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Goethe on Emma Hamilton's 'Attitudes': Can Classicist Art Be Fun?

1999; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gyr.2011.0140

1940-9087

Waltraud Maierhofer,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

WALTRAUD MAIERHOFER Goethe on Emma Hamilton's 'Attitudes': Can Classicist Art Be Fun? ATTHE CLOSE OFTHE EIGHTEENTH century, the house of Sir WillJam Hamilton, the British ambassador at the court of Naples, was a meeting place for lovers of things classical. Hamilton's friend and, later, second wife Emma Hart—I will refer to her as Emma Hamilton, under which name she became famous—developed a new acting genre called attitudes. This genre captured the essence of a character in certain gestures and facial expressions. By using only simple props, such as a shawl, Emma Hamilton could transform herself into Iphigenia, Medea, Diana, Niobe, Hebe, Juno, a sibyl, and other figures mostly from Greek myth and drama. In the attitude the bodily expression represented turning points in a drama or story. Her "Muse of Dance" or "Bacchante" were regarded as a revival of Greek classical dance, a glimpse of which had recently been found in mural paintings in Pompeii (fig. I).1 Like the celebrated eighteenth-century English actor David Garrick, Emma Hamilton was praised for her amazing ability to express widely different emotions and passions , without pausing in between her fluid poses, performed in rapid succession. In this pantomimic dance character, attitudes differed from Tableaux vivants or Lebende Bilder, which were stagings of paintings, mostly with more than one character and popular during the first half of the nineteenth century.2 The attitudes drew a deep emotional response from the audience.This was not only because of the individual characters presented but because of the tension between them, the stark contrasts, and surprising metamorphoses . Emma Hamilton's attitudes inspired other arts: Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein painted Emma Hamilton as Iphigenia (oil/canvas, 1788, private collection Arolsen) and as a sibyl (oil/canvas, Frankfurt/ Main,Freies Deutsches Hochstift/Frankfurter Goethe-Museum);Angelika Kauffmann painted her as the muse of comedy (oil/canvas, 1791, London , Victoria & Albert Museum); Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun's best-known Goethe Yearbook 223 painting of her is Lady Hamilton as Bacchante-Ariadne (oil/canvas , 1790,private collection);3 the Portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton as Three Muses (oil/canvas, c. 1789-90, Hamilton Collection, Lennoxlove, Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland) has recently been attributed to Hugh Douglas Hamilton;4 the painter and later professor at the Berlin academy, Friedrich (Frederick) Rehberg published his drawings of attitudes as a booklet of prints (fig. 2);5 others drew caricatures.6 Yet such representations froze the performances, made so alive by movement. Pietro Antonio Novelli's drawings (Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, 1791, pen and brown ink, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) capture better their fleeting character, but are less well-known.7 While the attitudes have recently received some attention in the context of the visual arts,8 I will, however, examine textual representations, and I will focus on German reports, as it seems that only here have contemporary critics discussed the attitudes as art form extensively.9 The texts not only describe the attitudes , but provide evidence for a specific mode of spectatorship. Several contemporary travelogues as well as numerous biographies and novels about Lady Hamilton describe these performances .10 The German reception was fundamentally shaped by Goethe's description in the second part of his Italienische Reise (1817), and his depiction will be the center of my argument. We read under the heading "Caserta, den \6. März 1787" the following, quoted here in full: Wenn man in Rom gern studiren mag, so will man hier nur leben; man vergißt sich und die Welt, und für mich ist es eine wunderliche Empfindung, nur mit genießenden Menschen umzugehen. Der Ritter Hamilton, der noch immer als englischer Gesandter hier lebt, hat nun nach so langer Kunstliebhaberei, nach so langem Naturstudium den Gipfel aller Natur- und Kunstfreude in einem schönen Mädchen gefunden. Er hat sie bei sich, eine Engländerin von etwa zwanzig Jahren. Sie ist sehr schön und wohl gebaut. Er hat ihr ein griechisch Gewand machen lassen, das sie trefflich kleidet, dazu lös't sie ihre Haare auf, nimmt ein paar Shawls und macht eine Abwechslung von Stellungen, Gebärden, Mienen ec, daß man zuletzt wirklich meint, man träume. Man...