Luisa Calè

Illustrations, optics and objects in Nineteenth-Century literary and visual cultures

This book explores the encounter between verbal and visual forms through a material aesthetic in which perception is shaped by the tangible qualities of the media. The contributors map a new critical approach in which typography and design play an important role as well as the images represented or evoked in the text.

Introduction: Nineteenth-Century Objects and Beholders

What happens to the objects that make up a ‘literary and visual culture’ when we try to imagine them not only through our minds, but also through our bodies and our senses? When we ‘re-member’ their different materialities? In his Italian Journey Johann Wolfgang von Goethe remembers his experience of Rome through the story of Pygmalion and Galatea, ‘the living woman’ emerging from ‘sculptured stone’. Encountering Rome ‘in the flesh’ gives a new life to the city which had so long been an object of the imagination, yet also felt already so familiar through etchings, drawings, paintings, or three-dimensional models in cork, woodcut, and plaster.1 Through the physical pleasure implicit in the overlap between the experience of the city and the erotic discovery of the woman in the flesh, Goethe’s Pygmalion stands for a multisensorial model of cultural encounter in which images are given a body and enlivened through touch.

Introduction: literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle

In the provocatively entitled ‘Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse’ (Why sculpture is tedious), Charles Baudelaire launched an attack on sculpture as a superseded art form. Baudelaire was writing in response to the 1846 Salon, which displayed themost modern productions of the day. His adverse reaction was not so much to the actual works, however, as to the very medium: ‘Brutale et positive comme la nature, elle est enmême temps vague et insaisissable, parce qu’elle montre trop de faces à la fois’. The multiple points of view opened up by the threedimensionality of the sculptural object create a plurality that Baudelaire considers harmful to the aesthetic unity of the artwork because it enables different spectators to glimpse different meanings that are always necessarily partial, never quite right, and often at odds with the intention of the artist. Sculpture’s closeness to nature alienates Baudelaire, who sees its roots in rude primitive objects and fetishes. However, even in its most evolved modern forms, it still appeals primarily to unsophisticated viewers (Baudelaire speaks of savages and peasants), who take pleasure in ‘the sight of a cleverly turned piece of wood or stone’. His explicit point of comparison in this essay is painting (just as his implicit points of comparison, here and throughout his œuvre, are poetry and criticism), which he believes capable of capturing the full complexity of modernity, demanding a more sophisticated mode of engagement on the part of the viewer. Baudelaire’s aesthetic theories had an enormous influence on the fin de siècle, in France as well as in Britain, where they fuelled countercultural and avantgarde movements—Aestheticism, Decadence, Symbolism—by providing arguments against the tyranny of nature on the artistic imagination. However, his aversion to sculpture remained problematic and in time became the object of important revisions. Walter Pater, for instance, overtly subscribed to Baudelaire’s view when he set out a broad chronology for the evolution of the arts in his 1867 essay on Winckelmann: ‘Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depths and intricacy of the middle age; music and poetry have their fortune in the modern world’. In Pater’s aesthetic theory, the chronological evolution of the arts reflects ‘the growing revelation of the mind to itself’ (184). Pater evidently draws on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy as much as French sources, but steers clear of dismissing sculpture as outdated. It is precisely because sculpture appears to be so removed from modernity that it becomes extremely attractive to it, offering something that modern artistic culture lacks or at least does not comprehend in its full import: ‘pure form’ (169). Pater is not put off by the challenges of the three-dimensional object like Baudelaire. For him it is only ‘at first sight [that] sculpture, with its solidity of form, seems a thing more real and full than the faint, abstract world of poetry and painting’ (169). The opposite is, in fact, the case: Pater insists on the spiritual qualities of sculpture, making us see it as ‘mobile’ and ‘vital’ (170), while at the same time never losing sight of its materiality. While Baudelaire, in his responses to the Salon of 1846, had extolled the complexity of color, Pater believes that 1 – ‘Brutal and positive like nature, it is at the same time vague and elusive, because it shows too many faces at once’; Charles Baudelaire, ‘Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse’, in Critique d’art, suivi de critique musicale, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 147–49, at 147, authors’ translation.

‘A bright erroneous dream’: The Shelley Memorial and the body of the poet

Abstract This article argues that Edward Onslow Ford’s Shelley Memorial at University College Oxford (inaugurated in 1893) played an important role in refashioning Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpus at the turn of the century, particularly by enabling political and homoerotic readings of his works, and contributed to a distinctive fin-de-siècle reception of the Romantic poet. The display and architectural setting of the Shelley Memorial activate Shelley’s poetic Platonism by playing with the metamorphic possibilities of light and shadow. The sculptural medium thus generates new ways of reading Shelley just as it illuminates the aesthetics and politics of Victorian classicism and nineteenth-century attitudes to the cultural significance of the male poetic body.

Historic doubts, conjectures, and the wanderings of a principal curiosity: Henry VII in the fabric of Strawberry Hill

Abstract This article explores the inscriptions and material metamorphoses of Henry VII in Horace Walpole’s ‘paper fabric’, a reversible world of writing, collecting, and book-making. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762), Walpole celebrates the funerary monument of Henry VII by Pietro Torrigiano at Westminster Abbey. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), conjecture and speculation become methodological prompts to unveil the textual and architectural discontinuities of history. Walpole’s next historical experiment consists in placing a bust of Henry VII in the agonies of death in the Star Chamber at his house at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham. The bust’s importance is captured by its reappearance propped on top of a frontispiece and its dissemination in other reproductions in extra-illustrated copies of A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex … (1784). A dramatic representation of the bust in John Carter’s extra-illustrated copy of A Description, later engraved in his Specimens of the Ancient Sculpture and Painting now remaining in this Kingdom (1780–94), shows the alternative trajectories of Henry VII from Westminster Abbey to Strawberry Hill, from Walpole’s cosmopolitan collection of curiosities to Carter’s paper collection of national gothic specimens

Extra-illustrations: The Order of the Book and the Fantasia of the Library

In Bibliomania; or Book Madness (1811), Thomas Frognall Dibdin breaks down the act of reading into a series of operations that turn the text into a script for a material practice of collecting. Extra-illustration questions the book as a cultural object, subverts its bibliographical codes and opens its boundaries to articulate additional or alternative orders of knowledge. This essay explores two extra-illustrated Shakespeares described by Dibdin. Shakespeare editor George Steevens extended the text with engraved portraits of Shakespeare, his editors, commentators, as well as characters and places mentioned in the plays. Margaret Bingham, Lady Lucan, inlaid her edition with watercolours that attempted to recreate the aristocratic world of illuminated manuscripts and to reclaim Shakespeare from the bourgeois aesthetic of the portable gallery of prints. Together they articulate the social and aesthetic spectrum of extra-illustration.

Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality; Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre: Entering the Divine Body

Inchbald’s achievement in acting, in spite of her performance of many major roles, never brought her to the forefront of public adulation. Her reputation – at home and abroad, in her own lifetime and afterwards – was in the acclaim which she gained as a writer and which has endured for two centuries. Judith Pascoe’s work on Sarah Siddons and Ben Robertson’s on Elizabeth Inchbald both contribute magnificently to the current surge in studies on Romantic Drama. Siddons was a great actor, Inchbald was not. Inchbald was a great playwright, Siddons was not. Their friendship was more than casual, less than intimate. Each in their own way dominated the stage of their period, the first women in British theatre history to achieve such unrivaled prominence.

Blake and the Literary Galleries

With these words Blake overwrites Edmond Malone’s triumphal address to the King in his edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s works.1 In the annotations to Reynolds, Blake’s confrontation with Malone, Reynolds and the field of art takes on epic proportions through a series of references to Paradise Lost. Against Malone’s celebration of Reynolds and the new scene of British art, Blake conjures up Fuseli’s Milton Gallery and casts Fuseli and himself in a Satanic pose: ‘Fuseli Indignant hid himself — I [was] hid’ (E636). If Reynolds is the anointed son of God, Fuseli and Blake take on the position of marginalized Satans, reiterating Homer’s image of the stars who hide their diminished heads in front of the sun.2 Another symptom pointing to the failure of the field of art to foster the right artists is the career of James Barry. It was Barry whose paintings for the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts failed to lead to patronage; hence Blake’s contrast between Barry living on ‘Bread & Apples’ and Reynolds wallowing in riches (E636). Blake’s conflation of Barry and Fuseli is revealing. Neither enjoyed financial success, but after Barry’s expulsion from the Royal Academy, Fuseli took over his place as Professor of Painting (1799) and later became Keeper (1804). Although the Milton Gallery was a failure from a financial point of view, it enjoyed both support and recognition from the Royal Academy.