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Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
In the spring of 1793, a strange fad swept London: women began to wear belly pads under their dresses...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.99-123
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338.7
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3. London: Sculptural Contour
In the spring of 1793, a strange fad swept London: women began to wear belly pads under their dresses. Although no pads are known to survive today, a contemporary described the pad as “a linen bag, about the size and shape of a small pillow case, . . . left open at one end, which either ties or buttons for stuffing.”1Diary or Woodfall’s Register (London), April 20, 1793, issue 1274. This is part of a rather satirical description of the pad phenomenon. Also in April 1793, Mr. Lewis reportedly produced a pad onstage as a prop to his satire on the follies of the day, while speaking an epilogue to the play How to Grow Rich (Sun [London], April 19, 1793). A satirical engraving published on May 1, Frailties of Fashion (fig. 85), shows pads in use on a group of ladies promenading, although some wear the fashion more elegantly than others. Indeed, the woman in white in the center of the print wears it the best: her tall, elegant figure is not disfigured by a protuberance but rather swells gracefully at the breasts and belly, while her white muslin gown drapes across her thighs and flutters above her flat slippers. Besides her chic companion, the other women in the print create a less fortunate effect; they wear old-fashioned open robes with petticoats and layers of bodices, bonnets, and aprons, and yet they have stuck a pad under these more conservative garments, hiking up their skirts in front and creating a profile that the printmaker makes us understand is ridiculous.
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Description: Frailties of fashion by Cruikshank, Isaac
Fig. 85. Isaac Cruikshank, Frailties of Fashion, 1793. Hand-colored etching, 29.9 × 51.8 cm. British Museum, London
Between late February 1793 and the summer of 1794, numerous squibs, ballads, and satires appeared in the London press lampooning the fashion for a padded belly. In May 1793, a new play, The PAD; a Farce, opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, and ran throughout the summer to large audiences.2As noted in the Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal (London), Monthly Catalogue for July 1793, p. 348. Commentators delighted in the general spectacle, chortling over a fashion that caused women to appear pregnant. But as I will argue in this chapter, the pad fad was not actually meant to imitate pregnancy, although it did signify a kind of bodily liberty and “negligence” in dress that provoked a moral panic over female sexual agency. Rather, the pad fad was an initial, clumsy attempt to wear the artistic attire of radical neoclassicism as street dress. Women wearing the belly pad were participating in an emerging aesthetic movement focused on contour and outline as signifiers of a “Hellene,” libertine, and embodied neoclassicism. In fact, as we shall see, this early experiment failed in the translation from a two-dimensional effect of contour and outline, then current in printed representations, into a three-dimensional body.
THE PAD FAD OF 1793
Chroniclers and satirists of the pad fad in both word and image isolated the pad from the overall ensemble, concentrated on the strange new silhouette it created, and mused on its implications.3For a more detailed analysis of the pad fad with many more contemporary examples, see Rauser 2017b. Wahrman 2006, pp. 68–9, is one of very few historians to notice the pad fad; it does not surface in the important works on the history of eighteenth-century dress by Aileen Ribeiro, nor in Hollander 1994, which first made the argument that women and men were dressing to resemble sculptures in the late eighteenth century. Cunnington and Cunnington 1992 briefly mention the episode (p. 111). Some scholars doubt that the pad fad actually occurred, but the contemporary mentions of the fad are so numerous, multimedia, and temporally delimited as to seem irrefutable that some women wore it at least for some time. The fad is also plausible given the fashion experiments of the moment, as I explain below. Some critiques adopted a venerable argument frequently lodged against new fashions: that such silliness was merely the meaningless whim of fickle female taste. William Dent’s satire, Female Whimsicalities (fig. 86), published in May 1793, at first seems to take this line, as “Prominence, 1785,” with the false rump made of cork and padded pigeon breast, contrasts with “Prominence, 1793,” and its swelling, padded belly. Both of these excrescences are compared with “Virgin Shape” at the rear, whose dress is cinched below the breasts and then falls unimpeded to the ground. This argument was echoed in doggerel, such as the Epistle from Mrs. Bustle to Mrs. Pad:
You pride yourself much my dear BETTY PAD,
And thus say to me, now forsaken and sad:
“That you’re all the fashion, and I in the dumps,
Cause ladies no longer put on their FALSE RUMPS.”
The fact I allow—but pray Betty, mind,
You’re only BEFORE, that which I was BEHIND;
A horse-hair protuberance made up by folly,
Now wore from my Lady, to mopsqueezing Molly;
A projection much better, behind than before,
Because it make virgins now look like a —.4The Times (London), May 4, 1793, n.p.
Yet both the poem and the print betray a deeper anxiety about the pad. This style is not merely the turn of the wheel of fashion, “a horse-hair protuberance made up by folly.” Rather, Dent’s “Virgin Shape” and the morally charged ending of the verse both suggest that the unpadded woman represents not only undistorted nature, but sexual innocence as well.
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Description: Female Whimsicalities by Dent, William
Fig. 86. William Dent, Female Whimsicalities, 1793. Hand-colored etching, 24.4 × 35.1 cm. British Museum, London
Commentators’ central concern was that in seeming to simulate pregnancy, the pad signaled its wearer’s sexual knowledge and experience, and concealed the visible results of illicit dalliances. Indeed, the pad itself was sometimes known as a “faux-pas,” which was also a way to refer to an unsanctioned pregnancy: “The pad, alias the faux-pas, is said to have originated with some young Ladies of Fashion. Whatever their age might be, their ideas were perfectly matured. Those who advertise a snug retreat for Ladies in a certain situation will be ruined by the pads; for a Lady who has accidentally committed a faux-pas, has only provided herself with a natural pad.”5True Briton (London), April 17, 1793.
Although it is difficult to locate non-satirical representations of the belly pad, numerous painted representations testify to the existence of a distinct style of 1793 with consistent and recognizable features. Thomas Lawrence’s painting of Lady Amelia (Emily) Anne Hobart (fig. 87) was exhibited in the spring of 1794, and gives a good sense of the effect this transitional fashion attempted to achieve.6A gossip item from March 1793 named this lady, along with the Marchioness of Abercorn and Lady Charlotte Campbell, as among the “finest and most fashionable women England can boast” promenading in London on an “exceptionally fine day.” Morning Herald (London), March 1, 1793, n.p. Sashed with a broad blue ribbon directly under the breasts, her gown crosses over the torso and then releases into fluttering layers of transparent muslin. The tumbling clouds frame Lady Hobart’s body like an aurora and echo the loose curls of her hair, entwined with a muslin wrap, and the rounded forms of her figure. Interestingly, Lawrence has turned Lady Hobart’s figure frontally to the viewer, so the exaggerated contour of her (possibly) padded belly is not exposed.
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Description: Lady Amelia (Emily) Anne Hobart, Viscountess Castlereagh, later Marchioness of...
Fig. 87. Thomas Lawrence, Lady Amelia (Emily) Anne Hobart, Viscountess Castlereagh, 1793–4. Oil on canvas, 127 × 101.6 cm. National Trust, Mount Stewart, County Down
Ann Frankland Lewis’s watercolor from 1793 (fig. 88), part of the amateur painter’s decades-long series of “dresses of the year” seemingly painted for her own private study and enjoyment, pays sharper attention to the details of construction and decoration in the dress.7Ann Frankland Lewis’s album of watercolors is preserved in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The white-on-white embroidery at the hem, for example, and the separate frills at neckline and cuff, are meticulously noted. Like Lawrence, Lewis masks the full silhouette of the rounded belly—here with the figure’s outstretched arm—although the projection of the skirt beneath the figure’s right elbow seems unusually prominent and could indicate a pad. Even though the purposes of these two representations are different—a public and elite portrait versus a private and documentary watercolor—these depictions of the fashion of 1793 are remarkably consistent in their details and overall effect.8Dozens of other portraits of British women made in 1793 or 1794 concur in replicating these fashions; see, for example, Lawrence’s portrait of Lady Manners (figs 71 and 106), in which he also deploys an arm and slouched posture to perhaps downplay the exaggeration of the padded belly. Lady Manners wears an ensemble nearly identical to these two examples, including the cross-bodice dress, high waist, wide sash, and muslin turban.
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Description: Collection of English Original Watercolor Drawings, 1793 by Frankland Lewis, Ann
Fig. 88. Ann Frankland Lewis, 1793, from the Collection of English Original Watercolor Drawings, 1774–1807. Watercolor on paper, 23.5 × 17.8 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
In contemporary discussion, then, maternity was both the scandalous byproduct of the pad and its visual effect. But if we turn from satirical sources to the larger aesthetic context, it is clear that the early adopters of the pad were not, in fact, trying to look pregnant. Rather, they were trying to look like statues.
TWELVE STATUES: LADY CHARLOTTE CAMPBELL AND HER CIRCLE
The first clue to this original intention comes from the politician Sir Gilbert Elliot, whose letters to his wife describe the fashionable London scene. On April 25, 1793, he wrote:
I was, last night, at a ball. . . . and I stayed just long enough to see some of the dancing generation. There were one or two instances of the modern fashion of dress for young ladies, by which they are made to appear five or six months gone with child. Perhaps you do not believe this fashion, but it is quite literally true. The original idea seems to have been an imitation of the drapery of statues and pictures, which fastens the dress immediately below the bosom, and leaves no waist. The consequence of which is a slight swell of the figure, as you may see in pictures; but this being attempted by artificial means of pads placed on the stomach is an exact representation of the state of pregnancy. The dress is accompanied by a complete display of the bosom—which is uncovered, and supported and stuck out by the sash immediately below it.
I am giving you a faithful description of Lady C--- C--- as she was at the ball last night. She is the most exaggerated in this fashion, but it is followed in considerable degree by many others.9Elliot 1874, p. 133.
Elliot states plainly that “the original idea” behind this new style was the “imitation of the drapery of statues and pictures.” His “faithful description” of the new fashion includes not only the pad, used to accentuate the swell of the stomach seen in classical statues and pictures, but also a high waist (belted just under the breasts) and a completely uncovered bosom. Perhaps the intended effect was something like that created by Joseph Nollekens’s 1775 sculpture Minerva (fig. 89), whose rounded belly is accentuated by the clinging of her carved draperies beneath a high waist. A satire by Isaac Cruikshank called The Graces of 1794 (fig. 90) features a figure with a strikingly similar draped belly coupled with exposed breasts.
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Description: Minerva by Nollekens, Joseph
Fig. 89. Joseph Nollekens, Minerva, 1775. Marble, height 144 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
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Description: The Graces of 1794 by Cruikshank, Isaac
Fig. 90. Isaac Cruikshank, The Graces of 1794, 1794. Hand-colored etching, 37.9 × 31.8 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
Elliot’s “Lady C--- C---” is Lady Charlotte Campbell, the beautiful British woman lauded by several later chroniclers as the inventor of the neoclassical style of dress in Britain. Charlotte Campbell had been in Naples in 1789 with her mother, the Duchess of Argyll, who befriended Emma Hart and paved the way for other aristocrats to recognize her. While there, Campbell was painted by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein as a refined and subtle Neapolitan bacchante (fig. 91).10In his memoirs (Tischbein 1922, pp. 248–9), Tischbein wrote about the first time he saw Campbell in an encounter that inspired this painting. Observing her about to be crushed by carriage traffic in a Neapolitan forest, he sees her fright as beautiful authenticity and likens her to both nature and the classical art of the Herculaneum Dancers. For a more detailed analysis, see Rauser 2015; see also Ribeiro 2002, p. 275. In the portrait, Campbell wears a studio dress: a loose white gown and a rich golden shawl; her blond hair is unpowdered and simply styled, and her head is adorned with a wreath of roses, as often worn by Dionysus and his maenads.11For example, in frescoes found at Pompeii, such as those in the House of L. Caecilius Jucundus (unearthed 1875). Engaging with both nature and art, she holds a musical scroll in one hand and bends a branch for a nibbling deer with the other. This is bacchantism for respectable ladies, aligning a beautiful aristocratic teenager with the natural embodiment of classical grace and authenticity symbolized by the Neapolitan bacchante, while retaining an appropriate decorum.
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Description: Lady Charlotte Campbell by Tischbein, Wilhelm
Fig. 91. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Lady Charlotte Campbell, 1789. Oil on canvas, 197.2 × 134 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Purchased 1975
Lady Charlotte Campbell returned to England in 1790 with her ailing mother, and became a leader of fashion in London almost immediately after she entered the public scene upon turning eighteen.12Bleackley 1907, p. 311. In fact, it is Lady Charlotte who is portrayed as the elegant woman in white in the center of the Frailties of Fashion satire discussed above (fig. 85), demonstrating to all her promenading imitators the chic way to wear the pad. Her fashionable innovations, I suggest, emerged directly from her Neapolitan experience of living classicism and the example of Emma Hart’s “attitudes” and performance costumes she witnessed there.13Hart herself had just been in Britain in the summer of 1791 as Sir William Hamilton secured permission from the king to marry her; while in the country she performed the attitudes several times and drew admiring responses from major fashionable figures, including the Duchess of Devonshire. These appearances may have paved the way for Campbell’s radical fashionable innovation in the following spring of 1793 by giving more British observers a taste of the living classicism experienced by Grand Tourists. Yet, as a high-born aristocrat, Campbell brought this fashion from the artistic periphery to the center of London society—the elite “dancing generation” noted by Elliot above. And her fashion intervention was notably specific: Campbell’s “statue style” centered on the padded belly.
Campbell’s fashionable companion in the 1793 print is probably intended to be Lady Abercorn, formerly Lady Cecil Hamilton, poor relation (and likely mistress) to the Marquess of Abercorn before the death of his first wife, and newly married to the marquess in 1792, just a few months after William Hamilton had married his mistress, Emma Hart, at a ceremony at which Lord Abercorn was himself the chief witness. Lady Abercorn was part of the fashionable circle that propagated the pad fad. Indeed, a few weeks after the ball mentioned above, Elliot recounted to his wife:
Lady Abercorn had a ball the other night at which there were twelve ladies in the garb of statues—that is to say, with the girdle close up to their breast and the drapery falling, or intended to fall, statue-fashion below. They were not uncovered, but by all accounts it produced almost all the effect of nakedness. George Ellis asked Mrs. Poole, who was one of them, whether she was really as naked as she appeared to be, and she said she really was very near.14Sir Gilbert Elliot, letter to his wife, May 11, 1793 (Elliot 1874, pp. 142–3).
What had been only “one or two instances” of padded dress in the first ball is now an organized phalanx of “twelve ladies in the garb of statues”—a garb that paradoxically gave the appearance of nakedness.
Padded bellies, uncovered bosoms, and limp drapery were the fad of a small group of elite ball-goers and fashion leaders in the London of 1793, and deftly ridiculed. But this was not an isolated nor a frivolous aesthetic intervention. Rather, the belly pad and the dress it accompanied were part of a larger aesthetic project centered on outline, contour, and formalist two-dimensionality.
OUTLINE, “STATUE-NESS,” AND THE CORINTHIAN MAID
The pad was worn to create a distinctive contour, one that recalled the swell of the sculptural body. But, paradoxically, the very notion of contour is relevant mainly to two-dimensional works of art—drawings, engravings, silhouettes, or low-relief friezes. We have already discussed in Chapter Two the ways in which neoclassical dress thematized the skin as the sensitive boundary between self and world; this is the experiential, phenomenological aspect of an emphasis on contour. But in visual art, contour is expressed by a sharp line, not a modeled form. Indeed, in depicting the pad fad in the popular press, draftsmen found its distinctive contour irresistible. William Dent lavished attention on the extreme fashionable contours in his Female Whimsicalities (fig. 86); while the “Virgin Shape” might be morally superior to its fashionable sisters, it was dull and unattractive to his pen. The decisive contour of the belly pad, and the way it changed the silhouette of the body, was an aesthetic choice derived from the art theory of the 1790s and its elevation of outline as the essential element of great art. My contention here will be that pad-wearers embraced this strong contour as a sign of sculpture-ness—a visual marker of the distinctive swell of the sculptural body. A strong and sinuous contour was the visual shorthand for the representation of classical sculpture in two dimensions, having been established as such by decades of reproductive engraving and decorative arts, as we will see in more detail below. Yet what looked elegantly sculptural in two dimensions could look ridiculously obtrusive in three dimensions, and this is why the pad fad was so short lived. That the first impulse to dress like a statue was satisfied by a padded belly and strong contour, though, tells us something important about neoclassical culture and the attraction of outline.
Outline drawing was a powerful shorthand that promised to strip away layers of suffocating tradition and bring art back to a primitive nature that was also antique. Indeed, Robert Rosenblum has argued that a devotion to outline underlay all advanced art-making in the 1790s, culminating in an “international style ca. 1800” that was rigorously linear, abstractly based on imagination, and “completely two-dimensional,” entirely eschewing post-Renaissance illusionism: “If one wished to render a work of art in its most permanent, fundamental aspects, one used outline.”15Rosenblum 1976, p. 67. Neoclassical dress, I argue, was one way for female aesthetes to participate in this international style, and the pad fad in particular was an early exploration of the ways the rigorous purification of outline drawing might be applied to modern dress. Indeed, both outline drawing and neoclassical dress were interventions in visual culture that gained new visibility in the spring of 1793, due to the patronage of eccentric and cosmopolitan British women: Lady Charlotte Campbell, who introduced the belly pad and was credited with popularizing the high-waisted muslin dress in London; and Georgiana Hare-Naylor, who patronized John Flaxman’s first and most influential series of outline engravings illustrating Homer in Rome. And, despite their diverse mediums, both outline drawing and neoclassical dress were actually conceived of as ways to engage with, embody, or analyze antique sculpture.
“A statue is all Outline,” wrote George Cumberland in his 1796 Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the System that Guided the Ancient Artists in Composing their Figures and Groupes, “a creation, the bounds of whose surface require inconceivable knowledge, taste, and study, to circumscribe.”16Cumberland 1796, p. 9. In turn, he argued, a sensibility refined by the study of “chaste outline” will only be satisfied by the finest sculptures, for “. . . he that has once known how to judge of, or describe the fine Outlines of pure forms . . . finds little left to delight him but the best sculptures.”17Cumberland 1796, p. 34; see also Mazzeo 2001. Cumberland was a political radical and artist who mixed in the same circles of advanced neoclassicism as George Romney, Henry Fuseli, and Thomas Lawrence. His treatise, largely illustrated by his friend, William Blake, implored artists to engage outline as a foundational study for a widely shared artistic goal: making sculpture to rival the ancients. In fact, Blake’s design for Psyche Disobeys, discussed in Chapter Two (fig. 68), was an illustration for Cumberland’s treatise, thus linking female subjectivity, parables of animation, and the formalist attention to outline.
Cumberland praised the recent publication by Flaxman of illustrations for Homer’s Iliad (fig. 92), which had been produced in the very same months that the pad fad hit London: the spring of 1793. Flaxman’s Homeric engravings were the most influential prints of the 1790s.18For Flaxman’s influence, see Rosenblum 1967, pp. 158–79; Symmons 1984; and Bindman 1979. The style of these engraved drawings fascinated the erudite foreigners, artists, and Grand Tourists who encountered them in Rome, and they went on to have a widespread effect on artists across Europe over the ensuing decade, from Jacques-Louis David to Francisco Goya to Philipp Otto Runge. Commentators across Europe lauded Flaxman’s genius in at least three languages. As Romney wrote to their mutual friend, William Hayley: “I have seen the book of prints for the Odyssey [sic] by our dear and admirable artist Flaxman. They are outlines without shadow, but in the style of antient [sic] art. They are simple, grand, and pure; I may say with truth, very fine. They look as if they had been made in the age when Homer wrote.”19George Romney, letter to William Hayley, August 2, 1793 (Hayley 1809, p. 203). Romney misspeaks here when he mentions the Odyssey; Flaxman’s 1793 prints were of subjects from the Iliad and he did not engrave scenes from the Odyssey until 1805.
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Description: The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, Engraved From the Compositions of John Flaxman,...
Fig. 92. Tommaso Piroli after John Flaxman, title page, The Iliad of Homer (Rome), 1793. Engraving, 19.3 × 27.3 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Innovative though they were, Flaxman’s outline engravings didn’t come from nowhere. Linear abstraction had been used in the technical and didactic traditions of drawing and printmaking since at least the mid-century, particularly in the archaeological and architectural drawings of volumes such as Stuart’s and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (fig. 93). Perhaps the most influential precursors were Tischbein’s illustrated volumes of Sir William Hamilton’s second collection of Greek vases, published in 1791–7 (fig. 94). Hamilton felt his first illustrated collection, illustrated by Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville and published decades earlier, had been too detailed, expensive, and slow to appear to be of maximal use to contemporary artists and designers. For the publication of his new collection of antiquities he explicitly directed Tischbein to use outline to describe the vases’ motifs. Tischbein—the painter of Lady Charlotte Campbell’s Neapolitan portrait (fig. 91)—was also then the director of the Royal Academy of Painting at Naples, and was deeply involved both in contemporary archaeology and in the circles of German and British visitors to southern Italy. Tischbein’s simple transcriptions of motifs eliminated all reference to the color or location of the figures on their original vases, as in a profile drawing of a woman holding a crown and fillet (fig. 94). Bordered by thin black lines, lightly transgressed by floral motifs at the margins and the figure’s foot at the bottom, the image gives no further hint of space beyond this minimal overlapping. Contour, with a minimum of detail, drives the artist’s interest. Although Cumberland derided Tischbein’s “heavy translation” of Hamilton’s vases in his Thoughts on Outline, the illustrations were reprinted and copied numerous times over the following decade and inspired many other volumes of outline drawings, likely including Friedrich Rehberg’s outline illustrations of Emma Hamilton’s attitudes, published in 1794 and discussed in Chapter One (fig. 33).20Cumberland 1796, p. 16; Rosenblum 1967, p. 64.
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Description: A God and a Goddess by Unknown
Fig. 93. Unknown, A God and a Goddess, from The Antiquities of Athens, Measured and Delineated by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett (London), 1787, vol. 2, chapter 1, pl. 23. Engraving, 39 × 55 cm. Heidelberg University Library
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Description: Woman holding a Fillet by Piroli, Tommaso
Fig. 94. Tommaso Piroli after Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Woman holding a Fillet, from Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases of Greek Workmanship . . . now in the Collection of Sir Wm. Hamilton (Naples), 1795, vol. 3, pl. 49. Engraving, 26 × 17.8 cm. Heidelberg University Library
Commentators from Goethe to contemporary scholars have at times derided the flat, uninteresting outlines of Flaxman, Cumberland, Rehberg, and Tischbein as dry, stiff, and clunky.21West 2002, for example, argues that they are static and dull; Symmons 1984 also refers to Rehberg’s “banality.” But as David Bindman has noted, most contemporaries felt that it was the fact of the line that was important—its contour—not its quality. Outline drawings and engravings weren’t enjoyed by connoisseurs for their expressive artistic gesture or to recall the traces of the artist’s hand, but rather for their precise linear abstraction, and for the way they recorded the essence of a work of art that might go on to appear in many different forms and media, even oscillating between two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations. Indeed, Flaxman’s whole career had been predicated on the idea that an excellent artistic concept could easily move between flat, low relief, and sculptural forms.22Bindman 1979, p. 26, calls this a “principle of transferability.”
It’s worth pausing to compare three different examples of outline drawing from the early 1790s: Tischbein’s Woman holding a Fillet, Flaxman’s Departure of Briseis from the Tent of Achilles, and Rehberg’s Emma Hart as Dancer (figs 946). First, all of them shared a common engraver: Tommaso Piroli, who was based in Rome and also engraved the official Herculaneum archaeological publications of the 1790s, demonstrating the interconnectedness of these forms of neoclassical visual culture. Piroli’s linear style was applied with equal aptness to archaeological discoveries, vase motifs, attitude poses, or poetic illustrations; he was a one-man factory of diverse and pan-European neoclassicism. Second, in comparing these three examples, we see that while none has sculpture as a source, all transform their sources via the sculptural aesthetic of outline. Tischbein’s illustration simplified a design that was meant to unspool in the viewer’s experience of a vase, flattening, isolating, and framing it. By contrast, Flaxman’s Briseis was designed entirely from imagination, using a hallowed text as a source. Yet outline’s reference to archaeological projects gives the Briseis the appearance of antiquity, as if it were a transcription of a lost original. This same sense of metamorphosis, making the antique past come alive in the present, attends Rehberg’s engravings of Emma Hart, which took her performance (itself a translation of antique motifs into the sculptural form of her own body), stripped out its alternating stillness and movement, and fixed a particular moment on the page. All of these prints thus reduced the color, space, dimension, and motion of life to a colorless, austere, “chaste” or “pure” outline. Outlines reoriented art toward flatness and abstraction, even as they aimed at providing viewers with an aesthetic experience—the Winckelmannian and Herderian aesthetics widely accepted as foundational—that ideally happened in the apprehension of sculpture.23Rosenblum 1967 argues that this moment in the 1790s reoriented Western art toward the flatness that characterized modernism. Haptic aesthetics and neoclassical sculpture theory have been sensitively explored in several recent studies: see Lichtenstein 2003; Cohen 2004; Potts 2000; Betzer 2013; Lajer-Burcharth 2001; and Stoichita 2008. Thus the flat modernism and formalism of outline paradoxically grew from the neoclassical reverence for sculpture. What I wish to argue, then, is that outline expresses not sculpture exactly, but what I’ll call “statue-ness”: the elemental and eternal excellence belonging to antique sculpture, its essential rightness regardless of scale or medium, its morality, and the cultural prestige that thereby attached to it.
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Description: Departure of Briseis from the Tent of Achilles by Piroli, Tommaso
Fig. 95. Tommaso Piroli after John Flaxman, Departure of Briseis from the Tent of Achilles, from The Iliad of Homer Engraved From the Compositions of John Flaxman (London), 1793. Engraving, 28 × 42 cm. Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University
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Description: Lady Hamilton's Attitudes by Piroli, Tommaso
Fig. 96. Tommaso Piroli after Friedrich Rehberg, Emma Hart as Dancer, from Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature at Naples (Rome), 1794, p. 6, pl. VI. Etching and engraving, 26.5 × 20.5 cm. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
Outline may have surged in the 1790s as a proxy for sculpture because antiquities were actually rarely experienced, even by eighteenth-century cultural elites. Even though classical sculpture seemed to be everywhere in eighteenth-century aesthetics, leading in prestige among scholars, collectors, and aesthetes, life-size classical sculptures were not exactly thick on the ground in London, Paris, or Weimar in the late eighteenth century.24For a discussion of the rarity of full-scale antiquities and the intense competition for them, see Guilding 2014. Some artists and Grand Tourists saw them in Rome and Naples; a few private and royal collections allowed visitors; and art academies and private collectors amassed groups of casts; but most literate aesthetes across Europe participated in neoclassicism via flat or low-relief representations, often applied to furniture or decorative arts objects. As Goethe lamented: “art, which gave the man of antiquity his mosaic floor, and vaulted Heaven for the Christian, has now been reduced to snuff boxes and bracelets. These are worse times than one realizes.”25Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter of October 8, 1786; quoted in Hoffman 1979, pp. 14–15. The “statue-ness” of neoclassicism, then, was experienced primarily through two-dimensional representations such as prints, drawings, and paintings, as well as low-relief three-dimensional objects such as chimney pieces, stucco work, Wedgwood pots, plaques, and personal items like this tiny, 2½ inch tall scent bottle (fig. 97). These were items with which elite women and men interacted intimately in the material culture of their daily lives.26See Haskell and Penny 1981, and Coltman 2006. Cosmopolitan centers were teeming with these objects in the 1790s, and the pad-wearers and outline-purchasers were among the participants in its culture of copy, reproduction, homage, and exchange.
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Description: Scent bottle by Wedgwood, Josiah
Fig. 97. Josiah Wedgwood, Scent bottle, late 18th century. Jasperware, height 6.4 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This mingled and multifarious culture of reproduction and translation led to the belly pad’s adoption, and also to its failure as a statuesque fashion. The pad fad entailed a misapplication of the strong contour appropriate to neoclassical drawing or relief—that is, two-dimensional media—to the three-dimensional body, without taking fully into account the changing visual effects created by living women’s roundness and movement. On the body, such a strong shape could be created by the use of a pad—a tool with which fashionable women were quite familiar after decades of wearing hip pads and bum rolls. But in life, it clearly did not have the desired effect, instead provoking ridicule for its ungainly artifice and mistaken signification.
Flaxman’s entire artistic practice, especially in his work for Josiah Wedgwood, was predicated on the aesthetic principle that the essential greatness of any work of art should be highly transferable across scale, dimension, and medium; his designs moved inventively from sculpture to drawing to wax relief to biscuit porcelain. Similarly, in his Thoughts on Outline, Cumberland imagined distilling sculpture into silhouettes, noting “there are statues in the world which, if turned around on a pivot before a lamp, would produce, on a wall, some hundreds of fine Outlines.”27Cumberland 1796, p. 33. Yet in fashionable dress, something went awry in the translation from rock (marble sculpture) to paper (reproductive engraving) to scissors (fashionable dress): the belly pad created an exaggerated contour that may have beautifully defined the two-dimensional representation of the classical sculptural body, but which was misread in the three-dimensional one. Although women imagined themselves as fully modeled ideal classical sculptures, their understanding of such sculpture was largely mediated through the proliferation of flat and low-relief neoclassical works of art.
Cumberland’s vision of the beautiful statue casting outlines on the wall recalled not only contemporary practices for viewing sculpture—torchlit evening visits were highly desirable for the way the flickering light made the statues seem to come to life, as we have seen in Chapter One—but also the myth of the Corinthian Maid. Indeed, outline’s reputation as a purified graphic mode exemplifying an elemental approach to art-making was partly due to the story, which had seen a resurgence in the 1770s and 1780s.28On the Corinthian Maid in the eighteenth century, see Rosenblum 1957, Bermingham 1992, and Muecke 1999. It was also significant that the story of the Maid placed a woman at the center, yoking together outline, desire, and female artistic agency.
The Maid’s story, as told by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (ca. 77–9 CE) is of the origin of art. A young woman of Corinth was in love with a young man who was about to depart on a long journey; to keep a vestige of him, she “traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp.”29Pliny, Natural History, Book XXXV, chapter 15. Her father, a potter named Butades, then filled in the outline with clay and modeled it in low relief. Thus, the Corinthian Maid’s action was the origin not only of drawing, but of sculpture as well, and the story both situated outline as the antecedent for sculpture and sourced love and desire as the impetus for art’s creation.
Artists and writers have debated the extent to which artistic agency should be granted to the Maid in the origin of art, and whether she might stand as a powerful example for women’s aesthetic ambitions. As Frances Muecke has noted, early eighteenth-century representations of the scene downplayed the Maid’s agency by portraying Cupid as the “teacher” of the Maid, guiding her hand as she drew the outline, as for example in Simon Gribelin’s engraved frontispiece to Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica (The Art of Painting), 1716 (fig. 98).30Muecke 1999, p. 297. The divine direction of supernatural Love is thus the inventor of art, with the woman as merely the channel for its inspiration.
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Description: Frontispiece from De arte graphica by Gribelin, Simon, II
Fig. 98. Simon Gribelin, frontispiece, from Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy, De Arte Graphica (London), 1716. Engraving, 13.5 × 9.5 cm. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
A flurry of new visual and textual representations of the Maid of Corinth appeared in the 1770s and 1780s, however, and these usually showed the Maid herself wielding the pencil with deliberation and thoughtfulness: for example, in Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s grand painting in the Salon des Nobles at Versailles, or in George Romney’s quiet ink drawing (fig. 99). In 1778, poet William Hayley published a passage on the myth in his Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter that proved influential for many British artists and writers who followed, inspiring Joseph Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid (fig. 100) and cited by numerous authors:
Oh! LOVE, it was thy glory to impart
Its infant being to this magic art!
Inspir’d by thee, the soft Corinthian maid,
Her graceful lover’s sleeping form portray’d:
Her boding heart his near departure knew,
Yet long’d to keep his image in her view:
Pleas’d she beheld the steady shadow fall,
By the clear lamp upon the even wall:
The line she trac’d with fond precision true,
And, drawing, doated on the form she drew:
Nor, as she glow’d with no forbidden fire,
Conceal’d the simple picture from her sire;
His kindred fancy, still to nature just,
Copied her line, and form’d the mimic bust.
Thus from thy power, inspiring LOVE, we trace
The modell’d image, and the pencil’d face!31Hayley 1779, lines 124–39.
Ann Bermingham has argued that the primitivism and femininity at the heart of the story of the Corinthian Maid diminished its power as an origin myth, making it no more than a charming foil to the masculine, abstract, painterly art-making of the present—an amusing tale of how far civilization had come from its beginnings as mere female mimesis.32Bermingham 1992. Certainly Hayley’s formulation has elements of this view: it minimizes the outline as the mere “infant being” of the art of painting, and characterizes the Maid as “soft” and straightforwardly inspired by an all-capitalized “LOVE.” Yet he also devotes space to the Maid’s own experience of art-making: “pleas’d” to behold his shadow, she traced it with “fond precision” and “drawing, doated on the form she drew.” Wright’s, Regnault’s, and Romney’s works all capture this element of Hayley’s account, as the Maid focuses on her precise outline drawing with concentration and intelligence.
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Description: The Origin of Painting by Romney, George
Fig. 99. George Romney, The Origin of Painting, ca. 1775–80. Pen and brown ink and brush and gray wash on tan laid paper, 51.7 × 32.2 cm. Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of Frank Jewett Mather Jr., x1947-28
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Description: The Corinthian Maid by Wright, Joseph, of Derby
Fig. 100. Joseph Wright of Derby, The Corinthian Maid, 1782–4. Oil on canvas, 106.3 × 130.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Indeed, Mary Sheriff and Shelley King have found evidence that contemporary women were inspired by the myth as an emblem of female artistic agency. Sheriff notes the allusions to the myth made by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in her self-portrait of 1790, although it is perhaps even more apt for her self-portrait of 1800 (fig. 101).33Sheriff 1996, pp. 232–6. Here, the painter’s chalk, although ostensibly sketching an unseen female sitter, is poised just at the edge of the shadow of her own profile—she is, in this homage, both the Maid and her lover, a self-reflexive gesture of artistic subjectivity that is parallel to a woman sculpting herself as a living statue or creating her own arresting outline with the help of a belly pad.
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Description: Self-Portrait by Vigée-LeBrun, Elisabeth Louise
Fig. 101. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Self-Portrait, 1800. Oil on canvas, 78.5 × 68 cm. State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
King analyzes the assertions of female artistic agency in Amelia Opie’s poem “Maid of Corinth” from 1800.34King 2004. Notably, after she discovers the art of drawing, Opie’s Maid has a vision of future generations of women artists, all following after her and taking up the pencil:
Lo there! The maid by love like mine inspired,
Not only colour to my lines imparts,
See her bold hand to greater deeds is fir’d,
See the whole form to mimic being starts!
Hail! Fair creations, bursting on my view!
Kings, heroes, sages, even gods appear,
At Art’s bold touch, assuming Nature’s hue!
Jove grasps his lightning, Pallas lifts her spear!35Amelia Opie, Epistle from Eudora, Maid of Corinth, to Her Lover, Philemon, 1801, pp. 219–20; quoted in King 2004, p. 643.
Tracing an outline might be simple, but it is also foundational, inspiring “greater deeds” and “whole forms” in subsequent generations. The women artists of the future are similarly inspired by love, but with their “bold touch” they are also limning the most high-status subjects of history painting: “Kings, heroes, sages, even gods appear.”
As mythologies of artistic creation go, Pygmalion, discussed in Chapter One, might have some advantages over the Corinthian Maid. While Pygmalion sculpts, the Maid merely traces. His art is ideal, generative, inventing a figure more perfect than this world; by contrast, hers is merely indexing the world. His effort makes art so beautiful it is brought to life; hers starts from life and stills it, turning it to silhouette on stone, while the living lover goes off to fight and die, and leaves behind only this hollow trace. But the story of the Corinthian Maid places a woman at the center of the story of the origin of art, and it does so not via the practices of pastel or paint, color or textile, but in the austere, “manly,” abstract, and modern form of outline.
Further, the centrality of love and desire as a motivating force for art-making is something the Corinthian Maid story shares with Pygmalion, and its representation of female desire made it a powerful exemplar for women who exercised aesthetic agency through creating contours—the wearers of neoclassical dress among them. As we have seen in Chapter One, aesthetic theorists such as Lessing, Herder, and Winckelmann placed desire at the point of origin of aesthetic experience and understanding. Far from being marginalized as “feminine” emotions, then, love and desire were the key to all aesthetic experience; speaking to this impulse, the story of the Corinthian Maid conjoins love and art in a story of pure motives, essential form, and female agency.
Neoclassicism is often characterized as rational, orderly, and masculine, the house style of the bourgeois financial and political establishment. But as we have seen, neoclassicism was actually much stranger than this stereotype suggests, particularly in the 1790s. It was hot and emotional rather than cool and rational, and its insistence on rigor and purity was often in the service of a libertine profligacy of feeling and possibility.36Pop 2015 beautifully sketches this emotional and strange neoclassicism. And women were central to the production of radical neoclassicism from its start—and for the outline craze in particular. They were metaphorically at the center with the myth of the Corinthian Maid, and they were actually in the center with inspiration, production, and financial support.
Flaxman, for example, would not have produced his outline drawings without the directive patronage of Georgiana Hare-Naylor, an artist, friend of Benjamin Franklin, and scholar of Greek.37Symmons 1975, p. 647, notes that Flaxman himself took a dim view of the outlines, and that this may have been due to the “amount of interference which the patrons exercised on their production. . . . Flaxman had no freedom of choice over the subject for illustration; his own preferences which were Milton, Euripides, Bunyan, and Biblical stories never reached the market.” Flaxman is, of course, to be credited with the distinctive style he developed, but it was Hare-Naylor who urged him to illustrate Homer, rather than the Christian subjects he favored, and to publish them as engravings, thus marrying his spare style with an appropriately archaic Greek subject matter and launching them into neoclassical visual culture. Scholars, some of whom attribute the commission to her feckless husband instead, have overlooked her role as the patron of Flaxman’s Iliad.38Myrone 2005, p. 293, refers to Hare-Naylor as a “Rome-based gentlewoman,” noting that she and the other patrons of Flaxman’s early work were different from the “young, male, aristocratic characters who had patronized Hamilton and West in an earlier decade,” meaning thus to support his argument that outline illustration was an essentially feminized and commodified version of neoclassicism. As my argument below will make clear, I agree with Martin Myrone that women were at the heart of the outline aesthetic, but with a rather different interpretation of the meaning and purpose of that phenomenon. Bentley 1981 and Symmons 1975 both attribute the patronage to Mr. Hare-Naylor based on the account of a contemporary, but later scholars have credited Georgiana Hare-Naylor as patron based on papers that have subsequently come to light. Hare-Naylor was a non-conforming libertine who had eloped with her unsuitable husband, left her children to be raised by a female professor of Greek in Bologna, dressed herself habitually and entirely in white, and rode around her estate on a white donkey accompanied by her tamed, pet white doe.39According to her grandson Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, it was the killing of her doe by a pack of dogs that spurred her to leave England forever and move to Weimar, where she could live in proximity to friends and interlocutors such as Goethe and Madame de Staël; Hare 1894, p. 77. She corresponded with intellectuals and aesthetes, from Benjamin Franklin to Duchess Anna Amalia of Weimar, studied with Joshua Reynolds, and exhibited her paintings in the Royal Academy. In the spring of 1793, then, two British women, Lady Charlotte Campbell and Georgiana Hare-Naylor—both of whom had recently visited Naples and seen Emma Hart perform her attitudes—acted on a shared fascination with contour and outline, and with a formalist approach to the body. Their innovations aimed at the creation of a living classicism that erased the gap between past and present and caused art to live, as if in a new golden age, with themselves as artistic agents and aesthetic subjects at its center.
THE CESTUS OF VENUS
It is a gross error in our elegantes, to suppose that what is striking in marble must be just the same in animated nature. The finest attitude which artist ever executed would be stiff in a living subject.
Dress and Address (London), 1819
The rounded belly was the evolving visual shorthand for the sculptural body, yet the belly pad appeared too artificial on a moving, breathing, three-dimensional woman. How, then, could that desirable silhouette be created more effectively? As any woman who has ever worn a baby-doll-style dress could attest, a high waist coupled with a limp, clinging fabric and an absence of restraining undergarments amply created the effect of a rounded belly. Belly pads disappeared from the cultural conversation by mid-1794, supplanted by a more flexible innovation: the high waist.
Caricaturists had spoofed the pad by pairing it with traditional garments—robes, petticoats, and stays—and mocking the new silhouette. But in fact, in the earliest references to the new style in the press, from February and March 1793, observers noted that the pad was always accompanied by a high-waisted dress—indeed, the first published account attributed the silhouette’s distinctive rounded belly not to the pad, but to the dress’s “short” waist: “The fashion of short waists is carried to such an extreme, that the Misses all look as if they had been married about eight months!”40True Briton (London), February 26, 1793. On March 1, the Morning Herald explained the pad as a way to augment the belly created by the short waist:
The fashion of short waists, now carried to such an excess, has brought into use another artificial addition to female shape. This is a sort of pad, placed immediately under the zone, doubtless to prepare unmarried ladies for the burthens of another situation!41Morning Herald (London), March 1, 1793.
By July 1794 the pad was no longer worn, but the short waist remained, and was straightforwardly acknowledged as a defining feature of fashionable dress in regular press accounts:
Fashions for July. Morning: Muslin dresses, short waists; straw hats, with long coloured feathers; . . . flat heels. Evening: Muslin robes, or thin sarsnet: turbans of muslin, very high feathers . . . ; riband sashes, fastened behind in a large rose without ends; short sleeves a la pasanne.42Sun (London), July 19, 1794.
Fifteen years later, La Belle Assemblée had forgotten the pad but memorialized Lady Charlotte Campbell as the inventor of the high-waisted gown that accompanied it, and noted women’s ongoing gratitude to her, for her innovation “will long be remembered by those who have so often shuddered at that martyrdom which beauty has sustained from whalebone and tight lacing.”43La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, issue 44 (June, 1809). Although on its introduction in 1793 the high-waisted dress was greeted with controversy, mockery, and suspicion, by 1809 it was viewed as a humane and beautiful fashion, the orthodox style for women of all ages.
The short-waisted dress entered visual culture accompanied by a powerful and attractive iconography: it evoked the cestus of Venus, the enchanted girdle that gave any woman who wore it an irresistible beauty.44The iconography of the cestus has been analyzed by some literary scholars, such as Jung 2006, but has been little noticed by art historians. Because Juno legendarily borrowed Venus’s cestus to seduce Jupiter and keep him in the marriage bed, the idea of the cestus could in particular connote an appropriate and chaste desirability, and emblematize wedded love. The story of Venus’s cestus originated in Homer’s Iliad, but although Venus was widely and frequently represented in European art and literature from the Renaissance onward, this attribute of the goddess was little noticed except during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, France, and Italy. In this period, it appeared in several paintings and at least eight comedies and operas because, I argue, its meaning intersected with the pad fad in particular and neoclassical fashion more generally.
The imagery of the cestus had in fact already surfaced at the height of the pad fad. James Gillray’s A Vestal of 93, trying on the Cestus of Venus (fig. 102), shows a vain older woman strapping on a pad that is itself figured as the cestus; the ludicrousness of this project is signaled by naming the woman as a “vestal.” Her pretentions are satirized by the classical references in the print: as a flaming altar of Venus lies overturned, winged cherubs help her dress in this composition supposedly “[e]ngraved from a Basso-relievo, lately found upon some fragments of Antiquity.” Here Gillray gestures to the pad fad’s larger aesthetic context as part of the neoclassical visual culture of copy, translation, and homage that we have discussed above. His brilliance in distilling, uncovering, and linking the key threads and meanings of the pad fad may be found not only in his connection of the pad’s ridiculousness to the exaggerated sculptural contours of the bas-relief, but also in his invocation of the cestus. Pad-wearing women, Gillray argues here, see themselves—ludicrously—as living works of classical art, whose costume will cause any man to become spellbound by them.
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Description: A Vestal of 93 trying on the Cestus of Venus by Gillray, James
Fig. 102. James Gillray, A Vestal of 93, trying on the Cestus of Venus, 1793. Hand-colored etching, 31 × 37.6 cm. Lewis Walpole Museum, Yale University
The cestus had two related meanings: it signified the married state, and it functioned as a love charm, binding a man with desire.45Winterer 2005 convincingly connects this iconography to women’s political and intellectual lives in the early American republic. The cestus appears in Book XIV of the Iliad, as Juno is doing her utmost to seduce Jupiter. After perfuming and dressing her body, she asks Venus for assurance of her success and Venus agrees: “So saying, the cincture from her breast she loosed/ Embroider’d, various, her all-charming zone . . . Take this—this girdle fraught with every charm./ Hide this within thy bosom, and return,/ Whate’er thy purpose, mistress of it all.”46Homer, The Iliad, trans. William Cowper (London, 1791), Book XIV, lines 254–5, 261–3. Juno’s aim was political: she distracted Jupiter with sex and sleep so that Neptune could freely aid the Greeks against the Trojans. But most eighteenth-century representations dropped the political valence and invoked the cestus as an aid to getting and keeping a man. As the introduction to Venus’s Girdle; or, the World Bewitched put it in 1796: “The story is founded on Mythological fiction, which ascribes to the Ceinture of Venus the Power of giving irresistible attraction to whoever possesses it.”47Venus’s Girdle; or, the World Bewitched. As Performed at Sadler’s Wells, 1796, p. 3. In Arthur Murphy’s 1761 comedy The Way to Keep Him, a woman notes the cestus’s power to kindle and enliven a woman’s power:
When Juno was deck’d with the Cestus of Love,
At first she was handsome; she charming became;
With skill the soft passions it taught her to move,
To kindle at once, and to keep up the flame.
‘Tis this gives the eyes all their magic and fire,
The voice-melting accents; impassions the kiss;
Confers the sweet smile, that awakens desire,
And plants round the fair each incentive to bliss.48Arthur Murphy, “The Way to Keep Him, a Comedy in Five Acts,” 1761, in Bell’s British Theater, consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays (London: George Cawthorn, 1797), vol. 1, pp. 71–2.
The cestus was also known in English as a “zone,” an adaptation of the Latin zonam, or girdle. In the 1783 play The Cestus: A Serenata, a disaffected Jupiter calls himself a “hen-peck’d master of the universe,” so Iris counsels Juno to “employ dame Venus,/ For, if she lend you but her zone,/ The charms of love are all your own.”49Charles Dibdin, The Cestus: A Serenata. Performed at the Royal Circus, in St. George’s Fields (London, 1783), p. 12. The consummation of marriage was expressed in Latin as the solvere zonam—the loosening of the bride’s girdle. The paradox of the married woman as both bound and unbound by the girdle was thus expressed by the cestus’s status as belonging to Venus, the goddess of love and desire, but borrowed by Juno, the symbol of marriage.
The “zone” was also a term used in eighteenth-century fashion, referring to a vaguely classical idea of the girdle. A style of robe worn in the late 1780s and early 1790s was known as the zone-front, and featured diagonal style lines from the center of the bust down to the sides of the waist. Usually these diagonals were created by wearing an open robe whose sides tapered to a point and fastened just under the bosom (fig. 103). Often a belt or sash bound the natural waist over the top of the stomacher.50See, for example, the outstanding 1790s zone-front ensemble in the Kyoto Costume Institute (item AC9228 95–19–2AB,EF). This style maintained the long waist with its pointed stomacher but also accustomed the eye to girdles at the natural waist and at the bustline. We have already seen the short waist referred to as a “Grecian zone” by a London newspaper in 1795, noting the contrast with old-fashioned long waists; similarly, when he wrote to his wife about the “twelve statues” at the ball, Sir Gilbert Elliot described them as wearing “girdles” under their uncovered breasts.51Anon., The Oracle (London), December 24, 1795, n.p.; Sir Gilbert Elliot, letter to his wife, May 11, 1793 (Elliot 1874, pp. 142–3). The zone of Venus was a neoclassical concept adapted to fashion even before the pad fad and the short waist became current.
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Description: Woman's Dress (Robe à l'anglaise) with Zone Front by Unknown
Fig. 103. Woman’s robe à l’anglaise with zone-front (detail), ca. 1785–93. Indian export fine cotton plain weave with silver foil embroidery in stem and satin stitches, 154.9 cm long. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Thomas Francis Cadwalader, 1955, 1955-98-9
In two British paintings from 1771, a nude Venus, identifiable by the attributes of either a chubby Cupid or a pair of lovebirds (or both), hands Juno, attributed with a crown and a peacock, a thin golden belt or sash. Benjamin West’s version (fig. 104) loosely drapes both goddesses; Venus’s drapery seems to have come completely undone by removing her zone, and Juno prepares to tie up her own with the enchanted cestus. Guy Head’s painting (fig. 105), however, anticipates the neoclassical dress of the 1790s to a startling degree. His Juno stands barefoot, wearing a thin, white gown clasped at the shoulders and clinging to her thighs, with a matching veil. Her midsection is the clear focus of the painting, curiously obscured by the overlapping hands and parallel forearms of Juno and Venus, who appears to be winding the golden sash around her waist.
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Description: Juno Receiving the Cestus from Venus by West, Benjamin
Fig. 104. Benjamin West, Juno Receiving the Cestus from Venus, 1771. Oil on canvas, 230.2 × 191 cm. Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia
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Description: Juno Borrowing the Girdle of Venus by Head, Guy
Fig. 105. Guy Head, Juno Borrowing the Girdle of Venus, ca. 1771. Oil on canvas, 198.1 × 146.1 cm. Nottingham City Museums and Galleries (Nottingham Castle)
A comparison with Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Lady Manners (fig. 106) from more than twenty years later reveals illuminating similarities.52For analyses of this painting, see Day and Rauser 2016; Albinson, Funnell, and Pelz 2011, pp. 118–21 (catalog entry authored by Albinson); Levey 2006; Garlick 1989; and Rosenthal 2004. Lady Manners is cast as Juno here, backed by a spectacularly rendered peacock. Her dress is remarkably similar to Head’s Juno, echoing the diaphanous layers, swirling hem, and long white veil. Yet while Head’s Juno wears a goddess’s dress suitable for the cloud she stands on, Lady Manners wears a fashionable gown of 1794, fit for the elegant garden she is stepping into. Her midsection is also curiously obscured, both by her dangling glove and forearm and by her hunched posture. Is she wearing the fashionable pad beneath that blue girdle? Or has the high zone itself come to substitute for the exaggerated sculptural contour? Lawrence makes it difficult for us to see and to know, perhaps to avoid emphatically memorializing a disfiguring trend. By the mid-1790s, as we can see in a beautiful miniature portrait by Richard Cosway (fig. 107), it was impossible to tell—and perhaps also beside the point—whether a cestus-wearing British Juno was playing an allegorical role or simply wearing up-to-date fashionable dress.
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Description: Portrait of Catherine Grey, Lady Manners by Lawrence, Thomas
Fig. 106. Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Catherine Rebecca Grey, Lady Manners, 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: Unknown Lady of the Sotheby or Isted Families by Cosway, Richard
Fig. 107. Richard Cosway, Unknown Lady of the Sotheby or Isted Families, ca. 1795. Watercolor on ivory, 6.3 × 5 cm. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
Yet it is clear that the fashionable dress of the early 1790s was not only consciously engaging with the contours and silhouettes of classicism, but also with the consequences of reimagining the ways a woman’s body signified through its clothing. Gillray was right that the pad was a version of the cestus of Venus: it reshaped a woman’s body through fashion in order to connote a virtuous desirability, and it modeled that body on the statuesque contours of antiquity. In wearing the belly pad in 1793 and the high-waisted dress thereafter, women imitated the swelling curves and strong contours that emblematized antique sculpture, which they mainly experienced through outline engraving, decorative objects, and low reliefs. Outline in particular served as a powerful aesthetic inspiration, for it was understood not so much as a constructed work of art in itself as a partial trace of an aesthetically perfect original. Although in a Platonic sense that original may only exist in the mind of God, a woman—even more than antique sculpture—might claim to be its closest imitator on earth, as Cumberland had argued in his treatise, Thoughts on Outline:
There is but one thing that can have more intrinsic value than a very fine piece of sculpture, which is, a beautiful young woman, with an accomplished mind, and generous heart; for she combines in all her actions the graces and beauties of a pure statue, affords her admirer a thousand exquisite Outlines at every turn of her body, or change of her thought, blending colour, form, and motion . . .53Cumberland 1796, p. 34.
Lady Charlotte Campbell took her experience of objectification as a classical work of art come to life in the woods of Naples and transformed it a few years later, sculpting herself on the London scene as a living statue with a padded belly. Situated among a group of radical neoclassicists searching for an intense aesthetic experience, these early experiments in neoclassical dress were fueled by an embodied sensibility that aimed to strip away art and experience to its most elemental and primitive origins. In wearing the fashion, women offered their own bodies as exemplars of that idealized perfection, viewing classical art as both a path to nature and a portal to a revived golden age.
 
1     Diary or Woodfall’s Register (London), April 20, 1793, issue 1274. This is part of a rather satirical description of the pad phenomenon. Also in April 1793, Mr. Lewis reportedly produced a pad onstage as a prop to his satire on the follies of the day, while speaking an epilogue to the play How to Grow Rich (Sun [London], April 19, 1793). »
2     As noted in the Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal (London), Monthly Catalogue for July 1793, p. 348. »
3     For a more detailed analysis of the pad fad with many more contemporary examples, see Rauser 2017b. Wahrman 2006, pp. 68–9, is one of very few historians to notice the pad fad; it does not surface in the important works on the history of eighteenth-century dress by Aileen Ribeiro, nor in Hollander 1994, which first made the argument that women and men were dressing to resemble sculptures in the late eighteenth century. Cunnington and Cunnington 1992 briefly mention the episode (p. 111). Some scholars doubt that the pad fad actually occurred, but the contemporary mentions of the fad are so numerous, multimedia, and temporally delimited as to seem irrefutable that some women wore it at least for some time. The fad is also plausible given the fashion experiments of the moment, as I explain below. »
4     The Times (London), May 4, 1793, n.p. »
5     True Briton (London), April 17, 1793. »
6     A gossip item from March 1793 named this lady, along with the Marchioness of Abercorn and Lady Charlotte Campbell, as among the “finest and most fashionable women England can boast” promenading in London on an “exceptionally fine day.” Morning Herald (London), March 1, 1793, n.p. »
7     Ann Frankland Lewis’s album of watercolors is preserved in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. »
8     Dozens of other portraits of British women made in 1793 or 1794 concur in replicating these fashions; see, for example, Lawrence’s portrait of Lady Manners (figs 71 and 106), in which he also deploys an arm and slouched posture to perhaps downplay the exaggeration of the padded belly. Lady Manners wears an ensemble nearly identical to these two examples, including the cross-bodice dress, high waist, wide sash, and muslin turban. »
9     Elliot 1874, p. 133. »
10     In his memoirs (Tischbein 1922, pp. 248–9), Tischbein wrote about the first time he saw Campbell in an encounter that inspired this painting. Observing her about to be crushed by carriage traffic in a Neapolitan forest, he sees her fright as beautiful authenticity and likens her to both nature and the classical art of the Herculaneum Dancers. For a more detailed analysis, see Rauser 2015; see also Ribeiro 2002, p. 275. »
11     For example, in frescoes found at Pompeii, such as those in the House of L. Caecilius Jucundus (unearthed 1875). »
12     Bleackley 1907, p. 311. »
13     Hart herself had just been in Britain in the summer of 1791 as Sir William Hamilton secured permission from the king to marry her; while in the country she performed the attitudes several times and drew admiring responses from major fashionable figures, including the Duchess of Devonshire. These appearances may have paved the way for Campbell’s radical fashionable innovation in the following spring of 1793 by giving more British observers a taste of the living classicism experienced by Grand Tourists. »
14     Sir Gilbert Elliot, letter to his wife, May 11, 1793 (Elliot 1874, pp. 142–3). »
15     Rosenblum 1976, p. 67. »
16     Cumberland 1796, p. 9. »
17     Cumberland 1796, p. 34; see also Mazzeo 2001. »
18     For Flaxman’s influence, see Rosenblum 1967, pp. 158–79; Symmons 1984; and Bindman 1979. »
19     George Romney, letter to William Hayley, August 2, 1793 (Hayley 1809, p. 203). Romney misspeaks here when he mentions the Odyssey; Flaxman’s 1793 prints were of subjects from the Iliad and he did not engrave scenes from the Odyssey until 1805. »
20     Cumberland 1796, p. 16; Rosenblum 1967, p. 64»
21     West 2002, for example, argues that they are static and dull; Symmons 1984 also refers to Rehberg’s “banality.” »
22     Bindman 1979, p. 26, calls this a “principle of transferability.” »
23     Rosenblum 1967 argues that this moment in the 1790s reoriented Western art toward the flatness that characterized modernism. Haptic aesthetics and neoclassical sculpture theory have been sensitively explored in several recent studies: see Lichtenstein 2003; Cohen 2004; Potts 2000; Betzer 2013; Lajer-Burcharth 2001; and Stoichita 2008. »
24     For a discussion of the rarity of full-scale antiquities and the intense competition for them, see Guilding 2014. »
25     Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter of October 8, 1786; quoted in Hoffman 1979, pp. 14–15. »
26     See Haskell and Penny 1981, and Coltman 2006. »
27     Cumberland 1796, p. 33. »
28     On the Corinthian Maid in the eighteenth century, see Rosenblum 1957, Bermingham 1992, and Muecke 1999. »
29     Pliny, Natural History, Book XXXV, chapter 15. »
30     Muecke 1999, p. 297. »
31     Hayley 1779, lines 124–39. »
32     Bermingham 1992. »
33     Sheriff 1996, pp. 232–6. »
34     King 2004. »
35     Amelia Opie, Epistle from Eudora, Maid of Corinth, to Her Lover, Philemon, 1801, pp. 219–20; quoted in King 2004, p. 643. »
36     Pop 2015 beautifully sketches this emotional and strange neoclassicism. »
37     Symmons 1975, p. 647, notes that Flaxman himself took a dim view of the outlines, and that this may have been due to the “amount of interference which the patrons exercised on their production. . . . Flaxman had no freedom of choice over the subject for illustration; his own preferences which were Milton, Euripides, Bunyan, and Biblical stories never reached the market.” »
38     Myrone 2005, p. 293, refers to Hare-Naylor as a “Rome-based gentlewoman,” noting that she and the other patrons of Flaxman’s early work were different from the “young, male, aristocratic characters who had patronized Hamilton and West in an earlier decade,” meaning thus to support his argument that outline illustration was an essentially feminized and commodified version of neoclassicism. As my argument below will make clear, I agree with Martin Myrone that women were at the heart of the outline aesthetic, but with a rather different interpretation of the meaning and purpose of that phenomenon. Bentley 1981 and Symmons 1975 both attribute the patronage to Mr. Hare-Naylor based on the account of a contemporary, but later scholars have credited Georgiana Hare-Naylor as patron based on papers that have subsequently come to light. »
39     According to her grandson Augustus John Cuthbert Hare, it was the killing of her doe by a pack of dogs that spurred her to leave England forever and move to Weimar, where she could live in proximity to friends and interlocutors such as Goethe and Madame de Staël; Hare 1894, p. 77. »
40     True Briton (London), February 26, 1793. »
41     Morning Herald (London), March 1, 1793. »
42     Sun (London), July 19, 1794. »
43     La Belle Assemblée; or Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, issue 44 (June, 1809). »
44     The iconography of the cestus has been analyzed by some literary scholars, such as Jung 2006, but has been little noticed by art historians. »
45     Winterer 2005 convincingly connects this iconography to women’s political and intellectual lives in the early American republic. »
46     Homer, The Iliad, trans. William Cowper (London, 1791), Book XIV, lines 254–5, 261–3. »
47     Venus’s Girdle; or, the World Bewitched. As Performed at Sadler’s Wells, 1796, p. 3. »
48     Arthur Murphy, “The Way to Keep Him, a Comedy in Five Acts,” 1761, in Bell’s British Theater, consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays (London: George Cawthorn, 1797), vol. 1, pp. 71–2. »
49     Charles Dibdin, The Cestus: A Serenata. Performed at the Royal Circus, in St. George’s Fields (London, 1783), p. 12. »
50     See, for example, the outstanding 1790s zone-front ensemble in the Kyoto Costume Institute (item AC9228 95–19–2AB,EF). »
51     Anon., The Oracle (London), December 24, 1795, n.p.; Sir Gilbert Elliot, letter to his wife, May 11, 1793 (Elliot 1874, pp. 142–3). »
52     For analyses of this painting, see Day and Rauser 2016; Albinson, Funnell, and Pelz 2011, pp. 118–21 (catalog entry authored by Albinson); Levey 2006; Garlick 1989; and Rosenthal 2004. »
53     Cumberland 1796, p. 34. »
3. London: Sculptural Contour
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