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Romantic Hellenism, sculpture and Rome

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666280802260165

1943-2178

Stephen Cheeke,

Byzantine Studies and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. – The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, IX, p. 346 [hereafter, CWPBS]. 2. – See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (Yale: Yale University Press, 1981). 3. – Romantic historiography — never systematic or generic — organises its materials as if they were objects to be curated and exhibited in an imaginary museum. The present is belated, diminished, incomplete, and 'in despair of' the grandeur of the antique, whilst the antique is also these things in relation to its ideal invisible source. The present is divided between a rationalist or scientific approach to antiquity, and an attitude of rapture; it is like the figure of the connoisseur or antiquarian, a man of learned passion who is also faintly ridiculous, like Scott's Oldbuck conned into buying an ersatz Roman battlefield, or like Winckelmann himself perhaps as portrayed by Nietzsche. But it is also like a modern poet, as Keats when he describes an 'undescribable feud' in his emotion before the Elgin marbles. This feud, a nineteenth‐century version of the querelle des anciens et des modernes, takes a sculptural turn when German thought inspired by Winckelmann begins to define the 'modern' in contrast to the 'ancient' through analogy with Greek statuary. 4. – Cited in Esther Singleton, ed., Famous Sculpture Described by Great Writers (New York: Dodd Mead, 1910), p. 46. 5. – The most thoughtful essay on the place of this particular sculpture in art history is Richard Brilliant's My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 6. – Mary Ann Caws, The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 3. 'Such stress is indeed trying, since, in its translation from one domain to the next, the accent and the positive energy discharged by the problems of address encounter each other in a struggle at once vivifying, vitalizing, and agonistic'. (p. 3). 7. – There are many studies of Romantic Hellenism, but recently David Ferris has written of the promise of late eighteenth‐/early nineteenth‐century Hellenism as 'a knowledge of history in a resolutely aesthetic form'. Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. xi. This is a notion I wish to explore here. See also Bruce Hayley, Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003). 8. – August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures On Dramatic Art And Literature, trans. John Black (UK: Kessinger), p. 22. Coleridge's letter is quoted by Stephen Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York: Columbia University press, 1943), p. 140. Hazlitt is also translating and summarising Schlegel in his final lecture 'On the Spirit of Ancient and Modern Literature', in the series Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820). 9. – Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. and ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 101. This 'project' is undertaken most obviously of course by Keats, in the 'fair living forms' of Endymion, through his interest in Miltonic 'stationing or statuary', the life‐altering encounter with the Elgin marbles and the journey deep into 'Phidian lore' ('Ode on Indolence'); but it is also seen throughout Hazlitt's art‐criticism, in Blake's theory of 'determinate and bounding form' ('Descriptive Catalogue'), in the 'immortal forms' of Shelley's Hellenism, in Coleridge's 'entelechy of Phidian Genius' (letter to J.H. Green, January 1819), his theory of the 'forma efformans': 'all form as body, i.e. as shape, & not as forma efformans, is dead'. Seamus Perry, ed., Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 124. Keats's phrase 'stationing or statuary' comes from his own marginal note to Paradise Lost and is discussed at length by Nancy Moore Golsee in Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats and Shelley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985). 10. – Ferris, Silent Urns, p. 5. 11. – In doing so Winckelmann is sometimes credited with simultaneously inventing the disciplines of art history and modern historiography, since his periodisation of Greek art through 'origin, development, change, and downfall' also stands as a historical paradigm — and one with a most obvious parallel with Rome — in which national 'culture' is read as a complete historical representation. 'Culture' is taken to embrace political institutions, economic organisation, climate, and of course — as their supreme embodiment, indeed their true manifestation — artworks. The German philosophers writing under his spell developed this notion of interpreting cultural artefacts or objects in terms of their expressive 'forms' in which the spirit of historical epochs may be read, so that historical investigation could be conducted as a form of aesthetic attention, a form of intuiting meaning through the visible, the object. (See Hayley's Living Forms.) This was immensely significant for the nineteenth century since it inaugurated a historiography which was openly aesthetic, and a political and national project connected to the development of the European museum (a process always implicitly in rivalry or conflict with Rome). Artefacts disconnected from their original social or religious contexts would be expressive of a historical 'spirit', and yet the very possibility of imagining such a 'spirit' in Hellenism obviously depended on a dematerialisation of the body of Greece. A process of reification thus occurred through which Greek sculpture was cleansed of all contamination with Rome, whether it be in terms of provenance, or narrative source, or locale, in order to express a purity, an unalloyed elemental homogeneity, which was then taken as the very sign of the antique 'Greek' itself. Nikolaus Himmelmann, in Reading Greek Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), has argued that Winckelmann's success was in part dependent on the fact that the central pieces of his theory, the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere, were pieces associated with Roman history and literature. 12. – See especially Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Potts reminds us: 'For [Winckelmann] the Greek ideal embodied an integrity and wholeness that in modern culture could only be experienced as absence … his history locates some of the very finest [sculptures] after the event, in the so‐called period of decline, making them echoes of an ideal already and perhaps always lost' (pp. 47–8). Potts also reminds us of the 'eruptions of desire and conflict' into the stillness and serenity of Greek happiness, in such figures as the Laocoön and the Niobe. (p. 2). 13. – Madame De Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 140. 14. – This is in contrast of course to the idea of the ancient Greeks as joyous, sensuous, cheerful and healthy; to the notion that, as Schlegel famously expressed it, human nature was once 'in itself all‐sufficient' (Schlegel, Lectures, p. 26). 15. – The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 35. 16. – The Works of John Dryden: Poems: The Works of Virgil in English, 1697, ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), V, p. 387. 17. – Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 11. See also Khadija Z. Carroll, 'Re‐membering the Figure: the Ekphrasis of J.J. Winckelmann', Word & Image, 21:3 (July–September 2005), 261–9. Carroll re‐examines aspects of the Winckelmann–Lessing disagreement, and offers a powerful argument for the rhetorical force, innovation and significance of Winckelmann's ekphrases. 18. – Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818) 1.3, sec.46, cited in Brilliant, My Laocoön, p. 97. 19. – Three notions from Elaine Scarry's classic account of this subject seem worth emphasising: first and most obviously the difficulty of expressing pain; second the notion that pain differs from all other bodily or psychic events by not having 'an object in the external world'; and third, that the structure of the pain event is 'the structure of unmaking'. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 161; 20. 20. – See Simon Richter, Laocoön's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992). Richter argues that 'the classical aesthetics of beauty is at the same time, and even more, an aesthetics of pain. The serene surface of ideal beauty, as well as the equally serene surface of its discourse, simultaneously conceals and is dependent on some form of the dynamics of the infliction of pain. Aesthetic discourse should no longer be artificially separated from the many other discourses that between them constitute a historically specific understanding of the human body' (p. 11). 21. – Fuseli's observations are cited in Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 18–19. 22. – Meisel, Realizations, p. 19. The question of the representation of a process was a central one in early nineteenth‐century aesthetics. Meisel quotes from the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (1732): 'How is it therefore possible … to express a Change of Passion in any Subject, since this Change is made by succession; and that in this case the Passion which is understood as present, will require a disposition of Body and Features wholly different from the Passion which is over, and past? To this we answer, That notwithstanding the Ascendency or Reign of the principal and immediate Passion, the Artist has power to leave still in his Subject the Tracts or Footsteps of its Predecessor' (p. 18). 23. – Richter, Laocoön's Body, p. 14. See also Brilliant, My Laocoön, pp. 8–18. 24. – William Hogarth took this sense of sinuosity — the serpentine line — to illustrate his 'line of grace' in The Analysis of Beauty (1753). This is discussed by Richter, Laocoön's Body, p. 180. 25. – Brilliant, My Laocoön, pp. 13‐18. 26. – Virgil, The Aeneid, II, ll.48–9. 'The Roman national poet also reveals his ambivalence toward the duplicitous Greeks whose artisanship he admires, as if the Trojan horse were a prescient symbol of Laocoön's critical fate in modern times.' Brilliant, My Laocoön, p. 62. 27. – Brilliant, My Laocoön, p. 58. 28. – Goethe had commented: 'Laocoön lends only his name to the sculpture, since the artists have stripped him of his priesthood, his Trojan nationality, and of all poetic and mythological attributes. He is not Laocoön as portrayed in fiction, but simply a father who, together with his two sons, is about to fall prey to two deadly serpents.' Cited in Richter, Laocoön's Body, p. 167. 29. – Schlegel, Lectures, p. 66. 30. – CWPBS, VI, 310. 31. – 'A Defence of Poetry', CWPBS, VII, pp. 124; 125; 'A Philosophical View of Reform', CWPBS, VII, pp. 5; 19; 'An Essay on Christianity', CWPBS, VI, p. 228. 32. – 'Shelley comes to recognize that when conceived as a locus of imperialism, cultural spread, and institution building, Rome [rather than Athens] becomes the more dependable analogy by which to understand the development and repetition of the same process in England.' Jonathan Sachs, '"Yet the Capital of the World": Rome, Repetition, and History in Shelley's Later Writings', Nineteenth Century Contexts, 28:2 (2006), 109. 33. – CWPBS, III, p. 50. 34. – CWPBS, II, p. 271. 35. – CWPBS, II, p. 236. 36. – CWPBS, VI, p. 299. 37. – Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), 7 vols, II, p. 150 [hereafter, LBCPW]. 38. – Zuleika in Byron's The Bride of Abydos (1813) is compared to Niobe in her distress: 'Zuleika, mute and motionless,/Stood like that Statue of Distress,/When, her last hope for ever gone,/The Mother hardened into stone;/All in the maid that eye could see/Was but a younger Niobé' [LBCPW, III, p. 139]. 39. – The notion of animism runs throughout Shelley's 'Notes on Sculpture in Rome and Florence', CWPBS, VI, pp. 309–32. Shelley describes the 'filial love and devotion that animates' the sons of Laocoön (310); a statue of Mercury 'expresses the animation of swiftness' (317); on 'Another Apollo': 'the intense energy and god‐like animation of those limbs' (318); on 'Bacchus and Ampelus': 'the burning spirit which animates their flexible joints' (319); on 'Venus Anadyomene': 'yet to be animated' (320); on 'A Statue of Minerva': 'Her face uplifted to heaven is animated with a profound, sweet and impassioned melancholy' (320), a 'deep and impassioned grief, animating a divine countenance' (322). 40. – Cited in Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, p. 137. 'Winckelmann then is engaged in a very active suppression of femininity in his reading of the Niobe when he represents her as absolutely drained of any inner feeling and any trace of heroic self‐possession, and categorically denies her any of the resonances of motherhood she so readily invites. For him her composure is not an expression of some inner strength of self, but on the contrary is quite involuntary, made possible by the total annihilation of her "feminine" identity and consciousness' (p. 138). 41. – Cited in Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, p. 278. 42. – CWPBS, VI, pp. 331–2. 43. – James Thomson's description of the Venus de Medici in his The Seasons (1744 version) had become the best known example of the trope: 'With wild Surprise,/As if to Marble struck, devoid of Sense,/A stupid Moment motionless she stood:/So stands the Statue that enchants the World,/So bending tries to veil the matchless Boast,/The mingled beauties of exulting Greece.' (ll. 1344–9). 44. – James Thomson: The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 122. Interestingly, Thomson conceives the interrupted moment as one that freezes the goddess as if she is 'devoid of Sense' ('stupid' having more the sense of 'stupefied'). This suspension seems akin to that of Niobe in Winckelmann's reading. At the close of Byron's The Curse of Minerva the goddess turns Lord Elgin into a statue for eternity: '"So let him stand, through ages yet unborn,/Fixed statue on a pedestal of Scorn"' [LBCPW, I, p. 327]. Browning's My Last Duchess takes up the trope: '"…and there she stands"'. 45. – Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', from Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), reproduced in Art and its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory, ed. Stephen David Ross (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 259. 46. – G.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. I, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 111.