Word & Image A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry ISSN: 0266-6286 (Print) 1943-2178 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/twim20 ‘Life is movement’: Vernon Lee and sculpture Lene Østermark-Johansen To cite this article: Lene Østermark-Johansen (2018) ‘Life is movement’: Vernon Lee and sculpture, Word & Image, 34:1, 64-72, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2017.1333881 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2017.1333881 Published online: 28 Feb 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 105 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=twim20 ‘Life is movement’: Vernon Lee and sculpture LENE ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN Abstract How do living, breathing human bodies respond to the inert bodies of sculpture? This article examines some of the art- theoretical and psychological writings of Violet Paget (‘Vernon Lee’) and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson of the 1880sand1890sinan attempt to map the evolution of their formalist art criticism. Engaging with the eighteenth-century ghosts of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson created their very own exploration of art forms evolving in space and in time. Questioning how our reading of literature affects our reading of sculpture, and observing their own mental and physical responses to the encounter with three-dimensional artworks, their binocular gaze and critical collaboration resulted in innovative theories of empathy and intermediality. This article traces their discussions of the interrelationship between literature and sculpture from Lee’s early essays in Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (1881) to the late collaborative volume Art and Man (1924). Keywords Violet Paget (‘Vernon Lee’), Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, empathy, art criticism, formalism, Renaissance sculp- ture, ancient sculpture, tomb sculpture, non finito In the 1890s, Vernon Lee (1856–1935, a pseudonym of Violet an aesthetic theory of the perception of form with accounts of Paget) and her companion Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther- their experiments at home, in churches and galleries, as they Thomson (1857–1921) spent considerable time in the churches documented Anstruther-Thomson’s response to arm chairs, 4 of Florence studying sculpture together. They knew the city architecture, sculpture and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. and its artworks well; Lee had been living in Florence since her Their neighbour Berenson immediately charged them with early youth and Anstruther-Thomson had been a frequent plagiarizing his own theories of perception, and only several visitor ever since she first befriended Lee in 1887. Lee was decades later did the friendship between Berenson and Lee 5 immediately struck by Kit’s sculptural beauty: ‘Miss recover from the breach. Anstruther-Thomson and Lee parted Anstruther Thomson turns out very handsome, a sort of company in the late 1890s, and after Anstruther-Thomson’s 1 Venus of Milo’, she noted on their first encounter, and the death in 1921 Lee published their essays, together with essays study of three-dimensional form became a source of mutual and fragments by her friend, in a volume entitled Art and Man enjoyment in the close friendship between the two women, one in 1924. The volume contains two essays of which they both an established writer of fiction and essays on aesthetics, the figure as authors: one on Desiderio da Settignano’s tomb for other a trained artist. The encounter between language and the Florentine humanist Carlo Marsuppini in Santa Croce, the three-dimensional form engaged their bodies and minds for up other on Michelangelo’s Medici tombs in San Lorenzo. to a decade, as they carefully monitored their own and the This article attempts to trace Lee’s approaches to sculpture other’s responses to works of art, and subsequently recorded in her critical writings from the early 1880stoc.1900. Her their experiences in writing. Anstruther-Thomson responded to concern with the interrelationship between literature and sculp- the sculptural works through a series of inhalations and exhala- ture in the essays in Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical tions, and her plastic body often imitated, or realized, rather Questions (1881) serves as an overture to the formalist writings than merely recognized, the sculptural form being contem- with Anstruther-Thomson in the 1890s, when the encounters plated. Lee’s more cerebral responses were of a philosophical between perceiving subject and perceived object, between liv- and psychological nature. Together the two produced essays on ing bodies and inert material, take notions of language, poetry, aesthetic perception and empathy which reached the world in and sculpture into new realms. Lee’s questioning in the early the wake of Adolf von Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in der essays about the ways in which our reading of literature pre- bildenden Kunst (1893) and Bernard Berenson’s The Florentine condition our reading of sculpture paves the way for a new 2 Painters of the Renaissance (1896). kind of formalist synthesis. My focus is on the encounters Hildebrand and Berenson were also residents of Florence, between word and image, speech and silence, movement and and the concern with formalist art criticism and psychoaes- stasis, as the two female critics addressed the inner dynamics of thetics was concentrated in the mid-1890s in the hillside villas ornamental patterns as ‘verbs’, pulling upwards or inwards, or above the city, as tactile values and Morellian connoisseurship saw Michelangelo’s tombs as subjected to an ‘architectural 3 challenged iconographic approaches to art. Lee and Berenson syntax’, located in a spatial and material hierarchy where were practically neighbours in the hills of Settignano, north of volume and texture determined their function. Referring to the Arno, whereas Hildebrand resided south of the river, at the the ‘language of pattern’ and the ‘poetry of sculpture’, Lee foot of the hill leading to Bellosguardo. In their essay ‘Beauty and Anstruther-Thomson invite us to stretch our minds and and Ugliness’ (1897) Lee and Anstruther-Thomson combined establish connections between art forms separated in the WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 34, NO. 1, 2018 64 https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2017.1333881 # 2018 Taylor & Francis Renaissance paragone and in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s arousal caused by a confrontation with the sensuality of three- 6 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). dimensional art, an almost sublime experience in the Burkean Lessing’s fundamental distinction between art-forms evolving sense, a rape, or at least a rapture, of the senses. in space and art-forms evolving in time was challenged increas- To many of Lee’s readers the title and subject matter of her essay 7 ingly in the nineteenth century, and Lee and Anstruther- would have recalled Pater’s semi-autobiographical imaginary por- 15 Thomson’s exploration of movement, even in static trait ‘TheChildintheHouse’, published three years previously. It Renaissance tombs, is yet another questioning of Lessing’s became one of Pater’s most popular short stories, evoking the theories. Together the two women attempted to tackle some awakening of the protagonist’s aesthetic sense through a series of of the challenges imposed by sculpture as a three-dimensional synaesthetic experiences. The titular house, a receptacle of the past, art form partaking of the same space as the spectator. They is almost as much of a protagonist as the child: in chronicling the observed perceptively that ‘life is movement, our consciousness aesthete’s coming of age, both Pater and Lee stress the crucial is seething with impression of motion; and forms which appear interplay between perceiving subject and surrounding architecture. 8 inert are therefore alien to our whole way of being’. TheChildintheHouseandtheChildintheVaticanarekindred The notion of sculpture as negation, as that which is the opposite spirits haunted by the past inhabitants of the architectural structures of human life, goes back to antiquity, where it found expression in that enclose them. Pater’s world is the painterly world of the French suchmythsasthoseoftheMedusa, Niobe, and Pygmalion, popu- rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, Lee’s that of classical sculp- 9 larized in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In her partly autobiographical ture. The reader of both texts enters a universe of whiteness: the essay ‘TheChildintheVatican’ (1881), Lee constructed her text whiteness of dreams, art, and memory. around the fraught encounter between a vivacious child and the Lee, however, soon moves out of the Vatican and addresses 10 inert classical statues in the Vatican Museum. An experience of issues of pain, beauty, and narrativity in sculpture in her discussion alienation sets in the moment the child enters the galleries: the of the Hellenistic Niobids, which exist in several copies, one set in statues are perceived as hostile opposites in an imbalanced relation- the Uffizi, another in the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome. The ship where they constitute the majority. With echoes of Charles story of Niobe is a classic case of hubris: proud of her beautiful Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century invectives against sculpture as fourteen children, Niobe boasted of her offspring to Leto, who had 11 being ‘tiresome’, Lee’s child juxtaposes the engaging art of paint- ‘only’ begotten two, albeit rather splendid, children: Apollo and ing with the oppressive art of sculpture: Artemis. To punish Niobe for her pride, Leto instigated a mass slaughter of her seven boys and seven girls by a rain of arrows shot For they are dull things, in their dirty whiteness: they are by the two divine Archers. Niobe turned into stone in her grief, as doing nothing, these creatures, merely standing or sitting or narrated movingly in Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: leaning, they are looking at nothing with their pupilless white eyes, they have no story to tell, no name to be asked.