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Continental Crosscurrents

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Continental Crosscurrents British Criticism and European Art 1810–1910 J. B. BULLEN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp 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 in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © J. B. Bullen 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 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, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. 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 book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd. King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–818691–6 978–0–19–818691–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements The research and writing of this book was made possible with a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and through the support of my colleagues in the School of English and American Studies at Reading University. Throughout my career I have been offered help, information, and advice from many teachers, colleagues, and students, and would like to mention some of those who contributed to the studies that go to make up this volume. Ian Jack was the first to encourage me to work on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and he strongly supported my research into the connection between Vasari and Browning’s ‘Pictor Igotus’. This was much extended as the result of recent helpful advice from Lionel Gossman who has written so ably on the German Nazarenes. For the material on Edmund Sharpe no one could have been more generous in sharing the results of his own research than John Hughes. It was he who directed my attention to Sharpe’s and Whewell’s papers in Trinity College, Cambridge, where the Fellows were always ready to allow access to their collections. Susan Dench at the Cumbria Record Office has had a long-standing interest in Sara Losh and was an invaluable source of archival help both in Cumbria and elsewhere; extremely useful editorial suggestions in this same field were made by Caroline Elam. Ruskin figures prominently throughout the book and I have often discussed my work on him with colleagues Dinah Birch and Michael O’Gorman. Much of the material on Waterhouse and the Natural History Museum came from the archives of the museum at the Public Record Office, the British Museum and at the Natural History Museum itself, and in each of these locations the librarians and archivists were outstandingly helpful and efficient. In matters of museology I am particularly grateful to Carla Yanni, who has written so eloquently on museums, and to Colin Cunningham, who helped with much of the illustrative material connected with Waterhouse. It was at the suggestion of Giovanni Cianci that I should look into the anthropological context of Gauguin and the British and it was Riccardo Pinieri’s initiative that generated a Gauguin conference in Tahiti. For the chapter on D. H. Lawrence I am much

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indebted to Fryer Danhöffer and Beatrice Alexander, who offered their time, patience, and trouble with the local material in Cologne, and to Laura Scuriatti, who was always on hand with advice on German material. I have also benefited from the enthusiastic support of Bernard Dod, Cedric Brown, and Heather Glen, while none of my work would have been possible without the professional skills of the librarians at Reading University Library and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Then there is my family, lively, interactive, and never allowing me to sink into academic torpor. Some of the material in this book has appeared in other publications. Much of this has been rewritten, but the earlier appearances are as follows: ‘Browning’s “Pictor Ignotus” and Vasari’s “Life of Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco” ’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 23 (1972), 313–19. ‘A Clash of Discourses: the Reception of Venetian Painting in England 1750–1850’, World & Image, 8, no. 2 (June–Aug. 1992), 109–23. ‘Ruskin and the Tradition of Renaissance Historiography’, in The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture, eds. Michael Wheeler and Nigel Whitely (Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 54–76. ‘Coleridge and Early Italian Art’, in English Studies in Transition, eds. Robert Clark and Piero Boitani (Routledge, 1993), pp. 196–207. ‘The Romantics and Early Italian Art’, Keats-Shelley Review, 8 (1933–4), 1–20. ‘Byzantinism and Modernism’, Burlington Magazine, 151 (1999), 665–75. ‘Sara Losh, Architect, Romantic, Mythologist’, Burlington Magazine, 143 (2001), 676–84. ‘Great British Gauguin: his Reception in London in 1910–11’, Apollo, 158 (2003), 3–12. ‘D. H. Lawrence, Sculpture and Women in Love’, Burlington Magazine, 145 (2003), 841–6. ‘The Romanesque Revival in Britain, 1800–1840: William Gunn, William Whewell, and Edmund Sharpe’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 47 (2004), 139–58.

Contents illustrations INTRODUCTION 1. The English Romantics and Early Italian Art

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2. The Romanesque Revival in Britain 1800–1840: 1

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3. The Romanesque Revival in Britain 1800–1840: 2

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4. Robert Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’, and Continental ‘Christian’ Art

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5. Whoring after Colour: Venetian Painting in England

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6. Ruskin’s Venice and Victor Hugo’s Paris

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7. Alfred Waterhouse’s German Romanesque ‘Temple of Nature’: The Natural History Museum

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8. The Last Degradation of Art: Gauguin, the British, and French Polynesia

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9. Byzantinism and British Modernism

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10. D. H. Lawrence, German Sculpture, and Women in Love

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bibliography

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index

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List of Illustrations 1. Master of the Triumph of Death, Il Trionfo della Morte, Campo Santo, Pisa (detail). Early fourteenth century. Engraving from Carlo Lasinio, Pitture a fresco del campo santo di Pisa (1812)

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2. Cloister of Campo Santo, Pisa, begun 1278

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3. Illustration from William Gunn, An Enquiry into the Origin and Influence of Gothic Architecture (1819)

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4. Reconstruction of Edmund Sharpe’s German tour, 1832–4

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5. Edmund Sharpe, ‘Kloster Ebrach’, from Illustrated Papers on Church Architecture (1876)

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6. Reconstruction of Edmund Sharpe’s French tour, 1835

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7. Edmund Sharpe, St Mark’s, Witton, Blackburn, 1835–6

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8. Edmund Sharpe, St Paul’s, Farington, Preston, 1839–40

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9. ‘San Michele, Pavia’, from Thomas Hope, An Historical Essay on Architecture (1835)

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10. Sara Losh, St Mary’s Chapel of Ease, Wreay, Cumberland, 1842

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11. James Wild, Christ Church, Streatham, London, 1845

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12. Sidney Herbert, St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton, Wiltshire, 1845

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13. Friedrich Overbeck, The Triumph of Religion in the Arts, 1840. Städelsches Kustinstitut, Frankfurt

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14. Titian/Giorgione, Venetian Pastoral. Early sixteenth century. Louvre, Paris

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15. Alfred Waterhouse, The Natural History Museum, London, 1881

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16. Francis Fowke, 1862 Exhibition Building. The Builder (29 March 1862), 225

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17. George Gilbert Scott, rejected Byzantine design for the Foreign Office, Whitehall, London (1860). Pen and ink. Royal Institute of British Architects

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18. Francis Fowke, winning design for the Natural History Museum, London, 1864. Pen, ink, and wash. Royal Institute of British Architects

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List of Illustrations

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19. Francis Fowke, plan of winning design for Natural History Museum, 1864. The Builder (28 May 1864)

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20. Alfred Waterhouse, drawing for Natural History Museum, 1870–1. Royal Institute of British Architects.

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21. Alfred Waterhouse, Natural History Museum, London, 1868–81

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22. Alfred Waterhouse, Congregational chapel, Rusholme, 1863. Manchester School of Architecture

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23. Alfred Waterhouse, St Martin, Bonn, Sketchbook no. II, 17 August 1857, p. 17. Private collection

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24. Alfred Waterhouse, Trier, Sketchbook no. IV, 13 September 1861, pp. 35–8. Private collection

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25. Alfred Waterhouse, Andernach, Sketchbook no. IV, 20 September 1861, pp. 35–8. Private collection

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26. Alfred Waterhouse, detail of the enrichments of the new Museum of Natural History modelled by C. Dujardin for A. Waterhouse, c.1874–9. Sheet 26. Pencil on paper. Natural History Museum, London

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27. St Martin, Bonn, from Sulpiz Boisserée, Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert am Nieder-Rhein (1833), plate 66

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28. St Martin, Cologne, from Sulpiz Boisserée, Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert am Nieder-Rhein (1833), plate 10

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29. Poster for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, Grafton Galleries, 1910

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30. ‘Marquesas Islanders’, engraving from Illustrated London News (4 February 1843), p. 68

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31. Paul Gauguin, Adam and Eve, 1902. Ordrupgaardsamlingen, Charlottenlund, Denmark

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32. Fayaway Sails her Boat, Samoa, reproduced from John La Farge, Reminiscences of the South Seas: with 48 Illustrations from Paintings and Drawings made by the Author in 1890–91 (1914), p. 68

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33. Spencer Gore, Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery, 1911–12. Private collection

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34. Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon, 1888. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

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35. Boris Anrep, Scenes from the Life of a Lady of Fashion: the Toilet, 1923. Floor mosaic. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

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36. Lot and his Suite (detail). Fifth century. Mosaic, Sta Maria Maggiore, Rome

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37. Vanessa Bell, Byzantine Lady, 1912. UK Government Art Collection

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38. Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Tate Gallery, London

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39. Duncan Grant, The Queen of Sheba, 1912. Tate Gallery, London

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40. Mark Gertler, The Merry-Go-Round, 1916. Tate Gallery, London

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41. Gerhard Marcks, Work, 1914. Relief sculpture for the Deutz motor works designed by W. Gropius and A. Meyer for the Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne

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42. Gerhard Marcks, Lion Hunt (sketch for a relief), 1900. Gerhard Marks Haus, Bremen

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43. Josef Moest, Godiva, 1906. Stadtmuseum, Cologne

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44. Robert Seuffert, Portrait of Josef Moest, c.1912. Stadtmuseum, Cologne

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45. Joseph Moest with friends in his studio, c.1905

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Photo Acknowledgements British Heritage: National Monuments Record 10, 11, 12, 15, 19, 21; Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin 41; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 35; Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen 42; Louvre, Paris 14; Manchester School of Architecture 22; National Gallery of Scotland 34; Natural History Museum, London 26; Ordrupgaardsamlingen, Charlottenlund 31; Royal Institute of British Architects, London 17, 18, 20; Städelsches Kustinstitut, Frankfurt 13; Stadtmuseum, Cologne 43, 44, 45; Tate Gallery, London 38, 39, 40; UK Government Art Collection 37; Victoria and Albert Museum, London 29.

Introduction Frederick W illiam Faber, the famous superior of the London Oratory, first visited Italy in May 1843 at the age of twentynine. When he arrived at Pisa he had an extraordinary experience. It was one that mixed the visionary with the hallucinatory, the personal with the cultural, and he communicated the details to his brother. Like many visitors to Italy in the mid-century, Faber was well informed and excited, but he was unprepared for the full emotional impact of his arrival. ‘How often it happens,’ he said, when the mind sets out bent on the capture of some special train of thought, that an insignificant matter intercepts and detains it. It was in a measure so with me at Pisa. You know the quiet meadow, withdrawn a little space from the noisy streets, from whose smooth turf rise the cathedral, the campanile, the Baptistery, and the cloister of the Campo Santo, a group hardly equalled in the world. Of course I repaired there at once pretty well knowing what to find. But it so happened that the turf is just now closely carpeted with white clover in full flower, and overpoweringly fragrant. The odour was of such a home kind that away went buildings, art, history, Pisa, Italy, and the whole concern; my eyes saw, but reported not what they saw. I was in England; and yet the leaning tower fixed the exact spot in England, namely, the side window of the drawing room at Auckland, looking out upon the Bishop’s gateway, and wherein stood an old stained table, the drawer of which specially pertained to me. There I played the geographical game with my mother for hours; there I studied a fat duedecimo in red sheep, entitled The Wonders of the World, where the Wall of China and the Leaning Tower of Pisa made an ineffaceable impression upon me. Oh! I cannot tell you how that tower brought my dear mother back to me.1

The smell of the clover and the sight of the Leaning Tower triggered such powerful reminiscences in Faber that they temporarily blinded him, transporting him back into the past and to his home near Durham. The upsurge of nostalgia for a lost home combined with minute domestic detail to frame an uncanny memory of an image of 1 Dowden, John Edward, ed., The Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber (Dublin, 1869), pp. 178–9.

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Pisa in a popular leather-bound book illustrating the Wonders of the World. The picture of the Leaning Tower made an ‘ineffaceable impression’ upon him which he strongly identified with his mother and his mother’s love for him. In 1843 Faber had long been an orphan. His mother had died when he was fifteen and his father four years later. The identity between the tower and the mother was such that the journey to Pisa was an unexpected emotional homecoming. The visual culture of Faber’s childhood (in the form of ‘The Wonders of the World’) had provided him and his brother with a shared, pleasurable familiarity with the contours of a city that neither of them had visited. He knew ‘pretty well’ what he would find in Pisa, and Faber tells his brother that he, too, would ‘know the quiet meadow’ in which the buildings stand. But as the reminiscence dissolves and he returns to the present, Faber’s experience moves into another, more troubled mode. ‘To my taste,’ he continues, the cathedral, except in the façade is poor; but the Baptistery divine, the cloisters glorious though inferior to Gloucester; and it is the group which is so wonderful: and I mused, and mused, and mused, pacing about on the thick clover till all my senses were wrapped in a delicious dream of art and history. This was my second mood. Now it happens that this voluptuous silent poetry which Italy engenders in so many, is just what I have been arming myself against beforehand, as effeminate, sensual, literary; not devotional, priestly, Catholic, Christian.

Faber had anticipated that the art and history of Italy would attempt to seduce him, and in Pisa the magnificent spectacle of the central group of buildings combined with the perfume of the clover to assault his senses. Landing at La Spezia he confessed that the ‘luxurious gardens on the Mediterranean, with aromatic orange flowers . . . unmanned’ him, and so he pictures Italy, voluptuous, effeminate, sensuous, as a kind of Bower of Bliss where others before him had been tempted and had fallen. Shelley, a former inhabitant of Pisa, once gave Faber ‘joy and pleasure’ until he discovered that he was a ‘low, unprincipled scoundrel’;2 Byron, who also stayed in Pisa, was ‘godless’, while Milton, the ‘worse child of the devil’, celebrated, like them, the seductive beauties of Italy.3 Faber was brought up in the stark surroundings of Bishop Auckland by parents of Huguenot origin. His grandfather and his 2

Dowden (1869), p. 206.

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Dowden (1869), p. 205.

Introduction

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father were strict Calvinists, and only after the death of his father in 1833 and his simultaneous exposure to Oxford theology as an undergraduate at Balliol College did he begin to question the strictness of his inherited beliefs. The sensuousness of Italy represented a challenge to his religious asceticism, to his manhood, and to his Englishness. The preference for northern Gothic (the cathedral is ‘poor’) rather than Pisan-Italian Romanesque, and for the cloisters of Gloucester rather the Campo Santo, is an attempt on Faber’s part to affirm his Englishness, to stave off the temptations of the eye, and to assert his masculinity in the face of importunate foreign effeminacy. But there is a third stage in Faber’s experience. ‘I want to go to Italy,’ he told his brother, not as a poet, or as a tourist, or as a pleased dreamer, but as a pilgrim who regards it as a second Palestine, the Holy Land of the West, and here at Pisa was vanquished on the threshold. . . . But at last I succeeded in shaking off the poetic fit, and then as the flowers had brought home before me, and the beauty had brought art and history, so the character of the buildings, and especially the calmness of the locality, brought the Church to mind. Unaffectedly aloof from the city, in a calm meadow, the great tower leaning like a telescope pointed towards Rome . . . all seemed a world (to use the wrong word) of its own, apart from the other world, yet near; unlike, yet into which the other world must pass. It symbolized the character of the Church, it illustrated its history.4

During the period of his Italian tour Faber was undergoing a religious crisis. In the late 1830s he had been drawn under the spell of John Henry Newman, and became a strong supporter of the Oxford Movement. In 1837 he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England, and the journey of 1843 was intended to test his growing but troubling conviction that he should convert to Rome. Italy represented a double temptation. It threatened to seduce his senses from the path of spirituality and it threatened to seduce him away from the Calvinism of his parents. The potential for betrayal was immense, but happily the almost preternatural peace and tranquillity of the Pisan campus in ‘a world of its own’, together with its connection with the history and character of the Church, offered solace from the turbulence of religious indecision. Above all, the authority of the Leaning Tower offered him absolution for apostasy. He identified it 4

Dowden (1869), p. 180.

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Introduction

with his mother and instead of condemning his impending decision, as he might have feared, it pointed ‘towards Rome’. Faber’s responses to Italy in general and Pisa in particular epitomize many of the themes of this book. Italy and its art, indeed the art of continental Europe in general, was embedded in British visual culture. Engravings of places and pictures abounded, and even the popular Dioramas in Regent’s Park and Baker Street often featured continental subjects.5 All educated men and women arrived in Italy their minds filled with images of the Leaning Tower, the Sistine Chapel, and the pictures of Raphael. But personal experience was quite another matter. This was sometimes comforting and sometimes disturbing. In Faber’s case it was both. The flowers in the meadow and the Leaning Tower conjured up images of home, but Pisan art and Mediterranean luxuriance threatened his stability and his sense of identity both as a man and as an Englishman. One of the first to experience this combined ecstasy was Coleridge, who in the paintings of the Campo Santo discovered ‘the source of all that we really enjoy or that is worth enjoying’;6 another was Ruskin, who coming to Pisa not long after Faber found the Campo Santo to be ‘a veritable Palestine’.7 Like Coleridge, he revelled in pictures which became, he said, ‘at once living presences’ for him.8 The combination of guilt and pleasure in the presence of new aesthetic experiences is common in the nineteenth century, and the erotic is never far away. Ruskin’s journeys to France and Italy as a young man provided the experience of adolescent self-discovery denied to him by suffocating and over-protective parents. In contrast to Faber, his delight in Venice and San Marco lay partly in the fact that it was not like home. But Venice was above all a site of scopic and visually erotic pleasure for him, and one that far exceeded the dull accompaniments of matrimony and the less exciting body of his wife. Both 5

Italian subjects were very popular and included St Peter’s, San Paulo fuori le mura, the Tivoli Gardens, and the Coliseum in Rome, Venice, and (in the summer of 1832) the Campo Santo, Pisa. See Gentleman’s Magazine, 102 (July 1832), 64, and The Times (16 July 1832), 3. For the diorama in Britain see Derek Wood, ‘The Diorama in Great Britain in the 1820s’, History of Photography, 17, no. 3 (1993), 284–95. 6 Coleridge, The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (1949), pp. 168–9. 7 The allusion to Palestine derives from the story that the earth of the Campo Santo had been brought back from the Holy Land by Crusaders. 8 Ruskin, John, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (39 vols., 1903–12), iv, 316. Hereafter as Ruskin, Works.

Introduction

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Ruskin and Théophile Gautier (who was in Venice at much the same time) were fully aware of the tradition that linked the city with sexuality; the Englishman went into denial, hid behind his tape measure and his gondolier and produced a text, The Stones of Venice, which seeps sexuality at the margins. In contrast the Frenchman moved around the city in post-coital stupor, mixing Titian’s women with his own, and wrote a book, Italia, that was unashamedly visceral. Venetian art in particular had been branded by the eighteenthcentury Academy as sensuous rather than intellectual, as appealing more to the body than to the mind. This view was slowly eroded in the nineteenth century as the art of Venice was historicized and contextualized. So what had been problematic for Joshua Reynolds and his Professors of Painting, offered no obstacles in appreciation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite associates, and by the late 1850s even Ruskin was celebrating the ‘animalism’ of Veronese. In the essays here, however, the most virulent and sexually aggressive texts come out of Paris rather than Pisa or Venice. Uncertain whether he was dead or alive, the British believed that Paul Gauguin was attempting to undermine British respectability by defacing canvases with nude black bodies. Roger Fry, who had undergone an epiphany not unlike Frederick Faber’s, but in Sicily rather than Pisa, and in the presence of Byzantine art not Romanesque architecture, explained to the British that Gauguin was not a revolutionary subversive but a ‘neo-Byzantine’; this historicized him, gave him a context, and placed him safely in the category (together with Cézanne) of a master of the modern movement. Purer, safer pleasures were to he found in Germany, but the sense of aesthetic reversal and upheaval was no less great. The master of Trinity College, Cambridge, William Whewell, recognized a new and previously uncategorized style of architecture in the Rhineland, and he sent his protégé, Edmund Sharpe, on a voyage of discovery. The style now called Romanesque is found all over France, Italy, and Germany, and to a lesser extent in Britain, but it was in Southern Germany that Sharpe collected enough examples to demonstrate its unique qualities, its coherence, and its development and change into Gothic. Yet Whewell did not provide the all-important name for the style. ‘Romanesque’ was invented by William Gunn in the first decade of the nineteenth century, who formulated it standing on exactly the spot which so entranced Faber in 1843. Gunn, in attempting to describe the round arches of the Pisan duomo and the

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Campo Santo, suggested that the term ‘Romanesque’ might be used to indicate the classical origins of this style. In contrast to the springing verticality of Gothic, which by the middle of the nineteenth century had been adopted as the British style, Romanesque was perceived as crude, heavy, and primitive. Slowly these words of criticism changed into terms of approbation, becoming in turn, ‘honest’, ‘solid’, and ‘ancient’. Faber never made the shift, and his dislike of the duomo and his preference for Gloucester reflects this. But others were intrigued by a style that seemed to extend back into mysterious and uncharted historical territory, back through the lives of the first inhabitants of Torcello, back through Justinian’s Ravenna, and back to the ancient basilicas of Rome. It was one thing to experience this frisson on the banks of the Rhine, in the piazzas of Tuscany, and along the Mediterranean coast of France, but it was quite another to re-create it in the pleasant greenery of England. One of the leastknown but most remarkable nineteenth-century re-creations was a Romanesque church, St Mary’s, Wreay, by Sara Losh, whose pursuit of the primitive in archaeology, myth, and building was singular and original; one of the best-known was Alfred Waterhouse’s Natural History Museum in which he responded to current thinking on antediluvian matters by encrusting Romanesque surfaces with animal forms. A number of the chapters which follow touch on this issue of primitivism and, as Lovejoy and Boas point out, it is an attitude of mind that has its roots in antiquity. These two writers distinguish between what they call ‘chronological primitivism’ and ‘cultural primitivism’. The first is essentially a philosophy of history which describes a time in the local culture when the ‘most excellent condition of human life’ might have occurred; the other derives from a discontent of the civilized with civilization, and involves the belief that innocence and simplicity (often in a remote culture, since no one calls themselves ‘primitive’!) were more desirable than the conditions of the present.9 The eighteenth-century cult of the noble savage was a form of cultural primitivism, and in the work of Rousseau in France and Herder and Winckelmann in Germany the culture of ancient Greece was linked in its primitive innocence to the discovery of North American Indian tribes and Polynesian natives. In the early years of the nineteenth century the awakening of interest in medieval art took the 9 Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935, 1937), pp. 1ff.

Introduction

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form of a type of chronological primitivism. Coleridge’s Pisan discovery involved the recognition of what he thought was Platonic symbolism in the work of medieval painters; those writers and artists who came after him, the Nazarenes in Germany, for example, or A. F. Rio in France and Anna Jameson in Britain, each found something in early art which distinguished it from the canon with which they were familiar, yet they extended that canon backwards in time. In contrast, Roger Fry’s admiration for Gauguin or D. H. Lawrence’s for the native art of the Americas was different. Theirs was a cultural primitivism in reaction against aspects of contemporary aesthetics or prevailing ontological attitudes vested in art. At the third level of Faber’s experience was the conflict he felt between the ‘pleased dreamer’ and the ‘pilgrim’, between sensuousness and spirituality. The reassessment of the Primitives in general and the revaluation of attitudes to the art of the Pisan Campo Santo in particular, were heavily dependent on the Catholic revival in Europe and the development of aesthetic judgements based upon criteria which grew out of articles of faith and dogma. The key figures are the Catholic art historian A. F. Rio and his British advocate and supporter Richard Monckton Milnes. By the 1830s in Britain value in art was becoming inextricably involved with the Oxford Movement, and the dictates of that movement about the relationship between spirituality and its expression in the material world. As a consequence, belief in religion and belief in art became closely associated. Meanwhile, the status of the Italian Primitives rose upward on the current of these views, and so, too, did modern ‘PreRaphaelite’ movements dominated by the Nazarenes of Rome and Munich. ‘Christian art’ in both its ancient and modern forms was much discussed in Britain, and that discussion generated a spectrum ranging from enthusiastic supporters to hostile critics. Figures like Faber and Nicolas Wiseman greeted the new tendency in art as thankfully ‘devotional, priestly, Catholic, Christian’; Browning in poems like ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ expressed a distrust of aesthetic monasticism, whereas others like Ruskin, Jameson, and Francis Palgrave approved of Rio but were forced to adopt strategies to adjust his Catholic criteria to their versions of Protestantism. Each chapter in this book is located at the meeting place between verbal and visual cultures, and each of them deals with the impact of continental art or criticism on the British. They all represent discoveries. Faber travelled to Pisa with a certain kind of information derived from contemporary popular visual culture. His ideas about

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Introduction

the Leaning Tower came from the text that he had read as a child, and his encounter with the real building returned him to the popular image, which in turn surprised him by being charged with emotions about his mother. But the Leaning Tower was also redolent for him with other meaning. Contemporary Christian art theory had placed in doubt the morality and the spiritual health of much of the canon of Western art, and the Leaning Tower signalled Faber’s entrance into a new field (a meadow) of experience where his virtue as a Christian knight (he had ‘armed’ himself for the encounter) would be tried and tested by the temptations of art. But there was, in Faber’s mind, a third meaning attached to the Leaning Tower. It was a sign, and a good sign, that pointed him in the direction he must go. The interaction between Faber’s grounding in his early visual culture and his adult reaction to Pisa is fascinatingly complex. Other writers responded differently, and though few felt that it had a personal message for them, some saw the Leaning Tower as an example of primitive architecture, others as a relic of a purer age. Nevertheless, when writers, critics, architects, and artists such Coleridge, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Faber, Whewell, Jameson, Mary Shelley, Sharpe, Losh, Browning, Ruskin, Rossetti, Waterhouse, Fry, and Lawrence travelled abroad they went with well-formed ideas and attitudes. For nearly all of them, however, the interaction with continental art or architecture challenged those ideas or changed their perceptions. But the art of the Continent often did more than this for them; it sometimes activated processes of self-discovery. Again and again, continental experiences acted as a catalyst bringing about radical mental adjustments or fundamental changes of belief. These may not always have been on the scale of Faber’s secession from the Church of England and conversion to Rome, but some had considerable repercussions. One has only to think of the consequences of Ruskin’s passion for Venice in the Venetian Gothic buildings that cover the land. It is hoped that the reader, too, will make discoveries in these pages. Coleridge has not often been discussed as a pioneer of British art criticism; little has been said before about Browning’s attitude to the ‘Christian Art’ of the Germans, and the connection between D. H. Lawrence’s sculptor Loerke in Women in Love and the Bavarian artist Josef Moest is, as far as I am aware, quite new. Many of the chapters have been published elsewhere and over a long period of time. All of them have been rewritten, and many of them fundamentally revised in the light of new research.

1 The English Romantics and Early Italian Art It is a remarkable fact that between 1750 and 1850 European attitudes to medieval art were completely reversed. Paintings that Gibbon and his contemporaries found awkward and repellent, Dante Gabriel Rossetti found fresh and beautiful. We know a great deal about the stages by which this took place, and those stages have been outlined elsewhere.1 We know less about why it happened, why artists, critics, poets, and novelists turned away from art that was familiar to find new sensations in art that was primitive. It is usually the collectors of early Italian art who are credited with sowing the seeds of new aesthetic attitudes and values, collectors who were fascinated by the curious or eccentric, or interested in the early phases of the history of art. Clearly they were important, but rarely did they attempt to communicate their passion, and when they tried, they lacked the language in which to do it. Instead, in Britain at least, this was first attempted by a group who were neither economically nor professionally connected to the art world. They were writers of an imaginative disposition, writers centrally involved with the Romantic movement, but who are not usually regarded as critics of art.2 Perhaps surprisingly, Keats, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt were among the first to express a response to medieval paintings as objects of beauty rather than curiosities. Without wishing to detract from

1

Notably by Camillo von Klenze, ‘The Growth of Interest in the Early Italian Masters: from Tischbein to Ruskin’, Modern Philology, 4, no. 2 (1906), 207–74 and Giovanni Previtali, La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici (Turin, 1964). 2 The interest displayed by individual English Romantics in the visual arts has been the subject of extensive critical attention. For example, Martha Hale Shackford, Wordsworth’s Interest in Painters and Pictures (Wellesley, Mass., 1945); Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford, 1967), pp. 91–106; Carl Woodring, ‘What Coleridge Thought of Pictures’, in Images of Romanticism, ed. Karl Kroeber and William Walling (New Haven and London, 1978); Frederick C. Colwell, ‘Shelley and Italian Painting’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 29 (1980), 43–66. But what has been overlooked is the placing of the Romantic writers in British or even European taste at large.

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The English Romantics and Early Italian Art

the significance of the collectors, I suggest that it was the poets who were the first in Britain to adopt affective interpretations of early art of the kind that we more readily associate with Ruskin, some thirty years later. Aesthetic changes were triggered by the enormous political changes in this period. The incursions of Napoleon Bonaparte into Europe at the end of the eighteenth century not only changed the geographical map, they also brought about a revolution in the world of art, taste, and collecting. Throughout the period 1790 to 1815 the French presence in Italy had a profound influence on the movement of art works in Europe. The details are complex, and many of them have been traced by Francis Haskell,3 but the upshot was to dislodge thousands of paintings from their traditional settings and establish them either permanently or temporarily in others.4 Churches and monasteries, in particular, were forced to give up their treasures, not only in Italy but in the Rhineland5 and other parts of Europe, and throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon looked upon Italy in particular as a huge quarry of artefacts whose possession lent cultural authenticity to his reign. He rapidly began authorizing their transport to create the finest museum in the world in Paris—the Musée Napoléon. In England, too, Napoleon’s influence was felt within the art world as both paintings by well-known masters and much less well-known ‘Primitives’ were imported and put up for sale. This had two rather contradictory effects on people’s understanding of Italian art. On the one hand, the experience of seeing and sometimes buying the works of High Renaissance masters tended to substantiate the supremacy of that period over all others. On the other, the availability of earlier 3 In Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (1976), especially chapters 1 and 2. 4 Denys Sutton calculated that there were approximately 500 pictures by early masters in England between 1790 and 1815. See Denys Sutton, ‘Aspects of British Collecting—XIV. From Ottley to Eastlake’, Apollo, 122 (1985), 84. 5 The availability of old German religious art was in part the result of the physical dissolution of German ecclesiastical establishments and the secular administration of the Rhinelands in the wake of the French Revolution. Early in their collecting career the Boisserée brothers, Sulpiz and Melchior, made an astonishing purchase. In 1808 they bought Roger van der Weyden’s triptych (then thought to be by Van Eyck) from the monastery of St Columba. This formed the basis of a collection later sold to Ludwig I of Bavaria, which in turn provided the basis for the rediscovery of early German art and the promotion of its modern equivalent by the Nazarenes. See pp. 116–17 below.


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work from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries led many art lovers to take seriously painting which had previously been ignored or neglected. The first, and arguably the most important, in a veritable procession of collections to reach Britain, was that of the Duke of Orleans. This group of pictures, which included many masterpieces of the High Renaissance and later, went on show in London in 1798. It was this group that, according to Hazlitt, served to ‘form’ his taste,6 and included pictures by Titian, Raphael, Guido Reni, Domenichino, and the Carracci. Hazlitt’s inventory was confirmed by the art dealer William Buchanan, who capitalized by selling paintings from the continent to rich patrons in England. Through his activities, and those of dealers like him, the nobility and gentry, as Francis Haskell pointed out, ‘could now decorate their houses in the same style as the aristocrats of Rome, Venice and Genoa’—an endeavour which, he added, would have seemed ‘unimaginable only ten years earlier’.7 A less affluent group of collectors directed their attention to the Italian Primitives and bought paintings and drawings which others spurned. William Roscoe, for example, amassed over 200 works in the period up to 1816, of which 45 come into the category ‘early masters’, including Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple (1342) and Perugino’s Birth of the Virgin (c.1470).8 Roscoe was not the first in this endeavour and many in the eighteenth century, such as Ignazio Hugford, John Strange, and the Bishop of Bristol,9 preceded him. But all these early collectors shared a single aim, and this was clearly expressed by Roscoe in the ‘advertisement’ he wrote in 1816 for his own sale catalogue. He said: 6 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’ (1820), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (1930–4), viii, 14. 7 Haskell (1976), p. 26. 8 These were bought in 1804 from Colonel Mathew Smith, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Governor of the Tower of London. Under the auspices of Thomas Winstanley they passed first to the Liverpool Royal Institution (which Winstanley had helped to found) then to the Walker Art Gallery where they now hang. The Martini cost 5 guineas and the Perugino (then called Birth of the Baptist) 9 guineas. 9 Details of Hugford’s various activities can be found in J. Fleming, ‘The Hugfords of Florence’, Connoisseur, 136 (1955), part I, 106–10, part II, 197–206; Giovanni Previtali (1964), p. 222; Bruce Cole and Ulrich Middledorf, ‘Masaccio, Lippi, or Hugford?’ Burlington Magazine, 93 (1971), 500–7; Denys Sutton ‘Aspects of British Collecting—XIV: from Ottley to Eastlake’, Apollo (1985), 84–95; for Strange, see James Dennistoun, Memoirs of Sir Robert Strange and Andrew Lumisdon (1855); for Bristol, see William S. Childe-Pemberton, The Earl Bishop: The Life of Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry, Earl of Bristol, 2 vols. (1925), ii, 562.

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The following works . . . have been collected during a series of years, chiefly for the purpose of illustrating by a reference to the original and authentic sources, the rise and progress of the arts in modern times, as well in Germany and Flanders as in Italy. They are therefore not wholly to be judged of by their positive merits, but by a reference to the age in which they were produced. Their value chiefly depends on their authenticity, and the light they throw on the history of the arts; yet as they extend beyond the splendid æra of 1500, there will be found several productions of a higher class which may be ranked among the chef d’oeuvres of modern skill.10

What is important here is that Roscoe’s ostensible aim in acquiring early works was historical not aesthetic. In common with so many of his contemporaries in this field, he wished to put together a representative group of paintings which would illustrate the history and development of painting over three or more centuries, not because the early works were necessarily possessed of any ‘positive merit’.11 This archaeological passion was further encouraged by the publication of books of prints and engravings. Early painting featured incidentally in such texts as Stefano Mulinari’s Istoria pratica dell’ incominciamento, et progressi della pittura of 1778, Alessandro da Morrona’s three volume Pisa illustrata nelle arti del disegno of 1787, Marco Lastri’s L’Etruria pittrice of 1791, and The Italian Schools of Design of 1823 by William Young Ottley. Then there was Seroux d’Agincourt’s six-volume Histoire de l’art par les monumens, also of 1823, which, as we shall see, formed a ‘pictorial museum’—providing the reader with an illustrated history of the ‘progress’ of art in painting, sculpture, and architecture. But there was nothing exclusively devoted to the history of early Italian art before the ‘discovery’ of the great fresco cycle in the Campo Santo of Pisa. Pisa had never been part of any grand tour of Europe, but even in the eighteenth century the curious traveller had sometimes made a detour on the way to Rome. As time passed and the status of medieval art rose, more and more visitors arrived until eventually both the architecture and the frescoes of Pisa became some of the 10

William Roscoe, ‘Advertisement’, in Catalogue of the Genuine and Entire Collection of Drawings and Pictures, the Property of William Roscoe, Esq. (Liverpool, 1816), n.p. 11 I say ‘ostensible’ here because, though it is possible that early connoisseurs bought these paintings simply out of collecting mania, it is also possible that they felt strongly and positively about them, yet they were in possession of no terms by which they could articulate their liking.


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wonders of the world.12 The most important paintings were the Triumph of Death, the Last Judgement, Hell, and Scenes from the Lives of the Anchorites. The first two were generally thought to be by Andrea Orcagna,13 the third by his brother Bernardo, and the last by Pietro Lorenzetti. Vasari, whose authority still stood in the early nineteenth century, attributed a series depicting the sufferings of Job to Giotto, and the others he gave to Buffalmacco, ‘Simone Memmi’ (i.e. Simone Martini), Antonio Veneziano, Spinello Aretino, and Taddeo Bartolo. Benozzo Gozzoli completed the cycle in the 1460s with an Old Testament series including the Drunkenness of Noah. In the eighteenth century the cycle was the object of somewhat irritated curiosity. Though it was thought to be a remnant of art in its ‘barbaric’ state, the size and power of the frescoes demanded attention. The epithet ‘mauvais’ featured prominently in the responses of early French visitors. When Montesquieu saw the work in 1728, he wrote that in Pisa ‘one can clearly see the bad taste of that time’,14 while Charles de Brosses dismissed the same works as ‘very strange, very ridiculous, perfectly awful and extremely curious’.15 This attitude still prevailed when Cochin wrote his famous guidebook, Voyage d’Italie, in 1758. ‘The cloister is decorated’, he said, ‘with ancient paintings from the early days of painting [and are therefore] bad.’16 Gibbon, who used Cochin’s book during his travels around Italy, also used the word ‘mauvais’, but in keeping with his character he tempered his dislike with historical relativism. ‘The Campo Santo’, he confided to his journal, ‘is a genuinely unique and strange monument. It is a large Gothic cloister whose walls are painted by the earliest revivers of painting, Giotto etc. They are bad, but of

12 The story of the Campo Santo has been most substantially explored by Robyn Cooper in ‘ “The Crowning Glory of Pisa”: Nineteenth-Century Reactions to the Campo Santo’, Italian Studies, 37 (1982), 72–100, and Hilary Gatti, ‘Il Campo Santo di Pisa nella letteratura inglese’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa: Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 16, no. 1 (1982), 239–70. 13 Successively attributed to Orcagna, Pietro Lorenzetti, Francesco Traini, Vitale da Bologna, Buffalmacco and ‘Maestro del Trionfo della Morte’. 14 ‘On y voit bien à plein le mauvais goût de ce temps-là’ (Voyages de Montesquieu, ed. Albert de Montesquieu, 2 vols. (Bordeaux, 1894), i, 158). 15 ‘Fort bizarre, fort ridicule, parfaitement méchante et très curieuse’ (Charles de Brosses, Lettres historiques et critiques sur l’Italie (Paris, 1799), 75). 16 ‘Le cloître est décoré de peintures anciennes, dès les commencemens de la peinture, par conséquent mauvaises’ (Charles Cochin, Voyage d’Italie etc., 2 vols. (Paris, 1769), ii, 102).

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necessity they take one back to a time when they were rare and precious.’17 Many proto-Romantic writers like William Beckford were struck by the mysterious architectural atmosphere of the Campo Santo though they had little positive to say about the paintings.18 The buildings of the Pisan complex, as we shall see in the next chapter, played an important role in the historiography of nineteenth-century architecture, but it was not until right at the end of the eighteenth century that the painting was radically reassessed. The shift in responses is represented by Mariana Stark, who in 1802 developed the pedagogic line adumbrated by Gibbon. She suggested that ‘however deficient in many respects’ the paintings may be, they would, nevertheless, ‘yield pleasure to those who wish, in their entrance into Italy, to view the works of the Revivers of an art afterwards carried to such exquisite perfection’.19 The implication here, in keeping with the rationale of collectors like the Bishop of Bristol and William Roscoe, is that though the early paintings may be of little artistic merit, they are important to a complete understanding of superior, later works. How then did the change take place from perceiving early Italian paintings primarily as documents of historical interest to seeing them as aesthetic objects? From reading them as just a series of links in a chain to understanding them as independent, expressive works of art? The catalyst for this process was publication, and one publication in particular, Carlo Lasinio’s Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa (1812) with a text by Pompilio Tazini of the Scuole Pie.20 Lasinio taught engraving techniques at the Academia in Florence. In 1806 he moved to Pisa, and in the following year accepted the post of Conservatore of the Campo Santo where, during the war with 17 ‘Le Campo Santo est réelement un monument unique et curieux. C’est un grand Cloître Gothique dont les murs sont peints part les prèmiers [sic] Restaurateurs de la peinture, un Giotto &c. Elles sont mauvaises, mais il faut se transporter aux tems où elles etoient rares et precieuses’ (Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome: his Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (1961), p. 228). 18 William Beckford was in Pisa in 1780 (See Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (New Jersey, 1971), letter 15, p. 166). 19 Mariana Starke, Travels in Italy Between the Years 1792 and 1798, 2 vols. (1802), i, 211. For Henry Fuseli, who was in Pisa in December and January of 1803, see, ‘A History of Art in the Schools of Italy’ (c.1803), in The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, ed. John Knowles, 3 vols. (1831), iii, 157 and 180. 20 See Lloyd, Christopher, ‘A Note on Carlo and Giovanni Paolo Lasinio’, Bodleian Library Record, 10 (1978), 51–7.


15

Napoleon, his commitment to the building and its contents preserved them from ruin. His volume of 42 engravings took him six years to complete and was an expression of that same enthusiasm. It is monumental both in scope and physical size, and its very scale invites the reader to take the Campo Santo frescoes seriously. Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century only the art of the High Renaissance and later had received such lavish treatment; now in 1812 early art was being treated similarly and in a way which competed with the finest art publications of the period. The book was enthusiastically received; it was read all over Europe;21 it went into a number of editions, and it placed Pisa firmly on the artistic map.22 In England the development of general interest in early Italian art was a slow process. Even in 1842 Francis Palgrave told the readers in his widely read Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy that ‘it is but recently that travellers have described the paintings of the Campo Santo otherwise than in terms of dispraise’,23 and in 1845 Ruskin felt that he was making a considerable discovery at the Campo Santo when, using Wordsworth’s famous phrase, he told the readers of the second volume of Modern Painters (1846) that the figures in the Trionfo had become ‘living presences’ to him,24 but the public had to wait until 1848 before the National Gallery bought its first medieval paintings.25 The first stirrings of interest in medieval art, however, had actually come much earlier among artists of the late eighteenth century who looked to the past for fresh sources of inspiration. Among these was John Flaxman, who spent seven years in Rome between 1787 and 21 So impressed was Friedrich Schlegel with Lasinio’s work that he urged his fellow countrymen to produce something similar for German art. See ‘Schloss Karlstein bei Prag’, in Ansichten und Ideen von der christlichen Kunst, ed. Hans Eichner (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 35 vols. (Munich, Paderborn, Vienna, and Zurich, 1958–), iv, 207 ff.). 22 Many writers in the first half of the nineteenth century held the Campo Santo in high esteem from Goethe to the Pre-Raphaelites. They included F. Schlegel, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Flaxman, Samuel Palmer, Franz Kugler, Sir Charles Eastlake, Ruskin, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The reattribution of the frescoes in the midcentury led to a decline in interest and they were virtually destroyed by bombing in 1944. See Licia Bertolini, Mario Bucci, and Piero Sampaolesi, Camposanto monumentale di Pisa: affreschi e sinopie (Pisa, 1960), Cooper (1982), 72–100, and Gatti (1986), 239–70. 23 Palgrave, Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), p. 458. 24 Ruskin, Works, iv, 350. 25 Two pictures by Lorenzo Monaco were acquired by the gallery in 1848.

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1794.26 Inspired by Winckelmann’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek sculpture, Flaxman, together with a number of contemporary artists, turned away from the prevailing taste for Rococo work to what seemed to them to be the more austere, ‘masculine’, and rigorous treatment of the human form by the Greeks.27 When Flaxman arrived in Rome he became friendly with Antonio Canova, who was just beginning to emerge as the leading Italian sculptor. Both men began to explore other kinds of ancient art in what they thought was its pristine and uncorrupted state, and both were drawn to the then little-known work of the early Italians. Canova copied a number of paintings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Flaxman produced similar studies, including one of the Trionfo della morte in Pisa.28 Flaxman introduced Canova to the Bishop of Derry (Lord Bristol) with a view to a commission at a time when the bishop was seriously collecting early Italian works. One of the principal forces behind this new awareness of medieval Italian art was the remarkable French historian Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt, who, modelling himself on Winkelmann, openly confessed that he wished to become the ‘Winckelmann des temps de barbarie’.29 Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums had appeared in 1764 and its methodology was significantly original. In this book, Winckelmann, through a series of four periods, constructed a synthetic account of ancient art from its origins to its decline. Seroux d’Agincourt realized that Winckelmann’s method might be extended to more recent periods of art history.30 But his task was formidable. Ignorance of post-classical art was almost total, and he was faced with what he called ‘an immense desert’31 between the 26

Flaxman reported his 1787 visit to Pisa in his Lectures on Sculpture (1829), p.

304. 27 This turning away from styles which seemed moribund and decadent to those which appeared more bracing, astringent, and less refined, led to a type of Grecomania which reached its height around 1797 in the ‘Primitifs’ led by Pierre-Maurice Quay and other followers of Jacques Louis David. 28 Canova’s drawings are in the Museo Correr, Venice, and Flaxman’s sketchbooks from this period are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See Previtali (1964), p. 176 and David Irwin, John Flaxman: 1755–1826 (1979), p. 41. 29 Quoted M. J. Dumesnil, ‘J.-B. Louis Georges Seroux d’Agincourt’, in Histoire des plus célèbres amateurs français (Paris, 1858), iii, 34. 30 I am indebted here to Dennis Potts’s ‘Winckelmann’s Construction of History’, Art History, 5 (Dec. 1982), 377–407. 31 J.-B. L. G. Seroux d’Agincourt, Histoire de l’art par les monumens depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe (Paris, 1823), i. Discours Préliminaire, iii.


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fall of Constantine and the late fifteenth century. Nevertheless, by slowly piecing together evidence from painting, architecture, and sculpture he eventually produced in 1823 a great six-volume work, the Histoire de l’art par les monumens depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à sa renouvellement au XVIe. In 1778, at the age of 48, he left for Italy to extend his first-hand study of Italian art, little knowing that he would never to return to France. His travels took him all over Italy, visiting buildings, collections of paintings, drawings, coins, miniatures, and ancient manuscripts, and in the course of his journey he spent considerable sums of personal money employing draughtsmen to copy examples of pictorial, architectural, and sculptural work for his book. Among these artists were Canova and Flaxman, and it was d’Agincourt’s encylopedic venture that helped increase their awareness of the Primitives. They were joined by the Dutch artist Humbert de Superville and the connoisseur and writer William Young Ottley.32 Ironically, Seroux d’Agincourt himself had little time for this early work. As a man of the ancien régime his eyes were firmly fixed on the glories of the High Renaissance, and he saw his journey through this medieval period as dark and tedious. In the event, his book was not published until after his death in 1823, and though the illustrations encouraged those interested in medieval art and architecture, the text offered no support for the burgeoning taste in the Primitives. For this we have to look elsewhere, and in England that inspiration came from a surprising source. One might have expected primitivist impulses from historians or professional critics, but this was not so. Instead the imaginative leap took place amongst Keats, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt, each of whom underwent ‘conversions’ to the work of the early masters as the result of their direct or indirect experience of the frescoes of the Campo Santo. But before examining how this took place, their attitude to medieval art can be usefully thrown into relief by contrast with another member of the same group, Shelley, who knew Pisa well but whose taste remained resolutely fixed within the older, more conservative canon.

32 Humbert de Superville was in Italy between 1789 and 1800 and his taste for this early work earned him the nickname ‘Giottino’. William Young Ottley confessed that in his work for d’Agincourt he had ‘more than once visited Florence, Pisa, Orvieto, Assisi, and Sienna’ in the pursuit of examples of early Italian art. See William Young Ottley, An Inquiry ino the Origin and Early History of Engraving (1816).

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Shelley and Italian Art Between 1818 and his death in 1822, Shelley spent much of his time in Pisa, Livorno, Lucca, and Florence. He was passionate about Italian art, and made a point of visiting museums, churches, and galleries all over Italy, but strangely, there is no record of his ever having seen the paintings of the Campo Santo.33 It is true, the guide books on which he relied offered no encouragement to visit the Campo Santo nor did they have anything complimentary to say about early art. John Chetwode Eustace, in his Classical Tour (1815), speaks only of its architecture, and fails to mention the paintings, and Joseph Forsyth who had seen the paintings dismissed them in a few words. In his Remarks on Antiquities (1813), he says that they ‘betray a thin, timid, ill-fed pencil; they present corpses rather than men, sticks rather than trees’ and there is nothing ‘that is truly excellent’.34 Shelley’s taste in art was not, however, unusual and resembled that of many early nineteenth-century connoisseurs and collectors. Like Hazlitt, he was ‘of the old school in painting’,35 and his itinerary around Italy took him in pursuit of masters whose reputations had been firmly established in the eighteenth century or earlier. A note in Mary Shelley’s journal when the couple were in Bologna is indicative of his taste. There they saw ‘many exquisitely beautiful [works] of the first masters—a Christ of Correggio, St. Cecilia of Raphael, a great many of Guido, Franceschini, Domenichino, and Caracci [sic]’.36 Above all, Guido Reni was the painter of sentiment and emotion. In Reni’s Madonna che allatta il bambino,37 it was as if, said Shelley, ‘the spirit of a love almost insupportable from its intensity 33 But Geoffrey Matthews follows Edmund Blunden in suggesting that Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’ might have been inspired by The Triumph of Death. See Matthews, ‘On Shelley’s “Triumph of Life” ’, Studia Neophilologica, 34 (1962), 124, and Edmund Blunden, Shelley: a Life Story (1946), p. 291. 34 John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour Through Italy in 1802, 3rd edn., 4 vols. (1815), iii, 451–5, and Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy in the Years 1802 and 1803 (1813), p. 14. Shelley claimed to have a low opinion of Eustace, but he often follows his Judgements and mentions him twice in his letters. See The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford, 1964), ii, 54 and 89. 35 Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Painting’, in The Complete Works, viii, 14. 36 Shelley Letters, ii, 49n. 37 This was in Bologna until 1840 when it was sold to an English collector. It was later lost.


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were brooding upon and weighing down the soul, or whatever it is without which the material frame is inanimate and inexpressive’.38 Such was the power of Guido’s work over the poet that after seeing Guido’s so-called portrait of Beatrice Cenci in Rome in 1819—‘the most beautiful creature that you can conceive’39—he began his dramatization of her life in The Cenci. At this time Leigh Hunt shared Shelley’s taste. He wrote to him longing to hear ‘of Rome, & Naples, & the paintings’40 and, examining his books of engravings in London, sent Shelley off in search of the work Raphael and Giulio Romano, whom Hunt placed above Michelangelo.41 ‘I mention Julio Romano,’ he wrote, ‘because in the prints I have seen from him there is a poetical something more to my taste than in the heavy-built dreams, neither natural nor supernatural’ of Michelangelo.42 Fortified by Hunt’s advice and fortified, too, with large doses of Winckelmann’s neo-classicism, Shelley visited the Studii of Michelangelo in Naples and the Sistine Chapel in Rome. But he was dismayed by what he found there, and his account of the Last Judgement elicited from him a stream of vehement and hostile prose. Compared with Raphael, he told Hunt, Michelangelo has ‘no sense of moral dignity and loveliness; and the energy for which he has been so much praised appears to me to be a certain rude, external, mechanical, quality.’ As for the Last Judgement it was ‘deficient in beauty & majesty both in conception & the execution . . . & it is a dull & wicked emblem of a dull and wicked thing.’ ‘Jesus Christ’, he claimed, ‘is like an angry pot-boy & God like an old alehouse-keeper looking out of window [sic].’43 As for so many of his contemporaries, the artist par excellence for Shelley was Raphael, ‘whom’, he said, ‘I agree with the whole world in thinking the finest painter’.44 It is not surprising, then, given his preference for the idealizing tendencies of Raphael, and the sentimental ones of Guido, Shelley attributed no significance to the Campo Santo in whose shadow he lived for several years. 38 Shelley Letters, ii, 51. This picture is now in North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina. 39 Shelley Letters, ii, 102. 40 Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Donald H. Reimon, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), vi, 610. Letter dated c.14 July–4 Aug. 1818. 41 Ibid. Hunt told him that he should see The Triumph of Galatea in the Sala della Galatea, Cupid and Psyche in the Farnesina, Parnassus in the Vatican and the Mass of Bolsena (the title of which he had forgotten) in the Stanza d’Eliodoro. 42 43 44 Shelley and his Circle, vi, 553–4. Shelley Letters, ii, 112. Ibid.

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Keats and the Campo Santo etchings In 1818, Shelley invited his friend Keats to join him in Italy, and although by then Keats was too ill to take up the invitation, he had recently developed artistic tastes interestingly different from those of Shelley. On the last day of that same year, in a letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, Keats described his education in art by contrasting the work of two of Shelley’s favourites—Raphael and Guido Reni. ‘I can never feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty,’ he wrote, and continued, A year ago I could not understand in the slightest degree Raphael’s cartoons—now I begin to read them a little—and how did I lea[r]n to do so? By seeing something done in quite an opposite spirit—I mean a picture of Guido’s in which all the Saints instead of that heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur which they inherit from Raphael, had each of them both in countenance and gesture all the canting, solemn melodramatic mawkishness of Mackensie’s father Nicholas.45

It is possible to detect in the professional art language—‘heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur’—the influence on him of his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, who felt the same about the relative merits of Raphael and Reni. Unlike Shelley, however, Haydon also admired some early Italian art. This may seem surprising in such a devout neo-classicist, but like Flaxman and some of the circle around Seroux d’Agincourt Haydon felt an affinity between the stylized simplicity of early Italian design and similar qualities in Greek work— particularly vase painting. Indeed, in 1810 Haydon wrote in his diary: I could not help observing the other day on looking at a head of Giotto, saved from the Carmelites’ Church at Florence,46 the exact resemblance it 45 The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), ii, 19. Letter dated 31 Dec. 1818. 46 Thomas Patch sawed a fresco fragment of two haloed mourners from the walls of the Carmine after a fire in 1771. He thought that they were by Giotto, and published them in his Life of Masaccio . . . etc (1772), while the remainder of the series was destroyed in the restoration of the church. See F. J. B. Watson, ‘Thomas Patch (1725–82)’, Walpole Society Yearbook, 28 (1939–40), 15–40. In 1810 the fragment came up for sale in the Charles Lambert collection where, presumably, Haydon saw it (see Dorothy Lygon and Francis Russel, ‘Tuscan Primitives in London Sales, 1801–37’, Burlington Magazine, 122 (1980), 115. It was bought for 10 guineas by Samuel Rogers, and came to the National Gallery in 1856 after the Rogers sale. Thomas Hardy refers to it in the last chapter of Tess of the d’Urbervilles where he calls


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bore to the heads of the Panathenaic procession, as if (and it is certainly evident from this) he had been instructed by the poor Grecian Artists who fled to Italy during the invasion of their country and carried with them what they had seen in Athens.47

Haydon’s interest in early art was such that in 1818 he obtained a copy of Lasinio’s Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa, a surprisingly expensive possession for one who persistently confessed to his diary terrible ‘pecuniary difficulties’.48 In December of that year he showed the book to Keats, and though Keats thought the frescoes were in Milan, he was highly impressed by them. In the same letter in which he contrasted Raphael and Guido, he continued: ‘When I was last at Haydon’s I look [sic] over a Book of Prints taken from the fresco of the Church at Milan the name of which I forget—in it are comprised Specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy.’49 Keats’s word ‘Specimens’ here grows out of the prevalent idea that the most important function of early works was to provide historical justification for later ones, and that their interest was dominantly didactic. But Keats quickly moves away from this and adopts a more intimate, personal tone in his account: ‘I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare—Full of Romance and the most tender feeling—magnificence of draperies beyond any I ever saw not excepting Raphael’s—But Grotesque to a curious pitch—yet still making up a fine whole—even finer to me than more accomplish’d works—as there was left so much room for Imagination.’50 Instantly the formality of contemporary art discourse gives way to something more tentative but strongly felt, and in spite of the fact that Haydon had clearly been urging upon him the virtues of Raphael’s ‘more accomplished works’, he is deeply moved by the early painting. His unorthodox response to these engravings—‘there was so much room

it ‘Giotto’s “Two Apostles” ’. In 1906 it was attributed to Spinello Aretino. See Martin Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools, 2nd edn. (1961), pp. 498–500. 47 The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), i, 166. Haydon repeated the same idea in his diary in 1824. See Diary, ii, 489. 48 In 1820 these difficulties reached a climax. He was arrested for debt and in 1823 his library, including his copy of the Lasinio, was sold. Ian Jack points out that a ‘ “very fine” book of prints from the Campo Santo di Pisa is listed as item 79 in the catalogue of Haydon’s effects sold by auction in 1823’, Keats and the Mirror of Art, p. 99. 49 50 The Letters of John Keats, ii, 19. Ibid.

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for Imagination’—was an important and integral factor in the whole process of imaginative myth-making which would eventually radically change attitudes to early art. It is not difficult to see why, for Keats, the Campo Santo frescoes were more appealing than the work of the High Renaissance. Coming relatively untutored from a humble background, Keats was attempting to assimilate the visual taste of a higher class dominated by the painting of Raphael. Haydon (among others) must have explained to Keats the superiority of sixteenth-century work over the popular, but sentimental, painting of Guido Reni, and Keats says that recently he has begun ‘to read [the pictures of Raphael] a little’, like a child learning the language of the adult. Early Italian art, however, had no position in the canon, and Keats feels less constrained in his response to it. So, having made his obeisance to the contemporary middle and upper class taste for ‘high art’, he feels freer to attend to his own intuitions and to enjoy the imaginative pleasure afforded by the earlier work. Keats was, of course, not alone in this. He was preceded by one famous contemporary, Coleridge, and was followed by another, Leigh Hunt. They both have much more to say about early Italian art than Keats, and their responses to the Campo Santo are both unusual and highly innovative.

Coleridge and early art Like Keats, Coleridge came to painting late in life, and it was probably his acquaintance with Sir George Beaumont in 1803 which opened his eyes to its imaginative power. The revelation was dramatic. ‘O Christ, it maddens me’, he exclaimed, ‘that I am not a painter or that Painters are not I.’51 From Sir George, he said, he ‘learnt as much . . . respecting Pictures & Painting and Painte[rs as] [he] ever learnt from any man in the same Space of Time’,52 and though Sir George possessed a fine collection of paintings—the collection which became one of the nuclei of the National Gallery—his taste was conservative, and he possessed nothing that was early or

51

Notebooks (1957), i, entry 1495. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1956), ii, 1063. 52


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Italian.53 Nevertheless, he introduced Coleridge to the pictures belonging to the painter James Northcote, and to those of the collectors Lord Ashburnham and John Julius Angerstein, where he saw, for the first time, work by Bronzino, Salvator Rosa, and Veronese.54 When Coleridge finally set out for the Mediterranean in 1805 he was, under the tutelage of Sir George and his friends in London, most strongly disposed to enjoy High Renaissance painting and particularly the work of Raphael. In this he was not disappointed, and Raphael’s work ever remained for him, as it did for most of his contemporaries, the finest achievement in painting. When he reached Rome he met the Scottish painter George Wallis and struck up a close friendship with Washington Allston, a kind of American Richard Wilson, for whose classical Claudian landscapes Coleridge expressed great enthusiasm.55 Together with Allston he went to see Raphael’s Galatea in the Villa Farnesina,56 which he judged to be a ‘consummate work’.57 But in the forefront of Coleridge’s pantheon was the ‘unapproachable wonder of the sublime Florentine’ in the Sistine Chapel.58 Coleridge was bowled over by the work of Michelangelo: ‘I venerate the Last Judgment and the Prophets of Michael Angelo Buonoroti [sic].’ Yet the experience was not entirely pleasurable. There was also the ‘pain, which I repeatedly felt as I lost myself in gazing upon them . . .’59 and as an illustration of the ideal in painting he took ‘Michel Angelo’s despairing Woman at the bottom of the Last Judgment’.60 In one sense Coleridge’s taste was entirely orthodox. In 1814 he made a list of the ‘noblest productions of human genius’ that contains no surprises and is a catalogue of the early-nineteenth-century wonders of the artistic world. They included ‘the Iliad, the works of Shakespear and Milton, the 53 See David Blayney Brown, ‘Sir George Beaumont as Collector and Connoisseur: the Taste of the Golden Age’, in Noble and Patriotic: the Beaumont Gift, 1828, Tate Gallery (1988), pp. 17–30 passim. 54 Coleridge, Letters, ii, 589. 55 Coleridge intended to write a study of Allston’s work, but all that remains is a long and detailed appreciation of his Diana and Her Nymphs in the Chase. See Notebooks, ii, entry 2831. 56 Coleridge wrote to a friend in 1814 reminding Allston of their visit to the Farnesina. Letters, iii, 520–1. 57 ‘Essays on the Principles of Genial Criticism (1814)’, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Keith Winer (16 vols., Princeton, 1971–200), xi/1, 374. 58 59 Notebooks, iii, entry 3286. Notebooks, iii, entry 3286. 60 Notebooks, ii, entry 2828.

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Pantheon, Rafael’s Gallery, and Michael Angelo’s Sestine [sic] Chapel, the Venus de Medici, and the Apollo Belvidere’ [sic].61 It is a list with which Sir George and his contemporaries would have heartily concurred. Yet there was another side to Coleridge’s taste, and it comes as something of a surprise that the man who was so devoted to those ‘noblest productions of human genius’ was equally moved by the art of the Middle Ages. ‘When I enter a Greek church,’ he said, ‘my eye is charmed, and my mind elated; I feel exalted, and proud that I am a man. But Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite . . . I am nothing!’62 As we have seen, at the beginning of the nineteenth century medieval art was collected by a number of people who at that time had rather eccentric taste. In 1797 the Bishop of Bristol’s Italian collection was threatened with confiscation by the French invaders. In the following year Lord Bristol wrote to Sir William Hamilton reporting the fate of his collection. ‘These pictures’, he said, ‘are chiefly of Cimabue, Giotto, Guido da Siena, Marco da Siena and all that old pedantry of painting which served to show the progress of the art at its resurrection, and so, had they been left to the French might have been redeemed for a trifle, being, like many other trifles, of no use to anyone but the owner.’63 The importance which he attached to these paintings was primarily historical; he had bought them, he said, to set up a ‘gallery of . . . painters from . . . Cimabue to Pompeio Balloni . . .’ which would show ‘the historical progress of the art of Painting . . .’ in his new house at Ickworth in Suffolk.64 His plan for the gallery, however, never materialized because he died in Naples in 1803. His collection was then brought to Rome where 61

On the Principles of Genial Criticism’, Collected Works, xi/1, 364. Transcription of a lecture given on 30 June 1818 in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (1936), pp. 11–12. It is a measure of the relative novelty of Coleridge’s argument about the nature of the Gothic mind, however, that one member of his audience was amazed at Coleridge’s audacity in speaking of ‘the inferior excitement of his . . . feeling produced by . . . antient architecture compared to the intensity of the emotions which had been produced by a view of the cathedral at York, and the interior of Kings College Chapel’ (Miscellaneous Criticism, p. 9). 63 Quoted in W. S. Childe Pemberton (1925), ii, 562. Ultimately the French did disperse Bristol’s collection, but this was not until after his death in 1803 and after Coleridge had seen it in 1806. 64 The quotations are from letters of 1796 to his daughter, Elizabeth Forster. See Pemberton (1925), ii, 497 and 519. 62


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Coleridge saw it, perhaps on the recommendation of Canova, whom he met in around this time,65 and Coleridge recorded that he found it ‘interesting for the strange mixture’.66 This exposure to early Italian art must have triggered an interest in Coleridge which was further stimulated by his association with the German community in Italy. In Rome he read the work of A.W. Schlegel, and Schiller, and under the auspices of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Prussian minister to the court of Pius VII and admirer of Schiller, he met other members of the German community including Ludwig Tieck.67 Coleridge, who had learned German and had spent ten months in Germany in 1798–9, found this group very hospitable, and though he seems at the time to have been ignorant of Tieck’s reputation as a critic and novelist, he did translate one of his poems after this meeting.68 Tieck, he remembered, had been very kind to him69 and it is highly likely that it was Tieck who suggested he visit the Campo Santo in Pisa. The reason for this is that some ten years previously Tieck had included a description of the Trionfo della morte in a novel which he had written with his friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder entitled Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798).70 The two friends had hoped to travel to Italy together but Wackenroder died of typhoid, so Tieck came instead with his sculptor brother Friedrich, and the two draughtsmen brothers Johannes and Franz Riepenhausen, who went to Florence and Pisa to gather material to illustrate the medieval romance Genoveffa. It was not until many years later that Coleridge read Wackenroder’s criticism and Tieck’s novel, but there is little doubt that Tieck’s personal enthusiasm for Pisa and its frescoes was infectious. In May and again in June1806 Coleridge made visits to Pisa. On the first of these he responded rather like a number of picturesque travellers in the late eighteenth century. He wrote in his notebook of 65

Coleridge, Letters, iii, 844. Letter to Sir George Beaumont dated 7 Dec. 1811 where he mentions having met Canova in Rome. 66 Notebooks, iii, entry 2840. 67 See Donald Sultana, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Malta and Italy (Oxford, 1969), p. 386. 68 Notebooks, ii, entry 2791. 69 So he told Southey in a letter dated 20 July 1817. Letters, iv, 754. 70 Together with Tieck, Wackenroder wrote his pamphlet ‘Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders’ (Berlin, 1797) or ‘Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk’, which was instrumental in setting the tone for a wave of emotional rather than rational approaches to art.

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how ‘the hanging Tower, the Dome, the cemetery, the Baptistery . . . form a grand and wild mass especially by moonlight, when the hanging tower has something of a supernatural look.’71 The record of his second visit is so slight that his editor, Kathleen Coburn, suggests that his notebooks for this period may well have been lost. As a result, all we have is a list of the principal painters of the frescoes including Gozzoli, Buffalmacco, Giotto, Orcagna, Laurati, Antonio Veneziano, and ‘Simon Memmi’, but even this is interesting. It is written not by Coleridge, but in an Italian hand, and comparisons with this and the writing of the future conservator, Carlo Lasinio, suggest that Coleridge may have met Lasinio himself.72 Certainly, the visits made a huge impression on Coleridge and he recalled them many times throughout his life.73 For example, in a letter of 1815 to Samuel Rogers, himself a collector of early Italian art, Coleridge greeted his friend on his return from an Italian tour by saying: ‘I rejoice that you have returned in safety . . . and after having seen what no poet or philosopher can have seen in vain.’ Coleridge lists some of those sights, beginning with the classical repertoire: ‘the Moses of M. Angelo, his prophets, sibyls, and the central picture in the Sistine Chapel’. But most of all, Coleridge hopes that Rogers had managed to see the frescoes in the Campo Santo. These, he suggests, anticipate the work of the High Renaissance with the ‘rude but marvellous pre-existence of . . . [Michelangelo’s] genius in the Triumph of Death and its brother frescoes in the Cemetery in Pisa’. In contrast to the sentiments of men like Flaxman or Haydon, Coleridge values the early work, not because of its apparent links with the antique, but because of its use of symbolism. Comparing Orcagna’s fresco with Michelangelo’s statue of Moses, he says that ‘the one [w]as . . . the first and stately upgrowth of painting out of the very heart of Christendom, underived from the ancients, and having a life of its 71

Notebooks, ii, entry 2856. Notebooks, ii, entry 2857, and Lasinio’s letters to Dawson Turner in Trinity College, Cambridge (See Christopher Lloyd, ‘Some Unpublished Letters of Carlo Lasinio’, Italian Studies, 33 (1978), 83–91, where he reproduces Lasinio’s handwriting). Lasinio was in Pisa at this time, beginning his etchings for the 1812 publication and one year before he took up his official custodianship. Coleridge also made a note, in his own hand, of the inscription on the tomb of Benozzo Gozzoli. 73 As late as 1830 Coleridge reminisced about the Campo Santo frescoes. ‘The fresco painting by Giotto and others, in the cemetery at Pisa, are most noble’, Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coventry Patmore (Oxford, 1917), p. 116. 72


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own in the spirit of that revolution of which Christianity was effect, means, and symbol; the other, the same phenomenon in statuary, but unfollowed and unique.’74 In June 1817 Ludwig Tieck came to England and Coleridge, operating through acquaintances, made great efforts to meet him again. The two men eventually struck up a friendship, and in December 1817 Coleridge obtained a copy of Tieck’s Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen.75 In this he read Tieck’s account of the Trionfo della morte in Pisa. When he wrote the novel Tieck had never visited Italy, but he had heard of the Campo Santo from Herder, who had been there in 1789, and as a ‘lover’ of Vasari, as Friedrich Schlegel put it, he had read Vasari’s account of the Trionfo.76 In the novel, Sebald, who is a pupil of Dürer, travels to Italy in 1521. In Pisa, he meets a native of the town, Rudolph, who tells him about the achievement of Pisan art. ‘Rudolph,’ Tieck wrote, reminded Franz that Orcagna had studied Dante with particular passion, and had wished to create something similar. In his enormous picture he had in fact represented the whole of human life as a singularly sad metaphor. A field blooms with lovely fresh flowers and splendid colours, with richly dressed men and women passing to and fro enjoying all the splendour. Young girls dancing attract their attention with their lively movements, while amongst the trees, heavy with oranges, peeping Cupids send subtle signs with their arrows; and above the girls other Cupids vengefully fly at the richly dressed travellers. Instruments sound music for the dance; in the background one can make out a table sumptuously spread. In the foreground one can see steep rocks on which hermits do penance, praying in ecstatic positions, some are reading, one milks a goat. The simplicity of the humble life is here represented in contrast with that of splendour and pleasure. Underneath one can see three kings who are riding out to hunt with their courtiers, to whom a Saint gestures at some open tombs where the corpses of kings can be seen in a state of putrefaction. Death flies in the air, his sickle in his hand, pointing to the corpses of men and women from all walks of life

74 Coleridge, Letters, iv, 569. Coleridge’s hopes were unfounded since there is no record that Rogers visited the Campo Santo on this occasion but he did so in 1822. See p. 32 below. 75 Coleridge, Letters, iv, 793. Letter dated 13 Dec. 1817. 76 Herder records his visit to the Campo Santo on 21 May 1789 in Johann Gottfried Herder, Italienische Reise, ed. Albert Meier and Heide Holmer (Munich, 1989), and Schlegel’s remark is recorded in Fernando Mazzocca, ‘Conoscitori ed artisti tedeschi a Firenze tra Rumohr e “L’Antologia” ’, in Maurizio Bossi and Lucia Tonini, eds., L’idea di Firenze (Florence, 1989), pp. 43–51.

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beneath him. This picture with the artless verse which emerges from the mouths of many of the figures has often conjured up in me the image of the great life of human kind, where no one knows anything of other people, and in which we all move, blind and deaf in the face of our fellow humans.77

Here Tieck has used all the details from Vasari’s minute description of the fresco in his life of Orcagna to communicate the extent and richness of medieval civilization. In Sternbald Tieck interpets the Trionfo as a metaphor, or rather, allegory, for the stages of life, and on reading it Coleridge must have been reminded of his own visit to the Campo Santo in 1806, because less than a month later, in January 1818, he referred to it. In a talk entitled ‘General Character of the Gothic Mind in the Middle Ages’, Coleridge, as reported by H. H. Carwardine, contrasted the achievements of ancient Classical work with the symbolism of medieval painting on the one hand, and the work of the High Renaissance on the other. ‘In ancient art,’ said Coleridge, ‘. . . every thing was finite and material. Accordingly, sculpture was not attempted by the Gothic races till the ancient specimens were discovered, while painting and architecture were of native growth amongst them.’78 Coleridge’s evidence is drawn from the Campo Santo. ‘In the earliest specimens of the paintings of modern ages, as in those of Giotto and his associates in the cemetery at 77

‘Ich erinnere mich’, antwortete Rudolph, ‘eines alten Bildes in Pisa, das dir auch vielleicht gefallen wird; wenn ich nicht irre, ist es von Andrea Orgagna gemalt. Dieser Künstler hat den Dante mit besondrer Vorliebe studiert, und in seiner Kunst auch etwas Ähnliches dichten wollen. Auf seinem grossen Bilde ist in der Tat das ganze menschliche Leben auf eine recht wehmütige Art abgebildet. Ein Feld prangt mit schönen Blumen von frischen un glänzenden Farben, geschmückte Herren und Damen gehen umher, und ergötzen sich an der Pracht. Tanzende Mädchen ziehen mit ihrer muntern Bewegung den Blick auf sich, in den Bäumen, die von Orangen glühn, erblickt man Liebesgötter, die schalkhaft mit ihren Geschossen herunterzielen, über den Mädchen schweben andre Amorinen, die nach den geschmückten Spaziergängern zur Vergeltung zielen. Spielleute blasen auf Instrumenten zum Tanz, eine bedeckte Tafel steht in der Ferne.—Gerenüber sieht man steile Felsen, auf denen Einsiedler Busse tun und in andächtiger Stellung beten, einige lesen, einer melkt eine Ziege. Hier ist die Dürftigkeit des armutseligen Lebens dem üppigen glückseligen recht herzhaft gegenübergestellt.—Unten sieht man drei Könige auf die Jagd reiten, denenein heiliger Mann eröffnete Gräler zeit, indenen man von Königen verweste Leichname sieht.— Durch die Luft fliegt der Tod, mit schwarzem Gewand, die Sense in der Hand, unter ihm Leichen aus allen Ständen, auf die er hindeutet.—Dieses Gemälde hat immer in mir das Bild des grossen menschlichen Lebens hervorgebracht, in welchem keiner vom andern weiss und sich alle blind und taub durcheinander bewegen.’ Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798, Munich 1964), p. 213. 78 Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (1936), p. 7. The talk was given on 27 Jan. 1818.


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Pisa, this complexity, variety, and symbolical character are evident, and are more fully developed in the mightier works of Michel Angelo and Raffael.’79 Coleridge’s authority for linking the Campo Santo frescoes with Raphael and Michelangelo comes from Giovanni Rosini’s book which accompanied Lasinio’s volume. In his Lettere pittoriche sul Campo Santo di Pisa (1810) Rosini had called Gozzoli ‘il Raffaello degli Antichi’,80 and he speculated on the possibility of Raphael’s having gone to Pisa to study the frescoes. Rosini also suggested that Michelangelo based his figures of Christ and the Virgin in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgement on those of the Campo Santo.81 In this same lecture, Coleridge dealt in detail with the same picture that had so moved Keats, the Trionfo della morte. H. H. Carwardine reported of Coleridge: ‘Our poet was more happy in one of his flights upon painting when he described a picture of “The Triumph of Death” by Giotti (or some such name), a very early painter, which he saw at the Cemetery at Pisa, a rude drawing, and poorly coloured, but so grandly composed and happily designed as to have produced such a marvellous effect upon the poet.’ The general unfamiliarity of these early paintings is underlined by Carwardine’s confusion over their authorship, but even more striking is his astonishment at Coleridge’s dramatic rendition of the ‘marvellous effect’ produced by the impression of the fresco. He goes on to say that this ‘effect’ could be adequately described ‘only in his [i.e. Coleridge’s] own language’: ‘Death is seen of a livid white, “killing the air with the swiftness of his motions”; groups of figures are seen flying in all directions, with action and feature characteristic of their station, conduct, and dread of the Great Discoverer; while five poor beggars are alone seen prostrate on their knees with uplifted hand and eyes to welcome his arrival’82 (Fig. 1). Coleridge’s ideas about early art were further developed in the socalled ‘Philosophical Lectures’. These were given towards the end of 1818 and the beginning of 1819, and yet again he returned to his 79

80 Ibid. Lettere pittoriche sul Campo Santo di Pisa (Pisa, 1810), p. 13. Lettere pittoriche, p. 46. Friedrich Schlegel, whose work Coleridge certainly knew, took up this idea. In his essay ‘Schloss Karlstein’, Schlegel said that at Pisa ‘the earliest struggles of unassisted genius are laid before us . . . and in the compositions of Benozzo Gozzoli we recognize such an overflowing abundance of noble forms and grand conceptions, that we feel the editor of the work [i.e. Rosini] to be fully justified in styling him the Raphael of the early masters.’ See Schlegel, ‘Schloss Karlstein’, p. 210. 82 Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism (1936), pp. 9–10. 81

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1. Master of the Triumph of Death, Il Trionfo della Morte, Campo Santo, Pisa (detail). Early fourteenth century. Engraving from Carlo Lasinio, Pitture a fresco del campo santo di Pisa (1812)

visits to Pisa. The fourth in the series, given on 11 January 1819, deals primarily with the philosopher who, for Coleridge, was the most important of the ancients—Plato—and he treats Plato as the poetphilosopher whose ‘doctrine of Ideas has been a creative force down through the ages, the intellectual force behind the fine arts, [and] the basis of the most satisfactory reconciliations between reason and religion’.83 At the culminating point of this lecture, Coleridge searches for a vivid example of the impact of Platonic thought on Western art, and he turns to the Campo Santo, which he says will serve to illustrate for him ‘the first awakening of mankind out of the barbarism which followed the subversion of the Roman Empire’.84 83 The words are those of Kathleen Coburn in her introduction to Coleridge, The Philosophical Lectures (1949), p. 52. 84 The Philosophical Lectures (1949), p. 167. Coleridge had already mooted the idea of the visual arts reflecting current ideas in what he called ‘Speculative philosophy’ to Lord Liverpool in July 1817, when he spoke of ‘the coincidence of the revival of Platonism by Dante and Petrarch with the appearance of Giotto, and the six other strong masters, preserved in the Cemetario [sic] of Pisa’. Letter dated 28 July 1817, Letters (1956), iv, 759.


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‘As soon as Platonism began to dawn with sublimity’, Coleridge says, then arose Giotto, Cimabue and the others who, with all the awkwardness of composition and stiffness of outline of their predecessors, gave such a bewitching grace that one remains in looking at the pictures in perfect astonishment how such a feeling of grace could be conveyed through such media. We wonder, we do not laugh at the stiff line and the awkward form, and instead of it we find a presence we cannot explain, an expression of something that is equally pleasant to you as in the works of Raphael, without that which [?] can equally explain.85

Coleridge knows that members of his audience, like Carwardine in the previous year, would ‘laugh’ at the ‘awkwardness of composition’, and the ‘stiffness of outline’ of the Campo Santo cycle, so he immediately counteracts this possibility with his own impassioned and highly personal response. In contrast to many contemporary travellers, Coleridge claims to have been ‘bewitched’ and ‘astonished’. He then, once again, focuses on the Trionfo della morte and verbally re-creates the painting in a language in which active verbs stress the drama of the incident and whose adjectival force records, not so much the objective facts of the image, but rather Coleridge’s personal response to that image: I remember when I was at Pisa a picture (of one of those old painters who rose just at the time Platonism began to produce its effects in Italy, and to actuate the minds of men) which was the effect of the appearance of Death on all men—different groups of men—men of business—men of pleasure— huntsmen—all flying in different directions while the dreadful Goddess descending with a kind of air-chilling white with her wings expanded and the extremities of the wings compressed into talons and the only group in which there appeared anything like welcoming her was a group of beggars.86

The operation of Coleridge’s imagination in the presence of this fresco is, for its time, remarkable. Was it a coincidence that only eleven days previously Keats had been writing imaginatively and excitedly about this same fresco? It is, however, Coleridge’s theoretical account of the pictorial effects that is so striking. Contemporary guidebooks saw it as an example of the childhood of art; Tieck had allegorized it in terms of a moral narrative; Rosini stressed its use of natural detail and life-likeness, and Keats was struck by its 85 86

The Philosophical Lectures (1949), p. 167. The Philosophical Lectures (1949), pp. 167–8.

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expressive theatricality. Coleridge, however, explains the power of the Trionfo della morte in terms of its symbolism. ‘The impression was greater,’ he said, ‘than that which any poem had ever made upon me.’ There, from all the laws of drawing, all the absence of color (for you saw no color—if there were any you could not see it, it was gone) it was one mighty idea that spoke to you everywhere the same. In the other pictures the presence of an idea acting on that which was not formed was evident, because the forms there outraged all notions of that which was to be impressed, had there not been something more; but it was the adoption of a symbol which, though not in as polished a language as could be wished for, which though in a hoarser voice and less tempered modulation, uttered the same words to that mind which is the source of all that we really enjoy or that is worth enjoying.87

It would be hard to find an earlier writer in English treating medieval Italian art with such philosophical seriousness. Until this moment it had either been described as ‘childish’ and ‘primitive’, or it had been considered pure, and free from elements which had corrupted later styles; it had also been seen as one of the necessary, faltering steps towards a nobler ideal realized in the High Renaissance, but it had never previously been viewed as the equal of the art of the sixteenth century. What is most unusual about Coleridge’s criticism is his stress on the affective power of early work. By stressing his own responses, and by trusting their authenticity, he transcends the historical, and makes direct and unabashed comparisons between the work at Pisa and the Vatican Stanze on the one hand, and between Giotto and Michelangelo on the other.

Leigh Hunt and the Campo Santo Leigh Hunt is the final actor in this drama, and one who makes a surprising return since it will be remembered that when he was corresponding with Shelley in 1818 and 1819, his taste, like Shelley’s, was rather conservative. When he reached Pisa he met Shelley, who was there with Edward Trelawny, Byron, and Samuel Rogers. Rogers and Byron visited the Campo Santo together, though Byron, according to

87

The Philosophical Lectures (1949), p. 168.


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Rogers, ‘was without any feeling for the fine arts’.88 These were the last days before Shelley’s death, and a moving entry in Hunt’s autobiography records the last moments spent with his friend. ‘In a day or two,’ Hunt wrote, ‘Shelley took leave of us to return to Lerici for the rest of the season. I spent one delightful afternoon with him wandering about Pisa, and visiting the cathedral . . . I never beheld him more.’89 After Shelley’s death, Hunt remained three months in Italy, and his experience overturned his views of Italian art. ‘Since I have beheld the Campo Santo,’ he told the readers of the Liberal in 1822, ‘I have enriched my day-dreams and my stock of the admirable, and am thankful that I have names by heart, to which I owe homage and gratitude.’90 The frescoes became to him what he called ‘the crowning glory of Pisa’.91 Like Keats and Coleridge before him, Hunt, who had been reading extensively in fourteenth-century Italian poetry and prose, approached his material from a literary perspective. ‘Simon Memmi’ (i.e. Simone Martini) is ‘the artist celebrated by Petrarch’; Giotto ‘is the friend of Dante’, and the subjects of the pictures are reminiscent, for him, of the work of Chaucer. But, like both Keats and Coleridge, it is the power of early work over the mind and imagination that Hunt conveys most forcefully. The frescoes, he says, are of the same fine old dreaming character, the same imaginative mixture of things familiar with things unearthly, the same strenuous and (when they choose) gentle expression,—in short, the same true discernment of the ‘difference of things,’ now grappling with a fiend of a fierce thought, now sympathising with fear and sorrow, now writhing the muscles of grim warriors, now dissolving in the looks and flowing tresses of women, or setting a young gallant in an attitude to which Raphael might have traced his cavaliers.92

The very mention of the name of Raphael in this context from Hunt, who was until so recently of the ‘old school’, was a change indeed, and after a cornucopia of appreciative epithets, he concludes that ‘it 88 Reminiscences and Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. G. H. Powell (1903), p 185. Rogers also owned a copy of the 1812 edition of Lasinio that was sold on his death in 1856. See Christie, Manson, and Woods, Catalogue of . . . the Extensive Library . . . the property of Samuel Rogers, 16 May 1856, no. 1601, p. 66. In the 1838 edition of Italy he added a note in which he said: ‘I cannot dismiss Pisa without a line or two; for much do I owe her.’ Italy: a Poem (1838), p. 285. 89 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpugo (1949), p. 326. 90 Leigh Hunt, ‘Letters from Abroad’, in The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, 2 vols. (1822), i, 115. 91 92 Autobiography, pp. 340–1. The Liberal, i, 112.

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is an injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in all this multitude of imagery, not to recognize the real inspirers as well as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the honour to the Massaccios [sic] and Peruginos’.93 Less than ten years previously, the most enthusiastic advocate of the Campo Santo frescoes, Rosini for example, could urge the curious visitor to look upon these paintings as no more than ‘la Pittura bambina’ in the cradle of the history of the arts.94 Now Hunt tells his readers that ‘the Massaccios and Peruginos . . . meritorious as they are,’ are no more to be compared with the painters of the Campo Santo than ‘the sonneteers of Henry the Eighth’s time are to be compared with Chaucer’. Once it was all Raphael, Guido Reni, and Giulio Romano with Hunt, now it is the ‘tender and noble Orcagna’ and ‘Giotto . . . a name to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, solidity, and stateliness, with that of thy friend Dante’.95 In his Theories of the Symbol, Tzvetan Todorov points out how important to European Romanticism was the idea of the symbol and the way in which it was distinguished from allegory. For Coleridge ‘allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picturesque language . . . On the other hand the symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general.’96 Though Coleridge, as Norman Fruman points out, may well owe these ideas to Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Schlegel, and others,97 after 1811 he reinterpreted his experiences of Italian art in the light of this new distinction. Given the importance of the symbol, it is unsurprising that the history of art was interrogated for the signs of its earliest appearance. It was this primitivist impulse that took Coleridge back in his mind to the Campo Santo in Pisa. In a simpler way, Leigh Hunt, too, discovered something original, even aboriginal, in the frescoes of the Campo Santo; they were, he said, ‘a dream of humanity during the twilight of creation’.98 93

The Liberal, i, 114. Rosini, Lettere pittoriche, p. 15 and p. 12. 95 Leigh Hunt, The Liberal, i, 115. The friendship between Dante and Giotto was famous but apocryphal. 96 Coleridge in The Statesman’s Manual, quoted in Norman Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (New York, 1971), p. 204. 97 Ibid. 98 Autobiography, p. 341. 94

2 The Romanesque Revival in Britain 1800–1840: 1 Coleridge ’s pleasure, verging on ecstasy, in the presence of the paintings of the Campo Santo in Pisa is related to his sense of amazement that something so powerful can be created from such slender means: ‘We wonder, we do not laugh at the stiff line and the awkward form, and instead of it we find a presence we cannot explain, an expression of something that is equally pleasant to you as in the works of Raphael, without that which [?] can equally explain.’ How is it, Coleridge asks, that artists with such limited technical means can produce work for which an equivalent can be found in the painting of the most sophisticated artist of the Western world— Raphael. What we are witnessing here, of course, is the birth of a phase of primitivism. Coleridge’s admiration for art that expressed ‘the first awakening of mankind out of the barbarism which followed the subversion of the Roman Empire’,1 was closely related to what Lovejoy and Boas called ‘chronological primitivism’ (see p. 6 above). Coleridge is no proto-Pre-Raphaelite. Unlike many admirers of early Italian art later in the nineteenth century, admirers, who, motivated by religious or political ideals, used medieval art as a foil for their dissatisfaction with the shallowness or materialism of later periods, Coleridge is delighted to find in the Campo Santo ‘the expression of something’ which foreshadows the work of Raphael. The decorations of the Campo Santo are remote in time but not culture, and though his successors may have hankered nostalgically after the values of a mythical Middle Ages, Coleridge is not a romantic medievalist in this sense. His measure of cultural success, like that of so many of his contemporaries, is firmly rooted in the classical 1 The Philosophical Lectures (1949), p. 167. Coleridge had already mooted the idea of the visual arts reflecting current ideas in what he called ‘Speculative philosophy’ to Lord Liverpool in July 1817, when he spoke of ‘the coincidence of the revival of Platonism by Dante and Petrarch with the appearance of Giotto, and the six other strong masters, preserved in the Cimitero of Pisa’. Letter dated 28 July 1817. Letters (1956), iv, 759.

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The Romanesque Revival in Britain: 1

period and the period of the High Renaissance, and in Pisa he was delighted to observe evidence of similar qualities in work which had been previously despised or neglected. For many European writers in the early nineteenth century, the paintings of the Campo Santo were primarily evidence of a bridge between the classical and the modern period. Pisa, however, was an important source for another kind of primitivism which linked classical and medieval. This was architectural primitivism, because in the eighteenth century the round-arched style was categorized as ‘corrupt roman’. Joseph Forsyth, whose guidebook Shelley used when he was in Italy, told his readers in 1813 that at the Campo Santo ‘the portico of this vast rectangle is formed by such arcades as we find in Roman architecture. Every arch is round, and every pillar faced with pilasters; but each arcade includes an intersection of small arches rising from slender shafts like our cathedral windows. This is Gothic beyond dispute; but it seems an addition foreign to the original arcades, which were open down to the pavement.’2 Forsyth is touching here on a distinction that would open a whole new chapter in architectural history in the nineteenth century. Like many of his contemporaries, he had noticed that in many of the buildings of the Pisan complex earlier Romanesque round-arched design is mixed with later pointed Gothic arches. The first he identifies with Roman architecture; the second with the arches on ‘our cathedral windows’. But Forsyth does not have the word ‘Romanesque’ in his vocabulary simply because it had not yet been recognized and named as an independent early medieval style. This term would soon come into the language, and its presence would create a whole new category of European buildings and sculptural ornament. English architectural opinion had long cherished an affection for round-arched buildings. As Thomas Cocke points out, the first chronicler of British Romanesque was John Aubrey in his seventeenth-century manuscript Monumenta Britannica, and in the eighteenth century such writers as Thomas Warton and Thomas Gray were sympathetically disposed to ‘the national architecture of our Saxon ancestors’.3 The great so-called ‘Norman’ monuments were justifiably celebrated—Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and 2

Forsyth, Remarks (1813), p. 13. Thomas Cocke, ‘Rediscovery of the Romanesque’, in English Romanesque Art 1066–1200, ed. Tristram Holland, Janet Holt, and George Zarnecki (1984), p. 362. The words are those of Thomas Warton. 3


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parts of Winchester, Gloucester, and Exeter Cathedrals—and during the eighteenth century, though many were destroyed (parts of Hereford Cathedral), others were carefully restored (Ely Cathedral). But humbler local churches also received their share of attention. The 1792 restoration of the mid-twelfth-century church of Tickencote by S. P. Cockerell, ‘the most remarkable church in Rutland’,4 is a mixture of restoration and creation, and almost certainly inspired the Revd Richard Lucas to build the nearby All Saints Church at Pickworth in a simple round-arched Norman style.5 ‘Romanesque’ is the international version of this style. It was identified and given a label almost simultaneously in Britain and France in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and it emerged as a separate style, neither classical nor Gothic, out of the need to identify the prehistory of Gothic building. Up to the nineteenth century the term ‘Norman’ had served in this function, but ‘Norman’ was clearly unsuitable for the architecture of Germany or Italy. It was not until the 1830s, however, that the various phases of Romanesque architecture began to be explored, and the term became fixed in architectural writing. This was largely the work of the Master of Trinity College, William Whewell, aided by the historian Thomas Rickman and researched by the much younger Cambridge graduate Edmund Sharpe. And it was Sharpe, turned architect, who was perhaps the first in this country to experiment with Romanesque revival building in a series of small churches in the neighbourhood of Blackburn, Lancashire. In this way, the development of interest in Romanesque in Britain took place in three phases: denotation, exploration, and revival. First, it required a name to distinguish it from other similar round-arched styles such as Byzantine, Norman, Lombard, etc. Second, its evolution and development had to be archaeologically defined and its principal characteristics identified; and third, the style was adopted by architects and builders and integrated into the spectrum of available types.

The denotation of the Romanesque The rector of Irstead in Norfolk, William Gunn, has long been identified as the author of the term ‘Romanesque’. He first used it in

4 5

Gillian Dickinson, Rutland Churches Before Restoration (1983), p. 107. Ibid., p. 86.

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his book An Enquiry into the Origin and Influence of Gothic Architecture, written around 1812, but not published until 1819.6 Gunn was familiar with the English version of Romanesque, Norman, since there is a little Norman zigzag arching in his own church of St Michael. Furthermore, there are good examples of Norman churches nearby at Thetford, Wyndondham, and Castle Acre, while Norwich Cathedral contains some of the finest Norman building in the country. As is clear from the title of his book, however, Gunn’s principal interest lay in the origins of Gothic architecture. What pushed him towards creating a new architectural label broader and more European than ‘Norman’ was his love of Italy and his admiration for medieval Italian architecture. He shared this enthusiasm with his friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, and the two men spent time together in Italy, probably during Flaxman’s stay between 1787 and 1794.7 Most of their time was spent in Rome but they were also interested in the art and architecture of Pisa. Flaxman, who described the central Pisan group as ‘a scene of architectural magnificence and singularity not to be equalled in the world’,8 as we saw in the last chapter (pp. 15–16 above), made a copy of the Trionfo della morte in the Campo Santo. Meawhile, Gunn expressed enthusiasm for the architect of the duomo.9 The story of scholarly interest in Pisan architecture, however, begins around 1803 when the architect Robert Smirke visited the city. He was in Italy during the fragile stability between the treaty of Amiens in 1802 and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and his initial response to Pisan architecture was dismissive. He told his father that though the general appearance was ‘striking’, the interior of the duomo was ‘rather disagreeable to [his] Architectural Eyes’.10 As his 6 Tina Waldeier Bizzaro has pointed out that though the French writer, Charles de Gerville, spoke of ‘architecture roman’ a little earlier in 1818, Gunn had long composed his book with its important neologism. Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (Cambridge, 1992), p. 4. 7 In a letter to Gunn in 1800 Flaxman made a passing reference to the two of them seeing ‘Rome together’. Unpublished letter: British Library MS Add 39790, fol. 16. 8 John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (1829), p. 304. These were written much earlier in his life. 9 Gunn expressed his enthusiasm for ‘Bruschetto’ in An Enquiry (1819), p. 51. 10 Letters from Robert Smirke to his father, Pisa, 22 Nov. 1803, Smirke Papers, British Architectural Library (RIBA), quoted in Neil Jackson, ‘Christ Church Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), 221.


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2. Cloister of Campo Santo, Pisa, begun 1278

eyes began to open, however, he became fascinated by the curious mixture of Gothic detail on buildings that were otherwise exclusively round-arched. Pisa, he claimed when he came to write up his experiences in Archaeologia, was a remarkable record of that moment when round-arched buildings were transformed into Gothic buildings. His views were challenged by H. C. Englefield, who said that the Gothic details—the canopies on the roof of the duomo and the Baptistery, and filigree work in the round arches of the Campo Santo (Fig. 2)—were added at a much later date.11 Gunn, like Smirke, felt that the details were contemporary. 11

Robert Smirke, ‘Account of some Remains of Gothic Architecture in Italy and Sicily’, Archaeologia, 15 (1806), 363–6. The Campo Santo was begun around 1278 and, according to recent research, the Gothic filigree was added about one hundred

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During the composition of his Enquiry Gunn often turned to Flaxman as an expert on Pisan architecture, and the two men kept up a correspondence about the ‘edifices constructed subsequent to the reign of Constantine’. 12 In 1810 they were discussing the time when ‘arches were first made to spring from columns’, and in 1812 they exchanged views about the ideas of Smirke and Englefield. Gunn asked Flaxman about suitable books on Pisa and the sculptor responded by sending him several items from his library.13 The problem was finding a suitable label for this Pisan style, and that very problem was pointed up by the librarian of Cambridge University Library, Thomas Kerrich. In that same year, 1812, Kerrich published a paper on the current confusion in architectural nomenclature. Speaking of round-arched building, he said that ‘the Italians call the old, heavy style of building, Lombard Architecture, because they conceive that it was in fashion during the time that the Lombards were powerful in Italy. And we, for a like reason call it Saxon and Norman, but the architecture is the same.’14 In pursuing the origins of Gothic, Gunn’s net widened, and feeling that Smirke’s phrase, ‘the Roman circular arch’, was inadequate, he invented one of his own. This round arch, he said, was expressive of ‘the architecture from which it is a vitious derivation’ and which he will ‘denominate ROMANESQUE’.15 The word ‘Romanesque’, he explained in a note, was derived from the Italian word ‘Romanesco’ which, he said, denominated a foreigner ‘domiciled in Rome’. Without being fully aware of the fact, Gunn had invented a new label for an architectural style, and in doing so he laid the foundation for a history of architecture where clear discrimination was possible between Gothic and pre-Gothic work. Furthermore, Gunn’s term provided access to a range of European building which had been overlooked because it had been considered uncouth, rude, and unformed. Ironically, Gunn started out with no special interest in years later in the mid-twelfth century. See Antonio Caleca, ‘Costruzione e decorazione dalle origini al secolo xv’, in Clara Baracchini and Castelnuovo Enrico, Il Campo Santo Di Pisa (Turin, 1996), pp. 13–48. 12 Letter from Flaxman to Gunn, May 1810, BL MS Add 39790, fol. 20. 13 Letter from Flaxman to Gunn, November 1812, BL MS Add 39790, fol. 21. He recommended Giuseppe Martini’s Theatrum Basilicae Pisanae (Rome, 1705) and Alessandro da Morrona’s Pisa illustrata nelle arti del disegno (Pisa, 1787–93). 14 Thomas Kerrich, ‘Some Observations on Gothic Buildings Abroad, Particularly those of Italy’, Archaeologia, 16 (1812), 293. 15 Gunn, An Inquiry (1819), p. 6.


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3. Illustration from William Gunn, An Enquiry into the Origin and Influence of Gothic Architecture (1819)

Romanesque building. He admired ancient Roman work and was fascinated by the origins of the pointed arch. But as his book progresses he seems almost surprised to discover strength, delicacy, and beauty in Romanesque work, and he illustrated his Enquiry with a number of sensitive line drawings of this ‘primitive’ style (Fig. 3). Though Gunn himself used the term ‘Romanesque’ in his own publications,16 it was slow to be taken up. Interest in Romanesque and other styles of continental architecture had been inhibited by the Napoleonic occupation. When peace came in 1814 there was 16 William Gunn and Arthur Taylor, ‘Remarks on the Gothic Architecture of the Duomo, Battistero, and Campo Santo of Pisa’, Archaeologia, 20 (1824), 543.

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something of a stampede of British travellers across the Channel, including architects, all of whom had been starved of foreign experiences.17 Even in 1826, Anna Jameson was still puzzled by what to call the style of the duomo at Pisa. She thought it was ‘a magnificent edifice in bad taste’, but ‘as to the style . . . it would be difficult to determine what name to give it.’ ‘It is not Greek,’ she said, ‘nor Gothic, nor Saxon, and exhibits a strange mixture of Pagan and Christian ornaments.’18 Gradually, when, connections were made in the 1820s, between the round-arched medieval forms of British building and contemporary or earlier work in France, Italy, and Germany, ‘Romanesque’ came into currency.

The exploration of the Romanesque One of the key figures in promulgating the idea of this European architectural style was the remarkable Cambridge figure, William Whewell. Whewell was born in Lancaster in 1894, and his attachment to the North of England and its people was very great. He never lost his local accent, and, as we shall see, his local connections led to the building of the earliest neo-Romanesque churches in Britain. Whewell was a child prodigy, brilliant student, scholar, and polymath. He went up to Trinity College in 1812, won prizes for his mathematical prowess in 1816, and became assistant tutor at the college in 1818. In 1820, at the age of 26, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was elected Master of Trinity in 1841, and in 1842, Vice Chancellor of the University. He wrote extensively on mechanics, mineralogy, geology, astronomy, political economy, theology, architecture, and moral philosophy, as well as the works by which he is known today in the philosophy and history of science. His turn of mind was inductive, scientific, and systematizing, and his interest in architecture went back to his boyhood when his father was so impressed with his drawings that he sent some of them to a London architect.19 His wider understanding, however, was devel-

17 See Frank Salmon, ‘British Architects, Italian Fine Arts Academies, and the Foundation of the R.I.B.A., 1816–43’, Architectural History, 38 (1996), 80. 18 Anna Jameson, The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), p. 275. 19 Harvey W. Becher, ‘William Whewell’s Odyssey: from Mathematics to Moral Philosophy’, in William Whewell: a Composite Portrait, ed. Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer (Oxford, 1991), p. 4, and Carla Yanni, ‘On Nature and


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oped on continental journeys in France (1819) and Switzerland (1822). In 1823 he went on a tour with the romantic medievalist Kenelm Digby, who had recently published his book The Broadstone of Honour and would soon convert to Catholicism. Though Whewell’s romanticism was of a very different kind from Digby’s he, too, was an admirer of Coleridge and a friend of Wordsworth.20 In 1820, Christopher, William Wordsworth’s younger brother, was elected Master of Trinity, and in 1821 Whewell dined with the poet himself in the Lake District. Friendly meetings between the two men took place thereafter, particularly when Whewell made his frequent journeys to Lancaster and the northern hills.21 But Whewell’s romantic tendencies were closely allied to his scientific curiosity, and for him, like many of his successors, science was a kind of natural theology that provided evidence of the richness of the mind of God. It was, therefore, a scientific as much as a romantic disposition that he brought to his work on medieval architecture. His determination to identify, classify, and analyse its constituent elements resembled the work of the botanist and anatomist. He counted scientists like Faraday among his friends and it is no coincidence that he had been very close to the outstanding zoologist, Richard Owen, since his childhood. Owen, as we shall see (pp. 172–3 below), played a significant role in the design of the Natural History Museum.22 He also had a strong affinity with the Quaker architect Thomas Rickman, another outstanding systematizer, and though Rickman was eighteen years his senior the two often went on architectural tours together. Rickman had taken up architectural practice in 1817 soon after the publication of his groundbreaking book, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, and he might have met Whewell for the first time when, in 1826, he was invited to design the New Court at St John’s College, Cambridge. Whewell’s first appearance in Rickman’s diaries, however, occurs somewhat later during a stay in Cambridge in July 1830.23 Rickman had come Nomenclature: William Whewell and the Production of Architectural Knowledge in Early Victorian Britain’, Architectural History, 40 (1997), 204–21. 20 Janet Mary Douglas, The Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell (1881), p. 28. 21 Douglas (1881), p. 66. 22 Nikolaus Pevsner writes about this in ‘William Whewell and his Architectural Notes on German Churches’, German Life and Letters, 22 (1968), 39–48. 23 Thomas Rickman, The Journals of Thomas Rickman, RIBA, RIT/1–3.

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to visit a mutual friend, the successful, intellectual vicar of Blackburn, John William Whittaker,24 who was preaching in the church of St Mary’s. While staying in Trinity, Rickman fell into conversation with Whewell about the subject of architecture. Whewell knew Rickman’s work from 1817 when he bought a copy of An Attempt, and the two struck up a friendship. Whewell had just published anonymously his book Architectural Notes on German Churches (1830). It was the fruit of a German tour of 1829 during which Whewell found the richness of southern German architecture almost overwhelming. In Cologne he was ‘quite captivated by the odd ways that the churches have; and there are in that city such a lot of them that I had very nearly never got away from them.’25 Whewell’s mission, like that of Gunn before him, and like that, too, of so many of his contemporaries, was to identify the origins of Gothic architecture, and the unbroken series of churches he discovered in Germany provided many clues to the origin of what he called ‘the introduction of the pointed arch as an artifice of vaulting’.26 From our point of view, however, the most important thing was his response to ‘large and splendid buildings before the change took place, going back up to very early times . . .’27 and he wrote to Whittaker about them. But what can we call this architectural group? The Germans, as Whittaker knew, called them ‘Byzantinsch’, and he replied to Whewell saying that he knew someone who ‘has travelled much on the Rhine, in Italy and Turkey, who has a very good judgement and tolerably extensive knowledge of Architecture, from whom I have gained a very clear idea of the style which the Germans call Byzantine’.28 But ‘Byzantine’ would not do for Whewell. He was passionate about nomenclature, and the process of labelling was central to his methodology. He fully recognized that sciences such as botany and anatomy could not develop without their complex systems of differentiation by naming.29 Following in the footsteps of Rickman, he 24 Rickman had first worked as an architect for Whittaker around 1822 when the latter, as the new vicar of Blackburn, began a church-building programme. 25 Isaac Todhunter, William Whewell, an Account of his Writings, with Selections from his Literary and Scientific Correspondence (1876), p. 99. 26 27 Ibid. Ibid. 28 Letter from Whittaker to William Whewell, Blackburn, 30 Sept. 1829, Trinity College, Cambridge, Add. MS. a.21482. 29 Whewell actually provided the terms ‘anode’ and ‘cathode’ for Faraday in his work on electricity, and in 1840 he coined the word ‘scientist’.


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also saw that architectural nomenclature was important if criticism was to move forward. It was essential, therefore, to find a term to apply to this important pre-Gothic, continental style of building. Clearly, Rickman’s ‘Norman’ could not be applied to Germany, so he looked elsewhere. He found the answer in Gunn’s book, and on the second page of Architectural Notes Whewell tells us that he will adopt the word ‘Romanesque . . . proposed by Mr Gunn’ and containing ‘Saxon, Norman, Lombard, Byzantine etc.’30 What Gunn thought he found in Pisa, Whewell pursued in Germany. The Romanesque, he said, changed into Gothic ‘by gradations of more or less, by changes of one part or another, the style advanced over the interval without apparently finding any intermediate position of equilibrium . . . from the just-wavering Romanesque of Mentz or Worms, to the multiplied but not yet Gothic elements of Limburg or Gelnhausen . . .’31 As Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out, Whewell was a true pioneer in the history of late Romanesque, and much in advance of German and French workers in the same field.32 But Whewell was a very busy man, and architecture formed only a part of his hugely active intellectual life. It remained an important part none the less and his close friendship both with Rickman, and with Robert Willis, tutor in mechanical engineering at Caius College, is a testimony to his continuing interest in the subject. His occasional journeys to the Continent, however, were never long enough to allow him to collect the body of material that he needed to substantiate his theories. What was lacking was a research assistant. This came through his friendship with Whittaker, who had been admitted to St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1810 and had been a candidate for the professorship of Arabic in 1819. His friendship with Whewell went back at least to 1814 when the two men were at Cambridge together.33 In 1829 Whittaker’s cousin, Edmund Sharpe, at the age of twenty, came up to St John’s College. Sharpe was an able and intelligent young man who had known Whewell since he was eleven years old,34 and Whewell was almost certainly familiar with Sharpe’s abilities as 30

William Whewell, Architectural Notes on German Churches (Cambridge, 1830), p. 2 32 31 Whewell (1830), p. 24. Pevsner (1968), p. 46. 33 Letter from Whittaker to Whewell, Appleby, 22 June 1814, Trinity College, 77 Cambridge, Add. MS. 9.214 . 34 Letter from Benjamin Satterthwaite to Whewell, Lancaster, 5 Oct. 1820, Trinity College, Cambridge, Add. MS. a.21221.

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a draughtsman and his keen interest in medieval architecture. It was Whewell who then organized a meeting between Sharpe and Rickman. Sharpe was primed early for his task. In May 1832, Rickman told Whewell that he had left an invitation for Sharpe to visit his Birmingham home. He arrived, and, according to Rickman, ‘set hard to work’. ‘I think’, continued Rickmann, ‘[he] will be a valuable addition to our Hunters as he appears to have a pretty good discrimination of the English styles and therefore I trust will hunt well in other countries.’35 On his way up to Cambridge for his last term in 1832 Sharpe again spent a few days in Rickman’s house in Birmingham.36 Once again the stay went well, and once again Rickman was impressed by the young man’s intelligence and his capacity for hard work. In 1832, Whewell encouraged Sharpe to apply for one of two University travelling bursaries. Sharpe’s project was to study, draw, and record the medieval architecture of Germany and France. He was successful and with nearly three years at his disposal he would be able to conduct a detailed survey impossible for Whewell himself. Sharpe’s brief was clear. It was to identify some of the oldest remaining continental churches and to record those moments of transition when Romanesque began to pass over into Gothic. The letters that Sharpe sent back to both Whewell and to Rickman provide a fascinating account of the revelation which Sharpe felt on seeing and experiencing this new style, and they also serve to define the development of British interest in what had now come to be called ‘Romanesque’ architecture. Sharpe set off late in 1832, carrying letters of introduction from Whewell, and made his way to southern Germany (Fig. 4). The first section of his tour took in Bavaria, and in August 1833 he wrote back saying that he was ‘astonished and delighted’37 by the Romanesque churches of Cologne. Here he met one of the key figures in the Franco-German medieval revival—Sulpiz Boisserée, who together with his brother, Melchior, had long been an evangelist for the virtues of ancient art. When he was twenty-seven years old Sulpiz’s drawings of Cologne cathedral had attracted the attention of Goethe, and in 1827 Ludwig I of Bavaria had bought the brothers’ remarkable 35 Letter from Rickman to Whewell, Birmingham, 10 May 1832, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1132. 36 Rickman’s journals, entries for 6 and 10 Oct. 1832, RIBA. 37 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Koblenz, 2 July 1833, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.116.


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4. Reconstruction of Edmund Sharpe’s German tour, 1832–4

collection of pictures of the ‘Byzantinisch-Nieder-Rheinishe Schule’ (Lower-Rhine Byzantine School) to add to the National Gallery (see p. 10 note 5 above).38 Sulpiz was highly active in promulgating the idea that medieval Rhenish ‘neugriechish’ (neo-Greek) churches formed a special group that he called ‘byzantin-roman’, and in 1829 he took another visitor, Ludovic Vitet, on a conducted tour of the Rhine. His enthusiasm was infectious and when in 1830 Vitet was appointed Inspector of Historical Monuments in France, he carried 38

See J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered (2003), pp. 16–17.

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that enthusiasm with him into France. Edmund Sharpe was similarly impressed by Sulpiz Boisserée’s enthusiasm, and impressed, too, by his recently completed book on Rhenish churches, Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert (1833).39 Of the 21 plates, 11 were devoted to Cologne and almost all were Romanesque. At his next stop in Koblenz in July, Sharpe met Whewell’s ‘valued friend’40 Johan Claudius von Lassaulx, the Prussian Landbaumeister, whom he found to be a mine of detailed fact and information on Bavarian churches. Sharpe then moved to Mainz, ‘examining all the churches on both sides of the river’,41 and on to Carlsruhe and Baden Baden, where he spent two weeks waiting for money to arrive from England, and making excursions to Strasbourg and Schwarzach. He then travelled to Stuttgart and Groppingen, and in October he reached Ulm. In December he arrived in Munich where the richness of the architecture took his breath away. He spent the winter there planning excursions to Konstanz and the Bodensee and working in museums, galleries, and libraries. He must also have seen at first-hand something of Ludwig I’s huge building programme, much reported in the British press, to create an ‘Athens on the Isar’. Many of the most important monuments in this scheme adopted the Rundbogenstil (round-arched style)—a modification of German Romanesque.42 The king had encouraged the reluctant court architect, Ludwig von Klenze, to adopt a Romano-Byzantine style for the new court church, Allerheiligenhofkirche, in 1827; and in the following year, 1828, Friedrich von Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche began to rise in the centre of the city, soon to be followed by his Staatsbibliothek (1831–42) in a similar style. Sharpe also received ‘useful information’ here from 39 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Coblenz, 2 July 1833, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.116. 40 Pevsner (1968), p. 46. 41 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Munich, Dec. 1833, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.117. 42 The Rundbogenstil buildings of Ludwig I had received considerable favourable publicity in Britain. As early as 1831 the architectural writer W. H. Leeds praised the patronage of this style by Ludwig I in an article, ‘Modern Architecture and Architectural Style’, Foreign Quarterly Review, 7 (1831), 432–61, and again in ‘The Present State of Architecture in Germany’, Foreign Quarterly Review, 14 (1834), 92–118. In 1837 the architect Joseph Gwilt (who designed a Romanesque church for Greenwich in 1846) pointed out that ‘no country in Europe exhibits such early and beautiful specimens of Romanesque and pointed architecture as are to be found in Germany’, Elements of Architectural Criticism (1837), p. 73.


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5. Edmund Sharpe, ‘Kloster Ebrach’, from Illustrated Papers on Church Architecture (1876)

Georg Moller, some of whose Denkmäler der deutschen Baukunst (1815–51) had been translated into English in 1824.43 All these meetings with German experts in medieval architecture so early in Sharpe’s tour served to open his eyes to the extent and the subtleties of German Romanesque. He began to realize that his journey had been essential because without it, he said, it was impossible to conceive the effect produced on the beholder on entering the colossal buildings of Maynz, Speyer and Worms: we have no notion of such Romanesque in England;—the immense and lofty masses on which the arches rest; the simplicity of the arches themselves, and the vastness of the vault above, fill the Norman architect with wonder and astonishment.44

These words were written to Thomas Rickman from Regensburg where Sharpe had arrived in May 1834. His horse fell ill and he decided to leave it for a while and make an excursion to Prague. 43 Its title was An Essay on the Origin and Progress of Gothic Architecture, Traced in the Ancient Edifices of Germany. 44 Letter from Sharpe to Rickman, Ratisbonn (Regensburg), May 1834, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.118.

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Returning to Regensburg he showed his extensive notes and drawings to the Professor of Architecture, Bernhard Grüber, who had just been appointed (1833) to the Polytechnicum and who was interested in local medieval architecture. Grüber was so impressed that they decided to attempt a joint publication of their work on the twelfthcentury Benedictine Abbey of St Jacob.45 By August, Sharpe was in Bamberg. Drawing the Cistercian abbey at Ebrach (founded 1127) (Fig. 5)46 convinced him that it was to ‘Cistercian buildings that we are to look for those principles upon which we are to form our laws respecting the transition of the Romanesque architecture into Gothic’,47 and at Bamberg he met another of Whewell’s acquaintances, Carl Alexander von Heideloff, with his ‘superb drawings’.48 He then made his way back to the Rhine where, calling at Andernach, he found Lassaulx ‘busily engaged in the re-erection of a Romanesque Schloss at Reineck’.49 The second section of Sharpe’s journey began on 10 September 1834 from Frankfurt. He crossed to Freiburg near Dresden, to Leipzig where he met Ludwig Puttrich. Puttrich was President of the Society of Antiquaries of Germany. He was, said Sharpe, ‘a man of great research’50 and about to publish his Denkmale der Baukunst des Mittelalters in Sachsen (1836–52). At Halle he decided to turn back. Working outside in the winter badly affected his health and he returned to Koblenz via, Brunswick, Göttingen, and Marburg, reaching Koblenz in December. The third, French section of his tour (Fig. 6) is less well documented, but we know that he left Koblenz in January 1835 and stopped at Strasbourg where met Professor Jean Geoffroy Schweighäuser, whose Notice sur les anciens chateaux et autres monumens remarquables de la partie méridionale du département du Bas-Rhin had been published in 1824. He had, said Sharpe, ‘a most valuable and interesting collection of drawings of all the remarkable churches of lower Alsace’, but feared that they did not stand ‘much 45

This seems to have come to nothing. Edmund Sharpe, ‘Kloster Ebrach’ in Illustrated Papers on Church Architecture (1876), part 3, plate 3. 47 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Bamberg, 18 Aug. 1834, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.119. Sharpe later wrote extensively on Cistercian building. 48 Heideloff published Der christliche Altar in Nuremberg in 1838. 49 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Koblenz, 17 Dec. 1834, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1110. 50 Ibid. 46


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6. Reconstruction of Edmund Sharpe’s French tour, 1835

chance of publication’.51 Sharpe arrived at Lyons in February. His cousin William Whittaker was sceptical of his finding anything of medieval interest in the South of France, but Rickman was much more encouraging.52 In fact he saw a great deal, and though we do not know his route exactly we do know that he went north to visit the ruins of Cluny and south to Valence, where he found the eleventhcentury cathedral church of St-Apollinaire ‘the most interesting one [he had] seen’.53 He travelled into the northern part of Provence visiting Seyne, Embrun, and Digne. He admired the Romanesque work at Orange and Vaison-la-Romaine, and may have gone to Nîmes since he was fascinated by the ‘influence that Roman Architecture continued to exert over that of the South of France even at a very advanced period’.54 He then seems to have retraced his steps to Lyons 51

Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Lyons, 6 May 1835, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1114(1) 52 Letter from Whittaker to Sharpe, Blackburn, 13 May 1834, Central Library, Manchester. 53 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Lyons, 6 May 1835, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1114(1). 54 Ibid.

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and passed through Clermont Ferrand and the Puy de Dôme region before turning south once again towards Toulouse. By June we know that he was in Toulouse itself because he was enormously impressed by St-Saturnin and the collection of Romanesque material in the museum. This, he said, was ‘one of the most interesting in Europe’.55 He then moved north where he went twice to Moissac with its ‘porch and cloister of most remarkable and interesting character; the details were of decided Romanesque character, full of sculpture of the most extraordinary character . . .’56 By the time he reached Paris via Poitiers and Tours, his strenuous out-door work had taken its toll. He developed malarial fever, and his Lancaster friend, Benjamin Dockray, who met him on the Quai du Louvre, doubted that he would reach England alive.57 Throughout his time in France in 1835 Sharpe was strongly aware of the advanced state of interest in the Middle Ages, and he sent Whewell a fascinating vignette of an early pre-Raphaelite cult in Paris where it was ‘the rage’ to ‘affect in furniture, ornaments, trinkets, and even in dress, and tonsure, the modes of the Middle Ages. There were “meubles à la Gothic”, stained glass windows . . . “Boisseries”—Vessels,—Crucifixes—and relics of all kinds.’ He also told Whewell that one could find ‘peaked Hats, embroidered collars, long hair, and beards of your modern dandies of the Middle Ages.— and above all the multitude of architectural Lithographs, which are daily published and . . . serve to shew the turn of the popular passion.’58 He also knew that the French were taking a new and enthusiastic interest in the Romanesque architecture of the South. He mentions François Guizot, who in 1830 had fired this enthusiasm in his Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (1828), and who was responsible for appointing Vitet to the job of Inspector of Historical Monuments. Prosper Mérimée succeeded Vitet in 1834, and in a number of articles suggested that there was evidence of ‘Byzantine’ influence in St-Maurice d’Angers, St-Gilles-du-Gard and even the lower portions of St Germain-des-Prés in Paris.59 Sharpe 55 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Toulouse, June 1835, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1111. 56 Ibid. 57 ‘Farewell Dinner to Edmund Sharpe, Esq. M.A.’, Lancaster Guardian, 8 March 1856, p. 8. I am most grateful to John Hughes for pointing this out to me. 58 Ibid. 59 Prosper Merimée, Notes d’un vogage dans l’ovest de la France (Paris, 1836), p. 326.


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was familiar with Arcisse de Caumont’s Cours d’antiquités monumentales . . . histoires de l’art dans l’ouest de la France jusqu’au XVIIe, siècle. (1830–41) but the change which had taken place in French attitudes is most clearly marked in Alexandre Laborde’s influential Les Monumens de France. The first edition of 1816 had little space for Romanesque work, which it described as ‘architecture dégénerée’.60 The second edition of 1836 is quite different, and in this Laborde devoted the first section of the book to some thirty-three French ‘monuments in the Byzantine or Romanesque style’.61

The revival of the Romanesque Since he went as far south as Orange, Sharpe probably passed through the town of Nîmes. In the previous year he had certainly been encouraged to visit the town by Whittaker, who said that its ‘numerous splendid remains of good Roman Architecture’ should not be missed.62 Had he followed his cousin’s advice he would have been aware that the local council was planning an important church. In 1834, they sent a petition to the President of the General Council of the Gard urging him to support the building of a new St-Paul that would make a striking contribution to the already distinguished building of the city.63 The old St-Paul had become run down and was unable to hold the large number of Catholic worshippers, and the council of Nîmes were looking for something distinctive to replace it. In the autumn of 1835 a competition was opened. Thirty entries were submitted anonymously; a shortlist of six was drawn up, and the winner was discovered to be by a young twenty-eight-year-old from Paris, Charles Questel. The significance of the new St-Paul-deNîmes with its ‘façade byzantine’64 was that it was probably the first neo-Romanesque church in France. The style was born partly of 60

Alexandre Labord, Les Monumens de France (Paris, 1816), p. 37. ‘The style of the architecture of this time,’ Laborde wrote, ‘which lasted up to the middle of the twelfth century, is a continuation of the Roman.’ 61 ‘Monuments du style Byzantin ou Roman’, Laborde (1836), pp. 1–10. These included Moissac and St-Saturnin (Toulouse) visited by Sharpe. 62 Letter from Whittaker to Sharpe, Blackburn, 13 May 1834, Central Library, Manchester. 63 Petition a Monsieur le Président . . . Département du Gard, Archives du Département du Gard, Accession no. V. 172. 64 Adophe Pieyre, Histoire de la ville de Nîmes depuis 1830 à nos jours, 3 vols. (Nîmes, 1886), i, 77.

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Questel’s romantic architectural training under Felix Duban at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris;65 it was also determined by a site situated between the imposing amphitheatre and the equally impressive fifth-century Roman temple, La Maison Carrée. A Romanesque church was highly appropriate, because as contemporaries like Jules Salles pointed out, echoing Sharpe’s particular interest, it introduced ‘into the Roman monuments of which the city is proud, a building of the following epoch which itself served as a transition to the Gothic cathedrals’.66 When Sharpe returned to Lancaster in the autumn of 1835 he immediately decided to take up architecture as a profession. In this he was encouraged by Whittaker, who was already involved in a large church-building programme in and around Blackburn and realized that he could readily employ the younger man. Rickman, however, tried to dissuade him, arguing, quite reasonably, that Sharpe had absolutely no training in the profession. Nevertheless, Sharpe went ahead and within a fortnight had drawn up plans for his first church. In December 1835 he told Whewell that it was ‘about to be built at Witton near Blackburn’; it was financed by a relative of Whittaker’s, Joseph Feilden of Witton House, and its style, said Sharpe, was ‘Romanesque;—accommodation—650. Cost £1500 or £1550’.67 The choice of Romanesque is not quite as unusual as it might at first appear. At about the same time, the Vicar of Preston, Carus Wilson, like Whittaker, was pursuing a highly active policy of church building, and in the mid-1830s was experimenting with non-Gothic designs. So well-known did he become for this, that one contemporary said that the vicar was promoting ‘a conquest somewhat Norman’ in and around Preston.68 The Norman revival was well 65 Questel entered the Beaux-Arts in 1824. He was familiar with the adventurous historical relativism adopted by his teachers. In the early 1830s he helped Duban in his plans for reorganizing the buildings of the École and in creating the series of scenographic courtyards through the middle of the complex. One of those was French Romanesque. 66 Jules Salles, Notice sur l’église Saint-Paul de Nîmes (Nîmes, 1849). A similar point was made by Esprit Jouve in his Dictionnaire d’esthetique chrétienne (Paris, 1856), p. 470. Questel, in homage to his Roman neighbour, however, chose the same type of stone from Lens and Beaucaire that had been used in the construction of the Maison Carrée. 67 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Lancaster, 21 Dec. 1835, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1112. 68 A. Hewitson, Churches and Chapels . . . in Preston (Preston, 1869), p. 88.


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developed in this period, and produced a large crop of churches elsewhere in Britain and particularly in the North West.69 Carus Wilson clearly admired a strong, fortified look in his churches and employed John Latham to draw up the plans. Latham, who was born at nearby Longbridge, and described as ‘a plodding man who had burst through the bonds of joinerdom and winged his way into . . . architectural constructiveness’70 attempted his first church in the Norman style in St Andrew’s at Ashton-upon-Ribble (1835–7) (mainly destroyed). This was followed by his most dramatic example, Christ Church (1835–6) in Preston itself. Only the west end remains but its high windows and huge corner towers and conical turrets suggest a château or medieval castle. His third church, St Mary’s (1836–8) at the other end of town, followed almost immediately. Here, the Norman corner towers are less formidable, but the whole building is constructed in a severely rectilinear manner giving it a prefabricated appearance. In the following year Latham built yet another Norman church, St Thomas’s, Lancaster Road (1837–9), and in the same year a fourth, Holy Trinity (1837–8), in the nearby village of Freckleton. Both Rickman and Whittaker must have known about Carus Wilson and John Latham, since Rickman had been employed by Carus Wilson in the early days of the vicar’s building programme, and the parishes of Blackburn and Preston were closely connected, perhaps even rivals.71 But there were important differences between the approaches of the two architects to the round-arched church. Where Latham’s designs are formidably English, Sharpe’s are decidedly continental. St Mark’s (1835–6; Fig. 7), in the suburbs of Blackburn, is much more sophisticated than Latham’s work. It has an air of joviality about it, and particularly successful are the large numbers of small round-arched windows that punctuate the walls, while the Lombard frieze, impressed under the string-courses, rises as dwarf arches under the roof like the icing around a large cake. There is, indeed, something splendidly skittish about this decoration that contrasts with the sobriety of Latham’s contemporary neoNorman work. 69 Holy Trinity, Brathay, Ambleside (1836), by Giles Redmayne; St John, Out Rawcliffe (1837–8); by John Dewhurst; St James, Clitheroe (1839); Holy Trinity, Bacup (1840–1), are a selection mentioned by Pevsner. See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: North Lancashire (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 29 et seq. 70 Ibid. 71 Rickman and Henry Hutchinson designed St Paul’s, Preston (1822–6).

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7. Edmund Sharpe, St Mark’s, Witton, Blackburn, 1835–6

Sharpe’s next church, St Saviour’s at Bamber Bridge, near Preston (1836–7), is less successful, but its air of blank melancholy might derive from the fact that it was much altered in later years. In contrast the nearby school building is much more energetic. Here, the Lombard frieze hangs like lace that runs along under the roof and then jumps over the main entrance. In this early phase of his career Sharpe finished only two further Romanesque buildings, St Paul’s, Farington (Fig. 8), and Christ Church at Chatburn, Lancashire. St Paul’s (1839–40) was a Commissioners’ church. The interior has been totally remodelled but the vertical bands and Lombard frieze in the tower are undoubtedly Romanesque, if of a rather starved variety. Similarly Christ Church (1838), a rural church standing on a mound on the edge of the village, has also been much altered. Its slightly carnivalesque effect is created by deeply incised Lombard friezes hanging everywhere like bunting. The strongly articulated volumes are punctuated throughout by very tall, narrow roundarched windows, all of which lend the building an air of spirited wellbeing belonging to the non-native resident (as Gunn would have it), and appropriate to the first examples of continental Romanesque buildings in Britain.


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8. Edmund Sharpe, St Paul’s, Farington, Preston, 1839–40

These early Romanesque churches were modelled, said Sharpe, on ‘the plain Romanesque of Northern Germany’,72 and one can see in his sketch of the abbey at Ebrach the Lombard frieze that he brought to Lancashire. But while he was away two books were published in 72 Letter from Sharpe to Whewell, Lancaster, 21 Dec. 1835, Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. R.6.1112.

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1835 which turned the emphasis of the study of Romanesque from Germany to Italy—Robert Willis’s Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, especially Italy, and Thomas Hope’s An Historical Essay on Architecture . . . illustrated from Drawings made by him in Italy and Germany. Willis was born in 1800 and by the age of 19 had patented a gadget connected with the pedal of the harp. He went up to Caius College, Cambridge, in 1821, received his B.A. degree in 1826, was ordained deacon in 1827, became a Fellow of Caius in 1826, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1830 and Jacksonian Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 1837. His Remarks earned him the title of honorary member of the Institute of British Architects. He was a close friend and admirer of both Rickman and Whewell, and a tour of Italy in 1832–3 prompted him to ‘attempt to supply Italian travellers’ with a similar guide to the one that Whewell had written for visitors to Germany.73 Though he disagreed with Whewell on the pointed arch issue, he confessed to adopting Whewell’s methodology in an attempt to focus attention on medieval Italian architecture, which, he said, ‘has too often been treated with contempt, as if it were mainly debased Gothic’.74 Throughout his text Willis freely uses the term ‘Romanesque’ to include Byzantine, Pisan, and Lombard. Hope’s Essay is rather different. He uses only the term ‘Lombard’ and never ‘Romanesque’, which supports the suggestion of David Watkin, Jill Lever, and Suzanne Stephens that the book was drafted many years before its posthumous publication in 1835.75 Hope came from Amsterdam in 1796, a rich and cultivated admirer of the arts. He created a substantial of collection paintings, sculpture, and antiques, and he moved in the early nineteenth-century world of connoisseurs and artists.76 He travelled to Italy around 1812 keeping a sketch-book that concentrated on Romanesque and Gothic buildings, and travelled there again in 1815, 1816, and 1817. After he 73 Robert Willis, Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, especially Italy (Cambridge, 1835), p. 13. 74 Ibid., p. 1. 75 David Watkin and Jill Lever, ‘A Sketch-book by Thomas Hope’, Architectural History, 23 (1980), 52–9. Suzanne Stephens, ‘In Search of the Pointed Arch: Freemasonary and Thomas Hope’s “An Historical Essay on Architecture” ’, The Journal of Architecture, 1, no. 2 (1996), 133–58. 76 For Hope see David Watkin, Thomas Hope and the Neo-Classical Idea (1968).


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9. ‘San Michele, Pavia’, from Thomas Hope, An Historical Essay on Architecture (1835)

died in 1831 his eldest son, Henry Thomas Hope, decided to publish his breezy, ebullient, compendious, and unorthodox book that devoted half its text and seventy of the ninety-seven illustrations to ‘Lombard’ architecture (Fig. 9). This style, Hope believed, was an amalgam of Roman and Byzantine elements, whose adoption by the Masonic guilds had spread the style across Europe. ‘Lombardy,’ he wrote, ‘was the first after the decline of the Roman empire, to endow architecture with a complete and connected system of forms, which soon prevailed wherever the Latin church spread its influence from the shores of the Baltic to those of the Mediterranean.’77 An enthusiastic account of the style is followed by a gazetteer of Romanesque churches in Italy, France, Germany, and England, but he warns his reader that since Lombard was so widespread it would be ‘modified’ and mixed with other styles at different points in Europe. In that same year Whewell published the second edition of his Architectural Notes in which he objected to Hope’s ‘Lombard’ since, as he said, ‘Romanesque is now so generally understood . . .’78 77

Thomas Hope, An Historical Essay on Architecture (1835), i, 250. William Whewell, Architectural Notes on German Churches (Cambridge, 2nd. edn., 1835), p. 16. Britton’s 1838 architectural dictionary mentioned Gunn as the 78

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The end of the 1830s and the beginning of the 1840s mark a significant change in British attitudes to the study of architecture in general and to the Romanesque in particular. Beginning with the work of Gunn in the early part of the century, interest in the earlier styles of Norman, Lombard, and Romanesque had been largely archaeological. Whewell had moved the study of architecture into a scientific phase, and the tours of Edmund Sharpe and Robert Willis had been explorations that had shown that the round-arched, early medieval style of building was as widespread, diverse, and in some cases, as impressive as Gothic. Towards the end of the 1830s more and more writers urged architects to experiment with Romanesque for modern building. W. H. Leeds published a panegyric devoted to modern German round-arched building in the pages of the Foreign and Quarterly Review;79 Joseph Gwilt supported this view in his Elements of Architectural Criticism (1837),80 and John Shaw in his ‘Letter on Ecclesiastical Architecture, as applicable to Modern Churches’ (1838) pointed out to Charles Blomfield, the Bishop of London, that Lombardic architecture ‘contains in an eminent degree the qualities now so important’.81 This tendency culminated in J. L. Petit’s Remarks on Church Architecture, a two-volume anthology of drawings by Petit from a Continental trip of 1839, accompanied by his commentary in which he tentatively suggested that there would be an opportunity for splendid variety if round-arched architecture were adopted in Britain. But other movements were abroad, and towards the end of the 1830s a new tone in architectural criticism set in. In 1836 Augustus Welby Pugin’s Contrasts served to moralize architecture in religious and spiritual terms from a Roman Catholic perspective. The Cambridge Camden Society, founded in 1839, was set up for ‘the study of Gothic Architecture, and of Ecclesiastical Antiquities, and the restoration of mutilated Architectural remains’.82 It was the originator of the term ‘Romanesque’ and that it had Whewell’s approval, and similarly under ‘The Romanesque Style’ J. H. Parker’s third edition of his Glossary of Terms used in . . .Architecture (Oxford, 1840) quotes Whewell as an authority. 79 See note 38. 80 Joseph Gwilt, Elements of Architectural Criticism (1837), p. 73. 81 Quoted in Basil F. L. Clarke, Church Builders of the Nineteenth Century: a Study of the Gothic Revival in England (1938, 1969), pp. 42–3. 82 Geoffrey K. Brandwood, ‘Fond of Architecture—The Establishment of the Society and a Short History of its Membership’, in ‘A Church as it Should be’: the Cambridge Camden Society and its Influence, ed. Christopher Webster and John Elliott (Stamford, 2000), p. 49.


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brain-child of two Trinity undergraduates, Benjamin Webb and John Mason Neale, with the strong support of Thomas Thorp, Archdeacon of Bristol and tutor at Trinity. It was probably at his suggestion that Whewell was appointed vice-president, and his suggestion, too, that Willis was offered membership. In the early issues of the society’s publication, The Ecclesiologist, Neale created an aggressively English and Anglican tone in an attempt to distinguish the aims and objectives of the new society from those of the Roman Catholic faction. One of his bêtes-noires was Romanesque architecture, and especially neo-Romanesque churches. The first volume of the journal ranted against the ‘newfangled semi paganisms’83 suggested by Petit in his Remarks on Church Architecture, and against the ‘injury’84 done by Hope’s Essay. Subsequent issues went on to lament the ‘introduction of foreign styles of Church Architecture, essentially discordant with our national feelings and associations . . .’85 and after a long and acrimonious debate on the subject with the Broad Church Christian Remembrancer, The Ecclesiologist put its foot down by enunciating three fundamental principles for British church architecture. These were: ‘1. That Gothic Architecture is, in the highest sense, the only Christian Architecture. 2. That, during the period in which it flourished, our Country churches are, in their way, as perfect models as our Cathedrals. And 3. The proposed introduction by Mr Petit and his followers of a new style, whether Romanesque, Byzantine, or Eclectic, is to be earnestly deprecated, as opening a door to the most dangerous innovations, and totally subversive of Christian Architecture as such.’86 Surprisingly, the targets of this invective were not the churches of Edmund Sharpe. Seeing which way the wind was blowing he abandoned Romanesque87 and rapidly joined the growing numbers of the Camden Society.88 Instead, it was aimed at two much-publicized examples of neo-Romanesque building, James Wild’s Christ Church, 83

Anon., ‘Mr Petit’s Remarks on Church Architecture’, Ecclesiologist, 1(1842),

97. 84

Anon., ‘Modern Romanesque’, Ecclesiologist, 1 (1842), 162. Ibid., 161. Anon., ‘Romanesque and Catholick Architecture’, Ecclesiologist, 2 (1842), 5–16, p. 5. The view that ‘GOTHICK IS THE ONLY CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE’ was endorsed by its insertion into the third edition of the Camden Society’s bible for new churches, A Few Words to Church-Builders (Cambridge 1844), p. 5. 87 He returned to it at St Paul’s, Scotforth (1874–6). 88 The Report of the 21st meeting of the Cambridge Camden Society on 8 Nov. 1841 gives E. Sharpe as an elected member. See Ecclesiologist, 1 (1842), 7. 85 86

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Streatham, begun in 1840 and completed in 1842,89 and Sidney Herbert’s St Mary and St Nicholas at Wilton near Salisbury, which was begun in 1841 and consecrated in 1845. The choice of style for these churches placed them outside the mainstream of British building and in a category which threatened the orthodoxies of the Camden Society. In the next chapter we will explore their origins and those of a third building that the Camden Society missed, St Mary’s Chapel of Ease (1842) in the village of Wreay outside Carlisle. This was built by a remarkable Cumbrian woman, Sara Losh, and was perhaps the most original example of a Romanesque revival building in Britain. But the story does not stop there and in chapter seven we will move to the use of Romanesque at the end of the century and to its crowning glory in Britain, The Natural History Museum, London. 89 For a full account of this see Neil Jackson, ‘Christ Church Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), 218–52.

3 The Romanesque Revival in Britain 1800–1840: 2 Th e Cambridge Camden Society might have disapproved of the use of Romanesque for the British public at large, but it had no objection to the style being used for the poor or the savage. In 1841 the Maoris of New Zealand received their first Anglican Bishop, the thirty-two-year-old George Augustus Selwyn. With energetic missionary zeal he set out to bring the gospel to the islands and to begin a programme of church building. As an undergraduate and later Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, Selwyn had lent his support to the new Camden Society, and it was to the Society that he turned for designs for his new churches. In 1842 the Ecclesiologist told its readers that ‘the ingenuity of the natives in carving is well known; and it is the Bishop’s design to convert this faculty to the glory of God.’ To lend Selwyn a hand the Society agreed to ‘furnish working models of the actual size, of Norman capitals, sections of mouldings, ornamented pier, door, and window arches’ which the natives would copy in local stone.1 It was decided that since the distance between parish churches would be so great just one model would suffice for all. For this, Iffley Church in Oxford was chosen as the ideal example, and the Society began to send out ‘casts of the ornaments’.2 The reason for choosing a style that had been so strongly repudiated for British parish churches was a simple one. Romanesque was adopted because, like the natives themselves, it was primitive and unsophisticated. ‘It seems natural,’ said the Ecclesiologist, ‘to teach [the natives] first that style which first prevailed in our own country; while its rudeness and massiveness, and the grotesque character of its sculpture, will probably render it easier to be understood and

1

‘Parish Churches in New Zealand’, Ecclesiologist, 1(1842), 4–5. Rules and Proceedings of the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, Trinity Term (1842), p. 12. 2

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appreciated by them.’3 The project was idealistically ambitious, of course, and a far more simple solution was adopted instead.4 The natives of Bethnal Green were more fortunate. In the late 1830s the poverty there reached such distressing proportions that it was even mentioned by Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1844). Bishop Charles Blomfield, troubled by the problem, felt it incumbent upon him to bring succour and spirituality to a population of over 70,000 potentially unruly working-class people. Churches were few and far between here too, and Blomfield took advice on his building programme from various quarters. John Shaw, as we have seen (see p. 60 above), urged the virtues of the ‘economy’, the ‘facility of execution’, the ‘simplicity’, the ‘durability’ and the ‘beauty’ of Romanesque, and Blomfield took his advice. Between 1840 and 1849 ten churches were rapidly commissioned and equally rapidly built. Six were round-arched, built of brick, had very little ornament, and were extremely utilitarian.5 Louis Vulliamy designed three in Bethnal Green (St Peter’s, St James the Less, and St Thomas), while at the same time producing a luxury version, All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, for a richer parish in South Kensington.6 Thomas Wyatt and David Brandon created two Italianate churches, St Andrew and St Matthias, both prefiguring the infinitely more elaborate St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton (see p. 60 below), and Henry Clutton based St Jude’s on an extremely simplified version of the Rhineland Romanesque cathedral. But in this period three Romanesque churches stand out above all the others: Sara Losh’s St Mary’s, Wreay, near Carlisle, James Wild’s Christ Church, Streatham, and Sidney Herbert’s St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton. The last two were among the most publicized buildings of their time; they are all round-arched and all three were strongly influenced by continental models.

3

‘Parish Churches in New Zealand’, p. 5. Iffley church did not rise again on the other side of the world. Instead William Mason, first Superintendent of Works for New Zealand, chose brick plastered to look like stone for Old St Paul’s in Auckland, and wooden Gothic structures for the rest of the country. 5 See Curran (2003), pp. 199–208. 6 This was consecrated in 1849 but designed much earlier. 4


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Sara Losh’s St Mary’s, Wreay In 1869 Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited the small village of Wreay outside Carlisle. There he saw a church and some other buildings designed by a local woman, Sara Losh. He was greatly impressed and wrote back to his mother that Sara Losh ‘must have been a really great genius, and should be better known. She built a church in the Byzantine style, which is full of beauty and imaginative detail, though extremely severe and simple.’7 In 1868 Dante Gabriel Rossetti had met an old lady in Ayrshire called Margaret Losh. Next year, he went to stay with her briefly in Wreay. So impressed was Margaret Losh with Rossetti that she lent him money8 and talked to him about her remarkable cousin Sara, who had died in 1853. Sara Losh was remarkable for a number of reasons, for her personality, for her unusual interests, but above all for her architectural achievements. Rossetti wrote to Jane Morris with amazement about these ‘extraordinary architectural works—a church of a byzantine style and other things—erected from her own designs’, claiming they were much more original ‘than the things done by the young architects now’9 (Fig. 10). In fact they were so advanced that he wished Philip Webb, the designer of William Morris’s Red House, could come to Wreay and see them for himself. Still glowing with enthusiasm, Rossetti repeated these sentiments to his mother a few days later: Losh, he said, was ‘entirely without systematic study as an architect, but her practical as well as inventive powers were extraordinary’. ‘The church at Wreay’, he told her, is ‘a most beautiful thing’, and urged Mrs Rossetti to visit Cumbria since, he said, ‘I am sure the whole of this group of her works would interest you extremely . . .’10 The group to which Rossetti referred all stand in the village of Wreay and include a school and school house, a monumental obelisk in memory of her parents, a mortuary chapel based upon the ancient church of St Piran on the north Cornish Coast, a mausoleum for her sister, and the ‘Byzantine’ St Mary’s church. Rossetti was an early admirer; Nikolaus Pevsner was a more recent one, and though he 7

The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. W. E. Fredeman, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 2004), iv, 239. 8 She kept up a significant correspondence with Rossetti until she died in 1872. 9 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: their Correspondence, ed. John Bryson (Oxford, 1976), p. 24. Letter dated 23 Aug. 1869. 10 Rossetti Letters, ii, 716.

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10. Sara Losh, St Mary’s Chapel of Ease, Wreay, Cumberland, 1842

found the choice of style ‘remarkable’ there were many aspects of its design which he described as ‘bewildering’.11 The political and religious climate in which Sara Losh was brought up was radical, intellectual, progressive, and freethinking. She was born in 1786. Her father came from the old Cumbrian family (Arlosh) and had been to school at Sedbergh and then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he developed a love of science. According to the only authority we have on the Loshes, Henry Lonsdale,12 both John and his third brother William were, as he put 11

Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Cumberland and Westmorland (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 40, and Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Sara Losh’s Church’, Architectural Review, 162 (1967), 67. 12 Henry Lonsdale (1816–76) was a doctor, born in Carlisle, who practised first in Edinburgh, then in 1844 returned to his native city. He published widely on medical matters and in 1851 gave up medicine to pursue his interest in Italian art and write his six-volume Worthies of Cumberland. He was a political radical and as a friend of Mazzini and Garibaldi strongly supported Italian unity. He was also a friend of the medical mythographer, Thomas Inman, who published a two-volume Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names in 1869. Inman believed in a phallic basis for the religious impulse.


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it, ‘directed to political progress, and the securing of religious freedom untrammelled by creeds and other human credentials’.13 John Losh founded an alkali works for the manufacture of soda at Walker near Newcastle and in 1809 established the Walker Iron Works. On his death in 1814 his brother William continued to run the business which had been inherited by Sara. Sara’s mother, Isabella, died in 1799 when she was only twelve years old, and she and her sister Katherine were brought up by her aunt Margaret. It was her uncle James Losh, however, who seems to have provided for her a window on the larger world. He was a lawyer, and Recorder of Liverpool. He was an outstanding public figure, a Unitarian, a supporter of the new railway, a campaigner for the abolition of slavery and was in favour of Catholic emancipation. His mainly unpublished diaries14 make it clear that he was well read in contemporary literature and drama. He was friendly with Sarah Siddons and had a passion for politics both British and European. He was a close friend of many leading republican figures; he knew Wordsworth and Southey and even after his marriage in 1798 he brought many of his visitors to meet Sara and Katherine in the family home of Woodside15 near Wreay. According to Lonsdale, Sara Losh was a witty, intelligent, goodlooking woman who, when young, loved social gatherings and fine clothes. She was fluent in Italian and French, read Greek and could translate from Latin in extempore. She enjoyed the novels of Scott, Lytton, and Dickens. She excelled in music and mathematics, and according to her classics teacher was a scholar of outstanding ability. Lonsdale, who was thirty years her junior, was clearly a great admirer. As a friend he had the advantage of access to privileged knowledge about her, yet he is never entirely candid. He never explains, for example, why she never married. Instead he hints at an obstinate temper that would not tolerate fools, a singular desire to have her own way, a certain lack of self-confidence, but above all an intellectual command which might well have frightened potential husbands. She was, he says, ‘educated far beyond the reach of her

13

Henry Lonsdale, The Worthies of Cumberland, 6 vols. (1867–75), iv, 147. The Diaries and Correspondence of James Losh, ed. Edward Hughes (1963), was published by the Surtees Society but is extremely incomplete. 15 An engraving of 1794 shows this as an unexceptional building in Palladian style, but it was much extended first by Losh herself and then by other members of the family. See Laurie Kemp, Woodside (Wreay, 1997), p. 14. 14

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own sex, and, indeed of most men’.16 James Losh endorsed this opinion of her abilities. In 1825 he confided to his diary that Sara ‘has great powers of mind’, but, he added, ‘a languid constitution and an over delicacy of feeling have prevented her from taking that rank in society to which she is, in all respects justly entitled’.17 The rank in which Lonsdale places her is alongside the critical rationalists Madame de Staël and George Eliot (whom he claimed to know personally), and he speaks of how her ‘active and ardent mind’ drew to her ‘superior-minded company in various walks of life’. Above all he stresses her theoretical ecumenicalism, recording that he has ‘seen around her social board Unitarians and Episcopalians, Catholics and Christians unattached’.18 We know that these included her Unitarian uncle, the fervent Catholic antiquarian Henry Howard and his son P. H. Howard, who became M.P. for Carlisle in 1830. There were the Anglicans William Paley, a fellow of Christ’s, Cambridge, and Archdeacon of Carlisle, best-known for his book Evidences of Christianity (1794), and Isaac Milner, who had twice been Vice Chancellor of Cambridge and who frequently preached in Carlisle. There was Edmund Law, Bishop of Carlisle, the physicist Sir John Leslie, and there was the orientalist Joseph Carlyle, who became professor of Arabic languages in Cambridge in 1795 and who explored the libraries of Hagia Sophia and the Seraglio.19 In 1833 James Losh’s diary records one of his numerous visits to his nieces at Woodside, mentioning the fact that ‘my old friend Wordsworth, the Poet, dines with us . . .’20 James Losh died later that same year. In 1835 Sara Losh’s sister Katherine died. Sara was extremely close to her and in the words of her biographer she suffered ‘almost inconsolable grief’.21 Sara was then 49. She was without children or husband, and had already suffered more than her fair share of bereavements. Surrounded by death, she seems to have become fascinated with philosophical and religious ideas which involved the generation of life, the migration of the soul and the continuity of life 16

Lonsdale, iv, 201. James Losh, Diaries 1798–1833. Unpublished MSS. in Carlisle Public Library. Entry dated 30 Sept. 1825. 18 Lonsdale, iv, 236. 19 For Carlyle see Robin Cormack, ‘Curzon’s “Gentleman’s Book” ’, in Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium through British Eyes, ed. Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot, 2000), p. 154. 20 21 Losh, Diaries. Entry for 7 Aug. 1833. Lonsdale, iv, 220. 17


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after death. The first hint of these preoccupations was a memorial obelisk dedicated to her parents and modelled closely on the famous seventh century cross at Bewcastle.22 This she designed with Katherine but completed after her death. Later Sara designed a primitive Cyclopean mausoleum in memory of her sister. This must have been completed by 1847 because it is mentioned in a local guidebook.23 It is a box-like structure with a square copper-covered oak door and stands in the churchyard of St Mary’s looking as if it had been built by a pre-Christian race of giants from large elementary blocks held up only by their own weight. Inside it contains a pale marble statue of her sister by a local sculptor, Dunbar, done from a sketch which Sara did when the two women were in Naples in 1817. 1817 was the annus mirabilis in Sara Losh’s life. She was thirtyone, and went with her uncle William and her sister Katherine on a continental tour. The full extent of their journey is uncertain, but we know that they travelled through France to Italy down as far as Spoleto, Naples, Pompeii, and Terracina. From there they went on to Paestum and returned via Rome. Losh wrote seven volumes of energetic prose to accompany her travels and these were packed with details of society, paintings, landscape, and architecture.24 The journals have been lost but their bulk suggests a much more extensive tour than the places mentioned by Lonsdale. Her uncle James, who was a severe critic, even of Wordsworth, was impressed by them. Her attention to art and architecture, he said, was ‘indefatigable’, and if published, he claimed, they would form ‘one of the most amusing and instructive works on Italy’ to appear in recent years.25 This tour undoubtedly laid the foundations for her extensive architectural knowledge. It probably gave her her first sight of continental Romanesque building, which, as we have seen, was an unusual taste in 1817. The fragments extracted by Lonsdale, though they do not mention Romanesque, provide a fascinating insight into her temperament and interests. In France she is intrigued by the Christianized fertility rites in a Rogation Day procession at Pont 22 Henry Howard, whose drawings she used for this obelisk, published ‘On the Runic Column at Bewcastle in Cumberland’ in Archaeologia, 14 (1803), 113–18. 23 ‘In the church yard adjoining the chapel, is a chaste piece of sculpture, from the chisel of Dunbar, in which polished marble—the figure of the late Miss Catherine [sic] Losh—for which a cell in the Druidical fashion has been built.’ Mannix and Whellan, History, Gazetteer, and Directory of Cumberland (Beverley, 1847), p. 172. 24 Passages are quoted in Lonsdale, iv, 209–13. 25 Losh, Diaries. Entry for 28 Mar. 1823. Dr Jeffrey Smith pointed this out to me.

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l’Echelle, noticing that a ‘remnant of such observances may still be traced in England’, and while at Rome she is saddened by the departure of a belief in myth from modern painting.26 In the Sistine Chapel she is positively iconoclastic, finding it ‘gloomy’, ‘horrible’, and verging on the ‘ludicrous’,27 and after a talk on The Last Judgement by a Signor Magrini she outraged the lecturer by suggesting that the devils had the most satisfactory part in the whole work.28 Pompeii seems to have had a profound effect on her. ‘The view from the upper ranges of the amphitheatre’, she wrote, ‘exceeded in beauty, grandeur, and fascination all that we had ever seen or could have imagined.’29 When she returned home she constructed a ‘Pompeian court’ as part of the garden at Woodside,30 and in 1830 a cottage, now destroyed, ‘on the model of one discovered in the ruins of Pompeii’ for the schoolmaster of an infants’ school which she endowed.31 Architecture and architectural history—both practice and theory —seem to have always fascinated her. In 1827 James Losh was so enthusiastic about a lecture given in Newcastle by a Mr Woods entitled ‘Architecture as Illustrating History and the State of Society in Different Nations’ that he persuaded him to stay for four days.32 Knowing Losh’s interests, her uncle must have introduced them. Lonsdale confirmed that architecture was important to her as a means to historical and cultural understanding. ‘Archaeology had many attractions for her,’ he wrote, ‘not only as a study per se, illustrating the curiosities of ancient and modern structures, but as, viewed with an historic or architectural meaning, realising to modern eyes the life of the past.’33 By the time Losh came to build at Wreay she was realizing the fruit of a carefully considered view of architecture and its relationship with society and religion, and in St Mary’s she had an opportunity to put some of these ideas into practice. The motive was the state of Wreay parish church, which by 26

27 28 Lonsdale, iv, 208 and 212. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 213 30 Quoted in Lonsdale, iv, 201. Ibid., 216. Lonsdale gives no date for this. 31 Mannix and Whellan (1847), p. 174, and ibid., p, 223. 32 Losh, Diaries. Entries for 4, 6, and 7 Apr. 1827. This may have been the architect Joseph Woods, whose Letters of an Architect from France, Italy, and Greece were published in the following year. Woods was a convinced neo-classicist. His letters, however, betray some affection for Romanesque. He said that ‘the most interesting example at Verona to the antiquary, as a specimen of the architecture of the depth of the middle ages, is the church of S. Zeno. Letters (1828), p. 229. 33 Lonsdale, iv, 206. 29


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1832 was in a dilapidated condition.34 In a long and detailed surveyrecord of the old church, Sara Losh herself made it clear that preservation was in vain, and where possible the materials would be reused in the building of St Mary’s.35 In her own words, Sara Losh ‘offered to furnish a new site . . . and to defray all the expenses of its reerection, on condition that I should be left unrestricted as to the mode of building it.’36 In 1836 the township of Wreay donated a plot of land from the common that she had cleared, levelled, and drained. Her involvement at this point is highly professional. With extensive help from her local builder, William Hindson and his family firm, she supervised everything from the draining of the land, through the use of building materials and the choice of design, to the elaborate construction of the decorative detail. Characteristic of her record is the account of the foundations of the church. ‘To secure the dryness of the chapel floor,’ she wrote, ‘the flags are raised on dwarf walls, with the exception of the platform at the entrance, which is raised on dry stone chippings.’37 The result is an amalgam of the practical and the theoretical. The whole project derives from Losh’s command of technical detail, from her observations of ancient work in France and Italy, and from her personal interest in religious myth and symbolism. Her work for St Mary’s was prefaced by a smaller architectural project which in its turn was stimulated by an important archaeological discovery. In 1836 a small oratory church emerged out of the shifting sand-dunes near Perranzabuloe in north Cornwall, where it had been buried for more than seven hundred years.38 The antiquity of the church of St Piran caught the imagination of antiquarians because it demonstrated, as one of them wrote, ‘the similarity of St Piran’s to the structures of the early Christians, especially in the East—at Byzantium and Antioch’.39 Here, on British soil, was what 34

Losh, Diaries. Entry for 11 Nov. 1832. A transcript by the Revd Richard Jackson (first Incumbent of St Mary’s Wreay) of an account by Sara Losh of the building of St Mary’s Wreay, unpublished MS. in Carlisle Record Office, PR 118/30, p. 1. Internal evidence is indicative of the authenticity of this document. 36 37 Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., pp. 18–20. 38 The dating of this oratory is a matter of some debate and varies from 6th century (Pevsner) to 9th century (Thomas) and is discussed in E. W. F. Tomlin, In Search of St Piran (Padstow, Corwall, 1982), pp. 7–8. Material about the church is kept in Truro Museum, and after various phases of excavation it has once again been covered by the sand. 39 William Haslam, Perran-Zabuloe (1844), p. 89. 35

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appeared to be a piece of Byzantium, and as the oratory was excavated at one end of the country, it came to the notice of Sara Losh at the other. In the early 1830s before her sister died Losh had donated some land half a mile from the village of Wreay for use as an interdenominational burial ground. In 1836 her imagination was fired by the story of St Piran’s, by its antiquity, and by its links backwards to the earliest Christian buildings. In addition to this the discoverer of St Piran’s, the amateur archaeologist William Michell, reported that it was surrounded with the bones of an ancient cemetery.40 Sara Losh decided to build a replica mortuary chapel for resting coffins before burial which exactly duplicated the Cornish oratory in shape and size. She obtained details—plan and elevation—of the extremely simple, plainly decorated structure, and she carefully reproduced the two sculpted heads which serve as imposts to the single window, the leonine animal which serves as the keystone, and the double chevron which surrounds the door.41 Inside she copied the altar and stone side seats, and incorporated a sculpted palm as her only personal contribution. Immediately she moved on to her major achievement. In her design for St Mary’s, planned sometime after 1836 and consecrated in 1842, she gave full expression to her unusual philosophical and religious preoccupations. The building is unique. Rossetti’s friend, the artist and writer William Bell Scott, pointed out that ‘before the revival of church architecture in connection with ritual and reactionary theology, her little Byzantine church . . . was a notable performance.’42 Both Rossetti and William Bell Scott identified St Mary’s as ‘Byzantine’; Sara Losh called it ‘early Saxon or modified Lombard’,43 and her choice of phrasing suggests that her inspiration was partly English and partly continental. There are a small number 40 William Michell, letter to The West Briton (1835), quoted in Tomlin (1982), p. 8. Losh may have first read about St Piran’s in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1835, which quoted Michell, gave the precise dimensions of the building, and connected its extreme antiquity with its role as a mortuary. Anon., ‘Church of Pernanzabulo, Cornwall’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 4 (1835), 539–40. 41 These were removed to the Museum of the Royal Institution in Cornwall, Truro. It is now very difficult to determine their sex, so worn are they, but William Michell, whose detailed notes are also held in the museum, says that they are ‘the head of a man and that of a woman rudely sculpted of stone . . . of very remote antiquity’. 42 William Bell Scott: Autobiographical Notes, ed. William Minto, 2 vols. (1892), i, 221. 43 Losh transcript, p. 28.


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of English churches in which the apse is as developed as it is at Wreay, but the term ‘modified Lombard’ points strongly to the fact that she had read Thomas Hope and had seen the continental illustrations in his Essay.44 In fact, Lonsdale, in his account of St Mary’s, suggests that there is a similarity between the west front and ‘Lombard and Rhenish churches’, particularly those of San Michele in Pavia and the duomo of Parma, and he suggests that the doorway recalls ‘that of Santa Maria della Piazza, Ancona’.45 Though he does not mention Thomas Hope, each of these is illustrated in Hope’s Essay.46 Certainly, the total effect of the church is much more continental than it is English, and it was deliberately primitive in style. ‘The unpolished mode of building adhered to in the new chapel’, she wrote, ‘. . . was preferred to a more improved style, as less expensive and elaborate.’47 The gable on the west front, decorated with rising blank arches, bears a close resemblance to a number of Hope’s illustrations. On the outside all the windows are notable for their repetitive simplicity and for the absence of imposts. The windows and door of the west end, however, are unusually encrusted with the strangest decorations in a style unmatched in the 1830s. According to Lonsdale, Losh employed only local craftsmen, particularly Hindson and his family. Locally it was believed that she sent him to Naples for a brief period to study the art of sculpture and carving. For the decorations of the church it seems that she made clay mouldings that Hindson and his men copied in stone.48 The result is a curiously flattened and stylized decoration which, as Pevsner noticed, looks forward to the work of the Arts and Crafts movement of the end of the century.49 It is not surprising that Rossetti wanted Philip Webb to see this building. 44 St Mary’s Wreay is distinguished by its strongly defined apse, and though semicircular apsidal Norman churches are fairly unusual in Britain Sara Losh may well have known the nearby church of St Leonard in Warwick, Cumberland, or the famous church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck, in Herefordshire. Like St Mary’s, Kilpeck is round-arched and has a prominent apse, and like St Mary’s, too, it is extensively decorated with carving. 45 Lonsdale, iv, 224. 46 San Michele in Pavia, plate 32; the duomo of Parma, plate 30; Santa Maria della Piazza, Ancona, plate 10. 47 Losh transcript, p. 28. 48 A. R. Hall, Wreay (Carlisle, 1929), p. 74. 49 See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Cumberland and Westmorland (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 212. See also Pevsner, ‘Sara Losh’s Church’, Architectural Review, 162 (1967), 65–7.

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But it is the local richness and detail on the outside which are so striking. It is a cornucopia of flora and fauna. Fir cones, moths, owls, scarab beetles, ears of barley, butterflies, and ammonites crowd around the inside of the three windows at the west end, and the door (again with no imposts) is decorated with a double row of lotus flowers and leaves—the hood moulding over the door is ornamented with the leaf and flower of the water lily and the bosses on the end are in the shape of pine cones. Perhaps most remarkable on the outside are the huge ‘emblematical monsters’,50 as Losh called them—gargoyle beasts which seem to be bursting out of the four corners of the building. From one end comes a serpent, from another a tortoise, and the west end is crowned by a small bell tower surmounted by an eagle. The dragon on the north side, according to Losh, was to serve as a flue for the wood stove inside the building; ‘the iron bar inserted in its jaw’, she said, ‘is to prevent the starlings from making nests in it.’51 The style and decoration of St Mary’s suggest that Sara Losh was well aware of the rituals of the early Church and the controversies which were growing around church design. One of those involved the mythographic connection between ancient religions and Christianity. ‘Philosophy, religion, history and poetry, are the component parts of mythology’, wrote the anonymous reviewer of Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s influential Symbolism and Mythology in 1829. ‘Mythology according to Creuzer’s definition’, he added, ‘[is] the knowledge of the universal language of nature, as expressed by certain symbols.’ ‘It is the venerable porch by which we enter the sanctuary of history.’52 Creuzer was the most recent and most elaborate student of the symbolic basis of religion, but he was not the first. In fact he had been preceded by several mythographers to whose work Sara Losh would have had access. Dominant amongst these are Alessandro Maffei, Pierre d’Hancarville,53 Stanislas Famin, and above all Richard Payne Knight. Richard Payne Knight investigated the connection between natural symbol, myth, and religion in his book An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818). This was reissued in 1836, at precisely the 50 52

51 Losh transcript, p. 20. Ibid. Anon., ‘Symbolism and Mythology’, Foreign Review, 3 (1829), 326, 325, and

333. 53 For Payne Knight’s debt to d’Hancarville see The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, ed. Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny (Manchester, 1982), pp. 50ff.


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moment when Losh must have been contemplating the design of St Mary’s, and almost every one of the symbols which she uses in the decoration of her church has a place in his work. The guardians of the chapel are all there—the snake (‘symbols of health and immortality’, p. 19), the tortoise (‘immortality’, p. 40), and the eagle (‘creation, preservation, and destruction’, p. 82). The caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly, all of which appear on the windows of the west front, are related by Payne Knight to ‘an emblem of man in his earthly form’, ‘a natural image of death’, and ‘the celestial or ethereal soul’ (p. 136). They are representative, in other words, of the passage from birth, life, through death to immortality.54 Knight was essentially a pantheist. For him all creeds had elements in common, and Christianity was just one among others ancient and modern in the pantheon. He believed in what he called a ‘system of emanations . . . the fundamental principle of the religions of a large majority of the human race . . . though not now acknowledged by any established sect of Christians’.55 His ideas were revolutionary and Rousseauistic. Sara Losh may have been less sceptical about Christianity than Knight, but St Mary’s is filled with imagery which suggests the continuity of religious belief and the recognition that much pagan symbolism had been taken up by Christianity. The largest number of Losh’s chosen forms both outside and inside the church, however, are connected with fertility, the generation of life, and the male and female principles. The lotus flower, the pomegranate, and the barley corn, emblems which are distributed throughout the church, are representative, says Knight, of ‘the passive generative power’ of the female (p. 32). But it is the phallus, the lingam and other symbols of male generative power that he perceives as being fundamental to many religious beliefs. He explored the role of the phallus in ancient legend in his very first book, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786), and this theme is continued in the Inquiry. Sara Losh also employs many of the symbols 54 Paolo Alessandro Maffei, Gemme antiche figurante (Rome, 1707–9), illustrates a number of figures of Psyche, i.e. the soul as a butterfly or accompanied by a moth. Pierre d’Hancarville points out that with the Greeks, ‘le papillon devint chez eux le symbole de l’âme’. Pierre d’Hancarville, Recherches sur l’origine, l’esprit, et les progrès des arts de la Grèce, 2 vols. (1785), ii, 56. 55 Richard Payne Knight, Preface to Alfred, a Romance in Rhyme (1823), p. vii. For a discussion of this in Payne Knight’s work see Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 96ff.

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which Payne Knight identifies with phallic mysteries, but the one which is ubiquitous at St Mary’s is the pine or fir cone. It appears everywhere, inside and outside. Cones are attached to the window openings, they appear on the west door, they are sculpted in wood over the locks on the interior of the door, and they hang pendulously down from the centre of each of the large roof beams. Most prominently, they stand sculpted in stone between the ‘baptistery’ and the nave. But most significantly, the cone occurs in a location outside the church. In the mausoleum dedicated to Katherine Losh the classically posed figure of her sister in the centre of the small building shows her in rapt contemplation of something in her left hand. It is a fir cone. The fir cone, as Payne Knight points out, was one of the emblems of Bacchus and is placed on the end of his thyrsus. ‘It therefore holds the place of the male, or active generative attribute’, he says, and is one of the manifestations of the ‘symbol of the phallus’.56 But as Sara Losh well knew, the pine cone had been adopted by Christianity as a symbol of resurrection and immortality. When she was in Rome we know that she visited the Vatican, and there she would have seen the colossal pine cone in the Giardino della Pigna. It was made about 1 ad, is three and a half metres (over 11 feet) high, and forms part of a fountain. For the Romans it was a symbol of generation; for the Christians who had placed it in the forecourt of the Old St Peter’s it symbolized the promise of eternal life. It was the fruit of the arbor vitae. In 1605 it was moved to the Belvedere where it now stands.57 The transformation of pagan symbols into Christian ones was also an issue discussed by Thomas Hope in his Essay. ‘At Ravenna,’ he wrote, ‘. . . the vine, the palm-tree, the dove, the paschal lamb, or the peacock, are seen intermixed with the sacred monograms and the cross, on almost every one of those tombs of the fourth and fifth century . . . and the whole menagerie of sacred animals—the lamb, the dove, the deer, the goose, the peacock, and the fish . . . appears . . . still inserted in the walls of the modern cathedral.’58 He does not mention the pine cone but he might have noticed an example in a

56 Richard Payne Knight, An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (1818), p. 124. 57 Phyllis Pray Bober, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture (1986), entry 187, and Gerd Heinz-Mohr, Lessico di iconografia cristiana (Milan, 1984), pp. 286–7. 58 Hope (1835), i, 184.


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Christian context in the Lateran Baptistery in Rome or the duomo of Torcello.59 At St Mary’s, Wreay, the cone acts as a key element in the symbolic narrative about generation and the passage of the soul through life into death while presiding over the realm of the living and the dead. This is particularly evident when we move inside the church. Even on a bright day it is mysteriously crepuscular (the Bishop wanted more Anglican light in it)60 with small windows carefully calculated to produce the effect of sombre intensity. There are no aisles, no presbytery, and no organ loft. The main west door lets into the small rectangular baptistery which is separated from the nave by a low wall terminated by the two fir cones. The baptismal font in local alabaster was carved by Sara and her cousin William Losh. Between the Norman zigzag motif that encircles the top and the Greek fluting at the base there are a series of low-relief representations of lilies, butterflies, vines, pomegranates, birds, and beetles. Both the subject and the style are strongly reminiscent of some fine Byzantine work in Sant’Apollinare in Classe at Ravenna. The irony is that there they appear on magnificent ninth-century sarcophagi or ciboria for the benefit of the dead rather than the newborn.61 The area of initiation and the creation of life leads by means of a low step down into the nave which is about 10.5 metres (34 feet) 59 This is discussed in Eugène Gobelet D’Alviella, La Migration de symboles (Paris, 1892), p. 113. In her Apotheosis and the After Life (1915), Mrs. A. Strong points out that the pine cone appears ‘almost as constantly’ on Roman tombstones as the cross on Christian graves. ‘It has been suggested’, she says, ‘that the pine-cone is so frequently used to adorn graves because of its likeness to the grave conus, which is itself derived from the omphalus-shaped tombs or tholos. Further, it has been argued that the conical stone placed over the tumulus is simply the phallic emblem of life . . . I imagine that this sepulchral conus was never regarded as purely architectonic and ornamental, but that it owed its popularity as a funerary emblem to the fact that its original meaning, though modified, was not entirely forgotten. Nothing would have been more natural than definitely to represent the emblem of generation by means of the cognate shape of the fruit which from time immemorial had itself been regarded as an instrument of fertility. Then, again, this primitive symbol becomes, by the purifying influence of religion, the visible pledge of spiritual resurrection.’ pp. 195–6. 60 ‘In conformity to this primitive manner of building, large windows could not have been properly made in the absis, but the Bishop fearing a want of light, gave only a conditional assent to the plan as it now stands, desiring it should be so contrived that larger windows might be opened if found desirable. The however he afterwards dispensed with.’ Losh transcript, pp. 29–30. 61 The grape and vine leaf motif was taken up by a number of Arts and Crafts designers, most notably in the font by W. R. Lethaby at All Saints’, Brockhampton (1901–2).

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long. St Mary’s offers comfort and solace to the human as he or she makes the pilgrimage through life, and the simple unadorned pews suggest the simple events of quotidian existence. The approach to the sanctuary is guarded by a single round arch at whose base are two figures, one male the other female. They derive originally from the oratory of St Piran where they looked outwards. They were replicated in the mortuary chapel at Wreay where they also look outwards, but here in the church they are turned inwards to look at each other. The male and female face each other across the altar, on which are placed two large, open candlesticks in alabaster. They are carved in the form of the lotus flower, ‘the emblem’ as Lonsdale points out ‘of receptivity and reproduction’.62 Lord Lindsay, writing in his Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847) about the symbolic meaning of this arch in basilican churches, described it as ‘the Triumphal Arch, introducing from the central nave into the sanctuary, and thus figurative of the transition, through death, from the Church Militant on earth, to the Church Triumphant in heaven.’63 The impression of triumphant ascension is enhanced in St Mary’s by the upward-straining flap of the wings of a giant eagle on one side of the nave and of a pelican on the other, and the movement is taken up by the two winged angels above and echoed yet again by the seven musical angels ranged between eight palm trees.64 This area beneath the apse is much darker than the nave, the light hardly penetrating the high narrow windows. In the last phase the communicating worshipper has to ascend six high steps to approach the altar, behind which are clustered fourteen heavy romanesque pillars whose capitals are decorated with bats, water birds, leaves, grasses, and serpents. Each of the openings between the pillars creates a sedilia, with each space allotted to one of the apostles and bearing his monogram. Christ is seated in the centre to welcome the pilgrim through life. In the basilica this position behind the altar was occupied by the bishop and his clergy in a manner reminiscent of the duomo of Torcello. Above and behind the pillars seven coloured jars or lamps are placed in the small window 62 Lonsdale, iv, 231. Knight associates the lotus with the legend of Isis and Osiris and ‘the passive generative power’ of the female. 63 Alexander William Lindsay, Sketches of the History of Christian Art, 2 vols. (1847), i, 17. 64 The palm tree is another symbol of resurrection and spiritual triumph. Gerd Heinz-Mohr (1984), pp. 259–60.


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openings letting through pale and mysterious yellow, red, and orange light. Lonsdale tells us that they are ‘symbolic of the seven works of the Spirit of God’, and in his discussion of Losh’s use of the form of ancient ferns which decorate the higher windows of the apse he says that she ‘mingles the antediluvian world and that of external nature with the adornments of the churches of the East, in which Paganism and Deism, the Law and the Prophets, prefigure the forms, the affinities, and the antagonisms of the newer developments of our race.’65 Once again, Lonsdale was fully alive to the potentially heterodox religious views being expressed here, and what he calls Losh’s ‘spacious conception of human worship’.66 Sara Losh’s faith was clearly an unusual one. After the death of her father James Losh recorded in his diary a conversation in which she voiced ‘doubts and anxieties which are but too common to minds of much sensibility and deep research’.67 Sara Losh’s own research had taken her into a religious world whose springs were pre-Christian and pantheistic. Lonsdale cautiously historicizes his explanation of the church but betrays his own recognition of the presence of sexual symbolism when in a brief moment of irony he says that ‘there is unity of purpose throughout the work, showing the development of the different Cults, from the time of Osiris and his Nilotic nymphs, through the days of the wise King, bright in his polygamy and home virtues, down to the monogamic non-virtuous Anglo-Saxon, accredited with representing the latest phase of civilization.’68 One of those representatives of the ‘latest phase of civilization’ was Bishop Percy of Carlisle, and it is hardly surprising that when he came in December 1842 to consecrate the church he was puzzled by it.69 What Lonsdale fails to mention, and what the bishop could not have failed to notice, is that both interior and exterior are almost bereft of specifically Christian symbolism. There are few images connected with Christ, his teachings or his works and there are no details which record the history of the Church. Instead, the bishop found a building which was structurally simple but which pulsated with details of primitive organic, vegetable, and pagan life. Losh herself was keen to keep it that way. She 65

66 Lonsdale, iv, 231. Ibid., 233–4. 68 Losh, Diaries. Entry for 30 Mar. 1814. Lonsdale, iv, 234. 69 The significance of the symbolism, said Lonsdale, was ‘hardly comprehended by Bishop Percy and his episcopate supporters’. Lonsdale, iv, 230. 67

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hoped that no funerary monuments would be introduced to clutter its ‘simplicity and uniformity’,70 and later in the century Rossetti responded positively to the balance between the ‘beauty and imaginative detail’ and the church’s ‘severe’ and ‘simple’ structures. The reason for this contrast is now clear. In a sense the whole chapel is a funerary monument, albeit an unconventional one. It is not one which so much memorializes death as celebrates the whole life process. Its inspiration was undoubtedly personal, triggered by the deaths in the family and that of her sister in particular, but it is ultimately a monument to humankind caught up in the process of generation, birth, life, and death. The achievement is considerable. Writing in his autobiography, William Bell Scott said that Losh’s ‘Byzantine chapel at Wreay’ was the result of ‘taste and power of intelligent design altogether unusual among women’, and like Rossetti, Scott felt that Sara Losh was ‘entitled to a place in artistic dictionaries’.71

Wild’s Christ Church, Streatham St Mary’s, Wreay, was hardly mentioned in the architectural or church press. A notice in the British Magazine in 1841 recorded that on Monday 17 May the foundation stone was laid by the Revd Richard Jackson72 and the rest is silence. In contrast the publicity given to Wild’s Christ Church, Streatham, was considerable. The appearance of these two churches is equally foreign and unusual, but in very different ways. St Mary’s hugs the ground squatly like some Apennine chapel nestling on a hillside; Christ Church with its soaring campanile announces its presence like a church on a Venetian lagoon (Fig. 11). The contract drawings for Christ Church were

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Losh transcript, p. 22. Referring to monumental and funerary sculpture she said: ‘These I would earnestly hope may not be introduced into this rustic chapel, the simplicity and uniformity of which, would be totally destroyed, by the glaring aspect of black, white or coloured marble, with the usual decorations either heraldic or mortuary.’ ‘Indeed,’ she added, ‘I would hope the time is not distant, when Christians will have too much reverence for their places of worship, to fill them with the memorials of their dead, and that the pernicious practice of interment within these sacred buildings will soon be entirely abandoned.’ Losh transcript, pp. 22–4. 71 Minto, ed. (1892), i, 221. 72 The British Magazine, 20 (1841), 115. The church was rapidly constructed in 19 months.


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11. James Wild, Christ Church, Streatham, London, 1845

completed by 1840.73 The young James Wild, with six churches already to his name, came with the recommendation of the Bishop of Winchester for his efficiency, originality, and economy. From the start this was to be a church in the ‘Byzantine’ mode, as Wild himself stated in his correspondence. He stressed its ‘severe simplicity of design’ and explained that he was giving it the feeling of an early Italian church by the placing of the campanile.74 It is in a style similar to that of Louis Vulliamy’s All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, which was designed, but not built, at about the same time.75 Michael Darby in his work on this project has shown how, though the fundamental design remained unchanged, as building progressed many of the details were orientalized.76 So, the cornice was changed from Italianate to Egyptian, the tower was altered to include trellis work 73 For a full account of this see Neil Jackson, ‘Christ Church Streatham, and the Rise of Constructional Polychromy’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), 218–52. 74 Basil F. Clarke, Parish Churches of London (1966), pp. 266–7. 75 Vuilliamy’s church was not consecrated until 1849. 76 Michael Darby, ‘Owen Jones and the Eastern Ideal’ (Unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Reading University, 1974), p. 180.

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reminiscent of Moorish buildings in Spain, and the west door was framed by an arch not unlike that of a mosque. Inside Wild adopted the basilican style from Ravenna. There is a nave and flanking aisles of five bays, and within the bays smaller, cast iron arches support the gallery above. There is no chancel, and the apse is covered with a semi-dome and has nine windows at the same level as the clerestory. As Ruskin noticed in some appreciative remarks in the first volume of The Stones of Venice, one of the church’s most outstanding features is Wild’s use of exterior polychromy.77 Brick is used everywhere and in imaginative patterns. The voussoirs come in alternating red and yellow stressing the slightly oriental shape of the doors on the west end; red and yellow chequerboard banding runs around the church just under the roof cill, and vertical bands of red brick immediately under the roof stress its strong, shallow continental look. Wild’s preparatory designs for the interior also involved extensive use of colour but very little of the final arrangement by Owen Jones is preserved other than some splendid Byzantine capitals and a blue sky peppered with golden stars. The mention of Owen Jones suggests a possible source of inspiration for this remarkable church. Wild, when he designed this building, was only twenty-four years old and had hardly travelled abroad. He had been educated under George Basevi in the orthodox Gothic manner, but by this time, as Michael Darby points out, he was actually living at Owen Jones’s address in London. Two exchanges came out of this friendship. One was that Wild introduced Jones to his sister, Isabella Lucy, whom he later married, and the other is that Jones introduced Wild to the oriental architecture that was to influence his work thereafter. At the age of sixteen Jones had been apprenticed to Louis Vuilliamy, with whom he remained for five years before going off on extensive travels. Italian journeys of 1818, 1822, and 1823 were followed by a grand tour of Egypt, Spain, Sicily, and Greece between 1830 and 1833. At this time he made studies of Hagia Sophia and other buildings in Constantinople, and became interested in Lombardic and Byzantine decoration in Turkey, Greece, and Italy. Jacques Ignace Hittorff’s work in Architecture antique de la Sicile (1827) on the use of colour on classical architecture interested him considerably. His first publication, on the Alhambra Palace, appeared in 1836 where his fascination for oriental design is clearly 77

Ruskin, Works, ix, 349–50.


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evident, and he was involved with some of the plates for Henry Gally Knight’s The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Italy (1842), including rather peculiar images of Justinian and Theodora in Ravenna and other mosaics from Sta Pudenza and Sta Prassede in Rome.78 It was this Eastern enthusiasm that Jones must have communicated to Wild at about the same moment that he received his commission for Christ Church. Soon after completing the church Wild explained some of his reasons for choosing his design. Romanesque, he said, was worthy of study because it was a ‘transition style’ and ‘only half developed’. Wild’s preference for what he called the ‘Oriental’ version over the ‘German’ suggests a preference for what Jones had shown him rather than what was being built in Munich. Wild felt that ‘Byzantine’ was most useful in terms of its manipulation of mass rather than in its employment of detail. ‘To know how to use the Byzantine or Romanesque styles’, he wrote, ‘requires a considerable knowledge of the principles of other and purer times of architecture.’79 Both Sara Losh and James Wild were promiscuously primitivist in their motives for choosing Romanesque but they both used it to allude to ‘purer times’ in the past, with Losh working in terms of mystical and theological symbolism, and Wild in terms of architectural style only. But what of the third outstanding example in this group—St Mary and St Nicholas at Wilton outside Salisbury?

St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton Thomas Henry Wyatt and David Brandon’s St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton, startled all those who first saw it because of its very un-English, Mediterranean appearance (Fig. 12). Unlike Wild’s Christ Church, however, St Mary and St Nicholas is pure Romanesque. It was begun in 1841 and consecrated in 1845. It stands on a raised plinth of six steps 30.5 metres (100 feet) wide, its enormous rose window and its soaring fluted campanile 33 metres (108 feet) high proclaim to the bustling market town of Wilton that it is a swaggering Italian. In many respects it is a vertically stretched

78 These were, however, much admired at the time as ‘brilliant specimens of lithochromatography, and exemplify the perfection to which this beautiful art has been brought by Mr. Owen Jones . . .’ ‘Fine Arts’, Atheneum (8 Apr. 1843), 345. 79 Wild, writing in 1841, quoted in Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (1996), p. 100.

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12. Sidney Herbert, St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton, Wiltshire, 1845

version of two ancient churches, San Pietro and Sta Maria in Tuscania near Viterbo. The church was commissioned by Sir Sidney Herbert, who in an extravagant gesture first intended bringing back ‘the principal portions of an old Lombard church near Florence’,80 which, according to the Allgemeine Bauzeitung, was none other San Miniato al Monte!81 Unsurprisingly, the Italian authorities objected so he resorted to a revival design based on the two churches from Tuscania which were both illustrated in the splendidly illustrated two-volume work, Henry Gally Knight’s The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Italy from the Time of Constantine to the Fifteenth Century (1842).82 The front elevation is of Wilton based on San Pietro (vol. i, plate 36); both 80 George Godwin, ‘Early Christian Building and their Decorations: Illustrated by Wilton Church, near Salisbury’, The Builder, 16 (1858), 526–7. 81 See Kathleen Curran, The Romanesque Revival (Pennsylvania, 2003), p. 198. 82 Curran suggests (pp. 196–7) that Herbert knew Gally Knight through their parliamentary associations and that Knight supplied him with visual details of S. Pietro.


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Sta Maria (vol. ii, plate 16) and San Pietro have a nave and two aisles; both have three doorways (the two outer bricked up in Knight’s illustration of San Pietro), and there is an arcade of dwarf arches about the main door of each church. The rose window at St Mary’s is very similar in design to that in Sta Maria, and the four Evangelists surrounding the window come from San Pietro. The lions which support the pillars of the central porch are not uncommon in Italian Romanesque architecture, but two are placed prominently in the thirteenth-century porch of Sta Maria. In Wyatt and Brandon’s version the roof has been considerably raised to provide greater height, and a clerestory inserted down the sides of the nave. San Pietro has no campanile. The tower at Wilton is joined to the basilican body of the church by a short gallery of colonettes, richly decorated and very similar in design to the careful drawings in Thomas Hope’s Essay of the cloister in San Paolo fuori le mura, Rome. According to contemporary accounts, the idea of a basilica came from Sidney Herbert himself, and Herbert was also responsible for overseeing the detail both inside and out. He was an excellent draughtsman and loved architecture. Seeing Rouen cathedral on a riding tour of 1830 he exclaimed that it was ‘beautiful to a degree I cannot describe’.83 He managed to draw it, however, together with churches and cathedrals in Abbeville, St-Ouen, Beauvais, and Amiens, all of which appeared in sketches of passionately observed architectural detail.84 He saw Rouen again as he crossed France on another much longer tour in 1835, when he was once again impressed by the architecture. In the steps of Edmund Sharpe in the same year he passed through Lyons, Orange, Vaucluse, and Avignon, and like Sharpe he was enthusiastic about the buildings that he saw. He was in Nîmes only a few months after Questel had won the competition for his Romanesque design for St-Paul, and Herbert looked carefully at the Roman Maison Carrée, the arena and the Temple of Diana which, he said, was ‘very Italian’.85 His tour took him on through Italy where he marvelled at Genoa, detailing his responses to the palaces and pictures; he went through Lucca, Pisa, Florence 83 Among the Pembroke Papers in Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office is a small collection of drawings by Herbert of members of his family, landscapes and architectural studies that show considerable talent. 84 Sketchbook in Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office: 2957/F6/89. 85 Unpublished diary of Sidney Herbert. Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office: 2067/F5/15.

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(when he must have cast possessive eyes on San Miniato al Monte), Rome, Naples, and Pompeii. He particularly admired the cathedral at Spoleto with its ‘beautiful portico of about the eleventh century with two pulpits on each side’. In the following year, 1836, he set off for Germany, and once again architecture dominates his interest. Charlemagne’s ‘Byzantine’ chapel in Aix-la-Chapelle, modelled on San Vitale in Ravenna, caught his attention and he mentions Charlemagne’s direct dealings with Constantinople. From there he passed on to Cologne, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Augsburg, and Munich. Ludwig I’s Allerheiligenhofkirche would have been nearing completion and Ziebland’s St Bonifaz would have just been started, while the Nazarene painter Peter Cornelius was busy decorating the Ludwigskirche. Like Sharpe, Herbert could hardly have missed the hive of activity around Ludwig’s building projects in that year, and towards the end of the Wilton project encouraged Thomas Willement to produce non-figural ornament closely resembling Friedrich von Gärtner’s designs at the Ludwigskirche.86 Herbert’s unusual choice of style for Wilton was certainly encouraged by his continental visits, where not only did he see Romanesque buildings at first hand, but he also saw the way in which the style was being transformed for modern use. Yet in a British setting his was a very controversial choice. The style, said one of the writers for The Builder, is ‘Byzantine’, explaining that it is ‘coeval with the Norman of this country i.e. of the eleventh century’. It is, he added, ‘as yet little known in this country, and has recommended itself for its picturesque effect’.87 The exotic Catherine Herbert, Sidney’s mother and countess of Pembroke, enthusiastically supported her son in his ambitions. The daughter of the Russian ambassador to London, Simon Woronzow, and with eclectic taste for sumptuousness, she may have been responsible for the Russian orientation of the church (from north to south instead of west to east).88 86

See Curran (2003), p. 198. Anon., ‘New Church at Wilton’, The Builder, 1 (1843), 168; Anon., ‘New Church at Wilton near Salisbury’, The Builder, 3 (1845), 497–8. 88 The venture was hugely expensive, with contemporary accounts suggesting that the cost was over £30,000. Herbert’s official biographer, A. C. H. Gordon, suggests that the total expense ‘more than doubled that sum’. A. C. H. Gordon [Lord Stanmore], Sidney Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea: a Memoir, 2 vols. (1906), i, 99–100. It is noteworthy that Gordon calls the church both ‘Lombardic’ and ‘Byzantine’. 87


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This was truly an expensive project and much of that expenditure was related to bringing sculpture and stained glass from abroad. In the years before building actually began Herbert and his mother organized large shipments of objects from the Low Countries, France, and Italy. Sixteenth-century pearwood Flemish carvings for the doors at the west end combine with the ‘amazing collection’, as Pevsner calls it, of twelfth- and thirteenth-century glass from St-Denis and from Normandy;89 there are areas of flooring made up from ‘marble, porphyry, giallo and serpentine’ which Herbert ‘picked up’ in Italy;90 there are twisted columns from Palermo, and an Italian font, but above all there is the extensive marble work and sculpture, also Italian, which gives the clue to the motives of mother and son. At the end of the aisles nearest the altar stand black columns brought from the second-century Temple of Venus at Porto Venere, La Spezia, and here we can see that in recycling ancient materials the Pembrokes were emulating the building processes of the designers of the earliest basilicas. For the theologically alert writers of the midnineteenth century one of the finest ironies of early church architecture was the way in which it incorporated, assimilated, or reused the monuments of paganism. The most dramatic incorporation at Wilton, however, set the seal on the Pembroke endeavour, and that is their almost successful attempt to instate at the heart of the basilica a thirteenth-century tabernacle from Sta Maria Maggiore. All the pieces are there but not in quite the way in which Catherine intended. The Capocci tabernacle, as it is called, stood on the right-hand side of the apse of Sta Maria from the time that Giovanni Capocci and his wife had commissioned it in 1256. When the nave of the basilica was remodelled by Ferdinando Fuga in the eighteenth century the mosaic panel was sent to San Michele at Vico in Lazio and the rest was bought by Sir William Hamilton, who sent it around 1722 as a gift to Horace Walpole. Walpole was fascinated by such curiosities, and finding it ‘more gorgeous than the spoils of Ormus and of Ind’,91 had it reconstructed as a shrine and placed it in his ‘Chapel in the Wood’ at Strawberry Hill. In 1842 when the collection was dispersed it was 89 Nicolaus Pevsner and Cherry Bridget, The Buildings of England: Wiltshire (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 579. 90 Letter to Herbert’s mother quoted in Julian Lever and Joyce Osborne, The Church of St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton (n.d), p. 1. 91 Walpole to Hamilton, quoted in Julian Gardner, ‘The Capocci Tabernacle at S. Maria Maggiore’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 38 (1970), 221.

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acquired by an antique dealer called Webb, from whom it was bought by Sidney Herbert. Catherine wanted it restored to its place over the altar, but the Bishop of Salisbury was obliged to point out to her that the Church of England allowed only a wooden table, and the parts of the tabernacle are now distributed about the church. There are two colonnettes around the sanctuary door; there are two freestanding columns in the main apse; there is the architrave from above and below the tabernacle vertically flanking the doorway leading to the north porch, and panels for part of the basamento were placed around the apse. Four cosmati colonettes are placed in the extraordinary pulpit in a design reminiscent of the thirteenth-century work in Pisa or Pistoia, where the densely clustered columns rise in a graceful upward whorl. In an article entitled ‘On the Romanesque Style for Churches in London and Large Towns’ written for the Christian Remembrancer, the anonymous author agrees with Petit that Romanesque not only blends well with round-arched British Norman work, but in its modes of construction, in the relatively sparse use of decoration, and in the fact that it offers the possibility for the use of brick, it is potentially a much more economical form than Gothic. His examples are those of ‘the decorated chapel in Berwick Street’, St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton, and ‘the beautiful new church lately erected . . . at Streatham’.92 Elsewhere in the same journal writers were putting forward an idea which was being developed by some French Romantic architects, i.e. that the Romanesque style is ‘but a transition style; but from that very cause it is a creative style.’93 Gothic, they argued, was complete and end-stopped; Romanesque, in contrast, was flexible, adaptable, and open-ended. In a review of Pugin’s Principles of Gothic Architecture and Petit’s Remarks, the writer in the same journal made the point that if we were looking for the architectural form that most powerfully symbolized Christianity for the longest period of time, then it would be ‘the round-arch manner’.94 Gothic is a sophisticated Western mode of building, whereas round-arched is primal, ancient, and it spans East and West. ‘We recognize it in Constantinople by the name of Byzantine,’ he continued, ‘in Italy we term it Lombard or Romanesque, Carlomagnian [sic] or Rhenish in 92 93 94

Christian Remembrancer, 3 (1842), 583. Anon., ‘Styles of Church Architecture’, Christian Remembrancer, 4 (1842), 264. Anon., ‘Styles of Church Architecture’, Christian Remembrancer, 3 (1842), 356.


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Germany; Norman in France; and Saxon or Norman in England,’ concluding that, ‘from Jerusalem to St Kilda, the round-arch manner was orthodox and catholic for the long period of eight centuries.’ The somewhat defiant profile of Wild’s church attracted attention from the moment that the preliminary drawings appeared in the Royal Academy in 1841. The British Almanack welcomed it as a ‘public improvement’, praised its stylistic ‘singularity’,95 and even before it was finished it was receiving a warm welcome from the Broad Church Christian Remembrancer for its ‘independence’ of style. Similarly the British Magazine told its readers that the ‘Lombardic church’ in Streatham was exciting ‘no small prejudice’ for including ‘some features quite new in the architecture of this country’.96 But the Ecclesiologist weighed in with a strong attack. It lamented the ‘introduction of foreign styles of Church Architecture, essentially discordant with our national feelings and associations . . .’97 By quitting the path of Gothic the writer felt that British architecture had plunged into the slough of uncertainty, and he placed the responsibility of this state of chaos firmly at the door of Petit and Hope. ‘By following out the history of the early Italian, Lombardic, and Byzantine styles’, Hope’s Essay ‘has given a terrific spur to that love of novelty and eccentricity, which is natural to an enquiring mind when devoid of a true principle upon which to base its ideas’.98 The fear of innovation and confusion is very powerful. ‘Every young architect’, he went on, ‘has now his pet style of architecture: one goes to Constantinople, and imports the domes and minarets of the Greek Church and the Turkish Mosque; another introduces the Arabesques of Morocco and Grenada: a third, the Classico-Gothic style of the Roman Basilica: and a fourth, the early architecture of Lombardy and Venice, all of which are alike unsuited to our climate, and unconnected with our traditions.’99 ‘Fear’ is the word he uses to describe this incursion, fear of the unknown, the foreign, and specifically, the Oriental. Already a writer in the same journal (probably J. M. Neale) had protested ‘against the introduction of a foreign style in Church Architecture’ at Wilton. It may be a handsome church, he said, but it is built in ‘a foreign (we had almost said an un-Christian) style . . .’100 95 96 97 98 100

Anon., ‘Public Improvements’, British Almanack (1841), 229. ‘A. B.’, ‘Christ Church Streatham’, British Magazine, 21 (1842), 153–5. Anon., ‘Modern Romanesque’, Ecclesiologist, 1 (1842), 161. 99 Ibid., 162. Ibid. Anon., ‘New Churches: Wilton, Wilts’, Ecclesiologist, 2 (1842), 20–21.

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and even Ruskin, who visited it in the company of his new wife Effie and his parents in 1848, hated it. Effie told her mother that ‘everything about it made him quite sick’, adding that he found ‘the idea of putting up imitations of the churches of Florence and Venice here was too bad . . .’101 In 1848 Ruskin was still a committed Goth. He had not yet begun work on the Stones of Venice, and he had not yet been converted to the merits of Romanesque architecture. Like many of his contemporaries he saw this style as a foreign importation that posed a threat to the Gothic style, the symbol of British culture and British Protestantism. The foreign and primitive style chosen by Losh, Wild, and Herbert must have seemed to the architects themselves fresh, bold, and somewhat daring. They are all unsettling buildings, and even today strike the visitor with surprise and amazement. They do not fulfil the common expectations either within or without, but they reward in unusual and dramatic ways. This cultural shock was too much for many of their contemporaries, and the allusion to forms that were simple, direct, and less sophisticated than Gothic was disturbing. Romanesque seemed retrogressive, and though it might be suitable for the natives of New Zealand or the poor of the East End, it would hardly do for the Home Counties or suburbs of London. 101

Mary Lutyens, The Ruskins and the Grays (1972), p. 126. Letter dated 20 July 1848, after a visit on the previous day.

4 Robert Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’, and Continental ‘Christian’ Art S oon after their marriage in 1846 Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning went to live in Italy. They rented a flat in Pisa where they stayed from October until the following April before moving to Florence. We have already seen how important Pisa had become as a centre for both early Italian art and Romanesque architecture, and when the Brownings arrived it was probably at the height of its fame.1 ‘You know’, Elizabeth wrote to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, ‘that in this place are to be seen the first steps of art,—and it would be interesting to trace them from it as we go further ourselves.’ Elizabeth, who was not entirely ignorant about art, said that she ‘meant to know something about pictures. Robert does, and I shall get him to open my eyes.’2 She was right about this and Robert Browning’s interest in art is well known. His father was an accomplished draughtsman with a passion for Dutch art, and the son grew up in a household well versed in the established canon of Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting.3 Browning shared this taste and never abandoned his love of High Renaissance work. Much of his first-hand knowledge, however, came from his visits to Italy. The first was in 1838 when he was finishing Sordello, and the second in 1844. A number of poems are associated with the second visit, and two in particular stand out, ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ and ‘Pictor Ignotus’, because they both deal with the idea of success in art and 1 ‘As for the Campo Santo,’ wrote James Fenimore Cooper in 1838, ‘who has not heard of it?’ Excursions in Italy (1838), p. 64. 2 Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 5–8 Nov. 1846, in Philip Kelley et al., eds., The Brownings’ Correspondence, 14 vols. (Winfield, Kansas, 1984–), xiv, 39. 3 See John Maynard, Browning’s Youth (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 131ff.

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Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and ‘Christian’ Art

success in life. The first is readily identifiable with Browning’s visits to the churches of Rome and particularly San Prassede or Saint Praxed’s; the origins of the second are less clearly recognizable since they are obscured by the namelessness of the protagonist. But on inspection much can be said about the identity of Pictor Ignotus and even more can be said about the contemporary issues which may have stimulated Browning into writing this poem. In other words, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ can be located in contemporary attitudes to ‘Christian’ art, and can be read equally in terms of the rediscovered art of medieval Europe as well as the widespread cult for modern art inspired by Christian principles.

Browning and early Italian art Browning’s taste for early Italian art was a still a minority one in this period, and until the early nineteenth century, the so-called Primitives had been largely relegated to an insignificant position in art and its history. But the revaluation of early art was not a simple shift in taste. Instead it had come about, initially in the 1820s in Europe and then in the 1830s in Britain, as the result of a number of epistemological and social factors. At first, the change was stimulated by the publication of better-documented and more accurate histories of art. These opened the eyes of connoisseurs and collectors to what was considered the untutored directness of medieval painting, connoisseurs who were more accustomed to the elegance of Classical art or the luxuriance of Renaissance work. We have seen how the activities of collectors like the Earl Bishop and William Roscoe gave precedence to historical series (pp. 11–12 above), but the new scholarship also appealed to a number of Romantic writers who found in this medieval world the expression of strong but simple religious faith. Very soon, however, early art was adopted by a more doctrinaire group within the Catholic Church. For them it became an emblem of ecclesiastical antiquity and a symbol of spiritual revival in the nineteenth century. As a result, the history and interpretation of early art were rewritten in terms of religious intensity, pious emotion and conformity to Catholic doctrine. Since there were few examples of the work of early Italian artists in British public collections, it is likely that Browning first saw it on his second trip to Italy in 1844. He was particularly struck with Fra Angelico (c.1400–55), about whom he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett in


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1845, not long after the start of their correspondence. Familiar with his love of Italy and familiar, too, with his admiration for Shelley, she sent him a copy of Mary Shelley’s recently published Rambles in Germany and Italy. In this Shelley wrote about the work of Fra Angelico in a manner that irritated Browning. ‘Her remarks on art’, he wrote, ‘once she lets go of Rio’s skirts, are amazing.’ ‘Fra Angelico for instance,’ he continued paraphrasing Shelley’s views, ‘only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c.’ ‘She has no eyes’, he told Elizabeth, ‘for the divine bon-bourgeoisie of his pictures.’ 4 Alexis François Rio, to whom Browning refers here, had revolutionized art criticism. His book De la poésie chrétienne (1836) had effectively established a new canon in which aesthetic success was measured by religious intensity. Though his controversial Catholic theory was disquieting, especially for Protestants, it had received a warm welcome in Britain and in particular from many members of Browning’s own circle. Essentially ‘pre-Raphaelite’ in nature, it challenged the supremacy of Raphael in the history of art, suggesting that Fra Angelico’s spirituality marked him out as the superior artist. Browning, who had almost certainly seen Fra Angelico’s work in the Vatican in 1844,5 felt that Shelley’s understanding of Fra Angelico’s range, ‘Martyrs, Virgins &c.’, was inadequate. He told Elizabeth that Shelley misses entirely ‘the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint—and the children, and women,—divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets & market place . . .’6 4 Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, 11 Sept. 1845. The Brownings’ Correspondence, xi, 70. In the first volume of her Rambles Mary Shelley records having met Rio in the gallery in Dresden. There she described his face as being ‘wellknown’, suggesting that she had met him on some previous occasion. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), i, 245. In fact her account of the work of Fra Angelico in Florence is far from letting go of Rio’s skirts; describing Rio as a writer who ‘satisfactorily proves that the modern art of painting resulted from the piety of the age in which it had birth’ (Rambles, ii, 140–1), she not only paraphrases him on the ‘celestial sweetness he infuses into his saints and angels’, but quotes his words, in translation, in the notes (Rambles, ii, 144 and 146 note). 5 He was in Rome because he visited Keats’s grave. 6 Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 11 Sep. 1845. The Brownings’ Correspondence, xi, 70. Browning is not precise about which image or images by Fra Angelico he has in mind here, but there is one which specifically involves a saint preaching to the ‘common folk’. The Chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican contains a

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Browning’s stress on Fra Angelico’s subtle observation of the natural and the commonplace seems uncontroversial enough now, but it was highly unusual for the period. Most of Browning’s contemporaries thought very differently, and when Rio canonized Fra Angelico as the principal exponent of Christian sentiment in art he was confirming a tendency that went back at least as far as 1817 and A. W. Schlegel’s Johann von Fiesole.7 In the wake of Schlegel’s publication, Fra Angelico’s life and art were adopted as a model by the Nazarene artists in Rome and Germany; he was considered by ‘the school of Dusseldorf and Munich’, said Francis Palgrave, ‘as exhibiting the highest type of “Catholic Art” ’8 and in France he was idolized by Ultramontane writers like Charles de Montalembert and Rio himself. He was also widely admired in England for his ‘mysticism’. The art critic for the Athenaeum, George Darley, wrote rapturously of the ‘radiance’ of his ‘Coronations’ and ‘Assumptions’ with their ‘own ineffable candour’;9 Palgrave, writing in his Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), suggested that the faces in Angelico’s paintings were mystical ‘transcripts of the visions seen first by the mind’s eye’,10 and in her Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters (1845) Browning’s friend, Anna Jameson, spoke of how Fra Angelico’s works were entirely in ‘harmony with [his] gentle, devout, enthusiastic spirit’. ‘They are’, she says, ‘not addressed to the taste of connoisseurs, but to the faith of worshippers.’11 One of those worshippers was John Ruskin, who joined the chorus in the second volume of Modern Painters (1846). He concluded with a paean of praise to the tranquil spirituality of Fra Angelico and his ‘angel choirs . . . with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings’.12 series of paintings by Angelico depicting the life of Saint Stephen. One of these shows him preaching to a group comprising women and one child seated in the street, all in various postures and intently preoccupied with the saint’s address. Behind them stand a crowd of men. See Giorgio Bonsanti, Beato Angelico: catalogo completo (Florence, 1998), p. 149 no. 74. I can, however, find no image of anybody wearing spectacles in Fra Angelico’s work, though in his day spectacles were fairly freely available. 7 See Camillo von Klenze (1906), p. 40. 8 Palgrave (1842), p. 533. 9 [George Darley], ‘Christian Art’, Athenaeum (13 May 1837), 340–1. 10 Palgrave (1842), p. 532. 11 Jameson, Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters : and of the Progress of Painting in Italy. From Cimabue to Bassano (1845), p. 122. 12 Ruskin, Works, iv, 332.


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Browning’s resistance to this interpretation came partly from his suspicion of Catholicism13 and partly from his dissenting version of Protestantism.14 Similar attitudes can be detected in his poetry where he persistently challenges the current, pietistic reading of early Italian art. Filippo Lippi, for example, pours scorn on the religiose terms of the prior’s admiration for Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Lorenzo Monaco, and in ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ Browning implies that the success of medieval painters was dependent not on their piety and holiness but on their rough and naturalistic vigour, painting ‘man man whatever the issue!’15 Similarly, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ is a contribution to this debate. The vigour of the imagery and the strong rhythm of the opening lines endorse and make credible the artist’s claim to be the equal of Raphael, ‘that youth ye praise so’.16 But his conversion to religious conformity and moral rectitude vitiate his talent, reducing him to monastic insignificance. In this poem the protagonist acts out the disabling effects of an aesthetic based on doctrinaire religious belief, a belief that takes him to the point of anonymity and self-erasure. Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’, unlike his other two painter poems, ‘Andrea del Sarto’ and ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, has traditionally been thought to derive, not from the biography of a single artist, but from Browning’s general understanding of the technical innovations in painting and the changes in aesthetic attitudes in the early years of the Renaissance. The title has always led commentators to suppose that the painter is either imaginary, or represents a group of traditionalist artists overtaken by developments in art with which they 13 Gregg Hecimovich, ‘ “Just the thing for the time”: Contextualizing Religion in Browning’s “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed’s Church” ’, Victorian Poetry, 36, no. 3 (1998), 261, speaks of Browning’s ‘extraordinary interest [in] and knowledge’ of Roman Catholicism, while Kinsbury Badger, ‘ “See Christ Stand!”: Browning’s Religion’, in Robert Browning: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Phillip Drew (1966), pp. 72–95, suggests that Browning’s reservations about Catholicism focus on what he saw as its inflexible and doctrinaire nature (p. 88). Barbara Melchiori, ‘Browning in Italy’, in Robert Browning, ed. Isobel Armstrong (1974), pp.168–83, takes Badger to task, however, for not recognizing ‘the depths of bitter anti-Catholic prejudice underlying [Browning’s] frequent attempts at broadmindedness’ (p. 174 and note). 14 As outlined by Donald Davie in his Essays in Dissent: Church, Chapel and the Unitarian Conspiracy (Manchester, 1978, 1995), pp. 141–52. 15 ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. Ian Jack et al., 9 vols. (Oxford, 1983–), v, 303, l. 148. 16 ‘Pictor Ignotus’ in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, iv, 26, ll. 1–2.

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have been unable to come to terms. Two things tend to contradict this view. The first is Browning’s well-known concern, not with large cultural changes, but with individual personalities, however obscure. The second is the autobiographical nature of that part of the poem where the painter makes claims about himself, and where he seems to hint darkly at specific incidents in his life. The interpretation of these claims and allusions has led to different, even divergent, readings of the poem, but a knowledge of Browning’s likely source allows some of these problems to be reconciled, and as a result, the antinomies of his conflict can be more accurately defined.17 Broadly, the poem divides into two parts. In the first, the painter, in graphic but general terms, describes the recent developments in Renaissance art. There are suggestions of the energy (9–10) of Raphael, his penetrative vision (10–12), and above all his psychological realism (14–22). He also speaks of the new art of easel painting, the products of which, unlike those of the older fresco work, could be widely dispersed, and with them the reputation of a great painter.18 The second part is more specifically autobiographical. The delight in worldly fame described in the first is now seen as the temptation of 17 Interpretations tend to hinge on the relationship between the painter and the new, naturalistic art, and his motives for retreat from the world. With reference to the first, he claims to have been at one time the equal of Raphael, and to have been able to paint pictures ‘like that youth’s | Ye praise so’ (1–2). Richard Altick sees this claim and the subsequent renunciation of worldly success as a rationalization of the painter’s ‘refusal (actually his inability) to compete with the bright new stars of Renaissance painting’, since ‘boasts are cheap’ (Richard Altick, ‘ “Andrea del Sarto”: the Kingdom of Hell is Within’, in Browning’s Mind and Art, ed. Clarence Tracey (1968), p. 18). DeVane, however, reads the poem in quite a different way as a defence of early Italian artists, now unknown ‘in the face of the great vogue for the newer, more vulgar, painters who depict the expressions of contemporary human beings’ (William Claude DeVane, A Browning handbook (2nd edn, New York, 1955), p.155). Philip Drew takes the middle way and suggests that the argument stems from the ‘ “unknown” painter’s inability to sympathize with the artistic fashions of his time’ (The Poetry of Robert Browning (1970), p. 266n). 18 Francis Palgrave wrote in his Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842): ‘Before the sixteenth century, it may be doubted whether any cabinet pictures, that is to say, moveable pictures, intended merely to hang upon the wall and be looked at as ornaments, without any objective application, ever existed . . . Upon the walls of the choir or beneath the arches of the cloister, the magnificent solid masses of fresco, each compartment of which would seem to demand years of toil . . . There was a certain standard which even mediocrity was sure to obtain; and this removed the temptation of indulging in extravagance and affectation, the rant and bombast of art’ (p. 428). A letter from EBB, 26 May 1847 (The Brownings’ Correspondence, xiv, 212), demonstrates the Brownings’ familiarity with this guidebook.


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empty vanity. There is the suggestion that incidents, specific, yet too painful to be related in full, contributed to a withdrawal from the world. The artist’s inability to come to terms with secular life, together with a fear of exposure to harsh and penetrating criticism, are both hinted at in such a way that his present preoccupation with death becomes a consolation for failure in life. The two parts are linked by the pregnant half-line, ‘But a voice changed it’ (41). The positive, energetic gestures of the first part, with its bold description of painting and vignettes of contemporary city life, shift into a negative mood full of resigned sadness, and images of fear, and gloom. The imaginative world of past creative potential is overtaken by the realization of the inevitability of present conditions. The words spoken by the voice caused him to choose his ‘portion’ (56). It seems then, that Browning’s unknown painter, at some time in his life, was forced to make a moral choice. As an artist he represents this choice in terms of two different visual styles, one secular, naturalistic, and vigorous, the other ecclesiastical, hieratic, and repetitive. The shift from a positive frame of mind to a negative one suggests that this was a wrong choice. The hearing of the ‘voice’ of line 41 is a key moment in the poem. Was this the warning of a friend, the prompting of an enemy or even the delusion of an unbalanced mind? A clue to the identity of both the voice and the unknown painter himself lies in Browning’s reading in the history of art. We know that he was familiar with the older, standard art histories of Giorgio Vasari and Filippo Baldinucci,19 and we have seen that he had read the newer interpretations of art in the work of A. F. Rio and Anna Jameson. Now each of these writers deals at some length with the life and work of a notable painter, the details of whose biography correspond in a singular way with those of Browning’s unknown speaker. The artist in question was literally ‘Pictor Ignotus’ because his real name was never known. He was christened in 1469; in his youth he was called Baccio della Porta, and later, after entering the priory of San Marco, Fra Bartolommeo; and it is by this name he has

19

Browning refers to Vasari on a number of occasions (e.g. in ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, 73) and speaks of Baldinucci in connection with his researches into the life of Filippo Lippi.

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entered the annals of history.20 As a young man, he subscribed to the new, burgeoning Renaissance ideas on art, yet the quality of his life was noticeably different from that of his contemporaries, for, according to Vasari, he ‘always sought the society of the learned and sober’.21 When Girolamo Savonarola rose to prominence his eneregies were directed against the corruption of the Medici. He began a course of sermons in an attempt at moral reform in Florence, and one of the objects of his attack was what he considered to be the lasciviousness of the nude in art. Baccio della Porta was one of those who was changed by the voice of Savonarola, and he placed his earlier work on the so-called ‘Bonfire of Vanities’ which George Eliot later described so vividly in Romola. Events went against Savonarola, however, and he was besieged with his followers in San Marco, ‘Baccio della Porta joining himself to them for the very great affection which he bore to Fra Girolamo’.22 Vasari uses this incident to highlight certain aspects of his character and to emphasize the expediency of his decision to enter the convent. He says: It is true that having but very little courage, being indeed of a timid and even cowardly disposition, he lost heart, on hearing the clamours of an attack, which was made upon the convent shortly after, and seeing some wounded and others killed, he began to have grievous doubts respecting his position. Thereupon he made a vow, that if he might be permitted to escape from the rage of that strife, he would instantly assume the religious habit of the Dominicans.23

Like Browning’s unknown painter, Baccio della Porta, moving from a world where success and fame were assured to the seclusion of a convent, assumed the habit of San Domenico in 1500. Vasari 20

Two contemporary works support this. Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters says: ‘This great Florentine artist, whose sirname [sic] is not known, was called Baccio della Porta . . . and this name was afterwards changed to the more celebrated one of Fra Bartolommeo di S. Marco . . . Sometimes he is only called “il Frate” ’ (Matthew Pilkington, Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters, ed. Henry Fuseli (1805), p. 219). Anna Jameson echoes this, saying that ‘by many writers he is styled simply Il Frate (the Friar); in Italy he is scarcely known by any other designation’ (Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters (1845), p. 224). 21 ‘The Life of Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco’, in The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Mrs Jonathan Foster (1851), ii, 44. Browning must have used an earlier Italian edition, but this first English translation will be referred to here. 22 Vasari describes at length the drama of this incident (Vasari, trans. Foster (1851), ii, 448). 23 Ibid.


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tells us that since he was ‘exclusively occupied with his attention to the religious services’24 he abandoned painting for a time, and the resumption of this activity, and his friendship with Raphael, formed the next significant events in his life. Baldinucci wrote: ‘Raphael himself greatly respected Fra Bartolommeo, and during his stay in Florence, scarcely seemed separated from him: even more, he was willing to teach him the art of perspective and at the same time learn the finest aspects of Bartolommeo’s soft, graceful painting never before seen in any other artist.’25 This theme was taken up by Rio, who stessed that ‘the impress left by this transcendent genius was never effaced from his imagination, nor the recollection of his friendship from his heart’.26 Similarly, Anna Jameson emphasizes the closeness of the two men. She describes their friendship as one ‘which ended only with death, and to which we partly owe the finest works of both’.27 Both she and the art historian Luigi Lanzi endorse an earlier statement made by Richardson that ‘at this time Fra Bartolommeo seems to have been the Raphael had not fortune been determined in favour of the other’.28 For this reason, Bartolommeo might legitimately have echoed the claim of the unknown painter: ‘I could have painted pictures like that youth’s | Ye praise so.’ Some time later and with the permission of his prior, Fra Bartolommeo visited Rome with a view to seeing what Vasari calls the ‘marvels effected’ there by modern artists. The monk was ‘bewildered and astounded’ and, according to Rio, shocked by the moral degradation of the city. 29 It appeared to him, to use Browning’s words, ‘like the revels through a door | Of some strange house of idols at its rites’ (43–4). When Fra Bartolommeo returned to Florence, ‘cold faces’ began to ‘press’ on him and ‘judge’ him. Rio’s account of the incident, like Browning’s poem, depends upon the antithesis of sacred and profane, with the emphasis placed upon the

24

Ibid. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei professori del disegno da Cimabue, 5 vols. (Florence, 1845–7), i, 585. Translation by L. P. Bullen. 26 A. F. Rio, The Poetry of Christian Art (1836), trans. anon. (1854), p. 283. 27 Jameson, Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters (1845), pp. 224–5. 28 Ibid., p. 225. 29 Alexis François Rio, De la poésie chrétienne dans son principe, dans sa matière et dans ses formes: forme de l’art, peinture (Paris, 1836), trans. as The Poetry of Christian Art (1854), p. 378n. 25

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painter’s spiritual integrity rather than artistic excellence. In Florence, said Rio, he had to refute two accusations brought against him by his enemies; the first, that he concealed under the ample folds of his draperies his powerlessness to draw the nude; the second, still more senseless, that he was incapable of designing on a grand scale . . . It is easy to perceive that a snare was concealed under this apparent defiance, and that it was hoped that, by means of a bait so cunningly offered to his amour propre, the Christian artist might be tempted to transgress the narrow circle of religious representations to which he had scrupulously confined himself: but he knew how to vindicate his art without violating the rule he had prescribed to himself when, instead of a Danae or a Venus, he produced a Saint Sebastian, which shut the mouth of the most exigeant critics of anatomical science.30

It is Rio above all who celebrated Fra Bartolommeo for his piety rather than his skill, and for his holiness rather than his imagination. For Rio, Fra Bartolommeo is above all the dedicated and devout follower of Savonarola, and he devoted a whole chapter to Savonarola’s attempt to reform Florence and to turn painting back to its Christian origins. Fra Bartololommeo with his ‘celestial imagination’31 was a willing listener, and it is surely Savonarola, ‘the powerful dialectician, the accomplished orator’32 as Rio describes him, with whom we can identify the ‘voice’ of line 41.33 Vasari, no admirer of Savonarola, says that the painter ‘attended his preaching with infinite devotion, and with all the respect which he felt for the person of the preacher’,34 and Rio points out that ‘he was scarcely twenty when he edified the Florentines by his piety and the assiduity with which he attended the sermons of Savonarola’.35 It is also possible to suggest why Browning should have chosen Fra Bartolommeo as the subject of his poem, rather than, say, Fra Angelico, with whose work he was also familiar. Unlike Fra Angelico, whose life was as unproblematical and straightforward as 30

31 Alexis François Rio, pp. 378–9. Ibid., p. 383. Ibid., p. 335. Vasari as a ‘courtier’ as Rio puts it (p. 345n.) is extremely hostile to Savonarola and the effect of his reforms on art. 33 The most recent account of the relations between Fra Bartolommeo and Savonarola comes in Piero Scapecchi, ‘Bartolomeo frate e pittore nella congregazione di San Marco’, in L’età di Fra Bartolomeo e la scuola di San Marco, ed. Severina Padovani, Magnoli Scuderi and Giovanna Damiani (Venice, 1996), pp. 19–28. Much of this information, of course, was not available to Browning. 34 35 Vasari, trans. Foster (1851), ii, 447–8. Rio (1854), p. 345. 32


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his painting, Fra Bartolommeo posed real problems for art historians. Vasari, for example, was unable to reconcile the painter’s sectarian attitudes with the greatness of his style, and more recent historians were divided on similar issues. Franz Kugler and William Young Ottley, for example, emphasized the crippling limitations of a religious withdrawal which cut him off from the centres of contemporary artistic activity. Rio disagreed, and arguing from the point of view of a committed Catholic suggested that Fra Bartolommeo’s soul was filled equally with ‘religious and poetic exaultation’, ‘love of God and enthusiasm for art’.36 The question arises, of course, which pictures of Fra Barolommeo would Browning have seen by the time he wrote ‘Pictor Ignotus’? In Britain and France the Catholic revival generated a renewed interest in the work of Fra Bartolommeo as the ‘publicist’ of Savonarola’s doctrines.37 In April 1836, the dealer Samuel Woodburn put on show in St Martin’s Lane two volumes of drawings by the painter which had, until his death in 1830, been the property of Sir Thomas Lawrence. Browning’s appetite may have been whetted by these, and when he met Walter Savage Landor on Landor’s return from Italy in 1836 he may well have told Browning about his enthusiasm for Fra Bartolommeo.38 Landor, a well-known collector of Italian art of the earlier periods, possessed some work by Bartolommeo which Richard Monkton Milnes saw in 1833 and for which he wrote some lines:39 . . . thou canst read, with deeper reve’rence still, Rare lessons of the later Monk, who took The world with awe of his inspirèd skill To which th’Apostle leaning on his book, And those three marvels in old Lucca shown, Bear witness, in the days we call our own.40

36

Ibid., p. 371. Giovanni Damiani, ‘Fra Bartolomeo e Mariotto Albertinelli, “Giudizio Finale” ’, in Padovani (1996), p. 166. 38 The Brownings’ Correspondence, iv, 254. The first recorded letter to Landor is in 1840 accompanying a copy of Sordello. 39 See Malcolm Elwin, Landor: A Replevin (1958), pp. 217–18. 40 Richard Monckton Milnes, ‘To Walter Savage Landor’, Memorials of a Residence on the Continent, and Historical Poems (1838), p. 94. Milnes identifies the ‘Monk’ as Fra Bartolommeo. Principal amongst those ‘three marvels’ is his Madonna and Child with Saint Stephen and John the Baptist (1509) in the duomo of Lucca. 37

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Browning, who knew Milnes’s work well, admired him, and was pleased to be invited to breakfast soon after the publication of Sordello in 1840.41 Landor shared Milnes’s view of Fra Bartolommeo’s ‘inspirèd skill’, and provocatively told Henry Crabb Robinson that he would not give £1,000 for Raphael’s Transfiguration but would offer ‘ten times that sum’ for Fra Bartolommeo’s picture of Saint Mark in the Pitti Palace.42 Since Browning visited Florence in 1844 the Pitti Palace would have been on his list of places to visit. He might also have visited Sta Maria Nuova where Fra Bartolommeo painted a fresco of the Last Judgement for a mortuary chapel in the church. Begun 1499, the year before the painter entered the Dominican order, it was executed, as Rio pointed out, in his preconversion, ‘secular’ manner. It has about it a proto-Raphaelesque quality with a wide range of characters, splendid vigorous aerial movement and a strong sense of spatial perspective. The poor condition of the wall on which it was painted caused it slowly to disintegrate and it was moved to another cloister in Santa Maria Nuova where it stood in Browning’s day.43 Some of the preliminary drawings for this fresco were in the Lawrence volumes on show in 1836, and these same volumes had been the subject of an earlier dispute about Bartolommeo’s standing vis-à-vis Raphael. In a late-eighteenth-century discussion between Benjamin West and Gavin Hamilton on ‘the comparitive merits of Raphaelle and F. Bartolomeo’, Gavin Hamilton made a ‘set of orations’ in honour of Bartolommeo which were so vigorous that he knocked over the wine and stained some of the drawings.44 When Browning visited Florence the most outstanding, if unfin-

41 RB to Richard Monckton Milnes, Mar. 1840, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, iv, 256. Much information about Milnes comes from James PopeHennessy, Monckton Milnes, 2 vols. (1949–51). 42 The anecdote is reported by E. V. Lucas in his A Wanderer in Florence (10th edn., 1923), p. 328. The painting is still in the Galleria Palatina in the Pitti Palace and was first recorded in 1516. See Padovani (1996), pp. 122–5. 43 After several further moves it was taken to the convent of San Marco where it is now on show. For the history of this work see Giovanna Damiani, ‘Fra Bartolomeo e Mariotto Albertinelli, “Giudizio Finale” ’, in Padovani (1996), pp. 163–72. 44 The incident is recorded in a letter from Samuel Woodburn to the Prince of Orange’s agent in 1840 when Woodburn was selling him the two Lawrence volumes. See Chris Fischer, Fra Bartolommeo: Master Draughtsman (Rotterdam, 1990), pp. 14–15.


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ished, work by Fra Bartolommeo was a group consisting of ‘Virgin, Babe and Saint’ in the Uffizi. The Signoria altarpiece or ‘Pala’ was commissioned by Pier Soderini, the gonfalniere of the Republic of Florence, in 1510 for the altar of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio.45 Filippino Lippi was orignally asked to create this highly political image celebrating the religious triumph of the Republic, but he died in 1504. The finished painting was to show the Virgin and Child protected by Saint Anne. Around the central group a converzatione is taking place about the significance of the Immaculate Conception reminiscent of Raphael’s Disputa in the Vatican Stanze. With the return of the Medici and the fall of the Signoria in 1512 the Sala, a symbol of republican government which in turn was the inspiration of Savonarola, was first invaded by soldiery then turned into a salt warehouse. As a result the painting became redundant and remained faded and unfinished on Fra Bartolommeo’s death in 1517.46 It might be argued that Fra Bartolommeo, dying in 1517, was hardly an early Italian painter. Yet many of Browning’s contemporaries regarded him as such. ‘Before we enter the golden age of painting,’ wrote Anna Jameson, ‘we must speak of one more painter . . . still living at this period.’47 He is the last, she said, of the ‘elder painters of the first Italian school’.48 According to Jameson, Fra Bartolommeo was essentially retrogressive: he ‘belonged to a previous age’ and was informed by ‘a wholly different spirit’ from the younger men of the Renaissance. Browning is clearly fascinated by the cusping nature of Fra Bartolommeo’s career. He lived at the very dawn of a pagan age, but was tempted back into a medieval world of religious dogmatism and monasticism. He was attracted to the power of humanistic art, to the representation of the flesh and the body, but chose to paint in a bloodless, archaic style. He was talented, but denied that talent for doctrinaire reasons. A voice, presumably that of Savonarola, pulled him back from the brink of worldly success and remade him into a ‘Christian’ artist of an earlier period.

45 46 47

For the history of this painting see Padovani (1996), pp. 100–3. It was returned from the Uffizi to San Marco in 1922. 48 Jameson (1845), p. 282. Ibid.

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Browning and modern Christian art ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ have often been linked as companion pieces since they both drew their material from the same Italian journey. In a well-known remark to Frederick Ward about ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’ Browning pointed out its contemporary relevance and topicality. It was, he said, ‘just the thing for the time what with the Oxford business, and Camden society and other embroilments’.49 In other words, like much of his writing in this period, Browning’s poem is historical in subject but contemporary in significance; the monologue of the sixteenth-century bishop is rooted in its time but directed at a debate taking place in the 1840s about the relationship between religious belief and its material expression. Many of Browning’s early poems work like this and some touch on similar issues. ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ provides the most vivid example; ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ is the most closely historically argued, and ‘Pictor Ignotus’ the most enigmatic. Each of the monologues involves a speaker who is instrumental in creating works of art whose qualities are intimately dependent upon the each speaker’s religious beliefs, and the relations, in turn, between his beliefs and those of the prevailing culture. Fra Lippo Lippi, for example, as an emergent early Renaissance naturalist, argues for the congruence of his faith and his art, but places himself in a conflictual relationship with the aesthetic values of the prior who wants quite a different kind of painting for his monastery. In contrast, Pictor Ignotus, as the result of a conversion to monasticism, denies himself a legitimate place in the new order and satisfies himself with a more limited and debilitated expressive range. But what of the topicality of these poems, and in what way are they ‘just the thing for the time’? The answer lies partly in issues involving contemporary art theory. The new ‘Christian’ history of art had prioritized belief in aesthetic judgements based on spiritual value. In this system art was ranked, not for its formal or expressive excellence, but for its ability to communicate religious sentiment. The theory of contemporary practice adopted similar spiritual criteria with the consequence that modern work, too, was assessed by its place in the 49 Browning to Frederick Oldfield Ward, 18 Feb. 1845. See The Brownings’ Correspondence, x, 83.


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‘Christian’ canon. The new art history had hugely increased the status of early, medieval art, and the stress on spirituality had boosted the reputation of various neo-medieval groups in Europe but principally that of the German Nazarenes led by Johann Friedrich Overbeck. The parallel between ancient and modern art was constantly enforced in this period, and it this parallel which Browning so skilfully exploits in ‘Pictor Ignotus’. Just as fifteenth-century Florence had a talented artist, Fra Bartolommeo, who turned away from the blandishments of the world to pursue religious art in a monastic context, so nineteenth-century Germany had produced Overbeck, who having converted to Catholicism, adopted a monastic life and had confined his work to religious themes. But the affinities between ancient and modern were intensified in the 1840s when the example of early Italian fresco and the values of German painting were simultaneously thrust into public prominence. In 1841 the British government was considering the decorative scheme for the new Houses of Parliament. The ancient art of fresco was its first choice, and inevitably it was to the example of Munich and the Nazarenes that it turned. We have seen how Rio’s history of art promulgated a positive interpretation of monasticism in art, and in Rio’s text Fra Bartolommeo, like Fra Angelico, emerges as a painter who made the right decisions in favour of his religious beliefs. The theoretical basis of Rio’s approach had its roots in the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s ‘Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders’ (Berlin, 1797),50 and Friedrich von Schlegel’s series of articles that made up his Gemälldebeschreibungen aus Paris und den Niederlanden, in den Jahren 1802–180451, and he spent several years in the early 1830s in Munich with the idealist philosophers Johann Joseph Gorrës and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling. If this tradition of writers had provided fertile soil for the new Catholic theories, 50

Wackenroder, ‘Outpourings from the Heart of an Art-Loving Monk’. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands’, in The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel, trans. E. J. Millington (1849) This appeared first as series of articles in the journal Europa. Lionel Gossman, ‘Unwilling Moderns: the Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century’, www.19thcartworldwide.org (2002–3), pp. 1–68, and E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive (2002), pp. 115ff., both contain good accounts of the relationship between German theory and the establishment of the Nazarenes. 51

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it also had an impact on artistic practice. The same idealistic tendency had provided the inspiration for the Nazarenes, who, by the time that Browning was writing ‘Pictor Ignotus’, had taken up a leading role in modern European art. The Nazarenes emerged around 1808. Overbeck, together with Franz Pforr, rejected the academicism of the Austrian Academy of Arts and in 1810 set up a small group of painters in the monastery of San Isidoro in Rome which they called the Lukasbrüder. Wackenroder’s idealized monasticism provided a romantic impulse and Schlegel, also a disciple of Wackenroder, formulated a powerful theory about the relationship between art, religion, and history, in which he contrasted the ‘devout, pious, deeply significant style’ of the old school of Italian painting with the ‘florid pomp’ of Renaissance art.52 Schlegel, though he remained appreciative of the youthful works of Raphael, was the first to openly condemn what he considered the decadence of the later paintings.53 The Nazarenes were intensely devout and most, including Overbeck, Wilhelm Schadow, and Johannes and Philipp Veit (the two sons of Dorothea Schlegel), were Catholic converts. Art, they claimed, should serve only the highest religious ends and it should not pander to the vanity of the rich or the royal. The group lived ascetic lives and worked on archaizing principles. They chose fresco as their medium because they saw it as more democratic than oil. Fresco, they argued, with its huge narrative potential and its exposure on church walls, might become the appropriate medium for restoring the rapport between art and the people that existed in the Middle Ages. On joining the group in 1814, Peter Cornelius told Görres that instead of creating commodities for the rich and famous, fresco would speak to the German people ‘from the walls of ancient cathedrals, silent chapels, and lonely monasteries . . .’54 Similarly, in Browning’s poem Pictor Ignotus works in fresco, but here it is symptomatic not of progress and vitality but of pictures that ‘surely, gently, die’ by ‘moulder[ing] on the damp wall’s travertine’ (69, 67). Furthermore, Cornelius’s ambition to avoid commodification becomes, in the mouth of Pictor Ignotus, a consolation for faint52 Schlegel, ‘Paintings in Paris and the Netherlands’, trans. Millington (1849), p. 49. 53 Schlegel, ‘Vom Raffael’, in Ansichtenund Ideen von der christlichen Kunst, ed. H. Eichner (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgale (1958), iv, 48–60). 54 Cornelius quoted in Gombrich (2002), p. 122.


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heartedness and the fear of failure. ‘At least,’ says Pictor Ignotus, ‘no merchant traffics in my heart’, and as a monk he is no longer forced to deal with those that ‘buy and sell our pictures, take and give, / Count them for garniture and household stuff . . .’ ( 50–1). Turning away from the late work of Raphael, the Nazarenes modelled their art on painting from Cimabue to the early Raphael. In a similar way, Pictor Ignotus is overwhelmed by the challenging humanistic art of the burgeoning Renaissance, and ‘dreams’ regressively of the kind of fame that was loaded upon Cimabue when his Madonna was transported from the Borgo Allegri (‘named afresh from the event’ (32)) to Santa Maria Novella. In the work of the Nazarenes this archaizing mode was integral to what Charles Eastlake in 1820 called their ‘simplicity, holiness and purity’. ‘This style’, he added, ‘has little or nothing to do with reality. It diffuses a sort of calm and sacred dream.’55 For Pictor Ignotus, stylistic stasis went hand in hand with fears of a paganized world. ‘Glimpses of such sights | Have scared me,’ he says, ‘like the revels through a door | Of some strange house of idols at its rites!’ (42–3). The Nazarenes, too, decided to remove themselves from contemporary events by withdrawal into a legendary past. Their relative distance, says Lionel Gossman, ‘from the optimistic progressivism of their own tumultuous time was expressed artistically in the still symmetry of their compositions, the flatness of their paint application, and, more generally, their resolve to break with the artistic tradition of the baroque and the rococo and seek inspiration instead in . . . the Italian “Primitives”.’56 But of all the members of the Nazarene group, it is Overbeck whom Pictor Ignotus most closely resembles. In 1841 Overbeck said that the true artist ‘must avoid the tumult of the world, and love retirement and application’; he should exercise the arts exclusively for ‘religious purposes’.57 So, Pictor Ignotus, retiring into ‘the sanctuary’s gloom’ (63), monotonously paints for religious purposes ‘endless cloisters and eternal aisles | With the same series, Virgin, Babe and Saint, | With the same cold calm beautiful regard’ (59–60). 55 Quoted in William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (1979), p. 183. 56 Gossman (2002–3), pp. 1–2. 57 Frederick Overbeck, An Account of the Picture of Frederick Overbeck Representing Religion Glorified by the Fine Arts, trans. John Macray (2nd edn., Oxford, 1850), p. 10.

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In the 1820s and 1830s the German artists came to be closely connected with the Catholic revival in Europe. Overbeck in particular had gained an international reputation amongst liberal Catholics as ‘Perugino reborn’, and in France Henri Lacordaire and Montalembert praised the ‘new German school . . . of painting, which, under the dual direction of Overbeck and Cornelius, shines every day more brightly’. Thanks to these artists, said Montalembert, Germany was set to become the home of a new renaissance of art—‘la patrie de l’art régénéré, la seconde Italie de l’Europe moderne’.58 In Britain, too, the impact of Nazarene work was strongly felt. It is not difficult to see why, in 1841, the Catholic architect and writer Augustus Welby Pugin should claim Overbeck as ‘the prince of painters’,59 nor why Nicholas Wiseman, rector of the English College in Rome, was an enthusiast for Nazarene painting and probably introduced William Dyce to Overbeck in 1829.60 But non-Catholics as much as Catholics sought out the Nazarenes. In the same year, 1829, Edward Pusey visited Overbeck in Rome. Charles Eastlake went to Rome to meet the Nazarenes, and in 1840 Ford Madox Brown went to Munich in the hope of studying with Cornelius. The historian Lord Lindsay visited Munich in 1839, where he developed an enthusiasm for the Nazarene work of Hesse and Overbeck. Without subscribing to the Catholic tendencies of the work, he welcomed their attempt to create a new poetics of painting in religious terms, and even planned a project on the ‘poetry and prose of painting’. The great ‘poets’ of painting, he said, were ‘Giotto, Fra Angelico . . . Overbeck, Hesse etc.’61 One of the most vocal supporters in Britain of Overbeck and German art was the newly founded journal, The Art Union. Its first volume in 1839 contained an adulatory article entitled ‘The German School of Art’, in which the writer’s positive terms of praise closely resemble those used by Browning later in a negative sense. The writer speaks of the ‘calm and majestic form of art which belongs to earlier times, and first issued from the quiet sanctuary of monastic retire58 Charles René Forbes, Comte de Montalembert, ‘Du vandalisme en France: lettre à M. Victor Hugo’, Revue des deux mondes, 2nd ser., 1 (1833), 421–68, quote on p. 425. 59 Augustus Welby Pugin, Contrasts (2nd edn., 1841), p. 8. 60 Vaughan (1979), p. 41. Vaughan is extremely illuminating on the relationship between the Nazarenes and British artists in this period. William Dyce’s Paolo and Francesca (1837) is conceived much in the spirit of Nazarene work. 61 Nicolas Barker, Bibliotheca Lindesiana (1977), p. 106.


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ment’. Simplicity is ‘natural to those who live detached from the world’, and though there may be some ‘monotony’ in their types there is a wonderful ‘calmness’.62 Each year the journal made a point of stressing the achievement of the Nazarenes, linking it to that of the early Italians, and culminating in 1844 with the first of a series of articles, ‘The Living Artists of Europe’, in praise of Overbeck.63 Perhaps one of the most telling proofs of Nazarene popularity, however, was a letter from the publisher John Murray to Ruskin’s father in 1842. In this he politely rejected the first volume of Modern Painters and urged the young John Ruskin to write ‘on the German School, which the public were calling for works on’.64 But amongst Browning’s friends two in particular stand out as being eminently well informed about both ancient and modern art. One is Richard Monckton Milnes and the other is Anna Jameson. As we have seen, Milnes had made Browning’s acquaintance around 1840. Although he was a Member of Parliament, he was probably best known at this time as a poet, hence his interest in meeting Browning. He was wealthy, cultivated, sociable, well travelled, and had a taste for art. Soon after coming down from Trinity College, Cambridge (where he was an Apostle), in 1831, he went first to Bonn then to Rome, where, in 1832, he became a close friend of Baron Bunsen and his Welsh wife, Frances. Though they were Protestants, he was introduced through them to the French Ultramontanes, Montalembert and Félicité Lamennais, with whom Milnes had considerable sympathy. He also began a long and close friendship with Rio, who was gathering material for his history of art and enthusing about the painting of the Nazarenes.65 Milnes got to know Nicholas Wiseman and struck up a firm friendship with the writer and critic George Darley. Darley, socially retiring to the point of anonymity, was influential in promoting the fortunes of early art in the pages of the Athenaeum where, at Milnes’s request, he reviewed, Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne.66 Milnes cultivated a group of interesting artists 62

Anon., ‘The German School of Art’, Art Union, 1 (1839), 168. Anon., ‘The Living Artists of Europe: no. 1–Overbeck’, Art Union, 6 (1844), 13. Ruskin, Works, iii, p. xxxii. In that same volume of Modern Painters (1843) Ruskin contrasted the ‘older Italians’ with ‘the mechanical incapacity of the unhappy Germans . . . strained, artificial, and diseased’. Works, iii, 351. 65 Alexis François Rio, Epilogue à l’art chrétien (Fribourg-en-Brisgau, 1870), ii, 176. 66 For Darley see Robyn Cooper, ‘The Growth of Interest in Early Italian Painting in Britain: George Darley and the Athenaeum, 1834–1846’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43 (1980), 201–20. 63 64

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and writers in Italy, including Walter Savage Landor (see p. 101 above). In the following year, and at the age of twenty-five, Milnes set off for Germany where he met Anna Jameson, who, having got to know two Nazarene painters, Wilhelm Schadow and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was becoming as passionate about early art as she was about modern German religious art.67 On his return to England Milnes became a regular presence at Samuel Rogers’s famous breakfasts, upon which he modelled his own. Rogers, independently of Rio, had many years previously begun his own small collection of Primitives, and as we have seen (p. 20 note 46 above), communicated enthusiastically about early Italian art with Coleridge.68 Understandably, he was delighted to meet Rio, whom Milnes brought along to one of those breakfasts in 1838. As part of his campaign to popularize De la poésie chrétienne, Milnes also introduced Rio to many other influential friends, including Carlyle, John Kenyon, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Landor, and William Gladstone.69 In 1841, while Milnes was establishing a warm friendship with Browning,70 he was sitting on the Royal Commission set up to consider the decorative scheme for the new Houses of Parliament. Various possibilities were examined but fresco seemed the most appropriate, and the acknowledged masters of fresco painting in Europe were, of course, the Nazarenes. The publicity given to modern German art as the result of this enquiry was enormous. Witness after witness expressed enthusiasm, admiration, and approval for the work of Cornelius in Munich and Overbeck in Rome, and again 67 See Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Goethe, ed. G. H. Needer (Oxford, 1939), p. 23. Schnorr von Carolsfeld had joined the Nazarenes in 1817 and had been called to Munich by Ludwig I in 1827. 68 In 1810 Rogers bought what he thought was a Giotto in the Charles Lambert sale in London. It originated with Thomas Patch, who sawed a fresco fragment of two haloed mourners from the walls of the Carmine after a fire in 1771. Patch thought that they were by Giotto and published them in his Life of Masaccio . . . etc. (1772). Later, in 1817, Rogers bought a ‘Cimabue’ from the collection of Charles Greville, in 1826 a ‘Verocchio’, and in 1837 another ‘Cimabue’. See Lygon and Russel (1980), p. 115. The ‘Giotto’ was bought for 10 guineas. In 1906 it was reattributed to Spinello Aretino. See Martin Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: the Earlier Italian Schools, 2nd edn. (1961), pp. 498–500. 69 Mary Camille Bowe, François Rio: sa place dans le renouveau catholique en 1797–1874 (Paris, 1938), p. 122. 70 Browning told Alfred Domett in 1842 that he ‘would like’ Milnes if he met him. RB to Alfred Domett, 31 Sept. 1842, The Brownings’ Correspondence, vi, 89. Strangely Browning does not seem to have met Rogers until 1851.


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and again their achievement was compared with that of medieval art.71 Though views on how the British might imitate the Germans differed, there was almost complete unanimity for the idea that the German model was the most appropriate for the Palace of Westminster. Milnes took a prominent part in the discussion, and in keeping with the attitudes of his friend Rio was keen to press the connection between modern art and the study of the Primitives. ‘Do you not think’, he asked Eastlake, ‘that devotion to the early Italian and German painters, which is perhaps the foundation of the modern school of Germany, has been a great instrument in bringing to perfection the modern school of fresco painting in Munich?’ ‘No doubt of it,’ Eastlake replied. 72 In keeping, too with his ‘Puseyite’ tendencies,73 he more than any other member of the committee was keen to explore the connection between art and religious belief, and on several occasions he pressed the question as to whether ‘religious feeling in Munich has had much bearing upon the revival of German art?’ Eastlake replied that ‘opinions are very much divided upon that point in Germany’, and to illustrate his point he told an anecdote about Overbeck which may have played a significant part in the composition of Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’. ‘There is’, he said, ‘a great war at this moment, in consequence of a publication by Overbeck, accompanying a picture of his now at Frankfort [sic], which is called “the Triumph of Religion in Art”. When that picture was completed, he published for the first time his sentiments, a manifesto of his views on art, to appear with it, and there he says that the antique statues are only to be considered as idols, and that any art produced by pagans is to be held in abhorrence.’ ‘I need not say’, Eastlake concluded, ‘that the generality of German artists do not coincide with that view, and he has been very ably answered in the Kunstblatt.’74 71

Martin Athur Shee, President of the Royal Academy, pointed to the success of the arts in Bavaria, and suggested that the ‘calm and natural’ style of contemporary German art resembled that of ‘ancient Italian art’. Report of the Select Committee on Fine Arts, Parliamentary Papers (1841), pp. 21, 25. 72 Ibid., p. 45. 73 In March 1841 Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s father, invited by John Kenyon, dined with Milnes and reported back that Milnes was a supporter of Puseyism and the Oxford Movement. EBB to George Moutlon-Barrett in The Brownings’ Correspondence, v, 31. 74 Parliamentary Papers (1841), p. 45. His publication One Tract More (1841) in support of the Tractarians bears out this impression.

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13. Friedrich Overbeck, The Triumph of Religion in the Arts, 1840. Oil on canvas, 392 ¥ 392 cm (154 1/2 ¥ 154 1/2 in). Städelsches Kustinstitut, Frankfurt

Did Milnes recount this story to Browning and tell him about the attack made on Overbeck’s Triumph of Religion (1840; Fig. 13)?75 Overbeck’s painting, begun many years previously in Rome and based on Raphael’s two Vatican frescos, the The School of Athens (1510–11) and Disputa (1509–10), is a challenge to Raphael.76 By 75 This was commissioned by the city of Frankfurt and is now in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut. 76 George Darley saw it in Rome in 1834 and thought that Overbeck’s work was mere ‘beautiful imitation’, and that this painting was ‘taking up Raffael’s dead hand . . . to paint with, fixed on the stump of his which he amputated’, Athenaeum (19 July 1834), 538.


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adding the Virgin, babe, and saints to a group of artists, architects, and sculptors, Overbeck had reinscribed Catholic dogma in Raphael’s assembly, thus reaffirming the centrality of religion at the centre of the arts. In a sense Overbeck, using the words of Pictor Ignotus, is defiantly announcing: ‘I could have painted pictures like that youth’s | Ye praise so’ (1–2). Theodor Vischer, picking this up, compared Overbeck with Raphael, and found the German wanting. ‘Raphael’, he said, ‘had . . . more masculinity and completeness than Overbeck will ever reach. His genius is that of a blossoming virgin whose bud is not entirely broken.’77 It is striking that Browning also effeminizes his unknown painter, who, faced with criticism, becomes weak and womanly: ‘Mixed with my loving trusting ones, there trooped | . . . Who summoned those cold faces that begun | To press on me and judge me? Though I stooped | Shrinking as from the soldiery a nun’ (44–7). Vischer, for his part, rather brutally described Overbeck as ‘castrated Raphael’ in whom ‘masculinity is everywhere missing’.78 Again and again in this period, the criticism and analysis of modern German art involved comparisons with the Italian Primitives. Both groups were perceived to share similar goals, aims, objectives, and techniques, and their work was thought to be the product of mysticism and strong religious belief. But this approach was problematic for Browning and many of his British contemporaries. First (in a period of intense anti-Catholic feeling in Britain), there was a widespread resistance to the dominantly Catholic tone of Rio’s critical discourse, and resistance too to the connection between artistic excellence and religious dogma. Second, the strong vein of narrowness and prudery in both the criticism and practice of Christian art was felt to be excessive, even in Victoria’s England. Following in the footsteps of his master, Fra Angelico, Overbeck, for example, refused to paint from either the cadaver or the naked female model;79 the hypocritical Prior of Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ embodies some of the contradictions inherent in this position. And third, many of Rio’s readers had a problem with his denigration of, on the one hand, 77 Mitchell B. Frank, ‘ “Castrated Raphael”: Friedrich Overbeck and Allegory’, Word and Image, 18 (2002), 87. 78 Ibid., 89. 79 See Mitchell B. Frank, ‘The Nazarene Gemeinschaft: Overbeck and Cornelius’, in Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan (Aldershot, 2000), p. 53.

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classical and Renaissance art as ‘pagan’ and corrupt, and, on the other, naturalism as ‘degenerate’. In order to admire fully both Primitive and modern it was necessary to reject a large portion of the traditional canon, and many refused to do this. Avoidance tactics were imperative, and these produced a whole range of attitudes in the British. At one extreme, for example, Nicholas Wiseman welcomed equally the growing popularity of the Primitives and the ascending fortunes of the Germans, since in his eyes both advanced the Catholic cause. In the wake of Rio’s book, Wiseman devoutly wished that the spirit of the ‘Christian School of Germany’ would also ‘cross the Channel’.80 At the other extreme was Benjamin Robert Haydon, who had a real interest in early Italian art. He had first introduced Keats to the paintings of the Campo Santo in Pisa (see pp. 20–1 above), and he admired Ludwig I’s patronage in Bavaria, but he hated the modern intolerance of the classical spirit in art and the Christian distaste for the body.81 ‘Is it anti-Christian’, he asked in 1841, ‘to restore man to the essential properties of his species as compared with the brute?’, commenting that ‘the leaders [of the Nazarenes] conceived the art to have degenerated, and to require an opposition so comprehensive that it bordered on the ridiculous.’82 In the 1840s there were, however, three contemporary writers who used critical terms that enable us to strengthen the link between the modern art of Overbeck and the ancient art of Pictor Ignotus. The first is Edward Villiers Rippingille, an East Anglian artist who had spent the years between 1837 and 1841 in Rome. He wrote widely on art matters, and in 1843 set up as editor of the short-lived Artist and Amateur’s Magazine, in which he described his Roman experiences. Overbeck, he said, because he ‘made an ex voto offering of his pencil to the service of religion’, lost his vitality as an artist. Given his reputation and influence, says Rippingille, the painter is ‘without one exalted quality of mind or high aspirations . . . Without invention he contrives to make out his story, and to fill his canvasses with figures; without any conception of character, feeling for nature, or 80

John Steinmetz and Nicholas Wiseman, ‘The Philosophy of Art’, Dublin Review 1 (1836), 460. 81 Benjamin Robert Haydon, Lectures on Painting and Design (1846), p. 181. 82 Benjamin Robert Haydon, Thoughts on the Relative Value of Fresco and Oil Painting as Applied to the Architectural Decoration of the Housese of Parliament (1842), pp. 23–4. Haydon also launched an attack on the Germans in the Spectator (12 Nov. and 3 Dec. 1842), 1099 and 1170.


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power of expression, he performs that which stands in the place of all; without being able to represent as a painter, what exists, he renders that which is satisfactory by imitation.’ Throughout his career, says Rippingille, ‘it has not been the object of this Artist to produce expression, but to avoid it, and in its place to offer a blank.’83 Similarly, Browning’s painter claims that he might have represented character and ‘truth made visible in man’ (12), and could, had he wished, have portrayed ‘Each face obedient to its passion’s law | Each passion clear proclaimed without a tongue’ (15–16), but in the service of religion confined himself to the ‘same series’ in ‘endless cloisters’ (60, 59). The second writer is Elizabeth Rigby, later Eastlake, who having spent two years in Germany between 1827 and 1829 and having visited again in 1836, returned to live in Edinburgh and write for the Quarterly Review. In 1846 she published ‘Modern German Painting’, in which she attacked the contemporary ‘deification’ of the Nazarenes and the idea held by many of her contemporaries that the Germans were ‘leaving us far behind in all that is most worthy of attainment in art’. Sceptical of revivals in general, she believes that advancement in art cannot be made by always looking backwards. She is particularly sceptical of the Nazarenes who, she says, having become ‘enamoured of . . . religious earnestness and simplicity which they found in the early masters . . . became enamoured of their technical defects’.84 She is highly critical of their ‘coarse conventional fresco’ which has ‘neither colour nor handling’; she is critical, too, of the narrow limitations of their subjects, ‘virgins, saints, and martyrs with folded palms and downcast eyes’,85 and she distrusts the way in which the Nazarenes ‘denude their characters of all earthly expression’ and ‘clothe them with a spiritual one’.86 One is reminded once again of Pictor Ignotus’s disembodied, depersonalized ‘Virgin, Babe, and Saint’. Like Rippingille, Rigby distrusts particularly the work of Overbeck. He may, she says, be a ‘great man’ but he is ‘only half an artist’. He has, she adds, ‘no scope of language; he is tongue-tied.’ Like Pictor Ignotus himself, she stresses the closeness to Raphael. Overbeck’s designs, she says, possibly echoing Vischer’s 1841 attack, 83

Ibid. Elizabeth Rigby, ‘Modern German Painting’, Quarterly Review, 77 (1846), 323, 324, and 325. 86 85 Ibid., 329. Ibid., 329–30. 84

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‘have much of [Raphael’s] heavenly grace and sweetness; a design of his might at first sight be mistaken for one of Raphael’s’, but ‘on point of real practical performance’ he falls far short of the Italian. ‘Where then’, she asks, ‘is his comparison with Raphael?’ 87 Finally there is Anna Jameson. She had been a friend of Browning from the late 1830s and shared many of his tastes. She was more knowledgeable even than Milnes about early Italian art and she was the leading authority in Britain on modern German painting.88 Jameson’s earliest continental experiences came when she was a governess with the Rowles family in 1822. These were recorded in her first major publication, The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), but give no evidence of interest in the medieval period or its art. This came later, and not in Italy, but in Germany. Her first trip was in 1829 when she and her father toured the country in the company of Sir Gerard Noel. A second, much longer stay took place in the years 1833 and 1834. This time she learned the language, developed a knowledge of the culture and discovered groups of intellectuals ready to address topics that interested her. 89 In Dresden she met Ludwig Tieck, Milnes, and several of the Nazarene painters, and in Bonn she met A. W. Schlegel.90 Like the two German critics, she had recently published on Shakespeare91 and found much in common with two men who had been instrumental in shaping early nineteenth-century German Romanticism. Both had a highly developed interest in the culture of the Middle Ages, and this prepared her for her time in Munich. For it was in Munich that she was fully exposed to medieval art and to the modern enthusiasm that it generated. By 1833 Munich had become a major centre of medieval culture. In 1826, Ludwig I, anxious to stimulate interest in Germany’s Catholic past, approached Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée for the purchase of their collection of German medieval religious pictures gathered earlier in the century. On coming to the throne Ludwig 87

Elizabeth Rigby, 330. Browning’s first recorded letter to her is in 1840 (The Brownings’ Correspondence, iv, 217) but by then they are on familiar terms. Thereafter very few letters have been preserved, but several remarks in EBB’s correspondence suggest that RB often saw her. 89 Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough: the Life of Anna Jameson (1967), p. 76. 90 It is interesting that in 1843 Browning, who knew German ‘tolerably’ well, told Alfred Domett that he was reading Tieck and A. W. Schlegel. RB to Alfred Domett, 5 Mar. 1843, The Brownings’ Correspondence, vi, 353. 91 In her Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical (1832). 88


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wished to enhance his standing in Europe by remodelling his capital. He wished to be seen as a king with discriminating taste, a king who promoted the Catholic cause, and a king who supported Bavarian nationalism and Bavarian traditions. He employed the architects Leo von Klenze (whom Anna Jameson met in 1834) and Friedrich von Gärtner on building programmes that became the envy of Europe. He invited Cornelius to Munich to help with the fresco decorations, and with Cornelius’s support he purchased Boisserée collection. Ludwig was also keen to stimulate modern German Catholic art. When she was in Munich, Jameson was impressed both with the ‘far-famed Boisserée gallery’ and with modern German painting, between which she perceived a strong link. In her book Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834) she spoke with enthusiasm about ‘the simplicity and integrity of feeling’ of the early painters92 and how they resembled their modern counterparts. Overbeck, and those who made up the ‘national school of art’, she said, placed feeling above imitation just like the medieval artists.93 Like many of her British contemporaries, however, Jameson had a dilemma with early Italian art and with its modern German equivalent, and that dilemma was made greater by the publication of De la poésie chrétienne in 1836. In 1841 she met Rio in Paris and toured the Louvre with him.94 She was impressed by the man and by his book, but she rejected his doctrine. 95 They had much in common, and Rio like Jameson had moved in the late Romantic intellectual circles of Munich. But where he came to art as a committed Breton Catholic, she came as a somewhat sceptical Protestant. We have seen other critics wrestling with this problem, and her solution became 92 Anna Jameson, Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad: with Tales and Miscellanies now First Collected, and a New Edition of the ‘Diary of an Ennuyée’, 4 vols. (1834), i, 261. 93 Jameson (1834), i, 265 note. Visits and Sketches was an important source of information for the British reader as she described the early history of the Nazarenes, including accounts of Overbeck’s work in Rome, and gave elaborate descriptions of the new art of Munich and elsewhere in Germany. Jameson (1834), ii, 48–9. 94 On 15 Oct. 1841 she wrote to her sister Charlotte Murphy from Paris: ‘The great event of my life here has been meeting with Rio.’ Anna Jameson, letters and friendships, 1812–1860, ed. Beatrice Caroline Erskine (1915), p. 203. 95 In 1841, Paris, where the ‘great event’ her life was meeting Alexis François Rio (Anna Jameson, Letters and Friendships, 1812–1860, ed. Beatrice Caroline Erskine (1915), p. 203, letter to her sister Charlotte Murphy, 15 Oct. 1841). She was enchanted and impressed by the critic and like so many British writers in the 1840s fell under the spell of his ‘eloquent exposition of Christian art’ (Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), i, xxxii).

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clear in an essay entitled ‘The House of Titian’, written in September 1845.96 What is particularly interesting is that she sets up a comparison between modern German art and ancient Italian art using lines from Browning’s as yet unpublished poem, ‘Pictor Ignotus’.97 In the essay she argues that art is a product of its time, and has to be seen in that light. She distinguishes between what she calls ‘piety’ in art and ‘poetry’ in art. Piety in art, she says, was created by contemporary religious doctrine. Poetry in art, however, is transhistorical and could be felt by an audience even when the cultural or religious conditions had changed.98 To illustrate the special quality of ancient work she uses two lines from ‘Pictor Ignotus’ that Browning must have shown it to her in draft form.99 ‘When I wandered through some of those glorious old churches in Lombardy’, she writes, surrounded by their faded frescos and mystic groups— Virgin, and babe, and saint, With the same cold, calm, beautiful regard, A solemn feeling was upon me—a sense of the sublime and the true, which did not arise merely from the perception of excellence in art, neither was it a yearning after those forms of faith which have gone into the past; but because in these enduring monuments the past was made present; because the sprit of devotion which had raised them, and filled them with images of beauty and holiness, being in itself a truth, that truth died not—could not die—but seemed to me still inhabiting there . . . 100

Setting aside her curious misinterpretation of the lines by missing their negative implications, she goes on to contrast the integrity of early work, where piety and poetry were one, with the Nazarene painting she had seen in Germany. ‘The noble churches’, in Munich, 96 It was published in her Memoirs and Essays, Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals in 1846. 97 EBB was given a proof of ‘The House of Titian’ by Jameson in May 1846 (see The Brownings’ Correspondence, xii, 321). Though she disagreed with Jameson on a number of points, she thought that RB would like the essay and told him that she had quoted his lines from ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (See The Brownings’ Correspondence, xii, 334). 98 David J. DeLaura, ‘Some Notes on Browning’s Pictures and Painters’, Studies in Browning and His Circle, 8 (1980), 7–16, and Adele M. Holcomb, ‘Anna Jameson: the First Professional English Art Historian’, Art History, 6 (1983), 171–87. Both have good accounts of this. 99 It appeared in Dramatic Romances in November 1846, a year later than the composition of ‘The House of Titian’. 100 Jameson, Memoirs and Essays (1846), pp. 24–5.


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she writes, ‘professedly and closely imitated from the types and models left by medieval art, lavishly decorated with pictures and sculpture executed to perfection, found me every day admiring, praising, criticising—but ever cold.’ Once she had unbounded enthusiasm for modern German art. Now, ten years later in 1845, she confesses her reservations about Overbeck’s central mission and about the vanity of attempting to ‘reanimate the spirit of Catholicism merely by returning to the forms’.101 Since Anna Jameson was writing about the limitations of neo-Catholic art at the same time that Browning was composing his poem, it is quite conceivable that ‘Pictor Ignotus’ reflects a shared interest in a set of aesthetic attitudes that was much discussed in Britain in the 1840s. Placed within the context of a resurgence of interest in early art, and linked to the growing European reputation of German painting, ‘Pictor Ignotus’ can be readily interpreted as ‘just the thing for the time’. The echoes of the debate about Christian art have long died away, but it drew in and fascinated many of the people Browning knew, some of whom, like Milnes and Anna Jameson, were professionally involved. At the heart of the matter was the connection between belief and the creation of works of art, and whether it was possible to achieve success in the present by resurrecting the conditions of the past. So, while contemporary criticism tended to elide the mysticism of medieval art with the pietism of contemporary art, so the aims, aspirations, and excuses of Browning’s unknown painter can be identified equally with a medieval or modern persona. Pictor Ignotus, of course, is neither Fra Bartolommeo nor Overbeck, but by cunningly parodying the ambitions and motives of both, Browning provides a remarkable commentary on the vexed issue of the place of religion in art. Writing in 1844 in Rome, Florence, and London, Browning was less impressed than many of his contemporaries with the new view of art that linked piety and practice, and in ‘Pictor Ignotus’ he used the transtemporal figure of his unknown painter to point up the limits of two forms of artistic monasticism, late medieval and modern nineteenth-century. 101

Ibid., p. 25.

5 Whoring after Colour: Venetian Painting in England At the same time that Browning was familiarizing himself with early Italian art and beginning to collect a substantial body of paintings of his own, the twenty-one-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti paid his first visit to the Louvre.1 In 1849 he communicated his breathless and impressionistic responses to his brother in two letters from Paris. He dismissed as ‘slosh’ most of what he saw, though several paintings were ‘stunners’, as he called them, and stopped him in his tracks. Early art often caught his attention, a ‘wonderful copy of Fresco by Fra Angelico’, ‘some ineffably poetical Mantegnas’, and several other ‘early Christians whom nobody ever heard of’. But what impressed him most was the Ventetians. There were, he said, ‘some tremendous portraits by some Venetian whose name I forget, & a stunning Francis I by Titian’.2 He was clearly attracted by primitivism in various forms, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, and Van Eyck in the early period and Ingres and Ary Scheffer in the modern. There was little or no recent German art in Paris, but Rossetti was astounded by the ‘Christian’ painting of Hippolyte Flandrin. His Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, he said, was ‘wonderful! wonderful!! wonderful!!’3 The only other picture that matched it in significance was Venetian and was perhaps the highlight of his visit. It was, he told William Michael, ‘a kind of pastoral—by Giorgione, which is so

1 In 1855 Rossetti and Browning visited the Louvre together, and Rossetti found Browning’s ‘knowledge of early Italian Art beyond that of anyone I ever met— encyclopaedically beyond that of Ruskin himself’. Rossetti was hugely enthusiastic about Men and Women, and about ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ said that ‘it seems all the pictures desired by the poet are in his possession in fact.’ Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 25 Nov. 1855. W. E. Fredeman et al., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (4 vols., Cambridge, 2004), ii, 80. 2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Michael Rossetti, 4 Oct. 1849. The Rossetti Correspondence (2002), i, 109. 3 Ibid.

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intensely fine that I condescended to sit down before it and write a sonnet’.4 Like the reputation of the Primitives, attitudes to the Venetians underwent a huge change in the nineteenth century, and though the factors that brought it about were different there were significant and interesting parallels between the two groups. Ever since the publication of Vasari’s Lives Venetian painting has occupied a precarious position in the history of Western art. Venice has never been neglected or ignored, but it has always existed in a peripheral relationship to the work produced by those other major centres, Rome and Florence. Renaissance painting was probably not as centralized about the Rome–Florence axis as the histories would suggest, but the myth that Renaissance art was the sole creation of these two centres was powerful and durable. The literature of art, dominated, of course, by Vasari, lent powerful credence to that myth, as did the most influential treatises on the practice of the arts. Venice was then, and remains, on the edge of the central axis; its art was never overlooked or ignored, but its relationship with the painting of central Italy was an unstable one. It was, however, a creative relationship in terms of its reception, since that instability was reflected in the diversity of discourses that were created to explain it. The geographical placing of Venice reflects its position in the history of taste—magnificent though marginal. It resembles a distant planet, located at a sufficiently large distance in both space and culture from the artistic solar centre—Florence and Rome—to have an independent life of its own. If we add to this map Bologna, Pisa, and Siena, and then simulate the passage of time, the rise and fall of these schools in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be graphically illustrated. For eighteenth-century critics, in spite of their misgivings about Michelangelo, the Florence–Rome axis was of primary importance—Bologna coming a close third. About Venice there was a mixture of admiration, uncertainty, and suspicion. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, the reputation of Pisa and Siena began to grow, and within a few decades the whole disposition of this sidereal map of taste had changed. The bright constellation of Rome, dominated by its principal star, Raphael, had noticeably dimmed; Pisa had overtaken Siena in reputation and the Campo Santo rivalled almost anything at Florence; Bologna was fading fast like a dead or 4 Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Michael Rossetti, 8 Oct. 1849. The Rossetti Correspondence (2002), i, 114.

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dying star, and Venice had changed its complexion from Venus to Mars, and now glowed red and strong in the firmament. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Pisa and Siena were centres of the new vogue for the primitive in art, and we know a great deal about the dramatic change in the fortunes of the paintings of early Italian artists. We have seen in Chapter One how they were first collected as curios in the eighteenth century; how they were romanticized for their ‘simplicity’ in the early years of the nineteenth century; how connoisseurs historicized them, and how they were fetishized by Christian art historians. The change in attitudes to Venetian art in this same period has received much less attention, presumably because it was less dramatic. It was, however, not less interesting, and at least a part of that interest lies in the fact that the Venetians and the Primitives were very closely linked. Strange as it may appear, attitudes to the ‘dry and stiff manner’ (as it was called) of pre-Renaissance painting and the ‘sensual style’ of Venetian High Renaissance painting passed through similar phases. They were both reviled, then historicized, then worshipped—both for very different reasons but often, strangely enough, by the same people. For Joshua Reynolds and for many of his contemporaries, the term ‘Italian art’ signified work done in the sixteenth century and onwards. It focused on central Italy and included Venetian painting, but only painting of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the art of Florence and Rome was discovered to have a history. The general fascination with the Middle Ages produced a large number of antecedents for Raphael and Michelangelo, who, without necessarily coming into competition with the Renaissance masters, were now thought to have produced works of art of serious aesthetic merit. The expansion of the denotation ‘Italian art’ to include the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries served to widen its appeal. Early work was much cheaper than that of more established masters, and a significant community of collectors generated a traffic in early works. Venetian painting, however, did not immediately benefit from this process. This was for two reasons. First, its early history remained unexplored by those who lived outside Venice, partly because it was much slighter and partly because it seemed much less influential than that of central Italy. Second, it was much more difficult to buy early Venetian work because very little of it was in private hands. Consequently, well into the second or third decades of the nineteenth century Venetian art


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persisted in being associated almost exclusively with the painting of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Now the art of the Venetian High Renaissance can be distinguished from central Italian Renaissance painting in one very important respect. The painting of Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese never achieved the same status within the canon as that of Michelangelo and Raphael, and there was never the same consensus about their standing, either as individuals or as a group. ‘Great, but seriously faulted’ was the dominant judgement from Vasari onwards. There are various possible reasons for this, but I should like to suggest that one of them derives from the language adopted by successive generations to explain Venetian painting. The status of art objects in the culture is powerfully dependent on the language of critical discourse. We might go as far as to say that the reputation of any school, or artist, or even a single work of art lives in the language created to appreciate, or criticize it. Now the language of these discourses—the terms of admiration or disapprobation—change over time, and some discourses evolve more slowly than others. In the case of Venetian art, the widely differing opinions and the absence of a consensus were reflected in the instability of the constituent elements of the explanatory discourses. Michel Pêcheux in his book Language, Semantics and Ideology (1975) develops Althüsser’s work on discourses to show how they develop out of prevailing ideologies through stressful and often antagonistic mutual relations; how, as Roland Barthes put it, ‘discourse . . . moves, in its historical impetus by clashes’.5 In the case of the discourses about Venetian art the evidence of stress is particularly widespread. It took the obvious form of disagreement between individuals about the achievement of the school or disputes about the standing of individual members— most notably Tintoretto. It also took the form of inconsistencies within the explanatory discourses of individuals. These were not necessarily conceptual self-contradictions; more usually they took the form of discrepancies between intellect and feeling, concept and percept, and the stresses are detectable most prominently in the metaphoric rhetorical structures. These stresses are immediately evident in the single most powerful voice raised against the Venetians in the eighteenth century—that of 5 Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (1977), p. 200.

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Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds was well-known among his contemporaries for his love of Venetian colour. ‘Why are we told’, asked William Blake, ‘that Reynolds is a Great Colourist & yet inferior to the Venetians?’6 Many years later Roger Fry confirmed how Reynolds was ‘entirely at home in Venetian art’, and that in his Italian sketchbooks he made more notes on Tintoretto than on any other artist.7 Yet in his Fourth Discourse, so powerful was his strength of feeling that Reynolds felt obliged to employ Shakespearean rhetoric to denounce the Venetians. Their ‘boasted Art’, as he called it, ‘will appear a mere struggle without effect; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.8 Though Reynolds excluded Titian from general censure, he fully endorsed Vasari’s deep distrust of Venetian art. He quoted with approval Vasari’s criticisms of Tintoretto’s ‘wild, capricious, extravagant . . . fantastical inventions’ and his disparagement of Veronese for a mere ‘dexterity of managing and disposing the masses of light and groups of figures’.9 It is significant that Reynolds employs ventriloquism at this point and, under stress, quotes the opinions of others, but the same problem was registered by a number of his contemporaries. John Opie was one of them. Reynolds was, says Opie, ‘the slave and master of colouring, to gain which he almost lost himself, though sedulously devoted to it in practice, [but] seems in his writings, to consider it as rather detrimental, if not incompatible with sentiment and the grand style of art.’10 Reynolds’s public criticisms of the Venetians were, principally, two. The first was that Venetian painters were too concerned with detail—particulars of clothing, materials, marbles, finery, and stuff at the expense of ‘general nature’. They represented, he said, ‘the Dutch part of the Italian genius’.11 The second criticism was more damaging and came directly from Vasari. In a famous vignette in The Lives of the Artists Vasari says that having seen Titian’s Danaë in Rome, Michelanglo bemoaned the fact that the Venetians were igno6 The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1966), p. 450. 7 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, ed. Roger Fry (1905), p. 68. 8 9 Reynolds, Discourses, p. 88. Reynolds, Discourses, pp. 92 and 88. 10 Lectures on Painting by the Royal Academicians: Barry, Opie and Fuseli, ed. Ralph N. Wornum (1848), p. 314. Opie (1761–1807) gave his lectures just before his death in 1807. 11 The Idler, no. 79, Sat. 20 Oct. 1759.


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rant of design, composition, and drawing, and in their neglect of form they had abandoned themselves to colour. ‘But if general censure was given to that school from the sight of a picture of Titian,’ Reynolds adds, ‘how much more heavily and more justly would the censure fall on Paolo Veronese, and more especially on Tintoret?’12 How could theory and practice be so at variance? How could Reynolds, who spent so much time trying to imitate the effects of Venetian colour, abuse it so roundly in public? The pedagogic context of the Discourses is often offered as a reason for their uncompromising and extreme tone, but this does not explain why Reynolds felt so uneasy about Venetian art and its effect on the young. For this, we have to turn to Reynolds’s contemporaries and successors. His attack on Venetian painting was potently influential and his stentorian warnings were echoed down the line of the Professors of Painting both inside and outside the Academy, as each in turn stopped his students’ ears against the sirens of the lagoon. The burden of complaint was that the Venetians lacked substance. The Venetians produced ‘merely pieces of furniture’, said Henry Sass, the eponymous founder of the London drawing school, in 1818;13 earlier, in 1807, Opie warned students to beware of being ‘captivated by [their] ostentatious splendour’: a view which, forty years later, Opie’s editor Nicholas Wornum, wholeheartedly supported.14 On into the nineteenth century, John Thomas James in his The Italian School of Painting (1820) described the Venetian style as merely ‘ornamental’, and as late as 1833, another Professor of Painting, Thomas Phillips, insisted that the Venetian school is ‘paramount’ in ‘employing composition for the mere purpose of filling a portion of space’.15 The remarks of James Barry provide perhaps the most useful clue to the forces underlying this disapproval. Speaking from the Chair of the Royal Academy Barry, without a hint of self-doubt, dismissed the ‘dashing and slobbering’ of the later work of Titian, and described how the ‘excesses’ of Tintoretto were ‘subversive of all intelligence and variety’.16 It is the word ‘intelligence’ which is significant. The 12 13 14 15

Reynolds, Discourses, p. 92. Henry Sass, A Journey to Rome and Naples (1818), pp. xlii–xliii. Opie, in Lectures on Painting (1848), p. 317. Thomas Phillips, Lectures on the History and Principles of Painting (1833), p.

101. 16 Barry, in Lectures on Painting, p. 226. James Barry (1741–1806) gave his lectures from 1784 to 1798.

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‘ornamental’ nature of Venetian painting focused on surface not depth, colour not form, and form appeals to the reason or the intelligence. This anthology of objections to Venetian painting could be matched by a corresponding anthology of appreciation where adoration takes precedence over ‘intelligence’ and reason; in which the admirers of the school describe their experiences in religious, mystical, or emotional terms, and in which the word ‘worship’ is prominent. It might include Hazlitt on how he ‘worshipped’ Titian ‘on this side of idolatry’;17 how Fuseli, Etty, and Ruskin were crushed by Tintoretto; and how, according to Gilchrist, by 1863 people had ‘learned almost to worship the transcendent Venetian painters’,18 producing, as Claude Phillips was to add, ‘the greatest pictorial art that the world has seen’.19 Here indeed is a clash of discourses. Venetian art was prominent and important in the history of art, and that prominence lent power to the clash. The exact reasons for the disputed reputation of the Venetians, for their shift in status from critical alienation to critical adulation, are harder to find, but this much can be said: because of its peculiar position in the development of Western painting, Venetian painting permitted great interpretative latitude. The paintings themselves were of high status, and what was in dispute was the nature of that status. Thus Venetian art offered the critic, writer, and historian a wider scope for personal interpretation and preference than the work of more established masters. Venetian art was an admirable vehicle for the expression of personal bias as well as more broadly held aesthetic values. One of the reasons for the evolution of taste for Venetian art was reactive, even dialectical. As is not infrequent in these matters, what was asserted by one generation was denied by the next. But, in the case of Venetian painting, this movement was eminently paternalistic; the imperatives of the father were denied by the son. Within the critical discourse, Venetian art was metaphorically identified as the female, and the struggle for possession of that female took on oedipal proportions. Now, in this period everyone—that is everyone who had any interest in Venice—knew about Reynolds’s strictures against Venetian 17 William Hazlitt,’Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy’ (1826), in Complete Works, x, 270. 18 Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1863), i, 264. 19 Sir Claude Phillips, ‘Venetian Art at the New Gallery’, Fortnightly Review, n. s. 57 (1895), 424.


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painting. Reynolds was a formidable authority. He was not only a painter, a writer, and a teacher; he was above all the ‘father’ of the Royal Academy. Thus to dissent from Reynolds’s view was to set oneself up against paternal authority. The ‘sons’ who occupied the chair of the Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, Barry, Opie, Fuseli, Leslie, Phillips, struggled publicly with their patrimony. On the one side they felt the need to assert themselves against Reynolds, but on the other they had inherited the paternal mantle of teacher and instructor of the young. Ruskin was the most potent advocate of Venetian painting in this period, and in so ostentatiously embracing Tintoretto (the most vilified of the Venetians), he set himself up oedipally against not just one but two ‘fathers’. First there was the ‘father’ of art history—Vasari, whose views on the subject have already been quoted—and then there was Reynolds, the ‘father’ of the Royal Academy. There is also a third father—Ruskin’s own—to whom I shall return. In public, the academic debate over the Venetians was gentlemanly and polite; it took the form of judiciously weighing up the relative technical and historical merits of the school, of placing it in the context of the history of art, and assessing its value for modern practice. At a deeper level, however, a more primordial struggle was being waged. This was taking place at the level of figurative language, amongst the tropes, the metaphors and the rhetorical units of the competing discourses, and it focused most specifically on the issue of colour in Venetian art. As we have seen, Reynolds, in common with continental authorities such as Mengs and Félibien, interpreted the Venetian use of colour as brilliant but shallow. The reasons for this can be attributed partly to tradition. From the Renaissance onwards, central Italian theorists of art had consistently favoured form above colour. For them, the superiority of drawing, composition, and design over hues and tints was the superiority of the real over the illusory, and the triumph of the spirit over the flesh. Colour, as Barry put it, was ‘subversive of intelligence’. In the eighteenth century, the strength of feeling about colour suggests that something was operating beneath reason. Again and again, colour was personified, and the persona that was attributed to it was often subversive or troubling. Sometimes, its role was dramatized and the drama in which it took part often had a curiously libidinal tone. Take Dryden, for example, who announcing this theme,

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personifies colour as a woman. In his introduction to Dufresnoy’s De Arte Graphica (1695) he speaks of the two sisters, colour and form. ‘Our author’, says Dryden, ‘calls colouring, Lena Sororis, in plain English the bawd of her sister the Design or Drawing’. This ‘bawd’ is simultaneously a mistress of deception and a procuress. ‘She cloathes, she dresses her [sister] up, she paints her, she makes her appear more lovely than she naturally is, she procures for the Design, and makes lovers for her.’20 ‘Dresses’, ‘procures’, ‘makes lovers’—the message is clear and Dryden employs the word ‘paint’ here with a double meaning. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘to paint’ still signified both the activity of the artist and the deceptive application of female make-up. ‘Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed / Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay’, says Shakespeare in Sonnet 101, and as his editor Stephen Booth points out, ‘truth has no need of rhetoric’ was proverbial in this earlier period—colour being a synonym for a ‘lie’.21 Reynolds, of course, knew this when he said: ‘the writers . . . whose taste has begun to decline, paint and adorn every object that they touch.’22 But what comes under the guise of a serio/comic joke in Dryden becomes a serious admonition in Reynolds. Reynolds, in his discussion of colour, assumes the role of the parent warning the son. The Venetians are the worst offenders, and adopting his most paternal tone, Reynolds advises his students (all male) to close their eyes to the ‘seducing qualities’ of Veronese and Tintoretto. ‘Young minds’, he says, ‘are . . . too apt to be captivated by this splendour of style.’23 As Reynolds tells it, the narrative of this discursive and metaphorical drama hinges on a damaging sexual encounter with a charming but deceitful female. ‘I . . . wish to caution you’, he says, ‘against being too much captivated’—captivated by the Venetian’s use of colour and their ‘sensual style’. ‘These are the persons,’ says Reynolds in full moral flight, ‘who may be said to have exhausted all the powers of florid eloquence, to debauch the young and unexperienced.’24 20 Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy, De Arte Graphica, trans. John Dryden (1695), p. xlviii. 21 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 86 and 327. I am grateful to Dr Catherine Maxwell who pointed this out to me. 22 This example is provided by the OED. Reynolds in his Seventh Discourse quotes the analogy from Dufresnoy. Reynolds, Discourses, p. 213. 23 24 Reynolds, Discourses, p. 87. Reynolds, Discourses, p. 93.


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‘Venetian, all thy Colouring is no more / than Boulster’d Plasters on a Crooked Whore’:25 this time William Blake in one of his rare moments of accord with Reynolds, and even Fuseli, who was far from unsympathetic to Venetian art, also spoke of ‘the debaucheries of colour’.26 Perhaps most startling is John Opie’s story of a specific Venetian ‘captivation’ followed by a debauchery within the walls of the Royal Academy itself. ‘Not long since,’ he said, we were astonished by the proposals of a very young lady, scarce in her teens, for unveiling her Venetian secret, and teaching Royal Academicians to colour, at five guineas a head, by which young and old, learned and unlearned, were equally captivated, and the grave biographer of our illustrious first president so dazzled, as to lament most pitiously the great man’s misfortune, in being cut off before he had had an opportunity of purchasing her inestimable and cheaply proffered favours.27

In this aside Venetian colour plays Salome to Joshua Reynolds’s John the Baptist in a tableau involving child prostitution and the dance of the seven veils, and implicating foremost members of the establishment. The connection between colour and sexual allure is ubiquitous in the literature of this period, but Opie makes an interesting distinction within the metaphors. He discriminates between the dangerous pleasures of Venetian jouissance and legitimate procreation. At one point, he congratulates the Florentines on rejecting the ‘blandishments’ and the ‘fascinating charms of this Cleopatra of the art’,28 and at another, he takes unabashed delight in recounting Titian’s ‘sexual’ exploits with colour. He claims Titian as the ‘father’ of modern art, and vividly re-creates the conception of this child as a sexual act between the male artist and the female, colour. Titian, said Opie, ‘unfolded all its charms . . . united breadth and softness . . . dared all its depths . . . and taught colour to glow and palpitate with all the warmth and tenderness of real life’.29 Colour, he says, quoting

25

The Complete Writings of William Blake, p. 465. Fuseli, in Lectures on Painting, p. 520. Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) gave his lecture on colour from 1810. 27 Opie, in Lectures on Painting, p. 322. The ‘young lady’ was Anna Jemima Provis, who in 1797 claimed that she had discovered in an old book details of recipes used by Titian and other Venetian painters. Many Royal Academicians were duped by her. 28 Opie, in Lectures on Painting, pp. 314 and 315. 29 Opie, in Lectures on Painting, p. 325. 26

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Dryden, can indeed be a ‘bawd’, but Titian never drove her to prostitution; he never, says Opie, overstepped the ‘modesty of nature, and made that ostentatious and meretricious use of it so censurable in many of his followers’.30 The word ‘meretricious’ comes, of course, from the Latin meretrix or harlot, from which also comes the Italian meretrice—a term which, as Fuseli knew, was applied to the notorious Venetian cortigiane. Fuseli, a well-travelled continental, knew that once experienced, Venetian jouissance is hard to give up. ‘Mutual similarity attracts, body tends to body, as mind to mind,’ he says, ‘and he who has once gained supreme dominion over the eye, will hardly resign it to court the more coy approbation of mind . . .’31 ‘Add to this’, he concludes, referring to Venice itself, ‘the character of the place and the nature of the encouragement held out to the Venetian artists’. In the culture of the cortigiana, seduction achieved a curious social respectability: ‘Religion itself had exchanged its gravity for the allurements of ear and eye, and even sanctity disgusted, unless arrayed by the gorgeous hand of fashion. —Such was, such will always be the birth-place and the theatre of colour.’ Colour, temptation, sex and birth—the same metaphorical conjunctions—so with the temptation of such magnitude, says Fuseli, it is not surprising, that Titian’s followers should have ‘yielded by degrees to its golden solicitations’.32 Writing in 1822 the young Anna Jameson was extremely forthright in her summing up of the connection between sex and colour in the work of Titian. In her Diary of an Ennuyée she told her readers that ‘Titian’s character is well known: his ardent cheerful temper, his sanguine enthusiastic mind, his love of pleasure, his love of women; and true it is, that through all his glowing pictures, we trace the voluptuary.’ His Virgins, she added, ‘are rather “Des jeunes épouses de la veille” far too like his mistresses; they are all luxuriant human beauty.’33 Titian, she added some years later, had ‘sensualised art’.34 No wonder Ruskin, living with his unravished bride in Venice in 1851, was forced to construct an elaborate theory which sought to disengage colour (and Venetian colour in particular) from the sen-

30 31 32 33 34

Opie, in Lectures on Painting, p. 326. Fuseli, in Lectures on Painting, p. 392. Fuseli, in Lectures on Painting, p. 392–3. Anna Jameson, The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826, new edn. 1834), iv, 259–60. Anna Jameson, ‘The House of Titian’, Memoirs and Essays (1846), p. 5.


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sual, and connect it with something more ethereal—love.35 ‘Colour’, he asserts, ‘. . . is the purifying or sanctifying element of material beauty.’36 In volume five of Modern Painters he summed up a view which he had been maturing for some years. In the context of earlier discourses which interpret colour as sexually subversive it seems less eccentric for Ruskin to claim that there is a parallel between colour and human sexuality. ‘As colour is the type of Love,’ says Ruskin, ‘it resembles it in all its modes of operation; and in practical work of human hands, it sustains changes of worthiness precisely like those of human sexual love.’ ‘That love’, he continues rather pathetically, given his personal circumstances, ‘when true, faithful, well-fixed, is eminently the sanctifying element of human life: without it, the soul cannot reach its fullest height or holiness. But if shallow, faithless, misdirected, it is also one of the strongest corrupting and degrading elements of life.’37 Venice was, of course, uppermost in his mind: ‘had Leonardo and Raphael coloured like Giorgione,’ he says, ‘their work would have been greater.’38 In 1860 Ruskin was still wrestling with his conscience about Venetian ‘purity’, but by then many admirers of the school in Britain had overcome their inhibitions and were delighting in Venetian colour. A rough guide to the shift in attitudes can be had from the changes in the price of Venetian pictures. In 1827 the National Gallery secured Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne for £1,543, whereas in 1857, it had to pay £13,650 for Veronese’s The Family of Darius. The way for this change was paved by a number of important figures, amongst whom the earliest was Henry Fuseli. Fuseli was of Swiss origin; he led a dramatic political life on the Continent and did not take up painting until he was twenty-nine, when, encouraged by Reynolds, he spent eight years in Italy studying the art. He finally settled in England in 1779, and it is significant that his acceptance into the British establishment as a Royal Academician had to wait until 1790. Fuseli was, by birth and temperament, an outsider. His experiences in Italy led him to feel aggrieved that ‘criti35

Ruskin’s struggle with Venetian colour began in the second volume of Modern Painters of 1846, and reached a climax in his ‘unconversion’ away from narrow Protestantism and his acceptance of the sensuality colour of Veronese’s Queen of Sheba in Turin in 1858. 36 37 Ruskin, Works, vii, 415 note. Ruskin, Works, vii, 417 note. 38 Ruskin, Works, vii, 415. For a startling contrast between English and American attitudes in this period see Zorzi, pp. 267–94.

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cism’, as he put it, ‘has attempted to dismiss Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto from the province of legitimate history with the contemptuous application of ornamental painters’.39 And so it was within the realm of ‘legitimate history’ that Fuseli attempted to redress the balance in favour of Venice. The medium he chose was the popular biographical history of painting, the Dictionary of Painters, published by Mathew Pilkington in 1770, which Fuseli reworked in 1810, adding new lives and appending additional notes to Pilkington’s old ones.40 Fuseli’s contribution to the reputation of Venetian art was twofold: historical and critical. He extended (for the English-speaking audience) the very historiography of Venetian art. For Pilkington Giovanni Bellini scarcely existed and before him Venetian painting was a blank. Bellini was known, says Pilkington, as ‘the founder of the Venetian school’, but his ‘design is a little Gothic, and his attitudes not well chosen’.41 Now eighteenth-century Venetians themselves knew perfectly well that the history of art in Venice before the end of the fifteenth century was not a blank, and at least two Italians had published histories which would eventually revolutionize the ignorance of the rest of Europe. Antonio Zanetti, the conservator of the library of San Marco, published his Della pittura veneziana in 1771 and Luigi Lanzi his multi-volume Storia pittorica della italia in 1795. Fuseli’s revision of Pilkington makes it clear that he knew both these works, and the 1810 reissue of the Dictionary of Painters includes an entry on the Vivarini, where Luigi, ‘the last of the Vivarini’, is compared with ‘Giovanni Bellini, whom he equals and . . . Vittor Carpaccia [sic] whom he surpasses’.42 Fuseli also mentioned these and other Venetians in his Royal Academy lectures of that same year. Early nineteenth-century readers were also introduced to other names which would have previously meant very little to them: Gentile da Fabriano (c.1370–1427), Andrea da Murano (fl. 1463–1512), and Squarcione (1394–c.1468). 39 Henry Fuseli, ‘The Art of the Moderns’, in The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, ed. John Knowles (1831), ii, 110–11. 40 This was the same year that he began his lectures at the Royal Academy on colour. 41 Pilkington, Dictionary (1770), p. 48. 42 Fuseli mentions these Painters in Life and Writings (1831), pp. 336, 338, 339, and 340, and the quotation is from Fuseli’s edition of Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters (1810), p. 9, and Life and Writings (1831), p. 341.


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But it is Fuseli’s critical contribution in the form of long notes added to Pilkington’s flat-footed entries that is more startling. In these, Fuseli adopted a critical discourse rarely heard before in art history, and amongst them, his remarks on Tintoretto are the most innovative. In Pilkington’s account Tintoretto reads like a school report. We learn that he is ‘the most expeditious painter that ever painted’, and shows ‘great readiness of execution and great excellence’.43 Fuseli, however, stresses both Tintoretto’s strengths and his weaknesses in such a way that their dynamic interplay makes them appear virtues. He becomes, for Fuseli, a romantic artist hero: ‘Goaded on by rage . . . perverted by a false ornamental principle . . . debauched by unexampled facility’, Tintoretto, says Fuseli, ‘sacrificed mind, design, character, and sense to incongruous imagery, fugitive effect and puerile allurements.’ In Fuseli’s account of the Miracle of the Slave, in the Accademia, he transforms the verbal energy of biography into the energy of painterly style, describing Tintoretto’s ‘fierceness of rapidity of execution, correctness and even dignity of forms, powerful masses of light and shade, and more than Tizianesque colour’. ‘With all the fury of a sketch,’ Fuseli continues, ‘it has all the roundness and decision of finish; the canvas trembles; this is the vivid abstract of that mossa which Agostino Caracci exclusively ascribes to the Venetian school.’44 The verbal mossa of Fuseli’s prose is induced by the apparently spontaneous accumulation of adjectival phrases, which is itself the analogue of the painter’s own ‘sketch’, produced under the influence of powerful and immediate inspiration. When Fuseli turns to the Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco, he asks a rhetorical question, which seems to me to be crucial in the history of art-historical discourse, and provides an essential clue to the innovation which Fuseli has introduced into that discourse: ‘What impression feels he, who for the first time casts a glance on the immense scenery of that work?’45 What indeed! What Fuseli has done is to prioritize the spectator’s response in such a way that the account of the work of art as a material object is subordinated to the impression it creates. In the Miracle of the Slave the canvas ‘trembles’ only in Fuseli’s affected mind; similarly in the account of the 43 44 45

Pilkington, Dictionary of Painters (1770), p. 613. Fuseli, in Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters (1810), p. 443. Fuseli, in Lectures on Painting, p. 520.

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Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco language inhabits a space between viewer and object in such a way that it re-enacts or recreates the viewer’s response. Its primary concern is with the affective power of the work, and only at a secondary level is it concerned with technical or stylistic detail. The ‘numberless parts’ of the landscape are anthropomorphized by Fuseli as they ‘are connected by a lowering, mournful, minacious tone’. Detail is dedicated not to clarifying the image but to communicating the power of the impression: ‘A general fearful silence’, says Fuseli, ‘hushes all around the central figure of the Saviour’, and the representation of nature is imbued with feeling and emotion—what Ruskin later called the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’. ‘An assemblage of colours . . . all tinged by grief, all equally overcast by the lurid tone that stains the whole, and like a meteor hangs in the sickly air’. In the argument which Fuseli develops in favour of Tintoretto, the sensibility of the audience is integral to the act of full appreciation. In Fuseli’s view, all the limitations, the failures, the inadequacies that had previously been attributed to Tintoretto are now transcended within the synthesizing imagination of the spectator. The spectator is held in a state of suspended animation before the work; and, in that state, superior judgements come into operation: ‘Whatever inequality or derelictions of feeling, whatever improprieties,’ writes Fuseli, dismissing at a stroke Vasari and Reynolds, ‘all vanish in the power which compresses them into a single point, and we do not detect them till we recover from our terror.’46 One must not claim too much for Fuseli, but subsequent writers, including Ruskin, attended carefully to him. His unorthodoxy and his unusual taste are vividly demonstrated by the fact that when that rather dull stick, Allan Cunningham, came to revise this same dictionary in 1824, he systematically removed Fuseli’s passionate outpourings, preferring instead Pilkington’s pallid prose. Cunningham, who was deeply suspicious of Venetian influence on the young, added an introductory section to yet another edition of the same book in 1840 in which he dismissed the artists before the Venetian High Renaissance as ‘barbarous’. A note about Tintoretto is wonderfully and personally revealing: ‘Travellers assert’, says Cunningham, ‘that his works are of the highest order.’47 46 47

Fuseli, in Lectures on Painting, p. 521. A General Dictionary of Painters (1840), pp. xliii and xlvii.


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William Etty was just the kind of traveller of whom Cunningham disapproved. In 1823, he fell prey to Venetian painting and he, too, felt that the works of Tintoretto were ‘of the highest order’. ‘The poetry of his Last Judgement, the hues, the teeming richness of Composition, —figures whirled in all possibilities of action and foreshortening, —excite astonishment at his powers that does not easily subside.’48 Etty, a friend of Fuseli, had anticipated being overwhelmed by his seven months in Venice and was not disappointed. His enthusiasm was heightened by his Byronic love of the city that added yet another layer to the response to Venetian painting: the identification of art and environment. We have already detected it in Fuseli’s account of the ‘birth-place and the theatre of colour’. In Etty, it becomes fanciful. Like a ‘bee’, he speaks of how he sucks at ‘the sweets of Venetian colour: Nostro Paolo, —divine! Nostro Tintoretto’, and how the ‘Beloved city’ seemed ‘to love and cherish’ him even as he ‘loved it’.49 Etty was one of the first of a generation of young British artists for whom a Venetian sojourn became de rigueur. Engravings of High Renaissance and early Italian art had been distributed all over Europe. Venetian art, however, presented insuperable problems for the engraver since colour was, as yet, unreproducible.50 One simply had to go to Venice. The stern admonitions of Sir Joshua Reynolds and his successors certainly made Venice alluring, so what could be more attractive to young artists than a pilgrimage to the very fountainhead of colour followed immediately by Pisa and Florence? With the loosening of neoclassical values, the early Italians and the Venetians rose in status, and both Pisa and Venice were incorporated into the travel itinerary of the vie de bohème. In the steps of Etty in 1823, came his friend Charles Eastlake. He was followed by David Wilkie in 1830, William Collins in 1836, by Watts in the mid-1840s, and many others. Francis Haskell points out just how many were impressed both by Pisa, ‘that Mecca for all those in search of new aesthetic emotions’,51 and by Venice; but, as Haskell points out, it was the latter that affected artistic practice. The attraction of colour 48

Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, R.A. (1855), i, 169. Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, i, 159. Fewer pictures had left Venice in the eighteenth century. Compared with Florence, Rome, and elsewhere in Italy, Venice had been largely spared the plundering of the French under Napoleon. 51 Francis Haskell, ‘The Two Temptations’, in Rediscoveries in Art (1976), p. 47. 49 50

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was enormous; it was fresh and it was forbidden by the fathers, and it is just that sense of forbidden freshness that comes from the contemporary accounts. It can be felt in Hazlitt’s well-known rendition of Titian’s portrait A Man in Black, which he revisited in the Louvre in 1826. Hazlitt was a painter manqué and his strong, sensuous reaction echoes that of Fuseli’s and anticipates Ruskin’s: ‘Its keen steadfast glance staggered me like a blow,’ wrote Hazlitt.52 Similarly, Lamb’s highly imaginative account of the fictional double timescheme in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne in 183353 was made possible by the freeing of critical constraints and the greater latitude for interpretation possible in the Venetian context. As Michael Bartram so persuasively argues, for both Hazlitt, Lamb, and a whole generation of artists in the 1820s and 1830s, ‘Venetian painting was well placed: within the canon, but possessing the attraction of being only precariously so’.54 It is unlikely, however, that either Hazlitt or Lamb or the young artists who nurtured private enthusiasms for Venetian art would have done very much to change its reputation in this country. One person, however, who actively brought the Venetians closer to the mainstream of British taste was Charles Eastlake. According to Etty, Eastlake’s election to Associateship of the Royal Academy was the direct result of Venetian influence. ‘Of Venezia, cara Venezia! I often think,’ Etty wrote to Eastlake in 1827, ‘her tones—her unrivalled colour! Have you drank at her enchanted fountain? . . . that you have drunk of; your works avow it.’55 Had Eastlake remained only an artist his influence on taste would have been as slight as that of his contemporaries, but as a writer, official, and bureaucrat he was able to materialize his youthful love of Venetian art.56 It was Eastlake’s visit to Venice in 1828 which confirmed him in his response to Venetian art, and like Fuseli before him he became inter52

William Hazlitt, ‘Notes of a Journey Through France and Italy’ (1826) in The Complete Works, x, 112. 53 Charles Lamb, ‘Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art’ (1833), in Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (1980), pp. 338–9. 54 Michael Bartram, ‘Venetian Renaissance Painting: the Literary Response in the Nineteenth Century’, unpub Ph.D. thesis, Reading, 1981, p. 26. 55 Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts: Second Series (1870), p. 112. 56 Eastlake was an official of the Fine Arts Commission, then Librarian of the Royal Academy, Keeper of the National Gallery, President of the Royal Academy, and Director of the National Gallery.


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ested in its earlier history. The historical sense dominated in the reception of early Italian art, and Venetian painting achieved intellectual respectability only when its history was laid bare. As we saw in Chapter One (pp. 11–12), the early Italian artists achieved a secure foothold in English taste because they were illustrative of the ‘growth and development’ of art. Since Venetian art had not been collected in this way, and in spite of the valiant efforts of the Venetians themselves—Bellori, Boschini, Lanzi, and, above all, Zanetti— Venetian art seemed to lack antecedents. Etty, for example, demonstrates this when writing to Sir William Richmond in 1823. He clearly expected Sir William to share his enthusiasm for High Renaissance artists, but it is significant that he points out that the works of ‘Paris Bordone . . . Bonifazio . . . [and] Carpaccio . . . all these Names, great here, are hardly known among us.’57 Lacking a history, Venetian painting lacked intellectual (as opposed to aesthetic) seriousness. The paintings of Titian, Tintoretto, and Giorgione were indeed wonderful, but they hung in the vacuum of historical space. Eastlake, however, who knew the work of Lanzi and visited Venice ‘Zanetti in hand’,58 discovered Giovanni Bellini, and Bellini represented for him the irresistible combination of ‘primitive’ and colourist. The early history of Venetian art now unfolded before him, and soon after the opening of the National Gallery he wrote: ‘I hope the historical view of art will not be ultimately overlooked in our National Gallery. I think much of the essence of Venetian art is to be understood by tracing it from the beginning.’59 This was indeed ‘significant foresight’, as Elizabeth Eastlake pointed out, since Eastlake himself was (much later) responsible for bringing several important Venetian works to the National Gallery. But it was not historical importance alone that lent substance to the appeal of the paintings at this time. Their study was given a new and special urgency by A. F. Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne (1836). As we saw in the last chapter, most of the text is devoted to establishing levels of excellence amongst the early Italians according to the degree to which they expressed Christian piety and sentiment. Unusually for the time, however, Rio concludes his history with a section on 57

Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, i, 169. Eastlake, Contributions, p. 132. Eastlake also used Zanetti extensively for his Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847). 59 Eastlake, Contributions, p. 133. 58

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Christian Venice. ‘On n’est pas dans l’habitude’, he said, ‘de chercher de la poésie chrétienne dans l’histoire de la république de Venise.’60 No indeed, since Venice had been so long associated with sensual stimuli and libidinal pleasure; yet Rio went on to devote a large proportion of his text to a school which had certainly been overlooked by the new generation of pietist art historians. Using Zanetti’s Della pittura veneziana and quoting (unacknowledged) the words of Fuseli, he traces what he sees to be a strong line of Christian sentiment in the work of Cima da Conegliano, Marco Basaiti, Vittore Carpaccio, the Vivarini, Giovanni Bellini, and on into the sixteenth century. Suddenly, Venetian art, which had for so long been associated with debauchery, now appeared in the garb of holiness and piety. Anna Jameson, who fell under Rio’s spell, repeated similar sentiments. ‘In the Venetian school’, she wrote in her Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters of 1845, ‘still survived this inspiration, this vital and creative power, when it seemed extinct everywhere besides. From 1540 to 1590, the Venetians were the only painters worthy the name in Italy.’61 The notion that the Venetian could be spiritual was quite a novelty, but Rio’s claims opened the way for a reassessment of the enfant terrible of Venice—Tintoretto. When Ruskin went to Italy in 1845 it was in search of a deeper and more extensive education in Italian religious art. There he ‘discovered’ Fra Angelico and Tintoretto. The reputation of Fra Angelico has already been mentioned (p. 94 above) and Ruskin was ready to subscribe to it. But the effect of Tintoretto on him was quite different. He wrote to his father: ‘I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret.’62 Tintoretto, he said, was ‘a being from a planet a million of miles nearer the sun not . . . a mere earthly painter’.63 The psychic impact of Tintoretto came upon Ruskin like a physical force and was so deeply embedded in his mind that he continued to feel that force for the rest of his life. In 1845, however, he went to Italy to discriminate between artists and schools, mainly in respect of the spiritual achievement or failure of each. The previous generation of British art lovers looked to Michelangelo and particularly to 60

Rio (1836), pp. 433–4. Anna Jameson, Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters (1845), ii, 251. Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents 1845, ed. Harold I Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 211. 63 Ruskin, Works, iv, 394. 61 62


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Raphael for spiritual sustenance. Ruskin dutifully paid his respects to these masters in Florence but was clearly tiring of them. In his search for fresh stimulus, he turned first to the painting that had appealed to the artists of the 1820s and 1830s—the fresco cycle at Pisa, and early Italian art including that of Fra Angelico in Florence. Once, these had seemed very revolutionary. But by the time that Ruskin was in Italy, as we saw in the last chapter, a taste for early Italian art was becoming something of an orthodox cult with Catholic associations. This posed some problems for the extremely Protestant Ruskin, and it was at this point and with evident relief that he encountered the work of Tintoretto. By the time that he reached Venice in the autumn of 1845, Ruskin was already in a state of high excitement about his experiences elsewhere in Italy, and now in Tintoretto he made a real discovery. Not only had Tintoretto been outlawed by the Royal Academy, neither had he been brought within the fold of Romanist aesthetics; he was a painter whom old criticism had dismissed and of whom the ‘new’ critics of the ecclesiastical party had nothing to say. We have already seen that in England Tintoretto had always been a minority taste, and how his admirers, either by fortune or choice, had always been on the fringes of the establishment. Ruskin was no exception, and his ecstasy before the works in the Ducal Palace and the Scuola di San Rocco was as much an act of rebelliousness and self-assertion as it was a state of aesthetic euphoria. His oedipal rejection of the views of Vasari and Reynolds has already been mentioned. To that list we can now add those of Ruskin’s father, John James, who would have shared none of his son’s admiration for Tintoretto. When Ruskin came to write about Tintoretto in the second volume of Modern Painters he did so in a chapter with a splendidly phallic title: ‘The Imagination Penetrative’. In it he stresses the masculine power, the fury of Tintoretto for which Vasari and subsequent critics had vilified him, as opposed to the spiritual peace, calm, and tranquillity of Fra Angelico. The Massacre of the Innocents in the Scuola di San Rocco becomes, in Ruskin’s hands, a taxonomy of auditory and tactile effects. ‘The scene’, he writes, ‘is the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision.’ Fuseli’s stress on the perceiving agent is intensified by Ruskin as he dramatizes the image. Throughout, active verbal structures take precedence over the substantives so that a

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sense of movement overwhelms the pictorial image. ‘A huge flight of stairs,’ writes Ruskin, ‘without parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women mixed with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized by the limbs, she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost, dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight—she will be dashed dead in a second.’64 Stasis gives way to movement, and in the dramatic rendering of the image, its instantaneity dissolves into temporality: ‘she will be dashed dead in a second.’ When finally Ruskin tells us how the ‘shrieks’ of the women ‘ring in our ears till the marble seems rending around us’, we have reached a curious point in art-critical discourse. In an inversion of the neoclassical ideal, everything in Tintoretto that was for Reynolds a vice, has become for Ruskin a virtue.65 In contrast to the inward peace of Fra Angelico, Ruskin perceives nothing but Tintoretto’s representation of movement, violence, and energy. Yet for Ruskin, Tintoretto is no less a spiritual artist than the monk of Fiesole. In fact he is more so. Like Fra Angelico, his principal subject is the Christian legend, yet, in Tintoretto, the commonplace and the quotidian combine with the transcendent and the spiritual. Most importantly, however, for Ruskin, Tintoretto, unlike Fra Angelico, dramatizes life; he depicts it as a struggle; life in Tintoretto is a complex interaction of active deeds which invite the moral participation of the perceiving consciousness. The ‘terror’ which Fuseli felt before the Crucifixion was a disinterested emotion created largely by Tintoretto’s representational techniques; for Ruskin, the same painting stresses instead the ‘fainting of the deserted Son of God’ and the ‘rage’ of the onlookers.66 In Ruskin’s account of the Massacre of the Innocents the ‘horror’ engendered there derives from empathy with the plight of the terrorized mothers. Similarly the Baptism is greater than any by Giotto, Verrocchio, or Fra Angelico, he says, because it exemplifies the ‘earthly struggle’ of Christ. In this way, Ruskin has transformed Tintoretto into a Protestant artist, perhaps into the Protestant artist par excellence. Fra Angelico is the painter of the world of Catholic faith; Tintoretto, the painter of the world of Protestant deeds. It is one of those ironies of history that Ruskin and Dante Gabriel 64

Ruskin, Works, iv, 273. Ruskin removed this passage about the shrieks of the women in editions subsequent to the first. 66 Ruskin, Works, iv, pp. 270 and 271. 65


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14. Titian/Giorgione, Venetian Pastoral. Early sixteenth century. Oil on canvas, 109 ¥ 137 cm (43 ¥ 54 in). Louvre, Paris

Rossetti visited the Louvre within a month of each other in 1849. Ruskin was already drifting away from his preoccupation with early Italian art and was developing a strong interest in the Venetians. Titian and Tintoretto both caught his attention and he wrote extensive notes on their paintings, but it was about Veronese’s Marriage at Cana that he claimed that ‘more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.’67 Though he noticed Giorgione’s Concert Champêtre or Venetian Pastoral (Fig. 14),68 it was left to Rossetti to write the poem. Giorgione was certainly not a neglected or unknown painter. 67

Ruskin, ‘Notes on the Louvre 1849’, in Works, xii, 456. This visit was made on 8 Sept. 1849 on return from a visit to Switzerland. 68 Ruskin, Works, xii, 471. Ruskin first made a brief note on the Concert Champêtre in 1844 when he said that it was ‘very valuable’ (Ruskin, Works, xii, 454). The attribution to Giorgione was questioned by Gustav Waagen as early as 1839 and the debate about the relative contribution to this work of Giorgione and Titian still continues. See Pignatti, T., Giorgione: Complete Edition (1971), pp. 132–3.

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He was always prominent in histories of Venetian art, but his quieter and more enigmatic paintings tended to be overshadowed by the more aggressive, controversial, and brilliant works of Titian and Veronese. Rossetti’s sonnet ‘For a Venetian Pastoral’, however, marks (in England at least) a further stage in the fortunes of Venetian art. It is worth quoting in full, since its mood is so far removed from the mossa of Ruskin on Tintoretto. Water, for anguish of the solstice, yea, Over the vessel’s mouth still widening, Listlessly dipt to let the water in With low vague gurgle. Blue, and deep away, The heat lies silent at the brink of day. The hand trails weak upon the viol-string That sobs; and the brown faces cease to sing, Mournful with complete pleasure. Her eyes stray In distance; through her lips the pipe doth creep And leaves them pouting; the green shadowed grass Is cool against her naked flesh. Let be: Do not now speak unto her lest she weep, — Nor name this ever. Be it as it was: — Silence of heat, and solemn poetry.69

The interrogation of the image is reminiscent of Keats’s questioning of the Grecian urn, and the tentative interpretation seems at first remote from Ruskin’s bold assertions about the moral certainties expressed in Tintoretto’s work. Even here, though, the stress lies upon narrative. Certainly Rossetti exploits the stasis of the image, but this simply heightens curiosity about a narrative whose meaning, to quote Keats, ‘doth tease us out of thought’. Everything is enigmatic. And so it was with Giorgione. Enigma already possessed his shadowy life and early death, and the sense of mystery was enhanced by the discovery of the Tempestà in the 1850s, a painting whose subject has never been satisfactorily explained. Giorgione was the painter for those who valued the independence of form and content—Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Swinburne and particularly Pater, for whom the works of Giorgione above all others ‘aspire towards the condition of music’.70 69 The Rossetti Correspondence (2002), i, 114. Rossetti considerably revised this poem in later life. 70 Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance, ed Donald L. Hill (Berkeley, 1980), p. 106.


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By 1850, attitudes to Venetian painting were much richer and more diverse than they had been in 1750. The notion that the Venetians were great but flawed stage designers who had fallen prey to their baser instincts had been eroded, if not obliterated; Venetian painting now had a prehistory complete with its own Primitives; it had received the benediction of Christian art criticism, and Tintoretto, formerly the delinquent of the school, was ripe for canonization. The changes had been wrought largely from the margins of current art discourse. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Venetians had moved into the centre of established taste and had been vested with High Victorian virtues. Their splendour, their florid magnificence, and their richness fitted well with some aspects of late nineteenth-century love of pomp and circumstance, and was celebrated in the assured adjectival prose of John Addington Symonds and the hyperbole of Claude Phillips.71 But, once again, the sons moved in to remove the fathers. ‘A really impartial study of the mass of Tintoretto’s work will show . . . that [he] is frequently capricious, superficial, and essentially frivolous. While, when we come to the lesser Venetians, to Pordenone, Bordone, and Bonifazio, we may fairly admit that the splendour of decorative and non-significant colour is almost the only claim they have to our reverence.’72 The wheel has come full circle. The language is not neoclassical, but the sentiments are. This is Roger Fry in 1907 endorsing the views of Joshua Reynolds (who is no longer the father but the grandfather) in a new and sympathetic edition of the Discourses. 71

John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Fine Arts (1877), pp. 347 ff., and Claude Phillips, who claimed in 1897 that ‘There is no greater name in Italian art—therefore no greater name in art—than that of Titian’, The Earlier Work of Titian (1897), p. 1. 72 Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Roger Fry (London, 1907), p. 68.

6 Ruskin’s Venice and Victor Hugo’s Paris W hen Ruskin and Rossetti were in the Louvre in October 1849 their motives for visiting were very different. Rossetti at the age of twenty-one and abroad for the first time was in search of new sensations and experiences; Ruskin at the age of thirty and with several volumes of criticism already published was thinking seriously about material for The Stones of Venice. The first volume was published in 1851 the remaining two in 1853. Though Ruskin was by no means the first to write about Venice, these books changed the way in which people saw it. The three volumes of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice are difficult to identify generically. Justifiable claims have been made for them as a peculiar version of moral drama, a typological historical epic, a sacred legend, and even a kind of psychological travel book.1 They have also been described as a very early kind of cultural history, and there has been some attempt to trace their roots in the literature of writing about architecture. One of the most telling ways of locating their salient features has been to place them within the context of traditions already established in nineteenth-century writing, and to draw attention to the ways in which Ruskin operated within those traditional forms to create something of his own. Elizabeth Helsinger, for example, develops an idea originally suggested by Richard Stein that one of the central preoccupations of the books is with travel and journeying. Stein accounts for the famous imaginary 1 John Rosenberg in The Darkening Glass: a Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (1963), speaks of the ‘drama of a mystery play’, p. 80; Paul L. Sawyer, Ruskin’s Poetic Argument: the Design of the Major Works (Ithaca and London, 1985), pp. 94–5, treats of the typology of the book; Richard L. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation: the Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pater (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 77, speaks of The Stones of Venice as an ‘epic or sacred legend’, and Elizabeth Helsinger writes about the book as a piece of travel writing. Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘History as Criticism: The Stones of Venice’, in Studies in Ruskin, ed. Robert Rhodes and D. I Janik (Athens, Ohio, 1982), 176–80.

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trip from Padua to Venice in ‘The Sea Stories’ in terms of epic journeys taken by Dante and by Bunyan, and points out how the ‘physical movement across the seas and toward the center of the city parallels the narrative of the first five hundred years of Venetian history’.2 Helsinger enlarges upon this idea to show just how imaginatively powerful the literature of travel was for Victorian readers, and she points out how so many of Ruskin’s favourite authors—Byron, Wordsworth, Rogers, and others—adopted the leitmotif of the journey for explorations into the historical past.3 Though her insistence on The Stones of Venice as a travel document may seem at times too exclusive, it does, nevertheless, locate this aspect of the book firmly in an important tradition. Furthermore, it allows us to speculate on the relationship between the literal journey and metaphorical journeys such as the imaginative one into the past and the symbolic one into the self. Though Helsinger does not develop this question, her work opens up the fascinating issue of the significance for Ruskin of his Italian journey of 1845. Many of the imaginative sources of The Stones of Venice can be traced to this important year when Ruskin, removed from his parents, journeyed to Italy but journeyed also into himself, testing his inner reactions to art and architecture by what he perceived in the outer world. Helsinger also raises the question of what kind of history is written in the context of such a travel document. The critical consensus suggests that it is some form of ‘cultural’ history—what John Rosenberg calls ‘archetypal cultural history’, an idea which was modified by Helsinger to ‘historically self-conscious cultural criticism’.4 But what is ‘cultural criticism’? One way of seeing it, at least in the context of nineteenth-century historiography, is against what was accepted as a more orthodox form of historical writing—against that of, say, Hallam or Macaulay, or perhaps, more appropriately, Daru or Sismondi, to whose work Ruskin was indebted.5 Both these historians treat almost exclusively of politics, and their narratives are concerned with the actions of princes, politicians, and, of course, Doges. They rarely touch upon domestic life or the arts; when the ‘people’ appear they resemble a stage army—powerful, but 2

3 4 Stein, p. 87. Helsinger, p. 178. Rosenberg, p. 86. Pierre Antoine Daru, Histoire de la république de Venise (1819) and Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (1809–1818). 5

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essentially anonymous—and the arts are treated as a curious byproduct of political or economic factors. So in place of a linear progress of mainly political events, in The Stones of Venice we have a much slower evolution of large periods, and those periods are defined not so much by chronological time as by the moral temper which they represent. To be strictly accurate, ‘evolution’ is a misleading word to describe a process that, in Ruskin’s view, is in fact a decline, a decline which is precipitated by the struggle at the heart of The Stones of Venice—the struggle between Gothic and Renaissance. The much-used metaphors of ‘epic’ and ‘drama’ seem appropriate here, since in order to dramatize a historical struggle which took place on a European scale, Ruskin adopts a synecdochic method. He locates the European-wide conflict of interests at the point of maximum stress—Venice—and he does so in such a way that Venice becomes the ‘arena’ of the contending forces. Venice, Ruskin claims in a mood of interpretative extravagance, is ‘the source of the Renaissance’6 and ‘the centre of the Renaissance system’.7 But this is not all, and Ruskin further refines his ‘history’ away from that of the political historian. Inevitably the history of politics is propelled forward by time and events; Ruskin deals, instead, with the much slower time of the development of artistic style. Not only are the contending forces located in a single place—Venice—they are focused, as by a burning glass, within a single art—architecture. The flux of human events is arrested in art; the chronicle is memorialized in stone. What Pater was later to erect into a controversial principle about art’s encapsulation of the transient moment is anticipated by the methodology of The Stones of Venice. ‘By transferring most of his attention to buildings as events,’ says Paul Sawyer, ‘he evinces the Coleridgean idea of a symbol: his churches, we might say, are portraits and ideals because they are aesthetic representations as well.’8 In this way, Ruskin also anticipates the methods of the cultural historian. Where the historian of events is dominated by linear movement, and for him history is a progression of interwoven strands, the cultural historian is concerned with the section across those strands, showing how each relates to the other at any one point in the progression. In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin refined a method which was brought to a point of high sophistication by Michelet in France, Pater in England, and especially Burckhardt in Switzerland. 6

Ruskin, Works, ix, 47.

7

Ruskin, Works, xi, 82.

8

Sawyer, p. 97.


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Nevertheless, by the time that Ruskin was writing, his method had had a short but distinguished history, not amongst political historians but amongst writers of architectural history. It was they who had come closest to recognizing the link between style and culture, and Ruskin’s choice of a historico-architectural discourse in The Stones of Venice as a vehicle for wider cultural issues is attributable, at least in part, to the fact that it was in just this field that cultural history had begun to be legitimized. Ruskin’s method may seem forward-looking, and even original, but his interpretation remains problematic. His methods appear progressive, whereas his conclusions are retrogressive. They are as remote from us, Rosenberg says, as the teleology of Shakespeare’s history plays. Gerald Bruns agrees. ‘Ruskin’s views of art history may seem to us extravagant, but’, he adds, ‘they are not unintelligible.’9 This problem is particularly embarrassing in the context of Ruskin’s judgements about the Renaissance. Unlike his lyrical assessment of Byzantine and Gothic art, his view of Renaissance culture now seems decidedly eccentric. This is because it was superseded by Burckhardt’s quite different, humanistic interpretation. Ruskin’s account of the ‘pride’ and ‘infidelity’ of the Renaissance is entirely negative, and though he exempts Renaissance painting from general censure, he seems to have had no feeling for Renaissance philosophy, science, discovery, and architecture. In fact, in The Stones of Venice, the Renaissance often appears as a mere foil for the Gothic. Sometimes, its aesthetic and moral categories are the inversion of those of the earlier period; at other times, it becomes for Ruskin a kind of imaginative dumping-ground for all that he found politically and spiritually reprehensible in the modern world. So often his blindness to the Renaissance verges on the insensitive, the prejudiced, and the perverse. But neither Ruskin’s methods nor his conclusions were entirely new, and we can find precedents for both in earlier writers. These writers were neither as refined nor as fully developed as Ruskin, and yet the socio-cultural view of architecture had been developed in France, and the denigration of Renaissance art, architecture, literature, and philosophy was a commonplace in the art-historical discourses of the period. It was in the field of architectural writing that the germ of cultural history had begun to grow, and 9 Gerald L. Bruns, ‘The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking’, PMLA, 90 (1975), 913.

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it is an odd feature of nineteenth-century historiography that Kulturgeshichte, which we now associate so closely with the development of Renaissance studies, emerged from a genre which, in its early stages, had very little sympathy with Renaissance culture. So even if the type of cultural history which Ruskin employed in The Stones of Venice may have been new in English, it was more developed on the Continent. The connection between society and its expression in works of art had been explored a little by the French, most especially by writers on architecture, amongst whom there was an almost unanimous distaste for the Renaissance. In France, the historiography that had pushed forward the Gothic Revival had from the outset been political and polemical. Those well-known questions which, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had puzzled architectural historians and architects alike—‘In what style did we build?’ and ‘In what style shall we build?’—both received the politically contentious answer: ‘Style depends upon the culture which produces it,’ and, to the Romantic imagination, the rich Gothic surface provided palpable evidence of a correspondingly rich culture, while the symmetries of classicism were a testimony to Renaissance coldness and lack of humanity. Charles Nodier was one of the early champions of the Gothic in France, and he was convinced of its superiority to pretty well everything else. The issue of architectural style came to play a central role in the widespread debate between Romanticism and classicism in France, and Nodier, as the foremost, if self-appointed, representative of Romanticism felt that Gothic architecture symbolized all that was best in France’s ancient, benevolent, and Catholic past. Nodier’s Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France set out to remind the French of their glorious heritage. The volumes, which were published from 1820 onwards, were lavishly illustrated. Each one was dedicated to a different département, and the plates were accompanied by a critical account of the monuments. Though Nodier’s series might be added to that long list of titles for the armchair traveller identified by Helsinger, it is far from being simply an architectural guidebook. The text reflects the growing, though as yet undeveloped, belief that style could be interpreted as an index of the prevailing culture, and that architecture was able to register social and political change. Take, for example, Nodier’s account of the church of Louviers in the first volume devoted to Normandy. In this Nodier weighs up the positive and negative effects of what he calls ‘la


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RENAISSANCE, ou . . . la règne de FRANÇOIS Ier’, and it comes quite naturally to him to link precise, physical architectural detail with abstractions such as ‘noblesse’, ‘pureté’, and ‘sentiment réligieux’. ‘In the main part [of the church] and in the pilaster in the middle’, he writes, ‘one cannot fail to recognize the period of the Renaissance, undoubtedly a memorable and glorious revolution, which certainly creates ideas of nobility and purity in us.’ ‘But maybe’, he continues, ‘at the expense of religious sentiment of which Gothic architecture is the most perfect expression.’10 It is significant that Nodier thinks of the Renaissance as an époque, and one about which, in spite of his praise, he has strong reservations. Like Ruskin much later, Nodier admired the delicate richness of some cinquecento work, but distrusted the ontological consequences of the rationalism which produced it. In Nodier’s view, rationalism paralysed the free play of the imagination, and the manifestations of this rationalistic frame of mind in the contemporary inventions of printing and the mechanical replication of artworks led to stagnation and mental torpor throughout Europe. ‘This revolution,’ he wrote, ‘which more or less coincided with the invention of printing, produced the same effect in the visual arts as in literature. An ingenious slave of the past, it became the tyrant of the future; imitation took over the properties of the all the muses . . . the genius of Europe feared to be itself. It came to a halt.’11 In the 1820s, Nodier was joined in his campaign on behalf of French Gothic by the young Victor Hugo, and they both stressed the importance of architecture to the burgeoning French Romantic movement. In the 1820s, Hugo made many important contributions to the debate about restoration, but none was more influential than his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, which appeared in 1831. It was a new kind of romance, combining human drama with architectural history. As early as 1823, when he was only twenty-one years old, 10 ‘Dans ce partie principal et dans le pilastre du milieu on ne peut méconnoitre l’époque de la Renaissance, révolution glorieusement mémorable sans doubt, qui nous rendit des conceptions pleins de noblesse et de pureté . . . Mais peut-être aux dépens du sentiment réligieux dont l’architecture gothique étoit la plus parfait expression.’ Charles Nodier, J. Taylor, A. de Cailleaux et al., Voyages pittoresques it romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Paris, 1820–78), i, 2. 11 ‘Cette révolution qui concouroit à peu près avec la découverte de l’imprimerie produisit dans les arts du dessin le même effet que celle-ci dans la littérature. Esclave ingénieuse du passé, devenue le tyran de l’avenir, . . . le génie de l’Europe moderne craignit d’être lui même. Il s’arrêta.’ Ibid., i, 19.

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Hugo had reviewed a French translation of Scott’s Quentin Durward, in which he prophetically anticipated this innovative combination. ‘After the picturesque, but prosaic romance of Walter Scott,’ he said, ‘a different romance remains to be created, yet more beautiful and complete in our view. This is the romance, at once both drama and epic, picturesque but poetic, real but ideal, true but great, which will enchase Walter Scott in Homer.’12 The epical romance looks forward, of course, to his own novel Notre-Dame, but the terms of Hugo’s remarks—‘romance’, ‘drama’, ‘epic’—curiously anticipate similar terms used more recently to describe Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Now, if this were merely a question of terminology, the connection would be tendentious, and, to my knowledge, no one previously has thought to establish points of contact between Hugo’s novel and Ruskin’s history. But we do know that Ruskin read NotreDame in the 1830s and we know what he thought of it. He hated it. ‘I believe it to be simply the most disgusting book ever written by man,’ he told F. J. Furnivall in 1855; it had, he said, ‘caused more brutality and evil than any other French writing with which I am acquainted’.13 To this rather startling judgement, he added the confession that it caused him ‘harm’ as a young man, and he placed it at the head of ‘the whole cretinous school’ in France.14 The strength of the denunciation is revealing. Of course the Liberal French Catholic in Hugo was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the old-fashioned English Tory in Ruskin, but it does not take much to see that Ruskin’s cries of protest derive as much from proximity as distance. Many of the ideas which inform the narrative of Notre-Dame de Paris are similar in both form and substance to those which Ruskin later employed in The Stones of Venice, and in both works architecture is a measure of civilization. What Nodier had tentatively developed in the 1820s became in 12 ‘Après le roman pittoresque, mais prosaïque, de Walter Scott, il restera un autre roman à créer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. C’est le roman, à la fois drame et épopée, pittoresque mais poétique, réel mais idéal, vrai mais grand, qui enchâssera Walter Scott dans Homer.’ Victor Hugo, ‘Sur Walter Scott: à propos de Quentin Durward’, in Oeuvres complètes: critiques, ed. Jean Pière Reynaud (Paris, 1985), p. 149. 13 Ruskin, Works, xxxvi, 212. In Praeterita, Ruskin says that he read Notre-Dame ‘about 1834’; Works, xxxv, 143. Between 1833 and 1839 there were at least four English translations of Hugo’s novel. I quote from a modern version translated by John Sturrock, but give in the footnote the original French in an edition published in Paris in 1836. 14 Ruskin, Works, xxxv, 143, and xxxiv, 276.


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Hugo a central creative principle. ‘Up until the fifteenth century,’ Hugo wrote, ‘architecture was the principal register of mankind . . . during that period all ideas of any complexity which arose in the world became a building; every popular idea, just like every religious law, had its monuments . . . the human race, in fact, inscribed in stone every one of its important thoughts.’15 For Hugo architecture, in John Sturrock’s words, was ‘the most majestic and permanent repository of the national memory’;16 for Ruskin it was, in Richard Stein’s words, ‘a living symbol for the entire community’.17 Architecture’s greatest products’, wrote Hugo, ‘are less individual than social creations; the offspring of nations in labour rather than the outpourings of men of genius; the deposit left behind by a nation; the accumulations of the centuries; the residue from the successive evaporations of human society.’18 The true subject of history for Hugo and Ruskin is not politics or outward events, it is the moral and imaginative development of man. ‘The most important part of the history of man,’ said Ruskin, ‘is that of his imagination. What he actually does, is always in great part accidental.’19 So the gradual unfolding of mentalities takes precedence over the chronicle of battles and treaties. It is the life of the culture or the race rather than the career of the prince, Doge, or courtier which is stressed, and that life is often expressed in events which, for the political historian, might seem trivial. Hugo’s novel, originally entitled ‘1482’, opens on 6 January 1482—‘not a day’, as Hugo correctly points out, ‘of which history has kept any record’;20 it kept 15

Notre-Dame of Paris, trans. John Sturrock (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 195. ‘L’architecture a été jusqu’au quinzième siècle le registre principal de l’humanité . . . dans cet intervalle il n’est pas apparu dans le monde une pensée un peu compliquée qui ne soit faite édiface . . . toute idée populaire comme toute loi religieuse a eu ses monuments . . . le genre humain enfin n’a rien pensé d’important qu’il ne l’ait écrit en pierre.’ Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (Paris, 1836), p. 233. 16 John Sturrock, introduction to Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 20. 17 Stein, p. 83. 18 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 129. ‘. . . les plus grands produits d’architecture sont moin des oeuvres individuelles que des oeuvres sociales; plutôt l’enfantement des peuples en travail que le jet des hommes de génie; le dépôt que laisse un nation; les entassements que font les siècles; le résidu des évaporations successives de la societé humaine . . .’ (Hugo, pp. 144–5). 19 Ruskin, Works, xxii, 269. In the MS draft of The Stones of Venice Ruskin wrote that ‘the history of every people ought to be written with less regard to the events of which their government was the agent, than to the despotism of which it was the sign.’ Works, ix, 18 note 1. 20 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 31. ‘Ce n’est pas . . . un jour dont l’histoire ait gardé souvenir’ (Hugo, p. 11).

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comparatively little record, too, of the date to which Ruskin traced the collapse of Venice and the decline of the West—the death of Doge Carlo Zeno on 8 May 1418.21 Both writers treat their chosen dates as profoundly significant, as marking two moments in the history of a people, as signifying important stages in architectural history, as pivotal moments in the development of European culture, and in Ruskin’s case, a significant moment in his personal history.22 Furthermore, both books are romantic, flamboyant, imaginative testimonies to the superiority of Gothic architecture above all other styles. In Notre-Dame, Hugo uses the huge topographical panorama of a ‘A Bird’s Eye View of Paris’ as evidence of the rich and multifarious texture of Gothic art and life—the setting against which the narrative of Quasimodo and Esmeralda is played out. Similarly, in The Stones of Venice, the diversity of Gothic architectural detail, the surface carving, the use of coloured marble, and the irregularity of the elevations is evidence of the creativity and diversity of the Venetian Gothic imagination. Both works have a central focus about which both the text and the city revolves. At the centre of Hugo’s Paris towers Notre-Dame, ‘as powerful and as fecund as that divine creation whose twin characteristics of variety and eternity it seems to have purloined’;23 at the heart of Ruskin’s Venice stands the Ducal Palace, which Ruskin calls ‘the central building of the world’.24 Both Hugo and Ruskin exploit the energy and the vitality of the grotesque. This was not, at the time, unusual, and Wolfgang Keyeser has shown how important the idea of the grotesque was in the aesthetics of European Romanticism. He suggests that the idea that grotesque art disclosed deep psychic emotions came originally from Schiller and the Germans.25 Nevertheless, the points of contact between Ruskin and Hugo are striking, and no one before Hugo had employed the grotesque so extensively and with such force in a historical novel. In Hugo’s work, the irregular surface of Notre-Dame is

21 Ruskin’s source is, as Ruskin himself points out, Daru, but Daru attaches none of the importance to it which Ruskin does. 22 It almost coincided with the birthday of Effie Gray. See ‘Ruskin, Gautier, and the Feminization of Venice’, in Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman, eds., Ruskin and Gender (2002), pp. 64–86. 23 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 124. ‘Puissante et féconde comme la création divine dont elle semble avoir dérobé le double caractère: variété, éternité’ (Hugo, p. 138). 24 Ruskin, Works, xi, 38. 25 Wolfgang Keyeser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington, 1963).


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encrusted with grotesque sculpture of which the principal human representative in the text is the hideous but powerfully dynamic Quasimodo. Here, as elsewhere in Hugo, the grotesque is developed as an important symbol for the unexpected and the imaginative in art, a symbol for a vitality of mind which would not be bound by academic rules; the irregularity of the grotesque stands in sharp opposition to the symmetry, the clarity, the order, and the cold perfection of classicism. In Ruskin, too, the ‘noble’ grotesque of Gothic provides evidence of the expressive spirit of the free workman.26 ‘Those ugly goblins, and formless monsters’ of the Gothic façade, says Ruskin, ‘. . . are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone.’27 In the ‘most noble work of the Gothic period,’ there is, he says, ‘jest—perpetual, careless, and not unfrequently obscene’.28 Yes, Hugo agreed: ‘Monks and nuns coupled shamefully on capitals, as in the Hall of Chimneys in the Palais de Justice in Paris. The story of Noah was carved in full, as beneath the great portal of Bourges. A bacchic monk with asses’ ears and glass in hand laughed a whole community to scorn, as above the lavabo in the Abbey of Bocherville.’29 Though both Hugo and Ruskin see the grotesque as a democratic art, there are important differences of interpretation. Where Hugo reads the vigour of the images as subversive of ecclesiastical rule and as a symptom of popular rebelliousness, Ruskin interprets those same rude sculptures as part of a healthy and legitimized ‘game’ played within the bounds of ecclesiastical approval. One of the dominant and most extensively employed metaphors in Notre-Dame is that of the building as a book. As Hugo sees it, architectural form is a mode of writing or language; the whole medieval city of Paris is a ‘chronicle in stone’,30 made up of individual ‘volumes’ of which the principal is Notre-Dame itself. The church, he says, is a legible ‘book’. ‘Each face, each stone of this venerable

26 To which Ruskin adds the further category of the ‘ignoble’ grotesque as an expression of the degeneracy of the Renaissance. 27 Ruskin, Works, x, 193–4. 28 Ruskin, Works, xi, 136. 29 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 193. ‘Des moines et des nonnes honteusement accouplés, comme à la Salle-des-cheminées du Palais de justice à Paris. C’est l’aventure de Noë sculpté en toutes lettres, comme sous le grand portail de Bourges. C’est un moine bachique à oreilles d’âne et le verre en main riant au nez de toute une communauté, comme sur le lavabo de l’abbaye de Bocherville’ (Hugo, p. 230). 30 Ibid., p. 148. ‘Une chronique de pierre’ (Hugo, p. 170).

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monument is a page not only of our country’s history, but also of the history of science and architecture.’ ‘Indeed,’ he goes on, ‘many a massive tome and often the universal history of mankind might be written from these successive weldings of different styles at different levels of a single monument.’31 Just as Paris has its Notre-Dame, so Venice has its Ducal Palace, and never, says Ruskin, ‘had city a more glorious Bible’.32 It is, he says, a ‘Book-Temple’ whose ‘great series of capitals which support the lower arcade of the palace . . . might be read, like pages of a book, by those . . . who habitually walked beneath the shadow of this great arcade’.33 ‘The idea’, says Ruskin, ‘of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment.’34 It had certainly entered Hugo’s mind and he urged his readers to read the ‘beautiful pages of architecture’ of the façade of Notre-Dame, in terms not of Milton or Dante but of an epic tale worthy, he says, of the ‘Iliad or the Romanceros’.35 The architectural book is a vulnerable and delicate object, and Hugo, like Ruskin after him, was concerned almost to the point of obsession with the havoc which he felt was being wrought upon the pages of this book. Hugo in France and Ruskin in Venice pursued for years a practical and largely effective campaign against the so-called restoration, improvement, or the downright destruction of Gothic buildings, and both men conducted those campaigns with moral fervour. Both writers identified three principal causes of decay in ancient buildings. Time is the least destructive; collective political and religious revolutions rather more so, but the worst offender is the hand of the individual—what Hugo calls ‘the ever more foolish and grotesque fashions which, since the anarchic but magnificent aberrations of the Renaissance, have succeeded one another in the

31 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 129. ‘Chaque face, chaque pierre du vénérable monument est une page non-seulement de l’histoire du pays, mais encore de l’histoire de la science et de l’art . . . Certes, il y a matière à bien gros livres, et souvent histoire universelle de l’humanité, dans ces soudures successives de plusieurs arts à plusieurs hauteurs sur le même monument’ (Hugo, pp. 144–5). 32 33 Ruskin, Works, x, 141. Ruskin, Works, x, 365. 34 Ruskin, Works, x, 206. 35 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 123. ‘Belles pages architecturales . . . oeuvre colossale d’un homme et d’un peuple, tout ensemble . . . comme les Iliads et les romanceros’ (Hugo, p. 138).


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necessary decadence of architecture. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions.’36 At least part of this fear of destruction is the fear of the lost record and the lost message. Both writers employ the stones of their chosen cities to rewrite that message for their readers; both of them—one using Notre-Dame, the other the Ducal Palace—locate buildings within the context of architectural history and in the evolution of Western culture. Both Hugo and Ruskin analyse extensively the significance of Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance styles, and for each author style is not to be explained materially but in terms of the mentality of which those styles are expressive. The sermon that each man chooses to read from the stones of his chosen city, however, is a very different one. Broadly speaking, Hugo’s is a progressive lesson whereas Ruskin’s is one of decline and fall. For Hugo, Gothic is a populist art and a reaction against the ecclesiastical élitism of Romanesque. ‘The whole philosophy of the age, in fact, is inscribed in that sombre Romanesque style,’ says Hugo. It was, he claims, an authoritarian architecture that displayed ‘everywhere the priest, never the man’.37 After the Crusades, architecture was ‘invaded by the bourgeoisie, by the commons, by liberty’, and ‘the book of architecture no longer belonged to the priesthood, to religion, and to Rome.’38 In Hugo’s view, the positive spirit of democratic freedom expressed in Gothic architecture was short-lived and was rapidly transferred to the printing press. Amplifying considerably a point made by Nodier, Hugo says that the revolution initiated by Gutenberg was ‘the greatest event in history. It was the mother of revolutions.’39 The word ‘revolution’ is important here, since Hugo believed that the dissemination of knowledge through printing triggered the Lutheran revolution, which was itself a prolegomenon to the French Revolution. This led in turn to the July Revolution, 36

Ibid., p. 126. ‘Enfin les modes, de plus en plus grotesques et sottes, qui depuis les anarchiques et splendides déviations de la renaissance, se sont succédé dans la décadence nécessaire de l’architecture. Les modes ont fait plus de mal que les révolutions’ (Hugo, p. 141). 37 Ibid., p. 192. ‘Toute la pensée d’alors est écrite en effet dans ce sombre style roman . . . partout le prêtre, jamais l’homme’ (Hugo, p. 228). 38 Ibid., p. 192. ‘Envahie désormais par la bourgeoisie, par la commune, par la liberté . . . le livre architectural n’appartient plus au sacerdoce, à la religion, à Rome’ (Hugo, p. 229). 39 Ibid., p. 196. ‘L’invention de l’imprimerie est le plus grand événement de l’histoire. C’est la révolution mère’ (Hugo, p. 233).

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during which Hugo was composing his novel, and by implication to the 1848 revolution, against the background of which Ruskin was writing The Stones of Venice. Needless to say, given Ruskin’s wellknown distaste for the political turbulence in France, this view was not one with which he had much sympathy. Condescension was his mode of coping with Hugo’s republicanism, which he linked with John Stuart Mill’s. ‘What Diana Vernon is to a French ballerine [sic] dancing the Cancan,’ he wrote, ‘the “libertas” of Chartres and Westminster is to the “liberty” of M. Victor Hugo.’40 And as for ‘the modern or Cockney-French word liberté—M. Victor Hugo’s,’ said Ruskin, ‘[it] is not the equivalent of franchise.’41 It has, he said, more in common with the so-called ‘liberty’ of ‘that poor cretinous wretch, Stuart Mill’.42 Ruskin was far from alone in England in seeing Hugo as an immoral and worryingly subversive radical, and as Hugo’s views became more aggressively socialist in the 1830s so his popularity dwindled.43 On one occasion, Ruskin even threatened to walk out of a lecture given by Arthur Severn, if Severn so much as mentioned Hugo’s name.44 So Ruskin’s hostility to Hugo is entirely comprehensible; it undoubtedly derived from an awareness of Hugo’s intellectual proximity and was intensified by the ideological distance between the two men. Even though Hugo and Ruskin differed politically, they nevertheless held similar views both about the nature of medieval society and about the relationship between the Gothic period and the Renaissance. They both stress the organic, interdependent nature of Gothic society, its positive effect on the architectural imagination, and the collapse of the culture and the style at the end of the fifteenth century. They also shared similar views on the effects of the Renaissance on architecture. ‘From the sixteenth century on, archi40

41 Ruskin, Works, xxiii, 126. Ruskin, Works, xxiii, 116. Ruskin, Works, xxxiv, 528. 43 Popular though Notre-Dame was in England, at its first appearance it was something of a succès de scandale. William Hazlitt the younger, in his prefatory note to his 1833 translation, made Hugo appear a violent anti-Royalist and Republican, contrasting him with the repressive conservatism of Walter Scott. Furthermore, the Quarterly Review and the Foreign Review both waged war on Hugo for his ‘gross dereliction of decency’ in his treatment of the easy-going morality of Esmeralda. See: K. W Hooker, The Fortunes of Victor Hugo in England (New York, 1938), pp. 32–9, and Sturrock, p. 12. 44 Ruskin, Works, xxxiv, 727. His hostility did not, however, prevent his attending a performance of Hugo’s The Huguenot Captain in 1866. 42


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tecture’s malady was apparent; it was no longer the essential expression of society,’ wrote Hugo: ‘it turned miserably into a classical art . . . it became pseudo-antique . . . This was the decadence we call the Renaissance . . . It was this setting sun we take to be a dawn.’45 After the Renaissance, ‘the stonemason succeeded the sculptor. It meant farewell to all vitality, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It dragged on, like a pitiable mendicant of the studios, from imitation to imitation.’46 The rhetorical, highly metaphoric and elaborately adjectival language is not one to which modern ears are very sympathetic, since it smacks of moral disapproval rather then aesthetic judgement—yet it is a tone and a language which Ruskin persistently employs in The Stones of Venice. There are many points where the progression of Ruskin’s argument resembles that of Hugo. Hugo, for example, speaks of the dominance of Michelangelo in the sixteenth century, of the building of St Peter’s, its influence in Europe, and the detrimental effects of the classical style up to the eighteenth century. ‘This Titan of the art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon and created Saint Peter’s of Rome . . . but once Michelangelo was dead, what did this wretched architecture do, which was only the ghost or the spectre of its former self? It took Saint Peter’s and traced it, it parodied it. It became a craze.’47 Ruskin, writing similarly in ‘The Roman Renaissance’, says that ‘the Titanic insanity extended itself also into ecclesiastical design: the principal church in Italy was built with little idea of any other admirableness than that which was to result from its being huge.’48 Hugo then turns to the ‘declining and wasting’ of architecture from the ‘sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries’: ‘Look at Louis XIV’s palaces, elongated barracks for courtiers, stiff, glacial, uninteresting. Look finally at Louis Quinze, with its chicory and vermicelli, and all 45 Notre-Dame of Paris, p. 197. ‘Dès le seizième siècle, la maladie de l’architecture est visible; elle n’exprime déjà plus essentiellement la société; elle se fait misérablement art classique . . . elle devient . . . pseudo-antique . . . C’est cette décadence qu’on appelle la renaissance . . . C’est ce soleil couchant que nous prenons pour une aurore’ (Hugo, p. 235). 46 Ibid., p. 198. ‘Le tailleur de pierre succède au sculpteur. Adieu toute sève, toute originalité, toute vie, toute intelligence. Elle se traîne, lamentable mendiante d’atelier de copie en copie’ (Hugo, p. 236). 47 Ibid., p. 198. ‘Ce titan de l’art avait entassé le Pantheon sur le Parthénon, et fait Saint-Pierre-de-Rome . . . Michel Ange mort, que fait celle misérable architecture qui se survivait à elle-même à l’état de spectre et d’ombre? Elle prend Saint-Pierre-deRome, et le calque, et le parodie. C’est une manie’ (Hugo, p. 236). 48 Ruskin, Works, xi, 80.

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the warts and proud flesh which disfigure that old, decrepit, toothless and coquettish architecture. Between François II and Louis XV the disease grew in geometrical progression. The art was no longer anything but skin and bone. It died a miserable death.’49 So Ruskin, too, moves from the building of St Peter’s to the state of architecture in Europe, ending in France: It is easy to understand how an architecture which thus appealed not less to the lowest instincts of dulness than to the subtlest pride of learning, rapidly found acceptance with a large body of mankind; and how the spacious pomp of the new manner of design came to be eagerly adopted by the luxurious aristocracies, not only of Venice, but of the other countries of Christendom, now gradually gathering themselves into that insolent and festering isolation, against which the cry of the poor sounded hourly in more ominous unison, bursting at last into thunder (mark where, —first among the planted walks and plashing fountains of the palace wherein the Renaissance luxury attained its utmost height in Europe, Versailles).50

I do not wish to over-emphasize the importance of Hugo to Ruskin in matters of detail, but he seems to have provided a rhetorical model by which architecture could be used in the context of a new way of writing the history of European culture; he showed how a city and a building might be employed paradigmatically and synecdochically in a wider discourse, and he, like Ruskin, had a moral prejudice against the Renaissance and against Renaissance aesthetics. Hugo was not, of course, alone in his Romantic distaste for the classicizing tendencies of the Renaissance, and he had among his admirers at least two powerful allies whose political and religious views were closer to those of Ruskin. Charles de Montalembert and Alexis François Rio were inspired by Hugo’s fervour but did not share his politics. Montalembert’s Du vandalisme et du catholicisme dans l’art of 1839 was a political tirade consciously indebted to Hugo and written against the neglect of ecclesiastical monuments. Unlike Hugo, however, Montalembert and his friend Rio were inspired by a more disinterested spirituality 49

Ruskin, Works, pp. 198–9. ‘Voici les palais de Louis XIV, longues casernes à courtisans, roides, glaciales, ennyeuses. Voici enfin Louis XV, avec les chicorées et les vermicelles et toutes les verrues et tous les fungus qui défigurent cette vielle architecture caduque, édentée et coquette. De François II à Louis XV, le mal a crû en progression géométrique. L’art n’a plus que la peau sur les os. Il agonise misérablement’ (p. 237). 50 Ruskin, Works, xi, 80.


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than Hugo. As Catholics with Ultramontane leanings, they were much exercised by the role of the Church in the State and by the relationship between freedom of political expression and freedom within the precepts of Christian dogma. Consequently, their construction of the notion ‘la liberté’ bears a closer relationship to Ruskin’s than to Hugo’s. For Montalembert and Rio, the very word ‘Renaissance’ was paradoxical. As Montalembert pointed out when he reviewed Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne (1836), most surveys of Italian art began where Rio’s finished: ‘Tous les résumés de ce genre,’ he said, ‘ne commençant qu’à l’époque de l’envahissement du paganisme dit Renaissance, où nous nous sommes arrêtés.’51 Meanwhile, both Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne and Montalembert’s Du vandalisme revolutionized the historical perspective of one of the most influential architectural writers of the period. This was Augustus Welby Pugin, who at some point towards the end of the 1830s read the works of both men closely. We know this because Pugin says so in the second edition of Contrasts (1841) where he praises Rio’s book and describes Montalembert as ‘a man, of whom it may be said as of Savonarola, the Dominican, sans reproche sans peur’.52 He also reprinted a long extract from an article by Montalembert—‘De l’état actuel de l’art religieux en France’—which had appeared in Du Vandalisme. The first edition of Pugin’s Contrasts appeared in 1836, the same year as Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne. In it, Pugin had blamed the decay of faith in Britain and the consequent decay of architectural style on the evils of Protestantism and on the vandalism of Henry VIII. As a contemporary reviewer in Fraser’s Magazine put it, this view was ‘palpably absurd’53 since the two events were historically remote, and Pugin found a far more plausible account in Montalembert’s Du vandalisme. Montalembert opened Pugin’s eyes to the fact that fifteenth-century ‘decay’ was not confined to English Protestantism but had been a European affair. Throughout Europe, a weakened Catholicism became a prey to the influence of classicism and ‘paganism’. It was what Ruskin was later to call Catholic ‘infidelity’ that opened the gates to the Renaissance. ‘Both Protestantism 51 ‘Tableau chronologique des écoles catholiques de peinture en Italie’, Du Vandalisme et du catholicisme dans l’art , p. 135 (Montalembert’s emphasis). 52 Pugin, Contrasts (1841), p. 18. 53 Anon., ‘A Batch of Architects’, Fraser’s Magazine, 15 (Mar. 1837), p. 330.

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and revived Paganism’, said Pugin, ‘were generated by unworthy men who bore the name of Catholic.’54 So when Pugin came to publish a second edition of Contrasts he corrected what he called ‘important errors’ and enlarged the text, adding a whole new chapter: ‘On the Revived Pagan Principle’. The purpose of this was to denigrate the Renaissance, and somewhat in the manner of Savonarola, he condemned its criminality, its obscenity, its sensuality, and its preoccupation with nudity in art. The impieties and the classicizing tendencies of ‘revived Paganism’, he said, ‘are some of the accompaniments of the grand renaissance, or revival of classic art, which moderns so highly extol in preference to the glorious works produced by faith, zeal, and devotion of the middle ages.’55 Pugin also anticipated one of the dominant themes of Ruskin’s historiography—the link between the vices of the past and the present as they manifest themselves in architectural form. ‘Strange at it may appear,’ says Pugin, ‘there is a great deal of connexion between the gardens of the Medici, filled with Pagan luxury, and the Independent preaching-houses that now deface the land.’56 How closely Ruskin read Pugin’s work remains uncertain,57 but he did not have to go directly to Pugin to feel the influence of French criticism in England in the 1840s. It was being read and used everywhere. Francis Palgrave, for example, who was one of the most articulate exponents in English of the links between the moral temper of a society and its art, acknowledges his debt to A. F. Rio, quotes approvingly Henry Drummond who in turn admired the French, and is full of praise for Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes (1807–15).58 We know that Ruskin studied Sismondi attentively and Sismondi sketched the connection between builder and building.59 54

55 Pugin, Contrasts (1841), pp. iv–v. Ibid., p. 9 note. Pugin’s emphasis. Ibid., pp. iv–v. 57 Patrick A.M. Connor, who has written most extensively on this subject, points out that though Ruskin’s ‘Sketchbook 4’ (1846), at the Ruskin Museum, Coniston, contains a series of notes from Pugin’s The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), there is no direct evidence of Ruskin’s having read Contrasts. ‘Pugin and Ruskin’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insititutes, 41 (1978), pp. 344–50 (p. 344). 58 In his well-known article ‘The Fine Arts in Florence’, Quarterly Review 66 (1840), 350 and 354. 59 In Rome in 1840 he referred several times to ‘Sismondi’s Italian Republics’ (The Diaries, i, 120 and 121: entries for Dec. 1840) and again in 1843 (The Diaries, i, 249: entry for Nov. 1843). In 1845, he wrote to his father: ‘now I am studying the consti56


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‘Architecture’, he said, ‘is of all the fine arts the one which expresses most immediately the character of the age, and which is the best at communicating the greatness or the smallness of the nation in which it flourished.’60 Sismondi did little to develop this notion, but by 1831 a writer like Josiah Condor assumed that his readers would agree that ‘the history of Italy is written in its architecture’.61 Ten years later, Pugin, on lines derived from Victor Hugo, expanded the notion considerably and claimed that ‘the history of architecture is the history of the world’.62 Palgrave, too, stressed the idea ‘that architecture possesses its chief positive value’ as ‘a memorial of the state and condition of the people [and] as the visible embodying of the moral and physical condition of the nations’,63 and, like Ruskin, he spoke out against against the deadening effects of mechanization on the manual worker. ‘It is our civilization’, he says, ‘that has degraded the artisan by making the man not a machine, but something even inferior, the part of one;—and above all, by the division of labour.’ His example anticipates Ruskin’s famous ‘glass bead cutter’ of ‘The Nature of Gothic’: ‘He who passes his life in making pins’ heads,’ says Palgrave, ‘will never have a head worth anything more.’64 What gives both Pugin’s work and Palgrave’s its urgency, however, is the way in which the past is impacted upon the present. Pugin’s Contrasts is full of shrill examples of the inadequacies of modern secular culture and of the superiority of medieval culture when measured by the standards of architectural style. Palgrave, too, has his contrasts: ‘Let any one compare the iron gates of what men call the Police Station at Hyde Park Corner—in the language of the gods, the Triumphal Arch—with the bronze network of foliage of Verrochio [sic], which seems to grow and spring like living vegetation round the porphyry sarcophagus of Pietro de’ tutions of Ital[y] with great interest (Harold I. Shapiro, Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his Parents 1845 (Oxford, 1972), p. 168), and when he was in Venice in 1851 he tried to get Effie to read Sismondi. 60 ‘L’architecture, c’est de tous les beaux-arts celui qui porte le plus immediatement le caractère du siècle, et qui fait le mieux connaître la grandeur l’énergie ou la petitesse de la nation où il a fleuri.’ Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes, new edn. (Paris, 1840), iii, 114. 61 Josiah Conder, Italy (1831), i, x. 62 A. W. Pugin, An Apology of the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843), p. 4. 63 Palgrave, ‘The Fine Arts in Florence’, Quarterly Review, 66 (1840), 327. 64 Ibid., p. 324.

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Medici.’65 Ruskin, too, employs the contrast between Gothic and nineteenth-century culture, but he goes one stage further. Like Palgrave, he was fascinated by what Palgrave called ‘that great change which about the middle of the fifteenth century, came over the human mind, by the development in Italy of the most ardent desire for classical literature, immediately followed by affection scarcely less ardent for classical art’.66 But Ruskin also stresses similarities, and the affinity which dominates The Stones of Venice is the connection between Renaissance and modern. ‘Walk up and down Harley Street, or Baker Street, or Gower Street,’ Ruskin urges his reader, and ‘consider . . . what have been the causes which have induced so vast a change in the European mind.’67 The change is the one which Palgrave identified: it is the Renaissance, and in the Renaissance ‘we shall find’, said Ruskin, ‘partly the root, partly the expression, of certain dominant evils of modern times’.68 Consequently Ruskin’s hunting out of the ‘pestilent art of the Renaissance’ from the Grand Canal to Gower Street is, as he freely admits, ‘the final purpose’ of The Stones of Venice.69 In this context, Ruskin’s interpretation of the Renaissance seems less eccentric and less perverse than it might do in isolation. In Hugo and Sismondi the fifteenth century was a crucial moment in a grand human political epic; in Rio and Montalembert, it was the point at which faith became irreversibly diseased. But there remains one important question which demands an answer. Hugo’s interest in this period is exclusively French, and, though Sismondi, Rio, Montalembert, Pugin, and Palgrave deal with Italy, none of them sees Venice as having any special place in the decline of Western culture. From Voltaire onwards, through Gibbon and the widely read history of William Roscoe, it is Florence and the Medici which are at the centre of the dispute over the historical significance of the Renaissance. The art and architecture of Florence and its connection with the spiritual, political, economic, and above all, the moral temper of the fifteenth century was bitterly disputed by historians, and the reputation of the Medici underwent enormous changes in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile Venice was largely overlooked or seen as merely a shadowy adjunct to a greater drama being enacted elsewhere. So why, we might ask, did Ruskin decide to bring Venice 65 68

Palgrave, pp. 324–5. Ruskin, Works, ix, 46.

66

67 Ibid., p. 335. Ruskin, Works, xi, 4. Ruskin, Works, ix, 46.

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into this confused and difficult picture, and what was it that made him attach so much importance to Venice and its architectural history? Both questions can be answered, at least in part, by reference to 1845, and that first unaccompanied journey to Italy. It was, said Ruskin in later life, the moment that he realized the central importance of architecture in history. In Lucca, he said, ‘absolutely for the first time I now saw what mediaeval builders were . . . and thereon literally began the study of architecture.’70 It would, of course, have been impossible to illustrate the development of Gothic architecture at Florence, yet, at this same time, Ruskin discovered that it was southern rather than northern Gothic which moved him most deeply. Furthermore, the ‘restoration’ which he witnessed during his stay in Venice in the autumn of that year confirmed his sense of urgency in recording the history of the city before, as he felt, it would be destroyed. There is also that personal, psychosexual attachment to Venice which is mentioned in the previous chapter. Ruskin’s emotional desire to focus his intellectual attention on Venice received support from an interesting and curious source. As we saw in the last chapter, A. F. Rio’s book De la poésie chrétienne had a long and, for the time, unusual section on Venetian painting. Ruskin first read Rio in 1843.71 On his important Italian tour of 1845 his diary shows that he consulted Rio at all points, now agreeing, now disagreeing with the Frenchman,72 and though Ruskin was clearly impressed, the religious issue loomed large for him.73 Nevertheless, in the course of his account of the Venetians Rio made a strong case for the study of Venetian art in a moral and social context. He said: But as the changes which the fine arts undergo are the surest index of those which are effected at the same time in the popular imagination, the study of them may lead to the most instructive results, and thus become susceptible of the highest interest, even from a philosophical point of view. The works of 70

Ruskin, Works, xxxv, 350. As recorded in Ruskin diary entry for 20 Nov. 1843. The Diaries of John Ruskin, selected and edited by Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Oxford, 1956–9), i, 249. 72 Ruskin’s use of Rio is recorded in the Transcript Diaries, Bodleian MS Eng Misc. c.214. 73 It is significant, however, that in the long letters that Ruskin sent to his very Protestant parents that year, though there is much talk of aesthetic valuation and judgement, there is no mention of Rio’s name. 71

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the painter, like those of the poet, when they are recognized, encouraged and appreciated by his fellow-citizens, are the faithful mirror in which the modifications which the national genius undergoes are successively reflected. Individual inspirations, however original, always so strongly participate in the general state of intellectual development, that they cannot in any manner be said to interfere with the comparative appreciation of the people and the period.74

Indeed, the concluding pages of De la poésie chrétienne, where Rio sketches a new methodology for a history of the Venetian republic, might well have been written as a preface for The Stones of Venice. ‘If, instead of contenting ourselves with those external events which appear on the surface of history,’ Rio argues, We would take the trouble, or rather regard it as an imperative duty, to penetrate more deeply into the subject, and would consult the archives which best reveal the bent of the national genius, what valuable and unlooked-for discoveries might result from such an examination! What a different aspect and colour would be given to the annals of Christian nations, and particularly those of the republic of Venice! 75

Rio had nothing to say about Venetian architecture but at this point he quotes a poem, ‘On Venice’, by Richard Monkton Milnes. It began: Prime model of a Christian commonwealth! Thou wise simplicity which present me Calumniate not conceiving,—joy is mine, Thee I have read and learnt thee as I ought, 74 ‘Les révolutions que subissent les beaux-arts étant le plus sûr indice de celles qui s’opèrent en même temps dans les imaginations, l’étude qui s’y rapporte peut conduire aux résultats les plus instructifs, et devient ainsi susceptible du plus haut intérêt, même sous un point de vue philosophique. Les oeuvres des peintres, comme celles des poètes, quand elles sont avouées, encouragées et prônées par leurs concitoyens, sont le fidèle miroir où se réfléchissent successivement toutes les modifications survenues dans le génie national. Les inspirations individuelles, quelque saillantes qu’elles soient, participent toujours assez fortement au fonds d’idées qui entretiennentt la vie intellectuelle commune, pour qu’il soit impossible d’en être troublé dans l’appréciation comparative des peuples et des époques.’ Rio, De la poésic chiétienne (Paris, 1836), pp. 399–400. 75 ‘Au lieu de s’en tenir aux événemens extérieurs qui paraissent à la surface d’histoire on voulait se donner la peine ou plutôt s’imposer le devoir de pénétrer plus avant, et interroger de préférence les archives qui révèlent le mieux le génie national, que de découvertes précieuses et inattendues sortiraient de cet interrogatoire, et donneraient un tout autre aspect, une tout autre couleur aux annales des peuples chrétienes, et particulièrement à celles de la république de Venise!’ Ibid., p. 407.


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Not in the crude compiler’s painted shell, But thine own memorials of live stone, And in the pictures of thy kneeling princes, And in the lofty words on lofty tombs, And in the breath of ancient chroniclers, And in the music of the outer sea.76

Ruskin met Milnes at a dinner in 1844 during which Milnes invited the young man to one of his famous breakfasts.77 We do not know what Milnes and Ruskin talked about at this breakfast in 1844, but on the eve of Ruskin’s journey to Italy, Venice and its ‘memorials of live stone’ must surely have come up between them, and he may well have been encouraged by both Milnes and Rio to shift historical inquiry away from ‘the crude compiler’s painted shell’, and focus instead on artworks and monuments. In this way what had started with a casual visit in 1835 to what Ruskin called the ‘Paradise of cities’,78 became, after many pilgrimages, one of the central preoccupations of his life. The Stones of Venice is the principal fruit of that preoccupation. It is ‘romance’ in which the architectural body of the city is feminized and eroticized. The stress between the sensual and the spiritual, between the pure and the impure in the context of a journey, is reminiscent of Tannhäuser’s expedition to the cave of the Venusberg. But, for Ruskin, it is a journey in both space and in time, from London to Venice, from the outer world into the inner world, and from the present in the past. The Stones of Venice is also a tribute to Venice itself; it is a homage to an adored object, and what better model than Victor Hugo’s homage to his beloved Paris? Like Hugo’s Notre-Dame, The Stones of Venice negotiates between a number of different kinds of romance, some of them fictional, some not, and like Hugo’s work it is ‘at once both drama and epic, picturesque but poetic, real but ideal, true but great’. 76

Richard Monckton Milnes, Memorials of a Residence on the Continent, and Historical Poems (London, 1838), 38. Rio (1836) translates this section of Milnes’s poem and prints it, together with the English original, on p. 538. Rio praises Milnes for his focus on ‘Christian’ rather than ‘Classical’ Italy. 77 Ruskin, letter to his father, 28 Apr. 1844, in Works, xxxvi, 36–7. 78 The Diaries of John Ruskin, i, 183. Entry for May 1841.

7 Alfred Waterhouse’s German Romanesque ‘Temple of Nature’: The Natural History Museum Ruskin ’s influence on nineteenth-century architecture was enormous. The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice both served to fuel an already vigorous Gothic revival and buildings sprang up all over Britain in a ‘Ruskinian’ spirit. By the 1870s Ruskin himself was beginning to resent this, and he often disapproved of buildings designed in his name. Alfred Waterhouse’s The Natural History Museum was one of those (Fig. 15). In his youth as architect, Waterhouse was a devotee of Ruskin. In 1853 he had gone on a pilgrimage around France and Italy following the master’s footsteps, and a number of his early buildings were based on what he had read in The Stones of Venice. Much of the work that he did in the 1860s was in an eclectic Gothic style that Ruskin liked, but the Natural History Museum was far more rugged and self-consciously archaic. By the time Waterhouse completed its design he had moved away from, or modified many of Ruskin’s ideas, and Ruskin’s antipathy to the building (see below p. 199) was probably based upon the fact that Waterhouse had prefabricated much of the ornament in terracotta instead of carving it in stone and on site. Yet the Natural History Museum is a truly spectacular building, and as one of the outstanding landmarks of high Victorian architecture it was designed to draw attention both to itself and its contents. No other museum building in Britain adopted a Romanesque style on this scale; no other building used terracotta in such a rich and decorative manner; no other building so curiously employed external decoration to illustrate its internal function, and no other building was so aggressively primitive. It was calculated to appeal to a wide public and its animal sculpture was explicitly educational. Planned as a

Waterhouse’s Natural History Museum

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15. Alfred Waterhouse, The Natural History Museum, London, 1881

showcase for the nation’s imperial scientific achievements, its appearance was strongly ecclesiastical. When it opened in 1881, the Times leader called it a ‘true Temple of Nature’, which, the writer said, demonstrated ‘the Beauty of Holiness’.1 But for many visitors in 1881 Nature had abandoned the temple for wilder places; she had bloodied her claws, and the beauty of holiness had been replaced by the much more severe mechanical principles of Charles Darwin. 1 The Times (18 Apr. 1881), 9. According to Nature, 23 (1881), 549, it was George Augustus Sala who first used the phrase ‘Temple of Nature’ about the museum.

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The concept of a large museum of natural history was the inspiration of the great naturalist Richard Owen. It was also the crowning achievement of his lifetime in science. The ‘Temple of Nature’ that Alfred Waterhouse built for him embodied Owen’s belief that the history of the natural world was not a matter of randomness and chance but the creation of a transcendent presence. In other words, the Natural History Museum is the expression of an ideology, and its shape, size, position, style, and decoration are charged with legible meanings. Some of those meanings are readily interpreted; others less so, and although the building history of the Museum has been well documented,2 many questions remain. Why, for example, was Waterhouse chosen as its architect? What spurred him on to use terracotta in such an original way? And above all why did he risk the unusual Romanesque style? The choice of Romanesque for such a building, though it was later imitated elsewhere, was highly original.3 But that choice was conditioned by a substantial web of aesthetic, social, and political factors. The Natural History Museum was not just Waterhouse’s creation; it was very much the product of its time. It was born of national and local politics; it was shaped by Owen’s unusual position in the scientific world, and it was an expression of Waterhouse’s passion for early medieval architecture.

Richard Owen (1804–1892) Richard Owen was an outstanding figure in British science in the first half of the nineteenth century. He attended the same grammar school in Lancaster as that remarkable polymath, William Whewell, the 2 Most notably by F. H. W. Sheppard in ‘Natural History Museum’, in Survey of London: The Museums Area of South Kensington and Westminster (1975), pp. 201–13; John Olley and Caroline Wilson, ‘The Natural History Museum’, in Timeless Architecture, ed. Dan Cruikshank (1971), pp. 47–67; Mark Girouard, Alfred Waterhouse and the Natural History Museum (New Haven and London, 1981); Colin Cunningham and Prudence Waterhouse, Alfred Waterhouse 1830–1905: Biography of a Practice (Oxford, 1992), and Carla Yanni, ‘Nature in Conflict’, in Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (1999), pp. 112–46. 3 Though it was not the first. That honour goes to James Renwick’s Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington DC (1846–51) (though this might be considered neo-Norman rather then Romanesque). After Waterhouse we find Calvert Vaux and J. Wrey Mould’s American Museum of Natural History, New York (1872–7), William F. Smith’s Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii (1889), William Kemp’s Technological Museum (later Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences), Sydney, Australia (1891–2), and Charles Harrison Townsend’s Horniman Museum, Forest Hill, London (1897). See Phillip Kent, ‘Survival of the Fittest: the Romanesque Revival, Natural Selection, and Nineteenth Century Natural History Museums’, Fabrications, 11, no. 1 (2000), 1–25.


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Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1841 to 1861. Among his many accomplishments, Whewell as we have seen (pp. 42–3 above) was a pioneer in the history of Romanesque architecture, and he and Owen remained firm friends until Whewell’s death in 1861. Unlike Whewell, Owen was not a child prodigy, and on leaving school in 1820 was apprenticed to a surgeon and apothecary. A passion for anatomy took him briefly to Edinburgh University in 1824; then in 1825 he moved to practise as a surgeon at St Bartholomew’s hospital, London. He was made first Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1836, building a reputation as a specialist in comparative anatomy and, later, palaeontology. He was extremely sociable and used this gift to promote his scientific interests in the world of patronage and political support. The Prince Consort was an enthusiastic reader of his books, and in later life Owen tutored the royal children. He met Darwin in 1836 and Thomas Carlyle asked for an introduction. He was cultured, well read, and counted some of the leading figures in the literary and artistic worlds among his acquaintances. He was a liberal in politics, and in 1846 visited Sir Robert Peel to discuss the possibility of creating an educational museum by bringing together the fossil bones then housed in the British Museum, and the specimens of recent comparative anatomy in his own care at the Hunterian Museum. Owen was prominent in the movement towards sanitary reform in Britain which gathered strength in the 1830s and 1840s; and it may have been the result of an introduction effected by their common friend, William Whewell, that in 1845 Owen met Edmund Sharpe.4 Owen was visiting his home town, Lancaster, on behalf of the Health of Towns Commission. Sharpe, who had pioneered the introduction of Romanesque building into Britain, had his architectural practice in Lancaster, and accompanied Owen into every nook and cranny of the town. He became mayor of the city in 1848, set up the Lancaster Athenaeum in his own house, and in 1849 invited Owen to lecture on natural history there. There is no evidence that Owen had any special interest in architecture, but given his friendship with Whewell and his acquaintance with Sharpe it is likely that he would have been well disposed towards designs for his new museum based upon German Romanesque. In 1856, at the age of 52, Owen moved to the British Museum 4

For Whewell and Sharpe see p. 47 above.

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where he became the curator of Natural History. Anthony Panizzi, who had been promoted to principal librarian, favoured the library above the other museum departments, and though the natural history exhibits drew huge crowds the objects were poorly housed in cramped conditions. In the late 1850s Owen devised a scheme for a new and separate museum that would epitomize the three kingdoms of nature: plants, animals, and minerals. Because research was difficult to conduct at Bloomsbury the scientific community supported the idea of the separation of natural history from the other collections, but there was considerable dispute as to how this might be done. Some, like T. H. Huxley and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, wanted to divide the collection into separate specialist groupings; others, like Owen himself, wished to preserve its unity as a symbol of the unity of creation, and as an impressive educational tool. Owen’s most powerful supporter in this ambition was Gladstone, then Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, who shared Owen’s religious bias, and who adopted the museum enterprise as part of a more general Peelite reform movement. In 1859 Owen submitted to the Trustees of the British Museum a formal report on the removal of the natural history collections, accompanied by a plan for a new, large museum. He felt strongly about the organizing principles of the collection, about its logical division, and about the relationship between the parts and the whole, but he had no views on the architecture of the building. Even though his design, he said, was ‘not intended to advocate any particular . . . building style’,5 precedent dictated that certain styles would be more suitable than others. Waterhouse’s suggestion of Romanesque was particularly apt because, as Owen recognized, it could accommodate his own beliefs and scientific views to Waterhouse’s interests and professional experience. The shape of the museum evolved over time, but as Owen himself pointed out in his opening address in 1881, it still bore significant traces of the ‘ancestral structures’ of his original plan.6 Owen is often crudely depicted as a reactionary critic of Darwin’s evolutionism. In fact his position was one that attempted to reconcile his own extensive research (which included the transformation of 5

Owen quoted in Nicholas A. Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 35. 6 ‘The New Natural History Museum’, Building News, 41 (1881), 295.


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species) with a lingering belief in a benevolent creator. A number of tributaries fed into the main stream of this belief. William Buckland was one of the most influential promoters of British science as part of a liberal Anglican reform programme under the flag of ‘natural theology’. When, in a lecture given in 1863, Owen asked: ‘May we not discern the hand of Providence in the successive floods of light thrown upon the operations of which this earth has been the seat?’7 he was echoing the views of men like Buckland, who, from the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, endorsed the traditional argument of rational design, advanced in particular by the eminent authority William Paley. Together with writers like the Duke of Argyll, William Whewell, and Adam Sedgwick, Owen accepted the idea of evolution, but felt that the natural order within which it took place was the expression of the Creator’s will. Yet he was influenced too by Thomas Carlyle’s idealism, which was far removed from fundamentalist creationism, and long before the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 Owen had moved towards the idea of a developmental form of transmutation in natural history. This stress on order rather than randomness was central to his first plan for the new museum, and ultimately found expression in the symmetrical, balanced rationality of Waterhouse’s design. For this reason Owen would have rejected anything like the Normano-Romanesque irregularity of James Renwick’s Smithsonian Institution (1846–52), and might also have felt uneasy with a Gothic revival building that would have had too strong a specifically Anglican flavour for his enterprise. Though Owen had many admirers and supporters amongst the Oxbridge scientific community, they were ordained fellows of colleges, often aristocratic, and strictly non-utilitarian, and he was not one of them. Instead, his affinities were closer to the rising group of middle-class professional scientists based in London. Humphry Davy and later Michael Faraday worked in the Royal Institution, and this had come under the influence of transcendentalist modes of thinking imported from German Romanticism. Furthermore, the ideals of this metropolitan group were more secular and more utilitarian than those of the Oxbridge dons. They were patronized by Prince Albert, who, as president of the Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, invited Owen to contribute to the lecture series 7 Richard Owen, Instances of the Power of God as Manifested in His Animal Creation (1864), p. 53.

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arranged for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1858 Owen went to South Kensington to lecture (to a mainly working-class audience) on ‘The Animal Kingdom and its economic uses’, thus bringing together utility and natural history. So, when the time came to choose a location for his new museum Owen was extremely well disposed towards a site which had close associations with science, manufacturing, and the arts. The transfer of the natural history collections from the British Museum in Bloomsbury to the Commissioners’ Estate in South Kensington was politically contentious. There were three main reasons for this. First, South Kensington lay on quite the opposite side of the capital from the East End and the public that the museum was meant to ‘educate’, and many people felt that it would take the collection into what was then a remote part of London. Second, by removing the museum from the reference books of the British Museum Library, and placing it in the growing ‘Albertopolis’ of South Kensington, natural history would be shifted away from the old-fashioned scientists in Bloomsbury and would fall into the hands of technocrats such as Henry Cole and his circle. Third, the South Kensington site allowed for a substantial single building. Politically this was seen as a move towards the democratization of this branch of science, an extension of Owen’s belief in the display element of the collection, and a tendency to put the public before the researchers. But after considerable debate on all these matters in 1860, the Trustees decided in favour of placing the natural history collection in Cromwell Road. A Bill for the removal was introduced into Parliament in 1861. Gladstone was supported by Henry Layard and Richard Monckton Milnes, but there was such strong opposition from the Conservatives (who saw the venture as extravagant and foolhardy) that it was defeated. This defeat profoundly annoyed the Queen, for whom the museum played a key role in the South Kensington group that was rapidly becoming a memorial to her recently deceased husband.8 In spite of this setback, however, in 1862 Henry Hunt working for the goverment Commissioners prepared a plan based on Owen’s ideas, including a large lecture theatre ‘for popular lectures on natural history’.9 Though this was at first rejected on account of its size it later 8 9

See Sheppard (1975), 203. Archives of the Public Record Office (henceforth as PRO), Work 17/16/2 p. 2.


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16. Francis Fowke, 1862 Exhibition Building. The Builder (29 March 1862), 225

became the basis of all future plans. Gladstone suggested a compromise, pointing out that the round-arched, domed, bazaar-like building put up hurriedly for the 1862 International Exhibition (Fig. 16) from a design by Captain Francis Fowke might be reused as a museum. Fowke prepared designs for its conversion,10 but this idea found favour with almost no one on the grounds that it was, as Building News put it, ‘one of the ugliest public buildings . . . ever raised in this country’.11 So, much to Fowke’s dismay, he stood by as his work was demolished. Owen and Hunt then offered an acceptably scaled-down version of the original plan, and the land was purchased for a new building.

The South Kensington Museum competition In January 1864 William Francis Cowper, First Commissioner of Works, warily announced a competition for a building to house the new museum. The last major government competition, for the Foreign Office, had been a fiasco. It was first set up in 1856 but when 10

PRO Work 17/16/2 p. 15.

11

Building News, 11 (1864), 297.

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17. George Gilbert Scott, rejected Byzantine design for the Foreign Office, Whitehall, London, 1860. Pen and ink. Royal Institute of British Architects

Lord Derby came to power in 1858 with Disraeli as his Chancellor the competition was set aside and G. Gilbert Scott was commissioned with a Gothic revival design. Another change of government brought Palmerston to Downing Street, who was convinced that Gothic was uncomfortable, gloomy, and suitable only ‘for monasteries or a college of Jesuits’.12 In 1860 an energetic public debate took place between those who supported Scott’s Gothic design and those who wanted a classical or Renaissance building. The opposition to Scott was led by a fellow architect, William Tite, who as MP for Bath took the debate to Parliament. Tite’s furious and unfair opposition to Scott was so successful that Scott went into selfimposed exile in Scarborough to prepare a new Romano-Byzantine design that he hoped would satisfy the reactionary views of Palmerston (Fig. 17). This version was put on show, approved of by Lord Elcho (one of the Trustees of the British Museum) and liked, too, by William Cowper, Palmerston’s stepson, who had by now become the First Commissioner of Works. But this design, too, was 12 Palmerston quoted by James O’Connell in his ‘Natural History of Architecture’, London Quarterly Review, 13 (1859–60), 57. See also David B. Brownlee, ‘The “Regular Mongrel Affair”: G. G. Scott’s design for the Government Offices’, Architectural History, 28 (1985), 159–97.


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rejected by the Prime Minister as ‘a regular mongrel affair’;13 Cowper was told to pass on verbal instructions to Scott to prepare a building in ‘the Italian style’,14 and in a heated debate in the House of Commons in 1861 involving at least 282 MPs, Scott’s Italianate building was narrowly adopted by Parliament. Less than three years later Tite, with his well-known predilection for the Renaissance style, appeared again as one of the five judges for the Natural History Museum competition. There was also Lord Elcho, who had so recently been a vocal antagonist of Renaissance building at the Foreign Office and in favour of the Gothic revival designs of Scott. A third member, the architectural writer James Fergusson, would have sided with Tite in terms of taste. He was influential, knowledgeable, and scholarly. In 1862 he published a sequel to his Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855) entitled a History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, in which he admitted a liking for the quaintness of the Smithsonian Institution, but a healthy dislike for the modern German Rundbogenstil in Munich. He had a particular loathing for the ‘medieval absurdities’ of Deane and Woodward’s Oxford Museum but had a general admiration for the potential of ‘the Italian style’.15 Rather surprisingly, the competition for the Natural History Museum attracted only thirty-three submissions, and in contrast to the Foreign Office competition few were especially distinguished. Most designs were Renaissance or classical in style though there were four that were Romanesque or contained Romanesque elements. To everyone’s surprise, the winner was Francis Fowke (Figs. 18 and 19). Ironically both Tite and Elcho had been active in getting his 1862 exhibition building demolished, and now, two years later, they were faced with approving his Italianate round-arched building. Second prize went to Professor Robert Kerr with another Renaissance round-arched building, but one that was less imposing and less finished than Fowke’s. But all did not go smoothly. In June 1864 Kerr, who knew that members of the British Museum Committee thought his entry 13

George Gilbert Scott, Personal and Professional Recollections (1879), p. 197. Ian Toplis, The Foreign Office: an Architectural History (1987), p. 123. 15 James Fergusson, History of the Modern Styles of Architecture (1862), pp. 439–40, 343, 374–6, and 376. 14

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18. Francis Fowke, winning design for the Natural History Museum, London, 1864. Pen, ink, and wash. Royal Institute of British Architects

19. Francis Fowke, plan of winning design for Natural History Museum, 1864. The Builder (28 May 1864)

‘decidedly the best’,16 lodged an official complaint with Cowper that Fowke, having failed fully to observe the conditions of the competition, ought to have been excluded. An ugly correspondence took place in the press in which Kerr described Fowke as an ‘amateur architect’ with no professional training and said that his engineering 16

British Museum Committee papers, 14 Mar. 1865: 1367/8.


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skills might be fine for bazaars, but the plan for the new museum was more of a spectacle than a serious attempt at a research establishment.17 Henry Cole, who had supported Fowke’s application from the first, defended Fowke. He retaliated in public by claiming that Kerr had obtained inside information about the requirements of the curators of natural history, and had persuaded them through this same channel to support Kerr’s design against Fowke’s. Whilst this dispute was taking place Fowke himself was put in formal communication with the British Museum Committee generally, and with Richard Owen in particular, and in June 1865 Owen went to Edinburgh to examine Fowke’s Museum of Science and Art.18 This palazzo-like building had been started in 1861 and was modelled on recent Rundbogenstil work in Munich and Berlin. Prince Albert had encouraged Cole to examine this German version of Romanesque as a possible model for South Kensington, and Cole had passed this idea on to Fowke. On his return from Edinburgh, Owen with Fowke turned his attention to the decoration of the new museum. Since terracotta had been used in the new buildings of the Horticultural Society’s Arcades and at the South Kensington Museum quadrangle by Fowke and Godfrey Sykes,19 it was decided, in the interests of continuity, to use it again. Then in November 1865 the keepers of natural history at the British Museum began to grumble that they had heard nothing from the architect, to which Fowke replied that he had been ill but would soon be in touch.20 In December he died.21 The responsibility for continuing the project fell on William Cowper. The wrangle that had taken place over the competition made it impossible for him to replace Fowke’s entry with Kerr’s, since this would have been to besmirch the memory of a dead man. Instead he had to find someone who would be willing to bring to fruition, or at least appear to bring to fruition, Fowke’s designs, so in February 1866 he appointed Alfred Waterhouse.

17

Reference to this exchange was recorded in BM Committee, c.10911, and a letter from Cole was printed in The Times (18 Dec. 1865). 18 BM Committee, 29 July 1865, c.10857. 19 See Winslow Ames, Prince Albert and Victorian Taste (1967), p. 129, and John Olley and Caroline Wilson (1971), p. 56. 20 BM committee, 11 Nov. 1865, c.10885. 21 His death was reported to the BM Committee on 9 Dec. 1865, c.10899.

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Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905) The reasons for offering Waterhouse the commission have never been fully understood, nor is it known why he took on the project at this crucial moment in his career. A closer look at the architectural politics of the period, however, offers suggestions for his motives, involving close attention to what was happening in his life, month by month, in the years 1865 and 1866, including his preoccupations with the commission for the Natural History Museum, and the competitions for the new Law Courts in London and the Town Hall in Manchester. Until the mid-1860s Waterhouse’s practice had centred on Manchester. He had been born into a Liverpool Quaker family in 1830, but in 1848 had gone to Manchester to study in the office of another Quaker, Richard Lane. When he set up on his own, his practice flourished, with numerous projects in the north of England including the round-arched Royal Insurance Building (1862) and a little later Strangeways Prison (1861–9), both in Manchester. It was, however, his success in winning the competition for the Manchester Assize Courts (1861–9) which brought him national renown. They were built in a strongly Ruskinian spirit. Waterhouse as we have seen had long admired Ruskin; Ruskin, in turn, admired Waterhouse, and in 1863 praised the Assize Courts as ‘a very beautiful and noble building indeed’ and ‘much beyond everything yet done in England on my principles’.22 Similarly Gladstone was moved by the ‘beautiful Assize Courts’ when in 1864 he visited Manchester and met Waterhouse.23 So his renown grew, and in February 1865 the Assize Courts were treated to a three-page spread in The Builder.24 At this point Waterhouse moved himself and his family to a house in London where he felt he could substantially increase his influence in the architectural world. The problem in choosing a successor to Fowke for the Natural History Museum lay in its being overshadowed by another architec-

22

Ruskin to his father John James Ruskin, Dec. 1863. Works, xvii, p. lxxv. Diary entry for 14 Oct. 1864. H. C. G. Matthew, The Gladstone Diaries (Oxford, 1978), vi, 306. 24 The Builder, 11 (1865), 135–7. 23


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tural competition, this time for the New Courts of Justice.25 In February 1865 a motion was passed in the House of Commons enabling the Commissioners of Works to acquire a site for the project. The Times hinted at a competition ‘between a limited number of architects who stood high in their profession’,26 and on 18 February a local Manchester MP, Francis Powell, urged Waterhouse to write to the First Commissioner, William Cowper, asking if his name might be included amongst those invited to submit entries.27 Instead of writing, however, Waterhouse decided to travel to London to speak to Cowper in person. Meanwhile the Manchester novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who was a long-standing Nonconformist friend of Waterhouse, wrote (without telling the architect) to Ruskin asking him to lend his weight to the request.28 Gaskell had known Effie and John Ruskin very well before their separation; she and Ruskin admired each other’s work and Ruskin had sometimes visited her when he was in Manchester.29 Ruskin had become friendly with William Cowper through his wife Georgiana, whom he had first glimpsed in Rome in 1840 and then met formally at a dinner party in 1854. They got on well, and Ruskin was invited to the Cowper’s home, Broadlands, where a little later he was introduced to Mrs and Mrs Palmerston.30 The Cowpers shared many of Ruskin’s aesthetic and social ideals31 and William responded positively to Ruskin’s intervention on behalf of Waterhouse.32 In consequence, Waterhouse’s name was included in the list, and Ruskin spoke

25 Waterhouse’s role in this competition is dealt with substantially by David B. Brownlee in The Law Courts. The Architecture of George Edmund Street (Cambridge, Mass.), pp. 83ff. 26 The Times (11 Feb. 1865), 7. 27 See Cunningham and Waterhouse (1992), p. 41. 28 See Elizabeth Gaskell to Ruskin, Feb. 1865, in The Lettters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple (Manchester, 1966), letter 559. She also wrote to Lord Houghton, Richard Monkton Milnes, in similar terms. See Further Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J. A. V. Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester, 2000), pp. 268–9. 29 In 1855 (Works, xxxvi, 479) and 1859 (Works, xvi, p. lxv). In 1865 Ruskin wrote to her saying that both he and his mother had hugely enjoyed Cranford (Works, xxxvi, 479). 30 Ruskin, Works, xxxv, 503–4. 31 In 1871 Cowper became one of the original trustees for Ruskin’s Guild of St George. 32 Ruskin replied almost immediately to Gaskell enclosing a positive response from Cowper. See Chapple and Shelston (2000), pp. 269–70.

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strongly in favour of his work in a lecture to the Institute of British Architects in May of the same year.33 In November 1865, the legal adviser to the Law Courts Commission, Edward Wilkins Field, approached Waterhouse asking him to assist with drafting the conditions of the Law Courts competition. Cowper, realizing that this might prejudice Waterhouse’s position as a competitor, wrote to warn him, and on 1 December Waterhouse resigned the position after just a few weeks. Five days later Francis Fowke died. On 9 December this was reported to the British Museum Committee and the responsibility for continuing the Natural History Museum project fell to Cowper.34 No extant correspondence between Cowper and Waterhouse regarding this matter survives, so that Cowper’s precise motives are not known; yet several factors point fairly clearly to why he approached Waterhouse to ‘complete’ Fowke’s museum project. At the beginning of 1866 Waterhouse was a young architect of thirty-five, only just established in a national career. He had one highly regarded building to his name, but only one, and had yet to prove himself with another. The Law Courts competition was in its infancy, and no one yet knew whether Waterhouse could produce work of sufficient stature to succeed. The competition was very strong, and he was up against far more established members of the profession than himself. He was well liked, however, both personally and professionally. Gladstone, Ruskin, and Cowper appreciated his work, and clearly Cowper trusted him. Unlike Fowke (and this was a great advantage), Waterhouse shared the attitudes and values of the neo-medievalists. Cowper’s reasons for choosing Waterhouse seem to have been two. First, in asking him to take over the Natural History Museum project he must have seen an opportunity for Waterhouse to establish himself in London should the Law Courts competition not go his way. In this Cowper was proved correct. Second, he probably saw that with the recent death of Fowke there was no urgency to complete the museum building, and that over time its design might be shifted away from Fowke’s Renaissance style to something more in sympathy with Ruskin’s theoretical ideals and Waterhouse’s practice. Waterhouse was passionate about the Law Courts, but saw in Cowper a useful ally and was probably easily

33

Ruskin, Works, xix, 23.

34

BM Committee, 9 Dec. 1865, c.10899.


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persuaded. As late as 17 January 1866 the Keepers of Natural History at the British Museum were registering their anxiety about appointing a new architect for the museum and decided to approach the Commission about it. By 23 February Cowper’s office had written formally to Waterhouse asking him to generate estimates for the execution of Fowke’s plans; and on 2 and 3 March the Treasury and the Office of Works both wrote to the committee of the British Museum to inform them of the decision to appoint Waterhouse.35 Though Waterhouse’s energies in the next few months were dedicated to producing the hugely complex design for the Law Courts, he did not neglect his new obligation to the museum. On 6 March 1866 he was invited to communicate with the Keepers of Natural History at the Museum, and the next day he wrote to the Office of Works to say that he was going to Edinburgh in the following week to look at museums there; soon after, and urged on by Francis Cowper, he went to Dublin for the same purpose.36 By April, Waterhouse had met Richard Owen on several occasions, during which Owen had stressed some of the ‘advantages afforded’ by Fowke’s plan.37 By June 1866 things had changed radically. This month saw the fall of the Liberal government, the disappearance of Cowper from his job as First Commissioner, and the temporary halting of the whole Natural History Museum project. Meanwhile, in the competition for the Law Courts, though Waterhouse was a strong contender, he lost to G. E. Street. In March 1867 the competition for Manchester Town Hall was announced, and Waterhouse was declared the winner in September. Late in 1867 he turned his attention back to the Natural History Museum and began to redraw Fowke’s design. On 1 April 1868 Manchester Council formally ratified the competition result for the Town Hall, by which time Waterhouse had so recast the Natural History Museum that what Fowke had first envisaged as a Renaissance palace was now a Romanesque cathedral.

35 BM Sub Committee Building and Sub Committee Natural History; 17 Jan. 1866, SC 1407–1409; 14 Feb. 1866, PRO Work 17/16/2 p. 11, and 23 Feb. 1866, PRO Work 1/81 p. 74; BM Standing Committee, 10 Mar. 1866, SC 10944. 36 6 Mar 1866, PRO Work 1/81 p. 110, 7 Mar. 1866, PRO Work 17/16/2, p. 31, and 2 Aug. 1869, PRO Work 17/16/2 p. 88. 37 Officers’ Report, 20 April 1866: CE5/77 P. 3516.

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Waterhouse and Romanesque In the competition for the Foreign Office, style had taken a leading role at the planning stage. By contrast, during the long deliberations about the Natural History Museum style was hardly discussed. The British Museum Committee offered no opinion ‘as to the elevation’. Their piority, they said, was with the accommodation, and the proposed architectural style was ‘a matter of taste, and in their opinion a question to be left for the consideration and decision of Her Majesty’s Government’.38 But the government made no comment when Waterhouse explained in 1868 to Lord John Manners (the new First Commissioner) that he had chosen ‘as a basis, the round-arched style common in Southern Germany so late as the 12th Century’. ‘It would’, he said, ‘afford both the grandeur and simplicity which should characterize a building of this description.’39 In discussion with Owen, whom he met on a regular basis, he came to the conclusion that the symbolism of a great natural history museum (a ‘building of this description’) was best embodied in the language of the ecclesiastical architecture of southern Germany, because it brought with it a certain kind of ‘grandeur’. He also felt that this grandeur should be accompanied by ‘simplicity’, a term loaded with positive meaning for a Quaker like Waterhouse, and implying, too, that the more elaborate Gothic would not be appropriate. Instead, something less highly developed, more primitive even, would provide the best framework for a collection that focused specifically on the evolution of the most primitive forms of life into the most sophisticated. Then there was the terracotta moulding, which as Waterhouse pointed out to John Manners, had been used ‘extensively in the New Museum of the Science and Art Department’.40 And here again Romanesque was the most historically appropriate vehicle for the elaborate naturalistic decoration he was planning with Owen. The words used by Waterhouse to John Manners might seem to apply to the building in its final form, but in fact the design that he offered the Trustees in 1868 was very different from the one that now stands in South Kensington. The elevations for this have all disappeared, but the plan contains echoes of Fowke’s much-despised 1862 38 BM Sub Committee on Building and Sub Committee on Natural History, 25 Mar. 1868, SC 1473–4. 39 Waterhouse to Office of Work, 4 May 1868, PRO Work 17 /16/2. 40 Ibid.


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20. Alfred Waterhouse, drawing for Natural History Museum, 1870–1. Royal Institute of British Architects

exhibition building.41 Both possess two long arcades that terminate in pavilions on the street front; both have grand, cathedral-like entrances (and in Fowke’s case were loosely Romanesque), and the central focus of both is a large and imposing dome, which was employed by Waterhouse to roof a lecture theatre. By 1871 yet another plan moved closer to the present building in that the twin towers were in place (Fig. 20). Mark Girouard has elegantly traced the stages by which Waterhouse modified the Bramantesque structure proposed by Fowke, showing how he adopted many ideas from Fowke’s prize-winning design, but modifying them to conform to his own tendencies and interests and those of Richard Owen.42 The prominent dome was retained in 1871, and this now seemed to be roofing the main entrance hall, with the lecture theatre (a feature later abandoned) pushed backwards towards the rear of the building. The strategy of adaptation was magisterial. The exuberance in Fowke’s project43 is transferred from the elevation to the decoration, where vitality and energy are expressed in the bustle of animal activity across the surface of the new building. Meanwhile, the evolving design was not only simper than Fowke’s, it also acted as an emblem of the two motives which 41 The plans for this and those for subsequent years are contained in PRO Work 17/16/2. 42 Girouard (1981), pp. 25–33. 43 Based, as Carla Yanni suggests, on ideas contained in Androuet du Cerceau’s Les Trois Livres d’architecture (1559). See Yanni (1999), p. 121.

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21. Alfred Waterhouse, Natural History Museum, London, 1868–81

dominated Owen’s work, the epistemological and the theological. These are represented by the east–west and the north–south axes of the building. The first runs along the long front elevation (Fig. 21). With its steep gabled roof, regular fenestration, and dormers it looks back to Deane and Woodward’s recently opened Oxford Museum (1855–9), which in its turn is reminiscent of medieval halls such as Brussels Town Hall and the twelfth-century Cloth Hall at Ypres.44 These, of course, were pointed-arch buildings, and in retaining the round arch Waterhouse was alluding to recent commercial buildings (see below pp. 194–5) while simultaneously echoing the shape of the windows in Fowke’s proposal. The axis is strengthened by the symmetrical, worldly, somewhat Palladian pavilions retained from Fowke’s design. The second axis runs at right angles to the first, processing up the steps of the entrance, through the massive door, under the twin towers, and into the central hall. This axis is charged with different associations from that of the first, and is strongly ecclesiastical. Waterhouse himself saw it in these terms,45 and the area 44 See Eve Blau, Ruskin’s Gothic: the Architecture of Deane and Woodward 1845–1861 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 56–7. 45 Lecuring in the Index Museum, he said in 1873 it would be ‘very much like speaking in the nave of a cathedral’. PRO Work DF 930/1.


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reserved for Owen’s Index Museum, his ‘cathedral to God’s wonders of the natural world’,46 was persistently described in ecclesiastical terms by the architectural press of the period.47 So what Waterhouse achieved so brilliantly in his management of Fowke’s arrangement was to marry two architectural metaphors, one expressive of the secular, the other of the sacred. The front along Cromwell road is reminiscent of the secular public prosperity of the medieval merchant, the world of the marketplace and the guild. In contrast the grand ‘westwerk’ of the towers, the entrance, and the cathedral-like interior is strongly suggestive of the realm of faith and of the spirit. And this combination indirectly reflects the two sides of Owen’s scientific endeavour, in which his passionate secular commitment to evidence grounded in material reality was constantly referred back to a set of sacred metaphysical principles. In all this Waterhouse managed to preserve Fowke’s round-arched fenestration, but cleverly changed its ideological associations. Instead of being a product of what Ruskin called ‘the pestilent art of the Renaissance’, it was now modelled on the Romanesque ‘roundarched style common in Southern Germany’, a style whose ‘highest glory’, Ruskin claimed, ‘is that it has no corruption’.48 Ruskin’s enthusiasm for Romanesque in The Stones of Venice was certainly a factor in Waterhouse’s pleasure in this style. But he was also familiar with the work of Richard Owen’s acquaintance, Edmund Sharpe, who had used the architecture of southern Germany as a model for pioneering Romanesque churches like St Mark’s, Witton, near Blackburn (1835–6) and St Paul’s, Farington, near Preston (1839–40).49 Sharpe was also highly original in his use of terracotta. When Sharpe accompanied Owen around Lancaster in September and October 1844 he had just completed the first of his so-called Gothic ‘pot churches’, St Stephen and All Martyrs, Lever Bridge, and was in the process of submitting plans for the second, Holy Trinity, Rusholme, in Manchester (1844–6).50 In 1851 Waterhouse, quite independently, made a careful study of Holy Trinity in his sketchbook.51 Not until towards the end of his career, 46

47 Olley and Wilson (1971), p. 50. See notes 104–7 below. 49 Ruskin, Works, x, 253 and ix, 47. See above, pp. 54–7. 50 I am grateful to John Hughes who pointed this out. 51 Waterhouse Sketchbook: ‘Scrapbook 2’, 1851–3: drawing dated 21 Sep. 1851. See also Colin Cunningham, The Terracotta Designs of Alfred Waterhouse (2001), p. 12 note 9. 48

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when he returned once again to architecture, did Sharpe bring together Romanesque (or perhaps more correctly, neo-Norman) and terracotta at Scotforth, Lancaster (1874).52 When Romanesque was first introduced into Britain in the 1840s the Cambridge Camden Society strongly opposed its use for Anglican churches,53 yet, as Kathleen Curran convincingly argues, it was adopted instead by Nonconformist groups.54 Waterhouse fits this pattern; his Anglican mode is Gothic, but several dissenting chapels are built in a Romanesque style. The cemetery at Incein-Makerfield, for example, needed two chapels. Waterhouse built a Gothic one for Anglican use and a Romanesque one for Nonconformists and Catholics (1856–7). Then in Rusholme, and a stone’s throw from Sharpe’s Holy Trinity, he was asked in 1860 to design a Congregational chapel. He chose a strong Romanesque building with a tall corner tower, recessed porches, and round arches, some of them stilted (Fig. 22). Though Waterhouse was known to his contemporaries as a Gothic architect, his tastes were extremely eclectic, and this catholicism is reflected in his sketchbooks. In his early years as an architect he made almost annual trips to France, Italy, Switzerland, or Germany and his drawings record a perennial interest in continental Romanesque architecture.55 In 1853 he noted the Romanesque windows at Valence, made a delicate pencil study of the multi-colonnaded porch of the Lombard-Romanesque duomo at Monza, and had done a close study of the baptistery of the duomo at Padua.56 When, in 1857, he went on a leisurely trip down the Rhine as far as Cologne, he made a few drawings of Romanesque buildings, including a fullpage study of the ‘glorious Romanesque Cathedral’57 of St Martin at Bonn (Fig. 23). This interest developed in the 1860s when he made a second, more concentrated and intensive journey down the Rhine to southern Germany. In September 1861 he travelled from Trèves

52 See: Robert Jolly, ‘Edmund Sharpe and the “Pot” Churches’, Architectural Review, 146 (1969), 427–31. 53 54 See above, p. 61. Curran (2003), pp. 214ff. 55 Stuart Allen Smith points out that between 1857 and 1871 he made four trips to Germany, five to Italy, and seven to France. See Stuart Allen Smith ‘Alfred Waterhouse’, in Jane Fawcett, ed., Seven Victorian Architects (London, 1976), p. 112. 56 Waterhouse Presentation Book, 20 May 1853, p. iv; 25 July 1853, p. xv, and 29 Aug. 1853, p. xxiii. 57 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. II, 17 Aug. 1857, p. 36. The drawing is on p. 17.


22. Alfred Waterhouse, Congregational chapel, Rusholme, 1863. Manchester School of Architecture

23. Alfred Waterhouse, St Martin, Bonn, Sketchbook no. II, 17 August 1857, p. 17. Private collection

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(Trier), to Speyer, Mainz, Bacherach, Boppard, Kloster (MariaLaach), Laach, Koblenz, Andernach, and Cologne.58 All the time he was drawing energetically, and almost all the studies are of Romanesque buildings. Inside the churches he was fascinated by the spaces created by round arches, arcades, and stilted arches. At Trier he focused on the windows and their disposition, the short columns of the eastern apse, and made a careful study of an arcade where twisted columns, similar to those used later in the entrance to the Natural History Museum, support capitals comprising interlocked male figures and an arch richly decorated with animals wreathed with plants (Fig. 24). At St Peter, Bacherach, he drew gargoyles on the exterior, heavily foliated animal capitals in the interior and the stilted arches in a colonnade.59 Further down the Rhine at Boppard he made a fine, bold drawing of the twin towers of the Hauptkirche, another drawing of the twin round towers of Maria Laach,60 and yet another of the towers at Andernach, which also provided him with three dense pages of Romanesque interior detail (Fig. 25).61 The interdependency of flora and fauna in a rich, deeply carved surface emerges strongly in the drawings which Waterhouse provided C. Dujardin the sculptor for the terracotta decoration. The relationship with the Romanesque originals comes out even more clearly in the recently acquired album of more than sixty Waterhouse drawings owned by Dujardin.62 Unlike the working drawings, these often show the organic relationship between shaft and capital, as for example in a double colonette to the right-hand side of the central entrance (Fig. 26), which shows canine figures on one capital, and on the other a stork catching a frog, all embedded in a deep undergrowth of foliage. On arriving in Cologne, Waterhouse visited St Maria im Kapitol, St Apostolen, and St Andreas, drawing as he went,63 and he was particularly attracted by St Martin, of which he made several studies, both on this occasion and later in 1871, when 58 Mark Girouard (1981), p. 42, touches on the connection between the Museum and Rhenish churches. 59 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. IV, 17 Sept. 1861, pp. 13–15. 60 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. IV, 19 Sept. 1861, p. 30 and 32. 61 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. IV, 20 Sept. 1861, pp. 35–8. 62 Some Details of the Enrichment of the New Museum of Natural History (South Kensington) Modeled by C, Dujardin for A. Waterhouse Esq. A.R.A., c.1874–9. This album, which was in the possession of a French collector for some twenty years, has recently (2004) been acquired by the Natural History Museum. 63 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. IV, 21 Sept. 1861, pp. 39–45.


24. Alfred Waterhouse, Trier, Sketchbook no. IV, 13 September 1861, pp. 35–8. Private collection

26. Alfred Waterhouse, detail of the enrichments of the new Museum of Natural History modelled by C. Dujardin for A. Waterhouse, c.1874–9. Sheet 26. Pencil on paper. Natural History Museum, London

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25. Alfred Waterhouse, Andernach, Sketchbook no. IV, 20 September 1861, pp. 35–8. Private collection

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he drew the towers.64 In subsequent years on journeys to France (1865), Italy, and Germany (1867), he continued to make drawings of Romanesque detail, but nothing quite matched his enthusiasm of 1861. Waterhouse’s choice of Romanesque for the Natural History Museum may also have been influenced by contemporary architectural practice. A number of architects had used it to good effect, notably the Ruskinian partners Deane and Woodward at Trinity College Museum, Dublin (1851–5), whose Romano-Byzantine interior Waterhouse almost certainly saw in 1866. Perhaps most influential, however, was Gilbert Scott’s unbuilt Romanesque design for the Foreign Office of 1860. Since Waterhouse wrote to the Commissioner of Works in 1856 requesting particulars of the Foreign Office competition, he would have taken a close interest in its progress;65 and though he made no submission he must have followed the ‘battle of the styles’ that went on so publicly in the press and in Parliament.66 By the end, Scott had shown that a large-scale, prominent and public building in the Romanesque was possible, and even though it had been rejected by the personal whim of Palmerston, that possibility remained. In the year following Waterhouse’s Rhine journey, 1862, a letter was published in The Builder that caught Scott’s attention. It was entitled ‘Byzantine Decorative Colouring’, and was an encomium in favour of Romanesque vigour and energy.67 It was signed ‘A. W.’ A. W. said that Byzantine (by which he meant ‘all Christian work before Gothic’ including Romanesque) is ‘manly and massive’. ‘If Byzantine’, he continued, ‘had only had the pointed arch it would have been perfect. There is life in it, and plenty of grotesque,—the best sign of healthy minds. Gothic grotesque is sensual compared with the open-hearted vigour of Byzantine.’68 Scott, writing as ‘A Goth’, replied at length pointing out to A. W. that there was a form of early Gothic that conformed to his desire for something ‘manly’. 64 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. IV, 21 Sept. 1861, pp. 44–5, and Sketchbook no. V, 6 Sept. 1871. 65 Cunningham and Waterhouse (1992), p. 40 note. 66 In A. W., ‘Byzantine Decorative Colouring’, The Builder, 20 (1862), 230. 67 It appeared on 29 March, the same issue which contained Fowke’s new exhibition building. 68 A. W. [Alfred Waterhouse?], ‘Byzantine Decorative Colouring’, The Builder, 20 (1862), 230.


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It is, he said, ‘a Gothic of the twelfth century, as at Notre Dame and St Germain des Près in Paris, at Sens, Noyen, Canterbury, Glastonbury, St Cross &c.; which is his Byzantine with the addition of the pointed arch; and in this Gothic we greatly rejoice: nor will we complain of an ally using the round-arched Romanesque or the domed Byzantine, and helping us to mould them into one style with the mature Gothic of the glorious thirteenth century; preserving the beauties and eschewing the faults of both.’69 What emerges from this exchange between Scott and someone who may have been Waterhouse is a shared enthusiasm for Romanesque combined with historical uncertainty about the style. Waterhouse’s use of Romanesque motifs in the Natural History Museum (as many scholars have noticed) was loose and undomgatic. This was partly temperamental and partly conceptual. Not only was Waterhouse a non-doctrinaire designer, in the 1860s the history of Romanesque had hardly been written. Nevertheless, when we turn to contemporary continental publications we can see that since the days of Edmund Sharpe’s tentative attempts at Romanesque church building, a range of illustrated reference books was becoming available to those who wished to build in this style. Though it is not possible to isolate single models for the Natural History Museum, the Germans had been active through the century in producing a substantial literature on Romanesque, which, together with his own drawings, would have equipped Waterhouse with confidence and fluency in the vocabulary of this style of medieval design. C. G. Kallenbach and Jacob Schmitt’s book Die christliche KirchenBaukunst des Abenlandes . . . (1850) is a vast quarry of small but detailed illustrations of Romanesque plans, elevations, sculpture, capitals, windows, and doors from around Europe; similarly, Systematische Darstellung der Entwickelung der Baukunst (1852) by Ludwig Puttrich, President of the Society of Antiquaries of Germany, contains many pages of comparative drawings illustrating Romanesque windows, doors, and capitals. Furthermore, William Whewell’s friend Georg Moller in his Denkmäler der deutschen Baukunst (1815–51) provided detailed illustrations of churches at Frankfurt, Mainz, Paderborn, and the double towers at Limburg whose west end resembles that of the Natural History Museum’s twin tower arrangement. 69

A Goth [Gilbert Scott], The Builder, 20 (1862), p. 250.

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Perhaps most striking, however, are the illustrations in Sulpiz Boisserée’s Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert am Nieder-Rhein (1833).70 These had greatly impressed Edmund Sharpe when he saw them in 183671 and contain a wealth of Romanesque detail including animal and plant capitals from Andernach,72 many details from St Maria im Kapitol, Cologne,73 and ten highly ornamented capitals from St Pantaleon, also in Cologne.74 Two studies in particular can be related to Waterhouse’s museum design. The disposition of the central towers has strong affinities with the twin towers of the Minster of St Martin, Bonn, which Waterhouse so admired in 1857 (Fig. 27), and the design of each tower bears a close resemblance to the tower of St Martin at Cologne75 that he had seen in 1861 (Fig. 28). It is as if he had taken the square towers from Cologne and consistently simplified them. At the Natural History Museum he has made the corner elements less raised from the main body, and at the highest level he has reduced the two tiers of these corner towers to one. He has also simplified the multi-faceted pitched roofs, reducing their numerous sides to foursided pyramids. Similarly on the main central tower he has rendered the upper three windows as single- rather than double-arched and has lengthened them. Beneath them, the group of small windows has been reduced in number and the windows at the edges of the towers have been removed entirely. The central spires of Waterhouse’s two towers are octagonal, and have closer affinity with the principal tower of St Martin, Bonn, but capped with much shorter spires. Then there is the magnificent splayed portal, so reminiscent of the grand west entrances of a number of Romanesque churches. Mark Girouard nominates the Gnadenpforte at Bamberg or the splendid north door of St Jacob in Regensberg.76 Few, however, are so elaborate as the so-called ‘Golden Door’ of the Minster at Freiburg. In 1836 Puttrich published Die Golden Pforte der Domkirche zu Freiburg with nineteen pages of text and seven illustrations by G. W. Geyser dem Jüngern. This cavernous entrance sports ten columns (Waterhouse has sixteen) and both have hugely elaborate capitals. 70 This was translated as Monuments d’architecture du septième au treizième siècles dans les contrées du Rhin inferieur (Paris, 1842). 71 Letter from Edmund Sharpe to William Whewell, Koblenz, 2 July 1833, Trinity College, Cambridge, R.6.116. 72 73 74 75 Plate 49. Plate 8. Plate 30. Plate 10. 76 Girouard (1981), p. 42.


27. St Martin, Bonn, from Sulpiz Boisserée, Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert am Nieder-Rhein (1833), plate 66

28. St Martin, Cologne, from Sulpiz Boisserée, Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert am NiederRhein (1833), plate 10

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The double opening of Waterhouse’s great entrance has few Romanesque precedents, and his tympanum comprising a small row of sculpture surmounted by three round arches is also unusual. By 1868, though the monumental, ecclesiastical aspects of Romanesque architecture had hardly been revived in Britain, another version of the style was well established. This was the secular, commercial variety. It took its inspiration more from Italy than Germany, and as much from domestic building as ecclesiastical. In the 1850s and 1860s round-arched arcaded buildings had been widely used in the design of offices and warehouses. Many of these drew their inspiration from Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and from his drawings of Byzantine warehouses and palaces on the Grand Canal and elsewhere. Waterhouse was no exception in being captivated by Ruskin’s compelling argument, and in 1865 he successfully submitted a round-arched warehouse design to the Architectural Exhibition. This was for the sugar merchants Fryar and Binyon and was reminiscent, said the Guardian (alluding to the Doge’s Palace), of a ‘celebrated building in Venice’.77 According to Henry-Russell Hitchcock the first completely arcaded commercial building was some shops in Market Street, Manchester, built by Starkey and Cuffley in 1851,78 but the most influential was Deane and Woodward’s Crown Life Office. This opened in New Bridge Street, London, in 1856, the same year as Waterhouse’s warehouse design at the Architectural Exhibition.79 The appeal of this arcaded method, whether it was used for offices or warehouses, was that it could be endlessly repeated, endlessly extended, and (later in the nineteenth century), prefabricated. Unlike Gothic work, it also created large flat wall spaces. This feature was attractive to different groups and for different reasons. For church decorators the walls were suitable for large murals or mosaics; for museum curators they were admirable for the accommodation of showcases, shelving, and visual aids; for the aesthete they were ripe for polychromatic decoration; and in the case of the Crown Life Office, both exterior and interior were ornamented with a wide 77 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. I, 1855–8, p. 49. Waterhouse visited the exhibition and noted the words from ‘The Architectural Exhibition’, The Guardian (16 Jan. 1856), 47. 78 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘Victorian Monuments of Commerce’, Architectural Review, 105 (1949), 66. 79 The Crown Life Building was demolished in 1866.


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range of materials in variegated patterns and textures. The full force of this development was felt in such strongly round-arched commercial buildings as George Aitchison’s Mark Row, London (1864), or the work done in so-called ‘Bristol-Byzantine’. 80 The utilitarian aspect of the arcading of the Natural History Museum, whether derived from Ypres or the Grand Canal, would not have bothered Owen, whose aim was ‘creating a material symbol’ for ‘the greatest commercial and colonizing empire in the world’,81 but it did arouse criticism from Fowke’s principal supporter, Henry Cole. ‘A manufacturing sort of thing. Byzantine’,82 was how he described Waterhouse’s 1868 design, reacting aggressively to the domical outline. By 1870 the opposition had increased. Cole continued to call for a return to Fowke’s original plan and was supported by the backtracking Lord Elcho, who in Parliament now described Waterhouse’s design as an ‘abomination’.83 James Fergusson was equally implacable, and in an article to Macmillan’s Magazine in 1872 was highly critical of Waterhouse’s period style. He insinuated that from the first Waterhouse had no intention of completing Fowke’s work and ‘consequently very soon produced an entirely new design of his own, in what he is pleased to call the Norman, or according to the more fashionable modern euphemism, the “Bizzantine” style, though what its connection may be with Byzantium I do not know.’ ‘As Mr Waterhouse very well knows,’ he concluded, ‘it is no more Norman than the British Museum is Greek.’84 In the same year Cole wrote an open letter to The Times mocking the conduct of architectural competitions. In the recent instance of the Natural History Museum, he said: ‘Mr Cowper Temple, with delightful innocency, put the execution of it into the hands of a Gothic architect. Lord John Manners reappears in his favourite character as First Commissioner, and puts aside the design chosen by a public competition, for one in a style of Gothic which it is difficult to chararacterize, and approved of by no one but

80

Michael W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (1989), pp. 180–91, supplies a wide range of examples in this style. 81 Owen quoted in Rupke (1994), p. 13. 82 Henry Cole’s diary quoted in Sheppard, Survey of London (1975), p. 207. 83 Elcho quoted in Sheppard (1975), p. 209. 84 James Fergusson, ‘The New Law Courts’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 25 (1872), 254.

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himself.’85 In spite of all this hostility, however, the foundations for the museum were laid and by 1873 the building was well under way.

The terracotta decoration In their preliminary negotiations Waterhouse probably pointed out to Owen that Romanesque was far more suitable for sculptural decoration than the Renaissance of Fowke’s design. This is borne out by the fact that Owen repeatedly told audiences that Waterhouse ‘chose an adaptation of the Round-arched Gothic, Romanesque, or Romaic of the twelfth century’ because ‘no style could better lend itself to the introduction, for legitimate ornamentation, of the endless beautiful varieties of form and surface-sculpture exemplified in the animal and vegetable kingdoms’.86 The ‘animal and vegetable kingdoms’ had appeared in abundance at Deane and Woodward’s Crown Life Office. Sculptures designed by Hungerford Pollen and executed by the famous O’Shea brothers filled the little spaces throughout the building with birds, rabbits, and dogs. The architectural press found this treatment strange but interesting;87 the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Madox Brown, and Thomas Woolner were delighted by it.88 Similar sculptural effects were being achieved by Deane and Woodward at the Oxford Museum (1854–60). Waterhouse visited this in 1858, just when the O’Shea brothers (who had been employed at the Assize Courts) were working on the exterior, and he made detailed and appreciative notes on the decoration.89 But the difficulties of working in sculpture on such a large building were becoming evident. It was painfully slow, and when the O’Sheas walked out at Oxford it was impossible to complete the project. Waterhouse saw that terracotta

85 Henry Cole, letter to The Times (3 Feb. 1872), reprinted in Fifty Years of Public Works of Sir Henry Cole K.C.B. . . . Accounted for in his Deeds, Speech and Writings, ed. A. S. Cole and H. L. Cole, 2 vols. (1884), ii, 306. 86 Revd Richard Owen, The Life of Richard Owen (1894), ii, 52–3. 87 The Builder said that, ‘the whole effect is very different from that of Gothic, to the English eye’. ‘Architecture of the Day’, The Builder, 16 (1858), 842. 88 Rossetti said that it was ‘the most perfect piece of civil architecture of the new school’ and added ‘I never cease to look at it with delight’; Ford Madox Brown thought that it was ‘the most exquisite piece of architecture I have seen in England’, and Thomas Woolner said that it was ‘brilliant in effect and original’. Quoted in Frederick O’Dwyer, The Architecture of Deane and Woodward (Cork, 1997), pp. 314–15. 89 Waterhouse Sketchbook no. II, Sept. 1858, pp. 131–6.


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could circumvent these problems. He had a long-standing interest in the medium that went back to Edmund Sharpe’s ‘pot churches’. But Sharpe had tried to make terracotta look like stone, and this was not Waterhouse’s aim. In 1855 Waterhouse had been ‘struck’, as he put it, by the use of terracotta with brick in the museum building for the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris;90 in 1857 he described a new brick and terracotta Protestant church in Cologne as ‘a beautiful erection’,91 and he must have picked up on Gilbert Scott’s enthusiasm for terracotta in his 1858 Remarks on Domestic and Secular Architecture.92 Such was the vogue for terracotta that in 1863 William Tite offered a prize at the Institute of British Architects for an essay on the subject: ‘On the Application of Coloured Bricks and Terra Cotta to Modern Architecture’. The winner was the fledgling architect and novelist, Thomas Hardy!93 So, dignified by ancient use and graced with recent precedent, terracotta, as Waterhouse saw, might also be used to mediate between Ruskin’s demand for creative originality and the demands of modern technology. A large building might be decorated both inside and out with sculpture repeats which had all the appearance of originals.94 Though terracotta had not been much used by Romanesque builders, it could readily be adapted to vigorous naturalistic sculpture. Furthermore, terracotta was possessed of the appropriate associations for a building of this kind. Like the architectural design itself, it mixed the secular and the sacred; its earthy nature fitting the primitive aspects of the architectural style, and was charged with Biblical symbolism connected with the power of the potter’s hand.95 In 1873 Owen supplied Waterhouse with ‘figures and outlines of

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Waterhouse Sketchbook no. I, 19 Sept. 1855, pp. 15–16. Waterhouse Sketchbook no. II, Aug. 1857, p. 57. George Gilbert Scott, ‘Materials of Buildings’, in Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture (London, 2nd edn., 1858), p. 105. 93 See The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy, ed. C. J. P. Beatty (Dorchester, 1966), p. 6. The essay no longer exists. 94 The details of making and installing the terracotta are given in Ottley and Wilson (1971), pp. 51ff., and Michael Stratton, The Terracotta Revival (1993), pp. 70ff. 95 ‘Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. | And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. | Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, | O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the portter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.’ Jeremiah 18:3–6. 91 92

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upwards of fifty restorations of extinct animals’96 and Waterhouse, who had talents as a draughtsman much beyond those called for in his architectural profession, translated these outlines into a series of lively reincarnations to which he added numerous studies of living beasts.97 Owen’s reservations about the nature of evolutionary theory, however, made him separate biology from palaeontology, and his views are (in a sense) set in stone in Waterhouse’s building. He decided to segregate the dead menagerie by placing it on the east side of the building, with the living one on the west side. There was a final touch, however, which strongly separated Owen’s views from those that were beginning to change the shape of natural history. On the highest gable over the entrance, and at the precise intersection between the secular and the sacred axes, was a figure which for Owen represented the culmination of the order to which he subscribed. It was a statue of Adam.98

The reception of the Museum The actual construction of the museum was bedevilled by many practical, political, and financial problems. In late 1868, with Gladstone as Prime Minister and Henry Layard at the Office of Works, the Liberals planned to move the site to the Embankment. When this was found to be impracticable, back it went to South Kensington under a Conservative government, with A. S. Ayrton as First Commissioner, and underwent severe economies. Nevertheless, the work went forward slowly, and as it neared completion in the late 1870s members of the architectural profession began to visit it and reports of it appeared in the architectural press. These were largely positive and focused mostly on the success of the terracotta. When members of the Architectural Conference visited in 1879 they were full of praise for Waterhouse’s innovations,99 and, as The Architect put it, how rarely ‘so much freshness is to be found in a single build96 Natural History Museum archive DF 930/1/23. Owen reporting to the Trustees of the British Museum (Natural History), 20 Nov. 1873. 97 These are reproduced in Cunningham (2001). In his youth Waterhouse had wanted to train as an artist, but his pragmatic Quaker family set him on the road to architecture. His sketchbooks are a testimony to his native ability as a fine draughtsman. 98 This seems to have been toppled at the time of the Second World War. See Cunningham (2001), p. 15. 99 ‘Architecture and Public Works’, in The British Almanac and Companion (1879), p. 154.


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ing’.100 Ruskin dissented. Though he had previously supported Waterhouse, when he spoke of ‘the accursed mess of the Nt. Brit. Mus. At Kensington’ and how it was ‘the worst bit of jobbery we’ve done in London’, he was referring to the mechanical replication of the sculpture and the various compromises involved in the use of terracotta.101 The Daily News disagreed and, stressing the success of the terracotta, felt that only the Romanesque style would have given Waterhouse the latitude to experiment in this way. ‘This flexible style’, said the writer, ‘lends itself to all moods of playful inventiveness: to the close imitation of leaves and tendrils, animals and flowers and ample room for quaint “conceits” ’.102 The British Almanac and Companion also admired the use of terracotta, and praised Waterhouse’s ability to create out of ‘the old Romanesque style an architecture quite modern in feeling’.103 The ecclesiastical associations of the elevation, however, received a mixed reception. One of the leading scientific journals, Nature, was strongly opposed to the ‘adoption of such a semi-ecclesiastical style’, fearing that ‘in the future there will be a perpetual conflict between the views of the keepers of the Museum collections and those of the architect of the building’.104 Waterhouse himself described the entrance hall as the ‘nave of a Cathedral’105 and the Daily News, echoing his sentiments, said that the interior was ‘like a large Romanesque church’.106 A few writers such as Ingress Bell felt easy with the religious associations of the Romanesque style, and the soaring cathedral-like towers. ‘Glancing upwards over the whole field of its varied and orderly scheme of enrichment,’ he wrote, ‘the eye rests upon the consummation of the whole in the figure which terminates appropriately the highest gable. There standing erect, is seen the “quintessence of nature”, with outstretched arms and upward gaze directed towards a still higher power.’107 100

‘The Natural History Museum’, The Architect, 25 (1881), 302. Ruskin to Henry Swan, curator of the Sheffield Museum, 15 Nov. 1883 (EL3 .R596 MS1) and 8 June 1882 (EL3 .R596 MS1), both in Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia, PA. 102 Daily News (6 Sept. 1879), 2. 103 The British Almanac and Companion (1880), p. 160. 104 Nature, 23 (1881), 55. 105 Waterhouse to Jones about the issue of a lecture theatre in the museum, 25 Aug. 1873. Natural History Museum archive DF 930/1. 106 Daily News (6 Sept. 1879), 2. 107 Ingress Bell, ‘The New Natural History Museum—1’, The Magazine of Art, 4 (1881), 360. 101

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Waterhouse worked with the scientific, social, and political architects of the Natural History Museum to create a building embodying many ambitions. Its enormous size is an indication of its central public role in bringing science to the people; the long horizontal stretch of its repeating arcades, more substantial even than the Byzantine warehouses of Venice, contains the imperial collection of what was then the greatest trading nation on earth, yet the soaring verticality of it central towers aspires to something transcending earthliness and materialism. Its Romanesque style is simultaneously dignified and rugged. It looks back to Byzantine originals and beyond; it anticipates the more sophisticated and polished glories of Gothic, but in its imaginative use of terracotta, glass, and cast iron it is a piece of nineteenth-century engineering. The logical arrangement of the elevation reflects the logical order of the exhibits within, and this, in turn, parallels the ordered logic of evolutionary development. But across the controlled symmetry of that same elevation the teaming multifariousness of insects, plants, and animals acts as an emblem of the richness and abundance of the natural order. In 1881, Waterhouse’s ‘Temple of Nature’ may not have been a monument to the latest research in natural history, but it was the spectacularly ingenious record of the social and scientific beliefs of an earlier generation.

8 The Last Degradation of Art: Gauguin, the British, and French Polynesia W hen the birds and mammals were moved from the British Museum to the new Natural History Museum in South Kensington, the gallery space that was left empty at Bloomsbury was used to display a new kind of collection. Since his death in 1865 Henry Christy’s1 collection of primitive art and artefacts had been stored in his house in Westminster. This was now transported to the Museum and items brought back from Polynesia much earlier by Captain Cook and Joseph Banks were added to it. The new gallery was opened in 1886, and The Times was bemused. It thought that ‘the quaint dresses and weapons and carvings of South Sea Islanders and African negroes must necessarily be strange sights to a great proportion of the visitors’, adding that such sights, ‘will doubtless afford amusement and instruction to a large number of people’.2 Ethnology was still in its infancy, and the products of what the author calls the ‘uncivilized races’ were a source of mystery. Few British collections, other than that of General Pitt Rivers, had been set up on a scientific basis, and this new one represented unfocused British curiosity about racial primitivism. A few years later, in 1890, it was augmented by objects transferred from the Missionary Museum, but visitors remained puzzled. In the following year Paul Gauguin left Paris to make his first trip to Tahiti. He too was in search of the same ‘strange sights’ and new sensations, but unlike the British he had no doubts about the artistic and spiritual importance of the ‘uncivilized races’. Gauguin died in 1903, but his paintings were not seen in England until 1910, when they appeared, together with others by Cézanne, 1 Christy (1810–65) began collecting in 1850, was stimulated to travel the world in search of primitive artefacts by the 1851 exhibition, and was best known for his pioneering work on cave painting and sculpture in the Dordogne. 2 The Times (12 Apr. 1886), 12.

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Gauguin, the British, and French Polynesia

Van Gogh, and Matisse, on the walls of the Grafton Galleries for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition. The private view took place on 5 November, Guy Fawkes day. It was suitably explosive, a succès de scandale, and became the most widely publicized, most notorious exhibition in the history of British art. Both its timing and the choice of works, however, were entirely adventitious. The gallery had a gap in its programme, and in the summer of that year asked Roger Fry to rapidly assemble an exhibition for the autumn. Fry, a trusted and established connoisseur, critic, writer, and editor of the Burlington Magazine, went with Desmond MacCarthy to Paris and begged what they could from the dealers. Fry created a rationale for the selection by inventing a title—‘Post-Impressionists’—and overnight, a new school came into being. The public was astounded and many journalists suspected a plot to undermine British art and British civilization from an ‘organized headquarters in Paris’ reflecting ‘the debasement of the painters living in the Gay City’.3 The phobic response of the middle classes to this exhibition drew its energies from events that lay well beyond the ambience of Bond Street. At home in 1910, the striking Welsh miners and the demonstrating suffragettes both contributed to a sense that stable values and cultural certainties were under threat. On the Continent, Paris appeared to be a hotbed of anarchism. The knowledge that Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires had published the writings of Max Stirner and Michael Bakunin, and La Revue blanche had defended the causes of Symbolism, free verse, and anarchy, led to the British suggestion that the Post-Impressionists were ‘the analogue of the anarchical movements in the political world’.4 The first PostImpressionist exhibition was a blow aimed at British propriety, decency, and moral superiority from the ground of high art. Worse still, Fry had persuaded various members of the British Establishment to collude, and the Director of the National Gallery and the Keeper of the Wallace Collection had put their names to the conspiracy. The level of journalistic vituperation was startling. These were ‘hysterical daubs’, ‘crude intolerable outrages’, and ‘childish rubbish’; they were ‘sterile’, ‘unmanly’, ‘sickening aberrations’; they 3 Charles Ricketts, ‘Post-Impressionism’, Morning Post (9 Nov. 1910), 6, reprinted in J. B. Bullen, ed., Post-Impressionists in England: the Critical Reception (1988), p. 107. 4 Ebenezer Wake Cook, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, Morning Post (19 Nov. 1910), reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 118.


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were the product of ‘morbid’ and ‘diseased minds’; they were, in short, examples of ‘the last degradation of art’.5 Of the central triumvirate of painters, hostility to Cézanne was fomented by Roger Fry’s outspoken reverence for the artist; Van Gogh’s mental condition gave rise to predictable comments about the ‘visualised ravings of an adult maniac’,6 but the case of Gauguin was more complex. He dominated the show, from the advertising poster (Fig. 29) that used his Poèmes barbares (1896)7 to the 37 more examples on the walls. Since these were the most ‘decorative’ they was also the most approachable. ‘You might imagine that you are entering an exhibition of the New Tahitian Art Club instead of the Grafton Gallery,’ wrote Martin Hardie.8 Furthermore, these paintings had an anthropological appeal. Though the epithets used to describe them— ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’—were often derisive or dismissive, there was also a certain curiosity and even admiration for Gauguin’s ‘primitive grandeur’.9 In other words, the responses to Gauguin in 1910 were coloured by a number of contradictory prejudices, preconceptions, and received ideas, many of which were socially, culturally, aesthetically, and even scientifically determined.

The idea of the primitive Foremost among these preconceptions were those that conditioned understanding of primitive culture and primitive art. We have seen how Lovejoy and Boas distinguished between what they called ‘chronological primitivism’ and ‘cultural primitivism’, where one is suggestive of a time in the local culture which was preferable to the present, and the other represented a more general discontent of the 5 William Blake Richmond, ‘Post-Impressionists’, Morning Post (16 Nov. 1910), 5, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 115; Anon., ‘The Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries’, The Academy (3 Dec. 1910), 547; Lawrence Binyon, ‘Post-Impressionists’, Saturday Review (12 Nov. 1910), 609–10, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 111; A. J. Finberg, ‘Art and Artists’, Star (14 Dec. 1910), 2, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 137; Blake Richmond, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 115; Anon., ‘New Art that Perplexes London’, The Literary Digest (10 Dec. 1910), 1094; Robert Morley, letter to the Nation (Dec. 1910), 406; Ebenezer Wake Cook, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, Morning Post (19 Nov. 1910), p. 4, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 119–20. 6 Robert Ross, ‘The Post-Impressionists at the Grafton: The Twilight of the Idols’, Morning Post (7 Nov. 1910), 3, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 103. 7 Poèmes barbares (1896), Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. 8 Martin Hardie, ‘The World of Art’, The Queen (26 Nov. 1910), 959. 9 Lawrence Binyon reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 111.

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29. Poster for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition, Grafton Galleries, 1910

civilized with the civilized state.10 The cult of savage nobility reached its height in the late eighteenth century, when its locus shifted. Romantics in England, France, and Germany were less concerned with the material trappings of primitivism than with the workings of the primitive mind. Sometimes this took the form of chronological primitivism, as in Wordsworth’s fascination with the mores of the rural inhabitants of the Lakes; at other times it took the form of cultural primitivism, as in Keats’s interest in ancient Greece. 10

Lovejoy and Boas (1937), p. 6.


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30. ‘Marquesas Islanders’, engraving from Illustrated London News (4 February 1843), 68

In the nineteenth century the utopian idealism of both these views was tarnished by imperial and missionary activity. The positive associations of ‘primitivism’ gave way to the darker meanings of ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’,11 and real savages seemed less noble than their literary counterparts. It was in the interest of missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, to stress the violence, paganism, and associated vices of their potential converts, and the fate of the evangelist John Williams, who met his death at the hands of cannibals in 1839, further blackened the reputation of primitive peoples. An engraving entitled ‘Marquesas Islanders’ in the Illustrated London News of 1843 (Fig. 30) shows the idolatrous Polynesians in the grip of some 11 Christopher Green writes illuminatingly of the use of these two terms in connection with Post-Impressionism in ‘Expanding the Canon: Roger Fry’s Evaluations of the “Civilized” and the “Savage” ’, in Art Made Modern: Roger Fry’s Vision of Art, ed. Christopher Green (1999), p. 122.

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unspeakable rite. They had just become a French dependency and their diet of rats (as William Vaughan suggests12) probably reflects mindless imitation of their new frog-eating masters.13 The grotesque representation of these people draws on contemporary theories of polygeny that classified savages not just as the ‘other’, but also as quite another species from the white man with a separate and distinct development. In the infancy of anthropology, William Cook Taylor’s Natural History of Society (1840) promulgated the view that postEdenic white society was struggling back to perfection, whereas primitives had merely sunk lower into the slough of degeneration. The view persisted, and it emerged in 1910 in some of the comments on Gauguin’s Adam and Eve (Fig. 31). ‘Possessing a certain savagery . . . like a brave in war paint’, wrote the art critic of Truth, Gauguin’s ‘black Adam and Eve cheer us up by making us realise that there could have been no Fall in the Garden of Eden, since there was nothing to fall from.’14 The parallel existence of the myth of the noble savage and the darker notion of savagery is illustrated by ‘G.W.’ in an account of the same painting. He describes ‘a nude female’ who ‘had been drawn about the time “When wild in woods the naked savage ran” ’. ‘By the way,’ he asks, ‘is it “naked” or “noble”? I can never remember.’ The words are Dryden’s, who, writing in protoRousseauistic vein said: I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.15

Uncertain as to whether savages should be ‘noble’ or ‘naked’, however, G.W. adds that in the case of the Gauguin ‘it does not matter, for this lady was undeniably naked and ignoble . . .’16 From the British point of view a different ‘fall’, the fall of the Society Islands into the hands of the French in 1843, was not a fortunate one. The British remembered that the Society Islands had gained their name from the British Society, and the stories of Captain 12 William Vaughan, ‘Primitivism and Progress: A Victorian Problem’, in Art and the Natural World in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Three Essays (Lawrence, Kansas, 1990), pp. 55–84. 13 The sculpture in this image, according to Prof. Serge Bruni of the University of French Polynesia, is Hawaian rather than Marquesian. 14 Anon., ‘The Post-Impressionists’, Truth (23 Nov. 1910), 1304. 15 John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada (1672). 16 G.W., ‘Post Impressionism’, Westminster Gazette (21 Nov. 1910), 3.


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31. Paul Gauguin, Adam and Eve, 1902. Oil on canvas, 59 ¥ 38 cm (23 1/2 ¥ 15 in). Ordrupgaardsamlingen, Charlottenlund, Denmark

Cook’s three voyages of exploration (funded by that same society) had passed into the mythology of great British discoveries. But even though paradise had been territorially lost to the French, the objects that Cook gathered had not. His legacy of Polynesian artefacts, augmented throughout the nineteenth century by missionaries, explorers, and curators, eventually found their way to the British Museum, as we have seen (p. 201 above), joining the Christy collection in 1886. The French and the Germans had also amassed collections from the South Seas, but by the first decade of the twentieth

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century the British collections had become definitive. It is a splendid irony, that when the first British Museum Handbook to the Ethnological collections was published in the year of PostImpressionism—1910—it immediately became the international bible for emergent interest in primitive art and culture.

Savages in Britain In 1910, British understanding of Polynesia and its people was, however, extremely limited and derived largely from museum cabinets of curiosities. Direct experience of living ‘primitives’ came, instead, from elsewhere. British imperial links were much closer with Africa and India than the South Seas, so that to the British, ‘savage’ in the early twentieth century usually meant ‘African’. In the years that preceded the first Post-Impressionist exhibition the most prominent savages in Britain were those who came as part of Zulu spectaculars. In 1899 Prince Lobengula, the alleged heir to the throne of Matabeleland, appeared in the hugely popular ‘Savage South Africa’ at Earls Court. Women in particular seemed to have found the dark, muscular bodies of these Zulu warriors hugely enticing, and when the Prince announced his impending marriage to a white girl, Florence Jewell, the papers were outraged that a civilized female should wish to ‘tie herself to a savage . . . the lowest in man’.17 Greater care was exercised by the organizers of the Anglo-French exhibition at the White City, Shepherds Bush, in 1908. This spectacle was an attempt to foster relations with France at a time when Britain perceived a threat to imperial supremacy from Germany, America, and Japan. The whole tone of the show endorsed the superiority of white culture, but the main ‘attractions’ or amusements came in the form of native villages. The British supported one from Ceylon and the French reconstructed rural life in Senegal. The organizers did not want a repetition of 1899, so when they built the encampments and populated them with scantily clad natives, the public was kept at a distance both literally by carefully placed fences, and metaphorically in the abstract language of the guidebooks. Robert Ross, however, was quick to see a connection between 17

Vanity Fair, quoted by Ben Shepherd, ‘Showbiz Imperialism: the Case of Peter Lobengula’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John Mackenzie (Manchester, 1986), p. 102.


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Shepherd’s Bush and Bond Street when, in a strongly sarcastic account of Gauguin’s work, he suggested that ‘young artists need scarcely be told that until there is a Tahiti village at Shepherd’s Bush it is premature to “Gauguinise” the European landscape or the Aryan race.’18 The Shepherd’s Bush exhibition made use of many of the ideas about race popularized by the new ‘human’ sciences of the late nineteenth century. As Annie Coombes puts, it ‘anthropometry, anthropology, eugenics, evolution’ were all brought to bear upon the colonial subject.19 One display in particular summed up some of the contemporary assumptions about the nature of ‘the lowest in man’. It was entitled ‘The Life of Primitive Man with Particular Reference to the Stone-Age Peoples, Pre-Historic and Contemporary’. British ignorance about Polynesia prompted at least one critic of the Post-Impressionist show to go in search of books on Gauguin and Tahiti. What could he have found? Though Charles Morice had published Gauguin’s Noa-Noa in an unauthorized version in 1901, it had very few British readers. Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art, on the other hand, with its substantial account of Gauguin’s work, was more popular. It was translated in 1908, drew extensively on the artist’s account of his life in Tahiti, and is fairly explicit (though uncritical) about Gauguin’s exotic sexual experiences with underaged girls. Writing in The Queen, Martin Hardie, for example, relied upon the German in his praise of Gauguin’s ‘honest attempt to express the primitive and direct emotion of one who has lived as a savage among savages’, yet the pictures remained for him ‘unpleasant and unbeautiful’.20

Primitive art Like most writers of this period (including Gauguin himself) MeierGraefe makes no distinction between the barbarian in life and the barbarian in art. Before the work of Picasso and the Fauves around 1906, primitive art was hardly distinguished from primitive artefacts like weapons and household implements. In spite of the fact that by

18

Robert Ross, see note 6. Annie Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian Culture (New Haven and London, 1994), pp. 204–5. 20 Martin Hardie, ‘The World of Art’, The Queen (26 Nov. 1910), 959. 19

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1885 (according to Robert Goldwater)21 all basic types of primitive art were accessible to Western critics and writers, those types were categorized as artistically crude when judged by the scientific, material realism of Western conventions. The study of primitive art was encouraged by Edward Tylor, who, though he had no separate section on the arts in his Primitive Culture (1871), set out to determine ‘the relation of the mental condition of savages to that of civilized man’.22 Tylor was the first Lecturer in Anthropology at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which from its foundation in 1883 focused strongly on primitive art. Henry Balfour, the first Keeper of the Pitt Rivers, in his The Evolution of Decorative Art (1893), and Alfred Haddon (also a Pitt Rivers man) in his Evolution in Art (1895) both gave extensive treatment to non-European forms. Each of them applied evolutionary principles to primitive work by transporting theories of physical evolution into the world of psychology, but in doing so increased the distance between Western and non-Western art. Savages, they claimed, unable to accurately represent the forms of nature, simply replicated types from each other. This produced a sequence of steps in decorative systems, which, as they moved further and further from their originals in nature, ‘degenerated’. The term is drawn from pathology. It is, of course, negative in its implications by suggesting that in savage art forms ‘degenerated’ from realism to abstraction. In the 1880s the Pitt Rivers and other British museums began to accept a whole new kind of savage art. When the British destroyed the small African kingdom of Benin in 1897 in a punitive raid, a large number of art objects that were part of a long and distinguished culture were released into Europe. They made such an impression on the British view of ‘savage’ art that in 1910 Robert Morley was able to make connections between Tahiti and Africa. Gauguin’s work, he said, ‘resembles closely the productions which emanate from Benin City or the drawings cut upon coconut shells by the natives of tropical islands’.23 Morley, like many of his contemporaries, categorized primitive and neo-primitive work separately from Western art. Like the work of savages, Gauguin’s painting failed to conform to 21 Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2nd edn., 1966), p. 4. 22 Tylor quoted in ibid., p. 19. 23 Robert Morley, letter to the Nation (Dec. 1910), 406.


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Western traditions and was perceived as retrogressive. It was, said the critic of the Academy, ‘a recoil from all the conventions that have grown up in the art of the last three hundred years’,24 and, added Jacques Émile Blanche, ‘such aping of the barbarians by highly civilized Frenchmen or Englishmen [is] a simple fad, a decadent and morbid disposition . . . totally deprived of any sort of promise for the future.’25

Views of Polynesia In the latter part of the nineteenth century attitudes to Polynesia in the published literature were curiously binary, with some commentators condemning the corruption of the culture, and others praising its innocence and peaceableness. William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches helped to create one of these parameters when back in 1831 he claimed that ‘no portion of the human race was ever perhaps sunk lower in brutal licentiousness and moral degradation’. He quoted an anonymous poet who spoke of how the ‘Paphian Venus driven from the west, / In Polynesian groves long undisturbed / Her shameful rites and orgies foul maintained.’26 Ellis found Tahitian sexual mores, and particularly the openly practised homosexuality, too disgusting to address directly, referring his reader instead to St Paul’s condemnation of ‘unnatural’ sexual activity in Romans. The myths persisted. In 1872 Handley Moule, later Bishop of Durham, won the Cambridge Seatonian Prize for poetry with his ‘The Gospel in Polynesia’. In this he attacked the ‘lying strain [of] Rousseau’, and accounts of the ‘innocence and joy’ of the South Seas. From the missionary point of view the Gods of the Islands ‘shut the breast / Against all thoughts of holiness and set / Each pulse of wrath and lust on fierce and sudden fret.’27 No wonder when Robert Louis Stevenson arrived at the Marquesas Islands in 1888 he expected, as he put it, ‘to find them peopled with lascivious monkeys’.28 Later, in 1891 (the year that Gauguin arrived for the first time in Tahiti), a 24

Anon., Academy (3 Dec. 1910), 546. J. E. Blanche, ‘The Post Impressionists’, Morning Post (30 Nov. 1910), 5. 26 William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (1831), i, 97–8. 27 Handley Moule, The Gospel in Polynesia (Cambridge, 1872), stanzas xx, xvi, and xxvi. 28 Letter to Sidney Colvin dated 28 July 1888, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew (New Haven, 1994–), vi, 206. 25

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traveller, Dora Hort, commented on the fact that the ‘morality of Tahiti was at a very low ebb’,29 and still later, in 1910, F. W. Christian said that Marquesans were ‘the most debauched nation in Polynesia’.30 The time for relative ethnology had not yet come, and when visitors to the Grafton Galleries first saw Gauguin’s paintings they were unable to conceal their revulsion against subjects that they considered unacceptable in high art. Many of those visitors were amazed by the ‘primitive, almost barbaric, studies of Tahitian women’,31 and were disturbed by the presence of ‘lascivious’ and dark females in a temple of high art. Such things, said Philip Burne-Jones, could not be permitted, ‘if the temple is to be safeguarded from the invasion of the savage’.32 Traditionally, the nude was the province of the white female, but as the Daily Express pointed out, Bond Street was now plagued with the ‘bizarre, morbid, and horrible’33 women of Gauguin’s invention. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s remarks were particularly charged with innuendo. In what he called ‘a pornographic show’ he noted that Gauguin’s Maternité34 contained ‘three figures of brown people, probably South Sea Islanders . . . all repulsively ugly’. Pictures like this, he said, were no better than ‘indecencies on the wall of a privy’.35 By no means all contemporaries were outraged by the nudity or by tales of sexual libertarianism in Tahiti, and there were some attempts to contextualize the sexual mores of Polynesia. Edward Reeves in his book Brown Men and Women (1898) wrote of how the missionaries and especially their wives taught ‘a new sin’ to natives who ‘knew neither of the shame of nakedness nor the increased sexual attraction of the human form artfully draped’. To illustrate his point he pho-

29 30

Dora Hart, Tahiti: the Garden of the Pacific (1891), p. 29. F. W. Christian, Eastern Pacific Islands: Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands (1910),

p. 9. 31 Anon., ‘Paint Run Mad’, Daily Express (9 Nov., 1910), 8, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 105. 32 Philip Burne-Jones was the son of Edward Burne-Jones and was quoted in the Literary Digest (16 Dec. 1910), 1095. 33 Anon., ‘Paint Run Mad’, Daily Express (9 Nov. 1910), 8, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 105. 34 There is another version of this painting in the Rockefeller collection, New York. See Georges Wildenstein, Gauguin (Paris, 1964), i, pp. 244–6, entries 581 and 582. 35 Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, diary entry for 15 Nov. 1910 reprinted in Bullen (1988), pp. 113–14.


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tographed a young girl, Semilisi, placed luxuriantly in Gauguinesque pose on a bed ‘in her native dress’. On the opposite page she sits primly upright ‘in her new fashioned dress’.36 Though there is no question of which is the more attractive as an image, Semilisi’s nakedness must have seemed startling to British readers in 1898. Throughout this period, Polynesia was promoted as a paradise of pin-ups, and by 1910 a huge postcard industry had built up. The Australian firm of Kerry and Co. took pictures of native chiefs and landscapes, but women, ‘young and bare-breasted’, dominated their output.37 Characteristic of a similar genre was Frank Burnett’s Through Polynesia and Papua (1911). Here there is no attempt to disguise the erotic potential of Tahitian nudity, and the ‘nymphs’ are placed seductively in settings that are clearly created in the studio. Interestingly, they are silently passed over in the text. Paintings from this period are less common than photographs but here, too, the nudity of the South Sea islanders plays an important role. The best-known of these visiting artists is the American John La Farge, who visited Polynesia in 1894. His stay was almost exactly contemporary with that of Gauguin; he and his friend Henry Adams left Tahiti in 1894 only four days before Gauguin arrived. Like Gauguin, La Farge was attracted to the myth, beliefs, and stories of the South Seas, but unlike Gauguin, whose work he found ‘foolish’, ‘affected’, and ‘naïve’,38 he had no interest in identifying himself with the life of the natives. His subjects may have been primitive, but his style has none of Gauguin’s decorative verve, stylization, or vibrant colour. His journals, published in 1914 three years after his death, suggest that, like so many of his contemporaries, he was highly conscious of the unusual erotic conventions of the South Seas, but his way of coping was by distancing and mythologizing them. Typical is his watercolour, Fayaway Sails her Boat, Samoa (Fig. 32). It was reproduced in his travel journal as a directly observed contemporary event. In reality it was commissioned to illustrate a fantasy moment in an 1892 edition of Herman Melville’s South Sea novel Typee (1846). The treatment of the girl, standing naked on her boat and 36

Edward Reeves, Brown Men and Women (1898), pp. 78–9. Alison Devine Nordström, ‘Photography of Samoa: Production, Dissemination, and Use’, in Picturing Paradise: Colonial Photography of Samoa, 1875–1925, ed. Casey Blanton (Daytona Beach, 1995), p. 25. 38 Letter to Henry Adams in Kaori O’Conner, ed., An American Artist in the South Seas (1987), p. xvi. 37

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32. Fayaway Sails her Boat, Samoa, reproduced from John La Farge, Reminiscences of the South Seas: with 48 Illustrations from Paintings and Drawings made by the Author in 1890–91 (1914), p. 68

using her garment as a sail, is stylistically orthodox but is exoticized by being embedded in a double fantasy, one of Melville’s creation, the other of Lafarge’s, both involving the ‘freedoms’ of Tahiti. The girl is unashamedly unselfconscious and uninhibited in her own environment, but seen across a stretch of water in the La Farge (and through the Western eyes of Melville’s prose), the frail boat and the world it represents become tantalizingly inaccessible to the foreigner. Here is a sharp contrast with Gauguin. While Gauguin felt that he was observing native life from within, La Farge saw it only as an observer. Nevertheless, La Farge suffused his work with unabashed admiration for a remote culture which he thought preserved an uncorrupted state of primitive innocence. It was in the South Seas, he said, that he found ‘living proof that Greek art is not the mere invention of the poet’.39 This link between primitivism and ancient cultures goes back at least as far as Winckelmann, and it persisted into the twentieth century, with George Calderon writing in the New Age 39

La Farge quoted in Kaori O’Conner (1987), p. xii.


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of how the natural world in Gauguin’s work resembled that of ‘the primitive Maoris . . . when they first sang their Hesiodic songs of Creation’. Again and again, the champions of Post-Impressionism likened the stylization of Gauguin’s work to that of ancient Egypt, Greece, and most especially, Byzantium.40 Perhaps rather surprisingly, the most powerful indictments of Gauguin’s work did not come from his treatment of the erotic nor (as in more recent years) his personal treatment or representation of women. They were directed, instead, at his style and the implications of that style for both modern art and for the civilization that created it. Like Conrad’s Mr Kurtz, Gauguin had gone native and had betrayed the values of the society he had abandoned. In the view of some this was an honest attempt to revivify the moribund conventions of Western art, but for most it represented either a comic return to childhood, or a clear symptom of mental disease, introvertism, and moral degeneracy. When Lawrence Binyon called his work ‘childish rubbish’, and Wilfred Scawen Blunt said that Gauguin’s work resembled that of ‘an untaught child of seven or eight years old’, they were drawing on a long-standing tradition which associated the child and the savage.41

The child and the savage The hierarchy of races, dominated by Anglo-Saxon civilization, was firmly established at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By 1863, James Hunt, the President of the Anthropological Society of London, was able to accurately tabulate the position of races. So, for example, the Negro held an intermediate place with six races above and six below. By the age of 12, according to the Anthropological Review of 1864, the Negro child ceased to develop; ‘sutures’ closed, and intelligence stultified.42 The Negro then remained locked in a 40 George Calderon, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, New Age (24 Nov. 1910), 89. The reference to Byzantium particularly outraged devotees of Byzantine mosaic. William Blake Richmond had spent the last years of the nineteenth century completing the mosaic decoration of St Paul’s Cathedral in a Byzantine mode. 41 Lawrence Binyon, ‘Post-Impressionists’, Saturday Review (12 Nov. 1910), 609–10, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 111, and Wilfred Scawen Blunt, diary entry for 15 Nov. 1910, reprinted in Bullen (1988), pp.113–14. 42 Anthropological Review, 2 (1864), 386, quoted in Brian V. Street, The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction 1858–1920 (1975), p. 73.

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state of childhood. This view of the undeveloped races produced images common in both travellers’ tales and fiction. The savage, representing the infancy of European civilization, was seen as gullible, faithful, brave, and childlike by turns. Herbert Tichbourne, in Rambles in Polynesia (1897), told his readers that ‘the Polynesian men and women are great, big, lively babies, all mirth and innocence . . .’43 In the early twentieth century A. F. Chamberlin suggested that ‘without primitive peoples, the world at large would be much what in small it is now without the blessing of children,’ and in 1904 G. Stanley Hall, a leading American anthropologist, claimed that ‘most savages in most respects are children’.44 Yes, said E.-T. Hamy in 1908, ‘savages are like children . . . they draw, they mess in paints, [and] they model like children.’45 The theory of ‘recapitulation’ reinforced this idea from the other direction. Normal white individuals ‘recapitulated’ the history of mankind by passing through a series of stages that represented adult ancestral forms. Children therefore moved through the ‘savage’ stage as they approached adolescence and passed into adulthood. It was incumbent, therefore, upon the developed races as the ‘adults’ of the world, to bring the blessings of civilization to savages. The ‘White Man’s Burden’, as Rudyard Kipling called it in 1899, was to offer succour to ‘. . . new-caught sullen peoples / Half devil and half child’.46 Confronted with the painting of Gauguin in 1910, many critics could see only the work of savage ‘children’ who necessarily produce childish art. ‘It is surely absurd’, said the critic of the Academy, ‘for grown men and women to ape the imperfections of childhood.’47

Savage degeneration This attitude of benign, if condescending, paternalism was given a much more vicious twist by racial theories and anthropological 43

Herbert Tichbourne, Rambles in Polynesia (1897), p. 8. Chamberlin and Hall quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth, 2nd edn., 1992), pp. 116–17. 45 E.-T. Hamy, ‘La Figure humaine chez le sauvage et chez l’enfant’, L’Anthropologie, 19 (1908), 385–6, quoted in Goldwater (1966), p. 22. 46 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, in Rudyard Kipling: the Complete Verse (1990), p. 261. 47 Anon., ‘The “Post-Impressionists” at the Grafton Galleries,’ Academy (3 Dec. 1910), 546. 44


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Darwinism. De Gobineau’s Of the Inequality of Human Races (1853) enforced the idea of the natural aristocracy of the white races and the debasement of racial purity through miscegenation. ‘Oceania’, he said, ‘has the special privilege of providing the most ugly, degraded, and repulsive specimens of the human race, which seem to have been created with the express purpose of forming a link between man and beast pure and simple.’48 Cesare Lombroso’s Genius and Madness (1863) and William Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), by measuring and classifying physical characteristics, attempted the ‘scientific’ quantification of types within a race and between races. Lombroso’s findings were particularly chilling. Criminal physiognomy bore all the signs of degeneracy that pointed to atavism. Looking back at his own ‘discoveries’, he wrote how ‘at the sight of that skull [of a delinquent], I seemed to see all of a sudden . . . the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.’49 Lombroso made connections between criminals and savages in their mutual love of tattooing, their excessive idleness, their love of orgy, and their violent and cannibalistic propensities. It was a small step from this to Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892–3).50 Nordau popularized, moralized, and extended Lombroso’s ideas to take into account not just the extreme states of genius and madness, but those which lay between, what he called ‘borderland’ types. Like Lombroso he claimed that his methodology was scientific, as was his teleology. The scientific position, in Nordau’s view, stood against the degenerate state, and such a position endorsed the good bourgeois habits of strict discipline, neat appearance, and sexual rectitude. Though he has little to say about savages, he has much to say about artists, and particularly those artists who were possessed of savage, anti-scientific tendencies. ‘Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics,’ he wrote in his dedication to Lombroso. ‘They are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same 48 Quoted in Partha Mitter, ‘Reflections on the Construction of Beauty in the West’, in Cultural Encounters: Representing Otherness, ed. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street (2000), pp. 124–5. 49 Lombroso quoted in Gould (1992), p. 124. 50 Nordau himself attributed Bénédict Auguste Morel in his Traité des dégénerescences physiques . . . (Paris, 1857) with the invention of the term ‘degeneration’.

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somatic features, as the members of the [degenerate] anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil.’51 Nordau commended scientific realism and material accuracy in art, but condemned most modern art movements such as PreRaphaelitism, Impressionism, and Symbolism as inward, egotistical, distorted, diseased, depraved, and degenerate. The importance that Nordau attached to art as either a reflection of social degeneracy or as an act of degeneracy itself provided the most powerful ammunition against Post-Impressionism. Ebenezer Wake Cook, who had already written a pale interpretation of Nordau’s ideas in his book Anarchism in Art and Chaos in Criticism (1904), was quick to condemn the whole Post-Impressionist event as the ‘degradation of art, criticism, and journalism’.52 A. J. Finberg, an authority on the work of J. M. W. Turner, sarcastically alluded to the ‘sterile productions’ of artists with their ‘pitiable mental life’, offering Gauguin’s Yellow Christ as evidence for the ‘abnormal quality of the artist’s mind’.53 But it was Charles Ricketts who was most outspoken in his use of terms drawn directly from degeneration theory. He spoke of the ‘morbid and suffering egotism’ in the work of these ‘mad and bad painters’. They were subject to a ‘sickness of the soul’ and threatened to bring to Britain ‘strange imported maladies from abroad’.54 Britain, and particularly the British art Establishment, had been enormously insular during the fifteen years that preceded the Grafton Galleries show. In spite of the fact that by 1910 some younger artists were aware of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Fauvism, the conservative members of the profession, believing that British naturalism still led the world, were either ignorant or dismissive of new French movements. It was for this reason that artists like Sir William Blake Richmond, Philip Burne-Jones, and Charles Ricketts were so disturbed by what they saw on the walls of the Grafton. It went against ‘progress’ in art; it went against scientific accuracy; it was a malady, a sickness, and a plague that had been perpetrated by criminals posing as primitives. Gauguin’s Polynesia, said George Calderon, ‘is never as it is, in material trees and mountains 51

Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. from the 2nd edn. (1895), p. vii. Morning Post (19 Nov. 1910), reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 118. Finberg, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 137. 54 Charles Ricketts, ‘Post-Impressionism’, Morning Post (9 Nov., 1910), 6, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 107. 52 53


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and men and women’. Instead, the artist has chosen to regress to childish savagery and ‘shows Tahiti always through the collective mind, the race-mind of the inhabitants’.55 Finally, in what was perhaps the most bizarre critique, the genuinely insane were enlisted in the cause against Post-Impressionism. In February 1911, Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop, the Senior Resident Physician of the Bethlehem hospital, was asked by the artist George Clausen to lecture to the Art Workers’ Guild on the art of the mentally ill. Robert Ross had already suggested that ‘at Broadmoor there are a large number of post-impressionists detained during his Majesty’s pleasure’56 and Clausen, who was one-time Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and Master of the Guild, had little time for modern versions of primitivism which he described as ‘decadence rather than . . . Renaissance’.57 But Hyslop needed no prompting. In 1900 he had arranged a large exhibition of work by the mentally disturbed in which, ironically, he had included a painting of his own, for he was himself an artist who occasionally exhibited at the Royal Academy. Throughout his life he wrote about the artistic temperament, which existed on what he called ‘the borderland’ between sanity and madness. His views on art were entirely in sympathy with those of the Art Workers’ Guild. In art he stressed the importance of scientifically acceptable rules, of the primacy of conventions, of growth and development on organic lines, and of the value of hard work in artistic practice. His book of instructions for ‘Ortho-printing’ is characteristic. Ortho-printing was a process of printing directly from natural objects, involving technical skill, but with the minimum intervention on the part of the artist.58 Nothing could be more remote from Post-Impressionist painting, and Hyslop’s Guild lecture was intended to bring the new movement and its sympathetic critics like Fry and Bell into disrepute. By means of invidious pseudo-scientific analysis openly based on Max Nordau’s Degeneration, he showed that both groups provided evidence of symptoms similar to those of patients in his charge. ‘Degenerates’, said Hyslop, linking patients and Post-Impressionists, 55

Calderon (1910), p. 89. Robert Ross, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 101. George Clausen, ‘Theories of Representation’, in Royal Academy Lectures on Painting (1913), p. 324. 58 Theophilus B. Hyslop, Ortho-artcraft (Ortho-printing) and Glass-printing (1928). 56 57

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‘often turn their unhealthy impulses towards art, and not only do they sometimes attain to a high degree of prominence but they may also be followed by enthusiastic admirers who herald them as creators of new eras in art.’59 Progressive mental degeneration, said Hyslop, produces a state in artists where ‘sensation and perception of colour, form, and perspective become impaired’, and (with a sideswipe at Gauguin) he added, ‘this gradual retrogression . . . results ultimately in a pathological return to the crude and rudimentary conditions of barbarism.’ Such work, he said, with images of Tahitian women in mind, may be ‘sensuously charming’, but more often ‘suggestively pornographic or even immoral’. Thus, he continued, ‘the pathological process underlying reversion to a primitive type of simulation of barbaric art is frequently characteristic of brain degeneration.’ Hyslop’s over-determined language had quite the opposite of its intended effect. The health warning provided by the degenerationists about the baleful effect of Post-Impressionist art hugely promoted the reputation of the exhibition. No previous show had received such coverage, and the public came in their thousands.

Acceptance ‘Are we ready for a “Tahitian School”?’ asked the critic of the Literary Digest in December 1910.60 His answer, like that of most of his contemporaries, was ‘No’, but even before Hyslop gave his lecture on Post-Impressionist degeneration, the tide was turning in favour of many of the artists, particularly Gauguin and Cézanne. ‘During the first week or two of the exhibition’, wrote the critic of the Daily Graphic at its close in mid-January 1911, ‘spectators used to shout with laughter in front of Van Gogh’s Girl with the Cornflower, or Gauguin’s Tahitians . . . but on Saturday the general attitude was one of admiration.’61 The public and the buyers who had been first drawn in by the fuss in the press had been won over by the dogged perseverance of two groups of critics who had taken a positive line. One was led by Frank Rutter who, in the columns of the Sunday 59

Theophilus B. Hyslop, ‘Post-Illusionism and the Art of the Insane’, Nineteenth Century (Feb. 1911), 270–81, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 210. This was reprinted in a number of Hyslop’s titles. 60 Anon. ‘The New Art that perplexes London’, Literary Digest (10 Dec. 1910), 1094. 61 ‘An Art Victory: Triumphant Exit of the Post-Impressionists’, Daily Graphic (16 Jan. 1911), 15, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 184.


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Times and Art News, pressed the case for Post-Impressionism as something quite new in art.62 In his short, provocatively titled book Revolution in Art (1910) he openly espoused the new wave as antitraditional, rebellious, and explosive. Cézanne and Gauguin, he said, were revolutionary painters, and ‘are to their younger comrades what Marx and Kropotkin are to the young social reformers of today’.63 This anarchist stance did not endear itself to a public already agitated by Gauguin’s subversive primitivism, and it took the second group, led by Roger Fry, to offer a conciliatory, conservative, and ultimately acceptable view. It was, however, Fry’s friend Desmond MacCarthy, writing in the exhibition catalogue from Fry’s notes, who was most influential about Gauguin. He understood that ‘a return to barbaric art’ might be disconcerting, but ‘primitive art, like the art of children’, involved not so much material literalness, as putting ‘a line round a mental conception of the object’. In his Tahitian pictures, Gauguin, he said, ‘endeavoured to bring back into modern painting the significance and gesture and movement characteristic of primitive art’.64 The fact is that the Gauguin’s works appeared for the first time in London at just that moment when anthropology was shifting from Eurocentrism to a much more relativistic and discriminating position, and when aesthetic attitudes to primitivism were undergoing radical change. Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man (1915) rejected the connection between racial and mental types and pointed to cultural rather than genetic features as the determinates of any given form of art. Similarly, Roger Fry’s essay on Bushman art of March 1910 was a groundbreaking attempt in the understanding of primitive drawing in its own terms and in terms, too, of the physiology of perception.65 So, when Robert Morley derisively compared Gauguin’s work to that of Benin artists and Roger Fry was happy to accept the comparison but reject the derision, we have an aesthetic watershed in attitudes. In defence of Gauguin, Fry explained his return to primitive art by reference to science and history. Gauguin, 62 Rutter had been art editor for the Sunday Times since 1903 and was editor of Art News. 63 Frank Rutter, Revolution in Art (1910), pp. 14–18, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 193. 64 Desmond MacCarthy, ‘The Post-Impressionists’, Introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, Grafton Galleries (1910). 65 Roger Fry, ‘Bushman Paintings’, Burlington Magazine, 16 (1910), 334–8, reprinted in his Vision and Design (1920), pp. 56–64.

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33. Spencer Gore, Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery, 1911–12. Oil on canvas, 84 ¥ 72 cm (33 ¥ 28 1/2 in). Private collection

said Fry, turned his back not on Europe but on the exclusive modes of European representation. He rejected, said Fry, the too complex language of naturalistic representation and attempted to rescue art from ‘the hopeless encumbrances of its own accumulation of science’.66 Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, and the other champions of PostImpressionism invoked the Italian primitives as positive models, but the example of primitivism which spoke most tellingly to the audience of 1910 was Fry’s comparison between Gauguin’s work and the Byzantine artists of the fourth century. Between them these two groups of critics turned the older Post-Impressionists into masters of modern art. Almost exactly a year after the opening of Manet and the Post-Impressionists, this new status was confirmed by an exhibition 66 Roger Fry, ‘The Grafton Galleries—1’, The Nation (19 Nov. 1910), 331, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 121.


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34. Paul Gauguin, Vision of the Sermon, 1888. Oil on canvas, 73 ¥ 92 cm (28 3/4 ¥ 36 1/4 in). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

of works by Cézanne and Gauguin at the Stafford Gallery.67 In the autumn of 1911, Michael Sadler, later Sir Michael Sadler, had bought four pictures by Gauguin, Manao tupapau, Christ in the Garden of Olives, The Vision of the Sermon and an unidentified pastel. These works formed the centrepiece of the exhibition, to which the organizer, John Neville, added ten more. All the critical terms were now reversed. There was no more talk of ‘savages’ and ‘degeneration’; instead Gauguin was praised for his ‘genius for decoration’, his ‘unusually strong and sensitive gift for drawing’, and was turned 67

The exhibition opened on 23 Nov. 1911.

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into ‘one of the most interesting personalities in modern art’.68 Spencer Gore’s witty pictorial commentary on the exhibition, Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery (Fig. 33), shows a view of the gallery from above with Augustus John on the left, John Neville in conversation with a large woman, and Wilson Steer staring at the wall on the right. Three pictures by Gauguin hang on the far wall. The composition of Gore’s painting (as Anna GruetznerRobins points out69) reflects the composition of the Vision of the Sermon (Fig. 34), which is itself displayed on the wall. The red ground of the field has become Neville’s red carpet, the Breton women have turned into gallery visitors, and the overarching tree has become the arch of the gallery. In Gauguin’s painting, Jacob battles with an angel described in Genesis as a test of spiritual strength and determination. In a sense, Gore’s painting, too, is a record of a struggle: that between Gauguin’s paintings and the British public during the remarkable year 1910–11. Gore’s painting is also a ‘vision of a sermon’ and a subsequent conversion. The conversion it records is the experience of those who came to mock in 1910 and remained to pray in 1911. 68 J. B. M[anson], ‘The paintings of Cézanne and Gauguin,’ The Outlook (2 Dec. 1911), reprinted in Bullen (1988), pp. 245–6. 69 Anna Gruetzner-Robins, Modern Art in Britain, 1910–1914 (1997), p. 53.

9 Byzantinism and British Modernism Roger Fry’s championship of Post-Impressionism and his eloquent support for the ‘barbaric’ art of Gauguin in 1910 might seem far removed from his earlier work on Giovanni Bellini or his edition of Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses.1 The significant link is a formal one. In Fry’s opinion the treatment of space and form in Byzantine mosaics had analogies with the early Italian painters and the pictorial innovations of Post-Impressionism. To illustrate the point he selected a daringly contemporary series of mosaics by Boris Anrep entitled Scenes in the Life of a Mayfair Lady (Fig. 35).2 Anrep, he said, ‘is able to treat a completely modern theme . . . with exactly the same sense of the monumental and resistant qualities of the medium as the Byzantine mosaicists displayed.’3 In this way Fry placed mosaic alongside other visual expressions of modernism. ‘With the new aspects of pictorial design,’ he said, aspects ‘which were explored by Cézanne’s successors, in particular by Gauguin and still more in the early works of Matisse—e.g. his large design for The Dance—with the new interest in the organisation of the picture surface and the new sympathy for Byzantine art, it would have been natural enough that mosaic should once more appear to the artist as a peculiarly satisfactory method of expressing his pictorial conception.’4 The ‘new sympathy’ for Byzantine art was yet another form of primitivism whose origins can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, though it built on a tradition of Byzantinism which involved the scholarship and the artistic practice of the earlier part of 1

Giovanni Bellini was published in 1899 and Fry’s edition of the Discourses in 1905, see above p. 143. 2 These were commissioned for for the home of William and Lesley Jowitt and are now in Birmingham City Museum and Art Galleries. 3 Roger Fry, ‘Modern Mosaic and Mr. Boris Anrep’, Burlington Magazine, 32 (1923), 277. 4 Ibid., pp. 272–3.

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Byzantium and British Modernism

35. Boris Anrep, Scenes from the Life of a Lady of Fashion: the Toilet, 1923. Floor mosaic. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

that century.5 In the 1890s the proliferation of information about Byzantine culture permitted connections to be made between history, religion, and society, and the art of the period was reappraised in new terms. Above all, the French Symbolists perceived in Byzantine art an 5 The ascendancy of the medieval past stimulated interest in the pre-Gothic period which scholars (particularly French scholars) then began to document. Ranke and Mommsen dispelled the myth of a thousand-year Byzantine decline promulgated by Gibbon and Voltaire, and after the 1860s Byzantine history was given respectability by Alfred Rambaud in France, Vasilij. G. Vasiljevskij in Russia, Karl Krumbacher in Germany, and J. B. Bury in Britain. In 1892 Krumbacher established the first journal for Byzantine studies, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, followed in 1897 by Charles Diehl and Gabriel Millet’s Études Byzantins. Schlumberger was prominent in the field of


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adumbration of their own efforts. They replaced the myth of Byzantine distance and difference with something that was much fresher and more immediate, and iconic art provided them with a model that was non-mimetic, that tended towards the decorative and the abstract, and which, above all, gave priority to the symbol. But this ‘new sympathy’ for Byzantine art, as Fry called it, was unstable, and the values which were attributed to it underwent rapid changes in the first decade of the twentieth century as they came into contact with new philosophies and new ideologies. The dominantly symbolist interpretation was modified in Roger Fry’s formalist criticism, where the treatment of space and line in Byzantine art was prioritized. At almost the same time it was reassessed in the light of the intuitionist theories of Bergson by Matthew Prichard, and finally it was revised yet again—this time by T. E. Hulme in terms of the expressionist theory of Wilhelm Worringer. Symbolist interest in Byzantinism was inspired by the stiffly organised compositions and the self-conscious ‘primitivism’ of Flandrin and the stylization of Puvis de Chavannes. But more immediately Émile Bernard, Albert Aurier, and Maurice Denis effectively reinvented the iconic mode in terms of the famous ‘lesson’ of Gauguin and the work of Cézanne. They all wrote approvingly of the spiritual, symbolic language of the ‘Primitives’, whose nonmaterial values they urged against contemporary naturalism and whose expression of permanence they contrasted with the flux in Impressionism. Bernard in 1890 described Cézanne’s work as ‘essentiellement hiératique’;6 for Aurier Primitive art was ‘à la fois subjectif, synthétique, symboliste et idéiste’,7 and for Denis Byzantine art was the ‘most perfect type of Christian art’.8 In the modern period, said Denis (thinking of Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon), the numismatics and sigilliographics, and monographs appeared on mosaics such as Jean Paul Richter’s Die Mosaiken von Ravenna (Vienna, 1878) and D. V. Ainalov’s Origines hellenistiques de l’art byzantin (Paris, 1900–1). Two general books dominated the field of Byzantine art history: Charles Bayet’s L’Art byzantin (Paris, 1889) and N. P. Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin, published in a French version in 1886. 6 Émile Bernard, ‘Paul Cézanne’, in Hommes d’aujourdhui, no. 387 (1892), 2. Michael Paul Driskel points out that the words ‘hieratic’ and ‘iconic’ were shibboleths of the Symbolist criticism of this period. Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 239. 7 G.-Albert Aurier, ‘Le Symbolisme en peinture’ (1892), in Oeuvres Posthumes (Paris, 1893), p. 216. 8 Maurice Denis, ‘Notes sur la peinture religieuse’ (1896), in Théories, 1890–1910 (4th edn., Paris, 1920), p. 37.

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revival of religious art corresponded to a return to Byzantium and Byzantine symbolism. ‘A Byzantine Christ’, he said in 1890, ‘is a symbol; the Jesus of our modern painters is merely literary. In the first it is form which is expressive; in the second, expression is attempted through the imitation of nature.’9 In ‘Notes sur la peinture religieuse’ of 1896, Denis spoke of how Byzantine art had transcended the trompe l’oeil effects of late classical art and ‘invented a complete visual language’ to express the dogmas of Christianity. In the mosaics of Rome, Milan, and Ravenna Byzantine artists had created, he said, modes of expressing sacred history which they communicated to Cimabue, Giotto, Raphael, and Ingres. As a practising artist, however, Denis’s focus is on the present, and the whole tendency of his criticism is to inscribe the ancient within the modern. For him Byzantine symbolist ideas are imprinted in all good modern art.10 In ‘Cézanne, Gauguin, Bernard,’ he wrote, ‘il y avait donc étroit correspondence entre des formes et des émotions. Les phénomènes signifient des états d’âme et c’est le Symbolisme . . . et je reviens aux Byzantines.’11 As Michael Driskel points out, Denis, in his demand for a return to Byzantine hieraticism, wanted ‘a renunciation of narrative modes of representation’ and ‘a revival of an iconic one, dictating an attitude of non discursive contemplation and direct emotional response to the forms constituting the image’.12 Denis’s own iconic paintings were developed in the context of his response to the work of Bernard and Gauguin at the Café Volpini in 1889, at which time Denis began the first of his three versions of the famously iconic Mystère catholique. He had already been impressed by the writings of Sâr Péladan, who spoke warmly of the primitives, and in the next few years, together with the other members of the Nabis, he began to work out an avant-garde theory which favoured non-mimetic art and whose historical basis lay as much in Byzantium as in the Western classical tradition. No similar theories had been developed in Britain, but the seeds of the idea were germinating in the mind of Roger Fry, who was to materially affect the standing of Byzantium in Britain. In the early 1890s Fry as an aspiring artist was in Paris, where he claimed to have learned ‘all the latest theories of the Independents, the Symbolists, 9 Maurice Denis, ‘Définition de neo-traditionnisme’ (1890), in Théories, p. 10. My translation. 10 11 Denis (1896), p. 8. Denis (1896), pp. 33–4. 12 Driskel (1992), p. 236.


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the members of the Society of the Rose-Croix, and of Sâr Péladan, the Wagnerian’.13 At the same time he was preparing himself to write and lecture on art, and in 1891 had made his first visit to Italy. He was both impressed and puzzled by Byzantine art. He visited Rome to ‘get some idea of early Italian art as shown in the mosaics’, and Palermo where he found the ‘amalgam of marble and mosaic’ beyond description.14 When he reached Ravenna he recognized his ‘state of complete ignorance’ about the mosaics, and in his response to them we can hear the voice of both the would-be historian and budding critic. On the one hand the historian judges that ‘the art of the period is degraded and conventional to a degree’, but ‘as the cradle of medieval art and as explaining the transition from classic to medieval art it must be the most important place to see.’ On the other hand the critic in him grasped with enthusiasm the idea that Byzantine art ‘shows the hesitation between the old played-out classical ideals and traditions and the first children’s attempts to start an art expressive of the new ideals’.15 In 1894 he went to Italy again and was ‘getting a grip of Italian art’ such as he had never had before,16 and in 1897 he returned there for the third time and extended his knowledge of early art by visits to Pompeii, Naples, and Sicily. In the Cappella Palatina, Palermo (1142), he was intrigued by the mosaic of the raising of Lazarus, which, he wrote in his notebook, was ‘not much behind Giotto’.17 Giotto and his Byzantine predecessors were very much in his mind at this time because Fry had been invited to give some Cambridge University Extension Lectures on the subject.18 This was followed at the end of the decade by a request from Henry Newbolt to write an ‘article of 8,000 words’ out of those same lectures for the first volume of the Monthly Review in 1900.19

13

Roger Fry, Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (1972), p. 8. Fry, Letters, p. 137. Letter to G. L. Dickinson dated Apr. 1891. 15 Fry, Letters, p. 144. Letter to Lady Fry dated 14 May 1891. 16 Quoted in Virgina Woolf, Roger Fry (1940), p. 91. 17 Roger Fry, ‘Palermo Notebook’, Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge, 4/1/4. Hereafter as K[ing’s] C[ollege] A[rchive]. 18 These were entitled ‘The Transition from Classical to Modern Art’ and ‘Changes to Neo-Christian Art’. Notes for them are in Roger Fry, ‘Cambridge University Extension Lectures’, KCA, 1/65. 19 The article is referred to in Fry’s ‘Notes from various sources on Byzantine art’, KCA, 14/1/17. This notebook is undated but must have been compiled around 1899. 14

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The result was in fact two articles, ‘Art Before Giotto’ of 1900 and ‘Giotto’ of 1901. The work of Giotto overshadows both, and the second article contained several disparaging references to Byzantine art which Fry later regretted,20 but it is the first piece that is important to us here. ‘Art Before Giotto’ is a highly polished survey of Byzantine art, tracing its reaction against late classical naturalism—what Fry calls ‘the process of passing from a naturalistic to an abstract and symbolical art’.21 Fry distinguishes between the ‘barbaric crudity’ of the art of the Western Empire and the ‘suspended animation’ of the art of the Eastern Empire which ‘enabled it to burst forth into new splendour under the Comnenian Emperors’.22 The article contains no references and no bibliography, but his preparatory notebook reveals his reading of Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzantin on the ‘difference between Romano-oriented art and Byzantine properly called’,23 and suggests that his method of juxtaposing Byzantine mosaics with manuscripts and miniatures was also derived from Kondakov.24 Fry also consulted Éugène Müntz’s Études sur l’histoire de la peinture et de l’iconographie chrétienne (1881), which told him about the role of the Nicaean Council, and he made extensive use of the publications of the Palaeographic Society, which since the 1870s had published facsimiles of ancient documents, texts, and inscriptions. His meetings in this period with Jean Paul Richter, author of Die Mosaiken von Ravenna (1878), and Salomon Reinach, whose ‘knowledge’, Fry said, ‘is immense of all kinds of art from Greek to Impressionist’,25 must have increased his understanding of Byzantium. The importance of ‘Art Before Giotto’, however, lies not in its scholarship but in its methodology. Fry makes no claim to original research. Instead he sets himself up as what he calls ‘the middleman between the art-historian and the amateur’,26 and adopts the role of 20 In ‘Giotto’ he spoke of ‘the effete accomplishment of the Byzantines’, a remark which he withdrew in a footnote when the article was published in Vision and Design. See Roger Fry, Vision and Design (1920), ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford, 1981), p. 122. 21 ‘Art Before Giotto’, Monthly Review, 1, no. 1 (1900), 127. 22 Ibid., p. 132. 23 Roger Fry, ‘Notebook on Carpaccio’ and ‘Notes on Byzantine Art’, KCA, 4/1/21. 24 Kondakov and Fry make much of the famous tenth-century miniature of David playing his harp held in the Bibliothèque National, Paris, and the introduction to Histoire de l’art byzantin (Paris, 1886) is illustrated by details from the Utrecht Psalter, to which Fry also refers. 25 Fry, letter to Helen Fry, July 1900. Fry, Letters, p. 178. 26 Fry (1900), p. 126.


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the informed critic who offers his audience a stylistic reading of the changes which took place in Byzantine art. Though, like Maurice Denis, he suggests that ‘the material of all art is symbolic’,27 his attitude to Byzantine art is entirely secular and he hardly develops its symbolic significance. Instead his strategies are formalist, and at his best he produces close and illuminating interpretations of changes in the representation of dress or physiognomy in support of the procession of historical facts. In short, he aestheticizes Byzantine art in ways that were most unusual at the time. The empirical feel of his interpretation is intensified by the clear and enthusiastic imprint of his recent visits to Pompeii and Palermo, and also by his asides on modern art. Unlike the Symbolists earlier in the decade, Fry makes no direct link between Byzantium and modernism, but there are signs that analogies are developing in his mind. He communicates, for example, his dissatisfaction with Impressionism, which he compares with the ‘capricious sense of atmospheric perspective’28 of Roman wall painting in Pompeii; and, more important, he registers his irritation with what he sees as the state of confusion in modern art. In 1894 he had said to his father: ‘The more I study the Old Masters the more terrible does the chaos of modern art seem to me,’29 and now in ‘Art Before Giotto’ he praises the benefits to art of the Nicene Council as an antidote to chaos. This was the earliest of the Byzantine Councils which attempted to regulate Church dogma and to bring some kind of homogeneity into ecclesiastical practice. Fry’s view is that instead of stultifying creativity such a council served to concentrate artists’ minds. ‘And who,’ he adds wryly, ‘in face of the inchoate and tentative compositions of modern art, does not long for another Nicene Council?’30 Though the main focus of Fry’s interests in this period was Italian Renaissance painting—in 1899 he had published his successful book on Bellini—he never lost his fascination with Byzantium,31 a fascination which was deepened by his reading of Jean Paul Richter’s and 27

28 29 Fry (1900), p. 128. Ibid. Fry, Letters, p. 159. Fry (1900), p. 137. 31 His contribution to the 1901 The Macmillan Guide to Italy was an entry on Italian art in which Byzantium was represented by a condensed version of ‘Art Before Giotto’ (Macmillan’s Guides: Italy (1901), pp. xxxiv–lxxx), and in 1904 he referred to Blake as having recovered ‘for a moment that pristine directness and grandeur of expression which puts him beside the great Byzantine designers . . .’ (Burlington Magazine, 4 (1904), 267–98). 30

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36. Lot and his Suite (detail). Fifth century. Mosaic, Sta Maria Maggiore, Rome.

Alicia Cameron Taylor’s The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art (1904). This monumental study—‘epoch making’ as Berenson called it32—seems to have been catalytic in forging the link in Fry’s mind between Byzantine art and modern art. Fry’s review of Richter’s book in the Athenaeum was highly complimentary, and in it he mentions for the first time those authorities who for him were important in Byzantine studies.33 He also offers a formal reading of some of the mosaics in terms of modern art. Invoking a comparison between the mosaics of Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome (Fig. 36) with a head in San Vitale, Ravenna, Fry says that ‘both . . . show an art dependent on outline, without modelling or relief or true chiaroscuro, whereas when we turn to the examples of the original design we find an art in which the design embraces at once all aspects of nature—an art, that 32 Berenson hoped that Richter would continue to ‘illuminate that dark procession of ignorance which now passes for knowledge regarding the history of art in the West during the first 13 Xian [sic] centuries’. Berenson, letter to Richter, 5 Jan. 1905, in The Selected Letters of Bernard Berenson, ed. A. K. McComb (1965), pp. 69–70. 33 Fry speaks of the Russian scholar D. B. Ainalovf, whose Origines hellenistiques de l’art byzantin had appeared in 1900–1, and of the six-volume study by R. Garucci, Storia dell’ arte cristiana ne’ primi otto secoli della chiesa (Rome, 1873–81), and Giovanni Battista Rossi’s three-volume La Roma sotterranea cristiana (Rome, 1864–77).


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is to say, which is essentially modern, and in which the local visual impression of objects is symbolised.’34 The images remained in Fry’s mind, and they re-emerged when, several years later, he discovered the work of Cézanne. In 1905 Fry travelled to America on business connected with the Burlington Magazine, and while he was there his interest in Byzantium was given added impetus by a visit to Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. There he met Mrs Gardner herself and her deputy director Matthew Prichard.35 Fry warmed to Prichard. ‘The chief man’ at Boston, he wrote to his wife, ‘is an Englishman Pritchard [sic],’36 and in his turn, Prichard found Fry delightful. He is ‘the most inspiring critic I have ever met,’ he exclaimed, ‘with a wealth of knowledge derived from every branch of art’.37 Prichard was to play a powerful backstage life in the twentieth-century reinvention of Byzantium. He was educated at New College, Oxford, and became the amanuensis to an expatriate Bostonian, Edward Perry Warren, who lived in Lewes in Sussex. Prichard was learned, intelligent, and eccentric, and during his time with the aesthete and collector Warren he acquired a detailed knowledge of classical art in both its historical and technical aspects. Warren’s brother Samuel Denis Warren had been a trustee of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum since 1882, and Warren supplied art objects for the museum. Prichard was instrumental in the business of evaluation, buying, and shipping, and after S. D. Warren became President of the Gardner Museum, Prichard in 1903 was appointed Assistant Director. He was extremely well connected with a wide range of artists, dealers, and museum personnel in America and Europe, but when Fry met him in 1905 he was about to leave the museum after dissension among the museum staff. Like Fry, Prichard had a well-developed interest in Byzantine art, and like Fry, too, he had a burgeoning but undeveloped understanding of current work in France. On leaving the Gardner Museum 34

For Fry’s review of Richter see Athenaeum (11 Feb. 1905), 184. I am very grateful to Richard Shone for directing my attention to the role of Matthew Prichard in this tradition. 36 Fry, letter to Helen Fry, 31 Jan. 1905, Fry, Letters, p. 235. Sutton mistranscribes or silently corrects Fry’s incorrect spelling of Prichard’s name. 37 Matthew Prichard, letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 27 Jan. 1905. These and all the following letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner are kept in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Henceforward referred to as MP to ISG. 35

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Prichard spent two months of the summer of 1906 in Paris ‘absorbed in picture study’,38 during which time he met Fry once again.39 Both men knew Reinach, of whom Prichard, unlike Fry, had a low opinion—‘Reinach has little feeling for art,’ he wrote, while another mutual acquaintance was Claude Phillips, author and director of the Wallace Collection, whom they both admired. Neither, however, was in touch with the state of affairs in contemporary art. For example, when Prichard went to London in September 1906 he identified the most up-to-date figures in the art world as Renoir, Pissarro, and Besnard.40 Similarly, in November of that year, when Prichard asked Fry to recommend the ‘best moderns’ in Paris, Fry suggested to him the names of Anquetin, Veber, Denys [sic], and Baudouin!41 It will be remembered that it was in January of that same year that Fry had begun to notice the work of Cézanne at the International Society’s exhibition.42 In 1909 Prichard underwent what his biographer calls ‘a withdrawal’,43 and the upheavals in his personal life prompted a rebellion against many of the aesthetic principles in which he had been educated. He rejected museums and museum life with its materialism and its treatment of art objects as symbols of personal status; he turned, too, against both classical and Renaissance principles of visual perception, which he felt had blighted the development of Western art. He left America never to return, and plunged into continental Europe and the world of Byzantium. His decisive conversion to Byzantine art seems to have been consolidated in front of the Pala d’Oro in St Mark’s, Venice, in 1907. ‘It was made’, he wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner from Italy, ‘in the “dark ages” when people 38

ISG to Mrs Bernard Berenson, 17 Aug. 1906, quoted in Walter Muir Whitehill, ‘Some Correspondence of Matthew Stewart Prichard and Isabella Stewart Gardner’, Fenway Court: Art Review of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 6 (1997), 16. 39 Fry wrote Prichard’s name and address in his diary between 28 and 30 July, but corrected his initials from F. M. to M. S. and his surname from the spelling which he had used in the previous year in the letter to his wife—‘Pritchard’—to the correct ‘Prichard’. It is clear from their various letters that Fry and Prichard were independently working in connoisseurship while at the same time developing an interest in modern art. 40 41 MP to ISG, 26 Sept. 1906. MP to ISG, 19 Nov. 1906. 42 Fry confessed to ‘having been hitherto sceptical about Cézanne’s genius’, and even then felt that Cézanne ‘touches none of the finer issues of the imaginative life’. ‘The New Gallery’, Athenaeum (13 Jan. 1906), 56. 43 David H. Sox, Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes House Brotherhood (1991), p. 186.


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had foolish beliefs in angels . . . and I suppose I shall not ever see a more glorious page in my life-time.’44 Prichard’s passion for Byzantine art caused Claude Phillips, who was in Venice in September 1907, to accuse him of setting himself up as ‘a new Messiah in the world of art’. Fry was also with Phillips in Venice in that same month, and may have been stimulated by Prichard’s enthusiasm to look once again at Byzantine work, since something triggered a connection in his mind which was to crystallize his whole attitude to modern art.45 The occasion was the eighth annual exhibition of the International Society in London, which took place in January and February 1908, and which included a small selection of paintings by Signac, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and the first painting by Matisse to be shown outside France. An anonymous reviewer in the Burlington Magazine was disparaging about the work, suggesting that in its ‘callous imitation’ and ‘empty caprice’ it represented the fag-end of Impressionism.46 The article drew a response from Roger Fry, closely associated with the magazine of which he was to become editor in 1909. He defended the ‘Neo-Impressionists’, as he called them, by adopting the historical analogy that he had used first in his Cambridge lectures, and in ‘Art Before Giotto’, i.e. the parallel between Impressionism and the art of the late Roman Empire. But a 44 MP to ISG, 4 Aug. 1907. This stimulated Prichard into a minute study of the church and its mosaics at which he worked for nearly two months. He then spent a month in Ravenna where he was impressed by the buildings but disappointed with the mosaics. ‘Judged technically as draughtsmanship, representation, design, they are beneath contempt,’ he said (MP to ISG, 27 Oct. 1907). Although he went on to be enormously appreciative of mosaic work in Torcello, Palermo, and Rome, he never came to terms with those in Ravenna. In the light of his experience of Byzantine art, however, he wrote to ISG in Feb. 1908 outlining an aesthetic position which resembled that of Maurice Denis over a decade before. ‘Art for me at this moment’, he wrote, ‘is the record of man’s experiences of the unconditioned won in states of emotion by means of which we share the artist’s ecstasies. It is then not an object—that’s the materialist error,—but a revelation of something behind the object. It is therefore always symbolic, however much it thinks it is a representation’ (MP to ISG, 24 Feb. 1908). Prichard, however, was much less committed to organized religion than was Denis, consequently his attitude to symbolism was less grounded in Christian doctrine, more rarefied, and verged on the mystical. 45 Fry had met Phillips in Paris in May 1907 (Roger Fry, ‘Diary for 1907’, entry for 16 May 1907, KCA, 5/1/1) and again in Venice in September of the same year, where he had been hugely impressed by the ‘width of his sympathies in art’ (Fry, letter to John G. Johnson, Sept. 1907, in Fry, Letters, p. 290). 46 Anon., ‘The Last Phase of Impressionism’, Burlington Magazine, 12 (1908), 272–3, reprinted in Bullen (1988), pp. 41–4.

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new and important element is added. He now sees a further parallel between the work of the Impressionists and the art of Byzantium. ‘Impressionism’, he said, has existed before, in the Roman art of the Empire, and it too was followed, as I believe inevitably, by a movement similar to that observable in the NeoImpressionists—we may call it for convenience Byzantinism. In the mosaics of Sta Maria Maggiore as elucidated by Richter and Taylor (‘The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art’) one can see something of this transformation from Impressionism in the original work to Byzantinism in subsequent restorations. It is probably a mistake to suppose, as is usually done, that Byzantinism was due to a loss of the technical ability to be realistic, consequent upon barbarian invasions. In the Eastern empire there was never any loss of technical skill; indeed, nothing could surpass the perfections of some Byzantine craftsmanship. Byzantinism was the necessary outcome of Impressionism, a necessary and inevitable reaction from it.47

In 1907 Fry had given a series of lectures on a theory of art which he was developing at the time. The second of these was devoted to ‘epic’, in which Byzantine art featured as the supreme example of epic in the visual arts. The Byzantine period is now, for Fry, the ‘great age of hieratic art in Europe’, which he contrasted with the ‘impressionistic manner’ of earlier, Pompeiian wall painting. The art of Pompeii, he said, ‘was already passing over into a kind of sophisticated naiveté not unlike that of our own neo-Impressionists (Gaugin [sic], John) but it still had no vital ideas to communicate.’48 But what is most significant about this lecture is the fact that the precise, formal terms of praise for the sixth-century mosaics in Ravenna so closely anticipate what he will very soon apply to the work of Cézanne. ‘The contour’, he said, ‘has become significant and the forms are reduced to that abstract simplicity which is an essential of the Epic style.’49 Now in 1908, the connection between ancient and modern is firmly put in place. ‘MM. Cézanne and Paul Gauguin’, he writes, ‘have already attained to the contour, and assert its value with keen emphasis. They fill the contour with wilfully simplified and unmodulated masses . . .’ They are, Fry adds, ‘not really Impressionists at all. They are proto-Byzantines rather than neoImpressionists.’50 The label ‘proto-Byzantines’ did not stick and by 47

Roger Fry, ‘The Last Phase of Impressionism’, Burlington Magazine, 12 (1908), 374–6, reprinted in Bullen (1988), pp. 44–8. 49 50 48 Roger Fry, ‘Epic’, p. 10, KCA, 1/76/2. Ibid. Ibid, p. 46.


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1910 gave way to the more apposite ‘Post-Impressionists’;51 but the idea endured, and it would not be long before both Fry and Prichard were developing further the connection between Byzantinism and modernism. Prichard’s fascination with Byzantium was more exclusive, fervent, and fastidious than Fry’s, but during this period he entered into a serious dialogue with Fry about the connections between Byzantine art and modern work. In the autumn of 1908, after his trip to Italy, Prichard went to live in Paris where he began a concerted study of Byzantine history and Byzantine art. He also pushed forward his interest in contemporary painting, and in January 1909 went with a friend to see some of Matisse’s paintings. His first response was puzzlement. Matisse, he said, ‘is a man working toward a scale, is most emotional, a free draughtsman, but is coarse, is short-sighted and perhaps has some other optical trouble.’52 But by Easter 1909 Matisse, whose acquaintance Prichard now seems to have made, had become for him ‘the greatest of the modern men’.53 In May, Fry went with Victor Goloubew (who was then forming his collection of Middle Eastern miniatures54) to Matisse’s studio, where Prichard probably introduced them to Matisse as he was later to introduce both William Rothenstein and George Duthuit.55 Prichard told Isabella Stewart Gardner that Fry ‘liked Matisse’s work’, but Fry confessed to his wife that he was bewildered by it. He told her that Matisse was ‘one of the neo, neo Impressionists quite interesting and lots of talent but very queer’, and referring to their seven-year-old daughter, he added: ‘He does things very much like Pamela’s.’56 At this time Prichard clearly felt very much at ease with Fry, who, he said, accepted the ‘main positions’ of his ‘favourite mania’, which was that ‘painting, sculpture and architecture—went to pieces as 51 Like the term ‘proto-Byzantines’, Fry seems to have formulated the term ‘PostImpressionists’ on the spur of the moment. 52 MP to ISG, 2 Jan. 1909. 53 MP to ISG, Easter Day 1909. 54 Victor Goloubew sent works from his collection to the Munich exhibition of Muslim art in 1910 and the collection was eventually placed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. See Ananda Coomaraswamy, Les Miniatures orientales de la collection Goloubew au Museum of Fine Arts de Boston (Paris, 1929). 55 MP to ISG, 23 May 1909. See also William Rothenstein, Men and Memories (1932), p. 215. 56 Roger Fry to Helen Fry, quoted in Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (1980), pp. 118–19.

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early as 1200’,57 and as part of his fascination with his other mania— the work of Matisse—he sent Claude Phillips some photographs of Matisse’s works after he had heard that J. S. Sargent declared them worthless.58 Prichard now confessed to Isabella Stewart Gardner: ‘Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse . . . make a stronger appeal to my nature than most of the 13th and 14th century productions.’ And in the same letter he mentioned that he and Claude Phillips had had a serious disagreement about the standing of the mosaic work in Ravenna.59 In November 1909 Prichard united the two themes of his July letter to Phillips, and made the direct connection between Byzantine art and modern art. Where Fry had identified Cézanne and Gauguin as proto-Byzantines, for Prichard that rôle is played by Matisse. He told Isabella Stewart Gardner that he maintained his ‘passion for the expression we find in Byzantine art’, and how ‘the symbolic expression of the East, of Byzantium’ is to be found also in ‘the modern French school of which Matisse is the artist most talked of’.60 In the autumn of 1909 Prichard enrolled at the Sorbonne to begin the formal study of Byzantinism and modern French philosophy— especially that of Bergson—and it was his study of Bergson that was to clarify his attitude to iconic art. Early in 1910 Prichard met Fry again in Paris, but gaps were now beginning to appear in their attitudes to art both ancient and modern. Prichard resented what he perceived as Fry’s aesthetic formalism. He had repeated several times to Isabella Stewart Gardner that he felt that ‘art cannot exist alone’ but has to ‘attach itself to something with which it reconciles us’,61 whereas for Fry, he said, ‘art is quite separate from life, in fact a parallel, rival life, and consists only of works of art.’62 In spite of their differences, however, he applauded Fry’s attempt to bring modern French art to London in the first Post-Impressionist exhibition. While he was in England in 1910 Prichard also met and liked Clive Bell, who sympathized with the view that ‘we can only learn at this moment from Byzantine expression.’63 57

MP to ISG, 23 May 1909. Sargent strongly disapproved of the whole Post-Impressionist venture in art. See Bullen (1988), pp. 152–3. 59 MP to ISG, 7 July 1909. David Sox reports that Phillips thought that Prichard’s fanaticism was ‘mad’. See Sox (1991), p. 190. 60 61 MP to ISG, 12 Nov. 1909. MP to ISG, 20 July 1909. 62 63 MP to ISG, between 3 and 7 Mar. 1910. MP to ISG, 22 Nov. 1910. 58


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In these years Byzantine art became central to Prichard’s aesthetic. As early as 1909 he spoke to Isabella Stewart Gardner about the importance of intuition in art as opposed to thinking ‘scientifically’, and the superiority of Byzantine or ‘oriental’ art over ‘classical Greek’ and ‘classical Italian’ art.64 This view was considerably strengthened by his initiation into Bergson’s work, and in 1911 he spoke to Bergson himself of his ideas.65 Both Bergson and Prichard were critical of Kant’s separation of intuitive perception from an ‘intellectual experience of the world’. For both, and later for Matisse, who was very sympathetic to Prichard’s aesthetic application of Bergson’s views, the ‘Byzantine-Matisse attitude’ was superior to the ‘Greek-Renaissance-Academic position’.66 The exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910 together with Matisse’s visit to Russia in 1911 confirmed Matisse’s belief that colour should be used to express ‘emotion’ and not act as ‘a transcription of nature’.67 The nonrepresentational power of ‘oriental’ art in this exhibition—an exhibition which included Goloubew’s miniatures—impressed many commentators including the Berensons and Fry,68 but Fry would have had little time for Prichard’s ambition to develop his aesthetic ideas as ‘continuations’ of Bergson’s philosophy ‘in the direction of morals and religion’.69 So in 1911, though Fry recommended Prichard to Clive Bell, he also warned him about his Bergsonian monomania. ‘You must either avoid that subject,’ he said, ‘or be prepared to listen.’70 What was for Prichard a period of intense concentration on Matisse and Byzantium, was for Fry one of expansion. Fry, who had no real quarrel with the Euclidean treatment of space in art, was now moving eclectically between ancient and modern art and between Western and non-Western art forms. Byzantine art, however, was 64

MP to ISG, 11 Aug. 1909. See Mark Antliff, ‘The Rhythms of Duration: the Poststructuralist Bergson and the Art of Matisse,’ in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester, 1999), p. 204 note 12. 66 MP to ISG, 24 Apr. 1913. 67 Henri Matisse, ‘The Path of Colour’ (1947), in Matisse on Art, trans. and ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, 1995), p. 178. This point is developed by Rémi Labrousse in ‘Henri Matisse: un’ estetica orientale’, in Matisse: la révelation d’est venue de l’Orient, ed. C. Duthuit et al., exh. cat., Musei Capitolini, Rome (Florence, 1997), p. 341, and Matisse: la condition de l’image (Paris, 1999). 68 His review of the exhibition was included in Vision and Design (1920). 69 70 See Antliff (1999), p. 186. Roger Fry, Letters, p. 339. 65

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never far from his mind. In January 1910 he rhetorically asked the readers of the Burlington Magazine: ‘Was it not rather El Greco’s earliest training in the lingering Byzantine tradition that suggested to him his mode of escape into an art of direct decorative expression? and is not Cézanne after all these centuries the first to take up the hint El Greco threw out?’71 Fry’s tendency to connect Byzantium and Cézanne persisted, and it is curious to hear in the same year Fry’s pet theory echoing back from Bernard Berenson in Ravenna. He wrote to his wife Mary: ‘I have never before noticed so clearly the resemblance between the technique of colour in mosaic and in our impressionists as in Cézanne for instance. They have in common a procedure of juxtaposition of tones.’72 At this same moment, Fry’s involvement with the Bells seems to have stimulated Bloomsbury interest in Byzantium. Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes went to Greece and Constantinople in April 1910, where they visited Santa Sophia and Kariye Camii, and in the spring of the following year they went to Sicily and North Africa. At the same time—1911—Fry himself, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Harry Norton went to Constantinople. On her return from Constantinople, Vanessa Bell wrote to Fry saying, ‘I’m trying to paint as if I were mosaicing not by painting in spots but by considering the picture as patches . . .’, which, she added, ‘ought to give me something of the life one seems to get with mosaics.’ Duncan Grant approved of this experiment and ‘was very nice’ about the pictures, saying that ‘mosaic is the one thing to be done.’73 The result of Bell’s attempts can be clearly seen in her Byzantine Lady of 1912 (Fig. 37). In Sicily Grant had seen the twelfth-century mosaics in Monreale, and soon after his return he was invited by Fry to offer designs for a series of murals at the Borough Polytechnic. Grant’s contributions to ‘London on Holiday’ were Bathing (Fig. 38) and Football, and contemporary critics had no doubt about the source of inspiration. The writer in the Spectator, for example, suggested that Bathing ‘makes one want to swim—even in water like an early Christian mosaic’, and Robert Ross, writing in the Morning Post, said that the water was very much like the ‘strata 71 Roger Fry, Introduction to Maurice Denis, ‘Cézanne, 1 and II’, Burlington Magazine, 16 (1910), p. 207, reprinted in Bullen (1988), p. 61. 72 Berenson to Mary Berenson, 4 Sept. 1910. Unpublished letter quoted in John Rewald, Cézanne, the Steins and their Circle (1987), p. 30. 73 Roger Fry, Letters, p. 40. Letter dated June 1911.


37. Vanessa Bell, Byzantine Lady, 1912. Oil on canvas, 72.5 ¥ 51 cm (28 1/2 ¥ 20 in). UK Government Art Collection

38. Duncan Grant, Bathing, 1911. Oil on canvas, 229 ¥ 305.6 cm (90 1/4 ¥ 120 1/2 in). Tate Gallery, London

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and streaks such as you see in Christian Fifth Century mosaics at Rome or Ravenna’.74 But the impulse to address Byzantine art seriously came from the appearance of yet another new and stimulating figure in their midst—Boris Anrep. Alone among living artists he has practically restored a lost art, and revived the tradition of the golden age of Christian art in this particular medium. Affected both by the early Byzantine traditions still surviving in Russia, together with the magnificent examples to be seen in Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome, and those of Ravenna and Palermo, he has succeeded in expressing modern conditions in terms which have too long been considered obsolete.75

This testimony to Anrep is Augustus John’s, who unconsciously or not is quoting the title of Richter’s book on the mosaics of Sta Maria Maggiore, and it was John who patronized Anrep from the first. Anrep’s early training was not as an artist but as a lawyer, qualifying in his home town, St Petersburg. According to one of his biographers he left Russia around 1907 and went with his first wife on a tour through France and Italy to Ravenna.76 In 1908 he enrolled under J.-P. Laurens at the Académie Julien where he met Henry Lamb, who introduced him into Bloomsbury. In 1910 he met John, who was impressed by his designs for mosaic and commissioned one for his house in Chelsea.77 Anrep’s approach to Byzantium, however, was exclusively mystical and symbolist. ‘The innermost recesses of the Russian heart are filled with mystical passions,’ he wrote in the introduction to the Russian section of the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912. In the following year John helped organize a oneman show for Anrep at the Chenil Gallery for which Fry wrote the introduction, in which Anrep praised mosaic as ‘the embodiment of purely spiritual qualities’.78 74 Spectator (11 Nov. 1911), 795. Quoted by Richard Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits (2nd edn., 1993), p. 64. I have been unable to identify the precise reference for Robert Ross’s words. 75 Augustus John, ‘Five Modern Artists’, Vogue (3 Oct. 1928), 104. 76 Justin Vulliamy, Boris Anrep 1883–1969, exh. cat., Gallery Edward Harvane (London, 1973), n.p. Other details from John Dean, ‘Art Under Your Feet’, The Old Lady, no. 237 (1980), 18–20, and Annabel Farjeon, ‘Mosaics and Boris Anrep’, Charleston Magazine, 7 (1993), 15–22. 77 This was not executed until the end of the First World War. 78 Roger Fry and Boris Anrep, ‘Introduction’ to Works by Boris von Anrep, exh. cat., Chenil Gallery (London, 1913), p. 1 and p. 11. Of the 57 items in this exhibition 3 were mosaics, of which one, The Spirit of Reasoning, was in what the catalogue called ‘the early Byzantine’ manner.


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39. Duncan Grant, The Queen of Sheba, 1912. Oil on canvas, 120.5 ¥ 120.5 cm (47 1/2 ¥ 47 1/2 in). Tate Gallery, London

In the next couple of years Grant, in his easel paintings Byzantine Lady, Street Accident, and The Queen of Sheba (Fig. 39), experimented with public monumental art, and it was monumental art— Byzantine monumental art—which Fry made the subject of a lecture at the Slade School of Art in 1911. Referring to the mosaic figures of Abraham and Lot in Sta Maria Maggiore, he noticed how the eyes were not drawn but indicated by dots employing ‘almost exactly the method of the modern pointillists’, and, pointing to Sargent’s efforts in Boston, reminded his audience how difficult it was to achieve an ‘abstract and grandiose air’ in monumental art.79 The examples of Byzantine art which Fry gave in this lecture are familiar from his previous work—Sta Pudenza, SS. Cosma e Damiano, San Vitale, and 79 In 1891, the Boston Public Library commissioned from Sargent a set of monumental decorations exemplifying the development of religion and culture. Sargent employed Egyptian and Assyrian models for the pagan phase and Byzantine forms for the Christian. In 1897 he visited Sicily to study the mosaics, and in the following year he went to Ravenna. See Mary Crawford Volk, ‘The Murals’, in John Singer Sargent, ed. Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond (1998), p. 177 and p. 195.

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Sant’Agnese, reaching a peak of perfection in Monreale and Cefalù—but now he seems to stress as much the mystical and symbolic significance of mosaic as the formal and technical aspects. He remarks upon the ‘supernatural splendour and the ineffable glory of the divinity’ of the figures in SS. Cosma e Damiano, and the ‘rendering [of] abstract types of divine supernatural beings’ in Sant’Agnese and San Vitale.80 He may well have been encouraged in this direction by Matthew Prichard, whom he saw again in July 1911 just after his trip to Constantinople.81 But similar tendencies can be seen in the work of W. R. Lethaby and O. M. Dalton, whose work Fry knew.82 What is most striking about these various treatments of Byzantine art is the way in which, in their stress on Byzantine detachment from nature and the abstract visual schemata of mosaic art, they have assimilated the kind of formal analysis which Fry had begun to develop in 1900. Fry’s own surprise at this change was summed up in a review he wrote in the Burlington Magazine in 1912 of some enamels bought by Pierpont Morgan out of the Swenigorodski collection. ‘At one time,’ he wrote, ‘art historians would have written of such works as these as being barbaric, simply because they do not conform to the general idea of representation which we have inherited from Hellenistic art.’ ‘Now’, he added, ‘what has become most evident to me is the extreme modernity, the complete selfconsciousness, one might almost say sophistication of these artists.’83 The period of greatest interest in Byzantine art, when Byzantinism and British modernism were most closely linked, corresponds precisely with that extraordinary moment of innovation and experimentation between 1908 and 1914 when so many established ideas were challenged or overthrown. Around 1912 Byzantinomania reached its height. Duncan Grant designed ‘Byzantine’ costumes for Granville Barker’s Macbeth, and Roger Fry visited Ravenna again.84 In the following year the Daily Mirror illustrated an article on the Omega Workshops with a reproduction of the mosaic head of St Agnes from Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, and the signboard of the 80

Roger Fry, ‘Slade Lecture no 1 on Monumental Art’, KCA, 1/88/1. MP to ISG, July 1911. 82 For W. R. Lethaby see Richard Shone (1993), p. 56. O. M. Dalton, Byzantine Art and Archaeology (Oxford, 1911), was reviewed sympathetically by Fry in Burlington Magazine, 23 (1911), 358. 83 Roger Fry, ‘An Appreciation of the Swenigorodski Enamels’, Burlington Magazine, 21 (1912), 293–4. 84 According to Fry’s diary for 1912. KCA. 81


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Workshop itself depicted what the critic P. G. Konody called ‘an emaciated Byzantine youth’.85 In 1914 Clive Bell’s Art reaffirmed many of the ideas about Byzantium which Prichard and Fry had been promulgating elsewhere. According to Bell, European art sank ‘by slow degrees, from the thrilling design of Ravenna to the tedious portraiture of Holland . . .’,86 and he offered Hagia Sophia in Constantinople as one of the finest examples of ‘significant form’.87 In 1915 the American friend of the Steins, Willard Huntington Wright, compared the ‘harmony of Gauguin’s work’ with the Byzantine mosaics in San Vitale, but wished to dissociate Cézanne from the equation. ‘The most superficial corner of his canvas’, he wrote in his book Modern Painting, ‘had more organisation and incited a greater aesthetic emotion than all the mosaics in S. Vitale near Ravenna.’88 Willard Wright’s remarks published in the New Age were undoubtedly a response to its most combative art critic, T. E. Hulme. Rather like Prichard, Hulme (who also knew Bergson personally) found in Bergson’s work a release from nineteenth-century scientific determinism and a restatement of the doctrine of individual free will. For both Hulme and Prichard Bergson appeared to have given philosophical respectability to those forces of irrationality which science had left out of account. In 1911 Hulme and Bergson both attended the fourth International Philosophical Congress in Bologna. During the conference the Italian government offered a tour to Ravenna, an experience which served to shift Hulme’s aesthetic in a new direction. Between 1911 and 1913 he read the work of Riegl and Worringer, which confirmed for him the importance of Byzantine style in the history of culture. In his book Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) Riegl had put forward the view that art produced by different cultures conformed to the psychological needs of those cultures irrespective of technical competence or skill. Thus the post-classical ‘will to art’ (Kunstwollen) lay behind the special forms of Byzantium, which could be interpreted only in terms of Byzantine culture. This idea was taken up by Wilhelm Worringer in his famous text Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908). For Worringer art was 85

Quoted in Judith Collins, The Omega Workshops (1983), p. 65. Clive Bell, Art (1914), ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford, 1987), p. 39. Ibid., p. 8. 88 Willard Huntington Wright, Modern Painting (New York and London, 1915), p. 204 and p.150. 86 87

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divided into two tendencies between the need for empathy and the drive towards abstraction. Empathetic art he associated with the classical tradition. In this, man, at ease with himself and his place in the world, creates a vital, romantic, naturalistic art. The urge to abstraction, on the contrary, says Worringer, ‘is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world’,89 and it results in a desire, says Hulme paraphrasing Worringer, ‘to create a certain abstract geometrical shape, which, being durable and permanent shall be a refuge from the flux and impermanence of outside nature’.90 Like Prichard, Hulme confessed a ‘repugnance towards . . . all philosophy since the Renaissance’; like Prichard, too, he was ‘moved by Byzantine mosaic, not because it is quaint or exotic, but because it expresses an attitude I agree with’.91 But where Prichard’s enthusiasm for Byzantine work was developed around Bergson’s intuitionism, Hulme’s was developed in the context of Worringer’s anti-humanism. For Hulme, Byzantinism offered an ontological alternative to the classical tradition—‘a direct opposite of that which finds satisfaction in the naturalism of Greek and Renaissance art’. It produces an art which ‘takes no delight in nature and no striving after vitality’, and its forms are flat and geometric.92 Although Worringer’s text was later taken up as the basis for Expressionist art theory, he himself did not, at this stage inscribe his philosophy of art within modernist experimentation. Hulme, however, is entirely conscious of the relationship established between Byzantinism and modernism. Though he rejects most of Fry’s ideas he starts from a similar basis in the work of Cézanne, and like Fry he sees in Cézanne a proto-Byzantine. Cézanne’s Women Bathing, he says, ‘is much more akin to the composition you find in the Byzantine mosaic [of the empress Theodora] in Ravenna, than it is to anything which can be found in the art of the Renaissance’. In the Cézanne, ‘the form is so strongly accentuated, so geometric in character, that it almost lifts the painting out of the sphere of “vital” art into that of abstract art.’93 Hulme and Fry attach equal importance to the rela89 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: a Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (1953), p. 95. 90 T. E. Hulme, ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ (1914), in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford, 1994), pp. 273–4. 91 ‘Epstein and the Critics’ (1931), ibid., p. 257. 92 93 ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 281.


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tionship between Byzantine art and modern practice, but differ about the nature of that relationship. For Hulme it is the abstract spirit of Byzantium that lives on in modern art, not its outward formal qualities. Consequently he dismisses the ‘botched Byzantine’ of Bloomsbury,94 and in particular Duncan Grant’s work, where ‘elements taken out of the extremely intense and serious Byzantine art are used in an entirely meaningless and pointless way.’95 Fry’s criticism, for Hulme, is a form of superior journalism, the creation of a romantic empathetic mode, and Fry has no understanding of the emergent geometrical work. ‘He has’, says Hulme, ‘no conception whatever of this new art, and is in fact a mere verbose sentimentalist.’96 For Hulme, the future is represented by Picasso, Epstein, Lewis, Bomberg, and other members of the Rebel Arts Centre, and that future depends upon a reading of the tendency to abstraction in Byzantine art. In the art of Byzantium, he said, where ‘curves tend to be hard and geometrical, where the representation of the human body . . . is often entirely non-vital, and distorted to fit into stiff lines and cubical shapes’, Hulme perceived something which was ‘reemerging in modern art’. It was, he said, before the mosaics in Ravenna that he came to understand, ‘how essential and necessary a geometrical character is in endeavouring to express a certain intensity’.97 The First World War brought to an end this line of speculation, since Hulme was killed in action in 1917. After the war Anrep established his reputation as a mosaicist, and Prichard continued to preach the gospel of Byzantium, but the heart had gone out of a myth that seemed for a time to be so close to the interests of modern art. The period 1900 to 1914 was a remarkable one in terms of the ferment of ideas, and the rapid changes taking place in British art and aesthetics. This creative innovation is paralleled in the shifts which took place in the responses to and assessments of Byzantine art. For a short while the urge to abstraction which seemed to be latent within ancient iconic art fitted neatly with the aesthetics of British and continental modernism. The Byzantine use of symbolism, its reduction of form to stylized linearity, and its intuitive expression of non-material values attracted some of the most imaginative thinkers in that early modern tradition. 94 95 96

‘The Grafton Group’ (1914), ibid., p. 264. Ibid., p. 266. He is referring here to Grant’s Adam and Eve. 97 ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 271.

10 D. H. Lawrence, German Sculpture, and Women in Love Though Roger Fry a n d D. H. Lawrence were temperamentally unalike they had many things in common. They were both moralists with a passion for the visual arts; they both wrote and painted; they both greatly admired Cézanne, and they were both drawn to the primitivist element in modernism. Fry’s response to primitivism was dominantly formal whereas Lawrence’s was powerfully visceral, and when his pictures went on show at the Warren Gallery in 1929 they created a succès de scandale precisely because they were thought to be obscenely primitive. He seems, however, to have had much less interest in sculpture, and with the possible exception of Greek sculpture,1 he found painting ‘so much subtler’.2 Sculpture, he told Mark Gertler in 1917, was ‘the lowest of the arts’,3 and ‘never quite satisfies me’, because ‘it is not sufficiently abstracted’ and therefore ‘frustrates the clarity of conception’.4 Consequently, sculptors and works of sculpture rarely appear in his writing; yet, and herein lies a paradox, they both figure prominently in what is perhaps his most significant modernist novel, Women in Love.5 In Women in Love Gudrun Brangwen is a sculptress. She knows other sculptors in St Petersburg and Munich. Hermione Roddice suggests that she teach the techniques of sculpture to Gerald Crich’s sister, Winifred, who in her turn wishes to become a sculptress. Gudrun creates diminutive figures in a modern ‘primitive’ style. 1 In 1914 he said that he was ‘fascinated by Greek sculpture’ since it had ‘something of the eternal stillness’ which his ‘soul’ was ‘hungry for’. Letter to Henry Savage, 19 Jan. 1914. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton et al. (Cambridge, 1979–2000), ii, 137. Hereafter referred to as Letters. 2 D. H. Lawrence to Mark Gertler, 5 Dec. 1916. Letters, iii, 46. 3 4 Ibid. Lawrence to Gertler, 1 Apr. 1917. Letters, iii, 109. 5 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge, 1987). Hereafter page numbers cited in brackets after quotations.

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Authentic ‘primitive’ or tribal African carving is collected by the decadent playboy, Halliday, and images of this same sculpture punctuate the text at significant moments. Metaphorically, Lawrence uses sculptural imagery to express a human condition that is mechanical, torpid, or unfeeling, and both Gudrun and Gerald degenerate into statue-like figures towards the end of the book.6 In the context of the sculptural theme of this novel F. Loerke is a pivotal figure. Many of the issues in the relationship between art and modern culture raised by the novel are expressed through his conversations with Ursula and Gudrun, and he provides a catalyst, an ‘inevitable contingency’ (447), as Gudrun calls it, for the relationship between herself and Gerald. Women in Love centres strongly on culture in the process of dissolution. Lawrence identifies two degenerative modes, the African and the northern European. The African way, he says, is ‘controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara’ and its artistic expression is African carving. This, says Birkin, corresponds to ‘culture . . . mindless, utterly sensual’ (79). The white races, on the other hand, ‘having the arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow, would fulfil a mystery of ice-destructive knowledge, snowabstract annihilation’ (254). And this, too, finds an emblem in sculpture, the sculpture of Loerke. Gerald, with his associations with ice and snow, is the primary actor in this process of northern dissolution as the novel moves toward its climax in the cold emptiness of the high Tyrol. Lawrence identifies the root cause of this northern malaise with the systematic mechanization of ambition, action, thought, and emotion. Once again, it is Gerald, who, as a highly successful ‘Napoleon of industry’ (64) and ‘the God of the Machine’ (228), is most strongly associated with the emergent culture of the machine, and the text is insistently 6 After a climb to the summit of a nearby Alpine peak, Gerald, ‘stood back a little, and left [Gudrun] standing there, statue-like, transported into the mystic glowing east.’ The cold ecstasy she feels in the Alps, however, is empty. ‘ “That was the most perfect thing I have ever seen,” she said in cold, brutal tones,’ but ‘she was straining after a dead effect’ (p. 447). In a similar way Gerald is likened to statuary. Soon after the group arrive at the hostel in the mountains Gerald makes love to Gudrun, not like a living human being but like a statue. ‘His knees tightened to bronze . . . his hands were living metal.’ His ‘bronze-like limbs’ crushed down upon her as ‘he closed over her like steel’ (401–2). Once again in the alpine hut Gerald ‘sat for hours in bed, like a statue, reading’, while ‘his body understood nothing’ (p. 447), and when Gudrun confesses to the sculptor, Loerke, that she is not married, ‘Gerald sat erect, perfectly still, his face pale and calm like the face of a statue’ (p. 450).

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replete with images of wheels, cogs, and other metal devices that metaphorically embody Gerald and his ideologies. Gudrun is his appropriate mate and she is drawn to him by the very qualities that link him to this process of dissolution. Towards the end of the book she finds another ‘mate’ in the shape of the sculptor Loerke, but this shift of allegiance is not so much a change in direction as a focusing and concentration of the elements that drew her to Gerald. Although Loerke is physically and temperamentally very different from Gerald, he articulates in a conscious way many of the ideals that Gerald holds unthinkingly or spontaneously. But for Gudrun, Loerke’s most attractive feature is that the principal expression for his ideals comes in the form of art, and most especially in the art of sculpture. The imagery of ice, snow, and cold, which is associated with Gerald in the early part of the book, adumbrates the arrival of the two couples, Birkin and Ursula, Gerald and Gudrun, in the Alps. In the mountains the English are outsiders, tourists, and visitors. Loerke, in contrast, seems to be one of its denizens; he is, as Lawrence so frequently insists, a ‘troll’ (405 and 422) or a ‘gnome’ (411), and seems to be a personification of the frozen world that Gudrun so desperately seeks as her consummation. Loerke’s sculpture, too, serves to concentrate many of the themes announced in previous chapters. In its attempt to ‘interpret industry’ (424) his granite frieze is the apotheosis of mechanization, and his Godiva statue an expression of the cold sexuality hitherto in the novel identified with Gerald. The Godiva piece in particular exemplifies Loerke’s repudiation of intimacy and reciprocally experienced love. The violence which he claims that he practised upon his art-student model is expressive of a physical and psychological sexual brutality that has its earlier counterpart in Gerald’s equally brutal treatment of the Arab mare, and both produce a frisson of excitement in Gudrun. But the discussions around Loerke’s work extend beyond the English setting of the novel. Instead they are rooted in a number of aesthetic issues that were in the forefront of the European intellectual milieu just before and during the First World War. Two of these emerge most prominently. The first is aesthetic formalism, with its separation of art and life, and the second is concerned with the sympathetic relationship between art and the machine; both were features of Italian Futurism and (a little later) English Vorticism. Lawrence was familiar with these movements, and he felt for them simultaneous


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attraction and repulsion. Lawrence’s interest in Italian Futurism has been extensively explored, and though some uncertainty remains as to the precise nature of its influence, it is clear that many of the more general ideas in Women in Love derive from Marinetti, Boccioni, and other Futurist writers. In 1914 he was planning to write an article on Futurism, but other projects prevented his doing so.7 In Women in Love one of the most memorable expressions of this mechanistic way of life is Lawrence’s use of Mark Gertler’s painting The Merry-Go-Round (Fig. 40). He became aware of this in 1916 when Gertler sent him a black-and-white photograph of the recently completed work. Lawrence was amazed. It was, he told Gertler, ‘the best modern picture’ he had ever seen, but it was also ‘horrible and terrifying’ in its depiction of ‘violent mechanised rotation’ and ‘mindless human intensity of sensational involution’.8 Gertler correctly feared that it would be interpreted as critical of the war effort though he discussed with Lawrence the idea of turning it into sculpture. Lawrence had strong reservations about this. Sculpture seemed to him ‘to be going too far’, and the work would become a ‘form of incoherent . . . shouting’.9 Nevertheless, in the form of a sculpted frieze in alto rilievo (423), it fitted perfectly with one of the themes of his nearly completed novel. As a result, he elaborated Gertler’s image of a single roundabout into Loerke’s ‘fair, with peasants and artizans in an orgy of enjoyment’ (423). Following his discussions with Gertler, he transformed the painting into a ‘great granite frieze for a great granite factory in Cologne’, where Loerke explained that its place on the factory was an emblem of the new relationship between work, pleasure, and culture. At the fair, says Loerke, ‘the machine works [the man], instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body.’ ‘But,’ Gudrun asks, ‘is there nothing but work—mechanical work?’ ‘Nothing but work!’ the sculptor replies, ‘nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is all’ (424–5). These sound very much like ideas drawn from Futurism or Vorticism, but a telling statement 7 See especially Giovanni Cianci: ‘D. H. Lawrence and Futurism/Vorticism’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 8 (1983), 41–53, Emile Delavenay, ‘Lawrence and the Futurists’, in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenonenon, ed. L. B. Gamache and I. S. MacNiven (1987), pp. 140–62, and most recently, Andrew Harrison, ‘Electricity and the Place of Futurism in Women in Love’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 29 (2000), 7–23. 8 Letter to Mark Gertler, 9 Oct. 1916. Letters, ii, 660. 9 Ibid.

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40. Mark Gertler, The Merry-Go-Round, 1916. Oil on canvas, 193 ¥ 142 cm (76 ¥ 56 in). Tate Gallery, London

from Loerke about the relationship between art and architecture shifts the focus slightly. ‘Sculpture and architecture’, he says, ‘must go together. The day for irrelevant statues, as for wall pictures, is over. As a matter of fact sculpture is always part of an architectural conception. And since churches are all museum stuff, since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art— our factory-area our Parthenon . . .’ (424). Marinetti’s interest in industry and mechanization was conceptual, theoretical, and thematic; Loerke is speaking here about industrial practice and the design of what he calls a little later, ‘beautiful factories, beautiful machine-houses’ (424). Furthermore, it is significant that though Loerke knows and is familiar with Italy, Lawrence chose to identify


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these ideas not with an Italian, but with a German sculptor working in Cologne. Perhaps even more important is the change that Lawrence made in the typescript of the novel in order to insert the fairground scene. He saw a photograph of Gertler’s painting only in October 1916. The factory frieze in the first draft of April–June had quite a different subject; Lawrence had written that it represented ‘a village attacked by wolves, [with] great naked men, ten feet high, fighting with a horde of wolves, and women running, falling, and a rush of wolves sweeping all round the building like a storm driving in a shaggy swirl of leaves across the whole frieze’ (578 note). What was the original source of this image and can we be precise in locating the original of this alto rilievo depicting ‘great naked men, ten feet high’? The question takes us back to the genesis of Women in Love. According to Lawrence, it was ‘written in its first form in the Tyrol in 1913’,10 and it seems that the character of the sculptor Loerke was present in the earliest drafts.11 Lawrence, who later told Gertler that he and Frieda knew ‘a German who did these big reliefs for great, fine factories in Cologne’,12 had spent much time in Germany in 1912 and 1913 before he had read the Futurists in 1914, so it is to Germany that we should look for the possible seeds of Lawrence’s ideas on the relationship between art, life, and industry. There were many groups of artists and sculptors in Germany before the First World War concerned with the relationship between industry, design, and fine art, but none was so influential as the Deutsche Werkbund. It was founded in 1907, and from the first it had a more positive attitude to the role of industry and industrial processes than its parent, the British Arts & Crafts movement. One of its aims was to convince artists that the machine was an irreversible feature of modern life and that designing for the machine was not merely necessary, but desirable. One of its principal objects was the creation of model factories. The lead was taken by Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft or AEG, which, between 1909 and 1910, commissioned the architect Peter Behrens to design and 10 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Foreword’ to Women in Love (1919), in Women in Love (1987), p. 485. 11 See Lawrence, Women in Love (1987) p. 575, n. 405, where the editors point out that Loerke appeared in a MS. of 1913 cited in Robert S. Warren A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1982), p. 294, no. E441A. 12 Lawrence to Gertler, 5 Dec. 1916. Letters, iii, 490.

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build a new turbine factory in Berlin. Significantly, the young Le Corbusier, while on a fact-finding mission for the French, was working in Behrens’s office between 1910 and 1911, and he summed up his findings in a report entitled Étude sur le mouvement d’art décoratif en allemagne (Paris, 1912). In this he told his readers that the AEG ‘machine-house’ was commonly called a Kathedrale der Arbeit or ‘Cathedral of Work’.13 This is surely the source of Loerke’s idea about the connection between religion and industry in the new world of the machine, and when he suggests that factories will become religious buildings—‘let us make our . . . factory-area our Parthenon’— Lawrence was using him to parody one of the most memorable of the Werkbund ambitions. Working alongside Le Corbusier in Behrens’s office was another figure who had a passion for the well-designed factory—Walter Gropius. Gropius went on to found the Bauhaus just after the First World War, but before the war he expressed his fascination with the unity of art and technology through his membership of the Werkbund. Karl-Ernst Osthaus, a wealthy eccentric patron of modern art, introduced him into the group in 1910. Since 1902 Osthaus had been creating a collection in Hagen. What was initially the ‘Folkwang-Museum’ developed into ‘Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerke’, and in 1912 became the Werkbund Museum. One of its first special exhibitions was dedicated to model factory designs by leading architects and organized by Gropius. Gropius himself, together with Adolf Meyer (another member of Behrens’s office), designed the most famous of these—the Fagus shoe-last manufactory in Alfeld-an-der-Leine (1911). This later 13 Ch.-E. Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], Étude sur le mouvement d’art décoratif en allemagne (Paris, 1912), p. 44. This was Le Corbusier’s first publication. He was in Germany between April 1910 and May 1911 at the behest of the École des Beaux-Arts who wished to know more about the high reputation of the Werkbund. According to information kindly supplied by Anna Maria Jaeggi, one of the first critics to use the expression ‘Kathedrale der Arbeit’ in writing was Karl Scheffler in an article entitled ‘Das Geschäftshaus’, where he said, ‘Wie sich die Turbinenfabrik der AEG von Peter Behrens mit Wahrhaft großer Gebärde inmitten der häßlichen Großstadtwirrnis wie eine lichtdurchflutete Kathedrale der Arbeit erhebt, so könnte unsere ganze Industriearchitektur mit imponierender Würde in den Großstädten oder auf dem Lande auftreten und das Odium des Proletarischen endgültig abstreifen.’ Die neue Rundschau, 22 (1911), 234. This essay was reprinted in K. Scheffler, Die Architektur der Großstadt (Berlin, 1913), pp. 40–50. Sabine Röder points out that this same expression was quoted by Walter Gropius in his lecture ‘Monumental Kunst und Industriebau’ which he gave in Hagen in 1911. See Sabine Röder, ‘Moderne Baukunst 1900–14: the Architectural Collection of the Deutscher Werkbund’, The Decorative Arts Society Journal, 22 (1998), 15.


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became an icon of architectural modernism for its advanced use of brick and glass, but it was Gropius’s model factory in Cologne that is more important in this context. In 1914 the Werkbund staged its first full-scale exhibition in Cologne, an exhibition for which Gropius and Meyer designed a machine hall and office building for the Deutz motor works. Within the constraints of the programme, Gropius brought together his most recent ideas about the advantages of uniting art with technology and the creation of a modern aesthetic in terms of the economic requirements of the modern age. Most of the contemporary, advanced factory building involved simple, unadorned wall-spaces, but Gropius decided to decorate this new building with painting and sculpture. On the four angles of the two doors leading into the building was a relief in alto rilievo sections by two young sculptors, Gerhard Marcks and Richard Scheibe. This frieze ran round the corners of the entrances and depicted naked men exactly ten feet high in violent poses (Fig. 41). From a distance they might have looked like warriors. In actual fact they were representative of various kinds of manual labour. So was Marcks the ‘German who did . . . big reliefs for great, fine factories in Cologne’? There are no wolves in this frieze, although we know that Marcks in particular was a sculptor of animals, including wolves. In 1909 he completed a Grosses wolfsrelief for a Schloss Wendräben belonging to the family Von Wulffen who lived to the north-west of Loburg near Berlin, and in the same year did a ‘sketch for a frieze’ that shows large naked men fighting with animals.14 In this the figures are falling and the shaggy beasts, as in Lawrence’s account, sweep across the whole design (Fig. 42). In fact the animals are lions, though one could be forgiven for seeing them as wolves. As in the case of Mark Gertler’s Merry-Go-Round, Lawrence seems to have taken the germ of the idea from Gerhard Marcks’s factory frieze and elaborated it by adding the wolves to fit the theme of the novel.15 14

See Günter Busch and Martina Rudloff, Gerhard Marcks: das plastische Werk (Frankfurt am Mein, 1977), nos. 11 and 35. 15 There is no well-known story of wolves attacking a village, but at several points in the novel Gerald is likened to a wolf. Early in the book Gudrun watches him at the Crich wedding in Beldover where ‘his gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, goodhumoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. “His totem is the wolf,” she repeated to herself’ (14–15). And towards the end of the novel Lawrence describes the fight between Gudrun and Gerald as one between human and wolf: ‘His face was white and gleaming, she knew by the light in his eyes that she was in his power, the wolf’ (455).

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41. Gerhard Marcks, Work, 1914. Relief sculpture for the Deutz motor works designed by W. Gropius and A. Meyer for the Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne

42. Gerhard Marcks, Lion Hunt (sketch for a relief), 1900. Pencil, 20.8 ¥ 16.8 cm (8 1/4 ¥ 6 5/8 in). Gerhard Marcks Haus, Bremen


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But in Lawrence’s text, Loerke is the sculptor of another animal, the horse, and it is the photograph of the bronze Godiva statuette that shifts the focus away from the art/industry question to another issue, and one which provokes bitter animosity between the two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. This piece, he says, which is ‘not mechanical’, represents a girl on a horse. It elicits ‘dark homage’ (429) from Gudrun and generates profound irritation in Ursula. Why, asks the latter, is the horse so ‘stiff’? (430) The answer she receives from Loerke is that the sculpture represents not a real horse but ‘a certain form’: what they see in the photograph, he adds, ‘has no relation with the everyday world’, since art and life exist on ‘distinct planes of existence’ (430). Gudrun agrees: ‘I and my art’, she says, ‘have nothing to do with one another’ (431). The argument comes, of course, from a strain of British aestheticism that Lawrence despised. It received early expression in Roger Fry’s 1909 article in the New Quarterly Magazine, ‘An Essay on Aesthetics’, where he claimed that art was a function of the imaginative not the practical life, and that in ‘art we have no . . . moral responsibility—it presents a life freed from the binding necessities of our actual existence.’16 He repeated similar views in the catalogue for the second Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1912, where the PostImpressionists ‘do not seek to imitate form, but to create form’, and the idea was taken over by Clive Bell in his book Art of 1914. Lawrence would have been familiar with these English adumbrations of European formalism. About the details of the sculpture, Lawrence is very precise. It is ‘a naked girl, small, finely made, sitting on a great naked horse. The girl was young and tender, a mere bud. She was sitting sideways on the horse, her face in her hands, as if in shame and grief, in a little abandon. Her hair, which was short and must be flaxen, fell forward, divided, half covering her hands. Her limbs were young and tender. Her legs, scarcely formed yet, the legs of a maiden just passing towards cruel womanhood, dangled childishly over the side of the powerful horse, pathetically, the small feet folded one over the other, as if to hide. But there was no hiding. There she was exposed naked on the naked flank of the horse.’ As for the horse itself, it ‘stood stock-still, stretched in a kind of start. It was a massive, magnificent 16 Roger Fry, ‘An Essay in Aesthetics’, New Quarterly Magazine, 2 (1909), 171–90. Reprinted in his Vision and Design (1920).

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43. Josef Moest, Godiva, 1906. Bronze 21.5 ¥ 35 ¥ 8.5 cm (8 1/2 ¥ 13 3/4 ¥ 3 1/4 in). Stadtmuseum, Cologne

stallion, rigid with pent-up power. Its neck was arched and terrible, like a sickle, its flanks were pressed back, rigid with power’ (429). Here there is little doubt about the original of this image. Josef Moest’s Godiva was first exhibited in 1906 (Fig. 43). Several copies were made, some in bronze and some in wood. A bronze version seems to have been bought by Princess Mary of Romania, and Moest’s sister, Rosa Annacker, gave a wooden version to the Stadtmuseum in Cologne in 1951. Moest was born in Cologne in 1873, the son of Richard Moest, another sculptor.17 He studied in Munich between 1897 and 1902. In 1904 he joined a small group of 17 Information from Freya Danhöffer, author of ‘Joseph Moest (1873–1914)’, Kölner Museums-Bulletin, 4 (1995), 30–6.


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four architects, two painters, and two sculptors called the ‘Kölner Künstlervereinigung Stil’, dedicated to employing ancient techniques in the context of modern subjects. He travelled extensively in Italy and made regular visits to Davos as part of a cure for tuberculosis. He died young in 1914, at the age of 41. Although Lawrence may not have seen the original statuette, it is clear from his detailed account he must have at least possessed a photograph of it,18 and there are two pieces of evidence that it was Moest himself who showed it to him. The first comes from a story, ‘New Eve and Old Adam’, that Lawrence wrote in Irschenhausen between May and June 1913 when Lawrence and Frieda were on their way back to England from a long stay at the small village of Gargnano on Lake Garda. The story is set in London and its connection with Moest is solely the surname of the central protagonists. Originally they had been called ‘Cyriak’,19 and then around 8 July Lawrence wrote to Douglas Clayton, his typist, asking him to change the name to ‘Moest’.20 One of the characters is actually called ‘Richard Moest’—which was the name of Josef’s father, while ‘Richard’ was the middle name of Josef’s brother. If Loerke’s Godiva is undoubtedly Moest’s and the use of this unusual name suggests that the two men knew each other, can we establish how or when they met? I think we can, and the second piece of evidence comes from a postcard that Moest sent his sister in March 1913.21 It was from Gargnano on Lake Garda, and in it he says that he had arrived in the village on 3 March, that he was with a companion, and that he was not sure how long he would remain. His next postcard came from Venice a fortnight later, so we can be fairly sure that he stayed in Gargnano for two weeks. The significance is clear. Lawrence and Frieda had been renting a house in this same village since September 1912 and they remained there until April 1913. So Moest and the Lawrences were together in the same place for the duration of Moest’s stay. Gargnano then had only 1,200 18 In the Moest collection in the Cologne Stadtmuseum there is, amongst the postcards collected by his sister Rosa Annacker, a black-and-white reproduction of the Godiva. 19 Possibly, conjectures John Worthen, after Antonia Almgren, née Cyriak, who came to stay with the Lawrences in Gargnano around 1 March 1913. See D. H. Lawrence, Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge,1987), pp. 247–8. 20 Ibid. 21 There is in an album of such postcards in the Stadtmuseum, Cologne, KSM-G 16795.

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inhabitants;22 it boasted two hotels—the Hotel Gargnano and the Hotel Cervo—both run by Germans.23 The wife of the manager of the Cervo, Maria Samuelli, who was also German, befriended Lawrence and Frieda when they first arrived on the lake in September 1912.24 Had Moest been staying at the Cervo it would hardly be surprising that Maria Samuelli had introduced him to another resident German, Frieda Lawrence,25 and to her novelist husband, who had already begun work on the first version of Women in Love, then called The Sisters.26 There is no evidence whatever that Moest held the views on art that Lawrence attributed to him or that the circumstances in which Loerke produced his Godiva were those which led to the production of Moest’s sculpture. What is striking, however, is the degree to which Lawrence records the physical appearance of Loerke and the detailed, almost repetitive, attention he gives to his physiognomy. He insists upon his ‘arresting’ and ‘brown’ ‘quick, full eyes, like a mouse’s . . .’ (405) and his ‘fine, thin nostrils’ (422). Loerke has ‘fine, thin, shiny skin, reddish-brown . . . drawn tight over his full temples’. His hair was ‘fine’ and black, but ‘thin . . . on his full, sensitivelooking head, and worn away at his temples’ (423). In his brown velvet cap ‘his head was as round as a chestnut’ (468). He had a ‘thick, coarse, brush-like moustache’, which is ‘cut short about his mobile, rather shapeless mouth’ (426). The similarity between this account of Loerke and the portrait of Moest painted in 1912 by his friend Robert Seuffert is very strong (Fig. 44) . The thin hair indeed outlines the temples; the skin is tightly stretched and distinctly tanned. The eyes in Seuffert’s portrait are clearly brown, somewhat murine, and the mouth half-covered by a coarse moustache. Lawrence also has much to say about Loerke’s figure, agile and somewhat androgynous. It was, says Lawrence, ‘slight and unformed’ like that of ‘a boy, almost a street arab’ (422); ‘chétif and 22

According to Karl Baedeker, Northern Italy (Leipzig and London, 1913), p. 285. Oberitalien mit Ravenna, Florenz und Livorno: Handbuch für Reisende von Karl Baedeker (18th edn., Leipzig, 1911), p. 244. John Worthen kindly supplied this reference. 24 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: the Early Years 1885–1912, (Cambridge, 1991), p. 431, and information from Worthen himself. 25 On 11 March Frieda went ‘boating with some Germans’ on Lake Garda. Letter to Edward Garnett, 11 Mar. 1913. Letters, i, 572. 26 The editors of Women in Love state that Lawrence began Sisters-1 in the middle of March 1913; Women in Love (1987), p. xxi. 23


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44. Robert Seuffert, Portrait of Josef Moest, c.1912. Oil on canvas. 78 ¥ 58 cm (30 3/4 ¥ 22 3/4 in). Stadtmuseum, Cologne

puny’ (468), ‘smallish’ and ‘odd’ (470). The numerous photographs of Moest in the collection of the Cologne Stadtmuseum show a thin, diminutive individual. Another picture of him, taken in his studio around 1905 (Fig. 45), shows him in the foreground third from the left in the company of twelve men, and one woman, his sister Rosa. On the wall behind and to the left of him is the ‘Godiva’ statuette. Loerke was overtly homosexual and travelled with his ‘lovecompanion’ Leitner (411); we do not know who accompanied Moest on his visit to Gargnano, but he was never married and seems to have had no relations of any kind, friendship or marriage, with women.27 The character of Lawrence’s sculptor Loerke owes a great deal to Lawrence’s experiences in prewar Germany. It would seem that when he met Josef Moest in Gargnano, Moest made a strong, but 27 Strikingly, numerous tributes and letters of condolence now collected in Cologne marked his death in 1914, but not one of these came from a woman.

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45. Joseph Moest with friends in his studio, c.1905

mainly unpleasant, impression on him, and his Godiva statuette exemplified for Lawrence something of the emotionally cold aloofness of early twentieth-century aestheticism. There is no record of industrial reliefs by Moest, although one of his obituaries speaks of his having ‘worked on many large buildings in his last years when there was a boom in architectural sculpture’.28 Instead, Loerke’s alto rilievo frieze seems to be based on Gerhard Marcks’s decoration of Gropius’s model factory in the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. Whether Lawrence had direct experience of Gerhard Marcks and his work is not known, but it seems very likely that he saw a photograph of the original in contemporary journals. When Lawrence returned to England in 1914 after a long period in Italy he immediately familiarized himself with current art and literature. He found out more about the Futurists, whose exhibition at the Sackville Gallery had just closed, and he was in touch with Georgians, Imagists, Vorticists, and members of the Bloomsbury group.29 He continued

28

Cutting in the Köln Stadtmuseum collection from Kölnische-Zeitung, 29 May 1914, KSM-G 16796. 29 Worthen (1991), p. 128.


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writing and rewriting his novel for two years, and many of the characters were changed or augmented. Hitherto, it has been thought that the figure of Loerke and his ideas about sculpture derived mainly from Lawrence’s war-time period, but we can now see that the roots of his attitudes to sculpture in this novel are to be found in the prewar German Werkbund and his chance meeting with Josef Moest on the shores of Lake Garda.

Bibliography Sources of manuscript material Bodleian Library, Oxford. Transcript Diaries of John Ruskin. British Library, London. Correspondence between Flaxman and Gunn. Archives of the British Museum, London. Sub Committee on Building and Sub Committee on Natural History. Reports of Committees during the planning of the Natural History Museum. Carlisle Public Library. MS Diary of James Losh. Carlisle Record Office. Transcript by Revd Richard Jackson of an account by Sara Losh of the building of St Mary’s, Wreay. Archives of the Département du Gard, Nîmes. Material relating to SaintPaul de Nîmes. Archive of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Letters between Gardner and Matthew Prichard. Archives of King’s College, Cambridge. Unpublished lectures, notebooks, and diaries of Roger Fry. Archives of the Natural History Museum, London. Materials relating to Alfred Waterhouse, Richard Owen, and the Natural History Museum. Waterhouse, ‘Some Details of the Enrichment of the new Museum of Natural History (1877–9)’. Public Record Office, London. Materials relating to Alfred Waterhouse, Richard Owen, and the Natural History Museum. Archives of the Royal Institute of British Architects, London. Notebooks of Thomas Rickman. Archives of Trinity College, Cambridge. Letters between Edmund Sharpe, Thomas Rickman, and William Whewell. Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, Trowbridge, Wiltshire. Pembroke Papers including materials relating to Sidney Herbert.

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Index Page numbers in italic refer to the illustrations Académie Julien 242 Academy 211, 216 Adams, Henry 213 AEG 253–4 aesthetic formalism 250, 257 Africa 208, 210, 249 Aitchison, George 195 Aix-la-Chapelle 86 Albert, Prince Consort 169, 171–2, 177 Alhambra Palace, Granada 82–3 All Saints, Ennismore Gardens 64, 81 Allston, Washington 23 Althüsser, Louis 123 Ancona, Santa Maria della Piazza 73 Andernach 188, 189, 192 Andrea da Murano 132 Angelico, Fra 92–4, 95, 100–1, 105, 113, 120, 138, 139, 140 Angerstein, John Julius 23 Anglo-French exhibition, White City, London (1908) 208–9 Annacker, Rosa 258, 261 Anrep, Boris 242, 247; Scenes in the Life of a Mayfair Lady 225, 226 Anthropological Review 215 Anthropological Society of London 215 anthropology: collections of primitive art and artefacts 201, 210; nineteenth-century ideas of the primitive 205–9; Polynesian studies 211–15; racial theories 215–20 Archaeologia 39 The Architect 198–9 Architectural Conference 198–9 Architectural Exhibition (1865) 194 architecture: architectural primitivism 36; Byzantine architecture 190–1; cultural history 145–9; as expression of moral character 160–2;

Norman 36–7, 38; Norman revival 54–5; Renaissance 156–8; see also Gothic architecture; Romanesque architecture Argyll, Duke of 171 art: Byzantine art 225–47; and degeneracy 217–18; images of Polynesians 212, 213–15; industry and 252–4; primitive art 209–11, 218–20, 221–2; see also individual art movements Art News 221 The Art Union 108–9 Art Workers’ Guild 219 Artist and Amateur’s Magazine 114 Arts and Crafts movement 73, 77 n. 61, 253 Ashburnham, Lord 23 Athenaeum 94, 109, 232 Aubrey, John, Monumenta Britannica 36 Aurier, Albert 227 Austrian Academy of Arts 106 Ayrton, A. S. 198 Bacherach, St Peter 188 Bakunin, Michael 202 Baldinucci, Filippo 97 Balfour, Henry, The Evolution of Decorative Art 210 Balloni, Pompeio 24 Bamber Bridge, St Saviour’s 56 Bamberg, Gnadenpforte 192 Banks, Joseph 201 Barker, Granville 244 Barry, James 125–6, 127 Barthes, Roland 123 Bartolo, Taddeo 13 Bartolommeo, Fra 97–103, 105, 119; ‘Virgin, Babe and Saint’ 103

284

Index

Bartram, Michael 136 Basaiti, Marco 138 Basevi, George 82 Bauhaus 254 Bavaria 46–7, 48, 116–17 Beaumont, Sir George 22–3, 24 Beckford, William 14 Behrens, Peter 253 Bell, Clive 219, 238, 239, 240; Art 245, 257 Bell, Ingress 199 Bell, Vanessa 240; Byzantine Lady 240, 241 Bellini, Giovanni 132, 137, 138, 225, 231 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 137 Benin 210, 221 Berenson, Bernard 232, 240 Bergson, Henri 227, 238, 239, 245, 246 Berlin 177, 254 Bernard, Émile 227, 228 Bethnal Green 64 Binyon, Lawrence 215 Blackburn 37, 54; St Mark’s 55, 56, 185 Blake, William 124, 129 Blanche, Jacques Émile 211 Blomfield, Charles, Bishop of London 60, 64 Bloomsbury group 240–3, 247, 262 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 212, 215 Boas, Franz, The Mind of Primitive Man 221 Boas, George 6, 35, 203 Boccioni, Umberto 251 Boisserée, Melchior 46–7, 116, 117 Boisserée, Sulpiz 46–7, 116, 117; Denkmale der Baukunst vom 7ten bis zum 13ten Jahrhundert am Nieder-Rhein 47, 192, 193 Bologna 18, 121–2 Bomberg 247 Bonn, St Martin 186, 187, 192, 193 Booth, Stephen 128 Boppard, Hauptkirche 188 Borough Polytechnic 240–2 Boschini, Marco 137 Boston: Boston Public Library 243; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 233

Brandon, David 64, 83–5 Bristol, Frederick Hervey, Earl and Bishop of 11, 14, 16, 24–5, 92 British Almanac and Companion 199 British Magazine 80, 89 British Museum, London 169–70, 172, 175–6, 177, 201, 207–8 British Society 206–7 Bronzino 23 Brosses, Charles de 13 Brown, Ford Madox 108, 196 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 15 n. 22, 91, 92–3 Browning, Robert 7, 8, 15 n. 22, 92–103; ‘Andrea del Sarto’ 95; ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb’ 104; ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 95, 104, 113; ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ 104; ‘Pictor Ignotus’ 91–2, 95–101, 104–7, 111, 113, 115, 118–19 Bruns, Gerald 147 Brussels Town Hall 184 Buchanan, William 11 Buckland, William 171 Buffalmacco 13, 26 The Builder 86, 178, 190 Building News 173 Bunsen, Baron 109 Bunyan, John 145 Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher 146, 147 Burlington Magazine 202, 233, 235, 240, 244 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward 142 Burne-Jones, Philip 212, 218 Burnett, Frank, Through Polynesia and Papua 213 Bushmen 221 Byron, Lord 2, 32–3, 145 Byzantine architecture 82–3, 190–1 Byzantine art: Impressionism and 235–6; Matthew Prichard’s interest in 234–5, 237–9; modernism and 5, 225, 231, 232, 237–47; mosaics 225, 228, 229, 230, 232–3, 232, 236, 240–2, 243–4; ‘new sympathy’ for 225–8; Post-Impressionism and 222; Roger Fry and 227, 228–34, 235–7, 243–4

Index Café Volpini, Paris 228 Calderon, George 214–15, 218– 19 Cambridge Camden Society 60–2, 63–4, 186 Canova, Antonio 16, 17, 25 Capocci, Giovanni 87 Caracci, Agostino 133 Carlyle, Joseph 68 Carlyle, Thomas 110, 169, 171 Carpaccio, Vittore 138 Carracci family 11 Carwardine, H. H. 28, 29, 31 Catholic Church: and medieval art 92; and decline of Western culture 159–60; missionaries 205; Nazarenes and 108–19; Nicaean Council 230, 231; Oxford Movement 3, 7; see also Christian art Caumont, Arcisse de, Cours d’antiquités monumentales . . . 53 Cefalù 244 Cenci, Beatrice 19 Ceylon 208 Cézanne, Paul 225, 248; and Byzantine art 240, 245, 246; first PostImpressionist exhibition 200–2, 203, 220–1; International Society exhibition 234, 235; Roger Fry champions 5, 233, 234, 236–7; Stafford Gallery exhibition 223; Symbolists on 227, 228; Women Bathing 246 Chamberlin, A. F. 216 Charlemagne 86 Chatburn, Christ Church 56 Chaucer, Geoffrey 33 Chenil Gallery, London 242 children, as ‘savages’ 215–16 Christ Church, Chatburn 56 Christ Church, Streatham 61–2, 64, 80–2, 81, 83, 89 Christian, F. W. 212 Christian art 7–8; Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’ and 91–2, 95–101, 104–7, 111, 113, 115, 118–19; Byzantine art 227–8; Nazarenes 7, 94, 105–19; pagan symbolism in 74–6 Christian Remembrancer 88–9

285

Christianity: Gothic architecture 61, 90; Romanesque’s suitability to 88–9; see also Catholic Church; Christian art Christy, Henry 201, 207 chronological primitivism 6–7, 35, 203–5 Cima da Conegliano 138 Cimabue 24, 31, 107, 228 Cistercian order 49–50 classicism 148 Clausen, George 219 Clayton, Douglas 259 Clutton, Henry 64 Coburn, Kathleen 26 Cochin, Charles, Voyage d’Italie 13 Cocke, Thomas 36 Cockerell, S. P. 37 Cole, Henry 172, 177, 195–6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 8, 43, 110; introduction to painting 22–3; Mediterranean tour 23–5; and Pisan frescoes 4, 7, 9, 17, 25–32, 35–6; on symbols 34; ‘Philosophical Lectures’ 29–31 Collins, William 135 Cologne 44, 46, 47, 188–90, 197, 253, 255, 258–9; St Maria im Kapitol 192; St Martin 192, 193; St Pantaleon 192 colour, in Venetian art 127–31 Condor, Josiah 161 Congregational chapel, Rusholme, Manchester 186, 187 Conrad, Joseph 215 Conservative Party 172, 198 Constantinople 82, 86, 89, 240; Hagia Sophia 245 Cook, Ebenezer Wake, Anarchism in Art and Chaos in Criticism 218 Cook, Captain James 201, 206–7 Coombes, Annie 209 Cornelius, Peter 86, 106, 108, 110–11, 117 Cowper, Georgiana 179 Cowper, William Francis 173, 174–5, 176, 177, 179–81 Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, Symbolism and Mythology 74 Crown Life Office, Manchester 194–5, 196 cultural history 145–9

286

Index

cultural primitivism 6–7, 203–5 Cunningham, Allan 134–5 Curran, Kathleen 186 Daily Express 212 Daily Graphic 22 Daily Mirror 244–5 Daily News 199 Dalton, O. M. 244 Dante Alighieri 27, 33, 34, 145 Darby, Michael 81, 82 Darley, George 94, 109 Daru, Pierre Antoine 145–6 Darwin, Charles 167, 169, 170; The Origin of Species 171 Darwinism 217 Davy, Humphry 171 Deane and Woodward 175, 184, 190, 194–5, 196 degeneration theory 216–20 Denis, Maurice 227–8, 231; Mystère catholique 228 Derby, Lord 174 Deutsche Werkbund 253–5, 262, 263 Deutz motor works 255 Dewhurst, John 55 n. 69 Dictionary of Painters 132–4 Digby, Kenelm 43 Disraeli, Benjamin 174 Dockray, Benjamin 52 Domenichino 11 Driskel, Michael 228 Drummond, Henry 160 Dryden, John 127–8, 130, 206 Duban, Felix 54 Dublin 181; Trinity College Museum 190 Ducal (Doge’s) Palace, Venice 152, 154–5, 194 Dufresnoy, Charles Alphonse, De Arte Graphica 128 Dujardin, C. 188, 189 Duthuit, George 237 Dyce, William 108 Eastlake, Sir Charles 15 n. 22, 107, 108, 111, 135, 136–7 Eastlake, Elizabeth (née Rigby) 115–16, 137 Ebrach, Cistercian abbey 49–50, 49, 57 The Ecclesiologist 61, 63–4, 89 Edinburgh 181; Museum of Science and Art 177

Elcho, Lord 174, 175, 195 Eliot, George 68; Romola 98 Ellis, William, Polynesian Researches 211 Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 64 Englefield, H. C. 39, 40 Les Entretiens politiques et littéraires 202 Epstein, Jacob 247 Etty, William 126, 135, 136, 137 Eustace, John Chetwode, Classical Tour 18 evolution, theory of 171 Expressionism 246 Eyck, Jan van 120 Faber, Frederick William 1–4, 5, 6, 7–8 Fagus factory, Alfeld-an-der-Leine 254–5 Famin, Stanislas 74 Faraday, Michael 43, 171 Farington, St Paul’s 56, 57, 185 Fauvism 209, 218 Feilden, Joseph 54 Félibien 127 Fergusson, James 175, 195; History of the Modern Styles of Architecture 175; Illustrated Handbook of Architecture 175 Field, Edward Wilkins 180 Finberg, A. J. 218 Flandrin, Hippolyte 227; Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem 120 Flaxman, John 15–16, 17, 20, 26, 38, 40 Florence: Browning visits 102–3; Fra Bartolommeo and 98, 99–100, 103, 105; Pitti Palace 102; Ruskin and 90, 139, 163; Sta Maria Nuova 102; in study of Renaissance art 121, 122, 162; Uffizi 103 Foreign and Quarterly Review 60 Foreign Office, London 173–5, 174, 182, 190 formalism, aesthetic 250, 257 Forsyth, Joseph 36; Remarks on Antiquities 18

Index Fowke, Captain Francis 173, 173, 175–7, 176, 178, 180–1, 182–5, 195 France: Anglo-French exhibition 208–9; cultural history 148–9; Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris 149–56, 165; Polynesian territories 206–7; Romanesque architecture 50–4; Sara Losh’s tour of 69–70; Sharpe’s tour of 50–3, 51; Symbolism 226–8 François II, King of France 158 Fraser’s Magazine 159 Freiburg Minster 192 French Revolution 155–6 fresco: Houses of Parliament 110–11; Nazarenes 106–7; Pisan frescoes 12–18, 20–2, 25–34, 30, 35–6, 121, 122, 139 Fruman, Norman 34 Fry, Roger 8, 219, 248; admiration for Gauguin 5, 7, 221–2, 225, 236–7; and Byzantine art 227, 228–34, 235–7, 243–4; links Byzantine art to modernism 5, 225, 236–7, 239–40, 246–7; edits Reynolds’ Discourses 124, 143, 225; first Post-Impressionist exhibition 202–3; and Matthew Prichard 233–4, 235; second PostImpressionist exhibition 257; ‘Art Before Giotto’ 230–1, 235; ‘An Essay on Aesthetics’ 257 Fryar and Binyon 194 Fuga, Ferdinando 87 Fuseli, Henry 126, 127, 129, 130, 131–4, 135, 138 Futurism 250–1, 253, 262 Galton, William, Hereditary Genius 217 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 233, 234, 237, 238, 239 Gargnano 259–60 Gärtner, Friedrich von 48, 86, 117 Gaskell, Elizabeth 179 Gauguin, Paul 213, 214–15, 225, 227, 228, 235, 236, 238; and Byzantine art 245; criticism of 210–11, 215, 216, 218–19, 220; first Post-

287

Impressionist exhibition 201–2, 203, 209, 212, 218–19, 220; Fry admires 5, 7, 221–2, 225, 236–7; Stafford Gallery exhibition 223–4; Adam and Eve 206, 207; Christ in the Garden of Olives 223; Manao tupapau 223; Maternité 212; Noa-Noa 209; Poèmes barbares 203; Tahitians 220; Vision of the Sermon 223, 223, 224; Yellow Christ 218 Gautier, Théophile 5; Italia 5 Gentile da Fabriano 132 Georgians 262 Germany: cultural primitivism 6, 7; Deutsche Werkbund 253–5; and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love 253–63; Nazarenes 7, 86, 94, 105–19; Romanesque architecture 5, 44–5, 46–50, 86; Rundbogenstil 48, 175, 177, 185; Sharpe’s tour of 46, 47–50, 47 Gertler, Mark 248; The Merry-GoRound 251, 252, 253, 255 Geyser, G. W. dem Jüngern 192 Gibbon, Edward 9, 13–14, 162 Gilchrist, Alexander 126 Giorgione 120–1, 123, 131, 137, 141–2; Tempestà 142; Venetian Pastorale 141, 141 Giotto 24, 95, 110 n. 68; Byzantine influences 228, 229–30; Campo Santo frescoes 13–14, 26, 28–9, 31, 32, 34; Haydon on 20–1 Girouard, Mark 183, 192 Giulio Romano 19, 34 Gladstone, William Ewart 110, 170, 172–3, 178, 180, 198 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de, Of the Inequality of Human Races 217 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 34, 46 Goldwater, Robert 210 Goloubew, Victor 237, 239 Gore, Spencer, Gauguins and Connoisseurs at the Stafford Gallery 222, 224 Görres, Johann Joseph 105 Gossman, Lionel 107

288

Index

Gothic architecture 6, 36, 88; destruction of 154; Foreign Office competition 174, 175; French architectural histories 148–9; Gothic Revival 148, 166, 171; and the grotesque 153, 190; in literature 152–7; ‘manliness’ 190–1; as only possible Christian architecture 61, 90; in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice 146, 147, 162–3; transition from Romanesque 5, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46 Gozzoli, Benozzo 26, 29; Drunkenness of Noah 13 Grafton Galleries, London 202, 203, 204, 212, 218 Grant, Duncan 240, 244, 247; Bathing 240–2, 241; Byzantine Lady 243; Football 240; The Queen of Sheba 243, 243; Street Accident 243 Gray, Thomas 36 Great Exhibition, London (1851) 172 Greco, El 240 Greece 6, 20–1, 204, 240, 248 Gropius, Walter 254–5 grotesque 152–3, 190 Grüber, Bernhard 49 Gruetzner-Robins, Anna 224 Guardian 194 Guido da Siena 24 Guizot, François, Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe 52 Gunn, William 5–6, 37–8, 39, 60; An Enquiry into the Origin and Influence of Gothic Architecture 38, 40–1, 41, 45 Gutenberg, Johannes 155 Gwilt, Joseph, Elements of Architectural Criticism 60

Haydon, Benjamin Robert 20–1, 22, 26, 114 Hazlitt, William 11, 18, 126, 136 Heideloff, Carl Alexander von 50 Helsinger, Elizabeth 144–5, 148 Henry VIII, King of England 159 Herbert, Sir Sidney 64, 84, 85–8, 90 Herder, Johann Gottfried 6, 27 Hesse 108 hierarchy of races 215–16 Hindson, William 71, 73 historical writing 145–9 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 194 Hittorff, Jacques Ignace, Architecture antique de la Sicile 82 Holy Trinity, Rusholme, Manchester 185, 186 Hooker, Joseph Dalton 170 Hope, Henry Thomas 59 Hope, Thomas, An Historical Essay on Architecture . . . 58–9, 59, 61, 73, 76–7, 85, 89 Houses of Parliament, London 105, 110–11, 175, 179 Howard, Henry 68 Howard, P. H. 68 Hugford, Ignazio 11 Hugo, Victor 156–8, 162; Notre-Dame de Paris 149–56, 165 Hulme, T. E. 227, 245, 246–7 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 25 Hunt, Henry 172–3 Hunt, James 215 Hunt, Leigh 8, 9, 15 n. 22, 17, 19, 22, 32–4 Hunt, William Holman 108 Hunterian Museum, Glasgow 169 Huxley, T. H. 170 Hyslop, Theophilus Bulkeley 219–20

Haddon, Alfred, Evolution in Art 210 Hagen 254 Hagia Sophia, Constantinople 245 Hall, G. Stanley 216 Hallam 145 Hamilton, Gavin 102 Hamilton, Sir William 24, 87 Hamy, E-.T. 216 Hancarville, Pierre d’ 74 Hardie, Martin 203, 209 Hardy, Thomas 197 Hart, Dora 212 Haskell, Francis 10, 11, 135

Iffley Church, Oxford 63 Illustrated London News 205–6, 205 Imagists 262 imperialism 205 Impressionism 218, 227, 231, 235–6 Ince-in-Makerfield 186 India 208 industry, and art 252–4 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 120, 228 insanity 219 Institute of British Architects 180, 197

Index International Exhibition, London (1862) 173, 173, 175, 182–3 International Society 234, 235 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 233 Islamic art exhibition, Munich (1910) 239 Italian Primitives: Nazarenes and 111, 113–14; reassessment of 7, 9–34, 92; and Venetian art 122 Italy: dispersal of art works by Napoleon 10; English Romantics and medieval art of 9–34; Futurism 250–1, 253; importance of Venice to Ruskin 162–5; nineteenth-century English responses to 1–5; Robert Browning in 91–2; Romanesque architecture 58–9, 85–6; Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice 144–8, 150–7, 165; Sara Losh’s tour of 69–70; Venetian painting 120–43; see also Renaissance Jackson, Revd Richard 80 James, John Thomas, The Italian School of Painting 125 Jameson, Anna 7, 8, 42, 97, 99, 103, 109, 110, 116–19; The Diary of an Ennuyée 116, 130; ‘The House of Titian’ 118; Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters 94, 138; Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad 117 Jewell, Florence 208 John, Augustus 224, 236, 242 Jones, Owen 82, 83 July Revolution 155–6 Kallenbach, C. G., Die christliche Kirchen-Baukunst des Abenlandes . . . 191 Kant, Immanuel 239 Keats, John 8, 9, 15 n. 22, 17, 20–2, 31–2, 114, 142, 204 Kemp, William 168 n. 3 Kenyon, John 110 Kerr, Professor Robert 175–7

289

Kerrich, Thomas 40 Kerry and Co. 213 Keyeser, Wolfgang 152 Keynes, Maynard 240 Kipling, Rudyard 216 Klenze, Leo von 117 Klenze, Ludwig von 48 Knight, Henry Gally, The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Italy 83, 84–5 Knight, Richard Payne, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus 75–6; An Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology 74–5 Kölner Künstlervereinigung Stil 259 Kondakov, N. P. Histoire de l’art byzantin 230 Konody, P. G. 245 Kropotkin, Prince Peter 221 Kugler, Franz 15 n. 22, 101 Kulturgeschichte 148 La Farge, John 213–14; Fayaway Sails her Boat. Samoa 213–14, 214 Laborde, Alexandre, Les Monuments de France 53 Lacordaire, Henri 108 Lamb, Charles 136 Lamb, Henry 242 Lamennais, Félicité 109 Lancaster 169, 185, 186 Landor, Walter Savage 101–2, 110 Lane, Richard 178 Lanzi, Luigi 99, 137; Storia pittorica della italia 132 Lasinio, Carlo 26, 29; Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa 14–15, 21, 30 Lassaulx, Johan Claudius von 47–8, 50 Lastri, Marco, L’Etruria pittrice 12 Latham, John 55 Laurati 26 Laurens, J.-P. 242 Law, Edmund, Bishop of Carlisle 68 Lawrence, D. H. 7, 8, 248–9, 250–3, 262–3; ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ 259; Women in Love 8, 248–58, 260–1, 263 Lawrence, Frieda 253, 259–60 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 101, 102 Layard, Henry 172, 198 Le Corbusier, Étude sur le mouvement d’art décoratif en allemagne 254

290

Index

Leeds, W. H. 60 Leonardo da Vinci 131 Leslie, Sir John 68, 127 Lethaby, W. R. 77 n. 61, 244 Lever, Jill 58 Lewis, Wyndham 247 Liberal Party 198 Limburg 191 Lindsay, Lord 108; Sketches of the History of Christian Art 78 Lippi, Filippino 103 Lippi, Filippo 95 Literary Digest 220 Lobengula, Prince 208 Lombroso, Cesare, Genius and Madness 217 London: British Museum 175–6, 177, 201; Foreign Office 173–5, 174, 182, 190; New Courts of Justice 179, 180, 181; Romanesque churches 64; see also Natural History Museum Lonsdale, Henry 66–8, 69, 73, 78, 79 Lorenzetti, Pietro, Scenes from the Lives of the Anchorites 13 Lorenzo Monaco 95 Losh, James 8, 67, 68, 69, 70, 79 Losh, John 66–7 Losh, Katherine 68, 69, 76 Losh, Margaret 65 Losh, Sara 6, 62, 64, 65–80, 66, 83, 90 Losh, William 77 Lot and his Suite (mosaic) 232 Louis XIV, King of France 157 Louis XV, King of France 157–8 Louviers 148–9 Louvre, Paris 120, 141, 144 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 6, 35, 203 Lucas, Revd Richard 37 Lucca 163 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria 46–7, 48, 86, 114, 116–17 Lukasbrüder 106 Lutheranism 155 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 145 MacCarthy, Desmond 202, 221, 222 machines, and art 250–1, 253–4 Macmillan’s Magazine 195 Maffei, Alessandro 74 Mainz 48 Manchester 178; Assize Courts 178, 196; Congregational chapel,

Rusholme 186, 187; Crown Life Office 194–5, 196; Holy Trinity, Rusholme 185, 186; Town Hall 181 Manners, Lord John 182, 195 Mantegna, Andrea 120 Maoris 63–4 Marcks, Gerhard: Lion Hunt 255, 256; Work 255, 256, 262 Marco da Siena 24 Maria-Laach 188 Marinetti, Filippo 251, 252 Marquesas Islands 211–12 Marx, Karl 221 Mary, Princess of Romania 258 Masaccio 34 Matabeleland 208 Matisse, Henri 202, 235, 237–8, 239; The Dance 225 Medici family 98, 103, 160, 162 medieval art: adoption by Catholic Church 92; English collectors 9–12, 24; English Romantics and 6–7, 9–34; in histories of art 92 Meier-Graefe, Julius, Modern Art 209 Melville, Herman, Typee 213–14 Mengs, Anton Raphael 127 mental illness 219 Mérimée, Prosper 52 Meyer, Adolf 254, 255 Michelangelo 122, 123, 138; and Campo Santo frescoes 29, 32; English Romantics and 19, 23, 24, 26–7, 34; St Peter’s 157; on Venetian art 124–5; Last Judgement 19, 29, 70 Michelet, Jules 146 Michell, William 72 Mill, John Stuart 156 Milner, Isaac 68 Milnes, Richard Monckton 7, 101–2, 109–12, 116, 119, 164–5, 172 Milton, John 2, 23 missionaries 205, 212–13 Missionary Museum 201 modernism, and Byzantine art 225, 231, 232, 237–47 Moest, Josef 258–63, 261, 262; Godiva 258–62, 258 Moest, Richard 258, 259 Moissac 52

Index Moller, Georg, Denkmäler der deutschen Baukunst 48, 191 Monreale 240, 244 Montalembert, Charles de 94, 108, 109, 158–9, 162; Du vandalisme et du catholicisme dans l’art 158, 159 Montesquieu, Charles, Baron de 13 Monthly Review 229–30 Monza 186 Moorish architecture 82 Morgan, Pierpont 244 Morice, Charles 209 Morley, Robert 210, 221 Morning Post 240–2 Morris, William 65 Morrona, Alessandro da, Pisa illustrata nelle arti del disegno 12 mosaics: Anrep’s work 225, 226, 247; Byzantine 225, 228, 229, 230, 232–3, 232, 236; Fry’s lecture on 243–4; influence on modern art 240–2 Mould, J. Wrey 168 n. 3 Moule, Handley 211 Mulinari, Stefano, Istoria pratica dell’incominciamento . . . 12 Munich: Allerheiligenhofkirche 48, 86; Anna Jameson in 116–17, 118–19; Islamic art exhibition 239; Ludwig I’s building programme 48, 116–17; Ludwigskirche 48, 86; Nazarenes 105, 108, 118–19; Romanesque architecture 48, 83, 175, 177; St Bonifaz 86; Sharpe’s stay in 48 Müntz, Éugène, Études sur l’histoire de la peinture et de l’iconographie chrétienne 230 Murray, John 109 Musée Napoléon, Paris 10 Museum of Science and Art, Edinburgh 177 Nabis 228 Naples 19, 73, 229 Napoleon Bonaparte 10 Napoleonic wars 41 National Gallery, London 15, 22, 131, 137, 202

291

Natural History Museum, London 6, 43, 166–200, 167, 183, 184, 201; arcading 195, 200; choice of Waterhouse as architect 178–81; competition 173–7, 176; creation of 169–73; entrance portal 192–4; location 172; reception of 198–200; Romanesque architecture 166–8, 170, 171, 185, 189–96; Ruskin’s dislike of 166, 199; terracotta decoration 166, 168, 177, 182, 188, 189, 196–8, 199 Nature 199 Nazarenes 7, 86, 94, 105–19 Neale, John Mason 61, 89 Negro, in racial hierarchy 215–16 Neo-Impressionism 235–6 Neville, John 223, 224 New Age 214–15, 245 New Courts of Justice, London 179, 180, 181 New Quarterly Magazine 257 New Zealand 63–4, 90 Newbolt, Henry 229 Newman, John Henry 3 Nicaean Council 230, 231 Nîmes 51, 53–4, 85 ‘noble savage’, cult of 6, 204, 206 Nodier, Charles 148, 150–1, 155; Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France 148–9 Noel, Sir Gerard 116 Nonconformism 186 Nordau, Max, Degeneration 217–18, 219 Norman architecture 36–7, 38; revival of 54–5 Normandy 148–9 North Africa 240 North American Indians 6, 7 Northcote, James 23 Norton, Harry 240 Notre-Dame, Paris 149–55 nudity, Polynesians 212–14 Office of Works 181, 198 Omega Workshops 244–5 Opie, John 124, 125, 127, 129–30 Orcagna, Andrea 34; Last Judgement 13; Trionfo della morte 13, 26–8, 29, 30, 31–2, 38 Orcagna, Bernardo, Hell 13

292

Index

Orleans, Duke of 11 ortho-printing 219 O’Shea brothers 196 Osthaus, Karl-Ernst 254 Ottley, William Young 17, 101; The Italian Schools of Design 12 Overbeck, Johan Friedrich 105–17, 119; The Triumph of Religion in the Arts 111–13, 112 Owen, Richard 43, 168–73; background and achievements 168–70; and the Natural History Museum 170–3, 177, 181, 182, 183–4, 185, 195, 196, 197–8 Oxford: Iffley Church 63; Oxford Museum 175, 184, 196; Pitt Rivers Museum 210 Oxford Movement 3, 7 Padua 186 paganism 159–60 Palaeographic Society 230 Palais de l’Industrie, Paris 197 Palermo 229, 231, 242; Cappella Palatina 229 Paley, William 68, 171 Palgrave, Francis 7, 94, 160, 161–2; Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy 15, 94, 96 n. 18 Palmer, Samuel 15 n. 22 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount 174–5, 179, 190 Panizzi, Anthony 170 Paris 5, 52; Louvre 120, 141, 144; Musée Napoléon 10; Notre-Dame 149–56, 165; Palais de l’Industrie 197 Parma, Duomo 73 Pater, Walter 142, 146 Paul, St 211 Pavia, San Michele 59, 73 Pêcheux, Michel, Language, Semantics and Ideology 123 Peel, Sir Robert 169 Péladan, Sâr 228, 229 Pembroke, Catherine Herbert, Countess of 86–7, 88 Percy, Bishop of Carlisle 79 Perugino 34, 108; Birth of the Virgin 11 Petit, J. L. 89; Remarks on Church Architecture 60, 61, 88

Petrarch 33 Pevsner, Nikolaus 45, 65–6, 73, 87 Pforr, Franz 106 Phillips, Claude 126, 127, 143, 235, 238 Phillips, Thomas 125 Picasso, Pablo 209, 247 Pilkington, Mathew 132, 133, 134 pine cone, symbolism 76–7 Pisa 88; architecture 5–6, 38–40; Baptistery 1, 39; Campo Santo 6, 38–9, 39; duomo 5, 38, 39, 42; English visitors 1–2, 91, 135; frescoes 12–18, 20–2, 25–34, 30, 35–6, 121, 122, 139; Leaning Tower 1–4, 7–8 Pistoia 88 Pitt Rivers, General 201 Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 210 Pitti Palace, Florence 102 Plato 30–1 Pointillism 243 Pollen, Hungerford 196 Polynesia 6, 201, 205–8, 205, 209, 211–15, 216 Pompeii 70, 229, 231, 236 Porto Venere, Temple of Venus 87 Post-Impressionism 202–3, 218–24, 225, 237 Post-Impressionist exhibitions: First (1910) 202–3, 204, 209, 212, 218, 220–1, 222, 238; Second (1912) 242, 257 Powell, Francis 179 Pre-Raphaelites 5, 7, 218 Preston 54–5, 56 Prichard, Matthew 227, 233–5, 237–9, 244, 245, 246 primitivism 6–7; acceptance of 221–4; architectural 36; and Byzantine art 225–6; chronological primitivism 6–7, 35, 203–5; cultural primitivism 6–7, 203–5; D. H. Lawrence and 248–9; link to ancient cultures 214–15; nineteenth-century ideas of 205–9; primitive art 209–11, 218–20, 221–2; racial primitivism 201; Symbolism and 227–8; views of Polynesia 211–15; see also Italian Primitives Protestantism 159–60

Index Pugin, Augustus Welby 108, 159; Contrasts 60, 159–60, 161, 162; Principles of Gothic Architecture 88 Pusey, Edward 108 Puttrich, Ludwig 50; Die Golden Pforte der Domkirche zu Freiburg 192; Systematische Darstellung der Entwickelung der Baukunst 191 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 227 Quarterly Review 115 The Queen 209 Questel, Charles 53–4, 85 racial theories 201, 215–20 Raphael 4, 11, 106, 123, 131, 139; in Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’ 95, 96; Byzantine influences 228; English Romantics and 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 31, 33–4, 35; friendship with Fra Bartolommeo 99; Nazarenes and 107, 115–16; and reassessment of medieval art 93, 121, 122; Disputa 103, 112; Galatea 23; The School of Athens 112–13; Transfiguration 102 Ravenna 6, 82, 244; mosaics 83, 229, 232–3, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244, 246; Sant’Apollinare in Classe 77; San Vitale 86, 232–3, 243, 244, 245; symbolism 76 Rebel Arts Centre 247 Redmayne, Giles 55 n. 69 Redon, Odilon 227 Reeves, Edward, Brown Men and Women 212–13 Regensberg, St Jacob 192 Reinach, Salomon 230, 234 religion: missionaries 205; symbolism 74–6; see also Catholic Church; Christian art Renaissance: architecture 149, 156–8; and decline of Western culture 159–60, 162; in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice 146, 147–8; Venetian painting 120–43

293

Reni, Guido 11, 20, 21, 22, 34; Madonna che allatta il bambino 18–19 Renwick, James 168 n. 3, 171 La Revue blanche 202 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 5, 122, 126–7, 135; Discourses 124–5, 128–9, 143, 225 Rhine, River 186–8 Rhineland 5, 47 Richmond, Sir William Blake 137, 218 Richter, Jean Paul 231–2, 236, 242; Die Mosaiken von Ravenna 230, 232 Ricketts, Charles 218 Rickman, Thomas 37, 43–5, 46, 49, 54, 55; An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture 43, 44 Riegl, Alois, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie 245 Riepenhausen, Franz 25 Riepenhausen, Johannes 25 Rigby, Elizabeth, see Eastlake, Elizabeth Rio, Alexis François 97, 158–9, 160, 162; and Anna Jameson 117; on Fra Bartolommeo 99–100, 101, 105; and reassessment of medieval art 7, 113–14; on Venetian art 163–4; De la poésie chrétienne 93–4, 109, 110, 117, 137–8, 159, 163–4 Rippingille, Edward Villiers 114–15 Robinson, Henry Crabb 102 Rogers, Samuel 26, 32, 110, 145 Roman Empire 235–6 Romanesque architecture 36–62, 63–90; British architectural criticism 60–2; Christ Church, Streatham 80–2, 81, 83; commercial uses 194–5; denotation of 5–6, 37–42; Foreign Office competition 174–5, 174; in Germany 5, 44–5, 46–50, 86; in Italy 58–9, 85–6; London churches 64; Natural History Museum 166–8, 170, 171, 175, 185, 189–96; in New Zealand 63–4; revival of 37, 53–7; Rundbogenstil 48, 175, 177, 185; St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton 83–90, 84; St Mary’s, Wreay 65–6, 66, 70–80; studies of 191–2; transition to Gothic 5, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46;

294

Index

Romanesque architecture (cont.): Waterhouse’s interest in 185–91; Whewell and Sharpe’s exploration of 42–53 Romanticism: and early Italian art 9–34; Gothic architecture and 148, 149; and the grotesque 152–3; interest in primitivism 204 Rome 6, 77, 99, 121, 122, 242; Giardino della Pigna 76; San Paolo fuori le mura 85; Sta Prassede 83, 92; St Peter’s 157; Sta Pudenza 83; Sta Maria Maggiore 87–8, 232–3, 232, 236, 242, 243; Sistine Chapel 4, 19, 23, 24, 29, 70 Rosa, Salvator 23 Roscoe, William 11–12, 14, 92, 162 Rosenberg, John 145, 147 Rosini, Giovanni 31, 34; Lettere pittoriche sul Campo Santo di Pisa 29 Ross, Robert 208–9, 219, 240–2 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 5, 8, 9, 196; on St Mary’s, Wreay 65, 72, 73, 80; and Venetian painting 120–1; visits the Louvre 120, 140–1, 144; ‘For a Venetian Pastoral’ 142 Rothenstein, William 237 Rouen cathedral 85 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 6, 206 Royal Academy 89, 125, 127, 129, 132, 136, 139, 219 Royal Institution 171 Rundbogenstil 48, 175, 177, 185 Ruskin, Effie 90, 179 Ruskin, John 7, 8, 10, 134; and Romanesque architecture 90, 185; and the Campo Santo frescoes 4, 15; on colour 130–1; on decline of architecture after Gothic 156–8, 162; hostility to Victor Hugo 150, 156; importance of Venice to 4–5, 162–5; influence on Waterhouse 166, 178; and Natural History Museum 166, 179–80, 199; and Venetian art 126, 127, 138–42; Modern Painters 15, 94, 109, 131, 139; The Seven Lamps of Architecture 166; The Stones of Venice 5, 82, 90, 144–8, 150–7, 162, 164, 165, 166, 185, 194 Ruskin, John James 109, 127, 139

Russia 239, 242 Rutter, Frank 220–1; Revolution in Art 221 Sadler, Michael 223 St Mark’s, Venice 234–5 St Mark’s, Witton, Blackburn 55, 56, 185 St Martin, Bonn 186, 187, 192, 193 St Martin, Cologne 192, 193 St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton 62, 64, 83–90, 84 St Mary’s Chapel of Ease, Wreay 6, 62, 64, 65–6, 66, 70–80 St-Paul-de-Nîmes 53–4, 85 St Paul’s, Farington 56, 57, 185 St Peter’s, Rome 157 St Piran 71–2, 78 St Saviour’s, Bamber Bridge 56 Sala, George Augustus 167 n. 1 Salles, Jules 54 Samuelli, Maria 260 San Michele, Pavia 59, 73 San Pietro, Tuscania 84–5 San Vitale, Ravenna 86, 232–3, 243, 244, 245 Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna 77 Santa Maria, Tuscania 84–5 Santa Maria della Piazza, Ancona 73 Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome 87–8, 232–3, 232, 236, 242, 243 Santa Maria Nuova, Florence 102 Santa Prassede, Rome 83, 92 Santa Pudenza, Rome 83 Sargent, John Singer 238, 243 Sass, Henry 125 Savonarola, Girolamo 98, 100, 101, 103, 159, 160 Sawyer, Paul 146 Schadow, Wilhelm 106, 110 Scheffer, Ary 120 Scheibe, Richard 255 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 34, 105 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 25, 34, 152 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 25, 34, 106, 116; Johann von Fiesole 94 Schlegel, Dorothea 106 Schlegel, Friedrich von 15 n. 22, 27; Gemälldebeschreibungen aus Paris und den Niederlanden 105 Schmitt, Jacob, Die christliche KirchenBaukunst des Abenlandes . . . 191

Index Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius 110 Schweighäuser, Jean Geoffroy 50 Scott, George Gilbert 174–5, 174, 190–1; Remarks on Domestic and Secular Architecture 197 Scott, Sir Walter, Quentin Durward 150 Scott, William Bell 72, 80 sculpture: D. H. Lawrence on 248, 251, 252, 255–63; Natural History Museum 166, 188, 196–8 Sedgwick, Adam 171 Selwyn, George Augustus 63 Senegal 208 Seroux d’Agincourt, Jean-Baptiste 16–17, 20; Histoire de l’art par les monumens 12, 17 Seuffert, Robert, Portrait of Josef Moest 260, 261 Severn, Arthur 156 Shakespeare, William 21, 23, 116, 128, 147 Sharpe, Edmund 8, 192; background 45–6; churches 37, 54–7, 56, 57, 61, 185, 191; French tour 50–3, 51, 85; German tour 5, 46, 47–50, 47, 60; in Lancaster 169; use of terracotta 185–6, 197; Illustrated Papers on Church Architecture 49 Shaw, John 60, 64 Shelley, Mary 8, 18; Rambles in Germany and Italy 93 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2, 17, 18–19, 20, 32–3; The Cenci 19 Sicily 5, 229, 240 Siena 121, 122 Signac, Paul 235 Simone Martini 13, 26, 33; Christ Discovered in the Temple 11 Sismondi, J. C. L. S. de 145–6; Histoire des républiques italiennes 160–1, 162 Sistine Chapel, Rome 4, 19, 23, 24, 29, 70 Slade School of Art 243 Smirke, Robert 38–9, 40 Smith, William F. 168 n. 3 Smithsonian Institution, Washington 171, 175 Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce 171–2

295

Society Islands 206–7 Soderini, Pier 103 South Kensington 172 Spain 82 Spectator 240 Spinello Aretino 13 Spoleto cathedral 86 Squarcione, Francesco 132 Stafford Gallery 223–4 Stark, Mariana 14 Starkey and Cuffley 194 Steer, Philip Wilson 224 Stein, Richard 144–5, 151 Stephens, Suzanne 58 Stevenson, Robert Louis 211 Stirner, Max 202 Strange, John 11 Streatham, Christ Church 61–2, 64, 80–2, 81, 83, 89 Street, G. E. 181 Sturrock, John 151 Sunday Times 220–1 Superville, Humbert de 17 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 142 Sykes, Godfrey 177 symbolism, religious 74–6 Symbolists 202, 218, 226–8, 231 Symonds, John Addington 143 Tahiti 201, 209, 210, 211–14, 219, 220 Taylor, Alice Cameron, The Golden Age of Classic Christian Art 232, 236 Taylor, William Cook, Natural History of Society 206 Tazini, Pompilio 14 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 110 terracotta decoration, Natural History Museum 166, 168, 177, 182, 188, 189, 196–8, 199 Thorp, Thomas 61 Tichbourne, Herbert, Rambles in Polynesia 216 Tieck, Friedrich 25 Tieck, Ludwig 25, 27–8, 31, 116; Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen 25, 27–8 The Times 167, 179, 195, 201 Tintoretto 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 132, 133–5, 137, 138, 139–43; Baptism 140; Crucifixion 133–4, 140; Last Judgement 135; Massacre of the Innocents 139–40; Miracle of the Slave 133–4 Tite, William 174, 175, 197

296

Index

Titian 5, 11, 120, 123, 125–6, 129–30, 137, 141; Bacchus and Ariadne 131, 136; Danaë 124–5; A Man in Black 136; Venetian Pastorale 141, 141 Todorov, Tzvetan, Theories of the Symbol 34 Torcello 6, 77, 78 Toulouse 52 Townsend, Charles Harrison 168 n. 3 Trelawny, Edward 32 Trier 186–8, 189 Trinity College Museum, Dublin 190 Truth 206 Turner, J. M. W. 218 Tuscania: San Pietro 84–5; Sta Maria 84–5 Tylor, Edward, Primitive Culture 210 Ultramontanes 94, 109, 159 United States of America 233 Valence 50–1, 186 Van Gogh, Vincent 202, 203, 235, 238; Girl with the Cornflower 22 Vasari, Giorgio 13, 27, 28, 97, 98–9, 101, 123, 127, 139; The Lives of the Artists 121, 124 Vatican 76 Vaughan, William 206 Vaux, Calvert 168 n. 3 Veit, Johannes 106 Veit, Philipp 106 Veneziano, Antonio 13, 26 Venice 8, 90, 259; Byzantine art 234–5; Ducal (Doge’s) Palace 152, 154–5, 194; importance to Ruskin 4–5, 162–5; paintings 120–43; Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice 144–8, 150–7, 162, 165; St Mark’s 234–5; warehouses 194, 200 Veronese, Paolo 5, 23, 123, 124, 125, 128, 132; The Family of Darius 131; Marriage at Cana 141 Versailles 158 Victoria, Queen of England 172 Vischer, Theodor 113, 116 Viterbo 84 Vitet, Ludovic 47, 52 Vivarini, Luigi 132 Vivarini family 138

Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 162 Vorticism 250–1, 262 Vulliamy, Louis 64, 81, 82 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 25, 105, 106 Wallace Collection, London 202 Wallis, George 23 Walpole, Horace 87 Ward, Frederick 104 Warren, Edward Perry 233 Warren, Samuel Denis 233 Warren Gallery 248 Warton, Thomas 36 Waterhouse, Alfred 8; architectural background 178; architectural tours 186–90, 187, 189; interest in Romanesque 185–91; Natural History Museum 166–8, 167, 170, 171, 177–85, 183, 184, 189–200; Ruskin’s influence 166, 178; and terracotta decoration 6, 196–8 Watkin, David 58 Watts, G. F. 135 Webb, Benjamin 61 Webb, Philip 65, 73 Werkbund Museum, Hagen 254 West, Benjamin 102 Whewell, William 5, 8, 37, 42–6, 58, 60, 61, 169, 171; Architectural Notes on German Churches 44, 45, 59 Whittaker, John William 44, 45, 50, 53, 54 Wild, James 61–2, 64, 80–3, 81, 89, 90 Wilkie, David 135 Willement, Thomas 86 Williams, John 205 Willis, Robert 45, 60, 61; Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, especially Italy 58 Wilson, Carus 54–5 Wilton, St Mary and St Nicholas 62, 64, 83–90, 84 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 6, 16, 19, 214; Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums 16 Wiseman, Nicholas 7, 108, 109, 114 Woodburn, Samuel 101 Woods, Joseph 70 Woodward, Benjamin 175, 184, 190 Woolner, Thomas 196 Wordsworth, Christopher 43

Index Wordsworth, William 15, 43, 67, 68, 110, 145, 204 Wornum, Nicholas 125 Worringer, Wilhelm 227; Abstraktion und Einfühlung 245–6 Wreay, St Mary’s Chapel of Ease 6, 62, 64, 65–6, 66, 70–80 Wright, Willard Huntington, Modern Painting 245 Wyatt, Thomas Henry 64, 83–5

297

Ypres 195; Cloth Hall 184 Zanetti, Antonio 137; Della pittura veneziana 132, 138 Zeno, Doge Carlo 152 Ziebland, George Friedrich 86 Zulus 208

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