Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. Walter Rehm, ‘Der Renaissancekult um 1900 und seine Überwindung’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 54 (1929): 298, my translation. Throughout this volume, most translations from the German are my own. In the cases of Jacob Burckhardt, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, and several others, however, I have used standard English translations, and provided my own translation of the original only when conciseness rendered such intervention necessary. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). 3. Robert Crawford, ‘Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism’, ELH 53 (1986): 849–79; Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Linda C. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 4. Dowling, Hellenism, xiii. 5. I do not wish to suggest that any and all writers in Europe during this period who felt same-sex sexual attraction had the same experiences. My point is that those intellectuals who were aware of, or identified with, this new class of person (the homosexual) clearly shared an interest in fin-de-siècle dis- courses of sexuality; and that for some, those discourses were understood in the context of other, less taboo discourses (Oxford Hellenism, the Renaissance revival, socialism, anarchy, individualism, and so on). 6. Anna McCarthy, ‘Crab People From the Center of the Earth’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11:1 (2005): 98; Gustavus T. Stadler, ‘Queer Guy for the Straight “I” ’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11:1 (2005): 109. McCarthy and Stadtler were just two of the scholars who made critical interventions on the topic of ‘Queer TV’ in a 2005 GLQ forum edited by Chris Straayer and Tom Waugh. Among other things, contributors discussed the Queer Eye phenomenon as a sign of failed heterosexual reproduction (Sasha Torres, ‘Why Can’t Johnny Shave?’ 95–7); as the vehicle for ‘arbiters for correct forms of representation in the heterosexual marriage market’ (McCarthy, ‘Crab People’, 98); and as an out- growth of the ever-greedy ‘self-fashioning [...] industry’ (Toby Miller, ‘A Metrosexual Eye on Queer Guy’, 115). 7. John Shear man, Mannerism (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 19. Here Shearman also characterizes sixteenth-century Mannerism as a style that displays ‘poise, refinement and sophistication’; is ‘polished, rarefied and idealized away from the natural’; and speaks ‘a silver-tongued language of articulate, if unnatural, beauty’. The hallmark of the Mannerist work of art is its ‘refinement of and abstraction from nature’ (Shearman, Mannerism, 18)—in a word, its artificiality. ‘Self- conscious stylization’, Shearman writes, ‘is the common denominator of all Mannerist works of art’ (Shearman, Mannerism, 35). 157 158 Notes 8. The Renaissance-themed works of Mann, Sackville-West, and Wilde are dis- cussed at length in individual chapters in the present study. Couperus and Michael Field are discussed briefly in the Conclusion. 9. For reprints of the Sarony portraits see Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 65–91. 10. Brian Glavey, ‘Queer Ekphrasis, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde’, talk held at the University of South Carolina, 25 January 2007. 11. Jaime Hovey, Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 5. 12. Hovey, Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism, 6. 13. Dennis Denisoff, Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, 1850–1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 14. Denisoff’s is a truly groundbreaking work, challenging us to take images as seriously as words as we explore the visual history of sexuality. The present study bears out his central thesis that ‘visuality’ was of primary importance ‘to the formation of decadent identities’. Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, 16. 14. Denisoff, Sexual Visuality, 2. 15. Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 16. Lucien Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 28. 17. Jules Michelet, La Renaissance, vol. 7 of Histoire de France, 2nd edn (Paris: Lacroix, 1876). 18. One typical instance of this can be found in comments by John Rigby Hale, who writes that for a long time ‘it was a “renaissance” of this or that, of arts, of scholarship, of letters. Not until the publication in 1855 of Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France entitled ‘La Renaissance’ was the label attached to a period and all that happened in it’. See John Rigby Hale (ed.), The Thames and Hudson Encylopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 279. 19. J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 20. Fraser, Victorians, 1. 21. Bullen, Myth, 9. 22. Bullen, Myth, 18, 38. Indeed it has often been pointed out that in this limited sense the idea of a rebirth can be traced back to contemporary commentaries on art in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Richard Titlebaum speaks of ‘the myth of a rinascita disseminated by Leon Battista Alberti and later by Giorgio Vasari, who rejoiced that man had awakened from a “dark age” ’. While Bullen can also cite such instances, he criticizes Peter Burke for imagin- ing that ‘the Renaissance was quite conscious of the fact that it was the Renaissance’, and insists that ‘the Renaissance as a period in the continuum of history is an intellectual concept which was applied retrospectively by pos- terity, and only took shape when historians were sufficiently distant from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to look back on them as a whole’. See Richard Titlebaum, ‘John Ruskin and the Italian Renaissance’, English Studies in Africa 19:1 (1976): 1; Bullen, Myth, 8. 23. Bullen, Myth, 102. Notes 159 24. Bullen, Myth, 9. 25. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860; Leipzig: Johannes Müller & Co., 1933). 26. Volume 11 of John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12). 27. See August Graf von Platen, August Graf von Platens Sämtliche Werke, ed. Max Koch and Eric Petzet, 12 vols (Leipzig: M. Hesse, 1910). 28. See, for instance, his 1855 poems ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’. Robert Browning, The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, ed. Augustine Birrell, 2 vols (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 1: 267–72, 517–23, 523–6. For a discussion of Browning’s reception of the Quattrocento and Cinquecento in the context of nineteenth-century historicism, see Joseph Bristow, Robert Browning (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 67–127. 29. Ruskin, Works, 10: 34; Browning, Works, 1: 527–8. Ruskin might have used similar language to describe Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’, also published in 1845. See Browning, Works, 1: 384. 30. Vita Sackville-West, ‘The Cenci’ in The Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson Manuscripts, Letters and Diaries: From Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, The Huntington Library, California, and Other Libraries (Brighton: Harvester Microform, 1988), reel 6, file 13, item 20, pp. 6–7. Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, introduction by Victoria Glendinning (London: Virago, 1983). Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, ed. Brenda Lyons, introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 31. H. Aram Veeser (ed.) The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), xi. 32. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 12. Of course, the subjects of the present study are no longer living, so I am technically culling information solely ‘from texts’ thoughout this work. But in considering letters, notebooks, diary entries, appointment book data, and even (written) hearsay, I try to come as close as possible to culling information ‘from people’ in my case studies of Mann, Sackville- West, and Wilde. 1 Consummate Criminals: Nineteenth-Century Renaissance Historiography and the Homosexual 1. Walter Pater, Appreciations. With an Essay on Style (1889; rpt Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 5. 2. Karl Brandi, Die Renaissance in Florenz und Rom, 3rd edn (Leipzig: Teubner, 1909), 3. 3. Heinrich Hössli, Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen, 2nd edn (Münster, Switzerland: Beim Herausgeber, 1889), 1. The volume’s full title translates as: ‘Eros: Greek Love Between Men, and Its Relationship to History, Education, Literature, and Legislation in Perpetuity’. 4. Hössli, Eros, 6. 5. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 435. 6. Ellmann, Oscar, 435. 7. Hössli does suggest at one point that the darkest age for the sodomite ended in the sixteenth century, but he never elaborates on this comment and 160 Notes certainly never raises the notion that the sixteenth century was part of a phenomenon called the Renaissance. Hössli, Eros, 6. 8. A number of historians have tracked both the usage of the word ‘Renaissance’ and its development as an idea over the course of the nineteenth century. The first short essays that examined the development of the idea of the Renaissance (as opposed to examining the period itself) appeared in the German-speaking world around 1900. See Willy Pastor, ‘Eine Renaissance der Renaissance?’ Freie Bühne 5:1 (1894): 72–7; Hans Bauer, ‘Renaissance der Renaissance’, Der Kunstwart 8:7 (1895): 97–100; Emil Schaeffer, ‘Das moderne Renaissance-Empfinden’, Neue Rundschau 16:2 (1905): 769–84; Ludwig Geiger, ‘Zur Renaissance der Renaissance’, Das Literarische Echo 10:6 (1907–08): 377–85; Karl Brandi, Das Werden der Renaissance, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910). Adolf Philippi’s comprehensive Der Begriff der Renaissance, however, was the first book-length study of the history of the concept. It was followed by Walther Rehm’s Das Werden des Renaissancebildes, which dealt more with fictional representations of the era than with histories of the period.