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Genders and Sexualities in History

EDITED BY JANA FUNKE AND JEN GROVE Genders and Sexualities in History

Series Editors John Arnold King’s College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Sean Brady Birkbeck College University of London London, UK

Joanna Bourke Birkbeck College University of London London, UK Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accom- modates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the felds of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship, which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war. Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been more or less disconnected felds. In recent years, historical analyses of genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in historiography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, politics and the contexts of war and confict is refective of the movements in scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientifc thought, and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non- western History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15000 Jana Funke · Jen Grove Editors Sculpture, Sexuality and History

Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Editors Jana Funke Jen Grove University of Exeter University of Exeter Exeter, UK Exeter, UK

Genders and Sexualities in History ISBN 978-3-319-95839-2 ISBN 978-3-319-95840-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948660

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 Chapters 8 and 10 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover credit: Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Exhibition “Stare” Case’ (1811). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Series Editors’ Preface

Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Jana Funke and Jen Grove’s ground-breaking scholarly collection, addresses the sexual and erotic appeal of sculpture from the early 1700s to the present. The orig- inality of the book lies in the way all the authors interrogate questions not only of eroticism but also of temporality. They argue that statues are a useful lens through which to refect on the uses of the past and diverse felds of knowledge about history. The changing nature of the sensory appeal of sculpture tells us a great deal about the shifting meanings ascribed to sex, embodiment, and aesthetics. It is an interdisciplinary book, embracing insights from art history, literature, flm studies, museum studies, classics, and queer theory. In common with all the volumes in the ‘Gender and Sexualities in History’ series, Sculpture, Sexuality and History is a multifaceted and meticulously-researched, scholarly study. It is an innovative contribution to our understanding of gender and sexuality in the past.

John Arnold Sean Brady Joanna Bourke

v Acknowledgements

This volume originates in the Wellcome Trust-funded Desiring Statues: Statuary, Sexuality and History conference, jointly organised by both editors at the University of Exeter in April 2012. Jana and Jen would like to thank all speakers and participants who contributed to the conference. Some of the chapters collected in the present volume were frst delivered on this occasion and subsequently revised and rewritten. Other chapters were commissioned later to cover a wider range of themes and topics. The Desiring Statues conference was part of the Wellcome Trust- funded Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project, directed by Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, at the University of Exeter. We are enormously grateful to Kate and Rebecca for their long-standing support of our research and careers and for giving us the opportunity to work together on the conference. The writing and editing of the book was completed as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Rethinking Sexology project. We would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for their generous support of our work and the other Rethinking Sexology team members, especially Sarah Jones and Ina Linge, for their encouragement. Over the years, we have ben- efted greatly from conversations with other colleagues and friends at the Centre for Medical History, the Department of English and Film, and the Department of History at the University of Exeter. Claire Keyte, in particular, has been an invaluable source of advice throughout our time at Exeter. Beyond Exeter, the writing and editing of this book has been shaped by productive conversations with Viccy Coltman, Laura

vii viii Acknowledgements

Doan, Stefano Evangelista, Jennifer Ingleheart, Laura Marcus, Sebastian Matzner, Daniel Orrells and many others. We are grateful to Ian Jenkins for being an enthusiastic supporter of the project from the start. We would like to express our gratitude to all of the authors who contributed chapters to this volume. It has been a pleasure to work with them. Thanks are also due to the series editors of the Genders and Sexualities in History series, John H. Arnold, Joanna Bourke and Sean Brady, and the editorial and copy-editing team at Palgrave, especially Carmel Kennedy and Emily Russell. On a personal note, Jana would like to thank her family—Annegret Funke, Werner Funke, Nikolas Funke, Edith Fuchs, Sherri Lynn Foster, Guffey and Monday—and her friends and colleagues Chiara Beccalossi, Katey Coffey, Ben Davies, Sheetal Pillay, and Felicity Gee and Florian Stadtler (#JFF). Jen would like to thank her family, friends and colleagues, Jan and Dan, the Grove-Whites, the Gallaghers, Wendy and Paul, Jez and Rog, Wendy Benstead, Sanja, Abi, Karen, Alex, and, above all, RH. Praise for Sculpture, Sexuality and History

“This superb collection of learned interdisciplinary essays will intrigue any reader interested in Western sculpture. It investigates sculpted and sculptural intersections of temporality, sexuality, antiquity, and modernity, emphasizing the power, diversity, and complexity of eroticized receptions and gender dynamics and especially the possibilities of queer response as engaged by artists and writers from Winckelmann to sexology and psychoanalysis and beyond. The reader will come away deeply informed about what sculpture can do—and what it can’t—in fguring and provoking human desire.” —Whitney Davis, George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor, University of California at Berkeley, USA

“We all know the uncanny feeling that sculptures can cause in us as we perambulate around them in museums or reach out to touch their cold surfaces. But what does it mean to conceive of the aesthetic encounter with sculpture in terms of eros? Sculpture, Sexuality and History shows that there is much more to this question than the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. The essays in this stimulating book offer a series of original and sometimes surprising perspectives on the affective power of sculpture as an artistic medium and its role in the history of sexuality.” —Stefano Evangelista, Associate Professor, University of Oxford, UK

“Sculpture, Sexuality and History is as timely a publication as it is important. The editors of this attractive and compelling volume bring new

ix x PRAISE FOR SCULPTURE, SEXUALITY AND HISTORY vigour to the study of the capacity of human beings to reinvent the body as material artefact and to turn it into an object of art.” —Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator, British Museum, UK

“The contributors of this volume brilliantly explore how sculpture—beautiful, alluring, seductive, deceptive, dangerous and transgressive—has become a solid embodiment of the past as well as the possibility of the survival of the past in the present. This volume opens up new ways for thinking about how sculpture is both a signifer of a specifc time as well as transcendent of the specifc moment of its original manufacture and consumption. Sculpture becomes the visual and material embodiment of our relationship with the past. And that is why this volume really matters.” —Daniel Orrells, Reader, King’s College London, UK Contents

1 Introduction—Desiring Sculptures, Encountering the Past: Sculpture, Sexuality and History 1 Jana Funke and Jen Grove

Part I The Desire for the Living Statue and the Desire for the Past

2 Antiquarian Pygmalions: The Female Body, Ancient Statuary, and the Idea of Imaginary Transport in the Eighteenth Century 35 Katharina Boehm

3 Longing for the Past: Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, Historical Experience, and the Sexuality of the Masterpieces Room 57 Elsje van Kessel

4 Women, or Wax? Eros, Thanatos, and Sculpture in Cinema 81 Vito Adriaensens

xi xii Contents

Part II Sculptural Decency: Reception, Censorship and Liberation

5 The Indecent Body of Sculpture: Theodor Storm’s Realist Psyche 105 Catriona MacLeod

6 A Token of Triumph Cut Down to Size: Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill as Fetish Object 125 Bernard Vere

7 Ethics and Erotics: Receptions of an Ancient Statue of a Nymph and Satyr 145 Victoria Donnellan

Part III Queer Possibilities of Statuary

8 “Firm Outlines and Hard Muscles Immortalised”: Ancient Statuary and E.P. Warren’s “Uranian Ideal” 171 Jen Grove

9 Encountering the Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture 195 Francesco Ventrella

10 The Queer Materiality of History: H.D., Freud and the Bronze Athena 221 Jana Funke

11 “Britain’s Most Romantic Museum”?: Lesbian Spectatorship and the Reception of Historic Figural Sculpture at the V&A 245 Amy Mechowski

Index 269 Notes on Contributors

Vito Adriaensens is an adjunct assistant professor and visiting scholar at Columbia University and a researcher at the University of Antwerp. He has taught at the University of Antwerp, the University College in Ghent, the VU University in Amsterdam, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen. Vito’s research focuses on the aesthetic, cultural and (art) historical interaction between flm, theatre and visual arts. He is a co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017) and the author of Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema (2018). Katharina Boehm is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany, specialising in British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the history of science. She is the author of Charles Dickens and the Sciences of Childhood: Popular Medicine, Child Health and Victorian Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and of articles that have appeared in Studies in the Novel, SEL, Victorian Review and Textual Practice. Her current project explores antiquarian practices of the long eighteenth century and their impact on the novel and other contemporary prose genres. Victoria Donnellan completed her Ph.D. at University College London in 2015, on the role of collections of classical antiquities in UK regional museums. Her research interests focus on the history, role and reception of classical archaeology collections in museums and society. She has

xiii xiv Notes on Contributors worked in museums including Durham University Museums and the British Museum, where she is currently Documentation Offcer. Jana Funke is Senior Lecturer in English and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has published journal articles and book chapters on modernist literature, sexual science and medicine, and the history of sexuality. Books include Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (Palgrave, 2011) and The World and Other Unpublished Works of Radclyffe Hall (2016). In 2015–2016, Jana was selected to participate in the New Generations in Medical Humanities programme, funded by the AHRC and the Wellcome Trust. In 2015, she was awarded a Joint Investigator Award (with Kate Fisher) by the Wellcome Trust to lead Rethinking Sexology, a fve-year project on the cross-disciplinary history of sexual science. Jen Grove is an Engaged Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter. She is working on a Wellcome Trust- funded project on the cross-disciplinary history of sexual science led by Jana Funke and Kate Fisher. She has published book chapters and journal articles on classical reception, the history of sexuality, the history of medicine, and the history of collecting, museums and material culture. She also explores the impact of sharing such research outside the academy. She is interested in how looking to the past, especially historical artefacts, can still facilitate productive debate on sexuality today, for instance in museum exhibitions but also in less traditional settings such as classroom sex education. Catriona MacLeod is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller and of Fugitive Objects: Literature and Sculpture in the German Nineteenth Century. She recently co-edited the volume Un/translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures, and is also the co-editor of two volumes in the area of interarts scholarship, Elective Affnities: Testing Word and Image Relationships and Effcacité/Effcacy: How to Do Things with Words and Images?. Since 2011 she has been senior editor of the journal Word & Image. Her current book project Romantic Scraps is a study of paper cuts and collage in the nineteenth century. Notes on CONTRIBUTORS xv

Amy Mechowski is Head of the Learning Academy at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Previously an Assistant Curator at the museum (2007– 2013), she was the V&A Exchange Research Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art in 2012 and specialised in nineteenth-century women sculptors represented in the collection. As Programme Leader for the “Art Museums, Galleries and Curating” course at Sotheby’s Institute of Art (2013–2016), she published an essay on Live Art and museum programming in Performativity in the Gallery: Staging Interactive Encounters (2013). Elsje van Kessel is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of The Lives of Paintings: Presence, Agency and Likeness in Venetian Art of the Sixteenth Century. She has published a number of book chapters and articles on the history of display and presentation in and before the age of museums. The present chapter results from her postdoctoral project “A Silent Revolution: The Contested Presence of Art, 1789–1815” that she carried out as a fellow at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. Francesco Ventrella is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. He has written on modern and contemporary visual cultures, art historiography and aesthetics. He is the co-editor, with Meaghan Clarke, of a special issue of Visual Resources on “Women and the Culture of Connoisseurship” (2017), and with Giovanna Zapperi, he is co-editing the volume Art and Feminism in Postwar Italy: The Legacy of Carla Lonzi (2018). Bernard Vere is Programme Director of the M.A. in Fine and Decorative Art and Design at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, where he lectures on modernism. He has published widely on the avant-garde in England, including essays in Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, British Art Studies and Visual Culture in Britain. He is also the author of Sport and Modernism in the Visual Arts in Europe, c. 1909–1939 (2018). List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Mark Lewis, Nude, 6k transferred to 4k, 5′49″, 2015. Film still courtesy and copyright the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery 58 Fig. 3.2 Juno Ludovisi, marble, frst century CE, Rome, Palazzo Altemps (image in the public domain) 70 Fig. 5.1 Johann Heinrich von Dannecker, Ariadne on the Panther. 1803–14. Marble. Height 146 cm. Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt. © Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung—ARTOTHEK 116 Fig. 5.2 Carl Steinhäuser, Psyche. Marble. 136.0 38.0 50.0 cm. × × Kunsthalle Bremen. © Kunsthalle Bremen—Lars Lohrisch—ARTOTHEK 118 Fig. 7.1 Marble group of a nymph and satyr, British Museum, GR 1805,0703.2. © The Trustees of the British Museum 147 Fig. 7.2 Objects acceptable for display in 1808 and 1812. From top: Pan and a goat (GR 1805,0703.280), nymph and satyr (GR 1805,0703.2), well-head with four erotic pursuit scenes (GR 1805,0703.227), relief of a nymph and satyr (GR 1805,0703.127). © The Trustees of the British Museum 159 Fig. 9.1 Plate 73 from: Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions (1876). Albumen silver print from glass negative, 29.2 21.5 × cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 202

xvii xviii List of Figures

Fig. 9.2 The Subiaco Niobid, Fifth-Century BCE. Marble, 115 130 cm. Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. × Photo: Maurice Howard 207 Fig. 11.1 Auguste Rodin, The Fallen Angel, 1895, bronze, 53.3 81.2 90 cm, London, V&A. © Victoria × × and Albert Museum, London 252 Fig. 11.2 Installation of Thomas Brock’s Eve, 1900, marble, 175 49 43 cm, and Albert Toft’s The Bather, × × 1915, marble, 193 68.5 65 cm, on loan from Tate × × Britain in Gallery 21 of the V&A. Author’s photograph 261 CHAPTER 1

Introduction—Desiring Sculptures, Encountering the Past: Sculpture, Sexuality and History

Jana Funke and Jen Grove

Introduction One of the earliest accounts of statue love comes from Roman author Pliny the Elder, who described how the Venus of Knidos, sculpted by Praxiteles,

The authors are jointly and equally responsible for the text and accompanying research that has fed into this introductory chapter. They should also be recognised as joint and equal editors of the volume as a whole. The idea for this book was developed out of the Desiring Statues: Statuary, Sexuality and History conference (University of Exeter, April 2012), organised by Funke and Grove as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project (NC110388). The volume itself has been completed as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Rethinking Sexology project, also at the University of Exeter (NC106654/Z/14/Z and 106653/Z/14/Z).

J. Funke (*) · J. Grove University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 1 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_1 2 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE aroused such desire that it fell victim to sexual assault.1 Roughly 1800 years later, in the late nineteenth century, Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft- Ebing discussed sexual desire for statues in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). These are just two examples indicating statuary’s widely mythologised and theorised power to provoke an erotic response from human inter- locutors.2 The appeal of sculptural objects is not limited to the desire to have sex with statues, however, as sculpture has a far wider erotic appeal.3 Sculptural depictions, especially the naturalistic, free-standing and three- dimensional statuary art often associated with the classical world and the Renaissance, have persistently raised questions about the ideal form of the human body. The material presence and perceived immediacy of sculpture, appealing to sight as much as touch, as noted by fourteenth-century scholar and poet Petrarch and eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann,4 have also drawn heightened attention to the physical and sensual dimensions of the encounter with sculpture. At times, this has led to anxieties about the “improper” reception of sculpture, but such debates have also opened up new articulations of diverse sexualities, including same-sex and opposite-sex desires. This erotic appeal of sculpture has resulted in long-lasting discussions about the propriety and acceptability of creating and displaying partially clothed or nude sculpted bodies in public or semi-public spaces, such as museums or art galleries. While the erotic and sexual dimensions of the engagement with sculpture have been noted widely in existing scholarship, this volume examines sculptural erotics in relation to the medium’s temporal qualities, especially with regard to the past and history.5 Much attention has been

1 Shawn O’Bryhim, “The Economics of Agalmatophilia,” The Classical Journal 110, no. 4 (2015): 419–29. 2 George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artifcial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 3 We are using ‘erotic’ to capture a broader range of fantasies, desires and experiences than is commonly denoted by the world ‘sexual’, which is often associated more narrowly with physical contact. ‘Sexuality’ can be seen as a term that describes categories and identity labels particular to the modern world, but we are employing it in a strategically anachronistic way to capture more diverse ways of organising fantasies and desires that include the sexual as well as the erotic. 4 See Peter Dent, “Introduction,” in Sculpture and Touch, ed. Peter Dent (London: Ashgate, 2014), 1–26 (14). 5 We are using the term ‘history’ in the broadest possible sense to describe diverse attempts at making sense of, interpreting or representing the past. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 3 given to Winckelmann’s famous response to the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman copy of a Greek statue, found in Italy in the ffteenth century, in which he felt himself “transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honoured with his presence”.6 The medium of sculpture connotes durability and permanence, which is why it is often used for purposes of memorialisation. Statuary conveys the sense that it has outlived and will continue to outlast the observer in the present. This feeling is only heightened if a specifc sculpture is historical, originating in a moment in time that is far removed from the present. While representing the past, sculpture is also materially present, sharing the here and now of the human individual. As such, the encounter with sculpture is characterised by a tension between the object’s contemporane- ousness and its pastness: the tangible existence of the material object and the distance of time it seems to represent.7 This complex temporality means that sculpture holds out the promise of offering access to the past while also making the viewer aware of the fact that the past is inaccessible and ultimately out of reach. It is for this reason that sculpture has continuously inspired thinking about the experience of the past and the engagement with history. In modernity, statuary has been central to the reception and re-appropriation of the ancient past, for instance, via eighteenth-century Neoclassicism or the Victorian plaster cast copying industry.8 The collecting and appreciation of diverse sculptural objects, including classical statues but also modern Italian phallic wax votives or African masks, also fed into the modern fascination with allegedly primitive cultures.9 This volume is the frst to consider in tandem the erotic and temporal dimensions of statuary, going well beyond Winckelmann’s widely

6 E.g. Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–20. 7 Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 31. 8 Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Donna Carol Kurtz, The Reception of Classical Art in Britain: An Oxford Story of Plaster Casts from the Antique (Oxford: Archaeo Press, 2000). 9 See discussion below on phallic worship and primitivism. For ease, we are using ‘modern’ to refer to the entire time period covered in this book, including the second half of the eighteenth century, which is frequently seen as a transitional phase between the early modern and modern periods. 4 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE discussed engagement with ancient sculpture.10 In so doing, it intervenes in three broad areas of study. First, it opens up a new understanding of how aesthetic appreciations and experiences of sculpture have been shaped by related concerns about sexuality and the past. This speaks to art historical scholarship by demonstrating that the engagement with sculptural objects cannot be teased apart from the medium’s erotic potential or its temporal qualities.11 Second, the volume as a whole reveals the central role sculpture has played in articulating understandings of sexuality and gender in relation to the past.12 Indeed, the visceral and sensory appeal of sculpture foregrounds the embodied and erotic dimensions of such processes of knowledge production. Sculpture highlights that sexual knowledge is not the outcome of intellectual endeavours alone, but involves a complex negotiation of intellectual, physical, sensual and erotic factors. In exploring these questions, the book intervenes in existing scholarship across a wide range of disciplines and felds concerned with the articulation and production of knowledge about sex, gender and sexuality, including the history of sexuality, literary and cultural studies, and gender studies and queer theory, to name but a few. Finally, through its focus on sculpture and the erotic dimensions of its reception, this book offers an opportunity to investigate how explorations of the past and accounts of history are themselves gendered and eroticised.13 In opening up these questions, the book contributes to

10 This book is the frst to offer a sustained and cross-disciplinary engagement with these themes across the modern period. It builds on pioneering works by Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998); and Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 11 For work exposing the importance of considerations of sexuality and gender for understanding sculpture, see e.g. David Getsy, Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). For instrumental work on the role of the past in shaping modern engagement with sculpture, see Footnote 8. 12 The attempt to understand and make sense of sexuality in relation to the past is a pervasive feature of Western cultural thought, see Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, eds., Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 13 Important work in this area includes Orrells, Classical; Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 5 existing scholarship in reception studies, historiography and other felds concerned with the construction of knowledge about the past. To explore these broader concerns raised by the entanglements of statuary, temporality and sexuality, Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts brings together a group of contributors from a wide range of disciplines and felds, including art history, classics, flm studies, literary studies, museum studies, reception studies and queer theory. Challenging the assumption that sculptural art falls within the remit of art historians and reception studies scholars alone, the volume opens up dialogue between these and other disciplines and felds. The disciplinary breadth allows the volume to explore encounters with statuary in relation to different cultural contexts and debates, including antiquarianism, collecting cultures, censorship and museum spaces, and across different genres and media, such as literary writing, painting, flm and science. The fact that sculpture has resonated so powerfully with diverse writers, thinkers and artists demonstrates that sculptures, as real objects made of bronze, marble or wax and as imagined objects found in literature and the visual arts, have offered a rich array of possibilities for engaging with the human body, desire and the past, which this volume begins to explore. The chapters collected in this book focus on the period from the eighteenth century to the present and mainly explore sculptural encounters in Western European and Northern American cultures. It is clear that the relationship between sculpture, sexuality and history could be studied productively across an even broader range of historical and cultural contexts, and this volume should be seen as the starting point for such investigations. However, its cultural and chronological focus allows Sculpture, Sexuality and History to offer specifc insights into developments and shifts from the eighteenth century onwards. The Enlightenment witnessed signifcant changes in collecting cultures, the understanding of statuary and erotic material objects and the Western relationship with the past. The rediscovery of the ancient Roman sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the early 1700s was a central factor in the rise of Antiquarianism and Neoclassicism, both preoccupied with looking back to and acquiring material remains of antiquity, in particular statuary and sexually themed antiquities. Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity in 1764 defned the Western relationship with classical antiquity, sculptural art, aesthetic standards of beauty and their relation to ethical principles for many generations. Winckelmann, as the “father of Romantic Hellenism”, combined historiography dictated by 6 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE the Enlightenment’s rational thinking with an emotional and subjective interpretation of artistic works.14 The growth of the Victorian museum saw a new emphasis on the pedagogical function of ancient sculpture and the democratisation of access to such objects. This development has been identifed as an important element in the creation of modern concepts of the obscene and the pornographic, as debates grew around whether wider audiences should be able to view the antique nude or the classical erotic fgurine. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw marked shifts in understandings of desire, including the emergence of modern understandings of sexuality as an integral and defning component of the human subject, a development often associated with sexological thought. New technologies, like the cinema, and movements in literature and art, such as modernism, produced different forms of engagement with sculpture. Questions about the erotic potential of sculptural objects continue into the present, as is demonstrated by recent debates about the display of sculptural art in museum spaces. Across these three centuries, sculpture has been a crucial site that has shaped engagements with fundamental questions around uses of the past, tradition, cultural development, modernity and progress and placed these in dialogue with concerns around the body, sexuality and gender. By means of an introduction, this chapter argues that the pastness of sculptural objects, as material or imagined artefacts, is fundamental to the erotic and sexual qualities and possibilities associated with sculpture. In developing this argument, we also show that the erotics of sculpture are intimately connected with considerations around uses of the past and understandings of history. These points are developed through an exploration of three intersecting themes, which also structure the volume as a whole. The frst section examines the desire for the living, moving or otherwise animated statue. It suggests that the persistent cultural motif of the inanimate statue coming to life is tied to an engagement with the past and a negotiation of the boundaries between past and present. The second section investigates how the reception of statuary has been connected with concerns about obscenity, censorship, liberation and morality. It argues that statuary has often been seen to make “present” a past that opens up different and potentially liberating possibilities around sexuality, gender and morality, but also leads to anxieties when it comes to

14 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760– 1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 124. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 7 negotiating present-day ideals. The fnal section focuses on sculpture’s queer potential. It demonstrates that sculptural objects have continuously acted as sites allowing for the articulation of new sexual, gendered and aesthetic possibilities, while also being associated with the queer indeterminacy of identities and desires.

Desire for the Living Statue and Desire for the Past The medium of statuary has persistently given rise to dreams and fantasies of animation. As literary scholar Kenneth Gross has demonstrated in The Dream of the Living Statue, “the fantasy of an animated statue— a statue that moves or speaks, responds to a gesture, calls out, looks back at the person looking at it” is a pervasive feature found in myth, literature, drama, cinema, painting and other media.15 Such fantasies of animation—and the relationship they constitute between the living interlocutor and the lifelike statue—are frequently erotically charged and often gendered.16 The dream of the living statue is fuelled by the desire to turn cold stone, wax or other materials into living fesh and impel the statue to come to life, so that it can yield to human desires. The seemingly lifelike quality of statuary that provokes erotic fantasies of animation is tied to the fact that sculpture—in contrast to other art forms that have a primarily visual appeal, such as painting—is materially present, “thingly” and inviting not only to sight, but also to touch.17 Accounts of statues coming to life, as Gross points out, often demonstrate that our “peculiar fascination with signs of life [is] tied to the domain of touch”.18 Scholars have drawn attention, for instance, to the centrality of touch in French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s famous description of the Medici Venus: “And now here the adorable dimples along the loins […] It is truly fesh! […] You almost expect, when you touch the body, to fnd it warm”.19 Rodin refers to touching a warm body, indicating that he has already moved into thinking of the sculpture as a living human body.

15 Gross, Dream, 6. 16 Hersey, Falling. 17 See Peter Dent, ed. Sculpture and Touch (London: Ashgate, 2014). See also Jana Funke, Jen Grove, Elsje van Kessel, and Francesco Ventrella in this volume. 18 Gross, Dream, 84. 19 Jas Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 115. 8 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

Touch is also central to what is arguably the defning cultural reference point for the erotic love of the living statue, namely, the ancient myth of the sculptor Pygmalion. In this story, narrated most famously by the ancient Roman author Ovid in his Metamorphoses, and then adapted throughout Western culture, Pygmalion creates and falls in love with a female statue (named Galatea in post-classical accounts) that transforms into a living woman by virtue of divine intervention. The statue-come- to-life becomes Pygmalion’s lover, wife and mother to his daughter. In Ovid’s account, touching the statue is already part of the prelude to the transformation of the statue’s ivory skin into human fesh. Ovid’s narrative puts particular emphasis on Pygmalion’s repeated acts of feeling, touching and caressing the inanimate statue, which lead up to the moment of magical transformation made possible by the goddess Venus.20 While not foregrounded in Ovid’s account of the myth, the Pygmalion story already connects the desire for the animated statue with the desire for the past. Ovid’s narrative suggests that Pygmalion turns to sculpture and art, because he is repulsed by the living women he has encountered, the Propoetides who refuse to honour Venus. “[H]orrifed / At all the countless vices nature gives / To womankind”,21 Pygmalion fnds in his sculpture an embodiment of ideal femininity that is unob- tainable in the real world. The temporal dimensions of this longing for an impossible ideal become more evident when considering the narrative framework within which Ovid presents the myth: Orpheus, who has lost Eurydice to the underworld, is the narrator of Pygmalion’s story. As art historian Victor Stoichita points out, when read as “[a] story within a story, the tale of Pygmalion [in Ovid] fgures […] as a song of the hope of resurrection”,22 or the retrieval of a lost past. This close association between the desire for the living statue and the longing for the past became a recurrent theme in Western culture. When the myth of Pygmalion was appropriated in later historical moments,

20 Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14–15. For touch in modern receptions of the myth, see Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film Around 1900 (Yale University Press, 2007), 58. 21 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville, and ed. E.J. Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), x.241–42. 22 Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, 9. A later example of the living statue being associated with the return of the dead is found in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale (1623). 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 9 the living statue was explicitly associated with the reception of the classical past. As part of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revival of interest in the myth, paintings that engaged with the narrative frequently depicted a classical scene with Galatea—both before and after her transformation into human form—in the typical pose of a classical statue.23 Very often this pose resembles that of the Medici Venus, who partially covers her breasts and genitalia with her hands, perhaps to indicate the now human Galatea’s embarrassment at realising she is naked in front of Pygmalion. This demonstrates the cultural dominance of certain classical sculptures but also how such sculpture infuenced the presentation of the naked female body in this period.24 The idea of a Venus statue herself coming to life, and this being closely linked with a desire for the ancient past, is addressed by our con- tributor, art historian Elsje van Kessel, who examines Das Marmorbild, or The Marble Statue (1819), by the Romantic author Joseph von Eichendorff. This novella centres on the transformation of a statue of Venus to whom the protagonist is attracted into a real-life woman. Van Kessel demonstrates how this can be read as an expression of the early nineteenth-century Romantic longing for an embodied and emotional engagement with the past that runs counter to the increasingly “disin- terested enjoyment and scientifc analysis” encouraged by contemporary practices of museological display. Here and elsewhere, the engagement with historical statues, especially statuary from antiquity, promises to offer the human observer a means to escape the present by embracing the past, especially through the tactile and erotic engagement with statuary. The animated statue was associated with the potential to introduce the past into the present, literally making the past come to life. Another well-known example of this longing for the living past expressed through the fantasy of the living statue is found in Winckelmann.25 For him, Greek sculpture, and specifcally the male

23 Examples of paintings include Louis Lagrenée, Pigmalion, Dont Vénus Anime la Statue (1777), Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Pygmalion Amoureux de Sa Statue (1819), Edward Burne-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image (1875–1878) and Ernest Norman, Pygmalion and Galatea (1886). 24 Christine Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 25 Potts, Flesh. 10 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE nude, represented not just realistic depictions of the human body but came to stand for an idealised and venerated classical past. “The bodies of Greeks, as well as the works of their artists”, Winckelmann wrote, “were framed with more unity of system, a nobler harmony of parts, and a completeness of the whole, above our lean tensions and hollow wrinkles”.26 In the presence of the Apollo Belvedere he is not only transported back in time but is also powerfully affected in the present moment by a moral, and overtly erotic, bodily transformation.27 Winckelmann drew explicitly on the Pygmalion myth to express his entangled desires for the living past and the (in this case male) living statue, stating that “my fgure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty”.28 As psychiatrist and literary scholar Ian McGilchrist has pointed out, the Pygmalion myth suggests that it is the statue that comes to life, but the use of the noun “fgure” is ambiguous and might also refer to Winckelmann’s own body coming alive through the encounter with the Apollo and, by extension, the past.29 This ambiguity expresses precisely how the desire for the living statue came to be linked with the desire for a visceral experience of the past. At the same time, the dream of the animated statue was also undercut with fears regarding the failure to achieve, sustain or control fully this encounter with the past. Such anxieties are often overlooked due to readings of the Pygmalion myth that present the sculptor as an omnipotent creator who has mastered his craft and can create a statue so realistic that it comes to life. Examining the story carefully, however, it is evident that the power of animation lies with Venus, who grants Pygmalion his wish, not with the sculptor himself. Moreover, as Stoichita stresses, there is a magical and fantastic element to the act of creation itself: “Pygmalion does not intentionally create the perfect form of a virtual woman […] [;] it is, so to speak, art which creates her for him and in spite of him”.30

26 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Refections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, trans. Henry Fuseli (London, 1765), 16. 27 Potts, Flesh, 127. See Footnote 6. See also Katharina Boehm in this volume. 28 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Henry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 334. 29 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 371. See also Boehm in this volume. 30 Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, 13–14; his emphasis. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 11

This lack of male power is foregrounded in some later engagements with the myth, such as the Pygmalion and Galatea series (1875–1878) by Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Pygmalion is absent from the third panel in the series, which depicts the moment in which Venus transforms Galatea into a living woman and thereby emphasises the sculptor’s lack of control over the metamorphosis. The fourth and fnal panel shows Pygmalion on his knees kissing Galatea’s hand, thus presenting the artist in a position of submission rather than dominance. If the fantasy of the animated statue is volatile, so is the associated desire to reach back to the past. The fact that Orpheus, who failed to recover Eurydice from the underworld, is the narrator of the Pygmalion myth, acts as a strong reminder of the human individual’s ultimate lack of control over the encounter with the past. In fact, the very materiality of statuary itself—the cold and lifeless material of the sculpted form— draws attention to the impossibility of animation and, by extension, the impossibility to retrieve the past. As art historian Alex Potts points out, Winckelmann’s account of the encounter with the Apollo Belvedere is characterised by a powerful “interplay between the literally dead materiality of the actual sculpture and ostensibly live fesh of the body it represents”.31 Similarly, art historian and classicist Jas Elsner stresses with regard to Rodin’s longing for the transformation from stone to warm fesh that “this reality is precisely the limit it [the statue] can never reach, the boundary it cannot transgress”.32 The fact that statuary can appear warm, animated and present only puts into sharper relief the fact that it is cold, dead and absent. By extension, the past that is seemingly within reach when confronted with statuary can also appear even more distant once the futility of the desire for the animated statue has been realised. For Winckelmann, the veneration of the classical past went hand in hand with “a nostalgic vision of classical Greek perfection”, an ideal that could no longer be recuperated in the present.33 This was complicated by the fact that Winckelmann never visited Greece and engaged almost exclusively with Roman sculpture, which he believed to be copies of “original” Greek masterpieces. In addition, as literary scholar Gillen D’Arcy Wood suggests, a “compensatory desire

31 Potts, Flesh, 172. 32 Elsner, Roman Eyes, 117. 33 MacLeod, Ambiguity, 27. 12 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE to reproduce antiquity in material form” was also found in the eighteenth-century fashion for fabricating the past, which included the collection of casts of famous ancient sculptures.34 Ironically, this lack of “primary material” was the “very spur of Hellenist enthusiasm”, producing, as Winckelmann himself put it, a “more earnest longing for what we have lost” than if the “originals” had been available.35 Winckelmann’s work is indicative of a broader eighteenth-century trend in which statuary was used to negotiate the engagement with the past and, more specifcally, the writing of history. The eighteenth century was characterised by debate and contestation about historiographical approaches.36 Towards the end of the century, Romantic historians sought to distance themselves from their Enlightenment predecessors by challenging the latter’s alleged focus on abstracted and universalising accounts of history, championing instead the individual observer’s sympathetic and immediate relation to the past.37 The visceral and erotic qualities as well as the ambiguities of the sculptural encounter—the promise to touch the past coupled with the realisation of inevitable historical distance, propagated in particular by Winckelmann’s reception of antique sculpture which sat at the intersection between Enlightenment and Romantic thinking—allowed writers to negotiate different understandings of history.38 Recognising the central place of sculpture in this context reveals the complexly gendered and eroticised dimensions of emerging conceptualisations of the past and approaches to history that would continue to resonate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The passionate and erotic dimension of the encounter with the past was very prominent in Winckelmann’s writings on sculpture. As classicist Daniel Orrells states, “[i]t was Winckelmann’s description of his desires for an ancient statue of a beautiful male youth that focused the problems encountered by the scholars of historicism who attempted to adjudicate upon the meaning of modernity in relation to antiquity. Winckelmann’s paean to [the Apollo’s] beauties […] became the stereotypical image of

34 Wood, Shock, 123. 35 Ibid. 36 Noah Heringman, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 37 Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). 38 Wood, Shock, 123–5. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 13 modern veneration of the ancient world”.39 Winckelmann’s suggestion that the passionate admiration of statuary could offer a powerful means to experience the past set an important precedent. The fervent wish for a physical and erotic encounter with the past would reappear in later eighteenth-century movements, including the antiquarian search for knowledge about the past through the gather- ing of material objects and other forms of evidence, which can be traced back (at least) to the Renaissance. As a mode of engaging with the past and understanding history, antiquarianism exists in a complex relationship with Enlightenment and Romantic historiography. Antiquarians, like Enlightenment thinkers, were “omnivorous cultural data gatherers interested in ranging through, comparing and systematising all kinds of evidence”.40 However, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antiquarianism can also be read as part of the Romantic movement, especially in its passionate appreciation of the material remnants of antiquity. As literary scholars Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake argue, “[t]he embodied practice of Romantic antiquarianism […] promoted a convergence of antiquarian scholarship and imaginative empathy”.41 Instead of the detachment and analytical distance often associated with Enlightenment historiography, Romantic antiquarianism, through its focus on material culture, foregrounded the embodied, highly individualised, imaginative and often passionate and erotic engagement with history. Indeed, the obsessive nature of the collector, expressed in the search for antiquities from Greece and Rome by male upper-class members of European antiquarian societies, can be viewed in terms of a sexual impulse.42 One example is found in the collecting and connoisseurial habits of the eighteenth-century British Society of Dilettanti, which included Sir William Hamilton and Charles Townley, well-known for providing much of the founding material of the classical collections of

39 Orrells, Classical, 19. 40 Mauren McLane, “Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830,” in This is Enlightenment, eds. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 247–64 (249). 41 Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake, “Introduction,” in Romantic Antiquarianism, eds. Noah Heringman and Crystal B. Lake (Romantic Circles Praxis Series: https://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/antiquarianism/index.html, 2014), 1–28 (1). 42 Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995). 14 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE the British Museum. The antiquarian impulse to acquire large amounts of historical material and visual remains has been characterised in terms of an unhealthy, obsessive relationship to the past, especially when compared with historians’ efforts to theorise and draw broader conclusions from historical evidence.43 In addition, the Society of Dilettanti were seen, even in their own time, to have a markedly dedicated, if not prurient, interest in images of nudity and of sex from the ancient past, much of which came in the form of sculptural art, including female nudes and representations of the fertility god Priapus.44 Scholars have also, however, challenged the distinction between antiquarianism and “history proper” and acknowledged the many contributions antiquarian thinkers made to the development of modern history.45 In this way, the erotic dimension of the antiquarian engagement with sculptural art and other material objects needs to be seen as an important component of modern approaches to historiography, which combined erotic and intellectual elements. The embodied and passionate antiquarian engagement with the past through statuary was highly gendered: female sculptures or nudes represented a past that could be uncovered, explored and understood by male antiquaries. The desire to possess the female body (ancient and modern) was confated with the desire for the past, and this resulted in a commodifed and fetishised view of antiquity.46 At times, real living women were transformed into artefacts that were feverishly bought and exchanged by antiquarians, acting as “surrogate” antiquities. One famous example is Lady Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s wife and Horatio Nelson’s mistress, who famously performed so-called attitudes, poses from ancient art and literature, for her husband and his circle of friends.47 The heightened eighteenth-century vogue for highly realistic anatomical wax fgures of partially dismembered or dissected women, which were depicted in seductive poses and displayed in scientifc museums like La

43 Stefan Berger and Bill Niven, eds., Writing the History of Memory (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 44 Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London: Duckworth, 1996), 37. 45 Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1990), Chapter 3. 46 Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 176. 47 Chloe Chard, “Grand and Ghostly Tours: The Topography of Memory,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 31, no. 1 (1997): 101–8 (102). 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 15

Specola in Florence, offers another example of the objectifcation and fet- ishisation of the female body in this historical moment. Here, women’s bodies came to be associated not with the antique past, but with death. As flm scholar Vito Adriaensen demonstrates in his chapter in this volume, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cinema drew inspiration from the tradition of anatomical wax models and wax work museums. Films belonging to the emerging horror genre adapted the Pygmalion myth to present narratives featuring a male scientist who is able to enact metamorphoses between life and death.48 These Pygmalionesque scientists brought wax women to life and enacted gruesome operations or murders on living women, thus objectifying the female body and taking pleasure in blurring the lines between life and death. However, the sculpted female body also held the potential to resist such gendered appropriations, as literary scholar Katharina Boehm’s chapter in this volume demonstrates through an original reading of Emma Hamilton’s poses. Boehm argues that the female body was not merely reduced to an erotic object through its association with antique statuary, but became an artefact worthy of historical enquiry. Far from being a passive object that lacks agency, the female body was seen by male antiquarians as a particularly valuable artefact that acts out, and thereby brings to life, ancient cultural sensibilities. Here, again, the image of the omnipotent male interlocutor who is in charge of the living female statue and has full access to the past is called into question, and a more nuanced understanding of the gendered and eroticised dynamics of the engagement with history emerges. Boehm’s chapter challenges further misperceptions of antiquarianism as a misogynistic and masculinist endeavour by discussing the emerging fgure of the female antiquarian in the eighteenth century.49 As Boehm’s and many other chapters in this volume demonstrate, the passionate experience of capturing and admiring the sculpted form was eroticised and gendered in complex ways and cannot neatly be separated from the intellectual search for historical knowledge. On the contrary, from the eighteenth century onwards, writers and thinkers of all genders turned to statuary to engage intellectually and erotically with the past.

48 For more on Pygmalion and flm, see Paula James, Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). 49 See also Crystal B. Lake, “History Writing and Antiquarianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in the Romantic Period, ed. Devoney Looser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 88–100 (98). 16 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

Sculptural Decency: Reception, Censorship and Liberation The erotic appeal of sculptural art has provoked intense anxieties about its reception and display. This sense is heightened when faced with historical statues, which often represent ideals and morals that are seemingly incompatible with those held by the culture in which they are received. Because many sculptures, especially in the classical tradition, depict bodies without clothes or fgures in sexual or erotic poses, they have frequently been the subject of morally motivated debates throughout the modern period. For instance, the way in which the classical male nude came to be associated with male same-sex practices caused alarm to some critics.50 Likewise, unclothed or partially dressed male, female and sexually ambiguous statues could be seen to evoke paganism and sexual licentiousness associated with antiquity.51 Such anxieties provoked by sculptural art gave rise to wide-ranging debates about obscenity, censorship and immorality, which peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This historical moment witnessed the increasingly public display of antique collections in Western European museums, which heightened concerns about the impact such objects might have on supposedly morally vulnerable audiences, especially women, children and the lower classes.52 The history of the repression and censorship of sculptural fgures has been widely discussed, including the practice of attaching plaster fg leaves to the genitalia on nude human statues.53 Scholars have argued that the mass discovery of ancient sexually themed sculptures and other artefacts, in particular at Pompeii and Herculaneum, heightened further the wish to control and restrict access to such antiquities.54

50 Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 184–5. 51 Alastair Blanshard, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 9–11. 52 Stuart Frost, “The Warren Cup: Highlighting Hidden Histories,” International Journal of Art & Design Education 26, no. 1 (2007): 63–72 (65); Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 26. 53 Frost “Warren Cup,” 65. 54 Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987), 6. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 17

What was at stake for some in the modern censorship of ancient material, as reception histories have shown, was not only the protection of contemporary sensibilities, but also the defence of the probity of antiquity itself as founder of many of the principles of Western civilisation and imperialism.55 For instance, the discovery of a very carefully executed and detailed sculpture of Pan having sex with a she-goat, the garden centre-piece at a Herculaneum villa, and its subsequent censorship, have exemplifed for many scholars the threat such material caused to the legacy of Rome.56 The Pan and Goat sculpture and many other sexually explicit antiquities were removed from public access and eventually housed in the Secret Cabinet at the nearby Naples National Archaeological Museum, which, it is argued, sparked the creation of special collections of sexually themed material in museums across Europe. Literary scholar Walter Kendrick goes so far as to affrm that it led to the invention of the new category of “the pornographic” itself, which could be used to label and restrict access to sexually explicit materials more widely.57 As classical reception and museum studies scholar Victoria Donnellan shows in this volume, the British Museum’s own removal of sexually themed artefacts to a separate collection, later named the Museum Secretum, was similarly motivated by anxieties about access to sexual imagery by “vulnerable” classes of people. However, Donnellan reveals that this was initiated by a change in policy which was not related to who could enter the museums. Instead, new regulations relaxed the museum’s control over visitors’ experiences once they had entered, resulting in female, young and lower-class visitors potentially being able to “linger over sexually themed sculptures”. Donnellan also shows that the British Museum’s restriction of material happened gradually over several decades rather than in a single moment of censorship provoked by the discovery of the licentiousness of ancient culture and its material remains.58

55 Frost “Warren Cup,” 65. 56 Kendrick, Secret, 6. For other aspects of this sculpture’s modern reception, see Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “Bestiality in the Bay of Naples: The Herculaneum Pan and Goat Statue,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86–111. 57 Kendrick, Secret, 11. 58 For a similar account of Naples’ cabinet, see Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum”, in Pompeii in the Public Imagination From its Rediscovery to Today, eds. Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 301–15. 18 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

Donnellan highlights the complexities and inconsistencies around censorship decisions and the classifcation of certain iconography, imagery or themes as “obscene”. While provoking moral fears, disapproval and censorship, there is also a long history of affrmative responses to sculpture showing nudity or sexual scenes. As we have seen in the work of Winckelmann, the classical or neoclassical nude statue was viewed as having the ability to elevate moral conduct, in particular because it exposed viewers to perceived high standards of art and the beauty of the ideal human body.59 Winckelmann popularised the idea that Greek sculptors were able to create works of transcendental and universal beauty because of the unique political freedom they enjoyed in ffth-century ancient Athens.60 The appreciation and contemplation of these sculptures could educate and ennoble the minds of eighteenth-century viewers while also offering visceral and erotic stimulation.61 The idea that images of the ancient body could emit both physical and ethical ideals was inspired by Plato and other Greek authors, who presented aesthetic beauty and morality as correlated. If the contemplation of sculpture had refected and encouraged such ideals in the Greeks, it had the potential to have a similar impact on modern viewers. In the Victorian period, ideas about athletic and physical achievement (for men at least) were especially important in the elevation of the classical or neoclassical nude: a notion of healthy classicism was connected with the knowledge that real ancient Greeks had exercised naked, and that they had celebrated naked, disciplined bodies in their statuary art.62 Modern standards of female beauty were also developed with reference to ancient semi-nude Venus statues;63 however, these were typically celebrated for the passivity associated with the purity of white marble rather than the potential athletic action as embodied in the male nude.64 At the same time, female nudes were strongly eroticised.65 German

59 See Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (Pantheon Books, 1956). 60 Nichols, Crystal Palace, 171. 61 Caroline Vout, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 214. 62 See Blanshard, Sex, 10, 14. 63 Havelock, Aphrodite. 64 Nead, Haunted, 70. 65 John Barrell, “‘The Dangerous Goddess’: Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Cultural Critique 12 (1989): 101–31 (127). 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 19 studies scholar Catriona MacLeod examines this ambivalence in her discussion of German Realist Theodor Storm’s 1875 novella “Psyche”. Her chapter in this book explores the question of “sculptural decorum”: MacLeod argues that the use of sculptural art within the narrative “firts knowingly with the titillation of antique sculpture”, for instance in describing the male protagonist’s tactile contact with the wet and naked form of an adolescent girl, reminiscent of the wet-look drapery of neoclassical sculptures. At the same time, the novella dispels potential accusations of indecency by describing the girl’s body in sculptural terms borrowed from eighteenth-century aesthetics, which, as discussed above, centred on concepts drawn from a view of antiquity in which aesthetic beauty could act as a morally levitating force, thus distancing itself from mere corporeality. In contrast to the cautious negotiation of sculptural erotics in Storm’s work, other modern writers and artists who were keen to challenge contemporary ideals around gender and sexuality put emphasis on the sexually explicit qualities of sculpture. The fact that cultures in the past, including the highly valorised and celebrated cultures of antiquity, had enjoyed a seemingly more open and less restrictive appreciation of the body and sexuality could be used as a tool to push against the restraints held by cultures in the present.66 It was precisely the distance afforded by the engagement with statuary from the past that could be used to expose and challenge restrictive views of gender and sexuality. For this reason, statuary came to play an important role in shaping debates about sexual freedom, ranging from Enlightenment discussions of sexual lib- erty to scientifc articulations of sexuality produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.67 For instance, phallic and otherwise sexual sculptures from Pompeii and Herculaneum, such as the Pan and Goat sculpture, were used as evidence to demonstrate the greater sexual tolerance of the ancient world.68 They feature together with erotic stone carvings from India and wax models of phalluses from modern-day rural Italy which were thought to be cultural “survivals” from an earlier age, in the Society of Dilettanti’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786).

66 See Grove in this volume. 67 Carabelli, Priapus. For sexological uses of statuary specifcally, see Footnotes 70–72. Of course, following Foucault, any claim to sexual liberation and freedom needs to be read critically and should be seen as another means of disciplining sexuality in new ways. 68 See Fisher and Langlands, “Bestiality”. 20 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

Antiquarians used these sexually explicit sculptural objects to argue that all world religions originated in fertility cults. This was seen to indicate a “natural” appreciation of sexuality, which had been repressed by subsequent (especially Christian) moral and religious sensibilities.69 Following in the tradition of eighteenth-century antiquarians, early twentieth- century German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld gathered a collection of phallic artefacts from Asian cultures when travelling around the world in the early 1930s.70 Hirschfeld interpreted these sculpted objects as remnants of a universal phallic cult that has been repressed in the Western world.71 The ancient phallic sculptures allowed the sexologist to con- struct an image of sexuality as naturally free and unrestrained and to reveal the damaging impact of Western sexual repression.72 The antiquarian and sexological interest in phallic artefacts needs to be considered within the context of a broader fascination with world sculpture. Sculptural objects from African countries, the Pacifc Islands and Australia had been collected as curiosities throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sometimes as part of wider ethnographic collections.73 Such sculptures were often labelled as “primitive” in the Western imagination. Irrespective of whether these artefacts were historical or not, some eighteenth- and, especially, nineteenth-century theories of cultural evolution suggested that these objects (and the people who had created them) were remnants of a primitive past and

69 George Rousseau, “The Sorrows of Priapus: Anticlericalism, Homosocial Desire, and Richard Payne Knight,” in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, eds. Roy Porter and George Rousseau (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). See Boehm in this volume. 70 Jana Funke et al., “Illustrating Phallic Worship: Uses of Material Objects and the Production of Sexual Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism and Early Twentieth-Century Sexual Science,” Word & Image 33, no. 3 (2017), 324–37. 71 Jana Funke, “Navigating the Past: Sexuality, Race, and the Uses of the Primitive in Magnus Hirschfeld’s The World Journey of a Sexologist’,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 111–34. 72 For the inclusion of historical statuary in the ‘museum’ of Hirschfeld, see Jennifer Grove, “The Collection and Reception of Sexual Antiquities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Exeter, 2013). 73 On Cook’s collection, see Michelle Hetherington, Discovering Cook’s Collections (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2009). On African artefacts, see Karel Arnaut, “Art and the African World: A Historical Analysis of Their Interconnection,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 22, no. 2 (1991): 151–65. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 21 belonged to an earlier stage of development prior and inferior to the one that had been reached by classical Greece and Rome as well as modern Western European countries.74 Such interpretations of world sculpture in the nineteenth century served to secure racist and colonial ideologies of human progress.75 At the same time, non-Western sculpture was valorised as offering an important alternative to Western sexual codes as well as aesthetic ideals. French artist Paul Gauguin, who lived in French Polynesia in the 1890s and early 1900s, for example, drew inspiration from Polynesian art and produced wood sculptures, which he called “ultra savage”.76 These sculptures often depicted eroticised nude or semi-nude bodies of Tahitian women and, as historian Ageeth Sluis argues with regard to his paintings, “were steeped in the promise of escaping from a bourgeois life to a tropical paradise that fulflled the […] search for plenitude, pleasure and female bodies”.77 Gauguin’s appropriation of Polynesian sculpture reinforced pervasive cultural understandings of allegedly primitive cultures and peoples, especially women, as sexually open and unrestrained. Such exoticised and eroticised images offered Western European audiences a fantasy of sexual liberation. If Gauguin’s work rehearsed racist and colonial stereotypes, it also paved the way for a wider appreciation of primitive artefacts as art, which found expression in the artistic movement of “primitivism”.78 Early twentieth-century avant-garde artists, such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, appreciated and drew inspiration from

74 See Carabelli, Priapus, 119. 75 Robert Davis, “Civilization and Savagery at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition,” in Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn?, eds. Lorna Hardwick and Stephen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 105–18. On modern ambivalence towards the ‘civilization’ or ‘primitivism’ of classical antiquities, see Jen Grove, “Votive Genitalia in the Wellcome Collection: Modern Receptions of Ancient Sexual Anatomy,” in Bodies of Evidence: Ancient Anatomical Votives Past, Present and Future, eds. Jane Draycott and Emma-Jayne Graham (Abingdon and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2017), 214–36. 76 Cited in Jean-François Staszak, “Primitivism and the Other: History of Art and Cultural Geography,” GeoJournal 60, no. 4 (2004): 353–64 (355). 77 Ageeth Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900–1939 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 104–5. 78 The strict division between art and ethnographical object has been challenged by Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, “Art and/or Ethnographica? The Reception of Benin Works from 1897–1935,” African Arts 46, no. 4 (2013): 22–31. 22 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE so-called primitive art. The highly stylised and abstract treatment of the human form in African, and specifcally West-African, sculpture inspired artists to move beyond the naturalism that had characterised Western art from the Renaissance onwards as part of the neoclassical tradition.79 Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) depicts fve fgures, usually read as female prostitutes, whose faces resemble African masks and whose bodies are equally abstract in their geometric shape. In sharp contrast to Gauguin, Picasso turned to primitive art not to eroticise the female body, but to reveal the artifciality of all sex, sexuality and gender: rather than revealing the truth of the body, identity and desire, Picasso’s fgures draw attention to the fact that all representations of the human form are constructed, abstracted and, as such, inauthentic and unnatural. As literary scholar Michael North suggests in his reading of the painting, “the body is no longer a natural and inescapable datum, and gender is no longer a given, but rather something much more like clothes—or a mask”.80 For Picasso, the abstract qualities of African sculpture offered a very different means of escaping or at least exposing cultural restraints by presenting sex, gender and sexuality as cultural constructs rather than natural facts. Art historian Bernard Vere’s chapter in this volume explores this historical moment by focusing on the development of British sculpture. Examining Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill and Rock Drill Torso in Metal from the “Rock Drill” (1913–1916), Vere argues that the artist engaged with ideas of the primitive, particularly in drawing on phallic symbolism and imagery of progeny found in African art, which could offer a critique to modern Western values and aesthetics, as described above. However, Epstein was also infuenced by the ideas of Futurist artists, which can be seen in his sculptures’ machine-like and robotic characteristics. Together these infuences contributed to the abstract, rather than natu ralist, nature of the sculptor’s work. Vere suggests that the removal of the drill, which can be read as a phallus, in the second version of the sculpture should ultimately be interpreted in terms of Freud’s concept of fetishism, which can result from the male child’s realisation that the mother does not have a penis.

79 See e.g. Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 80 Michael North, “Modernism’s African Mask: The Stein Picasso Collaboration,” in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, eds. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 270–89 (282). 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 23

Freud himself developed ideas about the human psyche and individual sexual development through his engagement with sculptural artefacts from the past.81 He was an avid collector of antiquities, especially of ancient Greek and Roman as well as Egyptian and Indian objects, which were displayed in his study.82 Patients who came to see him in Vienna and later in London were surrounded by these material remnants of the past, which Freud used, at least occasionally, as part of his clinical practice to allow patients to explore the hidden contents of their own psyche.83 Patients, such as the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) and colleagues including Marie Bonaparte, would also give Freud antique objects as gifts.84 Throughout his career, Freud presented archaeological and psychoanalytic methods as analogous. Like the archaeologist, the analyst had to dig for buried treasures in the unconscious and reconstruct past events on the basis of the fragments he or she would discover. Repression was understood by Freud as the powerful and, to some extent, necessary process of excluding desires, wishes and memories from consciousness and subduing them in the unconscious. However, Freud believed that nothing was ever fully and irretrievably lost, and in his essay on “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1906), he uses the archaeological site of Pompeii, which he had visited in 1902, to illustrate this point:85 “There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades”.86

81 For a more wide-ranging discussion of sculpture and sculpting in relation to Freudian and later twentieth-century psychoanalysis, see Brandon Taylor, Sculpture and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). 82 Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis (New York: Walker & Company, 2006). 83 See Funke in this volume for a discussion of modernist writer H.D.’s engagement with Freud’s ancient objects. 84 Richard H. Armstrong, A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 197. 85 For more on Freud and Pompeii, see Daniel Orrells, “Rocks, Ghosts and Footprints: Freudian Archaeology,” in Pompeii in the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today, eds. Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 185–98. 86 Sigmund Freud, “Jensen’s Gradiva,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 9, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1906–1908), 1–95 (40). 24 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

If repression was a burial, it was also an act of preservation. The contents of the unconscious lay dormant and awaited discovery. While Freud did not comment explicitly on the sexually explicit artefacts found at Pompeii, his work on repression often centred on sexual desires, fantasies and memories. His comparison between archaeology and psychoanalysis captures the broader tensions explored in this section: like the discovery of sexually explicit objects at Pompeii, the recovery and reassembly of sexual material from the unconscious allowed the individual to gain a better understanding of the past, but this retrieval also raised challenging questions about how to interpret, place and make sense of such psychic objects.

Queer Possibilities of Statuary Because of statuary’s power to disrupt present-day ideals and values around gender and sexuality and elicit a strong physical and erotic response, it has often served to develop queer possibilities, understood here as a very wide range of articulations and expressions of sexuality. The strong link between male homoeroticism and the appreciation of the ancient male nude, in particular, has received much attention in scholarship, especially in regard to Winckelmann, who showed an “unusually explicit erotic enjoyment of the male nude” for his time.87 Like the Society of Dilettanti in their search for primitive fertility cults, Winckelmann also saw ancient sculpture as representative of an idealised past that was defned through its radical difference from the present. For him it was evident that this ideal was founded in homoerotic relations that were widely accepted and even celebrated in the ancient world. Thus, the appreciation of Greek statuary allowed Winckelmann to affrm same-sex desires that were largely proscribed in his life time, especially if they featured overt sexual expression. The legacy of Winckelmann’s accounts of the “supreme beauty” of Greek sculpture continued to frame the way in which the ancient past, represented through statuary, could facilitate an aesthetically idealised male homoeroticism.88 Classical statuary could be used to validate male same-sex relations and, increasingly, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to affrm a sense of homosexual identity,

87 Potts, Flesh, 5. 88 Reina Lewis and Andrew Stephenson, “Introduction: Queer Visual Historiographies,” Visual Culture in Britain 18, no. 1 (2017): 1–17 (6–7). 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 25 especially in the face of hostile social attitudes towards male same-sex desire. Nineteenth-century male homophile writers continued to turn to statuary to manufacture an ancient Greek past that would allow them to understand, articulate and validate their desires. In autobiographical writings, English authors like Edward Carpenter, George Ives and John Addington Symonds, for instance, all mentioned “adolescent epiphanies [concerning their own homoerotic desires] prompted by Greek statuary”.89 Into the twentieth century, writers such as E.M. Forster regularly drew on classical statuary to depict male same-sex desire. Written in the 1930s and published posthumously, Forster’s short story “The Classical Annex” features a male Roman statue that comes to life in a museum and has sex with a boy. As classicist Jennifer Ingleheart argues, the text presents a homoerotic reinterpretation of the Pygmalion myth and was written in a bid to reinforce the homosexual dimensions of classical culture that some contemporary commentators had tried to obscure.90 Scholars interested in modern homosexual self-fashioning have recognised the important role of classical and neoclassical sculpture within private collections of elite men, for instance in the frequent collection and display of images of Antinoüs, the youthful lover of Roman emperor Hadrian, who became a symbol of homoerotic desire in the nineteenth century.91 The joint collecting ventures of wealthy and fashionable male couples, and the subsequent display of their acquisitions of classical sculpture and other antiquities as part of the interior styling of their shared homes, played a key role in developing and affrming what art historian John Potvin calls “queer domesticities” in the late nineteenth

89 Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 126. 90 Jennifer Ingleheart, “Responding to Ovid’s Pygmalion Episode and Receptions of Same-Sex Love in Classical Antiquity: Art, Homosexuality, and the Curatorship of Classical Culture in E. M. Forster’s ‘The Classical Annex’,” Classical Receptions Journal 7, no. 2 (2015): 141–58. 91 E.g. Sarah Waters, “‘The Most Famous Fairy in History’: Antinous and Homosexual Fantasy,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 2 (1995): 194–230. Caroline Vout challenges the straightforward equation of the classical male nude with male same-sex desire or identity in modern collection histories, Caroline Vout, “Romantic Visions: Collecting, Display and Homosexual Self-Fashioning,” in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 232–51 (236–7). 26 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE and early twentieth centuries.92 Classicist and historian Jen Grove in this volume discusses how classical statuary functioned within the relationship of collector Edward Perry Warren and his lover John Marshall in this period. She also determines that Warren’s engagement with statuary, and the male nude in particular, can be interrogated to reveal the part it played in establishing and disseminating a particular model of classicised, virile masculinity and age-differentiated male–male attachments. Warren saw certain styles of ancient art as embodying particular ancient values which could be marshalled to challenge contemporary heteronormativity and associations between homosexuality and effeminacy, as well as resist emerging gender equality in this period. The ways in which statuary was used to explore questions around female homoeroticism and to articulate other expressions of female sexual desire have received far less attention, and this gap in existing scholarship is addressed by three chapters in the fnal section of this book. Francesco Ventrella, Jana Funke and Amy Mechowski examine the cultural and historical reasons that might have made it more diffcult for women to engage erotically with statuary from the past, but also demonstrate how statuary can nevertheless open up queer possibilities for female subjects. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, art historian Francesco Ventrella explores how Vernon Lee developed a queer theory of embodiment, empathy and aesthetics in collaboration with her lover Clementia Anstruther-Thomson. The materiality of sculpture was central to the aesthetic experiments conducted by both women, allowing for a new ethics of embodiment and plastic understanding of sexuality. Literary scholar Jana Funke investigates modernist author H.D.’s (Hilda Doolittle) engagement with statuary. Turning away from the frequently discussed uses of classical marble sculptures in H.D.’s work and focusing on the materiality and temporality of bronze statuary instead, Funke opens up a new reading of H.D.’s widely mythologised encounter with Sigmund Freud in the 1930s. Exploring H.D.’s and Freud’s engagement with a bronze statuette of Greek goddess Athena, Funke’s chapter argues that the bronze artefact signalled historical loss as well as anachronistic survival and thereby opened up a queer engagement with the past that allowed for exchange between the male psychoanalyst and female modernist writer.

92 John Potvin, “Askesis as Aesthetic Home: Edward Perry Warren, Lewes House, and the Ideal of Greek Love,” Home Cultures 8, no. 1 (2011): 71–89; Matt Cook, “Domestic Passions: Unpacking the Homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts,” Journal of British Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 618–40. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 27

The turn of the twentieth century, which Funke, Grove and Ventrella take as the starting point for their investigations, marked a shift in engagements with statuary. As discussed in the previous section, statuary had been used to celebrate and affrm same-sex eroticism as noble, valuable and uplifting, but, towards the end of the nineteenth century, more emphasis was put on the sensuous and physical dimensions of sculptural aesthetics. British literary scholar and art critic Walter Pater, for instance, engaged closely with Winckelmann’s writings in his book The Renaissance (1873). Whereas Winckelmann had celebrated the androg ynous beauty of classical Greek sculpture, because it was, in the words of MacLeod, an “aesthetic construction, self-consciously artifcial” and thus far removed from physical reality,93 Pater reminded his readers of the literal meaning of “aesthetic” as “perception”, thus emphasising more strongly than Winckelmann the embodied dimensions of sense experience. Given the homoeroticism of Winckelmann’s writings, of which Pater was keenly aware, foregrounding the sensory and possibly sensuous perception of statuary could be read as an argument against the idea that homoerotic desires had to be sublimated rather than experienced and enjoyed physically. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Aestheticist and Decadent writers and artists, who were very strongly infuenced by Pater, sought to disrupt strategically the association between morality and art.94 At the beginning of Irish author Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the painter Basil Hallward exclaims that Dorian Gray’s face is to his art what “the face of Antinoüs was to late Greek sculpture”.95 Wilde stresses the homoerotic nature of Basil’s and Dorian’s relationship by associating Dorian with a beautiful Greek sculpture of Antinoüs. The young man’s face, painted by Hallward, however, will remain neither youthful nor beautiful, as it comes to reveal the moral corruption that results from Dorian’s excessive indulgence in all physical pleasures. Thus, Wilde contrasts the purity and nobility of Greek sculpture with the physical indulgence and excess that results from its adoration.

93 MacLeod, Ambiguity, 29. 94 Elizabeth Prettejohn, After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 1–6. 95 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12. 28 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

It was precisely this association with physical pleasure that made the desire for statues a topic of interest for late nineteenth-century sexolo- gists, who argued that the love of statues was not merely a mythological trope, but needed to be understood as a recurrent form of human sexual desire. In Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing discusses “Statuenschänder” (people who violate statues) in a chapter on offences against morality.96 Here, he describes the 1877 case of a male “gardener who fell in love with a statue of the Venus of Milo and was discovered attempting coitus with it”.97 Krafft-Ebing puts emphasis on the pathological dimension of this form of desire, which he sees as a transition to “monstrous cases of necrophilia”.98 The Austrian sexologist also discusses homoerotic attraction to statues, including the historical case of a Greek man who was in love and had sex with a statue of cupid in the temple at Delphi.99 A few of his male and female homosexual patients report attraction to statues.100 In the fourth volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1905), British sexologist Havelock Ellis introduced the term “pygmalionism” to the English language to describe the phenomena of “falling in love with statues”, which he defnes as “a rare form of erotomania”.101 Unlike Krafft-Ebing, Ellis does not stress the pathological dimensions of pygmalionism, but emphasises that this form of desire is “by no means uncommon among young men during adolescence”, who have “sometimes masturbated before statues, and even before the image of the Virgin”.102 Of special interest for this volume is Ellis’ reference to the ancient Greeks, who, he explains, were drawn to this form of sexual behaviour because they had “tinted, and thus more lifelike” statues.103

96 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine Klinische-Forensische Studie (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1886), 53–4; Translations are the authors’ own. 97 Ibid., 54. See Alastair Blanshard, “Queer Desires and Classicising Strategies of Resistance,” in Sex, Knowledge & Receptions of the Past, eds. Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 25–44 (30–1). 98 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 53. 99 Ibid., 72. 100 E.g. ibid., 66 and 69. 101 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Davis Company, 1905), 188. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 29

The desire for statuary also played a signifcant role in shaping modern understandings of male masochism. Severin, the hero of Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), which inspired Krafft-Ebing to coin the term “masochism”, expresses his love for a statue of Venus104: “It is suffcient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her”.105 Here, male masochistic desires are expressed in the futile and frustrated desire for the inanimate statue. However, in Sacher-Masoch’s novella, the statue does come alive in the form of Wanda, who dominates Severin and fulfls his masochistic wishes. Sacher-Masoch’s adaptation of the Pygmalion myth inverts traditional gender roles: the female animated statue maintains her stone-like autonomy and takes on a dominant position over her male admirer, who takes pleasure in his subordinate role.106 Later feminist adaptations of the Pygmalion myth, while not necessarily depicting male masochism, would also stress the autonomy and agency of the Galatea fgure: in Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1914), for instance, the female Galatea character develops agency and speaks back to her creator. Angela Carter’s short story “The Loves of Lady Purple” (1974) presents a marionette who comes alive and emancipates herself from her puppeteer by killing him.107 While statuary could be used to affrm homoeroticisms, celebrate allegedly perverse and deviant desires and subvert traditional associations of masculinity with power and femininity with submission, the queer potential of statuary fnds its most powerful expression in foregrounding the fuidity and ambiguity of all sexual identities, gender roles and sexual desires. This point has been demonstrated by scholarship on the reception of sculpted depictions of adolescent male and hermaphroditic bodies. As MacLeod has discussed in her study of

104 See Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), esp. Chapter 5. 105 Quoted in Basil Dufallo, Roman Error: Classical Reception and the Problem of Rome’s Flaws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 167. 106 Gross, Dream, 80; Nead, Haunted, 70. 107 Stefanie Eck, Galatea’s Emancipation: The Transformation of the Pygmalion Myth in Anglo-Saxon Literature Since the 20th Century (Hamburg: Anchor Academic Publishing, 2014). 30 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE eighteenth-century classical German aesthetics, Winckelmann and his followers were fascinated with art works such as the androgynous Antinoüs relief (created around AD 140 and rediscovered in 1735) or the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (in the Villa Borghese and Museo Nazionale Romano delle Terme in Rome and the Louvre in Paris).108 Suspended between maleness and femaleness, as well as childhood and adulthood, these liminal fgures opened up an eroticism of indeterminacy that thrived on the viewer’s desire and ultimate inability to resolve the contradictions embodied by the sculpture. The ekphrastic poem “Hermaphroditus” (1868) by British Aestheticist writer Charles Algernon Swinburne, inspired by the sculpture of Hermaphroditus in the Louvre, describes the viewer’s struggle to make sense of the sexually indeterminate sculpted form. Swinburne fnds erotic potential in the frustrated attempts to understand the androgynous body as either male or female and the failure to impel the statue to yield to the observer’s desire. While the poem has been read in the tradition of male homoerotic writings about statu- ar y,109 the text also demonstrates the queer potential of statuary to blur distinctions between male and female, activity and passivity, pleasure and frustration. As we have seen above, the erotic encounter with statuary often centres on moments of metamorphosis, becoming and transformation, in which stable subject positions and oppositions are overcome in favour of an erotic experience of indeterminacy. Crucially, the encounter with statuary from the past could also result in the queer unravelling of any stable identity position. As queer theorist and literary scholar Heather Love has argued, queer engagements with the past do not always result in the affrmation of queer desires and identities, but can also involve radical feelings of loss and disconnection. Instead of yielding to the human interlocutor, statuary can also come to embody the resistance of the past to the touch of the present. As Gross stresses, “the statue […] marks an absence or a loss through the presence of a thing that is yet irremediably, materially present”.110 Indeed,

108 MacLeod, Ambiguity, 25–46. 109 Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 81–3. See also, Wendy Bashant, “Redressing Androgyny: Hermaphroditic Bodies in Victorian England,” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 4 (1995): 5–23 (13). 110 Gross, Dream, 15. 1 INTRODUCTION—DESIRING SCULPTURES, ENCOUNTERING THE PAST … 31 sculptural encounters often involve feelings of nostalgia, resulting from the realisation that it is impossible to reach back to the past, as we have seen. Pater’s essay on Winckelmann, for instance, brings out the tensions inherent in the attempt to draw on statuary to make sense of male homoerotic desires and identities in the present.111 Describing Greek statue as both life- and sexless, Pater highlights the statue’s resistance to being recuperated in the service of a modern homophile project.112 In so doing, he points to statuary’s troubling potential to undermine affrmative readings of male same-sex desire and to undo new homosexual identity categories that were beginning to emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century.113 Statuary’s queer potential to trouble rather than affrm sexual identity was also noted by Freud. In his essay on “The Uncanny” (1919), living dolls and automatons come to represent the haunting return of the repressed, related particularly to castration anxiety, which threatens to disrupt radically the psychic integrity of the heterosexual male subject.114 In the fnal chapter of this volume, Mechowski investigates how the queer possibilities of statuary can continue to be marshalled in museum spaces today, especially with regard to female same-sex eroticism. Engaging with art history and drawing on her own expertise as a curator, Mechowski suggests that the visual dialogue between certain twentieth-century female statues, as they are exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, allows for viewing experiences that are very different from the “specifc heterosexual, masculine visual economy in which they were produced”. This enables women to feel desire and pleasure in regarding female nudes, thus also creating a space that has the potential to facilitate the expression of homoeroticism between female viewers. The ability to facilitate queer experiences in museum spaces today, and the role of museums to challenge governing ideologies of sexuality and gender, is a topic of increasing interest in the museum sector.

111 See Potts, Flesh, 239–53. 112 Ibid., 249. See also Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007), 64–5. 113 For more on the ambiguous reception of ancient Greece by writers like Symonds, see Jana Funke, “‘We Cannot Be Greek Now’: Age Difference, Corruption of Youth and the Making of Sexual Inversion,” English Studies 94, no. 2 (2013): 139–53. 114 See Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 42–4. 32 J. FUNKE AND J. GROVE

Mechowski’s approach moves beyond traditional efforts to make explicit LGBT themes or artists’ identities in exhibits and calls instead for “display methods [that] reposition visitors and open up potentially transgressive and multiplicitous spaces” of queer desire.115

Conclusion As this introduction and the volume as a whole show, sculpture has played a major role in shaping how sexuality and gender are understood and experienced. Focusing on sculpture highlights not only how central the past is in this context, but also foregrounds the erotic, sensuous and embodied dimensions of any encounter with the past and attempt to write history. The ambiguities of the sculptural encounter also reveal the many different ways in which the past can relate to sexualities and genders in the present, ranging from the affrmation and celebration of sexual and gender identities to the queer unravelling of any fxed or stable notion of sexuality and gender. Exploring how engagements with sculpture have been articulated and mediated in diverse felds of knowledge and forms of expression over the past three centuries, the volume invites scholars across disciplines to revise existing understandings of sculpture and material culture and to investigate the entanglements between aesthetic and embodied experience, encounters with the past and understandings and experiences of sexuality and gender.

115 Robert Mills, “Theorizing the Queer Museum,” Museums & Social Issues 3, no. 1 (2008): 41–52 (41). On present-day museums’ approaches to sexual subjects in sculpture, see also Donnellan in this volume. PART I

The Desire for the Living Statue and the Desire for the Past CHAPTER 2

Antiquarian Pygmalions: The Female Body, Ancient Statuary, and the Idea of Imaginary Transport in the Eighteenth Century

Katharina Boehm

Throughout the eighteenth-century, members of the aristocracy, the gentry, and, increasingly, the middling classes found in classical antiquities a reason for travel and an object of conversation, learned dispute, and aesthetic appreciation. The fascination of ancient sculptures was endlessly rehearsed in travelogues: “No part of the Antiquities of Rome pleas’d me so much as the ancient Statues”, noted Joseph Addison in his infuential Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705).1 Indeed, the proliferation of written accounts of the most famous statues to be seen in Rome and Florence was such that the travel writer’s baulking at the task of producing a fresh description of a much-discussed sculpture became a

1 Joseph Addison, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c. in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703 (London, 1705), 303.

K. Boehm (*) University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

© The Author(s) 2019 35 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_2 36 K. BOEHM trope in its own right. Tobias Smollett’s observation regarding the statue of Laocoön in his Travels Through France and Italy (1766) stands representative for the responses of many other travel writers: “As you have seen innumerable copies and casts of it, in marble, plaister [sic], copper, lead, drawing, and prints, and read the description of it in Keyslar, and twenty other books of travel, I shall say nothing more on the subject”.2 At the middle of the century, both the vogue for copies of ancient statues and the rise of the neoclassical taste in Britain received a boost from archaeological fnds at Herculaneum and Pompeii, where excavation work began in 1738 and 1748, respectively. Both Naples and Rome were cosmopolitan centres of antiquarian activities. English expatriates, such as the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton and the collector and diplomat Sir William Hamilton, brokered the sale of ancient statues and modern copies to British patrons.3 However, they also connected collectors and antiquaries located in Britain to European-wide debates about ancient sculpture which intensifed after the publication of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Letter and Report on the Discoveries at Herculaneum (1762) and his History of Ancient Art (1764). Scholars have begun to map the different sexual politics and forms of desire that were interwoven with the activities of antiquaries and virtuosi, shedding light, for instance, on the place of homoeroticism and homosociality in eighteenth-century research into Greek sculpture as well as on the feminine gendering of antiques as “objects of male desire”.4 This chapter explores the role of a specifcally feminine

2 Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: printed for Baldwin, 1766), II: 151. 3 See Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially 49–83; Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 123–63; and Nancy H. Ramage, “Sir William Hamilton as Collector, Exporter, and Dealer: The Acquisition and Dispersal of His Collections,” American Journal of Archaeology 94, no. 3 (1990): 469–80. 4 Coltmann, Classical Sculpture, 176. On desire for the female form as represented in statuary, see also Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2009), 24–34. On homoeroticism, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) and George Sebastian Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Sexual, Historical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 172–9. 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 37 sculptural imagery in antiquarian representations of imaginary transport by William Hamilton, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Johann von Goethe among others, as well as the reconfguration of this imagery in the context of antiquarian inquiries into vestigial remains of ancient customs. My argument shifts attention away from the sculpted female form, which has garnered much scholarly commentary, and inquires instead into the meanings which antiquaries attached to the living female body when they imaginatively linked it to ancient statuary. It will become clear that in these instances the mechanisms by which the female body is objectifed and women locked in a passive position often correspond to the well-documented operation of the male gaze in contemporary discourses on eroticised female sculptures. More centrally, however, I am concerned in this chapter with tracing how the antiquarian image of the female body as sculpture and/or artefact casts into relief changing concepts of historical understanding and historical temporality. The fnal part of the chapter offers a female perspective on the fgure of the living statue. It turns to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), a novel that is steeped in antiquarian debates about the comparative study of past and present customs. I propose that when Lennox responded to the idea of the living female body as key to past manners and customs, she was equally concerned with the objectifcation of women and with the methodological weaknesses she detected in the research practices of male antiquaries.

Imaginary Transport, Desire, and the Living Statue The antiquarian activities of the aforementioned William Hamilton, who acted as British envoy to the Court of Naples between 1764 and 1800, and his collaborators provide a useful feld of inquiry because their work comprised both more traditional research into antiques and attempts to develop novel approaches to the study of ancient manners and customs. Hamilton’s Neapolitan home, the Palazzo Sessa, was the principal social hub of the European expatriate community in Naples.5 Hamilton hosted parties during which his second wife Emma enacted

5 For an introduction to the Hamiltons’ life in Italy and their social circle, see Carlo Knight, “William Hamilton and the ‘Art of Going Through Life’,” in Vases & Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection, eds. Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 1996), 11–23. 38 K. BOEHM her celebrated “attitudes”—a silent performance in which she imitated the poses and facial expressions of mythological fgures, including those represented on Hamilton’s famous antique vases. Frederick Rehberg’s drawings of Emma Hamilton’s attitudes, published in 1794, show that she performed with a variety of objects, including amphorae, bowls, and pitchers, which belonged to Hamilton’s collection of antiques.6 The story of Hamilton and Emma, including the hierarchies of social class and monetary power that defned their relationship as well as Emma’s heavily publicised relationship with Horatio Nelson during the fnal years of Hamilton’s life, has often been told.7 Horace Walpole famously quipped about Hamilton’s union with Emma that “Sir William has actually married his gallery of statues”, and many scholars have taken Emma Hamilton’s case as representative for the manner in which eighteenth-century travel writers styled famous female socialites as “surrogate antiquities”.8 Ann Bermingham, for instance, suggests that the commodifcation of antiquity and the female form that drove the craze for statues such as the Medici Venus translated seamlessly into the manner in which male virtuosi viewed living women such as Emma Hamilton, whom Bermingham describes as “an object of aesthetic exchange among men, a rare commodity to be shared, bartered, envied, and, when showing signs of wear, to be discarded”.9 Bermingham demonstrates that the value of feminised antiques and female “surrogate antiquities” depended on their

6 Historians have suggested a number of popular and painterly practices which may have infuenced Emma Hamilton’s attitudes. Kirsten Holmström argues that Emma’s experience as a painter’s model schooled her in embodying fgures from Greek mythology. Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion 1770–1815 (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1967), 128–35. According to Andrei Pop, Emma’s attitudes may go back to her alleged posing as Hygeia, the goddess of health, in the Adelphi in London. Pop, “Sympathetic Spectators: Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare and Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes,” Art History 34, no. 5 (2011): 934–57 (942–3). 7 Most prominently, Susan Sontag wrote a historical novel about the Hamiltons and Nelson. See Sontag, The Volcano Lover (New York: Farrar Giroux Strauss, 1992). 8 Horace Walpole, Letter to Mary Berry, 11 September 1791, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, vol. XI (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 348–51 (349). Chloe Chard uses the term “surrogate antiquities” in “Grand and Ghostly Tours: The Topography of Memory,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 1 (1997): 101–8 (102). 9 Ann Bermingham, “Elegant Females and Gentlemen Connoisseurs: The Commerce in Culture and Self-Image in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, eds. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 489–513 (507). 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 39 position within cycles of exchange that were largely uncoupled from the concerns of antiquarian research. However, as I propose in what follows, the fgure of the eroticised statue come to life can also be made productive for an inquiry into antiquarian ideas about the kind of access to the past that classical statues offer. At the same time, attention to antiquarian renditions of the living statue sheds new light on instances in which the female body was treated as an artefact in contemporary studies of ancient traditions. “[A] mobile statue” is how Goethe, who visited the Hamiltons twice in 1787, described Emma’s attitudes in his Italian Journey (1816–1817).

The old knight [Hamilton] has had made for her a Greek costume, which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, and letting her hair loose, and taking a couple of shawls, she exhibits every possible variety of posture, expressions, and look, so that at last the spectator almost fancies it is a dream. One beholds here in perfection, in movement, in ravishing variety, all that the greatest of artists have rejoiced to be able to reproduce. […] [G]rave or sad, playful, exulting, repentant, wanton, menacing, anxious— all mental states follow rapidly one after another. […] The old knight holds the light for her and enters into the exhibition with his whole soul. He thinks that he can discern in her a resemblance to all the most famous antiques, all the beautiful profles on the Sicilian coins—ay, of the Apollo Belvedere itself.10

Goethe’s suggestion that the observer falls into a dream-like state (the German original reads “dass man zuletzt wirklich meint, man träumt”) gestures to the notion of imaginary transport—the idea, famously expressed by the Renaissance humanist Francesco Petrarca and repeated by many later Italian and English antiquaries, “that by observing ancient statuary a gentleman might also observe directly, as if it were present, the ancient world”.11 The concept of imaginary transport is again evoked in Goethe’s reference to the Apollo Belvedere. Both for Goethe and Hamilton, this life-sized statue was inextricably linked to Winckelmann’s well-known account of it in his History of Ancient Art. Winckelmann,

10 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Travels in Italy, Together with His Second Residence in Rome (London: Bell, 1885), 199, 330. 11 Angus Vine, In Defance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 140. 40 K. BOEHM who was well acquainted with Hamilton, describes the experience of gazing at the Apollo Belvedere as follows:

In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those who were flled with the spirit of prophesy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and into the Lycean groves—places which Apollo honoured by his presence,—for my image seems to receive life and motion, like the beautiful creation of Pygmalion.12

Here, as in Goethe’s description of Emma Hamilton’s attitudes, the idea of imaginary transport is yoked to the image of the moving statue—in this instance, Pygmalion’s female sculpture quickened to life, name- less in Ovid’s rendition of the myth in the Metamorphoses but familiar to Hamilton, Winckelmann, and their contemporaries as Galatea from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s infuential play Pygmalion (1762) and Etienne- Maurice Falconet’s marble group Pygmalion and Galatea (1763). The sculpture of the Apollo Belvedere represents an iconic male body but, like Goethe, Winckelmann uses the image of the female statue come to life in order to signify the experience of imaginary transport: the Apollo Belvedere is gendered female in the moment in which the statue becomes animate. In order to get a better sense of the meanings attached to the moving female statue in Goethe’s and Winckelmann’s accounts, it is important to note that while the idea of imaginary transport remained in currency in antiquarian discourse throughout the eighteenth century, it stood at odds with the empiricist orientation of many branches of antiquarian research. The notion that an act of spontaneous hallucination, triggered by an encounter with an ancient masterpiece, could precipitate the observer into direct contact with the past was diffcult to square with the antiquaries’ desire to claim for their research an authority built on the painstaking study and documentation of the material properties of artefacts.13 The friction between both approaches is evident in Thomas

12 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, 4 vols. (Boston: Osgood, 1872), II: 313. 13 See Katharina Boehm, “Empiricism, Antiquarian Fieldwork and the (In)visibilization of the Past in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Mediating the Materiality of the Past, 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 41

Broderick’s derisive comments, included in his Travels (1754), on the ignorance of Britons on the Grand Tour who “expect to hear statues speak, and to be informed, not by the colouring or the design; not by the structure or harmony of the piece; but from immediate articulation from the canvas”.14 In Goethe’s and Winckelmann’s renditions of the experience of imaginary transport, the moving female statue both encodes and resolves the tension between empirically sourced facts and the antiquary’s imagination. When Goethe writes that Hamilton “enters into the exhibition with his whole soul”, fnding in his “moving statue” “all the most beautiful antiques” and “all the beautiful profles on the Sicilian coins”, he suggests that the past is animated through an act of projection since the antiquary’s view of the (living) statue is informed by the store of know ledge he has amassed through years of study and research. Imaginary transport, in other words, is not produced by an unrehearsed encounter with an authentic piece of the past. Instead, it is shaped by the increasing availability of reproductions of famous statues—the “innumerable copies and casts […], drawing[s], and prints” mentioned by Smollett in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. When antiquaries gazed at statues, what they saw—and hallucinated—was determined partly by their familiarity with a constantly growing body of antiquarian information: Hamilton’s mind is a repository of “all the most beautiful antiques” and “all the beautiful profles on the Sicilian coins”, and he views his statue come to life through this flter. It is signifcant in this context that Winckelmann’s encounter with the Apollo Belvedere begins with an act of forgetting (“I forget all else”), which implies that the fantasy of gaining unmediated access to the past requires the complete erasure of antiquarian learning.15 However, in the very moment

1700–1930, eds. Katharina Boehm and Victoria Mills (Special issue Word & Image 33, no. 3 (2017)), 257–66. 14 Thomas Broderick, The Travels of Thomas Broderick, Esq, in a Late Tour Through Several Parts of Europe, 2 vols. (London: printed for Mr. Cooper, 1754), I: 3. 15 For a discussion of some of the ideas that clustered around a specifc statue excavated at Herculaneum, the famous marble statue of Pan and a goat, and the manner in which it seemed to hold out—but also frustrated—the promise of granting unmediated access to the past see Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “Bestiality in the Bay of Naples: The Herculaneum Pan and Goat Statue,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 87–111. 42 K. BOEHM of Winckelmann’s experience of transport (“I feel myself transported to Delos”), the reader is reminded that this erasure is impossible and that whatever form the resurrected past takes in the present is the product of the antiquary’s own preconceived ideas: it is not the past, or even the statue, that “receives life and motion”, but “my [Winckelmann’s] image” of it. Winckelmann’s comparison between his “image” and Pygmalion’s statue can be read as admission that the antiquary’s desire for direct, ecstatic contact with the past returns him to the idealised image of the ancients that he himself has created. Goethe’s and Winckelmann’s meditations on imaginary transport confront the fact that direct communion with the past may be unattaina- ble, but they also use the fgure of the living female statue to point out that the past can still become available as affect when it animates modern bodies.16 When Winckelmann identifes with Pygmalion’s statue, he draws the reader’s attention to the fact that, like a reverse Galatea, he adjusts his position to approximate the marmoreal perfection of the Apollo Belvedere, moulding his fesh to the ethos and beauty epitomised in the statue: “My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those who were flled with the spirit of prophesy”. Instead of an abstract ideal, the past is here fgured as something that excites the senses and is registered as bodily affect in the present. Meanwhile, Rehberg’s drawings remind us that Emma Hamilton was feted for her ability to combine her classical poses with vividly acted emotional states. Goethe notes that she could appear “grave or sad, playful, exulting, repentant” in rapid succession, and the accounts of other eye-witnesses report that her attitudes elicited strong physical responses

16 I am using the term “affect” to denote the intensifed experience, articulated in many antiquarian texts, that occurs when the past becomes present and is seemingly drawn into sensorial proximity. In the reports of antiquaries, such affects are also associated with a de-individuation of experience, that is to say, with strong emotional effects that elude language and are often perceived to be communal rather than limited to the individual. Antiquarianism has variously been described as an approach to the past that foregrounds affect. The locus classicus for this interpretation of antiquarianism is Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” included in his Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–123. On affect and eighteenth-century and Romantic antiquarianism see also Stephen Bann, “Clio in Part: On Antiquarianism and the Historical Fragment,” in The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 100–21. 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 43 from observers. Marianne Kraus, a young German painter, witnessed one of Emma Hamilton’s performances in 1791 in the company of Rehberg, the painter Angelica Kauffmann, and the antiquary Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein: “I was ashamed of my cool-headedness when I saw how all the ladies and gentlemen cried”, Kraus notes. “Angelica’s audible swal- lowing could have moved stones. […] Herr Reiffenstein cried daintily, it was possible to count the tears rolling down his cheeks in the antique style”.17 Kraus renders Emma Hamilton’s attitudes as a forum in which members of the audience display their refned sensibility and in which the past’s hold on the present becomes manifest in their expressive bodies. In the German original of Kraus’s travelogue, Reiffenstein cries “antikische Tränen”, an ambiguous phrase suggestive of the idea that the past has taken possession of Reiffenstein to the extent that his body has begun to produce “antique” rather than modern tears. The writings of Goethe, Winckelmann, and Kraus remind us that the commodifcation of antiquity and the female form that Bermingham fnds in late-eighteenth-century representations of Emma Hamilton co-existed with other antiquarian investments in the idea of the female statue come to life. As I have noted above, the empiricist bent of many eighteenth-century branches of antiquarianism put pressure on the old ideal of imaginary transport. When Winckelmann casts himself in the role of Pygmalion’s Galatea and Reiffenstein allows his emotions to be dictated by Emma Hamilton’s classical poses, both antiquaries seem to understand identifcation with the female living statue as a means of unburdening themselves from the weight of empirically sourced antiquarian knowledge. The erotic charge of these scenes is at least in part generated by the antiquary’s desire to draw close to the past, either by experiencing once more the ecstasy of imaginative transport or by giving himself over to the affect of the past. The gendering of the realm of empiricism and scholarly knowledge as masculine—and of feeling and the imagination as feminine—is a familiar eighteenth-century phenomenon. However, what makes these scenes remarkable is the extent to which they recast male desire for feminised antiques. Their confguration of the relationship between living statue and antiquarian observer differs signif- icantly from the more familiar representational convention by which “the

17 Marianne Kraus, Für mich gemerkt auf meiner Reise nach Italien im Jahre 1791: Reisetagebuch der Malerin und Erbacher Hofdame, ed. Helmut Brosch (Buchen: Verein Bezirksmuseum, 1996), 96–7. My translation. 44 K. BOEHM allure of antiquity—the pursuit, possession, and penetration of its material culture—[is equated] to that of women”.18 This possessive desire is replaced in the works by Goethe, Winckelmann, and Kraus by the antiquary’s longing to become like (rather than to possess) the female living statue.

William Hamilton and the Women of Isernia When antiquaries like Hamilton began to study local Neapolitan traditions as vestigial remains of ancient customs, close empirical observation no longer seemed at odds with the desire to glimpse the living past. Looking at Hamilton’s research into the vestiges of what he perceived to be an ancient cult allows us to see how novel research practices also generated new epistemic objects and new subject positions for male antiquaries from which these objects could be known. The idea of the living female statue continued to inform but was also profoundly reconfgured in these debates. Hamilton collaborated with Pierre-François Hugues, the self-styled Baron d’Hancarville, in researching Classical antiquities and in publishing the highly infuential Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon. W. Hamilton (1767–1776). Hamilton and d’Hancarville established many parallels between Classical and local Neapolitan customs, including styles of dress, dances, musical instruments, and horse branding techniques, all of which are discussed in the copious footnotes to the Collection.19 Noah Heringman has described their “practice of deriving ancient customs from observable ‘primitive’ ones” as “ethnographic actualism” and as an important early step in the history of the anthropology of everyday life.20 Hamilton and

18 Coltman, Classical Sculpture, 176. 19 See, for instance, Pierre de Hancarville [P.F. Hugues], Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities of Sir William Hamilton, 4 vols. (Naples: Morelli, 1767–76), II: 161, 168; IV: 51, 57–58. On the cultural impact of the Collection, see Thora Brylowe, “Two Kinds of Collections: Sir William Hamilton’s Vases: Real and Represented,” Eighteenth-Century Life 32, no. 1 (2008): 23–56. 20 Noah Heringman, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 158, see also 155–82. Heringman shows that d’Hancarville anticipated and infuenced the work of Andrea de Jorio, author of Mimicry Among the Ancients (1832), whom Alain Schnapp credits with pioneering research into the anthropology of everyday life. See Alain Schnapp, “Antiquarian Studies in Naples at the End of the Eighteenth Century: From Comparative 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 45 d’Hancarville looked to the Neapolitans’ rituals and customs in order to decode the meaning of vase paintings and other artefacts that they studied. However, in doing so they faced challenges that John Brand, an antiquarian colleague who published one of the frst works dedicated solely to the parallel study of current and past British manners, described in his roughly contemporary Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777) as follows:

[Popular antiquities] have indeed travelled down to us through a long Succession of Years, […]. Many of these, it must be confessed are mutilated, and, as in the Remains of antient [sic] Statuary, the Parts of not a few of them have been awkwardly transposed: they preserve, however, the principal Traits, that distinguished them in their Origin. Things, composed of such fimsy Materials as the Fancies of a Multitude, do not seem calculated for a long Duration: yet have these survived Shocks, by which even Empires have been overthrown, and preserved at least some Form and Colour of Identity, during a Repetition of Changes, both in religious Opinion, and in the Polity of States.21

Brand draws attention to the fact that manners and customs—what he refers to as “popular antiquities” in the title of his study—are neither static nor stable: residual traditions and customs do not “travel[] down to us” and store information in quite the same manner that artefacts do. Customs are not attached to a fxed material container; instead they are feetingly embodied by successive generations. However, what is striking about this passage is not the difference that Brand detects between artefact and residual custom, but the extent to which the language that he is using produces a likeness between the two. At the opening of his study, Brand invests customs and traditions with a distinctly thingly quality. He compares them to “the Remains of antient Statuary”, and he builds on this analogy when he suggests that “vulgar rites” retain “at least some Form and Colour of Identity” over the centuries. Brand was eager to solicit support for this relatively new feld of

Archaeology to Comparative Religion,” in Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation State, ed. Girolamo Imbruglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 154–66 (166). 21 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities (Newcastle: Saint, 1777), n.p. [iii]. 46 K. BOEHM antiquarian research, and framing his subject in material terms that rang familiar to antiquarian ears implied continuity between his project and existing approaches. However, he does not explain how the methods of object-oriented historical research could be transposed in order to illumi- nate the domain of living manners and customs. As a result, he raises— but does not answer—questions that are also pertinent to Hamilton and d’Hancarville’s research into Neapolitan customs: what is the material or immaterial “object” of this kind of inquiry? Is it the human body that performs a particular rite or custom, the practice that is re-enacted, or the belief that animates this practice, and how can these be told apart? Living traditions could only be studied when they were transiently materialised through modern bodies that performed ancient rituals in the present. Antiquarian research into manners and customs sometimes treated the human body as a quasi-artefact—a tangible carrier of information—that provided empirical evidence relating to past customs. However, this approach necessitated the identifcation of subjects, usually of a lower-class background and living in remote areas where ancient traditions had seemingly been preserved, whose practices and rituals could be observed and documented. The stakes of antiquarian inquiries into manners and customs are illustrated with particular force in Hamilton’s thinking about the relationship between the modern female body and the material culture of the ancients in the context of the so-called Cult of Priapus, an ancient phallic cult vestiges of which appeared to have survived in the ancient town of Isernia, north of Naples. In July 1781, Hamilton sent a letter to Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and, like Hamilton, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, to communicate his discovery of an ancient fertility cult in Isernia. During an annual festival, he reported, devotees sold wax models of what was cheekily termed St. Cosmo’s Great Toe—the Neapolitan euphemism for the phallus. These ex-voti were then presented to the shrine of the saint. Hamilton marvelled at “the singularity of the ceremony, so very similar to that which attended the ancient Cult”,22 coming to the conclusion that “the Cult of Priapus

22 Parts of Hamilton’s letter to Banks were included in Richard Payne Knight’s An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus. See William Hamilton, “A Letter from Sir William Hamilton, etc.,” in Richard Payne Knight, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (London: privately printed 1865 [Reprint 1894]), 3–8 (5). 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 47

[was] in as full vigour, as in the days of the Greeks and Romans”.23 Hamilton sent fve wax phalli to the British Museum in 1784, and his report inspired Richard Payne Knight’s well-known treatise An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, which compared ancient and modern phallic cults and gave particular attention to phallic objects excavated at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Knight’s study appeared in 1786 and included Hamilton’s letter to Banks.24 Hamilton’s research into the Cult of Priapus was embedded in an antiquarian culture that was built on homosocial bonds of friendship and patronage. Unpublished letters exchanged between Hamilton and Banks indicate that the cult quickly became an in-joke (Hamilton ended a letter on his inquiries into the cult by wishing Banks “[t]hat your Great Toe & your purse may never fail you”).25 However, Hamilton’s investigation was also shaped by his aforementioned interest in the comparative study of present and ancient customs as a new method of historical inquiry,26 which becomes particularly apparent in Hamilton’s grappling with the status of the female body as an object of knowledge. Women are the protagonists of Hamilton’s report: he notes that the phallic ex-voti are “chiefy presented by the female sex”, and he describes how women buy, carry around, handle, and kiss these vows before presenting them to the priests.27 The report that he sent to Banks begins by pointing out an intriguing continuity between ancient and modern superstitions in Naples—a continuity which becomes visible and tangible in the interaction of female bodies and material objects:

23 William Hamilton, Letter to Joseph Banks, 17 July 1881, Letters from William Hamilton to Joseph Banks, British Library, Add MS 34048, folio 13 (back). 24 On Knight, see Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny, eds., The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982); Jana Funke et al., “Illustrating Phallic Worship: Uses of Material Objects and the Production of Sexual Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism and Early Twentieth-Century Sexual Science,” Mediating the Materiality of the Past, 324–37. 25 William Hamilton, Letter to Joseph Banks, 17 July 1881, folio 14 (front). Historians interested in the sexual aspects of the cult have investigated it chiefy in the context of late-eighteenth-century ideas about libertinage and homoerotic desire. See Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment, 172–79; Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London: Duckworth, 1996). 26 See Footnote 20 in this chapter. 27 Hamilton, “A Letter from Sir William Hamilton, etc.,” 6. 48 K. BOEHM

I had long discovered, that the women […] of the lower class, at Naples, […] frequently wore, […] a sort of Amulets […] exactly similar to those which were worn by the ancient Inhabitants of this Country for this very same purpose, as likewise for their supposed invigorating infuence; and all of which have evidently a relation to the Cult of Priapus. Struck with this conformity in ancient and modern superstition, I made a collection of both the ancient and modern Amulets of this sort, and placed them together in the British Museum.28

For Hamilton, the practice of wearing these phallic amulets provides material evidence for the survival of ancient superstitions and rituals among fairly uneducated, female Neapolitans. Few people would have been more attuned to this observation than Hamilton’s addressee: Banks had returned from his Endeavour voyages with Captain Cook (1768–1771) with detailed reports about the “primitive” peoples he had encountered in Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia.29 Banks, like other natural historians of his day, believed that the customs of these peoples had not changed since ancient times and represented vestiges of an earlier stage of human development. Hamilton’s letters to Banks reveal that he detected ample parallels between his inquiry into the customs of the Neapolitans and Banks’s studies in the Pacifc. In a letter from 1776, Hamilton writes about his research into local customs: “I am constantly remarking some very singular character as savage as you met with in the South Sea Islands, more so than the inhabitants of Otahite”.30 In a similar vein, Hamilton’s letter on the priapic cult notes “the strong resemblance between the common people of Naples & those of Otahite”.31 These comparisons between the “savage[ry]” of the islanders whose customs Banks studied and the lower-class women of Isernia and Naples suggest that Hamilton regarded the latter as reliable objects of inquiry because of what he perceived as their pronounced physicality, their lack of self-awareness, and the fact that they were far removed in social station and education from the empirical observer.

28 Hamilton, “A Letter from Sir William Hamilton, etc.,” 3–4. 29 On Banks’s journeys see Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 30 William Hamilton, Letter to Joseph Banks, 10 January 1776, Letters from William Hamilton to Joseph Banks, British Library, Add MS 34048, folio 3 (front). 31 William Hamilton, Letter to Joseph Banks, 17 July 1881, folio 13 (back). 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 49

If Brand’s awkward comparison between ancient statuary and customs betrayed an anxiety about the methodological and practical diffculties of antiquarian inquiries into feeting instantiations of past and present manners, Hamilton’s approach circumnavigates this problem by presenting the bodies of the women of Isernia and Naples as ersatz artefacts that manifest ancient customs in the present. Indeed, for Hamilton, the temporal exchange by which the priapic cult brings the past into the present appears to be directly linked to the porous boundaries between thingly bodies and feshly statuary. With their feshly colour and waxen texture the ex-voti had an eerily life-like quality.32 The devotees treated the ex-voti as surrogates for the absent human body; moreover, Hamilton’s fervent anti-Catholicism is also likely to have made him particularly receptive to analogies between the ex-voti and the fetishes used in tribal cults by the islanders Banks had observed: the practices surrounding both types of objects relied on animistic beliefs that invested these objects with agential qualities. As a collector of antique as well as modern phallic ex-voti, Hamilton was acutely aware of the fact that their design and function had not changed since the time of the Romans and Greeks. Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has observed of the curiously ahistorical nature of ex-voti: “In effect we are presented with a corpus, that […] does not evolve […]. Works of art undoubtedly have a history, but the only temporality that images in wax seem to have is that of an archaism or of an origin”.33 Resisting the linearity of teleological time, ex-voti seem to have fallen out of time, always pointing backwards. In his letter, Hamilton suggests that the bodies of the female devotees at Isernia are drawn into this anachronistic and asynchronous temporality when they participate in the ancient priapic cult, which choreographs the ritualistic movements of bodies and objects alike. In fact, thingly female bodies and bodily ex-voti become indistinguishable in Hamilton’s letter when they are anointed during the ceremony: “Those who have an infrmity in any of their members, present them at the great altar”, Hamilton writes, and

32 See Adriaensens in this volume. 33 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Viscosities and Survivals: Art History Put to the Test by the Material,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 2008), 154–69 (160). 50 K. BOEHM it remains unclear whether he is referring to the women’s limbs or the ex-voti.34 It is worthwhile to dwell for a moment on the parallels and differences in Hamilton’s approach to Emma’s attitudes and the folk customs he witnessed in Isernia. Hamilton’s thinking about the female body as a container of residual ancient customs probably boosted his enthusiasm for Emma’s attitudes. As Emma’s letters document, he preferred her wearing simple gowns made of “wite sattin; no collor abbout me but my hair and cheeks” and encouraged her to learn the Tarantella—a folk dance that was popular with Neapolitan locals but had ancient roots as a ritualised dance in the honour of Apollo—a fact of which Hamilton was well aware.35 So successful was Emma in adapting to her surround- ings—both ancient Greco-Roman and modern Neapolitan—that she was sometimes likened to a local. “A lovely Neapolitan” is how the travel writer Hester Piozzi refers to Emma in her letters.36 However, as I have shown above, when contemporary observers commented on the attitudes and on the likeness between Emma’s body and ancient statues, they deemphasised her physicality and suggested instead that her performance held out the promise of connecting the antiquary to the ethos and affects of ancient times. In the texts that I have discussed, the antiquary’s identifcatory desire for the “movable statue” was linked to an acute awareness of the limits of empiricism and propelled by the need to fnd new—or reinvigorate old—modes of drawing experientially close to the past. Unlike Banks’s sister Sarah, who worked with her brother and was a respected antiquary and botanist in her own right, Emma Hamilton, whose humble social background and scanty education meant that she was never fully accepted into Hamilton’s social circle, does not appear to have played an active role in Hamilton’s antiquarian research. But this

34 Hamilton, “A Letter from Sir William Hamilton, etc.,” 7. 35 Emma Hamilton, Letter to Charles Greville, January 1791. Qtd. in The Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents Formed by Alfred Morrison, 2nd series. Hamilton and Nelson Papers, 2 vols. (London: printed for private circulation, 1893), II: 151. 36 Hester Thrale Piozzi in a letter to her eldest daughter, Hester Maria Thrale. Quoted in Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Personal Letters,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 623–48. 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 51 should not lead us to conclude that her contribution to the vibrant antiquarian conversations that took place at Palazzo Sessa were negligible. Her attitudes took inspiration from Classical myth, art, and Hamilton’s own collection and integrated these infuences into a riveting spectacle for an audience immersed in the contemporary vogue for tableaux vivants. Even Kraus’s report, with its ironically distanced tone, concedes Emma’s skill as a performer who elicited extraordinary responses from her audience. That Emma’s audiences recognised both her identity as a performer and her acts of artistic translation meant that transforming herself into a “movable statue” strengthened rather than diminished her agency. What attracted Hamilton to the women of Isernia, by contrast, was the idea that in the instance of the priapic cult, no act of translation or artistic interpretation was needed to make the past appear in the present: observing these rituals gave the male empiricist direct access to an aspect of ancient culture. Whereas for Emma Hamilton claiming the thing-like status of the statue moved her closer to the refned sensibility and intellectual interests of her husband’s guests, Hamilton’s insistence in his letter to Banks on the affnities between feshly statuary and female bodies turned the women of Isernia into mute objects of inquiry. Emma Hamilton’s place within Hamilton’s coterie was partly circumscribed by her class background. However, her position as a leisured, white woman allowed her to respond and contribute to antiquarian discourse with a degree of agency wholly unavailable to the women of Naples and Isernia who were both socially inferior to Hamilton and constructed as primitive others when Hamilton compared them to Banks’s South Sea islanders.

Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote One of the most eloquent explorations of the challenges faced by researchers who hoped to study ancient manners and customs through the observation of their vestigial traces in the present was offered by Charlotte Lennox in her mid-century novel The Female Quixote. The novel’s young protagonist, Arabella, is a voracious reader of seventeenth-century French romances which are set in the Classical world, and which Arabella takes to be “real Pictures of Life”.37 Arabella imi- tates her Classical heroines and models her look, body language, and

37 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 8. 52 K. BOEHM stilted language on what she perceives to be authentic ancient customs. She dons Roman-inspired dresses that were in fashion, as the narrator humorously points out, “not much above Two thousand Years ago” and she often communicates with what she believes to be ancient “Signs” and “dumb Commands”.38 Lennox’s editorial work for her periodical The Lady’s Museum (1760–1761), which included many contributions that married the typically antiquarian interest in manners and customs with close attention to the lives of women, evidences her immersion in antiquarian debates.39 Arabella’s character is related to antiquarianism in several ways: she displays expert knowledge about historical dress articles and has many other antiquarian interests. For instance, she enjoys conversing about the origins and particularities of the Olympic games in ancient Greece and about the precise location and ancient uses of the medicinal springs at Thermopylae.40 Arabella’s eponymous quix- otism can be read as a nod to the stereotypical fgure of the antiquary as a modern-day Don Quixote, whose myopic obsession with irrel- evant historical details makes him or her lose touch with reality.41

38 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 271, 36–37. 39 Lennox published eleven numbers of the Lady’s Museum which were subsequently collected into two volumes. She included a number of historical biographies detailing, for instance, the lives of Gabrielle d’Estrées, the mistress of Henry IV of France and of the sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman Bianca Capello, alongside materials that could have been directly plucked from the desk of an antiquary. She invited her readers to explore archival material, reprinting “The Tryal of the Maid of Orleans: Extracted from the Archives of Normandy, by John Nagerel, Canon and Archdeacon of the Church of Notre Dame at Rouen”, and she serialised “An Essay on the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain” along with an illustration of two ancient Britons. 40 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 82. 41 As Craig Ashley Hanson has shown, the connection between Don Quixote—the eponymous hero of the novel by Miguel de Cervantes of the 1600s—and the eighteenth-century antiquary was further strengthened through the publication of Charles Jervas’s successful 1742 translation of de Cervantes’s work which included an engraving that shows Don Quixote sitting in a room that bears strong resemblance to an antiquary’s study with artefacts exhibited on the mantelpiece and a (presumably antique) breastplate hanging on the wall. See Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 127, 128–29. James Salter, erstwhile servant and travel companion to Hans Sloane, nodded to this tradition when he opened his famous coffeehouse-cum-antiquarian museum in 1717 and called it tongue- in-cheek “Don Saltero’s”. Uncle Toby, who carries out antiquarian research in order to enhance his bowling-green instalments in Tristram Shandy is another character who is explicitly linked to Don Quixote. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, eds. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin, 2003), 80. 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 53

Finally, Arabella’s character gestures to the fgure of the statue come to life when she moves, talks, and acts like her Classical icons. This affnity between Arabella and Classical statues is also foregrounded in Arabella’s habit of arranging her body in expressive, static “posture[s]” and in the formulaic rigidity of her “uncommon Style” of behaviour and address.42 Lennox’s protagonist thus combines traits that were divided along gendered lines in the texts that I have explored in previous sections of this chapter: she commands an impressive store of antiquarian knowledge, but she also attempts to immerse herself directly in ancient manners and customs. Arabella’s character allows Lennox to confront both the objectifcation of women and the quandaries of antiquarian approaches that treated present customs as evidence of ancient ones. As I show below, Lennox uses Arabella’s character to sketch out the contours of a new, intellectually ambitious mode of researching past manners and customs. However, the novel also exposes the weaknesses of existing approaches to the study of living traditions. For instance, Arabella’s attempts to look at manners and customs from an empiricist point of view serve to reveal the limitations of this method. Whenever Arabella is expecting to witness in real life the ancient customs described in her books, she ends up misinterpreting events even when she relies on “the Evidence of [her] own Senses”.43 For instance, she mistakes a group of highway men for knights intending to rescue her from a perceived danger because they were “of genteel Appearance” and “appeared to be in so handsome a Garb”.44 If we read Arabella’s futile search for contemporary manifestations of ancient manners and customs alongside the attempts of antiquaries such as Hamilton and d’Hancarville to study the vestigial remains of ancient rites, an important fallacy of the empiricist method comes into view: Arabella’s almost pathological tendency to assume that all events and activities that she observes bear some hidden relation to her own person mocks the notion that the empirical observer’s professional detachment yields objective results, and it provides a powerful reminder that all acts of empirical inquiry are shaped by the preconceptions and epistemological training of the antiquary.

42 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 33, 154, 187, 190, 201. 43 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 114. 44 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 257, 259. 54 K. BOEHM

Lennox suggests that empiricism may not be the appropriate tool for inquiries into manners and customs. Instead, Lennox dramatises Arabella’s efforts to “imitate” the customs of heroic ancient fgures, giving detailed attention to Arabella’s attempts to recreate the exact “Fashions of the Greek and Roman Ladies” and to communicate in “the Language of the admirable Cleopatra”.45 This approach foregrounds immersion and discards the carefully constructed claims to professional objectivity that we fnd in the studies of male antiquaries such as Brand and Hamilton. Arabella’s desire to immerse herself in ancient manners and customs gives the old ideal of imaginary transport a new lease of life, but it also reconfgures it so that transport is no longer regarded as a predominantly intellectual activity but emerges instead as the product of an embodied practice. Arabella’s dominant mode of engaging with the past is to absorb it into the realm of experience, and the novel suggests that this strategy has signifcant implications for the understanding of the nature of antiquarian knowledge. The antiquaries’ method of historical research relied on a wide range of verbal and visual techniques of documenting and transmitting information to produce codifed knowledge. By contrast, Arabella’s mode of inquiry is grounded in ritualised embodied performances that generate tacit knowledge which is non-reproducible in language. The crucial difference between both forms of inquiry is the manner in which the antiquary’s approach separates the object of investigation from the researcher, while Arabella’s pro- cedure acknowledges the fact that the object of inquiry is always partly produced by the bias, technique, and emotional investment of the antiquary. The antiquary upholds the fction of objectivity by using language and various inscription methods to turn customs into specimens that exist separately from his interpretation and observational standpoint. By contrast, Arabella’s participation in surviving customs as a mode of gaining insight into the Classical past thrives on precisely those factors that empiricists sought to eliminate: personal involvement, identifcation with the object of inquiry, and reliance on ephemeral, context-sensitive, and non-reproducible data. Lennox’s portrayal of Arabella’s imitation of ancient manners and customs also registers the malleability of the past in the present and reminds readers that visions of the past are always coloured by the context from

45 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 45, 116. 2 ANTIQUARIAN PYGMALIONS … 55 which they emerge in the present. The setting of the novel is contemporary with Lennox’s own day, and, in many scenes, Arabella’s enactments of Classical customs are rendered as ephemeral expressions of protest against the limited possibilities for women in a patriarchal society. While Arabella’s occasionally wooden performance of formulaic “ancient” customs and her penchant for dramatic postures might have reminded contemporary readers of Pygmalion’s statue come to life, The Female Quixote inverts the gender politics that are attached to the myth of the sculptor and the living female statue. Whereas Galatea is Pygmalion’s creation and brought to life for the sole purpose of becoming his mate, Arabella repeatedly declares “her Empire” over her suitors and expects them to obey her every whim.46 When she models her dress and poses on her ancient icons, she imagines the Classical world as one in which women dictate the fate of men, a stark inversion of Arabella’s social reality in which her father and Glanville plot the marriage that will transfer Arabella from her father’s guardianship to that of Glanville.47 The preceding sections of this chapter have shown that in the works of eighteenth-century antiquaries, the imaginative link between a modern woman’s body and ancient statuary signifed the fantasy of direct access to the past or, in the case of Hamilton’s work on the women of Isernia, allowed for the construction of an object of inquiry that seemed to turn this fantasy into reality. The female statue come to life fulfls different functions in the texts by Goethe, Winckelmann, and Hamilton, but each of these authors connects the statue’s animation, the moment in which it is quickened to life, to the intellectual powers of the male antiquary, foregrounding his imagination, knowledge, or skill in empirical observation. In The Female Quixote, by contrast, Galatea upstages these antiquarian Pygmalions when Arabella emerges as the better stu- dent of the past. Arabella’s approach to ancient manners and customs confronts the limits of empiricism and ventures into new territory for related antiquarian research. At the same time, the manner in which she fashions herself as a Classical statue inverts the dynamic by which the

46 Lennox, The Female Quixote, 136. 47 On the representation of gender and patriarchy in The Female Quixote, see Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 114–36; Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 185–94. 56 K. BOEHM conjunction between ancient statuary and the female body had often furthered the objectifcation of women: Arabella appropriates the role of the living statue in order to avoid being turned into a commodity on the marriage market, and she marshals her vision of the Classical past to legitimise her resistance to social mores and conventional codes of feminine behaviour. CHAPTER 3

Longing for the Past: Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, Historical Experience, and the Sexuality of the Masterpieces Room

Elsje van Kessel

Introduction In the summer of 2017, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon staged an exhibition entitled Sculpture on Screen: The Very Impress of the Object. This took the visitor into a large darkened hall showing a number of flm projections.1 The theme of these artists’ flms was classical sculpture and how it is experienced in museums. To give but one example, in Mark Lewis’s Nude (2015), the camera slowly moves around the Louvre’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite, only gradually revealing the sculpture’s surprising sexual nature (Fig. 3.1). Filmed after hours, Nude shows the

1 Sculpture on Screen: The Very Impress of the Object ran from 14 July to 2 October 2017 and was curated by Penelope Curtis.

E. van Kessel (*) University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, UK

Fig. 3.1 Mark Lewis, Nude, 6k transferred to 4k, 5′49″, 2015. Film still courtesy and copyright the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery

sculpture in the kind of semi-darkness that befts a private engagement with this tantalising stone body. Lewis’s work and the other flms in Sculpture on Screen raise issues that are also central to this essay. Antique sculpture may seem to anchor us in history, but its mediated presence in the exhibition—there was no sculpture, only flm—at the same time questioned this possibility. Representation in another medium can bring antique sculpture to life, as the exhibition demonstrated, and enhance the sexualisation of the stone body—in the case of Nude by directing the viewer’s eye to the sculpture’s skin-like polish, slowly brought into focus. But at what cost does the decontextualisation that this shift to another medium entails occur? In this chapter, I will focus on the period when the Sleeping Hermaphrodite frst entered the Louvre’s collections, that is, the beginning of the nineteenth century, when these questions were urgently debated, in order to examine how intellectuals and curators conceived of the relations between classical sculpture, history, and sexual desire in the frst public art museums. The starting point will be a German novella titled Das Marmorbild, or The Marble Statue, written by the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857). Das Marmorbild tells the story of a young man, Florio, who encounters a living statue of Venus when travelling 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 59 through Italy.2 Florio frst fnds the statue during a nocturnal walk in the Tuscan hills. When he returns the next day, it has changed into a beautiful, sensuous, living woman. The central storyline of the novella is about Florio’s longing for this attractive yet dangerous statue-woman, and how he eventually overcomes it. Since its frst publication in 1818, Eichendorff’s text has received a range of interpretations. In his Sublime Historical Experience (2005), for instance, the philosopher of history Frank Ankersmit identifes one of the novella’s central themes as historical experience.3 In Ankersmit’s reading the fgure of Florio personifes the present and the Venus statue personifes the past. Florio’s sexual desire for the Venus statue is the present’s desire for the past. Building on this provocative interpretation, I will argue in this chapter that Eichendorff’s Venus statue indicates that the kind of complicated engagement with history found in the literature of this time—as described by Ankersmit—fnds a clear echo in the way Eichendorff’s contemporaries experienced real-life sculpture. By the early nineteenth century, the notion of the living, sexually desirable statue had acquired a venerable history, but it also regained a new topicality at this time.4 Napoleon’s art lootings in the wake of the French Revolution brought about a large-scale dispersal of works of art, among them many antique sculptures. These were transported from their earlier contexts in Italian palaces to the newly established Musée Napoleon in the Louvre. Even when they were returned after

2 For a biography of Eichendorff, see Günther Schiwy, Eichendorff: der Dichter in Seiner Zeit: eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2007). For Eichendorff in the context of Romanticism, Rüdiger Safranski, Romantik: eine Deutsche Affäre (Munich: Hanser, 2007), especially 210 and further. 3 Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 4 For the theme of the living statue and the myth of Pygmalion in the history of art, see, among others, George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artifcial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Pygmalion (Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2009); Victor I. Stoichita, L’Effet Pygmalion: Pour une Anthropologie Historique des Simulacres (Geneva: Droz, 2008); Andreas Blühm, Pygmalion: die Ikonographie eines Künstlermythos Zwischen 1500 und 1900 (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1988); and Oskar Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter: Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Wolfgang Kemp (Cologne: DuMont, 1985), 183–224. 60 E. van KESSEL

Napoleon’s fall, the creation of new strategies of preservation and display became necessary, as the Musée Napoleon had fundamentally changed ideas about art and its presentation.5 In the same period, the new discipline of philosophical aesthetics fundamentally changed the conception of the relation between artwork and beholder. As a result, disinter- ested enjoyment and scientifc analysis became increasingly important. The development of art history as an academic discipline and the new museum displays of the early nineteenth century were both meant to create distance between object and viewer; the classifying gaze promoted by the new institutions posed a threat to an older, more involved enjoyment of sculpture.6 However, not everyone hailed this development towards an increasing rationalisation of antique sculpture. Indeed, I propose that Eichendorff’s Marmorbild was part of a Romantic counter-movement that tried to resuscitate the living statue in order to bridge the gap that had arisen between object and viewer, past and present. This chapter explores early nineteenth-century interplays between antique sculpture, sexual desire, and the experience of the past—three themes that are inextricably connected in Eichendorff’s novella. The aim is not to argue that Eichendorff intended to comment upon classical sculpture and its contemporary display by writing a thinly disguised museum treatise. Rather, I suggest that works of fction like Das Marmorbild offer insights into how statues and other works of art were framed aesthetically and perceived by past viewers. As much as theoretical or historical texts, literary texts like Eichendorff’s are interventions in a discourse on sculpture and shed light on the imaginary worlds of past viewers. It is implied that a museum, as much as a novella, was an imaginary space in which the visitor’s subjectivity—their thoughts, but also their feelings and bodily sensations—played a key role.

5 Bénédicte Savoy, Kunstraub: Napoleons Konfszierungen in Deutschland und die europäischen Folgen (Vienna: Böhlau, 2011). For the Louvre, see also Arthur McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth- Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6 For the relation between artwork and viewer and its changing conceptualisations through the early modern and modern periods, see Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). For sculpture and its display see Caroline van Eck, ed., Idols and Museum Pieces: The Nature of Sculpture, Its Historiography and Exhibition History 1640–1880 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 61

As such, this chapter fnds inspiration not only in Ankersmit’s reading of Eichendorff but also in Ankersmit’s fundamental emphasis on historical experience. Ankersmit’s commentary on Das Marmorbild is merely a small part of a much wider project that has as its principal aim to foreground—or rather bring back—historical experience in our engagement with the past. As will be shown in greater detail below, this is an outspo- kenly Romantic project in that it wants to restore to the study of history the historian’s full personality, including sensations, emotions and other aspects of subjective experience.7 By analogy, this chapter is built on the premise that such an experience of art should be part of art history and museum history, and sexual desire is seen as a privileged aspect of this experience.8 Sexuality, understood here as all things pertaining to sex, sexual behaviour, and desire, emerges as a key element not only in the history of art but also in the history of museums in the way that it is often seen to be at odds with rationality.9 In what follows, I will frst analyse the relation between history and sex in Das Marmorbild; the second section examines Eichendorff’s relation with Italy in terms of idolatry or image-love; and the third section considers the experience of sculpture in the art museum of Eichendorff’s days in relation to different modes of historiography.

7 Ankersmit himself speaks of a ‘new Romanticism’. See also Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 7. For the relation of his thinking with Hayden White’s work, see below. 8 See also Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For the experience of art in the eighteenth century, see van Eck, Art, Agency, and Living Presence, and Idols and Museum Pieces; also Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); and Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), addresses the connections between public art galleries and the general category of experience; however, it is not interested in subjective experience. 9 Here I follow David West’s “theoretically innocent” way of understanding the term “sexuality”; that is, not primarily in the Foucauldian sense as the socially constructed expression of subjectivity. See David West, Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005), 5. 62 E. van KESSEL

Sex and History in Das Marmorbild Eichendorff’s story begins when Florio, wandering through Italy without any apparent goal, encounters a charming stranger, the singer Fortunato, and, guided by him, attends a feast in the Tuscan city of Lucca. There, he meets the lovely Bianka, whose memory is soon to be overshadowed. At night, plagued by insomnia, Florio goes out into the hills and discovers a mesmerising marble statue.

For a long time he walked on, deep in thought, until he came unexpect- edly upon a large pond surrounded by tall trees. The moon, just rising over the treetops, illumined in sharp, clear outlines a marble statue of Venus set on a stone close to the bank. It was as if the goddess had at that very moment risen from the waves and were now watching in enchant- ment the image of her own loveliness refected from the quivering mirror of the surface of the water, among the stars softly rising from its depths. A few swans silently described their monotonous circles around the statue; a soft whisper passed among the surrounding trees.10

The next day, Florio is again irresistibly drawn to the place where he found this statue, but this time, in the bright light of day, he sees a splendid palace set in the most lavish of gardens, where a beautiful lady is singing a lustful song: “I see the Rose emerging from its green enclosures/and, as lusts may shimmer lasciviously/it unfolded, blushing in the tepid air”.11 He recognises the lady as the Venus statue of the night before: “So the beautiful marble statue had become a living thing and had stepped down from its pedestal into the springtime. The quiet pond was suddenly transformed into an immeasurable landscape, its stars into fowers and all of spring into an image of her beauty”.12 Ominously, a dark knight soon chases him away, and for the next few days, Florio longs for the mysterious lady. The story comes to a climax when, having thus spent a long time dreaming, Florio is fnally taken to the palace again, where its hostess invites him into her most private quarters. “Here his beautiful guide sank down upon silken cushions spread over the foor. As she did so, she

10 Unless otherwise indicated, the English language edition quoted is Frank G. Ryder and Robert M. Browning, eds., German Literary Fairy Tales (New York: Continuum, 1983), here 143–4. 11 Translation adapted from Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 151. 12 Ryder and Browning, Fairy Tales, 150. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 63 cast her snow-white veil in all directions about her, in charming movements, at one moment revealing, at another loosely concealing ever lovelier glimpses of her fgure. Florio gazed at her, his eyes burning”.13 But when their union is fnally at hand, he hesitates, the sounds of an “old, pious song” drifting in through the windows, compelling him to exclaim: “Lord God, do not let me lose my way in this world!”14 Even before he has fnished his cry, everything around him begins to change: he suddenly notices grass growing on the window ledge, “as on some ancient wall”, and his lady is growing pale. When the statues that had decorated the room come to life, and the fowers in their vases begin to writhe like snakes, he fees the palace in terror, and escapes. The story ends the next day, when Florio wakes as if from a dream, and, once again accompanied by Fortunato, only then manages to see the real beauty of Bianka, the innocent girl he had met before, and asks her to marry him. As mentioned above, I want to build this chapter in particular on Ankersmit’s reading of Eichendorff’s novella, which interprets Florio’s encounter with the marble statue in terms of historical experience.15 Ankersmit argues that one of Das Marmorbild’s central themes is what he describes as “how we experience the past and how this experience of the past may come into being by a movement comprising at the same time the discovery and a recovery of the past”.16 Historical experience is strongly connected with experiences of rupture, such as the shock of the French Revolution, which was a moment when Europe discarded the identity of the Ancien Régime, the previous political and social system of the Kingdom of France, and defned itself anew in terms of what had been relinquished.17 Such a rupture comes with a sensation of loss, caused by the realisation that the past is “broken off” from the present;

13 Ibid., 161. 14 Ibid., 163. 15 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience. Other interpretations which are particularly relevant to my own reading are: Gretchen Hachmeister, Italy in the German Literary Imagination: Goethe’s “Italian Journey” and Its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen and Heine (Rochester: Camden House, 2002); Volker Klotz, Venus Maria: Aufebende Frauenstatuen in der Novellistik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2000); and Simon Richter, “Under the Sign of Venus: Eichendorff’s “Marmorbild” and the Erotics of Allegory,” South Atlantic Review 56 (1991): 59–71. For critical reactions from Eichendorff’s contemporaries, see Schiwy, Eichendorff, 442–3. 16 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 9. 17 Ibid., 13. 64 E. van KESSEL at the same time historical experience overcomes the boundaries between present and past, thereby recovering the past. For Ankersmit, this recovery of the past is a moment akin to love. Indeed, love and desire are at the heart of his thinking about historical experience: he frames his account with a reference to Plato’s myth about the origin of the sexes, in which some males and females were once of one body and, now split, for ever yearn to reunite with one another.18 The moment of recognition of the long-lost counterpart is characterised by pain and desire at the same time; analogously, historical experience is sublime as it derives from a paradoxical combination of the recognition that the past is lost and the desire to bring it back. Written at the particular historical moment when the trauma of the French Revolution was acutely felt, Eichendorff’s treatment of the subject’s historical experience takes the shape of sexual desire, according to Ankersmit.19 Indeed, in Das Marmorbild, Florio repeatedly experiences the sensation of having met the statue-woman before, of having somehow known her since his youth: “The statue seemed to him like a long-sought lover, suddenly found and recognised […]”.20 And it is the same sensation, this time stated explicitly by the woman herself, that ultimately repels him: “Every man thinks he has seen me before—I suppose an image of me is one of the things that rises dimly up and fowers in all the dreams of youth”.21 Eichendorff hereby expresses the mournful intimation that history, which is part of ourselves, has been transformed into the past, outside of ourselves, something we cannot possess and that is fundamentally alien to us.22 The past is as cold and lifeless as a marble statue, indifferent to our attempts to engage with it. Yet there may be more to the sexuality, or sexualities, of Das Marmorbild, than Ankersmit acknowledges, and this has implications for the meaning of the novella’s marble statue and, hence, for what the text has to say about history and the past. When the possibility of a unity with Venus, who stands for the past, is imminent, Florio, representing the present, pulls back, in the awareness that he would lose himself and obliterate his individual identity. Instead he chooses the demure and

18 Ibid., vii and 9. 19 For Ankersmit’s full, intricate reading of Das Marmorbild, see ibid., 146–60. 20 Ryder and Browning, Fairy Tales, 144. 21 Ibid., 163. 22 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 160. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 65 innocent Bianka (meaning “white” in Italian), who at the story’s conclusion is, signifcantly, dressed as a boy. This, as Simon Richter explains, has often been taken as a denial of the character’s (female hetero) sexuality.23 A straightforward reading of this fnal turn of events is that Florio, a good Christian, chooses the spiritual, personifed by the sexless Bianka, over the sensual—innocence over knowledge, and metaphysical love over sex.24 However, such a reading may be overly simplistic. In fact, German Romanticism was characterised by a complex attitude towards love and sexuality. In Eichendorff’s circle, the most important voice on these matters was Friedrich Schlegel, a Catholic like Eichendorff. In 1811–1812, Eichendorff spent months in Vienna with Schlegel and his wife Dorothea.25 Schlegel, like Eichendorff, rejected the foregrounding of the sexual with which the heathen, polytheistic religions of Greek and Roman antiquity were associated.26 Yet this did by no means lead to the discarding of sexuality altogether. As West points out, love was a central metaphysical concept in Schlegel’s philosophy, which he describes as a “religion of love”.27 Schlegel advocated a passionate love (including sexuality) that unites traditional opposites such as spiritual and physical, masculine and feminine, mind and body, and self and other. Schlegel’s precarious synthesis, which combined reason with love and earthly fulflment, relied on Christian faith, including a frm belief in God’s benevolence.28 Upon closer inspection, Eichendorff’s Catholic tale reveals a similarly heterogeneous outlook on love and sexual desire. Richter’s interpretation of the novella, a reading that he characterises as “an erotics of allegory”, does justice to the complexities of Schlegel’s and Eichendorff’s thinking.29 Richter acknowledges the importance of allegory to Das Marmorbild and shows that it is, in fact, at the heart of the narrative: at frst sight, the story seems to revolve around the need for Florio to choose between the heathen path of physical love/Venus and the

23 Richter, “Sign of Venus,” 69. 24 Ibid. 25 Schiwy, Eichendorff, 673. 26 See Safranski, Romantik, 162–3; West, Reason and Sexuality, 88–9. 27 Ibid., 110. 28 Ibid., 104–10. 29 Richter, “Sign of Venus.” 66 E. van KESSEL

Christian path of metaphysical love/Bianka. The metaphysical, Christian choice here aligns with allegory, since both are focussed on the spiritual. However, concentrating on the materiality of Eichendorff’s language, that is, the words, their rhythm, and repetition, Richter reveals an alternative subplot: the Christian singer Fortunato expresses homoerotic desire for Florio. What is more, Fortunato, Richter argues, is subtly aligned with death: he may be the “silent guest” about whom Fortunato himself sings, and he is “bleich”, pale as a corpse (“Leich”).30 It is the character of Fortunato that delivers Florio to Bianka in the end, away from the sensual as Bianka’s sexless appearance makes clear. If Fortunato is death and the end of sensual love, then Venus, conversely, is life.31 Following Ankersmit, we saw that the present’s unison with the past would inevitably lead to death; now, with a materialistic reading of the text along the lines set out by Richter, we fnd there may be life in the lifeless marble Venus. This reading is not necessarily at odds with Ankersmit’s arguments; rather it is a development of them that has the further beneft of offering a closer look at the novella’s depiction of sexuality. I will pursue this reading, which encompasses the physicality of Eichendorff’s words as much as the meaning of his text, in the rest of this chapter by, ultimately, connecting Das Marmorbild with the experience of actual classical statues in the museum of the poet’s day. Building on the novella’s highly complex interplay between Venus and Fortunato, life and death, and the material and the spiritual, the next section of this chapter examines how these concepts appear in Romantic imaginations of Italy, the setting of the novella, which was the all-important inspiration for the early nineteenth-century museum.

Living Statues, Italy, and the Past At the turn of the nineteenth century, the relation between human subjects and lifeless objects was increasingly seen as a problematic issue that highly fascinated the Romantics. Due to such developments as industri- alisation and the rise of mass production, there was a sense that lifeless things were growing out of human control. Scientifc discoveries, most notably the development of the idea of the historicity of nature and the

30 Ibid., 64, 69. 31 Ibid., especially 69–70. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 67 realisation that human history was in fact much shorter than the pre-human past, similarly led to a perspective change on the place of humans in relation to the world of things.32 The motif of the living statue, enjoying great popularity in the period’s visual and literary culture, can be seen as symptomatic of this broader concern. To be sure, the living statue by then had a long history. A key inspiration for almost all stories of living statues at this time was Ovid’s tale of the sculptor Pygmalion.33 However, an important difference between Pygmalion and Eichendorff’s Marmorbild is that the latter lacks an artist fgure: the making of the sculpture plays no part in the story. The origins of the Venus statue remain obscure, and it appears as if it is not made by human hands. Nevertheless, the link with the Pygmalion tradition is of interest here, because it had come to stand for all animation of sculpture, including that provoked by the beholder. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, for one, makes this clear, when, contemplating the beauty of the Apollo Belvedere, he compares himself to the ancient sculptor, aware of the animating force of his imagination.34 Similarly, Eichendorff’s marble statue only comes alive to vulnerable young men: Fortunato hints, near the end of story, that some young spirits fall victim to her every spring. The metamorphosis of the statue only takes place in the mind of certain beholders. Eichendorff’s is a story about the experience, rather than the making, of living things. Das Marmorbild complicates the boundaries between living human beings and lifeless images and things by means other than just the marble statue. Giorgio Agamben has argued that the version of the Pygmalion story from the medieval Le Roman de la Rose is an allegory of medieval love, which centred on the obsessive contemplation of images, and which understood “idolatry” in a profoundly erotic way.35 It is likely that Eichendorff was aware of this medieval tradition of love, not only because he situates his story in what is most probably the late medieval

32 Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (London: Vintage, 2012); Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); William J.T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 167–84; and Klotz, Venus Maria. 33 See Footnote 4. 34 Lebensztejn, Pygmalion, 41. See also Bätschmann, “Pygmalion als Betrachter.” 35 Lebensztejn, Pygmalion, 64. 68 E. van KESSEL or Renaissance past, but also because his novella is dense with phrases that portray women as images. He even ends the story on this simile: “Against the deep blue ground of the morning sky, Bianka looked precisely like the shining image of an angel”.36 In Florio’s fantastic vision—a lover’s vision—image and what the image represents, art and life, dream and reality are confated. Italy, as a mythical place, a place of the past, became deeply entangled with the notion of the living image. Eichendorff was commissioned to write Das Marmorbild in 1814, and fnished the manuscript in 1817; it was published for the frst time one year later, and for a second time in 1826, together with his most famous work, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a Good-for-Nothing). In both novellas, the experience of Italy is a central theme. Yet unlike many young, upper- class men from earlier generations, Eichendorff would never be able to visit Italy. The impoverished state of his family and the Napoleonic wars prevented him from embarking on the Grand Tour.37 This lack of frst- hand experience had a number of consequences: the frst being that he necessarily derived all his knowledge of Italy from representations, literary, visual, and museological. A second consequence was that his rendering of the encounter with antique sculpture in Italy, at the heart of this chapter, was inevitably decontextualised and idealised. To Eichendorff, “Italy” was primarily a collection of images. The poet was not alone in his detached representation of Italy. An immensely important source of inspiration for Eichendorff was the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.38 Goethe travelled through Italy from 1786 to 1788, but only published the frst volume of his renowned Italienische Reise (Italian Journey) in 1816–1817, which was precisely the moment when Eichendorff was writing his Marmorbild. In the Italienische Reise, as in Das Marmorbild, the experience of antique statues is an important motif. “Only now do I see, do I enjoy the highest that antiquity has bequeathed to us: statues”, writes Goethe.39 Goethe’s account of experiencing these statues brims with desire: a desire for animation, a desire for love. “To my pleasure, I have yesterday put a cast of

36 Adapted from Ryder and Browning, Fairy Tales, 170. 37 Hachmeister, Italy, 86. 38 See, among others, ibid. 39 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise, vol. XI of Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Bänden (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), 477. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 69 the colossal head of Juno on display in the room, the original of which is in the Villa Ludovisi (Fig. 3.2). It was my frst love affair in Rome, and now I possess her”.40 He makes the connection between animated antique sculptures, love and desire even more explicit at the very end of the Italienische Reise, where a statue of a dancer or a muse that he saw earlier in Naples is offered to him for sale:

As between a passionate urge for love and a yet to be concluded marriage contract, various thoughts force themselves upon one, so it was here. And without advice and consent from our noble art friends, we did not dare enter into such an engagement. For an engagement it was, in an ideal-Pyg- malionic sense, and I will not deny that the thought of possessing this being had deeply taken root with me.41

As a statue of a dancer, this particular fgure is reminiscent of Eichendorff’s statue-woman, who, by making movements with her veil, alternately covering and uncovering her body, almost lures Florio into a sexual adventure that would mean his end.42 In Goethe’s writing, as in Eichendorff’s work, one fnds an image of Italy in which antique sculpture, male–female sexual and romantic desire, and an animated past are intimately connected.43 Yet there are also differences between Goethe’s Italy and the Italy of the Romantic poets. To Goethe, antique art represented an uncon- tested, timeless, and morally elevated ideal. He was weary of the approach of writers such as Schlegel and Eichendorff: “The bit of light that the Greeks brought into the world, is being darkened completely by these sad images of mystery [literally: “fog images”]”.44 The Catholic Eichendorff was one such maker of “fog images”; to him, classical antiquity had not enjoyed the fruits of Christian redemption, and it was diffcult to reconcile the classical, heathen past with his own moral ideals.

40 Goethe, Italienische Reise, 154. 41 Goethe, Italienische Reise, 551–2. 42 The veiling and unveiling of the statue-woman fnds an echo in the metaphor of the veil used in other Romantic literature, in which it can have a similar sexual connotation, next to, for instance, an epistemological one. See Christian Knirsch, “World Metaphor, Metametaphor: Veils in Literature, Literature as Veil,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32 (2012): 169–82. 43 See also Hachmeister, Italy, 63. 44 Quoted after Safranski, Romantik, 163. 70 E. van KESSEL

Fig. 3.2 Juno Ludovisi, marble, frst century CE, Rome, Palazzo Altemps (image in the public domain) 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 71

Classical antiquity was also morally problematic because, around 1800, the Romantic poets had identifed Italy with the once abstract Venusberg or Venus Mountain, a “seat of demonic seduction”.45 In the German tradition, the Venus Mountain—not coincidentally sharing its name with the female body part—goes back at least to the thirteenth-century min- strel Tannhäuser, and is a metaphor for the sins of the fesh—sins that the Christian protagonist needs to overcome.46 Italy, for Eichendorff, was the place where one fnds Venus, a place of enjoyment and danger. I have already touched upon another difference between the two poets: while Goethe’s image of Italy was based on personal experience, Eichendorff only knew Italy from a distance. The same was true for many other Romantic poets.47 Yet unlike earlier generations, this group of men could proft from a mass of standardised images, so that it became possible to speak about monuments and sights without ever having personally experienced them. Gretchen Hachmeister argues that the catalogues, sketches, descriptions, and encomia of the geographic loci of Italy, produced by generations of artists and travellers, were a “compart- mentalising gesture”, which “divorce[d] reality from representation”.48 Das Marmorbild is an eloquent example of this separation: the Italy it evokes is of a generic, unspecifc kind; it is a fantasy world, a dream. Moreover, the story self-consciously refects upon this situation: all Florio sees when he looks around him are images; yet the actual images that surround him—the Venus statue, the paintings and sculptures in her palace—come alive and haunt him. It can be inferred from all of this that Italy’s character in this period as the cradle of the living statue depended on its being associated primarily with the past. Due to the violence of the Napoleonic Wars and the rupture caused by the preceding Revolution, the Italy of lived experience became inaccessible to Eichendorff’s generation, both in a literal and in a fgurative sense: the country became the land of dreams and inevitably a territory of the past. This resulted in the creation of animated images

45 Hachmeister, Italy, 89. 46 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 150. See also Hachmeister, Italy, 89. 47 For example, Clemens Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Novalis: see ibid., 86. 48 Hachmeister, Italy, 87. 72 E. van KESSEL of Italy that replaced the frst-hand experience of the country itself.49 The desire for such images was, as Das Marmorbild suggests, indeed idolatrous. Paradoxically, in their turn away from urban, industrialised, bourgeois society, and towards an imagined past personifed by the living Venus statue born in Italy, the Romantics were particularly modern, as explained in the next section. Here, I examine the role of the petrifed Venus in the modern institution of the art museum, as it emerged in Eichendorff’s days.

Disciplined Museum or “Vast Tomb”: Historical Approaches and the Masterpieces Room Ankersmit interprets Eichendorff’s narrative as thematising post- Revolutionary historical experience. To briefy rehearse Ankersmit’s argument, this historical experience came with a feeling of loss, because the time of the Ancien Régime was perceived as disconnected from the present. Eichendorff formulates this modern, mournful sensation in sexual terms: Florio’s sexual desire for the Venus statue is a desire for the past. Ankersmit goes further; however, he makes a distinction between the subtlety, gentleness, and superfciality with which past and present meet in Eichendorff’s story, and “the brute and necessarily egocentrist questions by means of which the scientist tries to pilfer his objects of its secrets”.50 The “scientist” for Ankersmit is a fgure who is not to be imitated: someone who places his object of study in the brightest light of reason, so that no aspect can escape his efforts at understanding. This is someone who does not value the role of subjective historical experience within the rational enterprise that is history. Hence Venus’s reprimanding words when Florio asks her to reveal to him her name so that her lovely appearance would not ever be lost to him again: “[…] take the fowers of life cheerfully”, she says, “just as the whim of the moment may give them, and do not look for their roots in the soil, for there is no joy and

49 This is not unlike the invention of paper money, highly fascinating to Eichendorff’s contemporaries, which offered a substitute for the object of real value, and attracted and repelled at the same time: see Warner, Stranger Magic, 252 and further. 50 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 152. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 73 only silence there”.51 Venus here implores Florio not to become a scientist, but rather to “enjoy the experience”. Eichendorff’s insight, voiced by Venus, goes to the heart of Ankersmit’s project: defning historical experience as an aesthetic experience, as opposed to a positivist, “scientifc” history, from which the human, experiencing subject is expelled.52 Ankersmit turns, in the frst place, against the realist, objectivist approach that characterised all nineteenth-century historical writing self-identifying as serious. In the new, disciplined historiography there was no place, for example, for Johann Gottfried von Herder’s concept of Einfühlung (literally, “feeling one’s way in”), or for the Romantic idea that history was formless and sublime.53 Ankersmit follows White’s analysis of the historiography of the nineteenth century to this point, but he also laments the importance of the historical text within historical theory that White’s Metahistory of 1973 established. While, like White, Ankersmit is not primarily interested in historical truth, his work differs from White’s approach in looking for experience that precedes language, as, he states, White’s “il n’y a pas dehors texte” (“there is no beyond the text”) does not allow for the “radical ‘otherness’” of the past.54 In this sense he goes back to the kind of Romantic historiography that predates the objectiv- ism and realism of most nineteenth-century historiography. He radically rejects the historical theory that developed from linguistic philosophy of history and instead argues for the inclusion of the historian’s personality, including their moods and feelings, given that these codetermine how we relate to the past.55 In this section, I want to use this important distinction between these two modes of knowing the past—scientifc positivism and historical experience—in an analysis of the organisation of the early nineteenth-century museum, which became the new home to antique

51 Translation from ibid. 52 Ibid., 8–9. 53 Michael Forster, “Johann Gottfried von Herder,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2017/entries/herder/. See Michael S. Roth, “Foreword,” in Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Fortieth- Anniversary ed. with a foreword by Michael S. Roth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), xv; and Mark Day, The Philosophy of History: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2008), 118. 54 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 10. 55 Ibid. 74 E. van KESSEL sculpture. As Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and others have pointed out, in the new public art museum, an art historical mode of organising objects became prevalent, which is, to some degree, at odds with Romanticist ideals of the experience of art.56 I will propose that the “masterpieces room”—an invention from the mid-nineteenth century—was an apparatus introduced into the museum to counterbalance the institution’s rationality and unleash historical experience. In Eichendorff’s formative years, art museums had indeed become increasingly important as sites to experience antique statues. Centuries of collecting meant that the highlights of Greek and Roman sculpture could now be found, in the original or as plaster casts, in a variety of galleries across the Alps. Furthermore, at the turn of the century, Napoleon’s troops had plundered Italy of its antique (and modern) treasures, to be installed in the newly established Musée Napoleon.57 When the young Eichendorff visited Paris in the spring of 1808, he found such iconic works as the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, Apollo Belvedere, and the Medici Venus there.58 But even as a child, Eichendorff had already visited museums. In one of his very frst entries in his childhood diary, he lists the marvels of Dresden, the city he frst saw at the early age of nine. Like his older contemporaries Winckelmann and Goethe, the boy Eichendorff walked around the Grünes Gewölbe museum, encountering objects of all kinds, including “Antiquen”, antiquities.59 This early museum visit undoubtedly made a lasting impression.60 The new public art museum as witnessed by Eichendorff in 1808 shared an important characteristic with the travelogues, descriptions, and sketches of travellers to Italy that were the focus of the previous section; both led to a decontextualisation of antique art. As Pascal Griener argues, both the reproduction of antiquities (in descriptions, drawings,

56 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 7. 57 Savoy, Kunstraub. 58 Schiwy, Eichendorff, 259. 59 Joseph von Eichendorff, Tagebücher, ed. Ursula Regener, vol. XI.1 of Sämtliche Werke (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 5; James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 32. 60 In Das Marmorbild, the adult Eichendorff made the recovery of long-forgotten memories into a recurring motif. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 75 prints) and the transfer of antiquities to museums are gestures that alienate the antique object from itself, that separate it from its context, both physically and in the mind of the beholder.61 The great paradox of this decontextualisation of antique art is that those who contributed to it through their studies and their curatorial interventions were also the frst to mourn the sensation of loss that came with it. This was the loss of the unity between object and “original” context, a loss only revealed to those engaged in the sustained study of antique art. While art history in a scholarly and a curatorial sense was a nostalgic gesture meant to remedy this loss, this recovery could never be fully achieved: physical decontextualisation depended on mental decontextualisation, which, as Griener explains, in turn resulted from the Enlightenment understanding of the mind as a repository of immaterial images. Once the material object became separated from its immaterial image, it could never become whole again.62 This is similar to the paradox of historical experience described above: the pain brought about by the recognition of a lost past goes together with the desire to restore it. The decontextualisation of the object that entered the museum was furthered by the art historical framework within which the museum presented it.63 I would like to connect this art historical presentation in nineteenth-century museums with the scientifc way of knowing the past as identifed above. In post-Revolutionary Europe, more and more aristocratic art collections opened their doors to the public, and more and more national art museums were established. In these early public art museums, the prevalent mode of organisation was chronological. By and large, artworks, including antique sculptures, were ordered according to their medium, period of origin, and national or regional “school”. The sculptures of antiquity were separated from Renaissance and Baroque paintings; Italian paintings were separated from Flemish paintings, and the Tuscan school from the Venetian School, for instance. In institutions from the Musée Napoleon to the Berlin Museum, visitors were taken on a journey through the history of art, with its foundation in the achievements of the Greeks and the Romans, its rebirth in Renaissance Italy, and

61 Pascal Griener, La république de l’œuil: L’expérience de l’art au siècle des Lumières (Paris: O. Jacob, 2010), Chapter 3. 62 Ibid., in particular 90. 63 Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, Chapter 7. 76 E. van KESSEL its eventual spread over the European continent.64 This chronological and regional layout corresponded to the dominant task of the museum as it was formulated at the time: educating the public by offering a trans- parent overview of art’s history. The emphasis was on learning, on classifcation, and organisation, and in this sense, following Foucault, the post-Revolutionary museum can be seen as a disciplinary apparatus.65 Furthermore, it aimed at comprehensiveness: rather than focussing on a few artists or style periods, according to taste, the early nineteenth-century art museum attempted to include everything, so as to give the full- est possible picture of art’s growth and decline through the ages. As soon as this new type of institution had emerged, however, it began to evoke criticism. Critics of the art museum, referring to the process of decontextualisation that musealisation entails, argued that the museum deprived artworks of their life; that a museum was a graveyard for obsolete things that had lost their place in the world.66 One of the most articulate exponents of this view, Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, famously wrote that the museum “[…] kills art to turn it into history, or worse, an epitaph”.67 The (art) historical ordering prevalent in these new museums was seen to put the artworks to silence; Michel-Jean Sedaine argued in 1786 that the side windows in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie should be left open so that the “spectacle of the city” remained visible and the gallery was not turned into a “vast tomb”.68 This essentially Romantic criticism, triggered by a feeling of loss, has haunted the museum ever since and continues to persist in the present.69 Museums of Eichendorff’s time were by no means deaf to such criticism, and around 1850, a number of leading museums opened

64 Sheehan, German Art World, esp. 80. 65 Hooper-Greenhill, Shaping of Knowledge, 190. 66 For the topos of the early art museum as a mausoleum, see Elsje van Kessel, “The Role of Silence in the Early Art Museum,” in Silence. Schweigen. Über die Stumme Praxis der Kunst, eds. Andreas Beyer and Laurent Le Bon (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015), 169–82. 67 Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations Morales sur la Destination des Ouvrages de l’Art [suivi de] Lettres sur l’Enlèvement des Ouvrages de l’Art Antique à Athènes et à Rome, ed. Jean Louis Déotte (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 48. 68 Quoted after Mark Ledbury, “Art Versus Life: A Dissenting Voice in the Grande Galerie,” Journal18 2 (2016), http://www.journal18.org/866. 69 Van Kessel, “The Role of Silence.” For an alternative, anti-Romantic view see Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London: Verso, 2015), Chapter 5. 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 77 a so-called masterpieces room, in which the aesthetically most enticing pieces were put on display in no particular order.70 Institutions like the Louvre, the Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London designed a space, often in a round or octagonal shape, that interrupted the historical logic of the museum parcours and displayed the collection’s artistic highlights. I want to propose that the masterpieces room, an ahistorical eruption of aesthetic pleasure, can be seen as the answer to the “deadly” scientifc routine of the chronological narrative; or, in other words, as a catalyst for historical experience in Ankersmit’s sense. Although in principle everyone could appreciate a masterpieces room, for its maximum effect, visitors needed to recognise the room’s arche- type: the very frst room of its kind, naturally located in Italy, was the Tribuna of the Uffzi in Florence.71 Long before the nineteenth century, it had already been flled with the best of the Medici collections. Grand tourists would only be taken to the Tribuna at the end of their visit, so that it was the conclusion, or indeed climax, of their Uffzi experience. These sexual terms (“eruption”, “pleasure”, “climax”) are not used gratuitously here: what I am hinting at is that the way museums were conceived and experienced in this period was sexual. The masterpieces room was the aesthetic highlight as it contained the best of a museum’s collections, and it triggered a sensual, embodied experience as it let go, just this one room, of the museum’s rational chronological ordering. An important indication of the sexual nature of the masterpieces room in particular is that one work of art in the Tribuna of the Uffzi had a very special place: the antique Medici Venus. Countless visitors expressed their adoration of this statue: artist and writer Jonathan Richardson the Younger famously stayed at her side for ten hours straight, and Winckelmann described her pose as that of Laïs, frst love of the ancient Greek painter Apelles, whom he imagined to have stood exactly in this position when she had to undress for the frst time under the artist’s gaze.72 It is striking that visitors of this room flled with

70 Cecilia Hurley and François Mairesse, “In the Shadow of the Tribuna,” Studiolo 9 (2012): 128–40. 71 Hurley and Mairesse, “In the Shadow of the Tribuna.” For a contemporary voice, see, for example, Théophile Gautier, “Le Musée Ancien,” La Presse, 10 February 1849. 72 See Stijn Bussels, “Da più Scorretti Abusata: The Venus de’ Medici and Its History of Sexual Responses,” in The Secret Lives of Artworks: Exploring the Boundaries Between Art and Life, eds. Caroline van Eck, Joris van Gastel, and Elsje van Kessel (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2014), 38–55. 78 E. van KESSEL masterpieces time and again singled out this work, seeing it as the highlight of highlights and bringing it to life under their (imagined) caresses. Eichendorff’s Marmorbild may give us an inkling of the fantasies lingering in some of these visitors’ minds.

Conclusion Taking Eichendorff’s Marmorbild as its main source of inspiration, this chapter set out to connect the topos of the living statue with historical experience, sexual desire and the early nineteenth-century museum. As we have seen, the living Venus statue, central motif of Das Marmorbild, carried a range of associations. As image, it stood for the fantasy that Italy had become since the Napoleonic Wars. Venus as Italy was thereby also Venus as past. First and foremost, in their sculptural- ity, Eichendorff’s imagined marble statue, Goethe’s Juno, and the Medici Venus at the heart of the Tribuna invited a sexual response, whereby the imagined erotic encounter with the statue came to stand for a desired yet dangerous unison of the present with the past. Richter’s reading of Das Marmorbild has enabled us to celebrate, so to speak, the materiality of the Venus statue, and explore the connection between Eichendorff’s textual Venus and the Venus sculptures in the museums of Eichendorff’s day. While, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, these museums were rationalised and disciplined, they began to evoke criticism from Romantic thinkers who felt a more engaged relationship with the past was under threat. Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, a fctional account, is refective of such preoccupations with the present’s relationship with the past and the purposes and effects of museal display. As this chapter has shown, the historical experience as encouraged by certain museum settings of this period was itself sexualised. The display of sexualised bodies was essential, but not suffcient in and of itself: in addition to the actual objects that were exhibited, it was about the strategy of display, the masterpieces room, which interrupted chronological order and temporarily allowed for an engaged historical experience that resulted from unmediated aesthetic pleasure. In a time when, as Foucault has demonstrated, the sexual was under continuous scrutiny, we can begin to distinguish the ways in which sex co-determined not only the contents 3 LONGING FOR THE PAST: EICHENDORFF’S MARMORBILD … 79 but also the means of museal display.73 Sterile classifcation and chronological ordering of art are opposed to an immersive experience and an enjoyment of art that is physical and emotional and which can trigger an embodied engagement with history. The Tribuna, as the frst among many masterpieces rooms, was an imaginary space in which the body and mind, the past and the present, could all for a moment merge into one. In the light of Eichendorff’s Marmorbild, Ankersmit’s notion of historical experience, and an imaginary Italy as birthplace of the living Venus statue, we can see the masterpieces room as the museological answer to the post-Revolutionary, Romantic longing for the past.

73 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). CHAPTER 4

Women, or Wax? Eros, Thanatos, and Sculpture in Cinema

Vito Adriaensens

In Metamorphoses,1 the Roman poet Ovid chronicled the history of the world by portraying it as one of violence and corporeal transformations. Ovid invites “the audience to redraw the boundaries between fact and fction and give assent to the poet’s representation of the cosmos in pri- ority to the world of experience”.2 The most striking element of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the transformation of bodies, is, not coincidentally, the one that translates best to flm, a visual medium in which bodies are captured through mechanical mediation and transformed and preserved in every frame of celluloid. In the cinematic universe, bodies can be just

1 See Introduction. 2 Andrew Feldherr, Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 62.

V. Adriaensens (*) Columbia University, New York, NY, USA V. Adriaensens University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

© The Author(s) 2019 81 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_4 82 V. ADRIAENSENS as plastic as in Ovid’s verses, but the eye of the camera amplifes visceral change in such a way that whole genres have spawned from its representational qualities, most notably the horror flm and in particular one of its subgenres, the wax museum horror flm. Following French flm theorist André Bazin, the “radical breach between the transience of existence and mechanical reproduction”, or the distinction between the real and cinematic reality, is best illustrated by “a never to be repeated spectacle in fesh and blood”.3 Filmmakers have certainly been obsessed with trying to repeat the “spectacle of fesh and blood” and blurring the line between life and death. Outside the realms of mythology, religion, and magic, the processes of constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing, reassembling, and rep- licating bodies have usually been seen as the domain of sculptors, surgeons, and anatomists. Sculpture and science were frst brought into dialogue for anatomical purposes. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams points out, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was probably the “frst artist to cut up the human body”,4 and, a little later in the sixteenth century, Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) was digging up corpses and founding the science of modern anatomy. Indeed the distinction between Leonardo and Vesalius, or artist and anatomist, and the question of who founded the science of anatomy, were topics of discussion for many centuries.5 Spectacular entertainment was an immediate by-product of this fusion, because “the portrayal of the human body, however ostensibly neutral or technical […] invariably brings into play strong sensations”,6 meaning that the sight of dead bodies—whether in an anatomical theatre, an ossuary, or a museum—was a strong draw for the general public.

3 Ivone Margulies, “Bodies Too Much,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–23 (5). 4 Hugh Aldersey-Williams, Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013), 26. 5 A historiographical inquest reveals that it was still a hot topic in 1910. Cf. James Moores Ball, Andreas Vesalius, the Reformer of Anatomy (Saint Louis: Medical Science Press, 1910), 113. 6 Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press and the Hayward Gallery, 2000), 32. 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 83

This chapter will focus on this intersection between sculpture and anatomy in flm, singling out the horror genre’s predilection for equating sculptors with surgeons and analysing a universe in which the muta- bility of the body is an overture to plots centred on passionate physical attraction that tend to result in death. More often than not, the mutable body is depicted as female, building on the enduring myth of Pygmalion and Galatea that revolves around the changeability of the female form, as discussed in the introduction to this volume. Within cinematic history, the trope of Pygmalion and Galatea started with ciné-magicien and serial dismemberer of onscreen talent Georges Méliès (1861–1938).7 The trope was further developed in wax museum flms from Michael Curtiz’s 1933 Mystery of the Wax Museum onwards, with the character of the mad artist slowly developing into a Gunther-von-Hagens-esque fgure over time.8 This lineage will be traced to even more colourful examples that explicitly thematize the marriage of viscera and art, such as Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood (1959), in which a beatnik wan- nabe turns murder into hyperrealist art; Yasuzô Masumura’s Môjû (Blind Beast; 1969), that has a blind sculptor abduct a model to blur the lines between fesh and stone; and Jennifer Lynch’s Boxing Helena (1993), with a mad surgeon who turns a woman into a living Venus de Milo. These flms draw from ancient myths, anatomical science, and Victorian spectacle to create a new space for ideas on the living body as it relates to statuary. As I argue, this is effectuated through equating the two—with visual similes, for instance—and by exploring the boundaries of love and death, more often than not by trying literally to objectify and immortalize a lover in plaster, stone, or bronze. For the most part a twentieth- and twenty-frst-century phenomenon, cinema plays with the different temporalities behind its inspirations, in such a way as to bring out new connections between phenomena that existed in different timeframes and are visually linked on the silver screen.

7 Georges Méliès started out as a stage magician. When he began incorporating projection into his act and experimenting with flm production, he developed an onscreen magician persona and became known as the “ciné-magicien” or “cinemagician.” 8 An anatomist, sculptor, and plastination pioneer, Gunther von Hagens founded his Institute of Plastination in 1993 and set up his frst Körperwelten (Body Worlds) show with preserved and posed cadavers in 1995. He styles himself as a cross between artist Joseph Beuys and Rembrandt’s anatomical professor Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from the 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. 84 V. ADRIAENSENS

Sculpting Women The very concept of the creation of the human body is anchored in the fgure of the surgeon-cum-sculptor throughout various religions and mythologies. Adam is the frst man across the creation myths of the major Abrahamic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.9 The same deity is responsible for sculpting matter into fgurative shapes and magically bringing them to life. For the creation of woman, the deity could be equated with a modern surgeon (and stem cell scientist) seen to be performing a rib operation and using the tissue to generate a new human being, or in a modern Western cultural context as Mary Shelley’s Dr. Victor Frankenstein.10 Art and medicine are equated in the same breath in the Book of Genesis as viable means to building a body. Compared to religious texts, Ovid does not merely provide a glimpse of creation in his mythologies, but focuses intently on transformations from clay to fesh, from human to animal, and from inanimate to animate, turning the body into an arena of transgression. As classicist Charles Segal has noted, Ovid’s depiction of the body is marked by “his representation of a world in which reason and order decompose into frightening confusion and chaos,” and this “grotesque physicality of the body” returns throughout Western literature to comment on the “darker, less organized, perhaps more primordial […] visions of the self”.11 This decomposition of reason and order by means of divine intervention is found most popularly in the transformation of an ivory statue to a woman known as Galatea. The statue was carved to perfection by Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion and bestowed life through his touch by the grace of the goddess of love, Venus.12 A proliferation of Pygmalion and Galatea adaptations started with a revival of Ovid’s work in the eighteenth

9 The passages can be found in the Book of Genesis 2:7 and 2:21–22, quoted here from Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, eds., Eve & Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 26–7. 10 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818). 11 Charles Segal, “Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the ‘Metamorphoses’,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 5, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 9–41 (10–1). 12 Book 10 in Ovid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. John Dryden, Joseph Addison, et al. (Ann Arbor: Gale ECCO, 2007). See the introduction to this volume. 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 85 century, notably through Jean Raoux’s painting Pygmalion Amoureux de Sa Statue (c. 1717), Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s sculpture Pygmalion au Pied de Sa Statue, à L’Instant Où Elle S’Anime at the Salon of 1763 and Denis Diderot’s enthusiastic reaction to the statue,13 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s monodrama Pygmalion (1770). The popularity of the myth grew even more in the nineteenth century, when it became increasingly adapted to the stage in the guise of tableau vivant performers and plays such as William Brough’s musical burlesque Pygmalion; or, The Statue Fair (1867) and W.S. Gilbert’s highly successful Pygmalion and Galatea, an Original Mythological Comedy (1871),14 and was also immortalized on canvas in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Pygmalion et Galatée (c. 1890). As Hersey notes, artistic representations of the myth tend to focus on the moment “just when the statue comes to life,” because it represents an ultimate tactile exchange.15 It is the moment that Pygmalion touches the cold ivory and his fngers “made a print” on “fesh so frm, it rose against the dint,” feeling the skin change into “pliant wax” until he detects “the leaping vein”.16 It is also exactly this moment of transformation that translated so well to the new medium of motion pictures in the late nineteenth century. Whereas the popular retelling of Ovid’s myth usually leaves Pygmalion with a subservient spouse,17 however, statues coming to life in cinema almost always signal death and destruction. Stage magician, fedgling flmmaker, and special effects pioneer Georges Méliès rode the coattails of the myth’s popularity to produce 17 flms between 1898 and 1911 in which statues come to life and human subjects are turned to statues,18 prompting an onscreen universe with

13 Denis Diderot and John S.D. Glaus (trans.), “He Can Improve the Artist’s Concept as Well as Guide Him,” in On Art and Artists: An Anthology of Diderot’s Aesthetic Thought, ed. Jean Seznec (London and New York: Springer, 2011), 56–7 (56). 14 Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56–7. 15 George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artifcial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press), 102. 16 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 343–4. 17 A theme that is willingly continued and counteracted throughout history, most notably in George Bernard Shaw’s widely adapted class commentary update Pygmalion (1912). 18 These are: Le Magicien (1898); Pygmalion et Galathée (1898); Guillaume Tell et le Clown (1898); La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1898); L’illusionniste Fin de Siècle (1899); Le Diable Géant ou le Miracle de la Madone (1901); La Statue Animée (1903); L’Oracle de Delphes (1903); Tom Tight et Dum Dum (1903); Illusions Funambulesques (1903); Le 86 V. ADRIAENSENS new possibilities for bodily transgression. Méliès started with two flms, Le Magicien and Pygmalion et Galatée (both 1898) that deliberately place the fgure of the sculptor in an ersatz Classical environment. The flmmaker embodied the fgure of mythical Pygmalion, willing life into lifeless statues on screen. By virtue of the magical apparatus of the camera, he additionally took on the role of the deity, willing life into people photographed approximately 16 times per second. In what he has dubbed the “Pygmalion effect,” Victor Stoichita sees the blurring of boundaries that occurs between model and sculpture—or between original and copy— operating within “the connected realm of aesthetics, magic, and technical skill,”19 which holds up as a description of Méliès’s artistry. Méliès’s works seldom display just one kind of transformation, but rather include a wide variety of transformative possibilities. His short trick flms20 are flled to the brim with special effects and jokes revolving around transformations, which allows Méliès to create a strong contrast with the immobility and tranquillity of statuary. In his flms, statues are represented by cardboard cut-outs, (wax) mannequins, or simply motion- less women in togas. Indeed, Méliès might have found the appearance of “live fesh” preferable—it should be noted that these were almost always women—as this revealed certain titillating details such as ankles, partly bared chests, and underarm hair; parts which were considered highly intimate and sexually suggestive and were sure to draw a bigger crowd.21 In these flms, the inanimate changes into the animate and vice versa in a split second; bodies are violently thrown around, stomped to a pulp, dismembered, decapitated, and put back together, through the magic of

Baquet de Mesmer (1904); La Chaise à Porteurs Enchantée (1905); Les Bulles de Savon Vivantes (1906); Le Tambourin Fantastique (1908); La Bonne Bergère et La Mauvaise Princesse (1908); Les Illusions Fantaisistes (1909); and Les Hallucinations de Baron de Munchausen (1911). 19 Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5. 20 The trick flm was a genre most notably present in early cinema that revolved around cinematographic tricks (or some would say, magic), involving, among others, disappear- ances, transformations, and the animation of inanimate objects. 21 Francesca Berry, “Bedrooms: Corporeality and Subjectivity,” in Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns, ed. Georgina Downey (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 129–46 (132–3). 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 87 the camera and editing.22 Men more often bear the most torturous transformations while women are most often shown in varying states of undress, sexualizing the latter in a way that does not happen for the former. These flms not only exploit the malleability of the cinematic bodies—be they represented as mannequin, bronze, marble, cardboard, or fesh—but also demonstrate the strength and violence with which Méliès enforces his own Ovidian metamorphoses. Though Elizabeth Ezra has noted that violence is minimized in Méliès’s flms when there are no weapons involved or when characters infict harm upon themselves,23 I would argue that the visceral reaction that viewers still experience today surely contradicts that assumption. Furthermore, being dismembered through the sheer strength of a person’s hands seems to me to be more violent and shocking than by the use of weapons. The presence of wax mannequins in Méliès’s flms furthers this experience of violence, as well as the elision of the boundary between art and nature, because wax mannequins actively invite an investigation of their artifciality, much as they would during a visit to the wax museum. It is because of his consistent exploration of the “transgressions of corporeal borders” that Méliès is often considered to be the world’s frst horror flmmaker.24

Art, Science, and Horror In the early twentieth century, the Pygmalion trope collided on the silver screen with a form of entertainment that had equally grown in popularity since the eighteenth century: the wax museum. As quoted earlier, wax makes an appearance as a tactile intermediary between ivory and fesh in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Its application in sculpting seems to have been closely connected with death since ancient Greco-Roman times, when the material was used to make ancestral and death masks; as John

22 Most notably stop-motion camera techniques and substitution splices in editing, cf. Tom Gunning, “The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion,” in Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan (New York: Routledge AFI Film Readers, 2013), 52–70 (67). 23 Elizabeth Ezra, Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 143. 24 Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael, “Introduction,” in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque, eds. Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 1–16 (2). 88 V. ADRIAENSENS

Pollini notes, wax masks were an integral part of Roman visual culture, because “the very texture of wax and its appearance when painted [has] the ability to convey the feeling and look of real fesh”.25 The ancestral masks were also used performatively by actors who took on the roles of deceased family members at aristocratic funeral rituals, bringing the dead to life.26 A similarly verist tradition arose in Italy between the thirteenth and the seventeenth century, when a cult of votive offerings created an industry in wax,27 meaning that healthy or unhealthy body parts and organs were reproduced in wax and presented as offers to saints. Florentine noblemen even commissioned life-sized bóti, copies of themselves in coloured wax, which were dressed up and given to churches as a sign of their devotion. The Basilica della Santissima Annunziata in Florence claimed to have made a public attraction out of its collection of organs, parts, and noble bodies in wax, possibly instituting it as the world’s frst wax museum.28 The relationship between the medium of wax and the minutiae of the body, death and the afterlife—a relationship that had already been established through religious offerings—was expanded and partially sec- ularized, as the creation of wax bodies was refned as an art form during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.29 By the end of the seventeenth-century anatomical waxes were being created to replace the use of actual human corpses in anatomical theatres.30 Such theatres were popular both socially and scientifcally in the seventeenth century, as represented in paintings such as Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). The most prominent wax artists were

25 John Pollini, From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 14. 26 Ibid., 16. 27 James Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 134. 28 Roberta Ballestriero, “Anatomical Models and Wax Venuses: Art Masterpieces or Scientifc Craft Works?” Journal of Anatomy 216, no. 2 (February 2010): 223–34 (224). 29 Elizabeth Hallam, Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 294. 30 Margaret Carlyle, “Artisans, Patrons, and Enlightenment: The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge in Paris, St. Petersburg, and London,” in Bodies Beyond Borders: Moving Anatomies, 1750–1950, eds. Kaat Wils, Raf de Bont, and Sokhiengh Au (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017), 23–50 (24). 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 89 perhaps Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, Giuseppe Ferrini, and Clemente Susini, whose work has been well-preserved at the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze—known as La Specola—that opened its doors in 1775 and amassed an impressive collection of anatomical waxes.31 The wax fgures on display were mainly women, striking not only in their uncanny “lifelike” states of anatomical exposure, but also especially in their sensuous poses, which signal the sexualization of the anatomical wax body.32 These waxen women, known as anatomical Venuses, could be found in similar poses and states in other museums, including the Josephinum in Vienna, from the late eighteenth century on.33 The models for these waxes were corpses, and so most wax artists teamed up with anatomists who would dissect beside them, as the outcome needed to be precise and anatomically correct.34 The Venuses lay sensually reclining on soft bedding, their eyes usually half open in a dreamlike gaze, which is the case for Susini and Ferrini’s Medici Venus (1782) in La Specola. They are often healthy looking young women and are deconstructable: one can take them apart and look inside. Roberta Ballestriero notes that famed sculptor Antonio Canova was a fan of Susini’s work, and that “as an artist Susini could not avoid being infuenced by the neoclassical taste whereby the predominant perception of beauty was a smooth, refned, and sensual expression such as that portrayed by Canova”.35 The unmis- takable eroticization of the Venuses draws attention to the strong relation between desire and death, especially given the fact that the statues’

31 Renato G. Mazzolini, “Plastic Anatomies and Artifcial Dissections,” in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, eds. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 43–70 (45–6). 32 Though the museum only opened its doors to the public in 1775, it collected anatomical waxes by famed wax artist Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656–1701) that predate its grand opening by more than 70 years. Elizabeth D. Harvey, “The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 81–102 (96). 33 For a thorough history, see Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 34 Catherine Heard, “Uneasy Associations: Wax Bodies Outside the Canon,” in Disguise, Deception, Trompe-l’oeil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Leslie Boldt-Irons, Corrado Federici, and Ernesto Virgulti (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 231–50 (237). 35 Ballestriero, “Anatomical Models,” 230. 90 V. ADRIAENSENS faces and hands were often cast directly from corpses to ensure a realistic result, and that visitors of wax museums were sometimes allowed to touch the waxes, reportedly even spending time alone with them— though the latter would undoubtedly have cost extra.36 The Specola waxes were considerably more gruesome in their detailed anatomy than what consequent Chambers of Horrors at Madame Tussauds would present to the public, which also refects their scientifc purpose. The latter’s Chamber of Horrors, which frst opened in 1802, featured murderers whose wax faces were often “taken from life,” in the sense that they were cast from death masks taken by Tussaud herself. The Chamber was updated in keeping with the murders in the newspapers—much as the museum is now updated to keep up with the latest celebrities.37 As Michelle Bloom notes, although there was a separation between the two kinds of wax museums based on “an undesira- bly rigid divide between art and science” (the anatomically oriented halls of La Specola versus the popular entertainment of Madame Tussauds), both types provide entertainment and fascination.38 Their differences lay mostly in the dramatic presentation and the link to history or actuality, rather than constituting a hard difference between “art” and “science” per se: La Specola was as, or even more, seductive and horrifc to viewers as Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of Horrors, even though the former was more anatomically correct and the latter was geared specifcally towards achieving the effect of frightening people with lifelike imagery of death.39 The 1935 MGM flm Mad Love by Karl Freund demonstrates the deeper exploration of the relationship between sculptural art and science in the realm of anatomy that can be found in a number of feature-length American horror flms of the 1920s and 1930s,40 exploring the themes

36 Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2003), 26. 37 E.g. François Courvoisier’s death mask, fashioned after he was hanged for a crowd of 30,000 that included Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 118. 38 Michelle E. Bloom, Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xviii. 39 Bloom, Waxworks, xviii. 40 For instance The Penalty (Wallace Worsley, 1920), a Lon Chaney Sr. flm, in which the art of sculpture is equated directly with surgery in a plot of murder, amputation, and por- traiture. The flms also features one of few female sculptors in flm. Cf. Vito Adriaensens, 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 91 of ancient myth, death, and desire by visualizing and thematizing the medium of wax. Inspired by the 1920 Maurice Renard novel Les Mains d’Orlac, the flm conjures a creative three-way between the hands of a pianist, the hands of a murderer, and the hands of a surgeon, but, importantly, the story crosses over into the realm of Ovid’s Pygmalion and that of the wax museum. Set in Paris, Mad Love opens on mad surgeon Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), deeply in love with actress Yvonne (Frances Drake). She is married to famous pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) and rejects Gogol’s love, so the latter takes what he can: a lifelike wax effgy of her that stands in the lobby of a theatre. When Orlac loses his hands in a terrible train crash, Gogol transplants a dead murderer’s hands onto Orlac’s and tries to set him up for murder. Now struggling to play the piano, Orlac is left with nothing but a marble likeness of his former hands. Following Sigmund Freud’s elaboration of the uncanny when it comes to mutilated limbs and mechanical hands,41 Orlac’s new hands have a will of their own, more specifcally a curious knack for throwing knives inherited from the donor. Investigating Gogol’s home, Yvonne stumbles into her wax effgy and breaks it. She takes its place when Gogol comes home, but the house cockatoo nicks her on the cheek, leaving a drop of blood. A drunken Gogol sees his wax statue come to life and declares: “Galatea, I am Pygmalion. You were wax, but you came to life in my arms”. When she resists his advances, he tries to strangle her with her hair, whilst quoting Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836). The poem is not an accidental choice, for it contains a similar strangulation and also plays on the necrophiliac experience the protagonist can have when he changes “her” into “it” permanently; this is a transformation that literary critics see as pointing to the prevalent art of the tableau vivant, or living picture, in which people posed to recreate well-known statues or paintings.42 Gogol cannot experience the Pygmalion myth coming to fruition; as the Pygmalion of the story, the

“The Penalty,” in Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema, Steven Jacobs, Susan Felleman, Vito Adriaensens, and Lisa Colpaert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 183. 41 Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 226. 42 U.C. Knoepfmacher, “Projection and the Female Other,” in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, eds. Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 148–68 (160). 92 V. ADRIAENSENS only way to achieve subservience from this unwilling Galatea is to kill her and turn her into an object that rivals her wax effgy. It is this twist on the Pygmalion myth that perseveres in flm history, and this holds true in particular for the horror flm. If the anatomical wax was one of the frst instances in which the representation of the female body formed a nexus of art and science that could elicit desire and fear, the flm camera and the onscreen universe form a logical extension. Films that thematize the human body through similes with wax or other statuary often do not shy from exploring the deconstructability of the human form, exposing what lies underneath the skin in the guise of characters who are surgeon, artist, or both.

The Murder of Galatea The introduction of the wax fgure and Dr. Gogol’s impulse to kill the woman he so desperately wants seems to have been borrowed directly from competitor Warner Brothers’ Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933). The flm played heavily on the context of the wax museum as seen in Madame Tussaud’s London establishment and the Parisian Musée Grévin. Mark Sandberg has noted that the 1880s and 1890s saw a signifcant boom of these museums after the opening of Musée Grévin in 1882, with every major city wanting its own touch of Parisian refnement.43 It was this nineteenth-century popularization of the wax museum that found its way into fction, where the museum’s static inhabitants would be brought to life. As perhaps the most mimetic mode of sculpture, wax was excluded from the traditional arts on the basis of hyperrealism.44 At the same time, however, craftsmanship in wax continued to be lauded, and the tension it generated between being recognized as mere realism or as art is a frustration we recognize in the fgure of the wax museum’s mad artist on screen. The French theatre of horrors Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol (founded in 1897) was probably among the frst to pick up on the

43 Mark Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons—Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 26. 44 Joan B. Landes, “Wax Fibers, Wax Bodies, and Moving Figures: Artifce and Nature in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2008), 41–65 (53). 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 93 gruesome possibilities of the wax museum with André de Lorde and Georges Montignac’s 1912 stage play Figures de Cire (Wax Figures). Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, de Lorde became the theatre’s main play- wright, producing hundreds of short visceral tales concerned with murder, torture, and other “terror-inspiring” situations that gained him notoriety abroad as the Prince of Terror.45 The play was adapted to an eponymous flm in 1913/1914 by French-American director Maurice Tourneur.46 The short flm featured acclaimed Grand Guignol actor Henri Gouget as the wax museum’s proprietor, for the frst time intro- ducing the wax artist as a key fgure in the fctional imagining of the wax museum trope. As an actor, Gouget had been described as “living in that borderland between life and death, where terror is king,”47 and his screen introduction speaks volumes to this: after the title card with his name at the start of the flm, Gouget turns slowly to look at the camera with a sinister stare while his head dissolves into a skull. The transformation seems to poke fun at a popular Victorian belief that similarly haunted early cinema, namely that photography was a form of necro- mancy and the camera had “the ability to strip away layers of the soul”.48 The flm revolves around a wager between Pierre and Jacques, on whether fear will get the best of Pierre when he has to spend the night alone in a wax museum. Pierre is immediately unsettled by the many tableaux vivants alluding to violence and murder, and in the middle of the night, as the wind knocks over a wax mannequin, Pierre loses his nerves when he thinks one of the statues has taken hold of him. It is at this time that his friend Jacques drops in, and a frightened Pierre stabs him thinking it is a wax doll come to life. When daybreak comes, the police fnd Pierre out of his wits and Jacques’s body “the latest addition to the museum,” as the intertitle so eloquently puts it. In both the play and the flm, Figures de Cire renders the wax museum as a crime scene and a place of magic, where statuary holds the promise of life and death. The true blueprint for the wax museum

45 F. Irvin, “The Little Theatres of Paris,” The Theatre: Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Dramatic and Musical Art V, no. 53 (July 1905), 202–4. 46 Maurice Tourneur also shot de Lorde’s Guignol play Le Système du Docteur Goudron et du Professeur Plume (after Poe) in 1912. 47 F. Irvin, “The Little Theatres of Paris,” 204. 48 Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 46. 94 V. ADRIAENSENS horror flm, however, came in 1932 with an unpublished short story by Charles Spencer Belden called “The Wax Works”. Belden fashioned a story for Warner Bros. that was infuenced by Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1910). The plot put forth the wax museum’s artist as its protagonist—more clearly than Figures de Cire had done—and compounded the formula with the Pygmalion myth, creating a horror recipe that is still being reproduced today, as evidenced by the examples that will follow. The story was turned into the early Technicolor gem Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and would be adapted once more in 1953 as House of Wax (André De Toth), this time in 3-D.49 Belden’s story takes the implied horror of the wax museum one step further than Figures de Cire by sculpturally merging wax with fesh through a machine of the wax artist’s devising that encapsulates the body in a wax shell. An advertisement for Mystery of the Wax Museum plays with the idea that this flm will push the trope of the wax museum beyond mere suggestion, asking “are they women – or wax?” above partial nude images of the actresses.50 Much like in the case of the La Specola Venuses, the wax museum, and the frst instances of living statuary cinematography by Méliès, the advertisement invokes artistic licence to show salacious nudity that would surely have drawn a crowd. It merged artistic representations of the actresses in wax with their photographs to create realistic nudes. This clear gendering continues a lineage: it is generally female models who are subjected to transformation and sexualization. The frst two adaptations of Belden’s story by Warner Bros. were highly infuential and depict the wax artist as a Pygmalionesque genius who, embittered by the loss of his beloved wax dolls in a crippling fre, starts rebuilding his collection by murdering his enemies and the looka- likes of his favourite fgures, and then covering them in a thin layer of wax and placing them in his museum. Sandberg has noted that the element of horror is always already present in the voyeuristic model of the

49 Interestingly, H.P. Lovecraft also published a short story taking place in a wax museum in 1933: H.P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, “The Horror in the Museum,” Weird Tales 22, no. 1 (July 1933): 49–67. The plot was very similar to that of André de Lorde’s Figures de Cire, with a bet to spend the night and the promise of entrapment, but, in a Lovecraftian twist, a supernatural force kills one of the protagonists and turns him into a part of a tableau. 50 Anon, “Are They Women—Or Wax?” Motion Picture Herald 110, no. 8 (18 February 1933): 3. 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 95 wax museum in the mere idea that the realistic models might return spectators’ looks, but this plot usually centres on dream or confusion, without touching the integrity of the wax mannequins.51 The two flms foreground the artistry involved in the making of wax fgures, as well as the objectifcation of the female body, two integral elements of the Pygmalion myth. We see the sculptors sculpting in their workplace, talking to their mannequins as if they were alive, and even proclaiming their love for the cherished Marie Antoinette statue.52 Their peers recognize them for their extraordinary talent, and it becomes clear that the degree of verisimilitude achieved by the sculptors is the measure for their works’ greatness. In the 1933 version, sculptor Ivan Igor proclaims that he “could reproduce the warmth and fesh and blood of life far more better [sic] in wax than in cold stone”.53 The focus of this “warmth and fesh and blood of life” is female, for when his statues achieve a peak verisimilitude in the form of living female doppelgangers, the wax artist seeks their submission by wanting to objectify them and put them in a place in which they are sure to stay, his museum. The women are put on a pedestal by the camera as well, which treats them to soft-focus close-ups. Such forms of objectifcation rarely affect men in these plots. In later cinematic incarnations, such as Santo en el museo de cera (Alfonso Corona Blake and Manuel San Fernando, 1963), Nightmare in Wax (Bud Townsend, 1969), Waxwork (Anthony Hickox, 1988), M.D.C.—Maschera di Cera (Sergio Stivaletti, 1997), and the 2005 House of Wax (Jaume Collet-Serra), the plot still features the wax museum’s artist as a key fgure, but the focus on artistry is all but left out in favour of gruesome slayings, female nudity, and bodies dipped in wax. It should be noted that none of these flms features a female wax artist or a sexualized male body, but all of them work with the same motifs that were at play in the wax museum, such as the idea that these statues were once living people or could come alive, the visceral representation of human anatomy, and the sexualization of female bodies.

51 Sandberg, Living Pictures, 95. 52 Lionel Atwill plays sculptor Ivan Igor and Fay Wray doubles as Marie-Antoinette in the 1933 version. Vincent Price plays sculptor Henry Jarrod with Phyllis Kirk taking on the double role in the 1953 version. 53 Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933). 96 V. ADRIAENSENS

The Way of All Flesh The horror flm’s predilection for visceral effects relating to the manip- ulation and violation of the human body lends itself perfectly to the fgure of the insane sculptor and his creations, trapping living beings inside of sculptures, transforming them into sculptures, or using body parts as primary source material. The confusion that occurs between the real and the ideal when a statue comes to life is not benefcial for the characters of the horror flm.54 In the flms that follow Belden’s storyline in invoking the Pygmalion plot, the artist is a godlike creator who does not want to see his artwork come to life if not by his own hand, and who sets out to transform human beings into sculptures. Michelle Bloom bor- rows Philippe Dubois’s term “thanatography” to refer to this process; an amalgam of the Greek mythological personifcation of death, Thanatos, and the art of photography, which immortalizes people in statuary poses.55 This Pygmalionesque reversal is described by many artist characters of the flms as an attempt to immortalize the beauty of their subjects. In the Belden storyline, in particular, this reason is often presented to the models as an attempt at justifying their subsequent murder and transformation. The models will have eternal life and eternal beauty to look forward to, only in a different bodily form. This promise of eternal beauty stands in contrast to the transience of the artists’ material, wax, which proves quite infammable at the end of almost every flm. This immortalization also ties into the quest for artistic recognition. An interesting plot development echoed in flm’s dealing with murder- ous artists in general, not just in the wax museum flm or in flms thematizing sculpture, is that the artist is inspired to murder because it betters his work. In Roger Corman’s intelligent pastiche on beat culture, A Bucket of Blood (1959), schlemiel Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) only succeeds at ftting in with the artistic elite when he accidentally kills a cat and tries to cover it up with clay. The result is a hyperreal sculpture, aptly titled Dead Cat, which garners the favour of his beatnik pals. Needless to say, human “models” follow, and when the truth fnally catches up to Paisley, he puts an end to his successful run with a stunning “self-portrait”. A similar artistic appropriation of the human body leads to

54 Paula James, Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman (London and New York: Continuum International, 2011), 91. 55 Bloom, Waxworks, 124. 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 97 critical success for painter Adam Sorg (Gordon Oas-Heim) in Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Color Me Blood Red (1965). When Sorg’s paintings are criticized for their unimaginative use of colour, the painter accidentally discovers that blood makes a vivid pigment, and a few young girls have to pave his road to artistic fame with their lives. Both flms build on the themes found in the wax museum flm by focusing on artists who gain success through murder. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of flms continued this trope of the artist as a villainous madman, most notably vampiric painter Antonio Sordi (William Campbell) in Blood Bath (also known as Track of the Vampire; Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman, 1966); sociopathic painter/sculptor Victor Clare (Mike Raven) in Crucible of Terror (Ted Hooker, 1971); and hole-punching painter Reno Miller (Abel Ferrara) in The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979). In these flms, the artist’s toolkit is expanded beyond the brush and the chisel to include the instruments of the surgeon, and models’ anatomy become an integral part of the artwork. Perhaps nowhere are the lines between sculpted matter and fesh blurred more than in Môjû (1969). While this flm and the next that I will discuss do not deal with wax, they draw on the same themes as previous case studies. Môjû can be seen as part of a Japanese tradition of sexploitation flms with violence directed specifcally against the female body.56 Focusing on blind sculptor Michio (Eiji Funakoshi) who lives with his mother, the flm opens on photographs of nude female fgures by underground photographer Akira Suzuki and takes the viewer inside the artist’s 1968 exhibition Les Fleurs du Mal: Réhabilitation par Mon Sexe. The exhibition was inspired by the decadent eroticism of Baudelaire’s work, displaying photographs in which the female nude is subdued by way of bondage, and objectifed through analogies with sculpture and the use of montage. Lead actress Mako Midori, who plays Aki Shima, was one of Suzuki’s models for the exhibition,57 and thus the flm takes us to a strange realm between reality and fction, as the actress walks into a museum space flled with photographs of her. The exhibition also features one nude statue of the

56 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japanese sexploitation or “pink” flms became more grotesque and infused with violence—also known as “ero guro”—a lot of which was directed at the female body. Cf. Jasper Sharp, Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema (Lanham and Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2011), 253. 57 Akira Suzuki, Les Fleurs du Mal: Réhabilitation par mon sexe (Tokyo: Nobel Syobo, 1968). 98 V. ADRIAENSENS actress lunging with her hands towards the sky. At the foot of it, sculptor Michio is crouched down to explore it. This duplication of the female protagonist is in line with the doppelgangers that appear in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and House of Wax (1953), and points to the possibility of murder or transformation. The sculptor later drugs and kidnaps the model and introduces her to his artistic lair. In a scene reminiscent of Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), we see that his studio is made up out of walls of sculpted eyes, breasts, and limbs in all sizes, showcas- ing the blind sculptor’s far-reaching obsession with the human form that he cannot see, particularly the female form. Aki tries to get away, but stumbles through a studio landscape flled with giant statues of the nude female form in different textures and materials. The sculptor tries to convince her to become his partner in an experiment to introduce a new form of haptic art by and for the blind. He touches his model as part of his artistic process, sculpting limbs out of gigantic balls of clay. The two develop a relationship that leads to the murder of Michio’s mother, and experiments with mutilation and vampirism. As Justin Vicari puts it, their wounds become “decorations of the body, art projects; and also special symbols of intimacy”.58 The flm’s climax consists of a scene in which the two make love on a giant statue of a naked woman until the sculptor consensually rids the model of her limbs with a knife. The limbs turn to stone when they fall on the ground and the sculptor commits hara-kiri, or ritual suicide, by disembowelment with a sword. Aki is thus turned into Michio’s own Venus de Milo—a historical ideal of beauty. The Venus de Milo was found in 1820, and became the “prime manifestation of ancient Greek sensuality and eternal female beauty” in the nineteenth and twentieth century, inspiring many to seek the same body type.59 In Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s Boxing Helena (1993), the narrative of Môjû is inverted: the surgeon becomes the artist, and his home a museum. Boxing Helena represents what could be conceived as a further step in the genre. While it still entertains the notion of the female body as an object no different than a statue, it signifcantly dismisses the magic realism of Môjû, in which the anatomic experiments with Aki negate a full visceral experience because her limbs and body turn into stone when operated upon.

58 Justin Vicari, Japanese Film and the Floating Mind: Cinematic Contemplations of Being (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016), 130. 59 Johannes Siapkas and Lena Sjögren, Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrifed Gaze (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 137. 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 99

In Boxing Helena, main character Dr. Nick Cavanaugh’s (Julian Sands) obsession with the titular Helena (Sherilyn Fenn) leads him to mould her into a living work of art. The artistic process is also an anatomical one; it is aesthetically inspired, charged with sexuality, and, up to a point, necessary to keep death at bay. The only flm that might represent another leap further into exploring the realm of anatomy and art is Taxidermia (György Pálf, 2006), in which a gloomy taxidermist transforms his own body into an embalmed statue, ultimately decapitating himself as the end goal to achieving a classical Greco-Roman statuary ideal of beauty. Boxing Helena does not go quite as far, but does begin by taking the anatomical obsession back to a classical Oedipal complex. A fashback scene traces the origins of the surgeon’s obsession back to his childhood, as his gaze is drawn to a full-sized copy of the Venus de Milo. The statue is equated with the child’s beautiful mother, who stands next to it and is not only similarly wearing her hair in a chignon, but also has long black gloves on that give the impression of her arms disappearing beneath her elbows, both features of the statue. The mother is sexualized by close- ups and soft-focus cinematography in the opening sequence, and the father is dismissive when his son wants attention, setting up the doctor’s future deviance and obsession with the female form as an Oedipal complex. After she passes, the doctor’s mother is replaced by Helena. We can also fnd a suggestion of the Oedipal complex in Môjû’s sculptor Michio living alone with his mother. The mother is complicit in Michio’s crimes as his partner, until she is murdered and replaced by his captive model Aki. Since the mother’s perfect form and love for her son are equated with a statue of Venus de Milo in Boxing Helena, the protagonist seeks to replicate this love through a similar statuary equation in the future. The titular Helena is fetishized in the same way as the statue: slow motion cinematography turns her into a statuesque fgure, and she runs her hands over the flm’s Venus de Milo statue. When Helena is run over by a car, she wakes up with her legs amputated by the doctor. Under the veil of caring for her, Cavanaugh imprisons her, and when she tries to fght him he amputates her arms as well and literally puts her on a pedestal. As Steven Allen points out, Cavanaugh does not just want to control Helena by containing and mutilating her, he is adhering to a code of beauty that has the Venus de Milo as its ideal,60 just as in Môjû.

60 Steven Allen, Cinema, Pain and Pleasure: Consent and the Controlled Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 72. 100 V. ADRIAENSENS

The importance of gender for the trope of Pygmalionism in flm is hereby revealed; it is coupled both to statuary and to the broader implications of aspirational aesthetics regarding women’s appearances. The plot of the flm is undercut after it is revealed that everything following the accident was a dream. The flm ends with the haunted surgeon going to his Venus statue at night to press his head against it, perhaps in the hope that it will come to life in its amputated form so that he can control it. It should be clear that flms thematizing statuary often play on the idea that it is possible to blur the line between sculpted matter and fesh, often transforming one into the other through trick cinematography, the presence of a doppelganger, or craftsmanship that is more than once equated with surgery. Hyperrealist sculpture has played a signifcant part in the development of human anatomy studies, which have historically existed in a realm between art and science and continues to serve as entertainment in flms which draw heavily on these earlier traditions. Most, if not all, of the horror flms discussed in this chapter have never been analysed in line with these traditions or as a part of the pervasive trope of Pygmalionism and the rich history of the literal objectifcation of women into anatomical waxes and other statuary that connects them. Female statuary, such as the La Specola Venuses and the Venus de Milo, have historically been aestheticized, sexualized, and exhibited in a performative and interactive context. They have been seen as immor- talizations of the perfect form, captured at its youthful peak, and were therefore perceived as aspirational. Furthermore, the presence of fgurative art in the form of painted portraits or sculpted busts of flm characters has often led to the disappearance of either the art work or the character itself in flm; most often it are the characters who disappear and the art works that survive, and not just in the horror flm but for instance also noticeably so in flm noir.61 As Panzanelli notes, while statues “document arrested life: a body fxed, observed, remembered,” there is always that “uncanny moment of cognitive uncertainty,” which is the time it takes for the spectator to realize that he is looking at a crafted

61 For a myriad of examples, see, for instance, Steven Jacobs and Lisa Colpaert, The Dark Galleries: A Museum Guide to Painted Portraits in Film Noir Gothic Melodramas and Ghost Stories of the 1940s and 1950s (Ghent: AraMER, 2014). 4 WOMEN, OR WAX? EROS, THANATOS, AND SCULPTURE IN CINEMA 101 object instead of a real human being.62 On screen, this trope has become a staple of the horror genre since the early silent period. The mad surgeon and the mad sculptor occupy the same space. They are both in the business of building bodies and their felds are equated with one another visually and thematically. In the examples discussed in this chapter, those worlds collide in spectacularly visceral fashion, and the chisel and the scalpel serve the same purpose. The classical beauty of ancient Greco- Roman statuary and the unnerving verisimilitude of wax mannequins represent models of immobile and controlled bodies that many protagonists in these flms would kill or die for; and, in fact, that is exactly what they do in their quest to recreate these ideals.

62 Roberta Panzanelli, “Introduction: The Body in Wax, the Body of Wax,” in Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2008), 1–11 (2). PART II

Sculptural Decency: Reception, Censorship and Liberation CHAPTER 5

The Indecent Body of Sculpture: Theodor Storm’s Realist Psyche

Catriona MacLeod

Stubbornly associated with eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics, in the nineteenth-century sculpture comes under renewed scrutiny as a species of primitive, sensualistic, or obsolete object by a range of philoso- phers and poets including A.W. Schlegel, Hegel, Heine, and Baudelaire, to name only a few.1 At the midpoint of the nineteenth century, when

1 See Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 17–47. Both Schlegel and Hegel downgrade sculpture in their aesthetics from the primacy it enjoyed in Neoclassicism. Schlegel’s distinction between what he terms the plastic and the pic- turesque opposes sculpture (Classical, fnite, self-contained, generically pure) with painting (Romantic/modern, infnite, open-ended, mixed) and anticipates Hegel’s view of the uncanny spiritual inaccessibility of antique sculpture, whose very materiality proves a barrier to the imagination.

I would like to express my thanks to the editors of this volume, Jana Funke and Jen Grove, as well as to Adrian Daub, who helpfully shared his expertise on Wagner.

C. MacLeod (*) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

© The Author(s) 2019 105 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_5 106 C. MACLEOD the notion of “the modern” emerges in his writings as an aesthetic category, Baudelaire provocatively declares sculpture primitive (“Carib”), defunct, and worst of all from a poetic point of view, boring.2 This dismal fate, Baudelaire continues in his essay on the Salon of 1846, is intimately connected to sculpture’s proliferation in mass-produced and miniature forms such as candelabras, match-boxes, or busts.3 Thus sculpture fnds itself indicted simultaneously as a primitive relic of the past, and as a kitschy harbinger of a troubling modernity, based on its technical reproducibility. In considering the appearance of apparently contrasting sculptural bodies—a chaste young girl aligned with a neoclassical statue of Psyche, and a crude Valkyrie statue—in a novella of the second half of the nineteenth century by German Realist Theodor Storm, it is worth recollecting sculpture’s association, above all, with unbridled lust and female corporeality. Already Goethe, alluding to the story of Pygmalion in 1799, had expressed misgivings about the brutish sensuality triggered by attachment to a statue: “Die Tradition sagt: daß brutale Menschen gegen plastische Meisterwerke von sinnlichen Begierden entzündet wurden” (Tradition tells us that brutal human beings were consumed by sensual desires for sculptural masterpieces).4 A.W. Schlegel took up the Pygmalion myth in a poem of 1797. He is careful to eliminate sensuality from his retelling: the sculpture, in his lyric a symbol of chastity, poses with her arms covering her breasts and genitalia, and though the poem ends with a kiss, it is an unsensual, “sisterly” one.5 In Achim von Arnim’s playful 1817 story “Die Weihnachts-Ausstellung” (“The Christmas Display”), statues are comically and improbably unmoored from their pedestals and foat off, balloon-like, into the sky above Berlin.6

2 Charles Baudelaire, “Why Sculpture Is Tiresome,” in Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 41–120 (111–3). 3 Ibid., 112. 4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Diderots Versuch über die Malerei,” in Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, eds. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), 1.18: 559–608 (569). 5 August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Pygmalion,” in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, vol. 1 of 12 (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846), 38–45. 6 Achim von Arnim, “Die Weihnachts-Ausstellung: Ein Schwank,” in Werke, eds. Roswitha Burwick et al., vol. 3 of 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 976–98. See MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 77–9. 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 107

Yet despite the dire critique from all sides, paradoxically there is no literary embargo on sculptural bodies in the nineteenth century, and the legacy of Romanticism’s and Idealism’s fight from materiality—from the thingliness and the locked-down desires of sculpture—has important intermedial reverberations for Realism, a movement with its own stake in things. This article will consider the ambivalent status of sculpture in Storm’s 1875 novella “Psyche” as it relates to questions of decency and indecency, which involve both sculptural decorum and the problem of obscenity and its avoidance.7 It will explore how these issues leak out of the sculptures themselves to infect the status and reputation of Storm’s work. The reading of the novella, which was published shortly after the foundation of the new German state, also situates two types of sculpture in this historical context: a neoclassical marble statue and a terracotta fgure embodying Nordic nationalism. A brief summary of this lesser-known novella among Storm’s works is in order here. Set on the North Sea coast of Schleswig Holstein in the town of Husum (Storm’s home town), the narrative opens with the adolescent girl Maria fouting the bathing attendant’s urgent warnings about the stormy water to take a swim. Close to drowning, she is rescued by the sculptor Franz, who is on vacation in the North from his studio in Berlin, and who, not coincidentally, has just returned to the Prussian capital from Italy and Greece: she is so disturbed, however, at the thal- assic physicality of this encounter that she represses the identity of her rescuer. Franz, for his part, is inspired by the incident to create a new sculpture, which he titles The Rescue of Psyche. Maria visits Berlin where she is shocked to fnd her body, in the eroticized form of the sculpture, on public display. The novella ends happily, however, with Maria and Franz’s reconciliation and engagement.

7 For an excellent overview of the ever intensifying concern in the second half of the century with public decency, and the changing landscape of obscenity laws in the German states, especially of the 1871 law (Paragraph 184 of the Criminal Code) passed banning the sale, distribution, and public display of obscene material, see Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: Literary Censorship in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 191–4; and Sarah Leonard, Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Leonard mainly considers print culture and popular urban entertainments. My focus will be on other spaces in which anxieties about respectable bodies surface, namely bathing resorts and museum exhibition spaces. 108 C. MACLEOD

Decency and indecency are not only problems adhering to the sculptural works themselves, as their reputation is broadcast from metropolitan Berlin to the Northern provinces, the two settings of the novella. The question of decency attaches as well to the body of the young girl who inspires the sculptor protagonist of the work, Franz. Her frst encounter with the artist occurs as he rescues her in the swimming accident, coming into direct tactile contact with her wet and naked form— the “unerhörte Begebenheit” (unprecedented or unheard-of event), to use a key component of Goethe’s infuential defnition,8 of the novella genre, namely, a short prose narrative organized around such a singular event. The novella is set, it bears reminding, during a time when men and women bathed in separate areas, and the visibility of a wet female body, even in a bathing costume, would be considered improper exposure. As Gerhard Neumann has rightly pointed out, the “Badeanstalt” (swim resort) joins the art exhibition as an institution designed to control and codify the “natural” body.9 The girl’s body is indeed described from the very beginning of the novella in sculptural terms borrowed from eighteenth-century aesthetics as a “Gestalt,” albeit “eine leichte Gestalt” (a light form).10 “Gestalt,” for thinkers such as Goethe who admired and privileged Greek sculpture, would conjoin plastic, especially sculptural form with the human body.11 We would do well to recall Herder’s praise of antique wet-look drapery on sculptures, which, according to his haptic theory of sculpture, connects the viewer’s tactile appreciation of the stone with the fgure’s sensual awareness of a material touch on her own body.12 And added to this, as Jean-Didier Urbain

8 Johann Peter Eckermann: Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Christoph Michel, in Sämtliche Werke, 2.12: 221. 9 Gerhard Neumann, “Theodor Storms ‘Psyche’: Ein Wahrnehmungsmodell des Realismus,” in Wirklichkeit und Wahrnehmung: Neue Perspektiven auf Theodor Storm, eds. Elisabeth Strowick and Ulrike Vedder (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 131–47 (137). 10 Theodor Storm, “Psyche,” in Sämtliche Werke, eds. Karl Ernst Laage and Dieter Lohmeier, vol. 2 of 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 312–45 (318). Compare with the old “Badefrau” (bathing attendant), who is repeatedly apostro- phized as “die knochige Gestalt” (the bony form), e.g. 312, 313. (All further references will be provided parenthetically and are to this edition. All translations are by the author.) 11 On the Goethean notion of “Gestalt,” see Ernst Osterkamp, Gewalt und Gestalt: Die Antike im Spätwerk Goethes (Basel: Schwabe, 2007). 12 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Plastik: Einige Warhnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume,” in Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, vol. 2 of 6 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1987), 401–542 (483). 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 109 reminds us, is the raw and naked sphere of beach and ocean, a contact zone enabling “a relation of carnal intimacy between swimmer and sea that makes of the sea not just a metaphor but an erotic partner”.13 Finally, there are potent erotic, if not pornographic, reverberations for the reception of Storm’s novella, which is described by several contemporary reviewers as if it, like the adolescent Maria, were also a type of sculptural body. How is it possible, we might well ask, for the novella to provoke such disparate readings as it did? One contemporary Austrian reader, Emil Kuh, wrote to Storm that he was touching—or even caressing—the published novella as though it were the body of Psyche herself, felt through wet drapery (“Die Psyche […] genoß ich heute Morgens, nachdem ich sie gleich beim Eröffnen des Pakets hier und dort betastet hatte […] Die nassen Gewandfalten, welche den herben Mädchenleib abzeichnen, sind sozusagen das Kleid der ganzen Erzählung” [I enjoyed Psyche this morning, having touched her all over the minute I had opened the parcel […] The wet drapery revealing the contours of the austere girl’s body is so to speak the clothing of the whole story].14 The novella is caught in the twin trap of indecency and idealization. Certainly Storm was worried enough about the risqué, if not obscene, dimension of the novella’s subject matter that he tested it out before its publication by reading it aloud to an audience of ladies: they, claims Storm, with his concern for the work’s “chasteness of line” (“Keuschheit der Linie”), praised the “paradisical” relationship of its protagonists and were not offended by the representation of the bodily encounter in the sea.15 If one contemporary reader reported fondling the book as if it were the naked body of Psyche herself, another, the rector of the Husum Gymnasium Karl Heinrich Keck, could as confdently praise the work’s chaste (“von heiliger Keuschheit”) representation of levitating, spiritualized forms (“reine[n] lichte[n] Urgestalten”) unburdened by materiality.16

13 Jean-Didier Urbain, At the Beach, trans. Catherine Porter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 268. 14 See the editorial notes on the novella’s reception in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 894. 15 Editorial notes on the novella’s genesis, in ibid., 2: 889. 16 See ibid., 2: 894–5. Even Storm’s friend and advisor on technical matters related to sculpture Hans Speckter confessed to Storm that he could not say the novella was among the writer’s best works. Letter to Storm, 28 December 1875, in Theodor Storm-Otto 110 C. MACLEOD

Critic Eric Schmidt, in an 1880 essay on Storm published in the very journal (Deutsche Rundschau) that had debuted the Psyche novella, observes that Storm had managed to avoid the frivolous sensuality with which a French author might have imbued the theme, producing instead a “latent” sensuality and charming girlish modesty (“eine[r] latent[n] Sinnlichkeit und eine[r] reizvolle[n] mädchenhafte[n] Scham”).17 The tight-rope walk that Storm was undertaking was recognized by the author himself, who worried, not only about the danger of indecency, but about the aesthetic risks in teetering from the sublime to the ridiculous in his imitative return to the Greeks.18 Returning to the narrative itself, when the sculptor Franz’s depiction of the sea god rescuing Psyche goes on display in the Berlin art academy, once again the adjective “dezent” is applied, albeit ironically this time, to the viewership of the work (335), since these spectators immediately associate the theme and the naturalism of its execution with a titillating episode from the artist’s time in Rome: “‘Nicht wahr, Verehrtester,’ meinte ein alter Kunstmäzen, der vor dem Ausstellungsgebäude seinen Arm erhascht hatte und ihn nun innig festhielt, ‘das ist doch ein Motiv aus Ihrem römischen Aufenthalt? Wo haben Sie nur das allerliebste Köpfchen aufgefscht?’” (‘It must be true, dear sir,’ one old patron of the arts opined, who had caught him by the arm in front of the exhibition hall and would not let him out of the warm embrace, ‘that must be a motif from your stay in Rome? Where did you fsh up that little head?’, 334). The reception of Franz’s work by the chattering classes itself is transformed, in a letter by the sculptor’s friend, into sculptural terms that give language haptic, erotic, and violent potency: indecently, coarsely brushing the wings of the “butterfy” Psyche, their words are embodied like hands upon a sculptural surface: “hundert täppische und tückische Hände griffen nach deinem schönen Schmetterling, um ihm den Schmelz von seinen Flügeln abzustreifen” (a hundred clumsy and malicious hands reached out to touch your beautiful butterfy, to wipe the lustrous scales off its wings, 338).

Speckter, Theodor Storm-Hans Speckter, Briefwechsel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Hettche, vol. 12 of 19 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1991), 94. 17 Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 895. 18 Letter to Julius Rodenberg, 5 May 1875. Ibid. 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 111

Unlike some more recent scholarship on Storm, that views the contemporary focus on the putative nudity of the adolescent bather as anachronistically prudish or salacious,19 I argue that we need to put them back into the centre of a nineteenth-century debate about the representative powers of sculpture posed within a literary text, that is to say: about the conversion of naked bodies into artistic bodies, thus calling into question what Gerhard Neumann more recently called the novella’s exploration of a central tenet of Realism, “the naked truth”.20 Here, Neumann is hinting at the line of argument that Peter Brooks has drawn from Roland Barthes about Realist narrative, namely, that it performs a kind of “literary striptease” or “progressive undressing or unveiling of meaning” (borrowing Barthes’s terms from The Pleasure of the Text). Pertinently for my reading of Storm’s Poetic Realism, Brooks goes on, however, to describe a process of “undressing” that ultimately “swerve[s] away from[,] that fnal object of sight that cannot be contemplated”.21 What, I ask, can a consideration of sculpture’s nineteenth-century reputation contribute to a re-examination of a work that has suffered from charges of bourgeois prudishness,22 or of epigonal, middle-brow, and even kitschy classicism?23 And, what processes of undressing and redressing can be illuminated by sculpture’s own nineteenth-century histories?

19 Winfried Freund, “Die Versöhnung von Stoff und Sinn: Theodor Storms Programm- Novelle Psyche (1875),” in Theodor Storm: Studien zur Kunst- und Künstlerproblematik, ed. Walter Zimorski (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1988), 101–25 (101). Freund assigns “matter” and “spirit” gendered roles, following eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions conjoining sculpture and female materiality. 20 Neumann, “Theodor Storms ‘Psyche’,” 132. 21 Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 102–3. 22 Critic Franz Stuckert, for example, criticized the novella like Paul Heyse before him as “allzu dezent[e]” (overly modest); Theodor Storm: Sein Leben und seine Welt (Bremen: C. Schunemann, 1955), 327. 23 See John G. Robertson, “Theodor Storm,” in The Gentleman’s Magazine 279 (1895): 619–33, who notes that “the theme is open to the objection of conventionality and improbability” (629), and that the subject matter is “very hackneyed” (629) and “uncon- genial” (631). Twentieth-century commentators shied away from the novella for these very reasons. See for example John Pizer, who remarks on its clichéd sentimentality in “Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Totalität: Raabes ‘Pfsters Mühle’ und Storms ‘Psyche’,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft 39 (1998): 115–25 (120); and Fritz Martini’s judgment that the work represents “verfachte Könnerschaft” (trivial expertise), in Deutsche Literatur im bürgerlichen Realismus 1848–98 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1962), 650. More recently, Heinrich Detering’s Kindheitsspuren: Theodor Storm und das Ende der Romantik (Heide: 112 C. MACLEOD

In my book Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century, I investigate nineteenth-century German literature’s disposal of the problematically material medium of sculpture. There I considered among other works the dismembered and violated sculptural bodies of Clemens Brentano’s early Romantic novel Godwi (1800/01); translation projects into other, more abstracting, media such as painting and music in Achim von Arnim (“Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen,” 1824) and Joseph von Eichendorff (Das Marmorbild, 1819); and in the Realism of Adalbert Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer (1857), the efforts to repatriate and salvage sculpture that has been degraded on the Italian marketplace. All of these are narratives that foreground a young man’s Bildung or education via encounters with sculpture that enfold sexual maturation. Storm’s novella diverges from this male-oriented developmental trajectory—with its focus on a male protagonist in a desirous relationship with a statue of a female fgure—by placing the emphasis on an adolescent girl’s formative and forming encounter with herself as a statue, thus occupying both object and subject positions, while in an erotically charged dynamic with a male artist. Unlike Apuleius’s protagonist in the source tale Cupid and Psyche, a Latin text written in the second-century CE, who has entered into marriage with her (albeit unseen) husband Cupid, Storm’s protagonist, described repeatedly as a “girlish bud” (“Mädchenknospe,” 313, 315, 340), is still not sexually mature: dis- mayed by the feelings aroused in her by the encounter, she is yet more horrifed by the sculpture that the artist has created in her image and placed on public display—to the extent that she herself, upon frst seeing it, collapses as if blinded by shame (“vor Scham,” 341) and petrifed (“versteinert,” 340). I will suggest in this chapter that Storm’s Psyche

Boyens, 2011), with its critical focus on Storm’s sexuality, opens up avenues for reread- ing “Psyche” through the lens of (adolescent) desire. Detering reads the erotic poetry that Storm began writing as a nineteen-year-old to the then ten-year-old Bertha von Buchan as a red thread of paedophile desire that runs through his works. Michael Wetzel juxtaposes Hans Christian Andersen’s 1861 tale The Psyche, in which the Medusa-like living statue dis- gustedly and powerfully rejects her creator, with Storm’s “kitschy” corrective to the story. See “Mignon im Norden: Fortwirkungen der goethezeitlichen Modelle des ‘Kindsbraut’- Phantasmas bei Theodor Storm,” in Zwischen Mignon und Lulu: Das Phantasma der Kindsbraut in Biedermeier und Realismus, eds. Malte Stein, Regina Fasold, and Heinrich Detering (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2010), 113–32 (131). 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 113 novella on the one hand firts knowingly with the titillation of antique sculpture, yet at the same time deploys sculpture itself cathartically as a vehicle for dispelling the indecency of its source—and by extension, of emerging adolescent female sexuality. Storm picks up on a topical news story involving a schoolboy swimmer who rescues a (supposedly modestly dressed) drowning girl.24 The rescue itself, importantly (for it is after all the “unprecedented event”), is not narrated in the novella, that is: it is repressed. In his fctional retelling of the event, the boy is rewritten as a Berlin sculptor, newly returned from Italy and Greece, who falls in love with the girl whose life he has saved. Storm cites, in addition to the contemporary report, the portion of Apuleius’s narrative about Psyche in which she is rescued from the waves by the river god. (In Apuleius’s tale, however, the rescue is in the form of compassionate verbal advice delivered to the desperate Psyche, not of a physical, far less an eroticized, rescue. Indeed, the river into which she has plunged in despair, in Apuleius, is also a saviour, refusing to cooperate with her suicidal impulse: instead he—and the river is gendered male in Apuleius’s Latin—is “gentle,” bearing “her unharmed on his current” on to a grassy bank.25) Storm’s conversion of the adolescent boy from the newspaper story into, of all things, an adult sculptor, further heightens the sensuality of the source narrative, familiar as sculptors are with nude bodies. This is a point that author Paul Heyse makes in a letter to his close friend Storm in 1875, where he suggests that Storm’s focus on efforts to remain modest or “decent” (“Schamhaftigkeit”) have only resulted in the opposite effect, conjuring up readers’ fantasies of nude bathing:

Und doch ist das Motiv, da es ausschließlich auf dem Gefühl der Schamhaftigkeit basirt, nicht günstig. Sie haben sich bemüht äußerst decent zu bleiben; um so aufgeregter arbeitet die Phantasie des Lesers

24 See the editorial notes on the novella’s genesis in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 887. Storm refers to the news story without further specifcs regarding the newspaper in question in a letter to Julius Rodenberg of 5 May 1875. 25 Apuleius, Cupid & Psyche, ed. E.J. Kenney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79. Storm’s German source is Heinrich Wilhelm Stoll, “Amor und Psyche,” in Die Sagen des classischen Alterthums, vol. 1 of 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1862–1863): 391–422. Christian Neumann codes water in Storm as feminine and erotic, by contrast: Zwischen Paradies und ödem Ort: Unbewußte Bedeutungsstrukturen in Theodor Storms novellistischem Spätwerk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002). 114 C. MACLEOD

mit. Baden denn Mädchen splitternackt? Und wenn nicht, wie kann ein im Strandcostüm ohnmächtig den Wellen entrissenes junges Ding gerade eine Bilderhauerseele so mächtig entzünden, der ja mit ganzer Nacktheit vertraut ist?26

And yet the motif, since it is based exclusively on the feeling of modesty, is not effective. You have made every effort to remain as modest as possible; but this means that the imagination of the reader is working all the more excitedly. Do girls really swim stark naked? And if not, how can a young thing dressed in a bathing suit and just pulled unconscious out of the waves infame of all people the soul of a sculptor, who after all is familiar with complete nudity?

On the one hand, this novella sets up an incident that is bound to threaten propriety: male and female wet bodies touch, and the narrative equates the body of the girl on the cusp of her own sexual awaken- ing with that of an antique sculptural “Gestalt,” that is, with a medium that is associated throughout the nineteenth century with sensuality and desire. At the same time, in transforming the living girl into none other than a mythological Psyche statue, Storm has enacted a detour, via the very sensualism of sculpture, into an explicitly dematerialized, levitating subject matter (since Psyche, as a personifcation of the soul, is often represented as a bird or butterfy or in connection with those attributes). In the scene where the sculptor Franz carries the girl safely out of the waves to shore, Storm is careful, against a thickly described backdrop of vernac- ular realism—the harsh Northern seascape around Husum; the changing huts with their rustic attendant Frau Kathi, her coffee, and her accented speech—, to convert the rescuer and the rescued into chaste, shimmering classical forms, “Gestalten”. The girl, frst “ein junger Körper” (a young body, 323) somewhere between a child and a woman, is converted in his arms into “ein Bild der Psyche” (an image of Psyche, 323), adopt- ing a deathly sculptural pose: “der kleine Kopf war zurückgesunken; leb- los hing der eine Arm herab” (the little head had sunk down; one arm was hanging lifelessly, 323). Walking through the sculpture halls of the

26 Quoted in editorial notes on the novella’s reception, in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 893. Also at issue in Heyse’s remark is the shift from nude bathing earlier in the century to the introduction of swimming costumes when “family,” mixed sex swimming became more widespread. Storm replies in a letter that he had no intention of implying nudity. Ibid., 893–4. 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 115

Berlin academy on his return from the North, even Franz experiences an affective abreaction against the “üppige Gestalt” (ample form, 340) of a Venus in a half shell that has been created by a sensualist hand, and is drawn back to his own work, which, while sharing the watery motif, seems to breathe with a more spiritual life. (At the same time, his Rescue of Psyche sculpture has also attracted public criticism as “zu naturalistisch” (too naturalistic, 335).) With this subject matter, not to mention the big reveal at the end of the story that the as-yet unnamed girl is (unsubtly) a “Maria” (343), to the surprise of even Franz, who is shocked that the antique girl has been christened, there are clear parallels to be drawn with Berlin Romantic Achim von Arnim’s 1824 novella Raphael und seine Nachbarinnen. That story retrofts a problematically alluring antique Psyche statue into the soaring Virgin Mary of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (the iconic artwork for German Romanticism).27 Thus, Franz’s sculpture oscillates between pagan sensuality and Christian chasteness and spirituality. This dichotomy is enabled by the wilful historicism—that is, stylistic pluralism drawing on or intermingling elements from various historical periods—that attended sculpture and the other arts in the nineteenth century, while ultimately resolving itself in a Christian reading. Nineteenth-century sculpture is characterized both by its decontextualization, a function of the mass reproducibility bemoaned by Baudelaire, as well as by the way it plays fast and loose with conventional attributes, making possible multiple and often ambivalent or even contradictory readings (Fig. 5.1). A good early nineteenth-century example is Johann Heinrich Dannecker’s sensational marble Ariadne on the Panther (1810–1814), which places the female goddess atop Dionysus’s attribute, the panther, a combination not found in antique sources. Storm had seen the sculpture during a visit to the Städelsche Museum in Frankfurt, in 1865, yet this work by Dannecker, while it shares the mingling of attributes, can scarcely be considered a parallel statue to his Psyche, as Karl Ernst Laage has proposed.28

27 See the discussion of this novella in MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 77–94. 28 I disagree on this point with Laage’s claim that Dannecker’s sculpture was a “Vorbild” or model for the Psyche novella in Unterwegs mit Theodor Storm: Ein literarischer Reiseführer (Heide: Boyens, 2002), 95. Laage mentions in passing (95) that Dannecker had also sculpted a Psyche, but does not offer further details. Christian von Holst’s catalogue Johann Heinrich Dannecker: Der Bildhauer (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1987) lists, in fact, numerous sculptural treatments of the subject (See Footnote 31). 116 C. MACLEOD

Fig. 5.1 Johann Heinrich von Dannecker, Ariadne on the Panther. 1803–14. Marble. Height 146 cm. Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt. © Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung— ARTOTHEK

As Ivan Nagel has characterized it in the specifc case of Dannecker’s Ariadne, nineteenth-century post-classical sculpture is a sensualistic, slithery art form teetering between classicist imitation, genius aesthetics, and bourgeois kitsch: Dannecker’s sculpture was commissioned for a Frankfurt banker, not for an aristocratic patron.29 (The Ariadne was reproduced en masse in various sizes and media, including plaster, marble, bronze, and even, in greatly reduced format, in marzipan.30) As such, Dannecker’s Ariadne statue, probably the most celebrated German sculpture of the century, was open to contradictory readings. Did the sculpture celebrate female virtue domesticating bestial instinct, or rather, the triumph of sensual materiality? It is the very undecidability of its moral import that separates the Ariadne from Storm’s Realist Psyche. The many sculptural versions of Psyche produced in Germany during the nineteenth-century point in this syncretistic if not disorienting direction: among numerous examples in marble are works by Johann Friedrich Drake (Butterfy Catcher,

29 Ivan Nagel, “Dannecker, die Schöne und das Tier. Zur Lage der Frau um 1800,” in Kunst um 1800 und die Folgen: Werner Hoffmann zu Ehren, eds. Christian Beutler, Peter-Klaus Schuster, and Martin Warnke (Munich: Prestel, 1988), 108–26. 30 See Karin Görner, “Neue Weiblichkeitsideale,” in Sklavin oder Bürgerin? Französische Revolution und Neue Weiblichkeit 1760–1830, ed. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Historisches Museum, 1989), 838–52 (848). 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 117

1838–1839), Wolf von Hoyer (Psyche, 1838–1842), and Christian Daniel Rauch (Adelheid von Humboldt as Psyche, 1810–1826), not to mention the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen’s infuential fgural (Cupid and Psyche, 1807; Psyche, 1806) and multiple bas relief treatments of the theme, and Dannecker’s own earlier version of an Amor and Psyche sculpture (1787) as well as several terracotta studies, for example, of Psyche at the altar of Juno, with an eagle, with a jug; a bas relief; and a terracotta sketch of the river god carrying an unconscious Psyche from the river (ca. 1795).31 There is arguably a move away from highly eroticized sculptural representations of the embrace of Psyche and Eros such as, most famously, Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1793), towards single fgure statues that present a more introspective, spiritualized, and solitary, female. Psyche’s identifcation with the soul, and more specifcally with the Christian soul, comes to the fore. Drake and Hoyer’s inclusion of the butterfy attribute (which in the case of Drake is sculpted in another medium, bronze), juxtaposes the hard matter of marble with the fragility of the most ephemeral of insects (Fig. 5.2).32 Take, for example, Carl Steinhäuser’s 1846 marble Psyche statue (in the Bremen art museum). On the one hand, echoing the classical pose of the Venus Pudica, that is, an unclothed female fgure covering her genitalia with one hand, Steinhäuser stays closer to antique models than Thorvaldsen had in his earlier 1802 sculpture on this theme. Psyche’s hands are bound, referring to her mythological suffering as Amor’s lover. However, Steinhäuser combines these antique attributes with clear Christian iconography: his Psyche leans against the stump of a palm tree, with the palm symbolism referring to the Christian hope of redemption and the triumph of the spirit over the fesh, and the inclusion of a

31 On Dannecker’s returning attention to the motif, spanning his entire artistic career, see Holst, Johann Heinrich Dannecker: Der Bildhauer, 133–5, 221–5, 318–9, 361–3, 399–401. The sculpture of Psyche and the river god has not survived. As Holst points out, with reference to a fgure in marble from 1821 to 1825, later representations of Psyche by Dannecker seem increasingly to strip away her conventional attributes (362), so that by this point she stands simply for an innocent girl, rather than for Eros’s divine lover. 32 Berlin sculptor Reinhold Begas’s well-known Pan Comforting Psyche, of 1857–1858, which reprises the theme of Psyche’s rescue by the river god, is one exception to this pat- tern, though Psyche is notably demure and girlish in this sculpture. For a general overview of the Psyche motif in Western art, see Sonia Cavicchioli, The Tale of Cupid & Psyche: An Illustrated History, trans. Susan Scott (New York: George Braziller, 2002). 118 C. MACLEOD

Fig. 5.2 Carl Steinhäuser, Psyche. Marble. 136.0 38.0 50.0 cm. × × Kunsthalle Bremen. © Kunsthalle Bremen—Lars Lohrisch—ARTOTHEK

winding vine hinting at the Tree of Knowledge, along with a snake suggestive of Eve’s temptation by Satan, further underscore the biblical allu- sions. Like Dannecker’s Ariadne, this statue is connected both with the marketing of sculpture, in reproduced form, to an emerging middle-class audience, as well as with concerns about its moral impact on that very decency-oriented public. Steinhäuser’s Psyche was commissioned with a partner statue, a Pandora, for the Bremen Kunstverein. This association was founded in 1823 by a group of well-to-do businessmen, and as such one of the oldest art societies in Germany (and the funder of 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 119 the present Bremen art museum, which opened in 1849), as well as an example of an expanding new form of bourgeois art patronage.33 For the most part, the Kunstverein was interested in smaller format statuettes (a popular, domestic-scale genre for new bourgeois art consumers). Having decided to commission the large Psyche for the new museum, however, the by-now greatly expanded society had discussions about whether the statue should properly be displayed in a separate, dedicated and closed- off space (“passend drapiertes Zimmer”) or in a foyer with through traffc, where presumably there would be less chance of problematic, voyeuristic lingering—the latter choice prevailed. Finally, the catalogue of sculptures in the Bremen Kunsthalle notes that the placement of this statue in close proximity to the violin player by the same artist indicated another, allegorical meaning: the Psyche in this reading represents neither the suffering classical lover, nor Christian morality, but rather simply, and somewhat implausibly to the modern viewer, especially given the naming of the sculpture, the act of listening itself.34 In any case, it is clear that the bourgeois members of the art society, while the commissioners of Steinhäuser’s work, were concerned with potentially improper spectatorship of this kind of sculpture, and thus with fnding the right architectural programme in which to situate and contain it. Where sculptures such as Dannecker’s Ariadne or Steinhäuser’s Psyche simultaneously embody multiple, even contradictory iconographic elements, Storm’s processual narrative rehearses several interpretive possibilities while leading to the clear naming of the girl Maria, her body, and its sculptural representation as Christian. Storm’s novella, however, also sets the spiritualized and ultimately fully Christian Psyche up in competition with another work on which the sculptor has previously been working: the threateningly corporeal, “übermenschlich” (329) or superhuman Nordic sculpture of a “furchtbare Walküre des Nordens” (frightful Northern Valkyrie, 320) or “Brunhild” (319), which he is modelling in the raw, primal, and immediate medium of clay and which remains uncompleted:

33 A recent volume on the Kunstverein explores the connections between the middle-class patronage of art by successful Bremen merchants and colonial trade. See The Blind Spot: Bremen, Colonialism, and Art, ed. Julia Binter (Berlin: Reimer, 2017). 34 As noted by Bernhard Maaz, Skulptur in Deutschland zwischen Französischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg, vol. 1 of 2 (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010), 32–5. See also Katalog der Skulpturen in der Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1993), 454–5. 120 C. MACLEOD

In der Ecke [seiner Künstlerwerkstatt] rechts vom Eingange ragte, aus dunklem Ton geformt, die übermenschliche Gestalt einer nordischen Walküre aus der dort noch herrschenden Dämmerung hervor; aber nur der obere Teil mit dem einen Arm, den sie dräuend in die Luft erhob, war vollendet; nach unten zu war noch die ungestalte Masse des Tons, als wäre die Gestalt aus rauhem Fels emporgewachsen. Es mochte die furchtbare Brunhilde selber sein, die hier fnsteren Auges auf die heitere Griechenbilder herabsah. (329)

To the right of the [studio] door, the superhuman form of a Nordic Valkyrie, fashioned in dark clay, loomed out from the still gloomy corner; but only the upper part was fnished, her arm stretched threateningly into the air; the bottom portion was still an unshaped mass of clay, as if the fgure had emerged from the raw rock face. It was perhaps the fearful Brunhilde herself who was casting her dark gaze upon the bright Greek sculptures.

Storm’s friend the Hamburg artist Hans Speckter, who advised him about practical details of sculptural practice, specifcally about how to write credibly about the modelling of clay in his Psyche novella, indeed reminded the author of a saying attributed to Thorvaldsen, equating clay with life, plaster with death, and marble with resurrection.35 Monika Wagner has pointed out the historical meanings carried by media, and in the case of clay, its nineteenth-century associations in Germany with nationalistic notions of native soil or “Heimaterde”.36 However, the primal, life-giving associations of clay do not carry over positively in Storm’s work. We learn, signifcantly, that the huge fgure of the “Walküre,” with a menacingly raised arm, is incomplete, and “ungestalt,” and that the problematically unfnished portion of her sculptural “Gestalt” is precisely the lower half of her body, suggestive of latent, raw sexuality. Speckter’s notes on working with clay, accompanied by sketches of the process, repeat words such as “unförmlich” (unformed), “Klumpen” (clod), and “kleksen” (to daub or smear), reinforcing the crudeness of the medium;

35 See the editorial notes on the novella’s genesis, in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 888. For the correspondence between Storm and Speckter in the spring of 1875 on modeling in clay, Briefwechsel, 12: 86–9. Speckter’s friend the Norwegian artist Christian Meyer Ross in turn added four explanatory sketches. See Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 889. 36 Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 123. 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 121

Speckter emphasizes as well that ordinarily the smaller clay model will be a pre-stage to a model in plaster, and fnally to a larger work in marble or bronze (thus the menacing size of Storm’s Valkyrie is at odds with Speckter’s letter).37 (The Walküre’s mythological role as the rescuer of slain heroes clearly overturns the gendering of Psyche’s story in which the rescue is performed by a male; and the thrusting upraised arm fur- nishes another contrast, with Psyche’s lifeless, drooping arm described above.) Here we should bear in mind that the contrasting terms “Gestalt” and “ungestalt” are conceptually signifcant: the notion of the “Ungestalt” has also been connected culturally, like “Gestalt,” with the body, referring in the context of the Middle Ages, for example, as Valentin Groebner has indicated, to corporeal hideousness, violence, deforma- tion, and mutilation, not only to formlessness.38 Hegel’s use of the term “Ungestalt” in his lectures on aesthetics denotes uncouth, childish art, on the one hand, or physically overabundant aesthetic gestures, on the other, for example the deformations of symbolic Indian art that would be overcome by the Greeks.39 “Ungestalt” is primitive, animate, and formless, demanding here to be transformed in the sculptor’s hands into “Gestalt”. Modelling in the “base” matter of clay, as Speckter advised Storm, was often a preliminary stage, akin to an artist’s sketch, before a sculpture was executed in a noble material such as marble. In the novella, the problematically crude Walküre is superseded in Franz’s imagination by a completely different representation, namely by the image of a Psyche, who seems to hover over the former statue, and levitate away from it: “sie war ihm in diesem Augenblicke nichts, als nur der Hintergrund, auf dem vor seinem inneren Auge ein anderes, lichtes Bild sich abhob” (in that instant she was nothing but the background, against which before his inner eye another, bright image detached itself, 331). And a few pages later, after Franz has refected on the Apuleius source, reaching instinctively for a lump of wet clay, the novella insists

37 Briefwechsel, 12: 88–9. 38 Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 39 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol 1 of 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 364, 479 (where he describes the transformation of the “Mißgestaltete” into “Gestalt” by the Greeks). 122 C. MACLEOD on the conversion of this “ungestalten Tonklumpen” (unformed lump of clay) into the delicate form of Psyche, as a move from chaos to light:

[…] aus dem bunten Szenenwechsel, der vor seinem inneren Auge vor- beigezogen war, sah ihn stumm und rührend, wie um Gestaltung fehen, das eine Bild nur an. – Und seine Hände hatten nicht gerastet; schon war aus dem ungestalten Tonklumpen ein zarter Mädchenkopf erkennbar. […] Die Mittagshelle des Wintertages war heraufgezogen; da klopfte es von draußen mit leisem Finger an die Tür. – Er merkte es nicht; Ohr und Auge waren versunken in die eigene Schöpfung, die er aus dem Chaos an das Licht emportrug. (333)

[…] from the swift and colourful scenes passing before his inner eye, one image alone looked at him, mutely and pathetically, as if begging to be given form. And his hands had not rested; soon a delicate girl’s head became visible from the unformed lump of clay. […] The midday bright- ness of the winter day had appeared, when there was a gentle knock at the door. He heard nothing; his ears and his eyes were immersed in his own creation, which he brought out of the chaos into the light.

Strikingly, although on the face of it the novella seems to track a movement from amorphousness to material hardness (in the progress from water, to clay, to marble, as well as from immaterial source tale to sculpture),40 the narrative reverses this implied progression, since the marble statue that is created by the sculptor is so insistently dematerialized, both through the formal detour around the body, the associations evoked by the myth of Psyche, and her renamed incarnation as a Maria. We should not overlook here the powerful ideological, as well as erotic, associations in this face-off between threatening Brünhild and virginal, Christian Psyche. Of course, Wagner’s opera Die Walküre had premiered in 1870, and the Nibelungen saga would be quickly deployed in the newly established German Reich as a potent, or as Thomas Mann put it, “planetary” national myth,41 in the visual arts as well as

40 See Christian Neumann, Zwischen Paradies und ödem Ort: Unbewusste Bedeutungsstrukturen in Theodor Storms novellistischem Spätwerk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 137. 41 Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 54. Mann’s Wagner critique is from Refections of a Non-political Man (1918). 5 THE INDECENT BODY OF SCULPTURE: THEODOR STORM’S … 123 in music and literature. Like the fgural classicizing statues described above, we fnd in the monumental sculpture of the period an eclecti- cism of attributes and iconography, yoked in the service of nationalism. Already Leo von Klenze’s Bavarian Walhalla, inaugurated in 1842 as a temple to German unity, mingled classicism with Nordic mythology, as in sculptor Ludwig Schwanthaler’s monumental caryatids in the form of Valkyries.42 Contemporary commentators in the new state of 1871 tended to confate the fgure of Germania (mother of the nation) with that of the Valkyrie (virgin warrior) in what Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller identify as a “mixed metaphor,” citing an article in the 1897 Meyers Conversationslexicon: “This Germania is a conjoining of the warrior virgin (Valkyrie) with the German mother who symbolizes the all-embracing fatherland”.43 Nineteenth-century historicism conjures up such national imagery, decontextualizes it, and repurposes or redresses it, particularly via the monumental medium of sculpture. As I proposed in my introduction, nineteenth-century German sculpture is poised, Janus-faced, between the past and modernity. Storm, an author who generally has little time for epigonal classicism (unlike, for example, the Austrian Poetic Realist Adalbert Stifter), nonetheless deploys antique sculpture in this one, lesser-known novella to

42 Hans A. Pohlsander, National Monuments and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 139. 43 See Ulrich Schulte Wülwer, Das Nibelungenlied in der deutschen Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1980), 145–60. On Germania as Valkyrie, see “Introduction: Looking for Germania,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Germanness, eds. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Providence: Berghahn, 1997), 1–18 (5–6); Lothar Gall establishes the intensifying visual identifcation of Germania with a Valkyrie in the 1860s and 1870s, for example in Lorenz Clasen’s painting Germania auf der Wacht am Rhein (1860) and Johannes Schilling’s Niederwalddenkmal with its massive Germania, commemorating the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871– 1883); Die Germania als Symbol nationaler Identität im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 48–9; also, Franz J. Bauer, Gehalt und Gestalt in der Monumentalsymbolik: Zur Ikonologie des Nationalstaats in Deutschland und Italien 1860–1914 (Munich: Stiftung Historisches Kolleg, 1992), 21. See also Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Beauty or Beast: The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination from the Renaissance to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). As Watanabe- O’Kelly notes (95) in her survey of literary adaptations of the Nibelungen materials, as early as the 1760s (thus over a generation before Friedrich von der Hagen’s modern translation of the Nibelungenlied), Herder had incorporated a poem into his folksong collection about Valkyries as bloody agents of death. 124 C. MACLEOD several ends. As I have shown, he tests the limits of sculptural and literary decency by evoking the nude form of a girl, while skirting those limits in converting her to a marble representation of chaste spirituality. Furthermore, the successful management of erotic unruliness and of brutal violence underpinning respectively the Psyche and the Valkyrie is, I suggest, codifed here in the service of an associated political agenda. Storm, deeply sceptical as he was of Prussia’s ascendancy to power in the new German state, and in the “ungestaltet,” unfnished shape of Franz’s Berlin Walküre, hints at the raw, crude roots of post-1871 Germany, adding a strong political critique to the novella’s face-off with the past and present of sculpture, the antique legacy of art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the Classical Weimar aesthetics of Goethe and Schiller, and the new, Nordic-leaning and naturalistic aesthetic priorities of the nation. Psyche refashioned and redressed as a Christian bride, Storm forestalls the ascendancy of the Valkyrie, ending the novella with a citation from Schiller’s poem “Der Spaziergang” (“The Walk”) in which the Homeric sun still shines.44

44 Neumann, “Theodor Storm’s ‘Psyche’,” 135. CHAPTER 6

A Token of Triumph Cut Down to Size: Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill as Fetish Object

Bernard Vere

Between 1913 and 1915, the years in which he frst produced, then exhibited, then transformed his Rock Drill, Jacob Epstein was a sculptor much obsessed by sex. A transnational fgure, the New York-born avant- garde artist arrived in London via two years of study in Paris, to which he returned periodically and where he had recently, and controversially, completed his Tomb for Oscar Wilde (1912). This had been censured as an affront to public decency by the French authorities and covered by a tarpaulin on account of the work’s prominent genitalia.1 The titles of

1 See Mark Antliff, “Contagious Joy: Anarchism, Censorship and the Reception of Jacob Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde, c. 1913,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 4, no. 2 (2013): 195–225. My essay is based on research originally carried out for my Ph.D. thesis at the London Consortium, University of London, in 2005 and subsequently presented at the Desiring Statues conference in 2012. My thanks to my supervisors, Richard Humphreys and Peter Nicholls, for their help and advice on the former and to the conference organis- ers and participants for the latter.

B. Vere (*) Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 125 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_6 126 B. VERE his works at this time attest to his interest in themes of reproduction, renewal, and regeneration: Birth, the frst of two versions of Venus, Mother and Child. The double-sided Flenite Relief (fenite was Epstein’s term for a distinctive dark green, mottled, Serpentine stone) depicts, on one face, a woman clasping a phallus and, on the other, the moment of birth, which is fanked by two unmistakeably phallic forms.2 Two pregnant fgures in fenite continue the theme, as does a three-part series of mating doves. At frst sight Rock Drill sits a little uneasily in this company. Although the work no longer exists in this form it is known through period photographs and a reconstruction made by Ken Cook and Ann Christopher in 1974.3 At over two metres tall, it was on a larger scale than these other works. All of these were carved directly into stone, while Rock Drill was a plaster of paris cast of a fgure working a real rock drill, which Epstein had bought second-hand specifcally for the piece. The incorporation of a piece of industrial technology gave the work an overtly modern reference not present in the stone sculptures, nor in the work of the European sculptors to whom Epstein was closest—Constantin Brancusi and Amedeo Modigliani. Nevertheless, Epstein drew a sketch for Rock Drill on the same sheet of paper that he used for sketches of Venus and Doves, linking the three together.4 Rock Drill in its initial incarnation, then, is aligned with, but also differs from, Epstein’s other sculptures of this period. The original Rock Drill was exhibited only once, at the London Group exhibition of 1915. The following year, Epstein exhibited the more familiar Torso in Metal from the “Rock Drill”, a work which

2 Flenite Relief is now in the collection of Leeds Art Gallery. The two sides are titled Woman Clasping a Phallus and Birth on the Art Fund website, which partially funded the work’s purchase, “Flenite Relief by Sir Jacob Epstein,” Art Fund, accessed July 7, 2017, https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/9676/ fenite-relief-sir-jacob-epstein. 3 Photographs of the work include the unfnished Rock Drill in Epstein’s studio, see Chris Stephens, “The Story of Jacob Epstein’s ‘Rock Drill’,” Tate, July 27, 2011, http:// www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/story-jacob-epsteins-rock-drill. For a photograph of the reconstruction see “The Vorticists at Tate Britain—now open! Tell us what you think,” Tate, June 15, 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/ vorticists-tate-britain-now-open-tell-us-what-you-think 4 Jacob Epstein, Six Studies for ‘Rock Drill’, ‘Venus’ and ‘Doves’, in Richard Cork, Wild Thing: Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gill (London: Royal Academy, 2009), 162–3 (catalogue number 87). 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 127 amputates the right hand of the driller and shears off everything below the waist, casting what remains in metal.5 The original work is effaced, never to be seen again. This is a remarkable situation. Why, for instance, did Epstein not simply cast the Torso as another sculpture alongside Rock Drill? Doves and Venus exist in more than one carved version—a much more arduous process than modifying a cast—so why not Rock Drill alongside Torso in Metal from “Rock Drill”? Why did Torso come to replace Rock Drill? As an attempt to answer these questions, I will advance an argument drawn from congruencies between the work of Wilhelm Worringer and Sigmund Freud’s paper “Fetishism” (1927) to propose that Rock Drill is best viewed as a fetish object and that its two iterations can also be understood in these terms. As the linking of these two names—Worringer and Freud—suggests, this will involve looking at Rock Drill in the context of modernism’s fascination with so-called “primitive” art as a challenge to modern society. “Primitive” here need not refer to art produced a long time ago, but could just as well be applied to art produced contemporaneously to the period when Epstein was working, whether by children or non-Western cultures. Both Freud and Worringer equate primitive states to childhood. For example, Worringer compares the “‘artistic achievements’ of African natives” to the “scribblings of a child”.6 Freud also held the belief, widespread at the turn of the century, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—that is to say that the development of the individual parallels the development of a species. Opening his Totem and Taboo, Freud writes that:

Prehistoric man […] is known to us through the inanimate monuments and implements he left behind […]. But apart from this, in a certain sense he is still our contemporary. There are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental life

5 See the example in the Tate Collection, T00340, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/epstein-torso-in-metal-from-the-rock-drill-t00340, accessed May 13, 2018. The frst cast is in the National Gallery of Canada, 6498, https://www.gallery.ca/collection/ artwork/rock-drill, accessed May 13, 2018. A further example is held by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 155.1962, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81041, accessed May 13, 2018. 6 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 54. 128 B. VERE

must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development.7

As Freud’s formulation implies, the “primitive” was also frequently invoked by Western artists in opposition to Western conventional sexual mores of the time, and the remarkable history of Epstein’s Rock Drill opens up a reading that takes into account its emphasis on sexuality. Ever since the critic P.G. Konody condemned Rock Drill’s “nasty suggestiveness” when it was exhibited, almost everybody who has ever written on Rock Drill has noted the phallic connotations of the drill.8 For Richard Cork, the drill is quite simply “the mechanical equivalent of a penis”9; for Tate curator Chris Stephens it has “an enormous phallic power”10; for Sue Malvern, “[t]he whole ensemble stood as a modernist icon for potent and phallic masculinity”.11 Even Raquel Gilboa, whose general view is that Epstein’s obsession was with the mystical notion of procreation rather than a more prurient interest in the physiological aspects of copulation, is forced to concede the “phallic connotation” of the drill.12 An early sketch can be read as showing the drill pounding a vulva-like cleft, with the sloping ground either side read as a woman’s legs.13 If that is the case, then other studies produced by Epstein in preparation for the sculpture are less sexually graphic, but the work as a whole seems to stress the phallic, the machinic and the virile in a way that one might expect given that it dates from the point at which Epstein was most closely involved with the proto-Vorticist movement coalesc- ing around Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. As Peter Brooker notes,

7 Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo”, in The Origins of Religion. Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 13: 49–224 (53). 8 P. G. Konody, “Art and Artists: The London Group,” The Observer, March 14, 1915, 5. 9 Cork, Wild Thing, 165. 10 Chris Stephens, “The Story of Jacob Epstein’s ‘Rock Drill’,” Tate, July 27, 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/story-jacob-epsteins-rock-drill. 11 Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 1. 12 Raquel Gilboa, … And there was Sculpture: Jacob Epstein’s Formative Years, 1880–1930 (London: Paul Holberton, 2009), 125. 13 The work is Study for Rock Drill (1913) held at the New Art Gallery Walsall, “Epstein, Sir Jacob—Study for Rock Drill,” The New Art Gallery Walsall, accessed January 7, 2018, http://thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/item/study-for-rock-drill/. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 129

Pound conceived of London as “the great passive vulva” and the sculpture of Pound by his fellow Vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was, accu- rately, described by Lewis as a “marble phallus”.14 Adding Rock Drill into the equation, Brooker concludes that the “masculinised aggression and sexuality of the new art were blatant”.15 Although critics have agreed on the phallocentric elements of the sculpture, there is an ambiguity surrounding the fgure of the driller. Is it a man or a robot? The fgure is over life-size, which suggests a robot. Its elon- gated face has nothing human about it. Rock Drill as a title might indicate that the driller is part of the drill, that they are one complex (in a way that the—perhaps more obvious—Rock Driller would not). Epstein himself was inconsistent on this point, later describing it as “a machine-like robot, visored, menacing […] No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into”.16 What is a “machine-like robot”? Why would a robot require a visor? Isn’t Frankenstein’s monster at least partly human? And, if the fgure is something “we have made ourselves into”, then some sort of humanity seems implied. Stephen Gardiner, in his Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment, unhesitatingly calls the driller “the robot” before going on to quote from one of Epstein’s letters to his collector John Quinn in which he describes the Rock Drill as “a fgure of a man working a rock drill”.17 However, the most disruptive point about the fgure is the small shape enclosed within its ribcage, present in the original but viewed most easily in the Torso. Epstein referred to this as the driller’s “progeny”, calling it “protectively ensconced” in the body of the driller.18 This element, with its connotations of the maternal, brings Rock Drill into close proximity with the pregnant fgures in fenite, alongside which the original was exhibited at the London Group, and overdetermines the reading of the sculpture as an exercise in pure modernist masculine virility. Although the image of a child-bearing masculine fgure seems odd, especially one whose masculinity is so forcefully expressed in other elements

14 Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 99. 15 Ibid. 16 Jacob Epstein, Epstein: An Autobiography, 2nd ed. (London: Studio Vista, 1963), 56. 17 Stephen Gardiner, Epstein: Artist Against the Establishment (London: Michael Joseph, 1992), 128. 18 Epstein, Epstein, 56. 130 B. VERE of the sculpture, there was a recent precedent with which Epstein was surely familiar. In 1909, F.T. Marinetti published his novel Mafarka the Futurist, in which Mafarka gives birth to, or rather constructs, a mechanical son, Gazourmah.19 Having spent time in Paris during 1912, the year the Italian Futurists had held their frst group exhibition in the city, it is likely that Epstein knew the book, at least by repute, with its sexualised title character’s eleven-metre long penis. Aru H. Merjian has recently written of a “decidedly sculptural economy” operative in Mafarka, one “that organises the text from beginning to end”, pointing out that the novel features a number of sculptures and constructions, of which Gazourmah, “a multi-media assemblage”, is simply the most prominent.20 If this aspect of the book would have appealed to Epstein, there are also notable differences. Rock Drill, although also a multi- media assemblage, lacks the overheated hyperbole of Marinetti’s Mafarka. Mafarka’s antique North African setting, its massed battles and bloodshed and its symbolist imagery of femmes fatales has little in common with the isolated technological fgure of Rock Drill, which is altogether a colder piece of work, with one important exception: while Mafarka builds Gazourmah, literally constructing him as an already fully formed fying machine, Rock Drill seems to nurture the progeny, situated as it is in the position where a mother would carry a human foetus. Instead of scorning the idea of physical procreation, Rock Drill seems to embrace it, with the progeny apparently nursed by the fgure.21 It would be easy to schematise these elements as the masculine/technological on one side and the feminine/primitive on the other. But I want to hold them together for a little longer, especially as, under the terms of the psychoanalytic reading I am proposing, such a reductive move would obviate the mechanism of disavowal—the holding of clashing positions— that is fundamental to Freud’s account of fetishism.

19 F.T. Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (London: Middlesex University Press, 1998). Marinetti wrote the book in French. 20 Aru H. Merjian, “Manifestations of the Novel: Genealogy and the Sculptural Imperative in F.T. Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste,” Modernism/modernity, 23, no. 2 (2016): 365–401 (367). 21 Mafarka rejects the advances of Coloubbi and her claims on Gazourmah: “I won’t allow you to see my son! He is mine alone! It is I who made his body. It is I who engender him through sheer exertion of my will! … And I didn’t call on you to help me! … I did not lay you on your back and pump the divine seed into your ovaries, with heaves of pleasure!” Marinetti, Mafarka, 183. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 131

Fetishism emerges at the point where the male child realises that the mother does not have a penis. In Freud’s view, this necessarily brings about the realisation that the child’s own penis could be similarly effaced. Ordinarily this realisation precipitates the end of the Oedipus complex. Castrated, the male child could no longer hope to assume his father’s position and have intercourse with his mother. As Freud puts it: “If the satisfaction of love in the feld of the Oedipus complex is to cost the child his penis, a confict is bound to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body and the libidinal cathexis of his parental objects. In this confict the frst of these forces normally triumphs: the child’s ego turns away from the Oedipus complex”.22 However, in the fetishist the perception itself becomes the site of an impasse, as what the child has seen is simultaneously denied and acknowledged. The fetishist retains his belief in the mother’s phallus, but has also given it up. In order to retain his belief, he creates a substitute for the maternal phallus: “Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute”.23 Disavowal, as this admixture of acknowledgement and denial is termed, is summed up in the title of an essay by the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, “I Know Very Well … But All the Same”. Formally, Rock Drill owes a debt, as has been pointed out by various critics, to so-called “primitive” art, in which Epstein had a deep and abiding interest. Alan G. Wilkinson notes the persistence of African infuences in the preparatory material for the sculpture, as well as suggesting that the progeny might be derived from a wooden spatula from the Trobriand Islands depicting “a child encircled by the limbs of the parent”.24 Of course, such an interest was far from uncommon amongst modernists. Epstein himself credited the dealer Paul Guillaume

22 Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex,” in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Work. Penguin Freud Library, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 7: 315–22 (318). 23 Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in On Sexuality, 7: 351–7 (353). 24 Alan G. Wilkinson, “Paris and London: Modigliani, Lipchitz, Epstein and Gaudier- Brzeska,” “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affnity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 1: 417–50 (440). 132 B. VERE for starting “the vogue in African work”, although Epstein’s account makes clear that, in his opinion, the dealer was simply capitalising on the interest of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Maurice de Vlaminck.25 Guillaume was celebrated as the “Nova Pilota”, or new pilot, of modernism in a portrait by Modigliani, whose studio, Epstein remembered, was “flled with nine or ten of those long heads which were suggested by African masks, and one fgure. They were carved in stone; at night he would place candles on the top of each one and the effect was that of a primitive temple. A legend of the quarter said that Modigliani, when under the infuence of hashish, embraced these sculptures”.26 It should go without saying that such a construction, both in terms of Modigliani’s actions and Epstein’s retelling of them, reveals far more about Western and modernist attitudes to the “primitive” and its “discovery” than it does about the cultures and practice of the peoples from which they are supposedly derived. As Patricia Leighten has argued, “African art had been visible in Paris since at least the 1890s […] The modernists’ method was to critique civilisation by embracing an imagined ‘primitiveness’ of Africans, whose ‘authenticity’ they opposed to a ‘decadent’ West […] we must recognise how profoundly these artists misunderstood African art and how utterly Western and moderniste were the terms of their admiration”.27 The belief that certain non-Western cultures expressed through their works an originary, vital and spontaneous attitude to sexuality was also a commonplace of the modernist appropriation of the “primitive”. Freud himself believed that “the injurious infuence of civilisation reduces itself in the main to the harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilised peoples (or classes) through the “civilised” sexual morality prevalent in them”.28 In a similar vein, he later argued that: “On the one hand love comes into opposition to the interests of civilisation; on the other, civilisation threatens love with substantial restrictions. […] This

25 Epstein, Epstein, 188. 26 Ibid., 46–7. 27 Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism and Anti-Colonialism,” Art Bulletin, 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30 (610). 28 Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” in Civilization, Society and Religion. Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 12: 33–55 (37). 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 133 rift between them seems unavoidable”.29 Freud held that the tendency to restrict sexual life progressed as cultures developed and had reached “a high-water mark […] in our Western European civilisation”, where only heterosexual, monogamous sex within marriage was permissible, and this only because “there is so far no substitute for it as a means of propagating the human race”.30 Alternatives to Western culture therefore held out the possibility of freer attitudes. This played a considerable part in Paul Gauguin’s visits to Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands around the turn of the century. The example of Gauguin fed into the works of the German Die Brücke movement, bolstered by examples of South Sea Islands work that they saw in Dresden’s ethnographic museum, including a carved beam from a men’s clubhouse on Palau showing a man so prodigiously endowed that he was able to have sex with his partner despite the fact that she was located on a neighbouring island.31 In the Parisian context more familiar to Epstein, Picasso had already incorporated African masks seen on a celebrated visit to the Trocadéro, adapting them for works such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) with its depiction of a brothel. It is unlikely that Epstein saw the work, but he certainly knew Picasso. His own work prior to Rock Drill evidenced a similar fascination for sexuality and non-Western cultures, not just in the sculptures listed in the opening of this essay, but also in his collaboration with Eric Gill on a project known as the Secret Temple, an ambitious, but unrealised, scheme for which Epstein executed a drawing, Study for “One of the Hundred Pillars of the Secret Temple” (c. 1910). The pillar is a conscious subversion of the Greek caryatid form: instead of a draped female fgure acting as a support, here Epstein shows a standing couple making love, surrounded by abstracted shapes that also suggest naked forms in congress. Cork has noted the Indian and Egyptian infuences on works for the temple, and believes that Epstein’s “thinking about the project was dominated by an obsession with virility, fecundity and procreation”.32 As with Modigliani’s “temple”, which must have conjured

29 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” in Civilization, Society and Religion, 12: 251–340 (292). 30 Ibid., 12: 294. 31 See Jill Lloyd, “Kirchner’s Metaphysical Studio Paintings,” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, eds. Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller (London: Royal Academy, 2003), 15–21 (17). 32 Richard Cork, Jacob Epstein (London: Tate Gallery, 1999), 19. 134 B. VERE up memories of Epstein’s own abandoned project, the move to modes of depiction inspired by non-Western works was also bound up with an erotic economy. For his part, Gill simply pronounced Epstein “mad about sex”.33 When Lewis came to write a catalogue essay for a group show that included a study for Rock Drill, he wrote of Epstein and his drawings: “He fnds in the machinery of procreation a dynamo to work the deep atavism of his spirit”.34 Lewis’s comment encapsulates the mix- ture of the technologically modern (“machinery”, “dynamo”) and the “primitive” (“atavism”, “spirit”) with sex and reproduction (“procreation”) at its centre that defnes Rock Drill. That Epstein was later dismissive of both the infuence of Italian Futurism and African statues on his career should not mislead us. Marinetti is summarily dealt with in Epstein’s autobiography as the promoter of Futurism’s “silly gospel”, the leader of a group of “pre-Fascist […] Italian charlatans”.35 Yet, at one stage Epstein had apparently considered the addition of a motor that would allow the drill to function, although he gave up the idea on practical grounds.36 This incorporation of movement would have brought Epstein’s work into still-closer proximity to the Futurists and, as it is, the original Rock Drill has many points of convergence with Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) by Umberto Boccioni, Futurism’s leading sculptor and chief theoretician in the visual arts. Epstein was not a Futurist, but his protestations against the Italian movement do not come close to revealing that he was showing work alongside them at the end of 1913 in the “Post-Impressionist and Futurist” exhibition at the Doré Galleries, or that those English artists with which he was most closely aligned (and who would go on to launch the Vorticist movement the following year) held a banquet in Marinetti’s honour when he visited London in October 1913. Moreover, Epstein himself acknowledged a Futurist- sounding “ardour for machinery (short-lived)” at the time of Rock Drill.37 The position regarding the infuence of “primitive art” is more complex. Epstein assembled a notable collection of such works, admiring the “simplifcation and directness, the union of naturalism and

33 Gill, quoted in ibid., 19. 34 Wyndham Lewis, “The Cubist Room,” The Egoist, January 1, 1914, 8–9 (9). 35 Epstein, Epstein, 59. 36 See Gardiner, Epstein, 129. 37 Epstein, Epstein, 56. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 135 design” and the “striking architectural qualities” of the African pieces.38 In The Sculptor Speaks, a series of conversations with Arnold Haskell, Epstein claimed that they infuenced him because “African work has certain important lessons to teach that go to the root of all sculpture. I have tried to absorb those lessons without working in the African idiom”, although this has not stopped subsequent critics trying to establish links to specifc pieces of African art, and it also seems plain that there is a more generalised infuence.39 Be that as it may, even within the conversations with Haskell, Epstein was ambivalent about how the African works should be regarded. Dating the start of his own collection to his Parisian visits, and placing this activity alongside the similar activities of Picasso, Matisse and Vlaminck, he asserted that: “Negro sculpture is amazingly popular at the present day, but it is still generally misunderstood, and there are not many facilities for studying it as art. In the past all interest in it has been purely from the ethnographical side”.40 Along with his comments on the activities of other artists and dealers, this positions African work as something to be coveted, commodifed and valuable for its formal lessons. A few pages later, however, he claimed that “Aesthetically” the works were “fairly well understood. We must now know something more about the people who produced it, their customs and their magic. […] A deeper knowledge of tribal custom would support the view that these works are mainly realistic”.41 Later, Epstein fatly rejected any infuence: “I have, because of my appreciation of and enthusiasm for African work, been accused—as if it were a crime—of being largely infuenced by it. That is not so”.42 However, Epstein immediately exempts one period from this emphatic claim and it is, as with the short-lived ardour for machinery, precisely the period of Rock Drill that is exceptional: “My sculpture (apart from a short period in 1912–1913 when Cubism was in the air, and abstraction an interesting experiment) has remained in the European tradition of my early training”.43 The contradictions and ambivalences of Epstein’s

38 Epstein in Jacob Epstein and Arnold Haskell, The Sculptor Speaks: A Series of Conversations on Art (London: Heinemann, 1931), 90. 39 Ibid., 94. 40 Ibid., 88. 41 Ibid., 92–3. 42 Epstein, Epstein, 190. 43 Ibid. 136 B. VERE position might be summed up by what Hal Foster has referred to as “primitivism […] as a fetishistic discourse, a recognition and a disavowal not only of primitive difference but of the fact that the West—its patriarchal subjectivity and socius—is threatened by loss, by lack, by others”.44 That Foster links fetishism to the primitive is signifcant, for, as we will see, the turn towards art infuenced by the primitive was not a simple piece of escapism. By the time of Rock Drill, such “primitive” infuences were suffciently widespread for a surrounding critical literature to have emerged. Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (1916) was published in the year that Torso in Metal from the “Rock Drill” was exhibited, but, in particular, it was the ideas in Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908), refracted in the British context by the philosopher T.E. Hulme, that were closest to Epstein. Worringer opposed two urges: an urge to empathy, based on “a happy pantheistic relation of confdence between man and the phenomena of the outside world”45; and an urge to abstraction. This Worringer conceived as a defensive reaction, “the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world […] [w]e might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space”.46 Abstraction was a process of “taking the individual thing of the external world out of its arbitrariness and seeming fortuitousness, of externalising it by approximation to abstract forms and, in this manner, of fnding a point of tranquillity and a refuge from appearances”.47 Of the two urges, it is the urge to abstraction which is foundational, and Worringer proposes a “causal connection […] between primitive culture and the highest, purest regular art-form”.48 Although Worringer saw the urge to abstraction exemplifed in non-Western societies, he was in fact dismissive of the products of sub-Saharan African people, preferring instead the geometric art of the Egyptians or Byzantines. Hulme was far more interested in African art, whether through his friendship with Epstein or because its signifcance

44 Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 45–70 (46). ‘Socius’ literally translates as ‘fellow’ or ‘companion’ and its use here covers the bonds that are made in order to form patriarchal society. 45 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 15. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 16. 48 Ibid., 17. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 137 for modern art more generally was becoming increasingly evident by the time he came to present his ideas. For him, the renewed interest in African artefacts was symptomatic of nothing less than the breakdown of Renaissance humanism. Instead of feshy Madonnas, “archaic art” offered an alternative “where everything tends to be angular, where curves tend to be hard and geometrical, where the representation of the human body, for example, is often entirely non-vital, and distorted to ft into stiff lines and cubical shapes of various kinds”.49 It did so not, as had hitherto been widely assumed, because “primitive” artists were technically incompetent, but because it was based on the urge to abstraction, rather than the urge to empathy that governed the Renaissance. The lessons taken from this “archaic” art would soon be updated for the twentieth century, which would produce an art similar to that found in primitive societies, but now based on modern machinery. So close were Hulme and Epstein that Lewis once said “Hulme is Epstein and Epstein is Hulme”.50 Epstein certainly thought enough of Hulme’s writings on him that he republished Hulme’s essay, “Mr. Epstein and the Critics” in both The Sculptor Speaks (the book of interviews with Haskell) and the two versions of his autobiography.51 Towards the beginning of 1914, at a time when Rock Drill was already substantially complete, Hulme con- tended that Epstein was at “an interesting point in his development”, having passed through “a more or less archaic period” and arrived “at an entirely personal and modern method of expression”.52 Hulme’s major statement on aesthetics, “Modern Art and its Philosophy”, frst delivered as a paper in early 1914, drew heavily on Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, so much so that he described it as “practically an abstract of Worringer’s view”.53 Hulme proposes that geometrical art was stiff and lifeless, emerging out of what he thought

49 T.E. Hulme, “Modern Art and its Philosophy,” Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), 94–113 (98). 50 Lewis, quoted in Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1: 161. 51 See “Appendix One: An Article by the Late T.E. Hulme” in Epstein and Haskell, The Sculptor Speaks, 152–64; Epstein, Epstein, 63–8. Epstein is a revised and expanded edition of Epstein’s frst autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture (1940). 52 T.E. Hulme, “Modern Art—III. The London Group,” New Age, March 26, 1914, 661–2 (662). 53 Hulme, “Modern Art and its Philosophy,” 98. 138 B. VERE of as a “striving for structure” in the face of “the messiness and confusion of nature and natural things”.54 But Hulme also offers a theorisa- tion of the link between the “primitive” and the mechanical that could be applied to Rock Drill. Modern art might be marked by a turn to the “primitive” art of other eras, but this is an attempt to escape the urge to empathy, through a return to a previous form of geometrical art. Both “archaic” and the most recent abstract art of the twentieth century might emphasise two-dimensionality and the abstract, but modernity offers the opportunity to utilise complicated patterns of abstraction found in machinery, “the specifc differentiating quality of the new art”.55 Modern art will have “an organisation, and [be] governed by principles, which are at present exemplifed unintentionally, as it were, in machinery”.56 If Rock Drill seems to fulfl Hulme’s conditions, it should also be acknowledged that its break from the “primitive” is incomplete. Hulme does not theorise about sexuality and, indeed, describes the forms of geometrical art as “stiff and lifeless”.57 This is in stark contrast to the fecundity of Epstein’s earlier works, such as the pregnant fgures in fenite, themselves derived from conceptions of the primitive that stressed a supposedly more natural sexuality. With the emphasis on the phallic drill, but also its portrayal of the driller bearing the progeny within its body, Rock Drill updates and complicates, rather than rejects, his own earlier work. Perhaps it is best viewed as an example of what David Trotter has called the techno-primitive, a hybrid object that seeks at once to be ultra-modern at the same time as it looks to other allegedly more “primitive” cultures as a provocation to reimagine modern life.58 The disquieting aspect of the statue’s inclusion of the progeny has largely been ignored in favour of readings that stress Rock Drill’s virility. The phallic aspects of the work were greatly reduced by Epstein’s decision, apparently taken sometime after its exhibition in 1915, to dis- mantle Rock Drill and produce the Torso.59 Epstein’s own explanation

54 Ibid., 106. 55 Ibid., 110. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 99. 58 David Trotter, “Techno-Primitivism: À Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Modernism/modernity, 18, no. 1 (2011): 149–66. 59 Evelyn Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein: With a Complete Catalogue (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 134. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 139 is again disingenuous. “Later,” he wrote, “I lost my interest in machinery and discarded the drill. I cast in metal only the upper part of the fgure”.60 This is an unusual decision, for if Epstein had simply lost his interest in machinery, why then choose to exhibit a fgure still suffciently mechanical to allow it to be described as a robot?61 The result is a tre- mendous reduction in the scale of the work, the torso and head being just over seventy centimetres tall. In place of the original emphasis on virility, Cork’s explanation privileges the First World War. Cork describes the Torso as “melancholy and defenceless […] Deprived of its former lofty position the foetus now seems pitifully vulnerable. The metallic ribs surrounding this half-formed child belong to a body as broken as the wounded soldiers returning from the Western Front in ever greater numbers”.62 The reduction of the work, along with Epstein’s profession of loss of interest in the mechanical, enables Cork to resolve the question of the driller’s humanity. Whereas Epstein spoke of “progeny”, now we have a “foetus” and “half-formed child” on the point of annihila- tion, but representing a fragile hope. I think the trajectory of this argument is too easy to follow. Accounts of the reduction of the work that stress the First World War combined with what has been perceived as a retreat from avant-garde practice in England continue, even as they are advanced, to talk of the work in terms of the phallus and castration.63 Stephen Gardiner, an enthusiast for the merits of the Torso, still speaks of its “sheer impotence”.64 Evelyn Silber, author of Epstein’s complete catalogue, also calls the Torso “impotent”.65 Charles Harrison accuses

60 Epstein, Epstein, 56. 61 In 2012, Jonathan Jones, art critic of the Guardian newspaper, reproduced Torso under the headline “Menacing Machine”, writing: “A science-fction monster turns its long metal snout sideways as it scans the wreckage of some endless robot war.” Jonathan Jones. “Menacing Machine,” Guardian, October 1, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/picture/2012/oct/01/jacob-epstein-torso-metal-rock-drill. 62 Cork, Epstein, 40. 63 Cork, Epstein, believes that Torso marks the point at which Epstein “began to recoil from avant-garde art” and “returned to a more fgurative way of working”, 40, 41. For Charles Harrison, writing more generally, “the radical modernists were forced by the actual experience of war to adopt more naturalistic styles”, Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 131. 64 Gardiner, Epstein, 131. 65 Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, 33. 140 B. VERE

Epstein of “emasculating his work”.66 Cork feels that the driller in the Torso is “[d]eprived of his phallic weapon”.67 I take seriously Lisa Tickner’s assertion that “[w]ith all their diffculties only the insights of psychoanalysis can answer […] the transitions through which Jacob Epstein resolved his obsessions with pregnancy and copulation into Rock Drill—a totem of parthenogenetic phallic potency”.68 And the continuation of the language of phallic potency or impotence into discussion of the Torso might mean that it too could be incorporated into that psychoanalytic reading. Disavowal is the distinguishing characteristic of fetishism. As an example of how it can work, we could take the commentary on a drawing of Epstein’s held to be central to Rock Drill. Two Primitive Figures (c. 1913) shows a man and a woman with outsize genitalia, so much so, in the case of the man, that it could serve as an early study for Rock Drill. Cork calls it the “germinating motif” for the sculpture and notes that the fgures’ “form and sexual content rely strongly on precedents in primitive sculpture like the Standing Male Figure from Fang, Gabon, a highly phallic wood carving once in Epstein’s own collection,” with a footnote stating the work is now in the British Museum.69 Turning to the museum’s holdings, however, the only Fang fgure to have come from Epstein’s collection is noted in the 1962 report following its acquisition as having “genitals cut out” (not a unique phenomenon it appears).70 What Cork seems to have done is to ignore the mark of castration and (working from the photograph) to transfer his attention, either to a “wooden peg projecting down from the buttocks”,

66 Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 100. 67 Cork, Epstein, 40. 68 Lisa Tickner, “Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, eds. Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, and Norman Bryson (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 42–82 (46). This is, however, Tickner’s last word on Epstein’s sculpture. 69 Cork, Wild Thing, 165 (my italics). He calls this study the “germinating motif” of Rock Drill in Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 464. 70 The fgure is catalogued and reproduced on the British Museum’s website, “Af1962,20.2”, British Museum, accessed January 10, 2018, www.britishmuseum.org/collection. For emasculation of African fgures, see Jeremy MacClancy, “Cutting and Covering Up Ethnographica: The Culture of Curatorship,” Journal of the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASA Online, no. 01/08 (August 2013), https://www.theasa.org/down- loads/asaonline/PDF/asaonline0108.pdf. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 141 that was designed to support the fgure in an upright position, or to the light hitting the fgure’s rounded left leg and culminating in the circular kneecap, which could be read as a phallus. Disavowal works in this manner, by continuing to insist on the presence of the phallus even when it has been removed. This example is obviously based on a male fgure, but the fetish object “remains”, in Freud’s words, “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it”.71 In Freud’s theories, all children originally hold “that women, like men, possess a penis”.72 The combination of phallic and maternal elements mark out the Rock Drill as a fetish object, “a vehicle both of denying and asseverating the castration”.73 I am of course not making the simple claim that Rock Drill is the phallic mother, since this would be to replace the complicated acknowledgement and refusal of castration, the holding of contradictory positions, with an outright refusal. Moreover, the question of the driller’s humanity remains irresolvable, overdetermined as it now is by the maternal elements of the sculpture. The 1913 study for Rock Drill held at the New Gallery, Walsall, shows the driller surrounded by, yet isolated from, a series of jagged lines that could be lightning fashes. It shares with Parveen Adams’s description of the pervert’s object “a rigidity, a repetition, a compulsion that cannot fail to bring to mind Casanova standing all night in the pouring rain with bolts of lightning around him”.74 Freud’s theory of fetishism inter- sects in an interesting and suggestive way with Hulme and Worringer’s account of geometric abstraction insofar as both stress rigidity and structure as a response to anxiety. For Freud, the creation of the fetish was “due to an intention to destroy the evidence for the possibility of castration, so that fear of castration could be avoided”. Freud continues that: “In childhood, the ego often enough fnds itself in the position

71 Freud, “Fetishism,” 353. 72 Sigmund Freud, “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” in On Sexuality, 7: 183–204 (195). This study was published in 1908. 73 Jacques Lacan and Werner Granoff, “Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real,” in Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, eds. Sandor Lorand and Michael Balint (London: Ortolan, 1965), 265–76 (273). 74 Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences (London: Routledge, 1996), 43. Here Adams is discussing Octave Mannoni’s use of Casanova as an example of fetishism in his “‘Je sais bien … mais quand même’: la croy- ance” essay for Les Temps Modernes, 212 (1964), 1262–86. 142 B. VERE of fending off some demand from the external world which it fnds distressing and that this is effected by means of a disavowal of the perceptions which bring to knowledge this demand from reality […] Whenever we are in a position to study them they turn out to be half-measures, incomplete attempts at detachment from reality”.75 These quotes come from Freud’s late Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940), by which time he had broadened the scope of the mechanism of disavowal beyond simple fetishism. The urge to abstraction could be viewed as one such measure, intended to establish the object as a defence against anxiety, but insofar as it is marked by disavowal, this process is, to recall a phrase of Worringer’s, “a victory that is at the same time a defeat”.76 At this point it can be objected that this emphasis on impotence, castration and helplessness serves to disprove my own argument. If an object is wrested from the fux of the material world and invested with phallic signifcance in an attempt to avoid what the subject believes to be the distressing import of castration, why would that object subsequently be marked by that very same process of emasculation? Such an objection takes into account only the denial aspect of the contradictory positions held in the fetishist’s ego and ignores the simultaneous acknowledgement of castration. “To point out that he reveres his fetish is not the whole story”, writes Freud, “in many cases he treats it in a way which is obviously equivalent to a representation of castration”.77 He goes on to allow that: “Affection and hostility in the treatment of the fetish— which run parallel with the disavowal and the acknowledgement of castration—are mixed in unequal proportions in different cases, so that the one or the other is more clearly recognisable”.78 As Slavoj Žižek writes, in terms that also bring to mind Worringer’s “spiritual dread of space” and the attempt to “fnd a point of tranquillity”: “Contrary to the doxa [orthodox view], the fetish […] is not primarily an attempt to disavow castration and stick to the (belief in the) maternal phallus; beneath the semblance of this disavowal, it is easy to discern the traces of the desperate attempt, on the part of the perverse subject, to stage the

75 Sigmund Freud, “An Outline of Psychoanalysis,” in Historical and Expository Works on Psychoanalysis, Penguin Freud Library, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 15: 375–443 (439–40). 76 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 37. 77 Freud, “Fetishism,” 356–7. 78 Ibid. 6 A TOKEN OF TRIUMPH CUT DOWN TO SIZE … 143 symbolic castration—to […] obtain some space in which one can breathe freely”.79 The Torso then, far from invalidating an argument based on fetishism, further establishes the fetish character of the two sculptures. If Rock Drill, is an attempt to disavow castration, then Torso, in its treatment of the original sculpture, stages its castration, not only by the reduction of the work, but by its subsequent exhibition at the following year’s London Group exhibition. As Epstein himself said, his enthusiasm for machinery was indeed short-lived. If the Rock Drill held the primitive and the technologically advanced in balance, Epstein’s immediate move was a retreat to the more primitivist second version of Venus. This was another large-scale sexualised sculpture, with the goddess surmounted on a mating cockerel and hen. Epstein’s interest in sexual themes persisted, but the complexity of Rock Drill’s negotiation of those themes through the modern and the primitive, through the exhibition and subsequent dismemberment of the work, had gone.

79 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 104. CHAPTER 7

Ethics and Erotics: Receptions of an Ancient Statue of a Nymph and Satyr

Victoria Donnellan

Introduction This chapter considers the reception history of an ancient sculpture of a nymph and satyr, focussing on it as a sexual scene. The statue provides a rich case study for changing ethics of viewing and display, with regard to sexual imagery from the ancient past. I trace receptions of the statue from its Roman context, through its place in Charles Townley’s eighteenth-century collection of antiquities, and then into the British Museum, discussing how it has served as a stimulus for erotic fantasy, intellectual interest, and ethical concern. In the Roman and eighteenth- century contexts, the sculpture is likely to have been the subject of erotic

I am grateful to colleagues at the British Museum for help in preparing this chapter, especially Ian Jenkins, Celeste Farge and Francesca Hillier. Thanks are also due to attendees of the 2017 Classical Association conference, for thought- provoking questions, and to the editors of this volume.

V. Donnellan (*) British Museum, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 145 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_7 146 V. DONNELLAN appreciation. By the nineteenth century, when the sculpture was displayed to a wider public audience, the emphasis shifted to the question of obscenity. Moving forwards to the twenty-frst century, a key theme is the extent to which it represents sexual violence. The sculpture seems to embody an inherent ambiguity as to the degree of coercion taking place within the scene, perhaps exaggerated by the eighteenth-century restoration of the nymph’s head with its specifc facial expression. In the context of contemporary sexual and ethical frameworks, it has become a potentially troubling object, requiring sensitive museum interpretation. Drawing on the methodologies of reception and museum studies, my analysis shows how different receptions are overlaid through time, in a process of constant reinterpretation in the light of shifting ideas about sexuality, morality, and obscenity. The sculpture (Fig. 7.1) represents two naked fgures, a young female and a young male whose animal ears identify him as a satyr, one of the part-human, part-horse (or part-goat) followers of Dionysus. The woman is usually identifed as a nymph or maenad.1 Nymphs, in Greek myth, were minor female divinities, associated with wild, remote, and rural places. A maenad was a female worshipper of Dionysus, prone to ecstatic dancing and drunkenness. The scene is evidently set in the realm of myth rather than real life. It seems clear that the satyr’s intentions are sexual, and that the nymph is trying to break free from his embrace: she grasps his hair to push his head away and tries to peel his fngers away from her breast. The satyr’s penis is missing but the point where it broke away is clearly visible. While erect, it was not shown penetrating the nymph.2 The sculpture is approximately 77 cm high. It has been variously dated to the frst or second century AD, probably a Roman version of a Hellenistic sculpture, itself produced between the late third and frst century BC.3 The head of the nymph was missing on its discovery in the eighteenth

1 The female fgure is identifed as a nymph by, for example, Monique Halm-Tisserant and Gérard Siebert, “Nymphai,” in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), VIII.1 (Zurich: Artemis, 1997), 891–902 (895) (Cat 52b). She is described as a maenad by Adrian Stähli, Die Verweigerung der Lüste: erotische Gruppen in der antiken Plastik (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), 75–89; and 364, and Bernard Andreae, Skulptur des Hellenismus (Munich: Hirmer, 2001), 182–8. 2 Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 369, notes the same of the Capitoline Museum example. 3 Stähli dates the original to 175–150 BC (ibid., 81–4) and the Townley version to AD 117–138 (ibid., 368). 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 147

Fig. 7.1 Marble group of a nymph and satyr, British Museum, GR 1805,0703.2. © The Trustees of the British Museum 148 V. DONNELLAN century, and was restored by “[Lo] Sposino” (Little Husband), namely Giovanni Pierantoni.4 Much of the nymph’s arms and her right foot are also restored, as well as parts of the satyr including some fngers, the nose and feet.5 There are other versions of the same scene: notably one example in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, and another formerly in the collection at Hever Castle in Kent, England.6 The Capitoline Museum example is unrestored, with the nymph’s head missing, while the Hever version has both heads and other parts restored, including the erect penis. For clarity, I always refer to the version upon which this chapter focusses as the Townley nymph and satyr.

The Sculpture in Its Ancient Context The feld of reception studies shows that interpretations of ancient texts and images vary dramatically over time. For example, Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands trace shifting interpretations of the famous sculpture of the god Pan having sex with a goat, found at Herculaneum.7 Their analysis effectively demonstrates that “ancient objects cannot speak to the present except in the language of that present and […] there is no such thing as direct and unmediated access to the reality of the past, only a variety of versions that are constructed as acceptable and authentic knowledge in particular settings”.8 This frst section summarises some present-day interpretations of the meanings of the Townley nymph and satyr in its ancient context. The discussion highlights three aspects which are important for the rest of the chapter: the degree to which

4 List of marbles with descriptions and provenance, no date, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 10/8. All archival material is cited by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. Item details for Townley Archive materials are based on Susan J. Hill, Catalogue of the Townley Archive at the British Museum: The British Museum Occasional Paper Number 138 (London: British Museum, 2002). On ‘Lo Sposino’ see Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 317–8. 5 Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 364. 6 Capitoline Museum, Inv 1729. Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 362–7, catalogues examples of the type. 7 Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “Bestiality in the Bay of Naples: The Herculaneum Pan and Goat Statue,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 86–111. 8 Ibid., 110. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 149 the sculpture represents a narrative of sexual violence, the restoration of the nymph’s facial expression, and how the mythical nature of the scene affects its meanings. The Townley nymph and satyr is one example of a group of Roman sculptures thought to copy a single Hellenistic prototype. It seems to be an inherently ambiguous scene and has been variously interpreted. For example, John Pedley writes of the Capitoline version, “Is this serious? Is it a rape, or is it play? Is it deliberately ambiguous?”9 Bernard Andreae sees the story as having a happy outcome, with the satyr on the verge of a successful seduction.10 Bert Smith also considers the satyr to be “unthreatening”, writing that “pose and style convert rape into play” and describing this as a “trouble-free, Arcadian world, where attempted rape is Dionysian play”.11 According to Adrian Stähli, the narrative implied is somewhat less playful: the satyr has crept up on the unaware maenad from behind.12 He predicts, however, that the maenad will successfully escape, as satyrs are ineffectual beings whose lustful instincts remain frustrated.13 This and similar Hellenistic sculptural groups referred back to a tradition in earlier Greek art in other media of images showing satyrs pursuing or attacking nymphs or maenads, as part of wider imagery of erotic pursuits and abductions.14 Ambiguity is again commonly observed as to whether the female fgures clearly resist or possibly invite the pursuit of the male, as they often turn their heads to look back towards their pursuer and reach towards him with one arm.15

9 John Griffths Pedley, Greek Art and Archaeology, 5th ed. (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2012), 367. 10 Andreae, Skulptur, 187. 11 R.R.R. Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture: A Handbook (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 130–1. 12 Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 89. 13 Ibid., 301–7. 14 On such images in vase-painting, see Mark D. Stansbury-O’Donnell, “The Structural Differentiation of Pursuit Scenes,” in An Archaeology of Representations: Ancient Greek Vase-Painting and Contemporary Methodologies, ed. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis (Athens: Institut du Livre, A. Kardamitsa, 2009), 342–73 (342–3). 15 For instance, Susan Deacy, “The Vulnerability of Athena: Parthenoi and Rape in Greek Myth,” in Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds, eds. Susan Deacy and Karen F. Pierce (London: Duckworth & The Classical Press of Wales, 1997), 43–63 (45–6). 150 V. DONNELLAN

In this summary of interpretations of the statue, the term “rape” recurred. Abduction scenes in particular are often referred to in scholarship as rape scenes, for example, the “rape of Europa”. Here, scholars use the term in the sense of the Latin rapio—to seize or carry off—rather than explicitly referring to the sexual act which nonetheless remains implicit in such scenes.16 In the ancient world, non-consensual sex would have been a common experience for many real women, especially slaves, but also women married to husbands chosen for them. Ancient society, however, would not have recognised these experiences as anything akin to a modern concept of rape: men’s right to sex in these circumstances was accepted within societal norms.17 Caution is needed when applying modern-day terminology to sexual behaviour in the ancient world.18 In the nymph and satyr statues, the nymph’s facial expression is crucial for interpreting the scene, but her original head is missing in all surviving versions of the type.19 As the Townley nymph and satyr appears today, with its restored head, an interpretation of the nymph as complicit in the scene—playfully pushing the satyr away—seems plausible: her expression is calm, half-smiling. The Renaissance restorer of the Hever version, however, gave the nymph a facial expression which much more strongly suggests sexual assault: the recent sale catalogue describes her “anguished expression, her brow slightly furrowed, her lips set apart”.20 Other similar Roman erotic groups, also thought to copy Hellenistic prototypes, may provide some clues to the original expression. Shortly before acquiring the nymph and satyr, Charles Townley had

16 Karim W. Arafat, “State of the Art—Art of the State: Sexual Violence and Politics in Late Archaic and Early Classical Vase-Painting,” in Deacy and Pierce, Rape in Antiquity, 97–121 (97). 17 For example, Sharon L. James, “Talking Rape in the Classics Classroom: Further Thoughts,” in From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Diffcult Topics in the Classics Classroom, eds. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Fiona McHardy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014), 171–86 (179). There is of course no universally accepted modern defnition of what constitutes rape. See Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago, 2007), 8–13. 18 See for example Edward M. Harris, “Did Rape Exist in Classical Athens? Further Refections on the Laws About Sexual Violence,” DIKE 7 (2004): 41–83. 19 Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 372. 20 Bonhams, The Hever Nymph and Satyr. Thursday 21 April 2005. New Bond Street, London (London: Bonhams, 2005), 8. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 151 purchased a cast of a group in the Vatican Museums, representing Pan and a seated nymph, herself based on the nymph from a group known as the Invitation to the Dance.21 These groups show the nymph cheerfully smiling. There are general similarities between this head type and that of Townley’s nymph, which suggest that its restorer perhaps used it as a model, following a plausible ancient precedent for a nymph in an erotic group. In these groups, however, a smiling face seems less incon- gruous: in the one, the satyr dances before the nymph; in the other, Pan embraces the nymph and tugs at her drapery, but she only subtly resists. The same head type is seen on one example of another set of sculptures, collectively referred to as the Ludovisi type. The narrative appears closer to that of the Townley nymph and satyr—a seated satyr tries to pull a nymph or maenad into his lap as she actively twists away—so at least one Roman copyist saw a smiling expression as appropriate for this type of scene.22 Surviving examples of another satyr seduction scene, known as the Dresden symplegma and showing a struggling satyr and hermaphrodite, vary in expression: in some examples the hermaphrodite appears to smile, whereas others “display an expression of open-mouthed terror”.23 This latter example suggests that an anguished reaction would not be implausible for the original head of the Townley nymph. How much her restored head resembles the original, lost, Roman head therefore remains inconclusive, but is signifcant for interpreting the extent to which the scene depicts sexual violence.

21 The cast features in Townley’s accounts for 24 February 1773 (Account book, 28 October 1771–13 February 1774, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 8/4). Gerard Vaughan, “The Collecting of Classical Antiquities in England in the 18th Century: A Study of Charles Townley (1737–1805) and His Circle” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1988), 246, identifes it as a cast of the Vatican Museums’ sculpture of Pan and a seated nymph (Magazzino delle sculture no. 180). On the Vatican group, see Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 393–5. On the Invitation to the Dance, see Andreae, Skulptur, 184–5. 22 Museo Nazionale Romano, Inv. 80005. On the Ludovisi type see Stähli, Die Verweigerung, 68–74 and 340–61. Stähli, ibid., 358, argues that this head—the only well-preserved example—copies the nymph from the Invitation to the Dance, casting doubt over whether it refects the Hellenistic original of the Ludovisi type. 23 Elizabeth Bartman, The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture: Volume III: The Ideal Sculpture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 122. The term ‘hermaphrodite’ is used in this chapter following established usage in discussion of ancient art, while recognising that it is a problematic term that is inappropriate when used as a description of intersex people. 152 V. DONNELLAN

It is also important to consider where the group would have been displayed, at the time of its production, and its possible meanings for ancient viewers. According to Townley’s notes, his nymph and satyr was found in April 1773 by Domenico de Angelis near Tivoli, in the remains known as Cassius Villa, “with Grecian work of the high times”. A note in the margin describes the room’s mosaic pavement and walls orna- mented with various stones.24 This luxurious villa environment is consistent with the fndspots of other erotic groups which are known to have been found in Roman homes, including public parts of the house, and while such groups were also found in public spaces such as theatres and baths, Elizabeth Bartman suggests that they had a particularly erotic, voyeuristic function within the domestic setting.25 In its original context, then, the nymph and satyr probably served to satisfy the sexual fantasies of elite Roman men. In this regard, it was important that such images represented the uncivilised behaviour of the retinue of Dionysus: they allowed men to enjoy looking at images of unbridled sex, while simultaneously identifying such behaviour as characteristic of inhuman, uncivilised beings.26 As well as providing an erotic frisson, such images may also have served “an admonitory function”.27 They link uncontrolled sexuality with uncivilised beings in situations fraught with risk of violation. With pudicitia (chastity) linked with the success of Rome in the period, groups like the nymph and satyr might have provided a stimulus to thought and discussion of such moral concerns. Modern terms should be used with care, when discussing ancient sexual imagery, as concepts such as “rape” cannot simply be retrojected into the classical world. Any attempt to reconstruct these images’ signifcance

24 List of marbles, TY 10/8. Brian F. Cook, Documenting the Townley Marbles (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 57, notes that other documents give the date of discovery as 1772. He prefers this date on the grounds that the case was ordered on 24th February 1773 (citing Account book, TY 8/4). This case, however, was more likely for the cast of a nymph and satyr which appears in the same accounts (see Footnote 21). The April 1773 date for the discovery seems more convincing, given De Angelis received his permit for the site in January 1773 (Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging, 260). 25 Elizabeth Bartman, “Erotic Statuary in the Roman House,” in Cultural Messages in the Graeco-Roman World, eds. Olivier Hekster and Stephan Mols (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 57–65 (61). 26 Caroline Vout, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 177. 27 Bartman, “Erotic Statuary,” 62. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 153 must situate them within the subtleties of gender and sexual relationships in their particular ancient context. The scholarly interpretations I have summarised in this section are inevitably coloured by contemporary understandings of sexual behaviour: the extent to which the scene represents coerced or consensual sex has become a key point of focus.28 This ambiguity may have been a deliberate creation of the ancient sculptor, and is perhaps heightened by the nymph’s expression—a half-smile—as restored in the eighteenth century. The fact that the scene represents the world of myth has emerged as signifcant for its reception, allowing Roman viewers to engage with a dangerous expression of sexuality at a safe distance.

Rediscovery and Reception in Charles Townley’s Collection Part of a wide circle of late-eighteenth-century antiquarians and connoisseurs, Townley collected classical antiquities including sculptures, bronzes, gems, terracottas and coins.29 His sculpture collection, acquired during his travels in Italy and by correspondence with dealers, was displayed in his London home, in Park Street, where visitors were admitted from Britain and abroad, both male and female.30 In this section, I discuss the ways Townley is likely to have engaged with the nymph and satyr, as an object of both intellectual and erotic interest within his circle of fellow scholars and collectors, while de-emphasizing the sexual subject for non-specialist visitors. Townley paid the dealer Thomas Jenkins £350 for the nymph and satyr in 1773,31 the second highest amount he had paid for a sculpture by that date.32 On 19 February 1774, Jenkins wrote to Townley, “I fatter myself

28 Fisher and Langlands, “Bestiality,” 96–7, observe the same in recent scholarship regarding the Herculaneum Pan and goat. 29 On Townley, see Vaughan, “Collecting,” and Brian F. Cook, The Townley Marbles (London: British Museum Press, 1985). 30 Vaughan, “Collecting,” 373–8. Responses of female visitors to Townley’s collection are being considered by Miriam Stockill-al jamil in her ongoing research (Ph.D. diss., provisionally titled “Eighteenth-Century Women and Their Engagement with Classical Sculpture,” Birkbeck, University of London). 31 Account July 1773, paid 12 July 1773, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 8/74/9. 32 Vaughan, “Collecting,” 246. 154 V. DONNELLAN you can now say, you are in Possession of the fnest Drapery fgure and the fnest Groupe in the Universe”.33 In a later list of insurance values, Townley valued the sculpture at £1500, again an extremely high amount relative to other objects in this same list, and a remarkable fourfold increase on the purchase price.34 Why did Townley value the nymph and satyr so highly? A range of factors were probably involved in assigning values, including size, state of preservation, and sculptural genre. Gerard Vaughan notes that groups of several fgures were particularly prized.35 Another key factor may well have been its sexual subject, which, when combined with other factors, increased its value further.36 Townley’s collection included other sculptures in a similar genre, including a marble well-head with four erotic pursuit scenes (Fig. 7.2).37 Viccy Coltman and Colette Crossman have convincingly argued that Townley and his circle of connoisseurs had an erotic as well as intellectual interest in many of their objects.38 It is well known that meetings of the Society of Dilettanti, to which Townley was elected in 1786,39 provided an opportunity for sexually charged as well as intellectual discussion. The two paintings by Joshua Reynolds, showing members of the society admiring vases and gems, have been well analysed in these terms, pointing to the sexualised gestures and props.40 In this context, it is possible that Townley deliberately chose a restoration of the nymph’s head which mini- mised the violence of the scene, assimilating it to more playful types, which may have appealed to his own tastes. It is, however, also possible that it was

33 Thomas Jenkins, Letter to Charles Townley, 19 February 1774, Letters from Thomas Jenkins, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 7/327. Cook, Documenting, 57, identifes the nymph and satyr as the “Groupe” referred to here. 34 List of marbles with original costs and valuations, no date, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 10/6. 35 Vaughan, “Collecting,” 246. 36 For example, the similar-sized group of two boys playing knucklebones, while purchased for the higher price of £400, was still valued at £400 (List of Marbles, TY 10/6). 37 British Museum, GR 1805,0703.227. Cook, Marbles, 15, suggests Townley paid £50 for this, a high price relative to similar objects, because of the “mildly erotic” subject. 38 Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 159ff.; and Colette Crossman, “Priapus in Park Street: Revealing Zoffany’s Subtext in Charles Townley and Friends,” The British Art Journal 6, no. 1 (2005): 71–80. 39 Bruce Redford, Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum & The Getty Research Institute, 2008), 202. 40 Ibid., 97ff.; Coltman, Classical Sculpture, 164ff.; and Crossman, “Priapus,” 75. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 155 intended to make the group more acceptable for display in his home, as discussed further below, or was based on his scholarly judgment of the most likely original head. Another source of the sculpture’s particular interest to Townley probably derived from other preoccupations of his circle. Pierre-Francois Hughes, known as Baron d’Hancarville, and other close associates, notably the collector Richard Payne Knight, were interested in the interpretation of ancient art as part of a system of primitive universal theology, exploring the idea of a single generative deity shared across ancient cultures.41 This theory particularly focussed on artefacts with sexual themes—including Dionysiac scenes featuring satyrs, nymphs, maenads and the like—as being symbolic of this generative force. D’Hancarville refers to Townley’s nymph and satyr sculpture in this context in his Recherches Sur L’Origine, L’Esprit Et Les Progrès Des Arts De La Grèce (1785).42 While d’Hancarville’s description recognises that the nymph is attempting to resist the satyr, the erotic dynamics of the encounter were not the main point of interest. D’Hancarville and Payne Knight argued that the sexual content of ancient art was not to be interpreted literally, as erotic, but as part of these cultures’ religious beliefs. When intellectual discussion of such objects reached a wider audience, through publication, such ideas nonetheless sometimes met with scandalised reactions: Payne Knight’s 1786 Discourse on the Worship of Priapus was so vilifed that he attempted to suppress it.43 Descriptions of the Townley nymph and satyr in the catalogues intended for use by visitors to Townley’s home evade its sexual nature. The First Townley Inventory entry for the sculpture begins: “A Group of a Faun struggling with a Nymph”. In the remainder of the description, only references to “exerted muscles, and graceful female shapes” and the “most spir- ited composition” perhaps subtly allude to the erotic theme.44 In the later

41 See Fisher and Langlands, “Bestiality”; Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London: Duckworth, 1996), esp. 31–40; Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 51–81. 42 Pierre Hughes d’Hancarville, Recherches sur l’Origine, l’Esprit et les Progrès des Arts de la Grèce, vol. 1 (London: B. Appleyard, 1785), 329–30 (Note 189). 43 Davis, Queer Beauty, 56. 44 First Townley Inventory, A Catalogue of the Ancient Marbles in Park Street Westm [sic], The Places Where They Were Found and Where They Were Bought, Department of Greece and Rome archives, British Museum, GR1, Statues No. 7. Cook, Documenting, 12, suggests that this was compiled in 1784 and may have been intended for visitors. 156 V. DONNELLAN parlour catalogue descriptions, even these details are omitted.45 The emphasis is instead placed on the sculpture’s association with other statues found in the same villa which were displayed in the prestigious papal collection in the Vatican Museum. The stated intention in such catalogues was to provide details of subject and fndspot “with as much brevity, for the sake of the cur- sory observer, as a wish to satisfy the more inquisitive would allow”.46 The omission of the sexual subject was very probably motivated by more than just the desire for brevity. There was a precedent for the suppression of sexual scenes in sculpture displays of the period: the Pan and goat group from Herculaneum was famously kept separately in the original collection in Portici (as well as the later Naples museum), accessible only by special application.47 Townley’s similar “fragmented group of a Satyr and a goat”,48 was nowhere described more explicitly than this, and was not mentioned at all in the priced lists or the parlour catalogues for visitors.49 Townley’s nymph and satyr was certainly prominently displayed in his library at Park Street, in a corner niche to the right-hand side of the freplace,50 but the reticence of the written descriptions suggests visitors’ attention was not drawn to the sexual subject. According to James Dallaway, Townley not only admitted into his home “all who were known in the literary circles as antiquaries or men of taste” but also “others, less versed in the arts, but no less susceptible of pleasure from the effect produced by an assemblage of objects of genu- ine beauty”.51 Visitors were presumably exclusively of the upper classes, but

45 Parlour Catalogue, 1804, Department of Greece and Rome archives, British Museum, GR2, 25; Parlour Catalogue: Volume II, 1805, Department of Greece and Rome archives, British Museum, GR 2009,5002.2, 26. 46 Copy of Parlour Catalogue owned by Simon Townley, Department of Greece and Rome archives, British Museum, ST2, Introduction. 47 The Pan and goat is now in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples (MANN 27709). Townley owned an approximate small-scale terracotta copy (British Museum, M.550). For the Naples Gabinetto Secreto, see Walter Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (New York: Viking, 1987); Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, “The Censorship Myth and the Secret Museum,” in Pompeii in the Public Imagination from Its Rediscovery to Today, eds. Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 301–15. 48 British Museum, GR 1805,0703.280, as described in Townley’s book of lists of antiquities bought in Italy from 1768, Townley Archive, British Museum, TY 10/3, 8. 49 Cook, Documenting, 56. 50 Cook, Marbles, 33–4. 51 James Dallaway, Of Statuary and Sculpture Among the Antients: With Some Account of Specimens Preserved in England (London: J. Murray, 1816), 328. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 157 certainly included women and people without specialist antiquarian knowledge. The sculpture’s availability to this wider circle of viewers, beyond his immediate group of connoisseurs and antiquarians, may have motivated Townley to omit details of the sexual content in the catalogues. It is possible that the negative reception of Payne Knight’s publication may have infuenced Townley to reduce the description even further for the later catalogues. He was certainly displaying these sculptures in a period when scandalised responses to frank sexual discussion might be anticipated outside his close intellectual circle. I would suggest that both the restoration of the nymph’s expression as a smile, and the fact that the satyr’s erect penis was left unrestored—unlike that of the Hever version—may have been a deliberate choice to make the group more acceptable for open display in Townley’s home by minimising the erotic and sexually violent elements of the scene. In Townley’s collection, it is likely that the nymph and satyr was valued for its sexual content, providing an erotic frisson for his immediate circle of connoisseurs and antiquarians. Scholarly discussion of this and other sexually themed objects, meanwhile, focussed not on their erotic dynamics, but interpreted them through the lens of religious symbolism. Both these responses to the sculpture’s sexual theme—erotic and intellectual— were acceptable within a closed, elite, male group of intellectuals.52 When the sculpture was presented to the wider audience of visitors to Townley’s home, beyond his immediate circle, the sexual subject seems to have been downplayed.

In and Out of View at the British Museum Following Townley’s death in 1805, the British Museum purchased his collection of ancient sculpture from his heir. Initially, the nymph and satyr was displayed with the rest of the collection in the Townley Galleries, which opened in 1808.53 It is listed in the frst four editions of the Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum, between 1808 and 1810, as being displayed in Room VII.54 By the ffth edition, published in 1812, it is no longer listed: sometime between 1810 and 1812 it seems to have been

52 These two responses are not mutually exclusive and often went hand in hand. See Fisher and Langlands, “Censorship,” 310–1. 53 Cook, Marbles, 60. 54 British Museum, Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum (London: Printed by Cox and Baylis, 1808), 90. 158 V. DONNELLAN removed from display.55 In the Register of the Townley Collection, drawn up in 1848, the entry for the nymph and satyr was annotated “not exhibited”.56 Cook has previously noted its absence from display, writing that “this is not an isolated instance of an object that had appealed to the rather prurient taste of the eighteenth century falling foul of nineteenth-century prudery”.57 This statement is a considerable simplifcation of the complexity of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexual attitudes, but Cook’s suggestion that the sexual content was the motivating factor for its removal seems plausible. The Townley nymph and satyr later appears in the register of the Museum Secretum, which was drawn up when the Witt Collection of erotic objects was acquired in 1865. This was a collection kept separately, which was not displayed and to which access was restricted.58 Previous discussion of the Museum Secretum has traced its beginnings back to the 1830s,59 but it seems very possible that the treatment of the nymph and satyr and related erotic scenes from the Townley collection reveals the museum beginning to set some objects aside at an even earlier date in the 1810s. This set of objects thus represents an interesting case study for the shifting lines of acceptability versus perceived obscenity.60 Figure 7.2 offers a visual representation of where the lines were drawn in 1808 and 1812. In 1808, when the Townley Galleries opened and the Synopsis was frst published, all the scenes of satyrs pursuing nymphs or maenads were displayed.61

55 Nor does it appear in A Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles in the British Museum; with Engravings, the multi-volume catalogue of the Townley collection published between 1812 and 1861. 56 Register of the Townley Collection, 1848, Department of Greece and Rome archives, British Museum, T.2 (henceforth cited as ‘1848 Register’). 57 Cook, Marbles, 16. In Documenting, 57, Cook notes that the sculpture was displayed in 1808 and had been removed by 1817. 58 On the Museum Secretum, see David Gaimster, “Under Lock and Key: Censorship and the Secret Museum,” in Sex: The Erotic Review, ed. Stephen Bayley (London: Cassell & Co, 2001), 126–39. Cook, Documenting, 58, lists Townley’s nymph and satyr as Museum Secretum no. 666. In fact, it appears in the Register of the Museum Secretum, Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory archives, British Museum, as no. 466. 59 Gaimster, “Under,” 130. 60 Here, I focus only on these erotic groups. Rebecca J.I. Mellor is considering the cate- gorization of wider classes of sexual material in her ongoing research (PhD diss., provisionally titled “Phallus-ies Galore: Examining the Continuing Impacts of Archival, Display, and Collecting Practices of Greco-Roman Sexual Antiquities from Private to Public Collections in the Long Nineteenth Century,” University of York). 61 The relief appears in the 1808 Synopsis, 65, in Room III, and the well-head in Room VII (ibid., 91). 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 159

Fig. 7.2 Objects acceptable for display in 1808 and 1812. From top: Pan and a goat (GR 1805,0703.280), nymph and satyr (GR 1805,0703.2), well-head with four erotic pursuit scenes (GR 1805,0703.227), relief of a nymph and satyr (GR 1805,0703.127). © The Trustees of the British Museum 160 V. DONNELLAN

Meanwhile, evidence suggests that Townley’s sculpture of a satyr or Pan having sex with a goat was not exhibited.62 This is unsur- prising, given the similar, better-known group from Herculaneum was already famously kept in the earlier equivalent of the British Museum’s Secretum, the Gabinetto Secreto in what is now the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.63 By 1812, a mere four years later, the line of acceptability seems to have moved. A relief sculpture of a satyr trying to pull the clothes from a nymph was still acceptable for display.64 So too was a satyr sprawling on his back (not pictured), which was already known to be part of a group showing a struggle with a hermaphrodite, of the Dresden symplegma type.65 The well-head, discussed above, on the other hand, seems to have been removed from display in the same period as the nymph and satyr.66 The specifc reasons as to why the nymph and satyr and well-head were removed from display remain obscure,67 but I suggest that the most likely reason, at this particular point in time, was the relaxation of the admissions policy.68 When the Gallery of Antiquities opened in 1808, members of the general public (referred to as “strangers” in museum records) were only admitted as part of guided tours, four days a week. Only members and students of the Royal Academy had

62 It does not appear in the 1808 Synopsis, is marked ‘not exhibited’ in the 1848 Register, and is listed in the Museum Secretum Register as no. 465. 63 See Footnote 47. 64 British Museum, GR 1805,0703.127. 65 British Museum, GR 1805,0703.31. Both of these objects remained on display following the demolition of the Townley Galleries from 1846 (on which see Cook, Marbles, 61): in the 1847 Synopsis (52nd ed.) both are listed in the Grand Central Saloon. 66 It is also omitted from the 1812 Synopsis (5th ed.), and appears in the Museum Secretum Register as no. 467. Though not marked as ‘not exhibited’ in the 1848 Register, it is one of a relatively small number of sculptures (approximately thirty of 280) which have no Synopsis reference in this register, which suggests they may not have been displayed in the preceding years. 67 There is no mention of their removal in the minutes of General or Committee Meetings, the Offcers’ Reports or the Original Papers, Central Archive, British Museum, for these years. 68 For a detailed description of changing access arrangements in the period see Derek Cash, Access to Museum Culture: the British Museum from 1753 to 1836: The British Museum Occasional Paper number 133 (London: British Museum, 2002), 59–82, http://www.britishmuseum.org/ research/publications/research_publications_series/2002/access_to_museum_culture.aspx. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 161 arrangements for non-guided access at other times. General visitors’ access to specifc objects was limited: a report by the Principal Librarian, Joseph Planta, noted that it was “frequently lamented by strangers, of more than common curiosity, that (as the companies advance in a regular progress) they are generally hurried through the apartments, in a way that totally prevents their taking particular notice of those objects which chiefy interest them”.69 On 24 March 1810, the Trustees approved a signifcant relaxation of these arrangements: the Upper Floor and Gallery of Antiquities would be open to “all persons of decent appearance” from ten till four o’clock, three days a week.70 Whereas previously the Townley sculptures had only been on show in tightly controlled circumstances, members of the general public could now spend as long as six hours freely examining them in a single day. Visitor numbers roughly doubled as a result of the change.71 I propose that the decision to remove the Townley nymph and satyr and well-head from display was likely due to curatorial concerns about the broader audience to whom they would be available for close scrutiny. Jennifer Tyburczy writes of the Naples Gabinetto Secreto: “integral to the organisational system of the Secret Museum was the creation of a ‘vulnerable’ class of viewing publics – women, children, and the lower classes – who were seen as too endangered by the potential con- tamination of a temporary rendezvous with sex objects”.72 The categories of visitors permitted to enter the Gallery of Antiquities had not changed in the 1810 revision: women, children over ten, and lower-class individuals had all previously been allowed to enter.73 The degree of control over their experience of the objects had, however, been much reduced: it seems unlikely that the brisk guided tours of 1808–1810 would have permitted such visitors to linger over sexually

69 Report of the Principal Librarian Respecting the Admission of Strangers to the British Museum, 10th March 1810. Original Papers, Central Archive, British Museum. 70 General Meetings, Minutes, Vol. 5, 1074, Central Archive, British Museum. 71 15,390 in 1808–9; 15,197 in 1809–10; 29,152 in 1810–11; 31,402 in 1811–12 (Original Papers, Vol. III, 1047, Central Archive, British Museum). 72 Jennifer Tyburczy, Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 27. 73 The requirement for “decent” appearance dated to the 1803 regulations (Cash, Access, 65). 162 V. DONNELLAN themed sculptures.74 I suggest that the greater freedom of access for a wider audience instituted in 1810 may well have prompted curators to remove these objects from display at this time. So what might have been the specifc reasons for judging the nymph and satyr and well-head as unacceptable, and the relief and fallen satyr as acceptable (Fig. 7.2)? All represented mythical subjects, so this can be discounted as a factor. Perhaps the degree to which the two fully three-dimensional bodies were intertwined in the nymph and satyr group might have been perceived as more suggestive of actual intercourse, as compared with the relief sculpture in which the two fgures remain separate.75 In the case of the well-head, it is possible that anxiety may have been heightened by the scene featuring a hermaphrodite, due to its non-heterosexual nature.76 The sprawling satyr was perhaps acceptable because the hermaphrodite was missing from the group. In this section, I have traced the early history of Townley’s nymph and satyr in the British Museum, describing its probable censorship due to sexual content. According to Gaimster, the British Museum was “following the line of the Obscene Publications Act” of 1857 when it offcially created the Museum Secretum in 1865 in order to regulate access to such imagery by “‘vulnerable’ sections of society”.77 Gaimster makes this link despite acknowledging that the museum had been segregating objects from the

74 Women are however included in the list of art students admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, “without special comment or notice despite the issues of propriety around the drawing of even the sculptured nude fgure by female artists which crops up in contemporary commentaries” (Martin Myrone, “Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: ‘Free’ Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State,” in British Art Studies 5 (Spring 2017), https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-05/mmy- rone/p22). It is possible that this may have been another cause for concern. 75 The satyr’s erect penis, though damaged, is visible in the relief, which makes it more surprising that this object was never transferred to the Museum Secretum. The relief is relatively small and was fxed quite high on a wall in the Townley Galleries, so perhaps this detail was not readily observable. The remains of the penis are not shown in the engraving featured in A Description of the Collection of Ancient Marbles in the British Museum; with Engravings: Part II (London: W. Bulmer and Co, 1815), Plate I. 76 Richard Parkinson, A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World (London: British Museum Press, 2013), 48, has noted that, in Townley’s home, the well- head was displayed with the erotic pursuit scene featuring a bearded man and a hermaphrodite (now re-interpreted as showing two males) placed against the wall. 77 Gaimster, “Under,” 136. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 163 late 1830s.78 I have suggested that, in fact, the museum had begun removing objects with sexual subjects from display as far back as 1810– 1812, further weakening this connection with the Act, and predating even the creation of the Naples Secret Cabinet.79 If my interpretation is correct, the museum was not simply following policies established elsewhere for the display of sexual antiquities. The British Museum’s decisions about the display of these sexually themed sculptures would represent a signifcant step in the categorisation of obscenity in museum collections.

Recent Exhibitions and the Ethics of Display In the early twentieth century, the Museum Secretum was gradually dispersed, with some objects returned to the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in 1912 and further dispersals in 1937–1938.80 By 1984, when new Townley Galleries opened in the museum’s basement, the nymph and satyr was back on display.81 Since 2008, the group has featured in a series of international touring exhibitions, the Ancient Olympic Games, the Body Beautiful and Treasures of the World’s Cultures, and in the temporary exhibition Defning Beauty at the British Museum in 2015. This concluding section discusses the interpretation and reception of the Townley nymph and satyr in the twenty-frst century, when many museums and galleries have become more open to the display of objects which are sexually explicit or highlight sexual themes.82 Sex nonetheless remains a controversial topic for museums: they are spaces where “volatile and informative battles about sexual identity, sexual practices, and the history of sexuality […] continue to be waged in the public

78 Ibid., 130. Jen Grove previously highlighted this and questioned the link with the 1857 Act, “The Collection and Reception of Sexual Antiquities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2013), 53–5. 79 The Pan and goat had been segregated from its discovery in the mid-eighteenth century, but the Secret Cabinet was not created until 1819 (Fisher and Langlands, “Censorship,” 306–8). 80 According to a typewritten insert in the Museum Secretum Register, Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory archives, British Museum. 81 Cook, Marbles, 63, Fig. 58. 82 See Stuart Frost, “Museums and Sexuality,” in Museum International 65 (2013): 16–25, for a range of examples, with a focus on LGBT+ themes. 164 V. DONNELLAN sphere”.83 When the British Museum displayed the Herculaneum Pan and goat in the 2013 temporary exhibition, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, that part of the exhibition was given a parental guidance warning, continuing the group’s long history of restricted display.84 As Tyburczy points out, such warning signs act as a form of “implicit censorship” and, whether intentionally or not, serve to mark the boundaries of sexual normalcy.85 Curatorial decisions regarding the interpretation of sexually themed objects are not neutral: they have political and moral implications. My own experience of interpreting the statue as Project Curator for two of the touring exhibitions underpins the discussion in this section.86 In these exhibitions, the Townley nymph and satyr has been openly displayed, without a warning sign, as part of broad narratives relating to the ancient world. The frst focussed on the ancient Olympic Games, but also provided a general introduction to ancient Greece. The nymph and satyr featured in a section titled “Women’s Lives”. We wrote the following text for the exhibition label and catalogue entry, headed “Attempted rape”: “A young woman struggles to escape from a satyr. She is a nymph, a supernatural being associated with nature. Satyrs were mythical crea- tures whose human form was combined with horses’ (later goats’) ears and tails. As outsiders, nymphs were often shown naked in art and were the frequent victims of sexual attack by predatory satyrs. Such images were a form of pornography fulflling male fantasies about unbridled sex, in societies where relations between citizens and respectable women were strictly controlled”.87 The exhibition was then reworked to focus on the theme of the human body in Greek art. We used the same text, with the

83 Tyburczy, Sex Museums, xvii. 84 Caroline Vout, “The Shock of the Old: What the Sculpture of Pan Reveals about Sex and the Romans,” The Observer, 23 March 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/23/pan-sculpture-sex-and-romans. On its display in Naples, see Fisher and Langlands, “Censorship”. This group is perhaps particularly controversial, as it represents bestiality (though Pan is himself part goat). There may equally be a suggestion of bestiality in the idea of sex between a nymph and a part-goat satyr, but in the Townley type the satyr is suffciently human that this was not considered signifcant for the discussion in this chapter. 85 Tyburczy, Sex Museums, 105–13. 86 I was Project Curator, working with Senior Curator Ian Jenkins, on the Ancient Olympic Games and Body Beautiful exhibitions (then known by my maiden name, Victoria Turner). 87 Ian Jenkins and Victoria Turner, The Ancient Olympic Games: An Exhibition from the British Museum (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Heritage Museum (Bilingual edition), 2008), 138. The exhibition was shown in Hong Kong and Shanghai. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 165 addition of a sentence about the type of composition, where the bodies of two fgures are intertwined.88 A conversation with curators in one of the exhibition venues, who seemed a little discomfted when discussing this group, frst caused me to refect on the possible impact of the sculpture and its interpretation via our exhibition label. Academic classicists are accustomed to discussing and writing about the class of scenes which are conventionally referred to as rape scenes.89 It was perhaps my own familiarity with using the word “rape” in the academic context which led me to use it in the heading for this object’s label and catalogue text, without fully considering the potential power of the word in a non-academic, museum context. An object interpreted as representing sexual attack could, clearly, be a trigger for museum visitors who have themselves been the victims of sexual violence.90 Following this frst experience of displaying the Townley nymph and satyr statue, my own ethical concerns as a curator were no longer related to obscenity—as they had been for nineteenth-century curators. Instead, I began to focus on the need to mitigate potential negative impacts for visitors encountering a representation of sexual attack. When the statue was displayed in Defning Beauty, the text was rewritten by the curators as part of a general revision of the exhibition content.91 The title was changed to “Mythical desires”.92 The removal of the direct reference to rape, with a clearer emphasis on the mythical nature of the scene, is likely to have changed visitors’ encounters with the object, distancing it from real world sexual violence and thus perhaps reducing some of its potential to shock.93 Just as the mythical nature of

88 Ian Jenkins and Victoria Turner, La Belleza del Cuerpo: Arte y Pensamiento en la Grecia Antigua (Alicante: MARQ (Bilingual edition), 2009), 219. The exhibition travelled to ten international venues. The catalogues were adapted for each venue but all were based on the same texts. 89 See above, pg. 150. 90 This consideration parallels recent attention in academic pedagogy to the issues inherent in teaching sensitive subjects, for example in Rabinowitz and McHardy, Abortion. 91 I was not involved in curating the Defning Beauty exhibition. 92 Ian Jenkins, Celeste Farge, and Victoria Turner, Defning Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art (London: British Museum Press, 2015), 177. 93 The only published evaluation of an exhibition in which this object was included, of which I am aware, does not mention this object in particular (Morris Hargreaves Mcintyre, Spellbound by Serenity: A Summative Report of Defning Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art at the British Museum, 2015, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_pro- jects/all_current_projects/visitor_research.aspx). 166 V. DONNELLAN the scene created a particular meaning for Roman viewers, placing it at a remove from the real world and civilised experience, so too a twenty- frst-century viewer is likely to react differently to an image understood as mythical rather than real-life. While the label title foregrounded the mythological dimension, the text still referred to nymphs as the victims of sexual attack, and the nymph was still described as struggling to escape. This is important as, despite the need for sensitivity, museums should be open about the nature of such statues as representing sexual violence, for reasons analogous to those Sharon James puts forward in the higher education context. She argues that it is unsatisfactory to evade the topic of rape when teaching Classics, through tactics such as euphemism or the omission of challenging texts. Such strategies “present a sanitised version of antiquity” and are unsatisfactory for today’s students, who are highly politically aware and liable to be legitimately offended not only by depictions of rape in the ancient material they encounter, but also by any attempts to elide them in teaching.94 Museums have the same duty to address such topics head on rather than evade them.95 The two label texts from recent British Museum exhibitions which I have discussed took different approaches, but neither addressed the key factor which seems to me to make this a troubling object: namely the tension inherent in describing this half-smiling nymph as a victim of sexual violence. The mismatch between what appears to be happening to her and how she seemingly reacts carries uncomfortable shades of meaning— does ‘no’ really mean ‘yes’?—which risk subtly normalising or legitimising sexual violence.96 A powerful solution could lie in an interpretation which acknowledges the sculpture’s reception history, its restoration and the question of the nymph’s expression discussed in the frst section of this chapter.97 Visitors could be encouraged to refect not only on differences

94 James, “Talking Rape,” 175. 95 There is a growing trend towards tackling challenging and diffcult histories and themes with associated discussion of the ethical issues involved. See for example Jenny Kidd, “Challenging History: Reviewing Debate Within the Heritage Sector on the ‘Challenge’ of History,” Museum and Society 9, no. 3 (2011), 244–8 (244). 96 There is a considerable history of justifcations for rape based on the notion that all women either secretly or unconsciously want to be raped (Bourke, Rape, 67–76). 97 In the Defning Beauty exhibition, a brief reference was added to the fact that the head is restored, but without mentioning the question of the nymph’s expression. Decisions about label text are, of course, affected by many considerations such as word limits and the overall exhibition narrative. 7 ETHICS AND EROTICS: RECEPTIONS OF AN ANCIENT STATUE … 167 between social and sexual norms in the ancient and modern worlds, but also on the ways changing receptions over time are layered upon each other and complicate our modern-day encounters with ancient objects.

Conclusion Openly displayed in the Roman domestic space, the Townley nymph and satyr probably gave elite male viewers an opportunity for erotic fantasy while simultaneously reinforcing established morality. Given this mix of erotic and moral function, ambiguity as to whether the female fgure desires or resists the sexual encounter with the satyr was perhaps deliberate. When the sculpture was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, its treatment seems partly to have resembled that of the original Roman context: displayed in the public areas of Townley’s home, it likely provided an erotic frisson for a group of elite men. Intellectual interest in the group, however, focussed on its signifcance in ancient religious symbolism. Once the sculpture entered the nineteenth-century public museum, I have argued that its history reveals curators in the process of constructing the line between the acceptable and the obscene for the display of sexual antiquities, suggesting that the creation of a prototype of the Museum Secretum at the British Museum began considerably earlier than previously recognised. In the twenty-frst century, both academic scholarship and museum interpretation focus on the sexual dynamics of the group. As the sculpture has returned to open display, ethical considerations have shifted from perceived obscenity to a more specifc need for sensitivity concerning its representation of sexual assault. These changing receptions are layered upon each other to complicate and enrich modern viewers’ encounters with the sculpture: the troubling incongruity of the nymph’s smile, for viewers today, highlights the very different social and sexual norms of both the ancient world and the eighteenth century. Over time, the scene’s mythical nature has remained signifcant in shaping its meanings, distancing viewers from its sexual and violent dimensions in various ways: marking it as the behaviour of uncivilised beings for Roman viewers, providing a focus for symbolical interpretation in the eighteenth century, and perhaps rendering the sculpture less disturbing for twenty- frst-century museum visitors. Shifting receptions of Townley’s nymph and satyr reveal that it has variously—often simultaneously—been seen as the object of sexual fantasy, intellectual analysis, and moral and ethical concern: as such, it provides a powerful example of statuary’s role in constructing understandings of sexuality and obscenity over time. PART III

Queer Possibilities of Statuary CHAPTER 8

“Firm Outlines and Hard Muscles Immortalised”: Ancient Statuary and E.P. Warren’s “Uranian Ideal”

Jen Grove

A set of photographs taken around 1895 show a classical statue in a British garden.1 The statue is a slightly under life-size male nude, made of marble, and its limbs are missing below the elbows and the upper thighs. The statue

1 The photographs are reproduced in James Murley, “The Impact of Edward Perry Warren on the Study and Collections of Greek and Roman Antiquities in American Academia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Louisville, 2012), Figs. 17, 19–21. The dissertation

The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Wellcome Trust (NC106654/ Z/14/Z and 106653/Z/14/Z). This chapter is also based on research originally carried out for my AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Exeter and I would like to thank my supervisors Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, as well as my examiners Barbara Borg, Viccy Coltman and Daniel Orrells for all their help and support.

J. Grove (*) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 171 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_8 172 J. GROVE is not pictured immobile on a plinth, as we might expect of a Victorian out- door scene, however.2 Rather it appears in different places within the garden. In one photograph the statue is held on the lap of a man who is sitting on a bench with two other men at his side. The statue in these photographs resembles a living subject, changing place and position, and being touched and embraced by human companions. Its potential sensuality is underlined in photographs of it seemingly reclining against a chair covered in sumptu- ous fabrics, reminiscent of a nude portrait.3 The careful display of the statue in these images also presages its eventual exhibit in a museum or gallery, where it might be valued as an important artistic or historical specimen. We could read the presence of a sundial in the background of the photograph with the men on the bench as emphasising the aspect of temporality within this scene in which real-life Victorians engage with an ancient fgure of marble. The intersections between statuary, sexuality and history captured in this set of photographs are the starting point for this chapter. The person holding the statue in the photograph of the three men on the bench is Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928).4 Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1862 but living most of his life in Britain, Warren became one of the foremost antiquities collectors of his day. The photographs of the statue in the garden also resemble those taken of ancient objects by Warren and his colleagues for documentation purposes, as part of the mass sale and exchange of antiquities in Europe and North America, at the turn of the twentieth century.5 Warren is now most famous for his acquisition of the Roman silver drinking cup that was named after him and features the most explicit scenes of sex between men extant from classical antiquity.6 The sculpture from the garden is available open access here: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd/1028/. The photographs are in the Edward Reeves archive, a photographic studio based in Lewes, Sussex, UK which created several portraits and photographs of and for Warren. It is unknown if the set of photographs discussed in this chapter had a specifc purpose or audience. 2 See Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell, eds., Sculpture and the Garden (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2006). 3 See Murley, “Impact,” 99. 4 The photograph is reproduced in Murley, “Impact,” Fig. 17. See Footnote 1. 5 For instance, artefacts were photographed against draped fabrics, see “Trading Antiquities in early 20th-Century Europe. The John Marshall Archive Research Project Colloquium 2016,” posted January 28, 2016, https://britishschoolatrome.wordpress. com/2016/01/28/trading-antiquities-in-early-20th-century-europe-the-john-marshall-archive-research-project-colloquium-2016/. 6 Dyfri Williams, The Warren Cup, British Museum Objects in Focus (London: The British Museum Press, 2006). 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 173 photographs is from the Roman imperial period (made AD 30–40), although it is thought to be modelled on an early classical Greek style.7 Now identifed as “Mercury”, Warren referred to the statue by the Greek name, “Hermes”,8 a god associated with homoeroticism in the ancient world.9 It is one of a number of male nudes, in addition to hundreds of other pieces of sculpture and antiquities, from Greece and Rome which Warren purchased in collaboration with the man pictured with him in the garden photographs, his collecting and life partner, the archaeologist John Marshall (1862–1928).10 As Warren’s latest biographer, David Sox, suggests, Warren’s life and work were framed by the Winckelmannian idea that “the love of beautiful young men was connected with the spirit of Greek sculpture”.11 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) had instituted this notion as part of the establishment of his enduring paradigm for the modern appreciation and analysis of antique sculpture.12 Like Winckelmann, Warren’s own contribution to Western engagement with ancient sculpture (substantially expanding the collections of antiquities in European and, in particular, American museums at the turn of the twentieth century) was also framed and fuelled by homoerotic desires,13 in particular

7 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Collection Database. “95.67”, http://www.mfa.org/collections, accessed January 1, 2018. Photographs of the statue can be viewed on the online database, https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/mercury-hermes-151148, accessed January 1, 2018. See Mary B. Comstock and Cornelius C. Vermeule, Sculpture in Stone: The Greek, Roman and Etruscan Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1976), 145. 8 Osbert Henry Burdett and Edgar Henry Goddard, Edward Perry Warren: The Biography of a Connoisseur (London: Christophers, 1941), 185. 9 Thomas F. Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 252. 10 On Warren’s collection, see Murley, “Impact”. On Warren’s sexually-themed acquisitions, see Jennifer Grove, “The Collection and Reception of Sexual Antiquities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Exeter, 2013). 11 H. David Sox, Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren & the Lewes House Brotherhood (London: Fourth Estate, 1991), 17. 12 Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 13 See Martin Burgess Green, The Mount Vernon Street Warrens: A Boston Story, 1860– 1910 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), 88; Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), Chapter 1. 174 J. GROVE those inspired by the ancient convention of paederastia (paederasty)— an erotic mentorship between an older man (erastes, lover) and younger man (eromenos, beloved).14 Warren clearly subscribed to Winckelmann’s thesis that Greek sculpture’s unsurpassed artistic achievement was inextricably linked to a profound ancient admiration of youthful, male beauty.15 These ideas continued to facilitate modern male–male desire for men like Warren via the nineteenth-century reception of Winckelmann by Walter Pater (1839–1894) and his disciples, as part of the Aesthetic movement.16 Both Warren and Winckelmann are also noted for their especially visual and haptic relationship with antiquity. According to Warren’s friends and biographers, Osbert Henry Burdett (1885–1936) and Edgar Henry Goddard (1896–1983): “Being born with a strong visual and tactile sense [Warren] never fell into the common error of over-emphasis on the literary and philological side of the Classics”.17 The photograph of Warren holding the Hermes recalls the account of how Winckelmann “fngers those pagan marbles” as part of his famously embodied, sensory and emotional engagement with ancient male nudes.18 However, like Winckelmann and his followers, statues were not only important for Warren as material objects in the present day with which one could engage visually and tangibly,19 they were also vehicles which could transmit to the present a sense of an historical Greek past.20 Ancient sculpture was not just the means by which—because of its especial veneration in Western eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

14 William A. Percy, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 15 See Potts, Flesh, 5. 16 Stefano Evangelista and Katherine Harloe, “Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’: Aesthetic Criticism and Classical Reception,” in Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism, eds. Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, and Elizabeth Prettejohn (Oxford: OUP Oxford, 2017), 63–80. 17 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 365. 18 Lene Østermark-Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 87. 19 See the Introduction to this volume. 20 Daniel Orrells, Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 19–20. See Katharina Boehm in this volume. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 175 society—men could engage more safely with images of naked male bod- ies21; it also spoke of actual historical relations between men, and specifc qualities of those relations, from a culture in which they had been celebrated. While previous scholarship has acknowledged the importance of ancient sculpture in Warren’s life and work, this aspect of his relationship with the past and its connection to his sexual philosophy, as well as to his real-life relationships, has not yet been examined in detail. Scholars such as classicist and art historian Caroline Vout have rightly criticised the too readily made conclusion that male collectors’ interests in classicised male nudes are necessarily always proof of personal homoerotic tastes. Vout has also advised caution about viewing Warren’s wider collection as a straightforward stand-in for his sexual ideals and she highlights many other factors which shaped Warren’s acquisition strategy.22 I address these concerns in this chapter by picking apart the precise role ancient sculpture played in for- mulating specifc aspects of Warren’s sexual ideology. I consider Warren’s collection of male nudes in conjunction with analysis of evidence from his archival material and published works that demonstrates the ideologically and erotically driven motivations of his interest in this ancient object-type. Studying Warren’s life and work in this way elucidates statuary’s role in constructing same-sex identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and also how this related to rapidly changing gender politics at the time. It demonstrates how interpretations of historical material and visual culture fed into, and were fed by, debates within sexological, scholarly and aesthetic circles about the nature of male–male relationships, behaviours and identities, and associated legal and societal changes. These debates included the issue of age difference between male partners; the connection between masculinity and same- sex desire; the extent to which close attachments between men were sexual; and the role of women in a society that supports erotic relationships between men. Many of these debates in the latter half of the nineteenth century, insofar as they drew upon antiquity, had largely focused on

21 See Donald H. Mader, “The Greek Mirror: The Uranians and Their Use of Greece,” Journal of Homosexuality 49, no. 3/4 (2005): 377–420 (388). 22 Caroline Vout, “Romantic Visions: Collecting, Display and Homosexual Self- fashioning,” in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 232–51 (236). 176 J. GROVE readings of Plato.23 According to Warren these fourth-century BC texts could present an inaccurate image of ancient relationships between men and boys as a largely chaste and effeminated attachment. Warren challenged these ideas by turning to statuary, as well as other ancient visual culture, which had been made in—or in the style of—the early Classical Greek period (the frst half of the ffth century BC), which he identifed as a golden age for the type of paederastic attachments he espoused. Ancient male nudes in particular allowed Warren to affrm a model of a virile, ethical attachment between an older and younger man, which also had a sexual dimension. Statues helped him to develop a paradigm for contemporary Western society in which such relationships could be accepted and celebrated, and within which men could resist what Warren saw as the damaging effects of religious and sexual repression, and a culture increasingly “feminised” by growing gender equality.

Age- and Class-Structured Relationships The association between Hellenism and homoeroticism, which reached a peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century, has been widely recognised as having played a signifcant role in the negotiation and defence of male–male relationships, at a time when these were legally and socially proscribed, while antiquity was nevertheless revered as an ancestor of Western civilisation.24 Warren was in particular an advocate for “Uranian Love”, a term derived from the ancient Greek “heavenly” love of boys described in Plato’s Symposium.25 In the modern world, “Uranian” came to be used in a variety of ways in the context of male–male desire: it appeared in Germany as a new nineteenth-century sexological term for men who desired men, and in Britain to describe a specifc group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poets and writers, including Warren, who drew upon Greece in their depictions of desire for younger

23 Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 24 E.g. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3–4. On Rome, see Jennifer Ingleheart, Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 25 Plato, The Symposium, trans. Christopher Gill (London: Penguin, 1999), 180d–e, 181c. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 177 men and boys.26 Warren’s ideal was described in his three-volume work A Defence of Uranian Love (published in 1928–1932 but started around 1913), which sets out his vision for how ancient paederasty could be revived and justifed in the modern age.27 Although age-consistent desire between adult men and age-unequal desire between older men and boys were frequently confated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were specifc anxieties about the corruption of young people by adults at this time, as discussed below.28 For men like Warren, the ancient celebration of paederasty played an important role in affrming and validating this type of hierarchical attachment.29 This can be seen in Warren’s engagement with statuary. Warren was in his thirties in the 1890s when he purchased the Hermes nude and had photographs taken of himself embracing it. Like many Classical depictions of Hermes/Mercury, the god is shown in Warren’s statue as a teenager or young man.30 Warren’s photographs therefore rehearse nineteenth-century Greek-inspired paederastic fantasies about the ancient god.31 As well as providing pleasing representations of the young male body in the present, Warren believed that statues had played a role in facilitating paederasty in the ancient past, and that this might be re-enacted in the present-day. In Defence Warren describes how the ancient paederast, or “boy-lover” as he translates

26 Kaylor challenges the widely held belief that the word ‘Uranian’ used by British poets and authors is an Anglicised version of the German ‘urning’, frst used by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864 to describe men who desired men. Kaylor argues the British Uranians, being mostly Classicists, likely appropriated the term themselves directly from the Greek. They do not seem to have been associated with the German same-sex apologist movement, and differed in focusing more overtly on pederastic relationships and in not identifying with Ulrichs’ model of a Uranian as a female soul in a man’s body (see Footnote 86), Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (Brno, CZ: Masaryk University, 2006), xiii. For more on Uranian writers, see Timothy D’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ poets from 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970). 27 On Warren writing his “Magnum Opus” as he called it, which was done partly at Taormina, a paederastic destination in Sicily, Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 385. 28 Jana Funke, “‘We Cannot Be Greek Now’: Age Difference, Corruption of Youth and the Making of Sexual Inversion,” English Studies 94, no. 2 (2013): 139–53. 29 See Kaylor, Secreted. 30 Martin Henig, Religion in Roman Britain (London: Batsford, 1984), 41. 31 See Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 84. 178 J. GROVE this ancient term, was inspired by seeing young bodies “immortalised in sculpture”.32 This immortalisation preserves the youths at the age at which they are most appealing to the paederast.33 It also means the same bodies are preserved to be “admired and imitated in due course by the next generation (and all later generations)” of paederasts—an idea also featured in Winckelmann’s writing, as art historian Whitney Davis has observed.34 The modern “boy-lover”, Warren suggests, admires boys who have “the beauty of a Greek statue”.35 In this way, Warren’s writings resemble Pater’s description of the slippage between Winckelmann’s admiration for classical statuary and the eighteenth-century Italian young men he desired.36 In Defence Warren is careful to point out that he is concerned with “love distinguished by inequality of age”.37 His apologia is “restricted to the love of boys” which he calls “Uranian Love”—as opposed to love of fellow adult men, which he calls “Pausanian Love”, another reference to Plato’s Symposium.38 The “inequality” between partners within paederasty was a key aspect of Warren’s “defence” of age-differentiated relationships in the face of anxieties about the corruption of youth—in his own day and in antiquity, as this is an issue the ancient Greeks had also been concerned about. That Warren published Defence and his Uranian poetry under a pseudonym, Arthur Lyon Raile, suggests a sensitivity towards societal anxieties about paederasty. Warren stresses the benefts of Uranian Love for the younger partner, who, in the older, fnds

32 Edward Perry Warren, A Defence of Uranian Love, ed. Mark R. Miner (Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2009), 85. 33 The theme of young men losing their appeal as they age features in Warren’s poetry, see Michael Matthew Kaylor, “Introduction,” in The Collected Works & Commissioned Biography of Edward Perry Warren. Vol. I, ed. Michael Matthew Kaylor (Brno: Masaryk University Press, 2013), xi–cv (lxxxi, lxxii). 34 Davis, Queer, 31. 35 Warren, Defence, 16. See Green, Warrens, 87–8. 36 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 152. 37 Warren, Defence, 22. 38 Ibid., 22, n. 1. In Symposium Pausanias describes an attraction to “boys only when they start to have developed intelligence, and this happens around the time that they begin to grow a beard” (Plato, Symposium, 181d). Warren acknowledges that this passage describes young men but insists they are “more or less” adult, where as his ideal involves younger boys, although he never specifes an age, minimum or maximum. See Percy, Pederasty, 9. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 179 a dedicated teacher and guide.39 These ideas draw directly from the Platonic dialogues,40 but they also resemble other contemporary British discussions about “Uranian” relationships, such as those of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929).41 Another nineteenth-century writer and classicist, John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), had also espoused such ideas. However, as English scholar Jana Funke has shown, Symonds increasingly struggled with the issue of corruption and eventually concluded that age-different relationships between males could not be defended, even with reference to noble ideals from classical philosophy, and recommended that only age-equal relationships be decriminalised in UK law.42 Warren’s ideas often followed those of Symonds, as we will see, but he diverged from this earlier writer in remaining adamant that paederastia could play a positive role in modern society. Warren’s collection, display and dissemination of the classical male nude statue were an important part of his attempt to promulgate this Uranian ideal, in the face of public censure. The garden which appears in the photographs of the Hermes is that of Lewes House in Sussex, the eighteenth-century townhouse where Warren and Marshall set up an all-male community from 1890 and within which Warren displayed classical statuary from their collections as part of the inculcation of his Greek ideal amongst his like- minded friends.43 Furthermore, while he had published his writings and poetry pseudonymously, Warren’s collection of statues of naked youths and their dissemination to major museums allowed him the opportunity to celebrate Uranian Love much more publicly and safely. Although their public display was not unproblematic, as I explore below, there was an establishment endorsement of classical male nudes throughout the modern period.44 The third person who appears in the photograph of Warren, Marshall and the Hermes is regular Lewes guest Richard Fisher.45 Fisher went on to work for

39 Warren, Defence, 21. 40 Plato, Symposium, 178c, 184d–e. See Alastair Blanshard, Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 98. 41 Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (New York; London: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 104. 42 Funke, “Cannot”. See Orrells, Classical, Chapter 3. 43 John Potvin, “Askesis as Aesthetic Home: Edward Perry Warren, Lewes House, and the Ideal of Greek Love,” Home Cultures 8, no. 1 (2011), 71–89 (83). 44 Blanshard, Sex, 10. 45 The information about his identity was provided by Ann Spike, formerly of Lewes Town Council. 180 J. GROVE the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,46 where Warren would send the Hermes in 1896, probably soon after the photographs were taken.47 Warren called his work for Boston a “paederastic evangel”,48 and, according to Warren’s biographers, “[e]ach piece… was carefully chosen, not because it was archäologisch wichtig [archaeologically important] but because it displayed to a renegade world something of what Greece meant”.49 Warren’s provision of Greek male nudes in particular was meant to display Greek homoeroticism to a wider public.50 This included making public images like the Hermes, which encouraged not just the appreciation of male bodies,51 but of youthful male bodies, and which furthermore embodied the ancient valorisation of ethical, pedagogical and erotic mentorships between men and boys.52 However, despite fuelling Warren’s idealisation of paederasty, I suggest statuary also played an important part in his most signifcant real- life relationship—that with John Marshall, who was in fact nearly the same age as him. According to Warren’s biographers, Marshall shared Warren’s “fortune, his projects, and his heart”, and theirs was a partnership in some ways characterised by equality.53 A photograph, possibly taken in the same session as the Hermes set, shows how Warren and Marshall came to closely resemble one another: here they are dressed in the same clothes and even hold matching dogs.54 While English scholar Michael Kaylor has suggested that “[Warren’s] collecting activities certainly arose in the context of love, it was paederastic love—not […] his Pausanian love for Marshall,”55 I argue that statuary bolstered and enriched both types of male attachments in Warren’s life and work.

46 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 139. 47 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Collection Database. “95.67”, http://www.mfa.org/ collections, accessed January 4, 2018. 48 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 400. 49 Ibid., 366. Warren and his friends often wrote in German, Latin and Greek, see Kaylor, “Introduction,” liii. 50 See Green, Warrens, 127. 51 See ibid. 52 See Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 400. 53 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 110. 54 This is the cover image for Rodger Streitmatter, Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). See Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 100–1. 55 Kaylor, “Introduction,” liv. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 181

Statues were able to strengthen Warren and Marshall’s age-equal relationship: the connoisseurial, intellectual, romantic and domestic aspects of their partnership were facilitated through a shared project of study and collecting. This is exemplifed by their jointly developed “pelvic line” method of analysing male nudes by the shape of a statue’s pubic region, including that of “our Hermes”, the statue from the photographs.56 In the summer of 1893 on a trip to Rome, away from his partner, Marshall wrote to Warren about his analysis of the “pelvic line” of statues he was encountering, declaring that “those beastly Hebungen [“swellings”] will be the only thing to rescue me from blank despair […] for I feel very lonely here”.57 As a subject of eroticised scholarship, the male nude— even those embodying Uranian sentiments such as the Hermes—served to establish a connection between these men of equal age in the absence of physical intimacy. Art historian John Potvin has also explored the way in which, throughout Lewes House, statuary—the fruits of Warren and Marshall’s joint acquisitions programme—was displayed as part of the interior decoration of their shared home, and the fashioning of what Potvin has described as their alternative “queer domesticity”.58 The egalitarian nature of their relationship is highlighted in the strength of their collecting partnership, which brought together Warren’s connoisseurial talents with Marshall’s archaeological skills—each partner bringing his own expertise.59 One reason for the production of the photographs of Warren and Marshall with the Hermes is very likely the fact that this was probably the frst male nude which they purchased together, in 1895, near the start of their shared collecting venture.60 However, despite this, I want to highlight that there was also an asymmetrical aspect to Warren and Marshall’s relationship if we consider the issue of class-differentiation, and in this, too, statuary had its role.61 Although class was not a key part of Warren’s ideal, he acknowledges in Defence that in a Uranian attachment “the boy” may be “not

56 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 183–5. See Green, Warrens, 88. 57 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 183. See Murley, “Impact,” 100. 58 Potvin, “Askesis,” 80. 59 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 338. 60 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Collection Database. “95.67”, http://www.mfa.org/ collections, accessed January 1, 2018; Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 342, see 151. 61 On Uranianism and class, see Mader “Mirror,” 390. 182 J. GROVE of [the older partner’s] own station”.62 Carpenter had championed class difference as an alternative or complement to age difference in a benefcial “Uranian” relationship.63 Marshall was from a middle-class background, while Warren’s family was distinctly upper class and his abundant wealth created hierarchy in their relationship.64 According to his biographers, Warren acted as “patron and protector, guide and inspiration” to many “boys and young men” considerably younger than him, but Marshall, despite being Warren’s contemporary, was his foremost benefciary.65 Marshall was offcially Warren’s secretary, and Warren provided the means for him to live, travel and collect sculpture and antiquities.66 Sculpture here functioned as a commodifed object, the purchase of which created a hierarchy between the person with money and the person spending it. In letters approving Marshall’s spending on acquisitions, Warren addresses him as “my dear boy”.67 These letters therefore evoke both an employer-employee and erastes-eromenos dynamic which existed in conjunction with the egalitarian qualities of their relationship discussed above. As art historian James Murley suggests, the composition of the photograph of Warren, Marshall and the Hermes, with Warren in the centre, facing front and holding the statue, signalling his ownership, while Marshall at his side leans into him, does hint at a real-life attachment structured not by age, but by fnancial means.68 Statuary, therefore, acting as an aesthetic image of a youthful ideal of beauty, a piece of archaeological evidence about the historical existence of ancient male–male relations, an antiquity for connoisseurial appreciation and a prized commodity for purchase, was able to facilitate both the development of Warren’s sexual ideal of age-different male attachments, and his real-life relationships with other men which in reality encom- passed both egalitarian and hierarchal aspects.

62 Warren, Defence, 33. 63 Carpenter, Intermediate Sex, 107–8. 64 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 101, 70. Kaylor, “Introduction,” xli. 65 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 81, 131. Warren’s relationships with most younger men were probably not romantic or sexual, see Kaylor, “Introduction,” lxiii. 66 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 119-120, see also Chapter 9. 67 Warren to Marshall, 24/10/1892, reproduced in ibid., 164. 68 Murley, “Impact,” 99. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 183

Masculine Aesthetics The specifc brand of ancient age-different relationship that Warren wished to revive in the modern day was one which roundly rejected effeminacy, and this was informed by his engagement with a particularly athletic style of classical male nude. Warren’s ideas here should be viewed against a backdrop of an ongoing debate about the compatibility of masculinity and male same-sex desire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Defence Warren explains that it was with “no softened ἐρώμενος (eromenos, beloved) that the Greek lover was occupied”.69 Upon seeing young men’s “frm outlines and hard muscles immortalised in sculpture” the ancient paederast was struck by the “power and glory of the masculine”.70 The sculpted representations which inspired the ancient paederast depict not just any young male bodies, then, but bodies, Warren explains, perfected by time spent at the palaestra (wres- tling ground) and other spaces of athleticism.71 These ideas are drawn from Winckelmann;72 however, in his particular insistence on the “hardness” of the physical and moral qualities of the Greek eromenos, trained in self-discipline, Warren’s model is more closely aligned to that of Symonds in A Problem in Greek Ethics (1873).73 Not only does the Hermes statue from the photographs exemplify aesthetically the type of sculpted body Warren describes, but the god himself was especially signifcant in this regard: Hermes was the Greek deity of athletics, with statues of him often erected in ancient gymnasiums, and in poetry he was associated with erotic liaisons that happened between men and boys who trained naked in this space.74 Warren’s, and Symonds’s, use of the “hard” and “soft” dichotomy to describe the aesthetic and ethical qualities of real-life ancient young men and their sculpted form, drew upon the language of art historical analysis, especially the chronological classifcation of Greek statuary frst

69 Warren, Defence, 85. The words in brackets are the editor’s of this edition of Defence. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Davis, Queer, 31. 73 John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion; Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists (London: Privately printed, 1901), 69. 74 Scanlon, Eros, 252. 184 J. GROVE proposed by Winckelmann in History of the Art of Antiquity in 1764. Warren revered the athletic depictions of male bodies of Winckelmann’s “High Style” of the early classical Greek period (the frst half of the ffth century BC),75 which art historian Alex Potts has described as being characterised by “hardness and angularity of contour”.76 For instance, Myron’s famous Discobolus (discus-thrower), a statue of a body caught in a moment of action in the very activity that honed its toned physique, personifying the disciplined training of the palaestra, the space where such bodies might have been admired or even accessed by the ancient paederast.77 In Winckelmann’s chronology the “High Style” had been followed by the “Beautiful Style” of the later Classical Greek period (the later ffth century and fourth century BC), in which the “hardness” of previous periods was replaced by what Potts has described as a “new graceful beauty”.78 Though considered by Winckelmann and his nineteenth-century followers as the pinnacle of Greek achievement, Warren viewed the Beautiful Style largely as a degradation in ancient art and in homoerotic aesthetics. Warren was highly critical of Praxiteles—often thought to be the master of the Beautiful Style—describing a male nude identifed as a copy of a Praxitelean Eros, for instance, as a “drooping fgure”.79 Warren’s divergence from popular views about sculpture were in line with what his biographers describe as his wider criticism of the “standard ‘Classical’ view”, established by previous generations of Hellenists and aesthetes like Pater, which supposedly betrayed a certain “softness” caused by a “sentimental intrusion from their own Romantic age”.80 Again, Warren here followed Symonds who had also noted the “lack of

75 John Davidson Beazley, “Obituary Edward Perry Warren,” The Times, January 1, 1929, 3. 76 Potts, Flesh, 68. 77 See Ian Jenkins, The Discobolus (London: British Museum, 2012). On Warren and Discobolus, see Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 10. 78 Potts, Flesh, 67–8, 91. 79 Warren, Defence, 32. This refers to the Eros at Thespiai, a lost Greek sculpture thought to be known to modernity via Roman copies, see Aileen Ajootian, “Praxiteles,” in Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture, ed. Olga Palagia and J.J. Pollitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 91–129 (113–4). 80 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 365. See Østermark-Johansen, Pater, 73. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 185 true virility” in later Greek statuary.81 Warren did admire the much later fourth-century BC work of the sculptor Lysippos but precisely because he found himself “refreshed by the Lysippean reaction against that softer and more feminine art” of the later Classical period.82 Warren describes Lysippos’ “ideal of athletic manhood”, the brawny Apoxyomenos, as a “hero of discipline”.83 This statue shows an athlete depicted in the moment of scraping sweat from his body following vigorous exercise, and embodies the “hard” quality of ancient homoeroticism which Warren aimed to revive in the modern day. Warren’s preference for the “hard” aesthetics of Greek male nudes and ethics of ancient paederasty was an important part of his defence of male–male relationships against the charge of associated effeminacy, degeneration, and corruption. In Defence Warren poses a question he anticipates from readers: “Will there not be something immoral and unmanly in [the older lover’s] nature tending to demoralise or effeminate the boy?”84 “Boy-love”, he continues “is often thought of as a disease”.85 In the latter half of the nineteenth century German sexological theories had proposed that “sexual inversion” could be explained in terms of a “feminine soul contained in a masculine body”.86 Symonds had responded to this pathologised model of male–male desire by stress- ing the “hardihood” of ancient attachments between men,87 and this supported his later proposition that modern “inverts” could be healthy as well as “athletic, masculine in habits, frank in manner”.88 They could, in other words, conform to what historian Ivan Crozier calls “Victorian

81 John Addington Symonds, Essays Speculative and Suggestive (Chapman and Hall, 1890), 66. See also Ernest Henry Short, A History of Sculpture (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 194. 82 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 334. 83 Warren, Defence, 33. 84 Ibid., 36. 85 Ibid. 86 See Footnote 26. Ulrichs interpreted this as love of “young men” rather than “boys”, Matzner, “Uranians to Homosexuals,” 80. 87 Symonds, Greek Ethics, 69. 88 John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics. Being an Enquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists (London: Privately Published, 1896), 15. 186 J. GROVE concepts of manliness”.89 For Warren, masculinity was not only compat- ible with male–male desire, but was the crucial difference between true “boy-love” and “vice”.90 Although Warren did not engage as directly with medicine and the law as Symonds had done, he nevertheless speaks to contemporary debates that clearly moved between these felds and the felds of aesthetics, classics and collecting into the early twentieth century. Nineteenth-century aestheticism had also perpetuated an association between homoerotic desires and effeminate behaviour, and linked these with the love of antiquity and classical art. These ideas had been brought to greater public attention in 1895, the year Warren and Marshall purchased the Hermes, with the trial of writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)—one of the best known aesthetes and Hellenists of the time—on the charge of “gross indecency” with other men, including younger individuals.91 English and Classics scholar Stefano Evangelista has suggested that the Aesthetic movement and its turn to Greece lost credibility following Wilde’s arrest.92 Warren in many ways continued to subscribe to the principles of aestheticism and in particular its paederastic elements after this moment, but was determined to try to sever the association with “softness” and a loss of masculinity. In order to promote these ideals through the wider dissemination of sculpture, Warren hoped to be able to acquire an example of “High Style” Greek statuary from the early Classical period. However, as Warren himself proclaimed, even for the foremost collector of antiquities at that time, “[o]riginal Greek marbles” were hard to fnd.93 The Hermes is one of a number of Roman statues acquired by Warren which

89 Ivan Crozier, “Introduction,” in Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion, A Critical Edition, ed. Ivan Crozier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–86 (8). 90 Warren, Defence, 39. 91 Dowling, Hellenism, Chapter 1. 92 Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 158–65. Wilde and Pater had attempted to deploy a reading of pederasty as described by Plato as virile and not effeminate, see Dowling, Hellenism, 3; Orrells, Classical, 159. 93 See Edward Perry Warren, “The Bowdoin Collection,” in Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 414–9 (417). Availability of material is another factor shaping Warren’s collecting, see Footnote 22. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 187 were thought to be based upon the early Classical Greek style,94 and which had to satisfy Warren’s desire for a Greek “original”.95 In providing the Hermes and other examples to museums, Warren was not only trying to evangelise about age-differentiated relationships, but was motivated by an attempt to demonstrate the particular virile, masculine quality of ancient attachments, which he believed was embodied in this certain type of Greek statuary.

Platonic Love and Sexual Relationships Between Men and Boys Statuary also played a role in Warren’s insistence that Uranian Love should be a sexual attachment. Here Warren was speaking to another long-standing modern dispute about the physical dimension of ancient and modern paederasty. In the nineteenth century there had been an attempt to defend contemporary male–male relations from what historian Linda Dowling has called the “blind urgencies of a merely animal sexuality”, by drawing attention away from enduring associations between male bonding and sodomy.96 The interpretation of Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus—texts which gained in popularity from the mid-nineteenth century—fed such debates about the nature of modern relationships between men and boys. As we will see, statuary and other antiquities provided a different perspective on this topic for Warren. Warren’s Defence begins with instructions that the modern day Uranian lover must fulfl “both his bodily and his spiritual nature”,97 so long as this sensual relationship will also be benefcial for the junior partner, as discussed above. This draws upon what Warren refers to as a “golden passage” from Plato’s Symposium, in which the character of Pausanias declares it is considered ethical if the eromenos “gratifes [his lover] in the hope of becoming better through the lover’s friendship”.98

94 Other examples are “01.8190” and “92.2741”, http://www.mfa.org/collections, accessed January 4, 2018. 95 Jen Grove, “The Role of Roman Artefacts in E. P. Warren’s ‘Paederastic Evangel’,” in Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 214–31 (221). 96 Dowling, Hellenism, 115–6. 97 Warren, Defence, 13. 98 Ibid. See Plato, Symposium, 185a–b. 188 J. GROVE

Warren brought his ideas about the aesthetic styles of Greek male nudes, as discussed in the previous section, to his analysis of ancient physical paederasty. Warren and Marshall, through their pioneering study and collection of antiquities, also recognised that a particular type of scene painted on Greek vases, in which older and younger men engage in sexual activity, appeared only in the sixth and early ffth century BC, and practically disappeared after this.99 This disappearance coincides with the change in the later ffth century and fourth century BC to the supposed “softer” male nude statue, as discussed above. Warren also identifed an aesthetic shift in written descriptions of paederasty. Plato’s fourth-century BC dialogues, although highly infuential on Warren’s thinking, were “not of the good period”, according to a note in one of Warren’s notebooks.100 In other words Plato was not working in the “golden age of boy-love”,101 or what Warren also called the “pre-eminently paederastic period”102—the early Classical period which had produced the type of “hard” male nudes and vase paintings with scenes of paederastic sex that he admired. Warren describes Plato as “Praxitelean”—referring to the sculptor of the same period whose “softer” depictions of men Warren disparaged, as we have seen.103 In one of Warren’s notebooks Plato is accused of “softening” the “strict ffth-century rule” by changing the defnition of “beauty” from athletic heroism to a “soft, smooth, slippery thing”.104 Furthermore, Warren believed that aspects of Plato’s writing on paederastia, like the vases of the same period, lack sexuality: they are “Puritan”, according to Defence.105 This reading, although Warren does not make it explicit (he often refers simply to “Plato”, without specifying

99 Grove, “Collection,” 229–35, 244; Warren, Defence, 84. Scholars now suggest all sexual scenes dramatically reduced on vases after this period, see Robin Osborne, “Desiring Women on Athenian Pottery,” in Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece and Italy, eds. Natalie Kampen and Bettina Ann Bergmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65–80 (72). 100 Notebook, Edward Perry Warren Archives (uncatalogued.) Now housed in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. 101 Warren, Defence, 85. 102 Ibid., 84. 103 Ibid., 32, 233. See 428. 104 Notebook, Edward Perry Warren Archives (uncatalogued.) Now housed in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. This refers to Plato’s Lysis. 105 Warren, Defence, 130. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 189 a text or passage), is most probably derived from a particular interpretation of the speech of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Here Plato arguably prioritises abstract spiritual and philosophical learning over the physical desire for a boy.106 As we have already seen, Plato’s Symposium also provided Warren with his “golden passage” about the physical nature of paederasty and other sentiments with which he strongly agreed. It is important to acknowledge that Plato’s texts include many different characters who propose sometimes contradictory ideas about paederastia, including in regards to its physical nature.107 Warren contrasted the “Puritan” aspects of Plato with the odes of early Classical poet Pindar, written during the “golden age of boy-love” which wholeheartedly celebrate the sexual appeal of young, naked male athletes.108 For instance, compare Socrates in Plato’s Symposium: “he will regard beauty of body as something petty”,109 with Pindar’s “I […] melt […] whenever I look upon the fresh-limbed youth of boys”.110 From his analysis of evidence from literature, vase painting and Greek sculptural art, therefore, we see that Warren observed a feminisation in depictions of the male body and a diminishment in the celebration of physical paederastic encounters after the early Classical Greek period. Warren’s insistence on the sexual nature of paederasty should be viewed in the context of his fellow modern Uranians’ recourse to ideas of spiritual celibacy in order to defend male–male love from legal and social censure. As Dowling has described, in the later nineteenth century, by drawing largely on the Socratic philosophy in Plato, Uranian Love had been presented as a “spiritual and emotional attachment that was, at some ultimate level, innocent or asexual”.111 Symonds had argued against this reading of antiquity which suggested ancient relationships between men were “free from sensuality”.112 Warren, as we have seen, did not defend Plato, but criticised what he saw as the “Puritan” elements of the philosophical texts. Rather, he turned to

106 Plato, Symposium, 210c–d. 107 Christopher Gill, “Preface,” in Plato, Symposium, vii. 108 Warren, Defence, 85. 109 Plato, Symposium, 210c. 110 Pindar, Fragment 123, Beloved Boy Theoxenus, translation from Thomas. K. Hubbard, “Pindar, Theoxenus, and the Homoerotic Eye,” Arethusa 35, no. 2 (2002): 255–96 (256). 111 Dowling, Hellenism, 115. 112 Symonds, Greek Ethics, 8. 190 J. GROVE material from earlier Greek history, including statuary, which held out the potential for a sexualised but still healthy and ethical model of relationships with boys. Writing in the early twentieth century, Warren’s particular resolve in Defence on the issue of sexual relations was very likely a response to the well-publicised reference by Wilde in court in 1895 to the “pure” attachment found in Plato between an older and younger man.113 Warren’s use of “Puritan” to describe Platonic works also connects these debates about the interpretation of ancient paederastia with Warren’s condemnation of the “unhealthy Puritanism” of his Bostonian upbringing.114 Of Boston Warren said: “Here with cold winds and snow, the traditions of Puritanism … and the absence of aesthetic sympathy, all Greece is frozen out”.115 This explains Warren’s concentration on Boston and its Museum of Fine Arts in his provision of antiquities to institutions. As I argue elsewhere, material and visual culture were the most powerful tools with which Warren could communicate a pagan “frankness” about sexuality, that he believed would act as a powerful antidote to Boston’s prudery.116 Warren provided the Boston museum with a substantial collection of vases and other ancient artefacts featuring explicit sexual imagery, including sexual acts between men.117 Such imagery, however, proved to be too challenging, and most was not put on public display during Warren’s lifetime. While there is evidence of anxiety within the museum about displaying the male nudes Warren provided, they were enough of a conventional feature of a classical collection that they did appear in Boston’s public galleries.118 Examples of male nudes in the early Greek muscular style in particular could work to publically counter repressive societal attitudes about the naked body and

113 Dowling, Hellenism, 1. 114 Warren to Brimmer, 8/12/1894, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston records, 1870–1973, REELS 536–565, Archives of American Art. 115 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 111. 116 Grove, “Role,” 218–9. 117 Ibid., 224–30. 118 Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Oxford University Press, 1970): 31, 674. Anxieties about displaying male nudes were increased if— unlike the Hermes—the genitalia were still intact. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 191 sexuality, but more specifcally encourage the celebration of the sexual appeal of the young, athletic male body.

Anti-feminism The historical explanation which Warren used to account for, as he saw it, the feminisation of ancient art had disturbing implications for him as he witnessed a disagreeable increase in contemporary female liberation. Warren’s ideas should be seen in the context of the anxieties of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century men about women joining the political, educational and social sphere.119 Warren drew upon art historical theories which suggested that the “softening” of ancient Greek artistic styles was due to an increase in the presence of women in daily life in Athens in the second half of the ffth century BC,120 when, as Warren put it, “women mingled with the lives of men”.121 The earlier “golden age of boy-love” had existed, Warren thought, thanks to the strength of Greek patriarchal society.122 Of Greek adult men he writes: “On the male hung all their hope […] it would be a mistake to separate their affection for boys from their desire for sons”.123 Feminine infuences in later Greek history had undermined this masculine social organisation and masculine bonding, coinciding with a “softening” in Greek art and culture. I suggest Warren saw this as linked to the diminishment of the sexualised appreciation of young, virile bodies. The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century West in which Warren lived had, of course, reached greater gender equality than that which Warren supposed the Greeks had seen.124 He believed the hostility to erotic attachments between men in Christian society, originally

119 Michael S. Kimmel, “Men’s Responses to Feminism at The Turn of the Century,” Gender & Society 1, no. 3 (1987): 261–83. 120 Henry Beauchamp Walters, History of Ancient Pottery: Greek, Etruscan, and Roman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 376. 121 Warren, “Bowdoin,” 416. 122 Warren, Defence, 85. 123 Ibid., 130. 124 On Warren’s misogyny, see Sox, Bachelors, 17. On Uranianism and misogyny, see Kaylor, Secreted, 66. 192 J. GROVE produced by its unhealthy repression of sexuality, its heteronormativity, and its inherent effeminate “meekness”, was being further exacerbated by the increasing equality of the sexes and feminisation of society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.125 In Defence, Warren suggests “the Greeks disregarded women. We have disregarded men”.126 Warren thought that America was especially experiencing the “predom- inance of women and the feminine virtues”.127 This provides a further explanation for why Warren concentrated on Boston in sending ancient material. Beautiful, classical sculptures of men in the early Greek athletic style could also persuade contemporary men of the benefts of reaffrm- ing a highly masculine social arrangement. Warren felt especially betrayed by the entry of women into the University of Oxford just as he transferred from Harvard in 1883. Warren’s biographers describe how Oxford was the one place in the modern world where “Greek masculinity could still fnd its devotees— with its young men working and thinking under the supervision of older men”.128 Warren took the famous Classics course known as Literae Humaniores (or ‘Greats’),129 in which, as classicist Daniel Orrells has described, the Symposium and Phaedrus were read in intimate sessions between male tutors and pupils, mirroring Plato’s descriptions of ped- agogic, if not erotic, attachments between older and younger men.130 By the time Warren arrived “Oxford Hellenism” had already produced writers such as Pater, Symonds and Wilde, all of whom deployed Greek motifs in their homoerotic poetry and writing.131 Warren believed that if such a place could “foster real personal sympathy and love between older and younger [men]”, it was required that “women should be kept out”.132 Around the time Warren arrived at Oxford the permission granted to dons to marry and the new admission of women students

125 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 391–2. See also 301. 126 Warren, Defence, 305. These comments are likely inspired in large part by the granting of the vote for (some) women in the UK in 1918 and the US in 1920. 127 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 301. 128 Ibid., 374. 129 Ibid., 67; Kaylor, “Introduction,” xxxiv. 130 Orrells, Classical, Chapter 2. 131 Dowling, Hellenism. 132 Burdett and Goddard, Warren, 367. 8 “FIRM OUTLINES AND HARD MUSCLES IMMORTALISED” … 193 was, according to Dowling, “weakening the male homosocial college bond”—changes which many men like Warren resented and resisted.133 Warren’s establishment of Lewes House—his exclusively “masculine, communal environment”134—after leaving Oxford can be seen as a way of resisting the “feminisation” of Western society, and sculpture was signifcant in this effort. Warren set up a network to acquire ancient statuary and other antiquities which revolved around Lewes House, and which followed in a tradition of homosocial, if not homoerotic, collecting cultures that largely excluded women.135 Women were also not permitted to stay in or visit Lewes House as they “distract from the severe and higher ideal by inventing a refnement that it is the merit of Greek art to lack”.136 Inside the sanctuary of the house, Warren’s male guests could properly beneft from the impact of engaging with the ancient sculpture that was displayed in the home. Statues functioned as some of the only decoration in the otherwise sparse set-up, which Potvin calls “masculine minimalism”, designed to encourage “rig- orous simplicity and vigorous aesthetics” for the men of the household.137 The photographs of the Hermes in Lewes House garden show that, unlike a public museum, this was a private space in which Warren’s male guests could get close to, examine at leisure and even touch the ancient male body.138 Statues like the Hermes, as we have seen, embodied the creed Warren wanted for his community: the privileging of masculinity and male bonding, especially a paederastic eroticism, and the exclusion of femininity.

Conclusion This chapter set out to explore the way in which ancient statuary— acting as tangible objects to be engaged with in the present and as embod- iments of a historical reality in the past—helped to navigate male same-sex desire for the antiquities collector, classicist, and Uranian advocate Edward Perry Warren in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. We have

133 Dowling, Hellenism, 85. 134 Kaylor, “Introduction,” xlv. 135 See Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920,” Art History 24, no. 2 (2001): 247–77. 136 Warren, Defence, 59. 137 Potvin, “Askesis,” 84. Although on women in the house occasionally, see Murley, “Impact,” Footnote 349. 138 On differences between the public and private display of ancient sexuality via statuary see Donnellan in this volume. 194 J. GROVE seen that statuary provided inspiration for a specifc ideal of older and younger men in an erotic relationship, as well as the mode by which to promote that ideal to the world. As material artefacts to be collected and studied, sculpture also played a central role in Warren’s real-life age-equal partnership, highlighting the complexity of the history of the development of sexual identity and different models of male–male attachments in this period. For Warren, ancient statuary held out the possibility of virile, healthy and physical relationships between older and younger men. Warren thought the chronology of Greek art, in which a “harder” masculine aesthetic of male nudes of early Greek art was replaced by “softer” feminised depictions of young men, was evidence of the diminishment of the ancient masculine-centred social organisation which had cherished this type of relationship. This should be seen as a response in particular to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anxieties about the growing emancipation of women in the West. Although the acceleration of gender politics in Warren’s time brought a novel dimension to debates about masculinity, many of the issues that concerned Warren were a continuation of questions from the nineteenth century around the connection between the idealisation of ancient art, same-sex desire and gender expression. Ancient statuary, for Warren, could intervene in debates which had concerned the felds of classics and aestheticism, as well as medicine and the law, for several decades. These included the dangers or benefts of age-different attachments; the compatibility of masculinity with male same-sex desire; the pathologisation of this desire; and the role of sex or chastity within relationships between men.

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. CHAPTER 9

Encountering the Niobe’s Children: Vernon Lee’s Queer Formalism and the Empathy of Sculpture

Francesco Ventrella

Introduction: The Aesthetics of the Past A renowned Renaissance scholar and critic, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) occupies a special place in the historiography of art and cultural history not so much for her discoveries about the past, but for the way in which she used the past. What Goethe once said about Winckelmann should be valid for Lee as well: in reading her essays on art one learns nothing, but one becomes something.1 Lee’s use of the past is essential to understand

1 “Man lernt nichts wenn man ihn lieset, aber man wird etwas,” J.P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1955), 215.

This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to acknowledge Rowan Bailey, Julia Bryan Wilson, Zorian Clayton, The Drakes, Gordon Hall and Dawn Hoskins for responding with incisive comments to previous versions of this essay.

F. Ventrella (*) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 195 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_9 196 F. VENTRELLA what history meant to the late Victorians, but also how the past enabled them to think about their modernity. Since 1895, Lee’s interests as a historian had started to move towards contemporary discussions about psychophysiological aesthetics to study our bodily responses to the form of ancient statuary. For her, the history of art was the history of a human quest for a harmonious balance between the inner self and the outer world, and not the accumulation of facts organised through antiquarian systems. She argued that organic life can be attuned to the form of ancient statuary: “We can live off a beautiful object, we can live by its means”.2 Thus, Lee thought that art could furnish the organism with a tonic experience to enhance life and becoming “intimate with any great work of art” represented a possibility to fnd “a congruity with ourselves”.3 In her terms, the form of a work of art could be useful to literally style the self in both aesthetic and ethical ways. At the turn of the twentieth century, Lee started to keep some gallery diaries to annotate her physical responses in front of statues to examine the bodily adjustments occurring in organic functions such as breathing, heartbeat, or the speed of the eye movement. A document of Lee’s practice of self-observation, these diaries also represent an illuminating source to explain how she came to use ancient statues to produce a modern discourse of sexuality. In a passage of the diaries that builds upon the tradition of the paragone between literature and sculpture, Lee suggests that the previous has a “moral power” that the latter lacks:

The more a statue makes us look at it, the more it holds us by its reality, the less moral (or immoral) feelings we shall have. These are got largely by substituting the word for the form. If men have been in love with statues, it is because they have substituted for them the fesh and blood images in their memory. It is in this way that art, by reversing the process and fur- nishing us with artistic images and emotions to be revived by real things — by accustoming us to translate reality into form (instead of form into reality) — can purify and elevate the contents of our consciousness.4

Here, the love of statues stages an obvious Pygmalionic scene, which becomes useful to identify a gendered visual system. The men in the

2 Vernon Lee, “Art and Life I,” Contemporary Review 69 (May 1896), 666. 3 Vernon Lee, Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life (London: John Lane, 1909), 91. 4 Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912), 266. Italics in the original text. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 197 text could be taken almost literally as men stocking up images in their mind, against whom Lee voices an oblique critique of the social production of the male gaze. Michael Hatt reminds us that, during the late nineteenth century, for many artists and critics sculpture remained “the most elevated, moral and beautiful” of the arts.5 Yet, in the heroic and idealist celebration of the classical nude of late-Victorian criticism, sculpture’s moral standards could only be measured by means of an irresolvable erotic tension that statues posed as marble doubles of bodies of fesh.6 The fact that, in this passage, Lee refuses to look at statues as gendered doubles of the body represents the precondition for the creation of another chain of signifcation specifc to the language of sculpture. Purifed from their association with real bodies, the statues can now be appreciated only according to their own form, which is according to a formalist system. Lee is obviously not campaigning for a puritanical position against the idols of marble, but is using the critical language of formalism to free sculpture from the moral imperatives imposed by the mimetic representation of the human body. Kathy Psomiades has convincingly dismissed the polemic against Lee’s puritanism by suggesting that her work on psychological aesthetics, in association with her “tendency to ‘intellectualise’ love relationships” with her collaborators, must be considered as “less a denial of sexuality than it is a sexual style”.7 In this chapter, I am going to read Lee’s engagement with psychophysiological aesthetics and formalism in sculpture along these lines, as an exercise to model the self plastically. Lee’s reconfguration of the human form through the abstract language of formalism, therefore, should be taken as a form of intellectual asceticism, germane to Michel Foucault’s notion of askēsis, often referred to as “the exercise of oneself in the activity of thinking”.8 Exercises are

5 Michael Hatt, “Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude,” in Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith (London: Tate, 2001), 37–49 (37). 6 On this regard, see Alex Potts, “Male Phantasy and Modern Sculpture,” Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 2 (1992): 38–47. For an exploration of the queer tensions of sculpture in Britain during the long nineteenth century, see David Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 7 Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “‘Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace’: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21–41 (30). 8 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2: History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 9. 198 F. VENTRELLA transforming practices, practices by which one undergoes changes. The very aim of the exercise is to alter the practitioner.9 Ancient statues represented for Lee a special tool to exercise non-conforming ideas about gender and sexuality. In liberating the statue from its natural role as a referent of the human body and as object of art-historical knowledge, Lee created a queer space for an investigation of modern perceptions of sexuality which eluded the gender binary. While I discuss Lee’s encounters with statues of Niobids in her writings I will argue that her harnessing of the language of formalism and psychophysiological theories represented a modernist critique of the antiquarian methods founded on objectivity and accumulation of facts. A popular theme in ancient sculpture, the Niobids group illustrates the killing of the fourteen children of the queen of Thebes Niobe as a pun- ishment for having hubristically mocked the goddess Leto who had only two children, Apollo and Artemis. In her writings, however, Lee never assesses this sculptural group to corroborate any of the categories of connoisseurship: authorship, period and provenance. Rather, she proposes to invest the pastness of the statues with a modern aesthetic and a sexual imagination which represents one of the most sophisticated experiments in writing about sculpture from the turn of the twentieth century.

The Queer Child of Sculpture Since Susan Lanzoni sketched out the scientifc map of Vernon Lee’s work in psychological aesthetics and empathy theories, more scholars have started to engage with a parallel reassessment of her role in the development of formalist criticism and its cultural transformations.10 However, the frst essay in which Lee engaged with formalism predates

9 I take the reading of Foucault’s askēsis as exercise from Ladelle McWhorter, “Asceticism/Askēsis: Foucault’s Thinking Historical Subjectivity,” in Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental Thought, eds. Arleen B. Dallery, Charles E. Scott, and P. Holley Robert (Albany: State University of New York Press), 243–54. 10 Susan Lanzoni, “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 4 (2009): 330–54; Carolyn Burdett, “‘The Subjective Inside Us Can Turn into the Objective Outside’: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011): n.p.; Kirsty Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Benjamin Morgan, “Critical Empathy: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics and the Origins of Close Reading,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 1 (2012): 31–56. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 199 the psychological work of the 1890s. As Jonah Siegel has noted, Lee’s “The Child in the Vatican” (1881) “anticipates a modern aesthetic regime in which the formal qualities of artworks will be the measure of their achievement”.11 In this early experiment in formalist art writing, a visit to the Vatican gallery becomes the trigger for a number of considerations on the relationship between the medium of sculpture and history, but also on the relationship between formalist art writing and embodied aesthetics. In this way, Lee intended to set up an opposition between a formal and sensorial understanding of ancient statuary and the dominant antiquarianism of her time. Yet, this operation required some adjustments of the tradition of sculptural criticism. The essay was much indebted to Walter Pater’s aesthetic writings, but in planning her intellectual visit to the Vatican sculpture gallery, Lee was also engaging with a longer queer lineage of male aesthetic thinkers that included Goethe and Winckelmann.12 As Stefano Evangelista has pointed out, by the time Lee published her essay, the Vatican had become “the theatre for a culturally sanctioned type of love- making between the male critic and the male body as represented in ancient statues like the Apollo Belvedere or the Antinous”.13 In order to understand how Lee found her own critical voice among this male homosocial literature, we need to consider the role of the child in the text. Evangelista has suggested that, in line with the German Romantic tradition of Schiller and Hegel who saw the Greeks as “the children of humanity in an evolutionary history of European culture”, Lee’s child becomes the embodiment of the childhood of art.14 But the little visitor of the Vatican gallery also reminds us of eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s romantic concept of child, whose aesthetic sensitivities are yet unspoiled by modern education. Unable to read the

11 Jonah Siegel, “The Material of Form: Vernon Lee at the Vatican and Out of It,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (2013): 189–201 (199). 12 Scholars have already noted that Lee’s essay is intertextually connected to Pater’s ‘Child in the House’ (1878). Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 56. 13 Stefano Evangelista, “Vernon Lee in the Vatican: The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archaeology,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 1 (2009): 31–41 (38). 14 Evangelista, British Aestheticism, 61. 200 F. VENTRELLA statues, Lee’s child is only attracted to their form and colour. Thus, the encounter with the child allows Lee to refect on the silent art of sculpture as the conduit for a formalist aesthetics of perception:

To the child, the modern child, it [sculpture] is speechless; it knows not a word of the language understood by the child’s fancy […] The child does not recognise in it anything familiar: these naked, or half naked, limbs are things which the child has never seen, at least, never observed; they do not, in their unfamiliarity, their vagueness, constitute an individual character […]; but in these vague, white things, with their rounded white check, and clotted white hair, with their fold of white drapery about them, the child recognises nothing: men? women? it does not ask: for it, they are mere things, fgures cut out of stone.15

Lee’s child can only be gender neutral like the statues it inquisitively beholds. Neither men, nor women, the statues are not perceived by the child as gendered body doubles; they are just “mere things”. The whiteness of the marbles in the Vatican points to the blankness of meaning which they embody and becomes symptomatic of their queer capacity. The child does not feel any compulsion to follow the script of gender before the sculptures. Statues are not meaning petrifed, nor are they hieroglyphs to be deciphered, but their historical knowledge is immanent to their materiality: “the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected”.16 Lee not only disregards the relationship between form and content in the history of sculpture, but also the relationship between artworks and collections established by the modern apparati of connoisseurship and curatorship. In fact, the main sculpture discussed in “The Child in the Vatican” is a series of Niobids scattered across two Roman Museums, the Uffzi and the Munich Glyptothek. In 1876, the afficted facial expression of Niobe had already attracted the scientifc curiosity of Duchenne de Boulogne who used a cast of the Uffzi

15 Vernon Lee, “The Child in the Vatican,” in Belcaro: Being Studies on Sundry Aesthetic Questions (London: W. Satchell, 1881), 17–48 (20). 16 Lee, “The Child,” 48. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 201 type to illustrate his electrophysiological experiments on the Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (Fig. 9.1).17 Instead Lee chose to point to the pathetic and expressive connotations of the Niobids only to dismiss them. All the clutching, writhing, and grimacing with convulsed agony that we imagine in the story, she writes, disappears when the artist translates these ideas into form.18 While the philosophical reference of Lee’s aesthetics is obviously derived from Pater, her methodological model implies a reorganisation of the visual relationship between object and beholder, for gallery visitors too “forget” the subject of the sculptural group as soon as they start to focus on the form of the action: “For the more intense becomes our perception of the form, the vaguer becomes our recollection of the subject […] We are no longer feeling emotion; we are merely perceiving beauty”.19 The formalist objective of the essay also contains an intrinsic critique of the empirical methods of evaluation in art history. Lee complains that the statues’ own language has been sti- fed and even obfuscated by the cognoscenti who wrote about them. The statues, Lee sardonically writes, “who have never read Winckelmann, nor Quatremère, nor Otfried Müller, do not know all these wondrous classifcations of schools”.20 The passage seems to suggest that readers of the essay will learn nothing about the Niobids as an object of disciplinary knowledge; instead, they are invited to unlearn art history in order to foster another type of aesthetic appreciation. Lee’s child has a special relationship with senses other than the visual which only exacerbates its ability to read the statues: “this fancy language of our modern child is the language of colour, of movement, of sound, of suggestion, of all the broken words of modern thought and feeling: and the statue has none of these”.21 The child would have the sense of touch in common with the statues, except the modern museum does not allow it to touch. Pater had already described Winckelmann’s probing of pagan statuary as “shameless and childlike”; his fngers were represented

17 Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1876). 18 Lee, “The Child,” 43. 19 Lee, “The Child,” 34. 20 Lee, “The Child,” 29. 21 Lee, “The Child,” 20. 202 F. VENTRELLA

Fig. 9.1 Plate 73 from: Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine ou Analyse Électro-Physiologique de l’Expression des Passions (1876). Albumen silver print from glass negative, 29.2 21.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York × 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 203 as the conduits to the lost world of antiquity.22 Thus, the state of alien- ation of the statues, artifcially arranged in the museum like dead specimens, represents, as Siegel has put it, a “modernist romance of lost authenticity”.23 The statues are also physically fragmented, a condition that becomes paradigmatic of the fragmentation of their meaning to the modern viewer. Rather than attempting an archaeological reconstruction of the objects according to a nostalgic antiquarianism, Lee embraces the materiality of the statues in the present to produce a formalist and intertex- tual analysis irrespective of historical consistency. Lee was obviously in agreement with Winckelmann’s realisation that the historical meaning of ancient statues was irretrievably lost. However, she never allowed mourning to become the narrative mood for a historical system as the “father of art history” did.24 While the historical meaning of the statue may be forever lost, Lee explains that its formal and aesthetic qualities can still give us access to the “instinctively imperious artistic aim” of the sculptor to create beautiful form.25 The sculptor of the Niobe, in fact, has deliberately “selected among the attitudes and gestures and expressions suggested to him by this scene, rejected those which were inherently ugly and accepted those which were intrinsically beautiful”.26 Thus, when viewers look at the sculptural group of the Niobids in the present, they too reactivate, with their senses, the formal choices originally made by the sculptor in the past. A liminal object between past and present, the ancient statue becomes a tool by which the aesthetic instinct of the artist and ours meet across time. The modernity of Lee’s aesthetic imperative, and its romantic universalist undertones, can only be fully appreciated in opposition to the dominant discourse of antiquarianism that her formalist analysis was explicitly challenging through the fgure of the child. Indeed, the modernity of the child becomes proportional to the primitivist fantasies it embodies.

22 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 142. 23 Siegel, “The Material of Form,” 193, 194. 24 Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann Divided: Mourning the Death of Art History,” The Journal of Homosexuality 27, no. 1–2 (1994): 141–60. 25 Lee, “The Child,” 44. 26 Lee, “The Child,” 46. 204 F. VENTRELLA

The child is “barbarous” because it does not know how to make sense of the statues, nor can it read about them. However, there is also another sense in which the adjective “barbarous” resonates with a primitivist tradition about the sense of touch, the lower sense in the scale of evolutionary aesthetics. Touch is the frst sense developed in the animal world. Even before nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking, many aesthetic systems considered touch as the most primitive sense by which art historians started to explain how sculpture must have preceded all the other arts in teaching us how to embody form and perceive space. According to Aloïs Riegl’s evolutionary theory of art history, for instance, touch was older than vision, which instead afforded a higher degree of rationalisation of space. Riegl considered Egyptian art as the result of a crude apprehension of space in which it was impossible to separate individual objects: “the Egyptians were like small children learning to focus”.27 When she wrote about ancient statuary or the Renaissance, Lee complied with the dominant historiographical model that attributed a primal position to sculpture in the development of art history. Hence, in “The Child in the Vatican”, Lee was clear on the position of sculpture in the history of the senses: “humanity knew beauty in the statue before knowing beauty in the picture, and beauty in the picture before beauty in music. The frst standard of artistic right and wrong was the standard of sculpture”.28 Like Riegl, Lee believed touch to be less literal than vision and to have survived the many stages of western aesthetic civilisation. Unlike Riegl, however, she did not consider touch as a subset of vision, because Lee was never interested in a visual theory of beauty: “for beauty of form has a double origin: it is not only an intellectual conception, but also a physical embodiment”.29 Thus, her denigration of visuality must be read in conjunction to her critique of antiquarian methods and as an opening to the physiological experience of sculpture both forming and formed by beauty. The child’s polymorphous sensoriality is not aligned with the aesthetic hierarchies that organise art history’s temporality according to a continuous development from the haptic to the optic sense. While the

27 Aloïs Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) quoted in Fiona Candlin, “The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (2006): 137–54 (140). 28 Lee, “The Child,” 28. 29 Lee, “The Child,” 46. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 205 vertical history of the senses should evolve from touch to vision, Lee’s child seems stuck in a sensorial circularity between touch and sound, anticipating the Freudian concept of “arrested development” which may link the child’s barbarousness to one account about the phylogenesis of homosexuality.30 The horizontality of sensorial relations suggested by her formalist analysis thus invites us to read the child as a queer fgure that refuses to grow up into adulthood, but grows, instead, sideways.31 The “fairy tale” of the child, as Lee calls it, explains that the child’s aesthetic Bildung is not granted from its moving away from the language of the statues, but by the continual return to “those drowsy years of childish passion and day dreams” in which the child “learned something which others did not know”.32 Like the statues in the Vatican which do not appear to the child according to the classifcations of art history, the senses too are not organised vertically according to a progressive evolution. Touch and sound are horizontally placed like siblings: “the sounding ones of the statues: and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound, or colour, or written word, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognise us, and distinguishing us from others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin”.33 By abstaining itself from reproducing the vertical hierarchies of the museum, the formalist child in the Vatican challenged the antiquarian chronologies of art history while it opened up a productive space for Lee to rethink sculpture appreciation as a queer modelling of the self which she continued to probe through her later psychological work.

30 Neville Hoad, “Arrested Development or the Queerness of Savages: Resisting Evolutionary Narratives of Difference,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2000): 133–58. See also Jana Funke, “Navigating the Past: Sexuality, Race and the Uses of the Primitive in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Travel Writings,” in Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past, eds. Fisher and Rebecca Langlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 111–34. 31 On the queer temporalities of the child’s “sideway growth” see Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal,” in Curioser. On the Queerness of the Children, eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 277–315. 32 Lee, “The Child,” 26. 33 Lee, “The Child,” 27. The fact that this passage is repeated twice, only slightly altered in the very conclusion of the essay, only adds to the instrumental effect of resonance and relay inherent to Lee’s argument. 206 F. VENTRELLA

Miming Statues During the 1890s, memory started to occupy a vital place in Lee’s thinking about aesthetics psychologically and her turn to psychological theories of Einfühlung (translated into English in 1909 as “empathy”) added another wrinkle to her critique of the historical method.34 Contemporary psychological aesthetics presented her with a number of experiments that she was able to test in the galleries with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson frst, and alone later. Such experiments facilitated a consideration of art as a process of transfer in which the object under the eye of the beholder is invested with physical and mental processes associated with the act of viewing: “we transfer from ourselves to the object not only the physical muscle movement but the thought and emotion which have been accumulated in our minds to that movement”.35 One of the very frst statues that Lee examined in her Gallery Diaries (1901–1904) was the Subiaco Niobid at the Terme Museum (now Museo Nazionale Romano). A putative brother of the Niobids discussed in “The Child in the Vatican”, the Subiaco Niobid responded to her new interests in psychological aesthetics. “It affects me topographically”, she writes to explain the necessity to move around the statue:

Of course the mutilation of antiques immensely complicates matters. In this particular statue the mimetic balance happens to be magnifcently kept, but the balance of lines and masses is irreparably lost. In fact I suspect that I feel in myself the pressure—in a sort of attempt to restore—of an imaginary head, just a ball to steady the slew of the fgure; even to some slight degree of an imaginary raised arm (Fig. 9.2).36

Lee creatively uses a historic object as a sounding board to test the phenomenon of empathy with sculpture. She seems to respond directly to

34 In 1923 Vernon Lee gives the translation to Edward Titchener. Anstruther- Thomson, Art and Man, 73. On the translation of Einfühlung in the context of modernist psychology see Susan Lanzoni, “Empathy in Translation: Movement and Image in the Psychological Laboratory,” Science in Context 25, no. 3 (2012): 301–27. 35 Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 65. 36 Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, 254. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 207

Fig. 9.2 The Subiaco Niobid, Fifth-Century BCE. Marble, 115 130 cm. × Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome. Photo: Maurice Howard the possibility of our imagination to complete the movement of the statue by becoming conscious of the way in which our body apprehends its form. Yet, while our sense of movement is affected by the “mimetic balance” of the statue, the statue’s original movement cannot be imitated 208 F. VENTRELLA literally, because it is irreparably lost with the missing fragments. Lee’s experiment is not aimed at an archaeological restoration of the statue, but at the translation of aesthetic stimulations into ideated simulations.37 The incomplete statue of the Niobid brings to mind the Pygmalionic fantasies that Adolf Furtwängler had projected on the mutilated body of the Venus de Milo in 1893 to make her move according to his philological reconstructions of the original posture.38 However, for Lee, the Subiaco Niobid is not an object to set into motion like a doll; it is instead an agent of empathy that can be reactivated by the beholder. Lee clarifes that such a statue, because of its incompleteness, is an interesting methodological object to test the difference between actual locomotion and “empathically attributed movement”.39 Thus she tries to test Emmanuel Löwy’s theory that pre-Lysippian statues were composed from three points of view (Dreiansichtigkeit).40 Löwy implied that the beholder would stand still once they have found the desired point of view. Lee objected to the stillness of Löwy’s position and used the Niobid to assess whether the movement that we are induced to “mime” is exter- nally enacted by our body, or occurs internally in our consciousness as an ideated realisation. Her conclusion argues that the lack of a “dramatic” element in the plastic arts, i.e. the impossibility to decipher the action originally performed by the Niobid, only reinforces her opinion that the content of a sculpture should never get in the way of formal appreciation if we are to test the psychology of “inner mimicry”.41 The concept of “inner mimicry” was only introduced in her writings after the publication of “Beauty and Ugliness” (1897), the essay composed from a series of gallery experiments about empathy with Anstruther-Thomson. Derived from Karl Groos’ innere Nachahmung, the theory of “inner mimicry” came to encompass, for them, the complexity of ideated realisations of movement which before she had invariably expressed with terms such

37 Lee had already elaborated on the beauty of fragments in Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness” (Part II), Contemporary Review 72 (November 1897), 669–88 (678); see also Lee, “Central Problem of Aesthetics,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 77–151 (108). 38 Furtwängler proposed his reconstructions of the Venus de Milo in 1893 in a volume translated by Lee’s friend, the archaeologist Eugénie Sellers, Masterpiece of Greek Sculpture (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 378–84. 39 Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 241–350 (254). 40 Emmanuel Löwy, The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art (London: Duckworth, 1907). 41 Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” 255. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 209 as “imitation”, “mimetic”, and “miming”.42 However, “Beauty and Ugliness” also presented the formula “inner motor adjustments”, coined by Anstruther-Thomson, which attracted Groos’ interest.43 In spite of the apparent inconsistency of their terminology, Groos deemed “Beauty and Ugliness” of “preeminent interest” and gave it a substantial mention in his psychological study Die Spiele der Menschen (1899).44 “Beauty and Ugliness” stemmed from an initial consideration of the problem of movement derived from the appreciation of sculpture. The authors immediately discarded the idea that the beholder is actually set to imitate the movement of a statue. Their initial experiments were insti- gated by Giuseppe Sergi’s physiological work according to whom pain and pleasure were not cerebral operations but of the organic life of the “big viscera” (heart and lungs). Thus, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson argued that palpitations and breathing could be used as indicators for the perception of agreeable or disagreeable shapes.45 The elaboration of empathetic response or “bodily resonance” explored in “Beauty and Ugliness” derived mostly from three psychophysiological theories that were being discussed at the time: Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlung, Karl Groos’ concept of “inner mimicry” and the Lange-James theory of bodily emotion.46 In an article written for the Zeitschrift für Aesthetik (1910), Lee eventually clarifed that the analysis of the experiments in “Beauty and Ugliness” did not always distinguish between the three approaches.47

42 Lee was aware of the problematic inconsistency of the terminology used in the experiments. Lee, “Central Problem of Aesthetics,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 91. 43 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness” (Part II), 669–88 (681). Groos’ German letters to Lee in fact retain the English expression “körperliche Adjustments”. Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 15 February 1901. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library. All translations of Groos’ letters are the author’s own. 44 Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Menschen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1899), 424. 45 Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugliness” (Part I), 552. 46 The term “bodily resonance” is used incidentally only once. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, 96. 47 Following the lukewarm initial responses to “Beauty and Ugliness”, Lee decided to address the community of German psychologists in the most authoritative journal of the time. The initial comment from editor Max Dessoir that “[o]ur journal is strictly scientifc; pure art-historical works are excluded” suggests a bias towards Lee’s alleged disciplinary affliations. Max Dessoir to Violet Paget, 9 May 1906. All translations of Dessoir’s letters are the author’s own. Nonetheless, the article appeared as “Weiteres über Einfühlung und ästhetisches Miterleben,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 5 (1910): 145–90. The English translation of the article, with copious footnotes and annotations, appeared in Lee, “The Central Problem of Aesthetics,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 77–151. 210 F. VENTRELLA

Following the editor Max Dessoir’s criticism on her frst draft, Lee also explained the importance of self-observation as a key element of her and Anstruther-Thomson’s methodology.48 “Beauty and Ugliness” was the outcome of a distinct division of labour in which Anstruther-Thomson provided the raw data and Lee the theory. When Lipps reviewed the work, he found it unjustifable that their evidence was based on the empathetic responses of a single person, thus lacking in objectivity.49 I am not interested in proving their theories but in refecting historically on the conditions of their speculations. Although Lee reclaimed her work as scientifc, she also recognised that it had been conducted in a manner very different from other scientifc research of the time: “My aesthetics will always be those of the gallery and studio, not of the laboratory”.50 In reviewing the arguments proposed in “Beauty and Ugliness” in 1912, Lee made a point of remarking that the concept of “miming”, used by Anstruther-Thomson in her reports, was perhaps too literal in some instances and required verifcation to take into account the possibility that movement be realised rather than enacted. Following an invitation from Groos to provide practical examples in which Anstruther- Thomson attached the expression “miming movements”, she wrote a long report on the Venus de Milo which is an excellent example of how she conceived the empathic response:

My connection with her is through my motor impulses and so I feel as much connected with her drapery as with her body; both of them have balance and have movement […] The pressure on my feet on the ground is pressure that I see in the feet of the Statue. The lift up of my body I see done more strongly and amply in her marble body; and the steadying pressure of my head I see in a diminished degree in the poise of the statue’s beautiful head. These movements I may be said to imitate, but I should fnd them equally in a Renaissance monument or a medieval chalice.51

48 “It seems to me that continuous reference to your personal development pushes the subject matter into the background”. Max Dessoir to Violet Paget, 7 October 1909. Vernon Lee Correspondence, Somerville College Library. 49 Theodor Lipps, “Dritter aesthetischer Literaturbericht,” Archiv für Systematische Philosophie 6, no. 3 (1900): 377–409; Lee, “The Central Problem,” Beauty and Ugliness, 96–7. 50 Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, viii. 51 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 94. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 211

By comparing the Venus de Milo with a medieval chalice, these experiments reject the hierarchies of historical chronologies and employed formalist analysis to explore aesthetic continuities rather than artistic differences. As Renate Borsch explains, this implies that “there would be no realm of ‘high’ art, set-off from life as aesthetes and modernists insisted”.52 At the same time, this passage also represents the aesthetic exchange between two female bodies, Anstruther-Thomson’s body becoming sculptural in posture and matter, an aspect that Lee did not fail to notice in real life when she described “[h]er fnely chiselled, rather statuesque features, and a certain — I can only call it — virginal expression made one think rather to a very beautiful and modest boy, like some of the listeners of Plato”.53 This comment seemingly turns the relationship between gender inversion and the inversion of bodies and body doubles into a metaphor of fesh and blood. The fgure of the boy has been long explored as a code for lesbian subjectivity; the fact that Anstruther-Thomson reminds her of one of the boys of Plato’s symposium is another example of Lee’s queer use of the past.54 The collaboration with Anstruther-Thomson was essential for Lee to fnd a test case from which to obtain data. When Anstruther-Thomson reported back her experiment in the galleries, Lee started to fnd many correspondences with the psychological literature she was studying at the time.55 Many scholars have already commented on the eroticisation of their intellectual collaboration, the art gallery becoming the theatre of a mutual titillation.56 Diana Maltz has been especially critical in describing

52 Renate Brosch, “‘Art Can Do Nothing Without the Collaboration of the Beholder’: Vernon Lee’s Theory of Aesthetic Response,” in ImageScapes: Studies in Intermediality, eds. Christian Emden and Gabriele Rippl (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 97–116 (111). 53 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 8. 54 On the queer/lesbian boy see Martha Vicinus, “The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-Siècle Femme Fatale?” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, 83–106. 55 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 47. 56 Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 166–72; Burdett Gardner, The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian Style): A Psychological and Critical Study of “Vernon Lee” (New York: Garland, 1987); Maltz, ‘Engaging “Delicate Brains”: From Working-Class Enculturation to Upper-Class Lesbian Liberation in Vernon Lee’s and Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s Psychological Aesthetics,’ in Women and British Aestheticism, eds. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 211–29 (212). For a critique of these position see Psomiades, “‘Still Burning,’” 29–37; Sally Newman, “The Archival Traces of Desire: Vernon Lee’s Failed Sexuality and the Interpretation of Letters in Lesbian History,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 1–2 (2005): 51–75. 212 F. VENTRELLA

Anstruther-Thomson as a “performer” who demanded the attention of her lover as well as an upper-class female audience and stating that their literal methods of investigation were “comical in their physicality”.57 But it was not only the gaze of other women that was laid on Anstruther-Thomson but that of experimental psychologists as well. The conversations with Groos about inner mimicry, in particular, give us the opportunity to rethink the relationship between sculpture and sexuality in a way that goes beyond the biographical interpretation of their work on psychological aesthetics as a sublimation of lesbian desire. Hence, I would like to suggest that the aesthetic scene of inner mimicry and empathy can also be explored as a queer technology of the self, one which sits alongside, rather than in opposition to, the lesbian discourse hitherto developed by other scholars. In 1901, Lee reprinted the questionnaire that she had originally circu- lated at the fourth Psychology Congress in Paris (20–26 August 1900) and sent one copy to Groos in Basel.58 The questionnaire invited psychologists to observe themselves, a method that Groos too had been interested in using in a psychological laboratory. In Die Spiele der Menschen, he had praised the authors of “Beauty and Ugliness”, because “they quote a number of observers who, as much from practice as from possession of exceptional gifts, far transcend the limits attained by the average man in self-observation”.59 Groos, in fact, was especially curious about Anstruther-Thomson’s vivid descriptions of empathetic responses and suggested that she may be a “motor type” like himself—a categorisation that, as Carolyn Burdett has noticed, derived from neurological work conducted by Jean-Martin Charcot and Alfred Binet, “which resulted in distinctions being drawn between individuals’ capacity to process sense data”.60 When Anstruther-Thomson answered Groos’ question whether she felt the statue as a representation of a human body, she stressed that she did not perceive the Venus de Milo as a woman, but as “a Force”, and proceeded to give an example of inner motor adjustment: “another connection I feel with her is the balance and shifting of my weight from

57 Maltz, “Engaging ‘Delicate Brains’,” 225. 58 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Le role de l’element moteur dans la perception esthetique visuelle. Memoire el questionnaire soumis au quatrième congres de psy- chologie (Imola: Cooperative Typographique Edit, 1901). 59 Groos, Die Spiele, 328. 60 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 74–5; Burdett, “The Subjective Inside Us,” n.p. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 213 side to side in order to follow her balance”.61 Anstruther-Thomson’s mode of self-oblivion (to quote Groos’ letter) before the statue points to another kind of presence that engages differently with Victorian body doubles. Operating outside the feld of vision, the subject of the statue is no longer recognisable. This abstraction both hides and outs the lesbian narrative based on the mutual observation between the two collaborators/lovers. However, Groos’ letters urged Lee to separate the individual contributions of the two women, and invited her to engage with self- observation “to differentiate in a future publication between that which you experience for yourself and that which C. Anstruther-Thomson experiences […]”.62 Indeed, there seems to be a confusion about the assumption that Lee’s theories are only derived from the observation of Anstruther-Thomson’s body. Although it is true that Anstruther- Thomson was instrumental in making Lee turn away from psychological books and engage with the ‘raw’ data of aesthetic experience, it is also true that Lee practised self-observation on her own, as demonstrated in the descriptions utilised for the conferences on ‘Art and Life’ and subsequent publications on psychological aesthetics and empathy theory. Around 1894, Anstruther-Thomson prompted Lee to start “sampling” statues and pictures with tunes and record her bodily responses to objects during their gallery visits.63 Glimpses of the child in the Vatican reappear in Lee’s memories about apprehending the language of statues through sound. Her emphasis on comparing plastic and music harmo- nies anticipates many modernist experiments on synesthesia. Impressed by Anstruther-Thomson’s ability of self-observation, Lee tried to learn by looking at her way of looking at things: “I was learning to see a little with my own eyes and my own reactions”.64

61 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 95. 62 Karl Groos to Violet Paget, 30 July 1901. Papers of Vernon Lee, Somerville College Library. 63 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 38. The friend is most likely to be the feminist composer Ethel Smyth who described such sampling in the Vatican with a derisory tone in her autobiography, published after Lee’s death. Ethel Smyth, What Happened Next (London: Longmans and Green, 1940), 160. The episode has been thoroughly commented in Maltz, “Engaging ‘Delicate Brains’,” 222–4. 64 Lee, “Introduction,” Art and Man, 30. 214 F. VENTRELLA

Vernon Lee’s gallery diaries, therefore, record her own attempts to describe the process of “inner mimicry” that she discussed with Groos. However, as I am going to explain below, these experiments with sculpture also represent the formation of a very modern discourse about sexuality that is inherent to the experiment. Upon returning to see the Subiaco Niobid a second time in 1901, Lee failed to activate any empathetic response.65 Having insisted that one should forget what the artwork represents, and only focus on how its formal arrangements communicate, Lee also considered the conditions of the experiment as an integral part of the experiment itself. Light, temperature or mood are not disturbances to the empathic process, but conditions of which the beholder becomes conscious. Two years later, on 7 April 1903, Lee paid another visit to the Niobid in Terme Museum:

Effect of emotional tone on aesthetic perception. The other day, the frst time here (but it was pouring, the light extremely bad, and the rooms were most inconveniently crowded), feeling fearfully depressed […] I not only did not feel, but I didn’t see ‘how beautiful they are’ […] To-day, rather tired in body and spirit, but extraordinarily shaken up, (very literally) warmed, vibrating through and through (most literally almost quaking) […] I fnd I see very easily, even quite slight things, and feel and vibrate to the movement of them — the swing round the Niobid, etc. A slight but perceptible state of palpitation, rapid breathing through the nostrils, no sort of distraction or worry from without — a bit of Bach humming in me.66

The gallery exercise allows the body to be plastically reconfgured by empathy and transformed into a series of polymorphous symptoms.67 But there is nothing necessarily pathological in this body. Abstracted into mere affects, the illegibility of the body should not be confused with invisibility either, as the author is ever present in the text. A music becomes audible in Lee’s head. The child from the Vatican returns to remind her of the lateral relation of music to sculpture. Constantly haunted by form, Lee’s experiments set up a clear opposition between

65 Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 257. 66 Lee, “Aesthetic Responsiveness,” in Beauty and Ugliness, 299–300. 67 The role of plasticity in art history has been recently discussed in a panel organised by Rowan Bailey at the 43rd AAH Conference titled The Power of Plasticity Loughborough University, 6–8 April 2017. 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 215 knowing and becoming: the gallery diaries give no historical information about the Niobid, but they document a series of attempts through which the body of the beholder is continually reshaped.

The Plasticity of Empathy In Lee’s frst gallery entry, the Subiaco Niobid staged the problematic relationship between form and content. But Lee initially struggled to feel the statue. In the last entry on the same statue, the satisfaction of the empathetic response makes Lee aware of the way other visitors may look at this statue for another kind of satisfaction tinted with sexual undertones:

I see very well, easily, have no sense of seeing, but a strong full sense of it (the Niobid). It is the only nominative. The fgure seems to be waning about, thrusting forward, pressing down, hurling up, with a total delight- ful spiral movement. The pleasure seems to be in the impetuosity of that spiral cast forward of the body. Still, I do not think there is a vestige of pleasure in anything human: I am familiar with such impression about landscape. The surface modelling and patina give me another kind of pleasure, like that of the chest of Titian’s Flora. I fnd nothing human in this either, for I am conscious of a negative satisfaction in this surface having no tactile softness and no temperature; the fact of the bystanders having both is on the whole repulsive to me.

The whole passage is hinged around “it”, highlighted in italics in the original text, which the author informs us is the preferred nominative for what would otherwise appear as a statue representing a mutilated male ephebic youth. The neutral pronoun had a special valence also for Anstruther-Thomson who, “in those pre-Freudian days […] went on calling her studies ‘trying to fnd out what IT (viz. a work of art) is doing’”.68 Presented as the childish language of an unaccomplished theory, ‘it’ opens up a series of queer possibilities in Lee’s own text. By not saying ‘he’, she empties the statue of any human trait while, at the same time, takes it away from the gazes of the bystanders who may look at the statue for erotic satisfaction. The formalist language of this passage exposes the exercise of empathy upon the body of the practitioner which

68 Lee, “Introduction,” in Art and Man, 46. 216 F. VENTRELLA is transformed. By expressing her satisfaction in opposition to that of the bystanders, Lee fnally sets herself apart from the crowd of visitors, thus altering the sexual economy of display. The gallery experiments did not always confrm or conform to a monolithic ideology of gender in the museum and demonstrate that another narrative was possible.69 Once the Niobid has been removed from the heteronormative visual economy of the bystanders, the statue can freely enter the space of a formalist dialogue with other artworks—e.g. Flora, who, Lee suggests, is not a woman either. Statues are the conduit for the beholder’s own pleasure to revitalise their body through an erotics of empathy which does not always require a (gendered) object choice. Lee’s formalism practices impersonality; yet, the self can still be registered as affect, through its attachment to the materiality of sculpture. Finally, these experiments are also an illuminating instantiation of Foucault’s scepti- cism towards an epistemology of excavation in the work of the contemporary historian: nothing is hidden in the archaeological work, for what we are asked to defne here are solely “the relations on the very surface of discourse”.70 The affective speech of Lee’s gallery diaries represents an archive of feelings that exceeds the parameters of confession and truth that have been associated with the history of sexuality. In place of a lack of representation, hers seems like a strategy of disidentifcation.71 My insistence on maintaining a theoretical connection between disidentifcation and abstraction ultimately appeals to an established tradition in queer formalism. Abstraction has often been considered as a muted expression of homoerotic desire, a “homosexual code”, or an “aesthetic minoritising discourse”, but the self-oblivion of empathy also shows the possibility for sexuality to be implicit in erotic desire.72

69 For a discussion of other examples in which women challenged the male discourse of the museum, see Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). 70 Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984, ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 57–8. 71 According to José Esteban Muñoz, disidentifcation “proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture”. See his Disidentifcations: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 31. 72 Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 135; Thaïs Morgan, “Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and Pater,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993): 315–32 (316). 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 217

In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick argues that modernism’s com- mitment to abstraction has often be interpreted as an alibi: modernist abstract aesthetics functioned like a glass screen that sheltered desires which were too dangerous to be expressed in the open.73 Abstraction, therefore, corresponded to the sophisticated construction of an epistemology for a coded secret: many artists and art writers used abstraction to camoufage hot desires through cold form. However, Sedgwick’s analysis is perhaps too reliant on the opposition between abstraction and fguration. Lee’s theories demonstrate that the binary distinction between abstraction and fguration remains an incomplete description for art’s relation to empathy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, empathy theories were also employed by Havelock Ellis to make legible the link between psychological aesthetics and sexology to describe the “psychological anomaly” of what today is called gender dysphoria. British sexological literature was particularly committed to challenging the pathologisation of sexuality, and it is therefore extremely useful for understanding cultural perceptions towards sexual dissidence. In a pioneering article titled ‘Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion’, published in 1913, Ellis criticised reductionist approaches to transvestitism and argued that German empathy theories by Lipps and Groos could help to explain the means by which individuals who experience “gender inversion” imaginatively imitate the traits they admire in the opposite sex. It is interesting that Ellis did not include Lee in the list of authors discussed in this piece, in spite of knowing her work well through the mediation of his collaborator John Addington Symonds.74 In his study, Ellis elucidates different types of sexo-aesthetic inversion in which the subjects manifest an “impulse to project themselves by sympathetic feeling into the object to which they are attracted, or the impulse of inner imitation”.75 Freely borrowing from Lipps’

73 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 165–67. Sedgwick writes about Wilde’s Dorian Gray as ‘glass closet’ or open secret. 74 John Addington Symonds to Havelock Ellis, 17 January 1893. Quoted in John Addington Symonds and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources, ed. Sean Bready (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 240. 75 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Eonism and Other Studies, quoted in Jana Funke, “Intersexions: Dandyism, Cross-Dressing, Transgender,” in Late Victorian Into Modern, eds. Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 441–28 (419). I am grateful to Jana Funke for productive discussions of Ellis. 218 F. VENTRELLA defnition of Einfühlung and Groos’ innere Nachahmung, which had been popularised to the English readers by Lee, Ellis turned to another type of sexo-aesthetic inversion, which he defnes as “sexually abnormal but aesthetically correct”; this was represented by individuals who feel the beauty they see in the opposite gender by empathetically placing themselves in it: “Our emotions, as it were, beat in time to its rhythm”.76 Ellis’ utilisation of psychological aesthetics to stress the inner pleasure derived from the imitation of gender stipulates another entwinement between aesthetics and sexuality that runs at the level of affects, rather than being exhausted at the level of representation. The proposition of a rhythmic theory of gender is extremely fascinating for rethinking the relationship between abstraction and empathy that Lee had developed by evacuating the mimetic theory of sculptural representation. Gillian Beer has convincingly argued that Lee’s political and gender nonconformity must be read in relation to her lifelong cautioning against crowd mentality and polarising arguments—two phenomena that she studied carefully in her political writings: “[n]ormalcy for Lee is the great delusion”.77 Lee’s work on psychological aesthetics, too, was an attempt to think the self not in terms of stability, but in terms of change and transformation. In her endeavours to eschew sexuality as a category that connotes or denotes desire, one which can be represented in the visual economy of gender, Lee reimagined the human being as an erotic bun- dle of habits that rhythmically take shape through plastic movements. Thus, I attended to Lee’s sculptural imagination to tease out the question of what bodies may become when empathy introduces an abstract relation to objects. Lee’s attempts to think empathy as a relation resonates with David Getsy’s formulation of queer formalism as a relational discourse that breaks the binds of the allegedly natural discourse of gender, and builds new binds that have the capacity “for making visible, bringing into experience, or knowing genders as mutable, successive, and multiple”.78 Lee’s gallery experiments were not intended to recover

76 Havelock Ellis, “Sexo-Aesthetic Inversion,” (Part II) The Alienist and Neurologist 34, no. 2 (1913): 249–79 (276). 77 Gillian Beer, “The Dissidence of Vernon Lee: Satan the Waster and the Will to Believe,” in Women’s Fiction and the Great War, eds. Suzanne Raitt and Trudy Tate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107–31 (128). 78 David Getsy, “Capacity,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 47–9 (47). 9 ENCOUNTERING THE NIOBE’S CHILDREN … 219 the historical meaning of statues, but she used ancient sculpture as a tool of self-exploration to learn how to live by the formal rules of a work of art. Refecting on her encounters with a series of Niobids across different times in her intellectual path is one way for us to recognize how she made the aesthetic appreciation of sculpture into a sexual style. CHAPTER 10

The Queer Materiality of History: H.D., Freud and the Bronze Athena

Jana Funke

Introduction In February 1933, American-born writer H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) travelled to Vienna to be analysed by Sigmund Freud. H.D. entered into analysis for three months in 1933 and for fve weeks in 1934. H.D. had a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis: she had begun to read psychoanalytic literature in the 1910s and had previously been analysed briefy by Mary Chadwick in London and Hanns Sachs in Berlin.1 In the early 1930s, she sought Freud’s help to work through her writer’s block and

1 See Laura Marcus, “European Witness: Analysands Abroad in the 1920s and 1930s,” in History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past, eds. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 105–27.

The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the Wellcome Trust (NC106654/Z/14/Z and 106653/Z/14/Z).

J. Funke (*) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 221 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_10 222 J. FUNKE traumatic experiences during World War I, including the death of her brother and a miscarriage. The analysis also explored her bisexuality and her ambiguous gender identity.2 Knowledge of Freud’s sessions with H.D. is one-sided: she wrote repeatedly about her analysis, but the psychoanalyst did not leave his own record. In the autumn of 1944, H.D. composed a retrospective essay called “Writing on the Wall”, which was initially published in the journal Life and Letters To-Day (1945–1946). In 1948, she wrote a second piece, “Advent”, which was allegedly taken from notebooks she had kept during her time in Vienna.3 “Writing on the Wall” and “Advent” were published together in a volume entitled Tribute to Freud in 1956. A third account is offered in H.D.’s poem “The Master”, written before 1935 and published posthumously in 1981.4 Yet another perspective on the sessions can be found in the letters that H.D. wrote to her life-long partner Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who paid for the analysis, her lover Kenneth Macpherson and other members of her social circle.5 One widely noted aspect of H.D.’s conversations with Freud was their engagement with the psychoanalyst’s precious and vast collection of Egyptian, Indian, Roman and Greek antiquities, which were displayed prominently in his offce in Vienna.6 Both Freud’s and H.D.’s imagination was captured by a specifc object that would come to play an important role in the analytical sessions: a small bronze statue of Greek goddess Athena, which Freud kept on his desk and declared to be his

2 For sustained accounts of H.D.’s encounter with Freud and engagement with psychoanalysis, see, for instance, Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 1–154; Dianne Chisholm, H.D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009); and Valerie Rohy, “Exchanging Hours: A Dialogue on Time,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 2 (2017): 247–68. 3 According to H.D., “Writing on the Wall” was written without recourse to notes, but “Advent” was taken directly from the notebooks of 1933. The notebooks are destroyed or lost. 4 H.D., “The Master,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 3 (1981): 407–16. 5 This correspondence has been published as Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher and Their Circle, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman (New York: New Direction Books, 2002). 6 For more on Freud as collector, see Richard H. Armstrong, Freud and the Ancient World: A Compulsion for Antiquity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis (New York: Walker & Company, 2006). 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 223

“favourite”.7 Measuring roughly 4 1/8 inches, the statuette is a frst- or second-century AD Roman copy of a Greek original from the ffth century BC. The fgure holds a decorated libation bowl in the right hand. Her left arm is raised and her left hand would have held an object, presumably a spear or rod, which is now lost.8 The Bronze Athena, which Freud handed to and discussed with H.D. in their sessions, features in all of her accounts of the analysis. The statuette has also been central to critical debates about H.D.’s relationship with Freud with many scholars focusing on the tensions that arose due to the psychoanalyst’s views of femininity and female sexuality: the statue’s missing spear or rod has been interpreted as evidence of ‘female castration’, which Freud associated with penis envy and woman’s physical lack of a phallus.9 While acknowledging these tensions, this chapter presents a different reading of H.D.’s engagement with the statuette and her relationship with Freud by focusing on the material and temporal qualities of bronze. Bronze took on a specifc meaning in Tribute to Freud: in contrast to white marble, which was often linked to transcendence and abstraction in H.D’s work, bronze came to be associated with more complex experiences of temporality and materiality. More specifcally, bronze signalled an awareness of the losses of history and the diffculties of engaging with the past. Yet, the Bronze Athena also came to stand for the unexpected survival of the past in the present, signalling the potential to resist the passing of time. As such, in Tribute to Freud, bronze is associated with a range of temporalities that have recently been theorised as ‘queer’ in that they resist or at least complicate the “regular, linear and unidirectional qualities of ‘straight time’”, as Valerie Rohy states.10 These queer temporalities include an investment in historical loss, injury and damage as well as the anachronistic or untimely survival of the past in the present. In H.D.’s account, these queer temporalities are linked not only to her own bisexuality, but also to Freud’s old age and his racialized Jewishness. Moreover, Tribute to Freud demonstrates that these queer temporalities are articulated through

7 H.D., Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), 68. 8 An image and description of the statue can be found on the Freud Museum London website: https://www.freud.org.uk/collections. 9 See, for instance, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Susan Stanford Friedman, “‘Woman Is Perfect’: H.D.’s Debate with Freud,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 3 (1981): 417–30. 10 Valerie Rohy, Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality (New York: Suny Press, 2009), xiv. 224 J. FUNKE an engagement with nineteenth-century evolutionary science, which shaped both Freudian psychoanalysis and H.D.’s modernist aesthetics.11 Considering H.D.’s and Freud’s encounter through this new framework challenges reductive readings of their relationship that have drawn too sharp a line between the allegedly divergent gendered and disciplinary affliations of the male scientist and the female modernist poet. While H.D.’s engagement with the Bronze Athena does signal her resistance to Freud’s understanding of female sexuality and femininity, the ancient object and the queer temporalities with which it is associated also cut across these divisions, thus facilitating dialogue between H.D. and Freud.12

White Marble and Transcendence H.D.’s body of work, including poetry, novels, short stories and autobiographical writings, demonstrates an ongoing interest in sculpture. Her autobiographical novels—Paint It Today (composed in 1921), Asphodel (1921–1922) and HER (1926–1927)—are among the author’s most overtly lesbian texts.13 In this trilogy, H.D. turns to marble statuary, especially of the Hellenistic period, to articulate the possibility of female homoeroticism. In Paint It Today, for instance, H.D.’s alter ego, Midget, encounters the classical marble statue of the Venus of Milo on a tour of the Louvre with her male partner, Basil. The imposing female statue holds out the possibility of transcendence from the realities of the museum space and allows Midget to distance herself from her heterosexual relationship with Basil. Gazing upon the marble statue, Midget experiences a homoerotic encounter that excludes Basil, who is incapable of understanding the “whitest passion” that connects the female observer with the sculpted female fgure.14

11 For more on the importance not to confate queer temporality with non-normative genders and sexualities, see Ben Davies and Jana Funke, “Introduction,” in Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, eds. Ben Davies and Jana Funke (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 1–16. 12 Due to the generic complexity and deliberate blurring of the autobiographical and fctional in H.D.’s work, the claims made in this chapter are not straightforwardly biographical. ‘H.D.’ and ‘Freud’ refer to historical fgures, but also, primarily, to characters constructed in H.D.’s writings. 13 All of these texts, like much of H.D.’s other prose fction, were published posthumously. 14 H.D., Paint It Today (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 60. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 225

H.D.’s female homoerotic use of marble statuary constitutes a signifcant appropriation of existing masculine traditions in art history and literature, and she refers explicitly to earlier female authors who had begun to subvert such male-oriented articulations of statuary for queer female purposes, especially Vernon Lee (Violet Paget).15 H.D. was aware of the romantic heterosexual tradition that had framed the Venus of Milo statue as an icon of female beauty for male heterosexual writers.16 In addition, as Cassandra Laity has shown, H.D. drew strategically on the fn- de-siècle movement of Decadence in which statuary had served to articulate male–male desire.17 In Paint It Today, H.D. describes Midget as a sister of Charmides, referring to Oscar Wilde’s poem “Charmides” (1881) in which statue love comes to signal male homoeroticism. H.D. appropriates this male homoerotic tradition to express female same-sex desire.18 H.D.’s articulation of female homoerotic and androgynous possibilities through the encounter with marble statuary was also in direct dialogue with the work of late nineteenth-century art critic and literary scholar Walter Pater. As Eileen Gregory has argued, the language of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white passion’, seen in Midget’s encounter with the Venus of Milo in Paint It Today, is directly related to Pater’s association of whiteness with purity and transcendence.19 In The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), Pater stated with regard to marble statuary: “That white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the tranquil godship in him as opposed to the restless accidents of life”.20 Here, marble whiteness indicates immortality and spirituality, the ability to transcend the material world and human body. Pater was indebted to earlier Romantic

15 Paint It Today features a statuesque androgynous woman called Althea, a direct reference to Lee’s novel Althea (1910). In this volume, see Ventrella for more on Lee, and Mechowski for a wider discussion of female homoerotic uses of statuary. 16 Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96. 17 Cassandra Laity, “H.D. and A.C. Swinburne: Decadence and Modernist Women’s Writing,” Feminist Studies 15, no. 3 (1989): 461–84. 18 Cassandra Laity, “Introduction” to Paint It Today (New York: New York University Press, 1992), xxix. 19 Gregory, Hellenism, 92–4. 20 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Dover Publications, 2005), 139. For more on Pater and whiteness, see Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 146–9. 226 J. FUNKE and essentially Platonic associations of sculpture with abstraction and transcendent ideal beauty, as also found in the works of eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who had argued that sculptural art stood for “something beyond nature, namely certain ideal forms of its beauty”.21 In this tradition, the white marble statue came to be associated with the transcendent leap out of the material world of sexual difference as represented by the sculpted fgures of the androgynous boy or dually sexed individuals venerated by Winckelmann and his contemporaries.22 H.D. reworked this tradition and associated the marble statue and its whiteness with a transcendent androgynous beauty that served to express both her bisexual desire for male and female partners as well as her own sense of gender duality or androgyny. Following on from Winckelmann and Pater, the relation to temporality that H.D. articulates through the focus on white marble is one of overcoming temporal restraints in a bid to reach for an androgynous wholeness and unity that transcends time altogether. However, H.D.’s writings also register ambivalence regarding the Paterian vision of white marble.23 The promise of transcending sexual difference and temporality altogether leaves little room for the negotiation of different gendered and sexual positions or temporalities. In contrast to transcendent white marble, in Tribute to Freud, the bronze statuette of Athena foregrounds H.D.’s own as well as Freud’s vulnerability to the passing of time, as this chapter argues. H.D. also uses the ancient object to suggest that it is her own as well as Freud’s anachronistic relation to time that promises to open up a strategy of resistance to historical loss and allows for dialogue through a shared investment in the past.24

21 Winckelmann cited in Gregory, Hellenism, 93. 22 Gregory, Hellenism, 93. See also Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 23 Gregory, Hellenism, 95–6. 24 The aim of this chapter is not to propose a strict division between marble and bronze or the temporalities associated with these materials. H.D. repeatedly wrote about bronze in poems like “The Charioteer” and “Red Roses for Bronze”, her work on cinema published in Close Up, and essays on aesthetics, such as Notes on Thought and Vision. A thorough investigation of the different uses of bronze in these texts, and their relation to her equally complex engagement with marble, is beyond the scope of this chapter and warrants further investigation. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 227

The Missing Spear: Bronze and the Losses of History Existing readings of Freud’s and H.D.’s discussion of the Bronze Athena have often focused on the debate about the Oedipal confict provoked by the statuette. Over the course of their sessions, Freud diagnosed H.D. with “a desire for union with […] [her] mother”.25 H.D. was seen to long for the phallic mother, who stands for the pre-Oedipal phase in early childhood development, the stage in which the girl has not yet realised that she lacks a phallus. As H.D. recounts in “Writing on the Wall”, Freud stated that the statue of Athena was “perfect […] only she has lost her spear”.26 This statement has been seen as indicative of Freud’s focus on female castration and lack, here represented by Athena’s missing spear. According to this reading, Freud’s decision to engage H.D. in discussions about the Bronze Athena was an attempt to “intimidate” his patient, as Collecott suggests,27 by reminding her of her own lack as a woman and by insisting that the return to the pre-Oedipal mother, associated with female wholeness and autonomy, was impossible. It is clear that H.D. and Freud held conficting views on female sexuality and femininity, as all of her accounts of the analysis register a sense of discomfort with the psychoanalyst’s insistence on female castration. 28 This disagreement is articulated most explicitly in H.D.’s poem “The Master”, which she refused to publish during her lifetime out of fear that it would taint her relationship with Freud.29 In this text, H.D. counters Freud’s emphasis on women’s lack by affrming that “woman is perfect”.30 Some scholars, most prominently Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, have interpreted this statement as

25 H.D., Tribute, 44. 26 Ibid., 69, her emphasis. 27 Diana Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 254. 28 Although Marcus, “European Witness,” 120–1, suggests that H.D. was not entirely opposed to the idea of female castration. Keenly aware of Freud’s renewed interest in female sexuality and penis envy in the 1930s, H.D. believed that her case (as well as that of Bryher) might allow Freud to articulate a new understanding of castration anxiety in relation to female homosexuality and bisexuality. 29 Ibid., 417. 30 H.D., “The Master,” 411, her emphasis. 228 J. FUNKE a triumphant form of feminist resistance to Freud. Others have complicated this approach, suggesting that H.D. was interested in articulating an understanding of the bisexual female subject as split and divided, constituted by the loss of an original state of wholeness and unity and faced with the reality of her “two loves separate”,31 as H.D. writes in the poem.32 However, these two readings are not mutually exclusive: H.D.’s work demonstrates both a persistent interest in the possibility of returning to the pre-Oedipal phallic mother as well as an awareness of the inevitable losses that occur over the course of individual development. As a historical object, the Bronze Athena also drew attention to the losses that accrue over vast spans of historical time beyond the individual life course. Both Freud and H.D. were invested in nineteenth-century evolutionary frameworks that associated bisexuality with a primordial past that had been overcome through subsequent stages of evolutionary development.33 From the nineteenth century onwards, evolutionary sciences had created a strong association between primitive or primordial stages of development and bisexuality, understood here in the triple sense of physical sexual ambiguity, gender duality and sexual attraction to male and female partners. Charles Darwin, for instance, maintained that “some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite [sic] or androgynous”.34 Within this framework, the statuette of the warrior goddess without her phallic spear evoked the loss of an original state of bisexual wholeness associated not only with the early stages of individual development, but also with the primordial origins of the species and culture that had been overcome through subsequent evolutionary and historical developments. The materiality of the Athena statuette, the fact that it was made of bronze rather than marble, raises awareness of the loss of the past due to historical change and progress. While some of the most famous marble statues, including the Venus of Milo discussed above, have also survived

31 Ibid., 409. 32 Claire Buck, H.D. and Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 72–99, pursues a Lacanian reading of the poem that puts emphasis on the split subject constituted in and through the language of sexual difference. 33 Frank J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 158–60. 34 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: Penguin, 2004), 189. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 229 in fragments, the materiality of bronze draws heightened attention to the workings of history and the passing of time. The colouration of bronze objects, the result of corrosion or patination,35 stands in contrast to the transcendent whiteness of marble that is prized within a Paterian framework. Compared to marble, bronze does not signal a leap out of time, but indicates a deep awareness of the materiality of the sculpted object and its vulnerability to historical processes of change. This is particularly true of Freud’s Bronze Athena, which, as Janine Burke has highlighted, is “far from perfect […]. Her surface is pitted and scored. […] She is small, plain and damaged”.36 In a discussion of Freud’s collection in “Writing on the Wall”, H.D. highlights that “there are certain alloys [like bronze] […] that may corrode and corrupt in time; and objects so blighted must be segregated or scrapped”.37 This suggests that the passing of time can have such a damaging effect on artefacts made of bronze that the object might be beyond repair, suggesting the potentially irrecoverable loss of the past.38 The Bronze Athena clearly signalled to H.D. that this experience of loss was often gendered. Like other female modernist authors, H.D. was deeply aware of and concerned about the potential loss of women’s history. As has been widely discussed, H.D. was fascinated with the Sapphic tradition and knew that the works of the female Greek poet had often survived only in fragments found in texts written by men.39 Freud and H.D. were both infuenced by archaeologists like Arthur Evans and Jane Harrison, who suggested that early Greek societies, especially the pre-classical Minoan period of Cretan Knossos, had been matriarchal and had been replaced by later patriarchal cultures.40 Given H.D.’s profound interest in a matriarchal past that had been repressed by subsequent developments in patriarchal history, the loss of Athena’s spear, a symbol of authority and power, signalled the fact that this past may no longer be accessible. In H.D.’s imagination, the materiality of bronze acted as a reminder of the risk that women’s history can be recast and replaced over the

35 For a discussion of the particular material qualities of bronze objects, see Ittai Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1–16. 36 Burke, Sphinx, 92, 97. 37 H.D., Tribute, 41. 38 See also Tim Martin, “From Cabinet to Couch: Freud’s Clinical Use of Sculpture,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 24, no. 2 (2008): 184–96, especially 189–90. 39 See, for instance, Collecott, Sapphic, 78. 40 Gere, Knossos, 77–80, 85–7. 230 J. FUNKE course of time. Bronze statues from Ancient Greece and Rome are much rarer than marble statues, because the metal was frequently melted and repurposed over the course of history due to its material value and relative scarcity. In H.D.’s writings on cinema from the late 1920s, bronze is often presented as a masculine and alienating material that is juxtaposed with a feminine marble.41 In her review of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s historical flm The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), H.D. uses the term ‘bronze’ fve times to convey her inability to access the flm and relate to its protagonist, Jeanne, the “defant bronze statue”, envisioned here by a male director.42 H.D. describes the Medieval bronze relief decorating the doors of a church that fail to offer her entry and make her “very hands feel that they are numb and raw and bleeding, […] beating at those very impregnable medieval church doors”.43 Here, H.D. expresses her fear that the new cinematic portrait will replace and thereby put at risk her own image of the female saint. Just as the bronze church doors, associated with Medieval Christianity, might have been manufactured by melt- ing earlier Greek or Roman sculptures, the flm threatens to recast the image of the female saint in a way that excludes H.D. from a female historical tradition in which she is invested. Bronze—by virtue of its plasticity and ability to be moulded and recast in response to shifting values and ideals—draws attention to those aspects of the past that are at risk of being lost as history is written and rewritten by those in power. For H.D., the awareness of the losses of history was not limited to the historical exclusion of women, however. The Athena was not the only damaged object owned by Freud. Looking around his offce, H.D. might also have spotted another bronze artefact: a statuette of the male god Zeus that may have held a spear in his left hand, which is now lost.44 Moreover, the statuettes of Athena and Zeus owned by Freud

41 See, for instance, H.D., “Borderline: A Pool Film with Paul Robeson,” in Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, eds. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (London: Continuum, 1998), 221–36, especially, 227–8. 42 H.D., “Joan of Arc,” in Close Up, 130–3; 131. H.D.’s “considerable ambivalence” towards the flm has been noted by Marcus, Tenth Muse, 334. See also Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 148. 43 H.D., “Joan of Arc,” 130. 44 See Freud Museum London: https://www.freud.org.uk/collections. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 231 are reminiscent of some of the most famous damaged bronze statues depicting male characters. The Artemisian Zeus or Poseidon in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, for instance, can no longer be identifed unambiguously, because the trident or thunderbolt once held by the statue, symbols of Poseidon and Zeus respectively, is lost. In this regard, the Bronze Athena with her missing spear embodies a more general threat associated with the passing of time, which affects both H.D. and Freud.45 Indeed, H.D. stresses repeatedly that the male psychoanalyst, too, is at risk of being eliminated by historical change. She puts emphasis on Freud’s advanced age and impending death; she also notes the coming of the Second World War and the rise of Nazi power that poses an immediate danger to the Jewish psychoanalyst.46 As Rohy has demonstrated in her sophisticated reading of “Writing on the Wall”, H.D. associates historical time with the threatening move towards a future that will potentially annihilate both analyst and analysand: in H.D.’s text, “‘history’ names a temporality of unavoidable loss, whose effects cannot, perhaps, be forestalled, but with which one should never be complicit”.47 Presenting H.D.’s and Freud’s identity positions as different but analogous, Tribute to Freud suggests that analyst and analysand are able to forge a connection because they are both threatened by the passing of time. Aware of their precarious position, they share an attachment to the damaged and partially lost bronze artefact. Heather Love presents such “stubborn attachments to lost objects” as one expression of the queer impulse to ‘feel backward’,48 to dwell on and be vulnerable to moments of historical injury, failure and damage. Whereas Love focuses primarily on the “gender and sexual deviants” who have been eliminated (literally and fguratively) from Western history,49 Tribute to Freud works with a

45 Buck, Bisexuality, 11, rightly points out that Freudian psychoanalysis was founded on failures of masculine claims to suffciency and coherence, as the case studies of the Rat Man, the Wolf Man and Paul Schreber indicate. 46 In Tribute to Freud, H.D. comments frequently on Freud’s old age (for instance, 62 and 97) and describes the chalk swastikas painted on the street leading “to the Professor’s door” (59). Similar comments are found in letters written in 1933 and 1934. For more on H.D.’s political awareness at the time of her analysis with Freud, see Marcus, “European Witness,” 124. 47 Rohy, “Exchanging,” 252. 48 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7. 49 Love, Feeling Backward, 1. 232 J. FUNKE broader understanding of the queer experience of historical injury and loss: what is queer about H.D.’s and Freud’s joint investment in the missing spear is the backward turn towards an at least partially lost past, a move that draws attention to H.D.’s and Freud’s shared vulnerability. In this regard, relying on an antagonistic gendered reading of the missing spear as indicative of female castration alone overlooks important points of continuity between H.D. and Freud that are explicitly foregrounded in the text: the Bronze Athena represents the wider losses of history that affect Freud and H.D. in similar ways, albeit for different reasons.

Anachronistic Survivals: The Bisexual Oracle and the Old Man of the Sea If the Bronze Athena embodies historical injury, it also stands for a mode of resistance to the passing of time: while damaged and scarred, the bronze object is an unusual, precious and rare remnant from the past, an unlikely survival. As such, it becomes central to H.D.’s search for ways of resisting and redressing historical loss, a project that connects her modernist aesthetics with psychoanalysis.50 To reach back to an otherwise lost past, both Freud and H.D. turned to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientifc understandings of development, heredity and memory to cast themselves and each other in the role of anachronistic survivals, suggesting that they might have special abilities to access and retrieve the past. The Athena statuette is not unique among Freud’s antique objects in facilitating the attempt to reach back to the past, which is at the very heart of psychoanalysis. As is well-known, Freud presented psychoanalysis and archaeology as analogous, since both involved the search for the buried and forgotten treasures of the cultural and individual past.51 Most scholars of psychoanalysis read this relationship between the cultural past, represented by the antique objects, and the psychic past of the individual as metaphorical.52 However, Freud believed in a deeper link between the ancient objects and the individual’s psyche. He arrived at this conclusion by building on German embryologist Ernst Häckel’s

50 See also Merril Cole, “Symptom or Inspiration? H.D., Freud, and the Question of Vision,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 10, no. 2 (2010): 83–98. 51 See the introduction to this volume as well as the references in note 6 of this chapter. 52 Armstrong, Antiquity, 41, argues against this misreading. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 233 recapitulation theory, which suggested that the development of the child (ontogeny) repeated the stages of evolutionary development of the species (phylogeny).53 This approach allowed Freud to maintain that the individual psyche contained elements of the deep cultural past.54 He drew on the concept of organic, ancestral or ‘race’ memory to express the notion that individuals might have inherited memories of their ancestors, which can be recalled in the present.55 As Freud explained in “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” (1938): “not a few of the child’s new experiences will be intensifed because they are repetitions of some primaeval phylogenetic experience”.56 Freud’s antique objects were not simply metaphorical tools that served to represent the workings of the mind; he believed that these ancient artefacts contained ideas and experiences that were already part of the individual psyche by virtue of organic or inherited memory. Such ideas about recapitulation were central to H.D.’s conversations with Freud, especially regarding her bisexuality. In “Writing on the Wall”, she credits the psychoanalyst for bringing “the past into the present with his the childhood of the individual is the childhood of the race – or is it the other way round? – the childhood of the race is the childhood of the individual. […] [T]he traits and tendencies of obscure aboriginial tribes, as well as the shape and substance of the rituals of vanished civilizations, were still inherent in the human mind – the human psyche”.57 The belief that the child had a closer connection to the archaic past was particularly important for H.D., since early twentieth-century sexual sciences, including psychoanalysis, had turned to the concept of arrested development—the notion that an individual might be ‘stuck’ on an early stage of childhood development—to explain a wide variety of gendered and sexual phenomena, including homosexuality and bisexuality.58

53 See, for instance, Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). 54 Sulloway, Biologist, 245. 55 Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 56 Sigmund Freud, “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 23: 206–7. 57 H.D., Tribute, 12–3. 58 For more on arrested development in relation to sexuality, see Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Rohy, Anachronism. 234 J. FUNKE

During their analysis, Freud affrmed that H.D. was “that all-but extinct phenomena, the perfect bi-”, as H.D. reported enthusiastically in a letter to Bryher written on 24 November 1934.59 As DuPlessis and Friedman highlight, Freud’s diagnosis of H.D. as bisexual offered her “an identity more powerful than the one conventionally accorded women”.60 However, this was not only because the bisexual woman was seen to combine masculine and feminine attributes, as DuPlessis and Friedman acknowledge, but also because she was linked to the fgure of the child and therefore closer to the cultural past. H.D. herself explained this idea in another letter to Bryher in which she explicitly connects the notion of arrested development with the Greek past: “stuck at the earliest pre-OE [oedipal] stage, and ‘back to the womb’ seems to be my only solution. Hence islands, sea, Greek primitives and so on”.61 Read within this context, Freud’s decision to place the Bronze Athena in H.D.’s hands was not merely an opportunity to remind his analysand of the inevitability of women’s castration and lack. It was also a test to see whether the ancient object would resonate with H.D. in a particular way given her greater proximity to the past. As Cathy Gere states, H.D. might have represented for Freud a fascinating specimen of the developmentally arrested bisexual woman who could prove his ideas about inherited or ancestral memory that would later be articulated in Moses and Monotheism (1939).62 H.D. herself speculated that this was one of the reasons why Freud engaged her in conversation about his antiquities: “Did he want to fnd out how I would react to certain ideas embodied in these little statues, or how deeply I felt the dynamic idea still implicit in spite of the fact that ages or aeons of time had fown over many of them?”63 The possibility that her own bisexuality did not only implicate her in a narrative of lack and loss, but also enabled her to activate remote memories and enjoy a closer experience of the past was deeply satisfying for H.D. She held esoteric beliefs regarding her own divinatory powers and repeatedly recorded hallucinations or visions, which she read as indicative of prophetic talents that allowed her to reach back to the past. A number of hallucinatory experiences in the late 1910s and early 1920s affrmed

59 H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 497. 60 DuPlessis and Friedman, “Woman,” 425. 61 H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 132. 62 Gere, Knossos, 170. 63 H.D., Tribute, 68. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 235

H.D.’s belief that she was capable of accessing the past in this way. Arguably the most well-known of these was an incident that occurred on her trip to Corfu in 1920 during which she saw a series of mystic signs projected onto the wall of the hotel room she shared with Bryher. Both H.D. and Bryher maintained that these visions were proof of the author’s ability to receive messages from the past.64 As the title “Writing on the Wall” indicates, this particular visionary experience was central to her analysis with Freud, yet H.D. offers conficting accounts of the psychoanalyst’s response to her visionary abilities. At times, she suggests that Freud interpreted her visions as a “dangerous tendency or symptom”,65 a pathological sign of arrest and regression. Following H.D.’s lead, scholars have cast Freud in the role of a rational man of science and progress who dismisses H.D.’s longing for the regressive return to the matriarchal and pre-Oedipal past as irrational and unhealthy.66 Yet, H.D.’s occasional self-presentation as a time-travelling female oracle whose gifts are denied by the male scientist embodied by Freud also needs to be read as a self-mythologising strategy that reinforces misleading gendered antagonisms and inaccurate divisions between science and literature.67 Whereas H.D. records Freud’s dismissal of her visionary abilities in Tribute to Freud, she also presents an alternative account in a letter to Bryher, written on 19 March 1933, in which she states that the psychoanalyst called her mystical hallucinations “half-normal […] a poem sequence that was not written”.68 This demonstrates the complex temporalities Freud came to represent in H.D.’s accounts:69 when encour- aging H.D. to overcome her arrested development and “dangerous” attachment to the archaic past and the phallic mother,70 he reinforces a

64 For a discussion of H.D.’s visionary experiences, see, for instance, Cole, “Vision”. 65 H.D., Tribute, 41. 66 See DuPlessis and Friedman, “Woman”; Joanna Spiro, “Weighed in the Balance: H.D.’s Resistance to Freud in ‘Writing on the Wall’,” American Imago 58, no. 2 (2001): 596–621. 67 For more on H.D.’s self-mythologizing in relation to Freud, see Gere, Knossos, especially 164–6. 68 H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 115. 69 Rohy, “Exchanging,” 256, offers a different (though not incompatible) reading of this letter in which she contrasts the narrative and diachronic with the lyrical and synchronic, the expanded moment. 70 H.D., Tribute, 41. 236 J. FUNKE linear developmental time that insists on moving on from the past and thus entails loss. H.D.’s letter to Bryher, however, signals that Freud was also able to appreciate the poetic and literary signifcance of H.D.’s vision. More than that, for Freud and many of his contemporaries, the concepts of recapitulation, arrested development and ancestral memory offered scientifc explanations for these visionary experiences by opening up an understanding of time as also potentially regressive. While an evolutionary framework presented regression or backwardness as “half- normal” at best,71 this scientifc model nevertheless offered H.D. a means to associate her bisexuality with her visionary abilities, thus bringing together the scientifc and the literary or poetic. Freud’s embrace of these different temporalities is not only indicative of the psychoanalyst’s ability to switch from a scientifc to a literary register; it is also representative of the complex articulations of time found within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientifc debates.72 Read against this background, the Bronze Athena stands for the possibility of the untimely and unlikely survival of the past in the present. Freud’s decision to hand H.D. the statuette as part of their analysis affrms her identifcation with the anachronistic “perfect bi-” and her ability to access the past.73 However, the statuette’s damage also complicates the celebratory engagement with anachronism, acting as a reminder of the inevitability of loss resulting from a linear time of progress and change that neither Freud nor H.D. could escape, as discussed previously. Indeed, as Rohy rightly argues, the very concept of anachronism, by delegating gendered, sexual, racial and ethnic others to the primitive past, is complicit with a straight and linear time of progress that, as has been shown, threatened to exclude both H.D. and Freud.74 The Bronze Athena embodies both of these intertwined temporalities.

71 H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 115. 72 This is not to suggest that Freud was unskeptical of occult tendencies or ambivalent about the attention that should be paid to phylogenetic elements in relation to individual experience, which was one of the key sources of confict between Freud and C.G. Jung. For more, see Armstrong, Antiquity, 153–4. 73 H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 497. 74 Rohy, Anachronism, xv. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 237

H.D. also cast Freud in the role of an anachronistic survival who enjoyed and was able to grant privileged access to the past. Describing the analyst as “the Old Man of the Sea” and reminding readers of “the treasures he had salvaged from the sea-depth”,75 H.D. suggests a link between Freud’s old age and his collection of antiquities. The image of Freud retrieving objects from the sea speaks to the temporalities of bronze: many of the best-preserved bronze statues were rescued from the sea where conditions are more favourable for preservation of bronze than they are on land and the objects are not at risk of being melted and repurposed.76 This again draws attention to the vulnerability and rarity of bronze objects, which are subject to the passing of time. Freud’s old age, which H.D. stresses repeatedly in all of her accounts, makes him vulnerable to the passing of time. Yet, in discovering and retrieving the bronze objects from the sea where they have survived, Freud’s old age and associated wisdom and knowledge also enable him to establish a deep connection to the past, allowing him to redress at least some of the losses of history. In H.D.’s imagination, Freud’s association with the past was achieved not only through his age, his extensive collection of antiquities or the conceptual tools for recovering the past that he developed as part of the psychoanalytic project. She also maintained that it was his Jewish ancestry, “the Professor’s racial, ancestral background”,77 that forged a deep connection with remote ages: “He has his family, the tradition of an unbroken family, reaching back through this old heart of the Roman Empire, further into the Holy Land”.78 Through this racialisa- tion of Freud’s Jewishness,79 the psychoanalyst was tied to the archaic past. Ultimately, in H.D.’s eyes, he became “part and parcel of these [antique] treasures”.80 Importantly, it was not just H.D. who imposed

75 H.D., Tribute, 97. 76 Carol C. Mattusch, The Victorious Youth (Los Angeles: Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1997), 3. 77 H.D., Tribute, 42. 78 Ibid., 97. 79 For more on racialised Jewishness, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). Rohy, Anachronism, x, describes how anachronism connects sexually and racially different subjects through the force of analogy. 80 H.D., Tribute, 97. 238 J. FUNKE this racialised narrative onto Freud. The psychoanalyst himself told his colleague Sândor Ferenczi in 1922 that his study of antiquities provoked “strange secret yearnings – perhaps for my ancestral heritage”.81 H.D.’s accounts also suggest that Freud encouraged the association between his person and his priceless antiquities in conversation with his analysand.82 This indicates that Freud and H.D. understood themselves and each other within gendered, sexualised, racialized and age-infected frameworks in which bisexuality and racialized Jewishness as well as old age were associated with the distant past. The assumption that she shared the experience of being an anachronistic survival with Freud by virtue of analogy can be seen as an expression of H.D.’s broader (and often problematically uncritical) “identifcation with the different and dispersed”, those individuals who had been displaced by the forces of history.83 This opens up a different reading of her exchange with Freud, especially around the Bronze Athena, since it demonstrates that the attempt to resist the losses of history by affrming a deep connection to the past was a shared one, facilitating dialogue between the ageing Jewish psychoanalyst and the female bisexual writer.

The Value of Bronze and the Queer Touch of the Past The key scene in “Writing on the Wall” in which H.D. discusses the Athena statuette with Freud foregrounds the material qualities of the artefact, in particular, its material value as an object made of bronze.

81 Freud quoted in Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (London: J.M. Dent, 1988), 172. 82 See, for instance, H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 34. 83 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Modernism of the Scattered Remmant: Race and Politics in the Development of H.D.’s Modernist Vision,” in H.D.: Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986), 91–116; 116. Friedman’s intervention focuses on H.D.’s engagement with race in relation to blackness and African-American identity. In this context, the association between bronze and racial difference was reinforced in H.D.’s writings after she was involved in the 1930 flm Borderline, which featured black actor Paul Robeson in a leading role. The flm eroticised Robeson’s body in ways resonant with other primitivist appropriations of blackness. H.D. herself would present Robeson in the form of an eroticised bronze sculpture in the title poem of her 1931 collection Red Roses for Bronze. For more on race and primitivism in Borderline, see Carolyn A. Kelley, “Aubrey Beardsley and H.D.’s ‘Astrid’: The Ghost and Mrs. Pugh of Decadent Aestheticism and Modernity,” Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 3 (2008): 447–75. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 239

Shortly after Freud has told H.D. that the Athena is perfect except for the missing spear, she pauses the narrative to refect on the analyst’s use of the adjective ‘perfect’:

[…] when he said, she is perfect, he meant not only that the little bronze statue was a perfect symbol, made in man’s image (in woman’s, as it happened), to be venerated as a projection of abstract thought, Pallas Athené, born without human or even without divine mother, sprung full-armed from the head of her father, our-father, Zeus, Theus, or God; he meant as well, this little piece of metal you hold in your hand (look at it) it is priceless really, it is perfect, a prize, a fnd of the best period of Greek art […] [;] like a Jew he was assessing its worth; the blood of Abraham Isaac and Jacob ran in his veins.84

Several scholars have read these comments, which associate Freud’s Jewishness with materialistic values, as anti-Semitic slights made in retal- iation for his remarks about the Bronze Athena’s lost spear.85 H.D. does express her concern that the psychoanalyst will fnd the statue (and women) to be lacking and challenges his treatment of the object as a ‘good’ rather than a ‘god’, a pun that constituted an ongoing joke between them.86 However, in “Writing on the Wall”, this materialism, associated specifcally with the value of bronze, also becomes the basis for a specifc engagement with the past that not only foregrounds tensions, but also facilitates dialogue. In the passage above, H.D. articulates the difference between a transcendental and Platonic reading of statuary—the Athene as “a projection of abstract thought”—87 akin to Winckelmann and Pater on the one hand, as discussed previously, and a materially grounded reading of the statue as a particular object to be valued and prized for its individual qualities on the other. In “Writing on the Wall”, this difference between the abstract and the material is reinforced through the juxtaposition of

84 H.D., Tribute, 70, her emphasis. 85 See, for instance, DuPlessis and Friedman, “Woman,” 421–2; Spiro, “Resistance”; Ariela Freedman, “Gifts, Goods and God: H.D., Freud and Trauma,” English Studies in Canada 29, no. 3–4 (2003): 184–99, especially 186–7. Similar anti-Semitic sentiments are found in H.D.’s letters, for instance, H.D. et al., Analyzing Freud, 332. 86 Freedman, “Gifts”. 87 H.D., Tribute, 70. 240 J. FUNKE the bronze object with the ivory statuette of Vishnu, which Freud discusses with H.D. shortly before he turns to the Athena. The white artefact depicting the Hindu god Vishnu, who is associated with overcoming and transcending physical and material desire,88 is here dismissed by H.D. as a “cold abstraction”.89 This rejection is surprising, since H.D. and Freud were both invested in the idea that ancient objects represented abstract and timeless ideals and principles that could be applied universally and transhistorically. As several scholars have remarked, Freud began to collect antique objects at the same time as he was writing The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).90 In this work, Freud suggested that unconscious thoughts materialised in the form of dream contents and maintained that there might be a universal dream language that cut across cultures and historical periods and could be used to decipher the individual unconscious. Artefacts from the past were seen to embody abstract ideals that could offer important insights into this universal language. As Armstrong highlights, Freud’s desire for archaeology was also a “yearning for a clear and distinct body of demonstrable evidence coupled with a decisive consensus of meaning”.91 H.D., too, was fascinated with the notion of a universal and transhistorical or timeless language, which she, like Freud, compared to Egyptian hieroglyphics.92 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, H.D. would see cinema as a medium that could offer a new picture-language to reveal Platonic abstractions, an argument she developed through the explicit comparison with marble statuary.93 In her encounter with Freud, as represented in “Writing on the Wall”, however, H.D. rejects the white perfection and abstraction of the ivory Vishnu statuette, stating her strong preference for the Bronze Athena.94 One reason for H.D.’s ambivalence towards abstraction in this context

88 See Armstrong, Antiquity, 313. 89 H.D., Tribute, 68. 90 For the link between Freud’s collection and The Interpretation of Dreams, see, for instance, Armstrong, Antiquity, 88–92; and Burke, Sphinx, 153–74. 91 Armstrong, Antiquity, 112. 92 Buck, Bisexuality, 155. 93 Jean Gallager, “H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire,” modernism/ modernity 9, no. 3 (2002): 407–22. 94 H.D., Tribute, 68. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 241 is that accepting the Athena as an abstract symbol might, within a Freudian framework, have meant accepting female castration as universal fact. Importantly, Freud was himself ambivalent about the fea- sibility of such universal readings. With regard to The Interpretation of Dreams, he contradicted his search for a universal language of dream symbols by acknowledging the “insuperable source of arbitrariness and uncertainty [that] arises from the fact that the dream-element may recall various things to the interpreter’s mind and may recall something different to different interpreters”.95 The same emphasis on indeterminacy is expressed when H.D. explains that “Freud says there are always a number of explanations for every fnding, two or a multiple”.96 In “Writing on the Wall”, the indeterminacy and openness to different interpretations is closely connected with the specifc materiality and temporality of bronze, which offers an alternative to the Paterian model of white marble that has been discussed earlier. This materialist engagement with the bronze object becomes possible, H.D. argues, because of Freud’s “Jewish instinct for the particular in the general, for the personal in the impersonal or universal, for the material in the abstract”.97 Without dismissing either H.D.’s discomfort with Freud’s materialism or the anti-Semitic implications of her text, it is important to note that she also embraces a materialist approach that sees the Bronze Athena not as the abstract embodiment of universal ideals, but as a material object that can be valued and interpreted as an individual artefact with a specifc history. H.D. puts particular emphasis on the tactile nature of the exchange facilitated by her own and Freud’s physical handling of the Bronze Athena, stating that the object constituted “something tangible, to be weighed and measured” by analyst and analysand.98 Handing the ancient object back and forth, a communicative exchange becomes possible between the male scientist and the female poet. One way of framing this encounter is

95 Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), 4: 98, his emphasis. 96 H.D., Tribute, 144. See also Rohy, “Exchanging,” 256, and Cole, “Vision,” 87, for a discussion of indeterminacy. 97 H.D., Tribute, 71, her emphasis. 98 Ibid., 70, her emphasis. 242 J. FUNKE to appropriate Carolyn Dinshaw’s concept of the queer touch of the past, understood as a touch that does not deny differences between past and present or between different identity positions, but that facilitates “a queer historical impulse, an impulse towards making connections across time”.99 Whereas Dinshaw is interested in the ways in which individuals in the present can establish queer connections with different individuals in the past, H.D. explores the joint attempt on behalf of herself and Freud to communicate by touching the past through the Bronze Athena. The fact that both Freud and H.D. recognise each other—and the Bronze Athena— as anachronistic survivals is crucial in this context, since it opens up the past as a shared space to which both analyst and analysand have access and which they can jointly explore. Immediately after the exchange about the Bronze Athena, H.D. imagines herself climbing the steps to the Acropolis at Athens, which “[h]e [Freud] too had climbed […] once”.100 This shared memory of the temple of Athena is followed by a lengthy description of “universal consciousness” and the celebration of a language that was “the common property of the whole race”.101 If H.D. articulates the dream of a common language originating in the past, the Bronze Athena with her missing spear also draws attention to the losses of history, as explored previously; it suggests that a shared past is no longer easily accessible. What connects H.D. and Freud is not a shared understanding of the meaning of the lost spear, but an attachment and investment to the lost past that it represents. It is the very awareness of loss that makes possible Freud’s and H.D’s exchange by drawing attention to the inevitable indeterminacy of meaning: in its absence, the missing spear opens up a number of different interpretations. Instead of a universal language that can easily be shared and understood by all, trading the material object from one hand to the other and one moment in history to the next necessarily entails a loss of certainty that results from the different interpretative stances taken by individuals across time and across identity positions. Instead of universal abstraction, timelessness and transcendence, bronze draws attention to the particularities of the individual object and

99 Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 1. 100 H.D., Tribute, 69. 101 Ibid., 71. 10 THE QUEER MATERIALITY OF HISTORY: H.D., FREUD … 243 its relationship to history. The visible damage and age of the Bronze Athena shows that the object has not moved through time unharmed; on the contrary, it has changed its form and endured damage, and it bears the traces of its history. The fact that the statuette is a Roman copy of an earlier Greek original draws further attention to the fact that the past is always rearranged and represented in new ways by different interpreters in the present, thus resisting universalist and transcendental readings.102 In contrast to the ideal hieroglyphic language that holds out the promise of transhistorical understanding, or the transcendental whiteness of marble statuary that offers universal abstraction, the Bronze Athena opens up a different form of communication: foregrounding the impossibility of any singular or stable meaning, it facilitates an exchange that thrives on indeterminacy and openness of interpretation, thus allowing H.D. and Freud to connect while also leaving room for their divergent interpretations.

Conclusion Instead of representing either the inevitable fact of female castration or the triumphant affrmation of female autonomy, Athena appears in H.D.’s accounts in the Greek goddess’s traditional role as mediator and resolver of conficts. Far from reinforcing gendered or disciplinary divisions between the male scientist and female literary author, the material qualities of the bronze statue were associated in H.D.’s imagination with articulations of temporality and modes of communication that resist universalising and transhistorical truths. In contrast to the abstract and transcendental qualities of white marble, the materiality of the Bronze Athena draws attention to experiences of temporality that, H.D. suggests, connect her and Freud: their shared resistance to the losses and injuries of history and their joint experience of anachronism, related to the former’s bisexuality and modernist aesthetics and the latter’s Jewishness and old age as well as his roles as founder of psychoanalysis and ardent collector of antiquities. As such, Tribute to Freud indicates that the statue of the Bronze Athena enabled H.D. and Freud to relate to each other through the queer touch of the past, establishing dialogue through a shared engagement with the past that acknowledges individual differences and thrives on the inevitable indeterminacies of meaning.

102 See Burke, Sphinx, 94, for more on Freud’s general dislike of forgeries and copies. 244 J. FUNKE

“Britain’s Most Romantic Museum”?: Lesbian Spectatorship and the Reception of Historic Figural Sculpture at the V&A

Amy Mechowski

In an article published by the Daily Telegraph on the 6th of May 2006, entitled “Museums Where Love Is the Main Attraction,” the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) was declared to be “Britain’s most romantic museum”.1 Using the annual “Museums and Galleries Month Survey” (described in the article as a marketing exercise to boost visitor numbers) as the basis for this declaration, arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds made the provocative claim that “Britain’s leading museums and art galleries are

1 Nigel Reynolds, “Museums Where Love Is the Main Attraction,” Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517597/Museums-where-love-is- the-main-attraction.html.

A. Mechowski (*) Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2019 245 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_11 246 A. MECHOWSKI temples of lust, positively throbbing with passion”.2 A number of statistics are cited as evidence for this claim: 65% of those surveyed chose a museum or gallery to take someone they were trying to impress on a date; 18% had fallen in love in a museum or gallery; and 10% “admitted that they had chatted up a stranger in a temple of culture”. Speaking to the accolade, the V&A’s Director of Public Affairs, Damien Whitmore, expressed a lack of surprise at the result of the poll, stating: “We are a monument to a famous loving couple. The museum was a gift from Victoria to Albert”.3 In both this Telegraph article and the two which accompany it by Anra Kennedy and Bryony Gordon, the V&A’s “Sculpture in Britain: 1600- 1870” galleries (or, Hintze galleries, after donors Dorothy and Michael Hintze) fgure prominently in both image and text.4 All three articles centre on feelings of love and intimacy, passion, and eroticism, experienced by people looking at objects in the galleries, either alone or as part of a couple. While Reynolds and Kennedy describe scenarios in which men and women meet, firt, and pick up each other (and in Kennedy’s case get married and have children), Gordon describes her frustration in trying to attract the attention of a man, only to fnd that all of the male visitors she encounters seem to be gay: “Upon entering the museum, my eyes are immediately drawn to what I can only describe as not one but two lookers. I pretend to admire a bust in the hope that they might admire mine, but instead […] of course, they start holding hands”.5 The double meaning of lookers, as both observers and observed, is highlighted by the inclusion of a quote from Sandy Nairne, former Director of the National Portrait Gallery: “There is a long history of romance in museums. […] Not only are the exhibits on show, but there is a strong element that people are as

2 Commissioned by a campaign for Museums and Galleries Month, the survey was carried out on-line by the 24 Hour Museum between the 24th of April and the 2nd of May 2006. Now called Culture24, this British charity publishes two websites, Culture24 and Show Me, about visual culture and heritage in the United Kingdom. See: http://www.culture24.org. uk/places-to-go/north-west/manchester/art37218; http://www.culture24.org.uk. 3 Quoted in Reynolds, “Museums.” 4 Anra Kennedy, “Kisses in the Gallery,” Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517599/Kisses-in-the-gallery.html; and Bryony Gordon, “I Admired a Bust in the Hope He Would Admire Mine,” Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2006. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1517598/I-admired-a-bust-in-the-hope-he- would-admire-mine.html. 5 Gordon, “Admired.” 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 247 well”.6 There are, indeed, well-developed theories of the ‘museum gaze’ as interpreted by Foucauldian followers and others who have explored the museum space as ‘a site to see and be seen’, as discussed further below.7 However, within these articles, there is a distinct absence of a narrative or testimonial that relates to the experience of a female couple.8 This raises the question: What if Bryony’s bust had been admired by another woman?9 And in what circumstances might attraction or an erotic liai- son between women come about in the context of the objects on display in these galleries? This was my starting point, working as an Assistant Curator of Sculpture at the V&A in 2009, as I began to prepare a public tour of the galleries for LGBTQ History Month on the subject of lesbian spectatorship in the museum. Theories of female spectatorship and homoerotic desire provide a framework for teasing out the conditions through which the female homoerotic gaze might be actuated. Though Laura Mulvey’s theorisa- tion of the dominance of the male gaze in her seminal 1975 essay has been widely critiqued, her argument for the power of the male gaze imposed upon the female body, which functions as an object rather than subject of desire, continues to be compelling. The paradigm of the active male artist/passive female subject presents a quandary for a female viewer who, presented with a representation of a female fgure as a work of art, might be limited to identifying with the masculine agency that created it or with the object itself.10 It is the look of the

6 Quoted in Reynolds, “Museums.” 7 Amy K. Levin, “Introduction,” in Gender and Sexuality in Museums: A Routledge Reader, eds. Amy K. Levin et al. (London: Routledge, 2010), 1–15 (5). See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 59–88. 8 Scholarship considering the ubiquitous association between the male nude (especially in the context of Classicism and Neo-Classicism) and male homoeroticism prolifer- ates, so much so that its close association has been a subject of critique. See David Getsy, “Recognizing the Homoerotic: The Uses of Intersubjectivity in John Addington Symonds’ 1887 Essays on Art,” Visual Culture in Britain 8, no. 1 (2007), 37–57. However, a similar association between the female nude and female same-sex desire remains relatively unex- plored and untheorized. 9 In using the term ‘woman’ to refer to the viewer as subject throughout this chapter, I am referring to all viewers who identify as female, rather than assuming an essentialist defnition of women as cis women. 10 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 815. 248 A. MECHOWSKI lesbian—a “female spectator, who is thereby offered empowerment as an active desiring female subject,” which, Karen Hollinger argues, upsets Mulvey’s framework.11 Such theorisations surrounding lesbian spectatorship have involved discussions of the fuidity of lesbian identity itself. Though highly controversial, Adrienne Rich’s concept of the ‘lesbian continuum’ has played a key role in the disavowal of an essentialist framing of the lesbian, by extending the defnition to encompass homosocial bonds between women.12 The concept of the ‘lesbian continuum’ is useful here, for opening up the potential of homoerotic experience for women visitors who may not identify as lesbian and of a sexual feld that acknowledges the libidinal investment of a non-binary gaze. In the context of efforts by curators and educators to reconsider the role of the museum in constructing and maintaining dominant ideologies around sexuality and gender, traditional approaches to exploring heteronormativity and its alternatives have involved making explicit artists’ identities and representations in displays, making visible ‘hidden histories’, and producing exhibitions with LGBT themes.13 However, these initiatives have at times been deemed to run the risk of perpetuat- ing the ghettoising of queer experience or “foreground[ing] universalist notions of LGBT identity and desire”.14 In the 2008 Where is Queer? volume of the journal Museums and Social Issues, the use of display methods to reposition visitors and open up potentially transgressive and multiplicitous spaces for their engagement with objects is identifed by many of the contributors as being a key curatorial and interpretive strategy. Investigating new theories of “what it means to truly queer the museum

11 Karen Hollinger, “Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 3–17 (12). 12 See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” reprinted in Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 11–48. For a useful summary of the debates surrounding Rich’s ‘lesbian continuum’, see Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan, “Lesbian Continuum,” in Fifty Key Concepts in Gender Studies (London: Sage, 2004), 79–82. 13 For a summary of such exhibitions, see Stuart Frost, “Secret Museums: Hidden Histories of Sex and Sexuality,” Where is Queer? Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Refective Discourse 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 29–40. 14 Robert Mills, “Theorizing the Queer Museum,” Where is Queer?, Museums and Social Issues: A Journal of Refective Discourse 3, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 41–52 (41). 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 249 space, by understand[ing] gender and sexuality as relational constructs, subject to historical and cultural variation,” Robert Mills demands new strategies for exploring objects using contemporary display tactics that draw out multiple meanings and open up spaces for homosocial experience and plurality.15 As a place where past and present meet, the museum plays a crucial role in a consideration of how engaging with historic objects, as well as the modalities of their production and reception, can shape a temporal understanding of the diversity of sexual experience. Inspired to redress a balance and fll the lacuna of the Daily Telegraph feature, I not only embarked on a search in the Hintze Galleries for a space which might open up the potential for women’s experience of homoerotic desire and intimacy, but also questioned how that experience might manifest itself through viewing particular sculptures in the space. In this chapter, I will trace that journey by engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue which draws on the history of art, as well as, museum, literary, flm, and queer studies—problematising both female and lesbian spectatorship, within and across historical and contemporary contexts, and considering the potentialities of an erotic encounter facilitated by an engagement with the past, through an experience of historic sculpture.

Gallery 21 and Sculptures of Female Couples by Rodin The Hintze galleries were completed in two phases, as part of the V&A’s ten-year Future Plan—a museum-wide development programme intended to clarify the layout of the museum and make it more naviga- ble for visitors by revealing and restoring the original architecture, as well as using contemporary display techniques to make the collection more accessible to audiences.16 The three galleries making up “Sculpture in Britain, 1600-1870” opened in March 2006, followed by a fourth in May 2007, which displays British sculpture and its French infuences, 1870–1950. Populated entirely by historical subjects or portrai- ture (busts and fgures) as well as ‘ideal’ sculpture (fgures representing mythological or allegorical subjects), the last gallery in the suite (Gallery 21) was completed with the return of a group of sculptures by Auguste Rodin on loan from Tate and dating from the 1870s to the 1900s, which

15 Ibid. 16 “Future Plan,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/info/futureplan, accessed August 12, 2017. 250 A. MECHOWSKI form the focal point of the display.17 It is on this fnal gallery that I directed my attention, given the profusion of female nudes in the space and the highly charged corporeality of many of those objects, still palpa- ble for modern day audiences.18 While I am resistant to any assumption that the representation of an unclothed body should in itself conjure sexual thoughts or an erotic experience, it is the historic role of the female nude “as a means of containing femininity and female sexuality,” and the possibilities for discovering instances in which that role might be dis- rupted by the display tactics deployed in Gallery 21, which inspired me as a visitor, even as my interpretation of those tactics was informed by my work as a curator.19 Sculptures of the nude form were contentious in the late nineteenth century precisely because they shared a space with and mimicked viewers’ form and scale. Moreover, as Michael Hatt has argued, sculpture was perceived as an art of pure form which could transform the body into an allegory or ideological concept, but was also regarded as “the most concrete” in its materiality: “Unlike the illusory window of the painting with its own space, its own world, the statue is here with us, as substantial as—if not more so than—those who view it, and while this presence is one of the elements that elevates sculpture, it also threatens its status, for this materiality can threaten sculpture’s purity”.20 The ‘purity’ of the nineteenth-century female nude involved a negotiation of the delicate balance between the real and ideal, upon which the genre was contin- gent. Neo-classicism offered a visual vocabulary which transformed the ‘naked’ into the ‘nude’—a ‘framing’ of the female body using “conventions of high art [as] one way of controlling [that] unruly body and placing it within the securing boundaries of aesthetic discourse”.21

17 For a discussion of the unusual circumstances through which Rodin’s gift of these objects to the V&A came to be transferred to the Tate Collection and on loan to the V&A, see “Sculpture,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/sculpture,-metalwork,-ceramics-and-glass, accessed August 12, 2017. 18 Other sculptures in this gallery included female nudes such as: Jean-Baptise Carpeaux’s Eve After the Fall (1873), Alphonse Legros’ Female Torso (1890), Rodin’s The Muse (1896) and Despair (1890–92). 19 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 2. 20 Michael Hatt, “Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude,” in Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 37–49 (38). 21 Nead, Female Nude, 2. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 251

Neo-classical conventions for representation of the female body consisted of proportioned, harmonious parts forming a complete, smooth, and seamless whole; lacking nipples, genitals, body hair, and other physical specifcities in order to “transcend the marks of individualised corporeality,” resulting in a universal ideal.22 The rendering of bodies acceptable to a prevailing puritanism of public taste prevalent for much of the nineteenth century was largely dependent on these conventions; however, as Alison Smith points out, they also provoked “a number of competing perspectives on the way the human fgure was represented in art and society, […] informed by religious and social morality as well as aesthetic and libertarian values”.23 The often tense relationship between representation and materiality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century fgurative sculpture which inspired these “competing perspectives” as well as the effect of the overt theme of sexuality in Rodin’s work on contemporary British artists’ representation of the nude both emerge as dominant themes in Gallery 21. The sensuousness and specifcity, corporeality and outright eroticism of so many of Rodin’s fgures posed a challenge to the conventions of a Neo-classical ideal. A ground-breaking, controversial and infuential artist, Rodin “established himself as a pivotal fgure in the founding of a new idiom of sculpture”.24 In Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture, David Getsy persuasively argues that, most widely recognised for “what many perceived as his tendency to focus on bodies writhing together in pleasure and pain,” Rodin’s “work grafted sexuality onto sculptural practice”.25 If any objects in the gallery were most readily able to inspire an erotic investment on the part of the visitor (female, male or otherwise), beginning with the highly sexualised work of Rodin seemed a reasona- ble option. Of all Rodin’s sculptures in Gallery 21, two are of nude female couples and are rare examples of erotic intimacy between women

22 Ibid., 22. 23 Alison Smith, “The Nude in Nineteenth-Century Britain: ‘The English Nude’,” in Exposed, 11–20 (11). For an exploration of the cliché of Victorian prudery and its hypocri- sies, see also Martin Myrone’s “Prudery, Pornography and the Victorian Nude (Or, What Do We Think The Butler Saw?)” in the same volume, 23–35. 24 David Getsy, Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 153, 6. 25 Ibid., 153. 252 A. MECHOWSKI

Fig. 11.1 Auguste Rodin, The Fallen Angel, 1895, bronze, 53.3 81.2 × × 90 cm, London, V&A. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London on public display in the museum. These objects—a bronze on open display, The Fallen Angel (1895) (Fig. 11.1) and a cased, smaller plaster, The Metamorphosis of Ovid (1886)—were a useful starting point, considering the conspicuous connection between the representation of erotic intimacy between women and female homoerotic, scopophilic pleasure. The Fallen Angel consists of a winged, nude female fgure lying on a rock emerging from a swirling sea, held by a second female fgure. Uniting two early sculptures from The Gates of Hell—The Fallen Caryatid (1880–1881) for the crouching fgure and The Torso of Adѐle (1882) for the recumbent fgure—their proximity on that monumental portal, perhaps “prompted the idea of their union” in The Fallen Angel.26 Their bodies entangled, Rodin altered the position of the arms and bent the head of the crouching woman to kiss the other—a gesture partially hidden from view by the intermingling of their fowing

26 Albert E. Elsen with Rosalyn Frankel Jamison, Rodin’s Art, ed. Bernard Barryte (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 530. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 253 hair. The addition of wings to the supine fgure allowed for a variety of readings and titles, presumed by many historians as “exemplify[ing] Rodin’s tact in treating his theme,” as he consciously and strategically tried to obscure the homoerotic implications of the fgures’ embrace in order to side-step potential controversy.27 Having once been known variously as Illusion Falls with Broken Wings, the Earth Receives Him and The Fall of Icarus, the implied reading of the gender of the winged fgure as male through these titles, further blurred the homoeroticism of the sculpture.28 In spite of potential controversies over the homoerotic implications of many of Rodin’s works featuring nude women embracing, this subject was a common theme in the late nineteenth century—seen in the work of French artists such as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—indulging a voyeuristic fantasy that was pervasive.29 Rodin’s interest in the writings of Charles Baudelaire and his illustrations of nude female couples for a volume of the writer’s 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal (a text which played a key role in the development of the fgure of the lesbian as an icon of modernity and perverse femme fatale in the late nineteenth-century popular imagination), contribute to the positioning of these sculptures within a leitmotif of heterosexual male fantasy.30 Though the contextualisation of Rodin’s sculpture within such a fantasy in the sociocultural, historical moment in which he worked is key, possibilities for considering a greater breadth of readings beyond this reception through a male lens will be explored later in the chapter. The visitor is invited to experience The Fallen Angel, displayed on a 75-cm high plinth (not quite waist height) in the middle of Gallery 21,

27 Ibid. 28 Catherine Lampert, Rodin: Sculpture and Drawings (London: Arts Council, 1986), 214. 29 Kirk Varnedoe, “Life Drawings and Watercolours,” in Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert E. Elsen (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1981), 153–89 (180). For an in-depth exploration of the complexities of the apparent contradiction surrounding attitudes towards the subject of lesbianism at the turn of the century as both taboo and demonized, yet popular and poeticized, see Nicole G. Albert, Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-Siѐcle France, trans. Nancy Erber and William A. Peniston (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016). 30 Rodin illustrated the collector Paul Gallimard’s copy of the 1857 frst edition of Les Fleurs du Mal in the 1880s, resulting in twenty-seven drawings in the margins of that volume. Lampert, Rodin, 144. 254 A. MECHOWSKI in an intimate way. Able to walk around the object and view it from all sides, as well as from above, the visitor is drawn to the sculpture, with its patinated and lacquered surface appealing to touch. Following the contours of the bodies in a visual caress, the viewer looks for where one body ends and the other begins, and where they merge with the undu- lating base, with the graceful linking of the fgures conveying a sense of fuid movement. Art historian Albert Elsen’s description of the circulatory composition, which “originates in the buttocks of the crouching woman and swells upward and then down to the toes of the reclining fgure, then back along the concavity of the base, completing an oval confguration,” may be read as self-consciously sexualised as the fgural group itself.31 The plaster Metamorphosis of Ovid, displayed in the same gallery on the bottom shelf of a wall case, conveys a rather different sexual interplay between two female fgures.32 Again, a crouching woman leans in to kiss and embrace a second, however, in a gesture of resistance, the latter buries her face in her crossed arms. Rather than the pose of sexual abandon assumed by the winged fgure in The Fallen Angel, the recumbent fgure in this group presses her knees and ankles together, shrink- ing from her partner’s advances. With the suggestion of the penultimate moment of a seduction captured, Elsen observed that: “The defensive position of the reluctant woman’s arms seems to foreshadow her submission, but Rodin shows the thumb of the ardent wooer touching the extended right thumb of the other, thereby closing a compositional circle but suggesting successive events in their sexual drama”.33 Not (yet then) in a full embrace, the fgures’ bodies are distinct from one another and the shadows cast across the matte plaster surface, as well as the seams of the mould from which it was cast, emphasise the curves of their bodies. Like the addition of wings to The Fallen Angel fgure, Rodin added a “short, tufted tail” to the back of the kneeling fgure in later versions, making her a mythological creature that inspired alternative titles such as Satyresses—again interpreted as an attempt to make palatable a fgural group that might otherwise invite scandal.34 Situated in the upper right

31 Elsen, Rodin’s Art, 530. 32 Visitors look down on the object with a restricted view and perceive it at one remove, resulting in an experience which lacks the intimacy and immediacy of The Fallen Angel’s open display. 33 Ibid., 257. 34 Ibid., 256. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 255 tympanum (a semi-circular decorative feature over a doorway) of Rodin’s Gates of Hell (1917), The Metamorphosis of Ovid fgural group is known as Damned Women. Photographs of earlier versions of the portal show a relief of a mother and child occupying the space in which Rodin placed the Damned Women, and indicate that he signifcantly replaced the “fruited vine” that had surrounded the maternal group with a “barren thorned vine,” upon introduction of the lesbian couple—emphasising their non-reproductive, sterile, and therefore ‘perverse’ sexuality.35 While the title Damned Women might be interpreted as referring to women existing in a world in which they are damned or imply a condemnation of homosexual love, Elsen’s description of The Metamorphosis of Ovid and The Fallen Angel as “fatal pendant[s] to the story of lesbian lovers,” suggests the latter.36 Noting that this object is only “loosely inspired by Ovid,” the label in Gallery 21 states that “[c]ritics denigrated Rodin’s more erotic sculptures, calling them ‘fantasies’,” thereby ascribing less importance to them than his more ‘serious’ work.37 Despite referencing the sexual theme, the label does not draw attention to or address that the embracing fgures are both female. And though the label for The Fallen Angel does note this, it makes no reference to the sexual interplay of the fgures, simply stating that Rodin “explored the human body in extreme physical and emotional states”—suggesting that the V&A curators, like nineteenth-century critics, struggled to contend with or straightforwardly discuss the homosexual theme of these objects.

Women, Museums, and Sculpture in the Late Nineteenth Century Having looked at these historical sculptures in detail and considered them in the present context of Gallery 21 and its modes of display, I want to ask how the conditions under which they were perceived may have differed when they were frst exhibited. In a photograph of Rodin’s original installation of his gift of eighteen sculptures to the museum in

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 530. 37 All labels date from the opening of the gallery in May 2007. 256 A. MECHOWSKI

1914, The Fallen Angel can be seen on the far right of the West Hall (now the Porter Gallery) displayed on a plinth at the same height as it is today in the Hintze galleries.38 Without critical reviews or personal accounts of how this object was received in the context of that initial exhibition, the experience and reception of it by contemporary female visitors can only be inferred or speculated upon.39 However, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a pivotal moment not only for the development of sculpture in Britain, but also for museums and the sociocultural position of women. Exploring the relationship between women and museums as well as women’s contributions to sculptural discourse in this period usefully frames my discussion, in considering how female visitors may have engaged with sculptures, such as the works by Rodin, in a historic museum context. The role of the museum as an instrument of public instruction emerged in the nineteenth century as part of the formation of the bourgeois public sphere, and the V&A itself was founded in 1852 with the mission to educate not only artists, designers and manufacturers, but also the general public.40 Museums were regarded as spaces in which the working class might become more ‘civilised’ by beneftting from the moralising effect of great works of art, as well as emulating the middle-class codes of behaviour of socially elevated museum attendees.41 Museums also played an important role with regard to gender. Distinguishable from more unregulated social areas of the public realm that were still reserved for men, museums were spaces women were encouraged to visit, facilitated by a reassessment of public and private

38 Whilst the plaster was only bequeathed to the V&A by the collector Mr. Charles Shannon in the 1930s, the bronze was part of the artist’s original gift in 1914. “Search the Collections,” Victoria and Albert Museum. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O135955/metamorphosis-of-ovid-statuette-rodin-auguste, accessed July 1, 2017. 39 Kate Hill notes that the scarcity of “surviving records of visitors’ reactions, actions and experiences has meant that even when historians set out to document visitors’ opinions about museums, they have ended up focusing on how museums sought to shape those opinions.” Kate Hill, Women and Museums, 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 103. 40 “Building the Museum,” Victoria and Albert Museum. www.vam.ac.uk/articles/building-the-museum, accessed September 11, 2017. 41 See Bennett, Birth, 25–37. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 257 space as well as a shift in women’s position in the cultural sphere.42 With both women’s duties and public pleasures expanding, as Kate Hill explains: “[m]useums, as sites of pleasure in many ways analogous to shops, should not just be seen as places where citizenship and the civic were defned; they were also sociable and fashionable spaces, spaces for intense subjective and aesthetic experiences, and spaces where practical educational goals could be achieved”.43 With the increasingly fuid public, cultural realm of the early twentieth century, museums were dominated by women visitors who could meet and circulate, unchaperoned.44 Therefore, even while the museum functioned as a socially regulating ideological space, it was also an enabling one that impacted on models of bourgeois femininity, as “a sphere for female autonomy, pleasure, and creativity”.45 A potentially liberating space for women, the museum allowed for an escape from domesticity and served as a place of study for students and ‘lady-copyists’ (women who copied works of art in the galleries as a learning exercise), who, at least in some fctional accounts, were suspected of using their public visibility in museums to attempt to attract wealthy men or as opportune occasions to meet with male lovers.46 Therefore, there were concerns about the permissiveness of museum spaces allowing women to exercise their sexuality. However, the extent to which there was any opportunity for or perceived threat of women experiencing homoerotic liaisons in these spaces is largely unattested to, undocumented, and left to question. A burgeoning bourgeois female audience in museums was met with a rise in the publication of exhibition catalogues, gallery handbooks and

42 Ibid., 29. 43 Hill, Women, 106. The perception of women visitors, their roles, behavior, expecta- tions and experiences, diverged according to class distinctions, even as cultural institutions became more freely accessible to all, later in the century. Ibid., 114–5. 44 Ibid., 121. 45 Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3. 46 Victoria Mills, “The Museum as ‘Dream Space’: Psychology and Aesthetic Response in George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011), 3; Hill, Women, 112. See also Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville, and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 132; and Aviva Briefel, The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 46. 258 A. MECHOWSKI guides written by women, “cast[ing] women as special observers”.47 With the appreciation of sculpture regarded as requiring a more elevated imagination and even training, late nineteenth-century women writers, art historians and critics sought to help ‘ordinary’ museum visitors, especially women, develop the skills necessary for understanding and judging sculptural work.48 Though sculpture was broadly regarded as a masculine art form in this period (with women practitioners negotiating their position as professional artists in gendered terms), as critics and connoisseurs, women writers “modelled a sculptural discourse that was distinctive, often personally driven and biographically infected”.49 Signifcantly, as Hilary Fraser has established, writing about the representation of the “human body in sculptural form enabled women to comment obliquely on issues such as female creativity, sexuality, and education”.50 Writing about the psychological and physiological experience of sculpture, with a unique undercurrent of lesbian sensibility, the work of British writer Vernon Lee and her sometime partner Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thomson has been explored by literary scholars and art historians alike, and is the subject of the chapter by Francesco Ventrella in this volume. Lee’s exploration of the effects of a sculptural encounter on the female body, recording changes in balance and breathing, demonstrates that, as Ventrella has argued elsewhere, “women were able to circumvent the alleged script of the museum by experimenting with methods of art appreciation that did not necessarily confrm or conform to a monolithic ideology of gender”.51 Though he argues against interpretations of her experimental work in aesthetics “as a sort of sublimation for lesbian desire or a form of queer displacement,” others have located this work in the union between two female bodies in which a sculpture becomes a “feminine body with which [Anstruther-Thomson]

47 Francesco Ventrella, “Beyond the Gallery Handbook: Vernon Lee, Mary Berenson and Constance Jocelyn Foulkes,” (Gendering Museum Histories Conference, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, September 8, 2016). See also Hilary Fraser, Women Writing Art History: Looking Like a Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 48 Hilary Fraser, “Women and the Modelling of Victorian Sculptural Discourse,” Visual Resources Journal 33, no. 1–2 (June 6, 2017): 74–93 (75). 49 Ibid., 74. 50 Ibid. 51 Ventrella, “Beyond,” 2. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 259 has congress and all aesthetic experience for a moment becomes a bodily exchange between women”.52 It was an embodied response to historic fgurative sculpture that Lee argued was especially suited to their studies, “as the statue has the same general shape as ourselves,” and because “all form which we recognise as human awakens or can awaken the various orders of feeling which are awakened by human beings”.53 Exploring a dimension of intimacy and sexuality in women’s writing on sculpture, from novels to life writing and more critical work, Fraser argues that Lee and other female writers developed a new framework for “respond[ing] to the corporeal connections between viewers, models and fgurative sculpture”—especially those in which they found “the same ‘general shape’ as themselves”.54 Given this opening up of an enabling space of autonomy, embodied viewing, pleasure, and sexuality for women both in the context of museums and in the formation of sculptural discourses, it is tempting to imagine the potential for a contemporary engagement with works such as Rodin’s Fallen Angel and Metamorphosis of Ovid which might disrupt the masculine visual economy of the historical moment in which they were produced. However, any potential for women’s homoerotic pleasure would be mitigated by a contextualisation of the sculptures within a heterosexual male fantasy founded on voyeurism, and the contemporary construction of the lesbian as a titillating, yet loathsome, doomed fgure.

Gallery 21 and Female Nudes of the New Sculpture For present-day visitors, knowledge of the historic heteronormative codes related to the fgure of the lesbian informs, even if it may not necessarily detract from, the potential for women to take scopophilic pleasure in the homoeroticism of Rodin’s fgural groups. Whilst the nineteenth-century framing of the lesbian as a sexually perverse fgure may exist in some tension with the potentially feminist and queer late

52 Ibid., 3. Kathy Psomiades, “‘Still Burning from this Strangling Embrace’: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21–41 (35). 53 Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness, and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1912), 218, 265–6, quoted in Fraser, “Modelling,” 88. 54 Fraser, “Modelling,” 76. 260 A. MECHOWSKI nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readings of these sculptures which I have traced here, a present-day visitor’s homoerotic encounter with them in Gallery 21 is facilitated by and through an experience of them as historical objects, situated in a modern museum context, distanced from the circumstances in which they were frst produced and received. An experience of these sculptures as historical objects in a modern setting holds the possibility for both confronting the visitor with their conceivably problematic history and liberating them from it. The museum therefore acts as a temporally queer space, which connects visitors with the past while at the same time distancing the objects from their original historical context—allowing for new encounters that go beyond a single historical framework. Might there be an alternative space in this gallery for mobilising homoerotic desire that is not centred on the explicit depiction of female same-sex encounters, but, liberated from such a representational logic, is located instead in an engagement with the female form that is brought about by methods of display? I began to consider single, free-standing female fgures that are positioned in such a way as to suggest dialogue between themselves and/or with the viewer, as holding the greatest potential for exploring the possibilities of such an encounter—engendered by a ‘one to one’ exchange with the viewer rather than the voyeurism of witnessing a sexual communion between fgures whose exchange is with one another. There were only two such fgures on open display in Gallery 21: Thomas Brock’s Eve (1900) and Albert Toft’s The Bather (1915), (Fig. 11.2) positioned on either side of an arch which leads from the gallery into the rest of the museum. Both marble and just over life-size, standing on 150 cm high (eye-level) plinths, the fgures rise above the other objects. As visitors enter from Exhibition Road, they descend the stairs into the gallery, frst confronted with Eric Gill’s large, headless and limbless nude female torso (Mankind, 1927–8) before the sight of Eve and The Bather at the far end of the gallery draws them into the space. The positioning of these fgures and their location in the Hintze galleries themselves is signifcant. Towering over visitors on either side of the archway, the sculptures command a presence in the gallery as sentries or guardians of a threshold. The two fgures signal a point of transition as visitors enter from Exhibition Road and pass through the length of the Hintze galleries into the rest of the museum. With the courtyard garden on the left and the galleries and shops on the right, this is a space 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 261

Fig. 11.2 Installation of Thomas Brock’s Eve, 1900, marble, 175 49 × × 43 cm, and Albert Toft’s The Bather, 1915, marble, 193 68.5 65 cm, on × × loan from Tate Britain in Gallery 21 of the V&A. Author’s photograph 262 A. MECHOWSKI between spaces, a nexus between the open air and natural light of the garden and the shelter and artifcial light of the museum. As a public area in which people are often observed having private experiences, the space of the gallery is both a performative and a liminal one—where boundaries between private/public and inside/outside are blurred. Both of these sculptures were produced by British artists of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century New Sculpture movement, which was fundamentally shaped by the work of French artists such as Rodin, “involved in the same theoretical and visual debate about corporeality”.55 Receiving its name from an 1894 series of essays by art critic and poet Edmund Gosse, the movement was defned by artists’ disavowal of conventional classicism, a naturalistic rendering of bodies, and an espousing of sculpture as “a modern site of meaning, exemplarity and ideality”.56 Striving to render fgures which are “of and about experience,” artists sought to “represent the body as a vehicle of experience, as a means by which a subject engages with the world”—imbuing the fgures with a sense of subjectivity.57 A focus on the materiality of the body and corporeal detail leads Herbert Read to attribute the frequency with which New Sculpture artists addressed the female nude to their “new concern for detailed modelling of fesh” and “preoccupation with surface effect”.58 Michael Hatt, however, emphasises that this was moderated by an endorsement of gender norms in which female bodies often continued to be rendered as “smooth, uninterrupted skins,” while the surfaces of male bodies revealed the tension of muscles and tendons engaged in dynamic movement.59 Susan Beattie’s view of New Sculpture’s ideological struggle “with the confict between the nature and fact of female sexuality and the myth of purity[,] with the relationship of conscious to unconscious mind,” speaks to a more complex engagement with the

55 Michael Hatt, “Substance and Shadow: Conceptions of Embodiment in Rodin and the New Sculpture,” in Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture, ed. Claudine Mitchell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 217–35 (218). 56 Getsy, Rodin, 3; Hatt, “Thoughts,” 44. 57 Ibid., 46. 58 Herbert Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 315, 324. 59 Hatt, “Thoughts,” 46. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 263 female nude and is relevant to these two sculptures especially, which seem imbued with their own subjectivity.60 With the smooth surface of the white marble and idealised body, Brock’s Eve is an exemplar of the transformation from ‘naked’ to ‘nude’ and very much grounded in a Neo-classical aesthetic, even as the form is characteristic of New Sculpture. As early twentieth-century critic Marion Spielmann described: “Nothing could well be more touching than this fair, shamed woman—not endowed with that perfection of beauty which is the conventional rendering […] but just one of ourselves in fgure and nature, more exquisite in feeling than in person, […] with the consciousness of her wrong-doing in her heart, and head bowed with the weight of remorse[…]”.61 Confating the idealisation of this single sensuous form with a naturalism and sense of inner life that renders the fgure as “just one of ourselves,” this description highlights the uncanniness of a confrontation with a life-size sculptural body that appears to possess subjectivity. Though the elevated position of the fgure on the plinth in Gallery 21 upsets equivalence between the body of the sculpture and that of the viewer, it also heightens the potential for a visual exchange between the two. She looks down at the viewer who stands beneath and looks up at her. Her languid yet lingering gaze seems all the more penetrating, as her hair falls like a veil on either side of her face—with her lack of peripheral vision, her attention is focused exclusively on the viewer. Unusually for the era in which it was produced, Brock’s Eve is not presented as a temptress, but instead shown self-absorbed, her head bowed with shame and her left arm placed protectively across her chest.62 The humility of her pose elicits a sense of quiet invitation rather than imposing presence. Toft’s Bather, by contrast, is a vigorous fgure, captured in a moment of action. Leaning forward with purpose, she turns to look to her right as she clasps in both hands the drapery that has fallen from her shoul- ders. This gesture and the movement of the drapery add to the dynamism of the work and emphasise the curves of her body, defned

60 Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 1983), 231. 61 Marion Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-Day (London: Cassell & Co., 1901), 30. 62 For a discussion of Eve as prototypical temptress in sculpture, see Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 173–90. 264 A. MECHOWSKI musculature, and rippling of fesh across her torso. Her hair is bound up to reveal an outstretched, sinewy neck, and a more mature face than Eve’s. Toft was often criticised for neglecting the ideal, with Spielmann regarding his nude female fgures to have largely missed the mark: “Mr. Toft invests his fgures with realism; sometimes, indeed, as has been said, he ventures too close to naturalism, which he apparently seeks to com- promise or soften down […] The ideas he seeks to express are of a lofty kind, and are represented with technical skill, yet without display of dex- terity”.63 More ‘lofty,’ theatrical and forceful than her counterpart, the alertness of The Bather’s gaze is acute and she commands a presence— not just implying subjectivity, but agency. The downward gaze and demure passivity of Eve paired with the active dynamism of the gaze of The Bather creates a tension between the fgures and also with the visitor, which is conducive to an awareness of being both viewer and viewed, desiring and desired body. In my own experience, as a female viewer looking up at Eve with her gaze fxed on me, I turned to notice The Bather looking at her, or me, or both of us, and suddenly felt implicated in a triangular relationship—caught in a private moment and a very public ‘three-some.’ (Fig. 11.2) The method of display and positioning of the sculptures results in a visual exchange between objects and viewer, which creates a moment that is potentially charged with homoeroticism. As a queer response to Mulvey’s theori- sation of the heterosexual male gaze, which illuminates the interplay of such an exchange, Chris Straayer theorises the active desiring lesbian gaze so as to provide an alternative that requires exchange: “It looks for a returning look, not just a receiving look. It sets up two-directional sexual activity”.64 This scenario is dependent upon inanimate objects’ possession of ‘the gaze,’ which in turn is reliant on an imposition of subjectivity and agency onto them, as singular, outward facing fgures—all the more easily imagined with New Sculpture fgures that share a viewer’s scale and space and are characteristically individualised. Similarly produced within the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century heterosexual masculine visual economy, albeit across a

63 Spielmann, British, 124–5. 64 Chris Straayer, “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine,” Jump Cut 35 (April 1990): 50–8 (50), quoted in Hollinger, “Theorizing,” 12. See also Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, (London: Routledge, 1994) for debates surrounding theories of female spectatorship and homoerotic desire in lesbian flm. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 265 twenty-year period, Brock’s Eve and Toft’s Bather carry with them sociocultural conditions of production and reception akin to Rodin’s sculptures. However, rather than a potential erotic encounter being located in perceiving the sexualised subject of a fgural group, here it is borne out of inserting oneself into and engaging in a dialogue with the fgures as an interlocutor, facilitated by an awareness of experiencing historic objects in the present moment. Curatorial practice constructs dialogues between objects through methods of display—often in the form of juxtapositions that visitors observe, but in which they do not participate. Here was a curatorial opportunity to place the visitor within one of those dialogues, in body and gaze, to join a visual conversation and reciprocal exchange between fgures in space, rather different to the voyeuristic pleasures of viewing self-contained fgural groups such as The Fallen Angel and Metamorphosis of Ovid.

A New Entrance and a New Display The new Exhibition Road entrance and Sackler Courtyard opened in June 2017 and has resulted in a different route into the museum for the public, with fewer visitors descending the staircase that leads into Gallery 21. This has diminished opportunities to encounter the sculptures on either side of the arch as dominant fgures in the space, since visitors now enter from behind them. Though The Bather remains, Brock’s Eve was returned to the lender, Tate Britain, for its A Walk Through British Art redisplay in May 2013. Since then, a Tate loan of another New Sculpture fgure, Derwent Wood’s bronze Psyche (1908), has stood in its place. A curvaceous, voluptuous fgure, she cradles the side of her face with her right hand and turns away from the gaze of The Bather, to whom she firtatiously presents her breast with the fngers of her other hand. With her lips parted, Psyche looks down at a viewer who stands beneath and to her right, who can look up at her and meet her gaze. Peering behind and looking past her, the viewer can also meet the gaze of The Bather— in a dynamic similar to the dialogue with Eve, maintaining the visual conversation between the objects on these two plinths and a viewer’s reciprocal engagement with them. Another moment potentially charged with homoeroticism is opened up for a female viewer here, in this constantly shifting and evolving gallery, emphasising the temporal nature of the objects, the space, and the moment in which they are experienced. Dialogue, collaboration, reciprocity, and mutual engagement upset 266 A. MECHOWSKI dichotomous power relationships and reject the construction of the female body as inert and manipulated, facilitating a scopophilic pleasure in viewing female fgures which were otherwise created within a prescrip- tively heteronormative framework of desire. Considering sexual identity and desire as constantly developing, historical and culturally shifting concepts, the modern space of the gallery and viewers’ experience of the historic objects within it are equally fuid. I began this chapter by highlighting that curatorial efforts to explore heteronormativity and its alternatives have materialised in interventions which include contemporary strategies for displaying historic objects that open up spaces for a multiplicitous and diverse experience of sexuality and identity, presenting a transgressive and non-binary fuidity of viewing and meaning. Considering the signifcant implications of queer curatorial practices for engaging with historical, material objects, it is therefore enticing to see in the Gallery 21 display of Eve and The Bather—addressing the audience with an invitation to dialogue and reciprocity that makes available a queer gaze—a self-conscious, revisionist curatorial gesture. This display, however, was largely the product of logis- tical decisions (a museum-wide directive to put objects on open display and minimise the use of barriers; a requirement of the terms of the loan agreement with Tate that the objects therefore be placed on high plinths, out of public reach) as well as didactic and aesthetic choices (objects of a similar subject, scale, and medium, harmoniously arranged, and in keeping with both the historic narrative and overarching themes of the gallery).65 This was also true for the curatorial decisions and compromises which led to the choice of the bronze Psyche to replace Eve, as a contemporary fgure of similar scale was required to ft the original plinth and it proved too diffcult to identify another marble from the Tate collection which would work well aesthetically in the existing space.66 Regardless of how this staging of a mise en scѐne in which a queer or lesbian encounter might be mobilised came about, it speaks to the erotic dynamics of the display as well as the enduring alignment of historic, fgurative sculpture and same-sex desire for present-day museum visitors. Again, the museum serves as a complex temporal and queer space, capable of freeing the

65 Author’s own discussion with Senior Curator of Sculpture, Holly Trusted, V&A, February 2009. 66 Author’s own discussion with Assistant Curator of Modern British Art, Jenny Powell, Tate, March 2013. 11 “BRITAIN’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSEUM”?: LESBIAN SPECTATORSHIP … 267 objects from the historical context in which they were originally produced and consumed, while at the same time providing ways for visitors to situate and apprehend those objects within it. The continual negotiation of viewpoint, position, and space in such curatorial stagings serves to highlight how “the confgurations of objects, desires, and identifca- tions that collections set in motion can be multi-layered, multi-dimensional experiences and that these are processes in which museum visitors are fully implicated”.67 In the context of a discussion on New Sculpture (and with some irony), Michael Hatt astutely asserted: “Worries about sculpture as a sexual provocation are as old as sculpture itself”.68 Whether or not the V&A can be regarded as Britain’s most romantic museum, or indeed a “tem- pl[e] of lust, positively throbbing with passion,” the offer in Gallery 21 of an evolving space which invites and mobilises a queer encounter with historic sculpture and moves towards a complex and nuanced reading of the multiplicity of eroticism and desire for modern audiences through an engagement with the past is a seductive start.

67 Mills, “Theorizing,” 48. 68 Hatt, “Substance,” 227. Index

A anthropology and ethnography, abstraction, 22, 42, 112, 127, 133– 20–22, 44, 133, 135 138, 141–142, 189, 197, 213, Antinoüs, 25, 27, 30, 199 216–218, 223, 226, 239–243 antiquarianism, 5, 13–15, 20, 35–56, Addison, Joseph, 35 153–157, 198–199, 203–205. aestheticism, 27, 30, 174, 186, 194, See also Antiquaries, Society of; 199 Dilettanti, Society of aesthetics, 18, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30, Antiquaries, Society of, 46 60, 86, 100, 105, 108, 116, Apollo, 50, 198 121, 124, 137, 183–187, 193, Apollo Belvedere, 3, 10–13, 39–42, 195–219, 224, 226, 232, 243, 67, 74, 199 258–259 Apoxyomenos, 185 affect, 10, 42–43, 50, 115, 142, 214, Apuleius, 112–113, 121–122 216, 218 archaeology, 17, 23–24, 36, 152, 156, Africa, 3, 20, 22, 69, 127, 130–137, 160, 173, 180–182, 203, 208, 140, 238 216, 229, 231, 232, 240 agalmatophilia, 2, 28 Arnim, Achim von, 106, 112, 115 age difference, 26, 174–194 Artemisian Zeus or Poseidon, 231 allegory, 65–67, 119, 249–250 art history, 2, 4, 5, 9, 11, 22, 26, 31, anachronism, 26, 49, 111, 226–243 49, 60–61, 74–79, 124, 175, anatomy. See science 178, 181–184, 188–189, 191, androgyny, 27, 30, 225–226, 228. See 194, 201, 203–205, 214, 225, also body, the; gender 226, 249, 254, 258 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementia, 26, Asia, 20 206–215, 258–259 Athena/Minerva, 26, 221–243

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 269 J. Funke and J. Grove (eds.), Sculpture, Sexuality and History, Genders and Sexualities in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8 270 Index

Australia, 20, 48 129–130, 138–139, 151, 162, Austria, 2, 23, 28, 29, 65, 89, 109, 200, 212, 226 123, 221–222 Bonaparte, Marie, 23 avant-garde art, 21, 125, 139 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 59–60, 68, 71, 74, 75, 78 Boulogne, Duchenne de, 200–202 B Brancusi, Constantin, 126 Banks, Joseph, 46–51 Brand, John, 45–46, 49, 54 Banks, Sarah, 50 Britain, 13, 22, 27, 28, 30, 36, 37, 45, Baudelaire, Charles, 97, 105–106, 136, 153, 171, 172, 176, 177, 115, 253 179, 217, 245–246, 249, 251, beauty, 5, 10, 18, 19, 24, 27, 42, 256, 258, 262, 267 62–63, 67, 89, 96, 98, 99, 101, Brock, Thomas, 260–265 156, 163, 165, 173–174, 178, Broderick, Thomas, 40–41 182, 184, 188, 189, 192, 201, bronze, 5, 26, 83, 87, 116, 117, 121, 204, 208–210, 212, 218, 225, 153, 221–243, 252, 256, 265, 226, 263 266 Belden, Charles Spencer, 94, 96 Brough, William, 85 Bible, the, 84, 118 Browning, Robert, 91 Binet, Alfred, 212 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), bisexuality, 222, 223, 226–228, 222, 227, 234–236 231–238, 243 Burne-Jones, Edward, 9, 11 Boccioni, Umberto, 134 busts, 100, 106, 246, 247, 249 body, the, 2, 7, 10, 11, 19, 43, 46, Byzantines, 136 49, 65, 78–79, 82–84, 88, 96, 99, 137, 139, 164, 197–198, 207–208, 210–211, 214–216, C 250, 255, 258, 262 Canova, Antonio, 89, 117 female, 9, 14–15, 19, 21–22, 35– Carpenter, Edward, 25, 179, 182 56, 69, 71, 81–101, 105–124, Carter, Angela, 29 247, 250–251, 253–254, 258, Casanova, 141 263–266 castration, 31, 131, 139–143, 223, ideal, 2, 10–11, 18, 96, 98, 99, 101, 227, 232, 234, 241, 243. See also 109, 182–185, 193, 250–251, Oedipal complex 263–264 Catholicism, 49, 65, 69 male, 40, 95, 129–131, 138–139, censorship, 5, 16–18, 140, 156–164, 141, 175, 177–178, 180, 167 183–185, 189, 191, 193, 199, Chadwick, Mary, 221 238 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 212 sexually ambiguous/indeterminate, chastity, 65–66, 106, 109, 114, 115, 16, 29–30, 57–58, 64–65, 124, 175–176, 187–190, 194 pudicitia, 152 Index 271 childhood and the child, 16, 22, 30, curation, 58, 75, 161, 162, 164–165, 74, 99, 114, 121, 127, 129, 131, 167, 200, 245–267 139, 141, 161, 213–215, 227, Curtiz, Michael, 83, 92 233, 234, 246, 255 queer, 198–205 Christianity, 20, 65–66, 69, 71, 84, D 115, 117, 119, 122, 124, 191, Dannecker, Johann Heinrich von, 230. See also Catholicism 115–119 cinema. See horror flm; sculpture Darwin, Charles, 228 civilization, 17, 132, 133, 152, 166, death, 15, 66, 81–101, 114, 120, 157, 167, 176, 204, 233, 256 203, 222, 231. See also necro- class, 13, 16, 17, 35, 38, 46, 48, 51, philia; suicide 68, 85, 110, 118, 119, 132, 156, decadence, 225 161, 165, 176, 181–182, 212, Dessoir, Max, 209–210 256–257 De Toth, Andre, 94 classical art and classicism, 2, 9, 11, d’Hancarville, Baron (Pierre-François 16, 18, 24, 26, 39, 57, 68–69, Hugues), 44–46, 53, 155 71, 73–75, 99, 101, 111, 114, Diderot, Denis, 85 123, 153, 171–194, 197, 224, Die Brücke, 133 262. See also Greece and Greek Dilettanti, Society of, 13–14, 19, 24, art; Rome and Roman art 154. See also antiquarianism clay, 84, 96, 98, 119–122 Dionysus/Bacchus, 115, 146, 152 Clemens, Brentano, 71, 112 Discobolus, 184 Cleopatra, 54 Drake, Johann Friedrich, 116–117 coins, 39, 41, 153 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 230 collecting, 3, 5, 13, 17, 20, 23, 25, 26, 36, 38, 48, 49, 51, 68–69, 74, 135, 140, 153–158, 172– E 173, 175, 180–182, 186, 190, Egypt, 23, 133, 136, 188, 204, 222, 193, 194, 200, 222, 229, 237, 240 240, 243 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 9, 57–79, colonialism, 17, 21, 119 112 commodifcation, 38, 43, 56, 135, Einfühlung. See empathy 182, 258 Einstein, Carl, 136 connoisseurship, 13, 154, 157, Ellis, Havelock, 28, 217–218 181–182, 198, 200 empathy, 13, 26, 73, 136–138, Cook, Captain, 20, 48 195–219 copies. See reproduction and copying Enlightenment, 5–6, 12–13, 19, 75 Corman, Roger, 83, 96 Epstein, Jacob, 22, 125–143 Courvoisier, François, 90 Eros/Cupid, 28, 112, 117, 184 Cubism, 135 Eurydice. See Orpheus and Eurydice 272 Index

Evans, Arthur, 229 gaze, the, 41, 60, 212, 215, 247, 265 evolution, 20, 199, 204–205, 224, female, 89, 120, 212, 247–249, 228, 233, 236 252, 259, 263–265 lesbian, 212, 247–249, 252, 264 male, 37, 63, 68, 77, 99, 152–154, F 164, 167, 196–197, 247, 253, Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 40, 85 264 feminism and women’s rights, 29, queer, 215, 248, 266 175–176, 191–194, 227–228, gender, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 259 24, 26, 29, 31, 32, 36, 40, 43, femininity, 8, 29, 36, 43, 65, 130, 55, 94, 100, 121, 153, 175, 176, 185, 191–193, 223–224, 227, 191, 194, 196–198, 200, 211, 230, 250, 257 216–218, 221–244, 248–249, objectifcation of women, 15, 253, 256, 258, 260, 262 36–38, 47–48, 50–51, 53, 56, gender dysphoria, 217 69, 84–87, 89–90, 95, 97, 100, See also androgyny; femininity; 247 masculinity female viewers of sculpture, 157, Germany, 19, 20, 30, 39, 43, 58, 65, 161, 211–212, 224, 245–267 71, 106, 107, 112, 115, 116, Ferenczi, Sândor, 238 118, 120, 122–124, 133, 176, fetishism, 14, 22, 49, 99, 125–143 177, 185, 199, 209, 217, 232 flm. See horror flm; sculpture Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 85 formalism, 195–219 Gilbert, W.S., 85 Forster, E.M., 25 Gill, Eric, 133–134, 260 Foucault, Michel, 19, 76, 78, 197, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 37, 198, 216 39–44, 55, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78, France, 7, 21, 36, 51, 52, 63, 82, 92, 106, 108, 124, 195, 199 93, 110, 125, 130, 249, 253, 262 Gosse, Edmund, 262 French Revolution, 59, 63–64 Gouget, Henri, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 22–24, 26, 31, 91, Grand Tour, the, 41, 68, 77 127–128, 130–133, 141–142, Greece and Greek art, 3, 5, 9–11, 12, 205, 215, 221–244 13, 18, 21, 23, 24–25, 26, 27, Freund, Karl, 90 28, 31, 36, 49, 52, 65, 69, 74, Furtwängler, Adolf, 208 75, 77, 96, 98, 107, 108, 110, futurism, 22, 130, 134 113, 120, 121, 133, 146, 149, 150, 163, 164, 171–194, 199, 222, 223, 224, 229, 230, 234, G 239, 243 Galatea. See Pygmalion and Galatea Groos, Karl, 208–210, 212–214, Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 129 217–218 Gauguin, Paul, 21–22, 133 Guillaume, Paul, 131–132 Index 273

H nostalgia and loss, 11, 26, 30–31, Häckel, Ernst, 232 63–64, 72, 75–76, 136, 203, Hadrian, 25 208, 221–244 Hagens, Gunther von, 83 objective, detached or intellectual Hamilton, Emma, 14, 15, 38–51 engagement with, 9, 13, 40– Hamilton, Gavin, 36 41, 50, 53–54, 60–61, 72–79 Hamilton, William, 13, 14, 36–56 See also anachronism; antiquarian- Harrison, Jane, 229 ism; memory; primitivism and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 26, 221–244 the primitive; Romanticism Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 105, Hitchcock, Alfred, 98 121, 199 Homer, 124 Heine, Heinrich, 105 homoeroticism and homosexuality, 2, Hellenism. See Greece and Greek art 28, 29, 205, 216, 233, 249 Hera/Juno, 69, 78, 117 female, 26, 28, 31, 211–213, 224, Herculaneum, 5, 16–17, 19, 36, 41, 224–225, 245–267 47, 148, 156, 160, 164 male, 16, 24–28, 30–31, 36, 47, 66, Herder, Johann Gottfried, 73, 108 171–194, 199, 225, 246–247, hermaphrodite. See body, the 253, 264. See also pederasty Hermes/Mercury, 173–174, 177, horror flm, 15, 82–83, 87, 90, 92, 179–183, 186–187, 193 94, 96, 100, 101 heteronormativity, 26, 192, 216, 248, Hoyer, Wolf von, 117 259, 266 Hulme, T.E., 136–138, 141 heterosexuality, 2, 31, 133, 225, 253, hyperrealism, 83, 92, 96, 100 259, 264 hieroglyphics, 200, 240, 243 Hinduism, 240 I Hirschfeld, Magnus, 20 idealism, 2, 8, 11, 16, 18, 24, 26, 42, history 68–69, 98–99, 101, 107, 109, embodied, emotional or erotic 175–183, 185–187, 189–194, engagement with, 4, 9, 10, 197, 226, 230, 240–241, 12–13, 41–43, 54, 59–64, 69, 249–251, 262–264 72–74, 77–79, 174, 199, 204, imperialism. See colonialism 249, 259, 265–267 impersonality, 216, 241 changing paradigms in understand- India, 19, 23, 121, 133, 222 ing, 9, 12–14, 37, 61, 66–67, Italy, 3, 19, 35–36, 39, 59, 61–62, 65, 105–106, 115, 123, 203 66–72, 74, 75, 77–79, 88, 107, gendered engagements with, 4, 112, 113, 130, 134, 153, 178 14–15, 35–56, 191, 229, 249 Ives, George, 25 imaginary transport and fantastical or visionary engagement with the past, 3, 10, 35–56, 174, J 234–235 Japan, 97 Jenkins, Thomas, 153–154 274 Index

Jewish, 84, 223, 231, 237–239, 241, Mannoni, Octave, 131, 141 243 marble, 5, 9, 18, 26, 36, 40, 58, Juno Ludovisi, 69–70 62–64, 66, 67, 78, 87, 91, 107, 115–117, 120–122, 124, 129, 154, 171, 172, 174, 186, 197, K 200, 210, 223–226, 228–230, Kauffmann, Angelica, 43 240, 241, 243, 260, 263, 266 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 21–22 Marinetti, F.T., 130, 134 kitsch, 106, 111, 112, 116 Marshall, John, 26, 173, 179–182, Klenze, Leo von, 123 186, 188 Knossos, 229 masculinity, 15, 26, 29, 31, 43, Konody, P.G., 128 65, 128–130, 133, 138–140, Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 2, 28–29 142, 175–176, 183, 185–189, Kraus, Marianne, 43–44, 51 191–194, 225, 230, 234, 247, 258, 259, 264 masks, 3, 22, 87–88, 90, 132–133 L masochism, 29 Laocoön, 36 Masumura, Yasuzô, 83 Lee, Vernon, 26, 195–219, 225, Matisse, Henri, 21, 132 258–259 matriarchy, 229, 235 Lennox, Charlotte, 37, 51–56 Méliès, Georges, 83, 85–87, 94 Leroux, Gaston, 94 memory, 62, 196, 206, 232–234, 236, lesbian. See homoeroticism and 242 homosexuality men. See body, the; masculinity Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol, 92–93 metal, 22, 126, 127, 136, 139, 230, Leto/Latona, 198 239 Lewis, Mark, 57–58 metamorphosis, 8, 11, 30, 40, 67, Lewis, Wyndham, 128–129, 134, 137 81–87, 93, 218, 252, 254, 255, Lipps, Theodor, 209–210, 217 259, 265 literature. See sculpture Middle Ages, 67, 121, 210–211, 230 Lorde, André de, 93, 94 modernism, 6, 127–129, 132, 137, Lovecraft, H.P., 94 198, 211, 213, 217 Löwy, Emmanuel, 208 literary, 26, 130, 221–244 Lynch, Jennifer Chambers, 83, 98 visual arts, 125–143, 203 Lysippos, 185 Modigliani, Amedeo, 126, 132, 133–134 Montignac, Georges, 93 M Müller, Otfried, 201 Macpherson, Kenneth, 222 museums and collections, 6, 14–15, Madonna/Mary, 28, 115, 137 16–17, 25, 31, 57, 59–61, 66, magic realism, 98 68, 73–79, 145–146, 153–167, Mann, Thomas, 122–123 Index 275

179–180, 187, 190, 201–205, Villa Ludovisi, 69 216, 224, 245–267 wax museum, 14–15, 81–101 Bremen Kunstverein, 118–119 music. See sculpture British Museum 14, 47–48, 140, Myron, 184 145; Museum Secretum, mythology, 8, 28, 38, 64, 82, 84, 17, 158–163, 167; Townley 96, 114, 117, 121, 123, 152–3, Galleries, 157–163; Witt 164–167, 243, 249, 254 Collection, 158 Capitoline Museum, 148 Gabinetto Segreto, National N Archaeological Museum, nationalism, 107, 120, 122–123 Naples, 17, 156, 160–163 naturalism, 2, 22, 110, 115, 124, 134, Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden, 74 262–264 Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 57 Nazi, 231 La Specola (Museo di Storia necrophilia, 28, 91 Naturale di Firenze), 14–15, Nelson, Horatio, 14, 38 89–90, 94, 100 neoclassical, 18–19, 22, 25, 36, 89, Louvre, 30, 57–58, 76, 77, 224; 105–107, 250–251, 263 Musée Napoleon, 59–60, 74, New Sculpture movement, 262–265, 75 267 Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of New Zealand, 48 Horrors, 90, 92 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 42 Medici Collections, 77 Niobe and Niobids, 198, 200–203, Musée Grévin, 92 206–208, 214–216, 219 Museo Nazionale Romano delle nostalgia. See history Terme, 30, 206 nude, the, 2, 6, 16, 18, 57–58, 197, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 250 179–180, 190, 192 female, 14, 18, 21, 31, 94, 97–98, National Archaeological Museum of 113–114, 124, 247, 250–253, Athens, 231 259–264 National Portrait Gallery, 246 male, 9–10, 16, 18, 24–26, 171, strategies of display, 2, 6, 9, 14–15, 173–177, 179–181, 183–185, 16, 25, 60, 74, 76–79, 89, 188, 190, 194, 247 97, 107, 119, 145, 156–167, See also body, the; censorship; nudity 179–180, 190, 193, 222, or nakedness 245–267 nudity or nakedness, 9, 14, 18–19, Tate, 249, 265–266 94, 98, 108–109, 111, 114, Uffzi, Florence, 77, 200–201 133, 146, 164, 175, 179, 183, Vatican, 151, 156, 199–200, 189–190, 200, 250, 263 204–206, 213, 214 nymphs, 145–167 Victoria & Albert (V&A), 31, 245–267 276 Index

O Pindar, 189 Obscene Publications Act of 1857, plaster, 3, 16, 74, 83, 116, 120, 121, 162 126, 252, 254 obscenity, 6, 16, 18, 107, 109, Plato, 18, 64, 176, 178–179, 187– 146, 158, 162–163, 165, 167, 190, 192, 211, 239, 240 250–251. See also censorship Pliny the Elder, 1 Oedipal complex, 99, 131, 227–228, Poe, Edgar Allan, 93 234, 235 Pompeii, 5, 16, 19, 23–24, 36, 47, Orpheus and Eurydice, 8, 11 164 Ovid, 8, 40, 67, 81–82, 84–87, 91, pornography, 6, 17, 109, 164 252, 254–255, 259, 265 Poseidon/Neptune, 231 Pound, Ezra, 128–129 Praxiteles, 1, 184, 188 P Priapus, 14, 19–21, 46–48, 154, 155 Pacifc Islands, 20, 48, 51, 131–133 primitivism and the primitive, 3, paganism, 16, 115, 174, 190, 201 20–22, 24, 44–48, 51, 105–106, painting. See sculpture 121, 127–128, 130–134, Pan, 17, 19, 117, 148, 151, 156, 160, 136–140, 143, 155, 203–204, 164 228, 234, 236, 238 Pan and Goat statue from progress, 6, 21, 111, 122, 133, 205, Herculaneum, 17, 19, 41, 228, 235–236 146–148, 156, 160, 164 Psyche, 19, 105–124, 265, 266 Pandora, 118 psychoanalysis, 23–24, 26, 130–131, Pankejeff, Sergei (The Wolf Man), 23 140–142, 221–244. See also Pater, Walter, 27, 31, 174, 178, 184, Chadwick, Mary; Ferenczi, 192, 199, 201, 225–226, 229, Sândor; Freud, Sigmund; Sachs, 239, 241 Hanns Payne Knight, Richard, 19–20, 47, Pygmalion and Galatea, 8–11, 15, 25, 155, 157 28, 29, 40, 42–43, 55, 67, 69, pederasty, 174, 176–180, 182–183, 83–87, 91–92, 94–96, 100, 106, 185–194 196, 208 perversion, 29, 142, 253, 255, 259 Petrarca/Petrarch, Francesco, 2, 39 phallic objects, symbolism and wor- Q ship, 3, 19–20, 22, 46–49, 126, Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine- 128–129, 138–141, 155, 157, Chrysostome, 76, 201 228, 235 queer, 7, 24–32, 181, 195–219, phallus, the, 19, 22, 46, 126, 129– 221–244, 248–249, 258–260 131, 139–143, 223, 227–228, engagement with the past, 6, 24–26, 235 30–31, 200, 211, 223–224, photography. See sculpture 231–232, 238–244, 243, Picasso, Pablo, 21–22, 132–133, 135 248–249, 266–267 Pierantoni, Giovanni, 148 Index 277

engagement with the self, subjec- Riegl, Aloïs, 204 tivity or identity, 29–31, 205, Robeson, Paul, 238 212, 216–218, 242, 248, 266 Rodin, Auguste, 7, 11, 249–259, 262, indeterminacy, 7, 30, 198, 200, 265 215–216, 241–243 Romanticism, 5, 9, 58, 65–66, See also childhood and the child; 71–74, 107, 112, 115, 199, 203, gaze, the; heteronormativity; 225–226 homoeroticism and homosexu- and critique of history as science, ality; perversion 9, 12–13, 60–61, 72–74, 76, Quinn, John, 129 78–79, 107 Rome and Roman art, 1, 3, 8, 11, 13, 17, 21, 23, 25, 30, 35, 36, R 44, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 65, 69, race, 21, 223, 233, 236–238 74, 75, 81, 87, 88, 99, 101, Raoux, Jean, 85 110, 145–153, 163, 166, 167, rape. See sexual violence 172–173, 181, 186, 200, 222, Raphael, 112, 115 223, 230, 237, 243. See also Rauch, Christian Daniel, 117 Herculaneum; Pompeii realism, 10, 14, 19, 73, 92, 94–95, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 40, 85, 199 105–124, 135, 264. See also Royal Society, 46 hyperrealism; magic realism Rehberg, Frederick, 38, 42–43 Reiffenstein, Johann Friedrich, 43 S religion, 20, 45, 65, 82, 84, 88, 155, Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 29 157, 167, 176, 251. See also Sachs, Hanns, 221 Catholicism; Christianity; pagan- same-sex desire. See homoeroticism ism; sexual freedom vs. repression and homosexuality Rembrandt, 83, 88 Sapphic, 229 Renaissance, the, 2, 13, 22, 27, 39, satyrs, 145–167, 254 68, 75, 137, 150, 195, 204, 210, Schiller, Friedrich, 124, 199 225 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 105, 106 Renard, Maurice, 91 Schlegel, Friedrich, 65, 69 reproduction and copying, 3, 11–12, Schwanthaler, Ludwig, 123 36, 41, 68–69, 74, 82, 86, 88, science, 5, 19, 60, 66, 72–73, 75, 77, 90–91, 95, 106, 115, 116, 118, 87–92, 198, 210, 221–244 126–127, 139, 146, 149–151, and anatomy, 14–15, 81–101 173, 187, 200, 243, 254, 257 See also sexology and sexual science restoration, 146, 148–151, 153–155, scopophilic. See voyeurism 157, 166, 206, 208, 249 sculptor, the, 8, 10–11, 18, 55, 67, Reynolds, Joshua, 154 82–84, 86, 95–99, 101, 107–108, Rich, Adrienne, 248 110, 113–114, 119, 121–122, Richardson, Jonathan, 77 203. 278 Index sculpture 74–75, 107, 112, 146, 152, and beauty. See beauty 156–157, 160–161, 167, 172, and erotic or sexual motifs, 2–4, 179–181, 187, 190, 193, 252, 7, 16–22, 49, 57–58, 78, 262, 264 89–90, 95, 106, 107, 114, 117, educational and elevating impact of, 124–143, 145–167, 191, 194, 18, 69, 179, 196, 250, 256, 197, 251–252, 254–255, 260, 258 265–266 indecency or obscenity. See censor- and flm, 5, 7, 15, 57–58, 81–101, ship; Obscenity 230, 240, 249, 264 materiality of, 2–3, 7, 11, 26, 30, and form, 2, 9–12, 15, 19, 22, 46–47, 58, 78, 96, 107, 112, 98–100, 106–109, 114, 116, 114, 116, 117, 121–122, 118–122, 133, 135, 137, 140, 174, 200, 216, 223, 228–230, 183, 195–219, 226, 250, 238–241, 243, 250–251, 262. 258–259, 260, 263. See also See also bronze; marble; metal; formalism plaster; wax and gender. See gender statues coming to life and living and literature, 5, 6, 7, 51–56, bodies turning into statues, 58–69, 71–73, 78–79, 84, 7–15, 37–44, 58–59, 62–64, 105–124, 130, 196, 221–244, 67–69, 71–72, 78–79, 83–87, 259 95, 96, 100–101, 172, 211 and loss of the past. See history See also agalmatophilia; busts; and male form. See body, the commodifcation; nude, the; and music, 112, 204, 213–214 Pygmalion and Galatea; repro- and painting, 5, 7, 9, 21, 22, 75, duction and copying; resto- 85, 112, 154, 172, 250 ration; sculptor, the; tableau and photography, 86, 93, 94, vivant; votives 96, 97, 126, 140, 171–173, Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 217 181–182, 193, 255 Sergi, Giuseppe, 209 and science. See science sexology and sexual science, 2, 6, 20, and the female form. See body, the 28, 47, 175–176, 185–186, 194, and touch, 2, 7–8, 12, 84–85, 90, 217, 233. See also Ellis, Havelock; 98, 108, 109, 114, 172, 174, Freud, Sigmund; Hirschfeld, 193, 201, 204–205, 241–242, Magnus; Krafft-Ebing, Richard 254 von and transcendence, 18, 223–226, sexual freedom vs. repression, 229, 240, 242–243, 250–251 16–24, 158, 176, 192. See also display of, 16–17, 69, 74–75, 126, Catholicism; Christianity; religion 128, 134, 143, 152, 156–167, sexual morality, 71, 125, 128, 172, 180–181, 190, 193, 132–133, 145–146, 152, 154, 252–256, 260, 263. See also 158–164, 167, 185–186, 190, museums and collections; 192, 250–251, 253–255, 262, private vs. public, 25, 57, 267 Index 279 sexual violence, 146, 149–154, primitivism and the primitive; 164–167 queer sexuality. See agalmatophilia; bisexual- Thorvaldsen, Dane Bertel, 117 ity; castration; fetishism; heter- Titian, 215 onormativity; heterosexuality; Toft, Albert, 260–265 homoeroticism and homosexual- touch. See sculpture ity; masochism; necrophilia; ped- Tourneur, Maurice, 93 erasty; perversion; queer; sexology Townley, Charles, 13, 145, 150–157 and sexual science; sexual freedom Townley Nymph and Satyr, 145–167 vs. repression; sexual morality; sexual violence; voyeurism Shaw, George Bernard, 29, 85 U Shelley, Mary, 84 uncanny, the, 31, 89, 91, 100, 105 Sistine Madonna, 115 Uranianism, 176–177, 181–182, 191. Sleeping Hermaphrodite, 30, 57–58, See also pederasty 74 Smollett, Tobias, 36, 41 Speckter, Hans, 109–110, 120–121 V statuary. See sculpture Valkyrie, 106, 119–121, 123, 124 Steinhäuser, Carl, 117–119 vases, 38, 45, 63, 154, 188, 189, 190 Stifter, Adalbert, 112, 123 Venus, 8, 9–11, 18, 29, 58–59, 62, Storm, Theodor, 19, 105–124 64–67, 71–73, 78–79, 84, 115, subjectivity, 60–61, 64, 72–73, 136, 126–127, 143 211, 247–248, 262–264. See also anatomical Venuses, 89, 94, 100 queer Pudica, 117 suicide, 98, 113 Venusberg, 71 Susini, Jean-Jacuqes, 89 Venus Medici, 7, 9, 38, 74, 77, 78, Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 30 89 Symonds, John Addington, 25, 179, Venus of Knidos, 1 183–186, 189, 192, 217 Venus of Milo, 28, 83, 98–100, 208, 210–212, 224–225, 228 Vesalius, Andreas, 82 T Victorian, 3, 6, 18, 83, 93, 172, tableau vivant, 38, 51, 85, 91 185–186, 196–197, 213, 251 technology, 6, 66, 126, 128–130, 134, Vinci, Leonardo da, 82 138–139, 143, 212 violence, 71, 81, 86–87, 93, 97, 110, temporality, 2–5, 8, 26, 37, 49, 79, 121, 124, 154. See also sexual 83, 127, 146, 172, 204–205, violence 223–226, 231, 236–237, 241, Vishnu, 240 243, 249, 260, 265, 266. See also visual art. See horror flm; sculpture anachronism; history; memory; Vlaminck, Maurice de, 132, 135 Vorticism, 128–129, 134 280 Index votives, 3, 88 36–37, 39–44, 55, 67, 74, 77, voyeurism, 94, 119, 152, 246–247, 124, 173–174, 178, 183–184, 252, 253, 259, 260, 265–266 195, 199, 201, 203, 226, 239 women. See body, the; femininity; feminism and women’s rights; W gender; matriarchy Wagner, Richard, 122 Wood, Derwent, 265 Walpole, Horace, 38 Worringer, Wilhelm, 127, 136–137, war, 68, 71, 78, 139, 222, 231 141–142 Warren, Edward Perry, 26, 171–194 wax, 3, 5, 7, 14–15, 19, 46–47, 49, 81–101 Z Wilde, Oscar, 27, 125, 186, 190, 192, Zeus/Jupiter, 230–231, 239 225 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 2–3, 5, 9–13, 18, 24, 27, 30–31,

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