line requires focus, self-control, and attention. To recuperate the grave in engraving as Ruskin does is to establish that the importance of reproductive technology is misunderstood when its power is trivialized. The title he gave the published volume,

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274  Material Inspirations Ariadne Florentina, is referred to only once by Ruskin, and only as he suggests his failure to develop the significance of its obscure terms: when I chose the title for the collected series of these lectures, I hoped to have justified it by careful analysis of the methods of labyrinthine ornament . . . But the labyrinth of life itself, and its more and more interwoven occupation, become too manifold and too difficult for me; and of the time wasted in the blind lanes of it, perhaps that spent in analysis or recommendation of the art to which men’s present conduct makes them insensible, had been chiefly cast away. (22:451–2)24

Rather than an explanation, Ruskin once again recapitulates both the dark places where the project of the text has taken him and the importance of process itself for his argument. But we can fill in his outline a little. Ariadne’s clue is a thin line of safety with love at one end and danger at the other; its function is not to spare Theseus his trial, but to retrieve him after he has confronted the threat at the heart of the labyrinth. In the course of a far more extensive treatment of Ariadne in Fors, Ruskin will insist on the hope and risk contained in her clue: “this thread of Ariadne’s implied that even victory over the monster would be vain, unless you could disentangle yourself from his web also” (27:408). The thread neither breaks the maze nor maps out the structure in its entirety. Rather, it allows the possibility of egress by recapitulating the challenging form confronted on the way in. His ostensible failure to develop on his title notwithstanding, Ruskin’s text has certainly made clear the importance of the labyrinthine, that intricate detailed elab­ or­ation which is only clarified by careful reflection. By focusing on the attention of the audience on the one hand, and on the work of the printmaker on the other, Ruskin makes a plea for difficulty, for the virtues of the labyrinthine, of a line that takes the form of the maze in order to serve as the clue which provides a hope of escape. In this analysis, each impermanent piece of paper is a sign, not merely of a no longer valued original, but of the work of the hand that carved the lines on the surface so that the image could be made. Ultimately, the kind of attention Ruskin brings to bear allows what can seem merely ephemeral the opportunity to be recognized as grave.

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9

Pater at the Museum/Raphael’s Fortune 1.  The Nineteenth-Century Museum (Parnassus or the Dispute of the Sacrament) Between approximately 1509 and 1511, as Michelangelo completed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel nearby, Raphael set to work on his first major commission in Rome, painting frescoes for the room in which important papal documents were signed. On one wall of the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican he painted the fresco that became famous as The School of Athens (fig. 9.1); on the facing wall a theological subject that has come to be called the Disputation of the Sacrament (fig. 9.2); and between them, a vision of poetry, the Parnassus, presided over by Apollo and the muses and inhabited by the great poets of antiquity and the modern era (fig. 9.3). Raphael’s program presents a beautifully realized set of illustrations of various realms of achievement—intellectual, divine, and creative—given particular weight by his masterful technique and by their location in the heart of Christendom. Taken together, the frescoes represent an ambitious and diverse set of illustrious men, the kind of compendium that fascinated the Renaissance possibly as much as it did the nineteenth century. Given their setting, the frescoes also provide a surprisingly complex and unsettled vision of inspiration. In The School of Athens, Plato famously points up to indicate his emphasis on the ideal; Aristotle indicates the ground, a sign of his commitment to the more earthly empirical school of philosophy with which he was associated. The various other thinkers around them all stand for fundamentally different responses to the problems that challenge human reason. Still, we are accustomed to the notion of philosophical argument (even that philosophy is argument). More surprisingly, perhaps, the host that forms the center of the painting across from The School of Athens, the Disputation of the Sacrament, is not presented simply as the culminating earthly manifestation of all the divinity that rises above it (the gospels, Mary and Joseph, Jesus, and ultimately God the Father), but as another matter for transhistorical debate, and one not unrelated to the dispute captured in the contrasting gestures of Plato and Aristotle. Transubstantiation, the ineffable process whereby bread and wine are

Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After. Jonah Siegel, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jonah Siegel. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198858003.001.0001

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Fig. 9.1  Raphael, School of Athens, c. 1510–1511. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. Photo © Italy Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

Fig. 9.2  Raphael, Disputation over the Most Holy Sacrament, c. 1509–1510. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  277

Fig. 9.3  Raphael, Parnassus, 1511. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

changed into flesh and blood, from one form of matter to another, is nothing other than the divine manifesting itself within the material constraints in which our human life is spent. It is the nature of this paradoxical but fundamental sacrament that we find being debated by the Doctors of the Church, accompanied by a number of Popes and other dignitaries, including Dante and Savonarola. An astonishing variety of figures and ideas occupy the calm and carefully organized spaces of Raphael’s works. The painter’s art harmonizes a number of unresolved disputes on both sides of the room, and the program as a whole suggests the harmonization of classical thought with Christian. The Parnassus links both sides, enacting as it represents (in the god’s violin-playing) the pleasure of harmonizing itself. I cite Raphael’s work at the Vatican at the opening of a chapter on the place of the museum in the thought of Walter Pater not just because it is through discussion of the decoration of this space that the critic addressed the essential qualities of the institution in his seminal 1867 essay on Winckelmann, but because the force of the figure of Raphael in Pater’s account of the museum is characteristic of the place of the artist himself in the critic’s thought. Pater builds on the tradition discussed in Chapter  2 of this volume, which saw Raphael as the preeminent model for a self-conscious relationship to antiquity, or even as a symbol for—and an example of—the possibility of finding in the remains of antiquity a kind of relationship that might be powerful and productive for modernity.

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278  Material Inspirations Each of the frescoes in the Stanza has at its heart the juxtaposition of in­di­vid­ uals from widely divergent times and places (so, Homer with Dante, Saint Jerome with Savonarola; not only Plato and Socrates, but Pythagoras and Zoroaster). As in any pantheons of this sort, we find in the ensemble a claim or set of claims about the relationship of cultural achievement to time that is at once personal and something more (the fame that pulls individual figures out of the oblivion to which most existence tends serving as an analogue or stand-in for the continuing relevance of ideas). Both of the major themes shaping the works in the Stanza— the sources of inspiration and the commemoration of cultural achievement—are at issue when Pater addresses the implications of the decorative program carefully laid out in this central location in the history of art, religion, and power. In order to understand what is at stake in Pater’s claims, it will be just as well to begin with the precedent that certainly underlies his account, John Ruskin’s ­troubled reference to the space in The Stones of Venice III (1853). In the doubled parallels on which the painting program of the room is built—divine inspiration alongside artistic, pagan with Christian divinity—Ruskin discovered a fundamental lack of judgment, not to say the absence of a necessary hierarchy of values. The rooms speak to Ruskin of artistic egotism on the one hand and of a related loss of the ability to ascribe value on the other, two qualities he associates with the crisis of the Renaissance more broadly: The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter’s field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses.1

Ruskin’s evocation of the Disputa and the Parnassus marks the bathetic cul­min­ ation of a scathing description of the decline in the seriousness of painting in the Renaissance, a collapse indicated by the movement from the representation of religious subjects to classical ones. Raphael, of course, does not worship Apollo, but, as we saw in Chapter 4, that is precisely Ruskin’s concern; a culture that cele­ brates idols in which it does not believe participates in the emptying-out of meaning from all representations: “[T]his double creed, of Christianity confessed and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch as it refused ef­fect­ ive and practical belief altogether” (11:129). In order to describe the beginning of the museum culture he dreads, Ruskin evokes the tendency to see Raphael as a summation of—and therefore the perfect model for—the reuse of earlier art in later periods, the very quality that had made his career a kind of historic hinge since at least Schlegel (not to say Vasari). Hence Ruskin’s choice, from the range of pagan figures painted by Raphael, of a representation of Apollo and the muses—it is the museal he has in his sights, and his claims about the decline in art only

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  279 matter if they are understood as general (with Raphael simply standing in—as usual—as prime example): the more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of colour and execution; and gradually the mind of Europe congealed into that state of utter apathy,—inconceivable unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it, which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity.  (11:131)

Ruskin moves seamlessly from past tense to present, as in one paragraph he ­travels from Raphael painting muses at the Vatican to the modern mind at the museum, because he is describing what he understands to be both historical fact and cultural inevitability: the kinds of values instantiated at the Stanza lead in­ev­ it­ably to the historical situation in which we find ourselves. Pater’s more punctuated sense of the nature of cultural continuity leads him to offer an entirely different account of the significance of the frescoes at the Stanza. It is not the unavoidable loss of distinction and full meaning, bound to come to the fore when so many admired traditions are brought together in one place, that concerns Pater. What he emphasizes and, indeed, celebrates are those moments— rare and hard-won—when the inevitable relationship between apparently distinct traditions is recognized. Still, it is hard not to see an arch dig at his great ante­ cedent in the way he opens his discussion with a blithe reference to the very juxta­pos­ition that exercises Ruskin: In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raphael has commemorated the tradition of the Catholic religion. Against a space of tranquil sky, broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personages of Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of Raphael in the same apartment presents a very different company, Dante alone appearing in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology, under a thicket of laurel, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at his feet. On either side are grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollo descended, the classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of Castalia come down, a river making glad this other “city of God.”2

The sensibility behind Pater’s bald, even cheerful, identification of another city of God is precisely what Ruskin is trying to forestall. Nevertheless, it is in this other city and the tradition for which it stands that Pater locates the continuity of

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280  Material Inspirations culture that is his theme when he writes on Winckelmann, challenging the stark divisions separating historical periods that had been so important for cultural analysis throughout the century: In this fresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that Raphael commemorates. Winckelmann’s intellectual history authenticates the claims of this tradition in human culture . . . This testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, which Winckelmann contributes as a solitary man of genius, is offered also by the general history of the mind. The spiritual forces of the past, which have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed, within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this underground life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been drawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is not merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscious tradition in it.  (157–8)

Pater cheerfully cites the juxtaposition that had so offended his predecessor for precisely the reasons Ruskin had dreaded. Placing religions alongside other cultural phenomena—indeed, identifying them as cultural phenomena—is a typical strategy of the later critic; he has no problem understanding the works of art to illustrate two parallel “traditions,” the Christian and the classical. From this point of view, Ruskin’s anxious desire to look at only one wall at the Stanza della Segnatura is a willful denial of a constant tradition, not an instance of principled resistance to a depraved modernity. The difference between the two critics is ultimately traceable to their dis­tinct­ ive responses to a very material issue. Pater and Ruskin both are writing about the museum in the midst of the most important period of its development. For both, the institution is at once a symbol and a cause of the modern situation—one in which arguments for cultural continuity as much as for cultural breaks depend on an ever-more common possibility of seeing just the kinds of juxtapositions that concern Ruskin. Its name notwithstanding, the museum is far from being a clas­ sic­al inheritance. The idea that the gathering together and display of works of art was a social good and necessary for the emergence of further art came to the fore in Europe late in the eighteenth century in response to new concepts of art and art education. It is to the century that followed, however, that we can look for the great period of museum development. The eighteenth century had seen the formation or opening to the public of a handful of influential continental museums, among them the Capitoline in Rome (1734), the Uffizi in Florence (1769), the Pio-Clementino at the Vatican (1771), and the Louvre in Paris (1793). The first national public collection in England was the British Museum, founded in 1753

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  281 when the collection of curiosities and objects of natural history acquired from Sir Hans Sloane’s estate was combined with the Harley Collection of manuscripts and the Cottonian library acquired by the nation earlier in the century. The Museum opened (to a very limited public) in its current location at Montague House, Bloomsbury, in 1759, but its form and content, shaped early on by accidents of acquisition rather than any plan, would be a topic of debate and reform for the century to come, even as individual collections expanded at a rate unforeseeable by its founders and early supporters. While the nineteenth century saw the museum in Britain take on lineaments that are fully recognizable as anticipations of the modern institution, the material on display itself presented challenges at once practical and conceptual. As I have argued elsewhere in this book, the story of the development of the collection and display of art in this period is from the outset one of inexorable accumulation leading to competition for resources and a challenging relationship to the viewer’s attention. The passion for art that emerged with force in late eighteenth-century English intellectual circles, along with the opportunities for acquisition presented by international exploration and conflict, resulted in the creation or augmentation of important collections throughout the nineteenth century, which were experienced in themselves or in printed accounts and their illustrations. Given that the relationship among accessions, aesthetic value, and new knowledge was seldom straightforward or easy, the process of museal development was inevitably accompanied by the figure of the critic, the individual who took on the task of curating the experience of so many remains of culture. If the force of the museum in nineteenth-century culture was more than conceptual, or always at once conceptual and material, this is the case not simply because ever-greater and more varied quantities of material from the past were becoming available. The institution in which the material was typically presented was itself in the process of a long and never-finalized consolidation. We may take a broad measure of the change by the simple expedient of reflecting on what happened in one critic’s brief lifetime. When Walter Pater was born in 1839 the National Gallery in London was only fifteen years old, and among its two hundred paintings were to be found relatively few of lasting reputation.3 It was only the previous year that the Gallery had been moved from what had been the private home in Pall Mall of its principal benefactor, John Julius Angerstein, to premises built by the nation to house the collection and the Royal Academy on Trafalgar Square. By the year of the critic’s death in 1894, the Gallery had had two substantial renovations and the Royal Academy had been established in its own quarters for more than two decades. That very year, the Tate Gallery of British Art would be commissioned. At Oxford, where Pater lived for most of his career, the University Museum (devoted largely to science) was inaugurated in 1860, while the Pitt Rivers Museum (anthropology) opened its doors in 1884.

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282  Material Inspirations By the early decades of the twentieth century more than 400 museums were in existence in the British Islands, a remarkable change from the fewer than half a dozen that have been identified at the beginning of the nineteenth century.4 However, new foundations are only a small part of the story in a century that saw constant renovation and rearrangement in response both to new acquisitions and to conceptual developments including the rise of scientific art history, the emergence of anthropology, the discovery or new interest in areas ranging from Mexico to Mesopotamia to medieval Britain, and beyond. To cite an instance that would be quite local for Pater, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for all that its foundation in the seventeenth century makes it the oldest museum in Britain, saw massive changes in its collections and institutional commitments in the nineteenth century. Few objects on display when Pater arrived at Oxford in 1858—a time when the museum still displayed largely curiosities and objects of natural history—would have been on view by the time The Renaissance was first published in 1873, which was well after the museum directors had changed the institution’s focus to archeology. The 1845 Museums Act, which allowed town councils to levy rates to pay for local museums, added to the widespread diffusion of the phenomenon, though the National Gallery and the British Museum would remain the principal models and instances for nineteenth-century British culture. To these two still-extant institutions, we may add the Great Exhibition itself and its many descendants— not only the various international exhibitions that followed, and the important 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, but also the Crystal Palace reconstructed at Sydenham in 1854, with its historic courts, casts of artistic masterpieces, and sculptures of prehistoric beasts. Developments such as the British Museum’s acquisition of Assyrian antiquities in the 1840s and 1850s were well covered in the press, in part due to the success of Austen Henry Layard’s memoirs, Nineveh and its Remains (1848) and Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853). The print media also followed closely the various scandals and controversies related to acquisitions and restorations at the National Gallery, and the process of museum reform and renovation that preoccupied a number of Parliamentary commissions and resulted in notable projects, including the construction of the Reading Room at the British Museum and the opening of the South Kensington Museum (1857), the renovations of the frequently-derided National Gallery (1860–1861, 1872–1876), and the removal of the British Museum’s natural history collection from the Bloomsbury location to South Kensington (1881). Although Pater’s imagination of the museum, like Ruskin’s, will also circle around and return to Raphael at a number of key points, his work emphasizes not the loss and partial recuperation of modern attention that preoccupied the author of Stones of Venice, but the recognition of a lived experience that may be understood to be itself inescapably museal. In the context of Pater’s attentive and

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  283 textured account of the place of the institution in creating an ever-more material relationship to the past, the struggle over the meaning of the museum that underlay Ruskin’s account of the crisis of meaning implied by the program of the Stanza della Segnatura (the fear that possibly all the images Raphael brought together can signify is the loss of meaning), can be recognized as just one instance of the ongoing crisis in which the museum arose, and to which it in turn gave shape.

2.  The Museum as Medium (Apollo or the Discobolus) Keenly interested as he was at all times in the conditions that make perception possible and shape its contingent nature, it was inevitable that Walter Pater should have been particularly responsive to such a crucial setting for the experience of art as the museum—a location molding consciousness and the object both. It is a topic he develops with particular clarity in “The Age of Athletic Prizemen” (1894), a late work the historical subtlety of which is not unrelated to its institutional self-consciousness. In order to understand what is at stake in Pater’s long appreciation of the Townley Discobolus, in the British Museum, it will be helpful to cite the influential ekphrastic effusion with which it is clearly in dialogue, Winckelmann’s sem­inal description of the Apollo Belvedere (fig. 9.4) in the History of Ancient Art (1764). “Among all the works of antiquity which have escaped destruction,” Winckelmann famously claims, “the statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art.”5 But only quoting at length will demonstrate the ways in which the ideal qualities Winckelmann identifies are run through by a powerful identification linking the statue, its creator, and the sensitive viewer (not to say the author of the piece who returns at its end): “Let thy spirit penetrate into the kingdom of incorporeal beaut­ies,” Winckelmann enjoins the reader/viewer, and strive to become a creator of a heavenly nature, in order that thy mind may be filled with beauties that are elevated above nature; for there is nothing mortal here, nothing which human necessities require. Neither blood-vessels nor ­sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence, diffusing itself like a gentle stream, seems to fill the whole contour of the figure . . . The soft hair plays about the divine head as if agitated by a gentle breeze, like the slender waving tendrils of the noble vine; it seems to be anointed with the oil of the gods, and tied by the Graces with pleasing display on the crown of his head. In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those who were filled with the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and into the Lycean groves,— places which Apollo honored by his presence.  (312–13)

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284  Material Inspirations

Fig. 9.4  Belvedere Apollo, c. mid-2nd century AD. Vatican Museums, Vatican. Livioandronico2013/CC BY-SA 4.0/Wikimedia Commons, https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

In his important study of Winckelmann, Alex Potts has observed that Pater was “an unusually close and careful reader of the History of the Art of Antiquity,” a text seldom studied with any depth in nineteenth-century Britain, and only fully translated in 1873.6 And indeed, the work is clearly central to Pater’s essay on the art historian. It is little wonder, then, that echoes of this famous passage return when the critic sets himself to describe the beauty of a statue. But the similarities serve more than anything to bring out fundamental differences. Whereas the Apollo, in Winckelmann’s telling, is (has to be) the physical embodiment of the  ideal, and an unimpeachable masterpiece of original Greek creativity, the Discobolus (fig.  9.5) on which Pater turns his gaze in “The Age of Athletic Prizemen” is known to be one of several copies of a bronze original:7 The face of the young man, as you see him in the British Museum for instance, with fittingly inexpressive expression, (look into, look at the curves of, the blossomlike cavity of the opened mouth) is beautiful, but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker might be; but that head does not

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  285

Fig. 9.5  Roger Fenton, Discobolus, 1857. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum. really belong to the Discobolus. To be assured of this you have but to compare with that version in the British Museum the most authentic of all der­iv­ations from the original, preserved till lately at the Palazzo Massimi [sic] in Rome.8

As Pater indicates, the Townley Discobolus has generally been less admired than the one in the Massimo family collection, which he goes so far as to call the ori­ gin­al elsewhere in the essay, but which is, as he notes here, itself at best only “the most authentic of all derivations from the original.” Worse, the head of the statue at the British Museum, which is the feature to which Pater first draws the viewer’s attention, is itself not original, nor has it been correctly oriented on the body by the restorer who put it there. Whereas the gallery provokes in Winckelmann the fantasy of a direct encounter with the antique purified of all the accidents of history, Pater knows it is

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286  Material Inspirations modernity he sees when he gazes at any object in the institution. Winckelmann’s ideal form as instantiated in the Apollo combines divine power and indifference, perfection of execution with a complete invulnerability to the vicissitudes of the world. The image, like the god, is incorporeal, above nature, beyond what human necessities require. The subtlety of Pater’s vision of the museum, however, is that it leads him to imagine neither an atemporal ideal realm in which the experience of art takes place, nor that the institution vouchsafes him access to the original thing in itself. Far from it. While Pater relishes the incongruous atemporality of the experience of art in the museum—the very characteristics that can make a Greek athlete equivalent to a British cricketer, or that can make another Greek statue comparable to a Gothic work of art elsewhere in the same essay—the qual­ ities that inspire the general invitation to look together into the flower-like mouth of the young man imply a lost context of a sort which would preoccupy later ­writers on the institution, one recoverable only by the eyes of the mind, and only with great difficulty. “Look” is the invitation, “look into, look at the curves of, the blossom-like cavity of the opened mouth” of the young man, “as you see him in the British Museum.” Pater is doing more than indicating where the statue is to be found. He is insisting it be seen as there, not as though its current situation is immaterial to the experience of the viewer. If the museum allows us still in some measure to be with Pater when we gaze at the parted lips of the Discobolus, we cannot ever be in the original context in which the work of art arose. Pater is presciently thoughtful on the effect of the reception of art in the deracinated medium of the museum. When he turns to the version of the Discobolus in Rome, his nuanced and insistently material account of the object comes nowhere near the Lycean groves of Winckelmann’s ideal: Here, the vigorous head also, with the face, smooth enough, but spare, and tightly drawn over muscle and bone, is sympathetic with, yields itself to, the concentration, in the most literal sense, of all beside;—is itself, in very truth, the steady centre of the discus, which begins to spin; as the source of will, the source of the motion with which the discus is already on the wing,—that, and the entire form. The Discobolus of the Massimi Palace presents, moreover, in the hair, for instance, those survivals of primitive manner which would mark legitimately Myron’s actual pre-Pheidiac standpoint; as they are congruous also with a certain archaic, a more than merely athletic, spareness of form generally—delightful touches of unreality in this realist of a great time, and of a sort of conventionalism that has an attraction in itself.  (Greek Studies, 289)

As we saw in Chapter  4 of this book, the concrete specificity of the experience Pater describes opens up two lines of historical insight: one that is sensitive to the distinctions within Greek culture and among specific artistic practices (hence the

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  287 account of Myron’s place in the development of ancient art), and another that leads to something more conceptual, that serves as goad for the careful analysis of the sources (themselves paradoxically material) for long-lived fantasies of an ideal classical antiquity expressed by later admirers, such as Winckelmann: And if one here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks himself of the required substitution; if he endeavours mentally to throw them back into that proper atmosphere, through which alone they can exercise over us all the magic by which they charmed their original spectators, the effort is not always a successful one, within the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum.  (188)

“The Age of Graven Images” is the provocative title Pater gives the second part of the essay on “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture” (1880, also republished in Greek Studies), a quietly scandalous subtitle citing while flouting mosaic pro­hib­ ition, in order to gesture toward the centrality of the physical act of carving in wood for Greek culture. As in Ruskin, the deeply registered imagination of the workman’s hand at work lifts the art object from the deracinated realm in which it has been placed by its means of diffusion in modern culture. So, if he works to make his audience feel the grain of the matrix on which the carver works, he also registers the ways in which the experience of modern display contributes to the understanding of Greek sculpture as fundamentally ideal, which is to say bereft of the accidental, the contingent, even of color itself: Critics of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it as if it had been always work in colourless stone, against an almost colourless background. Its real background, as I have tried to show, was a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a peculiarly animated development of human existence—the energetic movement and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worthily clothed— amid scenery as poetic as Titian’s.  (Greek Studies, 224)

While the color of the stone has been stripped away by time, the colorless background is provided by the space of the exhibition. This is a kind of criticism that became commonplace in the twentieth century, when it was leveled at museums with greater insistence than it ever was in the nineteenth. But Pater’s alert interest in both the experience of actually looking and in the deep structures underlying cultural nostalgia makes it impossible for him to stop at the point that has generally satisfied later periods, that criticism of the museum as deracinating that is probably best understood as the complementary other side of the kind of fantasy of full contact with a lost prior state we saw propounded in Winckelmann’s visionary transportation from contemplation of the Apollo at the Vatican “to Delos and into the Lycean groves.”

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288  Material Inspirations For all the losses it entails, the modern museum itself in fact opens up the possibility of correcting the idealizing historical sensibility with which it has been associated. Indeed, for Pater, it is the museum itself that allows him to move beyond the outmoded (but still influential) hierarchies of taste that placed the (pure) merits of line above the (sensual) ones of color. A fiction traceable in no small part to the conceptual force of typical modes of display and reproduction, the chaste classical line of antiquity allowed a distinction between forms such as sculpture and painting that a more accurate understanding of the material past— of its color in particular—made moot.9 While the galleries of casts and restored antiquities of the eighteenth century allowed and supported a notably abstracted vision of sculpture, the museums of fragments that emerged in the nineteenth century opened the possibility of recognizing a more colorful, nuanced, and accidental past. Still, the process was extremely uneven, in part because preconceptions about classical sculpture proved longer lasting than the forms of display that promoted them. But also—as Pater himself suggests in his reference to the gray walls of the museum—because the museum itself will always tend to deracinate and idealize the objects it encloses, even when those objects themselves seem to speak about quite a different world from that which houses them.

3.  The Museum as Emblem (The Most Religious City in the World) The museum’s fundamentally antithetical function is easily apparent, but it has proved difficult to fully address in culture, which has tended to want more clearcut distinctions than attentive reflection on this institution is likely to provide. While the museum is often an important source for the troubling sense that all our most fully realized sites of aesthetic experience tend to create an abstracted and therefore falsified relation (removed from original context, from quotidian experience, etc.), it is also the location at which the abstraction built into thought, and even into our day-to-day lives, may seem to be overcome by experience. And so, while for Pater, as for Ruskin, the museum is a characteristic figure for the modern encounter with culture, its effects (both as experience and concept) are not simple and straightforward. The intersection of the domestic life and the museum becomes one place for the later critic to reflect on the power of an institution about which its critics like to imagine that nothing is really at home. Working with the figure of the home domesticates the dislocations that we may say are often outsourced to the institution. “To many, certainly,” Pater writes in a sketch composed in 1886 but first published in Appreciations (1889), the life of the antiquarian Thomas Browne would have seemed too like a lifelong following of one’s own funeral. A museum is seldom a cheerful place—oftenest induces the feeling that nothing could ever

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  289 have been young; and to Browne the whole world is a museum; all the grace and beauty it has being of a somewhat mortified kind.10

Pater was bound to be fascinated by the elaborate style of the author of Urn Burial (1658), but he was no less likely to respond to the macabre fascination of a home decorated with ancient funerary urns. “Their house at Norwich,” he writes of the Browne family, “even then an old one it would seem, must have grown, through long years of acquisition, into an odd cabinet of antiquities” (136). The objects that give the impetus and theme to Browne’s best-known work belong to a cat­ egory of antiquity entirely distinct from that to which the Apollo Belvedere or even the Discobolus belong. As receptacles of human remains, the urns are at once more commonplace and more profound. Moreover, they evoke an ancient link between Rome and Britain the existence of which must trouble that sense of unbridgeable distance that provoked so much productive nostalgia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The vessels and the remains they house are a reminder of a time when Britain was part of the classical world—hence Pater’s description of Browne’s “old Roman, or Romanised British Urns” (133). The urns make Browne’s home a mausoleum and a museum at once—a conflation of domestic grace and beauty, albeit of that “somewhat mortified kind,” that always fascinated the critic, most notably, perhaps, in his 1885 novel Marius the Epicurean. In Marius, the sense that the whole world may be a museum is first instantiated in the protagonist’s home, but then reiterated in relation to Rome itself, which is identified by an equivocal title in the chapter that brings Marius to the capital of the empire for the first time and sets up an important associative chain in which religion and luck stand at each end, and between them we find the idols of paganism made into objects of contemplation: “The Most Religious City in the World.” The narrator declares Marius lucky in the era of his arrival—the explanation of his good fortune filling in some of what Pater means by religion: He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached its perfection in the things of poetry and art—a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of a decline. As in some vast intellectual museum all its manifold products were intact and in their places, and with custodians also still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And at no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth seeing—lying there not less consummate than that world of pagan intellect which it represented in every phase of its darkness and light. The various works of many ages fell here harmoniously together, as yet untouched save by time, adding the final grace of a rich softness to its complex expression.11

Pater’s fantasy is a perfect museum, which is to say, one in which wealth of display is matched by clarity of explanation and harmony of effect. The museal quality of

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290  Material Inspirations ancient Rome is the ultimate source of the similarity between antiquity and modernity that Pater emphasizes throughout the novel. Nevertheless, the metaphorical force of the museum in the work is not simply due to the setting of the story in a cosmopolitan past. It is closely linked to the question of religion—hence the superlative title of the chapter. Rome is most religious in the sense that all gods are worshiped within its precincts. The kind of undifferentiated admiration Ruskin feared in relation to art is here transposed back to its natural realm, religion itself. But, Pater’s metaphor gains in complexity because the religious nature of the museum runs two ways, and includes the essentially museal nature of religion, Christianity in particular. Thus, Marius’s engagement with the early Christians he meets in Rome takes place not in a space dramatically different but notably similar to the pagan city. When, in the course of the description of the home of Cecilia, the woman who will be Marius’s main introduction to Christian life, its architecture is characterized as evincing what the narrator calls “a noble taste,” the term is meant to encompass something that is at once absolutely modern and typical of the antiquity Marius finds in the city: a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the ma­ter­ ial it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonised with effects . . . so delicate as to seem really de­riva­tive from some finer intelligence in these matters than lay within the resources of the ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance . . . conceiving the new organism by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements, all of which had in truth already lived and died many times. The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner stones of immemorial building, had put on by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, and air of grave thought, of an intellectual purpose, in itself, aesthetically very seductive.  (227–8)

The novelty of Christianity does not reside in the materials that make it up but in the spirit of arrangement that has harmonized those materials anew much as “the works of various ages fell harmoniously together” in the experience of Rome itself. Cecilia’s house comes to overlap with that other in which the entire novel is set—“the beautiful house of art and thought which was the inheritance of the age” (121), a location Pater ties directly to the practice of criticism. Like the Christian home, imperial Rome is made perfect by the heterogeneous range of antiquities it integrates. Pater evidently has more in mind than the history of architecture when he writes of the reuse of the antique. We may remember Ruskin’s desire to separate Apollo and the muses from the dispute over the host in the Stanza della Segnatura when Pater suggests in Marius that even Christian communion is “not so much new matter as a new spirit, moulding, informing, with a new intention, many

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  291 observances not witnessed for the first time today” (249). The history of the host is no less a tale of creativity and inspiration, as Pater understands it, than any other important cultural phenomenon. Ruskin’s anxious sense that a creative power fated to vividly render Apostles and Prophets would sink into powerlessness before Apollo and the muses is based on an anxious desire to maintain a distinction that Pater is openly challenging at its very earliest point in history.

4.  Raphael’s Genius By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his life, some would add in the “opportunity” of his early death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the good fortune of genius.12

I began this chapter with the proposal that Pater’s and Ruskin’s accounts of the work of Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura are best read as responses to a much later phenomenon than his frescoes, that when the critics look at these paintings they recognize an anticipation of what they had come to understand as culture in the museum. When Pater returned to Raphael in a late lecture first delivered to University Extension students at Oxford in 1892 and subsequently published in the Fortnightly Review, he was quite clear on the museo-critical qualities of the painter: “The formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius— triumphant power of genius” (39). Genius arising from scholarship or accumulation becomes a museal project. The key word, which is repeated four times in this brief description, never quite loses its meaning of “characteristic disposition” even as it shifts to the more typical sense in which it is used for Raphael: “creative power of an exceptional or exalted type.” This attempt to capture an achievement that is at once typical or even symptomatic, yet nevertheless exceptional or exalted, takes on a self-reflexive cast when Pater proposes that the paintings in the Stanza become pedagogic even as they show themselves to be reflections on the transmission of knowledge: But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergent ways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School of Athens, with their numerous accessories. In the execution of those works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead; and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, at work on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the apprehension, the transmission to others of complex and difficult ideas.  (56)

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292  Material Inspirations I have discussed at several junctures in this book the complicated nature of the figure of Raphael for the nineteenth-century culture of art. The very possibility of the emergence of “Pre-Raphaelitism” reminds us that his career came to be understood as an important historical marker or shorthand for a falling away that was never fully instantiated in his work, though dangerously promoted by its achievement.13 When lecturing in the 1890s, much as when he wrote in the 1870s, Pater knew himself to be entering contested territory. His Raphael, like so many of the figures he admires, is characterized by the ecumenical ability to take pleasure in a range of traditions typically understood as being fundamentally in contra­dic­tion, whether knowledge of pagan or Christian things (divinarum rerum notitia as is written on the allegory of theology above the stanza). In the following passage his point is made in the first instance by the unelaborated use of commas to set up equivalences between pagan philosophy and the Christian faith of the sort that Ruskin had so fervently tried to reject: For note, above all, that with all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge in detail, and with a perfect technique, it is after all the beauty, the grace of poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious faith that he thus records. Of religious faith also. The Disputa, in which, under the form of a council representative of all ages, he embodies the idea of theology, divinarum rerum notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic Church, ranks with the “Parnassus” and the “School of Athens,” if it does not rather close another of his long lines of intellectual travail—a series of compositions, partly symbolic, partly historical . . . which, painting in the great official chambers of the Vatican, Raphael asserts, interprets the power and charm of the Catholic ideal as realised in history.  (57–8)

Ruskin would recognize with distress the tenor of this analysis, in which the “charm” of the church is celebrated, not its truths. The historic sense that allows Raphael to become a thoughtful analyst of the past requires him to keep the diverse range of human achievement in play even as it makes impossible the kind of hierarchies Ruskin desperately hoped to promote. The great artist will necessarily take on the work of a critic in this context, and the mark of achievement will become “genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius—triumphant power of genius.” It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Raphael in Pater’s im­agin­ation of a successful engagement with museum culture. The fortunate arrival of Marius in Rome is more than matched by Raphael’s manifold good luck in the 1892 account of the painter. Indeed, Pater’s explanation of good fortune in the lecture provides a gloss for the presence of the concept in the novel a little over a decade earlier. In both instances, luck stands for a historicist claim about cultural opportunities. The “luckiness,” or what Pater also terms “the good

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Pater at the Museum/Raphael ’ s Fortune  293 fortune, of genius” (38) is the coming together of the receptive individual and the right historical moment. And Raphael’s good fortune is to have been born not only in the Renaissance, but at the eve of Reformation. Pater notes that Luther and Raphael were born the same year, but the links between them amount to more than temporal coincidence (39). The emergence of Protestantism is folded into the hyperbolic all in the following passage: “in Raphael, all the various conditions of that age discover themselves as characteristics of a vivid personal genius, which may be said therefore to be conterminous with the genius of the Renaissance itself ” (58). A kind of Marius redux, Raphael also has a notably ­celebratory first response to Rome, figured as a distinctly pagan place: “Coming to the capital of Christendom, he comes also for the first time under the full influence of the antique world, pagan art, pagan life, and is henceforth an enthusiastic archaeologist” (54). His encounter with the capital of Christendom makes Raphael a classical archeologist. We could call this turn the symmetrical opposite to the fate of Marius, if it were not the case that in his novel Pater had made Christianity itself so suitable an area for archeological researches. While I have noted Pater’s refusal to avoid what the museum has to offer of the broken, the transitional, the imperfect, the critic is far from presenting a vision of the institution in which the shocks of fragmentation predominate—a vision which, after all, would be predicated on disappointed fantasies of continuity in which each broken piece is a reminder of a lost whole. Pater’s historical sensibility makes the idealizations of Winckelmann and the claims of absolute historical breaks of Ruskin inadequate responses to the challenge of antiquity. He finds in the museum something quite different from the sense of distinction or separation between modernity and an admired earlier period underpinning apparently distinct earlier models. In Pater’s ideal museum the connections linking apparently disparate elements are revealed and made musical. It is in “Diaphaneité” that the most poignant and surprising celebration of Raphael is to be found. In this essay, the composition of which is contemporary with Pater’s evocation of the Stanza in “Winckelmann,” Raphael becomes a model for the response to divergent cultural drives. To be confronted by the apparently conflictual juxtaposition of, say, pagan and Christian, needs not result in a collapse into quiescent surrender to the loss of meaning, nor does it need to provoke a principled refusal of the relationship between these apparently antithetical dispensations. What Pater attempts to imagine in this notoriously difficult essay is the possibility of entering a state of happy self-contained contemplation that is likely to make the ideal artist, even more than the priest, incomprehensible to the world: Our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless uninteresting existence. Others are neutralised, not by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. In

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294  Material Inspirations these no single gift, or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world easily confounds these two conditions. It sees in the character before us only indifferentism. Doubtless the chief vein of the life of humanity could hardly pass through it. Not by it could the progress of the world be achieved. It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world.14

While Ruskin identified in Raphael’s calm response to the challenges presented by integrating the classical and the religious a sign of a morbid inability to judge characteristic of the age, Pater argues that Raphael found an equipoise that is itself musical. It is an argument for a contemplative pleasure based on the harmonization of the force of excessive and otherwise unintegrated experience (what Pater calls “collective life”). Underlying this notoriously abstract essay, and giving it substance, the reader may identify a very concrete location. Indeed, the lecture on Raphael and the essay on Winckelmann license the reader to recognize the actual and vivid manifestations of the Reformation and Renaissance in the midst of which the painter finds himself, and which he might be said to work to reconcile. The refusal to choose between The School of Athens and The Dispute of the Sacrament is mediated by the Parnassus, which in showing the muses at play, cele­ brates the tranquil work of harmonization itself. The Stanza stands behind this celebration of Raphael, which is a sympathetic refusal of the values of Ruskin, but also a celebration of the painter of the Stanza sublimed into an emblem of what it might mean to have the good fortune to live the life of the artist–critic–scholar— that is, life in the museum.

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Endnotes Preface 1. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975), 1:13–14. My translation. For an ambitious sense of some of the ways Baudelaire and Ruskin may be read as contemporaries, see Rachel Teukolsky, “Modernist Ruskin, Victorian Baudelaire: Revisioning NineteenthCentury Aesthetics,” PMLA 122, no. 3 (2007): 711–27. More recently, Jacques Rancière has proposed a vision of nineteenth-century art culture that includes the apparently disparate traditions to which both authors may be said to belong. See Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011), trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013). 2. I cite much interesting work in this area in the course of this book, especially as it touches on the nineteenth-century culture of art, but a brief list of texts that engage the complex tradition of non-fiction prose at the level of detail and with a sense of the intellectual traditions in which it arose might include such diverse texts as Raymond Williams’s path-breaking Culture and Society (1958; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); much in the work of Amanda Anderson, but especially The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); as well as the various works by Stefan Collini, out of which we might highlight in the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). One project that usefully thematizes the challenge to reading and study entailed in coming to grips with the form is the astonishing engagement with Ruskin of Jay Fellows in The Failing Distance: The Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) and Ruskin’s Maze: Mastery and Madness in his Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). An ambitious recent attempt to engage with the formal and thematic issues that will arise from attentive reading in this area is David Russell, Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 3. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 50. 4. The ambitious work with these materials carried out in literary studies and art history makes their frequent neglect among generalists indicative of the practical and conceptual challenges they present. A short summary list of relevant recent work might include much by Hilary Fraser, most recently, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Lucy Hartley, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017);

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296  Notes to Pages xiv–3 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the ­Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); and Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 5. “Ah! Seigneur! Donnez-moi la force et le courage / De contempler mon cœur et mon corps sans dégout.” Charles Baudelaire, “Un Voyage à Cythère,” Œuvres Complètes, 111–13, 113.

Introduction 1. Discussions of the concept typically go back to György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), though much of its later life was shaped by its return in the work of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47), ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). On the fate of the term, see Martin Jay’s introduction to Axel Honneth et al., Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–13. For a reflection on the polemics around the topic, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 16–43. For a subtle analysis of the conceptual claims involved in the topic, see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Fredric Jameson is interested in recovering some of the more interesting meanings of the term going back to Hegel. But, as he notes, current associations of the term have tended in another direction: “By habit and tradition, the notion of reification now strikes us as a negative or critical one; and the implication that the name necessarily reifies the emotion at once suggests the possibility of some more authentic experience that preceded the baleful spell of nomination (and that could in a pinch perhaps be recovered).” Fredric Jameson, Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2015), 30. 2. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, ed. H.  R.  Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 1.462. As noted below, Fairclough gives a very loose translation of the passage. For a good summary of translations or adaptations of the line, see “Sunt lacrimae rerum: An Exploration in Meaning,” The Classical Journal 103, no. 3 (2008): 259–79. 3. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik—or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 14. Further references made in the text. 4. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006), 63; The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983), 20; Civilisation, episode 1, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” directed by Michael Gill and Peter Montagnon, written and presented by Kenneth Clark (1969; London: BBC Warner, 2006), DVD. For an evocative recent reading of the passage, which does indeed engage with the second clause, see Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 151–3. The Loeb translation, which dates back to 1916, takes an entirely

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Notes to Pages 3–4  297 different strategy in generalizing the claim of the line, leaving out both things and mind: “here too are tears for misfortune and human sorrows pierce the heart.” 5. “[A]nimum pictura pascit inani” (Virgil, 1.464). The translations are from David Ferry, The Aeneid (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 22; Fitzgerald, 20, and Allen Mandelbaum, The Aeneid of Virgil (New York: Bantam, 1981), 17. In the course of his important analysis of the line, W. R. Johnson points out that inani means “having no life,” as well as “deceptive, illusory, empty, meaningless.” See  W.  R.  Johnson, Darkness Visible: A Study of Virgil’s Aeneid (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 101–14, 105. On the scene, see also Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), especially 23–54; and Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 66–9. The text is ambiguous about the medium of the images, which scholars describe variously as murals or reliefs. See Steven Lowenstam, “The Pictures on Juno’s Temple in the ‘Aeneid,’ ” The Classical World 87, no. 2 (1993): 37–49, 37n.3, see http://www.jstor.org/ stable/4351454. 6. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), Act 2, Scene 2, Line 95. Further references in the text are to act, scene, and line. 7. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald  L.  Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 187; my emphasis. Further references made in the text. 8. It bears saying that the concept of individual experience itself, understood as either the unquestionable individual ground from which conditions or situations are encountered (my experience), or as an impossible grounding condition known only by its tantalizing inaccessibility (true experience, or just experience without an adjective), is not a fully settled question, but one about which every evocation of matter and things is taking sides. Indeed, it is difficult to miss the close conceptual relationship between arguments that concern this chapter and those about ex­peri­ ence laid out in Martin Jay’s bold survey of the topic, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). In several cases we will find similar claims, related concerns, or even the same thinkers shaping both sorts of arguments. In many cases “thing” is the name for what is lost with experiences that are not found to be as true or as full as they should be. For a recent reflection on the particular challenges and hopes of experience in twentieth-century American culture in which we might place several of the instances I will be citing, see Jeffrey Lawrence, Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americans from Whitman to Bolaño (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 9. “Culture of art” is a formulation I proposed in Desire and Excess: The NineteenthCentury Culture of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), to describe the network of idea, text, and institution that subtends and therefore informs the concepts of art—and even the debates about those concepts—in a given period. It is a term akin to that suggested by Paul Kristeller in his groundbreaking piece, “The Modern System of the Arts,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951): 496–527. As I noted when I first used it, I favor the term “culture” both because of the suggestion of process (rather than full development) written into its agricultural sources,

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298  Notes to Pages 5–6 and for the evocation of an admiration approaching the level of worship. The apparently distinct ideas of cultivation and of cult are both kept alive in the word. 10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 70. 11. For the period’s own sense of the history of the topic and its pressing influence, see Frederick Albert Lange, A History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance (1866), trans. Ernest Chester Thomas (London: Trübner and Co., 1880). 12. The affective charge of things has provoked renewed interest and extraordinarily nuanced work in recent years as the history of the emotions meets the renewed commitment to materiality in a wide variety of fields. We may cite two significant collections of essays dealing with earlier periods in European culture for their methodological range and conceptual sophistication: Emotions and Material Culture, ed. Gerhard Jaritz (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003), and Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, eds. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). On the complexities of historical claims about the emotions see in particular Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Emotions and Material Culture: A ‘Site under Construction,’ ” in Emotions and Material Culture, 165–72. For an important methodological and conceptual review of the state of the field, see Downes, Holloway, and Randles, “A Feeling for Things, Past and Present,” in Feeling Things, 8–23. 13. In his pioneering discussion of the topic, Thomas Raff notes the expansive nature of the term “material” in German (as in English), and so prefers to use Werkstoff, with its more constrained sense of the material on which work is carried out. Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materialien: Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der Werkstoffe (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994), 13. This usage is similar to the original meaning of an English word that has also found its destiny in a loss of distinction, “stuff.” “That of which something is or may be made; material,” is an archaic or perhaps specialized definition of a term to which we now typically turn to indicate our unwillingness or inability to distinguish. Crises of nomenclature of the sort characteristic of any relationship to which we are too embarrassed to give a name will inevitably be exacerbated when the thing to be named is something that, by its nature, we hope escapes or exceeds the very processes by which we categorize. See, for example, the title of a recent book by Daniel Miller, Stuff, and the opening of his “Prologue.” “Don’t, just don’t, ask for or expect a clear definition of ‘stuff,’ ” he instructs the reader in what is clearly meant to be a disarming admission of uncertainty, or an invitation to embrace it, a gambit that we may perhaps think asks too much when the obscurity of one term is then used to illuminate that of another, “Material culture is no better defined than stuff is.” See Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 1. 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen  W.  Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 178. The issues involved in this claim are central to Kant’s seminal work, of course, and largely laid out in the chapter on “The Transcendental Aesthetic” (155–91). 15. Recent work on the foundational interplay between religious controversies and responses to works of art includes Costas Douzinas, “Prosopon and Antiprosopon,” in Law and Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law, eds. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 36–70; and Miguel

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Notes to Pages 7–8  299 Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). See also Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen’s useful compendium, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005). 16. The secularizing nature of the nineteenth century has been thrown into question by scholars in recent years. For a particularly rich study of the topic in literature see Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 17. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 152. Further references made in the text. 18. The most influential recent account of the material interests sometimes taken to underpin cultural developments is certainly Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), a text I will address more fully in Chapter 2, though it is worth putting the work of the influential sociologist in relation to the long and distinguished line that preceded him, including György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and of course Karl Marx himself. But the preoccupation with things has a long and distinguished pedigree in Victorian studies, running from Asa Briggs’s seminal Victorian Things (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989) to Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and it is part of a trend including work in eighteenth-century studies (Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)); American literature (Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003)); and an increasing number of theoretical works, including the special issue of Critical Inquiry 28 (2001), “Things,” edited by Bill Brown. A brief list of recent studies developing material themes cannot help but be idiosyncratic. It might include Andrew  H.  Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel Hack, Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005); William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Jules Law, The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Two extraordinarily sophisticated recent monographs demonstrate the ongoing vitality of returns to the topic in the nineteenth century: Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Science of Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Two useful surveys of the topic in the Victorian field are Elaine Freedgood, “Material,” in The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, ed. Kate Flint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 370–87, and John Plotz, “Materiality in Theory: What to Make of Victorian Things,” in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 522–38. A characteristic instance of the neurological approach to literary studies is Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006). An earlier and more evocative use of brain study is Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also the recent work of Elaine Auyoung, including

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300  Notes to Pages 8–9 “Cognitive Studies,” in The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, eds. Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes (Chichester: Wiley, 2015); “Rethinking the Reality Effect: Detail and the Novel,” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 581–92; and especially When Fiction Feels Real: Representation and the Reading Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). In history Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006) is an important recent work on the accumulation of objects of the nineteenth century. 19. A small selection of economically inflected approaches within art history might include Gerald Reitlinger’s early The Economics of Taste (London: Barrie and Rockliffe, 1961–1970) and The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London: 1850–1939, eds. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). But, it is worth citing the in­nova­tive economic approach of Guido Guerzoni’s Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400–1700, trans. Amanda George (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011), as well as two collections of essays laying out the fundamental questions of value underlying the topic: The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between Economics and Arts, ed. Arjo Klamer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996) and Sublime Economy: On the Intersection of Art and Economics, eds. Jack Amariglio, Joseph  W.  Childers, and Stephen E. Cullenberg (London: Routledge, 2009). 20. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward BurneJones: Interlacings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). See also the volume Arscott edited with Katie Scott, Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Georges Didi-Huberman, La Peinture Incarnée (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985) and “Viscosities and Survivals: Art History put to the Test by the Material,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Center, 2008), 154–69. On the body in art in the nineteenth century, see Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1995). It is worth citing the revisionist reframing of the artifact first laid out by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood in “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 403–15, and more fully developed in Anachronic Renaissance (New York: ZONE Books, 2010). See also Wood’s account of ma­ter­ial evidence in “The Credulity Problem,” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China 1500–1800, eds. Peter  N.  Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 149–79. (The whole collection is of interest on the place of objects in intellectual culture.) 21. “It is important to . . . admit that the history of collections is only one component of the cultural history of the gaze. This story is not disembodied: it recognizes in the human body a central organ, constituting a link between the subject and his fellows, as between the subject and the objects that surround him. This body is not totally free, far from it. It is partly governed by a habitus, internalized as a result of broad social pressures. The precise study of individual experiences is not therefore a micro-history that is blind to the social functions of cultural history; on the contrary, it finds that

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Notes to Pages 9–13  301 individual experience negotiates, in an continually renewed form, its relation to the social forces acting on it.” Pascal Griener, Pour une histoire du regard: L’expérience du musée au xixe siècle (Paris: Hazan, 2017), 21. My translation. For a useful set of studies attempting to bring together influential theoretical approaches and actual museum practices, see Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 22. Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), and Idols and Museum Pieces: The Nature of Sculpture, its Historiography and Exhibition History, 1640–1880 (Berlin: De Gruyter; Paris: École du Louvre, 2017). In this vein see also Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela  H.  Smith, The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, C. 1250–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 23. Both Armstrong and Corbett emphasize the challenging nature of the material forms of the mediations with which they are concerned, whether glass or paint, and find that challenge definitive but largely stinted by a critical tradition uncomfortable at once with the lived experience of matter and resistant to the value of mediation. “How can reality be communicated,” asks Corbett, recognizing the challenge, “and not simultaneously betrayed?” David Peters Corbett, The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 7. “There are traces,” Armstrong writes, “of the manufacturer’s identity and traces of the workman’s being in glass.” When the object we see through is recognized as in fact, “smeared with the prints of toil and thought,” we may arrive at a new insight about the world and what gives it its shape for us: “the transparency of glass becomes a third term—something between you and the world. It makes itself known as a constitutive element of experience that organizes work on the world as medium and barrier.” Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90, emphasis in the original. In part inspired by early formulations of work Armstrong ultimately published in this volume, Corbett suggests that, while a self-consciousness about mediation is definitive of modernity, in the painters he studies we may identify a resistance to mediation prompting the attempt to bring about more full mediation of the world: “Painting is imagined as outside the systems of mediation, direct and immediate in its relationship with the world and hence able to provide through its visual character an authentic knowledge denied to other forms of understanding.” He calls this aspiration a “dream,” a “desire to believe,” a “fantasy of immediacy” (17–18). 24. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972; 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1. Further references made in the text. 25. Baxandall is an important figure in Bourdieu’s Rules of Art, the “period eye” being an anticipation of the idea of habitus developed in that text. See The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992), trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 315–18; further references made in the text. For an interesting account of Baxandall’s relation to modern Marxist thought, see Alberto Frigo, “Baxandall and Gramsci: Pictorial Intelligence and Organic Intellectuals,” in Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words, eds. Robert Williams and Peter Mack (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 49–68.

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302  Notes to Pages 14–21 26. Bourdieu paraphrases Baxandall’s argument as follows: “To love a painting, in the case of the Quattrocento merchant, is to find a dividend there, to recover one’s outlay, getting something for one’s money, in the form of the ‘richest’ colours, the most obviously costly” (Bourdieu, Rules, 319; emphasis in the original). Bourdieu, who wants to identify Baxandall as shaping a stage in his own thinking beyond which he ultimately developed, gestures past the rather mercenary limits of this claim, toward more complex forms of interest and pleasure than the directly pecuniary. But it is hard for him to leave these kinds of formulations behind: “The contract for The Adoration of the Magi . . . shows that a painting in which economic sense is satisfied is also one which gratifies religious sensibility” (320). 27. “The ‘matter’ of most self-proclaimed materialists does not have a great deal to do with the type of force, causality, efficacy, and obstinacy non-human actants possess in the world. ‘Matter’, we will soon realize, is a highly politicized interpretation of causality.” Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76. Further references made in the text. 28. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 46. Further references made in the text. 29. On this important topic, see Wayne Cristaudo, “Theorising Ideas: Idee and Vorstellung from Kant to Hegel to Marx,” History of European Ideas 12, no. 6 (1990): 813–25. 30. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 31. 31. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing” (1950), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 165–82, 165. Further references made in the text. 32. “The idea that the Real would be by definition completely closed off from us,” writes Béatrice Han-Pile, a recent student of Heidegger’s use of Kant, “is not acceptable.” “Early Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant,” in A Companion to Heidegger, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015), 80–98, 98. HanPile usefully tracks the fine line Heidegger is treading, not least by not proposing a simple resolution that does justice to some of the evocative vaguenesses characteristic of the philosopher: “since entities are not substantially different from the Real, the ontic knowledge we can acquire of entities must somehow pertain to the Real” (98). Italics give emphasis to a vague verb which is in any case accompanied by a hopeful yet mollifying adverb that throws up its hands (“must somehow”). For a nuanced sense of Heidegger’s relationship to Kant (and Kant’s reception), see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 107–11. 33. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–16, 3. Further references made in the text. For Brown’s more developed response to the philosopher, see Other Things (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 24–32 and passim. Much of the book may be usefully read as a reflection on the power and limitations of the applicability of Heidegger. 34. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 1:112. Further references made in the text. 35. We hear echoes of Hegel in Adorno’s dynamic account of the fated instability of the art object’s status as thing: “If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The

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Notes to Pages 21–27  303 totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum Books, 2002), 175. 36. John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Keats’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 464. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1999), 1086. The passage cited is not in the original 1889 article in The Nineteenth Century, but appears to enter, along with the long passage on the visual arts in which it occurs, with revisions for publication in Intentions in 1891. On the mediated influence of Hegelian thought (and German aesthetic philosophy more generally) on Wilde, see Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 37. It bears saying that Hegel’s argument does not stop at beauty or at art, but ultimately runs past it, indeed, past the end of art. See, for example, Hegel 2:1. On this topic see Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 81–115. See also Jonathan Loesberg, “The Long Happy Death of Art,” Republics of Letters 5, no. 1 (2017): 1–17. Loesberg offers a particularly interesting account of the place of Hegel in a tradition emerging from Kant and including Bourdieu and other twentieth-century thinkers in A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference and Postmodernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 112–25. 38. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. Further references made in the text. Francesco Orlando, who draws on earlier work by Leo Spitzer on Whitman and others, identifies the formal work done by listing, writing of “The defunctionalizing effect that the list of things has on the things themselves.” Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabitable Places, and Hidden Treasures (1994), trans. Gabriel Pihas and Daniel Seidel, with the collaboration of Alessandra Grego (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 1–2, 21, 41–2. See Leo Spitzer, La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna (Buenos Aires: Coni, 1945). 39. Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” in Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 144. 40. William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” in William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (New York: New Directions, 1985), 56. 41. See Bourdieu, Distinction, 58. 42. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 189. 43. One source of the fundamentally conservative nature of the experiential line is its elegiac sensibility, its tendency to begin with reference to a lost world or a lost relationship to the world that is the thing’s site of origin. Indeed, Heidegger’s debt to the long German tradition of writing on art is indicated by his commitment to a particular location for his nostalgia. Although it is a topic to which he only gestures in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” it is unmistakably ancient Greece as imagined from Winckelmann forward that he has in mind as the site of unmediated intimacy with the heart of things: “for them,” he writes of the Greeks, “this core of the thing was

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304  Notes to Pages 28–29

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

something lying at the ground of the thing, something always already there.” On the same page he identifies as “the basic Greek experience as precisely what is no longer available now,” “the Being of beings in the sense of presence.” Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (1932–1935), 15–86, 22. The entire passage is germane, but I have translated just the final sentence. “Mais surtout l’histoire des collections demeure obsédée par l’etude des réseaux sociaux qui ouvrent à l’édification puis au maintien des collections. Elle scrute les principes rationnels qui président à une pratique sociale. Autrement dit, elle se donne come une science sociale, qui serait frappe d’un aveuglement chronique, parece qu’elle n’accorde trop souvent qu’une importance mineure aux objets qui constituent sans conteste la matière première de toute collection. Si elle mentionne des ouvres d’art, sa demarche demeure tributaire de l’inventaire; elle se cantonne à la saisie intellectuelle d’une objet, négligeant son poids symbolique, sans parler de sa dimension magique, toujours présente. Enfin, elle considère les acteurs de cette histoire comme de purs esprits, qui parcourent ou investissent des espaces réduits à une definition cartésienne” (Griener, 20–1). John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Balch, 1934), 3. Further references made in the text. Jacques Rancière, Aesthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011), trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), 19. See Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–84. Fried’s essay revolves around discussion of texts by three artists, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Tony Smith. I am focusing on Judd as the main source of the account of objects, and ultimately of matter with which Fried takes exception, but most of the claims about the subject-making project of what he calls literalist art emerge in the course of discussion of Morris and notably of Tony Smith’s sublime experience of a drive on an unfinished Jersey Turnpike. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 148–72, 154, 155, 159. Further references made in the text. In the same volume, see the important 1965 “Three American Painters,” in which Fried expresses his feelings of repugnance toward the notion that art is tending toward “the gradual apprehension of the basic ‘truth’ that paintings are in no essential respect different from other classes of objects in the world” (213–65, 255). See also Fried’s introduction to this volume for his own contextualization of his arguments, 40–7. Rosalind Krauss presents an important challenge to Fried’s ideas in Some Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977), 203–42; see also, Alex Potts’s treatment of “Specific Objects” in The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 281–4. David Raskin, Donald Judd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), offers the most thorough account of Judd’s intellectual formation, including the role of Dewey and other pragmatist philosophers in his development. “Most of the work,” Judd writes about the projects he is championing, “involves new materials, either recent inventions or things not used before in art. Little was done until lately with the wide range of industrial products. Almost nothing has been done with industrial techniques and, because of the cost, probably won’t be for some time. Art could be mass-produced, and possibilities otherwise unavailable, such as

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Notes to Pages 31–35  305 stamping, could be used. . . . Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.” Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Thomas Kellein, Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955–1968 (New York: D. A. P., 2002). Fried cites this passage in order to identify what he takes to be the contradiction at its core, one bound to arise between the specificity of a material and of a particular instance: “Like the shape of the object, the materials do not represent, signify, or allude to anything; they are what they are and nothing more. And what they are is not, strictly speaking, something that is grasped or intuited or recognized or even seen once and for all. Rather, the ‘obdurate identity’ of a specific material, like the wholeness of the shape, is simply stated or given or established at the very outset, if not before the outset; accordingly, the experience of both is one of endlessness, of inexhaustibility, of being able to go on and on letting, for example, the material itself confront one in all its literalness, its ‘objectivity,’ its absence of anything beyond itself ” (165). The material may be specific, but the specific object in which we encounter it is just one of a series, which Fried finds a paradoxically limiting kind of experience, or, rather, one in which infinite unspecific versions of matter present nothing more specific than their own potentially endless nature. 50. Hence Latour’s antipathy to the very word “society”: “from now on, the word ‘collective’ will take the place of ‘society’. Society will be kept only for the assembly of already gathered entities that sociologists of the social believe have been made in social stuff. Collective, on the other hand, will designate the project of assembling new entities not yet gathered together and which, for this reason, clearly appear as being not made of social stuff ” (Reassembling the Social, 75). 51. For a related sensibility that draws not on the history of science but on anthropology, see Miller’s argument that “The idea that stuff somehow drains away our humanity, as we dissolve into a sticky mess of plastic and other commodities, is really an attempt to retain a rather simplistic and false view of pure and prior unsullied humanity” (5). Miller identifies his work as offering a challenge to “our common-sense opposition between the person and the thing, the animate and the inanimate, the subject and the object” (5) But, as the work of Latour suggests—and Miller’s own research indicates— what Miller calls common-sense (like just about all phenomena given that tendentious name) is hard-won and ideologically contingent. 52. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6. Further references made in the text. 53. Arjun Appadurai, “The Thing Itself,” Arts in Circulation, Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 15–21, 20. 54. Anthropology has seen particularly rich engagement with the challenge of characterizing the kinds of exchanges involved in the creation and reception of art. On the limited applicability of economic values in analyses of the social role of art, see the essays collected in The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, ed. Fred R. Myers (Oxford: School of American Research Press, 2001). 55. Guido Guerzoni, Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400–1700, trans. Amanda George (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2011), xxi.

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306  Notes to Pages 35–42 56. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 8. See also the Coda, “Victorian Thing Culture and the Way We Read Now,” (139–58). Roland Barthes’s brief “Reality Effect” (1968) is still the most influential study of the place of apparently unmeaning objects in narrative. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 141–8. See also the, as yet unpublished, talk by Jacques Rancière, “The Reality Effect and the Politics of Fiction,” Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, September 9, 2009, see https://www.ici-berlin.org/ events/jacques-ranciere/. 57. “He therefore trusted that the erection of the edifice would not only contribute to the cultivation of the arts, but also the cementing of those bonds of union between the richer and the poorer orders of the State, which no man was more anxious to see joined in mutual intercourse and good understanding than he was.” Robert Peel, Parl. Deb. (series 3), vol. 14, cols. 643–8 (23 July 1832). On the material constraints and concerns shaping the development of the National Gallery and related sites of display especially in relation to the public, see Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747–2001 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), especially 22–99. 58. “House of Commons, Report of the Select Committee to Consider the Present Accommodations Afforded by the National Gallery; and the Best Mode of Preserving and Exhibiting to the Public the Works of Art Given to the Nation or Purchased by Parliamentary Grants Commissions on the Fine Arts” (1853). See Jonah Siegel, The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 124–5. 59. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, “Thoughts on the New Building to be Erected for the National Gallery of England, and on the Arrangement, Preservation, and Enlargement of the Collection,” The Art Journal (1853): 101–25. Rpt. in Siegel, Emergence, 200–12, 201. Further references made in the text. Waagen supported a move to Kensington, an eventuality which never came about, though the area would become the site of a number of important museums later in the century. 60. For a recent treatment of this topic, see Helen Rees Leahy, Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing (Oxford: Routledge, 2016). 61. Daniel Zalewski, “The Factory of Fakes,” The New Yorker (November 28, 2016), 67. 62. Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2011), 7–11. 63. Writing about the situation in 2004, Corbett describes the discipline of art history as shying away from engaging with the experience of the materiality of paint that preoccupied artists of the nineteenth century, “embarrassed, perhaps by the possibility that its object of study might after all exist only to serve something as frivolous as sensuous pleasure” (12). Later in The World in Paint he anticipates a movement in the discipline toward a far fuller engagement with the material nature of art (259). It is a development that he was clearly right in seeing coming, but his formulation is nevertheless still useful for its suggestion of the methodological challenge of sensuality and perhaps even pleasure that is li­able to arise in the course of any attempt to account for the material in art.

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Notes to Pages 42–43  307 64. For a sustained account of the complex nature of the recovery of antiquity, see the ambitious work gathered in Salvatore Settis, Memoria dell’Antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1984–1986). For an illuminating reconsideration of the relationship to the past that takes its bearing from the periods most typically associated with such recovery—classical antiquity and the Renaissance—see especially Nagel and Wood in “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism.” For an important recent treatment of the issue looked at from within the context of British art production, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 65. The apparent embrace of the ersatz, generic, or formulaic is such a convention of popular postmodernism that full citation would amount to little more than a list of most of the popular films and television shows of the last several decades. The main theorist to cite on this topic is probably Jean Baudrillard. See especially Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993). In art and design, we might mention that groundbreaking text from the 1970s, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). 66. Rosalind  E.  Krauss, in her seminal work on what she rightly calls the myth of the originality of the avant-garde, ultimately does not do full justice to her own per­spi­ca­ city when it comes to the nineteenth century. To write that “[t]he theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of au­then­ti­city, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the maker of art, and throughout the nineteenth century all of these institutions were concerted, together, to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original” is to make a development that is just one component part of the nineteenth-century culture of art, and which is ultimately consolidated and sustained as dogma only in the first half of the twentieth century, into the sole and characteristic drive of an earlier period in which major museums were often full of copies—as were art schools—and in which, as she herself indicates in her own work, makers themselves had a far richer relationship to the unoriginal than modernist dogma would allow. Evidently, she is right to note that the development she describes, insofar as it takes place, does so “despite [the fact that] the ever-present reality of the copy as the underlying condition of the original was much closer to the surface of consciousness in the early years of the nineteenth century than it would later be permitted to be.” My “later” (like that of most students of nineteenth-century art, I would think) is just bound to come much later than hers. See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 162. See also “Retaining the Original? The State of the Question,” in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions, Studies in the History of Art 20 (1987), 7–11. The entirety of this special issue is germane to the topic. For a useful contextualization of Krauss’s claims, see Ruth Weisberg, “Twentieth-Century Rhetoric: Enforcing Originality and Distancing the Past,” in The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. Elaine K. Gazda (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome, 2002), 25–46.

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308  Notes to Pages 44–53 67. Rancière, Aesthesis, 11–14. See Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550, revised 1568), Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672), Bernard de Montfaucon, Antiquity Explained and Represented in Figures (1719–1724). While the distinctions Rancière identifies between the practices of antiquarians and of biographers of artists is typical of his emphasis on the constant assimilation of heterogeneous material in the emergence of the concept of art, and is in many ways convincing as a matter of form and genre of analysis, it is conceivable that a fuller sense of the history of antiquarianism itself might enrich or complicate a claim based on a distinction that may be more vivid in retrospect than it was at the time. Rancière cites Montfaucon’s important work, but his argument might gain in texture and historical depth if it included reflection on earlier sources of antiquarianism going back to the Renaissance. On antiquarianism, see Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315. See also two edited volumes, Peter Miller, Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); François Louis and Peter Miller, Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012).

Chapter 1 1. On the history of printmaking, see Antony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). The diffusion of his work in prints (especially those of Marcantonio Raimondi) was an important part of Raphael’s reception in his own day. On this topic, see Edward H. Wouk ed. with David Morris, Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphael and the Image Multiplied (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). On the early history of the distribution of his work through reproduction see Raphael et La Seconde Main (Geneva: Cabinet des Estampes and Musée d’art et d’histoire, 1984). See also Martine Vasselin, “La Fortune Gravée de Raphaël en France,” in Raphaël et l’Art Français, eds. Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jacques Thuillier, and Martine Vasselin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984), 37–46. For a nineteenth-century source on Morghen, see Frederic R. Halsey, Raphael Morghen’s Engraved Works (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885). For an important history of reproductive engravings in the later period of this study, see Martha  P.  Tedeschi, “How Prints Work: Reproductions in England, 1840­–1900,” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1994). See also Katherine Haskins, The Art Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), who makes the im­port­ant point that “in the nineteenth century the ‘picture’ was more accessible as an altered graphic variant than as a unique painted surface” (27). Possibly the most compelling general study is Stephen Bann’s pioneering Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). In an argument that is at once deeply historical, conceptually rich, and formally nuanced, Bann makes a strong case for the need to understand reproductive engraving not

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Notes to Pages 54–58  309 simply as a secondary epiphenomenon of nineteenth-century art culture, but as “problemati[zing] . . . the status of the image” more broadly. Bann, Parallel Lines, 3. 2. Useful sources on a canvas that has received a great deal of attention over the years include Luitpold Dussler, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue, trans. Sebastian Cruft (London: Phaidon, 1971), 52–5; Leopold D. and Helen S. Ettlinger, Raphael (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987); S. J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:356–62, v.133; John PopeHennessy, Raphael (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 71–8; Kathleen W. G. Posner, Leonardo and Central Italian Art: 1515 –1550 (New York: New York University Press, 1974), 1–28, 43–7; Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 235–9; David Alan Brown, “Leonardo and Raphael’s Transfiguration,” in Raffaello a Roma, eds. Christoph Luitpold Frommel and Matthias Winner (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1986), 237–43; and Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel, 1999), 223–9. On the reception of Raphael see Raffaello e l’Europa, eds. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca Dello Stato, 1990); Cathleen Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Giovanna Perini, “Raphael’s European Fame in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Marcia  B.  Hall, The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 261–75. See also Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot, Raffael als Paradigma: Rezeption, Imagination Und Kult Im 19 Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011). For an ambitious treatment of Raphael in the context of nineteenth-century British literature see Stephen Cheeke, Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially 58–83. 3. On the topic of students, see Jonah Siegel, “Leonardo, Pater and the Challenge of Attribution,” Raritan 21, no. 3 (2002): 159–87; and “Schooling Leonardo: Collaboration, Desire, and the Challenge of Attribution in Pater,” in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), 133–50. See also Jeremy Melius, “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood,” Art History 34, no. 2 (2011): 288–309. 4. Matthew 17:1–9; all references in chapter are to the King James version. 5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, eds. Samuel Parsons and Albert Pinheiro (London: Blackfriars, 1971), vol. 53, The Life of Christ, 3a, 38–45. Extract in Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics: A Reader (Grand Rapids, MI: William  B.  Eerdmans, 2005), 90–2, 92; emphasis in the original. For an argument placing the canvas in a tradition of Christian reflection on representation, see Christian K. Kleinbub, “Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ as Visio-Devotional Program,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 3 (2008): 367–93. See also Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 120–45. 6. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters or the Language of Forms (c. 1712), ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 118, 118n. (The incoherence of the painting recurs as a topic in the work.) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, eds. Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 3:78. Roger Fry, Vision and Design

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310  Notes to Pages 58–63 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920), 198. Michael Fried, “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan, November 2 and 3, 2001, see http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/f/fried_2001.pdf. I have cited the Goethe as given in the Fry, which elides some material, but is otherwise accurate. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, eds. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey  L.  Sammons, trans. Robert  R.  Heitner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 364. 7. The founding role of Diderot’s criticism, in Fried’s work, is to valorize painting that— in his own summary of claims going back to Absorption and Theatricality—will “give rise in the beholder to the conviction of an immediately graspable unity, the effect of unity implying the perfect closure of the composition within the borders of the painting” (13). The claim driving his discussion of Fry’s account of the Transfiguration is “that Fry’s notion of pictorial unity is itself essentially antitheatrical, indeed that it ultimately stems from or at least has profound affinities with the theorization of unity in Diderot’s art writing” (14). Absorption, Fried claims, is what Fry is looking for, though he would not have recognized the claim when expressed in such a term, because it would have seemed to route the argument outside of form (Fried, 26). 8. See Ettlinger, 224–6. The richest recent account of the challenge of images in relation to developments in Christianity is Hans Belting, History and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Age of Art (1990), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For the period around the Reformation and CounterReformation, see especially 2–10 and 458–90. Belting’s argument shapes itself around an account of the image limited to the representation of individual persons, with narrative (what he calls “the image as text”) always left to the side (xxi, 10). In that sense, a work such as the Transfiguration, which may be read as both image and story presents an interesting variant that stands outside of his argument. He touches on this canvas toward the end of History and Presence, focusing on its role as an element in the celebration of the painter after his death (471)—a topic which is discussed in Chapter 1 of this book. 9. “The Council of Trent, The Twenty-Fifth Session,” The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Œcumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J.  Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 232–89, 234–5. Further references in the text. 10. In an important study Patricia Mainardi attributes the limited availability of resources for the scholar in this area to “the discipline’s traditional preference for original versus reproductive works.” Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 8. She gestures hopefully to a renaissance of interest in the topic, noting in particular two recent studies, Robert Verhoogt’s book on prints of contemporary artists, Art in Reproduction, Nineteenth-Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Jozef Israëls and Ary Scheffer, trans. Michelle Hendriks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), and Stephen Bann’s Distinguished Images: Prints and the Visual Economy in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), which addresses the reproduction of important masters in the period (Mainardi, 7 and 245n6). I will draw on this latter volume below, and on a number of other studies indicative of a small but burgeoning field. But neither the specialized interest emerging in various disciplines, nor even the ostensible fascination with copies and simulacra that has made itself manifest in

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Notes to Page 65  311 various areas of culture for quite a while now, have yet made these works of art available to reflection the way they merit, perhaps because of the way they inhabit a place between original and copy that is uncomfortable for concepts both trad­ition­al and avant-garde. In her useful study of the topic, Katherine Haskins writes of “a marked antipathy or indifference shown towards reproductive or commercial printmaking.” See The Art Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 18. On the contrast between ­nineteenth-century admiration and the indifference of later periods, see Bann, 7.

Chapter 2 1. It would be impossible to do justice to the variety of texts written under the banner of beauty in the last thirty years or so. I will only mention a few here to give a sense of the range of approaches, and the number of fields from which those approaches might be made. What stands out in all cases is the sense of a need to justify or explain the virtues of a category, sometimes to rescue it from various kinds of misunderstandings or misconstruals, to mark a (hoped for) return or a renewed recognition. Elaine Scarry presented a bold attempt to revitalize together the two categories in her title, both of which had become difficult to write in support of by the end of the last millennium, in On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). A sophisticated attempt to rescue the aesthetic from within the political traditions that had sometimes been seen to offer it its most difficult challenges is mounted by Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). A related project emerging from a politically inflected French philosophical tradition is the work of Jacques Rancière, including The Politics of Aesthetics (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004); The Future of the Image (2003), trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007); and Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2011), trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013). In philosophy we might cite Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics, ed. Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (New York: Allworth Press, 1998) assembles statements by a collection of artists, critics, philo­sophers, and poets toward an argument that is not so much about a new aesthetics as a newly energized set of claims or moments of witness for the value of beauty. As Elizabeth Prettejohn notes in Beauty and Art, 1750–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), “[i]t has proved inordinately difficult to dispel the sense that beauty is somehow a thing of the past. Even proponents of the new attention to beauty in con­tem­por­ary art have tended to describe it as a ‘return’ or a ‘revival’ rather than as a new departure” (Prettejohn, 195–6). Prettejohn’s comprehensive account is extraordinarily useful, not least for its commitment to at once historicizing the concept and to thinking about it as a contemporary phenomenon. Beauty may be read as an invitation to imagine the process of looking back as more than nostalgic or reactionary, a call Prettejohn herself begins to answer with two works tracing the ways in which the processes of retrospection modeled in earlier periods might be pressingly relevant today: The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from

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312  Notes to Pages 65–66 Winckelmann to Picasso (London: I.  B.  Tauris, 2012) and Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 2. Two recent works that usefully historicized the topic of interest also demonstrated the variety of its meanings in culture. For a study focusing on the place of interest understood as a political category, see Lucy Hartley, Democratising Beauty in NineteenthCentury Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Sianne Ngai’s account of the contemporary life of the term emphasizes how it has been largely drained of the affective energy it once bore in recent years, becoming a place-holder for an engagement with an object of aesthetic reflection that has not yet settled (may never settle) on a clear sense of what motivates it. See Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). The standard source for political reflections on the concept looking back to earlier periods is Albert  O.  Hirschman, The Interests and the Passions: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 3. Freud himself is still a key source on the difficult relationship between knowledge, pleasure, and sex, and reflections on these topics in queer theory have provided the most interesting recent responses to the tradition he initiated. See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. John Reddick (New York: Penguin, 2003), and Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (1979), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). Leo Bersani’s work has been among the most influential in challenging the self-certainties sometimes associated with sexuality; see, for example, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1976) and “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43 (Winter 1987): 197–222. Important work in queer theory in recent decades developing this discomfiting line of analysis in rich directions includes Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004) and Heather Love’s Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 4. A minimum survey of this line of argument would include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think this Essay is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–52; Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (2009): 1–2; Heather Love, “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 371–91; and Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 5. The two most compelling accounts of the emergence of a div­ision between high and low culture are both careful to historicize and nuance the development: Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981) and especially Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). Huyssen’s discussion of the role of the feminization of mass culture in the course of

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Notes to Page 67  313 the process, and toward the close of the period of this study, is particularly useful. See Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide, 44–62. 6. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7. For a nuanced but forceful account of the representation of the sexualized woman as an indication not of achieved power, but of unresolvable male anxiety, see Griselda Pollock’s treatment of the painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in which she finds “the negotiation of masculine sexuality in an order in which woman is the sign, not of woman, but of that Other in whose mirror masculinity must define itself.” That other, she points out, “is not . . . simple, constant or fixed. It oscillates between signification of love/loss and desire/death.” Pollock’s inclusion of the institution of art itself in her analysis usefully expands the scope of the anxiety she describes: “The terrors can be negotiated by the cult of beauty imposed upon the sign of woman and the cult of art as a compensatory, self-sufficient, formalized realm of aesthetic beauty in which the beauty of the woman-object and the beauty of the painting-object become conflated.” Griselda Pollock, “Woman as Sign: Psychoanalytic Readings,” Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988) 120–54, 153. Linda Nochlin addresses the limits of the representation of women in the studio and the art class as early as her foundational piece of 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 1988), 145–78. And, of course, the power imbalances suggested in the inequity of representation of the sexualized bodies of men and women were a recurrent topic in feminist revision of the history of art since its initial development. Important recent work placing the emergence of nineteenth-century concepts of art in relation to same-sex desire include Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), and Dustin Friedman, Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). Needless to say, the tendencies of queer theory and of feminist scholarship do not necessarily line up in any simple way. Indeed they are fated to often follow different paths for historical as well as conceptual reasons. I cite them together here largely to suggest some of the sources of our richest accounts of the complicated role of sexual pleasure in relation to the arts in the nineteenth century. 8. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 54. Further references made in the text. Cf. Elizabeth Prettejohn, “the erotic is a test case for both ideal­ist art theory and Kantian aesthetics” (Beauty, 98). 9. Bourdieu’s account differs from Freud’s foundational treatment of the concept of sublimation, not so much in its substance as in the distinct orien­ta­tion toward individual constraint motivating each author, and in the related absence of a positive term for the process and its outcomes in Bourdieu. While the binding up of libido that takes place in a range of activities, from simply working to creating works of art, is a loss compensated for at both individual and social levels in Freud, the compensations of civilization are not given weight in Bourdieu’s analysis, which tends to route itself, in any

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314  Notes to Pages 68–69 case, not through discussion of Freud’s essay, but through a reading of one of that essay’s great ante­cedents, Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History,” in which Bourdieu finds only the confession of the political projects hiding behind the claims of disinterestedness of the Critique of Judgment. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey (New York: W.  W.  Norton, 1965); Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” (1784), in Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 41–53. See Bourdieu, Distinction, 488–90. 10. A puzzling element in the reception of Bourdieu is the power of his claims in the face of the fundamental changes the institution of the museum has undergone not simply between the nineteenth and twentieth century, but within the lifetime of most of his readers. Between the time the research at the heart of Distinction was carried out and the date of the book’s publication, radical transformations in the financial resources available to institutions of culture had reshaped much of how museums imagine their relationships to the public, a process that has only sped up in the years since. Victoria  D.  Alexander traces the epochal changes in the funding structures of mu­seums starting around 1965, when she writes “a rumble was heard in the museum world. It was the sound of an old funding system cracking as a new one emerged to displace it.” As her study amply illustrates, by 1980 the resource base of museums had fundamentally changed—leading to major shifts in thinking about “audiences, ex­hib­ itions, and educational programs.” Victoria D. Alexander, Museums and Money: The Impact of Funding on Exhibitions, Scholarship, and Management (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 122. It would be interesting to learn that the same concepts of distinction prevail today—when major museums regularly devote ex­hib­ itions to popular culture (its music, its fashion) or redesign themselves to support a fundamentally pedagogic mission of public outreach—as in the 1960s, when none of these innovations were in evidence. Alexander’s insight is enriched by her nuanced sense of elements that are made into stark distinctions in Bourdieu’s argument. “Museums have long been pulled between populist and elitist conceptions of their responsibilities,” she notes, before pointing out that this pressure in many ways “[a]ntedates the institution itself ” (83). 11. “The opinion poll,” Jacques Rancière will write in his forceful account of the limits of Bourdieu’s methods and claims in The Philosopher and his Poor, is “a game that doxa plays with itself.” Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor (1983), trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 169. See also Nick Prior’s description of “the implicit functionalism or circularity of Bourdieu’s theories,” in “Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era,” in Art and its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 51–74, 61. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 91. Further references made in the text. For useful context for Kant’s argument, see Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 118–52. See also two books by Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),

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Notes to Page 70  315 17–28; and Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–128. Values of Beauty is particularly interesting on the important and still understudied British backgrounds to influential German formulations. See also Timothy  M.  Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–134. For an account of the emergence of the aesthetic as a category in eighteenth-century Britain, see Michael McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), especially 337–87. See also Jerome Stolnitz’s influential essay “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’ ” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2 (1961): 131–43, as well as the revisionist challenge of Miles Rind, “The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2002): 67–87. 13. “The work of art was no longer regarded as a product of general human activity, but as a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit which now, however, is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own particular gift, as if to a specific natural force.” G.  W.  F.  Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.  M.  Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:26; further references made in the text. Discussing the ana­ logy between art and freedom on one side and nature and necessity on the other, Derrida writes: “It places under Nature’s dictate what is most wildly free in the production of art. Genius is the locus of such a dictation—the means by which art receives its rules from nature. . . . One must not imitate nature; but nature, assigning its rules to genius folds itself, returns to itself, reflects itself through art.” Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11 (1981): 3–25, 4. 14. Francis Haskell, “The Old Masters in Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 90–115. The tendencies shaping this genre are not unrelated to those addressed by Elizabeth Prettejohn in relation to a later set of artists. Though she focuses on moments of artistic emulation rather than on representations of Old Masters, the drives to place new ambition in relation to past achievement are clearly congruent. Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 15. For a bold recent study putting the painting into its nineteenth-century context and compellingly addressing the question of desire that I develop in this chapter in relation to Ingres’s studio practice, see Sarah Betzer, “Artist as Lover: Rereading Ingres’s Raphael and the Fornarina,” Oxford Art Journal 38, no. 3 (2015): 313–41. See also Maria Cecilia Mazzi, “Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres: Il Culto di Raffaello,” in Raffaello e L’Europa, eds. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1990), 717–24. On the broader context see also two important books: Martin Rosenberg, Raphael and France: The Artist as Paradigm and Symbol (College Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), and Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Jacques Thuillier, and Martine Vasselin, Raphaël et l’Art Français (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984). Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014) is an excellent source on the place of Raphael in the German literary imagination. See especially 82–94.

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316  Notes to Pages 71–81 Her argument usefully accentuates the “the detour away from sensuality” characteristic of literary representations of Raphael (91–92). 16. For the early history of this tendency, see Maria H. Loh, Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), a study also concerned with the place of the material in paintings of Old Masters. 17. Recent scholarship has, unfortunately for the tradition, attributed the Rucellai Madonna, now at the Uffizi, to Duccio, not—as Vasari had it—Cimabue. See Hayden  B.  J.  Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 64–78. 18. George Hamilton, The English School: A Series of the Most Approved Productions in Painting and Sculpture from the Days of Hogarth to the Present (London, 1832), 2:99. 19. In her excellent study of the topic, Marie Lathers has described Raphael and the Fornarina as “the archetypal artist-model relationship of western tradition.” See “Chi era la Fornarina?” in her Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 60–85. Lathers identifies “an exceptionally fervent resurrection of the master” in the nineteenth century, along with “a related revival of the Fornarina debate” (63). On preoccupation with Raphael’s body and his death, see 66–74. See also Caterina Bon di Valsassina, “La Fortuna della Fornarina nel Romanticismo storico,” in La Fornarina di Raffaello, ed. Lorenza Mochi Onori (Milan: Skira, 2002), 57–67. 20. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1550, rev. 1568), trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1987), 1:312. 21. “Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit.” “But do you care about them?” was always Dorothea’s question. “They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product. But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome. He is the painter who  has been held to combine the most complete grace of form with sublimity of expression. Such at least I have gathered to be the opinion of conoscenti.” This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her. There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in  a blank absence of interest or sympathy. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 22. Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrapbook (London, 1832), 74; my emphasis. 23. Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, November 19, 1834, 270. 24. Ingres produced at least five painted variations on this theme, as well as a finished drawing now at the Louvre. One painting, once at Riga, lost in the Second World War, might have been painted earlier. But there has been some debate about dating, and in

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Notes to Pages 81–85  317 any case, the Fogg canvas is the earliest extant version. See Hélène Toussaint, “Ingres et la Fornarina,” Actes du Colloque Ingres et Rome, Bulletin spécial des amis du Musée Ingres (Montauban: Musée Ingres, 1986), 63–74; and also Henri Zerner, “Raphael and  the Fornarina, 1814,” in Stephan Wolohojian, A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 157–9. 25. Friedrich Schlegel, “Description of Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands in the Years, 1802–1804,” in The Esthetic and Miscellaneous Works, trans. E.  J.  Millington (London: Henry  G.  Bohn, 1860), 1–148, 49. The various returns to Raphael in this text lay out with extraordinary subtlety a great deal of what will be important about him as a figure in the nineteenth century. 26. In a brief but nuanced account of the interplay of sensuality and spirituality in the piece, Henri Zerner evocatively captures the haptic quality at the center of the canvas when he describes the Fornarina as “the palpable woman” (Zerner, 159). 27. Bryson also sees a historic sensibility in the piece, and the anticipation of a different future, but his argument includes its erotic drives. “Picasso knows far more about Ingres than Ingres’ commentators,” Bryson argues, identifying in the later artist’s returns to the piece a formal-play of line and plenitude that sexualizes the pressures of history that shaped Ingres, and to which Picasso also is deeply responsive. Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 146–50, 147. See Lathers’s review of important challenges to the masculine traditions assumed by Bryson—and also her own useful correctives to his argument, in which a different sexual politics and a less teleological vision of art history combine to reveal the nuance in the nineteenth-century work (82–3). See also Prettejohn on Ingres’s refusal of the split between beauty and the erotic life, an im­port­ ant part of a his­tor­ic­al sequence she traces in which artistic autonomy is not of necessity allied with formalism (Beauty, 94–100). Betzer also sees the turn away as raising the question of a choice between model and artwork, but—routing her argument through the androgynous nature of the two figures (with some basis in Ingres’s studio practice, including his use of a female model for both)—she ultimately resists the dichotomy. Betzer, 329–41. 28. “Boutades, a potter of Sikyon, discovered, with the help of his daughter, how to model portraits in clay. She was in love with a youth, and when he was leaving the country she traced the outline of the shadow of his face cast on the wall by lamplight. Her father filled in the outline with clay and made a model; this he dried and baked with the rest of the pottery and we hear that it was preserved in the temple of the Nymphs.” Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, in The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art, trans. Katharine Jex-Blake (London: Macmillan, 1896), 175. 29. Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” The Art Bulletin 39 (1957): 279–90. See also George Levitine, “Addenda to Robert Rosenblum’s ‘The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,’ ” The Art Bulletin 40 (1958): 329–31, and Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 55–60. Other recent work on Dibutade includes

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318  Notes to Pages 89–92 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Ann Bermingham, “The Origin of Painting and the Ends of Art,” in John Barrell, Painting and Politics of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 135–65; Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Frances Muecke, “Taught by Love: The Origin of Painting Again,” The Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 (June 1999): 297–302; Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, “ ‘La Fille de Dibutade,’ ou l’Inventrice Inventée,” Cahiers du Genre 2, no. 43 (2007): 133–51; and Hubert Damisch, “The Inventor of Painting,” trans. Kent Minturn and Eric Trudel, Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 3 (2010): 301–16. 30. Henry Fuseli, “First Lecture: Ancient Art,” in Fuseli, Lectures on Painting Delivered at the Royal Academy (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), 8. Emphasis in the original. 31. On Fuseli’s drawings, see Andrei Pop, Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Camilla Smith, “Between Fantasy and Angst: Assessing the Subject and Meaning of Henry Fuseli’s Late Pornographic Drawings, 1800–25,” Art History 33, no. 3 (2010): 420–47, a study focusing on the heterosexual and masochistic works. Earlier accounts of this still understudied area include Gert Schiff, “Fuseli, Lucifer, and the Medusa,” in Gert Schiff and Werner Hofmann, Henry Fuseli, 1741–1825 (London: Tate, 1975), 9–19, and David Weinglass, “The Elysium of Fancy,” in Erotica and the Enlightenment, ed. Peter Wagner (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 294–353. 32. Robert Browning, “Fra Lippo Lippi,” in Browning, Robert Browning’s Poetry, eds. James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 148–57. 33. Browning, “Andrea del Sarto,” in Robert Browning’s Poetry, 237–42. Further references made in the text. 34. Central texts on the topic of the rise and disappointment of autonomy include Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970) trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Bloomsbury, 2012) and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). A category that seems of most interest when it is felt to not quite match up to its destiny, autonomy has provoked a number of rich studies. A dense political attempt to engage the history of the field is Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). A sophisticated recent reflection on the topic is Jonathan Loesberg, A Return to Aesthetics: Autonomy, Indifference, and Postmodernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). On autonomy in Victorian art writing, see Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the topic in literary studies, see Andrew Goldstone’s Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 35. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History were lectures delivered by Carlyle in 1840, and published the following year (London: James Fraser, 1841). The “Frieze of Parnassus” of the Albert Memorial was designed by George Gilbert Scott and carved by Henry Hugh Armstead and John Birnie Philip (completed 1872). “Albert Memorial: The Memorial,” in Survey of London: Volume 38, South Kensington Museums Area, ed. F.  H.  W.  Sheppard (London: Athlone Press, 1975),

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Notes to Pages 93–99  319 159–76. British History Online, see http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/ vol38/pp159-176. 36. The topic of disinterestedness, which is central to Shaftesbury’s account of ethics, also returns in his closely related treatments of aesthetics. See Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Lawrence  E.  Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53–5, 62–5, 201–4, 413–17. Hegel’s account is centrally about the aesthetic, and openly develops from Kant, though it has its own road to follow. “The poorest mode of apprehension, the least adequate to spirit, is purely sensuous apprehension,” Hegel writes as he engages with the topic of desire, “In this appetitive relation to the external world, man, as a sensuous individual, confronts things as being individuals . . . he relates himself to the objects, individuals themselves, and maintains himself in them by using and consuming them, and by sacrificing them works his own self-satisfaction . . . Neither can desire let the object persist in its freedom . . . the person too, caught up in the individual, restricted and nugatory interests of his desire, is neither free in himself . . . nor free in respect of the external world, for desire remains essentially determined by external things” (Aesthetics, 1:36). Hegel’s direct response to Kant features on pages 56–60 of the Aesthetics, but the topic is diffused throughout the text. 37. The importance of Schopenhauer for nineteenth-century culture will be a recurring rediscovery for as long as it is forgotten just how significant his work was from the middle of the century, and how closely related his ideas were to important lines of thought in the period. See Whitney Davis for his place in a line of aesthetic thought going back to Winckelmann, Queer Beauty, 17, 83–98. For an important account of the diffusion of the philosopher in the English literary world, see S. Pearl Brilmyer, “Schopenhauer and British Literary Feminism,” in The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, ed. Sandra Shapshay (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2017), 397–424. For a polemical account of the influence of what he understands to be Schopenhauer’s erroneous understanding of Kant on Nietzsche, see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 107–11. 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 73–4. 39. Stendhal, On Love, trans. Philip and Cecil Woolf (New York: Brentano, 1916), 55. The Stendhal definition has returned in recent years in the title of a number of pieces by the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, concluding with Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art in 2007. Neither Stendhal’s historical claim about taste, nor his specific instances play a part in Nehamas’s argument, which largely le­ver­ages the phrase as it stands into a support for his reflections on an interested form of beauty—in that sense following Nietzsche’s lead, up to a point. 40. Betzer, 323. 41. In the course of developing quite distinct arguments, both Davis and Friedman find in the nineteenth-century culture of art important anticipations of the tradition in queer theory that Friedman associates with the powerful abjection he calls “queer negativity,” and that Davis links to the escape from the self that Foucault associated with sado-masochistic sex; for both, the recalibration of the will is paramount in this regard. Friedman is particularly interesting on challenges to the concept of free will in

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320  Notes to Pages 99–107 the erotic life in the period, describing the poetry of Michael Field as demonstrating “artistically mediated experience of erotic desires that are not actually one’s own,” as he proposes a paradoxical self-realization in loss in their work, a recovery of the possibility of representing autonomy, “in an era when scientific advances made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between responses to physical appetites and genuine acts of free will” (149). Following a different tradition, Davis finds in the constitution of the work of art not autonomy, but an escape from the will he associates with Foucault’s more ecstatic formulations: “To constitute an ordinary real thing as a work of art, as a representative real thing in certain respects, might well contribute to freeing us from its demands and to putting it in an entirely new light—even to criticizing its very existence in the world of human will and the claim it has on us there. And it may be that an aesthetics of sex, as Michel Foucault urged, can contribute in some measure to greater knowledge as it were ‘beyond “sex,” ’ as Foucault imagined in the case of gay male sadomasochistic sexual aesthetics” (98). 42. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1978) trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 46. 43. For an intriguing account of the intellectual backgrounds of the awkward topic or set of topics involved in the partial knowledges and self-certainties of the sexual life, see Simon Goldhill’s reflections on what he calls “knowingness,” which he frames with a reminiscence on sex education in his youth. “On Knowingness,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 4. For his treatment of the topic in the context of nineteenth-century art, see Goldhill’s “See Josephus: Viewing First-Century Sexual Drama with Victorian Eyes,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 3 (2009): 470–9. 44. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), 1:262. Further references made in the text. 45. Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott, “Introducing Venus,” in Manifestations of Venus, 1–23, 21. Further references made in the text. 46. Caroline Arscott, “Venus as Dominatrix: Nineteenth Century Artists and their Creations,” in Manifestations of Venus, 109–25. Further references made in the text. 47. See Ovid, Metamorphoses, X–XI in The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 325–62, and Georges DidiHuberman, Peinture Incarnée (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985), 116–17. DidiHuberman is drawing on the work of Simone Viarre, “Pygmalion et Orphée chez Ovide (Met. X, 243–297),” Revue des Études Latines 46 (1968): 235–47. 48. On the relationship between the painter’s death and his last masterpiece, see Kathleen Weil-Garris, “La Morte di Raffaello e la ‘Trasfigurazione,’  ” in Raffaello e l’Europa, 179–87. 49. Anna Jameson, Memoirs of Early Italian Painters (London: John Murray, 1859), 217. 50. On the painting and its history, see Martin Rosenberg, “Bergeret’s Honors Rendered to Raphael on his Deathbed,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 42, no. 1 (1984–1985): 3–16. See also Stephen Bann and Stéphane Paccoud, L’Invention du Passë: Histoires de cour et d’épée en Europe, 1802–1850 (Paris: Hazan, 2014), 98–9; and Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 36–7. The extensive effusions of a contemporary source are

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Notes to Pages 108–120  321 another indication of the cachet of work in this vein. See Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, Le Pausanias Français ou Description du Salon de 1806 (Paris: Buisson, 1808), 84–96. See also Letitia Landon’s poem apparently based on the painting, “Raphael’s Death-Bed,” in Friendship’s Garland (London, 1826), 73–5. 51. Marie Lathers provides the fullest and most interesting recent account of the event (67–74). See also Loh, 194–216. 52. Franz Kugler’s 1837 Handbook of the History of Painting Part I, ed. Charles Eastlake, trans. Margaret Hutton (London: Murray 1842), 304–5. 53. Samuel Rogers, “A Funeral,” in Italy (London, 1830), 148. 54. Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy: Including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1843), 399. Rogers published the first part of Italy in 1822, the second in 1828. In 1832 Ruskin acquired his copy of the illustrated edition, which had made the work newly popular on its release in 1830. Ruskin cites both the Rogers and the Murray repeatedly throughout his career, the former generally with admiration, especially for the plates, the latter with more reservations. 55. John Ruskin, “The Schools of Art in Florence” (Oxford Lecture, 1874), in John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E.  T.  Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 23, Val d’Arno, The Schools of Florence, Mornings in Florence, and The Shepherd’s Tower (1906), 254. 56. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (1983), trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 200–1. Further references in the text. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013). 57. Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: Heinemann, 1920), 81. 58. In an argument boldly moving between the history of science and philosophy from the middle of the eighteenth century to the first three decades of the nineteenth, Richard Sha makes the case for linking sexuality and the aesthetic by proposing an application of the concept of Kantian purposeless purposiveness to sex itself. See Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), especially 141–82. 59. Nehamas, 8. Schopenhauer’s rewriting of Kant along the lines shaped by his own desperate asceticism is central to the history of the loss of an ampler relationship to beauty Nehamas sketches out in his introduction. He argues that “Schopenhauer’s version of beauty, which extended radically Kant’s idea of the aesthetic and opened an unbridgeable chasm between beauty and the will” is ultimately manifested in the antipathy to lived experience of main lines of formalist thought in the twentieth century. Nehamas associates the abstracted version of the Schopenhauerian sensibility he describes as gaining an “absolute dominion over art” with foundational figures in the history of formalism, such as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and R. G. Collingwood, and identifies it thereby as de­ter­mina­tive in shaping the twentieth century (13). This part of his argument certainly describes the narrow base on which the elaborate structure Bourdieu tried to topple might be said to have been placed by the claim of disinterestedness.

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322  Notes to Pages 123–126

Chapter 3 1. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 7, Modern Painters, Volume V (1905), 387. Further references in text by volume and page number. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26. For a useful treatment of Nietzsche’s analysis in a philosophical context, see Gary Shapiro’s Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 87–106. Shapiro addresses the role of Schopenhauer in motivating Nietzsche’s response to the work (93). He also points out that Nietzsche, who had not been to Rome yet, would have only seen the image in reproduction at the time he wrote Birth of Tragedy (97). Jacob Burckhardt’s account in his Cicerone (1855) would also have been an important source. See The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy, trans. Blanche Clough (London: Murray, 1873), 140–2. 3. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor (1983), trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 197. Further references made in the text. 4. The topic is everywhere in Bourdieu’s work, but I will cite an instance particularly germane for my arguments because it claims to find exactly the opposite of what I see in the tradition of texts it mentions. To be fair, as Bourdieu evidently does not actually read the works he touches on here, the claim amounts to neither scholarship nor theory, but merely what he identifies it as being, the confession of an inclination to believe that everything illustrates the drive toward disinterestedness (“pure delectation and disinterested contemplation”): “Everything inclines us to think that the history of aesthetic theory and of the philosophy of art is closely linked (without being its direct reflection, since it, too, develops in a field) to the history of the institutions suited to fostering access to pure delectation and disinterested contemplation, such as museums or those practical manuals of visual gymnastics called tourist guides or writings on art (among which must be included innumerable travel writings). In fact, it is clear that the theoretical writings which the history of traditional philosophy treats as contributions to the knowledge of the object are also (and more especially) contributions to the social construction of the very reality of this object, and hence of the theoretical and practical conditions of its existence.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992), trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 294. This passage is characteristic of an author who frequently leverages his arguments by citing culturally despised middle-brow forms (“those practical manuals of visual gymnastics called tourist guides”) in order to show how they are in fact doing the same work as texts typically located in a higher cultural register—not just writings on art in this case, but the tradition of philosophical aesthetics: “the theoretical writings which the history of traditional philosophy treats as contributions to the knowledge of the object.” It bears saying that, in spite of the tendency to see Bourdieu as a source for egalitarian claims about culture, this practice only works by endorsing the abject status in which conventional taste places the guides that make culture widely available to those who cannot pretend to have imbibed knowledge of it

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Notes to Pages 126–139  323 with their mother’s milk. In that sense the project builds on the higher snobbery and self-hate characteristic of that avant-garde tradition that makes common cause with (various fantasies of) aristocrats and peasants in order to squeeze out the disdained bourgeoisie. 5. The surprising blind spot of class identity in Distinction is a recurrent issue in the literature. On the challenge of the categories of class as laid out in Distinction, even within Bourdieu’s own work, see Derek Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu: Recognizing Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 126–7. Edward LiPuma notes that Distinction “lacks a theory of class structuring.” See LiPuma, “Culture and the Concepts of Culture in a Theory of Practice,” in Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 14–34, 29. See also Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, and Alan Warde, who write of “a fairly simple correspondence between class position and cultural practice . . . within which actors’ reflections on their class identity have little part to play.” “Dis-identification and Class Identity,” in Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives, eds. Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde (London: Routledge, 2010), 60–74, 60. 6. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 190. 7. “Poems of William Morris,” published in the Westminster Review in October 1868, became the source of both “Aesthetic Poetry” (published in Appreciations in 1889) and the Conclusion (1873). 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment § 60 (appendix, “Of the Method of Taste”), trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1972), cited in Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, 197. 9. Ruskin, 7:386–8. The most compelling account of Ruskin’s argument in “Two Boyhoods” is still chapter  8 of Elizabeth  K.  Helsinger’s Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 10. On the painting see Gerald Finley, “Turner, the Apocalypse and History: ‘The Angel’ and ‘Undine,’ ” Burlington Magazine 121, no. 920 (1979): 685–96, and Finley’s study, Angel in the Sun: Turner’s Vision of History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill and Queens University Press, 1999). 11. See “Lulworth Castle, Dorsetshire” (1821), in Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England from Drawings Made Principally by J.  M.  W.  Turner (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1826), n.p. 12. The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 69. 13. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 13. Out of the many discussions the figure of the angel has provoked in recent years, I will just highlight two for their reflections on its role in relation to destruction and agency: Heather Love, in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 148–9; and Paul  K.  Saint-Amour, in Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 316.

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324  Notes to Pages 140–148 14. See Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). 15. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Trauerspiel, (1928), trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 195.

Chapter 4 1. John Flaxman, “Sculpture,” in Abraham Rees, Cyclopëdia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Science, and Literature (London, 1819), 32:n.p. Further references made in the text. On Blake’s work for the Encyclopedia, see Rosamund A. Paice, “Encyclopaedic Resistance: Blake, Rees’s Cyclopëdia, and the Laocoön Separate Plate,” Blake 37 (2003): 44–62. 2. On the productive, complex, and still understudied intersection of religion and something like a nascent anthropology with the history of art, see an important revisionary volume edited by Caroline van Eck, Idols and Museum Pieces: The Nature of Sculpture, its Historiography and Exhibition History, 1640–1880 (Berlin: De Gruyter; Paris: École du Louvre, 2017). 3. The most interesting recent account of the ways in which later ideas of formalism may be said to arise in the nineteenth-century culture of art is to be found in Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4. On the reception and diffusion of classical sculpture in Europe, including in reproduction, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). For a detailed recent study, see Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also the discussion of what Coltman calls “the cachet of the copy” in her Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 123–63. Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, trans. C. A. M. Fennell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882) is still an important source. On the Academy and Academic art instruction, see Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: Phaidon, 1971) and Sidney C. Hutchinson, The History of the Royal Academy, 1768–1986 (London: Royce, 1986). On earlier interest in the classics in British culture see Lucy Gent, ed., Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). The most ambitious reconsideration of the topic, is certainly Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (London: I.  B.  Tauris, 2012) For the broader context, see the five volumes of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, ed. David Hopkins and Charles Martindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012–2019). Caroline van Eck’s, Idols and Museum Pieces is also important to cite as an alternative to the Winckelmann-centered view of the history of the reception of sculpture. The account developed by van Eck not only takes the founder of art history out of the center of the story by including a fuller engagement

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Notes to Pages 149–150  325 with anthropological and religious elements that have sometimes dropped out of the account of the place of sculpture in the history of art and culture, it also provides a set of important object lessons on the place of mediation. 5. Prettejohn points out the paradoxical fact that modern instruction in classical art history is carried out almost entirely by reference to works discovered well after Winckelmann (Prettejohn, 3). As her work amply illustrates, the process whereby a change in canon will not fully map onto a change in the values that had been used to validate a particular set of works begins in the nineteenth century. 6. On the effect of the diffusion of knowledge of sculpture in print—including of its materials—even before the nineteenth century, see Malcolm Baker, “Shifting Materials, Shifting Values? Contemporary Responses to the Materials of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture,” in Sébastien Clerbois and Martina Droth, Revival and Invention: Sculpture through its Material Histories (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), 171–200. In the same volume, see also Michael Cole, “The Cult of Materials” (1–16) and Carol Mattusch, “The Privilege of Bronze: Modern Perception of Classical Materials” (17–30). An important early manifestation of the drive to reproduce sculpture is addressed in Erin Downey, “Sculpture in Print: The ‘Galleria Giustiniana’ as Exemplar and Agent of Taste,” in van Eck, 19–34. 7. Michael Baxandall’s groundbreaking work on The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980) is inevitably cited when the turn to the material in thinking about sculpture is mentioned, a volume dealing with a medium and period entirely distinct from the classical. But the topic is unavoidable in recent accounts of sculpture. Trying to explain the “ideo­logic­al­ly charged” problems presented by modern attempts to address the aesthetics of sculpture, Alex Potts notes that “a free-standing sculpture tends to activate a more directly physical and bodily engaged response from the viewer than a painting.” This quality is not unrelated to what he describes as the “modern anxieties about works of art being no more than mere objects or commodities” being given an added edge by what he describes as the “insistently literal nature of sculpture.” Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), ix. “For the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century,” write recent historians of the topic, “sculpture’s perceived conventionality was inextricably bound up with its objecthood, which in turn was innately defined by materials” (Clerbois and Droth, xix). The problem of being an object in the way sculpture is, is addressed by Potts in a compelling review of principal theories from the eighteenth century on, and in his nuanced account of the challenge of Michael Fried’s concept of “objecthood” in response to the rise of Minimalism (Potts, 24–37, 178–206). For a fascinating study of the challenge of sculpture in the nineteenth-century German context, see Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). In MacLeod’s compelling ana­ lysis, which starts from Rilke’s important writings on Rodin, the challenging status of sculpture as a medium throughout the period is traceable to its “undeniable ‘thingliness,’ an abject quotidian condition from which Rodin saves the statue, through the restoration, according to a phrase that is paradoxical, given sculpture’s supposed obdurate materiality, of its secure stance” (4). MacLeod finds the resolution to the

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326  Notes to Pages 151–153 challenge presented by sculpture in the turn to abstraction, a development anticipated by German romantic writers, whereby the medium “saves itself as an art form in literature largely by shedding figurality and turning to abstraction” (4). 8. Patrick  J.  Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, rev. edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5. Geary’s book is an excellent resource on the complex history of relics. 9. The topic of spolia is relevant here, those fragments of antiquity with which Italians of a later day decorated their structures. See Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca, 2003). Hansen argues that the nature of ap­pro­pri­ ations of this sort has been typically more readily available to thought by the theologian and historian of ideas than by the art historian “because of the cult of the classical as the supreme ideal” (277). She draws a distinction between the concept of the clas­ sic­al, with its association with timelessness value, and “a structure employing spolia,” which she describes as “a sign of temporality, as the salvaged building elements are reminders of the past and imply a historical process” (277–8). 10. It is to the history of education separated from admiration that later centuries have typically relegated the cast—when it is not to the role of simple decoration. Tellingly, Giles Waterfield does not discuss cast galleries in the section on sculpture in his magis­ter­ial study of museums and exhibitions in Britain, but in the chapter on “Education in the Victorian Gallery,” this in spite of the fact that the material was typ­ ic­al­ly displayed, as he notes, with a tendentious chronological gesture, “alongside original clas­sic­al sculptures, in the eighteenth-century manner.” Giles Waterfield, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 233–5, 234. For a sense of the place of casts in European culture, see Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, eds. Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). See also Catherine Chevillot, “Nineteenth-Century Sculpteurs and Mouleurs: Developments in Theory and Practice,” in Clerbois and Droth, 201–30. For a sense of the reception of plaster work, see Pascal Griener, “Plaster ‘versus’ Marble: Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt and the Agency of Antique Sculpture,” in van Eck, 159–76. 11. For a sense of what Townley’s collection meant in its heyday, see Coltman’s extra­or­ din­ar­ily detailed account in Fabricating the Antique, 165–93. For a relevant reconsideration of originality in earlier periods and today—and some attendant challenges to nomenclature—see the collection of essays gathered in The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. Elaine  K.  Gazda (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome, 2002). As the clever subtitle of the volume indicates, the fundamental question of originality begins in the modern period and gets projected back through what Gazda describes as “the layers of postclassical thought through which we have come to imagine antiquity” (18). See especially Nancy H. Ramage, “Restorer and Collector: Notes on Eighteenth-Century Recreations of Roman Statues,” The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity 1 (2002), 61–77.

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Notes to Pages 154–156  327 12. John Keats, -“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” lines 9–13, in Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 2nd edn (New York: Penguin, 1977), 99–100. Further references made in the text are to line numbers in this edition. Individual poems appear on the following pages: “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill,” 76–82; “Sleep and Poetry,” 82–93; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 344–6. 13. William Hazlitt, “The Elgin Marbles” (The Examiner, 1816) and “On the Elgin Marbles” (London Magazine, 1822), in Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P.  P.  Howe (London: F. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–1934), 18:100–3, 145–66. On the early display of the Marbles, see Ian Jenkins, “James Stephanoff and the British Museum,” Apollo 121 (1985): 174–81. On their reception, see William Linn St. Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967) and Jacob Rothenberg, Descensus ad terram: The Acquisition and Reception of the Elgin Marbles (New York: Garland, 1977). Andrew Ballantyne is particularly interesting on the difficulties presented by the condition of the Marbles in “Knight, Haydon, and the Elgin Marbles,” Apollo 128 (1988): 155–9. The best contemporary source on the aesthetic challenges presented by the pieces is the testimony in Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles (1816). 14. All the major excavations resulted in important accessions for national museums and collections, as well as in publications that often had a notably wide readership. It is worth citing just a few of the volumes that mediated some of the major discoveries to an interested public: Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (London: John Murray, 1849); Charles Thomas Newton, History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus (London, 1862–1863); Henry Schliemann, Troy and its Remains, ed. Philip Smith (London: John Murray, 1875); Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos at Knossos (London: Macmillan, 1921, and many subsequent editions). J. Lesley Fitton offers a readable account of the uncovering of an unsettling pre-classical antiquity in The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age (London: British Museum, 1995). Terra-cotta Tanagra figurines became fash­ion­able soon after their discovery in the 1870s, and were soon forged in great numbers. See Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archeological Discoveries, trans. Bettina Kahnweiler (London: John Murray, 1908), 237–8, and C. A. Hutton, Greek Terracotta Statuettes (London: Seeley and Co., 1899). 15. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 10, The Stones of Venice, Volume II (1904), 3. Further references in text by volume and page number. 16. The literature on the museum in the nineteenth century is large and growing. Useful sources include Germain Bazin, The Museum Age (New York: Universe Books, 1967); Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); Alessandra Mottola Molfino, Il Libro dei Musei (Turin: Allemandi, 1991). See also Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For the museum that became the center of the reception of antiquities in the period, see Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974). Adolf Michaelis provides a useful near contemporary account of the history of archeology in the period of this study in A

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328  Notes to Pages 156–159 Century of Archeological Discoveries. See also two volumes by Glyn Daniel, The Origins and Growth of Archaeology (New York: Penguin, 1967) and 150 Years of Archaeology, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1975), and Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past (New York: Abrams, 1996). Ian Jenkins is particularly interesting on the dynamic exchanges between museums and archeologists in Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800–1939 (Trustees of the British Museum, 1992). Though focused on Germany, Suzanne  L.  Marchand’s Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) is an extremely useful resource on the intersection of culture and archeology. Two volumes by Richard Jenkyns are im­port­ant in this context, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), especially “The Consequences of Sculpture” (133–54), and Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), especially “The Idea of Sculpture” (87–142). 17. On Romantic Hellenism, see Harry Levin, The Broken Column: A Study in Romantic Hellenism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931); Bernard Herbert Stern, The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature, 1732–1786 (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1940); Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937; reissued Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); and Stephen Addison Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles: The Relationship Between Sculpture and Poetry, Especially in the Romantic Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943). Timothy Webb, English Romantic Hellenism, 1700 –1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982) includes some im­port­ant sources. For recent revisions of the topic, see Jennifer Wallace, Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997), and David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 18. The most thoroughgoing account of the intersection of text and collection in the period—and especially at the elite levels of culture—is Coltman, Fabricating the Antique. 19. Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 162. 20. Hagstrum, 162. 21. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters or the Language of Forms (c. 1712), ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 121. 22. Leigh Hunt, “Recollections of the Author’s Life,” in Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 372. For a recent collection of essays illustrating the erotic life of statues in the imaginary, see Jana Funke and Jen Grove, eds. Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteen Century to the Present (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019). 23. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, “Recollections of Keats” (1861), in Recollections of Writers (New York: Scribner’s, 1878), 124; emphasis in the original. Byron, Letter to John Murray, April 26, 1821 in Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1898–1901), 5:69–70.

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Notes to Page 159  329 24. John Lempriere’s Bibliotheca Classica; or, A Classical Dictionary, a text drawing on a few Enlightenment antecedents, though reducing their encyclopedic scope to the clas­ sic­al arena, was first published in 1788 with the aim of using “a judicious collection of anecdotes and historical facts, to draw a picture of antient times, not less instructive than entertaining.” As is typical with these kinds of popularizing efforts, its author, a university man, is evidently im­agin­ing two kinds of publics, one erudite, using the volume as a reference, and another learning its topics for the first time: “Such a work, it is hoped, will not be deemed an useless acquisition in the hands of the public, and while the student is initiated in the knowledge of history and mythology, and familiarized with the antient situation and extent of kingdoms and cities that no longer exist, the man of letters may perhaps find it not a contemptible companion, from which he may receive information, and be made, a second time, acquainted with many im­port­ant particulars which time, or more laborious occupations may have erased from his memory.” Bibliotheca Classica (Reading: T. Cadell, 1788), iii. 25. Coltman’s claim that “the packaging of antiquity in book form created an elite, cosmopolitan, intellectual culture, a republic of letters that disseminated or . . . restricted the privileges of learning and collecting” (Fabricating, 64) is most useful as a description of a fairly straightforward sociological insight rather than as a proposition about the necessary effects of mediation (about what is “created” by “the packaging of antiquity in book form”). As a causal claim, the proposition is probably best reversed. After all, it is hardly surprising that when we look at the materials created by an elite, cosmopolitan, intellectual culture we will see the goals and values of that culture manifested. Tooke, Spence, Lempriere: these were the names we find in recollections of authors from the middling classes. No doubt their modest texts will be in some corner of the libraries of the erudite, but they are not the sumptuous volumes likely to figure in their public lives or self­presentations. Still, they are books that disseminated a know­ledge of classical culture, and of admired classical art works, to a broader public. The challenge of identifying with real specificity the links connecting elite intellectual networks to more modest ones is at once methodological, material, and ideo­logic­al—and it is, of course not limited to the reception of antiquity. But, in any case, it is unlikely that the most accurate account will conclude that the restricting of access is the main effect of the creation of books of any sort. In the course of his account of the diffusion of knowledge of sculpture in prints, Malcolm Baker identifies a conceptual fluency about materials emerging from the experience of reproductions. “[T]he eighteenth-century viewer of sculpture may have had as part of his or her viewing skills,” he proposes, “an awareness of the potential movement of images between materials” (Shifting Materials, Shifting Values? Contemporary Responses to the Materials of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture,” Clerbois and Droth, 186). 26. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766) trans. W.  A.  Steel, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J.  M.  Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 46. Further references made in the text. 27. Ian Jack, who did important work identifying Keats’s early mentors in the love of art, and the modes in which the poet came to know art objects, notes the presence of antique sculpture in this poem and others that he identifies as particularly related to Keats’s sense of his own poetic ambition. Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford:

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330  Notes to Pages 161–168 Clarendon 1967). See also Nancy Moore Goslee, Uriel’s Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats, and Shelley (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985). 28. Thomas Warton, “His Majesty’s Birth-Day, June 4th, 1785,” lines 29–33, in The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton, ed. Richard Mant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1802), 86–8. 29. Joseph Spence, Polymetis, Or an Enquiry Concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Antient Artists. Being an Attempt to Illustrate them Mutually from One Another (London: R.  Dodsley, 1747), 4. Further references made in the text. 30. Johann Winckelmann, “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” (1755), in Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, trans. Henry Fuseli (London, 1765), 60–1; further references made in the text. On the influence of Winckelmann’s thought in English letters, see Marcia Allentuck, “Fuseli’s Translations of Winckelmann: A Phase in the Rise of British Hellenism,” in Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century II, ed. R.  F.  Brissenden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 162–85, and Carol Louise Hall, Blake and Fuseli: A Study in the Transmission of Ideas (New York: Garland, 1985). 31. On the symbol in Benjamin, see Chapter 7 of this work. 32. Laocoön was not translated into English until 1836, but there are signs of its influence substantially earlier; excerpts were published by de Quincey a decade earlier as part of his essay on Lessing in Blackwood’s (November 1826 and January 1827). Fuseli cites Lessing and draws on his argument for his Academy lectures on the arts; see Fuseli, Life and Writings, ed. John Knowles (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 2:133–6, and passim. See also Marcia Allentuck, “Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) and Lessing,” Lessing Yearbook 1 (1969): 178–86. 33. The idea recurs in Walter Pater, perhaps most strikingly in “Apollo in Piccardy,” a story that first appears in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1893, and is republished in Miscellaneous Studies (1895), in which he cites Heinrich Heine, “Les Dieux en Exil,” originally published in Revue des Deux Mondes (April 1853), 5–38. See John Smith Harrison, “Pater, Heine, and the Old Gods of Greece,” PMLA 39, no. 3 (1924): 655–89. The topic receives a rich and nuanced treatment in Warburg. See, for example, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (1912), in Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 563–92. Walter Benjamin develops the theme from Warburg in his 1926 Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928), trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), a study which is treated at length in Chapter 7 of this book. For an account of the relationship between the thought of the two authors that is unusually attentive to the Warburg’s aspirations, see Matthew Rampley, Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). 34. Andrew Tooke, The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods And Most Illustrious Heroes: In a Plain and Familiar Method, 33rd edn, rev. and corr. (London: J. Rivington, 1810), vi. 35. Andrew Tooke, The Pantheon (London, 1774),144, 70. The original is even clearer on the parallel, linking the names by a simple comma at these title headings: “Sensus

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Notes to Pages 169–172  331 Fabulæ Historicus. Saturnus, Noe” (116), “Sensus Fabulæ, Historicus. Bacchus, Nemrodis aut Mosis Emblema” (56). François-Antoine Pomey, Pantheum mythicum, seu, Fabulosa deorum historia: hoc epitomes eruditionis volumine, breviter dilucideque comprehensa (Frankfurt, 1752). 36. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 84. 37. Evidently these projects follow and develop from efforts to reconcile classical myths and their relation to theology going back to the Renaissance. Two frequently cited predecessors are William Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses (1737–1741), and an important though distant predecessor, Francis Bacon’s De sapientia veterum (1609), with its early attempts to read classical myths as allegories of natural processes. It bears saying that much of the effectiveness and force of the wilder claims of ­eighteenth-century antiquarians is derived from the ability to draw on a long line of speculative antiquarians going quite far back, and including not only Verulam, but such continental luminaries as Athanasius Kircher and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. Two early attempts to engage the place of this tradition in the period of our study are Ruthven Todd’s Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (London: Grey Walls Press, 1946) and Kathleen Raine, Blake and Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). More recent work includes Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London: Duckworth, 1996). On Knight, see Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny, The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982). On d’Hancarville, see Francis Haskell, “The Baron d’Hancarville: An Adventurer and Art Historian in EighteenthCentury Europe,” in his Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 30–45. See also two essays in van Eck: Hans Christian Hönes, “Allegory, Ornament, and Prehistory’s ‘Secret Influence’: D’Hancarville versus Winckelmann” (115–26) and Tomas Macsotay, “Baron D’Hancarville’s ‘Recherches’ on the Evolution of Sculpture: Submerged Emblems and the Collective Self ” (127–44). On developments later in the century, which are characterized by striking gaps as well as con­tinu­ities when it comes to this material, see Margot  K.  Louis, “Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 47, no. 3 (2005): 329–61. 38. Blake’s print has received much important attention. On the broad context, see Nancy Moore Goslee, “From Marble to Living Form: Sculpture as Art and Analogue from the Renaissance to Blake,” Journal of English and Romantic Philology 77, no. 2 (1978): 188–211 and Irene H. Chayes, “Blake’s Ways with Art Sources II: Some Versions of the Antique,” Colby Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1990): 28–58. See also Morton  D.  Paley, The Traveler in the Evening (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 53–100. On the print in relation to the Encyclopedia illustrations, see Paice, “Encyclopædic Resistance.” On the poet’s relationship to the visual arts, see two pioneering works, Ruthven Todd, William Blake the Artist (London: Studio Vista, 1971) and Robert N. Essick, ed. The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics (Los Angeles, CA: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973), and two volumes by Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) and, especially, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

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332  Notes to Pages 173–186 University Press, 1992). See also the excellent edition by Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 39. Jacob Bryant, A New System, Or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (London, 1774), ix. 40. William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions, Painted by William Blake in Water-Colours, No. 2, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 531. Further references will be to this edition and made in the text. 41. For a recent account of Blake’s use of the Apollo in this work see Chayes, 32–3. 42. John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” lines 173–80, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt  Y.  Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Odyssey Press, 1957). A useful source on the rich and complicated history of the Protestant response to Classical art, of which the works I cite by Milton, Bryant, and in Blake may be understood as episodes, see Keith Thomas, “English Protestantism and Classical Art,” in Albion’s Classicism, 221–38. 43. See Martin Priestman, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016), especially his chapter on myths, 139–68. Priestman emphasizes the influence of Warburton, and places Darwin in relation to important developments in hermetic and Freemason traditions. 44. William Hamilton created two major collections of vases, knowledge of which was diffused in two sumptuous works even before the objects themselves came to Britain. The first, Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines, tirées du Cabinet d M.  Hamilton (Naples: Morelli, 1766–1767), was produced by d’Hancarville; the ­second, Collection of engravings from ancient vases mostly of pure Greek workmanship discovered in sepulchres in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies but chiefly in the neighbourhood of Naples (Naples: W.  Tischbein 1791–1795), was illustrated by Tischbein. On the influence of the collection, see David  G.  Irwin, English Neoclassical Art: Studies in Inspiration and Taste (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966), 27–8. See also Nancy Ramage, “Sir William Hamilton as Collector, Exporter, and Dealer: The Acquisition and Dispersal of His Collections,” American Journal of Archaeology 94, no. 3 (1990): 469–80 and Michael Vickers, “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases,” Past & Present 116 (1987): 98–137. 45. The vase was said to have been found in the tomb of the Emperor Alexander Severus and his mother near Rome, but as late as 1832 we find the popular press insisting on its Greek origins: “It is undoubtedly a work of Grecian genius, and is fortunately still as perfect as when it left the hands of its fabricator.” “The British Museum,—No. 6,” The Penny Magazine, September 29, 1832. For a popular account of the fortunes of the object since its discovery, see Robin Brooks, The Portland Vase (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 46. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden: A Poem, In Two Parts, canto 2, lines 319–26 (London, 1799), 1:102. Further references in the text by volume and page number. 47. Friedrich Schiller, The Piccolomini, or The First Part of Wallenstein, 2.4, trans. S.  T.  Coleridge (London, 1800), 82. On the importance of the poem, see Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937; New York:

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Notes to Pages 186–196  333 W. W. Norton, 1963), 48. It is worth citing in this context Schiller’s prose work as well, notably On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) and On the Naïve and Sentimental in Poetry (1795–1796), the latter of which in particular addresses itself to the powerful longing for a lost antiquity motivating modern literary creations. 48. Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us,” lines 9–12, in Wordsworth, 21st-Century Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 237. 49. See Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), see also Jenkyns, Dignity, 143–63. 50. See Benjamin’s development of this theme from the work of Hermann Usener in Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 243. See also Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 148. On the complex character of the concept of “Nature” see John Stuart Mill, “Nature,” in Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism (London: Longmans, 1874), later published as Three Essays on Religion. Raymond Williams provides a compelling account of the vicissitudes of the term in Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 51. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, in James, Novels 1871–1880 (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 243. Further references made in the text. 52. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (Boston, MA: James Osgood, 1876), 108. On James and the fine arts, see Adeline Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986). On this scene, see Jenkyns, Dignity, 108–10. 53. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald  L.  Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 98. 54. On Pater’s and Hegel, see Giles Whiteley, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death (London: Legenda, 2010). See also Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 55. Lewis  R.  Farnell describes Pater’s lectures as marking “an epoch in the history of Oxford studies; for he was the first to give this practical expression to the idea that Greek art was a fitting lecture-subject for a classical teacher.” An Oxonian Looks Back (1934), 76–7. Cited in Stefano Evangelista, “Vernon Lee in the Vatican: The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archeology,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 1 (2009): 31–41, 33. On Pater and Greek culture in context see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, and Elizabeth Prettejohn, eds. Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For an extensive treatment of the interplay between Pater’s style and his concern with sculpture, see Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). On Pater and Greek sculpture, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Pater on Sculpture,” in Pater the Classicist, 219–39. See also Frank Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 68–75. 56. Walter Pater, Greek Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 196. Further references made in the text. 57. Lene Østermark-Johansen, 215. 58. Pausanias’s work was the subject of a series of lectures Pater delivered in 1878. On his place in Pater and after, see Charlotte Ribeyrol, “Hellenic Utopias: Pater in the Footsteps of Pausanias,” in Martindale, Evangelista, and Prettejohn, Pater the

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334  Notes to Pages 201–213 Classicist, 201–18. On his sources on the myth of Demeter, see Bénédicte Coste, “Pater the Translator,” in Pater the Classicist, 47–61, especially 52–4. 59. Cf. Richard Payne Knight on the largely documentary value of coins in 1809: “as the dates of many of these can be fixed with tolerable accuracy, they may serve to show the style and degree of merit of many more important objects mentioned by antient authors.” “Preliminary Dissertation on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Antient Sculpture,” Specimens of Antient Sculpture (London: T. Bensley, 1809), xviii.

Chapter 5 1. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald  L.  Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 179–80. 2. On Eliot and the arts, see Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (1979). See also Richard Jenkyns’s chapter “George Eliot and the Greeks,” in Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 112–32. For an important recent study see Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).The most interesting recent treatment of the crisis providing the occasion for this scene is probably David Kurnick’s “An Erotics of Detachment,” ELH 74 (2007): 583–608. 3. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 184. Further references made in the text. 4. The mistake was William Hazlitt’s in Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy (1822), Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1932), 10:240. 5. For George Eliot’s summary of Bryant’s argument in her “Folger notebook,” c. 1869, see 48, 135; on Bryant as a source for Casaubon, see John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt, eds. George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Notebooks: A Transcription (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), xlvii. The most interesting recent work on this relationship is Ian Duncan, “George Eliot’s Science Fiction,” Representations 125, no. 1 (2014): 15–39. 6. Vernon Lee, “The Child in the Vatican,” in Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), 17. Further references made in the text. 7. Stefano Evangelista has carefully laid out the complex intersection of emergent and unfixed cultural fields out of which the piece develops in “Vernon Lee in the Vatican: The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archeology,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 1 (2009): 31–41. For a reading that boldly attempts to link this early text with Lee’s quite distinct later aesthetic projects in order to identify a continuity in its queer resistances, see Francesco Ventrella, “Encountering the Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture,” in Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, eds. Jana Funke and Jen Grove (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019), 195–210. As work on Lee has been expanding at a rapid pace, the nuance, variety, and complexity of her achievement has begun to emerge into view. A useful collection is Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, eds. Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics

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Notes to Pages 213–219  335 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). On the topic of travel as a cultural phenomenon, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) and Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 8. “Greek art, on the whole, bores you,” Ruskin will tell his students in the 1870s, in a passage discussed in the previous chapter (John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 10, The Stones of Venice, Volume II (1904), 19:413). It bears saying that the evidence of Eliot’s letters from Rome indicates that she herself did not experience the distress she invents for Dorothea, quite the contrary. The gap between biography and im­agina­tive creation is worth citing as an indication of the sensitivity to the psychology of art appreciation of the novelist—an insight into the possible distance between expected responses and actual experience not unrelated to that which Ruskin expresses with provocative glibness in the passage just cited. See John Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (London: Blackwoods, 1885), 2:173–89. 9. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, Stanza 79, in Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann (Canto IV: 19–206; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 10. Thomas Bulfinch, The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology (Boston, MA: S. W. Tilton, 1855), 158–9. Further references made in the text. See Ovid, Metamorphoses (6.209–450), trans. Charles Martin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 195–202. 11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), Act 1, Scene 2, Line 149. 12. See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), especially 277. Haskell and Penny emphasize the importance of the emotions represented in the group for their reception (278). On the background to, and reception of, Cockerell’s project, see Frank Salmon, “British Architects, Italian Fine Arts Academies and the Foundation of the RIBA, 1816–43,” Architectural History 39 (1996): 77–113. 13. See, for example, Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance” (1893). Writing about Italian artists of the fifteenth century, Warburg notes, “It is possible to trace, step by step, how the artists and their advisers recognized ‘the antique’ as a model that demanded an intensification of outward movement, and how they turned to antique sources whenever accessory forms—those of garments and of hair—were to be represented in motion.” Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 89–154, 89. Like Lee, Warburg links this sense of form with a newly prized psychological aesthetics: “this evidence has its value for psy­cho­logic­al aesthetics in that it enables us to observe, within a milieu of working artists an emerging sense of the aesthetic act of ‘empathy’ as a determinant of style” (144n3). Both authors acknowledge the influence of Robert Vischer in Über das optische Formgefül (Leipzig, 1873), which Warburg links to the work of his father, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, on the symbol. As is the case with Lee, however, one finds a great deal of emotion underpinning claims originally

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336  Notes to Pages 222–226 ­ resented in formal terms, as in this striking return to the Laocoön in Warburg’s p late work: “The vengeance of the gods, wrought on their priest and on his two sons by means of a strangler serpent, becomes in this renowned sculpture of antiquity the manifest incarnation of extreme human suffering. The soothsaying priest who wanted to come to the aid of his people by warning them of the wiles of the Greeks falls victim to the revenge of the partial gods. Thus the death of the father and his sons becomes a symbol of ancient suffering: death at the hands of vengeful demons, without just­ice and without hope of redemption. That is the hopeless, tragic pes­ sim­ism of antiquity.” Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (1923), trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 39.

Chapter 6 1. Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, vol. 1, 1843–1875, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1974), 167. 2. Karl Baedeker, Italy, Handbook for Travellers: Central Italy and Rome, 4th edn. (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1875), xxxii. The section by Reinhard Kekulé was first introduced in this edition; it is still there in the 15th edition in 1909. Niebuhr’s much-cited account of Rome was also diffused in other popular forms. See, for example, Niebuhr’s History of Rome, epitomized from the larger work and adapted to the use of schools and colleges, ed. Travers Twiss (Oxford: D. A. Talboy, 1845), 1–2. 3. The tendency to look at Roman art for what it could show of Greece has inevitably had long-term effects both on the possibility of reflecting on Roman work in itself as well as on the reception of Greek sculpture. See Elaine K. Gazda, “Beyond Copying: Artistic Originality and Tradition,” The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, ed. Elaine K. Gazda (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press for the American Academy in Rome, 2002), 1–24, especially 4–8. The entire volume is germane on this topic. See also Das Originale der Kopie: Kopien als Produkte und Medien der Transformation von Antike, eds. Tatjana Bartsch, Marcus Becker, Horst Bredekamp, and Charlotte Schreiter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). On the challenge of establishing a historically accurate sense of the antiquity being emulated in a given period, see especially Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 403–15. 4. Karl Baedeker, Italy, Handbook for Travellers: Central Italy and Rome, 12th edn. (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1897), xliii–xliv. 5. On the development of guides to Italy, see Stephanie Malia Hom, The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). On the intersection of guides and literary accounts of travel, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) and Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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Notes to Pages 229–233  337

Chapter 7 1. Important recent work on Renaissance art has illustrated the conceptual challenges of projecting onto earlier periods concepts of antiquity quite distinct from those that shaped the culture. See Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 403–15, especially 408. See also the chapter on “Plural Temporality” in their Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 7–19. 2. Walter Pater “Diaphaneité” (1864), Miscellaneous Studies (1895; London: Macmillan, 1901) 247–54; “Raphael” (1892), Miscellaneous Studies, 38–61. 3. “The ruin of Paganism,” notes Gibbon, who traces the final achievement of this cataclysmic change to the age of Theodosius in a famous chapter in his Decline and Fall, “is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition; and may therefore deserve to be considered as a singular event in the history of the human mind.” Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin, 1994), 71. On the destruction of non-Christian sites of worship under Constantine, see the fourth-century historian, Eusebius Pamphilus, The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1845), 158–64. For a recent review of the topic as a his­tor­ ic­al event, see Feyo L. Schuddeboom, “The Conversion of Temples in Rome,” Journal of Late Antiquity 10, no. 1 (2017): 166–86. On Laureti’s fresco, see Anna  C.  Knaap, “Sculpture in Pieces: Peter Paul Rubens’s ‘Miracle of Francis Xavier and the Visual Tradition of Broken Idols,’ ” in Caroline van Eck, Idols and Museum Pieces: The Nature of Sculpture, its Historiography and Exhibition History, 1640–1880 (Berlin: De Gruyter; Paris: École du Louvre, 2017), 65–84, especially 78–9. 4. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928), trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 173; further references made in the text, with the title abbreviated as OGT. New work on Benjamin appears at a rapid pace. On the intellectual backgrounds to the topic of the Baroque see, in particular, Christopher D. Johnson, “Configuring the Baroque: Warburg and Benjamin,” Culture, Theory and Critique 57, no. 2 (2016): 142–65, Jane O. Newman, Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), and Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, especially 78–93). See also Johnson’s Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 5. Erich Auerbach, “Figura” (1938), Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76. 6. The most ambitious recent book linking the history of in­ter­pret­ation to early church history is Miguel Tamen’s bold Friends of Interpretable Objects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Jean Seznec’s work is still vitally important in tracing the continuities not only of particular figures, but of modes of interpretation from antiquity forward. See The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (1940; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).

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338  Notes to Pages 234–239 7. “Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork in the context of tradition found expression in a cult. As we know the earliest artworks originated in the service of rituals— first magical, then religious. And it is highly significant that the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function. In other words: the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art always has its basis in ritual. This ritualistic basis, however mediated it may be, is still recognizable as a secularized ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Selected Writings vol. 3, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael  W.  Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002, 101–33, 105); emphasis in the original. Further references made in the text. For a wonderfully nuanced account of the topic of aura in Benjamin not as an index of an absolute loss but of something “falling away,” see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then, and Modernity” (trans Jane Marie Todd) in the catalogue Negotiating Rapture: The Power of Art to Transform Lives, ed. Richard Francis (Chicago, IL: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), 48–63. 8. “The unity of sensuous and supersensuous object—the paradox of the theological symbol—is distorted into a relation between appearance and essence” (OGT, 166). 9. 1 Cor. 8:4, King James Version. Although the practice of iconoclasm has roots early in the history of Christianity, the term took on new currency in the Restoration. More recently, the topic has become of pressing interest as culture attempts to come to terms with the destruction of historic objects by new forms of Islamic iconoclasm. Recent studies of the phenomenon include Stacy Boldrick, Leslie Brubaker, and Richard  S.  Clay, Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Iconoclash (Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media, 2002); and especially Joseph Koerner’s “The Icon as Iconoclash,” 164–213; Boldrick and Clay, eds. Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and Anne McClanan and Jeffrey Johnson, eds. Negating the Image (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). In the English context, Margaret Aston’s work is the vital source. See, especially, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Hans Belting’s account of the role of the crisis of the image in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the emergence of the modern concept of art is important to cite here, but it is worth noting that his focus on the image leads him to narrow the range of types of works he can consider. Belting, History and Presence: A History of the Image before the Age of Art (1990), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 10. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1990) trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4; emphasis in the original. Further references in the text. 11. See Aby Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 597–697, 621. Benjamin’s translators use this text. For the context of Warburg’s argument and Benjamin’s response, see Newman, 154–69.

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Notes to Pages 239–249  339 12. For an important and polemical account of the challenging nature of Warburg’s account of survivals in relation to later concepts of the Renaissance, see Georges DidiHuberman, “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,” trans. Vivian Rehberg and Boris Belay, Common Knowledge 9, no. 2 (2003): 273–85. On Warburg, see Christopher Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images. 13. On Winckelmann, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Far and away the most ambitious theoretical return to Winckelmann’s treatment of the torso is Rancière’s bold chapter, “Divided Beauty,” in Rancière, Aesthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (2011; London and New York: Verso, 2013), 1–20, in which the space between the whole imagined in concepts inherited from Kant, and the fragment on which those concepts alighted, becomes a key element in the emergence of the modern system of art. If Benjamin finds the pressure of history shaping the relationship to antiquity into allegory, Rancière identifies the constitutive role of forms of history (acknowledged or not) as always shaping and making meaningful the endlessly disappointed quest for pure form. 14. It would be difficult to find a clearer testimony to the loss of aura for maker and viewer than that offered by Winckelmann in his 1755 discussion of allegory: “The stories of martyrs and saints, fables and metamorphoses, are almost the only objects of modern painters—repeated a thousand times, and varied almost beyond the limits of possibility, every tolerable judge grows sick at them.” The “&c.” in the next line of the argument stands very effectively in the place of longer elaboration; it also removes the religious content that had been included in the previous one, or perhaps emphasizes its vacuity, if only by suggestion: “The judicious artist falls asleep over a Daphne and Apollo, a Proserpine carried off by Pluto, an Europa, &c. he wishes for occasions to shew himself a poet, to produce significant images, to paint Allegory.” Johann Winckelmann, “Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” (1755), in Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, trans. Henry Fuseli (London, 1765), 56–61. 15. See  T.  S.  Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), in Selected Prose of T.S.  Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), 59–67, and also related lectures from the 1920s and 1930s published in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Suchard (London: Harcourt Brace, 1993). See also, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), in the preface of which collection the American poet notoriously identifies his point of view not only as classicist in literature and Anglo-Catholic in religion, but perversely enough, royalist in politics. Evidently, it is not George V the poet has in mind when he proposes this constellation of commitments.

Chapter 8 1. On reproductive engravings in the later period of this study, see Martha P. Tedeschi, “How Prints Work: Reproductions in England, 1840–1900,” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1994). See also Katherine Haskins, The Art Journal and Fine Art Publishing

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340  Notes to Pages 249–252 in Victorian England, 1850–1880 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), and Simon Cooke, Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s: Contexts and Collaborations (Ravelston: Private Libraries Association, 2010), as well as an important early study, Gleeson White, English Illustration: “The Sixties”: 1855–70 (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co, 1903). 2. On the relationship of temporary sites of exhibitions to the periodical press—and on the challenge of temporality and display in Ruskin generally—see Jonah Siegel, “Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace,” Yearbook of English Studies 40, no. 1/2 (2010): 33–60. On the cultural importance of exhibitions see Kate Nichols, “Art and Commodity: Sculpture under Glass at the Crystal Palace,” in Sculpture and the Vitrine, ed. John C. Welchman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 23–46. Nichols points out that in the 1870s on bank holidays the Sydenham Palace was thronged by more than 60,000 visitors per day. She points out that attendance at the British Museum rarely exceeded 12,000. “[A]t least five times more people probably saw the plaster casts of the Elgin Marbles at Sydenham,” Nichols notes, “than the original in Bloomsbury” (25). On the heterogeneous kinds of objects on display along with the statues, including snacks and souvenirs, see 31–5. See also Nichol’s ambitious monograph, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On the Crystal Palace at Sydenham considered in relation to the history of the gaze in the nineteenth century, see Pascal Griener, Pour une histoire du regard: L’expérience du musée au xixe siècle (Paris: Hazan, 2017), 103–18. 3. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 16, “A Joy Forever” and The Two Paths, with Letters on the Oxford Museum and Various Addresses 1856–1860 (1905), 65. Further references in the text. 4. In the course of her meticulous account of the event, Elizabeth Pergam points out the importance of the association of the exhibition with what the city of Manchester stood for: “From its inception, the defining feature of the Art Treasures Exhibition was that it was organized by the local elite of a city and region associated almost exclusively with commercialism, industrialization, and an eponymous school of economics advocating free trade.” Elizabeth  A.  Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: Entrepreneurs, Connoisseurs and the Public (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 13. 5. The most subtle account on the kind of the modern relationship to ruins suggested in Ruskin is to be found some fifty years later, in Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin,” (1903) trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions: A Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture 25 (1982): 21–50. 6. Pergam’s magisterial treatment, the best resource on an event that was far more important in the history of art than the better-known 1851 Great Exhibition, is usefully supplemented by Giles Waterfield’s ambitious study, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). Waterfield’s emphasis on the specific circumstances of exhibitions and institutions outside of London is particularly helpful. On Manchester, see 67–70. On the Art Treasures Exhibition, see 89–92. Other useful sources include Ulrich Finke, “The Art-Treasures Exhibition,” in Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester, ed.

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Notes to Pages 252–255  341 John  H.  G.  Archer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 102–26; Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, The Art of All Nations: 1850–73, The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and Critics (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1981), 164–76; Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), 158–60; Frank Herrmann, The English as Collectors: A Documentary Chrestomathy (London: Chatto, 1972); and John Steegman, Victorian Taste: A Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 233–8, 229. See also Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The NineteenthCentury Culture of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 180–9. On international attention to the exhibition, see Holt, 166–7. Herrmann notes that eight weeks after opening, the Exhibition was still attended by 9,000 people a day. A good many guides were produced, their titles often indicating their role in directing an intrigued, but often confused, public around the ex­hib­ition. A small selection will give a sense of the genre: Gustav Waagen, A Walk round the Art Treasures Exhibition, under the guidance of Dr. Waagen, claims the cachet of the eminent authority on British collections and museum director while others aim for a more common touch, such as Blanchard Jerrold, How to See the Art-Treasures Exhibition, and the anonymous What to see and where to see it! or The Operatives Guide to the Art Treasures Exhibition. Several con­tem­por­ary accounts of the ex­hib­ition exist, among them The Art Treasures Examiner: A Pictorial, Critical and Historical Record of the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester in 1857, a particularly useful resource. An interesting con­tem­por­ary account by a foreigner is W. Burger [Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré], Trésors d’Art exposés à Manchester en 1857 (Paris, 1857), n.p. 7. Charles Blanc, Revue des Deux Mondes (October 17, 1857), quoted in Holt, 171. 8. In his groundbreaking study, John Rosenberg describes the change in Ruskin after 1860 as being “of emphasis only, not of direction.” Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 41, see also 42–5. Like Rosenberg, most recent readers see close continuities between Ruskin’s artistic and social criticism, or perhaps an inability to separate his concerns. 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility,” Selected Writings, vol. 3, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael  W.  Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 101–33, 116; further references in the text. The similarity between Benjamin’s concept of aura and Ruskin’s response to the explosion of cheap reproductions in the second half of the nineteenth century has not been missed by recent critics. See Linda M. Austin, The Practical Ruskin: Economics and Audience in the Late Work (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 4–5, and Elizabeth  K.  Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 138–9. Julie Codell’s “The Aura of Mechanical Production: Victorian Art and the Press,” Victorian Periodical Review 24, no. 1 (1991): 4–10, is interesting on magazine reproduction in particular. An important and sympathetic challenge to any simple account of Benjamin’s claims is launched by Stephen Bann in “In the Age of Reproduction,” in his groundbreaking Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 15–41. Bann’s project of valorizing the labor of the artists who worked on reproductive engravings of extraordinary quality means that his specific arguments

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342  Notes to Pages 255–256

10. 11.

12.

13.

sometimes have a limited applicability to the wood engravings in the press, but there is no question that he is right that the triumph of later modes of reproduction has both distorted the historic sense of what reproductive prints meant in the nineteenth century, and over-simplified the application of Benjamin’s insights. (On wood engraving, see Bann, 33–5.) Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” (1928), in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1964), 1284. Analysis of the psychology of surfeit recurs in Ruskin’s major works of the 1840s and 1850s, as indicated in this brief selection. Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849): [L]et us consider for an instant what would be the effect of continually repeating an expression of a beautiful thought to any other of the senses at times when the mind could not address that sense to the understanding of it. Suppose that in times of serious occupation or of stern business, a companion should repeat in our ears continually some favourite passage of poetry, over and over again all day long. We should not only soon be utterly sick and weary of the sound of it, but that sound would at the end of the day have so sunk into the habit of the ear that the entire meaning of the passage would be dead to us, and it would ever thenceforward require some effort to fix and recover it (8:155–6). Stones of Venice III (1853): “the charm of association which long familiarity with any scene too fatally wears away” (11:359). Modern Painters III (1856): “Another character of the imagination is equally ­constant, and, to our present inquiry, of yet greater importance. It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or a very grand one for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do . . .” (5:182). The relationship between exhibition and reproduction is manifold and ubiquitous, in Manchester as it had been during the Great Exhibition in London. Pergam notes that among the many innovations of the Art Treasures Exhibition was that it was the first time that etchings were displayed in frames. Her study also offers a fascinating account of the publication of illustrated catalogues of objects on display in a variety of media, including photography (Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, 114–35, 2). For more detailed information on the historical development of printing in England, see Eric de Maré, The Victorian Woodblock Illustrators (New York: Sandstone Press, 1980); Anthony Dyson, Pictures to Print: The Nineteenth-Century Engraving Trade (London: Farrand, 1984); Celina Fox, Graphic Journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s (New York: Garland, 1988); Basil Gray, The English Print (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1937); and Basil Hunnisett, Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England (London: Scolar, 1980). For many examples of the popular reproduction of paintings, see Rodney  K.  Engen, Victorian Engravings (London: Academy Editions, 1975). Helpful analyses of the varied intersections of art and reproduction in the period are provided in two issues of Victorian Periodical Review edited by Julie Codell in 1991 (vol. 24, nos 1–2). A summary of the topic in relation to Ruskin is provided in Austin, 4–6. Although she does not address reproductive prints, and her focus is largely French, Patricia Mainardi offers an important synoptic account of what she terms “illustrated print culture” in Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print

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Notes to Pages 256–263  343 Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Her nuanced account of the rise of illustrated periodicals including the The Penny Magazine and Illustrated London News, as well as related continental exemplars, focuses on the more conventionally journalist role played by these magazines. But, it is striking how consistently important the fine arts and places of exhibition were for these journals (73–116)—and how central illustration became to their mission, even when that was not necessarily a principal aim, as was the case of the The Penny Magazine (79–80). On the effects of reproduction on the development of the modern gaze, see Pascal Griener, Pour une histoire du regard: L’expérience du musée au xixe siècle (Paris: Hazan, 2017), 140–57. 14. Henry Cole, “Modern Wood Engraving,” London and Westminster Review, xxix (1838); quoted in Fox, 7. 15. Preface to The Penny Magazine, vol. 1 (1832), iii (preface dated December 18, 1832). 16. The most ambitious and theoretically engaged recent attempt to deal with the intersection of image, text, technology, and mass public entailed in the project of the Illustrated London News is Peter  W.  Sinnema, Dynamics of the Pictured Page: Representing the Nation in The Illustrated London News (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). On Ruskin’s account of engraving, see 73–9. 17. The promotion of the Exhibition by text and image is readily apparent in the coverage provided by The Illustrated London News over a number of weeks. See, especially, the issues of May 2, 9, and 16, 1857. 18. James Clark Sherburne places Ruskin’s views on plenty in the context of eighteenthand nineteenth-century economic and social theory. His concern is the manner in which Ruskin challenges what he describes as a Victorian economic sensibility based on scarcity, and his title is especially useful: John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance: A Study in Social and Economic Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). See also the chapter “Streams of Abundance,” 69–93. Jay Fellows offers a remarkable and compelling analysis of the oeuvre as instantiating a perpetually inadequate organization confronting an overwhelming world in The Failing Distance: The Autobiographical Impulse in John Ruskin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) and Ruskin’s Maze (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 19. Benjamin’s treatment of the lyric poet in the city also leads him into the topic of reproduction. See “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), in which Baudelaire’s response to the daguerreotype is in­tim­ate­ly related to the poet’s anxious awareness of the crowd and the threat both reproduction and proliferation present to the aura. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 186–92. 20. John Ruskin, Academy Notes (1875). Academy Notes, Library Edition, 14: 261–310, 263. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan presents Ruskin’s Academy Notes in the context of the art world he was challenging in “Bearding the Competition: John Ruskin’s Academy Notes,” Victorian Periodical Review 22, no. 4 (1989): 148–56, and “ ‘The Splendidest May number of the Graphic’: John Ruskin and the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1875,” Victorian Periodical Review 24, no. 1 (1991): 22–31. Garrigan’s articles are particularly insightful on the complex relationship between Ruskin’s account of reproductive art and his efforts to alter his own methods of communicating with the public. 21. Mainardi, 3–4. See also her useful discussions of the difficulty of finding a term other than “artist” for the makers of reproductive work in the period (9, 16). Katherine Haskins

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344  Notes to Pages 264–282 points out that as fine arts reproduction in particular “still required handcraft in the production process, . . . fine art publishing prior to the 1880s forged crucial and highly contingent connections between originals and reproductions.” See The Art Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 2. 22. On the place of these lectures in Ruskin’s career, see John Hayman, “Towards the Labyrinth: Ruskin’s Lectures as Slade Professor of Art,” in New Approaches to Ruskin: Thirteen Essays, ed. Robert Hewison (London: Routledge, 1981), 111–24. On the role of Botticelli in his argument, and the error behind it, see the editors’ introduction to Ariadne (22:xxxvii–xxxix). On the place of Botticelli in Ruskin’s thought, and especially in relation to reproduction, see Jeremy Melius’s evocative “Ruskin’s Copies,” Critical Inquiry 42 (2015): 61–96. 23. On Ruskin’s reform of his methods of production and distribution, see Garrigan, “Splendidest,” 22, and Cook and Wedderburn, preface to The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 27, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1907), lxxxii–lxxxvi. 24. On the history of the title, see 22:xxxvii–xl. On the important topic of mazes in Ruskin, see Fellows, Ruskin’s Maze, and Hayman, 15.

Chapter 9 1. John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), vol. 11, Stones of Venice, vol. 3 (1903), 130. 2. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 157. 3. When Gustav Friedrich Waagen visited in the 1830s, he found some canvases to admire, but he was clear on the weaknesses of the institution: “Of the great masters of the Florentine school, a school which above all others carried drawing to the highest perfection, there is, in my opinion, nothing here.” Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain (London: John Murray, 1854), 1:318–19. 4. The museum boom of the period comprised more than displays of art, and was wider than England, or even Europe. A sampling of the museums founded in Pater’s lifetime might include the Museum of Economic Geology (London, 1841), the Musée de Cluny (Paris, 1844), the Museum of Manufactures (London, 1852), which anticipated the South Kensington Museum (1857), which in turn became the Victoria & Albert (1899), the National Portrait Gallery (London, 1856), the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1859), the University Museum (Oxford, 1860), the Metropolitan Museum (New York, 1870), the Bethnal Green Museum (London, 1872), the Art Institute (Chicago, 1879), the Natural History Museum (London, 1881), the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford, 1884), and the Museum of Science and Art (Dublin, 1890). Foundational work on the emergence of the art museum was carried out by Haskell and Holt; see Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976) and Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, The Triumph of Art for the Public (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979). Other useful studies in this quickly burgeoning field include Christopher Whitehead,

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Notes to Pages 283–291  345 “Architectures of Display at the National Gallery: The Barry Rooms as Art Historiography and the Problems of Reconstructing Historical Gallery Space,” Journal of the History of Collections 17, no. 2 (December 1, 2005): 189–211, and Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800–1939 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1992). On the development of museums in the nineteenth century, see Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and The Emergence of the Modern Museum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5. Johann Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, trans. G.  Henry Lodge (Boston, MA: James R. Osgood and Company, 1880), 2:312. 6. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 238, 240. Elizabeth Prettejohn finds in the description of the statue a telling instance of the inevitable intersection of object with text at the emergence of art history. See The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (London: I.  B.  Tauris, 2012), 19–22. 7. The classical sources for the statue indicate that Myron’s statue was a bronze. On the Discobolus and its reception, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 199–202. 8. Walter Pater, Greek Studies (London: Macmillan, 1895), 289–90. Greek Studies was assembled posthumously by Pater’s friend Charles Lancelot Shadwell. For an im­port­ ant account of the volume, see Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 213–20. On Pater and Greek sculpture, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, “Pater on Sculpture,” in Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism, eds. Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 219–39. Prettejohn emphasizes the role of discoveries in archeology in shaping developments in Pater’s thought (226–37). 9. On the discovery of Greek polychromy, see Jenkins, 168–95. On the change between the imagination of the classical world between The Renaissance and Greek Studies see Lene Østermark-Johansen, 215. David Peters Corbett argues that Pater’s materialism is a manifestation of a tendency also evident in the drive toward more immediate experience that Corbett identifies as a fundamental part of developments in painting in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. See “Aestheticism and Unmediation: Moore, Leighton, Watts, Whistler,” in his The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 83–127. “Like Pater,” he writes, “these artists are left only with the material. But it is that very materiality that they put forward as a means of knowing the new conditions and experiences of the world” (126). 10. Walter Pater, Appreciations, With an Essay on “Style” (1889) (London: Macmillan, 1910), 134. 11. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885) (London: Macmillan, 1910), 1:172–3. 12. Walter Pater, “Raphael,” Fortnightly Review 52, no. 310 (October 1, 1892), 458; Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (1895) (London: Macmillan, 1910), 38.

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346  Notes to Pages 292–294 13. Cf. Schlegel: “None of Raphael’s works, though there may perhaps be many of equal merit in existence, have excited so much enthusiasm as the ‘Transfiguration,’ and the reason may possibly be this,—it seems to form the last link between the genuine style of the old masters, and the more artificial taste of modern schools.” Friedrich von Schlegel, “Description of Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands, 1802–1804,” in Schlegel, The Esthetic and Miscellaneous Works, trans. E.  J.  Millington (London: Henry  G.  Bohn, 1860), 44. For the kind of his­tor­ic­al sensibility underlying the response to Raphael, see Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). See also John Easton Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen, Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005). For important recent work on the Pre-Raphaelites, see Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, eds. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 14. Walter Pater, “Diaphaneité,” (1864) Miscellaneous Studies (1895; London: Macmillan, 1910), 252–3.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ” following the page number. AbdelGaber, Bahaa  38 absorption  58, 178, 223, 280, 310 abstraction  19, 80–1, 94, 111, 114, 125, 127–8, 141, 145, 150, 164–5, 170, 185, 188–93, 196, 207, 209, 219, 240, 288, 326 academic art  154, 172, 186, 190, 280, 324 Academy of St. Luke (Rome)  108 acquisition  xvii, 33, 35, 71, 154–5, 281–2, 289, 329 Actor–Network Theory (ANT)  31–2, 302 Adams, James  156 Adams, Robert  156 adaptations  10, 54, 60, 177, 296 admiration  x, xiii, 4–5, 19, 25, 45, 52, 55, 58, 92, 106–7, 129, 152–6, 161, 167, 176, 179–80, 185, 188, 190, 201, 205, 209–10, 215, 219, 222–7, 237, 249, 254, 261, 273, 279, 290, 298, 311, 321, 326 Adorno, Theodor W.  100–1, 302 Aesthetic Theory  303, 318 Dialectic of Enlightenment 296 Aeneas  2–4, 9–10 aesthetic  5, 52–3, 70, 95, 99–100, 102, 126–9, 154–5, 167, 186–8, 190–1, 202, 235, 238–40, 253–4, 268, 313, 315, 321, 327 autonomy  44, 64–104 consumption  68, 69 contemplation  92, 97, 102 disposition 67 encounter 260 experience  38–9, 204, 222, 260–1, 288 judgment  39–40, 67–70 aesthetics  66, 94–6, 101, 114–15, 119, 192, 199, 226, 281, 311, 319–20, 322, 325, 335 affect  xii–xv, 5, 10, 23–5, 38, 42–3, 62, 95, 101, 160, 204, 218–20, 260, 298, 312 Agazzi, Elena Raffael als Paradigma 309 agency  44, 65, 90, 98, 123, 141, 250–2, 323 Albert Memorial  92, 318 Albert, Prince  71 Alexander Severus, Emperor  332 Alexander, Victoria D. Museums and Money 314 allegory  xiv, 124, 150, 164–7, 181, 183, 187, 210, 228–9, 232–4, 236–45, 292, 331, 339

Allen Memorial Art Museum (Ohio)  108f Allentuck, Marcia “Fuseli’s Translations of Winckelmann”  330 “Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) and Lessing” 330 altarpiece  13, 129, 260 Amariglio, Jack Sublime Economy 300 American artist  204, 304 culture 297 literature 299 poet 339 verse 22 visitor to Rome  222 amphitheaters  ix, 205 analogy  56, 168–9, 196, 215, 221, 270, 272, 315 ancient art  xiii, 176, 183, 194, 223, 226, 287, see also antiquities Anderson, Amanda  67 The Powers of Distance  295, 313 Anderson, Christy The Matter of Art 301 Andrews, William Loring  135f angels  x, 12–13, 45, 92, 137, 139–41, 323 Angerstein, John Julius  281 anthropology  9, 195, 198, 281–2, 305, 324–5 anti-iconoclasm  233, 236–7, see also iconoclasm/iconoclastic antiquarian analysis of objects  44 curiosity 233 knowledge 291–2 revival 242 speculation 157 texts 156 antiquarianism 308 antiquarians  44, 108, 157, 162, 166, 288, 308, 331 antique art  81, 165, 168, 205, 214, 225, 228 culture 201 gods 168 kings 194 knowledge 164

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348 Index antique (cont.) material  168, 170, 209 monuments 44 objects  42, 151–3, 171, 208, 230 perfection 81 religion 234 remains  167, 207 sculptures  154, 162, 180, 185, 188, 193, 224 sources 335 statues  4, 151, 153, 158, 168, 204, 214 text  166, 180 things 239 vases 181 works 232 world 293 see also ancient art antiques  154, 180, 185 antiquities  38, 43–4, 145, 155, 163, 171–2, 176, 179, 181, 186, 193, 196, 201, 209, 228, 229, 240, 282, 288–90, 327 antiquity  26, 59, 141, 149, 153, 155–7, 159, 161–3, 167–8, 171–2, 174–5, 179–81, 183–9, 191–4, 198, 204–5, 207–9, 211, 215, 222, 224, 228, 230–1, 233, 236–7, 239–43, 256, 275, 277, 283, 287–90, 293, 307, 326, 329, 333, 336–7, 339 Aphrodite  120–2, 131–3, 139, 279, see also strange Aphrodite, Venus apocalypse  133, 141, 148, 249 Apollo  147, 160, 168, 169f, 170f, 176, 177f, 178, 180, 185, 190, 215, 219, 229, 275, 278–9, 283–4, 286–7, 290–1, 332 Apollo Belvedere  40, 150, 156, 159, 160f, 175–6, 178, 209, 215, 229–30, 240, 283–4, 289 Apollonian  196, 238 Appadurai, Arjun  34 Social Life of Things  33, 305 “The Thing Itself ”  305 appreciation  28, 40, 66, 127, 152, 215, 220, 223, 225, 232, 240, 254, 260, 283, 335 Apuleius The Golden Ass 183 Aquinas, Thomas  56, 58–9 Summa Theologiae 309 Archangel Michael  133 archeological accuracy 230 digs 194 poetics 192 research  157, 293 uncertainty 184 archeologists  38, 186, 293, 328 archeology  x, 4, 156, 167, 232, 282, 327–8, 345 Archer, Archibald The Temporary Elgin Room 154f

Archer, John H. G. Art and Architecture in Victorian Manchester 340–1 architectural decoration 187 drawings 106 group 193 architecture  156, 180, 250, 265–6, 290 Ariadne  205–6, 209, 264, 274, 344 Aristotle 275 Armstead, Henry Hugh  318 Armstrong, Isobel The Radical Aesthetic 311 Victorian Glassworlds  9, 301 Arscott, Caroline “Introducing Venus”  103, 320 Manifestations of Venus  300, 320 “Venus as Dominatrix”  102, 320 William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones  8, 300 Artaud, Antonin  99 Artemis 219, see also Diana art historians  xiii, 4, 11, 13, 15, 36–7, 44, 47, 66, 70, 79, 85, 164, 168, 192, 236, 240, 284, 326 art history  ix–x, 4, 8–9, 11, 35, 41, 43–4, 46, 60, 66, 80–1, 88, 104, 113, 123, 131, 156, 213–14, 222–3, 225, 232, 239–40, 278, 282, 295, 300, 306, 313, 317, 324–5, 340, 345 Art Institute (Chicago)  344 artistic achievement  64, 103 autonomy  109, 125, 317 canon 40 career 70 creativity  113, 238–9 culture  91, 102 egotism 278 emulation 315 practices  150, 286 production 14 representation 110 self-imagination 90 success 136 temperament 130 tradition 183 training 172 art objects  ix, xii, 8, 26, 29–32, 35, 40, 86, 110, 168, 181, 193, 203, 212–13, 219, 229, 233, 255, 260, 287, 302, 329 Art Treasures Exhibition (Manchester)  247, 249–50, 252–3, 282, 340–1, 342 artworks/works of art  ix, xii–xiii, 21, 26, 28–31, 34, 43, 50, 52–4, 58, 63, 68, 83, 86, 95–6, 111, 149, 155, 163, 168, 172, 180, 199, 204, 213, 219–20, 222, 225–6, 234–5, 244,

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Index  349 254–6, 270, 280, 286, 298, 302–3, 311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 325, 329, 338 ascetic  101, 110, 321 drives  94, 119, 237, 242 notion of beauty  69 pleasure 67 system 243 value 165 Ashmolean Museum (Oxford)  282 Asia Minor  225 Assyrian antiquities/statues  155, 282 Aston, Margaret Broken Idols of the English Reformation 338 astrology  239, 330 Athens 183 audiences  113, 157, 251–2, 254, 264, 272–4, 287, 314 Auerbach, Erich “Figura”  233, 337 aura  ix, 233–5, 240, 255, 259–61, 273, 338–9, 341, 343 Austin, Linda M.  342 The Practical Ruskin 341 autonomy  44, 67, 69, 92, 102, 109, 113, 115, 118–19, 125–6, 317–18, 320 Auyoung, Elaine “Cognitive Studies”  299–300 avant-garde  10, 35, 42, 153, 307, 311, 323, 325 Babylonians 174 Bacchus  170–1, 331 Bacon, Francis  181 De sapientia veterum 331 Baedeker, Karl  222, 228 Italy, Handbook for Travellers  223–7, 336 Baker, Malcolm  329 “Shifting Materials, Shifting Values?”  325 Ballantyne, Andrew “Knight, Haydon, and the Elgin Marbles” 327 Balzac, Honoré de “Unknown Masterpiece”  73 Bann, Stephen  311, 342 Distinguished Images 310 “In the Age of Reproduction”  341 L’Invention du Passe 320 Parallel Lines  308–9, 341 Barberini family 182 Palazzo  76, 80 Baroque  141, 229, 233, 235, 238, 337 allegory 243 art 140 Christianity 234 drama  166, 228, 232, 234, 240

literature 245 poets 243 Trauerspiel  232, 244, 324, 330, 333, 337 Barrell, John Painting and Politics of Culture 318 Barringer, Tim Pre-Raphaelites 346 Barthes, Roland “Reality Effect”  306 The Rustle of Language 306 Bartsch, Tatjana Das Originale der Kopie 336 Basire, James “Hippa Phigalensium”  197f Batchen, Geoffrey Burning with Desire 318 Battle of Arcole  123 Baudelaire, Charles  xv, 343 Les Fleurs du mal x “Les Phares”  x Œuvres Complètes 295–6 “Salons” x “The Salon of 1846”  xii, 295 “Un Voyage à Cythère”  xiv, 296 Baudrillard, Jean Simulacra and Simulation 307 Symbolic Exchange and Death 307 Baxandall, Michael  11–16, 30, 33, 302 Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy  11, 301 The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Germany  8, 300, 325 Bazin, Germain The Museum Age 327 beauty/beautiful  vii, xii, xvii, 2, 11, 15, 21, 47, 50, 65–7, 69, 72, 76, 82, 91–2, 94–7, 101–2, 118, 124, 128–9, 131, 137, 161, 168, 179–80, 183–5, 190–4, 196, 198–9, 202, 205–6, 210, 218–19, 235, 238, 240, 243–4, 247, 252, 255, 260, 263, 265, 275, 283–4, 289–90, 292, 303, 311, 313, 317, 319, 321, 338 Becker, David P.  117f Becker, Marcus Das Originale der Kopie 336 Beckley, Bill Uncontrollable Beauty 311 Beiser, Frederick C. Diotima’s Children 314 Bellamy, Elizabeth J. Translations of Power 297 Bell, Clive  321 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro  44 Belting, Hans  81, 83, 85 History and Presence  310, 338 The Invisible Masterpiece 80

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350 Index Benjamin, Walter  ix, 138–41, 148, 165–7, 210, 223, 228–9, 233–4, 236–9, 241–5, 255, 259, 269, 333, 339, 342 Illuminations  323, 343 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”  343 Origin of the German Trauerspiel (OGT) 232–4, 236–7, 239, 241–4, 324, 330, 337–8 “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”  235, 254, 338, 341 “Theses on the Philosophy of History”  323 Bennett, Jane  23–5 Vibrant Matter  22, 303 Bergeret, Pierre-Nolasque Honors Rendered to Raphael on his Deathbed  107, 108f Bermingham, Ann “The Origin of Painting and the Ends of Art” 318 Bernstein, J. M. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics 329 Bersani, Leo A Future for Astyanax 312 “Is the Rectum a Grave?”  312 Best, Stephen “Surface Reading”  312 Bethnal Green Museum  344 Betzer, Sarah  98, 317, 319 “Artist as Lover”  315 Bewick, Thomas  255 Memoir 273 Bibbiena, Cardinal  83, 97, 103 Bibbiena, Maria  97–8, 106 Bible  50, 55, 147, 168, 174, 178, 229, 309, 338 Matthew  55, 57–8, 309 New Testament  54, 58 Old Testament  133, 172, 188 Psalms 270 Revelation 137 Birch, Dinah Ruskin’s Myths 333 black arts  249, 261–5 Black Demeter  196, 198 Blake, William  145, 147–8, 171, 174–5, 176, 180–1, 185, 192, 209, 214, 229, 324, 331–2 Catalogue 179 Homer Invoking the Muse 118f “Jerusalem” 178 Laocoön  172, 173f Milton: A Poem  178, 179f “Portland Vase”  182f “Sculpture” 146f, 149f The Overthrow of Apollo and the Pagan Gods 177f The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan 175f

Blanc, Charles  330, 341 Blashfield, John Marriott Niobe and Her Daughter 217f body/bodies  xiv, 8–9, 24–5, 36–7, 41–2, 56–7, 59–62, 64, 82, 89–90, 98, 100, 106, 108, 110, 113, 118, 123–5, 133, 137, 145, 147, 152, 161, 165–6, 178, 194, 196, 203, 214, 216, 237, 242–3, 283, 285, 300, 313, 316 Boime, Albert Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century 324 Boitard, Louis Peter Apollo Belvedere 160f Boldrick, Stacy Iconoclasm 338 Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present 338 Bologna 44 Borani, Giambattista Raphael’s Skeleton at the Opening of his Tomb 109f Botticelli, Sandro  264, 269, 335, 344 Bourdieu, Pierre  14–15, 32, 39, 67–70, 91–4, 98–100, 114, 119, 125, 127–8, 299, 303, 321–2 Distinction  13, 67–8, 126, 299, 303, 313–14, 323 The Rules of Art  16, 126, 301–2, 322 brain  7, 102, 154, 299 Bredekamp, Horst Das Originale der Kopie 336 Briggs, Asa Victorian Things 299 Brilmyer, S. Pearl “Schopenhauer and British Literary Feminism” 319 Britain  36, 122, 136, 155, 249, 251, 281–2, 284, 289, 315, 326, 332, 345 British  xiii, 155, 186, 212, 251, 286 aesthetics 315 archeologist 38 art production  207, 307 authors/writers xiii collections  36, 341 culture  282, 324 history 242 ink 262 literature 309 success 122 travelers 155 British Museum  51f, 74f, 87f, 118f, 153f, 154f, 155, 186, 194, 195f, 196, 280, 282–7, 340 Brockedon, William Raphael and the Fornarina  72, 77f

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

Index  351 Brooks, Robin The Portland Vase 332 Brown, Bill  19, 27–8, 37 A Sense of Things 299 Other Things 302 “Things” 299 “Thing Theory”  302 Brown, David Alan “Leonardo and Raphael’s Transfiguration” 309 Browne, Thomas  288 Urn Burial 289 Browning, Robert  73 “Andrea del Sarto”  90, 93, 98, 101, 318 “Fra Lippo Lippi”  90, 318 Brubaker, Leslie Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present 338 Bryant, Jacob  172–5, 179, 181, 183–4, 208, 214, 334 A New System  171, 196, 197f, 332 Bryson, Norman  83 Tradition and Desire 317 Bulfinch, Thomas  220 Mythology 215 The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology 335 Bullard, Francis  138f Burckhardt, Jacob The Cicerone 322 Bürger, Peter Theory of the Avant-Garde 318 Burger, W. (Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré) Trésors d’Art exposés à Manchester en 1857 341 burin/graver  52, 266, 272 Burne-Jones, Edward  103 Bush, Douglas Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry  328, 332 Buzard, James The Beaten Track 335–6 Byron, George Gordon, Lord  159, 215, 328 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage  220, 335 Calhoun, Craig Bourdieu 323 Camuccini, Vincenzo Raphael’s Skeleton at the Opening of his Tomb 109f Canova, Antonio  96, 190 The Penitent Magdalene  95, 97f capitalism  33–4, 122–3 Carabelli, Giancarlo In the Image of Priapus 331

Carlyle, Thomas  92, 188 On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History 318 Carretto, Ilaria del  265 Carter, Howard  38 Carthage  2, 10 casts  85, 148, 152, 282, 288, 326, 340 catalogues  63, 132, 174, 179, 198, 342 cathedrals  61, 113, 249–53, 261, 264 Catholic/Catholicism  209, 228, 279, 292 causality  10–11, 14–16, 31, 302, 329 Caylus, Comte de Nouveaux sujets de peinture et de sculpture 166 Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises 166 Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée, et de l’Enéide de Virgile 166 ceramics  xiv, 18, 181–2, 184, 252 Chambers, William The Townley Collection 153f Charles I, King  242 Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Le Pausanias Français ou Description du Salon de 1806 321 Chayes, Irene H.  332 “Blake’s Ways with Art Sources II”  331 Cheeke, Stephen Transfiguration 309 Chevillot, Catherine “Nineteenth-Century Sculpteurs and Mouleurs” 326 Chigi, Agostino  75, 106, 239 Childers, Joseph W. Sublime Economy 300 children  13, 36, 46, 54, 57, 92, 123, 127, 146, 165, 167, 194, 213–15, 220 China  2, 148 Christianity  6, 59, 113, 162, 168, 171, 205, 208, 229–30, 233–4, 236–9, 241–3, 251, 277–80, 290, 292–3, 309–10, 338 Christians  103, 290 Christ/Jesus  53–9, 104, 106, 133, 136–7, 140, 178, 237–8, 275 Cimabue  71, 74f, 107f, 316 Clark, Kenneth Civilisation  3, 296 Clarke, Michael The Arrogant Connoisseur 331 classical achievement 176 antiques 154 antiquities  43, 154, 172, 181, 201 antiquity  26, 157, 167, 171–2, 183, 186–7, 191, 228, 231, 287–8, 307, 327 arena 329

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

352 Index classical (cont.) art/artworks  149, 158, 163, 165, 211, 213–14, 325, 329, 332 artists 89 authors 166 beauty 205 compendia 157–71 creativity 185 culture  168, 187, 192, 196, 207, 329 deities/divinities  168, 171–2, 186, 188, 190 form  168, 178, 187 knowledge 208 material  204, 243 model 168 myths 331 objects  180, 212, 224 painting 181 pantheon  189, 242 poetry/poets  168, 279 religion 187 sculpture  147, 190, 214, 288, 324, 326 sources  88, 166, 345 statues  95, 159, 193, 195 style  158, 168 taste 156 texts 174 things  180, 185, 219 thought  277, 326 traditions  192, 229, 280 treasures 154 work  152, 161, 164–5, 191, 193, 199, 204, 209, 233 clay  85, 131, 143, 150, 184, 317 Clay, Richard S. Iconoclasm 338 Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present 338 Clement VII, Pope (Giulio de’ Medici)  113 Clerbois, Sébastien  326 Revival and Invention 325 “Shifting Materials, Shifting Values?”  325, 329 Cnidus  155, 195 Cockerell, Charles Robert  216, 217f, 335 Codell, Julie  342 “The Aura of Mechanical Production”  341 Cohen, Deborah Household Gods 300 Cohen, William A. Embodied 299 coins  164, 168, 193, 196, 198–201, 334 Cole, Henry  256 “Modern Wood Engraving”  343 Cole, Michael “The Cult of Materials”  325 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  185–6

collections  5, 9, 26, 36, 40, 43–4, 49–50, 52–3, 63, 95, 152–7, 162–3, 165, 181, 220, 223–4, 228, 249, 251–2, 280–2, 285, 298, 300, 304, 326–9, 332, 341 Collingwood, R. G.  321 Collini, Stefan Matthew Arnold 295 Coltman, Viccy Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 324 Fabricating the Antique  324, 326, 328–9 Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio)  82f commodification  ix, 5, 26, 34 commodities  5, 25, 31–5, 151, 305, 325 compendia  4, 150, 152, 156–62, 164–7, 170–1, 178, 180, 245, 275, 299 concept of art  viii, 44, 308, 338 consciousness  2, 14, 205, 207, 218–19, 254, 307, see also self-consciousness Constantine  230, 337 contemplation  19, 28, 47, 49–50, 92, 97, 102, 124, 140–1, 257, 287, 289, 293, 322 continuity  ix, 28, 69, 130, 151, 170, 184, 204, 253, 279, 280, 293, 334 Cooke, Simon Illustrated Periodicals of the 1860s 340 Cook, E. T. The Works of John Ruskin 197f, 199f, 201f, 266f, 268f, 270f, 271f, 272f, 321–2, 327, 335, 340, 344 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see Shaftesbury copies  10, 43, 50, 62, 148, 152, 158, 163, 175–6, 182, 192, 215, 225, 257, 266, 284, 307, 310–11, 324 Corbett, David Peters “Aestheticism and Unmediation”  345 The World in Paint  9, 301, 306, 345 Corinthian maid  85–9, 86f, 317 Corinthians 236 Coste, Bénédicte Pater the Classicist 334 Costelloe, Timothy M. The British Aesthetic Tradition 315 Cottonian library  281 Council of Trent  59–60, 229, 236, 310 Counter-Reformation  229, 236, 242, 310, 338 Cowden Clarke, Charles  159 “Recollections of Keats”  328 Cowden Clarke, Mary “Recollections of Keats”  328 creative achievement  10, 40, 65, 129, 187, 275 act/activity  90, 239 failings 39 imagination  125, 222

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

Index  353 intimacy 91 power  103, 178, 291 work 164 creativity  xi, 10, 40, 42, 70, 90, 92, 110, 113, 121, 125, 147, 172, 175, 180–1, 183, 185, 187, 238, 284, 291 Creuzer, George Friedrich Symbolik und Mythologie 232 Cristaudo, Wayne “Theorising Ideas”  302 critics/criticism  x–xiii, xvii, 15, 23, 25, 28–9, 35, 40, 43, 58, 66, 79, 81, 98–9, 111, 128, 131–2, 140, 157, 163, 166, 172, 189, 191, 195, 201, 204–5, 208, 240, 244–5, 249–50, 252, 254, 260, 269–70, 277, 280–1, 284, 287–94, 310–11, 341 critique  13, 31, 66, 93, 98–9, 109, 126–7 Cross, John George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals 335 cross-hatching 268 Crystal Palace  253, 257 at Sydenham  282, 340 see also Great Exhibition Cullenberg, Stephen E. Sublime Economy 300 cults  171, 181, 189, 228, 240, 298, 313, 326, 338 culture of art  viii, x, xii, xvii, 4, 26, 33, 39, 41, 43–4, 46, 52–3, 115, 125, 148, 185, 228–9, 232, 292, 295, 297, 307, 319, 324 Cupid  183, 316 Cuzin, Jean-Pierre Raphaël et l’Art Français  308, 315 Cythera xiv, see also Aphrodite, Venus Daedalus 7 Damisch, Hubert “The Inventor of Painting”  318 Daniel, Glyn 150 Years of Archaeology 328 The Origins and Growth of Archaeology 328 Dante  71, 138, 277–9 Danto, Arthur  29 “The Artworld”  304 “The End of Art”  303 Darwin, Erasmus  183–4, 196 The Botanic Garden  181–2, 332 Darwinian models  7 Daumier, Honoré  261 Davis, Whitney  319–20 Queer Beauty 313 Dawkins, James Ruins of Palmyra 156 Décultot, Elisabeth Raffael als Paradigma 309

Dedalus, Stephen  17 death  24, 64, 70–3, 103–15, 120–39, 178, 181, 183–4, 205, 215, 230, 268–73, 291, 303, 310, 312, 316, 320, 321, 336, see also funeral/ funerary, grave deities  115, 147, 161–2, 164–5, 167–9, 171, 173, 176, 184, 188–90, 238, see also divinities, gods/goddesses Delacroix, Eugène  x Delaroche, Paul  90 Filippo Lippi et Lucrezia Buti 91f Delphi 178 del Sarto, Andrea  93, 98, 101, 224–5 Demeter  180, 188, 195f, 196–8, 334 demons  45, 189, 235, 336 demystification  10–11, 13–17, 25–6, 28, 31, 33, 42–3, 93, 114 de Quincey, Thomas  330 Derrida, Jacques  70, 99 “Economimesis”  93, 315 Memoirs of the Blind 318 The Truth in Painting  100, 320 desire  xi, xiv, xv, 2, 5, 7, 10, 14–16, 19, 22, 25, 36, 42–3, 45–6, 62, 64–9, 89–92, 95–6, 98–103, 106, 109–10, 113–15, 119–21, 123–4, 147, 164, 167, 171, 178–9, 184, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 199, 204, 206, 210, 213, 219, 226–7, 232, 237, 252, 255, 260, 262, 265, 280, 290–1, 301, 313, 315, 319–20, see also eros/ erotic, sex/sexuality destruction  37, 122, 146, 230, 251, 254, 283, 323, 337–8 Deucalion 174 Dewey, John  29 Art as Experience  28, 304 D’Hancarville, Baron  172, 181, 331–2 Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit et les Progrès des Arts de la Grèce 171 dialectic  20, 32, 110–11, 113, 196, 238, 242–3 Diana 215, see also Artemis Dibutade  85, 89, 317 Diderot, Denis  58, 310 Didi-Huberman, Georges  103, 236–7 “Artistic Survival”  339 Fra Angelico 338 La Peinture Incarnée  8, 300, 320 “The Supposition of the Aura”  338 “Viscosities and Survivals”  9, 300 Dido 2 Dionysian conditions  196, 238 Discobolus  283–6, 289, 345 disinterestedness  65, 67–9, 92–3, 96–7, 99–101, 109, 114, 120, 125, 127, 131, 314–15, 319, 321–2

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

354 Index display  4, 6, 26–8, 35, 37, 42–3, 53, 58, 60f, 70, 94–5, 107, 124, 152–3, 156, 162–3, 183, 193, 203, 207, 209, 211–13, 216, 224, 227–8, 230, 235–6, 249, 251–2, 255–6, 261, 266, 279–83, 287–9, 306, 326–7, 340, 342, 344 divine  53, 57, 61, 106, 110–12, 115–18, 136, 147, 151, 172, 174, 177–8, 183, 185–6, 188, 204, 230, 236, 239, 242, 275, 277–8, 283, 286 divinities  158, 167, 168, 172, 186, 188–90, 195, 238, 240–1, see also deities, gods/goddesses divinity  11, 55–6, 59–60, 62, 137, 140, 150, 152, 171, 189, 215, 237, 275, 278 Doctors of the Church  277 Douzinas, Costas “Prosopon and Antiprosopon”  298 Downes, Stephanie “A Feeling for Things, Past and Present”  298 Feeling Things 298 Downey, Erin “Sculpture in Print”  325 drawings  14, 37, 82, 86, 88–90, 103, 106, 115, 117, 135–6, 163, 263, 268, 316, 318, 344 Dresden  224, 226 Droth, Martina  326 Revival and Invention 325 “Shifting Materials, Shifting Values?”  325, 329 Duccio 316 Duncan, Ian “George Eliot’s Science Fiction”  334 Dunlop, Anne The Matter of Art 301 Duomo di Castelfranco Veneto  130f Dürer, Albrecht  131–2, 260 Dussler, Luitpold Raphael 309 Dyson, Anthony Pictures to Print 342 Eagleton, Terry Ideology of the Aesthetic 318 Eaves, Morris The Counter-Arts Conspiracy 331 William Blake’s Theory of Art 331 economic approach  8, 300 concerns 253 conditions  11, 33 exchange 34 inequality 36 interests  11, 67 models  7, 34 sense 302 sensibility 343 structure 25

values 305 violence 122 economics  35, 340, 343 Edel, Leon The Letters of Henry James 336 Edelman, Lee No Future 312 education  40, 148, 170f, 199, 280, 314, 320, 326 Egypt  174, 176, 184, 273 Egyptian antiquities/antiquity  38, 175 art/artworks 180 pieces 148 revival 214 Egyptians 183 Eisendrath, Rachel Poetry in a World of Things 296 Elgin, Lord  153 Elgin Marbles  154–6, 184, 186, 215, 327, 340 Eliot, George  25, 203, 208, 210, 213, 220–1, 223, 232, 335 “Folger notebook”  334 Middlemarch  76, 205, 209, 212, 226, 303, 316, 334 Eliot, T. S. For Lancelot Andrewes 339 “The Metaphysical Poets”  241–2, 339 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  58 Journals 309 emotion/emotions  xiii, 2, 3, 5, 22–4, 39, 41, 43, 62, 69, 85, 98, 123, 134, 207–8, 213, 216, 219, 221, 238, 241, 296, 298, 335 Engels, Friedrich The Communist Manifesto 298 The German Ideology 302 Engen, Rodney K. Victorian Engravings 342 England  35–6, 130–1, 158, 178, 187, 229, 256, 261, 263, 270, 273, 280, 342, 344 House of Commons Select Committees  306, 327 Museums Act  282 Parliamentary Commissions  282, 306 Reform Bill  36 English  17, 71, 76, 143, 190, 298, 338 critic 208 culture 158 death  122, 123, 132, 135 intellectual circles  281 language 21 letters  178, 191, 330 mob 265 poets  157, 178 Puritanism 207

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

Index  355 English Civil War  242 engravers  50, 52, 62–3, 172, 257, 263, 264, 266, 269–70, 272 engraving/engravings  xiii, 4, 45, 50, 52, 105, 118f, 136–7, 147, 150, 158–9, 168, 170f, 172, 180, 194, 249, 250f, 252, 253f, 255–7, 258f, 259f, 261, 263–6, 267f, 268–9, 271, 273, 308, 339, 341–3 Enlightenment  6, 18, 164, 180, 189, 191, 199, 329 eros/erotic  xiv, 42, 45, 66, 71–2, 80, 83–90, 95, 97–8, 100–3, 113, 117, 124, 128, 131, 160–1, 207–10, 317, 320, 328, see also desire, sex/ sexuality essays  xii, 18–19, 29–31, 36, 88, 94, 154, 164, 171, 191–3, 195–6, 212–13, 218, 220–1, 233, 241–2, 255, 261, 277, 284–7, 293–4, 298, 300, 304–5, 314–15, 326, 328, 330–1 Essick, Robert N.  173f Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works 332 The Visionary Hand 331 ethics/ethical  xvii, 6, 8, 25, 69, 115, 121, 126, 164–5, 167, 189, 198–202, 242, 319 Etruscan  148, 181 Ettlinger, Helen S.  59, 310 Raphael 309 Ettlinger, Leopold D.  59, 310 Raphael 309 Europe  58, 122, 148, 156, 181, 212, 229, 232, 236, 250, 279, 280, 324, 344 European antiquarians 157 art 157–8 Christianity 242 conflagrations 155 culture  70, 233, 298, 326 knowledge of art  264 reflections 6 religious violence  241 taste 223 Eurydice 103 Eusebius Pamphilus The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine 337 Evangelista, Stefano British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece 333 Pater the Classicist 333–5 “Vernon Lee in the Vatican”  333–4 Evans, Sir Arthur The Palace of Minos at Knossos 327 exhibitions  ix–x, 4–5, 27–8, 37, 39, 44, 71, 183, 249–57, 257, 259, 263, 266, 282, 287, 314, 326, 340–3

experience of art  9, 36, 38, 40, 158, 204, 254–5, 261, 283, 286 experience of form  203 Fagiolo, Marcello Raffaello e l’Europa  309, 315, 320 Fagles, Robert  2 Fairclough, H. R.  296 fakes 153 fantasies  5, 10, 14–15, 27, 38, 40, 42, 64–7, 70, 85–6, 88–90, 95, 97–8, 101, 108, 113, 119, 124, 130, 148, 151, 164, 185, 192, 204, 219–20, 228–9, 260, 285, 287, 289, 293, 301, 323 Farnell, Lewis R. An Oxonian Looks Back 333 Fellows, Jay Ruskin’s Maze  295, 343–4 The Failing Distance  295, 343 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique 312 feminine agency 90 pleasure 89 power 196 feminist art historians  66 criticism 66 revision 313 scholarship  8, 313 feminization of mass culture  312 Fenton, Roger Discobolus 285f Ferris, David Silent Urns 328 Ferry, David  297 Fielding, Nick  231f Field, Michael  320 fine arts  viii, x, xii, 35, 39, 41–2, 71, 110, 138, 150, 166, 183, 207, 218, 231, 333, 343–4 Finke, Ulrich “The Art-Treasures Exhibition”  340 Finley, Gerald Angel in the Sun 323 “Turner, the Apocalypse and History”  323 Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book  76, 78, 316 Fitton, J. Lesley The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age 327 Fitzgerald, Robert  2, 296–7 Flaxman, John  117, 146–8, 150–1, 156, 172, 187, 233 “Sculpture”  143, 145, 324 The Illiad of Homer 118f Flemish art  40, 158

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356 Index Fletcher, Pamela The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London 300 Flint, Kate The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature 299 Florence  11, 12f, 16, 44, 71, 84f, 96, 215–16, 218, 224–5, 280 Florentine schools  264, 269, 344 Fogg Museum (Harvard Art Museums)  71f, 117f formalism  43, 58, 68, 81, 92, 102, 125, 148, 188, 203, 212, 215, 218, 221, 310, 317, 321, 324 Fornarina  72–3, 76–7, 81–5, 87, 91, 93, 97, 106, 110, 114, 124, 316–17 Foucault, Michel  319–20 History of Sexuality, Volume 1 312 Fox, Celina Graphic Journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s  257, 342–3 Fragonard, Alexandre-Evariste Raphael Correcting the Pose of His Model 79f France  16, 40, 68, 72f, 91f, 120f, 136, 158, see also French Francis, Richard Negotiating Rapture 338 Frankfurt School  296 Fraser, Hilary The Victorians and Renaissance Italy 346 Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century 295 Fredeman, William E. “A Rossetti Gallery”  76f Frederiksen, Rune Plaster Casts 326 free will  319–20 Freedberg, S. J. Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence 309 Freedgood, Elaine  35 “Material” 299 The Ideas in Things  299, 306 freedom  20–1, 24, 46, 110–11, 114–15, 128, 187, 238, 240, 243, 315, 319 Freemasons 332 French  92, 95, 123, 129, 342 critics 128 intellectual context  8 military campaigns  123 museum-going public  13 painters  85, 90, 117 people 69 philosophical tradition  311 taste 158 see also France

French Revolution  80–1, 126, 233, 241 frescoes  13, 15, 93, 209–10, 224–5, 230, 275, 278–80, 291, 316, 337 Freud, Sigmund  64, 103, 119, 313 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 312 Civilization and its Discontents 314 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 312 Friedman, Dustin  319 Before Queer Theory 313 Fried, Michael  30, 34, 58, 305, 325 Absorption and Theatricality 310 “Art and Objecthood”  29, 304 Art and Objecthood 304 “Roger Fry’s Formalism”  310 “Three American Painters”  304 Frigo, Alberto “Baxandall and Gramsci”  301 Frommel, Christoph Luitpold Raffaello a Roma 309 Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise “ ‘La Fille de Dibutade,’ ou l’Inventrice Inventée” 318 Fry, Roger  58, 310, 321 Vision and Design 309 funeral/funerary  112, 288 ceremony 108 effigy/monuments  181, 265 practices 181 urns 289 see also death, grave Funke, Jana Sculpture, Sexuality and History  328, 334 Fuseli, Henry  86, 89–90, 172 “First Lecture: Ancient Art”  318 Lectures on Painting Delivered at the Royal Academy 318 Life and Writings 330 Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks  330, 339 Zwei Lesbierinne, mit erotischen Spielerein beschäftigt 88f Galerie Impériale et Royale de Florence 217f Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica  80f Gamboni, Dario The Destruction of Art 338 Garrigan, Kristine Ottesen “ ‘The Splendidest May number of the Graphic’ ”  343–4 “Bearding the Competition”  343 Gazda, Elaine K. “Beyond Copying”  336 The Ancient Art of Emulation  307, 326, 336 gaze  4, 9, 13, 17, 78, 97, 128–9, 140–1, 161, 207, 237, 284, 286, 300, 340, 343

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Index  357 Geary, Patrick J.  151 Furta Sacra 326 Gell, William Pompeiana 156 genius  vii, 62, 64–5, 70, 81, 92, 128, 145, 180, 190, 193, 224–6, 259, 280, 291–3, 315, 332 genre  xi, 66, 70–2, 80, 85, 92, 133, 159, 308, 315, 341 Gent, Lucy Albion’s Classicism 324 German  159, 223, 298 blue 13 community 132 drama  140, 228, 232–3, 244, 324 literary imagination  315 painter 205 philosophy  192, 303 romantic writers  326 sculpture 325 Germany 328 Geuss, Raymond  322 The Idea of a Critical Theory 296 Ghirardo, Diane Oppositions 340 Ghirlandaio, Domenico The Adoration of the Magi  11, 12f Gibbon, Edward  180 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 337 Ginsberg, Allen  22–3 “A Supermarket in California”  303 Collected Poems 1947–1997 303 Giorgione  129, 131 Madonna and Child between St. Francis and St. Nicasius  129, 130f Giotto  71, 75f, 224–5 God  xiv, 56–7, 59, 123, 137, 180, 186, 188, 236–7, 243, 275, 279 gods/goddesses  xiii, 45, 50, 103, 115–16, 120, 147, 156, 158, 164–5, 167–8, 172, 175–6, 178, 180, 187, 189–91, 198, 215, 234–5, 238–9, 283, 286, 290, 336, see also deities, divinities Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  58, 225–6 Italian Journey 310 Goffman, Erving  32 Goldhill, Simon “On Knowingness”  320 “See Josephus”  320 Goldstein, Amanda Jo Sweet Science 299 Goldstone, Andrew Fictions of Autonomy 318 Görres, Joseph  232 Goslee, Nancy Moore “From Marble to Living Form”  331 Uriel’s Eye 330

Gothic  266, 268 images 264 workmanship 186 works of art  180, 286 see also medieval, Middle Ages Goya, Francisco  x Gramsci, Antonio  299 grave  24, 45, 113, 122, 194, 249, 264–5, 269, 273–4, 290, see also death, funeral/funerary Gray, Basil The English Print 342 Gray, Gilbert  273 Great Exhibition  256–7, 259, 282, 340, 342, see also Crystal Palace Grecian art/artworks 180 genius 332 grandeur 154 Urn  21, 184 see also Hellenic Grecians 174 Greece  27, 147, 161, 176, 183–5, 189, 191, 194, 216, 225–6, 303, 336 Greek art  149, 187, 194, 196, 198–200, 224–6, 333, 335 artists  89, 176, 201 coin 199 creativity 284 culture  40, 286–7, 333 deities/divinities/gods/goddesses  156, 161, 190–1, 238 experience 304 material 175 models 178 mythology/myths  159, 196, 279 origins 332 painting  88–9, 117 poet 115 polychromy 345 productions 148 question 132 religion  187, 196, 241 sculpture  147, 176, 187–8, 191, 193, 198, 201, 226, 287, 336, 345 statues  176, 286 studies 345 style 187 texts 172 tragedy  192, 238 vase  117, 181 works  150, 165, 195, 199–201, 225–6 see also Hellenic Greeks  95, 122, 147, 152, 164–5, 174, 176, 188, 191–2, 198, 235, 240, 250, 303, 336 Gregory XVI, Pope  108

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358 Index Griener, Pascal  28, 44, 304 “Plaster ‘versus’ Marble”  326 Pour une Histoire du Regard  9, 301, 340, 343 Griffiths, Antony Prints and Printmaking 308 Grove, Jen Sculpture, Sexuality and History  328, 334 Guerzoni, Guido  35 Apollo and Vulcan  300, 305 Guyer, Paul  298 Kant and the Claims of Taste 314 Values of Beauty 315 Haber, Graham  104f Hack, Daniel Material Interests of the Victorian Novel 299 Hagstrum, Jean  157–8 The Sister Arts  328, 333 Halicarnassus 155 Hall, Carol Louise Blake and Fuseli 330 Hall, Marcia B. The Cambridge Companion to Raphael 309 Hall of Constantine  230 Halsey, Frederic R. Raphael Morghen’s Engraved Works 308 Hamilton, George The English School  72, 77f, 316 Hamilton, Sir William  181–2 Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines, tirées du Cabinet de M. Hamilton 332 Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases mostly of Pure Greek Workmanship 332 Hampton Court  256 Han-Pile, Béatrice “Early Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant”  302 Hansen, Maria Fabricius The Eloquence of Appropriation 326 happiness  64, 92, 95–6, 101, 188 Harley Collection  281 Harriet, Fulchran-Jean  103 The Death of Raphael 104f Harrison, John Smith “Pater, Heine, and the Old Gods of Greece”  330 Hartley, Lucy Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain  295, 312 Harvard Art Museums  71f, 117f Haskell, Francis  70, 72, 79, 81, 83, 85, 103 Past and Present in Art and Taste 331 Rediscoveries in Art  341, 344 Taste and the Antique  324, 335, 345 “The Baron d’Hancarville”  331 “The Old Masters in Nineteenth-Century French Painting”  315

Haskins, Katherine The Art Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880  308, 311, 339–40, 344 Hausenstein, Wilhelm  140 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  50 Hayman, John “Towards the Labyrinth”  344 Hazlitt, William  154 Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy 334 “On the Elgin Marbles”  327 Hebrew texts  233 Hegel, Georg W. F.  16, 20–1, 23, 70, 110–11, 114, 192, 205–6, 214, 296, 303, 333 Aesthetics  19, 92–3, 191, 302, 315, 319 Phenomenology of Spirit 191 Heideggerian  21, 111 Heidegger, Martin  19–20, 27 Nietzsche, Volumes One and Two  302, 319 “The Origin of the Work of Art”  99, 303–4 “The Thing”  18, 302 Heine, Heinrich  167 “Les Dieux en Exil,”  330 Helfand, Michael S. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks 303 Hellenic  191–2, 280, see also Grecian Helmreich, Anne The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London: 1850–1939 300 Helsinger, Elizabeth K.  132–3 Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder  323, 341 Heracles and the Nemean Lion 201f Hercules  174, 176, 180, 201 Hercules of Camarina 199f, 200 Herder, Johann Gottfried von  225–6 hermetic traditions  332 heroes  x, 92, 158, 169f, 170f, 174, 176, 201, 318, 330 Herrmann, Frank The English as Collectors 341 Hesiod  114, 116f, 117f, 118, 119f The Homeric Hymns and Homerica 321 Theogony 115 Heß, Gilbert Raffael als Paradigma 309 Hewison, Robert New Approaches to Ruskin 344 hierarchies of taste  30, 32, 68–9, 158, 278, 288, 292 hieroglyphics 182–4 Hindu antiquity/artworks  175, 180 Hirschman, Albert O. The Interests and the Passions 312 historicism  x, 79, 187–9, 236, 292

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Index  359 history of art, see art history Hoeniger, Cathleen The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings 309 Hofmann, Werner Henry Fuseli, 1741–1825 318 Holbein, Hans  273 The Dance of Death  268–9, 270f, 271f “The Last Furrow”  271f “The Two Preachers”  270f Holloway, Sally “A Feeling for Things, Past and Present”  298 Feeling Things 298 Holofernes 133 Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore The Art of All Nations 341 The Triumph of Art for the Public 344 Hom, Stephanie Malia The Beautiful Country 336 Homer  117, 118f, 160, 176, 178, 185, 187, 278 Hönes, Hans Christian “Allegory, Ornament, and Prehistory’s ‘Secret Influence’ ”  331 Honneth, Axel Reification 296 Hopkins, David The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 324 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  19 Horkheimer, Max Dialectic of Enlightenment 296 Hugo, Victor  127 humanism  192, 234, 244 humanity as determined by aesthetic judgments  68, 100 in relation to stuff  305 in relation to things  22–4 Hunnisett, Basil Steel-Engraved Book Illustration in England 342 Hunt, Leigh  159–62 London Journal 316 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries 328 “Recollections of the Author’s Life”  328 “The Fornarina to Raphael”  77 Huntington Art Collections  177f Hutchison, Sidney C. The History of the Royal Academy, 1768–1986 324 Hutton, C. A. Greek Terracotta Statuettes 327 Huyssen, Andreas After the Great Divide  296, 312–13 “Mass Culture as Woman”  313

Icarus 7 iconoclasm/iconoclastic  233, 236–7, 338, see also anti-iconoclasm idealism  6, 16, 313 ideology  viii, 11, 15, 44, 65, 305, 325, 329 idols  59, 172, 178, 180, 229–30, 236, 241, 251, 278, 289, 301 illustrations  44, 52, 62, 111, 117, 145, 147–9, 157, 159–60, 162–3, 166, 168, 178, 181, 194, 206, 215, 219–20, 257, 266, 275, 281, 331, 343, see also images illustrators  73, 168, 263–4 images in allegory  232 in reproduction  50, 145–9, 151, 156, 158, 161–5, 168–73, 176–80, 182, 194, 196, 198, 309 in the Aeneid  3, 297 of artists  70, 72, 79–90, 92–3, 97, 102–8, 109, 112, 115–19, 309–10, 322, 329, 338–9, 343 of sacred subjects  59–60, 239, 278–80, 286, 310 of things  22 proliferation of  xiii 17, 52, 157–8, 249–57, 260–9, 283 see also illustrations imagination  16–17, 20, 31, 42–5, 53, 67, 70, 89–90, 98, 102, 109, 111, 115, 125, 158, 161, 163, 175, 178, 185, 194, 198, 204, 211, 216, 222, 227, 239–40, 282, 287, 292, 315, 342, 345 imitation  164, 187, 240, 330, 339 incarnation  6–7, 45, 236–7, 239, 336 India 148 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique  81, 84–6, 97–8, 101, 103, 124, 316–17 Francis I Receives the Last Breaths of Leonardo da Vinci 73f Raphael and the Fornarina  70, 71f, 80, 82f, 83f, 110, 315 The Betrothal of Raphael and the Niece of Cardinal Bibbiena 78f Innocent  XI, Pope 60 inspiration and death  115, 120, 131, 135 and erotic desire  66, 75–6, 159 and individual advancement  102 Blake on  172–3, 175–6, 180 conflicting sources of  275–8, 291 embarrassing without being scandalous  65 feminine in representations of  89–90 from alternative traditions  149, 176 from mediated forms of antiquity  180, 180 outside of the artist’s control  79 proletarian faith in the inspiration of poets  115 sexualized  83–90, 97, 104, 115–18

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360 Index institutions  viii–x, xii–xiii, xix, 4–5, 9, 27–8, 31–2, 37, 41, 43–4, 49, 52, 60, 155, 203, 210, 213, 216, 222, 224, 228, 249, 251, 277, 280–3, 286, 288, 293, 297, 307, 313–14, 322, 340, 344 intellectuals/intellectualism  16, 128 interest 67 and disinterestedness in arguments  67, 92, 96 and formalism  92 and the subject in Hegel  20 apparently self-evident nature of  42, 64–6 as loss of freedom  67 class  31, 40, 68, 126 economic 11 erotic 90 in Derrida  93, 99 in Kant  69, 93, 95 in Nietzsche  95–6, 102 material  90, 103, 125 of sex  100, 102 predominance of self-interest in contemporary explanatory models  7 Irwin, David G. English Neoclassical Art 332 Isaiah 55 Israel Museum (Jerusalem)  139f Italian artists 335 economy 35 light 207 masterpiece 50 painters  106, 107f painting  81, 226 Renaissance 224–5 ruin 249 themes 269 work 269 Italy  40, 95, 96f, 97f, 107f, 112, 123, 130f, 182, 223–4, 231f, 238, 276f, 336 Izenour, Steven Learning from Las Vegas 307 Jack, Ian Keats and the Mirror of Art 329 Jager, Colin Unquiet Things 299 James, Alice  222 James, Henry  222, 224, 227, 336 Letters 191 Roderick Hudson  190–1, 204–5, 333 Jameson, Anna  104, 108, 111, 257 Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters 106, 107f, 320 “The Entombment—Raphael”  107f

Jameson, Fredric Antinomies of Realism 296 The Political Unconscious 312 Jaritz, Gerhard Emotions and Material Culture 298 Jay, Martin  296 Songs of Experience 297 Jenkins, Ian Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800–1939  328, 345 “James Stephanoff and the British Museum” 327 Jenkyns, Richard Dignity and Decadence  328, 333 “George Eliot and the Greeks”  334 “The Consequences of Sculpture”  328 “The Idea of Sculpture”  328 The Victorians and Ancient Greece  328, 334 Jerrold, Blanchard How to See the Art-Treasures Exhibition341 Jesus, see Christ/Jesus Jex-Blake, Katharine The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art 317 John, Juliet The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture 299 Johnson, Christopher D. “Configuring the Baroque”  337 Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images  337, 339 Johnson, Jeffrey Negating the Image 338 Johnson, W. R. Darkness Visible 297 Jones, Roger Raphael 309 Joseph 105f, 275 Joyce, James Ulysses 302 Judaism 237 Judd, Donald  30, 304 “Specific Objects”  29, 305 Judeo-Christian tradition  171 judgment  vii, 8, 13, 39–40, 69, 100, 126, 133, 141, 202, 213, 222, 278, 314, 323 Judith 133 Juno  10, 183, 190, 297 Jupiter  183, 204, see also Zeus Kantian aesthetics  101, 119, 313 in Adorno  100 in Bourdieu  67–70, 91–4, 98–100, 114

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Index  361 in Derrida  93, 100 in Nietzsche  94–8, 100–2, 109, 119 in Rancière  114–15, 125–8 in Schopenhauer  94, 101–2, 119, 321 Kant, Immanuel  6, 21, 67, 92–3, 95–6, 98–9, 102, 302–3, 319, 321, 339 Critique of Judgment  69, 94, 100, 126, 314, 323 Critique of Pure Reason 298 “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”  314 neo-Kantian though in Benjamin  243 Political Writings 314 post-Kantian concepts of perception in Heidegger  18, 302 Keats, John  21, 154, 160–2, 192, 194, 212, 232, 329 Endymion 253 “I stood tip-toe upon a little hill”  159, 185, 327 “Ode on a Grecian Urn”  184, 303, 327 “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”  327 “Sleep and Poetry”  185, 327 Kekulé, Reinhard  223, 336 Kellein, Thomas Donald Judd 305 Kircher, Athanasius  331 Klamer, Arjo The Value of Culture 300 Klee, Paul  138–41 Angelus Novus 139f, 139–41 The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1916  138, 323 Kleinbub, Christian K. “Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ as Visio-Devotional Program”  309 Vision and the Visionary in Raphael 309 Knaap, Anna C. “Sculpture in Pieces”  337 Knight, Richard Payne  172, 331 Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus 171 Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology 171 “Preliminary Dissertation on the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Antient Sculpture”  334 knowingness  100, 320 Koerner, Joseph “The Icon as Iconoclash”  338 Krauss, Rosalind E. “Retaining the Original? The State of the Question” 307 Some Passages in Modern Sculpture 304 The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths 307

Kristeller, Paul “The Modern System of the Arts”  297 Kugler, Franz  111 Handbook of the History of Painting  110, 321 Kurnick, David “An Erotics of Detachment”  334 Lamb, Jonathan The Things Things Say 299 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (L.E.L.)  76, 84–5, 91 “Raphael’s Death-Bed”  321 landscape  x, 44, 129, 131–5, 186, 189 Lange, Frederick Albert A History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance 298 Laocoön  40, 147, 156, 162, 165–7, 172, 176, 178–9, 201, 209, 215, 218, 229, 330, 336 lapis lazuli  13, 15, 17, 25 Larrabee, Stephen Addison English Bards and Grecian Marbles 328 Lathers, Marie  317, 321 Bodies of Art 316 “Chi era la Fornarina?”  316 Latin  2, 143, 162, 178 Latour, Bruno  15, 31–3 “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik”  2, 7, 296 Iconoclash 338 Making Things Public 296 Reassembling the Social  302, 305 Laureti, Tommaso  337 Triumph of the Cross  230, 231f, 233, 240–1 Law, John Easton Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance 346 Law, Jules The Social Life of Fluids 299 Lawrence, Jeffrey Anxieties of Experience 297 Layard, Austen Henry  155 Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon 282 Nineveh and its Remains  282, 327 Leahy, Helen Rees Museum Bodies 306 lectures  xii, 13, 15, 44, 88–9, 92, 136, 193, 197f, 198, 199f, 201, 249, 252–4, 262, 264–5, 267, 269, 272–4, 291–2, 294, 318, 330, 333, 344 Lee, Vernon  xi, 203, 211, 213–16, 218, 221, 223, 232, 335 “Anthropomorphic Aesthetics”  219 Belcaro 334 “The Child in the Vatican”  212, 220, 226, 334 legends  41, 45, 52–4, 62, 82–3, 88–90, 103–4, 106, 110, 113, 117, 168, 174, 196

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362 Index Leighton, Frederic  71 Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna is Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence 74f Lempriere, John Bibliotheca Classica  159, 329 Leonardo da Vinci  x, 191, 195–6 Mona Lisa  40, 191 Saint John the Baptist 40 Lerner, Ben  39 Leaving the Atocha Station  38, 306 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  159, 162–3, 167, 172–3, 192, 205–6, 218, 330 Laocoön  166, 329 Leto 215 Levant 13–14 Levin, Harry The Broken Column 328 Levitine, George “Addenda to Robert Rosenblum’s ‘The Origin of Painting’ ”  317 Lippi, Fra Lippo  90 LiPuma, Edward Bourdieu 323 “Culture and the Concepts of Culture in a Theory of Practice”  323 literature  xii–xiv, 2, 21, 27, 35, 39, 41, 71, 126, 163, 166–7, 183, 189, 218–20, 240, 245, 252, 299, 309, 323, 326–7, 339 lived experience  26, 29, 68, 129, 260, 282, 301, 321 Loesberg, Jonathan “The Long Happy Death of Art”  303 A Return to Aesthetics  303, 318 Loh, Maria H.  321 Still Lives 316 Louis, François Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800  300, 308 Louis, Margot K. “Gods and Mysteries”  331 Louvre  x, xiv, 79f, 82, 136, 156, 194, 252, 280, 287, 301, 316, see also Musée Napoléon Love, Heather “Close But Not Deep”  312 Feeling Backward  312, 323 Lowenstam, Steven “The Pictures on Juno’s Temple in the ‘Aeneid’ ”  297 Lucretius 7 Lukács, György  299 History and Class Consciousness 296 Lulworth Castle  136, 323 Luther, Martin  59, 229, 238–9, 293–4

Mack, Peter Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words 301 MacLeod, Catriona Fugitive Objects  315, 325 Macsotay, Tomas “Baron D’Hancarville’s ‘Recherches’ on the Evolution of Sculpture”  331 Madonna, Maria Luisa Raffaello e l’Europa  309, 315, 320 Magi  11, 12f, 14, 302 magic  9, 261, 287, 338 Maginnis, Hayden B. J. Painting in the Age of Giotto 316 Mainardi, Patricia  263 Another World  310, 342–3 Malraux, André  157 Mandelbaum, Allen  320 The Aeneid of Virgil 297 Mant, Richard The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton 330 Marchand, Eckart Plaster Casts 326 Marchand, Suzanne L. Down from Olympus 328 Marcus, Sharon “Surface Reading”  312 Maré, Eric de The Victorian Woodblock Illustrators 342 Martindale, Charles Pater the Classicist  333–4, 345 The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature 324 Marxism  32, 301 Marx, Karl  5, 15, 17, 33, 299 The Communist Manifesto 298 The German Ideology  16, 302 Mary 105f, 275 Masaccio 224–5 masculine fantasies  65, 89–90, 317 sexuality 313 masochism/sadomasochism  90, 103, 318–20 masterpiece  5, 38, 40, 45, 50, 62, 73, 80, 82, 112, 136, 140, 155, 157–8, 203, 207, 223–6, 251, 282, 284, 320 materialism  ix, 5–9, 24, 45, 181 materialist approaches  8, 15 demystificatory  11, 32 desire 7 explanations 34 thought  14, 24 materialists  7, 25, 65, 140, 302

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Index  363 materiality  ix, 7, 23, 35, 56, 62, 66, 113, 165, 216, 240, 242–3, 298, 306, 325, 345 materials  xi, 3, 8, 10–11, 29–30, 38, 41, 89, 152, 163, 166, 173, 290, 304–5, 325, 329 Mattusch, Carol “The Privilege of Bronze”  325 Maxwell, Catherine Vernon Lee 334 Mazzi, Maria Cecilia “Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres”  315 McClanan, Anne Negating the Image 338 McClellan, Andrew  314 Art and its Publics 301 Inventing the Louvre 327 McKeon, Michael Secret History of Domesticity 315 media/medium  ix, 4, 62, 109, 147, 150, 166–7, 206, 208–9, 213, 218, 233, 261, 265, 273, 282, 284, 286, 297, 301, 325, 326, 342 mediation  ix, 4–5, 9–10, 22, 43, 52–4, 63, 145, 147–50, 152, 193, 204, 208, 219–20, 249, 294, 301, 303, 320, 325, 327, 329, 338 Medici Venus (Venus de’ Medici)  95, 96f, 156, 159, 176 medieval art 186 Britain 282 Christianity 234 clerics 235 Rome 224–5 sources 233 theology 59 see also Gothic, Middle Ages Mediterranean  223, 229 Melius, Jeremy “Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood” 309 “Ruskin’s Copies”  344 memory  2, 49, 89, 118, 129, 137, 145, 151, 208, 219, 230, 232–3, 236–7, 253, 265, 269, 329 Ménageot, François-Guillaume Death of Leonardo da Vinci  70, 72f Mengs, Raphael  225 mercantile exchange  11, 33 Mesopotamia 282 Messiah  14, 234, 238 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)  84f, 135f, 317, 344 Mexico 282 Michaelis, Adolf A Century of Archeological Discoveries 327–8 Ancient Marbles in Great Britain 324

Michelangelo  x, 54, 82–4, 97, 101, 107, 180, 224–5, 275 Midas 124 Middle Ages  168, 169, 241, 250, see also Gothic, Medieval Miller, Andrew H. Novels Behind Glass 299 Miller, Daniel  305 Stuff 298 Miller, Edward That Noble Cabinet 327 Miller, Peter N.  300 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 308 Momigliano and Antiquarianism 308 Mill, John Stuart Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism 333 Three Essays on Religion 333 Milton, John  178, 180 “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”  176, 177f, 332 Minimalism  29–30, 325 Mitchell, W. J. T.  7, 26–7 What Do Pictures Want? 299 modernist dogma 307 painting 30 sensibility 141 modernity  6–7, 18, 22, 41, 81, 114, 131–2, 148, 186, 188, 191–2, 205, 209, 221, 228, 235, 249, 254–5, 260–1, 263–5, 269, 272, 277, 280, 286, 290, 293, 301, 311 Molfino, Alessandra Mottola Il Libro dei Musei 327 Momigliano, Arnaldo “Ancient History and the Antiquarian”  308 money  xiii, 1, 11, 14–15, 42, 201, 259, 302 Montfaucon, Bernard de  163, 181 L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures  44, 157, 162, 308 monuments  44, 164, 175, 181, 194, 256, 340 moral catastrophe 251 censure 119 challenges 251 claim 68 excellence 68 failure 186 legibility 140 lessons 166 phenomenology 131 project 269 question 69 rehabilitation 257 tendency 273 value 181

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364 Index moralists  119, 131 Moreau, Gustave  115, 118 Head of Orpheus 120f Hesiod and the Muse 117f, 119f Hesiod and the Muses 116f Morgan, Benjamin The Outward Mind 299 Morghen, Raphael Sanzio  53, 308 Transfiguration 51f Morris, David Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphael and the Image Multiplied 308 Morris, Robert  304 Morris, William  128, 323 mortal conditions 178 disease 127 experience 56 frame xv life 182 remains 108 things 2–3 mortality  2, 100, 103, 131, 182, 272 Moses  55, 57, 168, 170–2, 204 Muecke, Frances “Taught by Love”  318 Müller, Ottfried  214 Murray, John  107f, 159, 320, 322, 327–8, 344 Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy  112, 321 Musée de Cluny (Paris)  344 Musée de l’Hotel de Ville (Amboise)  72f Musée d’Orsay (Paris)  120f musée imaginaire  157, 163 Musée Magnin (Dijon)  81f Musée Moreau (Paris)  116f Musée Napoléon (Paris)  80–1, 136, 156, see also Louvre Musei di Strada Nuova (Genoa)  97f Museo Chiaramonti (Vatican)  211f Museo Pio-Clementino (Vatican)  209, 280 muses  45, 115, 116f, 117f, 118f, 119f, 275, 278–9, 290–1, 294 museum as emblem  288 museum as medium  283 Museum of Economic Geology (London)  344 Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)  138f Museum of Manufactures (London)  344 Museum of Science and Art (Dublin)  344 Museums Act (England)  282 music  178, 180, 192, 215–16, 220, 294, 314 Myers, Fred R. The Empire of Things 305 Myron  286, 287, 345

mysteries  7, 11, 26, 34, 40, 42, 45, 59, 89, 132, 135–6, 159, 164, 174, 180–1, 183, 195–6, 198, 204, 236, 331 mystic/mystical 140 accounts of the relics of antiquity  181 depth of the Middle Ages, in Pater  192 knowledge kept alive in art  183 urn 182 mystification  11, 15–16, 28, 40, 42, 65, 93, 114, 119, 125 myths/mythology  159, 164, 169, 171, 174–6, 181, 183, 187, 190, 195–6, 197f, 198, 208, 215, 232, 279, 307, 316, 328–9, 331–2, 334, 337 Nagel, Alexander Anachronic Renaissance  300, 337 “Plural Temporality”  337 “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”  300, 307, 336–7 Nägele, Rainer Theater, Theory, Speculation 337 Napoleon  107, 122–3, 209 Napoleonic struggle  122–3, 155 Narbonne  54, 113 Narbonne, Bishop of  54 National Gallery (London)  36–7, 74f, 257, 281–2, 306, 345 National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa)  119f National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh)  344 National Gallery (Washington)  86f National Portrait Gallery (London)  344 natural history  256, 281–2, 317 Natural History Museum (London)  282, 344 Nead, Lynda  298 The Female Nude 300 necromancy  187, 261 Nehamas, Alexander  120, 321 Only a Promise of Happiness  311, 319 neoclassicism  85, 156, 161, 164, 174, 188, 190, 240 Neufeldt, Victor A. George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Notebooks 334 New York Public Library  179f Newman, Jane O.  338 Benjamin’s Library  324, 337 Newton, Charles Thomas  155, 186, 195–6, 198 History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus 327 Ngai, Sianne Our Aesthetic Categories 312 Nichols, Kate “Art and Commodity”  340 Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace 340 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg  223–4, 336

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Index  365 Nietzsche, Friedrich  66, 83, 95–102, 109, 119, 140, 198, 238, 242 On the Genealogy of Morality  94, 319 The Birth of Tragedy  47, 124, 322 Niobe  215–16, 217f, 218f, 219–20, 334 Niobides 219 Noah  168, 170 Nochlin, Linda Women, Art, and Power, and Other Essays 313 non-fiction prose  xi–xii, 295 nostalgia  50, 80, 150, 155, 185, 229, 233, 238, 287, 289, 303, 311 novels  xi, 31, 35, 38, 206, 208–9, 226, 289–90, 292 nymphs  156, 210, 317 Oberhuber, Konrad Raphael 309 objecthood  26–7, 29–30, 34, 304, 325 Old Masters  4, 40, 52, 66, 70–1, 73, 79–81, 92–3, 96–7, 109–10, 118, 120, 134, 315–16, 346 Onori, Lorenza Mochi La Fornarina di Raffaello 316 originality  viii–ix, 43, 152, 157, 176, 203, 251, 307, 326 origin of painting  85, 88–91, 117, 317–18 Orlando, Francesco Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination 303 Orpheus  103, 114, 118, 120f Ospedale degli Innocenti (Florence)  11, 12f Østermark-Johansen, Lene  193 Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance 346 Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture  333, 345 Other  26, 313 Ovid  103, 176, 178, 215 Metamorphoses  320, 335 Oxford University Museum of Natural History  281, 344 Paccoud, Stéphane L’Invention du Passé 320 pagan antiquity  162, 242 art 293 city 290 deities/divinities/gods  164, 167–8, 171, 176, 177f, 178, 234, 278 mysteries 183 philosophy 292 religion  162, 186, 238, 242, 251 temples  205, 230 world  191, 289

paganism  190, 233, 236–7, 278, 289, 331, 337 Paice, Rosamund A. “Encyclopædic Resistance”  324, 331 Palazzo Barberini  76, 80 Paley, Morton D. The Traveler in the Evening 331 Panofsky, Erwin  168 Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art 331 Pantheon  106, 108 paranoid reading  66, 312 Paris  136, 224, 226, 280 Parthenon  153–4, 225 Passavant, Johann David Rafael von Urbino 104 passions  45, 56, 62, 64, 71, 75, 79, 82–6, 98, 101–3, 109–11, 113–14, 121, 125, 127, 129, 159, 161, 165, 167, 189, 199, 204, 210, 214, 227, 238, 281 Patent Vertical Printing Machine  257, 259f Pater, Walter  xi, 4, 43, 73, 155, 167, 191–2, 195–6, 198–9, 201, 204, 212–15, 219, 229, 275, 277–81, 285, 290–2, 294 “Apollo in Piccardy”  330 Appreciations, With an Essay on “Style” 288, 323, 345 “Diaphaneité”  293, 337, 346 Greek Studies  194, 286–7, 345 Imaginary Portraits 205 Marius the Epicurean  205, 289, 345 Miscellaneous Studies  330, 337, 345–6 “Raphael”  337, 345 “The Age of Athletic Prizemen”  283–4 “The Age of Graven Images”  287 “The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture”  193, 287 The Renaissance  24, 127–8, 131, 194, 205, 282, 297, 323, 333–4, 344–5 “Winckelmann”  194, 205 pathetic fallacy  134, 186–7, 189 Paul, Saint  236, 242 Pausanias  196, 333 Peel, Sir Robert  36, 306 Penny, Nicholas Raphael 309 Taste and the Antique  324, 335, 345 The Arrogant Connoisseur 331 perception  6, 11, 13, 17–19, 26, 30–1, 45, 56, 59, 101, 210, 215, 218, 227, 241, 260, 283 Pereisc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de  331 perfection  81, 125, 150, 152, 192–3, 205–6, 219, 224, 226, 228, 261, 266, 286, 289, 291, 344 Pergam, Elizabeth A. The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857  340, 342

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366 Index Perini, Giovanna “Raphael’s European Fame in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”  309 period eye  13, 30, 301, see also Baxandall periodicals  255, 263, 273, 340 Blackwoods 330 Cornhill Magazine 257 Die Illustrierte Zeitung 257 Fortnightly Review  291, 345 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 330 Harper’s Weekly 257 Illustrated London News 250f, 253f, 257, 259f, 343 Intentions 303 L’Illustration 257 London and Westminster Review 343 London Journal 77 London Magazine 327 Magazine of Art 261 Punch  257, 267f The Examiner 327 The New Yorker  37, 306 The Nineteenth Century 303 The Penny Magazine  104, 105f, 113, 256f, 257, 258f, 332, 343 Westminster Review 323 Persephone 196 Persian antiquities  148, 175 Peter, Saint  55, 59 Petit Palais (Paris)  73f Phidias  190, 215 Philip, John Birnie  318 photography/photographs  25, 42, 199, 255, 261–2, 342 daguerreotype 343 Picasso, Pablo  34, 83, 85–6, 90, 97, 101, 317 Raphaël et la Fornarina X 84f Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England from Drawings Made Principally by J. M. W. Turner 323 Piombo, Sebastiano del The Raising of Lazarus 54–5 Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford)  281, 344 Plato  178, 275, 278 Pliny the Elder  85 Natural History 317 Plotz, John “Materiality in Theory”  299 poems/poetry  x–xii, xiv, 3, 22–3, 25, 66, 73, 76–7, 90–1, 101, 109, 128, 154, 159, 161, 167–8, 178, 180, 182–6, 192, 242, 275, 289, 292, 320–1, 327, 329, 332, 342 poets  xii, 23, 38, 103, 115, 117–18, 127, 157–9, 163–4, 167, 172, 178–9, 181, 184–6, 188, 238, 242–3, 275, 279, 311, 329, 331, 339, 343

Pollock, Griselda Vision and Difference 313 Pomey, François-Antoine  168 Pantheum mythicum seu fabulosa deorum historia  158, 331 see also Tooke Pop, Andrei Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli 318 Pope-Hennessy, John Raphael 309 Portland, Duchess of  182 Portland Vase  181, 182f, 184 Poseidon 188 Posner, Kathleen W. G. Leonardo and Central Italian Art 309 postmodernism 307 Postone, Moishe Bourdieu 323 Potter, Mary Knight “Galleria delle Statue”  212f “Museo Chiaramonti”  211f The Art of the Vatican 211f, 217f Potts, Alex  284 Flesh and the Ideal  339, 345 “Specific Objects”  304 The Sculptural Imagination  304, 325 Poussin, Nicolas  50 Prado Museum (Madrid)  38 Pratt, John Clark George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Notebooks 334 Praxiteles  190, 195 Pre-Raphaelites  81, 209, 292, 346 Prettejohn, Elizabeth  313, 325 Beauty and Art, 1750–2000  311, 317 Modern Painters, Old Masters  296, 307, 312, 315 “Pater on Sculpture”  333, 345 Pater the Classicist  333–4, 345 The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture 311, 324, 345 The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites 346 Priestman, Martin The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin 332 printing  4, 158, 257, 259f, 262, 342 printmakers/printmaking  264, 266, 274, 308, 311 prints  10, 72, 83, 107, 117, 145, 147, 308, 310 as remnants of an earlier taste  49–50, 62–3, 208 effect on taste of their diffusion  158–9, 235, 254–74, 338, 341–2 influence on reception of classics  159–64, 168–81, 193–4, 329 Klee’s Angelus Novus 139–40 Turner’s Liber Studiorum  135, 137–8

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Index  367 Prior, Nick “Having One’s Tate and Eating It”  314 prose influence of Turner on Ruskin’s  132, 141 non-fiction, its value  xi–xii, 295 style  11, 24, 129, 200, 251 Protestantism  59, 207, 209, 228, 235, 251, 293, 332 Psyche  183, 316 psychological aesthetics 335 challenge 260 conditions 33 effects 261 experience 36 force 242 psychology 195 of art  220, 252, 335 of surfeit  342 Puget, Pierre  x Pulham, Patricia Vernon Lee 334 Puritanism  207, 209–10 Putnam, Michael C. J. Virgil’s Epic Designs 297 Pygmalion  86, 87f, 96, 101–3 queer theory  66, 312–13, 319, 334 Raff, Thomas Die Sprache der Materialien 298 Raimondi, Marcantonio  308 Raine, Kathleen Blake and Antiquity 331 Ramage, Nancy H. “Restorer and Collector”  326 “Sir William Hamilton as Collector, Exporter, and Dealer”  332 Rampley, Matthew Remembrance of Things Past 330 Rancière, Jacques  29, 92, 114, 125–9 Aisthesis  28, 44, 115, 295, 304, 308, 311, 321, 339 “Divided Beauty”  339 The Future of the Image 311 The Philosopher and His Poor  115, 314, 321–3 The Politics of Aesthetics 311 “The Reality Effect and the Politics of Fiction” 306 Randles, Sarah “A Feeling for Things, Past and Present”  298 Feeling Things 298 Raphael  41, 55–6, 62, 70, 71f, 72, 74–7, 78f, 79, 81, 84–5, 88, 91, 93, 97–8, 103, 104f, 105f, 108–9, 114, 124, 138, 140, 180, 209, 224–5, 229, 239, 257, 269, 279–80, 282–3, 293, 308, 315–17, 320–1, 337, 345

Christ delivering the Keys to St. Peter 256f Crowning of the Virgin 60 Disputation of the Sacrament  275, 276f, 278, 292, 294 La Fornarina 80f Madonna di Foligno 60 Parnassus  275, 277f, 278, 291–2, 294 The Entombment 107f The School of Athens  275, 276f, 291–2, 294 Transfiguration  47, 50, 51f, 52–4, 58–9, 60f, 61f, 73, 82, 106–7, 110–13, 125, 128, 132, 136, 141, 238, 309–10, 346 Raskin, David Donald Judd 304 realism  2, 8, 10, 31, 140, 213 reality  1–2, 9, 16–17, 28, 42, 46, 64, 111, 114, 150, 214, 219, 300–1, 306–7, 322 reception  ix, xiii, 52–4, 58, 81, 97, 113, 157, 159, 184, 192, 220, 226–7, 229, 232, 236, 242, 245, 257, 302, 308–9, 314, 335, 345 of antiquities  145, 153, 183, 187, 193, 201, 204, 222, 228, 233, 324, 327, 329, 336 of art  ix, xiii, 13, 67, 222, 228, 235, 249, 286, 305 of plaster work  326 Rees, Abraham Cyclopædia  143, 145, 146f, 149f, 180, 233, 324 Reformation  59, 140, 228–30, 233–7, 239, 241–2, 269, 293–4, 310, 338 reification  2, 5, 296 Reitlinger, Gerald The Economics of Taste 300 relics  7, 43, 62, 114, 151–2, 174, 181, 205, 229–30, 326, see also remains religion  6, 9, 45, 59–60, 147, 150, 162, 164, 167, 179, 185–7, 196, 209, 229–30, 233–7, 239–42, 251, 261, 278–80, 289, 324, 339 remains  ix, 42–3, 114, 141, 151, 157, 204, 210, 220–1, 228–34, 238, 245, 281 human  60, 106, 108, 118, 289 of antiquity  149, 155, 162–3, 167–8, 171–2, 180, 185, 207, 239, 277, 290, 327, 330 see also relics Rembrandt van Rijn  x Renaissance  26, 130, 171, 186–7, 191, 205, 224–5, 230, 235–6, 238–9, 242, 275, 278–9, 290, 293–4, 300, 307–8, 310, 331, 335–7, 339, 407 representation  7, 8, 15, 17, 56, 59, 62, 71, 82, 86, 98, 101–2, 107, 110, 115–18, 133, 140–1, 148, 164–8, 202, 204–5, 207–8, 210, 221, 229, 232, 234, 236–9, 241–3, 261, 309–10 of Apollo  150, 159–60, 168–70, 175–7, 178, 180, 190, 215, 219, 275, 278–9, 283–4, 286–7, 289–91

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368 Index representation (cont.) of artists  42, 92, 109, 111 of deities/divinity  56–60, 147, 150, 152, 167, 173, 190, 195, 278 of Old Masters  70, 73, 79, 97, 315 of Raphael  71–85, 91, 93, 98, 103–5, 107–10, 112, 124, 316 of the Pygmalion legend  103 of things  3 reproduction  4, 50, 53, 60–1, 70, 72, 136, 147–8, 152, 157, 162, 168, 171, 182, 184, 216, 219, 234–5, 245, 254–7, 261–2, 269, 288, 322, 324, 329, 344 reproductive art  158, 343 engravings  xiii, 52, 158, 249, 308, 339, 341 image 264 printmaking 311 prints  10, 63, 158, 342 technologies  263, 265, 273 work  310, 343 republic of letters  158, 329 restoration  28, 50, 153, 225, 282, 285, 288, 325 Restoration 338 Revett, Nicholas Antiquities of Athens 156 Reynolds, Joshua  172 Ribeyrol, Charlotte “Hellenic Utopias”  333 Riegl, Alois “The Modern Cult of Monuments”  340 Rilke, Rainer Maria  325 Rind, Miles “The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics” 315 Robbins, Derek The Work of Pierre Bourdieu 323 Robinson, John Henry The Death of Raphael 112f Rodin, Auguste  325 Rogers, Samuel “A Funeral”  321 Italy, a Poem  111, 112f, 321 Pleasures of Memory 137 Roman  240, 250 amphitheater ix art  149, 226, 336 galleries 225 models 178 museums 225 object 223 poets 163 religions 241

script 224 sculpture 147 statues 214 work 336 works of art  163 see also Rome Romano, Giulio  107 Romantic concept of symbol  234 Hellenism  156, 183, 185, 328 inheritance  156, 185 Rome  54, 60, 75, 80f, 87, 93f, 94f, 106, 108, 112, 136, 138, 176, 184, 189–91, 205, 207, 209–10, 215, 218f, 220, 222–6, 275, 276f, 280, 285–6, 289–90, 292–3, 309, 316, 322, 332, 335–6, see also Roman Rosenberg, John The Darkening Glass 341 Rosenberg, Martin “Bergeret’s Honors Rendered to Raphael on his Deathbed” 320 Raphael and France 315 Rosenblum, Robert  85 “The Origin of Painting”  317 Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art 320 Rosenfeld, Jason Pre-Raphaelites 346 Rosenwein, Barbara H. “Emotions and Material Culture”  298 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  71–2, 313 Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante 75f Quartier Latin. The Modern Raphael and La Fornarina 76f Rothenberg, Jacob Descensus ad terram 327 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  128 Confessions 127 La Nouvelle Héloïse 127 Rowlandson, Thomas  89–90, 261 The Modern Pygmalion  86, 87f Royal Academy (London)  71, 88, 148, 184–5, 263, 281, 324, 330 Royal Gallery (Berlin)  36 Rubens, Peter Paul  x, 50, 70, 74f, 158, 337 Rubio, Luigi  70 The painter Rubens persuades young Van Dyck to leave the Flemish village of Saventhem 74f Rucellai Madonna  71, 316 ruin/ruins/ruined  45, 132, 151, 182, 208, 228–9, 240–1, 243–5, 249, 251, 282, 303, 337, 340 cathedrals  249, 251, 253, 264 forms of art  244 religious structures  229

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Index  369 Ruskin, John  xi, 43, 112–13, 120, 123, 130, 132, 135, 137, 139–41, 155, 188, 191, 196, 200, 204, 212–13, 219, 229, 235, 249–51, 253, 255, 257, 260, 262, 279–80, 283, 287–8, 290–5, 341 Academy Notes 343 “A Joy Forever”  252, 259, 340 Aratra Pentelici 197f, 198, 201 Ariadne Florentina  264–5, 266f, 267, 268f, 270f, 271f, 273–4 Fors Clavigera  273–4, 344 Modern Painters  x, 73, 122, 128–9, 131, 133–4, 138, 186–7, 189, 263, 322, 342 Praeterita 272 “Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Schools of Engraving”  264, 269 “The Black Arts”  261, 263 “The Hercules of Camarina”  199f “The Nature of Gothic”  186, 266, 268 “The Political Economy of Art”  252, 254 The Queen of the Air  198, 199f, 201 “The School of Athens”  197f, 201f “The Schools of Art in Florence”  321 The Seven Lamps of Architecture  265, 342 The Stones of Venice  186–7, 226, 263, 266, 278, 282, 327, 335, 342, 344 “Two Boyhoods”  73, 122, 129, 323 Val D’Arno 265 Russell, David Tact 295 Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future 323 Saint Peter’s Basilica  60, 61f Salmon, Frank “British Architects, Italian Fine Arts Academies and the Foundation of the RIBA, 1816–43”  335 Santa Maria del Popolo (Rome)  239 Santa Maria Maggiore (Florence)  71 Saturn  168, 170, 174 Savage, Mike “Dis-identification and Class Identity”  323 Savonarola, Girolamo  277–8 Scarry, Elaine Dreaming by the Book 299 On Beauty and Being Just 311 Schiff, Gert “Fuseli, Lucifer, and the Medusa”  318 Henry Fuseli, 1741–1825 318 Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825 88f Schiller, Friedrich  128, 186, 190 On the Aesthetic Education of Man  21, 333 On the Naïve and Sentimental in Poetry  191, 333

The Piccolomini, or The First Part of Wallenstein  185, 332 Schlegel, Friedrich von  81, 278 “Description of Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands in the Years, 1802–1804”  317, 346 The Esthetic and Miscellaneous Works  317, 346 Schliemann, Henry Troy and its Remains 327 Schnapp, Alain The Discovery of the Past 328 Schopenhauer, Arthur  66, 101–2, 120, 319, 321–2 The World as Will and Representation  119, 320 Schreiter, Charlotte Das Originale der Kopie 336 Schuddeboom, Feyo L. “The Conversion of Temples in Rome”  337 Schumacher, Frederick W.  82f science  vii, 6–8, 156, 241, 262, 281–2, 305, 320–1 Scott Brown, Denise Learning from Las Vegas 307 Scott, George Gilbert  318 Scott, Katie  102 “Introducing Venus”  103, 320 Manifestations of Venus  300, 320 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  66 Touching Feeling 312 self-consciousness  xi, 80–1, 115, 233, 264, 271, 277, 283, 301 sensibility  x, xvii, 19, 39–40, 52, 58, 97, 111, 118, 135, 141, 155, 159, 171–2, 174, 186, 188, 191, 198, 207, 209, 226, 235, 240, 242, 251, 260, 264, 270, 272, 279, 288, 293, 302–3, 305, 317, 321, 343, 345 sensuality  89–90, 99, 109, 159, 165, 242, 279, 288, 306, 316–17 Settis, Salvatore Memoria dell’Antico nell’arte italiana 307 sex/sexuality  66, 75, 85, 89, 94, 100, 104, 108, 110, 119–20, 312–13, 319–21 desire  65, 67, 99–100, 102, 109 experience 102 failure 100 in aesthetic arguments  66–8, 94–102, 119–21 knowingness 100 pleasure  64–5, 67, 209, 313 sexualized bodies  113, 313 encounter with Rome  210 vision of inspiration  85–90, 104, 115–18 woman 313 Seznec, Jean The Survival of the Pagan Gods 337

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

370 Index Shadwell, Charles Lancelot  345 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper)  58, 157, 162, 194 Characteristics of Men, Manners Opinions, Times  92, 319 Second Characters, or the Language of Forms  158, 309, 328 Shakespeare, William  178, 180 Hamlet  3, 297, 335 Shapiro, David Uncontrollable Beauty 311 Shapiro, Gary Archaeologies of Vision 322 Shapshay, Sandra The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook 319 Sha, Richard Perverse Romanticism 321 Sherburne, James Clark John Ruskin or the Ambiguities of Abundance 343 Sherman, Cindy Untitled Film Stills 110 Siegel, Jonah Desire and Excess  297, 317, 327, 341, 345 “Display Time”  340 Haunted Museum 335–6 “Leonardo, Pater and the Challenge of Attribution” 309 The Emergence of the Modern Museum 306, 327, 345 Silenus  47, 124 Silva, Elizabeth “Dis-identification and Class Identity”  323 Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy 323 simulacra  42, 150, 245, 310 Sinnema, Peter W. Dynamics of the Pictured Page 343 Sistine Chapel  209, 275 Sloane, Sir Hans  281 Smith, Alison Pre-Raphaelites 346 Smith, Camilla “Between Fantasy and Angst”  318 Smith, Pamela H. The Matter of Art 301 Smith, Philip E. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks 303 Smith, Tony  304 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge  108, 256 Society of Dilettanti Specimens of Antient Sculpture  171, 334 South Kensington Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum)  256, 344

specific objects  29–30, 33, 35, 267, 304–5 Spence, Joseph  165–7, 170–1, 173, 184, 209, 329 Polymetis  159, 160f, 161–4, 168, 183, 185, 189, 212, 330 Spinoza, Baruch  7, 294 Spitzer, Leo La enumeración caótica en la poesía moderna 303 Stanza della Segnatura (Vatican)  209, 275, 276f, 280, 283, 290–1 St. Clair, William Linn Lord Elgin and the Marbles 327 Steegman, John Victorian Taste 341 Stendhal 101 On Love  95, 319 Stern, Bernard Herbert The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature, 1732–1786 328 Stevens, Wallace  128 Stoddard, John L. Florence, Naples, Rome 218f Stolnitz, Jerome “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness’ ”  315 Stothard, Thomas  111 The Death of Raphael 112f strange Aphrodite  120–2, 132–3, 139, see also Aphrodite, Venus Stuart, James Antiquities of Athens 156 Studio del Mosaico Vaticano  61f stuff  22, 208, 298, 305 subjecthood  29, 30 Suchard, Ronald The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 339 symbols/symbolism  47, 68, 124, 147, 150, 166, 171, 176, 209, 213, 230, 232, 234–6, 240, 244, 277, 280, 292, 304, 330, 335–6, 338 Tamen, Miguel  236 Friends of Interpretable Objects  299, 337 Tanagra figurines  327 Tate Britain  93f, 94f, 133f, 134f, 136f, 175f Tate Gallery  281 Taylor, Brandon Art for the Nation 306 “How Prints Work”  308, 339 temples  ix, 10, 59, 190, 205, 213, 230, 250–1, 317 Tenniel, John “Astræa Redux!!”  267f, 268f

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

Index  371 Tertullian 236 Teukolsky, Rachel “Modernist Ruskin, Victorian Baudelaire” 295 The Literate Eye  296, 318, 324 Theodosius 337 theology  6, 56, 59, 113, 161, 236–7, 240, 275, 292, 331, 338 Theseus  7, 274 Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth Theological Aesthetics  299, 309 thing culture  35, 306 thinging  19, 21 thing-in-itself 18 thingliness 325 thingness  18–19, 26–7 thing theory  25, 302 Thirty Years’ War  235, 241 Thomas, Keith “English Protestantism and Classical Art”  332 Thorvaldsens Museum (Copenhagen)  109f Thuillier, Jacques Raphaël et l’Art Français  308, 315 Tintner, Adeline The Museum World of Henry James 333 Tischbein, Johann  332 Titian  40, 258f, 260, 287 Todd, Ruthven  172 Tracks in the Snow 331 William Blake the Artist 331 Tooke, Andrew  159, 161, 168, 170–2, 205, 329 The Pantheon  158, 169f, 170f, 330 see also Pomey tourism/tourists  38, 40, 155, 209, 228, 230, 251 guides  60, 226, 322, 336, 341 Toussaint, Hélène “Ingres et la Fornarina”  317 Townley, Charles  153–4, 326 Townley Collection  153f, 154, 326 Townley Discobolus  283, 285 transfiguration  49, 56–9, 118, 129 Troilus 3 Troy  2–3, 327 Turner, Frank The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain 333 Turner, Joseph Mallord William  x, 111, 122–3, 128–31, 140, 229, 263, 273, 323 Crypt of Kirkstall Abbey 135f Lecture Diagram 10 136f Liber Studiorum  135, 137 London from Greenwich Park  132, 133f Picturesque Views on the Southern Coast of England Rome, from the Vatican 93f, 94f, 136

The Angel Standing in the Sun  132, 134f, 137, 141 The Lost Sailor 138f Twiss, Travers Niebuhr’s History of Rome 336 Uffizi (Florence)  96f, 216, 218f, 280, 316 Unhellenic 196 Usener, Hermann  333 Uwins, Thomas  36, 38 Valéry, Paul “The Conquest of Ubiquity”  247, 255, 342 Aesthetics 342 Valsassina, Caterina Bon di “Fortuna della Fornarina nel Romanticismo storico” 316 values  4, 29–30, 70, 108, 150, 153–4, 156, 161–2, 164, 166–7, 172, 178, 189, 191, 199, 201, 204, 222, 226–7, 230, 233–5, 240–2, 259, 273, 278–9, 294, 305, 325, 329 van der Weyden, Rogier The Descent from the Cross 38 van Dyck, Anthony  70, 74f van Eck, Caroline  325–6, 331 Art, Agency and Living Presence  9, 301 Idols and Museum Pieces  324, 337 Van Hove, Francine  90 Vasari, Giorgio  44, 54, 73, 76, 88, 103, 113, 278 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects  308, 316 vases  17, 21, 117, 181, 182f, 183–4, 208, 232, 332 Vasselin, Martine “La Fortune Gravée de Raphaël en France” 308 Raphaël et l’Art Français  308, 315 Vatican 60f, 61, 93f, 94f, 107, 136, 165, 176–7, 203–5, 207, 210, 211f, 212f, 213–16, 220, 222–7, 229–30, 275, 279–80, 287, 292, 333–4 Vatican Museums  231f, 276f, 277f, 284f Veneto  129, 130f Venice 129–30 Ventrella, Francesco “Encountering the Niobe’s Children”  334 Venturi, Robert Learning from Las Vegas 307 Venus  xiv–xv, 102–3, 147, 160, 185, 190–1, 235, 320, see also Aphrodite, strange Aphrodite Venus de’ Medici (Medici Venus)  95, 96f, 156, 159, 176 Venus de Milo (Venus of Melos)  156, 193, 198, 215

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

372 Index Verhoogt, Robert Art in Reproduction 310 Viarre, Simone “Pygmalion et Orphée chez Ovide”  320 Vickers, Michael “Value and Simplicity”  332 Victoria and Albert Museum  256, 344 Victoria, Queen  71 Villa Farnesina (Rome)  75, 316 Virgil  9, 162, 165 The Aeneid  2, 296–7 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor  335 Vischer, Robert Über das optische Formgefül 335 Viscomi, Joseph Milton a Poem, and the Final Illuminated Works 332 visual arts  39, 41, 115, 166, 183, 186, 196, 205, 243, 303, 331 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)  127, 180 voyeur  82–3, 97–8, 101, 104, see also eros/ erotic, sex/sexuality Waagen, Gustav Friedrich  36–8 A Walk round the Art Treasures Exhibition, under the guidance of Dr. Waagen 341 “Thoughts on the New Building to be Erected for the National Gallery of England”  306 Treasures of Art in Great Britain 344 Wagner, Peter Erotica and the Enlightenment 318 Wallace, Jennifer Shelley and Greece 328 Walters Art Museum (Baltimore)  78f Warburg, Aby M.  167, 219, 229, 239, 242–3, 269, 339 Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America 336 “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara”  330 “Pagan Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther”  238, 338 “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring” 335 The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity  330, 335, 338 Warburg Institute (London)  13 Warburton, William  172, 332 The Divine Legation of Moses 331 Warde, Alan “Dis-identification and Class Identity”  323 Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy 323 Warhol, Andy  29 Warton, Thomas “His Majesty’s Birth-Day, June 4th, 1785”  161, 330

Waterfield, Giles The People’s Galleries  326, 340 Watteau, Antoine  x, xiv–xv Webb, Timothy English Romantic Hellenism, 1700–1824 328 Wedderburn, Alexander The Works of John Ruskin 197f, 199f, 201f, 266f, 268f, 270f, 271f, 272f, 321–2, 327, 335, 340, 344 Weibel, Peter Iconoclash 338 Making Things Public 296 Weil-Garris, Kathleen “La Morte di Raffaello e la ‘Trasfigurazione’ ”  320 Weinglass, David “The Elysium of Fancy”  318 Weisberg, Ruth “Twentieth-Century Rhetoric”  307 Welchman, John C. Sculpture and the Vitrine 340 White, Gleeson English Illustration 340 Whitehead, Christopher “Architectures of Display at the National Gallery” 344–5 Whiteley, Giles Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death 333 Whitman, Walt  22–3, 303 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”  xvii Whitney, Wheelock  104f Wilde, Oscar “The Decay of Lying”  21, 303 Williams, Carolyn Transfigured World 333 Williams, Raymond Culture and Society 295 Keywords 333 Williams, Robert Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words 301 Williams, William Carlos  23, 25, 29 “The Red Wheelbarrow”  303 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  41, 85, 163, 165–7, 172–3, 187, 191–2, 194, 196, 199, 201, 205, 209, 212, 214, 218, 225–6, 229, 244, 277, 280, 284–7, 293–4, 303, 319, 324–5 Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks  330, 339 The History of Ancient Art  44, 283, 345 “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture”  164, 240, 330, 339 Winged Victory of Samothrace  156 Winner, Matthias Raffaello a Roma 309

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 14/09/20, SPi

Index  373 Witemeyer, Hugh George Eliot and the Visual Arts 334 Witkin, Joel-Peter  110 Wolohojian, Stephan A Private Passion 317 Wood, Christopher S. Anachronic Renaissance  300, 337 “Plural Temporality”  337 “The Credulity Problem”  300 “Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism”  300, 307, 336–7 Wood, Robert Ruins of Palmyra 156 Woolf, Virginia  46 A Room of One’s Own  1, 45 Wordsworth, William  185, 188, 190 “The world is too much with us”  186, 189, 333 works of art/artworks  ix, xii–xiii, 21, 26, 28–31, 34, 43, 50, 52–4, 58, 63, 68, 83, 86, 95–6, 111, 149, 155, 163, 168, 172, 180, 199, 204,

213, 219–20, 222, 225–6, 234–5, 244, 254–6, 270, 280, 286, 298, 302–3, 311, 313, 315, 317, 320, 325, 329, 338 worship  ix, 59, 151, 186, 188–9, 198, 228, 235, 237, 241, 254, 260, 278, 290, 298, 337 Wouk, Edward H. Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphael and the Image Multiplied 308 Wright of Derby, Joseph, The Corinthian Maid 86f Yeazell, Ruth Bernard Art of the Everyday 334 Zalewski, Daniel “The Factory of Fakes”  306 Zerner, Henri “Raphael and the Fornarina, 1814”  317 Zeus  115–16, 180, 188, 193, see also Jupiter Zunshine, Lisa  300 Why We Read Fiction 299