Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators'

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Fuseli’s Milton Gallery ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ LU ISA C AL E`

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   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  Luisa Calè 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 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 organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–926738–3

978–0–19–926738–5

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements A this study turns into a book, I am extremely grateful to all those who have helped me on the way. First, I would like to thank Lucy Newlyn and Marcus Wood for intellectual guidance and stimulation in their role as D.Phil. supervisors and for their generous and unfailing support since. From Lucy Newlyn I learned so much about the dynamics of reading and the Romantic reception of Milton. Her irony rings whenever an uncouth word appears on the page. Marcus Wood guided me through visual and cultural theory and practice, encouraging me to challenge interdisciplinary boundaries. I would also like to thank my two examiners, John Barrell and Jon Mee, for their rigorous and thought-provoking engagement with my argument. Their questions and criticism informed my thinking throughout the metamorphosis of thesis into book. I also feel deeply grateful to Jon Mee for sharing and discussing ideas, reading and sources during my time at University College, Oxford. Our late Senior Tutor Clare Drury was a source of inspiration, comfort, and friendship. I wish she were here to see the printed shape of things so often discussed. This book goes to press as my intellectual life is enriched by the creative interdisciplinary culture of my new students and colleagues at Birkbeck College. I am especially grateful to Sue Wiseman for her intellectual energy and for helping me balance my new teaching duties with the final stages of this book. But I first stepped into the epic, Milton, and English literature following the inspiration of my first teachers Marina Beer, Paola Colaiacomo, and Sergio Rufini. Seminar discussions helped me sharpen my argument. I would therefore like to thank Elizabeth Eger, Emma Francis, and Anne Janowitz, Sophie Thomas, Frederic Ogée, Jo McDonagh, Sally Ledger, Hilary Fraser, and William Rowe for inviting me to try out my ideas in fruitful discussions. But I also owe a lot to conversations with experts, colleagues, and friends who have lent their ears, ideas, and expertise: Mina Gorji on visual and verbal interactions; Elinor Shaffer on reader response; Sebastian Kalhat Pocicovich on Blake and visual modes of thinking; Holger Hoock on the Royal Academy; Cynthia Roman and Rosie Dias on the literary galleries; Marius Kwint and Christine Riding on visual spectacles; Piero Boitani, Isabel Iribarren, and Nicola Bown on

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angels; Isabel Rivers on religion; Diana Lewis on language; Saba Bahar and Tone Brekke on Wollstonecraft; Susan Matthews on Blake, Fuseli, and femininity; David Weinglass, Martin Myrone, and Karen Junod on Fuseli. Saba Bahar, Karen Junod, and Neelam Srivastava have read the whole manuscript at different stages. My deepest thanks to them for their time and constructive criticism. I am grateful to the staff of the Upper Reading Room and the John Johnson collection at the Bodleian Library for their help and patience. I would also like to thank Mark Pomeroy at the Royal Academy, and the staff of the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library, and the Cambridge University Library, the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. At Oxford University Press, I would like to thank Sophie Goldsworthy for signing up the project, Andrew McNeillie and Tom Perridge for their patience and helpful support, and my two anonymous readers for giving me much to think about. I would also like to acknowledge the institutional support I received for this project from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Wingate Foundation, the Principal and Fellows of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, the Fondazione di Piacenza e Vigevano, the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford, the Lewis Walpole Library, the School of English and Humanities of Birkbeck College, and the British Academy for a grant to pay for picture copyrights and reproductions. I am grateful to the following institutions for granting me permission to reproduce the pictures in this book: the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft for Plates 1, 2, 8, 13; Tate Britain for Plate 3; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for Plate 4 (Gift of Mr and Mrs Frederick N. Nicholas, Mr and Mrs Harry B. Swerdlow, and Mr and Mrs William R. Glirbarg); the Dallas Museum of Arts for Plate 5 (Foundation for the Arts Collection, Mrs John B. O’Hara Fund); the Kunsthaus Zürich for Plates 6, 11, 16; the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Plate 7 (Bequest of Lillian S. Timken, by exchange, and Victor Wilbour Memorial, the Alfred N. Punnett Endowment, Marquand and Charles B. Curtis Funds, 1980); the Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau for Plate 9; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund, for Plate 10; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart for Plate 12; the Hamburger Kunsthalle for Plate 14; the Auckland Art Gallery for Plates 15 and 19; Christie’s Images Ltd for Plate 17; the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, for Plate 18; and the Bodleian Library for Plates 20–3.

Acknowledgements

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Finally, with immense gratitude, I dedicate this book to my parents, my brother, and Richard, thanking them for their nurturing love, intelligence, and irony, for bearing with me and letting me recede into a protected shell in which this book could be born. L.C.


Contents List of Plates List of Abbreviations Introduction: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ 1. The Literary Galleries and the Field of Art Commerce, Art, and Public Culture Literary Investments Fuseli’s Milton Gallery Private Interest—Public Benefit: Fuseli’s Career 2. The Spectator Turned Reader: Printed Text at the Galleries The Spectator as Reader Reading Aids at Exhibitions Macklin’s Catalogue: Excerpting and Viewing the Poets Fuseli’s Catalogue: Excerpting and Abridging Milton Fuseli’s Milton: Epic and Painting Poems on the Galleries: The Reader Turned Spectator Turned Author 3. The Reader Turned Spectator: Visual Narratives Visual Bookkeeping Educating the Eye: A Reader’s Progress Technologies of Vision: Magic Lanterns, the Eidophusikon, and Panoramas Viewing Practices and Moving Pictures Gallery Plots Towards Montage 4. ‘Satan encount’ring Death, Sin interposing’: Milton’s Allegory and the Politics of Seeing Representing Supernatural Beings

xi xiii 1 16 18 29 42 52 58 59 64 70 78 96 99 105 105 112 114 121 126 131 142 144

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Contents Lapland Orgies Pictures at Exhibitions and the Politics of Obscurity

162 171

5. The Plot of Adam and Eve Conclusion

184 215

Appendix: ‘List of Pictures in the Milton Gallery’, The Times, 28 May 1799 Bibliography Index

221 225 249

List of Plates Where not otherwise stated, throughout the book the titles of Milton Gallery pictures appear as they are quoted in MG 1. Henry Fuseli, S risen from the Flood, B rising, oil on canvas, MG 1 2. Henry Fuseli, S calling up his Legions, oil on canvas, MG 2 3. Henry Fuseli, The Shepherd’s Dream, oil on canvas 4. Henry Fuseli, S encount’ring D, S interposing, oil on canvas, copy of MG 5 5. Henry Fuseli, The Birth of S, oil on canvas, MG 6 6. Henry Fuseli, S pursued by D, oil on canvas, MG 7 7. Henry Fuseli, L O, the Hell-hounds round S, oil on canvas, MG 8 8. Henry Fuseli, S bursts from C, oil on canvas, MG 11 9. Henry Fuseli, U between S and C, oil on canvas, MG 12 10. Henry Fuseli, A and E first discovered by S, oil on canvas, fragment of MG 13 11. Henry Fuseli, Adam and Eve first discovered by Satan, pen and sepia on pencil, sketch of MG 13 12. Henry Fuseli, Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel’s Lance, oil on canvas 13. Henry Fuseli, The Dream of E, fancying to have tasted the Fruit from the Tree of interdicted Knowledge, oil on canvas, MG 16 14. Henry Fuseli, The creation of E, as related by A, oil on canvas, MG 17 15. Moses Haughton after Henry Fuseli, A resolved to share the fate of E; the Guardian Angels leaving the Garden, mezzotint and spirit-ground aquatint on wove paper after MG 20 16. Henry Fuseli, The Vision of the Lazar-house, pencil and sepia sketch towards MG 24 17. Henry Fuseli, The Vision of the Deluge, oil on canvas, MG 25 18. Henry Fuseli, The dismission of A and E from Paradise, oil on canvas, copy of MG 27

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List of Plates

19. Henry Fuseli, S first Address to E, oil on canvas, MG 42 20–1. G. van der Gucht after Bernardo Castello, illustrations to T. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (London: Tonson, 1724), cantos  and , Bodleian Library, sig. GG 28 Art Subt. 22–3. Francesco Bartolozzi after William Hamilton, illustrations to J. Milton, Paradise Lost (London: du Roveray, 1802), books  and , Bodleian Library, sig. Vet. A6 d.15

List of Abbreviations ANQ

A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews

AR

Analytical Review

Becker–Hattendorff

Johann Heinrich Füssli. Das Verlorene Paradies, ed. C. Becker and C. Hattendorff (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997)

BMC

F. G. Stephens and M. D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols. (London: British Museum, 1870–1950)

CEL

The Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, ed. D. H. Weinglass (Millwood: Krauss International, 1982)

CM

Royal Academy Archives, Council Minutes, vols. i–iii (1768–84, 1785–98, 1798–1806)

CPW

The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. D. M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82)

E

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)

ECS

Eighteenth-Century Studies

F

The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. K. Garlick and A. Macintyre, 16 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978–98)

FU

Royal Academy Archives, Fuseli Papers

GA

Royal Academy Archives, General Assembly Minutes, vols. i–ii (1768–96, 1797–1809)

GM

Gentleman’s Magazine

HLQ

Huntington Library Quarterly

Howe

The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930–34)

JHI

Journal of the History of Ideas

JWCI

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

K

J. Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, 3 vols. (London: Colburn, 1831)

xiv MG

MM NT

P

PL RA RM

RW

Schiff

SECC SiR V&A WC

List of Abbreviations Catalogue entries according to Milton Gallery. A Catalogue of the First Series of Pictures and Sketches, from the Poetic Works of John Milton. By H. Fuseli (London, n.d.) Monthly Magazine William Blake’s illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts; see William Blake’s Designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: A Complete Edition, ed. D. V. Erdman, J. E. Grant, E. J. Rose, and M. J. Tolley, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) Milton. Proposals for engraving and publishing by Subscription Thirty Capital Plates, from Subjects in Milton; to be painted principally, if not entirely, by Henry Fuseli, R.A. and for copying them in a Reduced Size to accompany a Correct and Magnificent Edition, embellished also with Forty-Five Elegant Vignettes, of his Poetical Works, with Notes, Illustrations, and Translations of the Italian and Latin Poems, by William Cowper, of the Inner Temple, Esq. (London: Johnson, 1791) Paradise Lost, ed. A. Fowler (London: Longman, 1968) Catalogue of entries according to Royal Academy, The Exhibition of the Royal Academy (London, 1769–1800) M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in The Works of Many Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butter, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1989), v M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols. (London: Pickering, 1989), v Fuseli’s pictures numbered in Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741–1825, ed. G. Schiff, 2 vols. (Zurich: Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, 1973) Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture Studies in Romanticism National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum Wordsworth Circle

Introduction: ‘Turning Readers into Spectators’ Paradise Lost … is a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio-visual relationships. (Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 1943) I find, in reading Paradise Lost, that I am happiest where there is least to visualize. The eye is not shocked in his twilit Hell as it is in the Garden of Eden, where I for one can get pleasure from the verse only by the deliberate effort not to visualize Adam and Eve in their surroundings. (T. S. Eliot, ‘Milton I’, 1936) Milton can fill no picture galleries. (G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, 1766) The excellence of pictures or of language consists in raising clear, complete, and circumstantial images, and turning readers into spectators. (Analytical Review, 1788)

I one of his many forays into the archaeology of film, the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein tried to recover ‘the montage culture that so many have lost’. Where other film directors explored the coordination of music and action in opera or ballet, Eisenstein turned to literature and found a school of montage in Paradise Lost.¹ In an essay on the Soviet historical film Milton’s battle scenes are singled out as a model which Eisenstein wished he had known when he shot Alexander Nevsky.² In The ¹ S. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. J. Leyda (1943; London, 1986), 51. ² S. Eisenstein, ‘The Problems of the Soviet Historical Film’, in Selected Works, ed. R. Taylor, trans. W. Powell, 4 vols. (London, 1996), iii. 139. For an analysis of

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Film Sense (1943) he went back to Milton and gave a cinematic reading of the war in heaven, identifying ‘an identical number of lines and shots’.³ As he resegmented the text into a shooting script, he realigned each line so that it would coincide with the limits of a shot. Here is his exercise in segmentation: first, as broken by Milton into lines, and then arranged in accordance with the various compositional set-ups, as a shooting-script, where each number will indicate a new montage-piece, or shot. First transcription: I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI.

… in strength each armed hand A Legion, led in fight, yet Leader seemed Each Warrior single as in Chief, expert When to advance, or stand, or turn the sway Of Battel, open when, and when to close The ridges of grim Warr; no thought of flight, None of retreat, no unbecoming deed That argu’d fear; each on himself reli’d, As onely in his arm the moment lay Of victorie; deeds of eternal fame Were don, but infinite: for wide was spread That Warr and various; sometimes on firm ground A standing fight, then soaring on main wing Tormented all the Air; all Air seemed then Conflicting Fire: long time in even scale The Battel hung …

Eisenstein then clarifies the first transcription setting out how this section of the poem would function as a film montage: Second transcription: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

led in fight, yet Leader seemed each Warrior single as in Chief, expert when to advance, or stand, or turn the sway of Battel, open when, and when to close the ridges of grim Warr; no thought of flight,

Alexander Nevsky’s place in the epic tradition, see D. Quint, ‘Ossian, Medieval ‘‘Epic,’’ and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky’, in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Vergil to Milton (Princeton, 1993), 343–68. ³ Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 57.

Introduction 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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none of retreat, no unbecoming deed that argu’d fear; each on himself reli’d, as onely in his arm the moment lay of victorie; deeds of eternal fame were don, but infinite: for wide was spred that Warr and various; sometimes on firm ground a standing fight, then soaring on main wing tormented all the Air; all Air seemed then conflicting Fire: long time in even scale the Battel hung … ⁴

Eisenstein’s resegmentation releases Milton’s words from the rhythm and syntax of his lines and thus suggests what might be lost in an intermedial practice. Yet Milton’s rhythm is precisely what grants him a place in Eisenstein’s The Film Sense. What particularly interested him was enjambement, which Milton defined as ‘the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another’.⁵ For in Milton’s line endings the film director saw ‘a contrapuntal design of non-coincidences between the limits of the representations and the limits of the rhythmical articulations’.⁶ Translating the non-coincidence of line and sense in filmic terms, Eisenstein reconfigured enjambement as a resource for ‘audio-visual coordinations in film, where the picture plays the role of syntactical phrase and the musical construction the role of rhythmical articulation’.⁷ His exercise in resegmentation takes Milton’s words as instructions for visualization. Having turned the poet’s words into tableaux, the non-coincidence of sense and meter can be translated into a non-coincidence of shots and soundtrack. Adapting words into pictures means compressing the actions they represent into privileged instants or pregnant moments.⁸ The function of the enjambement is to produce an overlap. As it suspends, extends, and exceeds those instants or pregnant moments, the enjambement provides the link between different frames, dynamizing them into movement. Yet, while Eisenstein saw visual potential in Milton’s enjambement, T. S. Eliot attributed it to Milton’s blindness. Eliot considered Milton’s enjambement an effect of a ‘memory fortified by defective vision’, a ⁴ Ibid. 55–6. ⁵ Milton, ‘The Verse’ (1668), quoted in Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 54. ⁶ Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 57. ⁷ Ibid. 53, 55–8. On the analogy between the alternating rather than progressive nature of verses and film images, see also Y. Tynianov, ‘Des Fondements du cinéma’, Cahiers du cinema, 220–1 (1970), 66. ⁸ For Eisenstein’s ‘privileged instants’, as opposed to the ‘any-instants-whatever’ of cinema, see G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London, 1992), 4–5.

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Introduction

syntax ‘determined by the musical significance, by the auditory imagination’.⁹ Where the poet read in Milton the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, the film-maker saw in Paradise Lost a model for the synchronization of the senses, for the poem’s enjambements offered him a school of montage. What Eisenstein called Milton’s ‘sound montage’—the ‘contrapuntal writing of sound-picture elements’, which he analysed as an ‘audio-visual distribution of images’—anticipates the ‘audio-visual coordinations in film’.¹⁰ By breaking up the continuum of words, enjambement opens up a space for the production of moving images. Eisenstein helps us read Milton visually and provides a counterbalance to the anti-visual construction of Milton in an anti-pictorialist canon which Harold Bloom articulated in a paradoxical appropriation of Eisenstein against cinema and visual culture. In Bloom’s account, Milton ‘appealed to the holy light to shine inward, and created English Romanticism by doing so’. This counter-argument situates the act of reading within the media culture of Bloom’s imagined interpreter: ‘Artists create their own precursors, and force us to read the precursors differently. Art forms do the same, and the consciousness of films compels us to read past poetry differently.’¹¹ Bloom’s cinematic reading works as an antidote to what he considers the limitations of cinema: ‘no medium has inherent limitations so great that the Imagination cannot overcome them, and no medium is its own message’.¹² To read literature ‘with an eye made active by an awareness of cinema’ is to ‘break the confines of a possible cinema’, since the Romantics’ ‘cinema is too visionary for any technique devised in our time to encompass’.¹³ This statement opens up the potential for an analysis that restores the cinematic effects in Romantic writing, places Romantic writing in a continuum with Romantic visual spectacles and explores the visual skills and habits of Romantic period readers. Yet, instead of leading to a rediscovery of Romantic media culture, the visuality of Romantic writing serves as an iconoclastic instrument against the media culture of Bloom’s time. Indeed, Bloom goes so far as to enlist Eisenstein in making literature more cinematic than cinema ⁹ T. S. Eliot, ‘Milton I’, in On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957), 142–3. ¹⁰ Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 51–9. ¹¹ H. Bloom, ‘The Visionary Cinema of Romantic Poetry’, in A. H. Rosenfeld (ed.), William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon (Providence, RI, 1969), 21. ¹² Ibid. 35; see M. McLuhan, ‘The Medium Is the Message’, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London, 1964), 7–21. ¹³ Bloom, ‘Visionary Cinema’, 25, 27, 19.

Introduction

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to the point of turning literature against its own materiality. Consider Bloom’s treatment of William Blake: ‘Blake, I think, like his master Milton (as Eisenstein hinted) wants his reader to be more of a film-script reader or even a director than a film-viewer.’ Eisenstein certainly believed that ‘the spectator is drawn into a creative act’, yet if Blake’s words activate the readers’ ‘ocular powers’ better than his ‘inadequate engraved illumination’¹⁴ and better than cinema, it is not because literature is a cleansing vehicle of ‘unmediated vision’. Rather, the visual language of such iconoclasm reveals visual habits of reading, challenging any attempt to constitute literature as a separate and pure discipline—that ‘transcendent output of the human imagination’, which Clifford Siskin has identified as an effect of Romanticism.¹⁵ Using Eisenstein’s filmic eye against Bloom’s canonization of Romantic anti-pictorialism, I will seek to restore visual dimensions to Romantic reading practices by way of the intersections of literature and art in what was a new development in the eighteenth-century public sphere: a culture of exhibitions. This book is about an experiment which read Paradise Lost visually and turned it into a gallery of pictures. Taking Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery as my case study in the new exhibition culture emerging in late eighteenth-century London, my work investigates how this culture of exhibitions redefines visual and verbal interactions, and ways of reading and viewing. ‘Turning readers into spectators’ is the joint task of language and pictures. With this claim the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli inaugurated the Arts section of the Analytical Review in 1788. Fuseli made this bold claim after almost two decades of Royal Academy exhibitions, a period during which he had passionately attempted to present the field of art as an encounter between paintings and books. For Fuseli, reading and viewing were locked in a dialogue as tendentious as it was indicative. This dialogue diagnosed the spectators’ need for an aesthetic education and indicated that such a transfer of skills could come from the literary domain. However, Fuseli’s investment in literature was hardly hegemonic. Nearly two decades of Royal Academy exhibitions had shown a massive bias towards the established genre of portraiture and the emergent field of landscape art. Yet there had been little in the way of paintings in the grand historical style, let alone work which attempted to translate ¹⁴ Ibid. 19, 18. ¹⁵ C. Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore, 1998), 6.

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literary epic onto canvas. Consequently, the public exhibitions of the Academy failed to support Fuseli’s concern to bring great literature into the visual field. To claim such a role for literature therefore meant to marginalize the emerging institutional scene of British art and indicate that great art was happening elsewhere. When Fuseli was in Rome in the 1770s, his sketches visualized scenes from Milton and Shakespeare in compositions inspired by the architectural partitions of the Sistine Chapel. Back in London, Fuseli’s variant of Michelangelo’s great biblical narrative took on the more flexible format of a Milton Gallery. The project was announced with a prospectus published in September 1791. This plan to fund a series of paintings for exhibition through the serial publication of an illustrated book and a series of prints was not new. In 1786 the printseller John Boydell had launched his Shakspeare Gallery, which opened in 1789,¹⁶ while his competitor Thomas Macklin turned his printshop into the Gallery of Poets in 1788, and Robert Bowyer launched the Historic Gallery after David Hume’s History of England in 1792.¹⁷ The reconstitution of great British literature in the form of galleries of paintings had a dual cultural function. The galleries made a claim to be a new, narrative form of high art, yet they also circulated celebrated examples of the national literature in the commercial form of visual attractions. Indeed, the galleries were commercial outlets for the sale of illustrated books and prints, offering readers a visual entertainment for advertising and marketing purposes. Material conditions such as the galleries’ mode of production, circulation, and marketing suggest the mutual influence of reading practices and ways of seeing. ¹⁶ For a painter-centred account of the Shakspeare Gallery, see W. Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (New York, 1976); for a study of the gallery as a commercial enterprise in consumer culture, see S. Bruntjen, John Boydell, 1719–1804: A Study of Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London (New York, 1985); for the gallery’s place in the culture of exhibitions, see R. Dias, ‘John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Promotion of a National Aesthetic’, Ph.D. thesis (York, 2003); on the Shakspeare Gallery as part of the production of Shakespeare in the Romantic period, see J. Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 1986); id., Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford, 1989). ¹⁷ On Macklin, see T. S. R. Boase, ‘Macklin and Bowyer’, JWCI 26 (1963), 148–77; S. Higgins, ‘Thomas Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery: Consuming the Sister Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century London’, Ph.D. thesis (London, 2003); on Bowyer, see R. W. Hutton, ‘Robert Bowyer and the Historic Gallery: A Study of the Creation of a Magnificent Work to Promote the Arts in England’, Ph.D. thesis (Chicago, 1992); C. Roman, ‘Pictures for Private Purses: Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery and Illustrated Edition of David Hume’s History of England’, Ph.D. thesis (Brown, 1997).

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Identifying spectators among readers is a new phenomenon in the emergent exhibition scene of late eighteenth-century London. Yet the claim that readers should become spectators reactivated an Aristotelian commonplace which measures rhetorical power by its capacity to set a scene or a story before the eyes of the perceiver.¹⁸ In order to understand the manner in which the spectator was fashioned before exhibitions opened to the general public in the 1760s, consider the following article on the pleasures of the imagination, which appeared in Joseph Addison’s Spectator (1712). In a discussion of writers who ‘describe visible Objects of a real Existence’, Addison praised historians for the ability ‘to lead us step by step into the several Actions and Events of his History’. For Addison, Livy’s ‘whole History is an admirable Picture, and touches on such proper Circumstances in every Story, that this Reader is a kind of Spectator’.¹⁹ While Addison conceived the virtual scenario set by the writer in terms of a picture, this visual medium was not the main point of reference in eighteenth-century discussions of spectatorship. Theatre as much as painting defines the turn from actual to virtual spectatorship in Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music (1719), where it is the role of art to accommodate, sublimate, and defuse aggressive instincts by substituting the spectacle of a massacre or an execution with a vicarious and virtual aesthetic scene.²⁰ Theatre is also a key aesthetic analogy used by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), where spectatorship is the mechanism which binds selfish individuals within a society through the power of sympathy. Smith argues that in order to understand what others feel we place ourselves in their situation; similarly, to regulate our actions we ‘suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour’ and ‘examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would imagine it’.²¹ In all these texts, the civilizing work of the aesthetic sphere exercises the mind in the production of mental ¹⁸ Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. G. A. Kennedy (New York, 1991), 244–53. ¹⁹ J. Addison, The Spectator, ed. D. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), iii. 574. ²⁰ J.-B. Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music. With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients, trans. T. Nugent, 3 vols. (London, 1748), i. 10–35. ²¹ A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, 1984), 112, 110; on Smith’s spectator within the culture of sentiment, see J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford, 1988); on the impartial spectator as an abstraction that regulates rather than represents an ‘empirical community of spectators’, see J. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation (Oxford, 2003), 46–9.

8

Introduction

images and in projecting and practising the position of the spectator. These interpretative and reactive techniques immediately preceded the moment when the first exhibitions opened to the public. By the time Fuseli wrote, to link books and paintings, and to conjoin reading and viewing in terms of spectatorship, was to project the virtual spectators of reading onto the spectators assembling in flesh and blood in the new exhibition spaces. Where literary texts would turn readers into spectators by producing individual pictures, or pictures arranged in a sequence corresponding to the articulations of reading, exhibitions exposed spectators to a multifarious and multidimensional crowd of pictures displayed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. Turning readers into spectators after the exhibitions opened to the general public in the 1760s meant imposing the linear order of writing and reading on the spectators’ movements through the multidimensional experience of the exhibition space. In the new, purpose-built exhibition space at Somerset House (1780–1836), the Royal Academy ordered its annual exhibitions by hanging the pictures above and below the ‘line of sight’ and numbering them from left to right, which enabled spectators to organize the three-dimensional space of the exhibition along the linear sequence of catalogue entries, thus alternating viewing and reading. Reading took on a stronger place in shaping the experience of pictures at the literary galleries. Compared to the miscellaneous displays at the Royal Academy, these exhibitions offered a monographic path through a coherent literary corpus. Firstly, the literary galleries served as a spatial installation and visual adaptation of the works of the poets, of Shakespeare, of Hume’s History of England, of Milton. Secondly, gallery catalogues enabled viewers to complement pictures with a reading of the entire poem (Macklin) or meaningful excerpts which amounted to an anthology or an abridgement. The order of the text thus offered a visual path around the walls. Visiting an exhibition took the shape of intermittent acts of viewing and reading, in which readers turned into spectators and spectators into readers. So far, the literary galleries have been approached in art-historical terms, whether to reconstruct the iconographies and styles or the careers and funding of late eighteenth-century English painting. My work builds on pioneering art-historical research on Fuseli by Gert Schiff and David Weinglass,²² yet I believe that the Milton Gallery ²² G. Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füsslis Milton-Galerie (Zurich, 1963); CEL; D. H. Weinglass, Prints and Engraved Illustrations By and After Henry Fuseli: A Catalogue Raisonné

Introduction

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requires a more comprehensive interdisciplinary framework, for the intermedial environments of the literary galleries call into question twentieth-century disciplinary boundaries. The boundaries between painting and poetry were defined by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Laocoön (1766): poetry is an art of time and painting an art of space, which can represent actions by placing bodies one beside the other.²³ Yet boundaries are no sooner set than trespassed. Lessing’s definition identifies the medium by the boundaries of the individual painting, but it also captures the functioning of the exhibition space itself as a medium, something art historians have begun to do in recent work on Royal Academy exhibitions.²⁴ A new emphasis on the medium is essential to an understanding of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, which literalizes Lessing’s description of the boundaries of painting by translating the action of Paradise Lost in a series of twenty-seven paintings placed one after the other in the space of the exhibition. Moments of time juxtaposed in space lead to a cinematic interpretation of Lessing, which extends the space of painting beyond the limits of the frame and beyond the static juxtaposition of discrete pictures at the exhibition. In Eisenstein’s hands, Lessing’s juxtaposition turns out to define montage cinema, which the film director constructed like a sequence of tableaux. For montage too is an art of juxtapositions within each shot and between shots, where it is the spectator’s role to assemble the disjointed fragments into a whole. Much as Eisenstein’s montage looks back to cinematic effects in painting, his interactive spectator helps us reconstruct the spectator and the cinematic effects available at Fuseli’s gallery, for there the dynamism of form could animate a character’s movement beyond the limits of the frame and into the next painting. These dynamic effects of continuity between pictures are explained in very similar terms in Eisenstein’s writings and (Aldershot, 1994). For an iconographical account of Milton illustration from 1688 to 1800, see M. Pointon, Milton and English Art (Manchester, 1970), 106–15, 131–5. ²³ G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, trans. E. A. McCormick (Baltimore, 1984), 78–9. ²⁴ D. Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836 (New Haven, 2001); M. Hallett, ‘Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the British Royal Academy’, ECS 37/4 (2004), 581–604. For the museum and exhibition as a medium, see S. Alpers, ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC, 1991), 25–32; M. Bal, ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in J. Elsner (ed.), The Cultures of Collecting (London, 1994), 97–115; id., ‘The Discourse of the Museum’, in R. Greenberg (ed.), Thinking About Exhibitions (London, 1996), 201–18.

10

Introduction

in late eighteenth-century associationist psychology.²⁵ Both thought of the involvement of the spectator in terms of stimulus and response, and identified the illusion of movement perceived in discrete images as a matter of persistence of vision. Reading Fuseli’s Milton Gallery as a proto-cinematic medium indicates a path for further research on the role of pictures in the construction of moving images, but to construct continuities between the literary gallery scene and early film theory and practice exceeds the limits of this book. A growing body of work in Romantic studies has begun to argue for such continuities: witness James Chandler’s work on the influence of the historical novel and the structure of sentiment on Hollywood, and the work of Simon During and Orrin Wang linking Romantic spectacles of magic, optical tricks and animations with the ‘montage of attractions’ in early cinema.²⁶ My work participates in this field by offering an account of the intermedial make of late eighteenth-century cultural practices, arguing for closer attention to the birth and role of exhibitions in the production, reading, and adaptation of literature. Eisenstein’s path into eighteenth-century precursors of montage offers a radical reconfiguration of pictures at exhibitions among other types of visual pleasure. It is not enough to recover the interactive demands and the connecting abilities of the late eighteenth-century spectators as a dialogue between pictures and literary texts. To recover their skills and habits it is necessary to follow eighteenth-century readers and exhibition-goers on their cultural itinerary of overlapping visual experiences and experiments. This network of visual pleasures was first mapped in Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (1978) and can now be enriched with the interactive artistic, scientific, and optical displays studied by Jonathan Crary and Barbara Stafford.²⁷ Following Stafford’s focus on the connecting ²⁵ For a reconstruction of associationist visual theories and viewing practices, see Chapter 2, ‘Reading Aids at Exhibitions’, and Chapter 3, ‘Viewing Practices and Moving Pictures’. ²⁶ J. Chandler, ‘The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood: Scott, Griffith, and Film Epic Today’, in G. W. Ruoff (ed.), The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), 237–73; S. During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); O. Wang, ‘Coming Attractions: Lamia and Cinematic Sensation’, SiR 42/4 (Winter 2003), 461–500. ²⁷ R. D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); B. M. Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); id., Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); id., Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

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abilities of eighteenth-century spectators, I wish to challenge Crary’s periodization, which contrasts a disembodied and dualistic seventeenthand eighteenth-century Cartesian spectator to the embodied viewers of the 1830s. Because the galleries’ kinetic effects counted on the sensory superimpositions of images in the play of the spectators’ imagination, the late eighteenth-century exhibition scene testifies to the embodied practices of spectators. In fact, the practices I am reconstructing resist the regulating discourse which fashions the man of taste as a detached and disembodied spectator and the visual as a philosophical sphere of the mind as opposed to the vulgar inclinations of the body.²⁸ Part of the aim of this book then is to restore visual dimensions to the act of reading.²⁹ According to Wolfgang Iser, ‘the text represents a potential effect that is realized in the reading process’; it is a repertoire which contains the rules of its actualization for the implied reader. Following this lead, I have used lists of paintings, exhibition catalogues, and newspaper reviews as reading and viewing prompts. Yet in reconstructing the historical conditions of exhibition practices, my work departs from Iser’s transcendental model of the reading situation³⁰ as something which can be actualized regardless of historical, social, or cultural particularity. In this sense, Iser’s transcendental reader belongs in the class of the Kantian aesthetic subjects questioned in a number of studies on the sociology of taste by Pierre Bourdieu. For an aesthetic pleasure that is subjective and at the same time universally communicable depends on aesthetic work that cultivates and interiorizes cultural practices and skills before they can become a habit. In other words, such experiences are historically and socially grounded rather than intuitive.³¹

²⁸ On the discourse of the detached spectator, see J. Barrell, ‘ ‘‘The Dangerous Goddess’’: Masculinity, Prestige and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke, 1992), 63–87; for an analysis of the gendering of the detached spectator and an alternative, female scene of vision, see J. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke, 1998). ²⁹ For a more detailed reconstruction of Iser’s visuality, see my ‘A Visual Interface for the Act of Reading’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1–2 (Feb. 2004), 97–103. ³⁰ W. Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, 1978), pp. ix, 38, 34. ³¹ P. Bourdieu and A. Darbel, The Love of Art: European Museums and Their Public, trans. C. Beattie and N. Merriman (Cambridge, 1991); P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (London, 1984); id., The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson (Cambridge, 1993); id., ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, in The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1990), 54–65.

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Introduction

If Bourdieu’s museum without labels is a sign of the exclusions underlying the intuitive enjoyment of that which pleases without concepts,³² the early exhibition scene is a good place to study how such a public could be trained in the new art of seeing. This book considers the role that texts had in shaping the constituency of viewers out of that of readers. That the exhibitions’ public should be selected among readers has social implications which this book addresses, while it also seeks to reconstruct how exposing literature to the exhibition environment affected the constituencies and practices of reading. Looking for the places, cultures, and practices of reading and viewing means trying to understand whether, where, and how aesthetic response could be at the same time subjective and universal. In Kant’s epistemology, the aesthetic sphere articulates the free play of the faculties as an anticipation of shared communication on the strength of a common sense that binds individuals as a community.³³ If this encourages us to analyse the aesthetic subject as a member of a public, the exhibitions offer a place where such a public is as much visible as its objects and practices; witness the group portraits captured by prints of exhibitions.³⁴ While Kant’s imagination at play and its pleasure without concepts have often been used to configure the aesthetic as an autonomous and individual sphere, the work of sublimation distinguishing the imagination from the unpredictable domain of the senses leads to different stories about the aesthetic as a means of control or at least an attempt to regulate the interplay of reason and the senses. To understand the public and private dimensions of aesthetic acts, to understand why and how it could be possible to anticipate the ways in which perceivers would collaborate in the performance of an art work, it is necessary to understand subjective and personal reactions within a specific aesthetic culture, recuperating their cultural location within a network of public culture. This study restores reading and viewing within the continuum of late eighteenth-century cultural practices. Consequently, my work focuses on the aesthetic impact of visual culture, and the culture of exhibitions in particular, by referring back to specific locations, and to specific practices which have left their traces in late ³² I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. and ed. P. Guyer (Cambridge, 2000), 75–7, 175. ³³ Ibid. 172–6. ³⁴ T. Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, in Greenberg (ed.), Thinking About Exhibitions, 81–108; S. Matheson, ‘ ‘‘A Shilling Well Laid Out’’: The Royal Academy’s Early Public’, in Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line, 39–53.

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eighteenth-century material culture. In this sense, I offer an alternative vision of Romantic visual culture, in contrast to approaches that see the field through the eyes of authors retroactively canonized as ‘the Romantics’. This book reconstructs the impact of visual culture on practices of reading. Recovering the visual cultures of reading means analysing how visual skills influence reading as much as how reading influences viewing. If reading activates a common body of images and practices, to follow readers as they turn into spectators and interact with a range of visual entertainments is to understand the kinds of visual experiences and possibilities they activate in turning a text into a series of mental images. Texts and media need the collaboration of readers and spectators, but it is also vital to consider how developing media also change the modes of perception and reconfigure ways of reading and seeing. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1, ‘The Literary Galleries and the Field of Art’, reconstructs the literary gallery phenomenon as an interface between the book and print market in the new public sphere of art, in its tensions and complementarities between institutional and commercial sites of cultural production. Framed by Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, the chapter explores the role literary texts played in the new exhibition culture of late eighteenth-century London and the function they had in artists’ careers and institutional policies. At the same time, the visual circuit exhibits literary texts to public culture and thus participates in the making of a literary canon. The chapter surveys John Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery, Thomas Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery, and Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery, and describes their marketing strategies in showcasing illustrated editions, books of prints, series of prints, or single prints. By exposing modern literature in the form of paper surrogates for the classical cycles in princely galleries, the literary galleries invented a Grand Style tradition of British painting and made it available to a larger public. While literary gallery promotional materials adapt the discourse of civic humanism to justify the marriage of art and commerce, such claims for inclusiveness are challenged and debunked in caricatures highlighting their role as commercial complements of the Royal Academy. The commercial ideology of the literary galleries helps us understand Henry Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, which came out of the radical circle of the publisher Joseph Johnson. The chapter maps the project for an illustrated Milton, its affiliations and failure. It considers Milton as cultural capital invested in furthering Fuseli’s career in the Royal Academy.

14

Introduction

Chapters 2 and 3 explore reading and viewing at exhibitions. Chapter 2, ‘The Spectator Turned Reader: Printed Text at the Galleries’, analyses the circulation of texts in visual environments, locating the culture of exhibitions within a culture of anthologies and abridgements. Iser’s analysis of ‘the implied reader’ posited, constructed, and guided by literary texts is adapted to an investigation of the skills and practices expected of the exhibition-goer. Fuseli’s gallery is read as an event in textual transmission, somewhere between an anthology and an abridgement of Paradise Lost, compared to Richard Bentley’s bold interventions to free Paradise Lost from what he deemed unnecessary interpolation and John Wesley’s 1763 Extract of Paradise Lost. In Wesley’s Paradise Lost cuts are hidden, and hiatuses welded, so as to present a seamless continuous text. By contrast, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery catalogue marks editorial interventions and presents entries as a series of anthological excerpts. As a result, it is up to the reader–viewer to reconstruct the poem as a continuous action. Finally, the painter’s cut of Paradise Lost is compared to his editorial interventions on William Cowper’s Homer, which reveals that the painter’s kinetic eye restores the Iliad hidden within Paradise Lost. Chapter 3, ‘The Reader Turned Spectator: Visual Narratives’, explores the visual side of the tension between the discrete and continuous elements, dispositio and elocution discussed in the previous chapter. The visual skills required to turn discrete pictures into a continuous narrative can be posited by analysing the Milton Gallery in terms of eighteenth-century theories, experiments, and technologies of vision. The cultural practices and itineraries of eighteenth-century viewers recover the montage culture which Eisenstein found in Lessing’s Laocoön. Lessing’s definition of painting as representing bodies placed one beside the other in space opens up the potential for a literary gallery. How these bodies could move from one picture to the next depended on the senses of energized spectators. Associationist experiments on the persistence of vision showed that subsequent impressions are superimposed as afterimages; so too could pictures at the Milton Gallery be superimposed and reassembled as a montage sequence. This montage practice offers an alternative account of eighteenth-century viewing as a highly interactive experience, correcting negative views of visual adaptations deemed to reduce viewers to purely passive receptors of external stimuli. After these three broad chapters setting up the institutional framework and the gallery lives and stories of literary texts, Chapters 4 and 5 move from plans d’ensemble to a series of close-ups. Because the Milton Gallery

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was part of a public Romanticism, the pictures are read in the light of their discursive networks. Chapter 4 wanders in the infernal sequence, while Chapter 5 fleshes out Adam and Eve. Chapter 4, ‘S encount’ring D, S interposing: Milton’s Allegory and the Politics of Seeing’, analyses Fuseli’s visualizations of Milton’s allegory as a negotiation between the interpretative community of the dissenting radical publisher Joseph Johnson and Royal Academy loyalty. Fuseli’s allegorical beings appear and disappear into a dark background. Their uncertain status aptly visualizes the oscillation between metaphor and agency which Joseph Priestley and Gilbert Wakefield held responsible for the textual corruptions of the Bible. For the Devil and the Trinity are nothing but figures of speech. Taken literally, however, they become incorporeal agents. Moreover, the seemingly headless Death wearing the likeness of a kingly crown activates the ‘imaginary treason’ analysed by John Barrell in Imagining the King’s Death. For unlike Blake’s more clearly spelt-out regicide premonitions, it depends on the eye of the beholder whether Fuseli’s figures visualize the regicide haunting Milton’s text or not. It is this ambiguity that enabled Fuseli the radical to turn into Fuseli the professor of painting of a royal institution. Chapter 5, ‘The Plot of Adam and Eve’, reads Fuseli’s pictures through his dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft concerning the gendering of the sublime and the beautiful. The final pictures, their palimpsests, and omissions exemplify Fuseli’s and Adam’s difficulties in performing a fiction of masculinity. Thus, Paradise Lost visualized becomes an example of montage, a collection of statuesque postures that the spectator is required to connect and animate in a choreography. Only with the Fall does Adam master a statuesque code of masculinity. By contrast, the attempts at mastering Eve’s all-too-powerful agency negotiate Wollstonecraft’s claims for women’s active role in the public sphere. Wollstonecraft’s discontinuous and contradictory readings of Milton’s Eve belong to the fragmented textuality of anthology and exhibition culture explored in Chapter 2. Beside the image of femininity that declares Milton a ‘bogeyman’ lives the equally Miltonic image of conjugal happiness based on rational conversation to which Wollstonecraft aspires. The chapter offers a much-needed revisionary account of the relationship between Wollstonecraft and Fuseli, an intellectual dialogue which many still read as a plot of seduction, which defuses her agency.

1 The Literary Galleries and the Field of Art The Climate cannot be too cold, nor the air too gross, to bring forth even an Apelles or a Raphael, that produced a Milton. (Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting, 1740) As if the Genius of a Painter was one Kind of Essence, and the Genius of a Poet another; and as if the Air and Soil which had given Birth to a Shakespear and a Bacon, a Milton and a Newton … could be deficient in any Species of Excellency whatsoever. (The Plan of an Academy, 1755)

I 1737, picture dealers were flooding the country with ‘Ship Loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madona’s, and other dismal Dark Subjects’.¹ Eight years later, after making this complaint under the name of ‘Britophil’, William Hogarth painted his self-portrait and chose to rest his bust, and therefore his fame, on volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift.² Associating with the poets, Hogarth gave visual shape to what was a recurrent reply to Dubos and later Montesquieu and Winckelmann. While these foreigners claimed that art was alien to the British national character due to a climate hampering the imagination, British responses indicated in Shakespeare and Milton the counterproof and promise of British genius.³ Considered as a storehouse of ¹ St. James’s Evening Post, 7–9 June 1737, quoted in R. Paulson, Hogarth, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991–3), ii. 137. ² See The Painter and His Pug (1745, National Gallery, London). ³ G. Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740), 110; The Plan of an Academy for the Better Cultivation, Improvement and Encouragement of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and the Arts of Design in General (London, 1775), p. vi. See J. Barry, An Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (London, 1775), 4–6, arguing against Dubos, Montesquieu, and Winckelmann, the key

Literary Galleries and the Field of Art

17

subjects for painters, British poets offered a secular alternative to the dead Christs and Madonnas coming from the Continent. What had been a serious religious obstacle to the formation of a public visual culture in Britain was thus cleared. Another problem which the book market addressed was funding, for publication by subscription offered a commercial alternative to aristocratic patronage.⁴ Half a century later, the invasion of dead Christs, Holy Families, and Madonnas was indeed checked by a visual heritage coming out of editions of British poets published by subscription. As John Boydell put it in his Shakspeare Gallery catalogue, no subjects seem so proper to form an English School of Historical Painting, as the Scenes of the immortal Shakspeare; yet it must be always remembered, that he possessed powers which no pencil can reach … It must not then be expected, that the art of the Painter can ever equal the sublimity of our Poet. The strength of Michael Angelo, united to the grace of Raphael, would here have laboured in vain.—For what pencil can give to his airy beings ‘a local habitation and a name’?⁵

Newspaper reviews backed Boydell’s claim, holding up the Shakspeare Gallery against foreign criticism: ‘F, partly with truth, and partly with affectation, have affirmed, that Britain has produced no Genius for H P … this national censure is completely , by the combined exertions of our Artists, for B’s edition of our  B!’⁶ As we shall see, Boydell’s initiative gave new shape to the British national character, turning commercial success into an index of the superiority, rather than limit, of British taste. Encouraging the arts through a commercial enterprise becomes ‘peculiarly honourable to a great commercial country’.⁷ sources of the argument against British genius. See also W. Oechslin, ‘Le Gôut et les nations: Débats, polémiques, et jalousies au moment de la création des musées au XVIIIe siècle’, in E. Pommier (ed.), Les Musées en Europe a` la veille de l’ouverture du Louvre (Paris, 1995), 365–414. ⁴ On Hogarth’s role in the 1737 Engravers’ Act, see Paulson, Hogarth, ii. 36–44; on subscription publishing of books and prints, see T. Clayton, The English Print (New Haven, 1997), 52–7, 198–201. ⁵ Preface, in A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (London, 1789), pp. ix–x. ⁶ Morning Star, 6 May 1789; see also The Diary; or, Woodfall’s Register, 5 May 1789; Elucidation of Mr. Bowyer’s Plan for a Magnificent Edition of Hume’s History of England, with a Continuation by G. Gregory (London, 1795), 9–11. ⁷ The Times, 7 May 1789.

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This chapter locates the literary galleries within the public sphere of art, analysing how these commercial venues engaged with the emergent field of institutional art. Contrasting a commercial ethos to the ethos of civic humanism, which shaped the claims of the Royal Academy as an art institution, these galleries offered an alternative view of public culture and complementary sources of funding and prestige for painters. Following the uses and roles of literature in commercial and institutional art, this chapter lays the ground for an understanding of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery within the London art scene. C O M M E RC E , A RT, A N D P U B L I C C U LT U R E Though the Royal Academy has been established in England thirty years; and its annual Exhibitions applauded, we may consider the opening of the S G as the first Aera of competition in Painting.⁸

When the 1789 exhibition season opened, Edmund Burke chose the most institutional arena to welcome Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery: the dinner offered by the Royal Academy to mark the opening of its annual exhibition. As Holger Hoock argues, the annual dinner had a key role in constructing the public image of the Royal Academy.⁹ Served before the pictures and in the very room that would soon be open to public inspection for the annual exhibition, the dinner offered a cogent polemical setting for Burke’s homage to Boydell. According to tradition, Burke passed a note to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Royal Academy, suggesting a toast. Yet his toast was not in keeping with the self-congratulatory function of the dinner: ‘This end of the table, at which, as there are many admirers of the art there are many friends of yours, wish to drink an English tradesman who patronizes the art better than the Grand Monarque of France.’ The Prince of Wales agreed, and proceeded with the toast.¹⁰ Though explicitly framed to rival French royal patronage, Burke’s praise ⁸ St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 5–7 May 1789. ⁹ H. Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford, 2003), 216–22; id., ‘From Beefsteak to Turtle: Artists’ Dinner Culture in Eighteenth-Century London’, HLQ 66/1–2 (2003), 29–54. ¹⁰ The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, v (July 1782–June 1789), ed. H. Furber (Cambridge, 1965), 465; see also Morning Chronicle, 25–8 Apr. 1789; the toast was also reported by the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 25 Apr. 1789, whereas the London


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of Boydell implicitly casts doubt on the King’s and the Academy’s role in furthering the arts, and especially in encouraging a British school of historical painting. When Boydell’s gallery opened, newspaper reviews made the comparison explicit, celebrating the ‘liberality of an individual’ for laying ‘the first stone of an English School of Painting’, coming to rescue and nourish historical painting after thirty years of public exhibitions and twenty years since the foundation of the Royal Academy.¹¹ Compared to another famous merchant of London, Sir Thomas Gresham, and ‘the Medici of Italy’, Boydell was celebrated as a ‘commercial Maecenas’. Taken together, these names suggest that the story of art involves a movement from Italy and France to Britain, from despotism to freedom, from royal and aristocratic patronage to the patronage of the people under the aegis of Commerce. By presenting art as a source of commercial profit, the literary galleries implemented a policy that had been recommended time and again as a British recipe for the arts. Their beneficial influence in furthering taste and craftsmanship in design and manufactures had been endorsed by Jonathan Richardson’s 1719 Discourse on the Dignity … of the Science of a Connoisseur, the 1755 Plan of an Academy, and the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, which instituted a prize for historical painting in 1759 and hosted the first public exhibition of paintings in 1760.¹² When Thomas Macklin launched the first literary gallery, he underlined ‘the influence the Fine Arts have on the Taste, Manners, and the Commerce of a Country’: In the same degree they excite Genius and employ Industry at home, they extend Commerce and Credit abroad, and ultimately decide the Balance of Profit in favour of the Country where they are most cherished … in less than half a Century our Artists have excelled those on the Continent; and the Demand

Chronicle, 25 Apr. 1789, and the Whitehall Evening-Post, 25–8 Apr. 1789, also reported toasts to the King and Royal Family, rather than exclusively to the Prince of Wales and Alderman Boydell. ¹¹ The Diary; or, Woodfall’s Register, 5 May 1789; The Times, 7 May 1789. ¹² J. Richardson, A discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage, of the Science of a Connoisseur, in Two Discourses (Menston, 1970), 48–56; The Plan of an Academy; D. G. C. Allan and J. L. Abbott (eds.), The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth-Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts (Athens, Ga., 1992), 101–3.

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for British Ornament, and Elegance has become a powerful Branch of Trade, and a new source of National Opulence.¹³

If paintings and prints had largely been considered foreign luxuries, they had worked as a school of taste. Supply stimulated demand, emulation, and production, fuelling commerce and industry, an argument Adam Smith developed to condemn mercantilist restrictions on the freedom of the market.¹⁴ Nor were the effects on manufactures limited to stylistic improvement in design, for, as Boydell argued, art attracted viewers from abroad, thus activating the tourism industry: ‘the more objects of attraction and amusement held out to Foreigners, that may induce them to visit this Metropolis, the more are our Manufactures promoted, for every one on his return, carries with him some specimen of them’.¹⁵ In other words, the literary galleries articulated a new platform for art. The public benefit inherent in private interest challenged the civic humanist ethos of the Royal Academy. Such a commercial rationale had been at the heart of the divisions that had led a faction of artists to secede from the Society of Artists and lay the foundations of the Royal Academy.¹⁶ The identity of the new institution was sanctioned by expelling commerce from the arts in the inaugural discourse Reynolds pronounced at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1769.¹⁷ As John Barrell argues, to be a liberal art painting ought to be disinterested, general, and ideal rather than particular and appealing to sensual and material interests.¹⁸ Yet the preponderance of portraits at Royal Academy exhibitions contradicted its civic humanist agendas. By contrast, the historical painting flourishing at the literary galleries could legitimize public art financed by private interest. Barrell and Solkin have traced civic humanism and commerce as competing models for public culture.¹⁹ In this section, I build ¹³ See Thomas Macklin’s prospectus of The British Poets (1 Jan. 1787), V&A, sig. 200 B 280. ¹⁴ A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, 1981), i. 443, 407. ¹⁵ J. Boydell, A Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (1789), pp. vi–vii. ¹⁶ On the conflict on commerce that differentiated the future Royal Academicians from the Society of Artists, see D. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1993), 261 ff.; Hoock, The King’s Artists, 19–20, 146–9. ¹⁷ J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R. R. Wark, 3rd edn. (New Haven, 1997), 13, 19. ¹⁸ J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: ‘The Body of the Public’ (New Haven, 1986), 14. ¹⁹ Ibid., passim; Solkin, Painting for Money, 2, 19, 28.


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on their conceptual frameworks to discuss the rhetorical strategies entrepreneurs and artists deployed in negotiating social and cultural authority. A public domain configured by commercial interest gives a significant turn to the civic humanist ideas underlying Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere. In the Preface to the first catalogue of the Shakspeare Gallery, reprinted in full in The Diary; or, Woodfall’s Register, Boydell presents his initiative as ‘an undertaking that originated in a private company, where Painting was the subject of conversation’.²⁰ This might seem to substantiate Habermas’s interpretation of the public sphere, ‘a sphere of private people come together as a public’, a public domain identified with civil society and distinguished from the state.²¹ So too does the Royal Academy stem from private initiative, in the tradition of artists’ organizations in the earlier part of the century. Yet the Academy’s move from Pall Mall to Somerset House proclaimed its place among a number of public offices that constituted the machinery of the British state, an association strengthened by the architectural emulation of French state buildings.²² The connection with king and state was further highlighted by contrast with an alternative public culture arising from private initiative, which found its focus in and around Pall Mall after the Academy had moved out, as Rosie Dias argues. Indeed, when the literary galleries chose Pall Mall, the street already offered alternative exhibition spaces for artists who had decided to desert the Royal Academy exhibitions.²³ If the Royal Academy negotiates the place of art within a civic humanist idea of the public good, the literary galleries participate in a public domain explicitly configured through commercial interest. Public debates on art in the period question the disinterestedness that Habermas’s utopian model requires for its participants. In Habermas’s public sphere, disinterest is ²⁰ The Diary; or, Woodfall’s Register, 5 May 1789. ²¹ J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, 1989), 27. ²² On 18th-century artist clubs and societies, see I. Bignamini, ‘Art Institutions in London, 1689–1768: A Study of Clubs and Academies’, Walpole Society, 55 (1988), 1–148. On Somerset House, see J. Murdoch, ‘Art and Experience: The Visitor and the Spaces of Somerset House, 1780–1796’, in Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line, 9–22. For a reassessment of the Royal Academy as a national institution, see Hoock, The King’s Artists. ²³ R. Dias, ‘ ‘‘A World of Pictures’’: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display, 1780–1799’, in M. Ogborn and C. Withers (eds.), Georgian Geographies: Essays on Space, Place and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 2004), 92–113.

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guaranteed by a utopian condition that cancels subordinating factors: the laws of the market are suspended and the barriers of social hierarchy transcended.²⁴ Indeed, liberty and independence are conditions for the flourishing of art in both the civic humanist and the commercial public sphere, but they are advocated within alternative configurations of the social order. The civic humanist model shapes the painter as gentleman, a liberal artist who participates in an ethos of leisure and disinterest untouched by commercial concerns. By contrast, in the commercial model the artist’s independence depends on art as a selfsustaining profitable activity. Much as the revenue of exhibitions could help the Academy gain autonomy from its royal patron, the financial independence offered by the print market safeguarded the King’s history painter from over-reliance on the King’s commissions and configured him as a free agent, who escaped royal ‘monopoly’.²⁵ The relationship between the literary galleries and the Royal Academy articulates art as a field of cultural production, which Pierre Bourdieu defined as ‘the locus where the belief in the value of art and in the artist’s power of valuable creation is continually produced and reproduced’. The field is structured as a dynamic of ‘relations … between social positions that are both occupied and manipulated by social agents’. For Bourdieu, the field emerges with the set of social conditions that enable the autonomy of art, which include places where art can be exhibited to the public, institutions that confer recognition on and training for artists such as the Royal Academy, and a series of agents such as dealers, collectors, and critics.²⁶ While the term ‘field’ was not in use at the time, late eighteenth-century observers located art within a commercial ‘system’. Visiting Boydell’s printshop in 1786, the German traveller Sophie von La Roche praised the commercial model, admiring ‘the excellent arrangement and system which the love of gain and the national good taste have combined in producing’.²⁷ While ‘system’ suggests a coherent and stable functioning, Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘field’ accounts for the dynamic tension and struggle between competing, complementary, and overlapping agents and sites of cultural production.²⁸ If Reynolds chose to ‘transubstantiate’ art, other forces ²⁴ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 33–7. ²⁵ The Times, 7 May 1789. ²⁶ Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 260, 29–30. ²⁷ Sophie in London 1786 being the Diary of Sophie v. la Roche, trans. C. Williams (London, 1933), 237. ²⁸ Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 30, 34.


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reclaimed art’s fleshly body within a competing commercial ideology that paraded its difference. Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of cultural production helps identify those social dynamics of the public sphere that are absent from Habermas’s account. Habermas’s public sphere should be understood as a ‘regulative ideal’ in the Kantian sense: ‘just as the idea supplied the rule, so the ideal served as the archetype for the determination of the copy, always only a ‘‘standard for our actions’’ ’. Indeed, it provided ‘a series of fictions’ for ‘the self-understanding of the bourgeois consciousness as ‘‘public opinion’’ ’, fictions that depend on private interests subsumed and sublimated as public benefits.²⁹ In defining ‘publicity’ as ‘public opinion’, Habermas distinguishes his regulative and indeed utopian public sphere—‘a space where extant status distinctions are bracketed and neutralised’—from medieval publicity, which he characterizes as a display of status through insignias, dress, and demeanour.³⁰ Yet much like self-interest, status is far from absent from the late eighteenthcentury public sphere. Its social dynamics turn it into ‘an arena for the formation and enactment of social identities’, as Nancy Fraser suggests.³¹ Indeed, the public sphere was the place where painters and entrepreneurs sought recognition and claims to distinction. In what follows, I will map the positions, strategies, and choices of agents in the field of art.³² Consider John Boydell’s investment in the field of art. Elected Lord Mayor in 1790, Boydell married his professional and political role through the iconographic motifs he chose for the insignias to feature at the procession on Lord Mayor’s day: ‘The figure of Minerva appeared surrounded with the emblems of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture, and a medallion of Shakespeare. On the other side were represented the City trophies, aptly expressing the civic honours of this patronizer of the Arts.’³³ A sanction of his public role, such paraphernalia declared the merchant’s social position-taking. Public benefit and civic engagement reconfigure civic participation within an ethos of industry and commerce ²⁹ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 114, 116–17; Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, trans. R. Johnson (Cambridge, 1998), 138–40. ³⁰ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 7–8, 36. ³¹ N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 114–15, 125. ³² Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 9; id., The Field of Cultural Production, 30. ³³ V&A, Press Cuttings, ii. 576, dated Nov. 1790.

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rather than disinterest and leisure. In the same year, reviews praised his Shakspeare Gallery as ‘this great repository of national taste and treasure’.³⁴ Beside the Shakespeare pictures, the gallery catalogue also listed drawings and copies from ‘some of the first Cabinets of pictures in this kingdom’.³⁵ At first sight, the juxtaposition reminds us that, although purposely built as an exhibition space, the Shakspeare Gallery also served as a printseller’s showroom. Yet, as we shall see, there was more to this contiguity. In November 1786, the Morning Post published an article entitled ‘Alderman Boydell’s Gallery’, which took the reader through ‘the range of rooms appropriated by this truly patriotic Alderman’: The entrance of this gallery is filled with a number of correct and high finished drawings from that great collection, late Lord Orford’s, now lost to this country, and rotting in Russia … The inner room is now furnishing wholly with modern paintings—around it on the top are portraits of the most eminent English artists, whose works have been purchased, and engraved from by the Alderman, or of engravers, who he hath at different times employed to engrave for him.³⁶

The movement from the entrance to the inner room could be read as a statement not only of ‘the spirit of the compiler’, but also of ‘the improved state of the arts’, the story of art flourishing first on the Continent and now in England, but also the progression from aristocratic to commercial patronage, from copies after the old masters to works of civic substance: pictures of sea engagements, Copley’s Death of Major Pierson, and James Northcote’s pictures from Richard III, an English theme set beside the Revd Peters’s subject from the Apocrypha, ‘The Three Holy Children Protected by the Angel’. Two years later, the pictures that had left Lord Orford’s mansion at Houghton for Russia were made available to the public in the form of a book of prints published by Boydell. Entering it in his catalogue, Boydell pronounced the sale and export of the Houghton collection ‘a Dishonour and a Loss to this Country in general and more particularly for the County of Norfolk, as this collection was the chief reason for great Numbers to make that Tour’.³⁷ With no explicit mention of the state’s failure ³⁴ V&A, Press Cuttings, ii. 576, dated 6 Dec. 1790. ³⁵ J. Boydell, A Catalogue of the Pictures, & c. in the Shakspeare Gallery (1790), p. xvii. ³⁶ Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 14 Nov. 1786. ³⁷ J. and J. Boydell, A Catalogue of Historical Prints, various Subjects, Landscapes, Sea Pieces, Views, &c. after the Most Capital Pictures in England. Engraved by the Most Celebrated Artists (London, 1787), 48.


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to purchase the Houghton collection for the nation,³⁸ all the merits went to the industry of Boydell the patriot. Exported as a consequence of aristocratic dissipation, the collection was preserved in the virtual format of Boydell’s engraved gallery in print. Adam Smith had made an allowance for art and architecture as among ‘modes of expence … [that] seem to contribute more to the growth of public opulence than others’, concluding that ‘noble palaces, magnificent villas, great collections of books, statues, pictures and other curiosities, are frequently both an ornament and an honour, not only to the neighbourhood, but to the whole country to which they belong’.³⁹ Boydell capitalized on that ‘ornament and honour’ by seeing them as a source of wealth to be derived from tourism. However, the fate of the Houghton collection shows how ‘durable goods’, besides standing as an ‘ornament and honour’ to the country, can be recycled. Smith referred to the material transmigration of goods from the rich to ‘the inferior and the middling ranks of people’, but mechanical reproduction provides an alternative example of the mobility of luxury goods. As a paper surrogate, the Houghton Gallery proves to be a more ‘durable good’ than its original (the pictures sent to Russia). Thanks to the mobility of commercial capital, the print market not only preserves the visual wealth dispersed by the sale of the thing itself, but it also multiplies and circulates reproductions of what had been immured within aristocratic mansions. Indeed, at the time when the literary galleries were launched, the term ‘gallery’ could stand for an architectonic form as much as for a book of prints. While Boydell also stocked prints of the best pictures in England,⁴⁰ Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery, also in Pall Mall, offered print reproductions of the galleries at Düsseldorf and Vienna.⁴¹ Reproduced in the same medium, shown and sold on the same premises, literary and princely or aristocratic galleries were assimilated in the form of portable virtual galleries.⁴² ³⁸ On Wilkes’s parliamentary engagement in favour of government purchase of the Houghton collection as a national gallery to be housed at the British Museum, see J. W. C. Conlin, ‘High Art and Low Politics: A New Perspective on John Wilkes’, HLQ 64/3–4 (2001), 357–82. ³⁹ A. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, i. 347. ⁴⁰ J. and J. Boydell, A Set of Prints Engraved after the Most Capital Paintings in the Collection of Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress of Russia. Lately in the possession of the Earl of Orford at Houghton in Norfolk (London, 1788); id., A Catalogue of Historical Prints. ⁴¹ Proposals, by Messrs V. and R. Green of Berners Street, London; and Chr. De Mechel, of Basil, in Switzerland, for publishing, by Subscription, Two Prints … now exhibiting at the Historic Gallery (1795), V&A, sig. BOX 2 38 F. ⁴² V&A, Press Cuttings, ii. 579, 581.

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Boydell’s and Macklin’s moves from Cheapside and Fleet Street to Pall Mall strengthen the upward-mobility narrative of commerce and its displacement of aristocratic economies of art. Close to aristocratic and royal homes, the galleries’ new premises on Pall Mall turned contiguity into challenge as much as complementarity. The Shakspeare Gallery is open to the public unlike the works ‘locked up in the cabinets of the curious, or dispersed over the country’.⁴³ Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery catalogue praises print for ‘the acquisition of those productions which would otherwise perhaps have been confined to the apartments of Nobles, or the palaces of Kings’.⁴⁴ Presenting the Historic Gallery, Bowyer observes that ‘the art of the engraver multiplies and diffuses those beauties, which must otherwise be confined to a single cabinet’.⁴⁵ Yet the challenge stands alongside an acknowledgement of the King’s patronage of the Royal Academy and the display of royal and aristocratic favour implicit in the access and permission to sketch and later engrave pictures in their possession. When the Shakspeare Gallery was published as a two-volume set of prints in 1803, pride of place was given to the portraits of the King dedicated to the Queen and of the Queen dedicated to the King, engraved after paintings belonging to the King’s collection. The patronage of the King and the privilege of engraving from his collection stand alongside the claim that modern patronage is devolved to a ‘commercial Maecenas’. A similar tension inhabits the paratext of Bowyer’s Historic Gallery. As Cynthia Roman argues, dedicating the illustrated edition of David Hume’s History of England to the legislature has the flavour of a challenge.⁴⁶ Yet such a challenge is oddly juxtaposed to another plate dedicating the work to the King. The 1803 edition of the Shakspeare Gallery represented the architectural space of the gallery in the form of a Shakespeare Memorial on paper. The frontispieces of the two volumes feature bas-relief classical vignettes from Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, which identify Shakespeare with classical heritage. This impression is strengthened as the readers follow their way into this virtual world of print through a reproduction of the Thomas Banks monument placed above the real entrance of the Shakspeare Gallery. Such a threshold inscribes Boydell’s venture in a tradition that compared the resilience and enduring power ⁴³ Boydell, A Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (1789), p. xii. ⁴⁴ Poetic Description of Choice and Valuable Prints, published by Mr Macklin, at the Poets’ Gallery (London, 1794), pp. vi–vii. ⁴⁵ Elucidation of Mr Bowyer’s Plan, 11. ⁴⁶ Roman, ‘Pictures for Private Purses’, 145–6.


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of writing to monuments, dating back to Horace via Shakespeare’s Sonnet LV and Milton’s epigraph to the 1632 edition of Shakespeare’s works. In 1743 Sir Thomas Hanmer had appropriated this tradition to describe his illustrated edition of Shakespeare ‘as another small monument’, compared to the statue being erected ‘at a publick expense’.⁴⁷ Similarly, the 1803 Preface argues that the Shakspeare Gallery bears ‘much more the appearance of a National Undertaking, executed at the public expense, than the enterprise of the branches of one private family’.⁴⁸ The sense of virtual ownership of an albeit paper Shakespeare palace was critical to the experience of the galleries. Virtual ownership was all the more essential to the galleries’ financial success. For the experience substantiates the appeal to public patronage with the claim to further the public enjoyment and public ownership of art works. If eighteenth-century art treatises had attributed the lack of British historical painting to that of aristocratic or royal patronage, the literary galleries were celebrated for encouraging ‘the Patronage of the People’.⁴⁹ In this alternative system, genius depends on the encouragement provided by the public in the form of investment. The art dealer’s role in the enterprise is then constructed as a form of mediation. As Macklin argues, ‘I do not wish to exhibit myself as a patron of the Arts’, but ‘as an humble, but I trust not unfaithful, steward of the public munificence’. Macklin’s agency disappears into ‘the patronage of a munificent and generous Nation’.⁵⁰ Commerce and liberty go hand in hand. Funding and publication by subscription enlarged the circle of art patrons and distributed the claim to ownership. If the subscription at 3 guineas apiece was hardly affordable, the outreach of the galleries was carefully diversified to include other forms of ownership. Those who could not afford the nine-volume edition of Shakespeare and the two-volume collection of prints could buy the ⁴⁷ T. Hanmer, Preface, in The Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (1743–4), vol. i, pp. i–vi, quoted in E. Shaffer, ‘ ‘‘Shakespeare Between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting’’: From Boydell Façade to Shakespeare Shrine’, in W. Pape and F. Burwick (eds.), The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery (Bottrop, 1996), 80. ⁴⁸ J. and J. Boydell, Preface, in A Collection of Prints from Pictures painted for the Purpose of illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, by the Artists of Great Britain (London, 1803). ⁴⁹ V&A, Press Cuttings, ii. 592, dated 21 Apr. 1790. ⁵⁰ Catalogue of the Third Exhibition of Pictures, painted for Mr. Macklin, illustrative of the British Poets, and the Bible (London, 1790), p. vi; Catalogue of the Fifth Exhibition of Pictures, painted for T. Macklin, by the Artists of Great Britain; illustrative of the British Poets, and the Bible (London, 1792), 4.

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series of prints or individual prints. Failing that, catalogues listing the pictures and excerpting quotations from the literary sources were priced at 6d ., a mnemonic aid for viewers to fortify their virtual appropriation of the gallery open at 1s. admission fee. In a language reminiscent of Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee, in 1807 the Boydell company summed up the Shakspeare Gallery venture by thanking the subscribers to ‘this great National Work’ and congratulating themselves for enabling ‘every Subscriber to possess, in his own library, a Monument to the Memory of the immortal Shakespeare, which has cost them considerably above 100,000 pounds’.⁵¹ Placed at the intersection between the art and book market, the literary galleries give a particular turn to Habermas’s idea that ‘the public sphere in the political realm evolved from the public sphere in the world of letters’.⁵² Indeed, the public function claimed by the literary galleries reflects the interests, concerns, and arguments voiced in the copyright debates of the 1770s. These debates define the classics as works belonging to the people rather than the copyright holders. Marking a shift from producers to consumers, Trevor Ross argues that while literary genealogies have a long history in shaping the place of authors in a literary tradition, the emergence of a canon should be dated to the democratization of print, when literature came out of coterie circulation networks to become available as an empirical body of works disseminated among a wide readership.⁵³ The change in copyright brought into the public domain works that were more than 24 years old. If earlier in the century the place of an author would be established by the expensive and monumental editions of Jacob Tonson, after the copyright law of 1774 the classical status of a text could be more soundly measured by its publication in the cheap, affordable format of John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (1776–82) and The British Theatre (1776–8).⁵⁴ ⁵¹ J. and J. Boydell, A Catalogue of Prints, Books, and Works, after the most celebrated Masters, Ancient and Modern engraved by the First Artists and published by Boydell and Co. (London, 1807). ⁵² Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 30–1, 38. ⁵³ T. Ross, ‘Copyright and the Invention of Tradition’, ECS 26/1 (Autumn 1992), 1–27; id., ‘Just When Did ‘‘British Bards Begin t’Immortalize’’?’, SECC 19 (1989), 383–98; id., The Making of the English Literary Canon from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth-Century (Montreal, 1998); J. Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge, 1998). ⁵⁴ T. Bonnell, ‘John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain: The ‘‘Little Trifling Edition’’ Revisited’, Modern Philology, 85/2 (Nov. 1987), 128–52; id., ‘Bookselling and CanonMaking: The Trade Rivalry Over the English Poets, 1776–1783’, SECC 19 (1989), 53–69.


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In this context, the literary galleries occupied an intermediate position. From an economic standpoint, the 1s. entrance fee offered literature on display as part of a network of visual entertainments such as the pleasure gardens, the panoramas, and the theatre. On the other hand, the higher price of subscribing reprivatized the experience of literature, reserving the illustrated edition and the collection of prints for a more select public. Through their diversified outreach, the literary galleries participated in the invention of a cultural tradition and canon as a recognized and recognizable body of works by putting literary pictures on display. L I T E R A RY I N V E S T M E N TS If the public domain configures culture in terms of public property, such culture depends on processes of individual and collective appropriation. That public benefit goes hand in hand with private interest was clear to Charles Lamb, who presented Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery as a process of privatization rather than circulation of culture: ‘to have Opie’s Shakespeare, Northcote’s Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney’s Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare (though he did the best in ‘Lear’), deaf-headed Reynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody’s Shakespeare’.⁵⁵ Lamb’s point is made by conjuring up a gallery of portraits, but it is a gallery of painters, rather than actors depicted in famous impersonations. Lamb’s ekphrasis adapts prints of gallery viewers, which had become a genre in their own right. Much like these views of viewers in exhibition spaces, Lamb plays with the identification of seeing and being seen, which was often more than just a motivation behind gallery-going as a practice of conspicuous consumption. For the preponderance of portraits at the Royal Academy would often involve mirroring effects between pictures and their viewers, given that sitters would be seen perusing their own portraits. Emulating what he valued in Shakespeare’s own writing, his capacity to see ‘the texture of Othello’s mind’,⁵⁶ ⁵⁵ To Samuel Rogers, n.d. [21 Dec. 1833], in Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 3 vols. (London, 1935), iii. 394. On portrait and history painting at the Shakspeare Gallery and Shakespeare as a personal or general property, see C. Rovee, ‘ ‘‘Everybody’s Shakespeare’’: Representative Genres and John Boydell’s Winter’s Tale’, SiR 41/4 (Winter 2002), 509–43. ⁵⁶ ‘On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation’, in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 7 vols. (London, 1903–5), i. 102.

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Lamb’s satire pierces into the movements of the painters’ minds and represents the motivations behind their Shakespearean impersonations. Shakespeare is the great resource of the English School, the painters’ ticket to fame, what can save them from the drudgery of portraiture and project them into the higher walks of historical painting. However, the metamorphosis of portraiture into Grand Style fails. Deflating their ambition, Lamb revokes the illusion and turns them into a gallery of portraits. His gallery writing annexes Shakespeare’s name to the names of painters, each characterized by a key attribute. Bringing together different painters depicting Shakespeare is a way of displaying differences in style, which lead to identifying each painter’s manner. Instead of the object, painting reveals the subjectivity of the painter. Painting Shakespeare is a way for painters to represent themselves, a process of self-fashioning. What did literature do for painters? In Boydell’s first catalogue, painting Shakespeare challenges and exceeds the combined powers of Michelangelo and Raphael: ‘For what pencil can give to his airy beings ‘‘a local habitation and a name’’?’⁵⁷ Trying their strengths on Shakespeare is a way for painters to establish their cultural credentials. While Boydell’s comparison acknowledges the challenge and the unequal efforts on display at the gallery, his challenge implicitly also configures the Shakespearean ground as an arena for British painters to prove superior to the Old Masters. Writing in the aftermath of the Shakspeare Gallery lottery, the Royal Academician James Northcote, himself a key contributor to the Shakspeare Gallery, gives a more explicit account of the interest of literature: Perhaps it may be asked, why was our prime poet Shakespeare selected for the English painters to try their first efforts on?—I would answer, not because he helped those painters in their art, but because the popular eminence of Shakespere’s name would help on to high notoriety any work connected with a poet already so precious, and would thus become the most ready means of attracting an unwilling people to pay some attention to their unknown painters.

Investing in Shakespeare secures a public and revenue that would never be generated by historical painting alone: ‘by connecting himself to the poet’, the painter ‘immediately partook, and became a sharer, in all the advantages of his established notoriety’.⁵⁸ Art participates in a wider field ⁵⁷ Boydell, Preface, in A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (London, 1789), p. x. ⁵⁸ J. Northcote, The Artist, 9 (9 May 1807), 6–7. For Northcote on Boydell as ‘a true patron of the art’, see Hazlitt, Conversations of Northcote, in Howe, xi. 216.


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of cultural production, in which the complementarity between poetry and painting depends on the production and circulation of celebrity. In this section, I will reconstruct the role of literature in the field of art, looking at how it shaped agents and sites of cultural production. To follow literature’s trail in the late eighteenth-century field of art is to see it function as a guarantee against the uncertainty and risks involved in funding painters. Literature legitimizes their claims, reputations, and careers; it turns exhibition spaces into scenes of reading or rational recreations for a polite society. If rhetorical strategies posited an antithesis between the Royal Academy and the literary galleries, painters’ positions suggest a complementary relationship: where the literary galleries gain in prestige and recognition from the participation of Royal Academicians, the Royal Academy’s disinterested stance relies on the financial backing of commerce. In other words, the literary galleries exhibit the other side of the field of cultural production. At the Royal Academy, literature played an important role at the level of policies and strategic statements, but it was almost irrelevant at the level of individual practice. The cultural policy of the Academy as an institution can be reconstructed from the premiums for the best historical painting. The premiums were assigned on the day that marked the Academy’s foundation and the subjects were chosen by the President and Council. While themes from British history were usually chosen for the prize instituted at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in 1759,⁵⁹ the Royal Academy opted for literary themes. Initially, the choice fell on classical sources. Even the exception, the 1772 Coriolanus Taking leave of his Family, conformed to classical expectations. Yet throughout the 1780s the Academy switched to English literature, with three subjects from Shakespeare, followed by one each from Paradise Lost, ‘Dryden’s Ode’, and Caractacus.⁶⁰ While such a choice shaped a collective strategy, it failed to inform the practice of individual painters. The discrepancy is remarkable when one turns to the paintings submitted as Diploma pieces. Because such paintings were a requirement for painters to be elected to RA membership, they are revealing strategic statements. Between 1771 and 1790, neither Shakespearean nor English themes feature among ⁵⁹ Allan and Abbott (eds.), The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences, 101–3. ⁶⁰ Royal Academy Archives, Council Minutes, CM i. 23–4, 277, 319, 352; ii. 18, 20 (20 May 1769 passim). See also General Assemblies, GA i. 298, 331–3 (10 Dec. 1972, 1 Dec. 1794). For a list of the premiums, see S. Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy (London, 1968), 411–15.

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Diploma paintings.⁶¹ Further confirmation of this discrepancy comes from the Academy’s annual exhibitions. If Shakespeare topped the choice of literary subjects, literary pictures were far outnumbered by portraits and landscapes. The gulf between programmatic statements and the poor showing of historical painting at the annual exhibitions was blamed on commissions. Where the Academy was criticized for failing to redirect patronage towards commissioning public images, the literary galleries stepped in, took on the Academy’s concern for historical painting, and offered alternative sources of income. The idea of combining the art and book market in the form of a literary gallery was first broached at a dinner at Alderman Boydell’s in December 1786. According to Joseph Farington, it was remarked that the French had presented the works of their distinguished authors to the world in a much more respectable manner than the English had done. Shakespere was mentioned, and several present said they would give 100 guineas for a fine edition of Shakespere. Being wound up by the conversation Alderman Boydell expressed a desire to undertake it, which was warmly encouraged.⁶²

Subscription schemes had originated in the book market as ways of funding expensive editions, often involving engraved illustrations. As Tim Clayton argues, this method tested the market to check the popularity of authors, who, in turn, benefited from the funding. During the eighteenth century, subscription took off as a method for financing art through engraved reproductions. From James Thornhill to Hogarth, Benjamin West, and Angelica Kauffman, art depended on what Fuseli termed ‘the luxuriance of the printshop’.⁶³ The literary galleries were marketed as recognizable commodities within the print market. Boydell’s stock includes the two most significant precedents in the adaptation of literature into a series of pictures and prints: Hogarth’s Progresses and the series engraved after Joseph ⁶¹ The Diploma piece was not a requirement for the first thirty-six members nominated by George III when the Royal Academy was founded. For a list of Diploma pieces, see Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy, app. , pp. 405–9; for reproductions of the Diploma pieces, see Royal Academy of Arts, Paintings and Sculpture in the Diploma and Gibson Galleries (London, 1931). ⁶² Diary entry for 12 Sept. 1798, F iii. 1057. ⁶³ Fuseli, ‘Dunciad of Painting—Four Fragments’, in Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. M. Bircher and K. S. Guthke (Zurich, 1973), 80. On subscription, see Clayton, The English Print, 52–7, 86–9, 198–200; on Kauffman, see D. Alexander, ‘Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in W. Wassyng Roworth (ed.), Angelica Kauffman: A Continental Artist in Georgian England (London, 1993), 141–78.


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Highmore’s pictures from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; at the gallery, besides Shakespeare, Boydell also exhibited scenes from Tom Jones.⁶⁴ Furthermore, a newspaper announcement defined Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery ‘a Collection of the Beauties of Shakspeare’.⁶⁵ This formulation connected Boydell’s Gallery not only with Robert Smirke’s The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare,⁶⁶ but also with the culture of anthologies which had been booming since the reform of the copyright laws. In an article entitled ‘The Competition of Bell, Boydell, and Macklin’, The Times attributed to Bell ‘the revival of, if not the original taste for, fine Painting and elegant Book Establishments in England’. Having ‘awakened public curiosity, and invited emulation’, Bell stimulated the demand satisfied by ‘the present spirited plans of B and M’ as part of the process of dissemination and democratization of culture brought about by competition, ‘honest ambition, and judicious speculation’.⁶⁷ The link was embraced by Bell three years later, when he offered ‘Shakspearean Collectors and Admirers’ ‘Sets of Prints, fine Impressions, adapted to each of Shakspere’s Plays; which may be bound up with any Edition of his Works’—including ‘Boydell’s Edition, or any of the smaller Publications’—‘or added to them as a Supplementary Volume of Embellishments’.⁶⁸ Bell’s advertisement gives an insight into the material culture of books at the time. Instead of buying ready-made editions, buyers could interleave the text they owned with series of prints, or individual prints coming from miscellaneous sources.⁶⁹ Thus the relationship between text and illustration and the boundaries of books was quite dynamic and could be specified to individual tastes. ⁶⁴ On Boydell’s acquisition of Hogarth’s works, see Clayton, The English Print, 209; Highmore’s Pamela is listed in Boydell and Boydell, A Catalogue of Historical Prints, 72. Downman’s pictures from Tom Jones are mentioned in GM 40/2 (Dec. 1790), 1089. ⁶⁵ St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 30 Apr.–2 May 1789, 4. ⁶⁶ The Picturesque Beauties of Shakespeare being a Selection of Scenes from the Works of that Great Author; intended to contain the Most Striking Incidents and Descriptions of each Play; in Oval Prints (London, 1783–7). ⁶⁷ The Times, 13 Dec. 1790. ⁶⁸ The Oracle, 8 Apr. 1793; also quoted in Dias, ‘John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery’, 270 n., where she discusses extra-illustrated editions of Boydell’s Shakespeare. ⁶⁹ Both Macklin and Boydell priced individual numbers of the galleries at 3 guineas to include four capital prints, whereas Bowyer’s numbers cost 1 guinea for one capital historic print, and other materials, see P by T M, no 39 Fleet Street, for Publishing a Series of Prints illustrative of the Most Celebrated British Poets (1 Jan. 1787), V&A, sig. 200 B 280; for Boydell’s prospectus issued on 1 May 1789, see Boydell, A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (1789), 2; ‘Sketch of Mr Bowyer’s Prospectus’, in Exhibition of Pictures Painted for Bowyer’s Magnificent Edition of the History of England (London, 1795), 15.

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Through this process of extra-illustration, books enabled collectors to arrange their prints in however loose a relationship with the letterpress. As a result, books became the collectors’ paper galleries. The market and genres of extra-illustration shaped Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery of Hume’s History of England more than any other literary gallery. Bringing history before the eyes of readers had proved a very profitable activity for the print market, which quickly responded to the demand for ‘heads’ of illustrious people, coins and topographic views to paste onto interleaved sheets in history books following the parameters set by James Granger in his History of England (hence the term ‘Grangerization’). Newspaper advertisements for Bowyer’s Historic Gallery competed with advertisements such as ‘Portraits to Granger. This day is published No 1 of E P, to be accurately engraved from Scarce Prints, or from Original Pictures, as described in Granger’s Biographical History of England, with many additional ones not hitherto mentioned.’⁷⁰ Bowyer’s Gallery targeted the same buyers: in addition to one capital historical print, each number contained ‘one or more Vignettes, Portraits, Views of Naval Engagements, Monuments, Ruins, Coins or Medals’. Besides newly commissioned portraits by contemporary painters, the Historic Gallery reprinted the illustrious persons of the past as depicted by ‘Reubens, Vandyke, Janssen, Lely, Kneller, Sir Joshua Reynolds …’.⁷¹ As for the capital prints, the undertaking would follow the style of ‘the celebrated prints of the Death of General Wolfe, and the Battles of the Boyne and La Hogue’.⁷² In the 1770s these had been announced as part of a series of prints West was to choose from British history, a series which failed to be published.⁷³ Though the Historic Gallery set out to illustrate Hume’s History, it sometimes integrated Hume with Rapin, thus looking back to its first predecessor: Arthur Pond’s illustration of Rapin’s History of England, its continuations and supplements at the suggestion of George Vertue.⁷⁴ All the literary galleries shaped their marketing strategies so as to complement Bell and other purveyors of prints for extra-illustration, yet the miscellaneous offer of Bowyer’s ⁷⁰ The Times, 10 Jan. 1792. ⁷¹ Roman, ‘Pictures for Private Purses’, 44–5. ⁷² ‘Sketch of Mr Bowyer’s Prospectus’, in R. Bowyer, Exhibition of Pictures Painted for Bowyer’s Magnificent Edition of the History of England (London, 1795), 15. ⁷³ See the 1778 proposals quoted in Clayton, The English Print, 240. ⁷⁴ L. Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London (New Haven, 1983), 149–53, 156, 191 n.


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numbers more closely responded to the subject matter cherished by antiquarians and extra-illustrators, whereas Macklin and Boydell offered a more homogeneous visual product. The marketing of the literary galleries also placed literary pictures and prints within a circuit of visual entertainments. An account tracing the idea of the Shakspeare Gallery to the 1769 Shakspeare Jubilee is a case in point.⁷⁵ To follow Shakespeare’s trail is to see exhibitions emerging among other forms of visual spectacle that transformed the Bard’s productions into a number of entertainments and a resource of national heritage. Shakespeare had already been a choice for pictures exhibited in the Royal Pavilion at the Vauxhall Gardens in the 1760s, but it was down to the entrepreneurial spirit of the actor David Garrick to exploit the Bard as a source of conspicuous consumption with the idea of a Shakespeare Jubilee. The entertainment Garrick organized for the event featured a procession of characters from the Bard’s plays, the plots of the plays summarized in dumbshows and finally a temple with an altar where the main scenes were represented.⁷⁶ As theatre emulated the dumb performances of painting, the boundaries between the two media were blurred. Garrick’s acting cultivated the technique of the climactic moment, pausing into a series of arrested images, an analogy that a review of the Shakspeare Gallery was quick to turn to Boydell’s advantage: ‘What a gratification would it have been to the late David Garrick … Garrick in his own person exhibited more characters from our divine poet than any other man; but Mr Boydell’s exhibition gives us still more, and more opposite in their natures, and various in their appearances.’⁷⁷ Probably engineered by Boydell himself, the review capitalizes on Garrick’s celebrity the way others use epigraphs from Shakespeare as comments endorsing the exhibition. Garrick himself had carefully taken advantage of print culture in constructing, commodifying, and marketing his own image as Shakespeare’s greatest interpreter.⁷⁸ By the time Boydell initiated the Shakspeare Gallery, theatrical performances of Shakespeare generated ⁷⁵ Boydell and Boydell, A Collection of Prints for illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare. ⁷⁶ J. von Archenholz, A Picture of England: Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs, and Manners of England (London, 1789), ii. 164–6. ⁷⁷ The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 8 May 1789. ⁷⁸ For Garrick’s investment in pictures and prints as part of a celebrity industry, see G. D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860 (Basingstoke, 2001), 35–7.

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a substantial demand for prints portraying celebrity actors and famous scenes. Portraits of Shakespeare and Garrick prefaced the editions published by Bell during the 1770s and 1780s, ranging from the nine volumes of Shakespeare’s plays ‘as they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London’ (1773, 1774, 1775–8) to the twenty-one volume Bell’s British Theatre (1776–8, 1780–1, 1790–7), to a twentyvolume literary edition combining prefaces, poems, and other materials from the first Folio and the editions of Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warton, with texts as established by Johnson and Steevens (1785–8). Published in numbers and by subscription, these editions included engravings of scenes from the plays and ‘character prints’, i.e. portraits of famous actors caught in significant attitudes, which could also be bound in a separate volume.⁷⁹ In addition, theatrical portraits were in rich supply on the walls of the Royal Academy exhibitions. While such widely disseminated and differentiated visual productions showed the potential market Boydell’s initiative could count on, it was essential for him to distinguish his wares, hence the patriotic appeal of historical painting. Differentiated from portraiture, his paintings would enjoy a higher cultural appeal. Attempts to purify art from commerce stand against a shared aesthetics of display. Foreigners visiting the capital compared shop windows to galleries and cabinets of curiosities.⁸⁰ Indeed, Thomas Macklin called his shop ‘Gallery of Poets’ much as Bowyer metamorphosed his printshop into ‘the Historic Gallery’ before they both opened premises on Pall Mall. The case of the Shakspeare Gallery is slightly different, given its premises were a purpose-built ‘Museum’ which emulated the roof lighting pioneered by the Royal Academy’s exhibition space at Somerset House (1780).⁸¹ From the outside the façade embellished the entrance surmounted by Thomas Banks’s monument. Yet Dias argues that for all its monumental appeal Banks’s Shakespeare between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting participated in the iconography of street signs, blurring the distinction between Boydell’s ‘Museum’ and ⁷⁹ K. A. Burnim and P. H. Highfill, Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in His Editions of Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre (Carbondale, Ill., 1998). ´ des arts en Angleterre (Paris, 1755), 184–6; K. P. Moritz, ⁸⁰ A. Rouquet, L’Etat Reisen eines Deutschen in England im Jahr 1782 (Berlin, 1783), quoted in J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London, 1997), p. xxvii; La Roche, Sophie in London, 237. ⁸¹ The World, 14 May 1788.


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the shops in the street.⁸² Such visual continuities underscored what such commercial visual arenas shared with other commercial premises, for the success of a gallery could well depend on whether it fitted within the viewers’ shopping itinerary.⁸³ The status of exhibitions—sometimes sites of recreation, sometimes retail outlets—defines the field in which the literary galleries confronted the Royal Academy. At first sight, the difference suggests a polar opposition between commerce and a disinterested aesthetic sphere. However, this clear-cut distinction was wittily challenged by James Gillray in his 1789 caricature Shakespeare Sacrificed;—or—The Offering to Avarice (BMC 7584). The print depicts Boydell burning Shakespeare’s works as an offering to Avarice. Subsuming Boydell’s activity to Avarice rather than ‘industry’ or ‘frugality’ means denying the transubstantiation of personal interest into public benefit. From the smoke loom images which allude to the pictures hung at the Shakspeare Gallery. The centre of the print is circumscribed by a circle bearing the Greek motto placed at the entrance of the Great Room at Somerset House: ‘Let no stranger to the muses enter’. Applied to the Shakspeare Gallery, this motto doubly debunks the field of art. On the one hand, by identifying the space of the Shakspeare Gallery with the Royal Academy exhibition, it elides the distinction between the disinterested ethos displayed at the Academy and the commercial interest at the heart of Boydell’s Gallery. On the other hand, by defining the ‘friends of the muses’ as those who can read Greek,⁸⁴ the circle denies the inclusiveness claimed by literary gallery advertisements; instead, it uncovers the ground the literary galleries share with the Royal Academy, emphasizing the boundaries of taste and distinction. If the 1s. entrance fee charged to enter both exhibitions was meant to discourage the lower strata, subscription to the Shakspeare edition entitled one to perpetual access, thus further controlling the ⁸² Dias, ‘ ‘‘A World of Pictures’’: Pall Mall and the Topography of Display’, and ‘John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery’, 59–60. ⁸³ In March 1799, Mary Berry commented: ‘the Lyceum is out of the way; and besides, it is not near Dyde’s and Scribe’s, nor Butler’s, nor any of the great haberdashers for the women, nor Bond St. nor St. James’ St. for the men’, in Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry from the Year 1783 to 1852, ed. T. Lewis, 3 vols. (London, 1865), ii. 87, quoted in F. Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (London, 1976), 25. ⁸⁴ ‘An Epigrammatick I on the M over the Door of the Exhibition Room, at Somerset-Place’, ‘Poets Corner’, St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 20–2 May 1788. See G. Unverfehrt, ‘Shakespeare Sacrificed: Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in Gillray’s Caricatures’, in The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 161–73.

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social composition of the public. In the corner behind the Alderman are two children representing Painting pushing Engraving out of the circle. Through this allegory, Gillray represented and challenged the hierarchical distinctions between the arts at the Royal Academy, where engravers were barred full membership on the ground that their art was mechanical rather than liberal.⁸⁵ Shakespeare Sacrificed challenges such distinctions in what amounts to a personal inscription in the field of art. Because it is the first work Gillray signs since his illustrations of Tom Jones and Nancy Packet, this signature acknowledges visual satire as an artistic medium. The inscription below the print announces the publication of the first number of ‘Shakespeare Illustrated, with the Text, annotations, etc. complete; the Engravings to be carried on in imitation of the Alderman’s liberal plan’. A parody of the format of Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery, Gillray’s parallel publication plan undermines the threshold between high and low art, defying the distinction and separation between painting and engraving, Grand Style and caricature.⁸⁶ Confirming Gillray’s move to conflate the space of the Academy with the literary gallery schemes, the literary galleries made good use of the Royal Academy in negotiating their claim to the field of art. First of all, Royal Academicians figured prominently on their prospectuses. Securing the work of the Royal Academy President Sir Joshua Reynolds was the crucial move, one that best encapsulates Gillray’s critique, given the President’s stated position against commerce. In November 1786 Boydell paid a 500 guineas down-payment to Reynolds for Macbeth and the Witches. In January 1787 the Public Advertiser publicized pictures by Reynolds in the first four numbers of the Shakspeare Gallery. For the Gallery of Poets Macklin was so keen to have Reynolds that he accepted to adapt The Vestal as an illustration of Mr Gregory’s Ode to Meditation, but the newspapers were quick to point out that it had been conceived and painted for other purposes. In The Cottagers, Reynolds depicted Macklin’s family in a setting that illustrated Thomson’s ‘Autumn’ from The Seasons. Reynolds’s The Holy Family, exhibited at the Gallery of Poets in 1789, launched Macklin’s Bible project.⁸⁷ Whereas Reynolds was a reluctant participant, Benjamin West took full advantage of the ⁸⁵ CM i. 9 (19 Jan. 1769). ⁸⁶ BMC, no. 7584. For an analysis of Shakespeare Sacrificed, see Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, 49–57; Unverfehrt, ‘Shakespeare sacrificed’, 161–74. ⁸⁷ St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 17–19 Apr. 1788; The Times, 21 Apr. 1788. See M. Postle, ‘The ‘‘Modern Apelles’’ and the ‘‘Modern Maecenas’’: Reynolds,


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commercial opportunities offered by the print market: he contributed two pictures to the Shakspeare Gallery, four to Macklin’s Bible, and two to Bowyer’s Historic Gallery. Unlike Reynolds, West also advocated commerce in public in his first lecture as Royal Academy President.⁸⁸ Second, where Gillray inscribes the Royal Academy exhibition within a literary gallery scheme, exhibitions configured the field of art as a series of complementary sites. Claiming to found a British School of Historical Painting, the literary galleries contrasted their coherent monographic exhibitions to the chaotic and miscellaneous display at the Royal Academy. Many painters contributed to both the institution and the commercial galleries. By exhibiting at the literary galleries, Academicians sanctioned these exhibition spaces as venues for high art. In fact, commenting on Boydell’s initiative, one reviewer argued that ‘if the President and West, wide, very wide, as the distance is between these artists, should withdraw their assistance, the undertaking is at once knocked on its head’.⁸⁹ While the contribution of Academicians was essential to the literary galleries, it was considered detrimental to the Academy. Owing to the opening of Macklin’s Gallery of Poets, the 1788 RA exhibition was said to lack ‘many excellent pictures, exhibited in private Collections:—Macklin only, takes away three R.A.’s of the general Exhibitors, beside the President’.⁹⁰ The following year, the RA exhibition was declared ‘inferior to any of the late Exhibitions of the Academy’ because the best artists were working for Boydell: ‘who will regret, that instead of dull and insignificant portraits, the English masters are now employed with the ardour and enthusiasm that belong to the subject, in the illustration of Shakespeare’.⁹¹ On the other hand, the literary galleries also took advantage of the Royal Academy exhibition to advertise their initiatives. Coverage of the 1786 exhibition celebrates Boydell’s patronage of the arts by way of Northcote’s The Children in the Tower from Richard III : Boydell and Macklin’, in Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge, 1995), 234–272, and Ch. 2 in this volume. ⁸⁸ B. West, A Discourse delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy (London, 1793), p. iii. ⁸⁹ Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 16 Dec. 1786. ⁹⁰ Morning Herald, 16 Apr. 1788; see also The Times, 18 Apr. 1788, 3; Morning Chronicle, 2 May 1788; see Postle, Reynolds: The Subject Pictures, 238–9. ⁹¹ The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 28 Apr. 1789; see also St. James’s Chronicle, 25–8 Apr. 1789.

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It is said to have been purchased by Alderman Boydell, who by his many excellent publications, and the very liberal encouragement he has given to the artists of his country, has been the means of spreading their reputation throughout Europe; so that they now stand high in fame with the neighbouring nations; and their works are sought after, in preference to those of any contemporary artists.⁹²

A few months later, the picture features among modern paintings hanging at ‘Alderman Boydell’s Gallery’, exemplifying Boydell’s role as a talent scout for young painters.⁹³ In 1789 Boydell finds his way into reviews of the Royal Academy exhibition, either because they indicate that West’s sketch from King Lear is meant for the Shakspeare Gallery, or because they report the printseller’s conspicuous purchase of Reynolds’s pictures.⁹⁴ In 1792 the Royal Academy exhibited a portrait of Robert Bowyer just before his Historic Gallery opened. As gallery catalogues ceased to be published after 1795, Farington suggested that Bowyer should use the Royal Academy to advertise his gallery. Four Historic Gallery pictures were shown at the Royal Academy, though only one title acknowledged Bowyer’s scheme.⁹⁵ Between 1796 and 1800, other publishers took advantage of the free showcase offered by the Royal Academy exhibitions, making sure that catalogue entries mentioned the illustrated editions pictures had been commissioned for.⁹⁶ In addition, the literary galleries profited from newspaper coverage of the RA exhibition in a number of ways. For instance, newspapers reviews of the 1798 Royal Academy exhibition informed viewers that Smirke’s The Seven Ages of Man, from Shakespeare (RA 1798, no. 88) had been bought by Boydell for the Shakspeare Gallery.⁹⁷ As a result, the articles implicitly invited viewers to follow the pictures going from the Academy to the commercial gallery and ⁹² Public Advertiser, 11 May 1786. ⁹³ Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 14 Nov. 1786, and for Boydell’s role in supporting new promises, see St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 5–7 May 1789. ⁹⁴ On Boydell’s purchases, see The World, 27 Apr. 1789; Public Advertiser, 28 Apr. 1789; The Diary; or, Woodfall’s Register, 29 Apr. 1789; London Chronicle, 30 Apr. 1789; and The World, 28 Apr. 1789, which also mentions West’s Lear as intended for Boydell’s Shakespeare. ⁹⁵ RA 1797, no. 257; the other Historic Gallery pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy are RA 1796 no. 190; 1797 nos. 257 and 429; 1798 no. 26. See F iii. 763, 766 (5 and 9 Feb. 1797), and Hutton, ‘Robert Bowyer and the Historic Gallery’, 299–307. ⁹⁶ RA 1796, nos. 492, 496; RA 1797, no. 257; RA 1799, nos. 157, 369, 374, 402, 859, 870; RA 1800, nos. 85, 172, 311–13, 406. ⁹⁷ True Briton, 30 Apr. 1798.


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thus blurred the distinction between the disinterested aesthetic sphere of the former and Boydell’s commercial repository, turning the Academy exhibition into a temporary showroom for the entrepreneur’s wares. The relationship between exhibition and commerce harks back to a long-standing practice in marketing engravings: the subscription was launched during the exhibition season, so that prospective subscribers could peruse the pictures on display at the exhibition, while printsellers took advantage of their newspaper coverage.⁹⁸ Finally, the Royal Academy and the literary galleries had a complementary function in establishing and furthering artists’ reputations. Not only did the literary galleries take care to profit from artists exhibiting at the Royal Academy, commissioning pictures in the genres for which they had established a reputation, but they sometimes went so far as to acquire new versions of pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy. For instance, Fuseli features with the first picture at Macklin’s Gallery of Poets, a remake of his 1781 Royal Academy exhibit Queen Catherine’s vision from Shakespear’s Hen. 8th , act 5th (RA 1781, no. 118). Furthermore, Fuseli’s Death of Beaufort also follows from his first submission to the Royal Academy (RA 1774, no. 90). In this case, however, another factor enters into the equation: competition between literary galleries and between painters. Reynolds’s Death of Cardinal Beaufort exhibited at Boydell’s in 1789 is a case in point. According to Dias, Reynolds’s choice may have been dictated by his rivalry with Fuseli. For Reynolds’s Beaufort sidestepped his first commissions: Macbeth and the Witches was exhibited only after Reynolds’s death, and the closet scene featuring Hamlet, the Queen, and the Ghost is also a late addition, while Fuseli’s paintings from the two plays were on show when the gallery first opened and his ghost was praised for its terrible lifelike effect on spectators. Yet Reynolds’s Beaufort was nonetheless assessed against the supernatural performances of Fuseli. Dias suggests that Beaufort enabled Reynolds to challenge Fuseli’s The night-mare with a deathbed scene that gave him a chance to display his engagement with a famous old-master picture, Poussin’s Death of Germanicus.⁹⁹ The night-mare itself had been the second of two paintings with which Fuseli responded to Reynolds’s 1781 Death of Dido, a picture he had already rivalled with his own Death of Dido exhibited that same year. Later, in 1793, spectators could compare Reynolds’s and Fuseli’s competitions on Shakespearean ⁹⁸ Clayton, The English Print, 198. ⁹⁹ Dias, ‘John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery’, 121–33, 185.

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ground: if at Boydell’s Reynolds’s Macbeth ‘is not aided by its vicinity to the bold enthusiasm of F’s first scene of the same subject’, it is also up for comparison with Fuseli’s own Death of Beaufort at Bowyer’s Historic Gallery.¹⁰⁰ Much like painters, galleries also ventured onto one another’s territory: while Shakespeare could easily offer pictures to the Historic Gallery, Macklin displayed Bunbury’s Shakespeare, whereas, as we will see, Boydell’s repertoire added ‘the first heroic poet’ to the ‘first dramatic poet’. Indeed, not only did literature offer subjects for painters, but it also shaped the identity and claims of exhibition spaces, providing a testing ground where agents and sites would build their reputation. As we have seen, Fuseli’s exhibits at the Royal Academy were part of an astute strategy. At the time when he was an outsider, he singled out the President of the Royal Academy as the one to challenge in the field of historical painting. Fuseli’s claim to academic status can be gauged from the choice of Michelangelo’s style and of literary motifs that would qualify him as a cultural operator in the highest genres. The Royal Academy exhibition offered him an arena of competition where his sensationalist choices made him stand out as a painter of the sublime, the ghostly, and the terrific, as Martin Myrone argues.¹⁰¹ By the time he was commissioned to paint pictures for the Shakspeare Gallery, Fuseli had a consolidated profile as the pre-eminent painter of the supernatural. In the next section, I will concentrate on Fuseli’s strategic moves within the field of art as a way into the Milton Gallery project.

F U S E L I ’ S M I LTO N G A L L E RY I have and am Contributing to make the Public drop their gold in purses not my own … There are, Says Mr. West but two ways of working Successfully, that is lastingly, in this Country for an Artist; the one is to paint for the king, the other to meditate a Scheme of Your own. The first he has monopolized, in the Second he is not idle: witness the prints from English History and the Late advertisement of Allegorical prints to be published ¹⁰⁰ For the Macbeths, see The Oracle, 6 Apr. 1793; for the Beauforts, see The World, 25 Sept. 1793, and Hutton, ‘Robert Bowyer and the Historic Gallery’, 109. ¹⁰¹ M. Myrone, ‘The Sublime as Spectacle: The Transformation of Ideal Art at Somerset House’, in Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line, 77–91.


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from his designs by Bartolozzi. In imitation of So great a Man, I am determined to lay, hatch and Crack an egg for myself too … a Series of Pictures for Exhibition, such as Boydells and Macklins. (Fuseli to William Roscoe, 17 August 1790)

The plan to turn Milton into a literary gallery emerges as a response to the British art scene, as Fuseli described it to his main patron, the dissenting Liverpool banker and abolitionist author William Roscoe. However, his literary and visual engagement with Milton has a much longer history. The literary encounter dates to his education at Collegium Carolinum in Zurich under Johann Jacob Bodmer, translator of Milton in German and theorist of the sublime; the visual adaptation starts in Rome in the 1770s: witness the Roman album, where the Sistine Chapel provides a template for his Shakespeare Memorial. These cosmopolitan encounters take on a new shape in the London scene of the late 1780s, where Fuseli envisages his visual engagement with Milton as ‘a Series of Pictures for Exhibition, such as Boydells and Macklin’s’. Between 1783 and 1785, Fuseli described the dynamics of the art world in four poetic fragments entitled The Dunciad of Painting. Through Pope’s Dunciad the artist compares the art market with Grub Street, much as Hogarth’s 1746 auction ticket satire The Battle of Pictures had compared art and book market as depicted in Swift’s The Battle of Books.¹⁰² The commercial alliance of painter and engraver is satirized by singling out the painter Angelica Kauffman and the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi: Where London pours her motley Myriads, Trade With fell Luxuriance the Printshop spread: There as the wedded elm and the tendril’d vine Angelica and Bartolozzi twine.103

The sexual undertone of the image recalls Fuseli’s account of Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts, where the perverting agency of the arts born of luxury is amplified into a narrative of sexual enticement. According to Fuseli’s description they ‘fettered the mind to unnatural wants, and adulterated the manners’—‘rosy harlots, who by coaxing ¹⁰² Paulson, Hogarth, ii. 231 and pl. 99; M. Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994), 46. ¹⁰³ H. Fuseli, ‘Dunciad of Painting’, 80.

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and magic embraces give momentary springs and elasticity to those limbs which their abyss of pleasures sucked into languishment and impotence’.¹⁰⁴ However, in The Dunciad of Painting the gender roles are reversed, and the perverting and enervating agency of the arts is transferred to the ‘luxuriance of the printshop’, the alliance of painter and engraver. This representation of the dynamics of the art market positions painting (Angelica) as the noble elm and the printshop (Bartolozzi) as a parasitic agent which feeds on painting and simultaneously chokes it.¹⁰⁵ As we shall see, the British poets helped Fuseli reconfigure that narrative of commercial vice assailing liberal virtue by giving consistency of purpose to a subscription plan that would finance painters and engravers engaged in long-term projects. Fuseli’s fluid ideological affiliations can be read as a plot of selfadvancement by mapping his several positions within the field of cultural production. In 1767 Fuseli’s paraphrase and amplification of Rousseau’s civic humanist denunciation of the arts as luxury position him as a would-be mediator of Continental art in Britain; in 1783–5 his witty adaptation of Pope ennobles the painter at the expense of the engraver; in 1790 his letter to Roscoe shows the painter taking advantage of commerce. In The Political Theory of Painting, Barrell explores civic humanism as ‘a mode of thinking or writing which may coexist, whether comfortably or in conflict, with other discourses within the same text’.¹⁰⁶ Reading Fuseli’s Royal Academy Lectures, Barrell identifies two voices in Fuseli: the ‘stoic guardian of public virtue’ and ‘the victim of history, rather than its critic, who sees himself as inescapably part of the corruption he attacks’. It is not by chance that Fuseli’s academic persona should voice authority in the mode of civic humanism. Because the Lectures are uttered in the aftermath of the Milton Gallery, their civic humanist denunciation of the decline of contemporary art may be read as a palinody, if not a repudiation of the commercial paradigm.¹⁰⁷ Yet, while this may be a factor, it is worth reading Fuseli’s public statements as tactical moves within the field of art. If civic humanism is the game to play at the Academy, Fuseli’s discrepant characterizations of the Milton Gallery answer the different purposes the exhibition embodied at different moments in his career. The commerce-driven ¹⁰⁴ H. Fuseli, Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau (1767), ed. Karl S. Guthke, Augustan Reprint Society, 82 (Los Angeles, 1960), 10. ¹⁰⁵ For the Bartolozzi–Kauffman artistic partnership, see Alexander, ‘Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, 141–78. ¹⁰⁶ Barrell, Political Theory of Painting, 9. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid. 258–307.


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initiative Fuseli envisions in his private correspondence with Roscoe takes on civic humanist features of disinterestedness when presented to the public: In the present age, when painting is degenerated almost into a trade for getting money, and the Artist’s study is become a mere shop for portrait painting, the real lovers of the art must feel great pleasure in visiting the Milton Gallery, where they will find that one Artist, at least, retains some of the enthusiasm of his profession, and must have devoted a large portion of his time to the highest department of it. To embody the imagery of our great heroic Bard, to render his thoughts visible, and to give to airy nothings ‘a local habitation and a name’ must be allowed to be an effort of genius almost equal to the Poet himself. This high praise, however, Mr Fuseli may justly claim, whose exhibition we consider as a national honour, and we are happy to find that all ranks of people have sufficient taste to admire, and liberality to encourage it.108

In 1790 Fuseli counted on the private sector, whereas in 1799 he was carefully juggling two competing and complementary worlds. While ‘all ranks of people’ failed, in fact, to ‘admire’ such ‘national honour’, there is a tension between the disinterested pose of the artist rising above art degenerated into a trade and the need for ‘liberality to encourage it’, a familiar motif recalling Boydell, Macklin, and Bowyer. Why does Fuseli depart so drastically from their marketing strategies by sounding such a civic humanist contempt of commerce? While he was desperate for the exhibition to generate income, as we shall see, his one-man-show also served as a stepping stone towards the professorship of painting at the Royal Academy. It is a claim to such status that explains Fuseli’s civic humanist attitude, best embodied in the Platonic motto quoted in Greek on the frontispiece of the Gallery catalogue: ‘and this sound of these words re-echoes within me and prevents my hearing any other words’.¹⁰⁹ Out of context, the passage claims the presence of Milton’s words in Fuseli’s mind. In addition, the Greek quotation also claims such presence for the gallery as an enactment of those words, suggesting that the pictures evoke the words in the minds of the viewers. If contextualized, however, the passage makes Fuseli, the Milton Gallery, and the gallery-goers (those, at least, who could read Greek) occupy the subject position of Socrates facing death in order to uphold the words of the law, rather than heed Crito’s invitation to flee. In this sense, Fuseli, ¹⁰⁸ Morning Chronicle, 17 June 1799. ¹⁰⁹ Crito 54d, in Plato, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), i. 190–1.

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Milton, and the gallery-goers find at the gallery a terrain for the exercise of the highest model of citizenship. Though the visual cycle dates back to the 1770s and the prospectus was published in 1791, by the time the Milton Gallery opened in 1799 and 1800 the season of the literary galleries was nearing its end. By then Fuseli could scarcely expect a commercial success. Back in 1795 Farington had noted that the Macklin and Bowyer Galleries were selling at auctions for two-thirds of their original price (F ii. 456). Boydell blamed the difficulty on the aftermath of the French Revolution, which disrupted the export patterns of the print market on the Continent. Within a few months of the Milton Gallery opening, Macklin folded in a lottery.¹¹⁰ In 1790 Fuseli envisaged a plan somewhat different from that of the galleries he was emulating. To follow Macklin and Boydell initially meant to advertise an exhibition financed by subscription. Only later did Fuseli link the pictures to an illustrated edition and a series of prints by subscription: it will be necessary that I should have it in my power to work without Commission or any View of intermediate gain for, at least, three years—in which time, I am Certain, of producing at least twenty Pictures of different dimensions—the Question is what will enable me to Live in the mean time? With less than three hundred a year Certain, I cannot do it. My idea is to get a Set of Men (twenty perhaps, less if possible, but not more) to Subscribe towards it. Suppose twenty pounds each annually, to be repaid either by small pictures, or drawings or the profits of the Exhibition, Should it Succeed, of which there can be no very great doubt. Such is, at present, the rude outline of my Scheme. (CEL 61)

Impressed with Fuseli’s Shakespearean pictures for Boydell, the dissenting publisher Joseph Johnson volunteered to be ‘one of six or even of three to support him in it’ (CEL 62). A year later, this support had transformed the Milton Gallery into another publishing venture associated to the publication of an illustrated edition. While Fuseli was responsible for the illustrations, Johnson asked William Cowper to supervise the text (CEL 65–6). A prospectus for subscription was published on 1 September 1791: ¹¹⁰ The Times, 4 Jan. 1799. The Bible terminated in 1800 with Macklin’s death. The Boydells retired on 24 November 1803 (F vi. 2169) and the Shakspeare Gallery was sold by lottery on 28 January 1805. The Bowyer Gallery went through an acute crisis in 1796, but survived until 1806, when it was sold by lottery.


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proposals for engraving and publishing by subscription thirty capital plates, from subjects in Milton; to be painted principally, if not entirely, by Henry Fuseli, R.A. and for copying them in a reduced Size to accompany a correct and magnificent Edition, embellished also with Forty-five elegant Vignettes, of his Poetical works, with Notes, Illustrations, and Translations of the Italian and Latin Poems. By William Cowper … As soon as a sufficient Number of Paintings are finished to form an Exhibition, they will be placed in a Room for that Purpose, to be called the Milton Gallery.¹¹¹

The goal was a two-volume quarto edition of Milton published on vellum paper. Much like Boydell’s, Fuseli’s plan allowed for ‘the Choice … of subscribing for the large Plates only, or the Book and small Plates, or both’. The large plates (16 inches by 23) would be published in fifteen numbers at the price of 2 guineas each, with 1 guinea to be paid in advance on subscribing, while numbers featuring ‘two Plates, with about Seventy Pages of Text, and, on an Average, Three Vignettes would be priced at one guinea each’. Two numbers would be published annually starting in 1794 (P 2). The editorial venture never took off. By October 1791 Fuseli suggested he might align his Milton pictures with small-sized pictures to earn him a £100 annually for three or four years.¹¹² By February 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft expressed her doubts as to the prospects for its success in such a ‘puffing age’, when ‘schemes for printing works embellished with prints have lately been started with catch-penny eagerness’. Even if she thought that the publication of the first number would have ‘considerable effect towards filling the subscription’, she hoped for ‘a partner or two with money to speculate with’.¹¹³ Two numbers were advertised between January and May 1792: one containing Satan, Sin and Death engraved by William Sharp and Eve Starting from herself in the water to be engraved by Bartolozzi, the other Adam and Eve observed by Satan and Satan taking his flight upwards from Chaos intended for Blake.¹¹⁴ While the letters are crowded with Fuseli’s pressing requests ¹¹¹ Milton. Proposals for engraving and publishing by Subscription Thirty Capital Plates, from Subjects in Milton (P). The subscription plan is reprinted in N. Russell, A Bibliography of William Cowper to 1837 (Oxford, 1963), 178–9, but without the introductory text that is appended to the conditions for subscription. ¹¹² Fuseli to Roscoe, 1 Oct. 1791, CEL 73. This contradicts the image of a disinterested Romantic painter averse to the commercial system and to personal gain one finds in W. Carey, Cursory Thoughts on the Present State of the Fine Arts; occasioned by the Founding of the Liverpool Academy (Liverpool, 1810), 21. ¹¹³ Wollstonecraft to Roscoe, 14 Feb. 1792, CEL 79–80. ¹¹⁴ The Oracle, 13 Jan. 1792; CEL 81.

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and plans for partnerships to fund his scheme, and Joseph Johnson features as one of his referents,¹¹⁵ no more mention is made of the numbers, nor the editorial venture until July 1794, when its failure may be read in a generalizing remark: ‘the Printsellers have withdrawn Themselves and by the Printsellers we lived, for my Case is the Case of all History Painters here’(CEL 121). While in 1792 Fuseli had compared his difficulty to those incurred by Milton himself (CEL 82), in February 1795 he refused the comparison: ‘do not lay this to the unpopularity of Milton. He is here popular. H as not Boydell a Milton?’ (CEL 128). Boydell’s Milton prospectus, dated 3 September 1791, claims that ‘a magnificent Edition of M’ had been planned at the time of the Shakespeare proposals, and would have been announced when ‘nearer publication, but having been informed that Proposals for a similar plan have been advertised, they now think it their duty to give notice of their determination, to the Subscribers to the S, and the Public in general’.¹¹⁶ Coming two days after Joseph Johnson’s prospectus, there is no mistaking the reference. Yet, the rivalry between the publishers did not extend to the writers engaged in the respective projects. In December 1791, Cowper registered the situation and his lack of interest: ‘this squabble, in the mean time, between Fuseli and Boydell does not interest me at all, let it terminate as it may, I have only to perform my Jobb, and leave the event to be decided by the combatants’.¹¹⁷ In January 1792, The Oracle published an entry headed ‘The Miltons’: These grand Designs display so well the Taste and Talents of a Nation, that we say the more rivalry the better. The arrangements run thus: ¹¹⁵ See Fuseli to Roscoe, 26 Mar. 1794, CEL 106; for Johnson’s draft of the plan, see CEL 116. ¹¹⁶ London Chronicle, 6–8 Sept. 1791; see also St. James’s Chronicle; or, British EveningPost, 6–8 Sept. 1791. An expanded prospectus for Boydell’s Milton dated 2 January 1792 reiterated the hint at competition: see The World, 9 Jan. 1792; St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 7–10 Jan. 1792. The Victoria and Albert Museum houses a prospectus dated 15 May 1793, announcing publication within the next six months (V& A, sig. 103 B). In the meantime, a proposal for subscription to Paradise Lost with prints by Bartolozzi after Stothard and notes by the late William Shenstone was also advertised in The World, 13 Jan. 1792, dated 2 or 12 January 1792 (date scarcely legible); in Morning Chronicle, 21 Jan. 1792, Stothard is described as engaged in designs ‘for one of the Miltons’. ¹¹⁷ Cowper to Walter Bagot, 5 Dec. 1791, in The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1979–86), iii. 594.

Literary Galleries and the Field of Art J, F,

versus

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B. A E.

Literary Department C,

H.118

One month later, ‘on hearing, that we had been represented as rival biographers’, William Hayley wrote to Cowper.¹¹⁹ Collaboration rather than rivalry characterized Hayley’s and Cowper’s Milton work from then onwards. Not only did Cowper and Hayley share an interest in vindicating ‘Milton from the malignant asperity of his biographer’ Samuel Johnson, but they worked hand in hand. Cowper read and approved Hayley’s Life, while foreseeing that the publishers would take issue with its politics. Indeed, while he was allowed to print a separate edition of his Life of Milton in its entirety,¹²⁰ Hayley had to cut and reshape his text into ‘a meagre poetical life’. As it stands in Boydell’s edition, Hayley’s Life of Milton is purged of all its regicide subject matter, and adapted to royalist needs.¹²¹ As a result, the Boydell and Johnson circle ventures ended up being antagonistic despite the two writers. According to Hayley, the Johnson venture failed because of Cowper’s depression following the death of his friend and guardian Mrs Unwin.¹²² While this project was to wait for Hayley’s edited Cowper’s Milton of 1810, Boydell’s edition incorporated Cowper’s translations from Milton, though shunning the ideological framework that Cowper and Hayley had shared.¹²³ Boydell’s hint at competition suggests that he wanted to extend his hegemony of the illustrated book and the print markets so as to secure the commercialization of Milton. A 1793 prospectus presents Boydell’s Milton venture in the light of the Shakespearean one: ‘this national edition of our first Heroic Poet is intended as a companion to that of our ¹¹⁸ ‘The Miltons’, The Oracle, 10 Jan. 1792. I am grateful to Jon Mee for this reference. ¹¹⁹ Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Hayley, Esq., ed. J. Johnson, 2 vols. (London, 1823), i. 429; Hayley to Cowper, 7 Feb. 1792, in Cowper’s Milton, ed. W. Hayley, 4 vols. (Chichester, 1810), iv. 383–4; Hayley, Memoirs, i. 425–7. ¹²⁰ Hayley to Cowper, 12 Dec. 1793; see Memoirs, i. 450–1. ¹²¹ For a collation of the two editions, see J. A. Wittreich’s introduction to W. Hayley, The Life of Milton, ed. J. A. Wittreich, Jr. (Gainesville, Fla., 1970), pp. ix–x. ¹²² Cowper’s Milton, iv. 392. ¹²³ For Hayley’s influence on Cowper’s political interpretation of Milton, see J. King, ‘Cowper, Hayley, and Samuel Johnson’s ‘‘Republican’’ Milton’, SECC 17 (1987), 229–38. For an analysis of the political implications of the Milton Gallery, see below, Ch. 4.

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first Dramatic Poet’.¹²⁴ While the Shakspeare Gallery provided a canon of painters alongside an anthology of Shakespearean topics, Boydell’s Milton differs not only in providing a more systematic illustration of the author (a painting per book), but also in its choice of execution. Initially, Boydell’s prospectus had called for ‘the best engravers, after the designs of the first artists’; in the end, it commissioned Richard Westall to illustrate the whole text, thus emulating Fuseli’s one-painter formula. Westall’s drawings were exhibited at the Shakspeare Gallery in 1797 and in 1799, when the Milton Gallery was also open to the public.¹²⁵ A careful advertisement campaign publicized the Milton Gallery when it opened to the public in 1799 and 1800.¹²⁶ The choice to exhibit at James Christie’s Auction Room in Pall Mall positioned the gallery within a network of polite urban landmarks. Advertisements mentioned the site as the ‘Old Academy Rooms’, situated ‘near Carlton House’, the residence of the Prince of Wales.¹²⁷ While the position already placed the gallery at the heart of the exhibition scene, further work ensured newspaper coverage, starting with the newspapers that least favoured Fuseli’s output. On 19 May 1799 Farington interceded with John Taylor, former dramatic critic of the Morning Post, and owner of the True Briton. the True Briton had published very negative reviews of Fuseli’s pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy.¹²⁸ Taylor attended the opening of the exhibition. On 25 May a review appeared in the True Briton and 120 people attended the exhibition (F iv. 1228). Taylor’s suggestion to contact ‘Mr Dutton, Author of the literary census,—also … Mr Hill, author of the Monthly Mirror’ (F iv. 1225) secured a review in the May issue of the Monthly Mirror; the same piece was also published in the Morning Chronicle, which promised more detailed reviews to ¹²⁴ The 1793 prospectus planned thirty-six plates the size of the book. It would cost subscribers 12 guineas, two at the time of subscribing and two more on delivery of the first volume and then in proportion for the following two volumes (V&A, sig. 103 B). ¹²⁵ V&A, sig. 111.c.145; see also the Shakspeare Gallery advertisement published in the Morning Herald, 27 May 1799. The edition was defined as ‘the ne plus ultra of magnificent printing’ in T. F. Dibdin, The Library Companion; or, The Young Man’s Guide, and the Old Man’s Comfort, in the Choice of a Library (London, 1824), 709–10, which also mentions the 1802 du Roveray edition, but makes no mention of the plates after Fuseli. ¹²⁶ The gallery was opened on 20 May 1799 and it closed on 29 August 1799 to reopen from 21 March to 18 July 1800. ¹²⁷ See e.g. Morning Chronicle, 30 May 1799; The Times, 21 Mar. 1800. The Royal Academy had moved to Somerset House, built for this purpose in 1780; see Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 238–46. ¹²⁸ True Briton, 30 Apr. 1798, 3 May 1799.


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come.¹²⁹ In addition to the reviews, Farington had recommended that Fuseli himself write a promotional piece, though he disapproved of it the next day (F iv. 1226–7). On the other hand, Fuseli’s Liverpudlian and Unitarian connections were at work on the poems published in the London Packet, the Morning Chronicle, and the Gentleman’s Magazine. If the poems were formulaic and harmless, the authors—George Dyer, William Shepherd, and William Roscoe—would associate the gallery with Joseph Johnson’s radical dissenting circle.¹³⁰ On another front, on 5 June attempts were made to contact the Berry sisters, two influential connoisseurs.¹³¹ Following Farington’s observation that there were not enough women, a crucial ingredient of exhibition sociability (F iv. 1226), a concerted campaign was directed at the female public through two different strategies. The Times and, later, the True Briton published the alleged comment of a female viewer seduced by the male vigour of Fuseli’s Satan.¹³² While this highlighted sexual intrigue, another review published in the Monthly Mirror, and abbreviated in the Morning Chronicle, presented the gallery as a site of pleasing instruction and conversation.¹³³ Finally, the Royal Academy held a dinner at the Milton Gallery during the 1800 season, which publicized the patriotic element and social importance of the exhibition. Royal Academy dinners had become a target of satirical writing emphasizing the self-referential rituals of Royal Academicians,¹³⁴ and thus provided an easy focus for the True Briton’s critique of Fuseli’s endeavours: ‘The countenance which the Royal Academy has shown to Mr. Fuzeli in having a dinner in honour of his Miltonic Illustrations is very honourable to them, but we fear, notwithstanding all their laudable efforts to support a brother Artist, the Works of that Artist will still be ‘‘caviare to the Million.’’ ’¹³⁵ An allusion to Hamlet which contrasts select taste to the taste of the multitude,¹³⁶ Fuseli’s caviar is too sophisticated and elitist a menu. Rather than nourishing an interest in high culture, Fuseli’s alien food is ignored by true Britons. ¹²⁹ Morning Chronicle, 21 May 1799; Monthly Mirror (May 1799), 305. ¹³⁰ Morning Chronicle, 28 June 1799, and GM 69/1 (June 1799), 508–9, which also contains a gallery poem by George Dyer. The London Packet, 5–7 June 1799, published ‘Verses on the Milton Gallery’ by the Revd W. Shepherd, a correspondent of Fuseli’s. ¹³¹ William Shepherd to Roscoe, 5 June 1799, CEL 200. ¹³² The Times, 17 June 1799; True Briton, (10 July 1799); and below, Ch. 5. ¹³³ Monthly Mirror (June 1799), 341–2; Morning Chronicle, 12 July 1799. ¹³⁴ On the rituals and significance of Royal Academy dinners, see Hoock, ‘From Beefsteak to Turtle’. ¹³⁵ True Briton, 19 May 1800. ¹³⁶ Hamlet, . ii.

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The trajectory of the Milton Gallery comes back on itself. Initially subject to a subscription scheme, then part of a book project, Fuseli’s paintings acquire autonomy from the written text in the form of pictures for exhibition, but finally they go back to the format of an illustrated book. After the exhibition fiasco, Fuseli was commissioned to provide six illustrations for F. J. du Roveray’s 1802 edition of Paradise Lost. Fuseli painted copies of Milton Gallery pictures in smaller formats and added Uriel observing Satan’s Flight for book  and The Triumphant Messiah for book .¹³⁷ Finally, ‘gallery’ becomes a metaphor: no longer an architectural space, it returned to the form of a paper surrogate much like many eighteenth-century collections of prints or descriptions, which bore the word ‘gallery’ as a title. In 1803 Fuseli started a partnership with the engraver Moses Haughton, who took up residence with him. In this new context, the Milton project was refashioned to suit a cosmopolitan canon. An 1805 advertisement in a Swiss journal announced it as ‘a series of prints from Shakespeare, Milton and Dante, after paintings by Henry Fuseli’.¹³⁸ In 1807 The Artist listed ‘The Milton Gallery, with additional designs from Shakespear and Dante, by Haughton’ among engraving projects undertaken in England.¹³⁹ This English advertisement capitalized on the name of the exhibition and recaptured the unifying features of the gallery, presenting Dante and Shakespeare in an adjunct position.

P R I VAT E I N T E R E S T — P U B L I C B E N E F I T: F U S E L I ’ S CAREER The identification between private interest and public benefit is brilliantly captured by Gillray’s prints. I have shown how important the Shakspeare Gallery was in embodying John Boydell’s bid for a social role in the public sphere. The Bard embodied cultural capital allowing commerce a place amid polite society. The extent to which Boydell ¹³⁷ The other episodes singled out are ‘Satan Calling up his Legions’, ‘Satan Encountering Death at Hell’s Gate, Sin Interposing’, ‘Satan starting at the Touch of Ithuriel’s Spear’, and ‘The Expulsion from Paradise’. See Weinglass, Prints and Engraved Illustrations By and After Henry Fuseli, 201–7. ¹³⁸ ‘Ankundigung einer Folge von Kupferstichen aus Shakespeare, Milton und Dante, nach Gemälden von Heinrich Füeßli Esq.; gestochen von Moses Haughton’, Journal für Litteratur und Kunst, 3 (Zurich, 1805), 378. ¹³⁹ The Artist, 21 (1 Aug. 1807), 11.


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identified with the Shakespeare project is made clear by his desire to have Thomas Banks’s Shakespeare Monument transferred to adorn his grave when he died.¹⁴⁰ For all their differences, Boydell’s construction of his after-life identification with Shakespeare parallels Fuseli’s construction of a Miltonic persona. While the Milton Gallery was a financial failure, it must be considered a success in terms of Fuseli’s academic ambitions. The 1791 prospectus highlighted the need for its enterprise as ‘national honours remain yet to be paid to the greatest epic name next to Homer’. In summer 1790 the need for a scheme of his own defined his living space through an anatomical metaphor: ‘a little … ‘‘elbowroom’’ for my Mind’ (CEL 61); five years later the spatial analogy acquired architectural dimensions: ‘all accidental and inferiour works, to use Your [Roscoe’s] phrase, as Visits and my great work as my home’ (CEL 133). By 1795, Fuseli’s Milton became ‘a Monument of myself’ (CEL 135). The relationship between a gallery and its painter is very important in the birth of a field of art. The places of art and the names they are called identify the status of art as an activity, let alone a discipline shaped by funding, authority, and power dynamics. Eighteenth-century guides and repertoires listed galleries under the name of the owners as well as under the main topic or the name of the painter. For instance, in 1722 Jonathan Richardson senior and junior offered two indexes: by place and painter. The Farnese Gallery is known as ‘Gallery of Carracci’, whereas the ‘Lungara or Little Farnese’ is also known as ‘The Gallery of Psyche’, and the Vatican ‘may be said was Raffaele’s Painting Room’, hence the alternative name of ‘Logie di Raffaele’.¹⁴¹ The double indexing indicates the rising status of artists within aristocratic patronage. In 1771 Heinecken opted for a different classification: for ‘gallery’ he intended ‘les Collections des Tableaux, que les Souverains ont recueillis, & dont ils ont donné des estampes au public’;¹⁴² nonetheless, he directed elsewhere a public which identified ‘galleries’ with their painters: ‘les Galleries des Caraches, de l’Albane, de Le Brun—se trouveront dans ¹⁴⁰ Annals of Thomas Banks: Sculptor, Royal Academician, ed. C. F. Bell (Cambridge, 1938), 85, quoted in Shaffer, ‘Shakespeare Between the Dramatic Muse and the Genius of Painting’, 76. ¹⁴¹ An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c with Remarks, by Mr Richardson Sen. and Jun. (London, 1722), 117–19, 135, 193. ¹⁴² C. H. von Heinecken, Idée générale d’une collection complette d’estampes. Avec une Dissertation sur l’origine de la Gravure et sur les premiers Livres d’Images (Leipzig, 1771), 9.

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les Oeuvres de ces artistes’.¹⁴³ This shift underlies Boydell’s gesture in appropriating the subject matter of ‘his’ Shakspeare Gallery to his own persona, as much as Fuseli’s awareness that the Milton Gallery was a monument to himself. Commercial entrepreneur and artist had supplanted royal and aristocratic patronage, publicity, and authority. Reviews covering the gallery in 1799 and 1800 gave public visibility to Fuseli’s monumental inscription by defining the gallery ‘a monument to our national glory, [which] will live to immortalize the genius which has achieved it’.¹⁴⁴ I will now consider the Milton Gallery from a strategic standpoint, as a tactical statement, which defined Fuseli’s position in the public sphere and in the field of art. In Farington’s diary entry for 23 January 1799, Fuseli’s exhibition is contiguous to Royal Academy networking for candidates to fill the vacant post of Professor of Painting (F iv. 1145). In retrospect a teleology connects two pieces of information which seem randomly juxtaposed. The 18 May 1799 entry registers the social practices at the Milton Gallery: Fuseli called this morning and brought Tickets for his Exhibition for Susan and myself.—I had some conversation with him abt. the vacant office of Professor of Painting.—He said He shd. Think it an high honor to be elected, and could prepare a course of Lectures by January next. … I went down to Pallmall, to Fuseli, and saw his Exhibition. Cartwright & Grandi only there.—I was much struck with some of the pictures as being great efforts of poetical feeling,—the pictures however are very unequal.—He recd. my candid opinion well,—and at the conclusion asked me if I had changed my opinion as to His being a proper person to fill the Office of Professor of Painting. I replied certainly not. (F iv. 1224).

Farington’s entry presents Fuseli’s gallery as a place for lobbying and a showcase displaying the painter’s potential as a candidate for the professorship of painting. The Royal Academy exhibition had offered an opportunity for Fuseli to measure himself against other painters and to acquire a position within a culture of celebrities. At the Academy he built a reputation as a painter of the sublime, whereas a one-man exhibition enabled him to diversify his output and to show the cultural contribution he was capable of. A literary gallery was the ideal medium in which to launch his image as a participant in the British cultural ¹⁴³ Ibid., 10. ¹⁴⁴ MM 7 (June 1799), 347; see also Monthly Mirror (June 1800), 211.


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effort. The patriotic and national relevance of the literary galleries was emphasized in catalogues and newspaper coverage: they paid ‘national honours’ to the author, were painted ‘by the artists of Great Britain’, from the ‘poets of Great Britain’, or—as Boydell put it—in view of a ‘national edition of our first Heroic Poet’ and ‘our first Dramatic Poet’. Similarly, Fuseli’s endeavour was seen as ‘a monument to our national glory’.¹⁴⁵ Rather than a ‘mere shop for portrait painting’, the Milton Gallery ‘embod[ies] the imagery of our great heroic Bard’, giving ‘to airy nothings ‘‘a local habitation and a name’’ ’. The Morning Chronicle summed up by declaring the exhibition ‘a national honour’.¹⁴⁶ The language of patriotism and the cultural identity of the nation were strategically deployed against those who opposed a foreigner’s candidacy to the professorship of painting on national grounds. As Farington recorded in his diary: ‘on our way home West talked to me abt. ensuing election,—said exertions were making for Tresham, and objections to Fuseli on acct. of his being a Foreigner, to which West replied, that shd. have been a consideration before his being elected an Academician, but being one, He was entitled to any situation’ (F iv. 1244).¹⁴⁷ Nothing would better challenge the Swiss painter’s foreign marginality than pursuing the transfer of British cultural heritage from the field of poetry to that of painting. After much lobbying, Fuseli was elected on 29 June 1799. The Morning Chronicle commented that the election was ‘the most unequivocal and authentic’ among ‘private and public marks of approbation received by the Painter of the Milton Gallery’.¹⁴⁸ If the election finally sanctioned Fuseli’s place within an institutional setting, the reception of his work, however, pointed to other kinds of visual shows, which blurred the emergent distinctions between academic and commercial art, painting, and other types of visual entertainment. In June 1799 the Morning Chronicle published a letter criticizing the Morning Herald because it had publicized Fuseli’s exhibition as ‘Fuseli’s Devils’, which raised the ‘expectation of seeing monsters and phantoms, of being offended with images of outraged nature’.¹⁴⁹ Such ¹⁴⁵ MM 7 (June 1799), 347. ¹⁴⁶ Morning Chronicle, 17 June 1799. ¹⁴⁷ See also F iv. 1248 for Bourgeois’s preference given to ‘an Englishman though not so well qualified’. On residence as qualifying aspiring academicians’ eligibility, and the tensions between the Academy’s cosmopolitanism and its patriotism, see Hoock, The King’s Artists, 129–39. ¹⁴⁸ W. Hamilton judged Fuseli deserving of the professorship on account of his Milton Gallery; see F iv. 1232. On election, see also 1245; GA ii. 61–2. For the Morning Chronicle’s comment, see 9 July 1799. ¹⁴⁹ MM 7 (June 1799), 347.

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a characterization links the gallery with other visual spectacles which crowded the front pages of newspapers. For instance, the ‘Miltonic Hell’ and the demonic transformations of serpents into demons on show at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1800 convey the circus potential of a picture Fuseli had envisaged in the 1791 prospectus: Transformation of Satan and his Peers into Serpents. Such a performative opportunity was seized by Maria Edgeworth in Belinda (1801), where the libertine hero Clarence Hervey promised to ‘perform the part of the serpent such as is seen in Fuseli’s well known picture’, a tableau vivant of Fuseli’s Satan’s First Address to Eve, one of the pictures added to the Milton Gallery in 1800.¹⁵⁰ Nor was Gillray alone in turning Fuseli’s sublime into the ridiculous. Reviewing Fuseli’s The Cave of Spleen from The Rape of the Lock (RA 1799), the True Briton found it an example of the Popean ‘art of sinking in poetry’: nothing have we ever seen from his hand, but a wild distortion, that seems more like burlesque than sublimity. … the figures are vulgar … the woman in the fore-ground seems to be one of the ladies of Bartholomew fair, reposing herself after being fatigued by the labour of inviting the croud to her puppet-show, and most of the other figures may be considered as the puppets themselves.151

Reviewing the Milton Gallery, the True Briton argued that ‘it is very easy for Critics, whose minds are not prepared for the higher pursuits of the Arts, to find occasion for ridicule in works that abound in marks of grandeur and sublimity’.¹⁵² The bookseller Nicol ‘said that there were parts of great ability, but the public wd. laugh’ (F iv. 1225). In other words, these denigrating reviews debunk Fuseli’s sublime heights, reading his figures in ways that highlight continuities between his paintings and other types of visual entertainment. In the end, was the cultural capital Fuseli invested in the country enough to grant him naturalization? Evidence goes in both directions. Surely the academic position helped. However, in 1802 Noel Desenfans catalogues Fuseli and Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg as part of the German School.¹⁵³ On the other hand, both figure in Sir John Fleming Leicester’s gallery of British painters.¹⁵⁴ Yet when the collection of Julius ¹⁵⁰ M. Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. K. Kirkpatrick (Oxford, 1994), 23. See J. Cass, ‘Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: Satan’s First Address to Eve as a Source for Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda’, ANQ 14/2 (Spring 2001), 15–24. ¹⁵¹ True Briton, 3 May 1799. ¹⁵² True Briton, 25 May 1799. ¹⁵³ N. Desenfans, A Descriptive Catalogue (with Remarks and Anecdotes never before published in English) of Some Pictures of the Different Schools, purchased for His Majesty the Late King of Poland (London, 1802), nn. 80–2, 15–18.


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Angerstein was accepted as the nucleus for the collection of the newly opened National Gallery, Fuseli’s paintings were the only works that failed to make the transfer from the private to the national repository.¹⁵⁵ His exclusion was noticed and highlighted in a self-reflexive pictorial critique. When the Royal Academy opened its new exhibition space at Somerset House in 1780, it featured Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi. This painting reproduced canonical old-master paintings and thus invited viewers to compare them to the paintings hanging in the Great Room of the Royal Academy.¹⁵⁶ Similarly, in the year of the opening of the National Gallery the Royal Academy exhibition featured William Witherington’s A Modern Picture Gallery (RA 1824, no. 192). This picture reiterates Zoffany’s gesture by representing an imaginary rather than real exhibition space. The 1780 exhibition had featured Fuseli’s Satan starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s lance. The Milton Gallery version, now lost (MG 14), was bought by Angerstein and is one of the very paintings that failed to make it into the National Gallery. Therefore, it is quite significant to see it hang in pride of place in Witherington’s canon of A Modern Picture Gallery.¹⁵⁷ Finally, in 1830, Allan Cunningham’s The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects listed an entry for Fuseli thus reinstating him in the British School, but it took until 1887 for his pictures to be admitted to the National Gallery.¹⁵⁸ ¹⁵⁴ J. Young, A Catalogue of the Pictures by British Artists in the Possession of Sir John Fleming Leicester (London, 1821), 6, 14, 16. On Sir John Fleming Leicester, later Lord de Tabley, and the first gallery of English painters, see W. Carey, Some Memoirs of the Patronage and Progress of the Fine Arts (London, 1826), and P. Hoare, Epochs of Art (London, 1813), 63. ¹⁵⁵ J. Egerton, The National Gallery Catalogues: The British School (London, 1998), 360, for the exclusion of Satan starting at the Touch of Ithuriel’s Spear, The Vision of the Deluge, and The creation of E, all part of the Milton Gallery, bought by Angerstein in 1799; J. Young, A Catalogue of the celebrated Collection of Pictures of the Late John Julius Angerstein, Esq. (London, 1829), nn. 39–40 (the second is not numbered). ¹⁵⁶ D. Solkin, ‘ ‘‘This Great Mark of Genius’’: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836’, in Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line, 1–8. ¹⁵⁷ Witherington’s A Modern Picture Gallery (Wimpole Hall, Bambridge Collection) is reproduced in G. Waterfield, Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain 1790–1990 (London, 1991), 78–9. ¹⁵⁸ A. Cunningham, ‘Henry Fuseli’, in The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 6 vols. (London, 1830–3), ii. 260–320. In 1887 Fuseli’s Titania and Bottom was accepted as a gift; see Egerton, The National Gallery Catalogues, 12.

2 The Spectator Turned Reader: Printed Text at the Galleries The excellence of pictures or of language consists in raising clear, complete, and circumstantial images, and turning readers into spectators. (Analytical Review, June 1788) The translation of the images of poetry from the ear to the eye, is an undertaking at all times regarded with general favour. Those delightful and instructive ideas, which long and laborious diligence alone can otherwise unfold to the solitary and the studious, are thus rendered the easy objects of intuitive attainment, amidst the chambers of gaiety and in the cheerful hours of converse and recreation. (‘The Milton Gallery’, Monthly Mirror, June 1799)

W happens to literature at exhibitions? The following two chapters investigate the complementarity between reading and viewing at the literary galleries. Placed at the intersection between book and print market, these galleries targeted consumers who were at the same times readers and spectators. In these spaces the culture of books turned into a culture of paintings while paintings were reproduced in books, series of prints, and single prints. This chapter explores the spectator as a reader by analysing the printed matter and textual practices generated around literary pictures at exhibitions. To think about literature at exhibitions involves thinking about the relationship between cultures of viewing and reading. What did literary pictures draw on? What reading did exhibitions make available to their viewers? Not only did exhibition culture draw on a culture of anthologies, which circulated literature as a series of excerpts,

The Spectator Turned Reader

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but the process of literary adaptation contributed to producing literary texts in the form of quotations and abridgements. In thinking about literature at exhibitions in terms of textual practices, I have used Wolfgang Iser’s reader response method. According to Iser, the literary work depends on ‘the convergence of text and reader’ engaged in ‘an arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination’. Indeed, ‘in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text’. Printed text in the gallery environment exhibits many of the prompts Iser identifies as essential to the act of reading: gaps and indeterminacies, which engage the reader in a filling-in process; suspension of good continuation, which calls the reader to collaborate in the storytelling through retrospection and anticipation; ‘conventions necessary for the establishment of a situation’.¹ The following two chapters historicize the texts and actions generated in the exhibition environment. As a result, the reader is pluralized into historically specific reading practices and reading communities.

T H E S PE C TATO R A S R E A D E R ‘Painting is silent poetry, | and Poetry is a speaking picture’: the words of Simonides helped Fuseli structure the article with which he inaugurated the Arts section of the Analytical Review. In June 1788 the claim that the state of the arts depended on ‘the display of the picturesque scenes described by our poets’ served a selective and militant story of art, one which implicitly gave pride of place to the newly opened Gallery of Poets at Macklin’s. The identification of painting and literature was pushed further as Fuseli went on to argue that ‘the excellence of pictures or of language consists in raising clear, complete, and circumstantial images, and turning readers into spectators’.² This general statement came from an unacknowledged source, Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius of Pope. Where Warton attributed the power to turn readers into spectators to ‘the excellence of language’ only, Fuseli added ‘pictures’ ¹ W. Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’, New Literary History, 3/2 (Winter 1972), 279–80. ² AR 1 (June 1788), 216.

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to the subject of the sentence, thus extending that power to pictures.³ For Warton, turning readers into spectators meant impressing a precise image onto their minds. Warton’s point was to ban abstractions and generalities and to defend details as the source for the performative power of language. For him, Milton’s Eve should produce a clear and distinct portrait, not an image so abstract as to allow each reader to imagine her differently, as Count Algarotti had argued.⁴ In the hands of painters literature offered spectators a more interactive textual practice. Writing for Samuel Johnson’s Idler (1759), Sir Joshua Reynolds had denounced a ‘mechanical’ imitation that tricks the viewer into mistaking a representation for reality. Speaking to the Academicians in 1778, Reynolds followed Algarotti in praising the generality of Milton’s Eve, suggesting that art relies on the collaboration of the viewer.⁵ Instead of ready-made visualizations which neutralize the efforts of readers, texts should engage and energize their imagination, which they could do if representations were left general enough for viewers to be able to flesh them out into the particulars of their choice. To say that pictures turn readers into spectators is to posit readers as the public of art. A year after public exhibitions first opened to the public in London, the pamphlet A Call to the Connoisseurs addressed spectators and divided them into two categories according to their aesthetic skills: painters appreciate the colour, design, and technique of a picture, whereas ‘every spectator of good sense enjoys the Story’.⁶ To argue that only painters can appreciate the material qualities of painting is to deny its universal or more immediate appeal and foreground the skills required to enjoy the aesthetic, indicating in literature and reading the cultural competence of a public untutored in visual form. Yet by 1788, literature had had little role in nineteen years of Royal Academy exhibitions dominated by portraits and landscapes. In fact, Fuseli’s call ³ J. Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 4th edn., 2 vols. (London, 1782), ii. 165. ⁴ Ibid. ii. 169–70. ⁵ Cf. S. Johnson, The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate and L. F. Powell (New Haven, 1963), 246; Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 164. ⁶ A Call to the Connoisseurs, or Decisions of Sense, with respect to the Present State of Painting and Sculpture, and their several Professors in these Kingdoms (London, 1761), 9–11. For the opposite line of argument privileging the spectator, see D. Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting (London, 1760), 18, quoted in S. Copley, ‘The Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Polite Culture’, in J. Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700–1850 (Oxford, 1992), 21–2.


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on readers as spectators feels like a criticism of the Royal Academy and a bid to turn to the literary galleries as alternative arenas for high art. While the Royal Academy reflected the realities of patronage, the importance of subject paintings could be judged by their prominence in newspaper reviews. In this case, the choice of a literary theme bespoke the ambition and status of the painter. Moreover, Fuseli’s statement becomes less tendentious if one moves from the Academy’s exhibition space to its programme and directions to artists. In his fourth discourse to Royal Academicians, Reynolds argued that the subject of a historical painting should be found in poets or historians and distinguished the painter’s from the reader’s invention: ‘whenever a story is related, every man forms a picture in his mind of the action and expression of the persons employed. The power of representing this mental picture on canvass is what we call Invention in a painter.’⁷ In his annotations to du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica, Reynolds identified the subject for a painting as ‘a story generally known; for the Painter, representing one point of time only, cannot inform the spectator what preceded the event’.⁸ In other words, painting appealed to the collaboration of spectators, expecting them to fill in the gaps and flesh out the story alluded to. As we shall see in Chapter 3, painting had various ways of alluding to the rest of the story. For instance, Fuseli admired Michelangelo for choosing ‘the moment of transition, the crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future’ (K ii. 89). Yet such virtuosity still depended on a spectator who knew enough to capture and activate the plot compressed in such a ‘pregnant’ or ‘fruitful moment’. To identify spectators as readers meant to select an audience fit though few. For reading also functioned as an invisible barrier, which defined the social and cultural boundaries of taste. Indeed, if the spectator untutored in the formal qualities of painting would enjoy a picture because of its story, choosing the story entailed choosing a public, because not everybody would know and recognize the plot. For Reynolds, the subject for painters should be sought in ‘the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history, which early education, and the usual course of reading, have made familiar and interesting to all of Europe’. Such a course of reading circumscribed the space of the exhibition through a set of inclusions and exclusions. To define ⁷ Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 58. ⁸ The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. E. Malone, 2nd edn., 3 vols. (London, 1798), iii. 104.

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the public as a public of readers and the shared culture as classical is to restrict access to the visual sphere, a cultural analogue of the fee levied at the entrance of the Royal Academy exhibition ‘to prevent the Room from being filled with improper Persons, to the entire Exclusion of those for whom the Exhibition is apparently intended’ (RA 1769). Not only did classical subjects define the exhibition’s barriers, but they also showed the Academicians’ place among a cultured elite. Shaping the education of painters along the lines of classical rhetoric (inventio, dispositio … ) involved a bid for the inclusion of painting among the liberal arts and of painters among polite society. Much as Latin epigraphs had guarded the threshold of the Royal Academy in catalogue frontispieces, in 1780 a Greek motto was placed over the entrance to the Great Room restricting access to ‘men of taste’.⁹ The discrepancy between what was on show at the exhibition and the education, training, and programmatic statements of painters suggests the unstable positioning of the field of art. Amid a preponderance of portraits, classical themes dominated the choice of literary pictures in the first exhibitions. Things were changing by the time Fuseli wrote in 1788, when classical themes amounted to roughly half of the literary pictures, counting thirteen of twenty-eight out of 656 Royal Academy exhibits. Whereas Reynolds’s classicism welcomed a cosmopolitan European community, substantiating the claim that painting would speak a more universal language and overcome national and linguistic barriers,¹⁰ the literary galleries chose British poets and British history, thus addressing a more local but socially wider constituency of readers. Thanks to the Shakspeare Gallery, argued a 1789 review, ‘the dialogue of Shakspeare comes home to all men’s business and bosoms; we are all conversant with his language. And have fixed in our minds some ideas of the appearances of his characters’.¹¹ The culture of exhibitions was articulated by what Pierre Bourdieu defines as ‘cultural capital’. While the 1s. entrance fee was the standard price of London entertainments in the late eighteenth century, such economic capital had to be supplemented by symbolic or cultural capital. Much as the painter’s choice of a literary subject was an investment that yielded cultural status and visibility if not an economic ⁹ On the motto, see Hoock, The King’s Artists, 207–9. ¹⁰ For Richardson it is a language more universal than writing; see J. Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715), 5–6. ¹¹ The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 8 May 1789.


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return, so the viewer who preferred subject painting and could activate its literary references displayed a cultural competence that was not equally distributed and thereby ‘secure[d] profits of distinction’.¹² This dynamic challenges Kant’s configuration of the aesthetic as that which ‘pleases without concept’. In the 1761 pamphlet the possibility of a natural aesthetic pleasure was called into question, because if the texture of painting could only be perceived by painters, the sensual and intellectual pleasures of viewing required skills that identified particular constituencies of viewers. Feeling comfortable with art works depended on what Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’, an instinctive sense for the situation, an intuitive capacity that is the outcome of repeated, interiorized, and naturalized cultural practice.¹³ The aesthetic relies on what Kant called the ‘sensus communis’, or taste, ‘a capacity for judging that which makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept’.¹⁴ Bourdieu’s aim, however, is to analyse ‘the social conditions which make possible both this experience and the people for whom it is possible’.¹⁵ Reynolds’s spectator and Iser’s reader know how to activate the literary conventions of texts and pictures because they share a cultural capital, or that ‘repertoire’ which ‘incorporates both the origin and the transformation of its elements’.¹⁶ Indeed, this initial scene confirms Peter de Bolla’s claim that the Royal Academy exhibition is regulated by what he calls ‘the regime of the picture’: ‘a grammar of looking at artworks that … is based on what one knows—say a narrative in the Bible, or taken from history … and enables one to see or recognize what one has, in effect, already seen’.¹⁷ For de Bolla this amounts to a privatization of the experience of pictures, where sensory pleasures and textures were regulated by reference to pre-established forms of perception. Yet such acts of recognition involve an intermedial practice that should not be dismissed as an impoverishment of either viewing or reading, a one-way traffic from literature to exhibitions. The new visual network of public entertainments was bound to change literature ¹² Bourdieu, Distinction, 86 and 562 n. 4. ¹³ The habitus is ‘the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations’; see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, 1977), 78–9; see also id., ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, in The Logic of Practice, 54–65. ¹⁴ Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 75–7, 175. ¹⁵ Bourdieu and Darbel, The Love of Art, 109. ¹⁶ Iser, The Act of Reading, 69. ¹⁷ P. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif., 2003), 9–13.

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as much as literature contributed to pictures. If transforming the exhibition space into a scene of reading answered the dynamics of distinction, it could be an enabling as well as exclusive strategy. First of all, not only did anchoring paintings to text hail spectators as readers, but it also contributed to making spectators into readers, new agents who could join the cultural elite if they performed the right actions, helped by the textual props available at the exhibition. Both Fuseli and Macklin compared the dissemination of prints to the invention of print, implicitly suggesting that visual culture contributed to a wider circulation of literature.¹⁸ Second, a new means of circulation entails new forms of perception. Art treatises and literary gallery catalogues established painting as a rational recreation, arguing its capacity to show everything at one view, contrasted to the length and labour of reading.¹⁹ The reading matter produced to help the spectator through the exhibition fostered new ways of viewing and reading. R E A D I N G A I D S AT E X H I B I T I O N S Homer ‘paints so as to need no inscription over his figures’.²⁰ Shaftesbury’s paradox implies that writing ought to communicate without any help from other media. His statement constructs reader and viewer as those to whom the text is transparent. Similar statements on the autonomy of the arts inevitably call on a very elitist public. In his fourth lecture to the Royal Academicians, Fuseli maintained that ‘The first demand on every work of art is that it constitute one whole, that it fully pronounce its own meaning, that it tell itself; it ought to be independent; the essential part of its subject ought to be comprehended without collateral assistance, without borrowing its commentary from the historian or the poet’ (K ii. 190). For literary pictures to pronounce their own meaning and tell themselves without collateral assistance, Fuseli’s viewers had to rely on the art of memory. The paintings encountered at the exhibition would recall the mental images produced during the act of reading. Reading meant turning the favourite passages of great authors into commonplaces, which would be conveyed to memory by being arranged into ¹⁸ AR 1 (1788), 216; Macklin, Poetic Description, p. iii. ¹⁹ Macklin, Catalogue of the Third Exhibition, p. iii; Bowyer, Elucidation of Mr Bowyer’s Plan, 7–8; see also the epigraphs to this chapter. ²⁰ A. A. Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy; or, Advice to an Author, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. L. Klein (Cambridge, 1999), 88.


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consecutive places within an architectural space.²¹ Invention, elocution, and composition consist in a mental walk through the topology of memory, ‘each memory-place hung with a vivid image, through rooms, doorways, stairways, porticos and terraces’.²² For instance, the lunettes in the Sistine Chapel gave Fuseli the structure in which to arrange climactic moments from Shakespeare’s plays, which he wanted to embody in a Shakespeare Memorial.²³ This practice of visualization also worked in reverse. In a review of Archibald Alison’s associationist aesthetics, Fuseli argued that the pleasure in objects of nature and art derives from the associations it evokes in the mind of the viewer, a pleasure acquired through the habit of associating them ‘with classical imagery, or moral sentiment’. Alison’s associationist pleasure becomes a literally ‘blind’ response to an external impulse, but his claim that the blind are just as capable of experiencing visual pleasures as the seeing was rejected by Fuseli. For the painter the blind may well ‘by long habitual association, use the terms with propriety, but it is a kind of working with unknown quantities. Who does not see that he wants, not an adventitious idea, but the very source and spring of all the beauty his terms are conversant about?’ In other words, the link between visual and verbal images is not a mechanical ‘blind’ association, but rather a genuine complementary enhancement of visual and verbal pleasures.²⁴ The associationist model underlying Fuseli’s aesthetic practice is best exemplified by the epigraph prefixed to the Milton Gallery catalogue, which invokes the sound of words re-echoing in the mind as an accompaniment to the exhibition. Is the art of memory redundant in the age of print? In Practical Education (1798), Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth argued that before the invention of print, ‘A man who had read a few manuscripts, and could repeat them … was a circulating library to a nation, and the more books he could carry in his head the better.’ By contrast, in the age of print, ‘knowledge is now ready classed for use, and it is safely stored up in the great common-place books of public libraries’.²⁵ As we shall see, printed matter at exhibitions makes cultural capital available so that ²¹ Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 11. 2. 17–22, quoted in F. A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), 22. ²² N. Bryson, ‘Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum’, in S. Melville and B. Readings (eds.), Vision and Textuality (Basingstoke, 1995), 190. ²³ Fuseli’s sketches are part of the Roman Album, now in the British Museum, see Schiff, nos. 475–8. ²⁴ AR 7 (May 1790), 26–32. ²⁵ M. Edgeworth and R. L. Edgeworth, Practical Education, 2 vols. (London, 1798), ii. 554–5.

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a public of spectators may be educated through practices of reading. By joining visual images with printed collections of authors digested into commonplaces, the exhibition environment provides a visual aid and an alternative to retentive memory and to the commonplace book. Like the public library, the exhibition participates in bringing the otherwise ‘solitary’ practice of reading into a public sphere of cultural production. The expectation that art should ‘speak’ for itself, unencumbered by information that cannot be perceived intuitively in direct contact with the work, characterizes what Bourdieu and Darbel term the ‘charismatic’ approach to art.²⁶ Access to art is regulated by the degree of information offered to bridge the discrepancy between the code demanded by the work and the competence of viewers.²⁷ Signposting indicates who is being invited and the actions required to enter and activate the aesthetic experience. As we will see, Fuseli made sure that his Milton pictures had as much ‘collateral assistance’ as possible, ‘borrowing their commentary’ from the poet. To compare Fuseli’s articles for the Analytical Review with his lectures is to see him combine elitist classicism with the language of progress, improvement, and utility that would appeal to the commercial ideology of his key patrons, Joseph Johnson and William Roscoe. On the one hand, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery catalogue outdoes the classical thresholds guarding Royal Academy catalogues by moving the customary Latin motto to the verso of the frontispiece and giving pride of place to a quotation in Greek with a reference in Latin to Plato’s Crito. On the other hand, Fuseli praised the power of dissemination of prints, taking on Roscoe’s claim that ‘what printing has been to Science, Engraving has been to the Arts’.²⁸ While the fear of an anonymous public could inspire elitist gestures, exhibitions needed to display their sources if they were to impress those who would not otherwise detect them. As a result, the display of cultural capital would conversely enable such less well-read spectators to master the code they were not familiar with. A proliferation of commentary accompanied exhibitions ever since their opening in the 1760s, going from catalogues sold at the exhibition to James Barry’s 200-page description of his paintings at the Adelphi, which hardly lent ²⁶ Bourdieu and Darbel, The Love of Art, 54, 94. ²⁷ Ibid. 42–3, 93. ²⁸ Quoted in J. Strutt, A Biographical Dictionary of Engravers, from the earliest period of the art of engraving to the present time (London, 1785), i. 3; for the attribution to Roscoe, see H. Roscoe, Life of William Roscoe by his Son, 2 vols. (London, 1833), i. 64–7, and Higgins, ‘Thomas Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery’, 43; for Fuseli and Macklin, see n. 18 above.


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itself to reading while walking around the exhibition space. Exhibition catalogues usually took the shape of inventories, listing the title of pictures and the names of painters.²⁹ More explanatory guides sometimes juxtaposed such listings to a hierarchical order by genre, and added evaluative commentary. For instance, John Williams (alias Anthony Pasquin) considered paintings by genre and concluded his guide by indicating the ‘five principal parts of a picture’: ‘Invention, or historical argument’, ‘Proportion, or relative symmetry, or analogy’, ‘Colour, which involves all the perceptible gradations, connected with light or darkness’, ‘Disposition, which is arranging the whole according to the economy of judgment’, and ‘Motion, which embraces all the force of action and passion’.³⁰ Reviews in newspapers and magazines commented on the exhibition as a whole, evaluated the overall quality of pictures in terms of genre, and then discussed the performance of individual painters and individual pictures in short entries.³¹ First of all, printed matter helped spectators find their way through the three-dimensional space of the exhibition, taking over from the walking practices whereby the art of memory naturalized knowledge into easily accessible spatialized units. Initially, catalogues listed pictures in alphabetical order under the name of the painter. When the Royal Academy exhibition moved to the Great Room at Somerset House in 1780 the system of classification changed, and the numbering followed the pictures from left to right as they hung along the wall. This numerical sequence was adopted by newspaper reviews and the guides and other explanatory materials printed by booksellers on the Strand for sale to exhibition-goers. If the visual field lured spectators in all directions, exposed to a chaotic array of pictures stacked from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling, the catalogue encouraged them to view pictures in horizontal rows corresponding to the numerical sequence, and thus make sense of the experience by literally ‘walking the reader’s eye’ through the exhibition space.³² The page layout of the Poets’ and Milton Gallery catalogues further helped the viewer’s eye going from ²⁹ G. Waterfield, ‘The Origins of the Early Picture Gallery Catalogue in Europe, and Its Manifestation in Victorian Britain’, in S. Pearce (ed.), Art in Museums (London, 1995), 42–73. ³⁰ J. Williams, A Critical Guide to the Present Exhibition at the Royal Academy, for 1797 (London, 1797), 24. ³¹ M. Hallett, ‘The Business of Criticism: The Press and the Royal Academy Exhibition in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line, 65–76. ³² C. de Mechel, Catalogue des Tableaux de la Galerie Impériale et Royale de Vienne (Basel, 1784), pp. v, vi, xv; see Ch. 3 in this volume.

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page to picture and back, making it easier to find the right entry by identifying the picture’s number and the relevant textual reference on the left-hand side of the page, whereas title and excerpt would be centred. As a result, viewers could engage in an intermittent practice of reading and viewing. Second, titles helped viewers to identify the subject. References in Royal Academy catalogues are quite idiosyncratic given that the titles were entered by the painters. Some titles only give the name of characters, leaving it to the viewer to identify the source, or invent an appropriate story according to generic expectations. An intermediate type of title such as Angelica Kauffman’s 1769 The Interview of Hector and Andromache or Venus shewing Aeneas and Achates the way to Carthage sets up the kind of action represented but counts on viewers well versed in Homer and Vergil to recognize the text, recall the scene referred to, or engage in a sequence of mental imaging, in which different passages would be compared in order to find the lines that would best fit the picture.³³ Compare her entries to the 1776 exhibition: 155 The Tender Eleanora Sucking the Venom out of the Wound which Edward I. Her Royal Consort, received with a poisoned Dagger from an Assassin in Palestine. Rapin’s Hist. Vol III. p. 179 156 Lady Elizabeth Grey imploring of Edward IV. the restitution of her deceased husband’s lands, forfeited in the dispute between the houses of York and Lancaster. Rapin’s Hist. Vol. V. p. 26 157 Patience ‘Her meek hands folded on her modest breast, ‘In mute submission lifts th’adoring eye, ‘Ev’n to the storm that wrecks her.’ Mason’s Caractacus, p. 15 158 Armida in vain endeavours with her entreaties to prevent Rinaldo’s departure. Tasso, Vol. II. Canto 16

Entries 155 and 156 offer circumstantial information that helps identify characters and connections. By putting the main action in the gerund and its immediate motivation in a participial or relative clause, these titles offer an abridgement for viewers not well versed in history. Titles ³³ Compare Richard Cosway’s and Angelica Kauffman’s 1772 RA exhibits Rinaldo and Armida after Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, as discussed in The Middlesex Journal, 28–30 Apr. 1772.


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abridging the action vary from nominal clauses, which require the viewer to endow a static reference with action, to present tenses or various gerund constructs that put all the stress on the impending or climactic nature of the scene. While the information provided might be sufficient to make out the story, the precise reference encourages viewers to read the text. This is evident in entry 157 from Mason’s Caractacus, a well-known play performed at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden in 1785 and 1786. Kauffman’s 1776 titles testify to different types of reading: skimming and skipping. Her entries show the potential of what might seem the narrow bounds of a single point in time: in the history subjects the focus is on the story, which encourages skim-reading, or ‘reading for the plot’, which is to say the abridgement of the text; by contrast, the Caractacus picture stops the flow of drama in order to embody an allegory, which is the result of skip-reading, extracting and anthologizing the moral, reducing the drama to lyric utterance.³⁴ Released from its context, the lyric connotation takes the shape of an edifying commonplace made available for further use. Third, entries might include a relevant excerpt, as in the case of Kauffman’s Patience, from Caractacus. While titles digested a plot reduced to topoi of inventio, entries combining titles and quotations draw from both inventio and elocutio—i.e. the subject matter and its linguistic expression broken down into easy units. So exhibitions offered pictures that could be memorized as mental images referring to the best specimens of the language, indeed a public commonplace book, which could be accessed by following up the source indicated in the printed materials accompanying the show.³⁵ Kauffman’s Patience is a rare entry in Royal Academy catalogues, which banished the use of quotations in 1786, only to allow them back in 1798.³⁶ As we have seen, the indication of a source and page number could supplement the quotations the catalogue failed to excerpt. In addition, when the Royal Academy relied on the ‘early habits of reading’ to supply appropriate quotations, other publications came to the rescue. Explanatory guides ³⁴ On skip-reading and skim-reading, see L. Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge, 2000), 10. ³⁵ On the commonplace and its canonic status, see J. Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993); id., ‘Literary Capital: Gray’s Elegy, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and the Vernacular Canon’, in J. Brewer and S. Staves (eds.), Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London, 1995), 389–410. ³⁶ For the ban on quotations, see CM ii. 26, 353, 355; in 1798 a 6d. charge for the catalogues was added to the 1s. admission fee: see Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy, 75.

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and newspaper articles offered the missing textual excerpts and plot summary to those who could not count on memory recall.

M AC K L I N ’ S C ATA LO G U E : E XC E R P T I N G A N D V I EW I N G T H E P O E TS Reading and viewing were more closely knit at the literary galleries than at the Royal Academy. Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery, the first to open in 1788, offers a useful counterpoint to the Royal Academy. At a first impression, the typographical layout assimilates literary gallery catalogues to anthologies or commonplace books in which each entry combines a title with a relevant excerpt. Looking at the overall textual output of the galleries, literary sources underwent various degrees of anthologization. The shortest type of reference is on the frames of Shakspeare Gallery pictures, bearing the name of the painter, and the act and scene of the play depicted.³⁷ A few essential lines would be printed as inscriptions to the prints, following a practice established in various branches of the print industry. On the other hand, the Shakspeare Gallery catalogue tended to offer much longer entries, so it highlighted the point of time in italics. In addition, the prints issued in numbers would come with letterpress usually lengthier than what could be included in the gallery catalogue, in which case the Poets’ Gallery also resorted to italics to identify the point of time depicted. Where possible, Macklin published the shorter poems in their entirety. Paintings, numbers, prints, and catalogues could be compared at the gallery, which also served as a retail outlet for the illustrated edition.³⁸ The varying length of excerpts sometimes allows for a different dynamic between text and picture. For instance, the first number of the Poets’ Gallery reprints the entire scene from which Fuseli painted Queen Katharine’s Dream. Whereas the scene represents Katharine before and after the dream, including a description of the dream itself, the catalogue entry introduces the picture in medias res, as Katharine wakes up and addresses the spirits that have dissolved in thin air. Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery displayed Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton alongside fashionable eighteenth-century authors, most of ³⁷ Boydell, ‘Advertisement’, in A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (1789). ³⁸ St. James’s Chronicle, 24–6 Apr. 1788.


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whom featured in Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (1776–82) and Dilly’s Works of the English Poets (1779–1781).³⁹ Among the exceptions, Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village had been through fourteen editions between 1770 and 1786;⁴⁰ Richard Jago’s The Goldfinches had been published in the 1755 edition of Dodsley’s Collection, the best-selling miscellany of the century, which also housed Shenstone’s The SchoolMistress and was republished for the twelfth time in 1782.⁴¹ In addition, Macklin displayed pictures from poems by living authors: William Cowper’s The Task (1785); Edward Jerningham’s The English Wake (1779, 1786), the subject of a Royal Academy painting in 1786; Mrs Barbauld’s The Mouse’s Petition (1773), included in Poems by the Most Eminent Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland (1785); and, finally, The Vestal from the Revd. Thomas Gregory’s Ode to Meditation. Unlike the rest, Gregory’s poem was not a 1780s staple; in fact, it is so unknown that it may well have been commissioned for the purpose of accompanying Reynolds’s depiction of The Vestal. The Poets’ Gallery catalogue placed the author to the left and the painter to the right of each excerpt, a layout which encouraged readers to engage in an ekphrastic exercise. Initially, reviews commented on the painters’ success at ‘describing’ the poetical excerpts, an exercise which led to mobilize further quotations and thus encouraged a wider circulation of texts in the press. Reynolds’s The Vestal and Gainsborough’s Lavinia came under particular scrutiny for having been adapted to poetry ex post facto. The retroactive adaptation shows to what extent the success of Macklin’s gallery depended not only on the choice of fashionable texts but also on celebrities such as Reynolds and Gainsborough. The fact that Macklin had to find literary excerpts that would describe their paintings marks a turning point in the relationship between text and image. While the titles of his catalogues declare the pictures ‘illustrative of the British Poets’, Macklin’s catalogue of prints is significantly entitled Poetic Descriptions of Choice and Valuable Prints. The tension between words and images is, however, already clear in the earlier catalogue: even though the pictures have an ancillary role as paratextual ³⁹ ‘Hobbinol and Ganderetta. Vide Somervile’s Hobbinol, p. 108 is the only entry Macklin takes from a Bell edition. On the canon at Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery, see Higgins, ‘Thomas Macklin’s Poet’s Gallery’, 13–25. ⁴⁰ Goldsmith was included in Works of the English Poets in 1790. ⁴¹ For a reprint of the 1782 edition, see A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, ed. M. F. Suarez, 6 vols. (London, 1997), i. 164, iv. 334. Jago’s poem was also available through the posthumous 1784 edition of his poems.

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embellishments or aids to the visualization of literature, that hierarchy is overturned by Macklin’s aim ‘to procure … the happiest designs from the Poets of this country’, ‘a selection of scenery’, which inevitably turns the sources into ‘poetic descriptions’. By this point, literature becomes truly ekphrastic in its role as a repository of descriptions of paintings. If the role of literature consists in helping the viewer identify the picture’s subject and story, one might consider its function exhausted once its ‘referent’ materializes before the eyes of the reader turned spectator. However, while connecting pictures to texts might fix them into stable denotations, the discrepancy between picture and excerpt engaged reviewers in a game of recognition. Instead of fixing the mind on a permanent visual embodiment, exhibition excerpts energized readers ‘hovering between images’, imagining alternative images and texts for their virtual galleries. For instance, Fuseli’s articles for the Analytical Review listed the pictures that failed to depict the poetical excerpt appended to them. Besides Gainsborough’s Lavinia and Reynolds’s The Vestal feature Gainsborough’s Young Hobbinol and Ganderetta (Somervile), Maria Cosway’s Ode to Spring (Gray), and the Revd. Peters’s The Death-bed of the Just (Young).Whereas in the case of Gainsborough’s pictures Fuseli deplores a subsidiary use of literary excerpts merely for the sake of embellishing autonomous paintings, in the case of Reynolds’s The Vestal he relishes the ironic discrepancy between the words and the image: It is not necessary to know that the Vestal is the portrait of Mrs B ll, to discover the whole is an irony; the humid side-leer of this eye can as little issue from the face of chastity, as a vestal from such a mother—but the picture itself—as a composition of certain beauties … never let us once remember, that it ridicules what it pretends to celebrate.⁴²

Other reviewers also identify the sitter as Mrs Seaforth, lover of Mr Barnwell, who had commissioned the picture,⁴³ an identification that helped less knowing viewers into the culture of celebrity that was such an important feature of Royal Academy exhibitions. While recognition is essential to the insider joke about The Vestal’s embodiment of chastity, it is just as important to appreciate Reynolds’s The Cottagers, a fancy portrait of Macklin’s family and inner circle. In terms of genre, these pictures blurred the boundaries between the literary galleries and the ⁴² AR 4 (July 1789), 369. ⁴³ Morning Herald, 16 Apr. 1788, and Postle, Reynolds: The Subject Pictures, 237–8, for other reviews.


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Royal Academy, where a literary reference would raise the status of a fancy portrait. Much as literature could define the genre of the picture and fashion the identity of the sitter, it shaped the cultural competence and skill of painters and viewers. Another game of recognition, and another reason for Fuseli’s exclusions, measures literary excerpts against commonplaces. According to Leah Price, each act of editorial packaging—whether in the form of anthology, abridgement, expurgation, or collected works—renegotiates the position of texts within the system of genres.⁴⁴ Appended to exhibition pieces, literary excerpts reveal their reliance on stock images. Martin Postle argues that Gregory’s The Vestal is the least canonical entry at Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery, but its subject is a stock piece of allegorical portraiture dating back to Pliny the Elder.⁴⁵ Similarly, Maria Cosway’s Ode to Spring is significantly renamed The Hours. As its title and length change in the catalogue, letterpress, and print inscription, Gray’s ode is turned into a mythological dictionary entry, one of many performances of a commonplace like Flaxman’s The Hours.⁴⁶ The Poets’ Gallery shows the intermedial dynamics of canon formation. First, consider the reception of rustic poetry. Some of Fuseli’s rejects can be broadly grouped as rustic: Reynolds’s Cottagers and Gainsborough’s Lavinia from Thomson’s Seasons, Gainsborough’s Hobbinol from Somervile’s Hobbinol and Ganderetta, and Ramberg’s Goldfinches excerpted from Jago. For William Hazlitt, writing some thirty years later, it was paintings like these that developed a taste for realistic nature poetry, ‘which leans for support on the truth and fidelity of its imitations of nature’. Crabbe’s poetry—the subject of Hazlitt’s essay—did indeed depend on Reynolds’s support, yet painting was as much influenced by Thomson and his followers (Shenstone, Jago, Somervile) as it may have contributed to their wider circulation.⁴⁷ By accompanying rustic paintings with literary excerpts, Macklin prompted the later circulation of Thomson’s Seasons at exhibitions, a customary reference used to legitimize landscape as a genre. In this sense, the Poets’ Gallery, and literary pictures at exhibitions generally, nourished what Hazlitt termed the tendency ‘to read poetry with the eye of a connoisseur’.⁴⁸ The suggestion that exhibitions help read Crabbe and Thomson through ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸

Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 10. Postle, Reynolds: The Subject Pictures, 237–8. D. Bindman (ed.), John Flaxman (London, 1979), 54, pl. 27. Postle, Reynolds: The Subject Pictures, 243–4. Hazlitt, ‘Mr Crabbe’, in Howe, xix. 53.

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the spectacles of Gainsborough turns reading into the production of a virtual picture gallery. Yet this connection between reading and viewing challenges the idea that such a gallery might be a private reservoir of mental images and questions reading as an independent and private activity cordoned off from a public visual culture. Second, the Poet’s Gallery and the Shakspeare Gallery engage in a double act of canonization by associating a painter with a literary text or genre. Because painters were associated with particular genres, choosing a painter meant defining a text’s genre. After his Royal Academy exhibits of Queen Catherine’s Vision from Shakespear’s Hen. 8th , act 5 th in 1781 and The night-mare in 1782, Fuseli would be the obvious candidate for the same Shakespearean topic at Macklin’s and for Boydell’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Similarly, Macklin capitalized on Gainsborough’s excellence in landscape painting, whereas Bunbury was commissioned ballads and comic and pastoral themes. Indeed, the style of a painter may homogenize otherwise distinct literary sources, bridging between different genres and forms. For instance, Fuseli’s Queen Katharine’s Dream and Prince Arthur’s Vision smooth over the generic distinction between Shakespearean dialogue and Spenserian romance, while the neoclassical idiom associates Prince Arthur’s Vision to Maria Cosway’s Ode to Spring as The Hours. A painter marks a genre’s aspiring status much as an unusual genre tests the painter’s range. Such is the case of Reynolds’s The Cottagers, which confirms his flair for fancy portraits, but at the same time entices his admirers to see him experiment with a new genre.⁴⁹ Key features of the English School, variety and eclecticism were important tests for a painter. Third, the literary galleries could offer a number of different canons for different social and cultural communities. Because of their varied marketing and output, the galleries displayed a variety of pictures, but offered subscribers a more homogeneous selection. Compare the anthological choice on offer at Macklin’s exhibition to the prints of the first number published at the same time. While rustic and fancy pictures were a fashionable ingredient for Macklin’s exhibition, the first number of Macklin’s Poets targets a different taste. Price substantiates the differentiation, given that the 1s. entrance fee would include many more people than the 4 guineas needed to buy a number, let alone the capital needed to pay for the projected twenty-five numbers priced at 3 ⁴⁹ Postle, Reynolds: The Subject Pictures, 240.


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guineas each.⁵⁰ For the first number, Macklin chose excerpts that had been sanctioned by critical opinion: Fuseli depicted dreams taken from Spenser and Shakespeare, Cosway Gray’s Ode to Spring, and Kauffman Selim; or, The Shepherd’s Moral. An Oriental Eclogue, by Collins.⁵¹ Macklin’s four Spensers reflected his status as ‘poet of painters’, a favourite source for Royal Academy pictures, ‘unrivalled in the visionary art of bringing objects before your eyes, and making you a spectator of his imaginary representations’.⁵² Fuseli’s Prince Arthur’s Vision envisioned the faerie queen as a figure from an ancient vase in the Hamilton Collection and the prince after Van Dyck’s Rinaldo and Armida.⁵³ All in all, the first number of Macklin’s poets is homogeneously painted in the neoclassical idiom that identifies the cosmopolitan public envisioned by Reynolds. While the contrast between the first exhibition and the first number suggests that the exhibition was addressed to a wider and more mixed constituency of viewers, the subsequent numbers gradually included the variety on display at the exhibition. Pricing the galleries at 1s. meant inserting them into the visual circuits of popular entertainments such as panoramas and the theatre, and hence opening up what would be a more exclusive publication to a much wider public. Conversely, the publication side of the venture, initially more conservative in terms of its visual choices, ended up following the trends set at the gallery. The different consumer groups targeted help understand Macklin’s place in the illustrated book market. The price of the exhibition makes good of the otherwise puzzling connection the reviews made between Macklin’s Poets and the democratizing policies of John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (109 vols., 1777–82), published in instalments at 1s. 6d. per volume.⁵⁴ Illustrations became a common feature of cheap editions after the 1774 Copyright Act.⁵⁵ What Bell did for British poets and theatre, Harrison did for the novels, producing a canon published in 6d. ⁵⁰ Macklin, Proposals for Publishing a Series of Prints, V&A, sig. 200 B 280. ⁵¹ Spenser counted four pictures, followed by Chaucer modernized by Dryden with three, Thomson, Gray, and Milton, two. ⁵² J. Upton, Spenser’s Faeerie Queene. A New Edition, with a Glossary, and Notes explanatory and critical, 2 vols. (London, 1758), vol. i., p. xxxii. ⁵³ G. Schiff and P. Viotto (eds.), L’opera completa di Johann Heinrich Füssli (Milan, 1977), 90, no. 40, and pl. 2, compared to P. d’Hancarville, Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon. le W. Hamilton, 4 vols. (Naples, 1766), vol. i, pl. 130. ⁵⁴ On Bell’s pricing, see Bonnell, ‘John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain’, 139. ⁵⁵ W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 134.

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weekly numbers including at least one engraving per text in the Novelist’s Magazine (1780–88).⁵⁶ Macklin played at both ends of the publishing market, looking back to the elegant illustrated editions published by Tonson and Dodsley, while appropriating the rhetoric of improvement, which connected engraving to print and the wider dissemination of culture in the book and art market. Divided by price, Bell’s and Macklin’s Poets shared their packaging of literature in the form of engravings. Bell’s Poets had oval frontispieces containing an illustration, and a tag with the name of the author, the volume, and a short quotation. The engravings for the Milton volumes abridge Paradise Lost as two climactic actions: the first volume bears the inscription ‘M V I | Then with expanded wings he steers his flight | Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air | Par. Lost Book I Line 225’; volume  shows Eve about to pick a rose, inscribed ‘Milton Volume II. Rose & went forth among her fruits and flowers | Par. Lost Book VIII line 44’; volume , containing Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, offers a recantation: ‘Milton Volume III. | but here I feel amends | the breath of Heav’n fresh blowing. | Samson Agon. Line 9’.⁵⁷ Taken together, the three frontispieces offer Milton’s trajectory as a poet. Thus Bell’s engraved frontispieces function as an anthological device. Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery is also anthological, but the selection takes place at both the visual and the verbal level. Once disanchored from their source, excerpts wander into new textual forms and exchanges. The intermedial adaptation disrupts the text’s original teleologies, opening it up to the viewer–reader’s rewritings. The epigraph to this chapter contrasts the pleasure and ease of literature experienced at the Milton Gallery to the ‘long and laborious diligence’ required for it to ‘unfold to the solitary and studious’. Joining pleasure with utility, exhibitions displayed a curriculum of reading that would help viewers on the road to elocution, offering ready-made excerpts with which to embellish polite conversation. Yet one should not hasten to the conclusion that the spectators who were turned into readers at the gallery were passive and docile subjects regulated by external inculcation as opposed to the free spirits who enjoyed ⁵⁶ The Novelist’s Magazine sold up to 12,000 copies of each number weekly. See R. C. Taylor, ‘James Harrison, the Novelist’s Magazine, and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 33/3 (1993), 632. ⁵⁷ See The Poetical Works of John Milton. From the Text of Dr Newton. In Four Volumes. With the Life of the Author, and a Critique on ‘Paradise Lost’. By Joseph Addison (London, 1778; though the second frontispiece reads 1788).


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the intellectual and spiritual pleasures of solitary reading. Reflecting on the proliferation of print and daily occupations, Vicesimus Knox claimed that ‘it becomes necessary to read in the classical sense of the word, legere, that is to pick out … the best parts of books’.⁵⁸ Literary pictures at exhibitions participate in a culture of anthologies. Price argues that anthologies trained to read for the moral and aesthetic beauties, which ‘punctuated the narrative, interrupted the time of reading, and forced readers to surface periodically from the self-indulgent pleasures of mimesis to a higher, less particularized, more disinterested plane’.⁵⁹ Yet, at the same time, anthologies also suggest that any reading practice is selective. Nor is selective reading necessarily a sign of superficial engagement. Quite the opposite: Knox, for instance, praises the virtues of selective reading, degrading reading from cover to cover as a less reflective practice that may well induce the engrossing absorption and addictive hunger for novels, rather than opening an arena where the imagination can engage in free play with the other faculties. Literature at the exhibition enhances the interruptions of reading. In guiding the reader’s eye from the printed page to the picture, gallery catalogues encouraged the reader to pause and wander off in a reverie.⁶⁰ Lists of paintings published as advertisements for exhibitions further encouraged readers to project expectations by activating the titles into imaginary visualizations before seeing the pictures displayed at exhibitions. Yet, while the encounter with a single excerpt or literary picture might foster another type of absorption, the dynamic is different when there is continuity between the entries. In this case, not only does the exhibition anthologize the text, but the sequence of extracts also ends up producing an abridgement. As we will see, the Milton Gallery capitalized on this type of virtual reading, ensuring that reading and viewing kept alternating. Through this intermittent practice, the exhibition format created a tension between textual continuity and discontinuity. The continuity of writing is continuously broken into discrete units of dispositio. This layout in turn calls on the viewer to patch together the discrete climactic moments into a new continuous plot. While the viewer might tend to create a virtual whole out of the ⁵⁸ V. Knox, Winter Evenings; or, Lucubrations on Life and Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1790), ii. 10, quoted in Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 3. ⁵⁹ Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 7. ⁶⁰ Y. Bonnefoy, ‘Lifting Our Eye from the Page’, Critical Inquiry, 16 (1990), 794–806.

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metonymic impulse of a picture, this virtual enactment is interrupted and kept in check as s/he is called back to the next catalogue entry. Contiguous excerpts are strung into a sequence of before and after, negotiating perspectival shifts going from picture to text, from picture to picture, and from text to text. F U S E L I ’ S C ATA LO G U E : E XC E R P T I N G A N D A B R I D G I N G M I LTO N The Milton Gallery catalogue is an anthologizing act, which changes depending on the actions of the perceiver, oscillating between a collection of disjointed excerpts and an abridgement, which uncovers unsuspected continuities when rearranged into a new continuous whole.⁶¹ Taken as an anthology, it looks like a piece of montage, but reading it as an abridgement hardly makes it an easier or more normative version of the text. For the blanks within and between entries are there to engage the imagination of readers and depend on their connecting abilities to be turned into a continuous text, nor is the resulting whole a reconstruction and reduplication of the original. Before proceeding to a reading of the Milton Gallery catalogue as an extract of Paradise Lost, I want to explore the rather different anthologizing act envisioned in the 1791 prospectus for subscribers. The original plan draws on Milton in ways that parallel his currency in the culture of anthologies. Under the Joseph Johnson imprint, in texts such as William Enfield’s The Speaker and Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘sequel’ The Female Reader, Milton circulated in the form of a series of excerpts ‘selected from the best English writers, and disposed under proper heads, with a view to facilitate the improvement of youth in reading and speaking’. Johnson’s educational output provides a context for Fuseli’s claim that his Milton specimens will appeal to someone ‘who had never perused Paradise Lost, and its most sedulous reader’ alike, ⁶¹ Milton Gallery pictures and catalogue entries are abbreviated MG followed by catalogue number, according to the list published in the exhibition catalogue; see Royal Academy Archives, sig. Fu/4/1/1–8, Milton Gallery. A Catalogue of the First Series of Pictures and Sketches, from the Poetic Works of John Milton. By Henry Fuseli, R.A. (London, n.d. [1799, 1800]). The gallery catalogue excerpts are reproduced in K i. 205–21, 231–5, but Knowles eliminates the mottoes, the footnotes (which I will discuss in Chs. 4 and 5), and the small-capital letters identifying agency. The list published in The Times, 28 May 1799, is generally consistent with the Milton Gallery catalogue, but it fails to reproduce small-capital letters.


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because ‘to sympathise with the situations and characters in these Poems, human feelings alone are required’ (P 6). A few months later, the Milton and Shakspeare Gallery are recommended as rational entertainments in Capel Lofft’s edition of Paradise Lost with ‘the original system of orthography restored’ because ‘fittest for Elocution’.⁶² Yet Fuseli’s prospectus also had a sensational appeal. Much as Milton’s texts were excerpted in collections entitled The Beauties of Poetry, The Beauties of Thought, and The Beauties of Sentiment, Fuseli’s 1791 anthologizing intention proceeds from the claim that ‘the characteristic of Milton is sublimity’. Following that principle, the poem is scanned for the ‘number of sublime subjects’ in which it exceeds Homer. These are divided into pure (i.e. where astonishment predominates), or mixed, whose interest is drawn from ‘our nature and its passions’ (P 3). A list of nineteen pictures follows, the first ten identifying the pure sublime as Satan’s subplot and the following nine the plot of Adam and Eve. Having separated the matter of Hell and Earth under different aesthetic effects, Paradise Lost is restructured into a supernatural plot, featuring Satan in Hell, his journey upward through Chaos, his encounter with Uriel and Gabriel, ‘the precipitation of the Rebel-host to the Abyss’, the Creation, the Bridge built over Chaos, and ‘The Transformation of Satan and his Peers to Serpents’. By contrast, the human sublime follows ‘Satan’s Discovery of Adam and Eve’, ‘The first Impression of Eve’s reflected Image on herself’, ‘Satan touched by the Spear of Ithuriel starting from the Ear of Eve’, ‘Raphael’s Visit to Adam’, ‘Adam’s Dream of Eve new-formed’, ‘The Interview between Adam and Eve after her Fall’, ‘The Judgement pronounced on Adam and Eve, and the Serpent’, ‘The Vision of the Flood’, and ends with ‘The Expulsion from Paradise’ (P 3–6). Despite this restructuring, this juxtaposition of disjointed excerpts harbours two adaptations of Milton’s poem. Skipping can give way to skimming and an anthology of sublime moments can be ‘read for the plot’, turning the entries into an abridgement. Such plot potential acquires more cohesion by contrast with the subsequent entries in the prospectus. As one moves from Paradise Lost to the subjects from Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and the shorter works, the list turns into a series of effects: ‘the united efforts of the ⁶² Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books. The Author John Milton. Printed from the 1st and 2nd Editions collated. The Original System of Orthography restored; the Punctuation corrected and extended. With Various Readings: & Notes; chiefly Rhythmical, ed. C. Lofft (Bury St Edmunds, 1792), p. xxv. In May 1799 Lofft dedicated his specimen of Paradise Lost to Mrs Siddons: see Monthly Mirror, 7 (May 1799), 282.

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greatest names in art, celebrated for poetic or mechanic excellence, could not have contrived materials better suited to produce their several powers’. This is where Fuseli’s projected gallery begs comparison with Macklin’s and Boydell’s. Since the prospectus announces the subjects ‘to be painted principally, if not entirely, by Henry Fuseli’, by offering a one-painter show of a single author, the gallery will showcase the painter’s many talents, testing his ability to combine and rival the united efforts of the greatest. For the sake of ‘variety’—allegedly to ‘refute the charge of sameness which has been made, (chiefly indeed against the simplicity of plan in Paradise Lost)’—Fuseli counts on Milton’s other works to offer up ‘a series of subjects in which fancy has combined every form that can interest the eye by novelty, beauty, grandeur, dignity, character, or whim, with the utmost variety of important action’. In particular, Paradise Regained is itemized into four excerpts, which are headed by a series of questions rather than titles such as ‘what can exceed the enchantment of the following assemblage of grand, elegant, and luxuriant images?’, ‘what can exceed the magic of the following scene of terrour?’ As the catalogue takes on features of showmanship, the gallery is turned into an entertainment of tableaux, following the vogue for serial, climactic discontinuity, which has led Meisel to assimilate the theatre to magic lanterns.⁶³ A further element of discontinuity depends on the reading patterns shaped by serial publication.⁶⁴ At the time of the prospectus, the Milton Gallery was to be published in fifteen numbers each containing ‘two plates, with about seventy pages of text’. Six weeks later, Fuseli announced that the first number would contain prints of Satan Sin and Death and Eve Starting from herself in the Water.⁶⁵ In all likelihood, on top of the discontinuity between the two images a mismatch between plates and letterpress would encourage subscribers to recall or invent appropriate literary excerpts for the prints and activate the plot on the basis of the excerpts provided. Individual numbers were often miscellaneous. The last instalment of Macklin’s Bible and Bowyer’s Hume came with instructions to the binder detailing where to place the prints; only at the moment of binding would the relationship between prints, vignettes, and letterpress be stabilized. ⁶³ M. Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in NineteenthCentury England (Princeton, 1983), 38–51. ⁶⁴ T. Keymer, ‘The Serialization of Tristram Shandy’, in Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford, 2002), sect. . ⁶⁵ Fuseli to Roscoe, 22 and 28 Oct. 1791, CEL 74, 77.


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Iser argues that serial publication foregrounds the functioning of literature: ‘the text represents a potential effect that is realized in the reading process’.⁶⁶ By ‘suspending good continuation’, serial publication opens texts up to the collaboration of readers. This performative and collaborative practice of literature is activated at the literary galleries, which were indeed conceived as serial publications. An anthological gallery catalogue that opts for a single picture per text draws on readers to enact an adaptation of the original story, so that if the literature presented at the exhibition turns readers into spectators, it also pushes spectators to turn into readers if not authors, asking them to complete the story with what precedes and comes after the point of time represented in a picture. Much as in a serial publication each instalment suspends ‘good continuation’, in any act of reading the text is only available bit by bit and reading involves making assumptions and readjusting one’s viewpoint each time these assumptions are tested against the text. Because the Milton Gallery represented twenty-seven pictures from the same text, it is closer than the other literary galleries to the selective reading of a complete text. Admittedly, the serial publication aspect of Fuseli’s enterprise had fallen through a long time before the exhibition opened, which meant that there were fewer formats for printed matter circulating at the gallery. Viewers could count on lists of pictures published in the newspapers and the catalogue on sale at the exhibition, but had no prints with titles and excerpts, nor any numbers combining prints with letterpress. Yet the monographic focus of the Milton Gallery would encourage practices of reading shaped by serial publication, engaging viewers in an interactive dynamic. While interruptions required them to formulate assumptions and fill in missing links, these would then be tested against subsequent pictures, which kept asking viewers to readjust their story and expectation. Thus, going through the gallery involved a tension between discontinuous excerpts and continuous articulations. Moreover, the continuities and discontinuities of Milton’s text had been at the centre of eighteenth-century philological interventions, a tradition Fuseli’s prospectus explicitly recalls: the names of Bentley, and of Newton, grace the list of scholars who employed their leisure in amending and commenting on his text … the labours of the first offer little more than the result of that intemperate criticism which considers the author as its victim, and, without remorse, lops what it disdains to understand, or is too callous to feel. (P 1) ⁶⁶ Iser, The Act of Reading, pp. ix, 191.

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By mentioning Richard Bentley’s 1732 and Thomas Newton’s 1749 editions of Paradise Lost, Fuseli raised the expectation that his project would respond to their efforts. Even though Fuseli’s pictures eventually failed to be accompanied by the text edited and annotated by William Cowper, the Milton Gallery kept up its engagement with and challenge to eighteenth-century editorial practices. Bentley had an interventionist approach to Paradise Lost. Assuming that blindness prevented Milton from checking the manuscript, Bentley invented the figure of an interpolator to hold responsible for the passages he disapproved of.⁶⁷ Unwelcome digressions fell the victims of exercises in ‘suspension of good continuation’, which were not about filling blanks or missing links, but fighting excess. ‘Reading for the plot’, Bentley restored ‘good continuation’ by cutting out what he considered as distracting additions attributed to the interventions of the evil interpolator: ‘’tis a silly Interruption of the Story in the very middle, which ought to have been continued; and casting 55 Lines out, aptly coheres thus’. Bentley’s fiction of the interpolator highlights the reader’s focalizing activities. Each excision contains both a destructive and a reconstructive textual practice. Passages up for excision were bracketed and italicized, which dynamized the text highlighting editorial intervention. What Bentley highlighted for excision often seamlessly disappeared in John Wesley’s 1763 Extract from Paradise Lost. It may seem unfair to compare such different materials as an elite bibliographical disquisition and a militant evangelical product for mass distribution, but the comparison sheds light on different ways of reading. In an attempt to bring Milton closer to the common reader, Wesley abridged Milton’s poem by pruning ‘the immense learning which he has every where crowded together’, and ‘omitting those lines, which I despaired of explaining to the unlearned, without using abundance of words’.⁶⁸ Wesley extracted the plot by cutting mythological figures and lengthy connotative passages. Milton’s long sentences, erudite similes, and difficult word order were frequently perceived as a hindrance to the general reader. Priestley pointed out that when we read the beginning of Paradise Lost we have to wait for sense through a long sentence whose separate members are ⁶⁷ R. Bentley, ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost ’. A New Edition, by Richard Bentley, DD (London, 1732), 93, on PL . 444–98. ⁶⁸ [J. Wesley], ‘To the Reader’, An Extract from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, With Notes, 2nd edn. (London, 1791), 3. See also O. Sherwin, ‘Milton for the Masses: Wesley’s Edition of Paradise Lost’, Modern Language Quarterly, 12 (1951), 267–85.


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remote and disjointed from one another.⁶⁹ Eighteenth-century writers of treatises on elocution and the art of reading tried to correct Paradise Lost by rearranging its lines, so that the reader could visualize the whole sentence at a glance, knowing where to pause for sense and breath. Such interventions dissected and dynamized Milton’s verses, sometimes reining in enjambements to restore the whole to the limits of the line. Yet to establish homogeneity between sense and line endings meant to curb if not stop the figural potential of gaps. Thus established and stabilized through closure, the sense would inhibit the transgressive potential of the action arrested at its pregnant moment, fearful that such a pregnant moment might be carried towards fulfilment in ways different from those achieved by the author or editor.⁷⁰ Wesley’s abridgement and Fuseli’s Milton Gallery catalogue belong to opposing textual practices and ideologies. The Milton Gallery catalogue disarticulates Paradise Lost at key junctures and excerpts climactic moments, which are then listed in separate entries. Expurgations and interruptions are marked by blanks between entries, and blanks and dashes within entries. Beside the dashes, line numbers in the left-hand column document jumps, helping readers to find their place from one end to the other of a hiatus. According to Iser, blanks expose the seams of the text, foregrounding breaks in connective patterns, which invite the reader to fill in links, drawing on inferential processes. While Fuseli’s text is anthological, Wesley offers a continuous text meant to stand in place of Milton’s. In contrast to the exposed seams Fuseli displays in his mangled entries, Wesley elides any signs of editorial intervention: no dots, dashes, or blanks mark Wesley’s passage. Wesley’s critical intervention is self-effacing: the text is fixed in a version that leaves no marks pinpointing the editor’s changes, nor where further changes can engage the work of other editors or readers. To compare Bentley’s and Wesley’s Paradise Lost to Fuseli’s is to see the text metamorphose in the eyes of the reader. Depending on the point of view, the same textual locations may be read as gaps or excrescences. Purging the textual matter ⁶⁹ J. Priestley, Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777; Menston, 1968), 283. ⁷⁰ On discussions of Milton’s lines in 18th-century treatises on elocution and the art of reading, see R. Bradford, ‘ ‘‘Verse Only for the Eye?’’ Line Endings in Paradise Lost’, Essays in Criticism, 3 (1983), 187–204; id., ‘Milton’s Graphic Poetics’, in M. Nyquist and M. W. Ferguson (eds.), Remembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (New York, 1987), 179–97; id., Silence and Sound: Theories of Poetics from the Eighteenth Century (Rutherford, NJ, 1992).

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between quotations either brings together the essential, climactic turns in the text, or restores its true cohesion by extracting the ‘mangled Limbs of our Poet, scatter’d among’ the lines and trying to ‘have the Features of Milton’ ‘with some help of Surgery’.⁷¹ I will use Wesley’s abridgement as a testing ground for Fuseli’s Milton Gallery catalogue. Similes about Satan and the matter of Hell are the most prominent area where the Milton Gallery restores and exhibits Bentley’s and Wesley’s textual lacunae. By choosing twelve pictures out of twentyseven from the first two books of Paradise Lost, Fuseli amplifies Satan’s plot, departing from the average scale of one picture per book usually adopted in illustrated editions. Four of these pictures derive from similes that Wesley excises from his Extract. The first comes after three pictures depicting the first sighting of Satan in Hell, and Satan addressing his host: Figures from a simile in allusion to the contracted form of the Spirits assembled in the new raised Hall of P, illustrated by a simile from Fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over head the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds. (MG 4, PL . 781)

While the elves had disappeared from Wesley’s text to privilege the more dystopian connotations of giants turned into dwarfs,⁷² Fuseli leaves out this miniaturizing transformation of demons into pigmies and chooses instead to emphasize the elves, the viewer, and the dream. The imagery of the belated peasant is associated with the pictures from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which Fuseli painted for Boydell, and the Puck and Fairy Mab pictures drawn from L’Allegro.⁷³ The focus on the elves, rather than the architecture of Pandaemonium, turns the matter of Hell into the texture of fancy. This escapist power of the excerpt is, however, kept at bay by the title, which restores the broken link to the main action ⁷¹ Bentley, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 281, on PL . 386. ⁷² ‘Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room, | throng numberless. Thus spi’rits to smallest form | reduc’d their shapes immense’ ([Wesley], An Extract from Paradise Lost, 24, on PL . 563–5). ⁷³ These pictures are listed as of similar size in Fuseli to Roscoe, 16 Feb. 1795, CEL 127.


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by paraphrasing and abridging what is cut out. The same anchoring is offered by the title of another picture drawn from a simile: L O, the Hell-hounds round S compared to those that follow the night-hag, when call’d In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lur’d with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the la’bring moon Eclipses at their charms. (MG 8, PL . 662)

These two titles are slightly different in the list of pictures published in the newspapers, where the syntactic links that anchor title to quotation and fragment to abridgement are discarded. If in the catalogue it is the titles that prevent the quotations from metamorphosing into independent actions, in the newspaper lists these very titles tend to become free-standing. Taken together, the titles of MG 4 and 8 present two stages in the transformation of simile into independent action: while the former includes words that register its origin as a comparison (Figures from a simile in allusion … ),⁷⁴ in the case of ‘L O, the Hell-hounds round S’ no term of comparison signals the position of the image within the economy of narrative. No place for such witchcraft can be found in Wesley’s abridgement, where the Hell-hounds are pruned of the syncretic infernal topology that Milton had packed in Cerberus, Scylla, and Lapland: About her middle round A crew of hell hounds never ceasing rung A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep, If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb, Yet there still bark’d and howl’d the other shape … (PL . 653b–654, 656–7, 666b)75

Bentley had also disposed of this passage, which he labelled as ‘trash’.⁷⁶ The same homogenizing strategy directs Wesley’s reader and Satan through Chaos, discarding mythological apparatuses such as Bellona’s war engines (PL . 921–4), and the company of sable-vested Night ⁷⁴ See also ‘comparison’ and ‘exemplification’ marking the pictures’ status as similes subordinated to the main action in the titles of MG 10 and MG 12. ⁷⁵ [Wesley], An Extract from ‘Paradise Lost’, 48, lines 561–5. ⁷⁶ Bentley, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 61, commenting on PL . 659–66; M. Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge, 1997), 72. See also Ch. 4 in this volume for a detailed discussion of this picture.

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(Orcus, Hades, Demorgon, and Rumour). Such materials are also cut out of Fuseli’s script despite his choice of four pictures for the allegory of Satan, Sin, and Death. Far from static ingredients of a topology of Hell dictated by commonplaces, Fuseli’s cuts highlight action and movement. For S encount’ring D, S interposing (MG 5) he chooses the climactic moment, rather than the description of the anamorphic figure of Death, which was a locus classicus of the sublime: And now great deeds Had been atchiev’d, whereof all Hell had rung, Had not the snaky Sorceress that sat Fast by Hell gate, and kept the fatal key, Ris’n, and with hideous outcry rush’d between. She finish’d, and the subtle Fiend his lore Soon learn’d, now milder. (MG 5, PL . 722, 815)

The strategy is even more evident in the entry for S pursued by D, where the action is streamlined at the expense of all qualification, while the dashes marking lacunae contribute to the dynamism of the entry: I fled, and cry’d out Death; I fled, but he pursued And swifter far Me overtook. (MG 7, PL . 787 (PL . 787b, 790a, 791b–792a) )

The fact that Fuseli proceeds to cut Chaos, Night, and Bellona’s war engines further enhances the dramatic bent of his script because it has the effect of tidying and speeding Satan’s movement once the allegorical encounter and the matter of Hell is left behind. Satan’s flight, a movement scanned into four pictures for less than a hundred lines, is the best testing ground for the politics of Wesley’s and Fuseli’s lacunae. From the painter’s cut emerges a more heroic characterization. Satan’s heroicomic fall, the prey of farting elements (PL . 932–8), is hardly consistent with the swift-moving hero Fuseli is carving out. Out goes the image. By contrast, the image is preserved in Wesley’s abridgement, for it visualizes Satan as a bathetic and passive victim of an alien space, foregrounding his heteronomy in Chaos. On the other hand, Wesley cuts out and Fuseli amplifies similes visualizing Satan as a force of nature, the half-eagle half-lion figure of A G pursuing an A. A comparison S exertions to force his way through


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the realm of C (MG 10, PL . 943), and U between S and C. An exemplification of S straightened in his passage to Light Harder beset Than when Ulysses on the larboard shunn’d Charybdis, and by th’other whirlpool steer’d So with difficulty and labour hard Mov’d on. (MG 12, PL . 1019 (1016b, 1019–22) )77

In abridging this passage Fuseli, Wesley, and Bentley go their separate ways: Wesley expunges everything, Bentley leaves Argo in place and cuts the Ulysses line out on the grounds of its ‘abominable’ heroic style, which is precisely what Fuseli instead selects for his image of Satan.⁷⁸ To look at Bentley, Wesley, and Fuseli either expurgating or focusing on those similes is to see them operate with different models of Paradise Lost and to test the difference between the text and its many actualizations. In Thomas Newton’s 1749 variorum edition of Paradise Lost, the passage comparing the miniaturizing giants of Pandemonium to fairy elves exemplifies the way Milton ‘never quits his simile till it rises to some very great idea, which is often foreign to the occasion that gave birth to it’. Newton agrees with Addison that such ‘long-tail’d’ comparisons add variety by diverting the reader with beautiful fables. This anthological device will please ‘those, who are acquainted with Homer’s and Vergil’s way of writing’.⁷⁹ This is what Iser calls ‘situation building’, a process whereby the reader builds ‘a situational frame to encompass himself and the text’ by appealing to a common ground, a repertoire of commonplaces. Negotiating the unknown in terms of the known identifies a community of readers. However, just as these similes ‘reduce the indeterminacies’ linking the story to a body of fables and mythological commonplaces that help set a scene, they exclude others such as ‘the unlearned’ Wesley is catering for.⁸⁰ ⁷⁷ [Wesley], An Extract from ‘Paradise Lost’, 55–6; see lines 791–2, 802–4, 809–10, 822. ⁷⁸ Bentley, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 74–5, on PL . 1019. On Bentley’s excisions on grounds of low or distasteful subject matter, see J. K. Hale, ‘Paradise Purified: Dr Bentley’s Marginalia for his 1732 Edition of Paradise Lost’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 10/1 (1991), 63–70. ⁷⁹ Paradise Lost. A poem, in twelve books. The author John Milton. A new edition, with notes of various authors, ed. T. Newton, 2 vols. (London, 1749), i. 74–5, on PL . 780. ⁸⁰ Iser, The Act of Reading, 66.

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Fuseli’s intertextual recourse to the commonplace book is much more evident in entries 28 to 40, where Milton’s other works are excerpted in disjointed anthological excerpts. In some cases, the process of familiarization inverts the focus and Milton’s texts become the known material used to familiarize the less known. Consider C meditating revenge over the Sword of S (MG 34), which Fuseli links to an excerpt from Il Penseroso, turning Milton’s text into an anthology open to further stories: Or call up him that left half told The story of Cambuscan bold And if ought else great bards beside In sage and solemn tunes have sung

.

Here the text’s relationship to the repertoire places Fuseli’s northern cosmopolitanism and his British audience at the two poles of the situational frame. If for him Chremhild would certainly have been a port of entry into Milton, for the British viewer Milton provides the familiar ground for the northern subject matter of the Nibelungenlied and Lapland. A footnote to the gallery catalogue further familiarizes the image through a classical lineage: ‘This image, from the poem of Chunrat, a bard anterior to Chaucer, is Homeric; Penelope weeping over the bow of Ulysses—which was probably the moment chosen by Zeuxis for his picture of Penelope. Plin. 35.10.’⁸¹ The appeal to classical lineage restores Milton within a classical commonplace book in entry 36, where Comus is referred to Orgies of Cotytto. Baptae preparing a Philtrum. See Vth Epode of Horace. Of the pictures from L’Allegro, The Frier’s Lanthorn (MG 31) is in an afterthought linked to an excerpt from Paradise Lost: Picture XXXI receives still better light from the following lines in Paradise Lost, Book IX. v.634, &c. as when a wand’ring fire, Which oft, they say, some evil Spi’rit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads th’amaz’d night-wand’rer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool, There swallow’d up and lost, from succour far.

By exposing ‘the unseen joints of the text’ and suspending ‘good continuations’, Fuseli’s cuts open up their textual possibilities. According ⁸¹ [Fuseli], Milton Gallery. A Catalogue, 17.


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to Iser, the lack of connection ‘releases something which had hitherto inevitably remained hidden’ and offers a ‘tacit invitation to find the missing link’.⁸² I will explore a couple of cutting devices, and then go on to analyse how larger gaps let the text loose of its supernatural moorings, and drift into rather different textual economies. Patching entries together does not always confirm Iser’s idea that ‘the blank as an empty space between segments enables them to be joined together’.⁸³ See, for instance, S bursts from C He ceas’d; and Satan stay’d not to reply, But Springs upward like a pyramid of fire. (MG 11, PL . 1010 (PL . 1010, 1011a, 1013) )

The sentence ‘He ceas’d’ points backwards to something missing. Instead of an element of cohesion, it highlights a lacuna, Satan’s dialogue with Chaos, which has been left out of the script. By pointing back to the textual ghost, which is expunged in the gap between excerpts, ‘He ceas’d’ interrupts the flow that might merge entries into a new continuum. What might seem sloppy acquires a functional dimension because it emphasizes a sudden shift from stasis to movement. This kinetic effect is enhanced by the use of tenses. For Kames the present tense activates the text by making it present to the reader, who is drawn in as a spectator.⁸⁴ The juxtaposition of past and present tenses, a key ingredient of Milton’s visuality, indicates variation in scale, distance, and depth, as the reader identifies with the character and moves with him through space. In other cases, cutting produces invisible condensations, as in the Ulysses entry, where only one out of two similes is retained and, this time like Wesley, Fuseli conceals his intervention beneath a smooth textual surface unmarked by dashes or line numbers. Another way of bridging gaps into new connections emulates the rhetorical figure of the homoteleuton, which brings together an ending with a similar beginning and creates an effect of continuity that papers over the textual gap in between. See, for instance, how the entry for the third picture connects to the second: ⁸² Iser, The Act of Reading, 184, 196. ⁸³ Ibid. 197. ⁸⁴ H. Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1762), i. 119.

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S haranguing his Host He spake: and to confirm his words, out flew Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs Of mighty Cherubim (MG 3, PL . 663)

‘He spake’ seems to be a reaction to S calling up his Legions (MG 2, PL . 299, 314, 330), but it is the end of a later speech that provides a suture bridging in one sequence two excerpts separated by 300 lines. This cut replicates a mechanism responsible for the spreading of error in manuscript transmission, the ‘saut du même au même’, which involves leaping from one point to another that starts or ends with the same word or expression, missing out the intervening passage. This mechanism emphasizes that reading and writing are selective, anthological practices. The most radical ‘suspensions of good continuation’ reshape the middle books of Paradise Lost. After a wealth of images representing the first two books, large cuts open the text at its seams.⁸⁵ Adopting Bentley’s philological practice against his principle, Fuseli’s exercises of expurgation read for the plot discovering and restoring new cohesions. Having spent twelve pictures in Hell, book  is cut out and, with it, out go God the Father and the Messiah. Indeed, grounding the plot at the level of Eden, Fuseli does away with the celestial regions altogether. Instead, the narrative focuses on the plots of Satan and Adam and Eve. A and E first discovered by S (MG 13) conflates 180 lines into ten that place Adam and Eve in Eden (PL . 325–7). The picture represents their interaction (PL . 337–40) juxtaposed to Satan’s lonely watching, envying, plotting: aside the ‘Spirit’ turn’d For envy, yet with jealous leer malign Ey’d them askance. (MG 13, PL . 325, 337, 502)

Fuseli’s montage contrasts with Milton’s continuity editing, a scene that progressively expands into a plan d’ensemble on the animals in the garden, until it includes Satan the serpent. Fuseli’s choice quickens the pace of Milton’s narrative merging MG 13 and 14 in a continuous movement, in which Satan’s viewing is encompassed by Uriel’s: ⁸⁵ Iser, The Act of Reading, 183.


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S surprised at the ear of E, starting from the touch of I Spear. Him thus intent Ithuriel with his spear Touch’d lightly; up he starts Discover’d and surpriz’d. As when a spark Lights on a heap of nitrous powder, the smutty grain With sudden blaze diffus’d inflames the air: So started up in his own shape the Fiend. Back stept those two fair Angels half amaz’d So sudden to behold the grisly king. (MG 14, PL . 810 (PL . 810–811a, 813b–815a, 817b–819) )

The first gap shows Fuseli’s lack of patience with qualification and explanation as he cuts For no falsehood can endure Touch of celestial temper, but returns Of force to its own likeness. (PL . 811b–813a)

Where Bentley feels the need to add a verse to ensure that Milton’s narrative does not enlarge Satan’s field of action into deceiving angelic powers,⁸⁶ Fuseli prunes off teleological props and treats angels and demon on the same footing. Similarly, the gap between MG 14 and 15 could also be reabsorbed by diegetic cohesion, for Fuseli cuts the dialogue between Satan and the angels and mounts together the angels’ reaction to their discovery of Satan and Satan’s later reaction to the dialogue that takes place between the two entries: S discovering his fate in the Scale aloft, flying from G and the Angelic Squadron On th’other side Satan alarm’d Collecting all his might dilated stood. The Fiend look’d up, and knew His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled Murm’ring, and with him fled the shades of night. (MG 15, PL . 985, 1013) ⁸⁶ Between ‘Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear’ and ‘touches lightly’, Bentley suggests interpolating ‘knowing no real Toad durst there intrude’; see Bentley, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 136–7; Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, 71.

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The gap within the excerpts highlights action at the expense of the dilating, delaying effect of Milton’s cosmic amplification (PL . 985–1005) and further dialogue (PL . 1005–13). The action carved out by cuts is then abridged in the title. The same selective editing contrasted to a prolix paraphrasing title governs The Dream of E, fancying to have tasted the Fruit from the Tree of interdicted Knowledge, with One shap’d and wing’d like one of those from Heaven. Forthwith up to the clouds With him I flew, and underneath beheld The earth outstretch’d immense Suddenly My guide was gone, and I, methought, sunk down, And fell asleep; (MG 16, PL . 55, 86, 90)

The title helps the less well-read viewers by filling in the information considered essential to the plot. The syntactic cohesion between title and quotation requires them to be read together. Yet the quotation could stand alone and follow from the previous entry. After Satan discovered by the angelic squadron ‘fled | Murm’ring, and with him fled the shades of night’, the scene shifts onto Eve’s reawakening from his oneiric influence. The first person in the quotation clashes with the title’s third-person account. Again Fuseli edits out anything that might delay the course of the action: the description of Satan, whom pictures would ‘bring before the eyes’ of viewers, and all dialogue. Fuseli’s kinetic cut expunges the flashbacks and the hierarchical checks which obstruct the action and mark the boundary between natural and supernatural. Out go the encyclopedic encounter with the Archangel Raphael, the Creation, and the War in Heaven. The encyclopedic dimension is at odds with the universality that Fuseli attributed to the epic: ‘the end of epic poetry’, he argued, is ‘to write for all times and all races,—to treat of what will always exist and always be understood’ (K i. 82). Fuseli’s editorial practice restructures Milton’s epic as the medium that should ‘impress one general idea’, considering ‘the visible agents’ as ‘only engines to force one irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy’ (K ii. 157). Not only is the Archangel Raphael obsolete rather than universal, but he also slows down the thrust of the irresistible idea. Fuseli’s engagement with the supernatural will be discussed in Chapter 4, but here I want to highlight what the cut brings together.


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Skipping three books, Fuseli’s expurgation brings to light the possibility for a new cohesion. As if redeeming the text from ‘interpolations’ in the Bentleyan style, Fuseli’s editing welds the juncture left open by the gap of three books separating MG 16 and 17. The result is to bring together the dreams of Eve and Adam: The creation of E, as related by A. Abstract as in a trance methought I saw, Though sleeping, where I lay, and saw the shape Still glorious before whom awake I stood; Who stooping open’d my left side, and took From thence a rib Under his forming hands a creature grew, so lovely fair, That what seem’d fair in all the world, seem’d now Mean, or in her summ’d up. (MG 17, PL . 462, 470)

Fragmenting Milton’s text into such excerpts means releasing them from the temporal planes that structure the poet’s plot hierarchy. The entries may well be in the past tense, but once they are taken out of their place in Milton’s text, Eve’s and Adam’s dreams can no longer be contained in the form of flashbacks. Mounted in a new sequence, they powerfully expose and restructure the dynamics of the poem. As Chapter 5 will show in greater detail, the cuts open up the story of Adam and Eve and reveal the uncertain negotiations of male and female agency in the poem. Instead of being ‘for God in’ Adam, Eve looks up at Satan, while Adam is bent on Eve rather than upwards. MG 18 continues Adam’s first sighting of Eve: E, new created, led to A. On she came, Led by her heav’nly Maker, And guided by his voice, Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her eye, I overjoy’d could not forbear aloud. This turn has made amends. (MG 18, PL . 484 (PL . 484–485a, 486a, 488, 490–491a) )

Moving on to E at the Forbidden Tree (MG 19) means mounting in a sequence the sight of Eve and the Fall:

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E at the Forbidden Tree. Her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the fruit, she pluck’d, she eat: Back to the thicket slunk The guilty Serpent. (MG 19, PL . 780 (PL . 780–781, 784b–785a) ) A resolved to share the fate of E; the Guardian Angels leaving the Garden.∗ if death Consort with thee, death is to me as life; Our state cannot be sever’d, we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself. So Adam, and thus Eve to him reply’d. O glorious trial of exceeding love, Illustrious evidence, example high! So saying, she embrac’d him, and for joy Tenderly wept Up into Heav’n from Paradise in haste Th’angelic guards ascended, mute and sad For Man (MG 20, PL . 953, 958, 990, . 17)

After the fall, Fuseli’s cuts leave Adam and Eve without a guide amid the fragmentary visions of the history of mankind. As Fuseli expunges the poem’s celestial mediations, with the silencing of Raphael’s warning voice out go Michael’s lessons on man’s future. Without the angels’ hierarchical interventions, which provided the teleological underpinnings and justifications within Milton’s narrative, Fuseli’s cuts dismiss the teleological structure of the story. No Providence intervenes to direct Adam and Eve’s path at the Milton Gallery. E after the Sentence and departure of the Judge, despairing, supported by A (MG 21) joins the sentence of the Judge to Adam and Eve’s reaction to the Fall (PL . 224, 1007–1012a). The juncture with the next picture changes Adam’s focus: at the end of MG 21 he ‘to better hopes his more attentive mind | Lab’ring had rais’d’, yet the object of his attention is not the teleological plan of history and felix culpa, but the ‘pontifical’ art of Sin and Death: D and S bridging the ‘waste’ of C, and met by S on his return from Earth.


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The aggregated soil Death with his mace petrific, cold and dry, As with a trident smote, and the mole immense wrought on Over the foaming deep high arch’d, a bridge Of length prodigious. when behold Satan in likeness of an Angel bright Sin, his fair Enchanting daughter, thus the silence broke: O Parent, these are thy magnific deeds. (MG 22, PL . 293, 300, 326, 352) S discovered on his Throne, after his return from Earth. Down a while He sat, and round about him saw unseen: At last as from a cloud his fulgent head And shape star-bright appear’d all amaz’d At that sudden blaze the Stygian throng Bent their aspect loud was th’acclaim: Forth rush’d in haste the great consulting peers, Rais’d from their dark Divan. (MG 23, PL . 447, 452, 455)

This is followed by The Vision of the Lazar-house, The Vision of the Deluge, and The Vision of Noah (MG 24–6). No longer framed to be part of the Archangel’s lessons in futurity as they are in Paradise Lost, in Fuseli’s cut these visions are arranged on the same plot level as the visualization of Satan’s triumph of book . While The Vision of Noah should redirect the plot towards a potential happy ending, Providence is excluded from the picture: The dismission of A and E from Paradise. In either hand the hast’ning Angel caught Our ling’ring parents, and to th’eastern gate Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast To the subjected plain; then disappear’d. They looking back, all th’eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late their happy seat, Wav’d over by that flaming brand, the gate

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The Spectator Turned Reader With dreadful faces throng’d and fiery arms: Some natural tears they dropt. (MG 27, PL . 637)

The elimination of Raphael and Michael from Fuseli’s Paradise Lost exemplifies Iser’s ‘suspension of good continuation’. Fuseli guts Milton’s poem, reducing it to a series of climactic moments that are rearticulated in a new whole. Like Bentley, Fuseli’s new cohesion connects passages that bridge the interruptions caused by his cuts. The new, streamlined epic shape he models for Milton’s poem is easier to understand in the light of this role as editor of Cowper’s Homer and of the epic theory of painting. F U S E L I ’ S M I LTO N : E PI C A N D PA I N T I N G Cowper’s damn’d blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism.—Chapman gallops off with you his own free pace. (Charles Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, 23 October 1802) [Cowper’s] injudicious use of the stately slow Miltonic verse in a subject so very different, has given a distaste. Nothing can be more unlike to my fancy than Homer and Milton. Homer is perfect prattle, tho’ exquisite prattle, compared to the deep oracular voice of Milton. In Milton you love to stop, and saturate your mind with every great image or sentiment; in Homer you want to go on, to have more of this agreeable narrative. (Charles Lamb to Charles Lloyd, 31 July 1809)

Lamb’s pronouncements contrast the varying speeds of Homer in translation to the arresting images of Milton’s verse. Yet where Lamb perceived a contrast, Cowper identified a similarity between Milton and Homer: ‘it is in those breaks and pauses, to which the numbers of the English poet are so much indebted both for their dignity and variety, that he chiefly copies the Greecian’.⁸⁷ Cowper’s Homer represented a preliminary ground in which the epic took shape before Fuseli turned to his Milton. For the painter had been ⁸⁷ W. Cowper, ‘Preface to the First Edition (1791) of the Translation of Homer’, in Letters and Prose, v. 65. In his second preface he answers those who denied the presence of pauses in Homer; see ibid. 70.


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engaged as a ‘Revisor’ for Cowper’s Homer by Joseph Johnson.⁸⁸ The first edition was published in 1791, and between 1791 and 1792 Cowper was revising his Homer while also working on a commentary for Fuseli’s Milton.⁸⁹ In January 1793 Fuseli reviewed Cowper’s translation for the Analytical Review.⁹⁰ Fuseli’s editing of Cowper sheds light on his own rewriting of Paradise Lost. In both cases Fuseli purges the Miltonic out of the epics. Cowper’s lines are pruned of those inversions he recognizes as Miltonic. The epithets also must go ‘lest the English reader should blame Homer … for such constant repetition’.⁹¹ Fuseli’s revisionary exercise tried to restore narrative pace to the epic. In his review Fuseli claimed that Homer ‘hurls us along by the torrent of his plan’ (K i. 83). Fuseli’s Ulyssean simile is a mise en abyme of his own restructuring of Paradise Lost, where he tries to highlight action at the expense of inwardness. Because the epic is the genre of pure diegesis, the speed of third-person narrative is at odds with self-reflexive authorial intrusion: To have leisure to think of the author when we read, or of the artist when we behold, proves that the work of either is of an inferior class: we have neither time to inquire after Homer’s birth-place or rank, when Andromache departs from her husband, nor stoop to look for the inscription of the artist’s name, when we stand before Apollo. (K i. 83)

There is no space then for Milton’s autobiographical poems. The better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom are better left unsung. Inward strife is incompatible with painting as much as with ancient epic, for both media represent external narratives better than lyric inwardness. Those elements that characterize Milton’s remodelling of the genre are rejected. Following Aristotle and Le Bossu, Fuseli restores the centrality of action at the expense of character.⁹² Privileging action over character makes the epic central to the parallel between poetry and painting. In his 1783 annotations to du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica, Reynolds confirmed that ‘action is the principal ⁸⁸ Cowper to Joseph Johnson, 25 Jan. 1786, and to Lady Hesketh, 31 Jan. 1786, in Letters and Prose, ii. 468, 474. Cowper complained that Fuseli’s strictures went well beyond checking the translation against the original; see Cowper to J. Johnson, 25 Jan. 1786, in Letters and Prose, ii. 475 n. ⁸⁹ Cowper, Letters and Prose, iv. 27, 364. ⁹⁰ AR 15 (Jan. 1793), 1–16, repr. in K i. 81–109. ⁹¹ Cowper to Samuel Rose, 17 Feb. 1793, in Letters and Prose, iv. 292–3, commenting on Fuseli’s review, rep. in K i. 85–6. ⁹² Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic, ed. S. Curran (Gainesville, Fla., 1970), 54.

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requisite in a subject for History-painting’.⁹³ Indeed, as a medium painting is closer to Aristotelian rules than tragedy (let alone epic), as Dryden observed in The Parallel of Poetry and Painting: But the parallel is more complete in Tragedy than in an Epic Poem: for as a Tragedy may be made out of many particular Episodes of Homer, or of Virgil; so may a noble picture be designed out of this or that particular story in either author. … Tragedy and Picture are more narrowly circumscribed by the mechanic rules of Time and Place than the Epic Poem. … I must say this to the advantage of Painting, even above Tragedy, that what this last represents in the space of many hours, the former shews us in one moment.⁹⁴

Fuseli’s Milton Gallery tests Dryden’s definition in that the unity of action within each painting is supplemented by the overall unity of the epic original. If action is central to the epic as a ‘poetical recital of great adventures’, Hugh Blair recommends ‘a style always rapid and vehement; in narration concise, even to abruptness’, at the expense of a ‘full and extended connection of parts’.⁹⁵ Hence, either prune or promote similes to the main action. The focus on speed and rhythm associates Fuseli with Lessing’s analysis of Homer’s progressive actions.⁹⁶ Like Lessing, Fuseli underlines Homer’s kinetic rhythm: He never suffered the descriptions that branched out of his subject to become too heavy for the trunk that supported them … he … contrived to create the image he described, limb by limb, part by part, before our eyes, connecting it with his plot, and making it the offspring of action and time, the two great mediums of poetry. … we are not introduced to enumerate greaves, helmet, sword, belt corslet, spear; they become important by the action only that applies them to the hero’s limbs. … where description must have stagnated or suspended action, it is confined to a word, ‘the sable ship’ … this is the mystery, without which the most exquisite description becomes an excrescence, and only clogs and wearies the indignant and disappointed reader. Poetic imitation, we repeat it, is progressive, and less occupied with the surface of the object than its action. (K i. 88–9)

While he indicates Milton as the only Homeric follower who managed to ‘accumulate details without losing the whole’ (K i. 87), Fuseli’s ⁹³ Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, iii. 104, and also Le Bossu, 186–90. ⁹⁴ Dryden’s text was first published as a preface to his 1695 translation of du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica, rep. in Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, iii. 242–5. ⁹⁵ H. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. H. F. Harding, 2 vols. (Carbondale, Ill., 1965), 410, 418–19; id., A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London, 1763), 18. ⁹⁶ Lessing, Laocoön, 79.


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philological practice seems to be trying to find and restore the Iliad hidden within Paradise Lost. POEMS ON THE GALLERIES: THE READER TURNED S PE C TATO R T U R N E D AU T H O R Where Fuseli streamlines his Miltonic script into a Homeric epic, blanks and references in catalogue entries offer a series of generative images and fragments of elocution to the multifarious associations of viewers and readers. In the end, Paradise Lost becomes a dynamic script, a virtual text that can be rearticulated into quite different wholes. More than one shape is fleshed out of the gaps between pictures and between and within catalogue entries. A few poems written about the literary galleries will show how the galleries worked as arts of memory and sites of cultural production. Not only did they turn their readers into spectators and their spectators into readers, but they also turned them into authors. Gallery poems tend to configure texts at exhibition as disjointed series of commonplaces. As readers turn into spectators, texts are transformed into spatial projections and linear sequence into a sequence of scenes, discrete images, and excerpts. Offering literature as an art of memory, the exhibition space identifies the work of poets, painters, and viewers. Like poets and painters, viewers are in turn confronted with the task of composition, having to build a path and plot their way from one scene to the next. Turning gaps and interruptions into continuities involves various shapes of cohesion. In some cases, the plot is structured as a travel narrative or an astral journey, which can take the first person and an autobiographical turn. Alternatively, discrete scenes are strung together through a set of instructions, with a strong use of imperatives and deictics. In this case, tableau vivant meets prosopopoeia as pictures are made to tell their own story. As a result, the poems explore texts and pictures testing how poetry becomes ‘a speaking picture’, and painting ‘silent poetry’. Edward Jerningham’s 1791 The Shakspeare Gallery, ‘ does not pass any judgment upon the Pictures that are now exhibited in the Gallery; but attempts to point out new subjects for future exhibitions’. No attention is paid to pictures or painters. The poem is structured around leading characters from Shakespeare’s plays, with footnotes identifying textual references occasionally supplemented by a brief relevant quotation. Jerningham’s poem is an exercise in virtual imaging. His mental gallery

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turns Shakespeare readers into spectators. Some of Jerningham’s scenes are contiguous to passages featuring at Boydell’s, others already figure at the exhibition, though the pictures are not acknowledged. His readers are asked to match text with pictures hanging at the Shakspeare Gallery, supplement them with new ones, and create alternative connections and routes through the exhibition. By contrast, Tomlins’s 1797 The Shakspeare Gallery draws on the pictures on display at the gallery. Closer to a poetical guide, it tours the reader through the exhibition, pointing out key painters identified for their distinctive gifts and productions: Reynolds for displaying ‘all his wonted pow’rs’ in letting ‘Beaufort first arrest our wond’ring eyes’; Fuseli for ‘sportive grace’, but also ‘the horror of the tragic scene’ once ‘bright Fancy’s pleasing dream is o’er’; ‘engaging Hamilton’ for ‘elegance’; ‘Gentle Northcote’ for the capacity ‘with childhood innocence to melt the heart’; and so forth.⁹⁷ In both poems painting occupies a ‘middle place betwixt reading and acting’, as Kames argued.⁹⁸ The virtual text is shown in various degrees of actualization as the poems try and outperform painting in offering the impression of acting, something Hogarth had himself practised in considering his paintings as dumbshows.⁹⁹ Imperatives exhort the readers to look at characters coming one after the other as though arranged ‘on a spacious plain’ in the form of tableaux vivants, miming their scene. Such an adaptation recalls the procession of characters and dumbshows that Garrick had devised for the Shakespeare Jubilee.¹⁰⁰ Despite Tomlins’s mention of painter and genre, characters seem to break free of their frames as the medium of painting dissolves into a portal leading to visual imaging and mental enactment. Admittedly, newspaper articles generally supported Boydell in consecrating the Shakspeare Gallery as a repository for historical painting rather than portraits of actors. Yet, if gallery poets and viewers could endow painting with motion and dumbshow, it was because they were trained by the visual culture engineered by Garrick, who had shaped his own ⁹⁷ E. Jerningham, The Shakspeare Gallery: A Poem (London, 1791), ‘Advertisement’; ‘The Shakspeare Gallery’, in E. S. Tomlins, Tributes of Affection: with ‘The Slave’; and other Poems. By a Lady; and her Brother (London, 1797), 112–18. See also ‘Ode on the Shakspeare Gallery’, in Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh, 1797), 81–4, which takes the shape of a dispute on poetry and painting between the Muses, but fails to mention the Shakspeare Gallery. ⁹⁸ Kames, Elements of Criticism, i. 117. ⁹⁹ W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. R. Paulson (New Haven, 1997), 121–2. ¹⁰⁰ For a discussion of the Shakespeare Jubilee in connection with the Shakspeare Gallery, see Ch. 1, and Archenholz, A Picture of England, ii. 164–6.


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reception through an acting style driven by physiognomy and pauses in arresting attitudes, matched by his explicit scene-setting instructions to painters.¹⁰¹ The text’s visual actualization of frozen scenes into dumbshows activates the necromantic metaphors used to argue that book and stage endow Shakespeare with a new lease of life: to open the doors of the gallery is to see The throng of his departed Forms arise! … As from their grave shall burst the num’rous host, And on these walls a new existence boast.102

Conjuring the scenes goes hand in hand with evoking a scene of invention and composition, and equating poet, painter, and viewer as witnesses of the episodes on display. While Tomlins invites Shakespeare to come and see his ‘airy beings … embodied … claim ‘‘a local habitation and the name’’ ’, other gallery poems configure the process of composition as an astral journey. Jerningham compares Shakespeare to Ezekiel. Positioned ‘beyond the solar road, and starry course’, Shakespeare’s invention consists in looking down ‘as on a spacious plain, | Of human passions the long shadowy train’, much as the viewer goes from scene to scene at the gallery. Similarly, William Shepherd’s ‘Verses on the Milton Gallery’ start with an apostrophe: ‘Look down, great Milton, from the starry spheres,’ asking the Bard to visualize Fuseli following his path to ‘seize the vast forms that cross’d thy glowing Mind | and follow thee thro’ Fancy’s realms’.¹⁰³ Paradise Lost doubles as a metanarrative of the process of composition. Not only does the painter’s journey follow the Bard’s track through the poem, but in so doing both paths re-enact Satan’s journey through Chaos under the gaze of the angelic powers. So too does Roscoe in his ‘Verses to Henry Fuseli’ describe Milton as ‘him who wing’d his daring flight | Towards the confines of primaeval light’.¹⁰⁴ In turn, this inflection of the plot becomes ¹⁰¹ An advertisement published in The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 5 May 1789, argued that the Shakspeare Gallery avoided ‘all that extravaganza of attitude and start, which is tolerated, nay, in a degree demanded at the play house’; see also GM 58/2 (Sep. 1788), 778–9. For a comparison of Boydell pictures to theatrical performances, see F. Burwick, ‘John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Stage’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 133 (1997), 54–76. For Garrick’s attitudes, see Wood, The Shock of the Real, 28–35. ¹⁰² Jerningham, The Shakspeare Gallery, 6. ¹⁰³ Jerningham, The Shakspeare Gallery, 2; W. Shepherd, ‘Verses on the Milton Gallery’, London Packet, 5–7 June 1799. ¹⁰⁴ W. Roscoe, ‘Verses to Henry Fuseli, Esq., R.A. On his Series of Pictures from The Poetical Works of John Milton’, GM 69/1 (June 1799), 508–9.

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available to the viewer as a way of bringing together the pictures into a personalized version of the poem. Fuseli himself had appropriated Satan’s voyage to describe his own process of composition when he visualized Milton’s epic by going from one mnemonic site to the next: There may indeed be Some danger that, after bursting the Gates of Hell, bridging Chaos over, escaping from daemoniac phrenzy and moaping Melancholy in the Lazarhouse; or in the midst of an ecstasy at Eve new Created; Securely Snoring with Puck or eating Junkets with Mab—I may fall a prey to my Colourman or Landlord.¹⁰⁵

The same process is at work in a passage Fuseli’s pupil Benjamin Robert Haydon wrote recollecting a visit to his master recounted as a descent to the other world. Again, the paintings acquire life and motion: You knocked at a large, high door, which was opened by a gigantic Porter. Opposite the entrance stood in a dingy light the ponderous Hercules, bending over his Labours; to the right, various statues, semblances of the mighty dead. You mounted these long steps, passed close by the Hercules, turned through a low door into a dingy landing place, & turning to the right, mounted a flight of stone stairs, perfectly obscured in darkness. After groping your way and breaking your shins, you came to another landing place & door, which you opened, and the light flashing from a high window dazzled your eyes, as you found yourself amidst a parcel of spasmotic, leaping, or grimacing figures, equally terrific & unaccountable. Opposite spins Satan, like a Pyramid of fire, fighting the air through Chaos, then the Arimaspian, and under it Milton dictating to his daughters, while on the left was some German hero, stretched out, & some German savage heroine holding up long hair, Sigfrida discovers the murder of Vaspatlundeburg [?] her husband. You passed on [in] the great room; opposite the entrance hung the Lazar House, with the raving maniacs & all the dreams of a hospital mooning madness, and turning in to a smaller room full of equal horror, flying angels, with long noses & twisted hands or long legs & [an illegible word ] feet, came to a short passage on the left in which was the high door of the Old Enchanter’s cavern. By this time you naturally expected Satan to push his head out through the wall with his cruel eye, or Archimago to conjure you into a coal skuttle; at last you knocked, and a cracked or a gentle voice answered, as it suited, the old shape if shape it could be called!¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁵ Fuseli to Roscoe, 15 Jan. 1795, CEL 125. See also ‘A Vision’ (anonymous poem probably written by Roscoe’s daughter, the Countess of Guildford, rep. in K i. 434–9). ¹⁰⁶ The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. W. B. Pope, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960–63), iii. 18–19.


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Haydon’s expectation to meet with Satan has a performative effect on the pictures, transforming Fuseli’s rooms at the Royal Academy into a virtual environment that envelops him and thus turns him into a character within Milton’s setting. In this ironic scenario Haydon applied the generative potential of the pictures amplified into the plots for which they were metonymies. The pictures are dynamized into action by inflecting their titles. S bursts from C (MG 11) abridges the plot and already brings it before the eyes in Milton’s performative use of the present tense. In Haydon’s rewriting, a pastiche of title and catalogue excerpt visualizes and amplifies the picture: ‘Opposite spins Satan, like a Pyramid of fire, fighting the air though Chaos’.¹⁰⁷ Analysed, scanned, and stored in the reader’s memory, the poem turned gallery is a ready-made store of images for any user to inflect in the first person, providing linear cohesion to discrete images and excerpts. Once the text is turned into discrete pictures, the gallery space opens them up to multidirectional possibilities. While Fuseli’s catalogue orders the pictures in a sequence that mostly respects the dispositio of Milton’s poem, Roscoe’s poem rearranges those ingredients into two new configurations, following neither the plot of Paradise Lost nor the sequence of the pictures. Roscoe’s narrative starts with prelapsarian happiness and goes on to map the incestuous rite of Sin and Death followed by the phenomenology of the Fall culminating in the Lazarhouse (MG 24). Sketching an apparently parallel path of composition for poet and painter, Roscoe starts by undoing Milton’s beginning in medias res, having him follow a chronological sequence that first leads to ‘the pure confines of primeval light’, enabling the poet to witness the heavenly war, and ‘see in’th’abyss the proud apostate hurl’d, | and rising into light the infant world’, images not to be found at Fuseli’s gallery. Such viewing positions Milton into books  to , and Fuseli in front of picture 13 of his sequence. Fuseli’s ‘opening’ ‘the dread scenes that heaven suspensive ey’d’ means starting from ‘Eden’s happiest prime’ and moving on to the ‘dread reverse’: Then first, whilst Nature shudder’d with affright, Of Sin and Death was held th’incestuous rite; Then, first, o’er vanquish’d man began their reign, The fiends of Woe, the family of Pain! Disease the poison’d cup of Anguish fills, And opes the lazar-house of human ills!— ¹⁰⁷ The catalogue excerpt reads ‘springs upward like a pyramid of fire’ (PL . 1010).

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The Spectator Turned Reader See Frenzy rushes from his burning bed; See pining Atrophy declines his head; See mute Despair, that broods on woes unknown; And Melancholy gaze herself to stone!108

Under the pressure of description, the syntax breaks down and Fuseli’s Lazarhouse becomes animated. A repetition of imperatives instructs us to see, but the vision is so absorbing that its object simultaneously becomes the subject of another sentence. The coming together of seeing and writing causes a syntactic breakdown as excerpts of elocution and verbs are juxtaposed to the scene under view without syntactic subordination. Thus the writing revives the depiction of a pregnant moment as a sudden action. The contiguity of viewing and seeing accounts for the power of the literary gallery experience in George Dyer’s ‘On Visiting Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, in Pall Mall’: And while the youthful Bard shall listening hang On those sweet melodies, his raptur’d eye Shall gaze upon the wonders of thy art, And from the Painter catch the Poet’s fire.109

As Dyer indicates, one must imagine the spectator with ‘raptured eye’ looking at the pictures while s/he ‘listening hang[s] | on those sweet melodies’. Recounting the experience will imply inflecting the words coming under the heading of such pictures: joining the analytical commonplaces—those scanned images of good and evil—to the cumulative commonplaces of elocution, the centos of suitable passages which can be used on occasions such as those emblematically presented to the eyes. ¹⁰⁸ Roscoe, ‘Verses to Henry Fuseli’, 508–9. ¹⁰⁹ G. Dyer, ‘On Visiting Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, in Pall Mall’, GM 69/1 ( June 1799), 510.

3 The Reader Turned Spectator: Visual Narratives C 2 used Iser’s reader response to analyse the role and transformation of texts at exhibitions. That analysis is here pushed further as we move from the catalogue to the pictures. Much as gallery catalogues exemplify the ways in which texts construct their implied readers, so do literary galleries construct their implied spectators. This chapter sets the visual narrative explored by theorists alongside dictionary entries, developments in museum layouts as well as the visual spectacles of the day: magic lanterns, panoramas, and the Eidophusikon. In The Shows of London (1978), R. D. Altick offered a ground-breaking inventory of London’s spectacles. Eighteenth-century spectacles and viewing practices went across the barriers preserving high art and literature from what now falls in the precincts of popular culture. In order to reconstruct how language and painting turned readers into spectators in late eighteenth-century London, we need to explore the ways in which aesthetic experience was shaped by visual technologies as a series of integrated cultural practices. This chapter focuses on how reading shaped the experience of exhibitions and ends with an analysis of literary gallery narratives, culminating in a montage reading of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. V I S UA L B O O K K E E PI N G Heracles is continually shooting an arrow from his bow. He completes the act again and again, but in spite of this incessant activity on his part, the arrow remains motionless. (Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry) L’unité de temps est encore plus rigoureuse pour le peintre que pour le poète; celui-là n’a qu’un instant presque indivisible.

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The Reader Turned Spectator

Les instants se succèdent dans la description du poète, elle fournirait a` une longue galerie de peinture. (Denis Diderot, Pensées détachées sur la peinture, la sculpture et la poésie)

Heracles’ arrow from Odyssey 11. 606–7 illustrates the paradoxical condition of the visual arts in their attempt to represent an action in its making. By trying to freeze an image in its pregnant moment, visual narrative exemplifies the paradox of moving immobility explored by the Greek philosopher Zeno: ‘the arrow … cannot move because, at any given moment, it occupies a definite point in space’.¹ While Zeno argues the impossibility of a movement blocked in its several locations, the Milton Gallery tests the possibility that such arrested instants may merge into a continuous movement and produce moving pictures. Zeno’s paradox offers a solution to visual adaptation. For the attempt to fix the key action in its pregnant moment may give way to a proliferation of images, which chronicle the text’s successive instants. How many pictures does a literary text contain? This exercise in visual bookkeeping dates back to the sister arts tradition. In An Essay upon Poetry and Painting (1730) Charles Lamotte evaluated poetry through a via negativa, a process of definition through negation. Poetry is that which lacks the limits of the visual and has to defeat painting on its own terrain, i.e. immediacy, enargeia, or ‘bringing before the eyes’.² If the visual contracts a narrative within a single picture or has to split it into a series of pictures, then the supremacy of poetry is measured by the disproportionate number of images needed for painting to translate the contents of a verbal text: Vergil’s Aeneid contains a thousand pictures, Racine’s Iphigenia fifty.³ The hyperbole deployed to depreciate pictures paradoxically maps out the future of the literary galleries. Measuring a text’s worth in terms of the number of paintings it can produce becomes a criterion of judgement for the Comte de Caylus in Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade.⁴ If the number of pictures needed to translate a literary text bespeaks its greatness and superiority,

¹ S. Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 4–5; Zeno’s paradoxes of movement have been preserved in Aristotle’s Physics 6. 9. 239b–240a. ² See Aristotle on Rhetoric, 244–53. ³ C. Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting (London, 1730), 25, 31. ⁴ [A.-C.-P., Comte de Caylus], Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homere et de l’Eneide de Virgile (Paris, 1757), Avertissement, pp. v–vi.


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Caylus goes one step further and transforms literature into a storehouse of subjects for painters.⁵ How many pictures does Paradise Lost contain? In a direct reaction to Caylus’s critical practice, G. E. Lessing conceded that Milton could fill no gallery.⁶ Indeed, Caylus’s comparison between Milton and Homer prompts Lessing to define the boundaries between the arts. For Caylus had argued that the only thing Milton and Homer had in common was blindness.⁷ Translating physical sight onto the plane of textual production, Lessing turned the equation between physical and textual sight against Caylus’s visual practice. In Lessing’s Laocoön Milton’s blindness became a metonymy for the lack of pictures not only in his writings, but in writing as such.⁸ Once Lessing had established the autonomy of the literary, the next step was to argue that what constitutes a picture depends on the medium, that verbal media have a visuality of their own, and that there is no coincidence between verbal and visual pictures. Paradise Lost is Lessing’s test case in distinguishing between images which can and cannot be painted: Milton cannot fill picture galleries, it is true. But if the range of my physical sight must be the measure of my inner vision, I should value the loss of the former in order to gain freedom from the limitations on the latter. Paradise Lost is no less the finest epic after Homer because it furnishes few pictures … There are paintable and unpaintable facts, and the historian can relate the most paintable ones just as unpicturesquely as the poet is able to present the most unpaintable ones in a picturesque way. … A poetic picture is not necessarily something that can be converted into a material painting.9

In other words, a verbal text should not be measured according to the pictures it contributes to a gallery. If Paradise Lost fails to deliver canvases, this does not mean that there are no pictures in the text, but rather that such pictures are verbal and perhaps untranslatable. According to Lessing, the equation of poetic and visual images and the consequent rating of poetry in terms of its visual richness derives from the corrupted tradition of what Aristotle called enargeia and Longinus translated as ‘phantasies’, subsequently understood as ‘poetic images’ and therefore easily equated with material pictures. The philological vagaries of the translation of enargeia are also reconstructed in Fuseli’s third Royal Academy lecture (K ii. 143–4).¹⁰ If the original sense is restored, the evaluative connection between poetry and painting fails, ⁵ Ibid. p. iv. ⁶ Lessing, Laocoön, 74. ⁷ Caylus, Tableaux, pp. xiii–xiv. ⁸ Lessing, Laocoön, 74. ⁹ Ibid. ¹⁰ Ibid. 207.

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since the energy of the text can no longer be quantified through its translatability into material pictures. The equation of mental with pictorial images depends on the epistemological premisses underlying the interpretation of perception and reading. These premisses envision the process of apprehension as a visual translation, a hypothesis which is strengthened by the etymological link between the word ‘imagination’ and the production of images.¹¹ Restoring the ‘original’ sense of enargeia means challenging the canonic theories of Johann Jacob Bodmer, the greatest exponent of the Swiss school of aesthetics, translator of Milton into German and Fuseli’s teacher in Zurich.¹² In Bodmer’s Critische Betrachtungen u¨ ber die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (1741), the writer’s efficiency is measured by his ability to write on the brain the way a painter paints on a blank canvas. Indeed, he argued, the word ‘idea’ means nothing other than ‘image’ or ‘picture’.¹³ The immediacy of the visual is the premiss of Bodmer’s understanding of the process of perception. If understanding depends on the transformation of words into visual images or ideas, visual images become part of the text, whether resulting from the reader’s mental processing or materialized into illustrations. Literary texts seem unthinkable as separate from the production of images. In using Paradise Lost as a test case for the verbal production of images Lessing followed Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), which he intended to translate and edit.¹⁴ Challenging the main tenet of the visual tradition that Lessing further criticized in Laocoön, Burke’s theory maintains the essentially aural impact of words. The primacy of the visual as a criterion for the verbal is challenged through Paradise Lost. For its lines crammed with monosyllables help Burke argue that the poem cannot communicate visually, because its rhythm overwhelms the perceiver, ¹¹ The Latin term imaginatio derives from the word imago and the suffix -tio, indicating an action; the German Einbildungskraft from the prefix Ein-, the root Bild, and the suffix -ung, indicating an action which processes and unifies images. ¹² For Fuseli refusing to review Laocoön for the Lindauer Nachrichten, see M. Allentuck, ‘Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füßli) and Lessing’, Lessing Yearbook, 1 (1969), 179. ¹³ J. J. Bodmer, Critische Betrachtungen u¨ ber die poetischen Gemählde der Dichter (Zurich, 1741), 39. See J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), 104: ‘Whence comes that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it … ?’ ¹⁴ For Lessing’s translation of the Enquiry, see Briefe von und an Lessing 1743–1770, ed. H. Kiesel (Frankfurt, 1987), 261, 275–6. The translation was never published and is not extant.


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unable to sustain the speed required to conjoin words with images. Rather than concluding, with Caylus, that visual deficiency declares Milton’s inferiority, Burke turns Milton’s blindness into a characteristic of the medium and its aesthetic response. Far from depending on the reader’s mental imaging, Paradise Lost proves that verbal texts act on the reader through the emotional impact of sounds.¹⁵ Building on Burke’s separation of the sister arts in another effort to save Milton from the allegation of pictorial barrenness, Lessing formulated what he considered to be the essential difference between poetry and painting: In the one case [poetry] the action is visible and progressive, its different parts occurring one after the other in a sequence of time, and in the other the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing in co-existence in space. But if painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of imitation, which it can combine in space only, must renounce the element of time entirely, progressive actions, by the very fact that they are progressive, cannot be considered to belong among its subjects. Painting must be content with coexistent actions or with mere bodies which, by their position, permit us to conjecture an action.¹⁶

Painting can describe actions either by freezing them in their key moments, or by placing them one beside another in a sequence that develops in space. This definition came out of the dialogue that Lessing had with Moses Mendelssohn around the projected translation of Burke’s Enquiry.¹⁷ In a letter of 1758, Mendelssohn pointed out that visual and verbal arts both scan actions into sequences: the former represents objects by placing them one beside the other in space, while the latter places them one after the other in time (neben einander … auf einander). The distinction between temporal and spatial sequence engages Lessing and Mendelssohn beyond the shelved Burke translation and into the Laocoön manuscripts. The focus moves from the medium of expression to the physiology of the reader’s perception. When the spectator turns ¹⁵ E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757–1759), ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), 59–62, 167–73. ¹⁶ Lessing, Laocoön, 77. ¹⁷ M. Mendelssohn, Zu Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of ¨ the Sublime and Beautiful’, in Schriften zur Philosophie und Asthetik, ed. F. Bamberger and L. Strauss, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1932), iii/1. 242, commenting on Enquiry, 60–4: ‘If painting is to be compared with poetry, one has to have before one’s eyes that the former signifies through the sequence [of objects placed] beside one another, whereas the latter through the sequence [of objects placed] one after the other’ (my translation). The distinction was first formulated in a comment on Burke’s treatment of the visual and verbal expression of pain; see p. 241 taking issue with Burke’s Enquiry, 60.

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into a reader, the simultaneity of the spatial sequence is transformed into the temporal apprehension of the viewer. In a later manuscript addition to Laocoön, Lessing adopts Mendelssohn’s observation that since it takes time to perceive a visual representation in its extension and wealth of detail, ‘the poet can just as well describe one after the other those objects which I can only see one after the other in the painting’.¹⁸ Subjected to the temporal apprehension of the viewer, visual and verbal arts are transformed into still and moving images. While for Lessing painting signifies through bodies and poetry through actions, Mendelssohn corrects him arguing that one ought to speak about ‘movements’ rather than ‘actions’.¹⁹ Indeed, if we except the still actions presented in Homer’s similes, poetry avoids the description of still objects when it can describe them as actions. For instance, instead of describing Achilles’ weapons, Homer chooses to tell us how Vulcan made them, so that we see their shapes emerging from his hands. Much as painting must compress action to its pregnant moment in order to achieve swift movement, poetry must keep description to a bare minimum. One essential epithet is all Homer needs to qualify heroes and objects in order to focus on action.²⁰ If then poetry and painting can be defined in rhythmical terms, Mendelssohn’s aesthetics moves from painting through poetry to dance. In the process of perception the distinction blurs and Zeno’s immobile locations are added up and melted into movement. What emerges from Mendelssohn’s and Lessing’s work is that when a literary text is translated into a series of paintings, forms located one beside the other in space give shape to movements. Emulating dance, writing metamorphoses into a choreography of moving images. Paradoxically, then, it is by denying that Milton can fill a gallery, and by denying that writing should be perceived visually that Lessing ¹⁸ Lessing, ‘Paralipomena’, no. 5, in Werke 1766–1769, ed. W. Barner (Frankfurt, 1990), 251: ‘thus the effect on the viewer is achieved through time. That is, since the space we are capable of overviewing at one time is limited, since we can only have a vivid consciousness of the smallest among the multifarious parts one beside the other, so Time is required to go through this big space and to become conscious of this rich multifariousness one after the other. As a consequence, the poet can just as well describe one after the other those objects which I can only see one after the other in the painting’ (my translation). ¹⁹ See M. Mendelssohn, Betrachtungen u¨ ber die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften (1757), in Schriften, 176. ²⁰ Lessing, ‘Paralipomena’, no. 5, in Werke 1766–1769, 118.


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makes a place for the Milton Gallery, for the gallery indeed represents actions by placing bodies one beside the other in space. Paradoxically, Lessing’s denial of Milton’s pictures is later articulated by way of a list of Miltonic pictures. Because this list was published in the second, posthumous edition of Laocoön, one might be tempted to consider it an afterthought, or a closet obsession. Yet the list can also be explained in terms of the cinematic qualities that Lessing attributes to writing in his attempt to distinguish Milton’s ‘poetic pictures’ from painting: ‘Milton has painted beauty of form, after the manner of Homer, not so much by its ingredients as by its effects.’²¹ Lessing selects movements or transformations which spell out the dynamism inherent in writing. His imaginary gallery contains pictures such as ‘Satan lifting himself above the burning pool’, his transformation into a Serpent, and the creation of the world.²² The Paradise Lost that comes out of Lessing’s cut is a series of arrested motions.²³ A similar paradox takes place in Shaftesbury’s writing when he discusses how to depict Hercules at the crossroads. The choice is dictated by having to select and stick to the pregnant moment. Yet this requires dissecting ‘the Order of Time’ into its ‘points of time’, a mental adaptation that turns the text into a series of subsequent movements and poses. In the event, the outcome reverses the premiss by transforming the story into a choreography, or a proto-cinematic sequence.²⁴ In these acts of visualization writing gives way to moving pictures. Bodies arranged in space are quickened into motion and change through time. Before reading the Milton Gallery as a montage of moving pictures, it is important to document the progress of an education of the eye, that is to say the ways in which the eighteenth-century spectator was trained to read a sequence of pictures as a narrative continuum. ²¹ Lessing, Werke 1766–1769, 286. ²² J. Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost (1734), ‘Pictures’, 544–5; Lessing, Werke 1766–1769, 286. ²³ Such motions emulate what Martin Meisel defines as a theatre of turns (intransitive units, ‘effects’, or ‘situations’ juxtaposed like tableaux), which characterize late 18thcentury theatre: ‘The play creates a series of such pictures, some of them offering a culminating symbolic summary of represented events, while others substitute an arrested situation for action and reaction. Each picture, dissolving, leads not into consequent activity, but to a new infusion and distribution of elements from which a new picture will be assembled or resolved’; see Meisel, Realizations, 38–9. ²⁴ A. A. Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules (London, 1713), 7–10.

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E D U C AT I N G T H E EY E : A R E A D E R ’ S P RO G R E S S If a single picture does no justice to the wealth of images enclosed in a literary text—a challenge that only a series of pictures can take up—what happens to the sequence and sense of the story? Is linear narrative possible in the new medium? Once the action is dissected in its points of time and arranged in a spatial sequence, the perceiver is emancipated from the linearity of reading and exposed to multiple lures, pleasures, plot options. Having surveyed the types of linearity produced by verbal and visual media in the theories of Lessing and Mendelssohn, this section explores how series of images would cohere into wholes in visual perception and visual technologies. Where a spatial installation opened up a verbal text to the freedom to move in space, such multidirectional freedom was curbed by analogy. To arrange pictures into a coherent narrative, painting was compared to verbal forms, and especially the epic, the most codified and prestigious among narrative genres.²⁵ The plot factor was crucial to Caylus as he set out to provide the painter with a storehouse of literary topics to fill a gallery. Even though Caylus turned classical epic into an index and repository of discrete entries, he thought that the chief merit of his work consisted in presenting these detached subjects for pictures as a continuous action.²⁶ The plot analogy gave coherence to the action within a picture, and linked that picture to others as part of a meaningful sequence. If Caylus’s Homer and Vergil invited comparisons with the epic, the stanzas of a poem gave unity to the rooms of a palace. Playing with homonyms, the Encyclopédie built on ‘room’ (‘stanza’) as a metrical and architectural term to argue that a gallery is the spatial and visual analogue of a poem.²⁷ Catalogues and guides also defined the Farnese Gallery and the Maria de Medici cycle at the Luxembourg Gallery as poems, while Le Brun’s Louis XIV cycle at Versailles was received

²⁵ For a comparison, see Ch. 2, ‘Fuseli’s Milton: Epic and Painting’. ²⁶ Caylus, Tableaux, pp. v–vi: ‘la Peinture s’y trouve en quelque façon mise dans une action continuelle, & chaque sujet est, pour ainsi dire, placé sur le chevalet’; ‘suite continue de Tableaux agréables, variés & presque dépendans les uns des autres’. ²⁷ ‘Galerie’, in D. Diderot and J. d’Alembert (eds.), Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751–65), vii. 441, 443–4; see also J. G. Sulzer, ‘Galerie’, in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig, 1771–4), ii. 286–90, to which Fuseli collaborated.


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as an epic.²⁸ Fuseli himself defined the Sistine Chapel in epic terms (K ii. 85). Such analogical thinking relies on the practice of rhetoric, which would scan a text in units to be displayed in sequential places. This practice took on a new shape and function with the opening of public exhibitions. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the print matter produced to regulate the experience of exhibitions helped perceive pictures following the numerical order found in catalogue entries, so that the vagaries of viewing could be subsumed to the linearity of reading. The skills required for a gallery to be perceived as a coherent whole can be identified at the intersection between architectural layout, art of rhetoric, and the culture of the book. Books of engravings reproducing pictures from particular collections were luxury products as much as ways of preserving those collections once the originals had been dispersed, as was the case with the Houghton collection discussed in Chapter 1. The move from architectural gallery to gallery in print further subsumed the potential three-dimensional freedom of the visual display to the sequential order of a ‘path of reading’. As ‘gallery’ increasingly came to identify both the architectural repository of paintings and the book of prints, this virtual paper surrogate further brought home the similarity between series of pictures and poems, gallery-going and reading. Such an assimilation was substantiated by developments in museum layout, culminating in Chrétien de Mechel’s 1781 chronological reordering of the Galerie Impériale et Royale in Vienna. According to Mechel, the metonymic contiguity between the pictures can be subsumed in the continuity of a narrative. Describing a gallery is analogous to writing a history of art by ‘walking the reader’s eye through it’.²⁹ If the history of art is subject to visual presentation in a gallery, then it comes as no surprise that a gallery can be to painters what a library is to scholars, as Sulzer maintained.³⁰ ²⁸ ‘This Gallery was intended as a Gallery of Magnificence, and Pleasure, and withal to have something to Better the Mind. It was to be a Poem, not a Sermon.’ See J. and J. Richardson, An Account of the Statues in Italy, 143; ‘Avertissement’, in Galerie de Rubens, dite du Luxembourg (Paris, 1809); J. B. Massé, ‘Avertissement’, in La Grande Galerie de Versaille, et les deux salons qui l’accompagnent, peints par Charles Lebrun (Paris, 1752). All these volumes were available in the Royal Academy Library. ²⁹ C. de Mechel, Catalogue des Tableaux de la Galerie Impériale et Royale de Vienne (Basle, 1784), pp. v, vi, xv; see also C. L. Hagedorn, Betrachtungen u¨ ber die Malerei (Leipzig, 1762); see P. Holdengräber, ‘ ‘‘A Visible History of Art’’: The Forms and Preoccupations of the Early Museum’, SECC 17 (1987), 107–17. ³⁰ Sulzer, ‘Galerie’, in Allgemeine Theorie. On libraries, see A. Masson, The Pictorial Catalogue: Mural Decoration in Libraries (Oxford, 1981).

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What is required of the reader turned viewer? ‘Walking the reader’s eye’ through a gallery needs more than the catalogues, reviews, literary texts, and the transfer of reading skills analysed in Chapter 2. In order to enable the viewers to perceive the exhibition space as a path of reading, visual objects must be displayed and planned so that the eye may process them as a unified whole. Grasping many pictures at once and organizing such impressions into a unified field of vision is more than can be mastered by perspective. For this technique operates at the level of the single picture by subordinating visual elements to a single point of view for an immobile viewer.³¹ The geometrical system of points and projections governing the perspective within single pictures falls to pieces when pressured by the multiple visual lures of the exhibition space. In order for the pictures and the space of the exhibition to become a whole visual narrative, the movements of the viewers’ eyes and bodies must be factored in. How can the viewers’ movements be controlled? How can one ‘walk their eye’? In the following two sections, we will explore the visual technologies and entertainments that produced moving images, and the physiological theories that considered moving images as products of perception. The former will account for the production of movement within a single picture, while the latter will explain the practices that enabled an eighteenth-century viewer to generate cinematic links between pictures and blend them into continuous movements. T E C H N O LO G I E S O F V I S I O N : M AG I C L A N T E R N S , T H E E I D O PH U S I KO N , A N D PA N O R A M A S On 14 September 1792 Boydell’s Shakespeare and a magic lantern feature among the British manufactures satirized in James Gillray’s The Reception of the Diplomatique and his Suite, at the Court of Pekin (BMC 8121). The contiguity between book and magic lantern suggests that both were engaged in transforming knowledge into spectacle, book into visual culture. The magic lantern is a seventeenth-century optical invention magnifying pictures painted on transparent slides and projected on the wall. In 1659 the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens translated ³¹ P. de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford, 1989), 194.


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Holbein’s Dance of Death into a series of animated slides in which a moving skeleton performed actions such as taking its head off. Known as ‘lanterne de peur’,³² this device blurred the boundaries between science, magic, and faith. The first printed evidence of magic lantern slides showed Christ’s sufferings and souls burning in Hell in the 1661 edition of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae. During the Enlightenment, beside the machine that occasioned ‘Wonder and Surprise to an inconsiderate Populace’ stood the rational entertainment that could visualize anything from the sequence of the kings and queens of England to geometrical figures and vegetable samples. In The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy, Euphrosyne presented the magic lantern as an aid to memory that could ‘enlarge and enrich my Musaeum of Curiosities at Pleasure’.³³ Moving slides could be produced in a number of ways. To impart movement onto human characters, their limb should be painted on a separate surface that would be attached to the slide at the level of the limbs.³⁴ Atmospheric changes in landscape depended on the superimposition of slides adding subsequent phases to the first scene. In a recreation defined ‘the magical theatre’, William Hooper visualized ‘The Siege of Troy’ in five acts. Through careful disposition, discrete images were alternated and superimposed so that the plot resulted from a series of montage effects: In the second act may be represented the interior part of the city of Troy: on one side may be seen the wooden horse, and in the back part the temple of Pallas. The glasses for this act may be painted in the following manner. On the first, may be palaces and houses, representing the inside of a city. On the second, the temple of Pallas in the centre, with a clear night and the moon. In the front may be seen the wooden horse, that the Trojans have placed near the temple of Pallas. ³² P. Petit to C. Huygens, 28 Nov. 1664, repr. in L. Mannoni, D. Pesenti Campagnoni, and D. Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture (Gemona, 1995), 56; see also pp. 55, 65–7, 71, for reproductions of Kircher’s Ars Magna; see also H. Hecht, Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image Before 1896, ed. A. Hecht (London, 1993), 218, no. 328; F. P. Liesegang, Dates and Sources: A Contribution to the History of the Art of Projection and to Cinematography, trans. and ed. H. Hecht (London, 1986). ³³ B. Martin, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy in a continued Survey of the Works of Nature and Art, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1772), ii. 294; see also pp. 85, 288, 291. ³⁴ P. van Musschenbroek, ‘De la catoptrique’, in Essai de Physique, trans. P. Massuet, 2 vols.(Leiden, 1739), vol. . xxxv, sect. 1320, pp. 622–3.

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On the third, a troop of Greeks, with Sinon at their head, who are going to open the gates of the city to the Grecians. On the fourth, different troops of armed Greeks; painted on a long glass, to afford variety. On the fifth, several troops of Trojans. On the sixth, various appearances of fire and smoke, so disposed, that this glass being drawn up above the others, the objects painted on the first glass, may appear in a conflagration.

By inserting the slides representing the Trojans and the Greeks from opposite sides, the magic lantern projection visualized them moving one towards the other as if in a battle. Similarly, by sliding the image of the fire so that it was progressively superimposed onto the palaces depicted on the first slide the city ‘may appear to take fire gradually, and at last present a general conflagration’.³⁵ As a result, montage functioned as a plot-building device in which visual images could represent actions unfolding in time as well as in space. By claiming Homer’s subject matter, visual media claimed the field of historical and epic narratives. The effect of movement was produced by superimposing different moments onto one another in succession, or by having characters or actions enter the image from its sides, thus anticipating one-shot movies where a fixed camera represents an action taking place into a fixed slice of space. ‘Moving Pictures’ that could ‘copy the gradual workings of nature in her most important scenes’ were hailed as key attractions at the Eidophusikon in 1781. This entertainment consisted of a sequence of tableaux showed one after the other in the form of a theatrical entertainment and accompanied by ‘the picturesque of sound’. Such moving pictures were celebrated for challenging the limits of painting, which ‘expresses its subject in one point of view, and moment of time’, and earned their inventor Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg membership of the Royal Academy.³⁶ Formerly a scenery and machinery painter superintendent at the Theatre Royal, de Loutherbourg pioneered the effects that theatrical lighting could have on pictures. Clouds painted in semi-transparent colours were illuminated from behind. The linen they were painted on ‘was stretched on frames of twenty times the ³⁵ W. Hooper, Rational Recreations, 4 vols. (London, 1774), ii. 48–60. ³⁶ In 1781 it was divided into five scenes, in 1782 into two acts. See London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 8 May 1781; European Magazine, 1 (Mar. 1782), 180–2; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 26 Apr. 1782.


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surface of the stage, which rose diagonally by a winding machine’.³⁷ Movement was produced by stage effects made possible by mechanical devices: Before the line of brilliant lamps, on the stage of the Eidophusikon, were slips of stained glass; yellow, red, green, purple, and blue: by the shifting of which, the painter could throw a tint upon the scenery, compatible with the time of day which he represented, and by a single slip, or their combinations, could produce a magical effect.38

Music heightened the scenes and provided narrative unity and contrast to the successive turns of the story. In a picture representing a view of Plymouth, the musical accompaniment informs the mood and narrative development of the grand naval triumph from ‘the foggy sullenness of the Dutch captures’ to ‘a lively French air’, culminating in ‘a fine martial air’.³⁹ In 1782 the Eidophusikon ended with the picture Satan arraying his Troops on the Bank of the fiery Lake, with the Palace of Pandemonium: from Milton: a view of the Miltonic Hell, cloathed in all its terrors. The artist hath given shape and body to the imaginations of the immortal bard, and presents to the wrapt and astonished sense, the fiery lake bounded by burning hills. He follows closely the description of the poet. Belzebub and Moloch, rise from the horrid lake, and Pandemonium appears gradually to rise, illuminated with all the grandeur bestowed by Milton, and even with additional properties, for serpents twine around the doric pillars, and the intense red changes to a transparent white, expressing thereby the effect of fire upon metal. Thousands of Demons are then seen to rise, and the whole brightens into a scene of magnificent horror. The lightning exhibits all the varied and vivid flashes of the natural phenomenon, and the thunder includes every vibration of air, and shock of element which so often in its prototype, strikes terror and admiration on the mind.40

The spectacle was perceived through the frame of the sublime. A contemporary viewer presented de Loutherbourg as a demonic conjuror. Had he lived at the time of Galilei he would have run the risk of sharing his fate: ‘the ignorance of those days might have condemned the artist, under the ignominious charge of conjuration, who, by the black art, had captivated the sun, moon, and stars, and collected clouds, thunder, and ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰

E. Hardcastle, Wine and Walnuts, 2 vols. (London, 1823), i. 286. Ibid. i. 289. London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 4 May 1781. European Magazine, 1 (1782), 180–1.

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lightning, by the aid of the Devil’.⁴¹ This spectacular, revived image of Hell is the secularized outcome of a long tradition of visualization, animation, and impersonation of virtue and vice in both Jesuit and Protestant contexts. Trained as a Lutheran minister, de Loutherbourg is said to have had mystical tendencies, which might shed light on the colour symbolism of the Eidophusikon: in the foreground of a vista, stretching an immeasurable length between mountains, ignited from their bases to their lofty summits, with many-coloured flame, a chaotic mass arose in dark majesty, which gradually assumed form until it stood, the interior of a vast temple of gorgeous architecture, bright as molten brass, seemingly composed of unconsuming and unquenchable fire. In this tremendous scene, the effect of coloured glasses before the lamps was fully displayed; which, being hidden from the audience, threw their whole influence upon the scene, as it rapidly changed, now to a sulphurous blue, then to a lurid red, and then again to a pale vivid light, and ultimately to a mysterious combination of the glasses, such as a bright furnace exhibits, in fusing various metals. The sounds which accompanied the wondrous picture, struck the astonished ear of the spectator as no less preternatural; for, to add a more awful character to peals of thunder, and the accompaniments of all the hollow machinery that hurled balls and stones with indescribable rumbling and noise, an expert assistant swept his thumb over the surface of the tambourine, which produced a variety of groans, that struck the imagination as issuing from infernal spirits.⁴²

Satan’s obscure sublimity and dark majesty is updated by alluding to a firework display. Such an association activates the metaphoric field which characterizes Satan’s titanic revolt in terms of volcanic phenomena in Milton’s poem—where the demonic onslaught against Eden is defined as ‘our first eruption’ (PL . 656). Furthermore, de Loutherbourg’s transparency recalls the one of Vesuvius that Sir William Hamilton sent to the Royal Society in 1767 to document the activities of the volcano.⁴³ Satan’s volcanic sublime thus feeds into spectacles of science. ⁴¹ London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 2 May 1781. ⁴² Hardcastle, Wine and Walnuts, i. 302–3; Pointon, Milton and English Art, 105. ⁴³ On 29 December 1767 Sir William Hamilton accompanied his remarks on the eruption of Vesuvius (1765) with a painting in transparent colours, which ‘when lighted up with lamps behind it, gives a much better idea of Vesuvius, than is possible to be given by any other sort of painting’ (quoted from I. Jenkins and K. Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection (London, 1996), 66–7). For the volcanic sublime in painting, see A. Wilton and I. Bignamini (eds.), Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), 145, 148–9.


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Astonishment, terror, and admiration are an incongruous spectacular format for the visual experience suggested by Edward Burney’s bland depiction of the Eidophusikon.⁴⁴ Framed by a neoclassical decor of bas reliefs, columns, and mirrors, headed by the oval inscription that bears its name, the Eidophusikon fails to convey the excitement suggested in newspaper advertisements. Here the spiritual exercise is heteronomous, imposed from without to a seated audience. The picture is the climax of the whole sequence, but it is a kind of vivified fixation without narrative development. Furthermore, the intervals between pictures were long enough to justify their being interspersed with an unrelated and independent musical entertainment.⁴⁵ As a result, even though music enhanced narrative developments within each tableau, the musical interval would mark the boundaries between tableaux inhibiting the building of contrast and suspense, let alone any continuity between the pictures. The whole venture was reduced to polite spectacle. The Monthly Mirror for March 1800 advertises the Milton Gallery on the same page as the new Eidophusikon, which reopened in 1799–1800. This new show failed to feature the Hell picture and its short life was ended by a fire, which broke out just as the Milton Gallery reopened in 1800.⁴⁶ In Fuseli’s Milton Gallery the focus is very different. S calling up his Legions and S haranguing his Host are devoid of architectural elements. Indeed in most cases Fuseli’s figures dramatically occupy centre stage against a dark background. This technique had a powerful gestaltic effect in that, as in full-length portraits, the key figure would immediately capture the eye of the viewer, who would not be distracted by the complex entropic groupings of a history painting. Fuseli’s Hell centres on the Michelangelesque figure of Satan. While de Loutherbourg produced movement effects by lighting and overlaid slides representing subsequent moments of time captured within the same frame, Fuseli’s movement results from the dynamism of the human form, which provides cinematic links that help viewers in the effort to connect pictures juxtaposed one beside the other in a continuum. ⁴⁴ Burney’s watercolour is reproduced in S. Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. D. L. Schneider (New York, 1997), 72. ⁴⁵ London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 8 May 1781; European Magazine, 1 (Mar. 1782), 182; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 26 Apr. 1782. ⁴⁶ Monthly Mirror, 9 (Mar. 1800), 176, 117; 6 (Apr. 1799), 246.

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Such a continuum was perfected by the panorama, a visual entertainment patented by Robert Barker in 1787, which offered ‘an entire view of any country or situation as it appears to an observer turning quite round; to produce which effect the painter or drawer must fix his station, and delineate correctly and connectedly every object which presents itself to his view as he turns round, concluding his drawing by a connection with where he begun’.⁴⁷ Walking the viewers’ eyes through 360◦ views of towns and battles in a circular building lighted from above, the panorama suggested how discrete images could be connected into a unified whole. What Barker called ‘La nature a` coup d’œil’ presented a simultaneous allencompassing view to spectators placed at the centre of a circular space. Yet the very simultaneity Barker celebrated indicates the use and limits of the analogy between panoramas and literary galleries. Panoramas are doomed to represent landscapes, register impending action, or a moment frozen in time. Literary gallery viewers would need to turn round, applying the locomotive viewing practices learned at the panorama. Yet, instead of a simultaneous apprehension of space, their movement had to merge the pictures juxtaposed on the wall into one another to form dynamic figures engaged in a narrative movement in space and time. Whereas the movement of spectators at the panoramas was only needed for them to expand their field of vision and take in a ready-made whole, the movement of spectators at the gallery participated in the production of narrative continuity. How could the posture of a figure represented in one picture be superimposed onto the subsequent moment of action so as to produce the effect of continuous movement? In order to piece together the actions frozen in single pictures, viewing depended on the physiological transfer of the perceivers’ movement onto the object of their vision. ⁴⁷ ‘Barker’s Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures’, British patent no. 1612, 19 June 1787, repr. in Mannoni et al., Light and Movement, 157–8. The panorama of Edinburgh was exhibited in London in 1789; see Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 17 Apr. 1789; for the Panorama of London, see The Times, 3 Jan. 1792. On panoramas, see Oettermann, The Panorama, and R. Hyde (ed.), Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All-Embracing’ View (London, 1988). For writers’ reaction to the panoramas in the light of a psychoanalytic paradigm identifying the visual as a return of the repressed, see W. Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore, 1993); building on Galperin, but with a Benjaminian emphasis on the shock effects produced by means of mechanical reproduction, see Wood, The Shock of the Real, 99–120.


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V I EW I N G P R AC T I C E S A N D M OV I N G PI C T U R E S Moving pictures were not only consumer attractions at visual entertainments but also a continuous focus of enquiry in eighteenth-century associationist psychology. The persistence of vision and the impression of movement in still objects were at the centre of experiments on the interplay of motor impulses, impressions, and memory. The persistence of vision has been invoked by histories of the cinema to explain the movement seen in stroboscopic vision, an illusion produced by an object seen in successive positions at such small intervals that it gives the impression of an uninterrupted movement. This phenomenon is usually dated back to Goethe’s theory of colours and Joseph Plateau’s invention of the Phenakistiscope in 1830, a disk on which sixteen subsequent positions of an object were depicted. When turned, these discrete images blended into a continuous movement. This visual toy experimented and demonstrated Plateau’s idea that images would fuse into one another because of what he called ‘after-image’, which is an image’s persistence on the retina beyond its time of impression so as to be superimposed on the following impression and blended with it.⁴⁸ Yet if Plateau coined the term which we still use, the phenomenon of the persistence of vision had been discovered much earlier: it was discussed in Isaac Newton’s Opticks and in Enlightenment empiricist research. Discussions of the persistence of vision circulated in accounts aimed at specialist as well as wider publics published by Joseph Johnson. For instance, Joseph Priestley’s 1772 history of vision focused on experiments, mechanical apparatuses, and geometrical demonstrations,⁴⁹ whereas Erasmus Darwin’s 1796 Zoonomia made physiological phenomena available to general observation through easy exercises that required nothing more than one’s own body. Upon closing one’s eyes after looking at a bright object, the image continues to be visible for some time. R. W. Darwin called this phenomenon ‘ocular spectrum’: ‘when a fiery meteor shoots across the night, it appears to leave a long lucid train behind it, part of which, and perhaps sometimes the whole, is owing to the continuance of the action of the retina after having been thus vividly excited’. Sometimes the presence of the ocular spectrum is ⁴⁸ On the Phenakistiscope, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 107–12. ⁴⁹ J. Priestley, The History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours (London, 1772), p. vii.

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intermittent. When an image persists in the viewer’s memory it may be combined with a subsequent image.⁵⁰ Much as the temporality of vision explains how phases of a movement may be perceived as blending into a continuous movement, so too do ocular spectra explain the impression that the perceiver’s movement imparts motion onto the objects of vision. Darwin’s account of the visual fallacy produced by vertigo is a case in point. Upon experiencing vertigo, circumambient objects seem to move around in the opposite direction: ‘the apparent progression of the ocular spectra of light or colours is the cause of the apparent retrogression of objects, after a person has revolved, till he is vertiginous … it is the sensation or imagination of our continuing to go forwards in the direction in which we were turning, that causes the apparent retrograde circulation of objects’.⁵¹ In both cases, the analysis of perception calls into question the separation between perceiver and vision, challenging the ideal of a disembodied viewer. Rather than an intellectual activity within a dualistic mind–body divide, viewing is integrated into the motor impulses of sensation. Another experiment in which perception imparts movement on its object was proposed by Goethe. In an essay on the Laocoön sculpture, Goethe suggested an unusual form of artistic appreciation in which a commonplace trope in Grand Tour travel-writing and artistic appreciation is turned into a scientific experiment: ‘To seize well the attention of the Laocoon, let us place ourselves before the group with our eyes shut, and at the necessary distance; let us open and shut them alternately, and we shall see all the marble in motion; we shall be afraid to find the group changed, when we open our eyes again.’⁵² Viewers were accustomed to evaluate sculpture in terms of prosopopoeia, the coming to life of antique specimens frozen in a life of stone. By explaining how one can ‘see all the marble in motion’, Goethe’s experiment on double vision offers a scientific explanation of the myth of Pygmalion, the Greek artist praised for a statue that was so lifelike as to acquire movement and metamorphose into a living woman. Goethe follows Darwin’s line that anybody can make an experiment on the aberrations of the senses. Not only does his Enlightenment attitude explain away ⁵⁰ ‘On the Ocular Spectra of Light and Colours, by Dr R. W. Darwin, of Shrewsbury. Reprinted, by permission, from the Philosophical Transactions, vol. LXXVI, p. 313’, in E. Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2nd edn. (London, 1796), i. 548, 550, 563. ⁵¹ Darwin, Zoonomia, i. 574. ⁵² J. W. von Goethe, ‘Observations on the Laocoon’, MM 7 (June 1799), 351.


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Greek myth in terms of the human sensorium, but it also combines scientific entertainments with artistic experience, encouraging a new form of scientific appreciation of ancient statuary. To juxtapose Goethe’s and Lessing’s Laocoön is to show the interconnection between reading and viewing practices, literary and visual montage. Whereas Goethe’s visualizing recipe had to be practised in front of a sculpture, Lessing was concerned with the visualizing power of writing: ‘we must see first only the serpents and then Laocoön; we must not attempt to picture to ourselves how both would look together, for as soon as we attempt to do that we begin to take offense at Vergil’s picture and find it highly inartistic’.⁵³ Grand Tour visual experiments are predicated on the visualizing power of writing, best exemplified by Homer: ‘By means of countless artistic devices he places this single object in a series of stages, in each of which it has a different appearance. In the last stage the artist must wait for the poet in order to show us complete what we have seen the poet making.’⁵⁴ The tendency to restore motion to a visual object transfixed in a moment of tension is an important ingredient in the visual expectations and viewing practices of both readers and spectators. In both cases, texts are activated and performed through the collaboration of an embodied perceiver. Physiologically anchored in the human sensorium, the aesthetic is configured as an interactive experience. The opening of exhibitions to the general public in the 1760s put to the test empiricist theories on the work of perception. The analogy between the mind and a camera obscura or an empty cabinet to be filled with pictures raises the expectation that exhibition spaces might be associationist arenas. Armed with ideas about the mirror and the lamp, we might expect exhibition spaces to stage an Enlightenment experiment on the mechanism of stimulus and response. How ‘blind’ or, in other words, predictable were such spaces? Did they impress the same experience on all by offering an intuitive image to be grasped instantaneously at one view? Visual entertainments were indeed presented as rational recreations that offered faster access to knowledge, ‘intuitive attainment’ of texts that otherwise required long and solitary effort.⁵⁵ Yet, as we have seen, Mendelssohn undermined the idea that paintings ⁵³ Lessing, Laocoön, 43. ⁵⁴ Ibid. 80, quoted in Eisenstein, ‘Laocoön’, in Selected Works, ii. 158–60. ⁵⁵ ‘What the Poet or the Historian acchieves by long and laboured detail, the Painter accomplishes by an instantaneous effect’; Macklin, Catalogue of the Third Exhibition of Pictures, p. iv. For the Milton Gallery, see Monthly Mirror (June 1799) and Ch. 2.

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could be perceived in an instantaneous intuition, suggesting that the mind apprehends pictures one bit after the other and then unifies parts into wholes much as it reads a verbal text in a temporal sequence. Writing a few decades after the opening of public venues for the arts, Hazlitt used pictures to tell a new story about perception: If the mind is but a sort of inner room where the images of external things like pictures in a gallery are lodged safe, and dry out of the reach of the turbulence of the senses, but remaining as distinct from, and if I may so say as perfectly unknown to one another as the pictures on a wall, there being no general faculty to overlook and give notice of their several impressions, this medium is without any use.⁵⁶

Tested against the experience of the exhibition space, the pictorial analogy is used to disclaim the function it had had in the empiricist tradition. In Locke’s camera obscura, pictures conferred order and permanence onto otherwise fleeting impressions. David Hartley went on to call ‘miniatures’ a ‘disposition to diminutive Vibrations’ generated by often repeated sensory vibrations, thus turning the mind into a picture gallery in which virtual experiences are stored for recall. Pictures in storage offered the mind a more stable analogy than Hume’s theatrical stage, where impressions make fleeting appearances and exits. On the other hand, Hume identified in space one of the principles of association. In so far as the idea of space comes ‘from the disposition of visible and tangible objects’ and ‘the imagination must by long custom … run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects’, this process of perception and abstraction should be powerfully exemplified in an exhibition space.⁵⁷ By contrast, in Hazlitt’s hands the pictorial analogy works against the empiricist paradigm. Trying to counteract Hartley’s model of perception, Hazlitt exchanged the camera obscura for the gallery of pictures. While the camera obscura had ensured the continuous chain of reactions that leads the impulse of sensory impression up to the mind, the gallery is where the mind is saved from extinction or annexation as an extension of the body. The reason why the gallery offers a better room for the mind is that, ⁵⁶ ‘Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius’, in Howe, i. 69–70, first pub. in An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (London, 1805). ⁵⁷ Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 162–3; D. Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), ed. T. L. Huguelet (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 58; D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1978), 253, 11, 35.


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owing to the lack of a coherent organizing principle, pictures are hung arbitrarily. Consequently, in order to be a coherent experience, pictures ‘unknown to one another’ need the spectator’s active interpretative skills. Rather than condemning associationism on account of its reduction of perception to a blind mechanism that enslaves the mind to the body, Hazlitt released associationism from its mechanic certitudes and presented it instead as an agent of chaos. Once released from a mechanistic model of perception, the gallery and the exhibition offered something quite different from a readymade aesthetic experience that robbed readers of their imaginative freedom. Chapter 2 argued for the literary skills that spectators could use to impose some order on the chaotic excess of pictures displayed from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, suggesting that spectators could rely on their experience as readers and choose whether to move with or away from ready-made plots. Indeed, exhibition spaces test empiricist paradigms much as they complicate reductive interpretations of associationism. While much willing suspension of disbelief is needed to feel transported on the spot depicted at the panoramas, after-images depend on continuities between body and mind that enable viewers to perceive separate pictures as instants of an action that melts into the continuity of movement. Hazlitt preferred those exhibition spaces where pictures were hung at generous intervals from one another, so that the eye and the mind had freedom to roam in and out of a single painting without the pressure to merge it with neighbouring ones. Yet fixing the eye on an individual picture might be conducive to embodied absorption, whereas the incessant need to adapt to the excess of visual information might keep the mind ‘hovering between images’, a guarantee of exertion that keeps the spectator constantly active. Hazlitt’s ambivalent take on the chaos of exhibitions captures the associationist practices endorsed and produced within Joseph Johnson’s circle. A few months before Fuseli launched his Milton prospectus, the Analytical Review published a review of David Hartley’s Observations of Man and its abridgement by Joseph Priestley. Linking them back to John Locke and David Hume, the article argues that ‘all the faculties, which we term mental, are nothing more than modifications of the one principle of the association of ideas’.⁵⁸ Blurring the boundary between body and mind, exploring the mechanisms whereby the mind dissolves into the bodily operations of the senses, associationist psychology offered ⁵⁸ AR 9 (Apr. 1791), 361–76.

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an energized account that questioned the polite model of detached spectatorship. This alternative account of the play of the senses in the production of aesthetic experience opens up a much more collaborative and active role for spectators. In mapping the intersections and cross-overs between reading and viewing practices, so far this chapter has sought to reconstruct the skills required to fashion spectators. Surveying visual practices might evoke the teleological plot that has shaped art history as a narrative of progress towards ever increasing illusionism. The risk of such a narrative is that it points towards visual media that elide their own process of production, their functioning, and their materiality so that they become transparent vehicles offering virtual reality entries into second-order worlds. A side-effect of such a narrative is to depreciate the medium and practices that make such experiences possible. The result is to posit viewers as the passive spectators of ready-made entertainments. By contrast, I offer an alternative account of visual culture. My key concern is to elucidate the collaborative work of spectators, reconstructing the activities and skills required for such visual entertainments to produce the aesthetic effects perceived at the time. The range of visual entertainments on offer when the Milton Gallery opened helps understand the aesthetic practices, experiments, and expectations that spectators brought to it, for skills honed by one type of entertainment might well contribute to the perception of another. To divide up the history of visual media into disciplinary enclaves means to lose out on the integrated intermedial experience that defined a particular culture. The marketing and reception of the Milton Gallery explored in Chapter 1 suggest that boundaries to distinguish ‘high art’ from the circuit of visual entertainments were in the making. Yet such boundaries were questioned in parodies which deflated Fuseli’s claim for recognition and emphasized instead continuities between his work and other types of visual entertainments, such as the circus and puppet shows. The denigrating aim notwithstanding, such continuities encourage a more intermedial scope of enquiry.

G A L L E RY P LOTS The literary galleries experimented with how to adapt literary texts in visual media. The methods and the outcomes of such experiments in


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literary adaptation offered Fuseli a laboratory in which to test the range of possibilities open to visual representation. As we have seen in Chapter 2, these ventures oscillate between anthologizing and abridging literary plots. In so far as to visualize is to identify and select the ‘key moments’ of a text, or the best specimens of a literary canon, then the painter’s visual adaptation belongs to the culture of anthologies. It is difficult to find plot coherence linking a ‘beauty of Sterne’ to a ‘beauty of Shakespeare’. By and large, Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery anthologizes the most striking scenes to be found in the plays. Since ‘some of them exhibit more interesting Subjects than others’, the plan to publish two pictures per play is indicative rather than prescriptive.⁵⁹ When the gallery reached completion, it contained one to five pictures per play, with the exception of As You Like It, which added the seven ages of man to the four pictures devoted to its key moments.⁶⁰ Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery is even more anthological. Judging from the published numbers, there is only one example of narrative continuity. In the two pictures after Dryden’s modernized version of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale the viewer could identify the characters engaged in subsequent scenes of the same action because they were by the same painter. Otherwise, Macklin’s Poets are driven by an anthological interest in variety.⁶¹ The closest to representing a plot should be Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery, which illustrates Hume’s History of England. However, this is also an anthological venture in which pictures are limited to the representation of key points in time at the expense of the continuity between events. In their various approaches, literary gallery pictures drew from techniques of representation developed in different periods. The Stations of the Cross and the Lives of the Saints in Churches, and the Venetian Scuole later, represent a story by dividing it in a number of subsequent pictures. Renaissance perspective made it possible for spatial continuity to guarantee continuity of narrative within a single picture. Lew Andrews defines a ‘continuous (or polyscenic) narrative’ a picture in which ‘a number of actions occurring at different moments but involving the ⁵⁹ Prospectus dated May 1789, in Boydell, A Catalogue of the Pictures in the Shakspeare Gallery (1789), 2. ⁶⁰ Boydell and Boydell, A Collection of Prints for Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare. ⁶¹ Hamilton’s paintings were engraved by Bartolozzi in the second number of Macklin’s British Poets, published on 5 January 1790; see British Library, sig. 3Tab.43.

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same characters are presented together in a single unified space’.⁶² In other words, perspective guides the eye through the key event in the foreground and the action unfolding laterally within the same picture.⁶³ Paradoxically, while it unified the field of the canvas into a continuous space, rather than guaranteeing simultaneity, one-point perspective offered a structure for representing the same figure in more places and times at once. Polyscenic and monoscenic narrative techniques can be found in the Sistine Chapel: the ceiling depicts the story of man in a sequence of episodes each representing one point of time (monoscenic); on the side walls, the stories of Moses and Christ are represented in series of pictures devoted to meaningful moments, and within each picture the repeated figure of the main character provides a path for the eye to follow the polyscenic narrative through the three-dimensional space. Polyscenic narrative is adopted in some of the illustrations that J. B. Medina produced for the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost published in 1688. In the illustrations for books  and  to , the continuous setting enables the eye to follow the story in its serpentine path through the image’s third dimension. For instance, in book  the plot leads the eye from Adam and Eve kneeling in the foreground through the sighting of Raphael, Eve’s repast, and Adam’s encounter with the angel. In book  the eye follows Adam and Eve meandering through conversation, separation, Eve eating the apple, Eve offering the apple to Adam, and Adam’s dismay.⁶⁴ In other words, Medina’s polyscenic illustrations use the depth of perspective to place discontinuous moments in a sequence which may be perceived as continuous thanks to the continuity of space.⁶⁵ Some Shakspeare Gallery illustrations are also articulated as polyscenic narratives. For instance, a theatricalized polyscenic narrative structures two of the four pictures and prints illustrating The Tempest: in George Romney’s adaptation of the first scene of Act I, Prospero points upwards ⁶² L. Andrews, Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative (Cambridge, 1995), 3. ⁶³ Ibid. 79. ⁶⁴ Medina’s illustrations are engraved in J. Milton, Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books (London, 1688). See Pointon, Milton and English Art, 3–4, for a comparison of Medina’s illustrations to biblical book illustration. ⁶⁵ Alastair Fowler discusses Medina’s attempt to translate Milton’s minute count of the duration and events by complementing simultaneous narrative with little roundels representing the days of creation: see Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford, 2003), 43–4 and pl. 51.


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and Miranda’s eyes follow the direction indicated by him to visualize the shipwreck scene to the left. Through a choric effect, the father’s indication to his daughter redirects the viewer’s gaze onto the scene of their vision. Similarly, in the third Boydell picture, Joseph Wright of Derby chooses Prospero’s aside at the masque presented in the first scene of Act IV: ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy of the beast Caliban, and his confederates against my life; the minute of their plot is almost come.’ The action unfolds from left to right, with size and depth privileging Ferdinand and Miranda in the foreground over a much smaller Caliban placed in the middle-ground to the right. Yet narrative cohesion fails to extend beyond the precincts of the individual picture. The four scenes are painted by different painters as discrete images with no attempt to merge them into one another to produce an overall visual narrative. To achieve this effect, painters would need to produce a continuity of setting between the pictures and have characters’ postures link up subsequent pictures representing the stages of a continuous movement. Actions conveyed by freezing dynamic figures caught in instants of movement were much discussed. Mendelssohn and Lessing might well have had in mind Shaftesbury’s discussion of how the inward conflict of the choice of Hercules could be represented visually. Although ‘change is made by Succession’ and the artist must choose ‘one point of action’, he has ‘power to leave still in his Subject the Tracks or Footsteps of its Predecessor’. In fact, ‘the Turn of Action’, though fast in engaging the mind, ‘may leave the heavier and more distant parts to adjust themselves, and change their Attitudes some moments after’.⁶⁶ In The Analysis of Beauty (1753) William Hogarth aimed at simplifying choreographic annotation in that ‘the general idea of an action, as well as of an attitude, may be given with a pencil in very few lines’. Yet, according to him, The best representation in a picture, of even the most elegant dancing, as every figure is rather a suspended action in it than an attitude, must be always somewhat unnatural and ridiculous; for were it possible in a real dance to fix every person at one instant of time, as in a picture, not one in twenty would appear to be graceful, tho’ each were ever so much so in their movements; nor could the figure of the dance itself be at all understood.⁶⁷ ⁶⁶ See Shaftesbury, A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules, 10–2. ⁶⁷ Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 102–3.

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Though frozen into static, emblematic moments, the text may give way to a new form of narrative that defies the limits of the visual and represents its action through an illusion of movement. A body caught in the successive moments of its movement through space turns its individual pictures into frozen frames of a single action—so that the literary gallery might be read in relation to the dynamics of form. This visual narrative technique is already at work in Hogarth’s painting. Before and After, painted in 1730–1, exhibits a couple whose bodies are progressively merging in a triangular shape.⁶⁸ In 1787 dance acquires a simple choreographic notation of movement in Henry Bunbury’s 7-foot comic strip A Long Minuet as danced at Bath.⁶⁹ Effects of motion establishing continuities between pictures are pursued in some Shakspeare Gallery pictures. The three pictures James Northcote painted for Richard III dissect the fate of the royal children in what seem three subsequent instants. The indication of the source identifies the first scene of Act III for the first picture, while both the latter depict the third scene of Act IV. Yet, visually, the first picture merges with the subsequent ones to depict a single climactic action. Northcote seems to take points of time at face value in visualizing the impending death in slow motion. Fuseli’s two pictures for A Midsummer Night’s Dream respond to the logic of before and after, focusing on the Queen and the Ass, dream and awakening. Again two pictures for a single scene. The first, published on 29 September 1796, presents a sinewy Titania standing beside and slightly behind ass-headed Bottom surrounded by fairies. In the second picture, published on 1 December 1803, Bottom has resumed a human face, and lies asleep with his head leaning backwards, while Titania is sitting on her side and leaning against his left knee, engaged in telling Oberon about her vision. The visual and therefore narrative continuity between the pictures is all the more remarkable considering that the latter was conceived outside of the Boydell Shakespeare scheme and included only in the printed edition to substitute a picture by Francis Wheatley, which had been on show at the exhibition since 1789. Significantly, the continuity effect is in both cases achieved by pictures painted by a single painter. By contrast, it is hardly possible to identify Fuseli’s Lear, West’s Lear, and Barry’s Lear as the same character, because each painter is left free to depict ⁶⁸ Paulson, Hogarth, vol. i, nos. 86–7. ⁶⁹ Bunbury’s strip is reproduced in D. Kunzle, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories (Berkeley, 1973), 360.


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Shakespeare’s character according to his wish and style with no concern to amalgamate the many visualizations into the body of one and the same character. Therefore, claims that the gallery forecloses the readers’ imagination owing to the permanent and fatal embodiment of their favourite characters are hard to match with the gallery’s miscellaneous and discontinuous embodiments of the same characters into different figurations. The first attempts Fuseli made towards a literary gallery tended towards the anthologizing of disjointed key moments. His Shakespeare Memorial planned after Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling would arrange in architectural partitions a number of key images taken from the plays, but there is no sense of continuity between them as far as we can tell from the extant four drawings visualizing scenes from The Tempest, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Macbeth. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the Milton Gallery also starts as a collection of the sublime and pathetic highlights arranged in an order not following that of Milton’s epic. However, when the gallery opened in 1799, its juxtaposition of twenty-seven Paradise Lost pictures against thirteen miscellaneous ones from the rest of his works and three biographical pictures testifies to the anthological nature of the project. At the same time, the very contrast strengthens the cohesion and continuity between the Paradise Lost pictures, on which the reviews focused. As we shall see, if the outcome is also a series of arrested motions, such images are linked to one another through continuity of field and colour and dynamism of form. TOWA R D S M O N TAG E This chapter has reconstructed the forms and practices of eighteenthcentury visual entertainments alongside eighteenth-century associationist experiments on the persistence of vision so as to flesh out the skills late eighteenth-century spectators could activate at the Milton Gallery. Reading the Milton Gallery means literalizing Lessing’s claim that painting can represent actions one beside the other in space. For it is through that juxtaposition that the gallery functions as a medium. Thanks to the persistence of vision, that juxtaposition enables spectators to follow the action from picture to picture, turning it into a continuous visual narrative. Lessing’s definition of painting turns out to be very close to Sergei Eisenstein’s definition of montage: ‘we look for the essence of

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cinema not in the shots but in the relation of shots’.⁷⁰ Lessing is indeed part of the montage culture which inspired Eisenstein’s practice. The cinematic potential of Lessing’s analysis is developed in an essay the film director significantly entitled ‘Laocöon’. For Eisenstein, Lessing’s work was concerned not so much with the comparison between art forms, but rather with ‘the conflict between two methods’: a method of ‘static, representational depiction’ and ‘a method concerned with becoming, with process’, ‘the coming-into-being of an image’.⁷¹ It is to Eisenstein’s analysis of kinetic form in the visual arts that I now turn in order to offer a kinetic reading of the Milton Gallery as a medium. I will use Eisenstein’s analysis of kinetic shapes both within the limits of one picture and as visual cues between pictures, which make it possible to connect a character’s poses in different pictures as instants of a continuous movement. Eisenstein’s practice was deeply rooted in the tradition of painting. For instance, in his admission test for aspiring film directors, he asked them to cut a painting into pieces, rearrange them into an ordered sequence and then transcribe them onto a montage sheet.⁷² Master paintings also influenced Eisenstein’s film production. His notebooks feature elaborate drawings in which he programmed the composition and alternation between shots.⁷³ The fact that Eisenstein thought in pictures confirms Gilles Deleuze’s claim that Eisenstein’s shots re-create the privileged instants of painting through what Deleuze terms the ‘anyinstants-whatever’ of cinema. Elaborating on Henri Bergson’s analysis of Zeno, Deleuze argues that movement in cinema cannot be reconstituted from immobile sections or poses, for cinematic images visualize ‘a figure that is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course. … a Cartesian geometry’ which ‘gives us … the continuity of the movement that describes the figure’.⁷⁴ Yet Eisenstein’s shots emulate an earlier aesthetic as they arrest actions in ‘privileged instants’, thereby ⁷⁰ ‘Bela Forgets the Scissors’, in Selected Works, i. 70, quoted in N. Carroll, ‘Eisenstein’s Philosophy of Art’, in R. Allen and M. Turvey (eds.), Camera Obscura Camera Lucida (Amsterdam, 2003), 127–46. ⁷¹ Eisenstein, ‘Laocoön’, 158–9, for Eisenstein’s reading of Lessing’s reading of Vergil’s Laocoön; for the conflict of methods, see pp. 110, 116, 121, 153, 156. ⁷² Ibid. 138. ⁷³ See his plan for the ‘Battle on the Ice’ sequence in Alexander Nevsky, in S. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director, trans. X. Danko (London, 1959), inserted between pp. 40 and 41. ⁷⁴ Deleuze, Cinema 1, 5.


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re-creating the ‘pregnant moments’ of painting. His montage reduces the film flow to a series of frozen frames and thus provides the point of contact between moving pictures and literary galleries. One feature Eisenstein’s montage and the literary galleries have in common is their metonymic process of signification. Montage exhibits the combinatory aspects of composition and the arbitrary nature of film editing. The continuity of film narrative is displaced by the stilling effect of montage shots, thus getting closer to the juxtaposition of pictures at an exhibition. A further similarity consists in the change in perspective points and angles of vision. Seeing a scene from different points of view or locations disrupts the illusionist, continuous, and unified field constructed by one-point perspective. Where discontinuous shots are juxtaposed, the viewer is called on to collaborate in piecing them together into a narrative. In a series of pictures representing different moments of time much as in montage cinema there is a tension between scene and narrative, continuity and discontinuity. Visual narrative is not ready-made, but assembled in the mind of the perceiver: Whereas in theatre an effect is achieved primarily through the physiological perception of an actually occurring fact (e.g. a murder), in cinema it is made up of the juxtaposition and accumulation, in the audience’s psyche, of associations that the film’s purpose requires, associations that are aroused by the separate elements of the stated (in practical terms, in ‘montage fragments’) fact, associations that produce, albeit tangentially, a similar (and often stronger) effect only when taken as a whole. Let us take that same murder as an example: a throat is gripped, eyes bulge, a knife is brandished, the victim closes his eyes, blood is spattered on a wall, the victim falls to the floor, a hand wipes off the knife—each fragment is chosen to ‘provoke’ associations.75

Eisenstein’s practice is at home in eighteenth-century accounts of the associations the reader–viewer contributes to the production of art works. In the essay on the Laocoön, Eisenstein’s understanding of the mind’s synthetic ability to morph discrete images into the continuum of movement draws on associationist psychology: ‘it is characteristic not only of the phases of a movement to merge in our minds into one movement … but … of series of linked fragments to combine perceptually into a single phenomenon’. As it shares a reliance on persistence of vision with other art forms, cinema ‘is, in its potential, merely a technically more complete device’, as ‘the ⁷⁵ Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’, in Selected Works, i. 41.

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method … of depicting sequential phases for conveying a sense of movement’.⁷⁶ Because montage shots have the effect of frozen frames, the instants in which the plot is arrested can be visualized as a gallery of pictures. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery may be read as a specular image of film montage. When reconstructed into a sequence, the pictures provide the illusion of motion. Eisenstein’s essay ‘Laocoön’ traces the origin of motion pictures in the visual arts starting from the statue of Laocoön. Looking for movement in painting, he analyses the kinetic effects conveyed by a human figure when its body parts are arranged in subsequent stages of motion: the legs occupy position A, the torso position A+a, arms A+2a and so forth, so that the figure is drawn ‘as if it were six successive frames of the same figure in the various sequential phases of the movement’.⁷⁷ As we have seen, this visual effect had already been perceived and recommended by Shaftesbury, Hogarth, and Goethe, whereas Lessing had used the same sort of reading to animate Vergil’s verbal description of the Laocoön statue. Following Michelangelo’s human bodies, Fuseli’s elongated limbs and leaping figures put these effects into practice. Compare Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel to Fuseli’s Satan starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s lance, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780. Here both the group of the angels and the figure of Satan form a serpentine line in which parts of the body are captured in subsequent phases of a movement, the position of the torso coming after that of the legs. The angels developed out of the aerial and serpentine form of Michelangelo’s God seen in reverse. Fuseli painted another version in 1802 where the recto of Michelangelo’s God is restored to the shape of the angels. Fuseli’s energetic elongated forms communicate an impression of movement beyond the limit of the frame. Not only does the compression of subsequent moments in one figure enjoin spectators to develop the movement in their own minds, but it encourages them to follow that movement out of one frame and into another, following the character through subsequent instants in a movement as frozen in subsequent pictures in the series hanging one beside the other in the exhibition space. The dynamism of form compressed in such images of movement is enhanced by the mind’s tendency to retain a character’s pose after that pose is no longer in the observer’s field of vision and to superimpose it onto the character’s new pose in the following picture in the series. The ⁷⁶ Eisenstein, ‘Laocoön’, 116, 118.

⁷⁷ Ibid. 111.


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pressure of such visual cues and associationist effects conjoined with the expectation of linear cohesion exerted by the literary text encourages viewers to unify the single pictures into a continuous narrative. This dynamic effect can be seen at work in William Blake’s representations of Time’s flight in the 1797 illustrated edition of Night Thoughts. Time’s limbs recall plate 11 of The [First] Book of Urizen. Both rearticulate the elongated limbs dynamizing Satan’s flight through Chaos into the most effective sequence of the Milton Gallery. In Night 2 of Blake’s illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts two subsequent plates face one another, featuring a frontal image of Time crawling to the left of the letterpress and a backward frame illustrating Time having turned to the right of the letterpress. Working towards the engraved edition, Blake extra-illustrated Young’s own copy of Night Thoughts with his watercolours pasted as a ground surrounding the letterpress. Turning from the extra-illustrated to the engraved edition the relationship between illustration and pagination changes. Blake’s extra-illustrated watercolours correspond to the last line of page 12 and the second line of page 13: *Time, in advance, behind him hides his Wings, And seems to creep, decrepit with his Age; *Behold him, when past by; what then is seen But his broad Pinions swifter than the Winds? (NT, 45–6)

After two pages, Time comes back after yet another rotation (‘The Skies, which watch him in his new abode, | *Measuring his Motions by revolving Spheres’) (NT 49). Owing to a smaller letterpress, in the engraved edition the lines illustrating the first two plates move back onto the first plate, thus losing the cogent parallel between changing page and changing image. Yet the more compressed page layout allows for the elimination of the two pages originally dividing the first two plates from the third, so that Time’s flight is illustrated in three consecutive plates.⁷⁸ The sheer sequence and Time’s elongated limbs in the second picture allow for the illustrations to be read as instants of the same movement. The effect achieved by Blake’s Night Thoughts shows the medium of ⁷⁸ E. Young, The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts (London, 1797), 24–6; repr. as 14–16 in NT. For other illustrations featuring Time’s flight, see NT 102, 182, and 397. On Blake’s designs for Young’s Night Thoughts, see I. Chayes, ‘Picture and Page, Reader and Viewer in Blake’s Night Thoughts Illustrations’, SiR 30/3 (1991), 449–59.

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the book striving towards visual narrative, and the reader turning into a spectator. Readers must experience the effect of after-images, i.e. each image must be retained in their brain as their eyes turn to the next, so that the two subsequent engravings morph into one another. In going from the medium of the book to that of the exhibition, a few observations on the hanging order of the Milton Gallery are essential to the visual reading that follows. Except for Milton’s allegory, which is discussed in Chapter 4, the Milton Gallery catalogue numbers and lists pictures according to the order of the narrative sequence of Paradise Lost. The fact that the catalogue can be read as an extract of Paradise Lost reinforces the tendency towards a linear reading. The format of the catalogue, however, prescribes a linearity that was partly contradicted by anthologic expectation and the multidimensional nature of the exhibition as a spatial installation. As we have seen, the 1791 prospectus ranked pictures according to the type of sublimity they embodied. This generic approach is testified by contemporary reviews. The Morning Chronicle assigns the first rank to those which are wholly occupied with the agency of superior beings. The first two pictures, those of Satan’s encounter with Death, of Satan’s soaring into the Waste of Chaos from the Gates of Hell, and from the Pavilion of the Anarch towards Light, with the Birth of Sin, her Pursuit by Death, and that of Death and Sin forming their Bridge compose this class.79

This suggests that the ranking depends on effect rather than sequence. Similarly, the Monthly Mirror states ‘the first picture which immediately arrests our attention on entering the larger room, is Satan starting up from the touch of Ithuriel’s spear’.⁸⁰ Effect was achieved through careful planning. At the Royal Academy exhibitions, size suggested the placing of a picture, the larger canvases being placed just above the line, in the position that would most capture the attention of viewers. Size would also dictate the position of pictures at the Milton Gallery. The Morning Chronicle review tells us that S calling up his Legions and S haranguing his Host (MG 2–3) were hung one on top of the other according to size: beneath ‘Satan calling up his Host’ was placed ‘another representation of Satan in an attitude and action nearly parallel, but on a very diminished scale’. This suggests that the smaller pictures in the sequence were placed beneath the immediately preceding ⁷⁹ Morning Chronicle, 14 June 1799. ⁸⁰ ‘Remarks on the Milton Gallery’, Monthly Mirror, 18 (July 1799), 10.


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or subsequent larger picture. The difference in size between the two subsequent pictures produced an effect: ‘the same aim at grandeur of style is perceptible as on the large canvas. It is a giant seen through an inverted telescope.’ The Morning Chronicle review suggests other formal features that would guide a reading of the gallery narrative: ‘If in these the Painter has succeeded in connecting his agents in magnitude and dignity of form, boldness of motion, energy of expression, force of light and shade, depth and breadth of colour, with the confused fiery or murky element in which they act, he must be allowed to have expressed the Poet.’ In order to ‘express the Poet’, the painter ‘connects his agents’ through patterns of movement and colour. Thanks to the persistence of vision, such formal features can unify contiguous pictures. For repetition of motifs can produce overlaid impressions. Such impressions can turn the pictures on the wall into moments of the same action, the moving pictures of a continuous narrative. In my kinetic reading of the gallery I will use two types of montage practised by Eisenstein. First, I will identify figures in motion within a picture and between pictures. Then I will explore montage effects produced by intercutting similar scenes with extraneous matter. In his essay entitled ‘Laocoön’, Eisenstein quoted Lessing’s montage of Vergil’s description of the statue as an example of pre-cinematic montage. Seeing statues in motion offers a way into the effects of continuity we are going to explore at the Milton Gallery. In Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin there are two examples of animated sculptures. When the battleship Potemkin’s guns hit the military headquarters, bronze cupids are seen flying away from the roof of the theatre. That effect is achieved by taking shots of the same statues from different angles and juxtaposing them in a sequence in which the apparent variation of posture produces the impression of movement. The same happens after the bombardment: ‘the marble lion leaps up, surrounded by the thunder of Potemkin’s guns firing in protest against the bloodbath on the Odessa Steps. Cut together from three immobile marble lions at Alupka Castle (Crimea). One sleeping. One waking. One rising.’⁸¹ The juxtaposition of the three shots produces the impression of movement. In Eisenstein’s film these figures have the archaic function of supernatural markers of terrible events. Their archaism within the texture of film helps highlight mechanisms of composition which help flesh out their eighteenth-century counterparts. ⁸¹ Eisenstein, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form’, in Selected Works, i. 173–4.

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Continuity of movement makes it possible to follow Satan’s flight through Chaos to Eden. A number of formal features build continuities between S bursts from C and U between S and C (MG 11 and 12) as two pictures representing phases of the same movement. Not only are these two pictures the same size, but they also provide a very similar backdrop to Satan’s movement—the same contrast between light and dark, the same shape and colouring of the rocks, a shape which also defines the play of light and darkness in Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel’s Lance (RA 1780, no. 19).⁸² The elongation of Satan’s limbs provides a further visual thread for the viewer to merge the two pictures of Satan’s journey through Chaos as moments of the same movement. The viewer must imagine a 180◦ rotation. A foreshortened view of Satan from below and behind is followed by a lateral view in which Satan appears much smaller, thus conveying a sense of the space and depth covered.⁸³ Yet the scene in Eden seems to interrupt the continuity of this movement. Of A and E first discovered by S (MG 13) only the portion of canvas representing Adam and Eve is extant. Satan’s position in the picture can be reconstructed from a sketch, in which the demon’s big Apollonian head looks at the couple from the top right corner.⁸⁴ At a first impression, this picture’s focus on Adam and Eve was bound to divide the viewers’ attention, distracting them from the flow of Satan’s movement. If Adam and Eve’s appearance on canvas produces a discontinuous montage effect, an element of continuity is provided by their horizontalizing postures in MG 13 and 14. Their horizontalizing tendency frees the centre of the picture, which is occupied by Satan’s kinetic interaction with the angels. Adam and Eve thus constitute the lower angle of a triangular structure culminating in the two obliquely rising vectors which trace the movement of the angels and Satan towards the two upper angles. Satan’s posture completes the ⁸² S surprised at the ear of E, starting from the touch of  Spear (MG 14) is now lost. Judging from its reproduction in William Witherington’s A Modern Picture Gallery (repr. in Waterfield, Palaces of Art, 79), I assume that this picture reproduced the one exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, now at the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, to which I therefore turn. See Becker–Hattendorf, 20, for Fuseli’s Roman Album sketches, and p. 87 for the 1802 version, where Satan and the angels are in a reverse order. In this version the group of the angels is thus closer to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. ⁸³ A sketch chooses to reverse the scene presented in MG 11: a vision from below and behind is substituted with a frontal vision from above; see Becker–Hattendorff, 36. ⁸⁴ Becker–Hattendorff, 38, no. 39.


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phases of his movement from Chaos to Eden. In addition, his flying figure creates a continuity between Satan’s flight and the companion images The Dream of E, fancying to have tasted the Fruit from the Tree of interdicted Knowledge (MG 16) and The creation of E, as related by A (MG 17). Montage effects at the gallery go beyond the dynamism of a figure seen through instants of motion. For instance, The Dream of E and The creation of E exemplify montage based on repetition. Even though the former amounts to a third of the size of the latter, the two pictures are evidently structured as companion pieces, in which a female and a male form exchange postures. In the dream picture, the lying Eve and flying Satan seem a simplified, reverse version of Satan starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s lance. This is particularly significant given the intertextual links with Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. In Fuseli’s cycle, the angels assume God’s shape and their attention is fixed on Satan as opposed to Adam. The first instance of the creation sequence envisions Eve in the lateral position of Michelangelo’s Adam and Satan in the rising position, as if Eve had engendered Satan. The mirroring composition of Fuseli’s two pictures invites a joint reading, where size and contiguity suggest a causal link between the dream of Eve and Eve’s mastery of a vertical posture.⁸⁵ In the final sequence of the Milton Gallery’s rewriting of Paradise Lost, Fuseli alternates the vision of Milton’s proleptic movie with depictions of Adam and Eve. This sequence modifies Paradise Lost, where Eve is left behind and Adam alone follows Michael on the hill of contemplation to see the visions of the future (PL . 606–8). Fuseli’s rewriting heightens the dramatic impact of the sequence by eliminating the hierarchy of planes present in Milton’s plot. Far from being isolated as visions on the hill or as Archangel Michael’s revelations to Adam, Milton’s images of futurity become part of the main narrative. In Milton’s poem the deluge represents the end of Adam’s offspring. Acting on the text’s apostrophe to Adam as a suffering spectator, Fuseli places Adam and Eve in the situation described by Milton. In so doing, their dynamic of spectatorship follows the directions laid down by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Not only do Adam and Eve identify with the sufferers by placing themselves in their situation,⁸⁶ but they ⁸⁵ See Ch. 5 for a reading of the Adam and Eve sequence in terms of verticalizing agency. ⁸⁶ Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 8–9.

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are such good spectators as to incorporate the visions as their own plot. As a result, Fuseli turns into their story what in Milton’s poem is a two-book digression into images of the future of the human race. This sense of continuous narrative is strengthened by Fuseli’s montage. For The Vision of the Deluge (MG 25) is almost identical to The dismission of A and E from Paradise (MG 27). In the first Eve is on her knees and looking downwards, while Adam is intently looking upwards. In the second scene, Eve is standing, though still bent downwards, and Adam is this time looking at her. These two depictions of Adam and Eve anchor the visions of futurity as their objects of vision, providing narrative continuity. At the same time, however, this process is made out of a series of interruptions. Fuseli is here adopting a mixed technique. The two frozen frames of Adam and Eve are built in sequential phases so as to elicit the impression of movement. However, this sequential movement is intercut with the proleptic visions The Vision of the Lazarhouse (MG 24) and The Vision of Noah (MG 26). Thus the movement in the Adam and Eve scenes may be seen as an effect of the visions, intercutting perceiver and perceived. Here Fuseli’s technique alternates two lines of action, by intercutting subsequent phases of each so as to enhance the tension. Eisenstein uses this technique with great effect in the famous sequence of the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin. Shots of a woman wearing a pince-nez are repeated and intercut with shots of troops advancing menacingly and with repeated shots of a woman bearing a wounded child.⁸⁷ Another example of repetition and intercutting might explain the narrative potential of contiguity in some Milton Gallery pictures. In The Old and the New, Eisenstein repeats a shot of a sleeping woman intercut with tempest scenes. According to Jacques Aumont, the sleeping woman functions as the ‘ ‘‘guiding shot’’ which directs us to read the fragments that immediately follow as a dream’.⁸⁸ This technique recalls another example of intercutting at work in the Milton Gallery sequence. The reclined figure of a shepherd dreaming in MG 4 intercuts the first three visualizations of Satan in Hell and the next four pictures visualizing Milton’s allegory. Figures from a simile in allusion to the contracted form of ⁸⁷ See D. Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 74–5. ⁸⁸ See J. Aumont, ‘Eisenstein Taken at His Word’, in Montage Eisenstein, trans. L. Hildreth, C. Penley, and A. Ross (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 86.


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the Spirits assembled in the new raised Hall of P (MG 4)⁸⁹ avoids depicting the transformation of the demons in Pandemonium. First it defuses direct representation by means of simile, then it chooses to visualize the dreaming shepherd and lets the viewer imagine the dream’s content. By doing so, the content of the dream changes, for in addition to the demonic transformations depicted in the upper half of the dream picture, the dream expands to contain the matter of the following pictures. Thus, the dream provides a diegetic horizon not only for the Pandemonium transformation, but also for the pictures Fuseli devotes to Milton’s allegory of the encounter between Satan, Sin, and Death. Both the shepherd in MG 4 and Adam and Eve in The Vision of the Deluge subsume what precedes and follows as the contents of a vision—a narrative thread to link together what otherwise seems miscellaneous. For Eisenstein, repetition and intercutting heightens emotional impact as they call the viewer to patch up the pieces into his own projective narrative rather than imposing one from without.⁹⁰ This is achieved through ‘compression: the intermediate links in the chain fall away’.⁹¹ Montage thus works by inducing ‘associative chains of depictions … a form of mental skill reduces that intermediate chain to a minimum and we perceive only the beginning and the end of that process’.⁹² In the end it is left to the Milton Gallery spectator to reconstruct his/her Paradise Lost by piecing together the montage fragments into a narrative. ⁸⁹ Plate 3, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786, represents the same passage from Milton as MG 4; see Ch. 4, p. 158 and n. 44 below. ⁹⁰ Eisenstein, ‘Laocoön’, 134. ⁹¹ Eisenstein, ‘Montage 1938’, in Selected Works, ii. 300. ⁹² Ibid. 301.

4 ‘Satan encount’ring Death, Sin interposing’: Milton’s Allegory and the Politics of Seeing Over their Heads triumphant Death his Dart Shook. This Passage makes the Reader see Death with his Dart in his Hand, shaking it over the Heads of the unhappy Creatures describ’d in the Lazar-house, as plainly as if the whole was painted upon Canvas. (William Benson, Letters concerning Poetical Translations, 1739)

H can death be represented in pictures? Laurence Sterne went to one representational extreme in Tristram Shandy, where death is abstracted into a black rectangle.¹ This aesthetic shock tactic neatly sidesteps the iconographic repertoire that Fuseli confronted when he depicted Death hovering between form and abstraction. At first sight, Milton’s Death defied pictorial representation: Here is a striking example of the power of poetry to excite grand and impressive images, which painting cannot follow, though they refer to the sense which it peculiarly addresses. The gloomy indistinctness of outline in this shadowy figure, and its questionable form and substance, which render it totally unfit for the determinate strokes of the pencil, do not prevent the imagination from embodying a mass of black cloud, through which appear the obscure lineaments ¹ L. Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, ed. M. and J. New, 3 vols. (Gainesville, Fla., 1978), i. 37–8 (between chs. 12 and 13).

‘Satan encount’ring Death, Sin interposing’

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of a horrid phantom, sufficiently resembling the poet’s idea, to produce all the effect he intended.²

This presentation of Milton’s Death appears in John Aikin’s ‘Essay on the Personification of Abstract Ideas in Poetry’, which was serialized in the Monthly Magazine between June 1798 and autumn 1799 when the Milton Gallery was open to the public. Insofar as it features Death as a ‘mass of black cloud’, the essay contradicts its aim. Far from banning Death from visual representation, it takes readers through an iconographic repertoire of the supernatural. For to present Death in the shape of a cloud is to conjure up Correggio’s painting Jupiter and Io, where the Greek god metamorphoses into a dark cloud half-revealing, half-concealing shadowy facial features. While Correggio would come to the minds of connoisseurs and libertines familiar with pictures of the loves of the gods, ‘the obscure lineaments of a horrid phantom’ could be perceived in Fuseli’s modern counterparts: S encount’ring D, S interposing and S pursued by D. Readers of the Monthly Magazine would be familiar with these pictures either because they had seen them at the Milton Gallery between May and August, or because they had read about them in the June and August issues of the Monthly.³ Moreover, the article’s description of Death as ‘questionable’ adds a further Fuselian association. To flesh out the ‘shadowy figure’ into a ‘questionable form and substance’ meant to combine Milton’s vocabulary of Death with an allusion to the ‘questionable shape’ of Hamlet’s ghost. This allusion already haunted the background of Milton’s writing. In addition, in the London exhibition circuit, it connected Fuseli’s depiction of Milton’s Death with his picture of Hamlet’s ghost, which had been on show at Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery since 1789. In the wake of the regicide, this compound reference stood as a shorthand for the political potential and dangers of the gallery project. Was the magazine half-evoking, half-erasing a series of pictures and a political association which were best left unmentioned? This chapter and the next analyse the Milton Gallery pictures as a visual narrative within specific scenes of reading. Here Fuseli’s demonic ² ‘Personifications in Poetry’, MM 8 (Oct. 1799), 709. For the whole essay, see MM 5 (1798), 407–9; 6 (1798), 15–18, 177–8, 261–3, 433–4; 7 (1799), 112–14, 292–3, 370–1; 8 (1799), 709–10. ³ MM 7 (June 1799), 347; 8 (Aug. 1799), 558–9.

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pictures in Hell are read in the context of dissenting debates about supernatural form and the political circulation of Milton in the 1790s. To bring Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death to view meant to negotiate a slippery middle-ground. On the one hand, Fuseli’s art found cultural and financial backing in the Unitarian networks of his patron William Roscoe in Liverpool and of Joseph Johnson and his circle in London. On the other hand, the painter was making a name for himself at the Royal Academy exhibitions. An aesthetics of indeterminacy allowed Fuseli to please both publics and to be appointed to the professorship of painting at the Royal Academy. R E P R E S E N T I N G S U PE R N AT U R A L B E I N G S S encount’ring D, S interposing ‘is meant for one of the Centres in the Exhibition we intend,’ Fuseli announced to Roscoe in October 1791 (CEL 74). Because Fuseli had a reputation for the supernatural,⁴ starting with Milton’s allegory might strengthen his chances in securing a public. The allegory had exercised the poem’s public ever since Addison’s Spectator papers on Paradise Lost: ‘the Story should be such as an ordinary Reader may acquiesce in, whatever Natural, Moral or Political Truth may be discovered in it by Men of greater Penetration’, Addison argued.⁵ Fuseli was among the poem’s cosmopolitan readership, having been first introduced to it by its German translator Johann Jacob Bodmer at the Collegium Carolinum in Zurich, where the painter-to-be was educated to become a Zwinglian minister. Religious grounds led Bodmer to join the Italian translator Paolo Rolli in a challenge to Voltaire, who had deemed Milton’s allegorical figures ‘not adapted to our senses … so utterly Strangers to the Reader, that he cannot be affected in any Way towards them’.⁶ Rolli immediately reacted: ‘one wou’d suppose him an Indian, never acquainted with the Notions of our Religion’.⁷ For Bodmer too the supernatural subject matter addressed a Christian readership interested in the future state of the dead. Like a telescope, poetic metaphor allowed ⁴ M. Myrone, ‘The Sublime as Spectacle: The Transformation of Ideal Art at Somerset House’, in Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line, 77–91. ⁵ Addison, The Spectator, iii. 146. ⁶ F.-M. Arouet de Voltaire, An Essay on Epic Poetry, in The English Essays of 1727, ed. D. Williams (Oxford, 1996), 385. ⁷ P. Rolli, Remarks upon Mr Voltaire’s Essay on the Epick Poetry of the European Nations (London, 1728), 74–5.


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readers to see the invisible world that it is otherwise impossible for human faculties to perceive. Milton’s Paradise Lost exemplified how the imagination creates sensuous links between the phenomenal and the noumenal world.⁸ Within a Zwinglian perspective, this amounts to arguing the Eucharistical function of the imagination: showing the invisible through the visible, the incorporeal through the corporeal, the poem enacts the metaphorical assimilation of the Christian community of readers on Earth with the mystical community above. Because of its meaning for Christian readers, reading (and indeed viewing) the poem involves delicate theological negotiations. As an allegory of the flesh and an inverted Trinity, Milton’s allegory is one of the critical places where the relationship between the human and the divine, between the corporeal and incorporeal, is defined. In a Christian context, the questionable embodiment of supernatural agents was reframed in terms of the problematic nature and incarnation of Christ. Was he a human soul in a human body, as the Socinians argued? Or should one follow Arius in attributing him a divine soul incarnated into a human body? John Rumrich has shown how central incarnation was and is to the poem’s readers: William Empson thought that writing Paradise Lost turned Milton into an Arian; for Balachandra Rajan the poem’s narrative absorbs the Arianism in a way that carefully avoids offending orthodoxy; a host of twentieth-century critics joined forces to fend off Arian interpretations of the poem. However, among early readers it was common to consider Milton an anti-Trinitarian, whether of Socinian or Arian persuasion.⁹ Even Richard Bentley, who defended the poem’s orthodoxy, thought it required an active editorial intervention to prevent the likes of John Toland from turning it into ‘a manifesto of radical metaphysics and politics’. So, for instance, if Heaven is ‘chained’ rather than ‘changed’ to Earth Bentley secures the two realms to one another in perpetual contiguity, thus interrupting what might otherwise be a monistic continuity between matter and spirit that turns ‘corporeal to incorporeal’ ‘one first matter all’.¹⁰ The weighty theological matters raised by reading Paradise Lost could only be exacerbated by capturing the poem on canvas. Outside the ⁸ Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie (Zurich, 1740; Stuttgart, 1966), 23–7, 32–5, 37. ⁹ J. Rumrich, ‘Milton’s Arianism: Why it Matters’, in S. Dobranski and J. Rumrich (eds.), Milton and Heresy (Cambridge, 1998), 75–92; id., Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (New York, 1996), 29–34. ¹⁰ W. Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge, 1997), 119–21.

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binding of a book, visualization is less anchored to the letter of the text. Despite twenty-seven scenes from Paradise Lost, the Milton Gallery has no place for books  and : the Triumphant Messiah, the War in Heaven, and the Son are expunged from the visual cycle. Satan, Sin, and Death, and a shadowy, almost transparent figure witnessing the creation of Eve, are the only incorporeal beings to find a place in the Milton Gallery. Chapter 2 analysed the levelling effect such expurgations have on the plot and ideology of Milton’s poem by loosening those teleological props that provide guidance from above and mediate the course of human affairs. Here we go back to the same ground from the standpoint of the visual experience of the gallery and its interpretative communities. It may seem surprising not to find the War in Heaven at the Gallery, considering that Fuseli had first tried his hand at the fall of the angels at the age of 11. Yet his hesitation in representing the supernatural is easier to understand given that his livelihood depended on the Unitarian circles of Roscoe in Liverpool and Joseph Johnson in London. The impact of such context is best exemplified by the vicissitudes of Fuseli’s picture The creation of E, as related by A (MG 17), where Eve comes out of Adam’s side witnessed by an ‘aerial figure’. Barely emerging from the dark background, this shadowy yet statuesque figure evoked supernatural agency. Worried that theology might stand in the way of selling the picture, Fuseli explained to Roscoe that it was not meant to represent the Supreme Being, but rather ‘For Believers, let it be the Son, the Visible agent of his Father; for others it is merely a Superior Being entrusted with her Creation.’ Fuseli’s shadowy figure was versatile. Viewers of different religious denominations could embody it according to their different and probably incompatible views on supernatural agency. Such light-hearted handling smoothed over distinctions that engrossed Unitarian debates on the pre-existence of the Son, the Son as the Logos, which is to say the agent of God’s creation. Accepting either meant going against the Unitarian view of the Son as a man. It is hardly surprising that Fuseli’s cavalier attitude failed to satisfy Roscoe’s theological concerns. His objections were such that Fuseli’s reply mentioned the backing of a Liverpudlian Baptist minister and appealed to the fact that there was no ban on the representation of the Messiah. Nonetheless, he concluded, ‘I have however heard enough not to Send You again a Similar Subject’ (CEL 138, 140). By the time the picture made it to Pall Mall, despite the hope of a wider public, the Unitarian critiques were still felt in the defensive footnote


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appended to the entry for this picture in the Milton Gallery catalogue: ‘With regard to the central figure in this and the following subject, the Painter disclaims the ‘‘vaulting ambition’’ of an attempt to represent the Supreme Being. The form indicated, if it be found to possess sufficient dignity, may be considered as the semblance of an angelic agent.’¹¹ Standing alone and independent of Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1795, such a visualization suggested forms of worship and mediation incompatible with Roscoe and his Unitarian circle in Liverpool. At the Milton Gallery the picture is rearticulated in a visual narrative where the action is on level ground and supernatural agency mostly out of the picture. Such a narrative would defuse the otherwise theologically improper ‘aerial figure’—and even worse, the cavalier suggestion that it might be ‘the Son, the Visible agent of his Father’, or ‘a Superior Being entrusted with’ Eve’s creation. Finally, in 1803 Fuseli painted a new version of The creation of E, which was engraved as an illustration of Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society. In this new context, the anthropomorphic statuesque figure, which had incensed Roscoe, disappeared and was substituted by a materialist alternative. The power of Creation is symbolized by a shaft of light, an oblique vector connecting the top left corner of the picture with Eve coming out of Adam’s rib. Not only does the Unitarian public explain why the matter of Heaven would disappear from the Milton Gallery, but Unitarian debates also clarify why the matter of Hell is so amplified, and the allegory multiplied into four pictures. As an inverted Trinity that activated propaganda imagery used against the Church of Rome,¹² Milton’s allegory articulated those aspects of religious controversy that most exercised Unitarian hermeneutics: the Trinity, the Eucharist, the relationship between the body and the spirit, and the state of the dead. Fuseli’s first attempt at Milton’s allegory resulted in a Manichaean distribution of colour. In a drawing sketched in Rome in 1776, Satan is visualized as an idealized, light-winged form set against a dark background confronting the dark figure of Death, equally heroic in build, set against a light background. This first visual encounter defines the representational problems Fuseli faced in his Milton pictures during the 1790s. How should he signify the supernatural status and attributes ¹¹ [Fuseli], Milton Gallery. A Catalogue, 9 (RA, sig. FU/4/1/4), not repr. by Knowles. ¹² J. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Cambridge, 2000), 69–89.

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of Satan? Is he a man, a god, an angel? Does he wear wings? More generally, how can supernatural beings be captured on canvas? A generous spread of wings differentiates Satan from his model Apollo Belvedere.¹³ Satan’s wings remind us that he is a fallen angel, but such an attribute is absent in the Old Testament and in the Hebrew tradition. Fritz Saxl has traced the texture and representation of angels back to the early days of Christianity. During the first four centuries of the Christian era angels had no wings, following biblical iconography. Winged angels made their appearance from the fourth century onwards, when they were assimilated to the visual template of pagan messengers, especially Near Eastern and Roman representations of the Victory.¹⁴ The origins of Christian doctrine and iconography were a keen object of enquiry in Fuseli’s dissenting milieux, especially in Joseph Priestley’s work on the ‘corruptions of Christianity’. Although Priestley failed to analyse angels’ wings, he ascribed the doctrine of angels to the Christian Fathers’ commerce with Platonism. In The Statesman Plato’s definition of man as bipes implumis singles out wings as distinguishing humans from birds; in Phaedrus wings mark the soul’s upward tendency and its participation in intellectual and divine vision.¹⁵ Perhaps trying to avoid such syncretism, when Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock asked Angelica Kauffman to illustrate Der Messias, he asked for angels without wings: their supernatural texture should be made manifest through light and ethereal bodies alone.¹⁶ In the essay on divine poetry accompanying his biblical epic, Klopstock had envisioned the poet’s role as filling in the ‘outlines’, adding ‘bold touches’ and ‘colouring’ to the biblical source. Because supernatural characters are brought into the visible world by revelation, they ‘must be drawn in a manner suitable to human ¹³ For the iconographic link between the head of Satan and Apollo Belvedere, see J. C. Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter (London, 1789–98), ii. 285, compared to the first plate between pp. 376 and 377; for a discussion of Fuseli’s collaboration with Lavater and of Satan as Apollo, see S. Herrmann, Die natürliche Ursprache in der Kunst um 1800. Praxis und Theorie der Physiognomik bei Füssli und Lavater (Frankfurt, 1994), 28–31. ¹⁴ See F. Saxl, ‘Continuity and Variation in the Meaning of Images’, in Lectures, 2 vols. (London, 1957), i. 7–11. For the contamination of visual types from antiquity with Christian characters and vice versa, see E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1939), and id., ‘Classical Mythology in Medieval Art’, Metropolitan Museum Studies, 4 (1933), 228–80. ¹⁵ See Priestley, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, 2 vols. (Birmingham and London, 1782), i. 330; Plato, Statesman 266e and Phaedrus 246d. ¹⁶ Klopstock to Kauffman, 14 Mar. 1780, in Briefe 1776–1782, ed. H. Riege, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1982), i. 155.


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conceptions’, endowed with ‘some kind of corporeal vehicles’.¹⁷ In the event, Kauffman failed to adapt Klopstock’s Messias on canvas. Fuseli too was uncertain about wings. Dipped in the medium of oil painting, Satan’s wings risked too gross a material outline. Such materiality had to be thinned out. When he returned to Satan in the 1790s, Fuseli abandoned the colour partition that had polarized the contrast between Satan and Death in 1776, and opted for a uniform dark background instead. Against such darkness Satan’s wings appear and disappear in a twilight of form as the impalpable, anamorphic play of ‘darkness visible’. Nor are wings a consistent attribute of Satan at the Milton Gallery. The reason may partly be found in Milton’s text. In Paradise Lost the word ‘wing’ figures prominently, sometimes used as a noun and sometimes as a verb, sometimes indicating the comfortable free movement of supernatural beings across worlds, sometimes one of the accessories helping Satan carve a difficult path through extraneous and resistant matter. Given that Satan had ‘put on swift wings’ (PL . 631) on his way towards the gates of Hell, Fuseli follows the letter of the text in attributing him wings in S encount’ring D, S interposing (MG 5), thus integrating the scene in the sequence of his journey through Chaos. Yet the contextual pressure of Satan having to ‘wing his way’ upward through Chaos competes with other figurations in sketches of S bursts from C (MG 11). While in this picture the fallen angel ends up ‘winging his way’ upward, the following picture shows him wingless, arrested in the statuesque posture of the Gladiator, a better visual analogy for a role compared to Ulysses between Scylla and Charybdis (MG 12). Reading Satan’s limbs through Plato’s Phaedrus, wings define upward striving and loss of wings downward heaviness, an instance of reincarnation and fall (Phaedrus 248c–d). The soaring imagery of flight calls for Satan to spread his wings in The Dream of E (MG 16), where the love of a God and a human being recalls the apocryphal story of the seductions of the daughters of man at the hand of the angels, or adapts Plato’s winged soul into the figure of Cupid in the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Finally, in the more text-driven illustrations for du Roveray’s 1802 edition, book partitions oblige the illustrator to follow the roll-call envisaged by the main action, so that ¹⁷ F. G. Klopstock, The Messiah. Attempted from the German, trans. J. Collyer, 4th edn., 3 vols. (London, 1769–71), vol. i, pp. xvii, xlv–xlvi. A 1780 edition of Der Messias and ‘Klopstock’s Poetische Werke und Oden, 3 vols.’ are listed in Christie’s Catalogue of the Small and Very Select Classical Library of the Late Henry Fuseli (London, 1825), nos. 152 and 174.

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Fuseli cannot escape visualizing other generously winged if slightly clumsy supernatural bodies in Uriel observing Satan in his Flight to Earth for book , and The Triumphant Messiah for book .¹⁸ Much as Satan is modelled after a statuesque prototype of the human, so is Death. In his essay on personifications, Aikin had expected Death, ‘if presented as a bodily form to the imagination’, to be ‘associated with age and deformity’. Yet in discussing Milton’s allegory, Aikin shared Fuseli’s mental imaging and visualized the features of a Hercules instead. ‘Black it stood as night’, Aikin argues, is taken from Homer’s depiction of Hercules in Odyssey 11, an appropriate reference given that ‘in this very bold and martial figure, we want some of the peculiar features of the power intended to be represented’.¹⁹ Such a stable statuesque figuration familiarizes Death as a known ingredient in a classical underworld. However, the contours of Fuseli’s Herculean Death blur into the new dark background. Such an anamorphic oscillation between volume, contour, and background turns Death the agent into a perceptual illusion. In S pursued by D (MG 7, 1794–6), the barely perceivable shape of Death suggests a dark embrace enveloping the alluring female body of Sin and almost dissolving into shapeless darkness.²⁰ If perceptual illusion fends off the thing’s status as an agent, such a volume dimly perceived through the dark background may end up being more frightening than Herculean might personified. As an uncertain and potentially boundless figuration Fuseli’s Death fits the requirements of Edmund Burke’s sublime, a text Fuseli had in his library: ‘hardly any thing can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds’.²¹ However, in Burke’s aesthetic such obscurity has an anti-pictorial thrust, for it characterizes verbal indeterminacy as incompatible with visual images, which he considered as a Cartesian medium for clear and distinct ideas. By contrast, rather than fixing Death in a static and clearly defined abstraction, what one might find exemplified in an emblem, Fuseli uses the most intractable of figures to force the ¹⁸ These pictures are discussed as Empsonian confrontations with Milton’s God in W. Furman-Adams and V. James Tufte, ‘Anticipating Empson: Henry Fuseli’s Re-Vision of Milton’s God’, Milton Quarterly, 35/4 (2001), 258–74. ¹⁹ MM 7 (Mar. 1799), 113; 8 (Oct. 1799), 709–10. ²⁰ In an opposite pull towards precision of definition, around the same time Fuseli also produced a version featuring Death as a skull; see Becker–Hattendorff, 31. ²¹ Burke, Enquiry, 63.


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boundary between media and exemplify how painting can present the unpresentable. Fuseli’s uncertain supernatural forms visualize what eighteenthcentury commentators had tried to contain within the precincts of metaphor. While Fuseli brings Milton’s ‘substance’, ‘shape’, and ‘shadow’ to the eyes of his spectators, Addison and his followers had tried to domesticate them through the discipline of rhetoric and epic theory. Let them be ‘short allegories’, ‘comparisons’, ‘ornaments’, so long as they are not taken literally and become ‘Principal actors … engaged in a Series of Adventures’, argued Addison.²² Addison’s technique is to stabilize by separating out what Joseph Priestley and Hugh Blair would later consider ‘three different degrees’ of personification. For personification belongs in a progression of figures going from comparison to metaphor and personification proper, in which inanimate beings or concepts are assimilated to living beings to such an extent as to acquire the power of action or even of speech.²³ If Fuseli’s figures recede into the ground they may be ornamental effects or illusions of perception, but their protracted presence in four pictures implies that these ornaments threaten to become actual participants in the action. Furthermore, these four pictures delay the action, thus going against the kinetic cut of Paradise Lost, which was analysed in Chapters 2 and 3. Compare the slimmer and more dynamic rhythm outlined in the September 1791 prospectus, where Satan is visualized calling up his legions (1), assembling them in Pandemonium (2), ‘contesting his passage through Hell-gates with Death, and reconciled to him by the Interposition of Sin’ (3), before he ‘springs upward like a pyramid of fire’ (4). The very characterization of picture 3 is more dynamic than its final title, S encountering D, S interposing. Adding three extra pictures halts the progress of the action. What are these figures doing at the borders of Hell? Turning such substance–shape–shadow into allegorical agents was not just a rhetorical case study into the performative power of metaphor. Milton’s allegory highlights the continuities between rhetoric and theology. The theological ground of metaphor was central to the Unitarian hermeneutics of Joseph Priestley, whose works were published by Joseph ²² Addison, The Spectator, iii. 338. On the 18th-century debate on Milton’s allegory, see S. Knapp, ‘Milton’s Allegory of Sin and Death in Eighteenth-Century Criticism’, in Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 51–65; see also T. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge, 1997). ²³ Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, i. 326; Priestley, Lectures on Oratory and Criticism, 249.

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Johnson and known to Fuseli, who designed a title-page vignette for his 1768 Essay on the First Principles of Government and painted his portrait for Johnson in 1783.²⁴ Priestley’s definition of personification in his 1777 Lectures on Oratory and Criticism finds a philological and theological counterpart in his biblical criticism. For what Priestley calls ‘corruptions of Christianity’ are nothing other than personifications read literally, metaphors turned into agents, mistranslations: ‘it is only from the literal interpretation of a few figurative expressions in the scriptures that this doctrine of atonement, as well as that of transubstantiation, has been derived’. Such doctrines ‘arose from an abuse of the figurative language of scripture’.²⁵ Initially, moral and religious ideas were inferred from and named after impressions of the senses through an analogical use of figurative expressions. However, through repeated use and the power of association, the figurative origin of such terms and ideas was gradually forgotten.²⁶ Writing within the Unitarian framework, S. T. Coleridge fine-tuned this line of argument in a discussion of sacrifice as a metaphor for atonement: ‘the Similes of the New Testament were made to signify the thing assimilated, and Metaphors consolidated into realities … whenever the superstitious Jews addicted to Vice yet afraid of Deity offered sacrifices in the real sense of atonement, and converted the Thing signifying into the Thing signified’.²⁷ Coleridge’s view that the corruption of religion is due to the ‘thing signifying’ turning into the ‘thing signified’ reveals the Eucharistic influence of theology on language theory. For Priestley, the Trinitarian creed was another performative product of linguistic ‘delusion’ by faulty attribution, where an attribute misapplied turns an accident into a substance: ‘the doctrine of the separate divinity of Christ was at first nothing more than a personification of a divine attribute’. Then the Logos—be it power, reason, utterance—was converted ‘into a real person’, but ‘the reason of a man can never be converted into a substance, so as to constitute a thinking being, distinct from the man himself’.²⁸ In undoing the transformation of attribute into substance Priestley turned ²⁴ A. Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution 1750–1800 (Chicago, 1987), 295. ²⁵ Priestley, An Appeal to the Serious and Candid Professors of Christianity (1771), in Unitarian Society, Tracts. Printed and Published by the Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue, 13 vols. (London, 1791–1800), i. 31, 43. ²⁶ Priestley, The Scripture Doctrine of Remission (London, 1761), pp. v–vii. ²⁷ S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann (London, 1971), 202–3. ²⁸ Priestley, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, i. 34, 38, 39; see also 95, and 97 on three persons consubstantial, one hypostasis or ousia.


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to Locke’s critique of the idea of substance. Nothing other than an idea of reflection, substance consists in ‘a collection of simple ideas, that are united by the imagination’, for ‘the particular qualities, which form a substance, are commonly refer’d to an unknown something, in which they are supposed to inhere’, summarized Hume.²⁹ Against such radical uncertainty, Unitarian reading practices tried to define and rein in the work of the imagination. Unitarian reading involved emending the Sacred Scriptures, tracing the original and subsequent senses of words, the textual histories and layers of figures. Searching for the referential productivity of metaphors helped identify their performative power. For ‘consolidated metaphors’ needed disanchoring from the ‘thing signified’. On these grounds Gilbert Wakefield pulled apart the figure of Satan, and went so far as to deny his existence on philological grounds:³⁰ another metaphor, which, like Milton’s Sin, sprang up from a figurative reading of the letter of the Sacred Scriptures and achieved the status of agent. A restitutive reading practice identifies such anamorphic figures and calls them back to their metaphorical status within the text, stripping them of their agency and containing them within the precincts of rhetoric. Sin, Death, and the Devil embody this process of reading. By the end of Milton’s poem, they are reduced to moral categories. Metaphors should remain incorporeal, rather than turn to corporeal consolidation. Yet corporeal consolidation, or rather the relationship and continuities between spirit and matter, is precisely what Milton’s allegory is about. The ‘Shadowy and Fictitious Nature’ of Milton’s ‘shadowy and unsubstantial’ beings unsettled Addison.³¹ For these figures challenged the distinction between matter and spirit and could substantiate a monist view of the universe. Some of the most critical passages of Paradise Lost were cut in Fuseli’s adaptation of the poem into pictures. For instance, Fuseli sidestepped the War in Heaven in book  of Paradise Lost, where angels appear with ‘Helmet, Spear, Shield, Sword’, which John Dennis disliked for ‘in them the poet seems to confound ²⁹ Priestley, Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit (London, 1777), 72–3; Locke, Essay, 295–317; Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 16. ³⁰ G. Wakefield, A New Translation of the Gospel of St Matthew (Warrington and London, 1782), sect. , pp. 51–6. The text was distributed by Joseph Johnson. Priestley also asserted Satan to be a personification of evil rather than an agent, and another Oriental influence that corrupted Christianity; see An Answer to Mr Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’, being a Continuation of Letters to the Philosophers and Politicians of France, on the Subject of Religion; and of the Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (London, 1795), 85–6. ³¹ Addison, The Spectator, ii. 563, iii. 337.

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Body and Mind, Spirit and Matter’.³² Nor do Fuseli’s pictures visualize Gabriel’s discussion of angels and the transubstantiation of food in book , ‘one first matter all … till body up to spirit work’. Having the Archangel present and thus endorse a monist universe was a bold move, which the mid-eighteenth-century editor Thomas Newton felt he had to denounce: [Milton] is as much mistaken here in his metaphysics, as he was before in his physics. This notion of matter refining into spirit is by no means observing the bounds proportion’d to each kind. I suppose, he meant it as a comment on the doctrin of a natural body changed into a spiritual body, as in I Cor. XV. and perhaps borrow’d it from some of his systems of divinity. For Milton, as he was too much of a materialist in his philosophy, so was too much of a systematist in his divinity.³³

With Heaven out of Fuseli’s visual reach, the case for continuity rested on the allegory in Hell. It is here that Fuseli brings the uncertain borders of matter and spirit to the eye of the spectator. Translated on canvas, Fuseli’s supernatural bodies took on the attenuated aerial texture sanctioned by Bodmer.³⁴ An immaterial soul is a fairly modern invention, argued Priestley in The History of the Corruptions of Christianity. By contrast, the early Church Fathers thought that supernatural bodies had a certain degree of visibility and opted for various degrees of materialism, following the philosophical systems they believed in—let God be light, a subtle ethereal corporeal essence penetrating all bodies, ‘an intelligent fiery spirit, without form, but passing into whatever things it pleases, and assimilating itself to all’.³⁵ Rather than consolidating such bodies into a clear configuration, Fuseli’s best course was to produce a visual equivalent of Milton’s oscillation between substance, shape, and shadow, following Locke’s brilliant approach to the texture of spirits. To avoid theological controversy their substance ought to be said and unsaid at one breath, equally unknowable as bodies, for aren’t bodies just as imperceptible if their matter, following Boyle, is dissolved into invisible particles?³⁶ In practice, Locke’s solution comes close to Priestley’s definition of matter and of the matter–spirit problem. Indeed, once substance is debunked as unknowable, nothing ³² J. Dennis, ‘Observations on the Paradise Lost of Milton’ (1721), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1939), ii. 228–9. ³³ Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, i. 350 n., on PL . 478. ³⁴ Bodmer, Critische Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren, 34. ³⁵ Priestley, Disquisitions, 180–9. ³⁶ Locke, Essay, 313.


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more than an abstraction of a collection of properties and powers, then the distinction between matter and spirit is attenuated to a difference in degree, which can be defined in terms of energy depending on size, arrangement, and density of particles.³⁷ Less concrete, barely perceptible subtle bodies denote the uncertain border or progression between matter and spirit. Milton’s and Fuseli’s supernatural agents mimic a process of perception, where the wavering denomination of ‘shape’, ‘substance’, ‘shadow’ registers the oscillations of anamorphic uncertainty without letting the metaphor consolidate into a definite reality. Whether and how supernatural beings feature in space opens up new disciplinary ground. For Priestley, the Trinity and transubstantiation were a ‘physical impossibility’ and ‘a mathematical one’.³⁸ In Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, Priestley reviewed various attempts to accommodate spirits to the necessities of perception by conjugating res cogitans with res extensa. A spirit is ‘a substance that has no extension of any kind, nor any thing of the vis inertiae that belongs to matter. It has neither length, breadth, nor thickness’.³⁹ He thus compares spirits to mathematical points as far as their relation to space is concerned: A mathematical point is, in fact, no substance at all, being the mere limit, or termination of a body, or the place in void space where a body is terminated, or may be supposed to be so. Mere points, mere lines, or mere surfaces are alike mere boundaries of material substances, and may not improperly be called their properties, necessarily entering into the definition of particular bodies, and consequently bear no sort of relation to what is immaterial.40

Spiritual beings are thus denied substance and place. Nevertheless, the mathematical analogy has a strong bearing on the painter’s effort to locate and define spiritual agents in pictorial space. Sin and Death are ‘no substance at all’ trapped within the representational requirements of substance and thus forcing their way out of geometrical forms, out of the lines that would define the empty boundaries of material substances, although Locke would argue that bodily boundaries are themselves porous and temporary configurations of aggregated atoms. What Priestley said of spirits and substances may well be applied to Death, which was the critical ground where the immateriality or materiality of the soul was debated, defining the controversies and ³⁷ Priestley, Disquisitions, pp. xxviii, 104–5, 109, 222. ³⁸ Priestley, Defences of the History of the Corruptions of Christianity (London, 1783–6), 98. ³⁹ Priestley, Disquisitions, 54. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 56.

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distinctions between different religious denominations ever since the early Church Fathers, during the Reformation, and in Priestley’s own times. Is the soul the ‘form of the body’? Does it have an ‘intermediate material substance’, a ‘subtle vehicle’, the ‘infinitesimal elementary body’ posited by Hartley? Or is it dissolved into matter as Priestley argued?⁴¹ This theological context explains what could be gained by transforming the Manichaean Herculean figure painted in 1776—a definite personification, or what Lessing would define ‘the deity of Death’⁴²—into the imperceptible dark volume Fuseli visualizes in the 1790s, an outline receding into the dark ground, a soul returned to mud. If the soul has a life after death and before resurrection, where does it go? Is there an ‘intermediate state of the Dead’ where it can reside in the interim? Milton himself presents Death as a progression of figures: first a modifier of place, then an agent blocking Satan on his way out into the world: Shades of death A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire. (PL . 621–8)

Milton’s ‘intermediate state of the dead’ is a place of miscreated forms. Through the grammatical options of place modifier, noun, or verb, Milton explores Death as a juncture between matter and spirit, an uncertain oscillation between substance, accident, action. What is Death? Is it a place? A boundary? A point? A prolonged interval? Defining Death re-presents the ground covered by the respective spheres of painting and poetry discussed in Chapter 3. In the epigraph to this chapter, William Benson selects the passage from book  in ⁴¹ On the intermediate state of the dead, see ibid. 224–33; An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, i. 400–26. On the intermediate state of the dead as a defining feature of different denominations, see [F. Blackburne], An Historical View of the Controversy concerning an Intermediate State and the Separate Existence of the Soul between Death and the General Resurrection, Deduced from the Beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the Present Times, 2nd edn. (London, 1772). ⁴² G. E. Lessing, ‘How the Ancients Represented Death’, in Selected Prose Works of G. E. Lessing, trans. E. C. Beasley and H. Zimmern (London, 1879), 175–232.


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which Adam visualizes the Lazarhouse.⁴³ What ‘paints Death on canvas’ is the pause between subject and verb, the enjambement that freezes Death into a still, foreboding action: ‘Over their Heads triumphant Death his Dart | Shook.—’. No need for the author to quote the whole line ‘Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked’ (PL . 491–2): that immeasurable delay is compressed into the kinetic effect whereby the enjambement turns the still into a movement. By contrast, in Fuseli’s Lazarhouse, the enjambement doesn’t function as a movement between images, blurring before and after into a continuum, an insensible passage between two incompatible states. Nor does the enjambement freeze the action into a precise point of time or impending action. Instead, Fuseli’s Lazarhouse adapts the enjambement in the form of a figuration of time: not a point, but a figure of delay frozen into the bounds of a picture. Imprisoned into this prolonged point of time, illness and pain are captured as a dynamism of contorted forms. Their compressed energy contrasts their impossibility of movement and development, which is heightened by the very static impending figure of Death, spatialized and flattened in a two-dimensional Blakean bound of the horizon guarding the upper border of the frame. Unlike the movement produced by Benson’s cut, here Death is reduced to eternalized delay. By contrast, in book  that turn is multiplied for the length of four pictures. Initially, S encount’ring D, S Interposing (MG 5) was planned as a companion piece for Satan flying up from Sin and Death on his Enterprise, for they were listed one after the other in the 1791 prospectus, then as of the same size in 1796. This juxtaposition configured Satan’s encounter with a Herculean Death in the code of combat. This heroic point of time led to another dynamic turn: Satan’s leap towards light. Yet in the mid-1790s the two pictures were separated by three more visualizations of the allegory. On 30 April 1794 Fuseli mentions The Nighthag visiting Lapland Witches (CEL 117; cf. MG 8, PL . 662); on 9 August 1796, Sin forced by Death (CEL 155; cf. MG 7, PL . 787); The Birth of S (MG 6, PL . 752) is not listed in the two letters, but it is dated around 1795–6. The order of composition does not follow the sequence of Paradise Lost, nor does the arrangement of pictures come in line with the text in the Milton Gallery sequence, unlike all ⁴³ W. Benson, Letters Concerning Poetical Translations, and Virgil’s and Milton’s Art of Verse, &c. (London, 1739), 46.

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the other pictures, which are listed according to the order in which the excerpts appear in Milton’s poem. This proliferation of pictures slows down the action and expands the matter of death, opening up an ‘intermediate space’ at the uncertain borders between matter and spirit. Before the spectators get to these demonic borders at the Milton Gallery, an intermediate picture mediates between the strong male bodies visualizing Satan at the beginning of the Milton Gallery and the uncertain figures of the allegory. Mentioned in the 1794 list beside ‘The Nighthag’, ‘The Belated Peasant’ will figure in the gallery catalogue under the title Figures from a simile in allusion to the contracted form of the Spirits assembled in the new raised Hall of P (MG 4). Seeing the assembly in Pandemonium through the eyes of a belated peasant prepares the spectators to turn to bodies of a different kind. The fourth picture of the Milton Gallery is no longer thought to be The Shepherd’s Dream at Tate Britain,⁴⁴ a vision of fairies floating in an aerial dance in circle, similar to the iconography of Queen Katharine’s Dream, which Fuseli painted for Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery in 1788. The following year, in the first Midsummer Night’s Dream picture for Boydell, Fuseli’s fairies became more bodily, muscly, and earthy.⁴⁵ It is hard to tell whether and how the fairy bodies of the lost Milton Gallery picture differed from the mid-1780s version. In any case, fairy elves would be less concrete than the architectonic grandeur of Pandemonium or the other, more bodily metamorphoses containing gigantic demonic bodies into diminutive dwarfs and pigmies. Through the visionary delusion of the peasant, we see demonic bodies as the work of superstition morphing into a series of anamorphic oscillations between matter and spirit, attempts to grasp supernatural entities within the precincts of bodies, outlines, volumes. The varying shapes of the supernatural are most visible in the depiction of Sin, the ‘miscreated’ form that Milton evokes through the Horatian locus classicus for incongruity: ⁴⁴ Because of its size, Martin Myrone argues that the large picture under this title at Tate Britain is the 1786 exhibit of the same topic (see CEL 26, RA 1786, and Schiff 829 [dated 1786]), whereas MG 4 is described as smaller, of the size of Faery Mab and Puck (CEL 127). I am grateful to Martin Myrone for this information. ⁴⁵ Boydell, A Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakespeare Gallery (1789), 27. For an impressive reading of Fuseli’s resizing of Michelangelesque male figures in his depictions of male fairies in the Midsummer Night’s Dream pictures, see N. Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge, 2001), 23–4, 31.


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The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair But ended foul in many a scaly fold Voluminous and vast, a serpent armed With mortal sting. (PL . 650–3)

A wealth of emblems fuelled by anti-papist protestant propaganda could be called to visualize such an image following St James’s Allegory of the Flesh: ‘Then when Lust hath conceived it bringeth forth Sin, and Sin when it is Finished bringeth forth Death.’⁴⁶ Instead, Fuseli opts for a dynamic image of visual uncertainty, which would not only capture the two moments represented in James’s allegory, but also the problematic texture of a supernatural figure. Lessing would probably consider it impossible to visualize Sin’s temporal metamorphosis, her matter continuously disintegrating into incongruous joints and juxtaposed incompatible anatomies. Yet it is through the medium of painting that Fuseli finds a radical solution: anamorphosis. Traditionally, anamorphosis offers a double image embodying a before and after: a confused shape, which acquires identifiable contours when seen from a particular point of view, when its dispersed lines reassemble into a perceivable body. A typical allegory of the flesh would present an image within an image: a visualization of the pleasures of this world together with a memento mori, impending death coming in the form of an indistinguishable shape, which turns into the distinct features of a skeleton when viewed from a particular angle.⁴⁷ Fuseli’s anamorphosis works differently. Much as Milton had varied the texture of Death, calling it substance, shape, shadow, Fuseli adopts anamorphic figuration to present Sin and Death as undecipherable dynamic forms. Neither can be stabilized into a clear-cut static image. The anamorphic uncertainty of these two figures is matched by anamorphic oscillation at the iconographical level of the overall composition. For Hercules–Death allows us to read S encountering D, S interposing within the idiom of Homeric battle imagery, which Flaxman was visualizing in outline for Wedgwood; Sin’s outstretched arms dividing the two fighters adds to that composition what David needed for his Rape of the ⁴⁶ James 1: 15 is quoted as a source in Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Paradise Lost, 71–2, and Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, i. 126. ⁴⁷ On the genre, see J. Baltrusaitis, Anamorphoses; ou, Perspectives curieuses (Paris, 1955).

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Sabine Women.⁴⁸ Nor is one picture sufficient to stabilize Sin and Death into a single image, for we can go on to read anamorphosis as a process taking place across pictures. When Fuseli returns to the allegory, Sin oscillates in texture and size. For the dynamic miscreated fishtail woman visualized on a canvas of 13 feet by 12 in 1791 reappears as a life-length curvaceous female form on a canvas a third that size in 1796 (MG 7), and as a small and fairy-like armed goddess springing from Satan’s head in The Birth of S (MG 6). Fuseli’s multiple return to Milton’s allegory seems to fit S. T. Coleridge’s reaction to Milton’s Death in his 1811–12 lectures: ‘the grandest effects of where the imagination was called forth, not to produce a distinct form but a strong working of the mind still producing what it still repels & again calling forth what it again negatives’.⁴⁹ Coleridge’s Death is a reader-response variation on Milton’s oscillation between substance, shape, and shadow. In its oscillation between chaos and form, this figure aptly renders the uncertain texture to be found in the passage between life and death, informing soul and recalcitrant matter. The continuously shifting form provides a convincing analogue for the stretch required of the imagination to give shape to the noumenal, the symbolic presentation of a form that transcends itself and exhibits the impossibility of stable figuration. For Coleridge, as for Fuseli, Milton’s allegory is an example of enargeia. Yet in bringing images before the eye of the reader, this time the pictures work as an anti-pictorial device within an anti-pictorial argument governed by visual analogy. For Coleridge is not describing Fuseli’s pictures. Rather, like Aikin twelve years earlier, Coleridge uses Milton’s allegory to evoke, disarm, and dispel the pictures that come to his mind. The anamorphic energy in Fuseli’s pictures certainly does exercise the spectator into an ‘effort in the mind’ that keeps ‘the imagination … hovering between two images’. Yet Coleridge hastens to foreclose the possibility that such an aesthetic ⁴⁸ For the composition, see J. Flaxman, The ‘Iliad’ of Homer engraved by Thomas Piroli from the Compositions of John Flaxman Sculptor (Rome, 1793), nos. 9 and 22, and Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution, 486–7. On Fuseli’s composition reaching David via Gillray’s caricature of Fuseli’s depiction of Satan, Sin, and Death, see Boime’s ‘Jacques Louis David, Scatological Discourse in the French Revolution and the Art of Caricature’, in Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, French Caricature and the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (Los Angeles, 1988), 67–82. ⁴⁹ Coleridge, ‘1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry (London Philosophical Society)’, Records of Lecture VII (Notes taken by J. Payne Collier), in Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (London, 1987), i. 311.


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experience might take place in front of pictures: ‘as soon as it becomes is fixed on one it becomes understanding and when it is waving between them attaching itself to neither it is imagination’. As the argument turns into a distinction of the ‘limit between the Poet & Painter’, the visual image Coleridge wants to fend off is the emblem of Death: Sundry painters … had made pictures of the meeting between Satan & Death at Hell Gate and how was the latter represented? By the most defined thing that could be conceived in nature—A Skeleton, perhaps the dryest image that could be discovered which reduced the mind to a mere state of inactivity & passivity & compared with which a Square or a triangle was a luxuriant fancy.50

Death as a skeleton features in Medina’s representation of Death for the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost published in 1688, and in William Hogarth’s 1732 and James Barry’s 1790s versions.⁵¹ While Fuseli’s Death fits the first part of Coleridge’s argument, it challenges the second, because it refuses to keep within the boundaries that Coleridge drew in an attempt to separate the verbal from the visual. While the lecture notes fail to give any names, it is surprising not to find any acknowledgement of Fuseli’s Death. Much as Coleridge amplifies Burke’s 1757 argument, how could such an anti-pictorialist argument grounded in Milton’s text not require a mention of the Milton Gallery, the most significant attempt at turning Paradise Lost into a sequence of pictures? Nor can we think that Coleridge didn’t know about it: not only was he a contributor to and reader of the Monthly Magazine, but his 1811–12 anti-pictorialism contradicts his mid-1790s ekphrastic interest in Fuseli as an acknowledged source of inspiration. Perhaps at the heart of the matter is the idea that some things are best left ‘hovering between images’. What happens when the mind stops hovering between images, when the undecidable free play of the imagination settles on one image, or turns into understanding? In other words, what happens when the presentation of what is not presentable gives way to determinate figurations and concepts? In the following two sections the religious and political scenarios of the understanding will come to the fore. First of all, the final picture Fuseli visualized for Milton’s allegory helps us flesh out the religious potential of Coleridge’s verbal ekphrasis and of Fuseli’s pictures of Milton’s allegory, metaphors that are on the verge of consolidating into agents and bodies, the second and third person of an inverted Trinity. ⁵⁰ Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, i. 311–12. ⁵¹ Pointon, Milton and English Art, 4–5, 49, 57–8, 104.

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‘Satan encount’ring Death, Sin interposing’ L A P L A N D O RG I E S Much rather let him [the editor] take back his fabulous Night-Hag, his Dance of Lapland Witches, and his Smell of Infant Blood ; and not contaminate this most majestic Poem with trash, nor convey such idle, but dangerous Stories to his young and credulous Female Readers. (Richard Bentley, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 1732)

As Fuseli repeatedly came back to the allegory, his process of inventio visualized different aspects of Sin. Not only did the order of composition depart from Milton’s text, but so did the order of hanging, which marked the gallery’s only departure from Milton’s own segmentation. At a first impression, the first three pictures devoted to the allegory seem to parallel the order of Milton’s plot: S encount’ring D, S interposing (MG 5, PL . 722) is followed by the analeptic pictures The Birth of S (MG 6, PL . 752), S pursued by D (MG 7, PL . 787), and L O, the Hell-hounds round S (MG 8, PL . 662). Or so it seems, if we follow the excerpts selected in the catalogue. For the catalogue entry of S encountering D, S interposing excerpts the impending contrast and Sin rushing to intervene and block it. On the other hand, if we turn to Milton’s ekphrastic description—the passage in which he brings Sin and Death before the eyes of the spectators—we see Fuseli’s inventio at work, as he went back to the same passage to recuperate what he had previously cut when he compacted two segments of the text to produce one picture. Indeed, the first two pictures he singled out from the allegory (MG 5 and MG 8) come out of two consecutive passages describing Sin. The 1791 picture focuses on the first three lines presenting her as a woman ending in a serpent foul and then cuts to Death seen as a substance–shape–shadow (PL . 650–653a, 666–73). In 1794 Fuseli returns to Sin and focuses on those attributes he had left out of the previous picture: the Hell-hounds simile (PL . 653b–664). Both in the composition sequence and in the sequence of the exhibition, Fuseli radically resegments Milton’s plot. A first subversion is produced by the contiguity of the pictures, which fail to register Sin’s flashback as an antefact, blending it as one among a series of successive points of time, which seem to be rearranged chronologically into a linear plot, rather than following the medias res dispositio chosen by Milton. Following the linear reading, Sin’s story features encounter,


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visualization, copulation, offspring. This first restructuring reveals a further, more blatant subversion, because the last picture in the allegory sequence, L O, fails to follow the order of Milton’s text, fails to visualize Sin, and is disengaged into a completely autonomous picture, as reviewers acknowledged.⁵² This picture was first mentioned as ‘The Nighthag visiting Lapland Witches’, together with ‘The belated peasant’, among the pictures ready to be shown to subscribers at Fuseli’s house in April 1794, then again in 1796. By 1799, the exhibition catalogue enters it as L O, the Hell-hounds round S compared to those that follow the night-hag, when call’d In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lur’d with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Lapland witches, while the la’bring moon Eclipses at their charms. (MG 8, PL . 662)

However, this title was not retained when the picture was rediscovered in the 1980s, despite the fact that it was the final choice of the painter, the title under which the painting entered the public sphere when it was exhibited and when its title was printed in the catalogue and in the newspapers during the painter’s lifetime. Instead, following Schiff, the Metropolitan Museum initially renamed it The Wild Huntress and later opted for Fuseli’s earlier title The Night-Hag Visiting the Lapland Witches.⁵³ The curators’ choice is not, however, an isolated phenomenon, but a moment in an ever-varying tension between different iconographical and ideological possibilities. The polysemic potential of the Lapland orgies simile is already at the heart of Milton’s writing, for the poet sets it up as a layered perspective, which allows him to embed similes within the main simile. Scylla, the ⁵² London Packet; or, New Lloyd’s Evening Post, 22–4 May 1799: ‘The strong and fanciful similies of M, which in many instances have furnished the painter with subject matter for pictures, distinct from those which describe events in P L, are all conceived with a most fervid imagination.’ ⁵³ The Times, 28 May 1799. Schiff places ‘Die wilde Jägerin’ among other ‘scheinbare Fremdkörper’; see Schiff, i. 197, where the Metropolitan’s choice of title originates: see ‘The Wild Huntress on Her Flight to the Lapland Witches’, in P. de Montebello (ed.), Notable Acquisitions 1980–1981 (New York, 1981), 46; the title changes to ‘The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches’ in J. P. Marandel (ed.), The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution (New York, 1987), 105; Becker–Hattendorff, 32.

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Night-Hag, the Lapland witches, and infant blood are subsumed to the image of the Hell-hounds. By this means they are contained within the precincts of a simile and cannot achieve the status of agency, which gives them a function in the plot. Like vistas, they are foreshortened into a descriptive function. The layering of similes is governed by a perspective within the perspective. If from the main focus on the Hellhounds one shifts to visualize the subordinate image of the Night-Hag, then the latter occupies the centre of the image, in which case the Lapland witches, infant blood, orgies, and dances are foreshortened in the distance, becoming the goal of the hag’s journey. The syntax of composition thus contains the imagery, which is then further defused when anchored to classical iconography, for the iconographical attributes of the Night-Hag are footnoted as referring to Diana the huntress.⁵⁴ This classical anchoring effaces other iconographical possibilities and distracts the readers from what otherwise develops powerful ingredients of anti-papist propaganda: a parodic inversion of the Eucharist, a trinity in the flesh, the Church as whore of Babylon. Fuseli’s process of inventio exhibits the underside of Enlightenment rhetoric: it rediscovers, restores, and rewrites what Enlightenment critics had tried to discard. Sin’s incestuous offspring and chaotic proliferation of form is disgusting, devoid of allegorical meaning, and hard for delicate readers to bear, argued Voltaire, who would much rather stick with the classically sanctioned image of Sin as an armed Minerva coming out of the head of Satan–Jupiter. From a very different camp, Bentley agreed that such imagery was superfluous ‘romantic trash’ and went on to suggest its elimination from the poem. By contrast, Fuseli recovered such material and amplified it as the subject of four pictures, a process that exemplifies what Terry Castle has identified as the eighteenth-century’s invention of the uncanny, the ‘toxic side-effect’ of Enlightenment classifications.⁵⁵ For to define something as superstition, the refuse of reason, means to turn it into a discrete phenomenon, and to catalogue it in the non-place of discarded things—a heterodox, ⁵⁴ Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, i. 128, on PL . 649. ⁵⁵ See T. Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford, 1995), 7–8, 10; see also F. Orlando, ‘Rhétorique des lumières et dénégation freudienne’, Poétique, 9 (1980), 78–89; id., Illuminismo e retorica freudiana (Turin, 1982). I develop this line of argument in my ‘ ‘‘Lapland Orgies: The Hell Hounds Round Sin’’: Réećriture et invention dans la galerie miltonienne de J. H. Füssli’, in G. Bardazzi and A. Grosrichard (eds.), Dénouement et invention romantique (Geneva, 2003), 231–46.


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syncretic, and idolatrous art of memory. So too was the ‘romantic trash’ that Bentley cut let loose of the tight textual frame Milton had devised to present it and contain it at one and the same time. Thus free to return and proliferate for the space of four pictures, it nonetheless underwent another act of framing. In Fuseli’s dispositio the allegorical pictures (MG 5–8) are presented as dream visions of the belated peasant (MG 4), wild visualizations of matter and spirit, demons turned fairies turned demons. Visiting the Milton Gallery, the comfortable spectator ab extra would experience these sensational pictures through the ‘poetic faith’ which Coleridge later described as a ‘willing suspension of disbelief for the moment’: images to enjoy as though they were real, ‘and real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency’.⁵⁶ Such aesthetic distancing might well be another defence mechanism after the matter both ‘idle and dangerous’ had defied surgical intervention, a contamination that was there to stay, much to the disappointment of Bentley and other eighteenth-century editors and expurgators. Fuseli’s painting inverts Milton’s representational hierarchy: in the centre he places a child lying on a table, the potential victim of the Lapland witch. The Night-Hag and her Hell-hounds loom in the horizon, hardly visible. This reversal is reflected in the change of title: there is no Night-Hag in the title published in the catalogue and newspaper advertisements. The new title, L O: the Hell-hounds round S, highlights the painter’s appropriation of the plot.⁵⁷ Yet, at the same time, it limits the visual excess of the picture by referring the viewer back to the Miltonic source. In Paradise Lost, the Hell-hounds act as the vehicle of the comparison between Sin and the Night-Hag, but when we look at the picture the subtitle ‘Hell-hounds round S’ hardly makes sense since the dogs are barely visible, and Sin is not part of the picture at all, contradicting the small caps which ask the reader to visualize the two key plot components as ‘Lapland Orgies’ and ‘Sin’. In other words, the subtitle betrays a sense of uneasiness, as if the openness of the painting had to be limited. ⁵⁶ S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London, 1983), ii. 6. ⁵⁷ On titles as parts of the paratext, see G. Genette, Seuils (Paris, 1987). On titles in the visual arts, see E. Lilley, ‘How Far Can You Go? Manet’s Use of Titles’, Word & Image, 10 (1994), 163–9.

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The visual grammar of the picture confirms the ambivalence found in the interplay between title and subtitle. A departure from the hierarchy of Milton’s subject matter alongside an opposite impulse towards the order of the verbal source is exemplified by the posture of Fuseli’s Lapland witch. The visual hierarchy imposed by perspective, foreground, and lighting asks us to focus on the witch and the child beside her. Rather than looking at us or at the child, the witch is looking at the hardly visible shape of the Night-Hag and her Hell-hounds. So too is our gaze redirected by her, for her posture asks us to concentrate on the figure looming on the horizon. This device was recommended by Reynolds as a way of highlighting main characters when they are placed off-centre.⁵⁸ Yet this focusing instruction is disturbed by a sensational montage effect. Two hands and a weapon enter the lower margin of the pictorial space, while the figure they belong to is cut out. The importance of these hands is underlined by their hugely distorted size and the craft with which they are painted compared to the rough modelling of the witch’s limbs.⁵⁹ Not only do Fuseli’s hands distract our attention away from the centre of the painting, but they suggest that the action is taking place outside the frame. In other words, Fuseli’s montage challenges the boundaries of pictorial space. Limbs or figures half-inside, half-outside the frame or painted across architectural partitions can be used to produce illusionistic continuities, which blur the boundaries between walls and ceiling, inside and outside in apotheosis ceilings visualizing images of resurrection. If Fuseli’s device evokes such pictorial spaces, their illusionistic continuities are disrupted. Seen individually, then, the picture can be read as a centrifugal struggle where each detail seeks to divide and capture the attention of the viewer. On the other hand, those hands ask us to go beyond the frame of the individual painting. If the action is located outside the picture, the viewer is asked to view L O as one piece of a visual continuum that spreads across pictures. Even while they highlight the discontinuity of montage, hands and dagger also provide a visual and narrative thread, which guides the viewer’s eye beyond the isolation of the single picture. By the power of contiguity and association, the viewer is asked to match those ⁵⁸ See Reynolds’s annotation to du Fresnoy’s The Art of Painting, repr. in Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, iii. 125. ⁵⁹ The witch’s limbs might also fulfil the charge of deformity levelled against Laplanders; see J. Scheffer, The History of Lapland (London, 1704), 25.


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hands with the full body and action to be found in other pictures in the sequence. Whose hands, whose weapon, are they? Both Satan and Death are represented with a weapon in S encount’ring D, S interposing (MG 5), and Satan probably still holds his weapon in S surprised at the ear of E, starting from the touch of I Spear (MG 14), judging by the previous, extant Satan starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s lance (RA 1780). Following hands and weapon as plotting devices, viewers can connect the moments in time represented in different pictures. What emerges from this narrative thread is a witches’ sabbath. Witchcraft inverts Church ritual in ways that fit Protestant satires of transubstantiation and the Mass. For such rituals consist in partaking a fleshly rather than spiritual body, which results in ‘spiritual fornication’ and cannibalism.⁶⁰ In Milton’s poem, Sin holding the keys of Hell is an inversion of Mary as the mediation of Mother Church and of Peter holding the keys of Heaven. The encounter between Satan, Sin, and Death can then be read as a trinity of Hell acting out a parody of the Eucharist: ‘a multiplication of bodies to the same soul’.⁶¹ Through procreation and a communion of blood, this inverted Eucharist enacts a cannibalistic ritual in which the community feeds on its offspring. Looking back, this story makes sense of the barely perceivable dark embrace in S pursued by D. Much like the Devil’s, Death’s body could well be air ‘condensed’ or ‘inspissated’ in the shape of a man, which dissolves like black vapour, and is mostly inferred through the witches’ movements, since the partner would completely escape perception.⁶² Such a characterization fitted the survival of demonology within a rationalist, sceptical framework, for Death’s impalpable dark volume could well be nothing more than the effect of the diseased imagination of the witch or the witness. In a 1744 commentary, the Lapland orgies simile is explained in terms of the iconography of witchcraft: ⁶⁰ For a reading of Milton’s allegory in the context of his prose tracts and Spenser’s den of Error within the tradition of anti-papist Protestant polemics, see King, Milton and Religious Controversy, 69–89. ⁶¹ Priestley, An History of the Corruptions of Christianity, ii. 25. ⁶² R. Scot, Discourie of Witchcraft (1584; Amsterdam, 1971), 76: ‘a blacke uapor, of the length and bignesse of a man’. For the aerial body of the devils, see R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. T. C. Faulkner, N. K. Kiessling, and R. L. Blair, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1989), i. 176, 184–5. On Fuseli and demonology, see J. F. Moffitt, ‘Malleus Maleficarum: A Literary Context for Fuseli’s Nightmare’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th ser., 105 (May–June 1990), 241–8.

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Night-Hag … i.e. A Night Witch: The Latins called it Incubus and Succubus; i.e. Lying under and over; We, the Night-Mare … The Antients thought it was a Devil, or Witch, that haunted People in Bed, in the Night; but now it’s found to be only an heavy Weight, rising from their depraved Imaginations. Horses are more subject to it, than any Creatures else.⁶³

This scene of reading allows us to articulate Fuseli’s Hell sequence at the Milton Gallery and The night-mare (RA 1782, no. 64) as homogeneous enterprises. In December 1794 Coleridge wrote to Southey that the meeting of ‘the Night Mare & her nine Foals’ (King Lear, . iv. 125–9) would be a ‘fine subject for a wild Ode’: ‘I shall set about one, when I am in a Humour to abandon myself to all the Diableries, that ever met the Eye of a Fuseli!’⁶⁴ The King Lear passage had been associated with Fuseli’s work in a review of The night-mare.⁶⁵ Its success had helped construct Fuseli’s reputation as a painter by circulating stories about him ‘eating raw P for supper! The fact of indigestion producing a strong effect on the imagination, is fully ascertained. The monstrous forms which the latter brings forth, in consequence, are immediately sketched, and, when necessary, embodied on the canvass!’⁶⁶ Fuseli’s inspiration rituals were not seen as an individual eccentricity. Rather, his carnivore imagination declared him a ‘German’, and bespoke northern habits and beliefs.⁶⁷ Similarly, the witches’ Eucharist featuring in Fuseli’s picture is displaced as an image of Laplandic pagan survival. The northern hemisphere was traditionally associated with the Antichrist. Patrick Hume’s 1695 commentary on Paradise Lost had underlined the necessity for a more than Eucharistic repast to lure pagan Laplanders to church. In the 1740s missionaries sent to evangelize them recorded ⁶³ J. Paterson, A Complete Commentary, with Etymological, Explanatory, Critical and Classical Notes on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, 2nd edn. (London, 1744), 226–7, quoted in L. Feingold, ‘Fuseli, Another Nightmare: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 17 (1982), 54. ⁶⁴ Coleridge to Southey, 11 Dec. 1794, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1956–71), i. 135. See also N. Powell, Fuseli: ‘The Nightmare’ (London, 1973), 19. ⁶⁵ Morning Herald, 8 May 1782. ⁶⁶ Public Advertiser, 31 May 1790. For Fuseli’s witchcraft pictures, see Schiff, 72–5, 108, 156, 170, 187. ⁶⁷ See J. Oswald, The Cry of Nature (London, 1791), 28: ‘The antient Germans sometimes rioted in human repasts.’ For Fuseli’s demonic dreams, ‘like those of Eve they were sometimes disturbed by a demon’, see A. Cunningham, ‘Henry Fuseli’, in The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, ii. 316–17. See also B. R. Haydon, Lectures on Painting and Design, 2 vols. (London, 1846), ii. 30; and id., Diary, iii. 19: ‘this extraordinary specimen of Swiss & German indigestion’.


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the idolatrous Eucharistic practices celebrated in honour of gods both new and old.⁶⁸ Yet even such distancing fails to defuse Fuseli’s hybrid Eucharist, a scene of recognition, where Lapland orgies offer a displaced mirror for the corruptions of Christianity. L O is as close as Fuseli could get to referring to the Nativity. The triangular structure of the Madonna is underlined by the animal-skin veil substitute the witch wears on her head. She seems to be breastfeeding and the openness in her hands suggests care, though her rough limbs are as far as one can get from the angelic features of a Madonna. By compacting the climactic moments of the Gospel narrative—the birth, the Passover dinner, and the death—the subversion at the heart of sabbath rituals is enacted in its most powerful potential. Unitarian polemics and hermeneutics help locate Fuseli’s sensational and subversive religious subjects within a dialogic network. ‘Abandoned’ to ‘all the Diableries, that ever met the Eye of a Fuseli’ at the time when the artist was painting L O and S pursued by D, Coleridge visualized other apocalyptic variants of Milton’s allegory in ‘a poem written on Christmas Eve’ 1794: For She hath fallen On whose black front was written M; She that reel’d heavily, whose wine was blood; She that work’d whoredom with the D P And from the dark embrace all evil things Brought forth and nurtur’d: mitred A.

Coleridge compacted the Eucharist with the Whore of Babylon bringing forth ‘mitred Atheism’, an embodiment of the Church of Rome, which he reworked through Milton’s figuration of Death in his Lectures on Revealed Religion.⁶⁹ Earlier that year, in his Fast Sermon The Present ⁶⁸ See [P. Hume], Annotations on Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ (London, 1695), 80, on PL . 665; see also W. Dodd, A Familiar Explanation of the Poetical Works of Milton (London, 1762), k3r . On cannibalist rituals of the northern regions and the survival of ancient cults, see P. H. Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 2 vols. (London, 1770), i. 124–55. ⁶⁹ Coleridge, ‘Religious Musings’, 335–40, in Poems by S. T. Coleridge. Second Edition. To which are now added poems by Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd (Bristol, 1797), 142; see also Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, 90. A different version of the allegory appeared in The Courier, 31 Aug. 1811, as ‘Superstition, Religion, Atheism (An Allegoric Vision)’. See P. Kitson, ‘Coleridge, Milton and the Millennium’, WC 18/2 (Spring 1987), 61–6, and M. D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999), 110–11; on Coleridge and the Unitarians, see H. W. Piper, ‘Coleridge and the Unitarian Consensus’, in R. Gravil and M. Lefebure (eds.), The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland (London, 1989), 273–90.

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State of Europe with Antient Prophecies, Priestley had denounced transubstantiation and the Trinity as what kept the French away from religion, attributing the spread of atheism to the corruptions of Christianity endorsed by the Established Church.⁷⁰ Priestley, Coleridge, and Fuseli participate in a mid-1790s apocalyptic strain, an interpretative community used to reading the present through biblical prophecy. However, their figurations of the Eucharist as a cannibal feast also articulate a more specifically Unitarian hermeneutics. Reference to Unitarian readings of the Lord’s Supper helps understand another Unitarian way of reading Milton’s allegory. Priestley approved of the Eucharist so long as one saw it as a symbolical repast. Yet in expounding biblical dietary prescriptions requiring abstinence from blood (Gen. 11: 3), he recorded an interesting counter-reading which merges the activity of Christians with that of the witches: When the christians were charged with meeting in the night, and drinking blood, by way of binding one another to secrecy, in some immoral practices, Tertullian observes with respect to it, that it was well known that no christian would eat blood at all; insomuch, that it was usual with heathens, when they wanted to know whether any person was a christian, to set blood-puddings before him as a very sufficient test.⁷¹

Priestley showed how the cannibalistic rituals of witchcraft could be seen as Christian practices from an alien point of view. He dissociated himself from the view that Christians bound one another in secrecy by blood rituals; yet he went on to assert that the prohibition against drinking blood was only observed until the fourth century, which fitted his chronology of the corruption of Christianity setting in to distort the Unitarian practices of the early Christians. Priestley referred back to the work of another Unitarian, Nathaniel Lardner. In order to stress the historicity of biblical prescriptions, Lardner had highlighted the context for the biblical dietary restriction which constantly connects blood to ‘things offered to idols’.⁷² One is led to conclude that the eating of a non-symbolical body of Christ amounts to idolatry in Unitarian readings. In other words, Unitarian biblical scholarship revived the ⁷⁰ J. Priestley, The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies (London, 1794), 23. ⁷¹ J. Priestley, Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion, . vi. 2, in Unitarian Society, Tracts, x. 335–6. ⁷² See N. Lardner, Remarks upon the late Dr Ward’s Dissertations Upon several Passages of the Sacred Scriptures (London, 1762), 128–9, referring to Acts 15: 20, 29; 21: 25.


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iconography of Catholic cannibalism. Within this framework, Milton’s allegory offers a powerful site of Protestant satire against Church dogma, which substantiated the Unitarian controversy against the Trinity and the Catholic version of the Eucharist. Fuseli’s sequence supports the claim that following his infernal trinity or embracing the Catholic interpretation of the Eucharist is tantamount to being ‘a servant of the antichrist’ and that the way out of its domain is a way ‘out of intellectual darkness’, as Unitarians put it.⁷³ All in all, the Unitarian framework explains why Fuseli would cut out the matter of Heaven and yet multiply the figurations of Hell. His protracted and repeated attention to Milton’s allegory brings before the eyes of spectators those figures of speech that Unitarians held responsible for the corruptions of Christianity. The Eucharist, the Trinity, and transubstantiation are brought on canvas not as ‘distinct forms’, but as perceptive illusions, an uncertain play of substance, shape, and shadow, ‘a strong working of the mind, still producing what it still repels’.

PI C T U R E S AT E X H I B I T I O N S A N D T H E P O L I T I C S OF OBSCURITY Fuseli has painted a fine Portrait of Priestley, sitting upon the Fathers, and reading the Riot Act—A distant view of Philosophy in a blaze, perfectly calm. (The Oracle, 8 February 1792)

Fuseli and Priestley, the Fathers, and the ‘Riot Act’ or ‘Philosophy in a blaze’ alert us to the political scenarios of Priestley’s writings and Fuseli’s paintings. On the same page of The Oracle for 8 February 1792 another article discussed in terms of freedom of expression the Government’s failure to intervene during the Birmingham riots, when a crowd burned Priestley’s house, laboratory, library, and manuscripts on 14 July 1791. Instead of acting through direct forms of repression, the Government ⁷³ ‘A Second Friendly Dialogue between Eugenius and Theophilus’, in Dr Disney’s Friendly Dialogue, between a Common Unitarian Christian and an Athanasian: together with, a Second Dialogue between Eugenius and Theophilus, on the Same Subject, in Unitarian Society, Tracts, vol. ii, no. i, p. 73; see also W. Frend, A Second Address to the Members of the Church of England, and to Protestant Trinitarians in General, 2nd edn. (1789), in Unitarian Society, Tracts, vol. ii, no. v, p. 10.

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left it ‘to the general good sense of the People’ to ‘rise upon the invaders of their Peace’, a body of men ‘long labouring by their Writings, their Speeches … to subvert the present System of Government’. One month earlier, The Oracle had published three articles on the Miltons, which ‘the  powers of his C’ offered ‘in an age which more than any former has a just Taste in Poetry, and more than any other, a correct love of L rational and well pois’d’. In the ‘rival’ designs of Johnson and Boydell, the newspaper argued, Fuseli and Cowper were employed against ‘all England’ and Hayley. Another article published on 13 January lists Fuseli’s works, including ‘Satan opposing Death, and Sin intervening’ to be engraved by William Sharp and ‘Satan starts from Chaos’ intended for William Blake.⁷⁴ Presenting Milton’s poem to a 1790s public meant dealing with Milton’s revolutionary heritage in another age of revolution, a risk which the link between Fuseli and Priestley spelt out in its dangers. For the civil war was very much the horizon of expectation through which the English public lived the French Revolution. On 19 July 1791 a report published in The Times claimed that at a dinner on the eve of Bastille Day, what allegedly resulted in the Birmingham riots, Priestley had toasted the ‘Destruction of the present government and the king’s head upon a charger’. Summing up that period, the fellow Dissenter Theophilus Lindsay argued that what had prompted the propaganda campaign against Priestley was his argument against the interference of civil power in matters of religion, especially as formulated in the Letters to the Inhabitants of Birmingham. In the second of these letters, written in response to Dr Madan’s sermon The Principal Claims of the Dissenters Considered, Priestley defended the Dissenters from the charges of sedition, republicanism, and regicide. Such charges characterized as enemies of the King and Constitution those who argued against a state religion and asked for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which banned Dissenters from university degrees and public offices. Priestley’s answer challenged the genealogical links which the Reverend had traced between late eighteenth-century Dissenters and the Presbyterians and Independents held responsible for the beheading of Charles I. At the same time, however, Priestley argued that the King’s execution had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the defence of ‘sacred’ rights of the people against despotism. Nor would Priestley quench the fears of sedition by referring to his Essay on the ⁷⁴ The Oracle, 8, 10, 11, 13 Feb. 1792.


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First Principles of Government, for there readers would find not only his advocacy of a ‘limited monarchy’ rather than republicanism, but also his more explicit defence of the regicide.⁷⁵ The Dissenters’ cause did indeed look back to the civil war debate on civil and religious liberty, witness Joseph Johnson’s publication of Milton’s 1659 Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, dedicated to the Revd Richard Price, styled a second Milton ‘with dangers compassed round’ in his fight for religious and civil rights.⁷⁶ Through Milton’s treatise the civil war debate on the separation of Church and State could inspire the events in America and France.⁷⁷ Furthermore, Priestley’s trip to France in 1774 had helped establish links which facilitated the publication and dissemination of books between France and England. Thanks to this intellectual network, Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, came to England to have his work published by Joseph Johnson in 1784. Subsequently, Mirabeau’s translation–adaptation–summary of Milton’s Areopagitica helped shape the debate on the freedom of the press, whereas French editions of The First Defence of the People of England made available Milton’s defence of the regicide in 1789 and 1792.⁷⁸ It was this Milton, an act of reading that juxtaposed the civil war and the French Revolution, which Fuseli had to negotiate. Read alongside Milton’s regicide tracts and Priestley’s millenarian biblical exegesis, Sin and Death would visualize the whore of Babylon and the end of temporal power. Death’s indeterminate and changing shape fits the phantom king destitute of kingship, which Milton had ⁷⁵ Theophilus Lindsay, Preface, in Priestley, An Answer to Mr Paine’s ‘Age of Reason’, pp. xx, xxv; J. Priestley, Familiar Letters, Addressed to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, 2nd edn. (Birmingham and London, 1790), 10–11, 15; id., An Essay on the First Principles of Government; and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (London, 1768), 24, 29, 33–4. ⁷⁶ J. Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (London, 1790), 2; cf. PL . 27. ⁷⁷ J. Priestley, A Sermon Preached at the Gravel Pit meeting, in Hackney, April 19th, 1793, being the day appointed for a General Fast (London, 1793), 25–6; see C. Garrett, ‘Joseph Priestley, the Millennium, and the French Revolution’, JHI 34 (1973), 51–66. ⁷⁸ Mirabeau’s Areopagitica appeared under the title Sur la liberté de la presse, imité de l’anglois de Milton par le comte de Mirabeau (London, 1788), whereas his 1789 translation of the First Defence appeared as Théorie de la royauté, discussed in Le Patriote français of 1791 as ‘important dans la crise actuelle’. In 1792 it was republished as Défence du peuple anglais sur le jugement et la condamnation de Charles Ier roi d’Angleterre: see A. Thomson, ‘La Référence a` l’Angleterre dans le débat autour de la république’, in République et révolution (Paris, 1993), 137–8; on Johnson’s two-way publication traffic with France, see H. Brathwaite, Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Basingstoke, 2003), 93–4.

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described in his 1649 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, his defence of regicide. If the king is the soul, the divine element incarnated in the body politic, what is left once he is denied his function, dignity, and office? Is there life for the phantom king separated from the texture of his body politic? Following Priestley’s denial that the spirit survives its divorce from matter, a denial of political transubstantiation reduces the body natural to nothing when deprived of the office of power, a process which had well preceded the execution of the King. ‘The meere useless bulke of his person’,⁷⁹ an ‘execrable shape’ let loose of its office, haunts Milton’s prose writings. In The Readie and Easie Way, first published in 1660 and republished in 1791 as an answer to Burke,⁸⁰ the Christological representation of the body politic turns into an ominous icon: ‘all Protestants hold, that Christ in his Church hath left no vicegerent of his kingly power, but himself without deputy, is the only head thereof, governing it from heaven’.⁸¹ Turning the Christological argument against kingship by divine right, Milton’s tract resurfaces in the urgency of another beheaded body natural. The remembrance of the body politic thus culminates in a dismembering which emulates the shape of regicide, the spectre haunting Europe … ‘What seemed his head | The likeness of a kingly crown had on’ (PL . 672–3) was a timely and problematic image to annotate and visualize in Joseph Johnson’s projected edition of Paradise Lost. William Cowper argued that The indistinctness of this phantom-form is admirably well preserved. First the poet calls it a shape, then doubts if it could properly so be called; then a substance; then a shadow; then doubts if it was either; and lastly, he will not venture to affirm, that what seemed his head, was such in reality, but being covered with the similitude of a crown, he is rather inclined to think it such.⁸²

In Fuseli’s picture S encount’ring D, S interposing, the head wearing the kingly crown is foreshortened almost to the point of vanishing. To achieve this effect Fuseli performed a double distortion: not only is Death’s body receding obliquely with respect to the perspective ⁷⁹ J. Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), in CPW iii. 197. ⁸⁰ ‘It furnishes a rational and satisfactory answer to the splendid sophistry of Edmund Burke’; see ‘Advertisement’, in A Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth (London, 1791), pp. iii–iv. ⁸¹ The Readie and Easie Way to establish a Free Commonwealth (London, 1660); CPW vii. 364. ⁸² W. Cowper, ‘The Fragment of an Intended Commentary on Paradise Lost’, in Cowper’s Milton, ii. 453–4.


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plane, but this distortion is exacerbated by the low point of sight. Lucy Newlyn comments on Cowper’s ‘overlooking Milton’s covert allusion to regicide—an allusion that takes its gruesome force precisely from the suggestion that there may be no head for the likeness of a crown to rest on’.⁸³ Yet Cowper’s and Fuseli’s indeterminacy is quite deliberate. After handing in the Life of Milton commissioned for Boydell’s edition of the poet, Hayley wrote to tell Cowper that ‘his King’s booksellership’ (Boydell’s associate John Nicol) would not publish it ‘in the shape you saw. But as that questionable shape had your sanction, I, on my part, was firmly resolved that my work should not be dishonourably garbled.’⁸⁴ ‘Questionable shape’ shorthanded Milton’s republican and regicide stance by alluding to Milton’s allegory and another spectral presence behind it: the dead king in Hamlet.⁸⁵ Associated to the ghost of the murdered king, Death’s headless crowned head powerfully illustrates the performative potential of Milton’s allegory as a reference to Milton’s defence of the regicide. Allusion here works as an anamorphic figure which leaves readers ‘hovering between images’, whether or not they are fleshed out into distinct forms. To conjure up a headless figure wearing the likeness of a kingly crown could amount to ‘imaginary treason’ in the overheated atmosphere of the early 1790s, and particularly during the debate sparked by the 1794 treason trials. In Imagining the King’s Death, John Barrell reconstructs the legal aspects of imaginary treason. The 1795 Treasonable Practices Bill defined treason as to ‘compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend death’. As Barrell observes, ‘if the notion of ‘‘inventing’’ the king’s death meant anything in 1795, it was more likely to have been understood as ‘‘imagining’’ it, in the kind of elaborate scenario appropriate to the painting of history, than as ‘‘plotting’’ or ‘‘planning’’ it’.⁸⁶ This explains just how important it was to avoid fixing Milton’s anamorphic Death into a stable figure of the understanding at the Milton Gallery. Imaginary treason is an allegation which bounces back and forth. As an effect of reading or viewing, it is paradoxical in its predication, for ⁸³ L. Newlyn, ‘ ‘‘Questionable Shape’’: The Aesthetics of Indeterminacy’, in J. Beer (ed.), Questioning Romanticism (Baltimore, 1995), 217. ⁸⁴ Hayley to Cowper, 12 Dec. 1793, see Hayley, Memoirs, i. 450. ⁸⁵ Lucy Newlyn identified the allusion to Hamlet’s ghost in Milton’s allegory; see ‘Questionable Shape’, 211–13, and Hamlet, . iii. 43–4. ⁸⁶ J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), 573, 583–4; on the 1795 bill revising 25 Edward III, the 1351 law on high treason, see pp. 29–44.

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the offence cannot be recognized without it becoming performative. To identify it is to visualize it, and thus to participate in the crime. Anamorphosis blurs the distinction between offender and accuser. The charge of imaginary treason helps understand the reading practices and the politics of the aesthetic in the revolutionary period, shedding light on why Coleridge might prefer Death ‘hovering between images’ to a fixed figure of the understanding.⁸⁷ To construct the aesthetic sphere as an undecidable area of free play was to make political allusion unaccountable, allowing representation to evoke what radical readers and viewers could flesh out in its regicide potential, while at the same time not taking sides explicitly. Such a technique draws on Edmund Burke’s analysis of Milton’s representation of kingship: To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes … Those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye.⁸⁸

Burke’s aesthetics of indeterminacy enshrined kingship, protecting it from too close inspection. Milton’s Death is sublime because ‘in this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree’. Similarly, Milton’s description of Satan as a tower is sublime because ‘the mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused’.⁸⁹ In both cases, it is crucial not to focus on what the image conveys: the threat to kingship. Those who are not acquainted with kingship must be ‘struck with an awe which takes away the free use of their faculties’.⁹⁰ More than three decades later, in a parliamentary speech delivered on 11 May 1791, Burke conjured up the revolution as something he could not define, since ‘he knew not by what name to call it, nor in what name to describe it’. Turning to catachresis, Burke evoked Milton’s allegory in order to give a name to such an overpowering sublime experience, ‘a shapeless monster, born of Hell and chaos’.⁹¹ His rhetoric strikes and admonishes his public ⁸⁷ J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 643–56, and 644 in particular. ⁸⁸ Burke, Enquiry, 58–9. On the association of power and terror, see also pp. 66–7. ⁸⁹ Ibid. 62. ⁹⁰ Ibid. 67. ⁹¹ Burke, The Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 4 vols. (London, 1816), iv. 31–2; see R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, 1983), 67 n.


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by bringing before their eyes an unnameable event through a verbal anamorphosis, a shapeless form which takes on the features of a king without a head. Dangerous political references could be either visualized or defused by an overcrowding of images. The contiguity between pictures at the exhibition would leave it to the spectator to flesh out the narrative suspended between the points of time each picture represented. Witness the reception of Satan starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s lance, Fuseli’s 1780 exhibit at the Royal Academy. The London Courant read it as ‘a horrid figure of Satan shrinking from the touch of Ithuriel’s spear, whilst the eye carried on in the same line to that corner of the room quickly glances on the picture of Mrs. Wright, modelling in clay the bleeding head of the tyrant Charles the Ist’.⁹² What was supposed to be a hang according to size and genre reveals unsuspected political potential by linking two otherwise unconnected pictures. The demon’s gaze directs the viewers’ attention outside the frame of Fuseli’s picture, encouraging them to weave a narrative that unites it to Joseph Wright’s portrayal of Mrs Wright into one compositional whole. Such a threat of regicide gathered ominous meaning not only from the American Revolution, but also from the Gordon Riots, which broke out the day before the exhibition closed.⁹³ Milton’s Satan starting at the touch of Ithuriel’s spear acquired a further revolutionary reference in Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s plea for religious toleration in a pamphlet published by Joseph Johnson in 1790.⁹⁴ There, Milton’s figure becomes an emblem of the French Revolution: the unveiling of truth and the defeat of corruption and tyranny. Moving from the single picture hanging at the Academy exhibition to the monographic Milton Gallery involves turning to a hang that is designed to present pictures as part of a narrative. Yet, if Ithuriel uncovering Satan’s disguise symbolizes revolutionary transparency, placing this picture in the continuum of the Milton Gallery story involves continuous changes in the focus and referential frames that can anchor it to different narratives, whether it is read as the dream of a superstitious peasant, a sabbath, a threat to kingship, or the story of Adam and Eve explored in the next chapter. This ⁹² London Courant, 12 May 1780. I thank Holger Hoock for bringing this review to my attention. ⁹³ On this and other newspaper coverage of Wright’s regicide waxwork just before and during the Gordon Riots, see Hoock, The King’s Artists, 157–64. ⁹⁴ [A. L. Barbauld], An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 4th edn. (London, 1790), 32.

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polysemic overcrowding may well overwhelm spectators and foreclose readings that are best left unvisualized. Outside the Royal Academy, and outside the Milton Gallery, the anamorphic oscillation between headless crowns and crowned heads was a vigorous verbal and visual trope in the revolutionary period. Despite its indeterminacy, the foreshortened head depicted by Fuseli recalls other visualizations featuring the king’s head in a play of presence and absence. Compare the bipartite French caricature Dialogue. Je perds une tête, J’en trouve une, where a headless neck is juxtaposed to a kingly crown floating in mid-air.⁹⁵ Other caricatures present the aristocracy holding their heads in their hands to welcome the king to the other world.⁹⁶ On the other hand, if textual annotation anchored Milton’s Death to the biblical iconography of the ‘King of Horrors’, biblical texts such as Revelation and Daniel were used to announce the death of kings and the coming of the millennium. Witness Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s illustrations for Macklin’s Bible and especially Benjamin West’s pictures of Death on the Pale Horse, a central theme in the Chapel of Revealed Religion which he was painting for George III at Windsor Castle. To what extent the King appreciated being ‘admonished’ by painting is uncertain, though certain it is that West’s position at Court started to deteriorate in the early 1790s and the Chapel project was shelved after West’s trip to France and the Louvre, where his picture of Death on the Pale Horse had considerable success.⁹⁷ The politicization of Milton’s allegory helps assess Fuseli’s paintings as part of his careful positioning within the field of art. Compare Fuseli’s S encountering D, S interposing with James Gillray’s caricature Satan, Sin and the Devil, vide Milton (BMC 8105), published on 9 June 1792. By ‘physiognomizing’ the allegory,⁹⁸ fixing the plot in its supposed real referent, and showing its actualization in the political ⁹⁵ V. Rousseau-Lagarde and D. Arasse (eds.), La Guillotine dans la révolution (Florence, 1987), 127 n. 144; see also pp. 45–72. ⁹⁶ See Villeneuve, Réception de Louis Capet aux enfers par grand nombres de brigands ci-devant couronnées, repr. in Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, French Caricature and the French Revolution, no. 92. ⁹⁷ M. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven, 1986), 54–68 on de Loutherbourg, and 19–26 on West. On the Chapel of Revealed Religion, see also J. D. Meyer, ‘Benjamin West’s Chapel of Revealed Religion: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Protestant Religious Art’, Art Bulletin, 57/2 ( June 1975), 247–65. ⁹⁸ E. Gombrich, ‘The Cartoonist’s Armoury’, in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London, 1963), 139.


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realm, Gillray encourages readers to visualize Paradise Lost through episodic returns to denotation.⁹⁹ Relevant excerpts from the poem are cut and resegmented on the upper margin of the caricature so that each stands above the figure it refers to. A small editorial intervention, ‘Hell trembled at his hideous name’ (PL . 788), directs the spectator’s attention to Pitt as the new impersonation of Death. Queen Charlotte—a naked Sin with serpent, Medusa-like hair—stretches her arms, placing a hand over his genitalia to separate him from Chancellor Thurlow. The ‘instrument of all our woe’, as the tag puts it, hangs from her waist, metaphorizing the key of secret influence into that of the gates of Hell. The publication line of the caricature fleshes out what is at stake: ‘N.B. The above performance containing portraits of the Devil & his relatives, drawn from the life, is recommended to Messrs Boydell, Fuzelli & the rest of the proprietors of the Three Hundred & Sixty Five Editions of Milton, now publishing, as necessary to be adopted in their classick Embellishments.’ Turning Fuseli’s Academic idiom into portraiture, Gillray satirizes the Grand Style. Adapted to a contemporary scenario, Gillray’s Paradise Lost challenges the text’s transubstantiation as a classic devoid of historical intention. An earlier Gillray caricature inscribed ‘To H. Fuzelli Esq this attempt in the caricatura-sublime, is respectfully dedicated’ had used Fuseli’s depiction of the witches in Macbeth to represent Pitt, Dundas, and Thurlow in Weird Sisters; Ministers of Darkness; Minions of the Moon (BMC 7937). Gillray’s visual images encouraged readers to read politically, activating the political potential of texts and images, challenging attempts to free literature from politics. A more anamorphic play of referential productivity activates the revolutionary denotation of Milton’s allegory in William Blake’s 1794 Europe. The Preludium to Europe opens as ‘the nameless shadowy female rose from out the breast of Orc’. She reifies the comets which presage the fall of kings, those signs which had made the simile between Satan and a comet a potential for ‘imaginary treason’ according to Paradise Lost’s censor: ‘I seize their burning power | and bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings’ (E 61).¹⁰⁰ While Blake specifies Milton’s simile and highlights the regicide reference at the heart of Milton’s allegory, ⁹⁹ R. Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London, 1977), 25. ¹⁰⁰ On Milton’s censor, see J. Toland, A Complete Collection of the Historical, Political and Miscellaneous Works of John Milton, both English and Latin. With Som papers never before Publish’d, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1698), i. 40–1.

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the impending performativity of the Blakean figure is kept at the level of anamorphosis. For the shadowy female urges Enitharmon: ‘stamp not with solid form this vig’rous progeny of fires’ (E 61).¹⁰¹ Yet elsewhere Blake did not shy away from the regicide matter. In his marginalia illustrations of Young’s Night Thoughts, published by Edwards in 1797, Blake went all the way in representing Death trampling on crowned heads.¹⁰² Blake’s visualizations of Satan’s encounter with Sin and Death and of the death of kings are particularly interesting when read in the light of his failed commission to engrave for the Milton Gallery. As we have seen, in early 1792 newspaper advertisements he was engaged to engrave S Starting from Chaos, a Michelangelesque male body which he went on to visualize in plate 11 of The Book of Urizen. In the Descriptive Catalogue of the 1809 exhibition held at his brother’s house, Blake’s entry for Satan calling up his Legions, from Milton’s Paradise Lost voices his battles with ‘Demons’ Rubens and Correggio’s ‘tints without boundaries’ (E 548), instead of the Michelangelesque ideals he had earlier seen in Fuseli’s Milton. The substitution is highly significant, for in the Royal Academy Library Blake had been encouraged to substitute Raphael and Michelangelo with the Venetians and the Rubens Gallery at Palais Royal (E 639). In Blake’s polemics, Flemish and Venetian masters shorthanded the politics of the arts under royal patronage.¹⁰³ Their pre-eminence accounted for a corruption of style: ‘their art is to lose form’, whereas Blake’s ‘art is to find form, and to keep it’ (E 538), embodying the fleshly, full-bodied contours of Greek gods in classical statuary. For ‘a Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing’ (E 541). Despite Blake’s admiration for Fuseli and the Milton Gallery, resonant as they are of Priestley’s polemics, these statements sound like a criticism of ¹⁰¹ Not so Gillray: see his Tiddy-Doll, the great French-Gingerbread-Baker; drawing out a new Batch of Kings, BMC 10518, repr. in D. Hill, Mr. Gillray: The Caricaturist (London, 1965), pl. 105. ¹⁰² NT 20 (5), Night Thoughts, i. 195–211. See J. Mee, ‘ ‘‘As Portentous as the Written Wall’’: Blake’s Illustrations to Night Thoughts’, in A. S. Gourlay (ed.), Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant (West Cornwall, Conn., 2002), 171–203. ¹⁰³ In a footnote to Reynolds’s A Journey to Flanders and Holland, published in the edition of Reynolds that Blake annotated, Edmond Malone celebrates the Rubens Gallery and bemoans its closure due to the French Revolution. See Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ii. 414–16 n.


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Fuseli’s anamorphic representation of S encountering D, S interposing. Blake’s critique identified Reynolds with Burke, whom some thought the author of Reynolds’s Discourses.¹⁰⁴ In his marginalia to Reynolds’s Discourses, Blake commented that ‘obscurity is Neither the Source of the Sublime nor of any Thing Else’ (E 658). For him, blurry forms, sublime obscurity, and the aura of kingship joined as perverting agents and expressions of art in the public sphere. Blake’s dislike of Venetian blurring and cloudy vapour locates Fuseli’s Death as an example of the aesthetics and politics of obscurity which Blake identified with Burke and the Royal Academy. Blake was right in identifying indeterminacy as a characteristic of Royal Academy royalism. Fuseli’s election to the professorship left vacant by James Barry’s expulsion proves the point. On 22 March 1799 Farington records the suggestion that ‘being a Royal Academy it was sufficient ground for suspension or removal to prove that a Member avowed democratical opinions,—which Barry had done saying a Republic was the proper Government for Art to flourish under,—That He has highly commended David, & Mrs. Wollstoncraft & commended their principles’ (F iv. 1181). Indeed Fuseli’s association with the group surrounding the Analytical Review could hardly qualify him as a successor under such criteria. However, this argument was rejected since ‘’tis well known that some of the Members are supposed to lean to Democracy & to them it wd. seem to glance in such way as to cause uneasiness’. The Academy’s balance of power was delicate.¹⁰⁵ In July 1798 Fuseli featured as an example of ‘jacobin morality’ in a review of Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. There the painter is described as one of the ‘choice spirits’ of the Analytical Review, with whom Wollstonecraft had envisaged a ménage a` trois, someone who ‘had formed his moral and political creed upon ¹⁰⁴ In the edition Blake annotated, Malone discussed and dispelled Burke’s authorship of Reynolds’s Discourses; see Malone, ‘Some Account of the Life and Writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds’, in Reynolds, Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, vol. i, pp. xlii–xlv n. However, Reynolds did ask Burke for revisions and comments; see P. Martin, Edmond Malone Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography (Cambridge, 1995), 208–10, 214–15; for the Burke, Malone, and Reynolds connection, see F. Hilles, The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge, 1936), 188. ¹⁰⁵ E. Shanes, ‘Dissent in Somerset House: Opposition to the Political Status Quo Within the Royal Academy Around 1800’, Turner Studies, 10/2 (1990), 40–6; Hoock, The King’s Artists, 139–57.

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the opinions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; was consequently an enemy to civilised society and existing establishments’.¹⁰⁶ When the professorship of painting became vacant in Spring 1799, Fuseli regularly visited Joseph Johnson in prison.¹⁰⁷ Just as the Anti-Jacobin took every occasion to characterize Johnson and the Analytical authors as seditious regicides, on 27 April, the day of the Royal Academy dinner, the True Briton declared Fuseli’s competitor Henry Tresham cured from the ‘contagion of Gallic Liberty’ and ‘so fully convinced of the atrocity of the French, and the horror of their principles, that he has written a very spirited Poem, to warn mankind against such a race of fiends, and their destructive doctrines’.¹⁰⁸ On 1 May 1799 the Anti-Jacobin published a parody of Fuseli’s The night-mare featuring Charles James Fox’s tormented sleep: Death wearing a liberty cap emerges from his mouth on a white horse and holding a flag inscribed ‘Vive la liberté’.¹⁰⁹ When Fuseli was elected Professor of Painting, the True Briton published an ambiguous statement: ‘Barry, the discarded Academician, says that his triumph is complete, now that Fuseli is appointed his successor as Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy.’¹¹⁰ Yet Fuseli’s election proves that his radical leanings and associations were discreet enough for him to be accepted in a position of prominence at a royal institution. A similar dynamic characterizes his election as Keeper of the Royal Academy in 1804 after the King had rejected the appointment of Robert Smirke on account of the latter’s political leanings. Then, as in 1799, Fuseli’s successful candidacy confirms that he had an acceptable political record (F vi. 2147, 2445). It may come as no surprise that the encounter between Satan, Sin, and Death and its Laplandish excesses failed to figure in the illustrated Milton Boydell published between 1794 and 1797. This edition loyally defused and supplanted the one planned by Fuseli and Johnson and canonized Milton, ‘as this National Edition of our first Heroic Poet is intended ¹⁰⁶ See the reviews to Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman and Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, 1 (July 1798), 91–3, 99. ¹⁰⁷ J. W. Smyser, ‘The Trial and Imprisonment of Joseph Johnson, Bookseller’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 77 (Summer 1974), 418–35; G. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City, 1979), ch. 6. ¹⁰⁸ True Briton, 27 Apr. 1799. News of Barry’s expulsion was published on 25 April 1799. ¹⁰⁹ Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine (May 1799), between pp. 98 and 99, where the poem ‘The Nightmare’ opens the Poetry section. ¹¹⁰ True Briton, 3 July 1799.


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as a companion to that of our first Dramatic Poet’.¹¹¹ Boydell was a member of John Reeves’s Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers founded in November 1792. In December 1792, in an attempt to scrutinize caricatures for seditious agency, the Association had compiled and published a selection of sources considering pictures and engravings as subject to libel.¹¹² For book  of Boydell’s edition of Paradise Lost, published in the first volume in 1794, Richard Westall painted the birth of Sin from Satan’s head, a much more appropriate choice since it could be contained through both biblical and classical precedent: James’s allegory of Sin and the birth of Minerva. Boydell’s illustrated Milton also contained Hayley’s expurgated Life of Milton, where no trace could be detected of its original ‘spirit of republicanism’ (F ii. 288–9). Milton’s life was a crucial element in constructing him as a canonic author. As it stands in the illustrated edition, Hayley’s Life of Milton starts by clarifying that ‘these volumes are devoted to the decoration of his poetry; and the Editors are desirous of presenting their Milton to the world only in a poetical and a domestic point of view’.¹¹³ The loyalist line on Milton was only too clear: the man and the poet could be canonized provided the personal or domestic was divorced from the political, and the text was ‘poetically’ sanctioned by classical annotation and enshrined in sublime obscurity. ¹¹¹ Shakspeare Gallery, 15 May 1793 (V&A, sig. 103B). ¹¹² Liberty and Property Preserved Against Republicans and Levellers, Proceedings of the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, no. 1 (London, n.d.), 11 Dec. 1792, 15, in A Collection of Tracts (London, 1793). For Boydell’s membership in the Association, see M. Phillips, ‘Blake and the Terror 1792–93’, The Library, 6th ser., 16/4 (Dec. 1994), 263–97. ¹¹³ The Poetical Works of John Milton with a Life of the Author by William Hayley (London, 1794–7), vol. i, p. iv. The passage is excised in the 1796 edition.

5 The Plot of Adam and Eve A great part of the beauty of the celebrated description of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, consists in using only general indistinct expressions, every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination,—his own idea of beauty, grace, expression, dignity, or loveliness: but a painter, when he represents Eve on a canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourse VIII, 1778)

R Adam and Eve on canvas was no easy task. To follow Satan from Hell to Eden, from rebellion to temptation, Fuseli had to anticipate and negotiate his readers’ expectations. In a review of Eve appearing before Adam at Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery in 1788, the St James’s Chronicle had approved of Eve’s impersonation of Venus de Medici; Adam, however, failed to combine ‘the Form of the Apollo of Belvidere, united with that of the Gladiator’.¹ That expectation for a sublime male form was satisfied by the monotonously Herculean Satan and Adam in Boydell’s Milton edition. If turning readers into spectators meant meeting statuesque expectations, the visual templates for the heroic male form were well defined from the first two pictures at the Milton Gallery, which introduce Satan as a Michelangelesque male prototype. Painted among the last, between 1797 and 1799, after Westall’s pictures for Boydell were published and on view, these 4-metre canvases are also the gallery’s largest pictures. Satan’s impersonations in Hell go on to embody both Apollo Belvedere and the Gladiator. By contrast, Adam fails to live up to such embodiments, at least initially. When he turned the action in Eden into a series of pictures, Fuseli reached out for visual models encompassing different and alternative roles for Adam, Eve, and ¹ St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, 12–15 Apr. 1788.

The Plot of Adam and Eve

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Satan. Fuseli’s iconographies bring out competing narratives embedded in Paradise Lost. Where Genesis introduces Adam and Eve in the world as adults, and their story as a fall from perfection, Fuseli’s Adam and Eve are not born perfect. At the Milton Gallery their story is presented as a plot of perfectibility, a narrative of becoming. Where Milton’s readers first met ‘two of far nobler shape erect and tall, | Godlike erect’ (PL . 288–9), Fuseli’s viewers see through Satan’s eyes Adam and Eve reclined, ‘imparadised in one another’s arms’ (PL . 506). At the gallery, statuesque embodiments and standing postures are the end result of the temptation and the Fall. This chapter analyses Adam and Eve on canvas in the light of late eighteenth-century viewing and reading practices. James Barry argued that ‘Adam and Eve are figures in the truly Grecian style; they are undecked, save with their own naked majesty.’² If Adam and Eve announce a gallery of the ancient nude, such an expectation suggests a role for statuary as a body of specimens that might influence the ways in which Milton’s readers may be turned into spectators. One of the claims of this chapter is that the antique is not only a repository of prototypes of the human, but an iconographical resource that might articulate a number of different narratives in which such specimens are displayed in a meaningful sequence. It is the role of spectators to link up their postures into a choreography and animate a visual narrative through an act of montage. The public display of sculpture in the late eighteenth century offers a powerful scene where Adam and Eve can be shaped into models of human behaviour. Such statuesque embodiments suggest the cultural itinerary and the cultural practices that shaped reading and viewing Paradise Lost. To turn Adam and Eve into pictures at an exhibition means to turn the poem’s mental images into public images and therefore to bring reading and viewing into the public sphere. Because looking at nudes means being seen looking at nudes, visualizing Adam and Eve at the exhibition participates in the production of aesthetic pleasure as a form of regulation of body and mind. Women’s place in this economy of viewing is a powerful indicator of the tensions inherent in the public sphere of art. This chapter explores the ways in which the gallery invites women as spectators and shapes the relationship between spectator and spectacle. ² Barry, An Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England, 112; see W. L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven, 1981), 20.

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In doing so, the gallery is read through Fuseli’s dialogue with Mary Wollstonecraft and her misgivings about his Eve. Fuseli met Wollstonecraft through Joseph Johnson. Her influence had a shaping impact on Fuseli’s painting, which will be explored through a comparative reading of the gallery as it opened in 1799 and in its intermediate phases, taking account of the way in which palimpsests and omissions reconfigure its narratives. Individual pictures might powerfully stand for the whole, offering a meaningful point of time as a way into rereading and rewriting what comes before and after. On the other hand, however, a continuous act of revision is required as each picture is inflected by the pictures around it and turns into a moment in a sequence. The continuities and discontinuities revealed by such a visual exposure have broader consequences for textual transmission and adaptation. In a further plea for the integrated nature of aesthetic practices, this chapter gives a new reading of Wollstonecraft’s engagement with Milton via Fuseli’s projected gallery. Reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Fuseli’s 1791 prospectus and the Milton Gallery with Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet helps flesh out a discontinuous Paradise Lost, a text that is perceived not as a cover-to-cover continuum, but rather as a body of discontinuous mental images and anthological extracts. Looking for Adam and Eve’s spectators meant challenging Samuel Johnson’s claim that Paradise Lost lacked human passions and hence would fail to engage readers, an issue all the more pressing in a commercial enterprise predicated on calling upon such readers to become spectators. To contradict Samuel Johnson and open up the text to alternative readings was one of the aims of both Joseph Johnson’s and John Boydell’s editions. ‘Human nature and its passions’ are Paradise Lost’s main concern in Fuseli’s 1791 prospectus, which claimed that ‘human feelings’ would enable readers and viewers ‘to sympathise with the situations and characters in these Poems’ (P 3, 6). Turning such readers into spectators substantiated this claim by cutting from Satan–Gladiator in Chaos (MG 12) to the scene of sex in Eden (MG 13), a subject that not only showed human passion at the centre of the story, but would ‘engage’ the spectator in ‘a condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself ’.³ When the gallery opened in 1799, such scenes would also appeal to female spectators. ³ S. Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’ (1779), in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), i. 180.


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Female spectators were, in fact, the ostensible target in the gallery’s most clearly concerted newspaper advertisement, which appealed to the bodily participation in the act of reading so as to engage readers as spectators who could identify with the action. Joseph Farington had noted that there were not enough female spectators at the Milton Gallery (F iv. 1226). To make up for their absence, the following article appeared in The Times, and one month later in the True Briton: The general impression felt by all kinds of people on entering the Milton Gallery is, this is unlike every thing we have seen before. The old nurses’ stories about the devil are properly confuted by the exhibition of a figure that is bold, daring, and majestic, and a model of muscular strength and gigantic symmetry. ‘I have often wondered,’ said a Lady, ‘how Eve could have been tempted to transgress by such a hideous monster as Satan has been represented to me; but if he was in reality such a being as Mr Fuseli paints him, why—that accounts for it.’⁴

Activating the sexual energy embedded in the temptation story, the lady’s excitement at Satan’s embodiment advertises the Milton Gallery as a scene of seduction in which female viewers are encouraged to identify as Eves that Satan will tempt through his statuesque bodily attributes. Marketing the Milton Gallery as a scene of seduction, a display of heroic male nudes for female spectators, means foregrounding the place of women at the exhibition. When the Royal Academy moved to Somerset House in 1780, among other specimens of ancient statuary, casts of Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici were offered to the general public in a display called The Academy of the Antique.⁵ No longer the private or coterie pleasure of male dilettanti, ancient statuary became ‘a temple to Priapus … to the terror of every decent woman’.⁶ Confronted with muscular specimens of male statuary, women viewers were encouraged to conform to the requirements of modesty and affect disgust, thus resituating Herculean might as bodily excess in need of the feminizing influence of civilization. Women’s role as spectators of art or ‘female dilettanti’ was harder to negotiate, often undermined through reference to priapic rituals, fertility cults which many would deem incompatible with female modesty and innocence.⁷ ⁴ The Times, 17 June 1799; True Briton, 10 July 1799. ⁵ J. Baretti, A Guide through the Royal Academy (London, [1781]), 19, 29. ⁶ Quoted in Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 241. ⁷ C. Chard, ‘Effeminacy, Pleasure and the Classical Body’, in G. Perry and M. Rossington (eds.), Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture (Manchester, 1994), 142–61. For female spectatorship of erotica, see K. Harvey, ‘ ‘‘The

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In this context, Fuseli’s appeal to female viewers and his awareness of the role of desire in the appreciation of art might seem liberating. For bodily pleasure redefines the aesthetic sphere in a challenge to the ascetic ethos of critical detachment.⁸ Yet while that possibility may be part of the attempted broad appeal of the gallery, the libertine streak in Satan’s performance of masculinity suggests that his seduction plot may also maintain more traditional positions. Instead of challenging detachment as an ideal spectatorial posture, it may well serve to entice and undermine women as embodied readers and embodied spectators, an embodiment that would declare their imperfect aesthetic education and their lack of critical autonomy instead of their emancipation. If presenting women as spectators rather than spectacle means turning them from objects into subjects of the aesthetic experience, Satan’s seduction identifies the spectator with the heroine. Much as he emerges out of the canvas to seduce her, she impersonates Eve and enters the realm of fiction, blurring the distinction between spectator and spectacle, exhibit and exhibition space, fiction and reality. Satan’s physical attributes undo the spectator’s critical distance; she is so absorbed by him as to become part of the picture, another Eve succumbing to Satan’s masculinity. The exhibition space thus re-enacts Satan’s seduction of Eve in Paradise Lost, for the Milton Gallery might turn out to be another promise of expanded intellectual powers, which, instead of delivering the life of gods, bends and submits female spectators to the triumph of masculinity. This scenario of seduction may well give shape to a projected image of gender relations, but it reveals the need to outdo the critical autonomy of female viewers. Fuseli’s ambivalence and anxiety are best exemplified by his caricature of a woman in front of the Laocoön. In this incongruous encounter of modern and Grecian regimes of the body, when ‘no modern stiffening habit, no squeezing stays hindered Nature from forming easy beauty’,⁹ the woman’s strait-laced stiffness is contrasted Majesty of the Masculine Form’’: Multiplicity and Male Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Erotica’, in T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds.), English Masculinities 1660–1800 (London, 1999), 211. ⁸ On bodily pleasure as a new way of reading mythology within a materialist epistemology, see M. Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 1999); J. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1992), ch. 3. ⁹ J. J. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: with Instructions for the Connoisseur, and an Essay on Grace in Works of Art, trans. H. Fuseli (London, 1765), 7.


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to the muscular forms of the Laocoön.¹⁰ Whether she is meant to exemplify female desire repressed by means of constraining moral codes, the woman’s pose and her complicated hair style belong in the class of Fuseli’s sadistic, threatening women. ‘Female dilettanti’, or ‘female cognoscenti’ were beginning to claim their right to aesthetic education. Among the ‘female cognoscenti’ contacted in attempts to promote the Milton Gallery were the Berry sisters (CEL 200). Mary Berry was a friend of Horace Walpole and the editor of his works.¹¹ In her Grand Tour diary, she recommended that the Antinous be ‘viewed and reviewed to be enjoyed, like all chefs d’œuvre in art. The Laocoon, even upon consideration, astonishes more than it charms.’¹² Her competent use of the language of the sublime and the beautiful declares her an accomplished connoisseur. In fact, the very seduction through which Satan is meant to disempower his female viewer turns out to be internal to the language of artistic appreciation. Bearing in mind that Fuseli’s Satan no longer impersonates the half-animal, halfhuman grotesque features of his former figurations, but rather impressive prototypes of the human such as Apollo Belvedere and the Gladiator,¹³ let us turn to a female Grand Tourist’s experience of the original: when the folding doors were thrown open of the niche which conceals the Statue of Apollo, I started back with surprise. Never did I see any sculpture come so near the life, nor animation express so much majesty and dignity. I was struck with awe. The beautiful proportions of the limbs, the grandeur and noble air diffused over the whole figure, his commanding aspect blended with angelic sweetness, joined to the most perfect features, made me almost fancy he breathed, and was about to speak: at length, coming out of my first surprise, I said to myself, it is but marble that I see.¹⁴

¹⁰ Christoph Becker suggests she might be Maria Cosway, the RA painter who sketched and compiled a reproduction of the wall-hangings at the Louvre in 1802 when the Academicians went to Paris to see the Laocoön and other Napoleonic spoils; see ‘Der andere Eros. Eva und Satan’, in Becker–Hattendorff, 116. ¹¹ The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, 5 vols. (London, 1798). The nominal editor was, however, her father, Robert; see A. T. Hazen, A Bibliography of Horace Walpole (Folkestone, 1973), 75. ¹² Extracts of the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, i. 111. ¹³ On the transformation of Satan from satyr to Apollo, see Pointon, Milton and English Art. ¹⁴ Letters from Italy, describing the Manners, Customs, Antiquities, Paintings, &c. of that Country, in the years MDCCLXX and MDCCLXXI, to a friend residing in France, by an English Woman, 3 vols. (London, 1776), iii. 68–9.

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As the woman’s aesthetic experience is articulated through the language of Eve’s mirror scene—‘I started back, | it started back’ (PL, . 462–3)—Apollo’s smooth feminine beauty is a mirror image of the viewer. Such a scene of recognition highlights a founding moment in Eve’s aesthetic education, which in this new context is used to legitimize women in their ambition to participate in the field of art.¹⁵ Statues on the point of acquiring life were a trope of Grand Tour ekphrasis. The myth of Pygmalion, which the female connoisseur activated, could be found in J.J. Winckelmann’s own description of Apollo.¹⁶ While this female impersonation of Pygmalion highlights the homoerotic charge of Winckelmann’s Apollo, it also pioneers the idea of a female artist sculpting a male nude sculpture–lover. Admittedly, that possibility had to wait, given that women artists were not allowed into life classes.¹⁷ However, the female appropriation of Pygmalion nonetheless subverted the commonplace identification of man and woman as spectator and spectacle, for it substituted Apollo in the place of Venus and a woman in the position of the usually male connoisseur.¹⁸ Compare Sir Joseph Spence’s animation of Venus de Medici in his Polymetis: At your first approaching her, as she stands in the fine apartment assigned to this figure in the Great Duke’s gallery, you see aversion or denial in her look; move on but a step or two farther, and she has compliance in it: and one step more to the right, they tell you, turns it into a little insidious and insulting smile; such as any lady has, when she plainly tells you by her face, that she has made a sure conquest of you. The moral of all this may be very true and natural; but I think it is not justified by the statue itself.

The impression of a virtual, projected scene of seduction is confirmed when Spence goes on to argue that Venus de’ Medici ‘will ever be the ¹⁵ For Mary Wollstonecraft’s heroine rewriting Eve’s mirror scene and appropriating Pygmalion’s agency, see The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria. A Fragment, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler (London, 1989), i. 96–7, 105. ¹⁶ See J. J. Winckelmann, ‘Die Statue des Apollo’, in Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, ed. W. Senff (Weimar, 1964), 310; see also J. Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Oxford, 1996), 34–68, and id., ‘Johann Joachim Winckelmann: The Body in Question’, in J. Morrison and F. Krobb (eds.), Text into Image: Image into Text (Amsterdam, 1997), 39–45. ¹⁷ Hoock, The King’s Artists, 32. ¹⁸ Another powerful site of the female statue coming to life is, of course, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale; see E. Wind, ‘England und die Antike’, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg (1930–1931), ed. F. Saxl (Leipzig, 1932), 222–4; for an interesting reading of William Hamilton’s depiction of that scene for Boydell’s Shakspeare Gallery, see Rovee, ‘Everybody’s Shakespeare’.


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standard of all female beauty and softness’: she is ‘graceful’ because ‘if she is not really modest, she at least counterfeits modesty extremely well’.¹⁹ The discourse of artistic appreciation is the place where to model the relation between the sexes. Viewing and artistic appreciation indeed permeated the ways in which male and female roles were being shaped in conduct book literature. Statuary provided Hester Chapone with the negative image she needed to dismiss silent modesty as a feminine ideal: an active role in conversation would differentiate her reader from ‘those, who sit like statues without sense or motion’.²⁰ Where Chapone attempted to release women from static statuesque roles, Dr Gregory saw them best as pictures in perspective: ‘a fine woman, like other fine things in nature, has her proper point of view, from which she may be seen to most advantage’.²¹ At work with models of modesty, such objectification culminated in exhibition spaces, as Hannah More observed: if a man select a picture for himself from among all its exhibited competitors, and bring it to his own house, the picture being passive, he is able to fix it there: while the wife, picked up at a public place, and accustomed to incessant display, will not, it is probable, when brought home stick so quietly to the spot where he fixes her; but will escape to the exhibition-room again, and continue to be displayed at every subsequent exhibition, just as if she were not become private property.²²

The anxiety around fixing woman in a proper point of view suggests, however, that this was no easy task. Compare More’s Strictures to Fuseli’s advertisement, an appeal to the very air of intrigue condemned by More in her critique of the exhibition space as a place of dubious morality ¹⁹ Sir Joseph Spence, Polymetis; or, An Enquiry concerning the Agreement Between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists. Being an Attempt to illustrate them mutually from one another (London, 1747), 68, 66–7. See also [id.], Crito; Or, a Dialogue on Beauty, by Sir Harry Beaumont (London, 1752), 23, on modesty being ‘The prevailing Passion in Venus of Medici’. Spence’s Polymetis was very influential: discussion of the Venus de’ Medici in Bell’s New Pantheon (London, 1790) is reproduced from it. For a discussion of Shaftesbury and Spence in the context of statuary, see R. W. Jones, ‘From Civitas to Civility: The Re-Education of Hercules’, in Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge, 1998), 16–26. ²⁰ H. Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, addressed to a Young Lady, 2 vols. (London, 1773), ii.103. ²¹ J. Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, 2nd edn. (London, 1774), 41. ²² H. More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education. With a View of the Principles and Conduct prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols. (London, 1799), ii. 163.

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in which women might escape their identification as private property. It was certainly difficult to fix Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton, who appropriated and animated the attitudes of famous statues (including Apollo Belvedere) and thus blurred the distinction between subject and object and endowed art with a life of its own. If, however, Emma’s animations embodied the eroticized relationship of the collector to his collection, female Grand Tourists had a more empowered stake in Grand Tour discourse.²³ For by inverting the gendering of the subject and object of viewing, they showed how artistic appreciation made larger claims about women’s active place in the pursuit of knowledge and power. The use of statuary and anatomy to argue women’s access to knowledge takes on a Miltonic turn in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a pamphlet written at the time when Fuseli was drawing up his proposals for the Milton Gallery in 1791 and announcing the first number in early 1792. Her use of statuary and Milton’s Eve help reconstruct her dialogue with Fuseli and some of the tensions underlying his figurations of Adam and Eve. Milton is a crucial ingredient in Wollstonecraft’s argument about women’s access to knowledge. Implicitly rearticulating the plot of Paradise Lost with Areopagitica, Wollstonecraft claimed that ‘purity of mind’ is ‘the reserve of reason … so far from being incompatible with knowledge, it is its fairest fruit’ (RW 192–3).²⁴ Choosing, like Eve, to taste the fruit of knowledge, she argued against those who would forbid women access to Linnaeus’ sexualized system of botany because of its allusions to human sexuality.²⁵ ‘Thus is the fair book of knowledge to be shut forever with an everlasting seal!’ (RW 193), she exclaimed, identifying Eve and the blind poet of the proem to book  of Paradise Lost. Both are denied access to vision. Through a vertigo of allusion, Wollstonecraft changes the subject positions of Milton’s poem and rearranges its plot. The book of nature, which is shut with the injunction not to taste of the tree of ²³ Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 241, 267–75, on collectors versus Academicians. ²⁴ Compare Milton’s Areopagitica, CPW, ii. 514–15; see also p. 512. ²⁵ For Botany as Eve’s mirror, see William Hayley’s ‘To Dr Darwin’, dated 27 June 1792, in E. Darwin, The Botanic Garden, 4th edn., 2 vols. (London, 1799), vol. i, pp. x–xi. For women and botany, see L. Schiebinger, ‘The Private Life of Plants: Sexual Politics in Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin’, in M. Benjamin (ed.), Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780–1945 (Oxford, 1991), 121–43.


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knowledge, is identified with the sight of the human form in its naked wholeness.²⁶ Wollstonecraft’s engagement with anatomy, however, discards both the model of seduction and the feminine ideal of ignorant modesty, which for her belong to the same hypocritical visual regime. For ‘the fig leaf borrowed by wantonness’—her definition for the visual regime of false modesty (RW 196)—mangles the simple grandeur of the body. What conceals ‘the masculine parts … chastely represented … by the hand of nature’ allows for the imaginary supplement of imagination. Yet, instead of the plot of seduction, Wollstonecraft presents knowledge as rational conversation among equals. If they are not to be scientists, Wollstonecraft’s women ought to be ‘rational nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands’ (RW 249): ‘I have conversed, as man with man, with medical men, on anatomical subjects; and compared the proportions of the human body with artists—yet such modesty did I meet with, that I was never reminded by word or look of my sex, of the absurd rules which make modesty a pharisaical cloak of weakness’ (RW 193). To discard this false modesty is to recuperate the forms of antiquity and restore them in their wholeness. In turn, to flesh them out as a new bodily ideal means to call into question the separation of mind and body and to challenge codes of behaviour based on innocent, ignorant, and false modesty. A new, active regime of body and mind goes hand in hand with a new morality: I do not forget the popular opinion that the Grecian statues were not modelled after nature. I mean, not according to the proportions of a particular man; but that beautiful limbs and features were selected from various bodies to form an harmonious whole. … it might with propriety be termed rather the model of mankind than of a man … a model of that grand simplicity, of those concurring energies, which arrest our attention and command our reverence. … I believe that the human form must have been far more beautiful than it is at present, because extreme indolence, barbarous ligatures, and many causes, which forcibly act on it, in our luxurious state of society, did not retard its expansion, or render it deformed. Exercise and cleanliness appear to be not only the surest means of preserving health, but of promoting beauty. (RW 243)

²⁶ See my ‘ ‘‘A Female Band Despising Nature’s Law’’: Botany, Gender and Revolution in the 1790s’, Romanticism on the Net, 17 (Feb. 2000), .

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The relics of antiquity are ‘a majestic pile fit to receive a noble inhabitant’: Wollstonecraft’s appreciation of statuary has a practical bent and fits a regulative ideal. The model may well be an assemblage of the best parts of nature, like the statue Zeuxis sculpted, yet the individual fragments still bespeak a different and better regulation of the body. Restoring this classical body is part of Wollstonecraft’s critique of the mind and body dualism. The appreciation of statues participates in the nostalgic reconstruction of the public sphere of the ancients. In Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, translated by Fuseli in 1765, Winckelmann pointed out that ‘the Gymnasies, where, sheltered by public modesty, the youths exercised themselves naked, were the schools of art’.²⁷ Public games gave prominence to physical exercise and a different ´ regulation of the body. In envisaging Emile’s education, Rousseau too rearticulated the ancient public sphere. The place he identified for women was to decorate public games as visual spectacle—a healthy, civilizing counterpart to the homoerotic risks he perceived in an all-male gymnasium.²⁸ Rousseau’s identification of women with the visual field is what Wollstonecraft objected to. Despite their critique of strait-laced female forms,²⁹ both Winckelmann and Rousseau shied away from furthering the cause of female exercise, for women following the same physical exercise as men would soon result in Plato’s model of a state with no family.³⁰ This Spartan threat had to be defused if women were to participate in this culture of the body, so it was by rearticulating the cure of the body as a critical dimension of motherhood that Wollstonecraft argued her case for an active physical and intellectual education of women. Yet her active ideal was at odds with paradigmatic definitions of beauty. In A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful—a text that shaped Fuseli’s gendered approach to aesthetics just as it stimulated Wollstonecraft’s polemical argument—Burke argued that beauty has nothing to do with use, otherwise ‘strength and agility would be considered as the only beauties’. This in turn would lead to a ‘strange confusion of ideas, or abuse of words’, i.e. to have ‘but one ²⁷ Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 9. ´ ²⁸ J.-J. Rousseau, Emile; ou, De l’éducation (1762; Paris, 1969), 541. ²⁹ Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 6; Rousseau, ´ Emile, 541. ´ ³⁰ Rousseau, Emile, 535–6.


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denomination for the qualities of a Venus and Hercules’.³¹ By contrast, beauty, ‘where it is highest in the female sex, almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection’, witness modesty as ‘a tacit allowance of imperfection’.³² Beauty is associated with softness, and the physiology of love involves ‘a natural tendency to relax the fibres’: as a beautiful object presented to the sense, by causing a relaxation in the body, produces the passion of love in the mind; so if by any means the passion should first have its origin in the mind, a relaxation of the outward organs will as certainly ensue in a degree proportioned to the cause.33

Burke’s physiological argument owes something to discussions of statuary, revealing the work such texts perform in shaping male and female identifications. Compare Spence’s Crito on the division of labour in the domain of beauty: The distinguishing Character of Beauty in the Female Form, is Delicacy and Softness; and in the Male, either apparent Strength, or Agility. The finest exemplars that can be seen for the former, is the Venus of Medici; and for the Two latter, the Hercules Farnese and the Apollo Belvedere.³⁴

Both texts resonate with the first description of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘for softness’ and ‘sweet attractive grace’, yielding ‘with coy submission, modest pride, and sweet reluctant amorous delay’ (PL . 298–311). What are readers and viewers supposed to invest in such a figuration? Much as the 1788 review of Eve at Macklin’s, the entry for ‘beauty’ in the 1793 anthology The Beauties of Thought anticipates the expectation that Eve may be visualized as Venus: When Adam is introduced by Milton describing Eve in Paradise, and relating to the angel the impression he felt upon seeing her at her first creation; he does not represent her like a Grecian Venus, by her shape, or features, but by the lustre of her mind, which shone in them, and gave them their power of charming. Grace was in all her steps, heav’n in her eye, In all her gestures dignity and love. Without this irradiating power, the proudest fair one ought to know, whatever her glass may tell her to the contrary, that her most perfect features are uninform’d and dead.³⁵ ³¹ Burke, Enquiry, 106. ³² Ibid. 110 ³³ Ibid. 151. ³⁴ [Spence], Crito, 13. ³⁵ Beauties of Thought, on Various Subjects, in Prose and Verse. Selected from the Best Authors (Bridlington, 1793), 15–16.

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Yet the implicit divorce of mind and body suggested in this anthology for ladies is not what Wollstonecraft would advocate. For women’s autonomy should be gained not by denying the body, but by giving it an active shape. Ancient statuary becomes a platform for proposing a different regulation of the body. Instead of the ‘relaxed beauty’ embodied in female softness, Wollstonecraft would probably opt for one of Michelangelo’s ‘female bodies, which, under his bold hand, grew Amazons’, as Winckelmann and Fuseli put it.³⁶ What is at stake here is more than meets the eye. In Burke’s aesthetics beauty and the sublime, love and admiration, define the power relation between the sexes: ‘we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us’.³⁷ In Fuseli’s Aphorisms, Burke’s statement resurfaces among entries listing the types of women imagined by painters. In this new context, however, Burke’s plural ‘we’ is turned into a third-person singular and gendered female. This grammatical change involves an imaginary projection into the female side of that sexual dynamics: ‘female affection is ever in proportion to the impression of superiority in the object. Woman fondles, pities, despises and forgets what is below her; she values, bears and wrangles with her equal; she adores what is above her’ (K i. 144).³⁸ Fuseli’s female inflection is not, however, the mirror image of Burke’s statement. From the standpoint of women, equality adds a potential third position to the two options envisaged in Burke’s paradigm of gender relations, yet in Fuseli’s version there is no place for love. That equal ground seems to be posited only to disappear. For male desire to be satisfied, women need to position themselves in an act of submission or ‘adoration’. In other words, Eve should be soft for Adam to be straight and strong. Fuseli’s women are thus polarized between the options of soft beauty and stiff dominatrix. No wonder that Wollstonecraft should be anxious about the gender politics at Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. Wollstonecraft’s encounter with Fuseli is still read through the sentimental frame outlined by Godwin’s Memoir and Knowles’s Life.³⁹ By contrast, the Milton Gallery offers an alternative reading, where their exchange might restore her intellectual ³⁶ Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 23. ³⁷ Burke, Enquiry, 113. ³⁸ On the Aphorisms, which Fuseli started in 1789 as a companion to Lavater’s, see K i. 159–61. ³⁹ W. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1798), 85–91, 97–9; see also pp. 6, 20, on her sensibility; K i. 165; B. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), 197–8.


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influence, that invisible ground where woman ‘values, bears and wrangles with her equal’. In Fuseli’s paradigm the relation between the sexes had to be stabilized in the position of a female beautiful and a male sublime. This binary opposition fleshes out Satan and Eve in Wollstonecraft’s reading of Paradise Lost as Lucy Newlyn argues.⁴⁰ I agree with Saba Bahar that Wollstonecraft read Paradise Lost in a dialogic engagement with Burke and Fuseli, a starting point that Wollstonecraft needs to posit and subvert in order to reconfigure a sublime agency for women.⁴¹ However, more work is needed to see the Milton Gallery through Wollstonecraft’s eyes, for her influence goes well beyond their dialogue of 1791–2, nor are Fuseli’s Gallery and Milton’s poem the static patriarchal objects that most readers of Wollstonecraft make them out to be.⁴² Although she is ‘engrossed by writing and printing … Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Wollstonecraft finds time to express her opinion on Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: ‘his Devil will be the hero of the poetic series … I rather doubt whether he will produce an Eve to please me in any of the situations, which he has selected, unless it be after the fall’.⁴³ Bahar has rightly argued that by discarding ‘an Eve to please me’, Wollstonecraft discards the Burkean language of the beautiful. Her refusal of soft beauty is her clearest denunciation of Milton in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation. (RW 88)

Vindicating Eve meant undoing Milton’s initial diptych: ‘For Contemplation he and valor form’d, for softness she and sweet attractive grace’ (PL, . 297–8). However, Adam and Eve’s division of labour is less stable than it seems, nor is this soft Eve the only Eve to be found in Paradise Lost. In fact, there is no stable or coherently patriarchal Paradise ⁴⁰ L. Newlyn, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), 157. ⁴¹ S. Bahar, ‘ ‘‘An Eve to Please Me’’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the ‘‘Public Woman’’ ’, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy (Basingstoke, 2002), 16, 19, 22–24, 182 n. 6. ⁴² See J. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London, 2000), 157; Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy, 18, but also pp. 74–7 for Wollstonecraft’s use of Miltonic language and images in her challenge to Rousseau. ⁴³ Wollstonecraft to Roscoe, 3 Jan. 1792, CEL 79.

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Lost in Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet either. This is why the ways in which Fuseli visualizes the poem may be crucial to her cause, for Milton’s Eve may well depend on ‘the situations, which he has selected’, on the situations each reader remembers, visualizes, re-creates. For her, it is the inclination of the senses that led Milton, like other ‘great men’, into inconsistencies (RW 89). Such inconsistencies, however, open up the potential other Eves in the text. Thinking about Eve through the prism of Milton, Wollstonecraft, and Fuseli involves thinking about the anthological and interconnected nature of reading, viewing, and writing. There was no need to read Paradise Lost from cover to cover to meet contemplative Adam and soft Eve, for Milton’s image could be encountered in many places other than Milton’s poem. Instead of questioning the author’s intention and meaning, it is worth following the wanderings of the first pair into the world of anthologies and conduct books, a place where the author’s ‘Mahometan strain’ would be much more coherent. Indeed, this passage, Paradise Lost, and Milton’s name were excerpted to lend authority to conduct book claims about female perfection. Eve’s ‘softness’ and ‘sweet attractive grace’ had been excerpted by James Fordyce to argue for female meekness and restraint from exercise.⁴⁴ As we have seen, freed from its textual moorings, a quotation acquires a life of its own, but it also acts as a metonymy, inviting the reader to re-create the whole it is a part of. The context in which such a quotation is found necessarily offers guidance in this path from part to whole. Fordyce’s sermon and the discursive network it exemplifies act as a paratext, a frame of reference, and a horizon of expectation that shaped a powerful reading of Paradise Lost. When the Miltonic quotation within the conduct book is fleshed out as a whole, Paradise Lost can metamorphose into the text produced by ‘Milton the bogeyman’.⁴⁵ Yet the Paradise Lost underlying A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is anything but the coherent narrative of a bogeyman. Understanding Wollstonecraft’s attack on Milton as a reaction to that passage’s afterlife in conduct books makes much more sense of her fractured and incoherent dialogue with Milton’s text. For the poem’s ‘contradictions and inconsistencies … deftly planted so as to erode the orthodoxies the ⁴⁴ J. Fordyce, ‘On Female Meekness’, in Sermons to Young Women, 3rd edn., 2 vols. (London, 1766), ii. 231–2. ⁴⁵ S. Gilbert, ‘Milton’s Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers’, in S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1979), 187–212.


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poem is thought to espouse’ locate her individual encounter within a culture of reading spanning from the early female audiences reconstructed by Joseph Anthony Wittreich to the Romantic readers studied by Lucy Newlyn.⁴⁶ For instance, arguing with Milton, Wollstonecraft claims that ‘women … must be permitted to turn to the fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite’. Through astronomy as a topic of rational conversation for ladies emerge Eve’s nocturnal astronomic explorations in book  of Paradise Lost.⁴⁷ In book , Raphael reproaches Adam for not using the scale of love to ascend to Heaven and turning to Eve instead. As Wollstonecraft’s Eve revisits that choice and opts for the source of light rather than the satellite, she can enact sublime agency where Adam has failed (PL . 589–94). Is then Adam an emasculated, or effeminate, agent?⁴⁸ That Milton might have seen his Adam not quite fit for Apollo Belvedere, let alone craggy Hercules, while he might have envisaged a rather more prominent role for Eve, is a possibility Wollstonecraft swiftly forecloses. For Adam’s eccentric motion around Eve in Paradise Lost is later sexed male in Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet: ‘I have been led to imagine that the few extraordinary women who have rushed in eccentrical directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex, were [male spirits, confined by mistake in female frames]’ (RW 103). By changing the gender of planet and satellite, Wollstonecraft’s reading turns Milton’s heterodoxy orthodox; with the Archangel Raphael, she defines sublime agency as a vertical movement towards God as opposed to a movement centring on Eve;⁴⁹ having restored the gender of the planetary system, it is down to some exceptional women, or men in female frames, to choose an eccentric movement outside the orbit of their sex. ⁴⁶ J. A. Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 14; Newlyn, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Romantic Reader (Oxford, 1993), 154. ⁴⁷ The fashion for astronomy as a subject of conversation for ladies dates back to Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1687), which enjoyed a number of English translations from 1688 onwards; see M. Delon, ‘La Marquise et le philosophe’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 182 (1981), 65–78. ⁴⁸ For a reading of Paradise Lost in terms of Adam’s weakness and Eve as the summation and main agent, see J. W. Stone, ‘ ‘‘Man’s Effeminate S(lack)ness’’: Androgyny and the Divided Unity of Adam and Eve’, Milton Quarterly, 31/2 (May 1997), 33–42. See also P. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), 178–233, who looks at Eve as the last and therefore the telos of creation and traces the filiation of Adam’s ´ incompleteness back to Rousseau’s Emile. ⁴⁹ See also PL . 529 ff. on Adam’s passion, and p. 592 on verticalizing love leading to God.

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Despite her misreading, however, Wollstonecraft cannot quite produce the unidimensional text authored by the bogeyman: ‘Milton, I grant, was of a very different opinion; for he only bends to the indefeasible right of beauty, though it would be difficult to render two passages which I now mean to contrast, consistent.’ No sooner has Wollstonecraft denounced Milton’s characterization of Eve’s ‘perfect beauty’ and her ‘unargued’ obedience to the precept that ‘God is thy law, thou mine’ and defined this as a rule for children, than she points out a rupture: ‘yet, in the following lines Milton seems to coincide with me’. The passage she goes on to quote argues the impossibility of society ‘among unequals’: of fellowship I speak Such as I seek, fit to participate All rational delight (RW 90; PL . 389–91).

This line is fleshed out by an alternative tradition. Thomas Newton’s 1749 variorum edition praises Milton for describing Eve’s intellectual rather than physical qualities.⁵⁰ Attentive to the equality between the sexes, Bentley’s 1732 emendations had suggested substituting ‘He for God only, she for God and Him’ as opposed to ‘God in him’, an emendation which was recorded and approved of by Newton’s 1749 variorum.⁵¹ Furthermore, Bentley has Eve participate in the Morning Hymn and even revises it so as to divide the lines between Adam and Eve.⁵² It is in this shape that Handel had disseminated it in his musical rewriting.⁵³ Indeed, Paradise Lost could well contain Eves to please Wollstonecraft, whether such Eves figure or not among the situations chosen by Fuseli. ⁵⁰ Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, ii. 438, on PL . 304, referring to the manuscript notes received from Mr Thyer, librarian at Manchester. ⁵¹ Bentley, Paradise Lost, 117, on PL . 299; Newton, Paradise Lost, i. 251, on PL . 299. ⁵² Bentley, Paradise Lost, 151–4, intervening on PL . 153–208. Newton registers Bentley’s rewriting, pointing out that it derives from a musical adaptation into interlocutory parts, but disapproves of it as ‘by no means fit for an heroic poem: but if the author should be supposed to have design’d them, I should choose to divide this hymn very different from the Doctor’s division’. (See Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, i. 326, on PL . 202). See also Wittreich, Feminist Milton, 55; L. Moore, Beautiful Sublime: The Making of ‘Paradise Lost’, 1701–1734 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 61–2. ⁵³ The Hymn of Adam and Eve, taken from Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, and Mr Handell’s Anthem performed at the Funeral of Her late Majesty Queen Caroline (1783), Bodleian Library, sig. Antiq. E E. 40.


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Ever conscious of the influence of ‘Moses’s poetical story’, Wollstonecraft was also iconoclastically attentive to the power of pictures.⁵⁴ Eve’s indeterminacy was Sir Joshua Reynolds’s main example of the advantages of sketches over finished works.⁵⁵ It is precisely the sketchiness of Milton’s Eve that engages as much as it worries Wollstonecraft. Her contradictory reading of Milton’s Eve suggests she might be the character to effect ‘a R in female manners’ which would have ‘the most salutary effects tending to improve mankind’ (RW 265). The new woman Wollstonecraft shapes takes on the features of a new Eve. For her Wollstonecraft advocates education as opposed to self-absorption and appropriates the voice of God guiding Eve away from the image reflected in the water: ‘that she should avoid cultivating her taste, lest her husband should occasionally shock it, is quitting a substance for a shadow’ (RW 101).⁵⁶ Much as the female Grand Tourist had morphed Apollo into her reflected image, water turned to marble, here that same classical motif of female vanity undergoes another subversive transformation. In Wollstonecraft’s version, educated woman becomes the substance, and the figure in the mirror the vain product of a male sexual and visual economy. Turning away from that image is not relinquishing a female shadow for a male substance. Rather, ‘he whose image thou art’ turns out to be the illusory shadow which the new Eve should discard. For lifting the veil of ignorance she may well discover her companion unequal to her intellectual energy. Fuseli’s projected gallery provides an important dimension to Wollstonecraft’s subversive gendering of Eve’s mirror scene, but also to her dialogue with Milton in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman more generally. ‘Eve starting from herself in the water’ was among the pictures Fuseli had in the making at the time of her writing, one which fits her distrust of his Eve.⁵⁷ Such an Eve never made it into the Milton Gallery, but it clearly evoked a line of female iconography she would not approve of. Reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Fuseli’s Milton prospectus at hand suggests another way of looking at Wollstonecraft’s Milton. For Wollstonecraft’s expectation not to like ⁵⁴ Wollstonecraft uses the trope of pictorial presentation in RW 118, 142–3. ⁵⁵ Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 164. ⁵⁶ B. Taylor, ‘For the Love of God: Religion and the Erotic Imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’, in E. J. Yeo (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms (London, 1997), 15–35. ⁵⁷ Wollstonecraft to Roscoe, 3 Jan. 1792, CEL 79; compare the contents of the first number announced in The Oracle, 13 Jan. 1792.

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Fuseli’s Eve in ‘any of the situations’ he has chosen indicates that she treated Fuseli’s list as a prompt for visualization, which would generate a series of pictures and turn a number of passages in the poem into the sort of Burkean–Fuselian plot she disliked. The possibility therefore arises that some of the Miltonic surfacings in Rights of Woman are attempts to fight back or discard the Miltonic images prompted by Fuseli’s list of pictures. For instance True voluptuousness must proceed from the mind—for what can equal the sensations produced by mutual affection, supported by mutual respect? What are the cold, or feverish caresses of appetite, but sin embracing death, compared with the modest overflowings of a pure heart and exalted imagination? (RW 264)

In Milton’s allegory Sin is a paradoxical voluptuousness coming from the mind, though surely not expressive of mutual respect. The sequence is introduced in Fuseli’s prospectus, which registers ‘Satan contesting his Passage through Hell-gates with Death, and reconciled to him by the Interposition of Sin’. In late October of the same year, the first number is presented as containing Satan Sin and Death and Eve Starting from herself in the Water.⁵⁸ The contiguity of these two pictures would certainly have offered substance to a narrative in keeping with St James’s allegory of the flesh, one which articulates the birth of Eve and the prelapsarian plot in ways differing far from Adam’s and Wollstonecraft’s desire for ‘fellowship … and rational delight’. Looking for Adam and Eve at the Milton Gallery one is not struck by the potential for rational conversation. On the contrary, their first appearance activates a number of subtexts, which articulated the dangers of femininity. A and E first discovered by S (MG 13) and Satan starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s lance⁵⁹ represent two subsequent moments in Adam and Eve’s nuptial bower: Adam above Eve in the first picture gives way to Eve above Adam in the second. The reversal repeats similar pairings, postures, and reversals in depictions of Clorinda dying in Tancredi’s arms, Rinaldo ensnared by Armida, and Erminia curing Tancredi’s wounds in the 1590 illustrated edition of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.⁶⁰ These prints in turn reproduce the compositions ⁵⁸ P 3; Fuseli to Roscoe, 22 and 28 Oct. 1791, CEL 74, 77. ⁵⁹ A and E first discovered by S is fragmentary; S surprised at the ear of E, starting from the touch of I Spear (MG 14) is now lost, so I analyse the Royal Academy exhibit of the same theme instead (see Ch. 3 n. 82 above). ⁶⁰ Bernardo Castello’s illustrations to cantos , , and , repr. in T. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata, 2 vols. (London, 1724), ii. 33, 149, 245. These prints had been


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of Giulio Romano’s Venus and Adonis, where the female lies in the male’s lap, inverting the traditional iconography which has Adonis lying on Venus and the goddess having a more active role.⁶¹ Such images were precisely the kinds of embodiment that Newton’s 1749 variorum had tried to discard. In an annotation to book , despite an initial acknowledgement that Eve resembled the Venus described in Giambattista Marino’s Adone, the editor praises Milton for describing Eve in a manner which evoked the beauties of her mind rather than body. By contrast, most great poets have labor’d in a particular manner the delineation of their Beauties (Ariosto’s Alcina, Tasso’s Armida, and Spenser’s Belphoebe) and ’tis very probable that the portrait of Eve would have rival’d them all, if the chaste correctness of our author’s Muse had not restrain’d him. Thyer.⁶²

For Milton’s ‘picture of love and innocence’ has so nicely and judiciously cover’d the soft description with the veil of modesty, that the purest and chastest mind can find no room for offense … An Italian’s imagination would have hurried him the length of ten or a dozen stanzas upon this occasion, and with its luxuriant wildness chang’d an Adam and Eve into a Venus and Adonis. Thyer.⁶³

If Newton’s ‘veil of modesty’ is precisely the kind Wollstonecraft wanted lifted, there was not much to expect from the two pictures of Adam and Eve listed in Fuseli’s prospectus. Visualizing Eve meant granting new currency to those iconoclastically discarded images. Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered was a popular source for pictures at Royal Academy exhibitions between 1772 and 1792. As painters such as Angelica Kauffman, Benjamin West, and Richard and Mary Cosway turned Tasso’s poem into a repository of pictures, reviewers quoted and compared literary excerpts to the paintings on view, or evoked alternative passages and potential pictures. Alcina, Armida, and Venus are a dangerous company initially engraved by Agostino Carracci for the 1590 Genoa edition, see D. De Grazia, Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family: A Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, DC, 1979), 272–3 and pls. 160, 161, 163. ⁶¹ F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1958), vol. ii, pl. 49, and S. Massari, Giulio Romano pinxit et delineavit: Opere grafiche autografe di collaborazione e bottega (Rome, 1993), 37–8, which also includes as a source the print of the scene in the 1497 illustrated edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, already featuring the inversion of postures of Venus and Adonis. ⁶² Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, ii. 438, on PL . 304. ⁶³ Ibid., on PL . 492.

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for Adam and Eve. Such a gallery of empowered women announced the dangerous reversal which Burke’s Enquiry had denounced as a ‘confusion of ideas, or abuse of words’, a single denomination for the attributes of Venus and Hercules. In one of his aphorisms, Fuseli claimed that ‘in an age of luxury woman aspires to the functions of man, and man slides into the offices of woman. The epoch of eunuchs was ever the epoch of viragoes’ (K i. 144). The effects of luxury surface in these pictures, which represent paradise as Wollstonecraft had denounced it: a place where ‘men sunk below the dignity of rational creatures’ (RW 143), a place devoid of reason or that freedom to choose which alone, Milton argued, made Adam something other than ‘a meer artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions’.⁶⁴ In other words, where Wollstonecraft anticipated little enjoyment from Fuseli’s Eve, it was his Adam which she would find most wanting. If Milton’s poem is to be visualized in terms of classical ideals, there is no doubt as to where agency lies. In a preparatory drawing for A and E first discovered by S, Satan’s head bears the heroic features of the very Apollo Belvedere Adam fails to live up to.⁶⁵ Moreover, the figures are out of proportion: Satan’s head is so big that his body could not be fitted in the space allotted. Uneven scale declares Satan’s heroic agency in the following picture as well, where his gigantic body, hands, and elongated limbs convey his energy of movement and devote to him so much volume and depth as to reclaim the viewers’ attention away from the diminished forms of Adam and Eve in the lower background. Dimension within pictures is confirmed by the dimension of pictures themselves, crucial in capturing the attention of the viewer: S risen from the Flood, B rising (MG 1), S calling up his Legions (MG 2), A and E first discovered by S (MG 13), and S surprised at the ear of E, starting from the touch of I Spear (MG 14) are by far the largest pictures in the gallery. If vertical postures distinguish men from other animals, as Johann Gottfried Herder pointed out, then a postural reading of the gallery confirms that Adam fails to live up to his role as prototype of the human.⁶⁶ Because a vertical posture is also what identifies intellect and will, agency lies with Satan and Eve, rather than Adam, for it is only ⁶⁴ ‘Areopagitica’, in CPW ii. 527; Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy, 74. ⁶⁵ Herrmann, Die natürliche Ursprache in der Kunst um 1800, 28–31. ⁶⁶ J. G. Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1785; Berlin, 1965), i. 109 (Herder’s Philosophie is listed in Library of the Late Henry Fuseli, no. 153).


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after the Fall that Adam can master a vertical posture. In the two companion pictures of Adam and Eve in Eden, their postures have a horizontalizing bent. As she exchanges posture with Adam in the second picture, Eve begins her verticalizing trajectory. That movement identifies Eve with Satan’s verticalizing flight, for it is his posture that she replicates in inverting the position between man and woman in the companion pieces The Dream of E (MG 16) and The creation of E, as related by A (MG 17). These two pictures suggest Satan as the human prototype for Eve to emulate. Their specular composition joins together two images separated by three books in Milton’s poem. Such an identification activates Wollstonecraft’s cross-gendered ‘male spirits in female frames’; following Satan, women too belong to that ‘progeny of heaven’ which should find a path back to light.⁶⁷ In The Dream of E, Satan’s wings enhance this story by emphasizing its link to Plato’s allegory of the soul, which 1790s viewers would know through Thomas Taylor’s work on the Eleusinian Fable of Cupid and Psyche and his translation of Plato’s Phaedrus. In Paradise Lost Eve’s dream prefigures a literal premonition of the Fall, for it chooses the point in time when Eve–Psyche decides to see the invisible god and ‘in consequence of this illicit perception Cupid, or pure desire, flies away, and Psyche, or soul, is precipitated to earth’.⁶⁸ Taken alone, The Dream of E fits this point in the story; yet, seen together with the companion picture The creation of E, it articulates a more enabling turn of the story: ‘Cupid, however, or pure desire, at length recovering his pristine vigor, rouses Psyche, or soul, from her deadly lethargy. In consequence of this, having accomplished her destined toils, she ascends to her native heaven, becomes lawfully united with Cupid.’⁶⁹ This is the story Taylor dedicated to the Royal Academicians, celebrating it as a favourite subject for painters. Significantly, among Taylor’s Eleusinian sources features the passage from the sixth book of the Aeneid, which Fuseli used as an epigraph in his Milton Gallery catalogue: ‘Igneus est ollis vigor, et coelestis Origo | Seminibus, quantum non noxia Fuseli was instrumental to the 1800 English translation; see Translator’s Preface, in Outlines of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London, 1800). ⁶⁷ On Satan as a model for women’s agency, see A. Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2003), 100–4. ⁶⁸ T. Taylor, The Fable of Cupid and Psyche, translated from the Latin of Apuleius: to which are added, a poetical paraphrase on the speech of Diotima in the banquet of Plato (London, 1795), p. viii; compare PL . 86–92. ⁶⁹ Taylor, The Fable of Cupid and Psyche, p. xv.

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corpora tardant’ (‘Those seeds have the vigour of fire and a celestial Origin when they are not weighed down by bodies’; Aen. 6. 730). Guided by this reference, viewers would be encouraged to identify Eve as the soul incarnated in matter and striving to go back to the sky.⁷⁰ Taylor is also a likely channel for Wollstonecraft’s knowledge of Plato.⁷¹ Plato’s allegory of the soul provides a strong narrative thread for Fuseli’s sequence in Eden read with Wollstonecraft’s writings. The horizontal postures in the nuptial bower show that ‘immoderate desire to please’ which—Wollstonecraft argues following Plato—‘contracts the faculties, and immerges … the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation’ (RM 49); a soft and blind obedience deprives Eve of her soul as she ‘gratifies the sense of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation’ (RW 33). Where in epic plots the enchantress hampers the hero’s performance of masculinity, here we can see the roles reversed and it is the heroine who conquers a heroic posture as she finds her vertical trajectory out of the horizontality of the garden. This is where Plato’s allegory fits Wollstonecraft’s figurations of female heroism. Satan–Cupid wakes Eve from the lethargy of matter, imbuing her with ‘the romantic passion, which is the concomitant of genius.—who can clip its wing?’ (RW 61). Much as Wollstonecraft ‘instead of envying the lovely pair’ turns ‘with conscious dignity, or Satanic pride, … to hell for sublimer objects’ (RW 94), so too does Eve turn from Adam to Satan as a source of sublimity. Eve’s verticalizing sequence reverses the postures of Milton’s text, where Adam’s first impulse upward—‘straight toward heaven my wondering eyes I turned’ (PL . 257)—contrasts Eve bending down to look at herself reflected in the water. If Eve is somebody’s image, the companion pictures clearly define her as Satan’s. In another reversed impersonation of Milton’s script, moving from Adam to Satan is leaving a shadow for a substance.⁷² As Barbara Taylor argues, Wollstonecraft’s Platonism gives a feminine inflection to the formerly ‘male spirit transcending the temptations of the female flesh’.⁷³ ⁷⁰ T. Taylor, A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (Amsterdam [i.e. London], [1790?]), 60–3. ⁷¹ Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 277 n. 78. ⁷² On Narcissus’ absorption in his shadow in the water as the soul ‘becoming enamoured with a corporeal life’, see Taylor, A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, 105–6. ⁷³ Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 113.


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Yet in her ascent Fuseli’s Eve does not leave the flesh behind. The story of Adam and Eve is also about their becoming human, negotiating a new regime of the body. The Michelangelesque muscular body Fuseli visualizes in The creation of E produces a bodily ideal for Wollstonecraft’s challenge of Burke’s ‘beautiful weakness’ and his model of love. Taken together with the Platonic allusion, the picture also substantiates Wollstonecraft’s argument for the continuities between animal and rational perfection, activating her alignment of Milton and Plato ‘in asserting that human love led to heavenly, and was only an exaltation of the same affection … love of perfection, and not compassion for weakness’ (RM 46). For Milton’s scale of love participates in an organic view of human wholeness, where the body interface encompasses spirit and matter as continuous rather than contiguous: ‘one first matter all’ underlies all substances, from raw matter to angelic beings, from body to spirit.⁷⁴ It is not, however, the cross-gendered Herculean Venus that man should worry about, but ‘beauty, the grand tempter’, Wollstonecraft argues in Vindication of the Rights of Men. This is where Taylor’s monist Plato fleshes out the continuity of body and mind Wollstonecraft advocates in her rebuttal of Burke’s ‘beautiful weakness’. For this beauty’s corrupting power constitutes ‘a strong argument against its immateriality, and seems to prove that beauty relaxes the solids of the soul as well as the body’ (RM 46).⁷⁵ If absorption in this creature of the flesh clips the wings of the soul, it is the best proof of the continuities of matter and spirit and the need to cultivate them together. Translated visually, Eve’s creation and Fall become an allegory of painting. For her story takes the shape of a Michelangelesque prototype giving way to the softness of Correggio and Rubens as she loses her muscular verticality to Adam and turns into a serpentine, soft beauty. The moral implications of such aesthetic and erotic female prototypes are fleshed out in one of Fuseli’s aphorisms: ‘the forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate’ (K i. 135). Unfortunately E, new created, led to A (MG 18) is missing. E at the Forbidden Tree (MG 19) is lost also, but an extant sketch suggests a foreshortening of Eve’s head and full focus on her sinewy body while she reaches for the apple with both hands, denying that transgression may be a rational choice resulting from or in expanded intellectual powers. As we move ⁷⁴ Richardson, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on ‘Paradise Lost’, 228; Moore, Beautiful Sublime, 21–2. For Wollstonecraft quoting a similar passage in PL , see RM 46. ⁷⁵ Phaedrus 248c–d.

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towards the Fall, the soaring fit Eve gives way to more rounded forms and leaves the scene to craggy male impersonations, which activate the misogynistic motif of male prowess enervated by female charms. A very muscular, Herculean Adam ‘resigning [his] manhood’ (PL . 148) in a knee-bent, adoring posture characterizes A resolved to share the fate of E; the Guardian Angels leaving the Garden (MG 20), also lost.⁷⁶ If this picture exemplifies Fuseli’s aphorism that Beauty’s ‘empire is despotic’ (K i. 76) and Wollstonecraft’s argument that ‘passions of men … have placed women on thrones’ (RW 124–5), Eve’s power is an ‘arbitrary passion’, which declares her a ‘short-lived queen’ (RW 188). This identification of sexual and political representation resonates with the story of Marie Antoinette, the figure used by Wollstonecraft and other women writers to interrogate women’s place in the public sphere in the early 1790s, as Adriana Craciun argues.⁷⁷ Resigning natural rights in favour of the arbitrary right of beauty, Fuseli’s fallen Eve is reduced to a moment of weakness that marks an alternative narrative with which Fuseli plots Adam’s way out of his horizontal submission in Eden. This is where Fuseli’s two Eves take on the features of Virtue and Pleasure in Hercules at the crossroads. Commenting on James Barry’s 1771 Adam and Eve, Pressly points out a resemblance between Adam and Hercules as represented in Hercules at the crossroads, the difference being, of course, that Adam is only given the choice of Eve as pleasure. Arguing against Burke’s Enquiry, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men clearly sets up the homosocial scenario: If we really wish to render men more virtuous, we must endeavour to banish all enervating modifications of beauty from civil society. We must … return to the Spartan regulations, and settle the virtues of men on the stern foundation of mortification and self-denial; for any attempt to civilize the heart, to make it humane by implanting reasonable principles, is a mere philosophic dream. If refinement inevitably lessens respect for virtue, by rendering beauty, the great tempter, more seductive; if these relaxing feelings are incompatible with the nervous exertions of morality, the sun of Europe is not set; it begins to dawn, when cold metaphysicians try to make the head give laws to the heart. But should experience prove that there is a beauty in virtue, a charm in order, which necessarily implies exertion, a depraved sensual taste may give way to a more manly one—and melting feelings to rational satisfactions. (RM 46) ⁷⁶ See engraving by Moses Haughton, Schiff, no. 898, Becker–Hattendorff, 45. ⁷⁷ Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism, ch. 3.


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Both of Wollstonecraft’s Vindications resonate revealingly when compared to Shaftesbury’s 1713 Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules, pitched as it is between Virtue and Pleasure, admiration and tenderness. It is this disjunction that Wollstonecraft would like to weld. Her health prescriptions for women tie them closer to Virtue, whom Shaftesbury defines as a potentially helmeted Amazon, ‘tall, and majestick’, ‘sufficiently accustom’d to exercise. P, on the other hand, by an exact Opposition, is represented in better case, and of a Softness of Complexion; which speaks her Manners, and gives her a middle Character between the Person of a V, and that of a Bacchinal Nymph’. Virtue is characterized by ‘aspiring Effort, or Ascent towards the Stars and Heaven’ contrasted to Pleasure’s ‘supine Air and Character of Ease and Indolence’.⁷⁸ Turning Shaftesbury’s disjunctive visualization into the field of painting, Fuseli’s choice wavered between Michelangelo’s solid Amazonic heroines and the soft, serpentine and curvaceous Eve–Venuses painted by Rubens and Correggio. Where ‘beauty did not often visit … [Michelangelo’s] slumbers’, ‘the women of Correggio are seraglio beauties’, ‘sensuality personified’, argued Fuseli (K i. 141, 142). Looking at the iconography of Eve as a sequential narrative, ‘becoming woman’ means to turn from Michelangelo to Correggio.⁷⁹ In the contrast between reclining softness and sublime verticalization, Adam displaces Eve as a heroic prototype after his knee-bent posture. Unfortunately E after the Sentence and departure of the Judge, despairing, supported by A (MG 21) is also missing, but the combination of catalogue quotation and title suggests Eve reclining, while Adam ‘to better hopes his more attentive mind | lab’ring had raised’ (PL . 1011–12). The verbal cues suggest that the picture might share the composition of The Vision of the Deluge (MG 25) and The dismission of A and E from Paradise (MG 27), two pictures representing Eve bent in a curve and held by Adam, who has finally mastered the appropriately verticalizing and statuesque posture of the Montecavallo ⁷⁸ Shaftesbury, A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgement of Hercules, 20, 21, 26. ⁷⁹ Correggio’s The Education of Cupid was also on show at Pall Mall when the Milton Gallery opened in 1799; cf. A Catalogue of the Orleans’ Italian Pictures (London, 1798), 7, no. 1. The Orleans Gallery had been engraved in twenty-seven numbers in 1786; see GM 69/1 (Feb. 1799), 183.

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Dioscuri, a leitmotif of Fuseli’s heroic models.⁸⁰ The gap between Adam’s kneeling position and his heroic stature after the Fall might be explained by a curious footnote appended to the title in the gallery catalogue, and significantly not reproduced by Knowles: By uniting the departure of the guardian angels, with Adam’s resolution to share in the fate of Eve, and to taste the fruit, though Milton interposed the fervid consequences of that resolution; the Painter has endeavoured to invigorate the pathos of the scene: he has taken a similar liberty in the next subject, by saving Adam’s firmness and love the degrading expostulations of the intermediate scenes.⁸¹

The gaps needed to ‘save Adam’s firmness and love’ and ‘the degrading expostulations’ suggest uneasiness as to Adam’s heroic stature. By turning the plot from knee-bent Hercules to a ‘pathos of the scene’ ‘invigorated’ by the painter, the narrative strives to redress its course towards a more fitting pattern where male tenderness sustains female weakness. Fuseli’s difficulty in visualizing the plot of Adam and Eve is not only evinced from his initial centring on Eve’s self-mirroring, which he later discards. Joseph Farington’s diary registers another picture that never made it into the gallery: Fuseli I called on. He shewed me some of his pictures from Milton. One of them ‘Eve bringing the Apple to Adam’ he said He was not satisfied with; I told him it is much inferior in conception and execution to his other designs; that there is a littleness about it. He determined at once to give it up. (F ii. 597)

The fact that ‘there is a littleness about’ Eve bringing the Apple to Adam reveals Burke’s influence, for in the Enquiry littleness is one of the attributes of the beautiful, an identification Wollstonecraft questions: You may have convinced them that littleness and weakness are the very essence of beauty; and that the Supreme being, in giving women beauty in the most supereminent degree, seemed to command them, by the powerful voice of Nature, not to cultivate the moral virtues that might chance to excite respect, and interfere with the pleasing sensations they were created to inspire. … you could readily exculpate yourself by turning the charge on Nature, who made our idea of beauty independent of reason. (RM 45) ⁸⁰ Fuseli owned a reproduction of the Montecavallo Dioscuri. See Library of the Late Henry Fuseli, 20, no. 145. On the influence of the Dioscuri on Fuseli, see G. Briganti, I pittori dell’immaginario: Arte e rivoluzione psicologica, 2nd edn. (Milan, 1989). ⁸¹ [Fuseli], Milton Gallery. Catalogue, 10.


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It is precisely such constructs which corrupt women readers: ‘these ladies may have read your Enquiry concerning the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and, convinced by your arguments, may have laboured to be pretty, by counterfeiting weakness’ (RM 45). As we have seen by surveying the plot in terms of verticalizing agencies, Eve’s temptation fits what Fuseli defined as an effect of luxury, an epoch of viragos and eunuchs, in which women aspire to the occupation of man and men slide into that of woman. Venus turned Hercules, Eve takes over heroic agency while Adam is consigned to the relaxed horizontality of pleasure. It is illuminating to restore the rejected pictures among Fuseli’s ‘choice of situations’, the gaps within the final, accepted sequence. Bahar has reconstructed the Fuseli–Wollstonecraft dialectic in terms of Fuseli’s dependence on a Burkean gendering of the sublime and the beautiful. Denying that Fuseli can produce ‘an Eve to please me’, Wollstonecraft subverts the categories of the sublime and the beautiful through which Fuseli initially configures the Milton Gallery plot in his letters: ‘Eve Starting from herself in the Water is, I flatter myself, as likely to please as I hope the other [S encountering D S interposing] will Surprise’ (CEL 81).⁸² Even though the visual narrative eventually turns the story into an ending which celebrates male firmness sustaining female weakness, both the Eve–Satan companion piece and the rejected pictures suggest Fuseli’s awareness of the unlikelihood that Eve’s powerful agency may be compatible with ‘littleness’, and the pleasing influence of the beautiful. The beautiful is thus fraught with danger. Frances Ferguson’s reading of Burke’s attempt at containing the beautiful through the mastery of the sublime is crucial to late eighteenth-century gender trouble. The Milton Gallery reviews activate the gendered language of the sublime and the beautiful by distinguishing between ‘grandeur of design’ and ‘grace and elegance of fancy’, or ‘the softer and more delicate touches’. By centring on ‘the simplicity and beauty of The Dream of Eve, and the more vivid grace of the newly created Partner of Adam’ gender trouble is successfully mastered when the ‘frail mother’ is made the object of ‘the sympathy, the love and protection of Adam’.⁸³ However, confirmation of the instability lurking in Fuseli’s gendering of Adam and Eve may be found in du Roveray’s 1802 illustrated edition of Paradise ⁸² Bahar, ‘An Eve to Please Me’, in Many Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy, 14. ⁸³ Morning Chronicle, 12 July 1799, 21 June 1799; Monthly Mirror (June, July 1799).

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Lost.⁸⁴ Bentley notes that du Roveray chose Fuseli to depict Satan and supernatural agency, while he preferred William Hamilton’s depictions of Eve, thus contrasting the divine and the human.⁸⁵ Hamilton’s Eve is frontally offered to the viewer, who is thus made to embody Adam’s first gaze on her. Her reclined head fits her role as Adam’s image. Her legs and left arm emulate the pose of Venus de’ Medici. We do not have the corresponding Milton Gallery picture (E, new created, led to A), but it is significant that the one image the du Roveray edition chooses to focus on restricts Eve to the eye of the beholder. By contrast, Fuseli’s The creation of E, as related by A subverts the hierarchy of ‘for contemplation he and valour formed, for softness she and sweet attractive grace’ (PL . 297–8). It is she who ‘soars on the wing of contemplation’, fulfilling Wollstonecraft’s claim for a correction of woman’s mirror stage: Gracious Creator of the whole human race! Hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature exalted above her,—for no better purpose?—Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man, her equal, a being who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue?—Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee? (RW 136)⁸⁶

Both Adam and the viewer are denied Eve’s gaze. Her muscular body is turned back and away from the line of sight of the viewer. Her springing upward contrasts Adam’s recoiling back towards a horizontal position. She thus enacts Raphael’s preferred rational, human love, ‘the scale by which to heavenly Love thou mayst ascend’ (PL . 591–2).⁸⁷ While this Eve is sublime, the du Roveray edition chooses to limit her to the beautiful. It separates the human from the divine by concentrating Fuseli’s corporeality to the domain of a supernatural sublime. Ferguson notes that ‘the sublime acts as the antidote to the ⁸⁴ Fuseli depicted books –, , , while Hamilton depicted books , , , , , ; see Weinglass, Prints and Engraved Illustrations By and After Fuseli, 201–7. ⁸⁵ G. E. Bentley, Jr., ‘F. I. Du Roveray, Illustrated-Book Publisher 1798–1806; III: Du Roveray’s Artists and Engravers and the Engravers’ Strike’, Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Bulletin, 12/3 (1988), 107. ⁸⁶ Taylor, ‘For the Love of God’, 15. ⁸⁷ On the reverberations of this passage and of the Eve–God narcissism, see Taylor, ‘For the Love of God’.


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dissolution produced by the beautiful … Burke’s sublime is explicitly labelled as a providentially ordered capacity for mitigating the force of the beautiful that brought about both the Fall and the very possibility of the Fall’.⁸⁸ Du Roveray’s edition highlights the desire to maintain the lure of ‘softness and sweet attractive grace’, while hiding Eve’s most dangerous affiliations. Fuseli’s gendering of Adam and Eve’s corporeality wavers between Eve’s sublime agency and the soft, classical alter ego featuring in du Roveray’s edition. The pictures chosen for book  rearrange binary distinctions. In Hamilton’s picture for du Roveray, Eve’s arm raised towards the tree suggests the pose of the Esquiline Venus. S’s first Address to E (MG 42), added to the Milton Gallery in 1800, combines a Rubensesque serpentine pose with the raised arm of the Venus Genetrix. In the 1799 catalogue, a footnote introduces book : ‘What the second book is to the fancy, this is to the heart: its sentiments and language are the breath of humanity.’⁸⁹ In the 1791 prospectus Fuseli had divided his topics under ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ sublimity. Satan is the hero of the former, one where astonishment predominates, while Adam and Eve feature in the latter, which adds interest drawn from our nature and its passions. … the impression … becomes irresistible when we ourselves are called to share in the action, when human dignity, human beauty, human passions, surrounded by scenery more familiar, mix in the plan; when wonder is relieved by affection, when hope and fear are called forth, and every image before us is reflected by a similar one within ourselves. (P 3–5)

The distinction between a sublime that provides astonishment and one defining the familiar and characterized by interest is crucial. In so far as interest is distinguished from sublimity, it takes on an appropriative connotation. A reviewer commented that ‘the action and expression of face given to Adam and Eve, manifest much more of passion than sentiment’.⁹⁰ Probably Wollstonecraft would not have subscribed to ‘wonder relieved by affection’, while she was only too aware of the ⁸⁸ F. Ferguson, ‘The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or the Bathos of Experience’, in Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York, 1992), 52. ⁸⁹ Milton Gallery, A Catalogue, 9 (RA, sig. FU/4/1/4; not repr. by Knowles). ⁹⁰ London Packet, 31 May–3 June 1799.

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powerful ideological threat at the heart of such an articulation of the familiar, an ‘image before us’ whose goal is to fashion as it reflects ‘a similar one within ourselves’. The relief provided by affection is thus a prop to Adam’s performance of masculinity as he endeavours to master the wonder of Eve, the Amazonian threat his predecessors had confronted at the heart of many Renaissance poems.

Conclusion As to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly daydreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose. (S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817)

T book locates the act of reading within the vibrant experience of exhibitions which characterized public culture in late eighteenth-century London. After the new copyright laws of the 1770s offered authors to the public domain, an increasing number of texts circulated in the shape of cheap editions, anthologies, and abridgements. This wider market in turn identified in readers a constituency of viewers, and in subscriptions for literary prints and texts a way of funding historical and epic painting. The cultural practices emerging from this new culture of exhibitions and anthologies energized spectators and readers. Both exhibitions and anthologies excerpted literary texts, transforming them into a series of discontinuous turns which it was for readers and spectators to re-create into continuous wholes. My revaluation of Romantic visual culture counteracts an anti-pictorialist account, which has sought to separate reading from viewing and abstract the mind from the body. In conclusion, I turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge to flesh out this anti-pictorialist account of reading, for the passage I take as my epigraph uses many of the elements discussed in this book.

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Conclusion

‘Nine tenths of the reading of the reading public’ is constituted by ‘reviews, magazines, and news-journals … with a shelf or two of B, E E and ANAS’, argued Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817).¹ In a footnote, Coleridge went on to separate ‘reading’ from ‘amusement’. In the category of ‘reading’ he placed periodicals and anthologies. By contrast, the circulating library does not deserve the name of ‘reading’; in fact, it scarcely deserves the name of ‘amusement’, if ‘amusement’ means ‘to retire a musis’.² In other words, for Coleridge reading should take place in the company of the Muses, because to exercise in ‘silent and solitary meditation’ ‘encreases the power of thinking in long and connected trains’.³ Coleridge’s false etymology defines ‘amusement’ as a movement away from the Muses, whereas etymologically the term denotes a movement into musing,⁴ an intense internal state in which the mind is distracted, absorbed. In The Friend Coleridge argues that reading should engage the reader in ‘a strong effort of the mind’, whereas periodical literature produces instead ‘pleasure without any exertion of thought’, by presenting the reader with ‘short and unconnected sentences … wanting all the cement of thought’.⁵ The circulating library represents the lowest end of the spectrum, a reading practice which Coleridge associates with the camera obscura. Coleridge’s camera obscura stands for bad readers and bad reading. For him, the reading offered by the circulating library prints readymade images onto a tabula rasa, a blank slate denoting the passive minds of inert readers. Locke had used the image of the camera obscura as a figure of the subject’s freedom from innate ideas and freedom of experience. The potential of such freedom had to be channelled through habits, which Locke defined as ‘trains of motion in the animal spirits … which, by often treading, are worn into a smooth ¹ Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 48. ‘ANAS’ abbreviates The Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin (1799), see ibid., n. 1. ² On amusement, see also S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. B. E. Rooke, 2 vols. (London, 1969), i. 14–15. ³ Ibid. i. 20. ⁴ Intensive prefix ad- + musing, rather than ab- + musis (OED). ⁵ Coleridge, The Friend, i. 20. For Coleridge’s prospectus to the 1818 Lectures aiming to guide readers from the professional classes, providing them with principles to counteract the ‘mischief of unconnected and promiscuous reading’, and for an interpretation of Coleridge’s construction of the reader, see L. Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism (Oxford, 2000), 49–90.

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path, and the motion in it becomes easy, and as it were natural’.⁶ Locke’s camera obscura presents sensations as pictures hanging on the walls of the mind. We can think of the exhibition space as an attempt to order such sensations through habits of reading. Yet for Coleridge habit, or what he called ‘blind mechanism’, could not cement associations into ‘acts of thought and attention’; for him, there could be no order without ‘distinct powers, whose function it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal chaos of association’.⁷ The connective function of a mind that needs to be distinguished from the body emerges in another visual analogy: ‘when the nervous system is approaching to the waking state, a sort of under-consciousness blends with our dreams, that in all we imagine as seen or heard, our own self is the ventriloquist, and moves the slides in the magiclanthorn’.⁸ In these two examples the visual analogy depends on the association of unconnected sentences and unconnected perceptions with moving phantasms or slides. Coleridge identified the associationist mind, which receives all its images from without, with a passive subjected reader. What emerges is a concern about the process of perception and abstraction, the interplay of body and mind, and habits of mind untutored and unchecked by training. Left to their ‘poor unassisted senses’, such minds would be too embodied; lacking practice in processes of abstraction, they would be unable to separate intellectual from sensual pleasures, reading from amusement. Consequently, Coleridge’s separation of reading from amusement reveals an anxiety about bodily energy. If in the waking state the impressions of the senses are mediated by an ‘under-consciousness’ and in a well-exerted mind that mediation is the work of the imagination, what worried Coleridge was to see such mediation expropriated by the process of mechanical reproduction and manufactured at the printing office. To shape reading as an exercise in abstraction was to protect it from the embodied readers reached by its wider forms of dissemination and the infectious nature of the crowded public space. ⁶ Locke, Essay, 396, quoted in J. Priestley, ‘A General View of the Doctrine of Association of Ideas’, in Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas; with Essays relating to the subject of it by Joseph Priestley (London, 1790), pp. xxv-xxvi. ⁷ Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 116. ⁸ Coleridge, Appendix C, in The Statesman’s Manual (1816), in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (London, 1972), 80.

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Conclusion

The fear of the unconnected promiscuous reading produced by more widespread means of circulation emerges even more clearly when compared to what Coleridge considered good reading practices. For the boundaries of the reader’s ‘strong working of the mind’ are well defined by Coleridge’s ideal text: ‘it would be scarcely more difficult to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakspeare’. In other words, the text should be so well cemented as to avoid that the reader might play with its words, move them around, thus ‘making the author say something else, or something worse’.⁹ Ideally, the ‘consciousness of the Poet’s Mind must be diffused over that of the Reader or Spectator’,¹⁰ so that the author has ‘the power of so carrying on the Eye of the Reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words—to make him see every thing’.¹¹ In this case too, the consciousness on whose unifying power perception depends is situated outside the reader’s body. Here again the body is reduced to a passive, receptive medium. Consequently, it is by no means clear that the cohesion of a continuous text affords a better exertion of the mind. Even less clear is it that unconnected sentences fail to exercise the mind. Lord Kames, in his Elements of Criticism (1763), had argued that ‘an epic poem, a play, or any story connected in all its parts, may be perused in a shorter time, than a book of maxims or apothegms, of which a quick succession creates both confusion and fatigue’.¹² Textual cohesion protected the author’s words from the reader’s appropriation, but it also absolved the reader from a more active form of participation. How does this story change when viewing and reading are fleshed out differently, when reading is restored to other ‘amusements’ within a continuum of late eighteenth-century cultural practices? Coleridge’s use of visual analogy and his theory of reading illuminate the kinds of reading that his hegemonic place in a retroactive Romantic canon has obscured. Linking viewing and reading practices within the late eighteenth-century network of visual entertainments reveals a culture of reading that both relied on visual memory and fed into a new world of exhibitions and shows. The circulation of text at exhibitions did indeed rely on the promiscuous reading and the dizzying urban world ⁹ Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 23. ¹⁰ Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, i. 86. ¹¹ Coleridge, The Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, ed. K. Coburn, 5 vols. (London, 1957–2002), vol. iii, no. 3290 (Mar. 1808). ¹² Kames, Elements of Criticism, i. 385.

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of attractions of an expanding urban public. ‘Turning readers into spectators’ was not an imposition, which printed on their barren senses a ready-made textual impersonation. Charles Lamb feared ‘to be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen’s portrait!’ For him, ‘instead of realizing an idea’, viewing Shakespeare at the theatre and at the exhibition ‘materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood’. Such ‘strait-lacing actuality’ cramped and disempowered the imagination.¹³ Yet the multiple impersonations of Shakespeare on stage and in print could never fix the text in one particular impersonation. What Lamb feared was their power to activate embodied readers, to engage the readers’ senses as well as their minds. Restored to such a circuit of visual entertainments, reading would not necessarily be an abstract activity pursued in retirement, recollected in tranquillity, supported ab extra by the consciousness of the Poet’s mind. In these new associationist arenas it was left to the spectators’ faculties to flesh out unconnected sentences and unconnected perceptions by drawing on sensations, memories, and other media. The participation of empowered spectators was essential to ‘transmit the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium’. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery posited active spectators and exploited their desire for dynamic spectacles, counting on the blurring effects of their embodied vision and visual memory. ¹³ Lamb to Barron Fields, 4 Oct. 1827, in Letters, ed. Lucas, iii. 394, and Lamb, ‘On the tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, in Works, i. 98–9; for an analysis of Lamb’s separation of reading from viewing, see my ‘ ‘‘The Vantage-Ground of Abstraction’’: Charles Lamb on Reading, Visuality, and the Body’, in A. Braida and G. Pieri (eds.), Image and Word: Reflections of Art and Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, 2003), 151–75.


Appendix: ‘List of Pictures in the Milton Gallery’, The Times, 28 May 1799 PAR A D I S E LOS T 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Satan risen from the Flood, Beelzebub rising—From Book I, verse 221. Satan calling up his Legions—Verse 229. Satan haranguing his Host—Verse 663. Figures from a simile in allusion to the contracted form of the Spirits assembled in the new-raised Hall of Pandæmonium—Verse 781. Satan encount’ring Death, Sin interposing—Book II. Verse 722. The Birth of Sin—Verse 752. Sin pursued by Death—Verse 787. Lapland Orgies; the Hell-hounds round Sin—Verse 662. Satan’s ascent from Hell—Verse 927. A Gryphon pursuing an Arimaspian. A comparison of Satan’s exertions to force his way through the realm of Chaos—Verse 943. Satan bursts from Chaos—Verse 1010. Ulysses between Scylla and Charybdis. An exemplification of Satan streightened in his passage to light—Verse 1019. Adam and Eve first discovered by Satan—Book IV. Verse 325. Satan surprised at the ear of Eve, starting from the touch of Ithuriel’s Spear—Verse 810. Satan discovering his Fate in the scale aloft, flying from Gabriel and the Angelic Squadron—Verse 985. The Dream of Eve, fancying to have tasted the Fruit from the Tree of interdicted Knowledge—Book V. Verse 55. The creation of Eve, as related by Adam—Book VIII. Verse 461. Eve, new created, led to Adam—Verse 484. Eve at the Forbidden Tree—Book IX. Verse 780. Adam, resolved to share the fate of Eve; the Guardian Angels leaving the Garden—Verse 953.

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Appendix: ‘Pictures in the Milton Gallery’

21. Eve, after the Sentence and departure of the Judge, despairing, supported by Adam—Book X. Verse 224. 22. Death and Sin bridging the ‘waste’ of Chaos, and met by Satan on his return from Earth—Verse 447. 23. Satan discovered on his Throne, after his return from Earth—Verse 447. 24. The Vision of the Lazar-house—Book XI. Verse 477. 25. The Vision of the Deluge—Verse 742. 26. The Vision of Noah—Verse 861. 27. The Dismission of Adam and Eve from Paradise—Book XII. Verse 637.

PA R A D I S E R E G A I N E D 28. Jesus on the Pinnacle of the Temple—Book IV. Verse 549.

H Y M N O N T H E N AT I V I T Y 29. Mary and Jesus. The ruin of Paganism—Stanza 19.

L’ A L L E G RO 30. Faery Mab. 31. The Frier’s Lanthorn. 32. The Lubbar Fiend—Verse 101.

I L PE N S I E RO S O 33. Silence—Verse 78. 34. Chremhild meditating revenge over the Sword of Sigfrid—Verse 109. 35. The Palace and the Rout of Comus; the Lady set in the enchanted Chair, to whom he offered his Glass; the Brothers, rushing in with swords drawn, wrest the Glass out of his hand; his Rout flying. 36. Orgies of Cotytto. Baptae preparing a Philtrum—Verse 124.

Appendix: ‘Pictures in the Milton Gallery’ LYC ID AS 37. Solitude; Twilight—Verse 26–8.

38. Milton, as a Boy, with his Mother. 39. Milton, when a Youth. 40. Milton dictating to his Daughter.

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Index Numbers in bold italics refer to the sequence in the plate section. abridgement 59, 68, 69, 73, 77, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 127, 136 Adam as Gladiator 184 as Hercules 210 as Montecavallo Horse Tamer 209–10 and Eve 93–4, 184–5, 197, 202–3, 208–14 emasculated 199 adaptation 32–3, 59, 71, 76, 79, 100, 106, 111, 126–8, 139, 153, 186, 200 Addison, Joseph 7, 87, 144, 151, 153 Aikin, John 143, 150, 160 Algarotti, Francesco 60 Alison, Archibald 65 Allegory 69, 86, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 150, 151, 162–5, 169–71, 175–6, 178–9, 183, 202 of painting 38, 207 Plato’s 205–6 between rhetoric and theology 151–4 Altick, Richard 10, 105 Analytical Review 5, 59, 66, 97, 125, 181–2 anamorphosis 150, 158, 159, 175, 178–9 Andrews, Lew 127–8 angels 91, 92–5, 101, 102, 128, 134, 138, 139, 153–5, 207, 210 Archangel Raphael 79, 92, 94, 96, 128, 199, 212 Archangel Michael 94, 95, 96, 139 see also Satan Angerstein, John Julius 57 anthology 58, 73, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 88, 127, 131, 136, 186, 195–6, 198 Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 181–2

anti-pictorialism 4–5, 161, 215 Ariosto, Ludovico 203 Aristotle 7, 97, 106–7 see also enargeia art of memory 43, 65, 99 see also rhetoric associationism 65, 121–6, 133, 135, 141 Aumont, Jacques 140 Bahar, Saba 197, 211 Banks, Thomas 26, 36–7, 53, 56 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 69, 71, 177 Barker, Robert 120 Barrell, John 15, 20, 43, 175 Barry, James 16, 66, 130, 161, 181–2, 185, 208 Bartolozzi, Francesco 43–4, 47, 127n Illustrations to John Milton’s Paradise Lost 22–3 beauty 111, 194–7, 200, 207, 213 Becker, Christoph 189n Bell, John 28, 33, 34, 36, 71, 75, 76 Benson, William 142, 156–7 Bentley, Richard 14, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93, 96 Bergson, Henri 132 Berry, Mary 37n, 51, 189 Bible 101, 153, 159, 170, 173, 178, 183, 202 see also religion Blair, Hugh 98, 151 Blake, William 5, 15, 47, 135, 157, 172, 179–81 The Book of Urizen 180 Descriptive Catalogue 180–1 Europe 179–80 Illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts 135, 180 Bloom, Harold 4–5 Bodmer, Johann Jacob 43, 108, 144–5, 154. body 121, 124, 130, 150, 174, 180, 184, 188, 195, 204, 207, 212

250 body (cont.) and mind 122, 125, 145, 147, 154–6, 167, 185, 193–4, 196, 203, 207. see also substance, matter book 65, 101, 113, 114, 135–6, 198 and/as gallery 24–5, 33–4, 113 illustrated 6, 49, 52, 75, 128, 146, 149 Bourdieu, Pierre 11, 12, 13, 22, 23, 66 field of art 31, 53, 62 cultural capital 62, 63, 65 habitus 63 Bowyer, Robert 40 see also Historic Gallery Boydell, John 17–19, 23–5, 33, 37, 40, 46, 49, 50, 52 compared to the Medici 19 compared to Sir Thomas Gresham 19 conspicuous consumption 24, 39–40 and Gillray 37–8, 52 illustrated Milton 48–50, 172, 175, 182–3, 184 model of civic virtue 23 move to Pall Mall 26 public sphere 21 stock 32–3 as talent scout 40 on tourism 20, 25 see also Shakspeare Gallery Boyle, Robert 155 British School, see English School Bunbury, Henry 42, 74, 130 Burke, Edmund 18, 161 and French Revolution 174, 176 and gender 194–7, 202, 204, 207–8, 210, 211, 213 on kingship 176 Lessing and 108–9 on Paradise Lost 108–9, 176 and Reynolds 181 on the sublime 150, 176 Burney, Edward 119 camera obscura 123–4, 215–17 cannibalism 167, 169–71 canon 28–9, 64, 68, 70–6, 183 at Royal Academy exhibitions 62 cosmopolitan 52, 61 English/British 17, 31, 62, 70–1

Index of painters 30, 42, 50, 74 of pictures 57 Caractacus 31, 68–9 caricature 37–8, 178–9, 183, 188 Carracci 53, 203n Cartwright, John 54 Castello, Bernardo 202–3n Illustrations to T. Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata 20–1 Castle, Terry 164 catalogues 66, 67, 68, 78 titles 68, 85, 92, 103, 165 references 69, 70 quotations 68, 69, 72, 84 Caylus, A. C. P. Comte de 106–7, 109, 112 celebrity 31, 35, 36, 42, 72 Chandler, James 10 Chapel of Revealed Religion, Windsor Castle 178 Chapone, Hester 191 Chaucer, Geoffrey 70, 75, 88, 127 circus 56 civic humanism 18, 20, 23, 43, 44, 45 civil war 172–3 see also regicide, Revolution Clayton, Tim 32 Coleridge, S. T. 152, 160–1, 165, 168–70, 176, 215–18 Collins, William 75 commerce 23, 27, 28–9, 32–3, 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 45, 52, 54, 66 vs monopoly 22 shop as gallery or museum 22, 36 as a system of patronage 27 upward mobility 26 commonplaces, see rhetoric Copley, John Singleton 24 copyright 28, 75 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da 143, 180, 207, 209 Cosway, Maria 72, 73, 74, 75, 189, 203 Cosway, Richard 68, 203 Cowper, William 14, 46, 47, 48, 49, 71, 82, 96–7, 172, 174–5 Crabbe, George 73 Craciun, Adriana 208 Crary, Jonathan 10–11, 121 Cunningham, Allan 57 Dante 52 Darwin, Erasmus 121–2, 147, 192

Index David, Jacques-Louis 159–60, 181 Death in pictures 142–3, 150, 157–8, 161, 174–5 Coleridge on Milton’s Death 160–1 as emblem 150 and Hamlet’s ghost 143, 175 as Hercules 150, 156 the intermediate state of the dead 155–8 Pitt as 179 wearing the likeness of a kingly crown 143, 173–4 see also anamorphosis de Bolla, Peter 63 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 132 Dennis, John 153 denotation 72, 179 see also reference Desenfans, Noel 56 Dias, Rosie 21, 41 dinners 18, 32, 51 discontinuity 77, 80, 81, 128, 131, 133, 138, 166 see also montage, reading Dissenters 51, 144, 148, 172–3 see also Joseph Johnson, religion, William Roscoe, Unitarianism Dodsley, Robert 71, 76 Dryden, John 31, 75, 98, 127 Dubos, Jean-Baptiste 7, 16 du Fresnoy, Charles-Alphonse 61, 97, 166 During, Simon 10 Dutton, Thomas 50 Dyer, George 51, 104 Edgeworth, Maria 56, 65 editing 73, 82, 83, 90, 92–3, 97, 133, 145, 165, 179, 182–3 see also abridgement, montage Edwards, Richard 180 Eidophusikon 116–18 Eisenstein, Sergei 1–5, 9–10, 14, 131–4, 137, 140–1 ekphrasis 29, 71–2, 161–2, 190 Eliot, T. S. 3–4 emblems 23, 104, 130, 150, 159, 161, 177 Empson, William 145, 151 enargeia 7, 34, 75, 92, 103, 106–8, 144, 151, 154, 160, 162, 171, 177

251 Encyclopédie 112 Enfield, William 78 English School 17, 19, 30, 39, 57, 74 engraving, see prints epic 92, 96–9, 107, 112–13, 116, 131, 148, 151, 206, 215, 218 epigraphs 45, 62, 66 eucharist 145, 147, 152, 164, 167–71 extra-illustration 34, 35, 135 Eve in pictures 184 as Venus 184, 195, 203, 212–13 muscular 207, 211–12 serpentine 207–9 and Satan 204–7 Farington, Joseph 46, 50–1, 54, 56, 181, 183, 187, 210 femininity, see beauty, Eve Ferguson, Frances 211–13 Flaxman, John 73, 159 Fordyce, James 198 Fox, Charles James 182 Fuseli, Henry 29, 32, 100 and associationism 65 and Boydell 48–9 as British artist 56–7 and caricatural sublime 56, 179 and commerce 44–5, 54 and epic 92, 96–9 and Michelangelo 43, 134 professorship of painting 45, 54–5, 144, 181–2 Roman Album 43, 65, 131, 138n in Rome 6, 43 and Royal Academy 41–2, 43, 45, 54–5, 144 and Reynolds 41–2 and Shakespeare 131 Shakespeare Memorial and Sistine Chapel 43, 65, 131 and women 51, 196 Aphorisms 196, 204, 207, 208, 209 The Dunciad of Painting 43–4 Lectures 61, 64, 92, 107, 113 P (see also under Milton Gallery): The Cave of Spleen 56 The Death of Beaufort 41–2 The Death of Cleopatra 41 Hamlet’s Ghost 143, 174 The night-mare 41, 74, 168, 182

252 Fuseli, Henry (cont.) Prince Arthur’s Dream 74–5 Queen Catherine’s vision from Shakespear’s Hen. 8th , act 5 th 41, 74 Queen Katharine’s Dream 70, 74, 158 Satan starting from Ithuriel’s Lance 134, 177, 12 The Shepherd’s Dream (also known as ‘The Belated Peasant’) 84, 140–1, 158, 163, 165, 3 Titania and Bottom 74, 84, 130, 158 The Witches 41–2, 179 see also Milton Gallery, Shakspeare Gallery, Poets’ Gallery Gainsborough, Thomas 71, 72, 73, 74 galleries 52, 53–4, 112–13 of the ancient nude 185, 187 of empowered women 203–4 Farnese 53, 112 Houghton 23–4, 113 Rubens’ Maria de Medici gallery at Palays Royal 112, 180 Vatican 53 Vienna 25, 113 mental gallery 74, 106, 124–5, 185–6 see also literary galleries, Poets’ Gallery, Historic Gallery, Shakespeare Gallery Galperin, William 120 Garrick, David 28, 35, 36, 100–1 Gillray, James 37, 38, 39, 114, 160, 178–80 Godwin, William 181, 196 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 121–3, 134 Goldsmith, Oliver 71 Gordon Riots 177 see also Revolution Grand Style 13, 30, 38, 179 Grandi, Sebastiano 54 Granger, James 34 grangerizing, see extra-illustration Gray, Thomas 72, 73, 75 Gregory, John 191 Gregory, Revd Thomas 71, 73 Gucht, G. van der, see Bernardo Castello

Index Habermas, Jürgen 21, 23, 28 Hamilton, William 100, 127, 190, 212–13 see also Francesco Bartolozzi Hamilton, Sir William 75, 118 Handel, Friedrich 200 Hanmer, Sir Thomas 27, 36 Hart, Emma, Lady Hamilton 192 Hartley, David 124–5, 156 Haughton, Moses 52, 15 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 102–3 Hayley, William 48, 49, 172, 175, 183 Hazlitt, William 73, 124–5 Heinecken, C. H. von 53–4 Highmore, Joseph 32–3 Hill, Thomas 50 Historic Gallery 6, 25, 26, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 127 and extra-illustration or Grangerising 34 and print market 25, 26, 36 and Royal Academy 39, 40, 42 historical painting 17, 19, 20, 22, 27, 30–2, 36, 39, 42, 48, 61–2, 69, 98, 100, 116, 119, 175 Herder, Johann Gottfried 204 Hogarth, William 16–17, 32, 100, 129, 130, 134, 161 The Battle of Pictures 43 Holbein, Hans 115 Homer 53, 64, 96–8, 106–7, 110–12, 116, 123, 150, 159 Hoock, Holger 18, 20, 21, 51, 177 Hooper, William 115–16 Horace 88, 158–9 Human 185, 207 vs animal 204 horizontal posture 205 serpentine 207–9 vertical posture 204–6 Adam as prototype 204 Eve as prototype 206–7 see also Adam, angels, Eve, Satan Hume, David 124–5, 153 Hume’s History of England 6, 8, 26, 34, 80, 127 Hume, Patrick 168–9 Huygens, Christiaan 114 illusion 30, 150–1, 166, 171 see also perception, vision

Index imagination 108, 117–18, 122, 124, 131, 142, 150, 153, 160–1, 184, 193, 202, 203 imaginary treason 175–6, 179 and Eucharist 145 Fuseli’s diseased i. 167–8 readers’ 59–60, 77–8 spectators’ 186 immediacy 64, 106, 108, 119, 120, 123 see also ekphrasis, media indeterminacy 144, 150, 175–6, 178, 181, 201 intermediality 3, 9, 10, 35, 63, 73, 76 Iser, Wolfgang 11, 59, 81, 83, 89, 90, 96, 105 Jago, Richard 71, 73 Jerningham, Edward 71, 99–101 Johnson, Joseph 13, 46, 49, 51, 121, 125, 144, 146, 152, 172, 173, 174, 177, 182, 186 Johnson, Samuel 49, 60, 186 Kames, Henry Home Lord 89, 100, 218 Kant, Immanuel 11, 12, 23, 62, 63 Kauffman, Angelica 32, 43–4, 68–9, 75, 148–9, 203 Kircher, Athanasius 115 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 148–9 Kneller, Sir Godfrey 34 Knowles, John 78n, 147n, 196, 210, 213 Knox, Vicesimus 77 Lamb, Charles 29, 30, 96, 219 Lamotte, Charles 106 Laocoön 122–3, 132–4, 188–9 see also Lessing Lapland 164, 166, 168–9 Lardner, Nathaniel 170 Le Bossu, René 97 Leicester, Sir John Fleming 56–7 Lely, Sir Peter 34 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 9, 14, 98, 107–12, 123, 129, 131–2, 134, 137, 156, 159 Lindsay, Theophilus 172 literary galleries 6 and Royal Academy 22, 37, 38, 61

253 see also Historic Gallery, Milton Gallery, Poets’ Gallery, Shakspeare Gallery literature 31 and painting 59, 60, 61, 107, 111, 113 and visual entertainments 29, 35, 75, 79, 215–19 see also reading littleness 210–11 Lloft, Capel 79 Locke, John 124–5, 153–5, 216–17 see also associationism Loutherbourg, Philippe-Jacques de 56, 116–18, 178 Macklin, Thomas 19, 36, 46 see also Poets’ Gallery Madan, Revd Spencer 172 magic lantern 80, 114–16, 217 Marie Antoinette 208 Marino, Giambattista 203 masculinity 188, 206, 214 see also Adam, Satan matter and spirit 145, 153–6, 158–60, 165, 174, 206–7 see also body and mind, substance Mechel, Chrétien de 25, 67, 113 media 4–5, 13, 64, 97, 107, 112, 116, 126, 150–1 see also book, intermediality, immediacy, painting, pictures, prints Medina, J. B. 128, 161 Mee, Jon 7, 180 Meisel, Martin 80, 111 Mendelssohn, Moses 109–10, 112, 123 metaphor 52–3, 101, 118, 144–5, 151–3, 155, 161, 179 metonymy 77–8, 103, 107, 113, 133, 198 Metropolitan Museum 163 Michelangelo 17, 30, 61, 119, 158, 180, 184, 196, 207, 209 Sistine Chapel 131, 134, 138–9 Milton, John 53, 97, 107, 173, 199 bogeyman 198 Prose Works 173–4, 192 see also Milton Gallery, Adam, Death, Eve, Paradise Lost, Satan, Sin Milton Gallery advertising 50–1

254 Milton Gallery (cont.) catalogue 77, 78–96, 136 numbers 46–8, 172 prospectus 46–7, 53, 78–80, 81, 151, 186, 201–3, 213 similes 84–5, 97 and Boydell Shakspeare Gallery 48–50, 84 and women 51, chapter 5 P: omitted pictures 186, 201–2, 210 S risen from the Flood, B rising (MG 1) 204, 1 S calling up his Legions (MG 2) 90, 119, 136, 2 S haranguing his Host (MG 3) 90, 119, 136 Figures from a simile in allusion to the contracted form of the Spirits assembled in the new raised Hall of P… (MG 4) 84–5, 140, 141, 158, 163, 165 S encount’ring D, S interposing (MG 5) 47, 80, 86, 143–4, 147–9, 157, 159, 162, 165, 167, 174–5, 178, 180, 211, 4 The Birth of S (MG 6) 157, 160, 162, 165, 5 S pursued by D (MG 7) 86, 143, 150, 157, 160, 162, 165, 6 L O, the Hell-hounds round S (MG 8) 85–6, 157, 162–9, 7 A G pursuing an A… (MG 10) 86–7 S bursts from C (MG 11) 47, 89, 103, 138, 149, 157, 180, 8 U between S and C… (MG 12) 87, 138, 186, 9 A and E first discovered by S (MG 13) 47, 90, 103, 138, 186, 202, 204, 10, 11 S surprised at the ear of E, starting from the touch of I Spear (MG 14) 57, 90, 91, 134, 138, 139, 167, 202, 204

Index S discovering his fate in the Scale aloft, flying from G and the Angelic Squadron (MG 15) 91 The Dream of E, fancying to have tasted the Fruit from the Tree of interdicted Knowledge… (MG 16) 92, 93, 139, 149, 205, 211, 13 The creation of E, as related by A (MG 17) 57n, 93, 139, 146–7, 205, 207, 212, 14 E, new created, led to A (MG 18) 93, 207, 212 E at the forbidden Tree (MG 19) 93–4, 207 A resolved to share the fate of E; the Guardian Angels leaving the Garden (MG 20) 94, 208 E, after the Sentence and departure of the Judge, despairing, supported by A (MG 21) 94, 209, 15 D and S bridging the ‘waste’ of C, and met by S on his return from Earth (MG 22) 95 S discovered on his Throne, after his return from Earth (MG 23) 95 The Vision of the Lazar-house (MG 24) 95, 103, 140, 157, 16 The Vision of the Deluge (MG 25) 57n, 95, 140, 141, 209, 17 The Vision of Noah (MG 26) 95, 140 The dismission of A and E from Paradise (MG 27) 95–6, 140, 209, 18 The Frier’s Lanthorn (MG 31) 88 C meditating revenge over the Sword of S (MG 34) 88 S first address to E (MG 42) 56, 213, 19 see also Death, Paradise Lost, Satan, Sin Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti, Comte de 173 mirror scenes 29, 139, 190, 192n, 196, 201, 205, 210, 212 Eve starting from herself in the water 47, 80, 201–2, 211 montage 1–4, 9–10, 14, 78, 90, 115–16, 123, 131–4, 137–41, 166, 185

Index Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de 16 Monthly Magazine 142–3, 161 More, Hannah 191 movement 105, 111, 114–17, 119–23, 125, 129–35, 137–40, 149, 157, 199, 204–5 narrative continuous 112, 127–8, 135 polyscenic and monoscenic 127–8 diegesis 97 diegetic cohesion 91 diegetic horizon 141, 162–3 turn of action 111, 129, 205 visual 106, 109–11, 112–13, 115–16, 120, 127–31, 133, 136–7, 137–41, 157–60, 165–7, 185–6, 188, 201–11 see also time National Gallery 57 Newlyn, Lucy 175, 197, 199 Newton, Isaac 121 Newton, Thomas 81, 82, 87, 154, 200, 203 Nicol, John 56, 175 Niebelungenlied 88 Northcote, James 24, 29, 30, 39, 100, 130 Novelist’s Magazine 75–6 obscurity 142–3, 146, 149–50, 171, 176, 181 see also indeterminacy, sublime ocular spectra, or after-images 122 see also vision Old Masters 24, 30, 41, 203 see also Correggio, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Giulio Romano ownership 25, 27, 28 Opie, John 29 Orleans Gallery 209n painting caricaturized 37, 55–6 and Eidophusikon 116 limits of 9, 35, 106–7, 116, 130, 132, 150–1, 161, 165 and panorama 120 at Vauxhall Gardens 35 and visual entertainments 35 see also historical painting, pictures

255 Paley, Morton 169, 178 Pall Mall 21, 26, 36, 50, 146, 209n Panorama 29, 120 Paradise Lost 83, 84, 99, 103, 107, 111, 198 enjambement 2–4, 82–3, 157 Hell 84–6 at the Eidophusikon 117–19 teleology 90–6 war in heaven 153–4 see also Adam, angels, Death, Eve, Milton Gallery, Satan patronage 26, 27, 31–2, 39–40, 61, 180 aristocratic 17, 27, 53–4 commercial 18–29, 39 French 18 Fuseli and 43, 46, 66, 143–4, Royal 22, 26, 180 perception 63, 64, 108–10, 114, 122–6, 133, 150–1, 154–6, 167, 205 perfectibility in Eden 185, 207 personification 143, 151–3, 156 pictures evoking words 45, 58–61 literary 5–6, 8, 62, 64–104, mirroring viewers 29 moving pictures 106 see also adaptation, galleries, Historic Gallery, Milton Gallery, Poets’ Gallery, Shakspeare Gallery Pitt, William the Younger 179 Plateau, Joseph 121 Plato 45–6, 66, 148–9, 194, 205–7 Pliny the elder 73, 88 Poets’ Gallery 6, 59, 70–7, 158, 184 anthologization 73, 75, 127 and aristocratic collections 26 and Bell’s British Poets 75–6 and canonization 70–1, 74 catalogue 67, 70–2 and commerce 19–20, 36 ekphrasis 71–2 Fuseli and 59–60, 70, 72, 74–5 Royal Academicians’ pictures at 38–9 and Royal Academy exhibitions 39, 41 recognition 72–3 rustic poetry 73–4 politics 23, 49, 143, 144, 171, 182, 183, 208

256 politics (cont.) of the aesthetic 145, 161, 176–9, 180–1, 181–2 see also civil war, Dissenters, Gordon Riots, regicide, Revolution Pond, Arthur 34 Pope, Alexander 36, 43, 44, 56, 59 portraits 5, 12, 29, 30, 32, 36, 72, 74, 152, 171, 179, 203 Poussin, Nicolas 41 pregnant moment, see time Price, Leah 73, 77 Price, Revd Richard 173 Priestley, Joseph 15, 82, 121, 125, 148, 151–6, 167, 170–4, 180 prints 28, 32–3, 35, 36, 38, 41, 43, 47, 52, 64, 66, 70–1, 74–6, 80, 113, 135–6, 202–3 market 29, 32, 34, 39, 42–6, 47, 49, 75 exhibitions as advertising for 41, 46 public sphere 18, 20–3, 28, 52, 54, 66, 163, 181, 185, 194, 208, 215 Pygmalion 122, 190 Racine, Jean 106 Rajan, Balachandra 145 Ramberg, Johann Heinrich 73 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 16, 17, 30, 180 Rapin, Paul de 34, 68 reading 11–13, 77 cover to cover 198 discontinuous 77–8, 80–3, 89, 96, 99, 186 skim-reading 69 skip-reading 69 reading for the plot 69 and viewing 58, 61, 64–70, 70–3, 75, 77, 81, 100, 106, 113–14, 126, 186 reading communities 59, 62, 74, 87–9, 145, 146, 170, 199 women readers 211 Reeves, John 183 reference 63, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72–3, 88, 99, 143, 150, 164, 165, 169, 175, 177–9, 187, 198, 206 referential productivity 153 unaccountability of 176 regicide 49, 143, 172, 173, 174–7, 178–80, 182

Index religion 17, 118, 144–5, 146–7, 148, 152, 155–6, 164, 167, 169–71, 172–3, 177, 178, 201–2, 207, 212 see also angels, Bible, Eucharist, Trinity, Unitarianism reproduction 25, 32, 47, 57, 58, 113 see also prints Revolution 46, 171–3, 175–6, 177, 178, 179 rewriting, see adaptation Reynolds, Sir Joshua 18, 29, 34, 60, 61, 62, 63, 71, 73, 97, 166, 180n, 181, 184, 201 and literary galleries 38, 72, 73, 74, 75, 100, 212 Annotations to du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica 97–8, 166 Discourses 20, 60–2, 181, 184, 201 The Idler 60 P: The Cottagers 38, 72, 74 Death of Cardinal Beaufort 41–2, 100 Death of Dido 41 The Holy Family 38 Macbeth and the Witches 41 The Vestal 38, 71–2 see also Fuseli Rhetoric 62, 113, 176–7 commonplaces 73, 88, 99, 104 dispositio 65, 67, 77, 103, 162, 165 elocutio 65, 69, 79, 83, 99 inventio 61, 62, 65, 67, 69, 162, 164 homoteleuton 89–90 see also enargeia, metaphor Richardson, Jonathan 19, 53, 111, 113 Richardson, Samuel 33 Rolli, Paolo 144 Roman, Cynthia 26, 34 Romano, Giulio 203 Romanticism 4–5, 10–11, 13, 123, 199, 215–19 Romney, George 29, 128–9 Roscoe, William 43, 44, 45, 51, 53, 103, 144, 146, 147 Ross, Trevor 28 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 43–4, 194 Roveray, F. J. du 52, 150, 211–13 Royal Academy 5–6, 8, 18, 19 and commerce 31 dinners 18, 51 diploma paintings 31–2

Index exhibitions 29, 32, 61, 62, 177 and literary galleries 37–9 nudes at 187 literature at 29, 31, 61, 103 motto 37 premiums 31 at Somerset House 21, 37, 57, 67 Rubens, Peter Paul 34, 180, 207, 209, 213 Rumrich, John 145 Satan 84, 86, 117–18, 147–9, 151, 157, 160, 161, 167, 172, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182–3, 184–5, 187–9, 197, 202, 205–6, 211–13 as Ulysses 97 as angel 148–9 as Apollo 148, 184, 204 as Cupid 149, 206 as Gladiator 149, 184, 186 as Jupiter 164 Chancellor Thurlow as 179 deconstructed by Wakefield 153 Saxl, Fritz 148 Schiff, Gert 8, 163 Shaffer, Elinor 27, 53 Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of) 64, 111, 129, 134, 209 Shakespeare, William 16–17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35–6, 42, 43, 52, 53, 62, 65, 101 Antony and Cleopatra 26 As You Like It 40, 127 Coriolanus 26, 31 Hamlet 41, 51, 143, 175 Henry VIII 41, 70, 74, 158 King Lear 29, 40, 130, 131, 168 Macbeth 38, 41, 42, 131, 179 Midsummer Night’s Dream 74, 84, 130, 158 Othello 30 Richard III 39–40, 130 Romeo and Juliet 219 The Tempest 128–9, 131 Twefth Night 131 Winter’s Tale 190n Shakspeare Gallery 6, 17, 32, 33, 62, 127–9, 130, 190n and anthologization 127 canon 74 and celebrity 30

257 commerce 22, 28 idea 32 Fuseli’s pictures 74, 84, 130–1, 143, 158 lottery 30, 46n as museum 36–7 painters 29–30 paper gallery 26–7 poems on 99–100 prints scheme 130 as rational entertaimment 79 and Royal Academy 18–19, 21, 31 and theatre 35–6, 100 titles and entries 70 visual narrative 128–30 Shakespeare Jubilee 28, 35, 100 Sharp, William 48, 172 Shenstone, William 71, 73 Shepherd, William 51, 101 simile 82, 89, 97–8, 152, 162, 164, 167, 179 Homer’s 110 pictures inspired by 84–7, 140–1, 158, 163 Sin 158–60, 162–3, 164, 202 Queen Charlotte as 179 as Minerva 164 Smirke, Robert 33, 40, 182 Smith, Adam 7, 20, 253 Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce 31 Solkin, David 9, 20–1, 57 Somervile, William 71, 72, 73 spectators 5, 7–8, 41, 89, 100, 109–10, 126, 136, 139–40, 186 and spectacle 185, 187–92, 201 Spence, Sir Joseph 190–1, 195, Spenser, Edmund 70, 74, 75, 167, 203 Stafford, Barbara 10 statues 27, 122–3, 137, 146, 180, 184–5, 187, 189–96, 209, 213 see also Death, Laocoon, Satan and Paradise Lost for Apollo, Gladiator, Hercules, Pygmalion sublime 15, 42, 43, 54, 79, 86, 108, 117–18, 131, 150–1, 176–8, 181, 183, 189, 194, 211–12 caricatura-sublime 56, 179 female sublime 197, 199, 206, 212–13 male sublime 184, 196–7 subscription 17, 27, 32, 41

258 substance 151–5 transubstantiation 152, 154 see also body and mind, matter and spirit Sulzer, J. G. 113 supernatural 41–2, 79, 89, 92, 137, 144, 212 Swift, Jonathan 43 Tasso, Torquato 75, 202–3 Taylor, Barbara 196, 212 Taylor, John 50 Taylor, Thomas 205–7 textual transmission 14, 64–104, 126–41, 186 see also editing theatre 35, 36, 100–1 Theobald, Lewis 36 Thomson, James 38, 73, 75 Thornhill, James 32 Time 109, 116 allegory of 135–6, 157 coexistence 109 instants 129 perception of 109–10, 121, 124 points of 61, 69–70, 81, 111–12, 116, 119, 120, 127, 128, 130, 133, 134, 137, 157, 162, 167, 169, 177, 186, 202, 205 pregnant moment 3, 35, 61, 65, 77, 83, 86, 96, 104, 106, 110–11, 123, 128, 130–1, 133 present tense 69, 89, 103 sequence 109, 119, 124, 128, 132, 134–5, 137, 139, 149, 157, 162–3, 167–8, 185–6, 206, 211 simultaneity 110, 128 succession 109, 116 see also narrative, vision Toland, John 145, 179 Tom Jones 33, 38 Tonson, Jacob 28, 76 tourism 20, 25 Tresham, Henry 55, 182 Trinity 15, 145, 147, 152, 155, 161, 164, 167, 170–1 Tristram Shandy 142 True Briton 56, 182 Unitarianism 51, 144–7, 151–3, 169–71

Index Vergil 68, 87, 98, 106, 112, 123, 132, 134, 137, 205–6 vision 114, 120, 122, 125, 129, 130, 133, 134, 139–41, 148, 158, 164, 180, 192 inner 107 persistence of vision 121, 131, 133 temporality of 110, 122 visual regime 193, 194, 201 see also movement, narrative, perception visual technologies see Camera Obscura, Eidophusikon, Magic Lantern, Panorama, Theatre Van Dyck, Anton 34, 75 Vauxhall Gardens 35 Vertue, George 34 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 144, 164 Wakefield, Gilbert 153 Walsh, Marcus 85, 86, 91, 92 Wang, Orrin 10 Warton, Joseph 59–60 Waterfield, Giles 57, 67, 138 Weinglass, David 8, 52n, 212n Wesley, John 14, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89 West, Benjamin 29, 32, 34, 55, 130, 178 and literary galleries 38–9, 41, 130 Death on the Pale Horse 178 Westall, Richard 50, 183 Wheatley, Francis 130 Williams, John (alias Anthony Pasquin) 67 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 16, 190, 194, 196 witchcraft 157, 162–70, 181 Witherington, William 57 Wittreich, Joseph Anthony 199 Wollstonecraft, Mary 15, 47, 78, 186, 201–14 on anatomy and statuary 193–4 vs Burke 194, 207, 210–11 on Eve 186, 197, 199, 200–4, 208 and Fuseli’s prospectus 186, 201–3 Menage-à-trois 181–2 on Milton 192, 196–202, 207 on Mind and Body 196 and Plato 205–7

Index Wood, Gillen d’Arcy 35, 101, 120 Wright, Joseph: Mrs Wright modelling a head in wax 177 Wright, Joseph, of Derby 129 Young, Edward 72, 135

259 Zeno 106, 110, 132 Zeuxis 88, 194 Zoffany, Johann 57 Zwingli, Ulrich 144, 145

. Henry Fuseli, S risen from the Flood, B rising, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, S calling up his Legions, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, The Shepherd’s Dream, oil on canvas

. Henry Fuseli, S encount’ring D, S interposing, oil on canvas, copy of MG 

. Henry Fuseli, The Birth of S, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, S pursued by D, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, L O, the Hell-hounds round S, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, S bursts from C, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli,U between SCYLLA and C, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, A and E first discovered by S, oil on canvas, fragment of MG 

. Henry Fuseli, Adam and Eve first discovered by Satan, pen and sepia on pencil, sketch of MG 

. Henry Fuseli, Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel’s Lance, oil on canvas

. Henry Fuseli, The Dream of E, fancying to have tasted the Fruit from the Tree of interdicted Knowledge, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, The creation of E, as related by A, oil on canvas, MG 

. Moses Haughton after Henry Fuseli, A resolved to share the fate of E; the Guardian Angels leaving the Garden, mezzotint and spirit-ground aquatint on wove paper after MG 

. Henry Fuseli, The Vision of the Lazar-house, pencil and sepia sketch towards MG 

. Henry Fuseli, The Vision of the Deluge, oil on canvas, MG 

. Henry Fuseli, The dismission of A and E from Paradise, oil on canvas, copy of MG 

.Henry Fuseli, S first Address to E, oil on canvas MG 

–. G. van der Gucht after Bernardo Castello, illustrations to T. Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (London: Tonson, ), cantos  and , Bodleian Library, sig. GG  Art Subt.

–. Francesco Bartolozzi after William Hamilton, illustrations to J. Milton, Paradise Lost (London: du Roveray, ), books  and , Bodleian Library, sig. Vet. A6 d.

Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators'

Turning Life into Fiction

Turning Life into Fiction

Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools

Usability: Turning Technologies Into Tools

Milton

Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity

Rolling Thunder - Turning Junk Into Automobile Weaponry

Getting to resolution: turning conflict into collaboration

Remarkable Changes: Turning Life's Challenges into Opportunities

Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts into Books

Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts into Books

Alchemy for Managers: Turning experience into achievement

Turning the Mind into an Ally

Turning Advantage into Victory in Chess

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

Turning Advantage into Victory in Chess

Modern Phytomedicine: Turning Medicinal Plants into Drugs

Modern Phytomedicine - Turning Medicinal Plants into Drugs

Shooting Gallery

Turning

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Rogue's Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Milton Inglorious

milton-paradiselost

Milton Inglorious

Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators'

Turning Life into Fiction

Turning Life into Fiction

Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools

Usability: Turning Technologies Into Tools

Milton

Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity

Rolling Thunder - Turning Junk Into Automobile Weaponry

Getting to resolution: turning conflict into collaboration

Remarkable Changes: Turning Life's Challenges into Opportunities

Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts into Books

Writing Nonfiction: Turning Thoughts into Books

Alchemy for Managers: Turning experience into achievement

Turning the Mind into an Ally

Turning Advantage into Victory in Chess

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

Turning Advantage into Victory in Chess

Modern Phytomedicine: Turning Medicinal Plants into Drugs

Modern Phytomedicine - Turning Medicinal Plants into Drugs

Shooting Gallery

Turning

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Rogue's Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Shooting Gallery

Milton Inglorious

milton-paradiselost

Milton Inglorious

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