2. The Sensate Statue

Rauser, Amelia

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2. The Sensate Statue

Amelia Rauser

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

~In Marie-Denise Villers’s portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (fig. 56), the young artist sits at work in front of a cracked window.Higgonet 2016 demonstrates that the setting is a studio in the Louvre, making this an assertive and confident...

Author

Amelia Rauser

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.71-91

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.5

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23222

Chapter subject tags:Dress, NeoclassicalCostume--History--18th centuryCupid and Psyche (Tale) in artShakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Winter's tale

2. The Sensate Statue

In Marie-Denise Villers’s portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (fig. 56), the young artist sits at work in front of a cracked window.1Higgonet 2016 demonstrates that the setting is a studio in the Louvre, making this an assertive and confident depiction of a professional woman artist. Her fashionable neoclassical dress, with its high waist and tucked fichu, skims her torso and then falls in soft gathers. The contours of her legs are articulated by the folded cloth that pulls, puckers, and flows from her waist to the floor. Villers makes the unusual choice of backlighting Val d’Ognes, creating startling lighting effects. The light from the window highlights the peaks of each fabric fold, and shines through the wispy curls on the sitter’s head, giving it the appearance of a glowing corona. Most notably, the sitter’s bodily contour radiates with light, its edges not crisp but rather fuzzed out and blurred. This effect both emphasizes her bodily contour, silhouetting her white body—flesh and muslin—against the dark wall behind, and yet gives a sense of this boundary as a vibrating membrane that interacts with the world around it. Analogizing the woman and her art, Val d’Ognes’s portfolio is also a dark form surrounded by a glowing, white border; the paper on which she draws extends beyond the black support and catches the light. That her eyes, those traditional windows to the soul, are shadowed, reinforces the sense that it is Val d’Ognes’s body, shimmering with light and vibrating with energy, that is the place of cognition and sensibility here, glowing with life as she concentrates on her art. Constructed by the artist as not just the object of the artist’s gaze, but a subject as well, Villers’s Val d’Ognes, with her fuzzed, glowing borders, is animated by her own sensibility, a living statue pulsing with vitalist energy and creating not just herself, but also her art.

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Description: Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d'Ognes (1786–1868) by Villers,...

Fig. 56. Marie-Denise Villers, Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (detail), 1801. Oil on canvas, 161.3 × 128.6 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In this chapter, I will argue that the idea of the living statue was conditioned by and tied to current ideas about the science of life. Vitalism, which conceived of the life force as dispersed throughout the body, entailed a notion of embodied or entangled cognition. Enlightenment epistemology, with its widespread rejection of innate ideas, cultivated a kind of sensationism, and the notion that all knowledge was derived from the senses was shared by diverse thinkers across the spectrum of eighteenth-century thought. Like the aesthetic philosophers fascinated by bringing sculptures to life that we explored in the last chapter, scientists and physicians, too, were concerned with the mystery of life and whether the boundary between animate and inanimate matter might in fact be permeable. Vitalist ideas challenged the nature of life itself and posited that, with the right nudge, life might spark the inanimate into animation. As a sensationist philosophy, vitalism speculated about the interconnectedness of things and beings, materials and flesh.

Neoclassical dress engaged with vitalist theory in several ways. Its transparency veiled the body, whitening it and thereby seeming to marmorealize it in an intermediate stage between marble and flesh, inanimate and animate. The style’s classical form evoked the ideal of the living statue and the legend of Pygmalion, a work of art that was brought to life. Most importantly, its skimpiness removed inhibitions to sensation, allowing nearly the entire body to interact with the world. Neoclassical dress thus thematized the skin as a sensitive, perceptive interface. Drawing on the connection between sensibility, heightened nervousness, and purity of perception, neoclassical dress presented its wearers as exceptionally astute, artistic, and virtuous, firing with embodied cognition. Yet this heightened sensibility and sensitivity also brought dangers. While some physicians lauded the healthfulness of the liberated body in neoclassical dress, others warned that it exposed the body to cold, damp, and dust and that, because it heightened nervous perception, it increased women’s susceptibility to tuberculosis or other disease.

For an iconographic exploration of these ideas of animation and the breath of life, many turned to the figure of Psyche—in Latin, Anima. Connected metaphorically with both the soul and the breath of life, Psyche, like Galatea, was awakened by love and desire, animated from a deathlike stupor into life and, eventually, immortality. Psyche’s story was a tale of personal endurance and ultimate triumph. Although she was hidden, blinded, abandoned, and enslaved, Psyche gained her freedom and became immortal by empowering her own desiring gaze, defying the gods and daring to look—twice. In the 1790s, Psyche yoked beauty and desire to soul, animation, and the breath of life, serving as a compelling representation of the way living statues, with their exquisite sensitivity and perception, could connect contemporary vitalist notions of life science with the pluck and courage of a curious woman who dared to look.

VITALIST SENSIBILITY

The powerful image of the living statue was based on a philosophical sensationism that shaped diverse thinkers, British and continental, including theorists of the body, health, and the nature of life itself.2Vila 1998, p. 44. Landes 2008 notes that medicine was a kind of master discourse in the eighteenth century, similar to theology in the Middle Ages; see also Williams 2003 and O’Neal 1996. The living statue was a frequently invoked thought experiment: was dead matter invested with effable soul by God, as mechanist philosophy would have it? Or was the statue’s animation an example of the mediation of extremes, the result of a dynamic interaction of forces and the occult powers of teeming, vital nature? For Enlightenment vitalists, all matter was either imbued with self-organizing life or had the potential to be. Marble, flesh, or cotton—through natural sympathy, even inanimate objects could be invested with life, emotion, and consciousness. Vitalist life force, as extolled by both popular and philosophical theorists and aesthetes of sensibility, surged through and animated all living things, and might even be imagined to enliven inanimate ones. This cultural fascination with animating the inanimate would culminate in Mary Shelley’s dark vision of human hubris in her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). But for much of the eighteenth century, sensationism provided a way to imagine not only deep cross-species sympathies but also non-Christian morality and political federationism.

Sensation, the raw matter of cognition, was unevenly dispersed throughout the body as knowledge of the world entered through the senses. Thus, far from being a source of moral depravity, as earlier traditions might have it, the body’s sensations were the very stuff of moral, intellectual, and physical knowledge.3The replacement of the mechanistic with the sensationist model of perception and cognition lent itself to political, as well as aesthetic, analogies. Montpellier physician Théophile de Bordeu described it as a “federated” rather than “monarchic” system of intellectual centers. See Moravia 1978, p. 59. Cultivating those senses increased understanding. Indeed, it was not only statues that could be placed on a potential continuum between animate and inanimate, but humans as well. As Étienne Bonnot de Condillac noted, not all people experience sensations with the same vividness or reflect on them with the same precision, and thus, “some live so much more than others do”—and some of us are stonier than others.4Condillac 1982, p. 338. Those who were the most attuned to their sensations, then, were not only the most alive, but also possessed the greatest capacity for learning and knowledge. Sensibility, the cultivation of the senses toward the goal of refinement, facilitated more precise and sensitive perception of the world.

Women and artists were perceived to be among the least stony of humans, as a result of their longtime association with emotionalism, sensibility, and embodiment. This idea was expressed visually in a British color-printed stipple engraving after a painting by George Romney called Sensibility (fig. 57), which featured the mimosa, also called the “sensitive plant.”5For discussions about this work in the context of Emma Hart’s relationship with Romney and in dialogue with other portraits of her, see Ittershagen 1999, pp. 81–4. For the print in particular, see Alexander 2002. The Mimosa pudica, a creeping herb native to Central and South America, does, in fact, shrink back when touched, temporarily folding up to defend itself. Its association with sensibility was not only gendered female; in a poem by Anna Seward published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1783, the painter Joseph Wright of Derby was likened to a “coy Mimosa,” an analogy to his artistic sensibility.6See Bonehill 2013, p. 98. The plant is also popularly known as the “shame plant” or the “touch me not.” It was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his Species Plantarum in 1753. See the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System <https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/taxonomydetail.aspx?24405> (accessed February 6, 2017). Romney’s depiction was inspired by a scene in a long poem by his friend, William Hayley, called The Triumphs of Temper.7“The leaves, as conscious of their queen’s command,/ Successive fall at her approaching hand;/ Her tender breast with pity seems to pant,/ And shrinks at every shrinking of the plant.” William Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper; a Poem, Canto V (London: J. Dodsley, 1781), p. 116. In Romney’s image, the mimosa’s sensitivity is mirrored by the beautiful and sensitive woman, embodied by Emma Hart, Romney’s favorite model at the time. Hart herself loved Hayley’s book and its main character, tender Serena, and credited it with helping her to land her husband. As she wrote to Romney soon after her marriage to Sir William Hamilton in 1791: “Tell Hayley I am always reading his Triumphs of Temper; it was that that made me Lady H, for God knows, I had enough for five years to try my temper, and I am afraid if it had not been for the good example Serena taught me, my girdle would have burst.”8Emma Hamilton, letter to George Romney, Caserta, December 20, 1791 (Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 159). Girdle-bursting emotion is harnessed by the woman of sensibility, and transmuted into a vitalist communion with all living things. With one hand on her feeling heart, Romney’s Emma/Serena reaches out the other to almost touch the tip of the mimosa, as the plant in turn arcs toward her. In another instant, one imagines, a spark of vital electricity will jump across the gap, and both woman and plant will sensitively recoil from the jolt. Such tactile sensitivity was easily compared to virtue, as the doggerel beneath a 1787 mezzotint (fig. 58), representing a young girl reaching out to touch a snail, makes plain:

By nice Sensation and instinctive Laws,
From rude approach the tender Snail withdraws;
Thus modest nature guards the Virgin’s charms,
When coy suspicion gives it’s quick alarms.

Women could take lessons from plants and snails on how to be virtuous; cultivating their sensitivity would help guard their charms. This view places humans (or at least women) on a continuum with other, “lower,” living things, and posits that virtue is natural to life, not the product of dogma or the gift of grace. In addition, cultivation of the senses is not the enemy of virtue, but rather the very path to moral, as well as empirical, knowledge.

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Description: Sensibility by Earlom, Richard

Fig. 57. Richard Earlom after George Romney, Sensibility, 1789. Color-printed stipple engraving, 37.5 × 28.6 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

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Fig. 58. John Young after Richard Morton Paye, Sensibility, 1787. Mezzotint, 35.5 × 24.3 cm. British Museum, London

Women applied the sensationist aesthetics of the late eighteenth century to the social presentation of their own bodies. Harnessing their exquisite sensitivity, women cloaked the vitalist membrane of their skin in diaphanous white, thematizing the neoclassical contour and re-enacting for their beholders the exciting enlivening that was the kernel of all aesthetic experience and, indeed, the foundation of all knowledge. Engaging with the world with their outstretched hands and vital bodies, these sensitive women were not merely passive receptacles for sensory inputs, but, rather, curious and questioning. Like the oft-invoked mythological figure of Psyche, they dared to look.

PSYCHE DISOBEYS

In a print by Thérèse Éléonore Lingée after the little-known French artist Dutailly (fig. 59; see also opening figure of the Conclusion), a couple embraces in a garden, beneath a sculptural group of Cupid and Psyche.9The original drawing had a pendant to this scene called The Admiration of Antiquity (private collection), in which two young women admire two antique male sculptural bodies and two living artists in turn admire them. A second woman adjusts their postures, using the statue as a guide; a sculptor of sorts, she forms the living statues. Both women wear neoclassical dress. The famous and much-reproduced original for this composition was a Roman marble (fig. 60) then in the Capitoline collection in Rome; a few years later it was among the treasures Napoleon liberated from Italy and brought to the Louvre in Paris. Dutailly makes a straightforward analogy between marble, skin, and muslin here: where the sculpted Psyche is draped, the real woman is wrapped with a cashmere shawl, but where Psyche is nude, the living sculpture is draped in white muslin. Imitating Psyche means imitating not only the elegance and beauty of classical sculpture, but also its bodily and erotic freedom, and it entailed women presenting themselves as both sculpture and artist.

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Description: L'Imitation de L'Antique by Lingée, Thérèse Eléonore

Fig. 59. Thérèse Eleonore Lingée after Dutailly, L’Imitation de l’Antique, ca. 1800. Etching, 36.8 × 28.4 cm. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

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Description: Statue of Cupid and Psyche by Unknown

Fig. 60. Cupid and Psyche, Roman copy after a Hellenistic original, 2nd century BCE. Marble, height 125.4 cm. Musei Capitolini, Rome

The principal source for the story of Psyche is Apuleius’s Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, a Roman text from the second century that was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Psyche was acclaimed the most beautiful woman in the world, drawing Venus’s jealousy. She sent Cupid to destroy Psyche, but instead he fell in love with her and whisked her away to a magical house where she feasted on dishes that served themselves and was entertained by a magical lyre. There, Cupid came to her at night; they made love in total darkness and he forbade her ever to look upon him. Fearful that she might be sleeping with a demon, Psyche decided to disobey Cupid and empower her own gaze. After he fell asleep one night, she shone an oil lamp on him. She was pleased by his beauty, but accidentally spilled hot oil on him. Injured and angry, Cupid banished her and flew away.

Psyche then wandered the earth and finally went to Venus to beg forgiveness. In anger and revenge, Venus set her a series of impossible tasks, including sorting a heap of mixed grains into separate piles by dawn and gathering wool from demonic sheep. For her final challenge, Venus sent Psyche to the underworld to procure a dose of Proserpina’s beauty and bring it back to her in a box. Psyche managed this hardest task of all, yet on the way back she was overcome with curiosity and opened the box. Immediately, she was struck into a deathlike stupor. Cupid re-entered the story here; remorseful, recuperated, and searching for Psyche, he found her in a coma. Reviving her with a kiss, he then petitioned Jupiter to make Psyche immortal so that they could marry. Jupiter agreed, and the tale ends in the joyous wedding of Cupid and Psyche.

A popular artistic subject since the Renaissance, Cupid and Psyche were most frequently represented in the episode of their wedding, the tale’s happy denouement. But as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has shown, Psyche particularly flourished as a subject in the late eighteenth century, when one could find clocks, gowns, printed fabrics, and hairstyles “à la Psyché,” as well as decorative arts and personal adornments featuring the figure, such as this design for a pendant jewel (fig. 61).10Lajer-Burcharth 1999, especially chapter four. Certainly Psyche’s reputation as the most beautiful mortal, a rival to Venus, made her an attractive alias for fashionable women. Fortunée Hamelin, one of the fashion leaders of the Directory period (discussed more fully in Chapter Five), had a nearly nude Psyche painted on the ceiling of her neoclassical bedroom in Paris, while a young British woman cast herself as Psyche in a portrait by Samuel Shelley (fig. 62), fashionably dressed in high-waisted white muslin and holding the secrets of beauty retrieved from Proserpina. The fashion for a pale face, without rouge, was even called “à la Psyché,” according to one memoirist.11“On ne met plus de rouge, la pâleur est plus intéressante. On appelle cela une figure à la Psyché (d’après le tableau de Gérard).” Kotzebue 1805, p. 281.

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Description: Design for a Pendant by Unknown

Fig. 61. Unknown, Design for a pendant in gold with diamonds and pearls, featuring Cupid and Psyche, ca. 1805. Pen, pencil, and brown, yellow, blue, and grey ink on paper, 14.2 × 10.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Description: Portrait of a Young Woman as Psyche by Shelley, Samuel

Fig. 62. Samuel Shelley, Portrait of a Young Woman as Psyche, n.d. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 13 × 9.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Psyche’s resonance in this period, I argue, was deepened by her compelling conceptual relationship to the idea of the living statue. Connecting desire, sex, beauty, and love to soul, animation, and the breath of life—notions that were also central to the aesthetic philosophies of Herder, Lessing, Winckelmann, and others, as discussed in Chapter One—the story of Cupid and Psyche was a way to represent the vitalist conception of the spark of life and to identify with a curious woman who dared to look. Many representations of Psyche select a moment of the story with a similar meaning to the Pygmalion myth: kissing her to life, a male figure animates an ideally beautiful female through his desire for her. But whereas Pygmalion’s Galatea is blank ivory, dead matter totally without sensation until she is animated, Psyche was previously exquisitely sensitive to beauty and desire, and is merely frozen in a stupor, her sensibility only temporarily suspended.

Perhaps the most esteemed representation of this subject is Antonio Canova’s 1793 sculpture (fig. 63), commissioned by British collector John Campbell. Like many versions of the story, it focuses on the intense and reciprocal love and desire of Cupid and Psyche, here captured in the mirrored gestures of the two figures who encircle each other with their arms. But this is also the moment of Psyche’s revival, when Cupid’s kiss draws the poison from her and enables her reanimation. Through erotic touch, the spark of life flows into Psyche’s still body, emblematizing, as the Pygmalion story often did, a kind of parable of the sculptor’s own gifts.

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Description: Cupid and Psyche by Canova, Antonio

Fig. 63. Antonio Canova, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, 1793. Marble, 155 × 168 × 101 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Indeed, the sculptor’s identification with the subject is expanded upon in Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s large-scale pastel depicting the artist and the sculpture in his studio (fig. 64), in which he likens Canova’s exquisite representation of Anima’s reanimation to the artist’s ability to reanimate the classical style of the past into a new art for a new utopian moment. The pastel documents a network of men who created and nurtured neoclassical sculpture in Rome. Commissioned by the same Scotsman who had also commissioned the sculpture itself, Hamilton depicts his friend Canova, the plaster model for the final sculpture, and Henry Tresham, Campbell’s agent in Rome who had arranged the commission. At first glance, the animate and inanimate seem clearly differentiated here; Hamilton’s skill in using pastel to evoke the blood under the surface of the skin makes the two men appear exceptionally lifelike as opposed to the stony whiteness of the plaster model. In contrast with the intertwined gestures of the sculpted figures, the two men are self-contained, their cocked arms in mirrored opposition to one another, the zigzag space between their bodies carefully maintained. Tresham’s contemplative pose places him in thoughtful apprehension of the work of art, perhaps imaginatively summoning it to life, identifying with Cupid’s gesture in enlivening Psyche. Bridging the work and the connoisseur is the artist himself. Canova does not only occupy a middle position between these two; he also seems to exist somewhere in the middle of the continuum between art and life: his body, fully in contact with the sculpture, is increasingly whitened with plaster dust as the eye travels downward from his lively eyes to the wrinkly, grisaille drapery of his dusty breeches. Just as the breath of life is reanimating Anima, so the pastelist and the sculptor seem to be glorying, here, in their ability to reanimate the classical style of the past—both through their skill and their community of neoclassical artists, patrons, and intellectuals.

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Description: Antonio Canova in his studio with Henry Tresham and a plaster model for Cupid and...

Fig. 64. Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Antonio Canova in His Studio with Henry Tresham and a Plaster Model for Cupid and Psyche, 1788–91. Pastel on paper, 75 × 100 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

But the story has another element that made it especially attractive to women: Psyche’s assertion of her own will and curiosity. She is not only the desirable object, but the desiring subject. Twice she disobeys orders not to look. She looks first on love, and then on beauty, paying a price each time, although also eventually triumphing in a marriage of equals. This subject of the disobedient Psyche who dares to look has a curious iconographic tradition. The moment of the oil lamp, with its potential for dramatic tenebrist lighting effects, appealed to Baroque artists such as Orazio Gentileschi and Giuseppe Maria Crespi, whose paintings of the subject focus on the powerful exchange of glances between the two lovers (fig. 65). But eighteenth-century versions often drained the scene of its sexual power, as in the 1761 painting by Joseph-Marie Vien (fig. 66), which depicts Cupid as a chubby child, or Joshua Reynolds’s 1789 painting, in which Cupid is a skinny boy. Both are looked upon by a Psyche who appears more like a doting mother than a desiring woman who asserts her gaze in defiance of the gods.

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Description: Cupid and Psyche by Crespi, Giuseppe Maria

Fig. 65. Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Cupid and Psyche, 1707–9. Oil on canvas, 130 × 215 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence

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Description: Psyche Wakes the Sleeping Cupid by Vien, Joseph-Marie, the elder

Fig. 66. Joseph-Marie Vien, Psyche Wakes the Sleeping Cupid, 1761. Oil on canvas, 135.5 × 171 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille

Two representations of the subject from the 1790s are more erotically charged. Francisco Goya portrays Psyche whisking off her own blindfold and gazing upon her lover, while wearing a transparent muslin dress and “high zone” sash then current for fashionable women (fig. 67). Her willful look is contrasted with the gilded bust of a blindfolded woman that decorates the bed just below her elbow. William Blake’s 1794 print, Psyche Disobeys (fig. 68), shows Cupid’s naked form reclining in the foreground and Psyche above. He receives her gaze passively, sleeping, like Endymion, while her lamp, the source of enlightenment, is at the center of the composition.12Cumberland 1796, p. 34; see also Mazzeo 2001. Cumberland’s treatise, which is further discussed in Chapter Three, used several scenes from Cupid and Psyche to illustrate his ideas about properly executed outline drawing. These disobedient Psyches assert themselves despite their imprisonment in an enchanted house, despite being beset by the gods with impossible tasks. Nude herself, Blake’s Psyche pulls the blanket from Cupid to look at him more completely. In identifying with the disobedient Psyche, neoclassical Psyches in transparent muslin dresses saw themselves as exquisitely attuned to sensation, exploring the world empirically, and as seeking knowledge, even at a cost.

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Description: Allegory of Love, Cupid and Psyche by Goya, Francisco de

Fig. 67. Francisco Goya, Allegory of Love, Cupid and Psyche, 1798–1805. Oil on canvas, 220.5 × 155.5 cm. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona

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Description: Psyche Disobeys by Blake, William

Fig. 68. William Blake after George Cumberland, Psyche Disobeys, 1794. Illustration to George Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline (London), 1796, pl. 12. Etching and engraving, 12.3 × 15.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Yet, as Lajer-Burcharth has argued, some representations of Psyche attempted to discipline her, and her real-world emulators, for their effrontery.13Lajer-Burcharth 1999, pp. 281–4. François Gérard’s 1798 Psyche and Cupid (fig. 69) hybridized the erotic and childlike iconographic traditions of the myth into a frozen and ascetic tableau. His Psyche has a confusing blankness; Cupid encircles Psyche but their bodies do not touch, and it seems she has not yet been awakened from her stupor. Yet in her unanimated state she sits upright, statue-like, in an uncanny imitation of life, rather than sprawled on the ground in a death-like coma. Will Cupid’s kiss animate her, warming her to life like Pygmalion’s Galatea? Regardless, her agency or desire is irrelevant; this Psyche has been reduced to a passive vessel of others’ actions and desires.

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Description: Psyche and Cupid by Gérard, François, Baron

Fig. 69. François Gérard, Psyche and Cupid, 1798. Oil on canvas, 186 × 132 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Indeed, the art critic Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard lauded the painting as an example of chaste restraint and a model to young women, contrasting it with the too-visible women of contemporary Paris: “This is not a modern Psyche, not even that of the Opera; it is not a voluptuous Bacchante; it is a young girl, simple, sincere, virtuous, naive; but where is the pleasure? Don’t you see it in her innocence?”14Lajer-Burcharth 1999, p. 282. Gérard’s blank, chaste, and frozen Psyche is couched by Chaussard as a counter-example to the flesh-and-blood modern Psyches of late 1790s Paris, who were like voluptuous bacchantes in their devotion to pleasure, sensation, and a communion with antiquity. But there is no evidence that these modern Psyches were cowed by such reprimands. Emulating not only Psyche’s beauty, but also her curiosity, women who embraced Psyche’s example sought a visual language for their own embodied perception and a way to represent themselves as both desirable objects and desiring subjects.

MUSLIN DISEASE

Yet women’s embrace of vitalist sensation and erotic subjectivity not only seemed to endanger their chastity and morality; it might also endanger their physical health. The lightness and transparency of neoclassical dress facilitated women’s engagement with the world through sensory experience. But because excessive sensibility could be debilitating, contemporaries were divided on the question of neoclassical dress’s healthfulness.

On the one hand, the lighter and less restrictive garments enabled more robust movement and greater liveliness, qualities that were recognized not only in street fashion, but also on the stage. We have already noted the costume reform that occurred on stages across Europe in the late 1780s and early 1790s, as innovators in theatre, opera, and ballet strove for greater stylistic naturalism and signaled that quality with antique, rather than courtly, costume for performers. But in tandem with the less restrictive costumes emerged a new athleticism in performance. A 1796 appearance in London of the famed Parisian dancers Rose Didelot and Mademoiselle Parisot stimulated a flurry of satires on the revealing new ballet costumes. James Gillray’s Modern Grace (fig. 70) highlights not only the skimpiness and transparency of the dancers’ attire, but also the high kicks and jumps enabled by the liberating costumes. The watercolorist has contrasted the white and pale tones of the dancers’ dress and bodies with an intense red flush suffusing their cheeks, a sign of their vigorousness often seen in contemporary painting as well, such as in Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Lady Manners (figs 71 and 106).15For a detailed reading of this painting that argues Lawrence was imbuing his sitter with a tubercular glamour with this flush-cheeked treatment, see Day and Rauser 2016. Gillray’s Operatical Reform (fig. 72) encourages viewers to ogle the scantily clad dancers, flanking them with a sculpture of Venus who is more modest than they, and a leering satyr with a pointy-nosed mask poised over his groin. Gillray also connects the dancers’ aesthetic radicalism to revolutionary politics, not only in the use of “reform” in the print’s title, but also with the red cap of liberty at the foot of the stage. But even non-satirical representations of these dancers highlighted their nudity and athleticism, minus the obvious leering. An elegant stipple engraving of Mademoiselle Parisot (fig. 73) and a subscription ticket for a benefit for Rose Didelot (fig. 74) both depict dancers with a virtuous breast exposed and legs clearly outlined, bounding vigorously through verdant landscapes.

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Description: Modern grace, or, The operatical finale to the ballet of Alonzo e Caro by Gillray,...

Fig. 70. James Gillray, Modern Grace, 1796. Hand-colored etching, 26.5 × 36.5 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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Description: Portrait of Catherine Grey, Lady Manners, detail by Lawrence, Thomas

Fig. 71. Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Catherine Rebecca Grey, Lady Manners (detail; see fig. 106), 1794. Oil on canvas, 255.3 × 158 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art. Bequest of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. 1961.220

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Description: Operatical Reform by Gillray, James

Fig. 72. James Gillray, Operatical Reform, 1798. Hand-colored etching, 25.4 × 35.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Description: Mademoiselle Parisot by Turner, Charles

Fig. 73. Charles Turner after John James Masquerier, Mademoiselle Parisot, 1799. Stipple engraving, 25.9 × 19.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Description: Illustration for Mr. Didelot's Benefit by Bartolozzi, Francesco

Fig. 74. Francesco Bartolozzi after Charles Didelot, Rose Didelot Crowned by Psyche, 1796. Stipple engraving, 21.4 × 18.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Some argued that such bodily freedom contributed to the health of women who wore neoclassical dress by liberating them from both the weight of heavy garments and the pressure of stays. The English physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin, writing “on the care of the shape,” abhorred both stays, for the way they encouraged deformities, and “the stiff, erect attitude, taught by modern dancing masters.” By contrast, he recommended the example of “the easy grace of some of the ancient statues . . . and many of the figures of Angelica Kauffman. And lastly,” he added, making the analogy explicit between ancient statues, modern paintings by women artists, and neoclassically clad ladies, this healthful grace “is so eminently seen in many of the beauties of the present day, since they have left off the constraint of whalebone stays, and assumed the graceful dress of the ancient Grecian statues.”16Excerpted in the True Briton (London), October 6, 1797. Health, grace, and beauty went together, and were formed not just by fashion, but also by “attitude” or posture. Of course, Thomas Rowlandson found a way to mock such athletic wholesomeness; his Rural Sports; or Smock Racing (fig. 75), part of a series depicting sporting women in neoclassical dress, depicts barefoot and bare-breasted women in white dresses engaged in a foot race. They are the focus of a carnival atmosphere of rowdy spectators, rearing horses, and bleating horns.

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Description: Rural sports. Smock racing by Rowlandson, Thomas

Fig. 75. Thomas Rowlandson, Rural Sports; or Smock Racing, 1811. Hand-colored etching, 25 × 36 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Yet others argued that by removing inhibitions to sensation, and increasing the interface between the skin and the world, neoclassical dress made women not more vigorous, but rather more susceptible to disease. One French physician called neoclassical dress “the costume that will depopulate Paris of its young women” and described an epitaph on a marble tombstone that mourned the death of a young woman, “victim of murderous fashion.”17“Le costume qui dépeuplera Paris de jeunes femmes,” and “1er nivôse an XI, 6 hes du matin, décembre 1802. Louise Le Febvre, Agée de 23 ans, Victime de la mode meurtrière.” P. J. Marie de Saint-Ursin, L’ami des femmes, ou Lettres d’un médecin (Paris: Barba, 1804), p. 54; quoted and translated by Cage 2009, p. 201. But it was not only mere exposure to cold or fluctuating temperatures that could lead to “muslin disease”—that is, a bad cold or flu—but also the sensitivity of the exposed skin that could shade such disease into consumption. In fact, those flushed cheeks might have indicated not healthy glow, but unhealthy consumptive fever, one of the key features of the disease. Thin and transparent neoclassical dress was blamed for endangering women’s constitutions and increasing their susceptibility to tuberculosis. “[T]hese Athenians . . . will die from tuberculosis in a few years,” warned Baron Fauveau de Frénilly, “for having danced in Paris in the month of January, as if they were dancing in the month of August on the banks of the Eurotas.”18“. . . ces Athéniennes qui moururent de phtisie en peu d’années pour avoir dancé à Paris au mois du janvier, comme on dansait au mois d’août sur les bords de l’Eurotas.” Frénilly 1908, p. 235; quoted and translated by Cage 2009, p. 201. Cold and dampness were the chief enemies; cloaks, muffs, and tippets might mitigate the dangers somewhat, but the bare arms and legs of the neoclassically clad woman still made tempting targets for Jack Frost, as in an 1803 satire by Charles Williams (fig. 76). The filmy gown of the central woman allows us to see her stockings, garters, and bare posterior pinched by the talons of Frost: “the shape of her frame, by each gale was reveal’d/ While a slight robe of muslin her beauties conceal’d.” This woman “paid dear for the Fashion, her Folly and Pride;/ Went home to her bed and there lingering, died.”19This caption has been cut off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impression of the print, reproduced here (fig. 76); it is present in the impression belonging to the British Museum, for example.

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Description: A Naked Truth, or Nipping Frost by Williams, Charles

Fig. 76. Charles Williams, A Naked Truth, or a Nipping Frost, 1803. Hand-colored etching, 21.9 × 37.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

But neoclassical dress also often embraced its fashionable connection to consumption, which was considered a disease that tended to strike the young, beautiful, sensitive, and artistic, and in turn increased their beauty and sensitivity before they died. As Carolyn A. Day has argued, the small, low-cut back bodices of neoclassical dresses drew attention to the distinct vertebrae and projecting shoulder blades that were held to be both the tell-tale signs of the consumptive woman and a desirable feature of the bodily ideal of the sensitive woman.20“References to exposed backbones litter the fashion journals of the period.” Day 2017, p. 107. Sensibility was a double-edged sword; as John Brewer has noted, “it was both a virtue and a source of distress, a sign of moral superiority but also of weakness.”21Brewer 2007, p. 244. The exquisite sensibility that implied not only aesthetic refinement but also moral virtue, tended, in addition, to invite tuberculosis. The flushed cheeks, luxurious eyelashes, and protruding clavicles and shoulder blades made consumptive women appear exceptionally vital and animated; yet such women were also on the cusp of becoming stilled and marmorealized at the moment of their greatest beauty. The glamour of consumption and its associations with sensibility, vital energy, and the mysterious oscillation between animate and inanimate further inflected the meaning of women’s self-styling as living statues.

DRAMATIZING THE ANIMATED STATUE

Animation, sensitivity, female artistic agency, and neoclassical dress converged in a dramatic moment of Shakespearean theater in 1802, when John Philip Kemble revived The Winter’s Tale with Sarah Siddons in the role of Hermione. This was a play that had largely fallen out of favor in the eighteenth century; critics found it illogical, lacking in unity, and possibly popish in its idolatry, as the final scene turns on a statue coming to life. A shortened, altered version by David Garrick, featuring just the two young lovers, Florizel and Perdita, in a pastoral romance, was very popular in mid-century London, performed more than 60 times between 1756 and 1795.22Aasand 2018, p. 5. But the full play had been neglected for years until Kemble revived it in 1802, when the fashion for neoclassical statuesque dress was at its height. Its success demonstrates the shift that had occurred over the course of the 1790s in the cultural understanding of art, life, and women’s artistic sensibility, as well as the potent meaning of the living statue.

In the play, a jealous king, Leontes, accuses his pregnant wife, Hermione, of infidelity, and then banishes their newborn baby girl, Perdita, to a distant shore; his wife and son then perish of anguish (or so he thinks). Soon thereafter, the Delphic oracle tells Leontes that he was wrong and that Perdita was his legitimate child, and the king spends 15 years pining with loss and remorse. One day, Perdita, having been raised by a kindly shepherd, returns to court and is recognized as the lost princess, and to celebrate a feast is planned at the home of the dead queen’s loyal maid, Paulina. In the dramatic final scene of the play, it is revealed that, in fact, Paulina had commissioned a statue of Hermione that was just then being finished. Encountering the sculpture, Leontes is struck by its resemblance to the original, even to the point of Hermione having aged over the ensuing years; he trembles as she seems to breathe, and begs for her to be brought back to life. Paulina then, having received promises from Leontes that he will not accuse her of witchcraft, calls out: “Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach; . . . Bequeath to death your numbness.” As the statue reaches out her hand, Leontes cries out, “Oh, she’s warm!”

Garrick’s shortened version retained the statue scene, but it was performed in a perfunctory manner and dismissed by mid-century critics as irrational silliness:

Her [Hermione’s] having lived sequestered for many Years might be allowed, if she did not stand for a Statue at last. This Circumstance is certainly childish, as is likewise the pretended Revival of her by Music. Had Hermione been discovered to us in a rational Manner, the Close would have been pathetic, whereas at present, notwithstanding many Strokes of fine Writing, Reason operates too strongly against the Incident, and our Passions subside into Calmness and Inactivity.23London Chronicle, March 24, 1757; quoted in Bartholomeusz 1982, p. 32.

But Kemble’s fuller version invested the statue scene with great drama. Whereas earlier performances attempted to explain the statue’s problematic resurrection as an act of Christian grace, Kemble’s staging turned to the visual language of art. Drawing upon the audience’s familiarity with the decade-long exploration of the living sculpture, Kemble exploited the contemporary vogue for transparencies, torchlit museum visits, and other spectacles of dramatic lighting and sudden animation. Siddons was posed on a pedestal, surrounded by classical columns, and draped in neoclassical muslin, in contrast to the elaborate Renaissance costumes she wore in earlier scenes. She was backlit by flame lighting, an unusual and dangerous lighting trick that caused her dress to catch fire during rehearsal. As in Villers’s portrait of Val d’Ognes (fig. 56), the sharp backlighting would have emphasized the contour of her figure, cast her face into shadow, and tricked the eye with flickers of animation amid her stony stillness. Kemble’s staging transformed a sentimental romantic pastoral into a brooding drama of misguided jealousy and trauma, and Siddons’s performance as Hermione anchored the complete reassessment of this forgotten play.24Hunt 1995, p. 8. As Siddons’s biographer commented: “She looked the statue, even to literal illusion; and while the drapery hid her lower limbs, it showed a beauty of head, neck, shoulders, and arms that Praxiteles might have studied.”25Campbell 1834, vol. 2, p. 265.

At the dramatic moment when Paulina says, “Music, awake her—strike!” Siddons turned her head suddenly and caused the audience to gasp in shock. One reviewer claimed, “the sudden action of the head absolutely startled, as though such a miracle had actually revivified the marble.”26James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), vol. 2, p. 314; quoted in Bartholomeusz 1982, p. 61. In a contemporary print (fig. 77), fashionable portraitist Adam Buck memorialized the moment just before the “statue’s” revivification, depicting Siddons leaning pensively on a column, in a costume and pose that was nearly indistinguishable from his contemporary portraits of fashionable women, such as Mary Anne Clarke at the foot of a statue (fig. 78). Both women are analogized to adjacent classical fragments and statuary by the pleats and drapes of their muslin dresses. Whereas Mrs. Siddons is yet stilled, Mrs. Clarke appears to have just now lifted her head from her supporting hand and turned to engage the viewer. It is as if Paulina’s command to “awake her—strike!” had woken the living statue off stage, as well as on.

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Description: The Winter's Tale: Mrs. Siddons as Hermoine by Alais, William John

Fig. 77. John Alais after Adam Buck, The Winter’s Tale: Mrs. Siddons as Hermione, 1802. Etching and stipple, 14 × 8.7 cm. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

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Description: Mary Anne Clarke at the Base of a Statue by Buck, Adam

Fig. 78. After Adam Buck, Mary Anne Clarke at the Base of a Statue, 1803. Reproduced in The Connoisseur Magazine (London), vol. XLI (1915), p. 180

Thus, a play that had been largely illegible to earlier audiences by 1800 spoke clearly to viewers immersed in the contemporary context of vitalist philosophy and contemporary aesthetics. It dramatized the fantasies of continuity between all matter, both living and not-yet-living, and it used a virtuous woman’s extreme sensibility to heroize her, lauding her ingenuity, artistic agency, and persistence. Contemporary discourses of nervous sensibility and disease, and of the skin as an organ of sensation that informed cognition, gave audiences a new understanding of the vital and perhaps permeable boundary between animate and inanimate. As living statues, women embraced these examples of curious, animated, sensitive, artistic, vital, and wide-awake women, and used neoclassical dress to connect their daily self-presentation to these wider cultural discourses.

1 Higgonet 2016 demonstrates that the setting is a studio in the Louvre, making this an assertive and confident depiction of a professional woman artist. »

2 Vila 1998, p. 44. Landes 2008 notes that medicine was a kind of master discourse in the eighteenth century, similar to theology in the Middle Ages; see also Williams 2003 and O’Neal 1996. »

3 The replacement of the mechanistic with the sensationist model of perception and cognition lent itself to political, as well as aesthetic, analogies. Montpellier physician Théophile de Bordeu described it as a “federated” rather than “monarchic” system of intellectual centers. See Moravia 1978, p. 59. »

4 Condillac 1982, p. 338. »

5 For discussions about this work in the context of Emma Hart’s relationship with Romney and in dialogue with other portraits of her, see Ittershagen 1999, pp. 81–4. For the print in particular, see Alexander 2002. »

6 See Bonehill 2013, p. 98. The plant is also popularly known as the “shame plant” or the “touch me not.” It was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his Species Plantarum in 1753. See the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System <https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/taxonomydetail.aspx?24405> (accessed February 6, 2017). »

7 “The leaves, as conscious of their queen’s command,/ Successive fall at her approaching hand;/ Her tender breast with pity seems to pant,/ And shrinks at every shrinking of the plant.” William Hayley, The Triumphs of Temper; a Poem, Canto V (London: J. Dodsley, 1781), p. 116. »

8 Emma Hamilton, letter to George Romney, Caserta, December 20, 1791 (Morrison 1893–4, vol. 1, p. 159). »

9 The original drawing had a pendant to this scene called The Admiration of Antiquity (private collection), in which two young women admire two antique male sculptural bodies and two living artists in turn admire them. »

10 Lajer-Burcharth 1999, especially chapter four. »

11 “On ne met plus de rouge, la pâleur est plus intéressante. On appelle cela une figure à la Psyché (d’après le tableau de Gérard).” Kotzebue 1805, p. 281. »

12 Cumberland 1796, p. 34; see also Mazzeo 2001. Cumberland’s treatise, which is further discussed in Chapter Three, used several scenes from Cupid and Psyche to illustrate his ideas about properly executed outline drawing. »

13 Lajer-Burcharth 1999, pp. 281–4. »

14 Lajer-Burcharth 1999, p. 282. »

15 For a detailed reading of this painting that argues Lawrence was imbuing his sitter with a tubercular glamour with this flush-cheeked treatment, see Day and Rauser 2016. »

16 Excerpted in the True Briton (London), October 6, 1797. »

17 “Le costume qui dépeuplera Paris de jeunes femmes,” and “1er nivôse an XI, 6 hes du matin, décembre 1802. Louise Le Febvre, Agée de 23 ans, Victime de la mode meurtrière.” P. J. Marie de Saint-Ursin, L’ami des femmes, ou Lettres d’un médecin (Paris: Barba, 1804), p. 54; quoted and translated by Cage 2009, p. 201. »

18 “. . . ces Athéniennes qui moururent de phtisie en peu d’années pour avoir dancé à Paris au mois du janvier, comme on dansait au mois d’août sur les bords de l’Eurotas.” Frénilly 1908, p. 235; quoted and translated by Cage 2009, p. 201. »

19 This caption has been cut off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impression of the print, reproduced here (fig. 76); it is present in the impression belonging to the British Museum, for example. »

20 “References to exposed backbones litter the fashion journals of the period.” Day 2017, p. 107. »

21 Brewer 2007, p. 244. »

22 Aasand 2018, p. 5. »

23 London Chronicle, March 24, 1757; quoted in Bartholomeusz 1982, p. 32. »

24 Hunt 1995, p. 8. »

25 Campbell 1834, vol. 2, p. 265. »

26 James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), vol. 2, p. 314; quoted in Bartholomeusz 1982, p. 61. »

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