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British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 Maureen McCue BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND THE RECEPTION OF ITALIAN OLD MASTER ART, 1793–1840 For my family British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 MAUREEN MCCUE Bangor University, UK First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2014 Maureen McCue Maureen McCue has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: McCue, Maureen. British Romanticism and the reception of Italian old master art, 1793–1840/ by Maureen McCue. pages cm.—(Studies in art historiography) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6832-5 (hardcover) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Romanticism—England. 3. Art, Italian—Influence. I. Title. PR447.M35 2014 820.9'145—dc23 2014019266 ISBN 9781409468325 (hbk) ISBN 9781315570280 (ebk) Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 Attempting ‘To Engraft Italian Art on English Nature’ 25 2 Connoisseurship 63 3 Making Literature 89 4 Samuel Rogers’s Italy 127 Conclusion 161 Bibliography 167 Index 183 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Figures 4.1 Thomas Stothard, Cristina 139 4.2 Thomas Stothard, The Death of Raphael 145 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements This book began life as my PhD thesis and I am fortunate to have been taught during my time at the University of Glasgow by some of the world’s most dynamic Romanticists. I am especially grateful to have been able to work with Richard Cronin, who has been a generous reader of my work from the start. My particular thanks go to Nigel Leask for his guidance, enthusiasm and unstinting support, and also to Evelyn, Isabel and Flora Leask for easing my homesickness. A huge thanks goes to Anne-Marie Millim for her friendship and for reading several drafts of this book (and other work) at various stages. Thanks are also due to the special collections and library staffs at the University of Glasgow, the National Library of Scotland, and the British Library, and to the staffs of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome and Bologna’s Pinacoteca. The University of Glasgow’s Graduate School of Arts and Humanities and the British Association for Romantic Studies provided me with grants which enabled me to conduct research in Italy, and the School of Critical Studies’ postgraduate fund made much of my conference attendance during graduate school possible. I’ve found a very warm welcome at Bangor University. I’d especially like to thank Linda Jones for her generous help with the manuscript of this book and the College of Arts and Humanities that makes such support possible. This support is increasingly rare and is much appreciated. Voglio ringraziare te Paolo. No ho parole per dire quanto il tuo sorriso sempre pronto e il tuo supporto quotidiano abbiano rappresentato per me, ma sono così felice di affrontare la vita come in un viaggio insieme, l’uno a fianco dell’altro. Solo dopo essermi sentita finalmente a casa, ho potuto dare inizio al mio lavoro. I dedicate this book to my family – both that group of souls I was born into and the wonderful group I’ve been able to gather around me, no matter how far away that may be. Thank you all for your love, support and laughter. This page has been left blank intentionally List of Abbreviations All references to Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV are to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt in The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93. 2: 120–86. Line numbers are included within the text. Other works by Byron will be cited individually. All references to the work of William Hazlitt are to The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols. London: J. M. Dent, 1930–34. All references to Mary Shelley are to her review article ‘The English in Italy’ (1826) in The Mary Shelley Reader: Containing ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Mathilda’, Tales and Stories, Essays and Reviews and Letters. Ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 341–57. Hereafter, referred to by page number. All references to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ are to Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and N. Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002. 510–35. Hereafter, referred to by page number. All references to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci are to Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and N. Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2002. 140–202. Hereafter, references to his Preface are cited by page number, while passages from the text are cited by act, scene and line number. This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction In the October 1826 issue of the Westminster Review, Mary Shelley reviewed three books concerned with Italy: Lord Normanby’s The English in Italy (1825), Charlotte Eaton’s Continental Adventures (1826) and Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826). Shelley’s review offers contemporary readers not only insight into the special qualities of each book, but also into Italy itself. Her representation of Italy is a useful starting point in any attempt to understand the multiplicity of meanings Italy held for the British in the early nineteenth century. She writes, We fly to Italy; we eat the lotus; we cannot tear ourselves away. It is the land of romance, and therefore pleases the young; of classic lore, and thus possesses charms for the learned. Its pretty states and tiny courts, with all the numerous titles enjoyed by their frequenters, gild it for the worldly. The man of peace and domesticity finds in its fertile soil, and the happiness of its peasantry, an ameliorated likeness of beloved but starving England. The society is facile; the towns illustrious by the reliques they contain of the arts of ancient times, or the middle ages; while its rural districts attach us, through the prosperity they exhibit, their plenteous harvests, the picturesque arrangement of their farms, the active life every where apparent, the novelty of their modes of culture, the grace which a sunny sky sheds over labours which in this country are toilsome and unproductive. (‘The English in Italy’ 342–3) The British enchantment with Italy traverses differences of class, gender, age and education. Although Italy, its culture and its past offer an escape for the traveller, Shelley also importantly characterizes the peninsula as a kind of prelapsarian England. Above all, however, she presents Italy as a land of the imagination, as a country which has all but become in itself a work of art. By the time Shelley was writing, the tradition of cultural and mercantile exchange between Britain and Italy was already well established. British literature had long been indebted to the works of Dante and Petrarch. In addition, an imagined Italy had been central to the work of a host of writers, from Shakespeare to Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, and it would continue to be so throughout the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the cultural value of Italy was most securely located in its classical past. The principles of taste, refinement and order were embodied in their ideal forms in classical architecture, art and literature. The neoclassical ideal continued to inform the work of Romantic writers, though many became increasingly interested in the classical past as embodied in ruins and other visible traces of historic destruction so much in evidence in modern-day Rome. However, the present reality of the Italian peninsula was very different from the idealized Italy that could be encountered only in the imagination. 2 British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 The Napoleonic campaigns throughout the Italian peninsula and Napoleon’s power throughout Europe virtually cut off the British for more than a decade, preventing them from freely travelling to Italy as well as much of Europe. The golden age of the Grand Tour had come to an end, and the internal borders of an Italy which had long consisted of numerous governments and principalities were repeatedly drawn and redrawn. When the war finally ended, the British flooded into Italy. ‘[I]n their numbers, and their eagerness to proceed forward,’ Mary Shelley writes, the new tourists might be compared to the Norwegian rats, who always go right on, and when they come to an opposing stream, still pursue their route, till a bridge is formed of the bodies of the drowned, over which the living pass in safety. (341) When access to Italian culture was no longer the province of a select few, markers of that culture spread through the collective British imagination like wildfire, fundamentally changing the social, artistic and literary landscape of Britain forever.
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