1. Naples: Modern Bacchantes

Rauser, Amelia

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1. Naples: Modern Bacchantes

Amelia Rauser

The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s

In 1807, Germaine de Staël published her novel of female artistic ambition, Corinne; or, Italy...

Author

Amelia Rauser

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.33-63

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.3

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23220

Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalCostume--History--18th centuryNaples (Italy)--HistoryWomen dancersHamilton, Emma, Lady, 1765-1815

1. Naples: Modern Bacchantes

In 1807, Germaine de Staël published her novel of female artistic ambition, Corinne; or, Italy. As the novel’s title implies, the poet and performer at the center of the story is both a woman and an embodiment of the living classicism of Italy. Free-spirited and independent, authentic and passionate, Corinne demonstrates both the purity of her heart and the strength of her artistic sensibility one evening when a Neapolitan prince asks her to dance the tarantella with him:

Corinne saluted the assembly with both hands; then, turning, took the tambourine . . . and she beat time as she danced. Her gestures displayed that easy union of modesty and voluptuousness . . . Corinne was so well acquainted with antique painting and sculpture, that her positions were so many studies for the votaries of art. Now she held her tambourine over her head; sometimes advanced it with one hand, while the other ran over its little bells with a dexterous rapidity that brought to mind the girls of Herculaneum. . . . Corinne as thoroughly infected the spectators with her own sensations as she did while extemporizing poetry, playing on her lyre, or designing an expressive group. Everything was language for her. . . . every witness of this magic was electrified by impassioned joy, transported into an ideal world, there to dream of bliss unknown below.1Staël 1833, p. 89; see also Wu 2012.

Corinne’s artistry is profound, embodied, and multidisciplinary. Her erudition bodies forth transparently, as her knowledge of antique art causes her effortlessly to strike artistic poses herself and even unconsciously to imitate those paragons of antique painting, the Herculaneum Dancers (fig. 24). The narrator is careful to clarify that her entrancing performance is not merely licentious, but marries voluptuousness with appropriate modesty. Further, her embodied artistry is transmitted, as through an electric spark, to all of her spectators, causing the whole company to be “infected . . . with her own sensations” and to be “transported into an ideal world” for a brief, glorious moment.

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Fig. 24. Herculaneum Dancers, from the Villa of Cicero, Pompeii, 20 BCE–45 CE. Wall painting fragments, 30.5 × 213 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

Madame de Staël’s Corinne appeared at the end of a long decade of tumultuous social, political, and artistic change in Europe, in a novel that is widely recognized as a triumph of romanticism and a template for female artistic agency. But Corinne was not the first woman to wear classical dress, make art, and attempt thereby to carve out an independent and expressive life. Instead, Staël’s character was a particularly artful distillation of a subject position that many women claimed in the neoclassical culture of the 1790s. By seeming to bring great classical art to life through their bodies’ dress and attitudes, women not only asserted artistic agency for themselves, but also claimed a transformative potential for the culture around them—a path to a renewed golden age.

In this chapter, I will begin the story of living statues in the radical neoclassicism of the 1790s by arguing that neoclassical dress was invented in late eighteenth-century Naples, and that from the beginning it carried with it the connotations of transformative, embodied artistry and independent subjectivity expressed by Staël’s Corinne. Artists, diplomats and Grand Tourists all traveled to Naples, the third largest city in the eighteenth century after London and Paris, and many were both entranced and troubled by its heady mixture of hedonism and antiquity.2On Grand Tourists, archaeology, and the Bay of Naples in the eighteenth century, see Wilton and Bignamini 1996, Jenkins and Sloan 1996, Mattusch 2013, and Calaresu and Hills 2013. All of Naples seemed to be a magical place where the ribald, physical body of antiquity still breathed.

This atmosphere of living classicism in Naples was distilled into its most ubiquitous icon, the tambourine-playing female dancer, and often represented as a bacchante or maenad, especially in the particular form of the classical wall painting fragments, the Herculaneum Dancers (fig. 25). The bacchante, devotee of Bacchus and partaker in his ancient rites of sex and murder, was the classical figure that epitomized the distinctively embodied, sensual Neapolitan classicism, with its double-edged connotations of both passionate freedom and libertine degeneracy. Despite its traditionally licentious associations in European culture, the bacchante became a liberating template for female self-presentation and self-conception. This was aided by contemporary aesthetic philosophy, which, in an innovative series of analyses of the ways sculpture seems to come to life in the eyes of the viewer, credited women’s closeness to nature and their greater sensitivity to the “lower” senses of taste and touch with a privileged access to aesthetic, and even moral, truth. Together, the example of the embodied, Neapolitan bacchante on the one hand and the theories of sculpture appreciation on the other provided a way for women to participate in advanced artistic culture, turning to their advantage their existing status as beautiful objects, and exploiting the contemporary belief that those who were closer to unschooled and embodied “nature”— peasants, southern Italians, and women—were also closer to profound artistic truth. In dressing and posing like living statues during the 1790s, women played Pygmalion to their own Galatea, not only kindling the aesthetic imagination of others but also asserting their own.

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Description: Herculaneum Dancers, detail, dancer with a tambourine by Unknown

Fig. 25. Herculaneum Dancers (detail), dancer with a tambourine, 20 BCE–45 CE. Wall painting fragments, 30.5 × 213 cm. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

In what follows, I will first discuss the intertwined visual tradition of the Herculaneum Dancers, the bacchante, and Emma Hart’s attitude performances in the 1780s and 1790s, together with the special character of Naples as a place where classical culture still breathed. We will note the innovation of Hart’s performance dress and its importance for the effect her attitudes created. Finally, I will turn to the influence of the Neapolitan bacchante in European visual culture in the 1790s, noting both the power and the perceived danger of its embodied neoclassicism.

ART AND LIFE IN NAPLES

The making and viewing of art in Naples took place in an atmosphere of experimentation in which the boundaries between art and life, antiquity and modernity, and nature and culture were blurred. “The environs of Naples are truly Classic ground,” wrote the painter William Artaud in 1796:

I have visited Lake Avernus, have been in the Elysian fields, in the Baths of Nero, & in the Tomb of Virgil. I have also descended upwards of 100’ into the crater of Vesuvius . . . I have been at Herculaneum & Pompeii & the Museum at Portici, & saw Lady Hamilton’s Attitudes, & and made several drawings from the King of Naples’ Collection at Capo de Monte.3William Artaud, letter to his father, May 1796 (Sewter 1951, p. 115); quoted by Jenkins and Sloan 1996, p. 261.

Places mentioned in ancient texts were suddenly real and inhabitable; natural wonders like Vesuvius mingled with cultural marvels like the Tomb of Virgil; the performances of attitudes by Emma Hart (later Lady Hamilton) were as artistically notable as ancient treasures from Herculaneum. Tourists marveled at Pompeian ash that preserved the imprint of a woman’s breast, scraps of her linen shift, and bits of blond hair.4Dwyer 2010, pp. 11–12. Neapolitan classicism was alive, sensual and physical, and northerners who arrived in Naples steeped in the classicism of the schoolroom reported feeling dizzy, elated, and disoriented. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in 1787: “Naples is a paradise, and everyone lives, as it were, in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness. It is the same with me. I hardly recognize myself. I feel like a completely different person. Yesterday I thought: ‘Either you used to be mad, or you are now.’”5Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter, March 16, 1787 (Goethe 1989, pp. 169–70).

Neapolitans themselves were often perceived as living holdovers from the classical past. “Experience has taught me to discover many traces of ancient customs in the modes and habits of the modern Italians,” wrote Henry Swinburne in 1785:

The Neapolitan girls dance to the snapping of their fingers and the beat of the tambourine, and whirl their petticoats about them. With greater elegance in the position, and more airiness in the drapery, striking likenesses of them may be found among the paintings of Herculaneum. A young fisherman of Naples naturally throws his limbs into the most graceful attitudes; and it was, no doubt, from the study of similar figures, that the Grecian statuaries drew their nice ideas of beauty and perfection of forms.6Henry Swinburne, “Ancient and Modern Customs in the Kingdom of Naples,” Weekly Entertainer (London), August 8, 1785, pp. 121–3.

Swinburne’s account of the natural ability of Neapolitan peasants to unconsciously emulate the grace of the greatest works of antique art exemplifies the conflation of ancient/modern and art/life in Naples and portrays the city as a kind of school for art.7Calaresu 2013 notes that Neapolitans themselves sometimes played a role in constructing and deploying these stereotypes. Just as in antiquity, he muses, sculptors today might observe these beautiful Neapolitans and create great statues. He also points to two specific Neapolitan iconographies: the tambourine-playing girls as modern bacchantes who echo the Herculaneum Dancers; and the graceful imitation of classical statues through “attitudes.” Both demonstrate the way neoclassical visual culture seized upon suggestive fragments and revived them into animated wholes.

The Herculaneum Dancers in particular had a far-reaching impact on European painting and decorative arts, being copied and reproduced on objects, from suites of furniture to porcelain vases to marquetry pianos, and routinely invoked by writers and tourists—such as Staël and Swinburne (as above)—as the gold standard of “natural” female grace and beauty, free from fashion or modern artifice.8See Touchette 2000, pp. 134–9. For the history of the excavation of the wall paintings, see Parslow 1998. These wall painting fragments, each about 10 inches tall on a black ground, had been unearthed in 1749 in the Villa of Cicero in Pompeii. Their light and brushy style of painting certainly spoke to Rococo taste, but it was the contour and disposition of the figures that were most influential; after all, most viewers came to know the Herculaneum Dancers not through firsthand observation, which was restricted by the King of Naples, but through their publication in the deluxe official volumes produced by the Accademia Ercolano in 1757 (fig. 26), in pirated editions such as the English volume by Thomas Martyn and John Lettice that appeared in 1773, and in an inexpensive edition of prints engraved by Roman printmaker Tommaso Piroli in 1789 (fig. 27).9Regarding the restrictions on viewing and publishing these antiquities, see Haskell and Penny 1981, pp. 75–6, and Ramage 2013. The Herculaneum Dancers, then, were thoroughly associated with Naples and yet were known generally, as reference points circulating through a cosmopolitan exchange of prints and objects in neoclassical visual culture. By 1807, Staël could invoke them in her description of Corinne’s elegant dancing and be assured that her readers could instantly picture them.

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Description: Le Antichità di Ercolano (Naples) by Morghen, Filippo

Fig. 26. Filippo Morghen after Camillo Paderni, Le Antichità di Ercolano (Naples), 1757, vol. 1, p. 109, pl. 20. Engraved book illustration, 41.3 × 31 cm. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

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Description: Le Antichità di Ercolano (Rome) by Piroli, Tommaso

Fig. 27. Tommaso Piroli, Le Antichità di Ercolano (Rome), 1789, vol. 1, p. 90, pl. 20. Engraved book illustration, 28 × 22 cm. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Bibliothek, Rome

The Dancers came to life most memorably in the person of Emma Hart, whose distinctive presence graced the Neapolitan parlor of Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the pathbreaking collector whose first group of vases formed the core of the antiquities holdings in the British Museum, London.10See Jenkins and Sloan 1996, Ramage 1990, and Coltman 2006, especially pp. 65–96. Hamilton’s aesthetic home was among the most important sites for visitors to Naples and epitomized the city’s characteristic collision of art and life, antiquity and modernity. Guests could view his magnificent collection of antique vases and fragments, modern paintings and prints, geological specimens and natural wonders, and they could also observe Emma Hart, performing “attitudes” as classical art come to life while wearing simple neoclassical dress. Hart’s journey from housemaid to mistress and artist’s model to ambassador’s wife, to paramour of the great maritime hero, Lord Nelson, has been abundantly documented.11The most helpful comprehensive accounts are Holmström 1967, Fothergill 1969, Fraser 1987, Jenkins and Sloan 1996, Ittershagen 1999, Ludwig 2012, and Contogouris 2018. Hamilton’s cultured and musical first wife had died in 1782, and after his nephew, Charles Greville, could no longer afford to keep Emma Hart as his mistress, Hamilton took in the beguiling Hart and had her shipped to Naples in 1786, reversing the journey of the many treasures he had sent to London. From the start, many in Naples saw Hart as just another of his beautiful art objects. “Sir Hamilton perfectly idolises her,” wrote Lady Palmerston, “and I do not wonder he is proud of so magnificent a marble, belonging so entirely to himself.”12Palmerston 1957, p. 276. See Coltman 2006, p. 66.

Not only was art viewed at Hamilton’s house; it was also made. Indeed, Hart in Naples was at the center of a hive of art-making. “The house is ful of painters painting me,” Emma wrote home to her erstwhile lover, Greville:

He as now got nine pictures of me, and 2 a painting. Marchant is cuting my head in stone, that is in cameo for a ring. There is another man modeling me in wax, and another in clay. All the artists is come from Rome to study from me, that Sir William as fitted up a room that is calld the painting-room.13Emma Hart, letter to Charles Greville, August 4, 1787 (Coltman 2006, p. 67).

Hart was an experienced and accomplished model; she had sat for the English artist George Romney dozens of times before she went to Naples, who, as we have seen, painted her as Cassandra (fig. 14). Drawing Emma quickly became an important ritual for artists visiting Naples, and many of these relics survive, including the gem cut by Nathaniel Marchant (fig. 28) that Hart refers to above. Some artists represented her in hopes of currying favor with William Hamilton, who was a prolific patron. But many artists used their paintings, drawings, and cameos of Hart as artistic calling cards, carrying them on their travels to appeal to other potential patrons. Hart’s image thus became intertwined with the vanguard neoclassicism emerging from Italy.

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Description: Portrait of Emma Hart, Later Lady Hamilton (1765–1803) by Marchant, Nathaniel

Fig. 28. Nathaniel Marchant, Portrait of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, 1786–7. Smoky chalcedony with silver-gilt mount, 3 × 2.4 × 2.1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Many of these works depicted Hart as a bacchante. In fact, Hamilton had purchased two paintings of Hart as a bacchante, one by Romney and the other by Sir Joshua Reynolds (figs 29 and 30), before he acquired Hart herself. While Reynolds’s version emphasizes Hart’s seductive beauty, Romney’s is wilder, showing Hart running with a dog through a color-streaked landscape, emphasizing her animality, her vitality, and her deep connectedness to a powerful nature that is also glossed as classical. Both paintings hung in Hamilton’s home in Naples, and once Emma herself arrived, Hamilton soon commissioned more, including Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante (fig. 31). This painting, made in 1790–92 when the artist arrived in Naples after the outbreak of revolution in France, echoes Romney’s composition but infuses the painting with a strong sense of place, including not only the tambourine and the echoed posture of one of the Dancer fragments, but also the distinctive silhouette of Vesuvius, smoking in the background.14See Ludwig 2012, chapter two. Vesuvius’s presence had a specific resonance for Vigée-Lebrun’s patron, William Hamilton: he had studied the volcano for decades, published about it, and almost always had it included in portraits of himself.15Nolta 1997, p. 110. Yoking classical grace and modern beauty, wild nature and timeless culture, animal passion and aesthetic refinement, Vigée-Lebrun locates this bacchante distinctively in Naples.

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Description: Emma Hart as a Bacchante by Romney, George

Fig. 29. George Romney, Emma Hart as a Bacchante, 1785. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Private collection

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Description: Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Smith, John Raphael

Fig. 30. John Raphael Smith after Joshua Reynolds, A Bacchante, 1784. Mezzotint, with aquatint border, 38 × 26.7 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Description: Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante by Vigée-LeBrun, Elisabeth Louise

Fig. 31. Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante, 1790–92. Oil on canvas, 132.5 × 105.5 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, UK

Artists and aesthetes invoked the bacchante as the sign of a neoclassicism that was not in the head, but in the heart and the loins: an authentic neopagan communion that actually awoke the past and brought art to life.16See Chard 1997 on Grand Tourists’ interest in the ways women could reanimate the ruins of the past. Andrei Pop has used the term “neopaganism” to describe an alternative classicism that emerged in the aftermath of the discoveries of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and resulted in a decentering of both European subjectivity and Christian morality.17Pop 2015, p. 3. This was an essentially culturally relativist and pluralistic approach to the past, allowing not only for other moralities but other gods and other truths. Similarly, it allowed spectators to accept a “sensory pluralism” that resulted in a growing appreciation of artistic form for its own sake and invested formalism itself with moral meaning.18Pop 2015, p. 5. These “neopagans” or “Hellenes” used the classical inheritance—particularly a radical reading of classical Athens as offering a political and moral challenge to contemporary European values—as a template for liberation: bodily, social, and intellectual.

Scholars have usually considered this type of vanguard neoclassicism a masculine pursuit, but I argue that this priapic neoclassicism had its female counterpart in the experimental bacchantic neoclassicism of many women, for whom statuesque neoclassical dress became an important element of self-representation and group identity. Women’s embrace of fashionable dress and artistic forms such as attitudes represented ideological interests in bodily and social liberation and an alternative to Christian moralism, while emphasizing characteristics of emotion, embodiment, and sensibility with which they were already attributed. Unsurprisingly, such pursuits were often dismissed, both then and now; as Ann Bermingham has noted, in the eighteenth century certain artistic forms were denigrated as effeminate or licentious in order to elevate the status of other, more “manly” pursuits and thereby shore up both high culture and masculinity.19See Bermingham 1993 and 1995. In this book, however, we will take women seriously as aesthetic agents.

Hart seems to have recognized and embraced her peculiar role as a catalyst for experimental neoclassicism, in effect dramatizing it by developing her performance of attitudes. These were series of still poses as antique (and occasionally literary or biblical) characters such as Niobe, Ariadne, or Medea, with lightning-quick transitions in between, using only shawls to represent the drapery of gowns, veils, and so on.20There is some scholarly debate about the specific form of the attitudes; for a discussion see Rauser 2015, p. 471. See also Pop 2011; Touchette 2000; Lada-Richards 2003; Jenkins and Sloan 1996, p. 253; Holmström 1967; Maierhofer 1999; and Howell 1999, p. 4. From about 1787 until the Hamiltons left Naples in 1799, Hart performed her attitudes in their home for audiences of artists, tourists, and expatriates. She also performed them in London and Bath during a home visit in 1791, as well as in European capitals on journeys in 1791 and 1799. The question of Hart’s agency in these performances is central to their complicated reception. As we shall see below, while many contemporaries saw Hart as merely Hamilton’s pretty new acquisition, others credited her with the invention of an entirely new art form. These viewers saw Hart as actually embodying antique works of art during her performances, bringing them vividly to life.

Among the most oft-remarked elements of Hart’s performance was her dress, and how this dress made her appear as a classical statue come to life. Lady Elizabeth Foster, after seeing Hart perform in Bath during the couple’s home visit in 1791 for their marriage, wrote:

She was draped exactly like a Grecian statue, her chemise of white muslin was exactly on that form, her sash in the antique manner, her fine black hair flowing over her shoulders. It was a Helena, a Cassandra or Andromache, no Grecian or Trojan princess could have had a more perfect or more commanding form.21Lady Elizabeth Foster, journal entry of 1791 (Stuart 1955, p. 59); Fraser 1987, p. 141.

”She dresses in Greek or Roman style,” wrote a French visitor to Naples in 1790, “adorns herself with flowers or covers herself with a veil, and thus attired gives a living spectacle of masterpieces of the most celebrated artists of antiquity.”22“Elle se costume à la grecque ou à la romaine, se pare de fleurs ou se couvre d’un voile, et donne ainsi le spectacle vivant des chefs-d’oeuvre des plus célèbres artistes de l’antiquité.” Comte d’Espinchal, letter, January 28, 1790 (d’Espinchal 1912, p. 89). “Her toilet is merely a white chemise gown, some shawls, and the finest hair in the world, flowing loose over her shoulders,” wrote an admirer in 1796.23John B. S. Morritt, letter from Naples to his mother, February 14, 1796 (Morritt 1914, p. 281). “She has dresses for purpose, one a chemise, light & plaeted here & there, so as to shew limbs; her person very fine and a most expressive countenance.”24Henry Blundell, letter to Charles Townley, May 4, 1790 (Coltman 2006, p. 67, BM TY7/1320). These consistent accounts (and many others) highlight her costume as a significant part of the magic of Hart’s attitudes; as her filmy white dress fluttered and clung, it clearly outlined her body and accentuated its graceful contour.

Hart’s performance dress was so admired that contemporaries speculated about its origins, and several tried to take credit for inventing it. Some cited local influence, as Neapolitan peasant women were already renowned for wearing dress that made them appear like classical statues come to life. Englishwoman Cornelia Knight noted that “the dress of the common people was very slight. . . . The women wore their hair in the style of antique statues, and none of them had any stays.”25Knight 1861, vol. 1, p. 91. Knight’s memoirs were published long after her death in 1837; this observation dates to her arrival in Naples on May 5, 1785. Andrea de Jorio, master of antiquities at Naples, argued in an 1832 treatise that the Neapolitans were the only people who had preserved a “culture of bodily expression invented in classical times.”26“la mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano”; see Schnapp 2013, p. 30. Hart herself drew on this mystique of the Neapolitan peasant by frequently performing a dance of the traditional tarantella, including the playing of tambourines and castanets, as part of her evening’s entertainment. Indeed, a print after a drawing by William Lock of Emma, Lady Hamilton, Dancing the Tarantella (fig. 32) portrays her, perhaps physically doubled, in poses that again echo the Herculaneum Dancers in form, dress, and composition, and foreshadow the passage from Staël’s Corinne that opened this chapter.

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Description: Two Sisters by Bovi, Mariano

Fig. 32. Mariano Bovi after William Lock, Emma, Lady Hamilton, Dancing the Tarantella, 1796. Color-printed stipple engraving, 38.5 × 29.7 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Many observers had difficulty crediting Hart herself with the invention of either the attitudes or her performance dress, seeing her more as a Galatea formed by a shrewd Pygmalion than an aesthetic agent herself. Hart had certainly worn similar studio dresses when posing for Romney, which were likely a product of some collaboration between artist and sitter.27West 2002, p. 151. Vigée-Lebrun, who as we have seen both wore and encouraged a kind of picturesque artist’s dress that was a precursor of neoclassical dress, herself claimed credit for inspiring Hart’s attitude costume, although evidence shows that Hart had already been performing attitudes for two years by the time of Vigée-Lebrun’s arrival in Naples.28Vigée-Lebrun 1989, p. 67. For his part, Goethe credited William Hamilton with inventing not only Hart’s dress, but also the whole concept of the attitudes:

He has had a Grecian costume made for her that suits her to perfection, and she lets down her hair, takes a few shawls, and varies her postures, gestures, expressions, etc. until at last the onlooker really thinks he is dreaming.29Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter, March 16, 1787 (Goethe 1989, p. 171).

Goethe’s diminishment of Hart’s aesthetic agency begins with her influential performance costume, although it does not end there, as we shall see. Regardless of whose idea it was, Hart’s attitude dress was clearly perceived by contemporaries as remarkable. Different from contemporary fashionable dress in its simple cut, unembellished form, and lack of padded or structured undergarments, it was part of the flurry of innovative, classically inspired costumes to appear in studios and on stages in the late 1780s. But unlike those performance costumes, Hart’s elided the boundary—as indeed, the whole experience of Naples was said to do—between artistic space and everyday space, classical and modern, art and life.30For changes in the conventions of stage costumes in ballet, see Chazin-Bennahum 2005, pp. 109–11. On the changes in acting theory in the eighteenth century and the repeated use of the Pygmalion story for innovative productions, which included more “natural” classical costumes, see Holmström 1967, pp. 41–50. Hart’s attitudes were posed in the drawing room, in a social space shared with guests rather than an artistic space distanced from observers by a stage or easel. In addition, Hart kept on her white muslin dress as the guests repaired to supper afterward, and enjoyed recounting the fulsome praise for her beauty that came from her admirers as a result. Of a visit to a countess’s residence, Hart claimed: “there was a full conversazione, and, though I was in a undress, onely having a muslin chemise, very thin, yet the admiration I met with was surprising.”31Emma Hart, letter to Charles Greville, August 4, 1787 (Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 131). This letter also recounts an incident when she wore an ensemble “drest all in virgin wite & my hair all in ringlets reaching all most to my heals” to the opera. Hart’s performance as a living statue was costumed to strip away layers of civilization, convention, and custom, and to enact a natural and embodied authenticity.

Hart performed in the evenings under strongly directional light designed to highlight the drama of her suddenly struck poses.32See Contogouris 2018, chapter three, for a discussion of the lighting effects for Hart’s performances. Such lighting emulated the then-fashionable practice of torchlit museum visits, in which the flickering light and shadow caused marble or plaster sculptures to appear to pulse with life. “Saw by torchlight Mengs’ selection of casts. . . . They are lighted by a single torch carried by the Director. . . . In some measure cela les vivifie [it vivifies them],” wrote a visitor to Dresden in 1800.33Melesina Trench, September 6, 1800 (Trench 1862, p. 101). Such practices facilitated viewers’ imaginative engagement with art and followed contemporary aesthetic theories of beholding. The German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder waxed poetic about the magical effects of a torchlit museum visit:

Oh, what treasure of tender beauty and goodness
Have you, O art, buried in some stone!
How it gushes forth, when with the flames’ embers
The dead stone is soaked by the torch of life!34“O welchen Schatz des Holden and des Guten/ Hast Du, O Kunst, in manchen Stein gesenkt!/ Wie quillt’s hervor, wenn mit den Flammengluten/ Den todten Stein die Lebensfackel tränkt!” As quoted by Mattos 2006, p. 140; my gratitude to Maria Mitchell and Guillaume de Syon for help with the translation. See also the influential Bätschmann 1992.

Hart’s dramatic staging further blurred the boundary between statue and flesh, as she not only stood still and posed like a sculpture, with light flickering across her form, but also quickly moved and shifted into other sculptural forms. The spectacle dazzled visitors who reveled in its liminality.

Knowledge of Hart’s attitudes and the dress she wore to perform them was spread abroad by hundreds of eyewitnesses over the years, many of whom published their firsthand accounts, but they were given definitive visual form with the publication of a series of outline drawings by the German artist Friedrich Rehberg. Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature, at Naples, and with permission dedicated to the Right Honorable Sir William Hamilton, engraved by Tommaso Piroli and published in Rome in 1794 (fig. 33), depict Hart in 12 different attitudes. In both their conception of the attitudes as a series of still poses, and in their specific postures and attributes, Rehberg’s prints draw directly on the iconic Herculaneum Dancers for their composition, but rhyme stylistically with the contemporaneous outline prints of John Flaxman, whose Iliad had also been engraved by Piroli and published in Rome only the previous year (fig. 92), and with the publication of antiquities Piroli himself had engraved (fig. 27). Like Flaxman’s outlines, Rehberg’s prints of Hart’s attitudes circulated throughout Europe in the 1790s and had a profound influence on neoclassical visual culture, even forming the basis for a parodic series by James Gillray in London a decade later, when Hart herself had grown “considerably enlarged” (fig. 34). Drawing on the primitivist perception of Naples generally and the iconic poses of the Herculaneum Dancers in particular, Hart’s neoclassical bacchantism codified the ideal of the fashionable and aesthetically sophisticated woman as living statue.

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Description: Dancing with Child by Piroli, Tommaso

Fig. 33. Tommaso Piroli after Friedrich Rehberg, from Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature, at Naples (Rome), 1794, p. 8, pl. VIII. Etching and engraving, 26.5 × 20.5 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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Description: A new edition considerably enlarged, of Attitudes faithfully copied from nature by...

Fig. 34. James Gillray, A New Edition, Considerably Enlarged, of Attitudes Faithfully Copied from Nature: and humbly dedicated to all admirers of the grand and sublime (London), 1807, p. 2, pl. II. Etching, 31 × 22 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Hart’s attitude performances, in which Hart-as-statue came to life under flickering lamplight and then sat down to supper, occurred night after night, for years. Through this repeated metamorphosis for hundreds of observers, Hart’s white muslin drapery became liberated from the exclusive realm of fantasy and art, and blended into everyday life. Hart’s performances brought the neoclassical white chemise from the studio into the salon, capitalizing on the contemporary admiration for the passionate bacchante, and thereby imbuing the performance of daily life with the grace, prestige, and cloaked eroticism of classical art.

“BACCHANTISH ATTITUDES” AND SCULPTURE THEORY

Hart’s attitude performances inspired extreme reactions in her audiences—a clue that they mined something profound. Dozens of eyewitnesses reported that her attitudes left them feeling overwhelmed with emotion. As Hart herself wrote after one performance: “I left some dying, some crying, and some in despair. Mind you, this was all nobility, as proud as the devil. But we humbled them.”35Emma Hart, letter to Charles Greville, August 4, 1787 (Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 130). Accounts of weeping and swooning and generally being unable to put the experience into words were so common that they were spoofed by the German artist, Marianne Kraus. She wryly recounted the effect Emma’s performance had on a whole audience of German visitors, including the artists Angelica Kauffman and Rehberg, whose engravings spread Hart’s fame:

I was ashamed of my strong nerves, as I saw all the ladies and gentlemen crying. If I had known ahead of time, I would have brought salts along. There sits the wooden Kraus next to Angelica, who sobbed loud enough to move stones. Poor Rehberg looked like a boy getting thoroughly beaten by his schoolmaster. Mr. Reiffenstein cried so tenderly, one could count the slow-falling antique tears. Crying rather suited Miss Jenkins; it went very well with the deathly pale complexion . . . From the beginning, it took an effort to hide my laughter over the howling, but as I saw her approach with her big eyes on us, I drew back properly because I forgot that she just wanted to amuse us; Angelica was so entranced that she probably kissed the beauty’s hand twenty times.36“ Ich schämte mich meiner starken Nerven, wie ich so alle Damens und Herren weinen sah. Wenn ichs so vorgesehen hätte, ich würde mir Salz mitgenommen haben. Da sitzt also die hölzige Kraus neben einer Angelica, die so laut schluckte, daß sich Steine hätten bewegen können. Der arme Rehberg sah aus wie ein Knabe, der tüchtig Schläge vom Herrn Schulmeister bekommt. Herr Reiffenstein weinte doch noch zierlich, man konnte die langsam herabrollenden antikischen Tränen zählen. Miß Jenkins stand das Weinen nicht sehr übel, es war der totenblassen Gesichtsfarbe sehr angemessen . . . Von Anfang an kostete es mir Mühe, mein Lachen zo verbergen über das Geheul, aber wie ich sie so mit ihren großen Augen auf uns zukommen sah, wich ich ordentlich zurück, denn ich vergaß, daß sie uns nur amüsieren wollte; Angelica war so hingerissen, daß sie der Schönen wohl zwanzigmal die Hand küßte.” Kraus 1996, pp. 96–7; my translation. Cited and discussed by Maierhofer 1999, p. 233.

For Rehberg, Kauffman, and others, Hart’s embodiment of classical art was an unqualified success: it imported the idealism of art into the physical world and healed the fragments of the classical past into a vibrant and embodied living present. Yet the dismissive skepticism we can perceive in Kraus’s humorous account suggests that she found both Hart and her emotional spectators inauthentic. They seem to compete among themselves for who was most sensitive; those who wept with appropriate dignity, with “slow-falling antique tears,” triumphed in performing their erudition and sensibility.

Indeed, the spectacle of Hart’s attitudes struck some viewers as silly, overwrought, inauthentic, oversexed, and unsophisticated. Thomas Rowlandson’s caricature of Hart (fig. 35), published in 1791 during the couple’s home visit to England for their wedding, focuses on the licentiousness of her attitudes. In it, he portrays the clueless enthusiasm of Sir William Hamilton in exhibiting the body of his posing wife for the salacious enjoyment of a male artist.37See Thom 2015 on Rowlandson’s erotic satires of sculpture. In a confusion of art and life, Hart stands still on a plinth while sculpted busts in the foreground and full-length sculptures in the background seem to embrace lustily. The Comte d’Espinchal highlighted this erotic element in his 1790 eyewitness account of Hart’s attitudes and imagined Hamilton’s privileged access to Hart’s body:

If I were the chevalier Hamilton, I would review all Olympus; I would see often Hebe and Venus and the Graces, sometimes Juno, very rarely Minerva. To vary my pleasures, a rich boudoir would offer me an impassioned and tender Cleopatra welcoming Mark Antony and sometimes a woodland cabin would show Alcibiades frolicking with Glycera.38“Si j’étais le chevalier Hamilton, je passerais en revue toute l’Olympe; je verrais fréquemment soit Hebé, soit Vénus et les Grâces, quelquefois Junon, très rarement Minerve. Pour varier mes plaisirs, tantôt un riche boudoir m’offrirait la passionnée et tendre Cléopatre, recevant amoureusement Marc Antoine et tantôt un cabinet de verdure verrait Alcibiade folâtrer avec Glycère.” Comte d’Espinchal, letter, January 28, 1790 (d’Espinchal 1912, p. 89); my translation.

But this aspect of Hart’s attitudes exposed something profound and troubling for serious observers: the embodied presence of the woman as living statue called into question the sensuality at the heart of advanced theories of art appreciation itself. As Karin Wurst has argued, Hart’s attitudes disrupted the neoclassical viewing practices articulated by J. J. Winckelmann, G. E. Lessing, J. G. Herder, and others, whereby a viewer attempted, through careful contemplation and imagination, to bring a sculpture to life.39Wurst 2001.

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Description: Lady H________ Attitudes by Rowlandson, Thomas

Fig. 35. Thomas Rowlandson, Lady H_______Attitudes, first published 1791, later bound in Rowlandson Erotiques, mid-1810s. Hand-colored etching, 23.7 × 17 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Lifelikeness was the principal phenomenological experience of sculpture in the period, and its rational perception was held to be the basis for all aesthetic experience.40For helpful entry points into this literature, see Zuckert 2009, Potts 2000, and Wurst 2001. Rosenthal 2004, p. 565, not only argues for the place of the somatic body in aesthetic response but also notes the significance of the Pygmalion myth in this context. As will be discussed further in Chapter Five, Lessing suggested that the sense of a sculpture coming to life happened because the sculptor chose to represent a “pregnant moment” just before the decisive action of the implied narrative, thereby enlisting the viewer to complete the narrative in their imagination. This act of imaginative completion enlivened the sculpture through mental and sensual stimulation.41Lessing 1984; see also Wurst 2001, p. 158. According to this thesis, the more a sculpture stimulated a viewer’s imagination, the more engaged the viewer was and the more lifelike the sculpture seemed to be.

Winckelmann’s sensuous descriptions of the beauty of Greek sculpture used tactile language to evoke the haptic memory and thereby trigger an experience of enlivening, establishing the connection between sight and touch. For him, the erotic attraction of classical sculpture was the starting point for a transcendent experience of beauty, virtue, and excellence.42Potts 1994. Touch was similarly crucial for Herder’s theories; it was the sense upon which all others were founded, and sculpture was the form of art that engaged touch most profoundly. Like so many of his contemporaries, he turned to the story of Pygmalion in order to grapple with the unique properties of sculpture. In his 1778 essay, “Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream,” he argued that while painting is the art directed to the eye, sculpture addresses itself to the body, creating depth and form:

A statue must live: its flesh must revive: its face and mien must speak. We must believe we can touch it and feel that it warms itself under our hands. We must see it stand before us, and feel that it is speaking to us.43“Eine Statue muß leben: ihr Fleisch muß beleben: ihr Gesicht und Mine sprechen. Wir müssen sie anzutasten glauben und fühlen, daß sie sich unter unsern Händen erwärmt. Wir müssen sie vor uns stehen sehen, und fühlen, daß sie zu uns spricht.” Herder 1769, p. 88; my translation. Zuckert 2009, p. 294, notes that unlike many other aesthetic philosophers of his age, Herder does not feel that erotic attraction in art impedes art’s moral or aesthetic power—quite the contrary, since it is precisely the embodied nature of aesthetic response that contributes to both morality and self-knowledge.

Thus, for Herder, sculpture is not merely a different medium than painting, but rather an art that is closer to life.44“Die Bildnerei arbeitet in einander, Ein lebendes, Ein Werk voll Seele, das da sei und daure. . . . nothwendig muß sie also schaffen, was ihre Darstellung verdient, und was für sich da steht. . . . Wo Seele lebt und einen edlen Körper durchhaucht und die Kunst wetteifern kann, Seele im Körper darzustellen, Götter, Menschen und edle Thiere, das bilde die Kunst und das hat sie gebildet. . . . Eine Bildsäule kann mich umfassen, daß ich vor ihr knie, ihr Freund und Gespiele werde, sie ist gegenwärtig, sie ist da.” Herder 1778, pp. 16–18; translation by Jason Gaiger in Art in Theory, 1648–1815 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 770–71. The physicality of sculpture operates on our haptic memory. When the eye sees textures and contours that evoke the memory of touch, the imagination is fired and the statue seems to live.

The bacchante was a suggestive symbol in this aesthetic debate not least because of its connection to desire, the body, and the “baser” senses like touch and taste, long thought to be the most sensual and least intellectual of senses. But the bacchante also had a long iconographic connection with the concept of aesthetic taste. As Ariane van Suchtelen has shown, in seventeenth-century emblems the bacchante was connected with the ape, who represented impudence, lust, and base physicality.45van Suchtelen 1991. Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Bacchante with an Ape, 1627 (fig. 36), conveys the base sensuality of the ape, whose gesture mirrors that of the woman as both grasp a bunch of grapes. This imitative capacity was the limit of the ape’s intelligence; humans must beware lest they degenerate into brainless aping as well.46van Suchtelen 1991, pp. 40–41. Similarly, print cycles representing the five senses aligned taste with the ape, and both touch and taste with luxurious foods, drink, and fabrics. In a sixteenth-century print (fig. 37), Taste is a naked woman, indulgently eating with her companion ape. A depiction of Touch, from the mid-seventeenth century (fig. 38), features a nude woman swathed in billowing drapery wearing classical sandals. She stretches her index finger expressively, where it is nibbled upon by a bird. In both prints, the sensuality of touch and taste are connected with the unrestrained and animalistic impulses of women, whose “bacchantishness” makes them no better than apes. As a woman hedonistically gratifies her lower senses, so she apes true refinement and represents base, lustful, degenerate taste.

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Description: Bacchante with an Ape by Brugghen, Hendrick ter

Fig. 36. Hendrick ter Brugghen, Bacchante with an Ape, 1627. Oil on canvas, 102.9 × 90.2 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

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Description: Taste (Gustus), from The Five Senses by Pencz, Georg

Fig. 37. Georg Pencz, Taste/Gustus, from The Five Senses, ca. 1544. Engraving, 7.7 × 5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Description: Touch, from The Five Senses by Backer, Jacob de

Fig. 38. After Jacob de Backer, The Five Senses/Touch, 1640–70. Etching, 15.1 × 19.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Yet the background of Touch contains another emblem of this sense that is particularly enlightening for us in light of Herder’s revisionist theories of living statues: a sculptor’s studio. A reclining male figure and a standing female, both nude, occupy the space, and a man, whether sculptor or bystander, has entered the scene, stepped onto the female figure’s pedestal and embraced it. Is this Pygmalion embracing Galatea and longing for her enlivening? The sculpture’s body is almost a mirror image of the body of Touch in the foreground, and the long, sinuous curve that follows from the sculpture’s upraised right hand across the pecking bird to the allegory’s sensitive right fingers further connects them. While cultivating the senses had dangers, these beautiful female bodies fire the imagination through their invitation to touch, and that desire both inspires great art and has the power to transform that art into life. This complex aesthetic tradition colored the cultural reception of the real eighteenth-century women who, in wearing neoclassical dresses and standing in attitudes or playing the tambourine, both embodied bacchantism and “aped” classicism.

Inspiring desire was something Emma Hart was quite practiced in, and by exhibiting herself as a living statue in flickering candlelight she might seem to be activating precisely the process of aesthetic experience described by these theorists. It was as if the desirable sculpture were not sparked to life in the mind of the observer, but moved on her own as a result of her own deep connection to authentic aesthetic experience. After all, if women were particularly attuned to the haptic and brimming with sensibility, they should be particularly capable of aesthetic transcendence. This Galatea not only inspired desire, but also possessed it.

But far from appreciating this expansion of their theories into Hart’s performance as a flowering of theory into practice, the aesthetic philosophers who witnessed it were dismayed by experience of the living statue. Because Hart literally brought the poses to life and then moved from one to the next, the viewer’s experience was passive, and his transcendence from the erotic response to a higher apprehension of beauty and virtue was disabled.47Wurst 2001, p. 159. Thus, the viewer of Hart’s attitudes—or another woman’s living bacchantism—was not in complete control of the process of enlivening, as he was when in the presence of an actual statue; instead, the living sculpture herself directed the action and controlled the pace.

For example, Herder had a memorable encounter with Hart’s attitudes that caused him to rethink his sculpture theory and the way art seemed to come to life for the viewer. Herder made a tour of Italy a decade after writing his essay on sculpture theory, and he saw Hart perform her attitudes in 1789. Apparently, as he watched, Herder initially refused to succumb to Hart’s charms as a performer; in his own words, he “teased her.” In response, she addressed her “bacchantish attitudes” to him more and more forcefully in an attempt to win him over. There are two different accounts of what resulted from this charm offensive. Herder’s traveling companion, Anna Amalia, the Dowager Duchess of Weimar, wrote to Herder’s wife:

There was a small fight [for Herder’s heart between Naples and Philosophy]; Partenope [Naples] flattered by her victory sought in every way to secure it; she sent out one of her magical Syrens, who, through shape, voice, and magical attitudes of the most beautiful Greek art, enraptured him. —Gone was dry wisdom; as if with an electric spark, life became bliss and ecstasy flooded over his entire being; he became a god and now he himself wanted to create.48“Es entstand ein kleiner Kampf, Partenope geschmeichelt von ihrem Sieg suchte ihm auf aller weise zu behaupten, sie schickte eine ihrer zauberischsten Syrene ab, die durch Gestalt, Gesang, und zauberischte attituden, der schönsten Grieschen Kunst ihm entzückte—Weg war die trockene Weisheit; wie mit einen Elektrischen funken wurde leben Wonne und Seligkeit über sein ganzes wesen ergossen, er wurde ein Gott und wollte selbst schaffen.” Maierhofer 1999, p. 234; my translation.

Hart as a magical Siren of Naples (Partenope) performs her attitudes, which act as an electrical spark to the dry wisdom of Herder’s classical learning, thereby causing an ecstatic outpouring of joy and transforming him into a creative god.49Maierhofer 1999, p. 233. This version of the encounter, which clearly amused the duchess greatly, again evokes the transformative power of mad, fertile Naples, posing it in opposition to rationality and the dry learning of the schoolroom; the story also recalls Herder’s own account of the aesthetic process of enlivening sculpture into life and anticipates Staël’s language about Corinne’s effect on her audience. It even uses vitalist language of electrical sparks as life-bringing energy, here emanating from a living statue, enlivening a man who in turn feels the desire to create (or procreate?). In the duchess’s elegant inversion, it is the stony philosopher who is brought to life by the “magical attitudes of the most beautiful Greek art.” Yet Herder himself wrote to his wife that his view changed when the performance concluded:

When it was all over, I became very angry at her, for having so violently awakened me from the dream, and having rather ruined a large portion of my ideas about art positions [Kunststellungen], which of course were in all simplicity somewhat exaggerated.50Johann Gottfried Herder, letter to his wife, February 21, 1789 (Düntzer and Herder 1859, pp. 260–61); my translation. In this letter, Herder himself included the note from the duchess quoted above, so he was fully aware of its contents, calling it “beautifully and poetically written” and descriptive of a moment of “fun.” Here follows the full text from which several excerpts are discussed in the following paragraphs. “Hier ist ein Briefchen, das mir die Herzogin an Dich gegeben. Es ist wirklich schön und poetisch geschrieben, und der Spaß beruht darauf, daß als Hamiltons H--, sie heißt Mad. Hardt, ihre tausend Stellungen und Figuren im Griechischen Gewande machte, ich sie neckte und sie gegentheils ihre bacchantischen Attitüden in der Gesellschaft immer an mich addressirte. Übrigens ist sie à fonds eine sehr gemeine Person in ihrem Innern, ohne feineres Gefühl, wie ich glaube, für irgend etwas, was erhaben, groß und ewig schön ist; eine Äffin aber, daß nichts drüber geht. Da alles vorbei war, bin ich über sie recht ergrimmt worden, daß sie mich so gewaltig aus dem Traum geweckt, und einen großen Theil meiner Ideen über die Kunststellungen, die freilich in aller Einfalt etwas übertrieben waren, ziemlich ruinirt hat. Ich sehe nämlich, wie entfernt man vom wahren Sentiment jeder edlen Art doch so ein glücklicher Affe sein könne. Überhaupt komme ich aus dem Lande der Kunst beinahe als ein Feind der Affenkunst, oder wenigstens sehr gleichgültig gegen sie zurück.”

Perhaps Herder did feel that spark of joy in the moment and was initially as transfixed by Hart’s performance as the duchess paints him. Yet afterward, in describing the experience for his wife, he portrayed himself as dejected and angry. In fact, as he saw it, Hart’s attitudes perverted Herder’s ideal of a living sculpture. Indeed, as a Galatea gone wrong—”Hamilton’s whore,” as he referred to her—she awoke Herder, as Pygmalion, from his creative dream. As he went on to explain, her “thousand positions and characters in Greek garb” were the antics of an “ape”; she is “at bottom a very common person in her heart, without fine feeling, I think, for something that is noble, great, and eternally beautiful.” In his account of Hart’s performance, then, Herder places her in the tradition of the “bacchante with ape,” the symbol of degenerate taste, and of wild, sensual, bad art. Hart’s attitudes were vulgar, and she was a mindless aper of forms, a maker of shapes without grasping their substance—a dilettante. The desire she inspires, rather than sparking a profound aesthetic experience, merely makes her a “whore.” Yet Herder also acknowledged that, more fundamentally, her performance exposed a weakness in his own theory. “A large portion of my ideas . . . have been quite ruined,” he lamented, “because I see how removed from true sentiment of any kind such a happy ape could be. In fact, I am returning from the land of art almost an enemy of this ape art [Affenkunst], or at least very indifferent to it.”51Düntzer and Herder 1859, pp. 260–61.

Hart’s lower-class origins, poor education, and love of drink gave her critics plenty of ammunition, and many spectators were uncomfortable that such a dazzling and transformative performance could come from such a poorly educated person.52Lady Elizabeth Foster, in her journal entry of August 1791, voiced a criticism many observers recorded: “In short,” she concluded, “Lord Bristol’s remark seems to me so just a one that I must end with it: ‘Take her as anything but Mrs. Hart and she is a superior being—as herself she is always vulgar.’” Quoted in Fraser 1987, pp. 141–2. But I suggest that the strongly divided response to Hart’s attitudes and the terms of critique were not triggered by the particular characteristics of her identity, choices, or performance. On the contrary, we can see similar reactions to women wearing neoclassical dress and claiming artistic agency throughout the 1790s. “The symmetry of a statue may, without offending, be partially displayed through the folds of a cambric robe,” wrote one critic in 1800, “but who can forbear to smile when they contemplate an uncouth, unwieldy, shapeless mortal, assiduously displaying what it should be the labor of her toilette to conceal?”53Anon., Morning Post and Gazetteer, September 3, 1800. Hart was an exemplar and a pathbreaker, but many other women followed her neoclassical bacchantism, and when they did so, they were often subject to similar ridicule: they were silly, overwrought, inauthentic, oversexed, and unsophisticated. They were dilettantes.

DILETTANTES AND APES

All dilettantes are essentially plagiarists. They undermine and destroy all natural beauty in language and thought by mimicking and aping it in order to cover up their own vacuity.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Dilettantism,” 179954Goethe 1994, p. 216.

“Dilettante” was originally a neutral and descriptive term, like amateur—a lover of art who spent time and money refining his aesthetic sense and capacities. Members of the Society of Dilettanti in Great Britain embraced the label as a marker of their erudition, enjoyment of aesthetic pleasure, and quest for refinement. Yet by the end of the 1790s, the term had become pejorative, applied to diminish those who dabbled in art with insufficient seriousness, understanding, vision, or genius. Goethe had a transformative experience traveling to Italy in 1786–8, including a visit to Hamilton’s house in Naples, and altered many of his ideas about theatre and art afterward. Defining dilettantism became an obsessive, never-completed project for Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in the 1790s. For Goethe, the dilettante was not a mere dabbler, but someone devoted to art and indispensable to the art world. In his 1795 essay, “Literary Sansculottism,” Goethe notes that even geniuses are dependent on their circumstances; great art can only come from a golden age, and dilettantes play an important role in keeping tradition alive and art thriving until a golden age dawns and a genius arrives on the scene. Yet the dilettante was also dangerous to art, threatening to infect it with mediocrity and venality and to degrade the social conditions that might produce geniuses: “The extent to which artists, entrepreneurs, buyers and sellers, and aficionados of all art forms have drowned in dilettantism—this I see with horror only now,” he wrote to Schiller in 1799.55See Fleming 2009, p. 83. There was also an issue of imitation, copying, and aping: dilettantes, Goethe argued, come to art through the art they admire; they are essentially derivative. Geniuses, by contrast, are called by nature.

Goethe met Hart and Hamilton while on his sojourn in Naples in early 1787. If he saw Hart’s attitudes at all, it was at a very early stage of their development, for she had just arrived in Naples a few months earlier.56Maierhofer 1999, pp. 222–7, argues that Goethe never saw Hart perform at all. His long description of her attitudes in his Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), published 30 years after the trip itself, is often characterized by scholars as effusive praise, but its terms are actually ironic and mocking:

The old knight [Hamilton] holds up the light for the performance and has devoted himself heart and soul to this art object [Hart]. He sees in her all the antiquities, all the beautiful profiles on Sicilian coins, even the Apollo Belvedere itself. This much is certain, it is unique entertainment!57Goethe 1989, pp. 170–71.

Hart’s attitudes were perhaps the clearest example of the “dilettantism” that Goethe most disdained as he struggled to create the beautiful, intellectual art of Weimar classicism. Hamilton, who, “after long years of fancying art and studying nature, found the culmination of all his joy in art and nature in a beautiful girl,” Goethe says, is besotted and duped, and Hart herself is a crafty but mindless aper of forms.58Goethe 1989, p. 171. For Goethe, Emma’s attitudes are simply the expression of Naples’s indolence and a false way to engage with the real truth of art. By the time the Italian Journey was published, the ramifications of Hart’s Neapolitan experiments had spread through Europe—to Goethe’s dismay—and bacchantes and dilettantes were everywhere.

The woman-as-bacchante appeared in intimate and erotic settings, in portrait miniatures (fig. 2), and in depictions of actresses, dancers, and mistresses, such as the portrait of his mistress Emily St. Clare commissioned by Sir John Fleming Leicester (fig. 39). But neoclassical bacchantes also exceeded this liminal space, proclaiming themselves as completely respectable and exceptionally fashionable. A 1797 British popular print, Love and Harmony (fig. 40), shows the Neapolitan bacchante completely absorbed and digested into contemporary fashionability.59This print is an altered reissue of a Sayer & Bennett mezzotint from 1782 titled Music (British Museum, London); the costumes of all the figures have been altered to make them fashionably up-to-date. A family group is arranged outdoors in an orderly garden, playing music together. While the little boy strikes the triangle and the man plays the pipe, the seated woman at the center of the scene beats a tambourine. Her chic attire is given the detailed attention of a fashion plate, from her fichu to her headdress, to her high waist and gold hoop earrings. “Music has Charms to soothe the Savage Breast,” the caption reads, bidding the viewer to interpret the modern bacchante as a paragon of female refinement and family harmony, not of disruptive or unbridled appetite.

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Description: Portrait of Emily St. Clare as a Bacchante by Hoppner, John

Fig. 39. John Hoppner, Portrait of Emily St. Clare as a Bacchante, 1806–7. Oil on canvas, 239.7 × 148.6 cm. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

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Description: Love and Harmony by Unknown

Fig. 40. Unknown, Love and Harmony, 1797. Hand-colored mezzotint, 35 × 25 cm. British Museum, London

Indeed, playing the tambourine became a fashionable diversion in the 1790s. Tambourine lessons were offered by dancing masters and private teachers, and several instructional guides were published in the late eighteenth century.60Girling 2019. Scenes of domestic music-making often included tambourinists in neoclassical gowns. Samuel Woodforde’s The Bennett Family (fig. 41) diagrams this family’s rising social and economic status by painting the female family members making music within a quasi-interior while the male members play marbles and lean on a classical plinth under open skies. The central young woman with tambourine bridges the two halves and directly engages the viewer as a feminine ideal. Such pretensions were avidly satirized; George Moutard Woodward’s 1799 print (fig. 42) characterizes the tambourine as a “musical mania” that extended to the most fashionable and high-born ladies in the land. His two central figures include Lady Hobart on the tambourine and fashion leader Lady Charlotte Campbell—to whom we shall return in Chapter Three—playing the cymbals.61“Savoyard” was a term used to refer to foreign-born itinerant musicians; see “Savoyard, n. and adj.,” Oxford English Dictionary – OED Online, <www.oed.com/view/Entry/171501> (accessed March 29, 2019).

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Description: The Bennett Family by Woodforde, Samuel

Fig. 41. Samuel Woodforde, The Bennett Family, 1803. Oil on canvas, 303.5 × 364.5 cm. Tate, London

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Description: Savoyards of fashion, or, The musical mania of 1799 by Woodward, George Moutard

Fig. 42. George Moutard Woodward, Savoyards of Fashion—or the Musical Mania of 1799, 1799. Hand-colored etching, 30.8 × 40.8 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

But the tambourine had a second strand of cultural meaning in 1790s London, and it merged with the neoclassical bacchante in a potent brew of misogyny and racism. As with other aspects of their artistic endeavors, it was easy to mock women’s interest in the tambourine: “Our fashionable Ladies have for some months been assiduously applying themselves to the study of the Tambourine,” commented the Sun in 1798, “This, we presume, is by way of making a noise before marriage—They are enough heard of after.”62Anon., Sun (London), March 24, 1798; see also Girling 2019. But the tambourine was also associated with primitivism and African culture, as in Agostino Brunias’s print after his own painting (fig. 43), featuring a topless black woman playing the tambourine. Black musicians from the West Indies playing the cymbals, tambourine, and bass drum were introduced to the Duke of York’s Band of the Coldstream Guards in 1789 and created a sensation. Oboist William Parke remarked that the band “attracted crowds of persons to St James’s Park to listen to its performances. It may be worthy of remark that the Africans, who appear generally to have a natural disposition for music, produced such effect with their tambourines, that those instruments afterward, under their tuition, became extremely fashionable, and were cultivated by many of those belles of distinction.”63Parke 1830, vol. 2, p. 242. High-stepping and clad in feathered turbans and colorful uniforms, these musicians, the most famous of whom was John Fraser (fig. 44), were both celebrated and exoticized. In 1798, the Morning Post and Gazetteer reported:

The amiable Duchess of York is learning the fashionable exercise of the tambourine, which is not merely pleasant as a musical accompaniment, but promotes health by the agility it requires, and throws the body into the most graceful attitudes. One of the Blacks of the Duke of York’s band is her Highness’s instructor.64Morning Post and Gazetteer, November 20, 1798, n.p.

Playing the tambourine, then, became a modern female accomplishment. It provided exercise and musical education, and placed the body in poses plainly evocative of classical art—”attitudes,” as the Post says above—allowing women to create tableaux of re-enactment and shape themselves as neoclassical bacchantes, as if they were the Herculaneum Dancers come to life. But this “bacchantish” music was also considered primitive and atavistic, associated not just with delirious, murderous maenads but also with hypersexualized, otherized, black-skinned “savages”—an alliance we shall return to at the end of our story, in Chapter Five. Sexual dalliance between ladies and their music teachers was an old trope, and Rowlandson drew on it to satirize tambourine-playing bacchantes with imagery of female sexual abandon and racial and cultural miscegenation (fig. 45). Rowlandson’s satire updates the iconography of the “bacchante with ape”: these contemporary neoclassical bacchantes are merely gratifying their lower senses, deluded about their artistic refinement, and threateningly violating racial and sexual mores.

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Description: A Negroes Dance in the Island of Dominica, detail by Brunias, Agostino

Fig. 43. Agostino Brunias, A Negroes’ Dance in the Island of Dominica (detail), 1779. Stipple engraving with hand-coloring, 33.4 × 40 cm. Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Description: [John Fraser, Tambourinist with the Coldstream Guards Band] by Unknown

Fig. 44. Unknown, [John Fraser, Tambourinist with the Coldstream Guards Band], ca. 1790–1800. Mezzotint, 50.6 × 35.7 cm. British Museum, London

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Description: [Woman Playing Tambourine with the Coldstream Guards Band] by Rowlandson, Thomas

Fig. 45. Thomas Rowlandson, [Woman Playing Tambourine with the Coldstream Guards Band], ca. 1790–1810. Etching with stipple, 21.1 × 15.4 cm. British Museum, London

The artistic and fashionable woman, even one as elite and accomplished as Staël, would go some distance to avoid such satire of their erudition, ambition, and passion. Vigée-Lebrun’s monumental Portrait of Madame de Staël-Holstein as Corinne (fig. 46) pulls few punches, but in so doing, invites censure. A leading intellectual exiled to Switzerland by Napoleon, Staël entertained thinkers and artists from across Europe at her château in Coppet.65Interestingly, Staël’s reputed model for Corinne’s love interest, Lord Oswald Nevil, was John Campbell, 7th Duke of Argyll, brother of Lady Charlotte Campbell—further evidence of the international character of the elite and interwoven group of radical neoclassicists who anchor this book. She invited Vigée-Lebrun to visit in 1807, during the sensational success of Corinne’s publication, suggesting that perhaps her friend, the renowned beauty Juliette Récamier, could pose for a depiction of the title heroine.66Sheriff 1996, p. 259. My account of Vigée-Lebrun’s painting follows Sheriff’s analysis, which diverges from much conventional wisdom about Staël’s “preference” for the more fashionable copy by Firmin Massot. Vigée-Lebrun instead painted the author herself in the role, even though Staël’s physical charms did not match those of her heroine. As Mary Sheriff has argued, Vigée-Lebrun situates Staël here as an unabashed genius, with powerful arms and eyes upturned to heaven to mark her brilliant inward vision, defying norms of conventional beauty and agreeableness in favor of a forceful depiction of inspiration.67Sheriff 1996, pp. 258–60. Yet there is some suggestion that not only other viewers but Staël herself found the painting uncomfortable and unflattering, and when she commissioned a copy, diminished in scale and ambition, from a local painter, the result was a more conventionally attractive and fashionable depiction with more idealized features, smoother skin, and a more chic gown with cap sleeves and a square neckline (fig. 47). This is just a pretty woman playing the lyre, Firmin Massot’s painting seems to say, not an inspired channeler of the spirit of classicism, or a strange and disquieting piece of living antiquity.

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Description: Portrait of Madame de Staël-Holstein as Corinne by Vigée-LeBrun, Elisabeth...

Fig. 46. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Madame de Staël-Holstein as Corinne, 1807. Oil on canvas, 140 × 118 cm. Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva

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Description: Portrait of Germaine Necker, Mme de Staël, as Corinne by Massot, Firmin

Fig. 47. Firmin Massot after Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Portrait of Germaine Necker, Mme de Staël, as Corinne, 1807. Oil on wood, dimensions unknown. Château de Coppet, Switzerland

Vigée-Lebrun’s Corinne/de Staël champions women’s artistic agency in both painter and sitter, and charts a path to the assertion of female genius through the embodiment and re-presentation of classical art, daring the observer to take her seriously. Perhaps Staël did, in the end, favor the blander and more conventionally appealing portrayal by Massot, retreating a bit from Vigée-Lebrun’s bold assertion of female artistic inspiration. Yet neoclassical dress had already moved conventional fashionability so close to the ideal of artistic agency that the gap was small indeed, allowing women to play a role in contemporary neoclassical culture and intellectual life without straying too far beyond the confines of the acceptable. When confronted with the living examples of posing bacchantes, critics perceived their self-assertion as aggressive and vulgar dilettantism, primitive and laughable aping; such criticism perhaps stung even so formidable a character as Madame de Staël. Yet despite this mockery, neoclassical dress offered women something powerful, for it spread throughout the capitals of Europe and America in the 1790s, unmatched in its ability to represent the female body as simultaneously unfettered and respectable, erotically charged and morally virtuous, a learned expression of antique art and an authentic gesture of unschooled truth.

1 Staël 1833, p. 89; see also Wu 2012. »

2 On Grand Tourists, archaeology, and the Bay of Naples in the eighteenth century, see Wilton and Bignamini 1996, Jenkins and Sloan 1996, Mattusch 2013, and Calaresu and Hills 2013. »

3 William Artaud, letter to his father, May 1796 (Sewter 1951, p. 115); quoted by Jenkins and Sloan 1996, p. 261. »

4 Dwyer 2010, pp. 11–12. »

5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter, March 16, 1787 (Goethe 1989, pp. 169–70). »

6 Henry Swinburne, “Ancient and Modern Customs in the Kingdom of Naples,” Weekly Entertainer (London), August 8, 1785, pp. 121–3. »

7 Calaresu 2013 notes that Neapolitans themselves sometimes played a role in constructing and deploying these stereotypes. »

8 See Touchette 2000, pp. 134–9. For the history of the excavation of the wall paintings, see Parslow 1998. »

9 Regarding the restrictions on viewing and publishing these antiquities, see Haskell and Penny 1981, pp. 75–6, and Ramage 2013. »

10 See Jenkins and Sloan 1996, Ramage 1990, and Coltman 2006, especially pp. 65–96. »

11 The most helpful comprehensive accounts are Holmström 1967, Fothergill 1969, Fraser 1987, Jenkins and Sloan 1996, Ittershagen 1999, Ludwig 2012, and Contogouris 2018. »

12 Palmerston 1957, p. 276. See Coltman 2006, p. 66. »

13 Emma Hart, letter to Charles Greville, August 4, 1787 (Coltman 2006, p. 67). »

14 See Ludwig 2012, chapter two. »

15 Nolta 1997, p. 110. »

16 See Chard 1997 on Grand Tourists’ interest in the ways women could reanimate the ruins of the past. »

17 Pop 2015, p. 3. »

18 Pop 2015, p. 5. »

19 See Bermingham 1993 and 1995. »

20 There is some scholarly debate about the specific form of the attitudes; for a discussion see Rauser 2015, p. 471. See also Pop 2011; Touchette 2000; Lada-Richards 2003; Jenkins and Sloan 1996, p. 253; Holmström 1967; Maierhofer 1999; and Howell 1999, p. 4. »

21 Lady Elizabeth Foster, journal entry of 1791 (Stuart 1955, p. 59); Fraser 1987, p. 141. »

22 “Elle se costume à la grecque ou à la romaine, se pare de fleurs ou se couvre d’un voile, et donne ainsi le spectacle vivant des chefs-d’oeuvre des plus célèbres artistes de l’antiquité.” Comte d’Espinchal, letter, January 28, 1790 (d’Espinchal 1912, p. 89). »

23 John B. S. Morritt, letter from Naples to his mother, February 14, 1796 (Morritt 1914, p. 281). »

24 Henry Blundell, letter to Charles Townley, May 4, 1790 (Coltman 2006, p. 67, BM TY7/1320). »

25 Knight 1861, vol. 1, p. 91. Knight’s memoirs were published long after her death in 1837; this observation dates to her arrival in Naples on May 5, 1785. »

26 “la mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano”; see Schnapp 2013, p. 30. »

27 West 2002, p. 151. »

28 Vigée-Lebrun 1989, p. 67. »

29 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter, March 16, 1787 (Goethe 1989, p. 171). »

30 For changes in the conventions of stage costumes in ballet, see Chazin-Bennahum 2005, pp. 109–11. On the changes in acting theory in the eighteenth century and the repeated use of the Pygmalion story for innovative productions, which included more “natural” classical costumes, see Holmström 1967, pp. 41–50. »

31 Emma Hart, letter to Charles Greville, August 4, 1787 (Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 131). This letter also recounts an incident when she wore an ensemble “drest all in virgin wite & my hair all in ringlets reaching all most to my heals” to the opera. »

32 See Contogouris 2018, chapter three, for a discussion of the lighting effects for Hart’s performances. »

33 Melesina Trench, September 6, 1800 (Trench 1862, p. 101). »

34 “O welchen Schatz des Holden and des Guten/ Hast Du, O Kunst, in manchen Stein gesenkt!/ Wie quillt’s hervor, wenn mit den Flammengluten/ Den todten Stein die Lebensfackel tränkt!” As quoted by Mattos 2006, p. 140; my gratitude to Maria Mitchell and Guillaume de Syon for help with the translation. See also the influential Bätschmann 1992. »

35 Emma Hart, letter to Charles Greville, August 4, 1787 (Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 130). »

36 “ Ich schämte mich meiner starken Nerven, wie ich so alle Damens und Herren weinen sah. Wenn ichs so vorgesehen hätte, ich würde mir Salz mitgenommen haben. Da sitzt also die hölzige Kraus neben einer Angelica, die so laut schluckte, daß sich Steine hätten bewegen können. Der arme Rehberg sah aus wie ein Knabe, der tüchtig Schläge vom Herrn Schulmeister bekommt. Herr Reiffenstein weinte doch noch zierlich, man konnte die langsam herabrollenden antikischen Tränen zählen. Miß Jenkins stand das Weinen nicht sehr übel, es war der totenblassen Gesichtsfarbe sehr angemessen . . . Von Anfang an kostete es mir Mühe, mein Lachen zo verbergen über das Geheul, aber wie ich sie so mit ihren großen Augen auf uns zukommen sah, wich ich ordentlich zurück, denn ich vergaß, daß sie uns nur amüsieren wollte; Angelica war so hingerissen, daß sie der Schönen wohl zwanzigmal die Hand küßte.” Kraus 1996, pp. 96–7; my translation. Cited and discussed by Maierhofer 1999, p. 233. »

37 See Thom 2015 on Rowlandson’s erotic satires of sculpture. »

38 “Si j’étais le chevalier Hamilton, je passerais en revue toute l’Olympe; je verrais fréquemment soit Hebé, soit Vénus et les Grâces, quelquefois Junon, très rarement Minerve. Pour varier mes plaisirs, tantôt un riche boudoir m’offrirait la passionnée et tendre Cléopatre, recevant amoureusement Marc Antoine et tantôt un cabinet de verdure verrait Alcibiade folâtrer avec Glycère.” Comte d’Espinchal, letter, January 28, 1790 (d’Espinchal 1912, p. 89); my translation. »

39 Wurst 2001. »

40 For helpful entry points into this literature, see Zuckert 2009, Potts 2000, and Wurst 2001. Rosenthal 2004, p. 565, not only argues for the place of the somatic body in aesthetic response but also notes the significance of the Pygmalion myth in this context. »

41 Lessing 1984; see also Wurst 2001, p. 158. »

42 Potts 1994. »

43 “Eine Statue muß leben: ihr Fleisch muß beleben: ihr Gesicht und Mine sprechen. Wir müssen sie anzutasten glauben und fühlen, daß sie sich unter unsern Händen erwärmt. Wir müssen sie vor uns stehen sehen, und fühlen, daß sie zu uns spricht.” Herder 1769, p. 88; my translation. Zuckert 2009, p. 294, notes that unlike many other aesthetic philosophers of his age, Herder does not feel that erotic attraction in art impedes art’s moral or aesthetic power—quite the contrary, since it is precisely the embodied nature of aesthetic response that contributes to both morality and self-knowledge. »

44 “Die Bildnerei arbeitet in einander, Ein lebendes, Ein Werk voll Seele, das da sei und daure. . . . nothwendig muß sie also schaffen, was ihre Darstellung verdient, und was für sich da steht. . . . Wo Seele lebt und einen edlen Körper durchhaucht und die Kunst wetteifern kann, Seele im Körper darzustellen, Götter, Menschen und edle Thiere, das bilde die Kunst und das hat sie gebildet. . . . Eine Bildsäule kann mich umfassen, daß ich vor ihr knie, ihr Freund und Gespiele werde, sie ist gegenwärtig, sie ist da.” Herder 1778, pp. 16–18; translation by Jason Gaiger in Art in Theory, 1648–1815 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 770–71. »

45 van Suchtelen 1991. »

46 van Suchtelen 1991, pp. 40–41. »

47 Wurst 2001, p. 159. »

48 “Es entstand ein kleiner Kampf, Partenope geschmeichelt von ihrem Sieg suchte ihm auf aller weise zu behaupten, sie schickte eine ihrer zauberischsten Syrene ab, die durch Gestalt, Gesang, und zauberischte attituden, der schönsten Grieschen Kunst ihm entzückte—Weg war die trockene Weisheit; wie mit einen Elektrischen funken wurde leben Wonne und Seligkeit über sein ganzes wesen ergossen, er wurde ein Gott und wollte selbst schaffen.” Maierhofer 1999, p. 234; my translation. »

49 Maierhofer 1999, p. 233. »

50 Johann Gottfried Herder, letter to his wife, February 21, 1789 (Düntzer and Herder 1859, pp. 260–61); my translation. In this letter, Herder himself included the note from the duchess quoted above, so he was fully aware of its contents, calling it “beautifully and poetically written” and descriptive of a moment of “fun.” Here follows the full text from which several excerpts are discussed in the following paragraphs. “Hier ist ein Briefchen, das mir die Herzogin an Dich gegeben. Es ist wirklich schön und poetisch geschrieben, und der Spaß beruht darauf, daß als Hamiltons H--, sie heißt Mad. Hardt, ihre tausend Stellungen und Figuren im Griechischen Gewande machte, ich sie neckte und sie gegentheils ihre bacchantischen Attitüden in der Gesellschaft immer an mich addressirte. Übrigens ist sie à fonds eine sehr gemeine Person in ihrem Innern, ohne feineres Gefühl, wie ich glaube, für irgend etwas, was erhaben, groß und ewig schön ist; eine Äffin aber, daß nichts drüber geht. Da alles vorbei war, bin ich über sie recht ergrimmt worden, daß sie mich so gewaltig aus dem Traum geweckt, und einen großen Theil meiner Ideen über die Kunststellungen, die freilich in aller Einfalt etwas übertrieben waren, ziemlich ruinirt hat. Ich sehe nämlich, wie entfernt man vom wahren Sentiment jeder edlen Art doch so ein glücklicher Affe sein könne. Überhaupt komme ich aus dem Lande der Kunst beinahe als ein Feind der Affenkunst, oder wenigstens sehr gleichgültig gegen sie zurück.” »

51 Düntzer and Herder 1859, pp. 260–61. »

52 Lady Elizabeth Foster, in her journal entry of August 1791, voiced a criticism many observers recorded: “In short,” she concluded, “Lord Bristol’s remark seems to me so just a one that I must end with it: ‘Take her as anything but Mrs. Hart and she is a superior being—as herself she is always vulgar.’” Quoted in Fraser 1987, pp. 141–2. »

53 Anon., Morning Post and Gazetteer, September 3, 1800. »

54 Goethe 1994, p. 216. »

55 See Fleming 2009, p. 83. »

56 Maierhofer 1999, pp. 222–7, argues that Goethe never saw Hart perform at all. »

57 Goethe 1989, pp. 170–71. »

58 Goethe 1989, p. 171. »

59 This print is an altered reissue of a Sayer & Bennett mezzotint from 1782 titled Music (British Museum, London); the costumes of all the figures have been altered to make them fashionably up-to-date. »

60 Girling 2019. »

61 “Savoyard” was a term used to refer to foreign-born itinerant musicians; see “Savoyard, n. and adj.,” Oxford English Dictionary – OED Online, <www.oed.com/view/Entry/171501> (accessed March 29, 2019). »

62 Anon., Sun (London), March 24, 1798; see also Girling 2019. »

63 Parke 1830, vol. 2, p. 242. »

64 Morning Post and Gazetteer, November 20, 1798, n.p. »

65 Interestingly, Staël’s reputed model for Corinne’s love interest, Lord Oswald Nevil, was John Campbell, 7th Duke of Argyll, brother of Lady Charlotte Campbell—further evidence of the international character of the elite and interwoven group of radical neoclassicists who anchor this book. »

66 Sheriff 1996, p. 259. My account of Vigée-Lebrun’s painting follows Sheriff’s analysis, which diverges from much conventional wisdom about Staël’s “preference” for the more fashionable copy by Firmin Massot. »

67 Sheriff 1996, pp. 258–60. »

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