Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism 1316519023, 9781316519028

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge
Chapter
1 De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects
Chapter
2 Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions
Chapter
3 Girodet’s Electric Shocks
Chapter
4 Self-Evidence on the Scaffold
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A R T , S C I E N CE , A N D TH E B O DY I N E A R L Y ROMAN TICIS M

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This book reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that Romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of Romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy, and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of Romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them. stephanie o’rourke is a senior lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews.

cambridge studies in romanticism Founding Editor Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford General Editor James Chandler, University of Chicago Editorial Board John Barrell, University of York Paul Hamilton, University of London Mary Jacobus, University of Cambridge Claudia Johnson, Princeton University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Deidre Lynch, Harvard University Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of California, Davis This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s, a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad, and the reform movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion, and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; and poetic form, content, and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of commentary or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of literature and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge University Press, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere. See the end of the book for a complete list of published titles.

ART, SCIENCE, AND THE BODY IN EARLY ROMANTICISM STEPHANIE O’ROURKE University of St Andrews, Scotland

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316519028 doi: 10.1017/9781009004510 © Cambridge University Press 2022 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2022 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: O’Rourke, Stephanie, 1986– author. title: Art, science and the body in early Romanticism / Stephanie O’Rourke, University of St Andrews, Scotland. description: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Series: Cambridge studies in Romanticism | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2021038875 | isbn 9781316519028 (hardback) | isbn 9781009001267 (paperback) | isbn 9781009004510 (ebook) subjects: lcsh: Art and science – Europe – History. | Romanticism in art. | Human body (Philosophy) – Europe – History. | Science – Social aspects – Europe – History. | bisac: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh classification: lcc n72.s3 o77 2021 | ddc 700.1/05–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038875 isbn 978-1-316-51902-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

1

page vi x

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

1

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

22

2 Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

60

3 Girodet’s Electric Shocks

104

4 Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

151 182 221 248

Notes Bibliography Index

v

Figures

0.1 François Boucher, Academic Study of a Reclining Male Nude, page 8 1745–1755, chalk on laid paper. The Art Institute of Chicago. 0.2 Reinier Vinkeles, The Felix Meritis Society: The Physics Hall, 12 1801, etching and engraving. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 1.1 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, A Philosopher in a Moonlit 23 Churchyard, 1790, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1974.3.4. 1.2 Anon. [Mesmer Magnetizing a Patient], 1784, engraving. 28 1.3 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, The Falls of the Rhine at 37 Schaffhausen, 1788, oil on canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 1.4 William Dent, Billy’s Gouty Visit, or a Peep at Hammersmith, 42 1789, etching. British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 1.5 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Defeat of the Spanish 46 Armada, 8 August 1588, 1796, oil on canvas. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 1.6 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, An Avalanche in the Alps, 54 1803, oil on canvas. Tate Britain. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 2.1 Henry Fuseli, Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent, 1790, oil on 61 canvas. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 2.2 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, Satan, from Essays on 71 Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 285. 2.3 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, Martha Hess, from 72 Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 314. vi

List of Figures 2.4 Thomas Holloway, Caricature of Lord Anson, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), opposite 112. 2.5 Anonymous portrait, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 270. 2.6 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, Four Heads from Dante’s Inferno, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 290. 2.7 Henry Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul from Dante’s “Inferno” (recto), 1770–1778, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. 2.8 Henry Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul from Dante’s “Inferno” (verso), 1770–1778, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago. 2.9 Henry Fuseli, Achilles Grasping at the Shade of Patroclus, 1803, oil on canvas. Kunsthaus Zürich. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 2.10 Henry Fuseli, Satanic Call to Beelzebub in Hell, 1802, oil on canvas. Kunsthaus Zürich. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 2.11 Thomas Lawrence, Satan Summoning His Legions, 1796–1797, oil on canvas. Royal Academy of Arts, London. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Marcus Leith. 2.12 Henry Fuseli, Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus, 1800, oil and watercolor on paper. Kunsthaus Zürich. © Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings, 1916. 2.13 Henry Fuseli, Thetis Mourning the Body of Achilles, 1780, wash and graphite on paper. The Art Institute of Chicago. 2.14 Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts. USA Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman/Bridgeman Images. 2.15 Henry Fuseli, Mad Kate, 1806–1807, oil on canvas. Goethemuseum, Frankfurt. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 2.16 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, The Witch of Endor, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 289. 3.1 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1819, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Le Mage. 3.2 Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c.1816, oil on slate. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

vii 77 78 79 80 81 83 85 86 88

90 95

97 99 105 107

viii

List of Figures

3.3 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Sleep of Endymion, Salon of 1793, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Angèle Dequier. 3.4 R. Brunet after N. le Sueur, frontispiece from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Essay sur l’électricité des corps, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1750). 3.5 Plate 4 from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Essay sur l’électricité des corps, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1750). Credit: Wellcome Collection. 3.6 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes, 1802, oil on canvas. Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 3.7 Frontispiece from Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute E. G. Robertson, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1831). Image: Wikimedia Commons. 3.8 Gobin, plate II from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, vol. 6, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1745–1765). Image: Bibliothèque Diderot de Lyon. 3.9 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Une scène de Déluge, Salon of 1806 and 1814, oil on canvas. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 3.10 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Déluge, n.d., oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Gérard Blot. 3.11 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, preparatory sketch for Une scène de déluge, crayon on paper. Besançon, musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie (inv. D.2792). Photo © Pierre Guenat. 3.12 Detail from Gobin, plate II from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, vol. 6, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1745–1765). Image: Bibliothèque Diderot de Lyon. 3.13 Barnabé Augustin de Mailly, Congrès des rois coalisés, ou les tyrans (découronnés), 1793, engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo © Bibliothèque nationale de France. 3.14 Jacques-Louis Pérée, L’homme enfin satisfait d’avoir recouvré ses droits, 1794–1795, etching and burin. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

115 121 123 125

126

131 134 136 137 138 141

142

List of Figures 3.15 François-Marie Isidore Queverdo, La Chûte en masse, c. 1793, colored etching. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. 3.16 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, detail from Pygmalion and Galatea, 1819, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Le Mage. 4.1 Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (possibly exhibited 1812), oil on canvas. Tate Britain. 4.2 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Heads of Marquis de Launay, Foulon, and Bertier de Sauvigny, 1789, pencil on paper. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo © Bibliothèque nationale de France. 4.3 Villeneuve, Matière à reflection pour les jonglers couronnées, 1793, aquatint and etching. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. 4.4 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Revolt of Cairo, 1810, oil on canvas. Château de Versailles et de Trianon. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 4.5 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, study for Revolt of Cairo, 1810, charcoal and pastel on paper. Musée de l’Avallonnais Jean Després, Ville d’Avallon. 4.6 Detail from Isidore Helman after Charles Monnet, Execution of Louis XVI, 1794, engraving. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 4.7 Isaac Cruikshank, The Martyr of Equality, 1793, etching. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 4.8 Henry Fuseli, Kriemhild Shows Hagen the Head of Gunther, c.1805, pencil and watercolor on paper. Kunsthaus Zürich. Image: Wikimedia Commons. 4.9 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet, 1795, oil on canvas. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

ix 143 148 154 156

157 159 161 168 170 171 174

Acknowledgments

Few things are more pleasurable than to be indebted to those you admire. It is a genuine privilege to thank some of them here, albeit briefly. My first thanks are due to Jonathan Crary, whose instruction, conversation, and friendship have been simply invaluable. I have also benefited tremendously from the guidance and feedback I received at Columbia University, where this project initially took shape, from Noam Elcott, Stefan Andriopoulous, Branden Joseph, and Anne Higonnet. Several others whose work has been especially formative in my thinking have generously shared their time and their insights over the past several years: Tim Barringer, Ewa LajerBurcharth, Ann Bermingham, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Caroline Jones, Richard Taws, Mechthild Fend, and Andrei Pop. A number of friends and colleagues read portions of this text along the way, kindly intervening to prune its tangled prose and bolster its weaker claims: Tina Rivers Ryan, Sarah Schaefer, Susan M. Wager, Anna Hetherington, Trevor Stark, Alex Freer, Avis Bohlen, Susannah Blair, and Esther Chadwick. I owe particular gratitude to Rachel Silveri, an inspiring interlocutor over many years. Art history colleagues at the University of St Andrews offered feedback, support, and time to write when I needed it most: Marika Knowles, Julian Luxford, Catherine Spencer, and Linda Goddard. During this period, I also benefited greatly from the work of three talented research assistants: Aisling Coase, Lizzie Franco, and Lucy Howie. Most recently, Bethany Thomas, James Chandler, Linsey Hague, Cambridge University Press’s peer reviewers, and the Cambridge University Press editorial team have done much to greatly improve the manuscript and to help it find its current form. It is thrilling to contribute to a series that has consistently broadened and enriched my understanding of the period addressed in this book. The archival research upon which this project relies was funded by granting bodies whose support I am most grateful to have received: Social Science Research Council, Yale Center for British Art, Mellon x

Acknowledgments

xi

Foundation, and Columbia University. Some of the material from Chapter 3 first appeared as an article in Art History (“Girodet’s Galvanized Bodies,” Art History 41 no. 5: 868–893), and I am much obliged to the Association of Art History for granting me permission to reproduce it here. The Royal Academy kindly allowed me to use their photograph of Thomas Lawrence’s Satan Summoning His Legions (1796–1797) for Figure 2.11. Additionally, I thank the Musée Besançon for permission to reproduce Anne-Louis Girodet’s Une scène de deluge (n.d.) on the cover and as Figure 3.11. I also thank the Musée de l’Avallonnais for permission to reproduce Girodet’s study for the Revolt of Cairo as Figure 4.5. No single person has done more to help the project find its way than Sam Rose, in whose debt I happily linger. This book, like so much else that I do, is for Anne O’Rourke (1946–2010).

Introduction Bodies of Knowledge

Even in the tense summer of 1789, as the rest of Europe warily eyed France’s lurching steps toward revolution, it was still something of a scandal for an artist’s home to be set upon by an angry crowd. Then again, it wasn’t every day that a member of Britain’s prestigious Royal Academy of Art quit painting to open a healing clinic either. The Frenchborn, London-based artist Philippe de Loutherbourg was well known for his landscape paintings. Having first gained celebrity as a set designer at the popular Drury Lane theater, the artist had also invented a luminous display known as the Eidophusikon, one of the city’s most fashionable attractions. His notoriety as a painter and entertainer lent an air of sensationalism to his new clinic – but it was de Loutherbourg’s chosen method of treatment that sparked genuine controversy. It was widely reported that the artist was practicing “animal magnetism” (or “mesmerism”), a notorious and controversial medical therapy. First introduced by the physician Franz Anton Mesmer in Vienna in the 1770s, animal magnetism was said to be an imperceptible, magnet-like fluid that circulates within the human body. Mesmer claimed that all illnesses result from disequilibria in its flow and proposed to cure them by restoring the fluid’s normal distribution within the body. Unable to gain professional acceptance in Vienna, Mesmer moved to Paris where his magnetic therapies were embraced by many in France’s haute monde. Yet despite its popularity among high-ranking members of the French court, official approval from the country’s scientific institutions eluded him. The controversy reached a fever pitch in 1784, when King Louis XVI called for an inquiry led by the American polymath and statesman Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s royal commission denied the existence of animal magnetism and thus publicly repudiated Mesmer’s claims. One of the difficulties encountered by Franklin’s commission – and one of the reasons that some, like de Loutherbourg, continued to practice mesmerism afterward – vexed numerous empirical inquiries: the problem 1

2

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

of how to conclusively determine the existence of something that lay beyond man’s powers of perception. Given that Enlightenment conceptions of science prized knowledge grounded in direct observation, how could one contend with phenomena that could not be directly observed?1 How could one debate assertions that some did perceive a phenomenon which others did not? These questions give us a clue as to why animal magnetism remained a subject of public fascination even after it had been discredited by Franklin, for it claimed to possess considerable power over the human body through means that could not be directly apprehended. De Loutherbourg’s clinic was short-lived. Initially the response was so overwhelming that entry tickets were sold on the black market. Within weeks the tide had turned and a throng of people converged on the artist’s Hammersmith home, inflicting significant damage on the property. The artist, devoid of other means, returned to his artworks. Critics, no doubt with an eye to gossip and controversy, seized many opportunities to draw connections between the two activities. When London newspapers reported that de Loutherbourg had resumed painting they wrote that, “Loutherbourg . . . is again turning his MAGNETISM where it ought to be, to the PENCIL.”2 In the mid-1790s a widely read paper like The Public Advertiser could still announce that, “Loutherbourg ceases magnetising his patients, but in some new landscapes will soon magnetise the public by the charms of his colours.”3 Tongue-in-cheek as such comments may be, they suggest something quite specific about how art, science, and early Romanticism can be thought together at this moment.4 They begin to illuminate how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science together contested the evidentiary authority of the human body at the turn of the nineteenth century. That critics drew analogies between artistic production and a practice on the edges of science is hardly surprising in general terms. From the inclusion of anatomy and optics in artistic training to experiments with the materials of their craft, engagements with science have increasingly been understood to determine key aspects of the work of artists of the time. For example, the Royal Academy’s esteemed president Sir Joshua Reynolds created volatile pigments that were regarded as a form of experimental chemistry by his contemporaries.5 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many artists were reading about, discussing, observing, and in some cases practicing a range of scientific subjects – from anatomy, chemistry, and meteorology to pneumatics, electricity, botany, and geology; and while their most literate viewers often studied these subjects as a form of recreation, people outside of elite realms were

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

3

frequenting “spectacular” demonstrations, lectures, and exhibitions deriving from the same.6 Yet de Loutherbourg’s example suggests something further and far more particular than this: note the “popular” nature of the clinic, its status as a practice that demanded continued engagement with some of the most prominent scientists even as they tried to disprove it, and the way that analogies between artistic and mesmeric power could so easily (perhaps casually, but perhaps not) be drawn. As an artist and mesmerist, de Loutherbourg is the earliest – and certainly the most outlandish – example discussed in this book of a figure who engaged not just with the popular display and consumption of science but also with doubts about the evidence that our own bodies might provide about the world. Idiosyncratic as it may seem, his story opens onto some of the most pressing and pervasive intellectual debates of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Europe. Such debates concerned the vulnerabilities of the human body, the possibilities and limitations of empiricism, and the lack of a fixed consensus as to what is scientifically “true” and how that truth can be authenticated. The historian of science Simon Schaffer has aptly termed this phenomenon a “crisis of facts,” a major epistemological transformation at the turn of the nineteenth century that involved the decline of an empirical framework that privileged the human body as the ultimate source of evidentiary knowledge.7 This was a crisis, we will see, that was in no way limited to Europe’s scientific academies and lecture halls. It is from this perspective that we can reexamine the work of de Loutherbourg alongside that of Henry Fuseli, the Anglo-Swiss master of gothic sensationalism, and Anne-Louis Girodet, France’s preeminent postrevolutionary painter – artists who are rarely discussed together and who are often taken as outliers rather than exemplars of their given artistic contexts.8 I bring these artists together not to reveal their underlying commonalities but rather because each explicitly engaged with a cluster of scientific activities that had a significant presence in the broader cultural landscape of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe within which the evidentiary authority of the human body was called into question.9 This direct engagement makes their work especially fertile for analysis, though it does not mean they are the only artists whose work could have participated in the larger history under consideration. However, they do share several important points in common. Each artist, for example, enjoyed significant professional success but had far from straightforward relationships with their respective art academies. Such relationships, in each case, were complicated by the various ways their

4

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

work diverged from some of the neoclassical conventions enshrined within the academic system. Their paintings, more generally, were often extremely popular among viewers but were still regarded by many as bizarre or strange and have been difficult to situate within metanarratives about the period. Clearly there were certain features of their work that contemporaries found to be quite gripping, but it is also apparent that viewers struggled to make sense of them – a kind of confusion that can itself be revealing. One particular advantage of bringing them together is that all three men were embedded in multinational European networks of exchange; through them we can see how British visual culture was intimately bound up with concurrent developments in France, Switzerland, and Italy. Looking at Girodet, Fuseli, and de Loutherbourg together, in short, suggests productive ways to think about art of this moment outside of established modes. It may even be that their singularity facilitated rather than hindered their production of artworks that reflect critically on the epistemological structures within which they were embedded.10 Something similar can be said of the sciences with which they engaged – animal magnetism, physiognomy, and electricity – which often teetered on the edge of credibility and in certain cases fell squarely on the wrong side of it. Some might object to classifying animal magnetism or physiognomy as a “science,” for instance, but it is precisely that historical ambiguity which is important for this book, for it situates them at the heart of contemporaneous debates about what counts as legitimate or illegitimate scientific practice and, by extension, knowledge production.11 Moreover, many of the activities I examine straddled the boundaries of earnest academic study and pure recreation, boundaries that were not yet fully established or enforced. In order to recover them, I deliberately draw on a heterogeneous body of historical, literary, and artistic materials that vary greatly in their aims, their medium, and their audience. One of the centripetal terms under which these diverse activities can be said to align is that of emergent European Romanticism. In literary studies especially, there has already been significant work done on the relationship between Romanticism and the sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as literary studies has increasingly broadened its account of Romanticism to be more closely attuned to the visual.12 Nonetheless, art historical “Romanticism” remains a thorny concept, one that is often regarded with unease: first of all, numerous aspects of eighteenth-century artistic neoclassicism were dominant well into the nineteenth century; and second, Romantic art lacks a cohesive set of

Academic Bodies

5

distinctive stylistic features.13 Consequently, in recent decades art historians have focused less on Romanticism as a style or movement and instead considered how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists responded to an emergent consumer culture, the rise of public exhibitions, modern forms of spectatorship and visual entertainment, and various political transformations.14 Through their crucial research, a much more dynamic account of the cultural context of early pictorial Romanticism – a term to which I will return – has come into view. Inseparable from this larger story is the decline of a specific strain of Enlightenment knowledge-making procedures that had undergirded a wide range of eighteenth-century observational practices. In examining the role of artworks within such a transformation, Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism presents a less familiar account of what was “at stake” in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art, enabling us to see works by Fuseli, Girodet, and de Loutherbourg as active participants in a crisis over the evidentiary status of human experience itself. Doing so introduces a new set of questions around which to orient our understanding of a period often associated with the origins of modern visual culture. What kinds of truths does direct observation give us access to? Can we ever really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? Does our individual experience map onto collectively accessible realities? What do we do when our physical experience stands at odds with scientific knowledge? In order to consider how artworks might actually contend with these questions, it is necessary first to sketch out a few of the broader developments underway in scientific and artistic practices.

Academic Bodies One of the most significant changes afoot in the production and display of Western European art in the final decades of the eighteenth century and the opening of the nineteenth century was the proliferation of new kinds of public art exhibitions and the concomitant rise of a rapidly modernizing market for contemporary art. In addition to annual exhibitions sponsored by royal academies, for-profit urban galleries commissioned and displayed contemporary paintings to paying audiences, amateur art societies organized their own group exhibitions, and fine-art prints were available for purchase in unprecedented volumes. Especially in Great Britain (among the countries discussed in this book), artists were able to respond to public interest and demand within this marketplace and were often compelled to for financial reasons.15 Fuseli and de Loutherbourg proved particularly

6

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

savvy in the London context, taking on profitable commissions, actively soliciting public interest and even scandal, and also sponsoring their own business ventures that presented visual spectacles directly to fee-paying audiences. Born into affluence, Girodet confronted a slightly different situation. He enjoyed a greater degree of financial independence and worked within the relatively centralized French system, in which the market for purchasing and commissioning art remained dominated by clerical and aristocratic patrons for most of the eighteenth century.16 Although it wasn’t until near the end of Girodet’s career that a truly modern bourgeois-driven art market would coalesce, the artist was nonetheless obligated to cultivate patrons, appeal to critics, embark on publishing ventures, and court a degree of sensationalism to draw in viewers.17 In short, artists were well aware of the ascendant economic power wielded by an expanding and increasingly heterogeneous audience for contemporary art. This audience constituted more than simply a marketplace. As Thomas Crow and David Solkin have argued, something that might be called an exhibition-going “public” was itself being called into formation in the final decades of the eighteenth century.18 (Though rather than an undifferentiated, monolithic “public,” we should think of this development in terms of plural and overlapping publics.) Growing public access to and engagement with contemporary art was accompanied by the waning cultural authority of a model of neoclassicism that had dominated academic discourse for much of the eighteenth century, and with it a specific vision of the moral function of history painting. Of course, “neoclassicism” (much like the term which with it is often coupled, “Enlightenment”) has inexact conceptual and temporal borders.19 In its broadest sense, however, eighteenth-century neoclassicism centers on a renewed interest in the art of Greco-Roman antiquity. In Britain, academicians like Reynolds called for art to convey timeless moral and intellectual ideals through an appeal to general, universal forms. Although his adherence to neoclassical principles was hardly as strict as it is sometimes assumed, Reynolds did advocate for a stylistic emphasis on balance, clarity, restraint, and disegno – features that were intimately bound up with classicism.20 These qualities, coupled with pictorial motifs and narrative content drawn from the Greco-Roman tradition, were widely taken to be synonymous with the highest form of artistic creation within the European academic system. Such features are similarly apparent in the late eighteenth-century paintings of Jacques-Louis David, the artist with whom French neoclassicism is often associated.21 However, the art historians John Barrell and Alex Potts, among others, would caution us against

Academic Bodies

7

treating eighteenth-century neoclassicism as a mere pictorial style.22 For Reynolds, David, and many of their contemporaries, references to GrecoRoman antiquity were the vehicle of a much deeper ideological aim: to create art capable of presenting a viewing “public” (even a narrowly conceived one) with a model of civic, humanistic virtues. All three artists I examine were, like their peers, profoundly influenced by academic neoclassicism. This was especially apparent in their portrayal of the white male body, which was a significant compositional element in works by Fuseli and Girodet. After all, one of the most important expressive vehicles for eighteenth-century academic ideals was the heroic nude. In his seminal treatise Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (1755), the German historian and archeologist Johann Winckelmann praised the ancient Greeks for combining ideal beauty with natural forms, exemplified in representations of the athletic nude body.23 (Fuseli later translated Winckelmann’s Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J.J. Rousseau into English in 1767.) According to Winckelmann, the idealized Greek male nude belonged to a bygone historical era in which the natural order and social order were in perfect accord – hence the body’s ability to express ethical and political virtues in ancient art. A corresponding emphasis on the idealized male body in eighteenth-century academic painting was therefore essential to reviving the civic and cultural achievements of Greco-Roman antiquity. The neoclassical male nude thus became a major conceptual and aesthetic forum in which philosophical principles, social hierarchies, political ideals, and religious precepts were both affirmed and contested. The consummate importance of the idealized white male nude was reflected by its prominent place in the training regimen offered at Europe’s royal art academies. After studying engravings and then sculptures of the great nudes of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, students would eventually be allowed to study “from life,” to sketch from a live model. One of the highly regarded ways to demonstrate artistic mastery was to complete a finely rendered study of a male nude, a practice so closely aligned with academic values that it was actually called “an académie” (Figure 0.1). Yet within a Winckelmannian framework, Potts has reminded us, the political and subjective freedom that the male nude embodied sat uncomfortably with its patent eroticism and sensual appeal.24 His mideighteenth-century text reflected the male body’s bifunctionality as both an object of aesthetic pleasure and a figuration of an ideal subject. Consequently, scholarship has placed overwhelming emphasis on the political and psychosexual aspects of the idealized male nude in this period,

8

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

Figure 0.1 François Boucher, Academic Study of a Reclining Male Nude, 1745–1755, chalk on laid paper. The Art Institute of Chicago.

with particular interest in the complex gendered and libidinal economies at play therein. The classical body had long been a plural entity;25 but around the turn of the nineteenth century – at the very moment that public engagement with contemporary art was experiencing unprecedented growth – new and concentrated pressures were exerted on artistic representations of the human body as well as the principles undergirding its role within academic discourse. Male nudes were increasingly characterized by their passivity, their carnal sensuality, their exaggerated features, and their role as victims of aesthetic and narrative violence. Fuseli and Girodet, for example, famously distorted some of the very elements that made the idealized male body so heroic: although they cited neoclassical conventions, their nudes were often contorted or defeated. Even de Loutherbourg, who primarily painted landscapes and battle scenes, produced a small number of works featuring monumental nudes that deviated from academic precepts. I should stress that they were hardly alone in doing so. In the British

Academic Bodies

9

context, William Blake, Thomas Banks, and Benjamin West were among a number of artists who, in the final decades of the century, were portraying the male body in unusual, exaggerated ways. Likewise, in France, Girodet was not unique; Antoine-Jean Gros, François Gérard, and later JeanAuguste-Dominique Ingres were a few of the many artists whose rendition of the heroic male nude was characterized by various forms of distortion. In the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, “the beautiful male body ceded its dominant position in elite visual culture” – a development described by Abigail Solomon-Godeau as a “crisis in representation.”26 The deteriorating cultural authority and semiotic stability of the idealized male nude is often attributed to broader sociopolitical realignments. Particularly in the context of the French Revolution, both large-scale history painting and a vibrant print culture became increasingly active in visualizing and mediating various forms of political self-understanding.27 As the utopian aspirations of the Revolution waxed and waned, the political, iconographic, and psychosexual valences of the heroic, idealized male body are thus said to have undergone a dramatic transformation.28 For Solomon-Godeau, this served an emergent bourgeois public sphere predicated on the exclusion of women. Crow offers a different explanation: that it reflected the lack of a stable revolutionary model of heroic action and a larger crisis of male sociability.29 In the British context, Myrone points to the destabilization of a British concept of masculinity formerly predicted on political and military heroism.30 Generally speaking, the trials endured by the idealized male nude are taken to be symptomatic of the political and psychic transformations of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Europe. Art historians such as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Darcy Grigsby, and Satish Padiyar have shown how the painted body acted as a privileged site for the inscription of colonial anxiety, psychosexual identity, revolutionary trauma, political contestation, subjectivity, and desire.31 The gradual decline of eighteenth-century academic neoclassicism and the putative ascendance of Romanticism have often been expressed through a series of oppositions: reason versus imagination, didacticism versus entertainment, imitation versus expression, tradition versus originality, clarity versus ambiguity, and universalism versus individualism. Yet it should now be clear that we are dealing with a much more complex and multilayered set of developments that lack fixed and determinate boundaries. If the heroic, idealized male nude had once been a fraught but highly articulate representational vehicle, the erosion of its ability to function as such around the turn of the nineteenth century did not coincide with its disappearance from academic painting or popular forms of visual culture.32

10

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

Nor would it be difficult to identify neoclassical features in the art of de Loutherbourg, Fuseli, and Girodet. Yet their paintings also abound with traits that have since been attributed to early Romanticism: perceptual obscurities, strange luminous effects, dramatic contrasts, contorted bodies, raging natural forces, extreme affective states, and various stripes of pictorial and narrative ambiguity. Looking at the works of these artists and many of their contemporaries, we can see that major elements of eighteenthcentury neoclassicism were no longer in operation – particularly if we take the term “neoclassicism” to refer to a constellation of ideas about art’s ability to address a public by appealing to a relatively stable conception of the world that is perceptible and knowable to the human subject – ideas that, I would venture, were very much bound up in a specific model of empiricism. From this vantage point, painterly “Romanticism” looks somewhat different as well. Rather than dwell on its stylistic markers (or lack thereof), I follow recent scholarship beyond art history in taking Romanticism to express a fundamental realignment in the relationship between representation, sensory experience, and a stable, externally verifiable reality.33 The insights of literary historians Gillen D’Arcy Wood and Peter Otto are especially productive in this respect.34 Wood argues that popular forms of modern visual culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were characterized by increasingly spectacular and illusionistic “reality effects,” against which elite forms of literary Romanticism set themselves.35 Even more relevant to the present study is Otto’s work on the aesthetic “worlds” of Romanticism. Despite my reservations about Otto’s provocatively anachronistic use of the term “virtual reality” to describe this state of affairs, he supplies a valuable insight, namely that experience itself was being reevaluated in a number of different cultural spheres.36 As the historian Joan Scott writes, “what counts as experience is neither selfevident nor straightforward; it is always contested and therefore always political.”37 Romanticism grappled with a pervasive anxiety about the impossibility of unmediated access to external reality, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ease with which physical and psychic experience can be artificially manipulated.38 Otto’s prompt to think about this development in relation to the category of experience more expansively enables us to consider how concerns within artistic production might have overlapped with those in other spheres of cultural activity and, specifically, within the sciences.

Science, Spectacle, and Self-Evidence

11

Science, Spectacle, and Self-Evidence Two aspects of scientific discourse at the end of Enlightenment are particularly relevant for our consideration: its engagement with the body and its significant role in “public culture.”39 The “popular” status of the sciences included both the growing presence of science in the cultural life of Western Europe – its dissemination through public lectures, the proliferation of scientific texts directed to a general readership, and its incorporation into forms of popular entertainment – and its ascendance as an ideological force.40 Newtonian philosophy, for example, was widely discussed in London’s coffee houses and debating societies, which hosted regular scientific lectures.41 It was also a major topic of conversation among aristocratic circles, thriving in the fashionable salons of eighteenth-century Paris.42 Nor was this limited to London and Paris; science was both a popular commodity and an integral part of public knowledge in places like St Petersburg, Leiden, and Berlin. My use of the term “science,” though, is deliberately capacious: in the eighteenth century, these activities largely fell under the designations of “natural history” and “natural philosophy.”43 “Science” then denoted the general theoretical and academic pursuit of knowledge rather than the empirical study of natural phenomena.44 (The English term “scientist” did not appear until 1834, when it was coined by the Cambridge scholar William Whewell.) Using the term “science” in a contemporary sense allows me to draw together a set of practices that, although varied, were indeed historically contiguous; these were practices, moreover, that shared certain conceptual underpinnings and outward characteristics. One of the crucial features of popular eighteenth-century science was that it was often presented and understood as a spectacle.45 Scientific principles were routinely exhibited in front of an audience rather than merely described. This ranged from grand demonstrations – such as the debut flight over Paris of the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloon in 1783 – to intimate lectures on the air pump and the orrery, like those painted by Joseph Wright of Derby. In both public and private settings, scientific phenomena were presented through coordinated and visually impressive performances that were at times explicitly theatrical. Magnetism, electricity, and chemistry were particularly well suited to this format because their experiments produced dramatic and sensational results – a bright spark, a sudden poof of smoke, a twitching limb. This format had the practical advantage of soliciting and preserving the attention of the audience, but it simultaneously underscored a broader emphasis

12

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

Figure 0.2 Reinier Vinkeles, The Felix Meritis Society: The Physics Hall, 1801, etching and engraving. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

on the importance of directly observing phenomena in order to fully comprehend them (Figure 0.2). The demonstration-lecture, a combination of oral exposition and live demonstration, “became,” in the words of Geoffrey Sutton, “the primary locus for the exposition of the truth of science and by extension for the demonstration of Enlightenment.”46 But not all demonstrations took “the exposition of the truth of science,” as their objective; science was often incorporated into fantastical attractions that aimed to trick as much as to instruct. It is important to stress, here, the heterogeneity and plurality of scientific cultures of the eighteenth century and above all the lack of fixed distinctions between entertainment and instruction.47 Likewise, distinctions between amateur and professional and between the academy and the marketplace were not always clear. Scientific principles were presented and debated in numerous settings and contexts, from provincial town halls to metropolitan lecture theaters, raucous fairgrounds to elegant royal courts, and public coffee houses to private salons. This multiplicity of venues and subjects meant that scientific demonstrations often crossed paths with nonscientific forms of display, including theatrical attractions, luminous spectacles, and for-profit art exhibitions –

Science, Spectacle, and Self-Evidence

13

their cross-pollination was manifested in, among other things, hybridized forms of display (in the case of de Loutherbourg, “technology-driven spectacle”),48 shared or adjacent venues, and significantly overlapping audiences. Underlying a vast network of popular scientific activity was a prevailing commitment to the principles of Enlightenment empiricism. By this, I do not refer to British empiricism in the narrow sense, although the philosophical tradition of John Locke, Francis Bacon, and David Hume was essential to its development. Nor do I subscribe to the extremely general view exemplified by M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), in which he famously defined the rise of Romanticism as the rejection of what he called an “empirical” concept of art that aspires to “reflect” the external world. (Indeed, many have successfully challenged the idea that empiricism, generally speaking, ended with Romanticism.)49 Primarily I am concerned with empiricism as a framework that informed a diverse array of scientific practices rather than with the rhetorical or theoretical elaboration of empiricism within philosophical texts. It must also be acknowledged that empiricist rhetoric was never exclusively philosophical and scientific – it had broader moral, social, and political valences.50 It would be misleading to imply that there was such a thing as a homogeneous, “naïve” form of empiricism that defined scientific orthodoxy. Yet it remains possible to identify certain tenets as part of a more or less pervasive and more or less functional eighteenth-century paradigm, grounded in the overarching belief that the natural world is populated with information and that man’s perceptual and cognitive powers have extensive access to that information. Nullius in verba, reads the motto of the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660: “on the word of no one” (colloquially, “take nobody’s word for it”). The motto reflected a broadly held emphasis on direct observation and experimentation over received authority. This framework situated sensible experience at the heart of experimental practices and, by extension, scientific knowledge. Chemicals and minerals often came into intimate bodily contact with those who studied them by assessing their taste, smell, texture, and appearance.51 Likewise, an appeal was made to the authority of nature as the ultimate source of knowledge. How, then, could one translate man’s individual observations into universal truths?52 While the practical procedures for organizing sense-data varied, the data itself could be verified by the act of collective observation. To have others “witness” a phenomenon or an experiment was key to affirming it. The act of collective witnessing served

14

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

as a critical “social technology,” Steven Shapin has argued, to authenticate the truth-claims of experimental practice.53 Although we tend to emphasize the importance of rational cognition to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of knowledge, historians of science have demonstrated that bodily forms of cognition were, in fact, essential to empirical procedures of knowledge production. Yet the body could only serve as a privileged instrument of scientific inquiry if one believed that its sensory apparatus was highly accurate.54 Embedded in eighteenth-century theories of empiricism is the assumption that the body is fortuitously endowed with senses that function in mechanistic, reliable, causal ways.55 Three suppositions are especially important to note: (1) that the sensible features of the natural world correspond to the underlying truths of the natural world (i.e., that the way it “appears,” when observed properly, is the way it “really is”); (2) that man’s perceptual faculties have comprehensive access to those sensible features; and (3) that man’s cognitive powers are capable of accurately interpreting the sense-data produced by direct observation. Such a configuration explicitly and implicitly relied on the human body as the primary instrument with which to gather information about the natural world.56 This is not to say that the body sat entirely comfortably within empiricist schemes of knowledge; its limitations had to be carefully managed.57 On a very basic level, even the use of instruments such as the telescope presupposed that man’s intrinsic powers of sight needed augmenting. For the historian Pamela Smith, concerns about “the bodily dimension of empiricism” coincided with efforts by a new generation of natural philosophers to distance themselves from the early modern artisans and practitioners who had first asserted “that knowledge was gained through bodily engagement with nature.”58 In the eighteenth century, a number of procedures shored up the evidentiary reliability of sensory experience. For example, scientists were often trained to carefully manage and refine their bodies as perceptual instruments in order to discern subtle experimental variations. There were also social hierarchies according to which the body of the scientist was granted exceptional authority. Gender, class, race, nationality, and institutional affiliation authorized the body of the scientist to speak in ways that other bodies could not, resulting in what Schaffer has called a “cartesianism of the genteel,” in which white male members of polite society were deemed capable of parsing the disorderly fallibilities of the flesh from legitimate sensible observations.59 By the late eighteenth century, though, a number of controversies concerning popular sciences attested to how tenuous existing norms of

Science, Spectacle, and Self-Evidence

15

knowledge production had become. They indicated a growing lack of consensus as to how knowledge ought to be produced and authenticated. Many historians see this as part of a larger contest for political and moral authority in the years around the French Revolution.60 It was equally the result of a conflict within the divergent social imperatives of Enlightenment science: its drive toward inclusivity, accessibility, and universality, on the one hand, and the exclusivity that accompanied forms of expertise and institutional credibility, on the other.61 By the early nineteenth century, several important changes were already coming into effect. Although science remained a popular commodity in the general sense, its lay audience was not as actively solicited to produce or authenticate truth-claims.62 Scientific research was being divided into specialized disciplines and its practitioners were organized into formal social and institutional structures.63 This period saw an ascendant preference for quantitative over qualitative data, the proliferation of new technologies with which to conduct experiments and measure their outcomes, a growing distinction between “abstract” and “applied” studies, and the consolidation of practitioners into hierarchical organizations that enforced new metrics of professional qualification. In the progressively codified scientific activities of the early nineteenth century, the evidentiary authority of the body had limited purchase. Scientists “erased” – to borrow Lissa Roberts’s word – direct bodily observation from their discipline’s technologies. As “unmediated sense evidence played less and less of a public role in the scientific determination of knowledge,” Roberts writes, practitioners “subordinated their bodies to the material technology of their laboratories.”64 This shift was writ large across the experimental sciences, in which new technologies mediated the scientist’s physical presence in the laboratory. An increasingly sophisticated set of instruments appropriated the authority of direct sensory observation and required increasingly specialized practitioners to operate. Although my emphasis in this book falls on the shifting epistemological authority of the human body, it is critical to recognize that this development coincided with the emergence of a nineteenth-century scientific paradigm Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call “objectivity.” Their argument, which chiefly concerns the representational structures of scientific imagery, also delineates the emergence of a model of “scientific selfhood” that recognized itself as an impediment to rather than a vessel for knowledge. The individual was compelled to practice, Daston and Galison write, “self-discipline, self-restraint, self-abnegation, self-annihilation, and a multitude of other techniques of self-imposed selflessness.”65 Concurrently, embodied sensory

16

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

experience itself was progressively subjected to new forms of scientific analysis, marked in particular by the rise of physiology.66 In short, the scientific authority of the human body was undergoing intense scrutiny around the turn of the nineteenth century and novel techniques were emerging that significantly redefined its role in experimental procedures. At the same time, the spectacular ways in which scientific information was presented to the public were coming into conflict with an increasingly circumscribed definition of professional expertise and, even more importantly, were producing physical and psychic experiences in their viewers that seemed to call into question the sensory reliability of the body. All of this begins to indicate some ways we might see scientific and artistic transformations as interlocking rather than parallel and to identify points of contact between what Solomon-Godeau has called a “crisis in representation” and what Schaffer has called “the crisis of authority over the experimental body.”67 We might recognize that the decline of the neoclassical heroic male nude was part of a broader set of cultural practices that were questioning the evidentiary authority of the body. We might see romantic tropes of pictorial and narrative ambiguity operating in dialogue with contemporaneous scientific debates about the perceptual and cognitive legibility of the natural world. We might notice ways that people were called upon to be witnesses or spectators at scientific demonstrations and public art exhibitions, with related kinds of truthclaims attached to these experiences.68 We might note, moreover, the routine hybridization of those two modes of exhibition. Of course, this book is constrained by the fact that to speak of “the body” according to the terms of late eighteenth-century European scientific knowledge production is to speak of an extremely specific kind of body. The overwhelming assumption is that it is white, male, and governed by codes of gentility.69 Female bodies, nonwhite bodies, and laboring bodies were described in terms of their deviations from this ideal form. They were explicitly and implicitly treated as fundamentally nonnormative in mainstream scientific accounts from the period. While emergent ideas about the relationship between racial difference, comparative anatomy, and anthropology were very much in circulation, the dominant popular scientific and artistic discourses I explore in this book take as given that bodies capable of communicating universal truths belonged primarily to white European men. Enlightenment claims to universality were themselves an integral part of Europe’s imperial project, and there can be little doubt about what was to be gained by positing a white male body as representative of the universal category of personhood.

Artful Bodies, Ignorant Flesh

17

The exclusion of Black bodies in particular from this category operated in tandem with other ideologies that justified enslavement. This was a knowledge system predicated on the denigration and in some cases the outright denial of personhood for subjects inhabiting bodies that did not meet its extremely narrow parameters, a system that coincided with and abetted Europe’s profound reliance upon wealth generated by the exploitation and enslavement of those bodies.70 The authority to actively generate universal truths, tenuous as it may have been, was a privilege available to only the most elite kinds of bodies. In the nascent field of racial anthropology, for example, the Black body was figured as an object of knowledge rather than an agent who produces knowledge.71 I would venture that one of the many pressures visited upon eighteenth-century empiricism was the growing visibility of spheres of cultural activity that did not exclusively comprise genteel white men.72 Nor should it be taken as coincidental that the neoclassical male nude was in crisis at the very moment that figures like Mary Wollstonecraft, the Marquis de Sade, and William Wilberforce were articulating alternative psychosexual and sociopolitical configurations that might accommodate and accord forms of visibility to bodies that had been treated as nonnormative. New histories have begun to recenter those bodies, led by the scholarship of Anne Lafont and others.73 Throughout this book, I will speak of “the body” in a general sense, when in fact I am only referring to a very circumscribed kind of white male body. While using such language we should bear in mind that the universalizing aspirations of European Enlightenment science were born of exclusion and omission.

Artful Bodies, Ignorant Flesh The larger histories I have now sketched out illuminate some important points of conceptual overlap between artistic and scientific practices, but there are more specific things to say about how and why we might use them to talk about the art of Fuseli, Girodet, and de Loutherbourg. It is now relatively uncontroversial to claim that artistic and scientific practices have historically influenced one another. In recent years, historians have been increasingly interested in the relationship between art and knowledge and particularly with how images mediate and construct thought itself. This has been characterized by a dual emphasis on how knowledge is visually represented and on how the embodied making of images produces knowledge.74 Such inquiries have often focused on “epistemic” or “technical” images – that is, images whose primary function is to produce or

18

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

convey information.75 My analysis, however, looks to visual materials that are neither strictly “epistemic images” nor made by those we might recognize as scientific practitioners.76 It presupposes that works of art do not need to explicitly represent scientific information in order to engage with the structures that regulate how information is produced in a given historical context.77 In the most general terms, I take my cue from historical documents indicating that artists or their contemporaries recognized that specific artworks were in dialogue with forms of popular science, a task facilitated by my focus on a period in which the boundaries between artistic and scientific domains were mutable and porous.78 With such documents in mind, I pay close attention to and accord significant weight to historical accounts of how the works were produced and received as well as – crucially – the formal properties of those artworks, not merely insofar as these indicate how works resonated with certain scientific theories but also in their metaphorical engagement with some of those theories’ underlying concepts and structures. The status of scientific evidence was neither fixed nor monolithic in the period under consideration, and my own use of evidence reflects this variability. Across the chapters, the reader will encounter strikingly dissimilar scientific practices (some of which were deemed far more credible than others) alongside different modes of artistic engagement with those practices (some quite explicit and others more thematic). For example, de Loutherbourg’s brush with animal magnetism was significantly shaped by Mesmer’s inability to prove a direct causality between his therapy and its intended results; I take this very issue – the problem of causality – to be an important, historically specific way of approaching de Loutherbourg’s art. Fuseli, on the other hand, was embedded in scientific debates about the correspondence between the surface of the body and its underlying truths. So I search out various kinds of fractures, in his art, between appearance and reality, addressing artworks explicitly engaged in those debates as well as artworks whose relationship to them is relatively attenuated. Girodet’s study of electricity (one of the most “legitimate” sciences under consideration, for a contemporary reader) confronted a specific set of concerns about bodily experience and rational cognition. Consequently, I place great emphasis on the vocabulary both he and his viewers used to describe their physical experience of looking at art. All of this is to say that my own use of historical evidence reflects and responds to the different kinds of material each chapter explores. Only occasionally do I propose that an artist knowingly invoked or sought to illustrate a specific scientific theory in his work. This is in part

Artful Bodies, Ignorant Flesh

19

because my analysis tends to focus on how artworks grappled with concepts that were as relevant to artistic practices as they were to scientific discourses – ideas about “illusion” and “reality,” about “seeing” and “knowing.” While I focus on historical figures who possess unusually distinct and legible links with popular sciences, my approach presupposes that such ideas can inform and surface within a broad range of cultural activities without making their presence explicit.79 We might consider whether artistic production during this period was itself a kind of “laboratory” for exploring the relationship between perception, appearance, and cognition. Above all, I am interested in treating artworks as entities capable of staging epistemological claims in their own right, which may be in dialogue with scientific discourses but are never dependent upon or reducible to that relationship. In doing so, we can arrive at both a new understanding of what was at stake in these artworks and a new model for the kinds of questions that we as historians can ask about them.

*

The first three chapters of this book each pair an artist with a scientific discourse: de Loutherbourg and animal magnetism, Fuseli and physiognomy, and Girodet and electricity. In each case, I first address what kinds of challenges and provocations these artists have posed historically. In order to flesh out the epistemological stakes of their work, I explore the artist’s personal and artistic engagement with a given science in addition to its larger cultural footprint. I consider what kind of scientific knowledge was said to be produced, paying close attention to both the practical techniques and the conceptual precepts on which its truth-claims were based. With this in mind, it becomes possible to think more critically about how artworks interrogated some of the visual and structural features of those scientific discourses and, ultimately, the empirical framework that undergirded them. Although they are placed in very rough chronological order, I should stress that the chapters do not reflect a single, continuous development. Instead, each explores a set of tendencies we can identify across the period under consideration, which centers on the years 1780 to 1820. The first chapter situates de Loutherbourg’s work in relation to animal magnetism. This chapter reveals how de Loutherbourg’s art dramatized the exact structural characteristics of animal magnetism that made it both enormously popular and widely discredited – namely, its twin claims to possess significant control over the body and to lie beyond the reach of conventional scientific forms of apprehension or measurement. Revisiting

20

Introduction: Bodies of Knowledge

several of his major British and Swiss paintings, I argue that they cultivated effects of profound perceptual ambiguity, and in doing so illuminated the epistemological fault lines along which animal magnetism was positioned. When London critics subsequently described his paintings as “magnetic,” they, in turn, drew on that science to articulate – even to conceptualize – their experience of looking at art. The second chapter revisits the work of Henry Fuseli, an artist whose notoriously exaggerated and distorted representations of the male nude have been memorably described as “impossible bodies, corporeal conundrums.”80 Yet Fuseli was invested, intellectually and artistically, in the legibility of the body. For more than two decades, the Swiss-born, London-based artist collaborated with his childhood friend Johann Lavater on a multivolume treatise on physiognomy, the study of the face to determine man’s inner traits. As part of his effort to transform physiognomy into a modern science, Lavater placed great emphasis on the physical correspondence between the external appearance of the body and its internal, imperceptible truths. However, despite referring to physiognomy as “the mother of correctness,” Fuseli often represented bodies that could not be read according to the criteria of Lavater’s system.81 In doing so, I argue, the artist called into question not just physiognomy but the underlying claims on which it was based, evoking a world in which “appearance” and “truth” fail to correspond. Chapter 3 shifts from Britain and Switzerland to France, where electric demonstrations and experimental physics courses had become extremely popular in the 1780s. The artist Girodet, who attended one such course, referenced the visual and structural features of eighteenth-century electricity in both his written and his painted work. Specifically, he was drawn to its treatment of the human body, which was said to be a porous and penetrable entity capable of receiving and transmitting this powerful, immaterial force. Yet Girodet’s paintings featured dissolving bodies, strange atmospheric effects, and highly unorthodox forms of illumination that were incompatible with the empirical procedures that were central to the study of electricity: Girodet’s porous bodies tended to be “shocked” rather than “enlightened.” Reflecting on the revolutionary implications of a porous conception of selfhood, Girodet’s paintings thus interrogated the epistemological and political viability of an electrified body. The fourth, concluding chapter marshals the work of all three artists to address the physical and metaphorical disintegration of the human body on the scaffold of the French Revolution. I examine an international controversy ignited by the guillotine that revolved around the relationship

Artful Bodies, Ignorant Flesh

21

between cognition and sensation, the evidentiary authority of bodily experience, and the limitations of human perception. From this perspective, the work of all three artists point to the radical remapping of an Enlightenment empirical framework that used the human body as a privileged site of evidentiary knowledge. The controversies that circulated around the guillotine heralded, instead, a world in which “appearance” and “truth,” “seeing” and “knowing,” were radically decoupled – a world in which scientists began removing direct sensory observation from their experimental procedures and technologies. I contend that this shift had significant implications for the epistemological status of experience, more broadly. It was critical to the formation of modern spectatorship, in which audience members were interpolated as passive observers rather than active witnesses. The result is an alternative history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European visual culture that responded to and actively helped shape a post-Enlightenment way of understanding the relationship between experience, knowledge, and the body. It navigates a cultural landscape profoundly shaped by the collapse of certain eighteenth-century modes of knowledge production; and although the analysis is deeply rooted in the turn of the nineteenth century, the consequences of the larger history told here may have a renewed sense of urgency in the present day – for example, a fracturing of consensus about what is true, how truth is authenticated, and whether truth should or can align with our direct experience of the world.82 The relationship between knowledge and the body is one that is constantly reconfigured, a conceptual arena within which political selfunderstandings, modes of spectatorship, and the evidentiary status of experience itself have been historically transformed. It is a relationship to which we must also look whenever we wish to forge them anew.

chapter 1

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

In 1790, the Alsatian-born, London-based artist Philippe de Loutherbourg painted A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard (Figure 1.1). In it, a man stands before an emptied grave in the ruins of an old church. His left hand gestures down toward the open earth, but his eyes are transfixed by a painting of Christ – a fresco, perhaps. On the ground, in the form of a stone relief on the discarded lid of a tomb, another man’s supine body is sketchily rendered in worn contours of inky brown. Fabric gathers around the protagonist’s prominent front leg, swooping up from his foot toward a book at his torso and forming a darkened line that draws the eye up to the top of the arch on the left. There, a figure of Christ triumphant is outlined in diluted streaks of umber, completing the triangular arrangement. His flesh, barely distinguishable in tone from the background, is almost transparent. Our philosopher finds himself betwixt and between two corporeal modalities: below him lies the opacity and obdurate physicality of matter; above him, the vitreous immateriality of spirit. In the year leading up to the production of this work, London had been abuzz with the news of de Loutherbourg’s brief sabbatical from painting to practice “animal magnetism,” a scandal-ridden and discredited medical therapy. A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard was one of several signs that the artist had left his calamitous medical career behind and resumed making the kinds of artworks for which he was celebrated. The painting’s dramatic contrast of light and dark, ruins overtaken by natural growth, and shadowy backdrop of indeterminate depth were features familiar to his viewers even though they deviated from the morally elevated, civic-minded model of history painting espoused by the Royal Academy’s founding president Sir Joshua Reynolds and the luminaries that followed him, including Benjamin West and the young Thomas Lawrence. Despite their popularity de Loutherbourg’s landscapes and history paintings were routinely criticized for being melodramatic, difficult to read, and full of theatricality and tension. (This charge was amplified by the fact that de 22

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

23

Figure 1.1 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard, 1790, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1974.3.4.

Loutherbourg formerly worked as a designer of sets and showpieces for one of London’s most popular theaters – at the very moment when the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition was striving to distinguish itself from and in direct competition with such theatrical attractions.)1 Owing to the painting’s ambiguous but elegiac narrative content, A Philosopher is sometimes

24

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

now associated with the late eighteenth-century “Gothic” style epitomized in the novels of Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis and subsequently embraced by a number of Romantic writers and poets.2 Beyond the populated, bright wedge of the left foreground, the canvas is overtaken by unbounded vegetal forms, a half-obscured ruin, and a thick gray screen of moonlit clouds. There, mottled greens and diluted grays soften and blur the boundaries of material and immaterial, opaque and transparent, determinate and indeterminate. Insofar as it lingers on the threshold of what can be shown and what can be seen, this undelineated, elemental pictorial expanse recalls what Hubert Damisch once wrote of the cloud in quattrocento painting: it “contradicts the very idea of outlines and delineation” and negates “the solidity, permanence, and identity that define shape.”3 Such features were unwelcome in the idealized, Italianate landscapes held in highest esteem by the Academy and likewise in the lucid, detailed topographical landscapes that were gaining popularity. Of course, de Loutherbourg was hardly the only artist in late eighteenth-century Britain who was pushing the boundaries of landscape painting; John Cozens, William Hodges, and Thomas Gainsborough were among those who tested the limits of the genre and infused it with dynamic pictorial effects. Yet as we will see, de Loutherbourg’s strange formal devices did more than simply invigorate the conventions of landscape painting. They dramatized several of the problems motivating the popular controversies animal magnetism had aroused across Western Europe. Also known as “mesmerism,” animal magnetism was a medical practice that claimed to control immaterial forces and effect elemental transformations through means that could not themselves be directly apprehended.4 Mesmerism conjured up a world with porous physical boundaries, indirect causalities, and mysterious powers.5 Although the artist actively studied and practiced animal magnetism for a significant period of time, in this chapter I do not argue that his paintings actually “portray” it – at least not in any straightforward sense. Instead I explore how they operated within and allude to some of the epistemic fault lines to which mesmerism fell prey in the 1780s. Chief among these was the fact that animal magnetism could not be directly observed and that it was as such impossible to establish a definite causal link between its supposed imperceptible causes and perceptible effects – aspects that set it at odds with the dominant procedures of empirical scientific study. Yet many (including de Loutherbourg) continued to practice it after it had been publicly discredited. His art emphasizes the very features that made mesmerism so problematic, that enabled it to linger on the margins of

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

25

credibility even as it was emphatically attacked by the scientific establishment. Alongside his paintings’ articulate representational structures we find subtler and more unsettling relationships being expressed to do with material bodies and immaterial forces, the powers and limits of human perception, the reliability of experience, and threats to the very possibility of a fully visible and coherent pictorial field. In this way we can look anew to de Loutherbourg’s art, not to explain how the artist stood apart from his peers at the Royal Academy but instead to consider how his work engages with some essential features of a crisis around credibility and empiricism that came to a head in the late eighteenth-century practice of mesmerism – a crisis, moreover, that participated in a broader reconfiguration of postEnlightenment knowledge-making processes. As the first extended case in the larger history that this book addresses, de Loutherbourg’s study of mesmerism falls on the outermost edges of what we would expect from an artist’s engagement with a scientific practice. Unlike the following two chapters, it requires a mode of analysis animated as much by the power of suggestion as by traditional forms of evidence, just as the “science” itself is largely unrecognizable to us as such. Beginning on the diffuse boundaries of science, however, is precisely the point for a book that aims to engage with the heterogeneous and heterodox nature of late Enlightenment science. Consensus and causality were among the most pressing challenges for the scientific study of animal magnetism, just as they riddle the present-day study of de Loutherbourg – an artist who deliberately suppressed and manufactured information about his own life, not only misrepresenting details about his background but also actively swindling at least one person for financial gain. In what follows, I examine a number of his paintings that engage with these challenges, paying close attention to their portrayal of elemental and immaterial forces, their adjacency to stagecraft and illusionism, and their deviation from the principles of direct observation. De Loutherbourg and Mesmer were each, in their own way, marginalized and discredited; each one found himself periodically on the wrong side of the line being drawn between legitimate and illegitimate (and by extension, trustworthy and untrustworthy) kinds of display. Likewise, the public reception of both mesmerism and de Loutherbourg’s art reflected greater cultural anxieties about spectacular modes of instruction and entertainment around the turn of the century. De Loutherbourg’s viewers – and at times the artist himself – often struggled to make sense of the world in front of them, a world in which causal relationships and concrete boundaries are suspended, obscured, or upended.

26

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

Mesmer’s Powers The medical therapy Mesmer invented differs significantly from the version that eventually found its way to de Loutherbourg. However, its early history is important for understanding mesmerism’s guiding theoretical precepts in addition to the challenges it posed to conventional forms of scientific investigation. The initial success and public discrediting of his therapy disclose some of the moral and scientific values with which perceptual clarity was endowed at the end of the eighteenth century, as well as the strains to which it was subjected. Mesmer was originally trained as a medical doctor in Vienna, where he claimed to have discovered a mysterious force with significant curative powers.6 Although it was distinct from the attraction and repulsion of particles within a magnetic field, Mesmer named this force “animal magnetism,” which he used to describe a vital fluid that pervades the human body. (The term would subsequently become synonymous with “mesmerism.”) The physician proposed that man’s physical ailments result from blockages or disequilibria within the body, which could be remedied by transmitting some of this fluid from his own body to the affected parts of his patients. He soon established a small healing clinic at his home where patients supplemented therapeutic sessions with the doctor by drinking “magnetized” water, eating off “magnetized” plates, sitting in “magnetized” chairs, and even wearing “magnetized” clothing. Animal magnetism met with early success after being credited with several high-profile cures in Vienna that were widely reported in the Germanspeaking press. Maximilian III Joseph invited Mesmer to his court in Munich. There, after curing a number of patients, the young doctor was inducted into the Bavarian Academy of Science. However, institutional approval eluded him back in Vienna where the medical faculty publicly accused him of fraud. Upon relocating to Paris, the doctor developed a magnetic “tub” or baquet, a low, rounded oak reservoir said to contain a significant concentration of animal magnetism, out of which iron bars protruded. Patients were seated in concentric rows around the tub, where they each directed magnetic fluid to affected body parts through the iron rods. The restoration of health was marked by a “crisis,” a crucial stage in which a patient’s magnetic equilibrium or flow was restored. The crisis could be physically manifested in any number of ways, including the sensation of intense pressure, warmth, or sharp pain; physical convulsions; “wildness in the eyes,” in the words of one contemporary witness; and, he continued, “shrieks, tears, hiccupping, and immoderate laughter.”7 Equally, a crisis could be signaled by sedateness, fainting, or unconsciousness.

Mesmer’s Powers

27

It was in France that Mesmer achieved the height of his fame and yet also faced devastating public repudiation. In 1778, he befriended Charles d’Eslon, the first physician to the Comte d’Artois, brother of King Louis XVI. D’Eslon styled himself as Mesmer’s protégé and championed animal magnetism among both members of the Parisian medical faculty and the public. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, Mesmer’s animal magnetism clinic flourished and was attended by many prominent members of Paris’s haute monde. Within the court, Mesmer gained favor with Madame du Barry, the formal mistress of the recently deceased King Louis XV, and the Princesse de Lamballe, a close companion of Marie Antoinette. Disheartened by repeated rejection from the Académie des sciences, Mesmer briefly left Paris. In a bid to prevent his departure, Antoinette offered him a generous lifetime pension to establish a school of mesmerism in the French capital, which Mesmer refused. In his absence, Mesmer’s practice of animal magnetism continued to thrive through a “Society of Harmony” founded to disseminate his teachings. Approximately twenty such societies, which resembled Masonic lodges in their secretive, graduated system of study, were formed in the French provinces. Members included prominent physicians, politicians, and aristocrats. The Marquis de Lafayette, for example, having returned from his triumphant role in the American Revolution, joined the Parisian Society of Harmony and warmly recommended mesmerism to his close friend George Washington, resulting in an affectionate exchange of letters between Washington and Mesmer in 1784.8 Mesmer dedicated the greater part of his professional life to securing institutional recognition for animal magnetism without much success. Having repeatedly tried and failed to attract supporters among France’s foremost scientists, the physician was increasingly dogged by charges of charlatanism and misconduct. A roughly contemporary caricature (Figure 1.2) reveals some of the most common charges against him. Foremost among them were the accusations of showman-like sleight of hand and occultism. In the print Mesmer stands atop a balloon inflated by several of his followers, including a kneeling figure dressed in clerical robes. He holds a thurible, a metal cage containing burning incense suspended from chains, from which a vast cloud of smoke emerges. It is an allusion both to the spiritualist subtext of Mesmer’s healing practice and to the charge that Mesmer used stage tricks to conceal its true operations. The glass harmonica beneath the table and the mask by Mesmer’s legs similarly imply that his practice is one of theatrical illusionism rather than legitimate science. The physician is being crowned with a laurel wreath by a jester suspended

28

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

Figure 1.2 Anon. [Mesmer Magnetizing a Patient], 1784, engraving.

from a balloon while rays emerge from his fingertip and wand, ultimately landing on a seated woman on the left and a gentleman on the right. The popularity of animal magnetism became a source of tension within the French court, where it was embraced by several popular figures yet denounced by senior members of the scientific establishment. In 1784, King Louis XVI appointed a commission to investigate it. The surrounding

Mesmer’s Powers

29

controversy was of such a pitch that the inquiry was closely followed in the international press. Benjamin Franklin led a group of scientists including the acclaimed chemist Antoine Lavoisier and the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. The latter was subsequently credited with the invention of the guillotine, the device that would execute his former colleague Lavoisier almost exactly a decade later. Mesmer objected to the inquiry, which was instead conducted with his protégé d’Eslon.9 Members of the committee observed and participated in sessions of magnetic treatment to determine its efficacy. (They can be seen in the 1784 print to the left of the table, holding their eyeglasses up to nothing in particular and appearing oblivious to many of the activities going on around them.) Franklin’s committee conducted additional experiments designed to verify the presence of magnetism in inanimate bodies, instructing d’Eslon to magnetize an apricot tree and several glasses of water. When presented with these objects, Mesmer’s experienced supporters were unable to distinguish those that had been magnetized from those that had not, appearing to have therapeutic convulsions when stimulated with objects that did not, in fact, lay claim to any mesmeric properties. The commission concluded that Mesmer’s fluid did not exist and that the physical sensations experienced by his followers were solely the result of their imagination. Their inquiry had merely proven, in their words, “the efficacy of the imagination, and the impotence of the magnetism.”10 By 1785, mesmerism had fallen into disrepute. Mesmer largely withdrew from public life, leaving Paris to travel through Switzerland and Austria. He returned to Paris for three years after the Revolution, retiring shortly thereafter. What was it about Mesmer’s original system that was able to generate widespread acceptance and refutation among the broader public as well as within the most elite academic and social circles? A lack of explicit causality and consensus. The royal commission’s ruling seemed straightforward enough: none of the effects displayed or experienced by practitioners of mesmerism could be exclusively, causally attributed to animal magnetism. Nor could any scientific experiments verify its existence. Yet members of the highest and lowest echelons of European society had nonetheless insisted upon its legitimacy throughout the 1770s and early 1780s. The academician Jean-Sylvain Bailly lamented this fact in his 1784 report on animal magnetism, describing the lack of consensus among “enlightened people” as “a scandal.”11 Even the royal commission’s supposedly definitive public condemnation of animal magnetism was accompanied by a dissenting opinion authored by one of the committee members: Antoine Laurent de Jussieu wrote that the existence of animal

30

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

magnetism could not be ruled out! After the report was commissioned, both scientists and laypeople alike faced the same problem that they did before. Some continued to claim to experience mesmerism’s healing effects, and others did not; and as de Jussieu’s dissent pointed out, failing to prove that something exists is not tantamount to proving its nonexistence. Supporters of de Loutherbourg would, years later, invoke the same scientific criteria used by the commission to argue in support of mesmerism. Direct experience was not, it would seem, giving people unambiguous access to scientific knowledge. Something appeared to be faltering or shifting in the mechanisms by which people determined and agreed upon “real truth” – something more pervasive, and something that, in the end, had as much to do with de Loutherbourg as it did with Anton Mesmer.

Landscapes and Stage Tricks Like Mesmer, de Loutherbourg spent much of his life on the margins of public credibility. Unlike Mesmer, he seemed fairly content to remain there. The Alsatian-born artist cultivated a studied ambiguity about the precise details of his life, some of which remain unknown to this day.12 Born in Strasbourg in October 1740, de Loutherbourg relocated to Paris in 1755 to train as an artist. There he was affiliated with Carl Vanloo and was also a student of François Joseph Casanova, younger brother to the famed lothario Giacomo Casanova. De Loutherbourg’s early career in Paris was exceptionally successful. The young artist made his public debut at the Salon of 1763, where his landscapes earned rapturous praise from Denis Diderot. Within a few years, de Loutherbourg was one of the most prominent landscape painters in Paris and the youngest academician elected to the French Académie royale. As early as the 1760s, de Loutherbourg’s success was seamed with scandal. There was speculation dating back to his time in Casanova’s workshop that de Loutherbourg was rather too good at imitating the work of others. This charge gained momentum when Diderot himself suggested that de Loutherbourg had copied from Claude-Joseph Vernet in some of his landscapes.13 However, a far greater scandal soon compelled him to leave France altogether. A retired naval captain brought a suit against de Loutherbourg alleging that the artist had used his wife’s seductive powers to defraud the officer of a significant sum of money. Support from his fellow academicians was tepid and de Loutherbourg, unable to shake the mounting accusations, set off for London in the fall of 1771 leaving behind his first wife and children.

Landscapes and Stage Tricks

31

De Loutherbourg’s initial success in London was achieved not as a landscape painter but as a master of stage tricks. Shortly after his arrival, the artist was introduced to David Garrick, the famous actor and director of Drury Lane, one of London’s most popular theaters. Although de Loutherbourg soon began exhibiting at the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition, he remained relatively isolated within the Academy’s network of sociability and was not elected as an academician until 1781. His early fame resulted, instead, from the set designs and standalone showpieces de Loutherbourg created for Drury Lane throughout the 1770s. His masterfully illusionistic receding stage flats and especially his dramatic, changing luminous effects transformed British theater and ultimately introduced a new genre of technologically driven spectacle to London.14 Before de Loutherbourg, one 1779 review recalled, “stage tricks were never played off with such success . . . Under his direction we have seen fiery chariots, clouds, and burning gulfs, which have made the hairs of the spectator stand on end; and every other deception has been practiced with equal good fortune.”15 (Note, here, the coupling of an intense physical response in the spectator with theatrical “deception,” a point to which I will return.) In 1781, de Loutherbourg stopped regularly working for Drury Lane and unveiled a spectacle for which he has since become famous: the Eidophusikon.16 In a theater based in his Leicester Square residence, spectators would sit in a darkened room in front of a large window-like opening, within which painted scenes would appear to move and change. Hidden from view, a series of mechanisms created elaborate sound effects and manipulated the display’s lighting through the layers of translucent fabric, presenting the audience with gripping illusions that seemed both animate and imposing. So successful were his illusions that William Wordsworth, writing of the Eidophusikon and other related attractions in book 7 of The Prelude, described it as “a mirror” to natural phenomena.17 Although it continued afterwards under a different proprietor, de Loutherbourg only produced three seasons of the Eidophusikon: in 1781, 1782, and 1783. For this brief time it was one of London’s most fashionable and celebrated attractions and drew the admiration of fellow artists such as Thomas Gainsborough. De Loutherbourg’s proximity to the theater proved problematic for his career as an academic painter. From the beginning of his time in London, de Loutherbourg was known as a master of “stage tricks.” It was a reputation hardly compatible with the model artist described by Reynolds, whose works were supposed to shine with moral significance,

32

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

intellectual rigor, and timeless ideals – especially at a moment when the Summer Exhibition was trying to distinguish itself from less prestigious forms of entertainment like those on offer at Drury Lane.18 Yet even Reynolds was well acquainted with the attractions of the theater and was known to draw upon it within his portraits.19 Unsurprisingly, the aforementioned 1779 review that praised de Loutherbourg’s dramatic set designs lamented the presence of “extravagance” and “exaggeration” in his academic paintings. The implication was that de Loutherbourg employed tricks of illusionism at the expense of an honest representation of nature. The artist’s professional credibility was hardly improved by his social circle in London, which included the esoteric artists Richard and Maria Cosway, the millennialist engraver William Sharp, the wealthy eccentric and novelist William Beckford, and Lord George Gordon, the last of whom was best known for instigating riots in 1780 that destroyed more property in London over three days than an entire decade of revolution inflicted on Paris. De Loutherbourg’s other friends included radical Freemasons, occultists, and avid subscribers to the city’s less orthodox attractions. Like Mesmer, de Loutherbourg had emigrated to a different country to flee official censure and to rebuild his reputation; and, like Mesmer, his efforts to gain institutional credibility were repeatedly thwarted by his association with stagecraft. However, whereas de Loutherbourg’s extensive work in the theater was unusual for a prominent academic artist, Mesmer’s appeals to showmanship were a typical part of the public dissemination of popular science. Spectacular demonstrations – used in serious instruction as well as fairground entertainment – were among the primary means by which scientific phenomena were explicated.20 They were also a source of fear and distrust; some worried that they appealed too much to the senses or activated people’s baser desires for amusement rather than their powers of reasoning. In other words, this charge of showmanship against Mesmer was part of a conflict that resided within rather than outside of Enlightenment scientific practices. His case suggests that this conflict was reaching a crisis point in the 1780s – that if it was acceptable for an artist to be associated with “stage tricks,” it was increasingly antithetical to scientific credibility.21 Mesmer’s mesmerism and de Loutherbourg’s landscape paintings both straddled this widening fault line. In each case, the practitioner was suspected of acts of concealment and presentation whose truth-value was doubted; the way things appeared could not be trusted to accurately convey the way things actually were.

Secret Arts

33

Secret Arts How did de Loutherbourg, an established showman and artist, come to practice this strange and discredited branch of medicine? The artist enrolled in a course on mesmerism in the mid-1780s, a period that saw a surge in heterodox activity in London.22 The heady mix of mysticism, occultism, alchemy, and pseudo-scientific activities in circulation in late eighteenth-century London meant that, as Iain McCalman writes, “British mesmerism had simply to compete alongside other forms of so-called quackery in a pluralistic medical marketplace where borderlines between orthodox and heterodox practices were notoriously blurred.”23 De Loutherbourg and the artists John Flaxman and William Sharp were also among the founders of the London Theosophical Society, which studied the writings of the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s emphasis on a spiritual life defined by one’s receptiveness to God’s “divine flux” and on the necessity for spiritual equilibrium shared a certain conceptual sympathy with the mesmeric teachings that were just beginning to reach Britain.24 The version of mesmerism that reached Britain in the mid-1780s was noticeably different from the system Mesmer had put forward, and it never attained the degree of popularity it enjoyed in France. The Societies of Harmony that began disseminating his teachings early in the decade had effectively decentralized the practice, enabling powerful provincial societies to propagate teachings that Mesmer himself rejected. The most influential of these was in Strasbourg, de Loutherbourg’s birthplace, where the Chastenet de Puységur brothers introduced “mesmeric somnambulism.” The term “somnambulism” – literally, sleepwalking – describes a trancelike state in which waking consciousness is suspended but the ability to speak and act remains intact.25 In this state, patients were said to be able to diagnose their own illnesses and could prescribe the appropriate treatment. (One of its foremost advocates in the German-speaking world was the widely known physiognomist and minister Johann Caspar Lavater, who famously treated his wife’s chronic illness with a combination of electricity, mesmeric somnambulism, and more conventional therapies.)26 Whereas Mesmer dedicated his career to winning institutional approval, this second generation of mesmerists operated more firmly and willfully outside of the parameters of scientific and institutional credibility. His followers made increasingly baroque claims for the powers of mesmeric somnambulism, which included clairvoyance, telepathy, and extrasensory perception. Correspondingly, the medical applications of mesmerism grew secondary

34

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

to other pursuits: “to decipher hieroglyphics, manipulate magic numbers, communicate with spirits, and listen to speeches.”27 The Puységurs’ hybrid of mesmerism and spiritualism spread throughout Europe and quickly eclipsed Mesmer’s earlier version; it was this variant on which subsequent nineteenth-century revivals would later be based and that permanently altered mesmerism’s legacy by its adjacency to occultism and legerdemain.28 The most prominent London-based advocate of mesmerism was the Irish-born John Benoît de Mainauduc, who had studied medicine under William Hunter (the first Professor of Anatomy for the Royal Academy) and then moved to Paris, where he had been a pupil of Mesmer’s protégé Charles d’Eslon. De Loutherbourg and his friends Richard and Maria Cosway numbered among Mainauduc’s early students.29 I classify de Loutherbourg’s healing practice as “animal magnetism” in large part because that is the term the artist’s contemporaries most frequently used to describe it, although it is important to note that it integrated elements of spiritualism Mesmer would have vehemently disavowed.30 For de Loutherbourg, mesmerism and mysticism shared many conceptual similarities; alchemical notions of material transformation and Swedenborgian “divine influx” – both of which de Loutherbourg already had a demonstrated interest in – resonated with mesmerism’s claims to exert an immaterial, imperceptible power over material bodies. The adjacency of animal magnetism and occultism was quite literally embodied, for de Loutherbourg, in the figure of Count Cagliostro, a famed mystic and grifter.31 By the time he befriended de Loutherbourg in London, Cagliostro had already been tried and acquitted in the Diamond Necklace Affair; he had drawn the ire of the notorious lothario Giacomo Casanova (the older brother of de Loutherbourg’s former teacher, François Joseph Casanova), the Russian empress Catherine the Great, and the queen of France Marie Antoinette; and he would later antagonize the German poet Johann von Goethe as well as the Catholic pope, Pius Sextus. Cagliostro likewise quarreled with the Swiss minister and amateur healer Lavater (intimate friend of and collaborator with Henry Fuseli), although he was admired by the French artist Girodet and his mentor Trioson. Upon Cagliostro’s arrival in London in the late 1780s, the mystic began promoting his “divine arts,” a mysterious combination of fortune-telling, alchemy, numerology, necromancy, and animal magnetism. He was also in the process of establishing a new form of Freemasonry, which he called the Egyptian Rite. (In the early 1790s, Cagliostro would initiate a handful of unnamed young

The Elements, Unbounded

35

Parisian artists in Rome into the Egyptian Rite; among them may have numbered the young Girodet, himself a devoted Mason who had recently arrived in the city on a Prix de Rome.)32 De Loutherbourg was a longstanding Mason with a radical bent, and the two men became close friends. The artist was increasingly devoted to Cagliostro’s “secret arts,” first hosting the mystic in his Hammersmith home when Cagliostro was seeking refuge from French and English creditors.33 Cagliostro fled London in the spring of 1787 and was joined by de Loutherbourg and the artist’s second wife several weeks later in Biel. The painter laid down a considerable sum in order to be initiated into Cagliostro’s mystical practices. After several months, however, Cagliostro was no closer to revealing his “secret arts” to de Loutherbourg, who eventually threatened legal action and demanded that his money be returned. Early in 1788, the artist and his wife made their way back to England. Publicizing his return, the Whitehall Evening Post mocked de Loutherbourg’s “credulity in listening to the plausible stories [Cagliostro] had told him about his knowledge in the transmutation of metals” and added that “Cagliostro is certainly an adept in the art of transmutation, for he knows how to transfer at least into his own pocket the golden purses of his friends.”34 De Loutherbourg, the avowed master of “stage tricks,” had himself been tricked.

The Elements, Unbounded During his disastrous sojourn in Switzerland with Cagliostro, de Loutherbourg produced a landscape painting animated by some of the very issues that plagued mesmerism. First, its troubling proximity to showmanship, occultism, and charlatanry. Second, its ability to thrive despite a lack of institutional credibility. Third, and perhaps most revealing of all, its portrayal of the kind of perceptual ambiguities that lay at the heart of animal magnetism’s scientific precarity – the painting’s evocation of effects and forces that could not be readily disambiguated. A year earlier, de Loutherbourg had exhibited View of Snowdon, from Llan Berris Lake (c.1787, Strasbourg Musée des Beaux-Arts), a relatively restrained composition yet one that still delivered greater dramatic effects than could be seen in the work of fellow exhibitors at the Royal Academy such as William Hodges (c.1790, Landscape with Fishermen on a Lake, Yale Center for British Art). Like Hodges, de Loutherbourg observed the compositional conventions of landscape painting, including a backlit rocky outcropping in the foreground, a body of water in the lowest register of the painting, paler distant mountains, and vaporous light-flecked clouds. De

36

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

Loutherbourg’s clouds, matched only by Gainsborough and Wright of Derby in their luminous variety and meteorological specificity, creep toward the viewer and obscure bits of the distant mountain. Such details, along with the rhythmic alternation of receding outcroppings – which resemble, in no small measure, stage flats – led one critic to describe the painting as “in itself an Exhibition. The effect is almost miraculous. The eye is carried from cliff to cliff, in a deceptive and awful gradation to the summit of that prodigious mountain.”35 There was a critical undertone to such praise, which attributed it with flashy showmanship rather than the morally elevated restraint espoused by academicians (in theory, if not always in practice).36 De Loutherbourg’s recourse to the “extrinsic help of illumination of obscurity” produced, in the words of another review, “an illusive charm, a deception that is altogether necromantic.” The artist, elsewhere, was said to have “a most bewitching pencil.”37 The language of occultism (“necromantic,” “bewitching”) was commonplace in reviews of his work. “Whatever the master throws his pencil,” wrote the Morning Post, “we are enchanted with its magic.”38 In this context, “magic” doubled as an allusion to the occult and to a high degree of pictorial illusionism, the latter also invoked with regard to de Loutherbourg’s contemporaries such as Fuseli and Gainsborough.39 The Morning Chronicle, describing his paintings as “dangerous,” lamented that they “transport the common observer out of his judgment, and by the magic of their execution, divest at first even the studious artist of his discernment.”40 Reviews such as this underscored a certain congruity, recognized by the artist’s contemporaries, between painterly illusionism, stage craft, and occultism that had to do, firstly, with deceptive appearances and, secondly, with the power to manipulate its audience. In the case of de Loutherbourg, however, for whom it was not exclusively metaphorical, the language had real bite. More malicious forms of perceptual indeterminacy, it seems, were at work. De Loutherbourg exhibited The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (Figure 1.3) upon his return from Switzerland. A painting unlike any he had ever done before, it was meant as a rejoinder to critics who often accused him of basing his landscapes on inventions of fancy and imagination rather than the direct study of nature. In the Journal de Paris, for example, his landscape in the 1779 Salon was said to be the flawed result of a “system not based in truth.”41 The literary-minded cleric Joseph Holden Pott was one of many to describe his works as “visionary, without a trait of nature.”42 It was commonly said that de Loutherbourg “never condescends to draw from Nature.”43 The Falls of the Rhine was pointedly different.

The Elements, Unbounded

37

Figure 1.3 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 1788, oil on canvas. Victoria and Albert Museum. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Mainstream reviews took note of the fact that the painting arrived at the Summer Exhibition conspicuously late.44 The painting’s lateness, excused on the grounds that it had been shipped directly from Switzerland, bolstered de Loutherbourg’s claims to have painted the landscape based on the firsthand observation of nature. In 1788, then, de Loutherbourg was enduring publicly scrutiny about more than one kind of deception. First, his paintings were not considered “true” likenesses, a point conceded even in favorable reviews of his landscapes. Second, he had recently returned from Switzerland where, it was widely reported, he had been defrauded by Cagliostro. De Loutherbourg’s own ability to parse what was real, reliable, and credible from mere trickery had faltered in a most spectacular and humiliating manner. The Falls of the Rhine was a bid for credibility on both fronts. Set aside were the stage tricks. In place of the infernal lighting and elegantly groomed cows that populated much of his oeuvre, this was an earnest landscape whose authenticity ought to be unquestionable: the painting had to be a true likeness; after all, it arrived straight from the source. As such, it appealed to the evidentiary authority of direct observation, which remained a cornerstone of scientific knowledge production. Yet the painting itself, we will see, did

38

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

little to convince its viewers of the scene’s basis in factual reality. Instead, it emphasized pictorial effects and natural phenomena that tested the limits of human perception, proving difficult to apprehend through empirical means. In the painting’s right foreground, a finely attired couple prepares to visit the falls in a small boat, around which rustically styled locals gather. They are shielded from the falls by a rocky outcropping that cordons off human activity and its accessories (structures, tools) from the rest of the landscape and thus the social world from the natural. Within its perimeter and along its outer most boundary, there are barrels to move, laundry to dry, information to exchange. The diminutive scale of the human figures, despite their placement in the foremost spatial register of the painting, signals the vastness of the falls in the absence of conventional markers of depth and scale. In selecting the falls for his subject, de Loutherbourg was playing to one of his strengths: his reputed mastery of “the elements.” Falls were a favored theme of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jacob van Ruisdael, whose technique of combining long pigmented strokes and brief staccato passages of white impasto was taken up by de Loutherbourg in the 1760s and 1770s. The artist had a longstanding interest in meteorological effects, especially storms, and shared with his former teacher Casanova a preference for filling the backgrounds of his more sedate landscapes with elaborate cloud formations. “As an elemental painter,” wrote the Morning Post, “Mr. Loutherbourg has not an equal.”45 Even after his death, this reputation persisted. A catalogue from Peter Coxe’s postmortem sale of the artist’s work reads, “light and darkness; the elements of earth, air, fire and water, over these [. . .] he held imitative sway.”46 The term “elements” was aptly chosen, for it could refer to quite literal features of landscape painting while also evoking abstract, foundational components of the natural world – matter, its building blocks, and its various states and transformations. The double valence of “the elements” had already been activated by de Loutherbourg’s earlier treatments of water features, but de Loutherbourg’s “elements” in The Falls of the Rhine were without precedent. The waterfalls seen in his early landscapes cascade with a crisp, directed clarity, casting an ambient pallor on the surrounding rocks whose bulky solidity dominates the composition. Whereas in The Falls, behind the clearly delineated, closed forms of the foreground, the viewer encounters an intricately varied tonal expanse lacking both internal and external bounded contours. From under a thin and uneven veil of gray, patchy greens and browns evoke rocky and vegetal masses whose precise contours remain undisclosed.

A Fluid Too Subtle

39

Varied shading and tonal transitions hint at sudden drops, deep recesses, and bouldered ledges in the topography of the falls, the features of which are only partially glimpsed before they blend back into a bleached crush of mist and water. Pictorial distinctions between discrete forms and spatial registers are suspended. Likewise, elemental states – water, mist, and cloud – represented within the falls appear continuous. The boundary between water and earth is softened and blurred: to the right and left of the falls, whites and greens seamlessly merge in a blurry gradient of mist and rock. The translucent layers of gray that surround the base of the cliff on the right unhinge the distinction between solid materiality and vaporous ether – an opposition de Loutherbourg would subsequently foreground in Philosopher in a Moonlit Courtyard. (J. M. W. Turner, who was known to have lingered around de Loutherbourg’s studio, would preserve this distinction when painting the same falls several years later in Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 1805–1806.) A similar operation takes place on the level of pigment: chromatic deposits are thickly encrusted in passages that appear to depict water and become thin and translucent where they evoke a rocky substrate. In other words, pigment is the least materially dense precisely where it depicts “actual” material density.

A Fluid Too Subtle De Loutherbourg’s treatment of The Falls evokes a world hospitable to the operations claimed for animal magnetism, a world whose material and immaterial forces interpenetrate one another. Even more pointedly, several of the landscape’s natural features elude direct observation. In this regard, the painting replicates some of the most problematic aspects of mesmerism. Firstly, animal magnetism was said to penetrate and transform even the densest materials – it was predicated on a model of the physical world that is not as solid or discrete as it may appear. Secondly, Mesmer’s magnetic fluid evaded empirical observation. “It is too subtle to be subjected to [. . .] observation,” Franklin’s 1784 report complained.47 “It is not, like the electrical fluid, luminous and visible . . . it has neither taste nor smell; its process is silent, and it surrounds you or penetrates your frame, without your being informed of its presence by the sense of touch.”48 Put simply, although it claimed to permeate the physical world animal magnetism couldn’t be directly seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched. Here was an impasse: How could an observation-based, empirical science verify the existence of something that couldn’t be observed, that lay beyond man’s perceptual capacities and likewise beyond the measure of any

40

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

instrument? Conversely, how else could one account for all the shrieking, fainting, convulsing, and catatonic patients? On the one hand, it revealed a disparity between what people claimed to experience and what could be conclusively known. Nullius in verba, read the motto of the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660: “take nobody’s word for it.” This was shorthand for the maxim that proper science must be based not on received authority but on experimentally verifiable fact. Mesmerism presented a force that seemed to have powerful effects on the body but that could not be directly sensed by that body. Consequently, animal magnetism couldn’t be subjected to experimental verification. The Falls thus dramatized the notion of a natural world that could be pervaded by an imperceptible substance and the attending problem of the limitations of man’s perceptual powers to apprehend that substance. As we know, de Loutherbourg made both spoken and unspoken claims to have based the painting on the direct study of nature. Yet the result was a world in which water, mist, and cloud are dispersed across the canvas, transitioning freely into one another and unimpeded by the borders of physical materiality. This is more than an evocation of formal obscurity according to conventions of the sublime. The painting insists upon permeable boundaries between the material and immaterial, and it puts the viewer in the position of being unable to parse one from the other with any certainty. The artist’s own perceptual prowess was itself called into question by critics. St James’s Chronicle remarked: “We are glad to hear he has gone to paint water from nature; as he seemed to us never to have seen it with the eye of an artist. In this picture, the radical defect either of his eye or his judgment is remarkable.”49 “Nor,” it continued, “does any part of the water-fall predominate; an effect impossible in nature.” The painter’s apparent failure to create a hierarchy of detail, to distinguish significant from insignificant pictorial elements, was yet another aspect of the painting that suppressed the distinctions by which viewers could make sense of the world it purported to represent. In The Falls of the Rhine, we encounter the dissolution of bounded forms and the suspension of pictorial order. Having been humiliatingly swindled by Cagliostro, de Loutherbourg used The Falls to stage a bid for public credibility, underwritten by the direct study and faithful transcription of nature. Yet he also introduced profound pictorial indeterminacy, in which the operations previously consigned to distant clouds – powers of apparition and disappearance, chromatic expanses that escape the boundaries of shape, and the traversal of formal registers – become the compositional focal point. In doing so, de

The Powers of de Loutherbourg

41

Loutherbourg painted a scene in which the viewer pushes up against the limits of their perceptual capacity to make sense of the world; or, more troubling still, a scene in which the world itself is physically indeterminate. It served as an allegory for the artist’s ongoing and public struggle to draw easy and confident distinctions between illusion and reality, between mere trickery and actual truth; and it landed squarely on a challenge both proponents and skeptics of animal magnetism struggled with: direct observation, it would seem, does not always give one access to truth.

The Powers of de Loutherbourg The following spring, de Loutherbourg committed himself quite emphatically to a conception of the natural world penetrated and acted upon by imperceptible forces. The artist ceased painting and opened a free healing clinic in his Hammersmith residence where, assisted by his second wife, he employed an unspecified combination of mesmerism, faith healing, somnambulism, and chemistry. The Morning Post described the undertaking as “an absurd career of medical Quixotism . . . The powers of Loutherbourgh [sic] are so miraculous, that if report is to be trusted, he can restore lost limbs [and] give sight to those eyes which have long since vanished from their orbits.”50 One of his contemporaries took a more sanguine view, describing de Loutherbourg as one of “the most famous practitioners and most disinterested” of animal magnetism.51 The artist quickly gained popularity among the urban poor and especially the vagabonds who tended to congregate in Hammersmith, where it is estimated that he treated between two thousand and three thousand people.52 In an effort to manage the crowds, de Loutherbourg kept a sign outside his home announcing that new patients, to whom free tickets for admission were distributed, would only be seen on Thursdays. Those who did not receive tickets were apparently able to purchase them on the black market for up to five guineas.53 The Morning Post reported that “the crowd of people is so great who visit Hammersmith on Loutherbourgh’s public day, Thursday, that it appears as if all the country was rising, and the aid of the Magistrate has been actually required to prevent mischief.”54 The Morning Post was not the only one to point out the political subtext of de Loutherbourg’s clinic. William Dent’s 1789 satirical print Billy’s Gouty Visit (Figure 1.4) took up a similar thread, depicting William Pitt, on the left, in search of treatment for “the Fumes of discontent.” Standing in the center of the room attired in purple coat reminiscent of Mesmer’s well-known preference for dressing in lilac, de Loutherbourg replies, “I can

Figure 1.4 William Dent, Billy’s Gouty Visit, or a Peep at Hammersmith, 1789, etching. British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The Powers of de Loutherbourg

43

Cure my poor Patients vidout trouble or expense – but to make de Man of you by Cot I could as soon animate de Canvas.” Intriguingly, the text identifies a certain correlation between painterly illusionism and magnetic healing and points to a limit-case in each that lies beyond de Loutherbourg’s powers. To the doctor’s right, a pile of gold coins concealed under the table above the term “magnetism” may allude to the selfinterested, pecuniary motives of popular practitioners like Mainauduc. Behind the table, a group of “incurable curables” await treatment; each figure seems to be missing one or more body parts. The joke here lies in the obviously irreversible nature of their ailments, coupled with the suggestion that in order to seek de Loutherbourg’s treatment one would have to have “lost one’s head.” Dent’s satirical print sounded several familiar notes, including the charge of quackery, overstated claims about animal magnetism’s healing powers, and the particularly French frippery of its practitioner. On a practical level, de Loutherbourg’s healing clinic, like those of Mesmer, flew in the face of social and institutional hierarchies that were coming under increasing pressure in the final decades of the century.55 Mesmer’s teachings were able to gain a considerable foothold through a network of schools that resembled the Masonic lodges and other deist societies then flourishing in London and Paris. Merely by paying a subscription fee, individuals were able to completely sidestep the official mechanisms by which traditional doctors were trained, evaluated, and accredited. There was a populist strain in Mesmer’s Paris clinic, too. “The house of M. Mesmer,” one historical source notes, “reunites all classes; one sees there knights, abbots, marquises, prostitutes, soldiers, [. . .] midwives, [and] intellectuals.”56 The physical proximity of such groups was especially troubling because mesmeric treatment relied upon the transmission and amplification of animal magnetism among patients. Skeptics suggested that patients were unduly “influenced” by one another, that they were inclined to imagine they were magnetized when surrounded by other enthusiasts. In warning of this, the 1784 report issued by Franklin’s commission struck a prescient note: “The same cause is deeply governed in rebellions; the multitude are governed by the imagination; the individuals in numerous assembly are more subjected to their senses, and less capable of submitting to the dictates of reason.”57 Whether one believed them to be united by magnetic fluid or by the imagination, what remained beyond doubt what that the social classes gathered in Mesmer’s clinic were participating in unprecedented somatic and psychic exchanges.

44

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

De Loutherbourg was widely mocked in the press and derided as a “quack” doctor.58 The news was met with skepticism in Paris, too. “One of the new French papers,” read the Public Advertiser, “speaking of the Charlatan Loutherbourg, says, that his quackeries have completely deluded the English nation.”59 There was something clearly ridiculous about an eccentric painter claiming to possess healing powers embodied in his person – despite the fact that such a claim had been relatively credible in France when made by Mesmer a decade earlier. Yet this negative response was not as unanimous as one might expect. De Loutherbourg’s followers were savvy enough to appeal to the scientific authority of direct observation in support of his cause. The author of the 1789 pamphlet A List of a Few Cures Performed by Mr. and Mrs. De Loutherbourg, Mary Pratt, described herself as an “eye witness” and wrote that she felt obligated to “bear witness to those truths I am going to relate, from a conviction that facts are stubborn things.”60 The readiness with which someone like Pratt was able to coopt the language of scientific objectivity speaks to both the mainstream legibility and the problematic fluidity of an appeal to direct observation in shoring up empirical truths. Its plausibility among some quarters is evident not only from the vast numbers of de Loutherbourg’s patients and the extensive coverage he received in the press; it was sufficiently contested to merit public debate. The Coachmakers Hall, a prominent debate venue, hosted an event so popular it was repeated a second time. “A great number of persons having declared that they have been restored to health by this extraordinary character, and that they are ready to attest the same,” served as the impetus.61 For a mere six pennies, one could attend a debate on the question, “Is it consistent with reason or religion to believe that Mr. Loutherbourg has performed any cure by a Divine Power, without an medical application?”62 He also received support from the Diary or Woodfall’s Register, which lamented the “daily abuse” to which de Loutherbourg was subjected. “It is somewhat unfair,” they argued, “to attack the science of Animal Magnetism, without having investigated into its truth.”63 The events that ultimately destroyed the clinic were characterized as a kind of frenzied eruption of popular violence. Historical documents describing the clinic and its downfall are, as was often the case with mesmerism, typically inconclusive – some laudatory and others critical, with little consensus to be found. Whether the result of unrestrained enthusiasm or hostility, in July 1789 a crowd broke into his clinic and left it in a ruinous state. Afterward, de Loutherbourg abandoned his selfappointed role as a public healer, although he continued to practice some

Invisible Enemies

45

form of unconventional healing in secret for well over a decade.64 When de Loutherbourg resumed painting a few months later, he did so under the shadow of scandal. After the events of 1789, de Loutherbourg’s reputation was at its nadir. As his reputation was gradually rehabilitated, though, it retained its affiliation with animal magnetism. De Loutherbourg’s contemporaries were quick to understand his mesmeric and painterly practices as analogues, of a sort. Take the following three examples: “Loutherbourg, thanks to directing providence, is again turning his magnetism where it ought to be, to the pencil; and where he alone can justly lead the passion captive!”65 “Loutherbourg has given up his magnetising absurdity for a brand of the Arts in which he excels. The magical touches of his pencil will be more service to society, than all the magnetic infection he has made on his fair patients!”66 And, “M. Loutherbourg ceases magnetising his patients, but in some new landscapes will soon magnetise the public by the charms of his colours, and the attraction of his pencil.”67 I take this language to be more than coincidental. At a moment in British history when new forms of public art exhibitions were coming to play an increasingly dominant role in the cultural landscape – when more people than ever before were gathering to look at, read about, and buy contemporary art – a very particular relationship between the viewer and the work of art was being articulated, one that drew upon the language and concepts of mesmerism. By then, mesmerism had come to describe a widely discredited practice in which patients are acted on by mere feats of illusionism but might nonetheless exhibit or directly experience dramatic physical effects. It defined de Loutherbourg’s viewer as one acted upon by a seemingly powerful object and one whose perceptual experience thereof could not be trusted to correspond to an underlying truth or to facilitate one’s acquisition of knowledge.

Invisible Enemies In the years that followed, de Loutherbourg’s artworks envisioned a world in disarray and, correspondingly, a viewer who encounters dramatic illusionistic effects rather than evidentiary data. He embedded these effects, moreover, within a genre in which perceptual clarity often took on urgent moral and intellectual value: history painting. De Loutherbourg’s professional turn to history painting coincided with his decisive retreat from many of the pictorial features on which that genre relied. These included the legible arrangement of forms, the reference to classical precedents, compositional emphasis on decisive human protagonists, the use of

46

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

articulate gestures and expressive features to convey human emotion, and the coupling of informational details with formal effects that emphasize the most important aspects of the narrative. When de Loutherbourg debuted Defeat of the Spanish Armada (Figure 1.5) in 1796, it was still possible to identify a relatively stable set of conventions through which history painting functioned as a machine for moral, historical, and affective truth. However, it was also newly possible for viewers of de Loutherbourg’s paintings to characterize themselves as – and, to an extent, understood themselves to be – the metaphorical victims of “animal magnetism.” His painting presented two interrelated problems: an object that misrepresents or conceals its true operations and a viewer whose experience does not accurately reflect those operations. Several for-profit ventures at the time were commissioning prominent artists in Britain to paint scenes from literary and historical texts that could be exhibited and sold as prints, including Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, and Macklin’s Gallery of Poets.

Figure 1.5 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 8 August 1588, 1796, oil on canvas. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Invisible Enemies

47

De Loutherbourg’s Defeat of the Spanish Armada had been commissioned by Bowyer for a new illustrated edition of David Hume’s The History of England. As an illustration of a naval battle, the painting was expected to convey very specific kinds of information: which boats engaged which, under whose command, and with what outcome; the make and rigging of each ship and their positions relative to each other, to land formations, and to the wind; changing meteorological conditions; the scale of each fleet and the weapons used; and finally, the splendor and drama of an event in which human agency is sublimated into vast, slow-moving, rather featureless vessels – within a single cohesive image.68 By the late eighteenth century, such information was typically consolidated, freeing up space on the canvas for more detailed individual exchanges that could stand in for a whole series of unseen engagements, and shown from a point of view much closer to the waterline.69 Although some tension between historical fact and pictorial drama was endemic to the genre of marine battle painting, its presentation of certain kinds of information remained one of its defining features into the early nineteenth century – so important, in fact, that Eleanor Hughes, writing about the interplay of “factual correctness” and “fiction,” describes “reportage” as the genre’s primary historical function.70 In Defeat of the Spanish Armada, de Loutherbourg’s tendency to cluster pictorial detail in the foreground and suppress it in the background was taken to new extremes. Gone was the horizon line that had been so important, both conceptually and technically, for seascapes. Gone, too, was the warship as heroic actor and dominant compositional element. Instead, ships flicker in and out of view. On the right, the prow of an English ship enters the fray, its taut sails swelling with wind. On the left, the foreshortened bow of a single Spanish warship juts out while the rest of the Armada is reduced to a chimera of slackened sails and shivering lines of rigging. Thickly applied whites, yellows, and reds engulf the Spanish ships. Unmanned English fire ships laden with explosives, which were sent towards the Armada and abandoned at the last moment by a skeleton crew, have set the fleet ablaze. The Ark Royal, the flagship of the English fleet and the only warship shown in its entirety, lies dim and inconspicuous in the distant midground. The ship is dwarfed by the scale and pictorial activity of the left foreground in which hand-to-hand combat takes place between anonymous soldiers on modest English galleys. One of the challenges confronting de Loutherbourg was the decisive historical role played by the wind, which the English fleet maintained control over to great advantage. The night before the engagement they gained what is known as the “weather gage,” a strategically favorable position upwind of the Armada. The Spanish fleet, constrained by maneuvering

48

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

downwind, took tacks that forced their ships to heel (that is, lean to one side), thus exposing larger and more vulnerable parts of their hulls to English canon fire. It was a battle, in other words, in which the most instrumental force was invisible and elemental. Once again, de Loutherbourg sought recourse in boundless, formless pictorial expanses to manage the disjunction of invisible forces and visible effects. Rather than clouds, in Defeat of the Spanish Armada it is color itself that moves effortlessly across fixed boundaries and that, by turns, reveals and distorts. Tonal wedges encircle the canvas: on the left scarlet and then bright orange, above it clouds of pewter dissipating into a small, bright patch of sky, and on the right flax-hued sails and breaking water, below which lies the varied, light-flecked green of an uneasy sea. The color-saturated segments curl clockwise as if part of a rotating mechanism or a child’s painted whirligig – sails, shadows, clouds, and a crush of figures all spinning along, a maelstrom of light and color. The compressed, frenzied combat taking place in the left foreground, the ostensible focal point of dramatic narrative activity, is blanketed by an infernal glow cast from flames among the Spanish fleet. The color overtakes every surface – flesh, wood, fabric, and metal – and remakes them all as agents of fire. It permeates the left foreground, reflecting off Spanish and English soldiers alike and frustrating the viewer’s attempts to make ready distinctions between them. The result is a triumph of immaterial forces rather than human agents, of forces that cannot themselves be apprehended but can only be perceived in the effects they have on material bodies. Giving vast portions of the canvas over to “the elements,” although still a novel pictorial strategy, had its place in landscape painting; but to deploy it in a painting of a historic English victory and to thereby efface the visual presence of England’s greatest military asset, its navy, was something else entirely. In the late 1790s, Britain was struggling under the financial strain of ongoing war with France and was forced to institute Impressment, a system of compulsory military service, to man the Royal Navy. By 1796, the First Coalition, an alliance of European monarchies fighting France, was weakening and would soon collapse. French troops were advancing on Germany and Italy and recent British efforts to support royalist forces in the Vendée had unequivocally failed. The country was gradually mobilizing for what historians have called Europe’s first “total war,” a conflict with Napoleon-led forces that would last more than a decade. The approaching Napoleonic Wars were marked by not only what David Bell calls their “radically new scope and intensity but also the political dynamic that drove the participants relentlessly toward a condition of total engagement” without restraint.71

Dazzling Effects

49

In this context, perceptual clarity took on specific moral and political implications in which certain forms of concealment were regarded as a threat to national sovereignty. Vigilant observation was an important component of Britain’s “total war”: citizens were urged to be “on the lookout” for treasonous French sympathizers and spies – it marked the institution of what Anne Secord has called “regimes of watchfulness” that pervaded scientific as well as political observational practices.72 The same year that the Defeat of the Spanish Armada was completed, a Welsh tea-broker named James Tilly Matthews notoriously interrupted a meeting of the House of Commons with claims that the French were sending mesmeric waves across the Channel to gain access to Britain’s naval secrets. Although Matthews was subsequently institutionalized for insanity, his assertion found sympathy among those like the French counterrevolutionary Abbé Barruel, who likewise believed mesmerism was being used to revolutionary ends.73 The threat posed by animal magnetism in this context was twofold: firstly, it was perniciously “French”; and, more importantly, it was a powerful immaterial force that could be neither observed directly nor impeded by physical barriers. Mesmerism articulated faltering efforts in both the political and the scientific establishment to stabilize a correspondence between appearance and reality.

Dazzling Effects De Loutherbourg’s cultivated effects of perceptual obscurity in Defeat of the Spanish Armada would seem highly objectionable on both counts. Yet the very language that ties his paintings and the Matthews episode together – the literal and conceptual vocabulary of animal magnetism – goes a long way toward explaining why, ultimately, it was not. The observable effects produced by animal magnetism resembled the optical phenomena produced by de Loutherbourg’s painterly legerdemain insofar as both were understood to be somewhat separate or independent from their underlying cause. In the case of mesmerism, one’s physical symptoms were triggered by the presence of magnetic fluid but one could not sense the fluid itself. In a related manner, the spectacular coloring of de Loutherbourg’s painting did not indicate that the sailors actually were bright red; their strange appearance was a byproduct of something else: fire. Both mesmerism and the painting required one to accept a model of indirect causality in which a perceptual effect might be only distantly related to its underlying cause. In describing their art-viewing experience as if it were mesmeric, de Loutherbourg’s contemporaries were simultaneously domesticating

50

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

mesmerism by situating it within the sphere of artistic representation and lending the formal exaggerations found in academic art (and their evident impact on the viewer) a light-hearted triviality. The trick lay in recognizing them as illusory, in accepting that however real the effects might appear they should not be taken as a representation of how things actually are. One early nineteenth-century review described Defeat of the Spanish Armada as follows: “Mr. Loutherbourg has chosen the moment of the greatest confusion in the Spanish Fleet, before Calais, as affording the finest opposition of lights, and therefore the greatest contrast of coloring and composition.”74 The Spanish vessel in the foreground, the same review continues, “is detached by the dark shadow from the luminous mass of the burning fire ships.”75 Rather than rival warships, rather than heroic captains or decisive events, de Loutherbourg has painted “a luminous mass” and “clouds of smoke,” rendered with “the greatest contrast of coloring.” The latter was most emphatically displayed in the adjacency of saturated reds and greens in the center of the canvas. The de-masted ship on the left, rapidly being overtaken by churning waves, is laden with men all covered in the same undiluted, unshaded hue, whose intensity does not vary or diminish relative to their distance from the fire. As a result, fully concentrated, bright red heads, arms, and bits of wood are juxtaposed with deep, lustrous green water whose surface is lightly flecked with yellow but is otherwise unaffected by the dramatic luminous effects taking place. Defeat of the Spanish Armada is important for its emphasis on experiential effects and optical phenomena that are not claiming to correspond to the actual appearance of a historical scene. We cannot say whether de Loutherbourg knew that red and green, in addition to being complementary colors, form positive afterimages of each other – that if one stares at a bright red or green display for several seconds and looks away one will briefly see red where green has been and vice versa. However, as his many years working on the Eidophusikon and creating showpieces for Drury Lane attested, this was someone with an especially sophisticated understanding of how to manipulate the interaction of light and color to make “the hairs of the spectator stand on end.”76 When compared to the civic and moral function to which academic painting was supposed to aspire, de Loutherbourg’s effects ought to have been derided as unprincipled trickery, base deception lacking the intellectual substance that gives history painting merit. Yet de Loutherbourg and his peers, including Henry Fuseli, were painting for an audience who would have long been familiar with popular illusions. One reviewer of his work at Drury Lane in 1776 had noted that in de Loutherbourg’s scenery “the eye of the spectator might be

Dazzling Effects

51

so effectually deceived in a playhouse as to be induced to take the produce of art for real nature.”77 Of his showpieces (standalone displays presented at the end of a play), another historical commentator wrote of de Loutherbourg’s depiction of a shipwreck that “mariners have declared, whilst viewing the scene, that it amounted to reality. [. . .] The illusion was so perfect, that the audience were frequently heard to exclaim, ‘Hark!’”78 De Loutherbourg was certainly chastised for including such effects in his paintings by some critics. For example, of his subsequent Coalbrookdale at Night, a review observed that “the genuine aspect of this Picture is like the nocturnal transparencies which excite so much vulgar imagination in print shops.”79 In 1810, another critic wrote that his seascapes “seem composed of those blue tinctures, which chymists affixe in their shop windows, by night, to dazzle the spectator with a transparent object, that hath no reference to utility in its principles or effects!”80 “Vulgar” and “glaring” as his effects may have been, they did not undermine the basic painterly value of the work. During the final decades of the eighteenth century, the visual deception that was deemed acceptable in the theater was gradually being tolerated and eventually praised in academic painting. According to the artist’s critics, it had become not only possible but easy to accept a nonmimetic relationship between optical effects and underlying causes. However, as Ann Bermingham has argued, this did not remain the case. A distinction was subsequently enforced between theatrical illusionism and academic art such that, “by the middle of the nineteenth century, high art had come to define itself against the illusionistic machinery of popular visual culture.”81 To an extent, we need to recognize the enforcement of this distinction as a reaction against the deeply troubling elision of perceptual experience and theatrical illusionism that haunted both painterly and mesmeric practices at the turn of the nineteenth century. Defeat of the Spanish Armada, which was by most measures a very successful attraction in late eighteenth-century London, disregards the informational imperatives of marine battle painting and likewise ignores many of the conventions by which history painting more generally laid claim to moral truth. Instead, the painting suppresses important pictorial details with large expanses of smoke and fire, foregrounds the power of immaterial forces over human actors, and displaces its narrative drama onto discordant perceptual phenomena. Here and elsewhere in de Loutherbourg’s work, we find formal devices that reflect contemporaneous ideas about the sublime; and while there is no question that the artist was responding to this aesthetic category (to which I will return), we can

52

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

recognize aspects of his work that had specific and urgent stakes within a broader set of cultural parameters. This is a “mesmeric” history painting insofar as it represents indirect effects at the expense of mimetic specificity and clarity. Such effects and the readiness with which they were embraced by the painting’s audience answered the pressures that popular forms of entertainment were exerting on the conventions of academic art. However, something else was also happening: a subtle yet palpable retreat from the stability of historical experience and, likewise, from the supremacy of man’s observational powers in the pursuit and authentication of categorical truth.

Observation and Evidence What did it mean to be a witness or a spectator, if that also meant being acted on by animal magnetism? Direct observation was the ultimate tool with which scientists working in the tradition of Lockean empiricism could verify experimental results.82 By the mid-eighteenth century, “observation had also become,” in the words of Lorraine Daston, “an epistemic category, that is, an object of reflection that had found its way into philosophical lexica and methodological treatises.”83 More precisely, both the performed experiment and its outcome had to be witnessed by a community of experts in order to be admitted to the register of empirical knowledge – although, as Schaffer and Shapin have argued, it was a process whose actors and activities were carefully regulated according to social, intellectual, and institutional criteria.84 A pamphlet written in Mesmer’s defense underscored this point: “Nothing better clears Mesmer of suspected charlatanism than having solicited the scientific community to come witness the effects of his magnetism: it’s on [the basis of] evidence that he wanted to establish and convey his principles.”85 Yet what kind of evidence was Mesmer offering? The experiential claims made by practitioners of mesmerism were tricky to begin with. They participated in a larger tension between late Enlightenment principles regarding an egalitarian, inclusive, and collective public discourse and the restrictive, elite procedures by which scientific facts were secured. More problematic was the fact that the immediacy granted by direct observation and individual experience eluded the mesmeric patient. One might feel heat, pressure, or pain; one might tremble or faint; one might be compelled to shriek, laugh, or cry. A large variety of symptomatic responses to mesmeric fluid were reported. The only thing that couldn’t be experienced was the presence and movement of magnetic

A Hand Reaching Out from the Mist

53

fluid within the body. In other words, the perceptual experience of mesmerism was only ever the experience of its secondary or “side” effects. Discrediting animal magnetism entailed conceding, on some level, that the appearance or the perceptible qualities of the natural world do not always, or do not necessarily, reflect underlying realities. If one concluded that the fluid did not, in fact, exist, then human bodies were displaying physical effects that had no actual physical cause. So either it did exist, but revealed a grave shortcoming in man’s perceptual acuity, or it didn’t exist, and revealed instead that one could not trust the bodily evidence at hand. Having disproven the existence of a magnetic fluid, Franklin’s commission was forced to conclude that dramatic physical and mental transformations were produced by an imagined, rather than real, agent. This conclusion, in the words of Jessica Riskin, undermined “the principle that sensations were responses to a world outside the mind.”86 Ironically, then, by subjecting mesmerism to so-called rational, empirical scrutiny the commission had unknowingly attributed a profound power to the recesses of the nonrational mind.87 Their experiments, they concluded, merely revealed “the efficacy of the imagination, and the impotence of the magnetism.”88 The evidence displayed by the bodies of Mesmer’s patients could not be trusted. Moreover, their testimony, whatever they claimed to feel, did not have much evidentiary purchase to begin with. Nullius in verba: one could not simply take their word for it. While not exceeding the limits of pictorial innovation possible at the time, de Loutherbourg’s The Falls of the Rhine and Defeat of the Spanish Armada envisioned a world that could not be perceptually disambiguated, signaling either a failing in man’s powers of observation or a natural world that was, itself, never fully perceptible. He replicated, for the viewer, his own inability to parse what was mere effect from what was true cause. In his paintings, and likewise to a degree in his Eidophusikon, de Loutherbourg cultivated dissonance between appearance and reality – the very dissonance that Franklin’s commission had assumed when debunking mesmerism. The problem here was that the former was in the service of illusionism and the latter in the service of empiricism.

A Hand Reaching Out from the Mist By way of closing, let us turn to the painted body – a body whose perceptual acuity and physical self-possession were dramatically called into question by animal magnetism. With few exceptions, de Loutherbourg did not engage with the tradition of the neoclassical male

54

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

nude although one needs only to consult his Deluge (British Museum, 1797), produced for Macklin’s Bible, for proof that he was familiar with its conventions and more than capable of portraying an idealized nude. Nor does it necessarily follow that he was uninterested in the body in both pictorial and conceptual terms. Again and again, de Loutherbourg painted humans who are operated on by perceptually indeterminate or immaterial forces. Again and again, his protagonists are overpowered, vulnerable, attacked, and acted on. Their bodies are defined, in narrative terms, by their powerlessness and are increasingly defined, in pictorial terms, by their formal obscurity. Even their compositional marginality within the majority of his landscapes speaks to a human actor characterized by his limited agency, his material insignificance, and the ease with which the bounded contours of his body are cut through by luminous effects. Around 1803, de Loutherbourg completed two avalanche paintings, the first of which, An Avalanche in the Alps (Figure 1.6), would become one of de Loutherbourg’s most famous paintings.89 First exhibited at the Summer Exhibition of 1804 (for which de Loutherbourg sat on the powerful Hanging Committee), the work quickly sold to Sir John Leicester. The avalanche was a new class of natural disaster for de Loutherbourg, who was

Figure 1.6 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, An Avalanche in the Alps, 1803, oil on canvas. Tate Britain. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

A Hand Reaching Out from the Mist

55

by then an old hand at all manner of storms and combustions, but on a formal level it remained relatively continuous with his earlier work. Perceptual obscurity, unbounded forms, elemental transitions, matter and its various states – the same concerns that had preoccupied him for years – were put to full effect. Beyond the earthen bluff on the left, whose craggy edge divides the composition along a stark diagonal axis, lies a world in flux. Masses of rock and ice cascade downward and cast off a thick spray of snow that overtakes the landscape and fills the sky. Bright passages of alabaster snow become flecked with blue, blended with olive, and are rendered in fine downy strokes where they give way to taupe-hued clouds. Among the layered whites, greens, and grays at the center of the avalanche the categorical distinctions between figure and ground, between shape and color, and between light and the surface it falls on have been completely upended. De Loutherbourg engages with the full spectrum of opacity and transparency in his application of oil paint, whose pigmented particles are densely concentrated in some passages where they form an impasto crust, and elsewhere dispersed, diluted to a thin translucency through which primed canvas can be seen. On the far right, the contours of rocks have been scratched into a gossamer-like layer of paint with the wooden tip of a paintbrush. As in The Falls, the material properties of paint are set at odds with that which is represented: opaque, ponderous stone is almost transparent whereas mist is compacted and substantial. Avalanche in the Alps is a painting of dissolution. The pictorial indeterminacy evoked in de Loutherbourg’s earlier works is no longer localized nor is it subordinated to a larger visual or narrative structure. Whatever stabilizing operations that had been functional, if tenuous, in his earlier paintings seem to have broken down in the avalanche – itself a natural event about things falling apart. The avalanche is a subject that implicitly resists stabilizing pictorial operations for it is the very disruption of stability that defines it. It announces the catastrophic dissolution of that which was once solid and massive. The chromatic expanse of pigmented opacity that overtakes this portion of the canvas works both with and against mimesis. In its emphasis on material porosity it corresponds to the actual qualities of an avalanche, but in doing so it reproduces the perceptual obscurity that characterizes such an event in nature. It is here that the unbounded vaporous tones that spread across de Loutherbourg’s paintings, what we could call his drive toward “elemental formlessness” are fully realized, “in which,” per Damisch, “the limit of representation, of what is representable, is revealed.”90

56

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

What does it mean to encounter this, as a viewer? It is a question the painting itself begins to formulate an answer to. The composition is populated with figures who, mid-flight, have turned to look at the disaster unfolding behind them. At the far left, a single man stands to face the avalanche directly with arms flung open in astonishment. The review in the Sun did not approve, “for, instead of running with all possible speed from such a dreadful danger, they turn, as if to gratify curiosity, and indulge surprise. Even the dog seems to participate in this kind of philosophic wonder.”91 In other words, de Loutherbourg’s figures are spectators of their own mortal peril. Two of their companions in the right foreground are less fortunate. One man, whose backlit form is faintly outlined, has been thrown off a wooden bridge that has buckled under the avalanche. The other man is only present as a single arm that emerges from a cascade of ice and rock just above the bridge, a hand reaching out from the mist. De Loutherbourg included a similar figure in several of his paintings; their bodies are only ever partially shown emerging from a crush of human or natural activity. What the spectators in the left foreground observe is a world for which their perceptual powers are unequal. This coincides, moreover, with conditions in which human bodies are overtaken by natural forces. They are bodies defined by their helplessness against a power whose contours they cannot see that nonetheless, to borrow a phrase from Franklin’s report, “surrounds and penetrates [their] frame.” At every turn, de Loutherbourg paints a material world whose borders are permeable and whose structural distinctions are suspended. At a certain point the artist also doubted whether the painting’s literal frame could protect it from the influence of nearby paintings; we know from Joseph Farington’s diary (who was likewise on that year’s Hanging Committee) that de Loutherbourg expressed concern about the conditions under which the painting would be displayed at the Summer Exhibition. According to Farington, “he objected to White being in a picture [on the wall] above” his Avalanche out of concern that the color could have undue impact on – could perhaps breach the perceptual environment of – his own landscape.92 On the very level of application of paint we find the artist coupling hardened materiality with porous luminosity. His Storm and Avalanche near the Scheidegg in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen (1803–1804) goes still further, its entire surface pulsing with elemental activity that disavows natural or perceptual fixity.93 This alpine flood – which one review described as “a truly distressing picture”94 – portrays human subjects who are more profoundly exposed to a natural environment of instability

A Hand Reaching Out from the Mist

57

and upheaval. It seems revealing that when Turner, directly inspired by de Loutherbourg’s painting, made The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (exhibited 1810), he excluded human figures altogether and reasserted a compositional distinction between material and immaterial forces, creating a stark diagonal separating thickly painted boulder-like blocks of snow from the diluted streaks of gray evoking spray and cloud. In contrast, de Loutherbourg withholds perceptual clarity, suspends material distinctions, and underscores the power of elemental forces over the human subject. Placed in the midst of a pictorial field that is representationally neither cohesive nor self-consistent, de Loutherbourg’s bodies lack pictorial integrity or boundedness. As a student of Mainauduc, de Loutherbourg would have been taught that the human body is “composed of pipes and pores, beyond conception, and formed of particles, between which, the most minute, and extensive porosity is admitted; through which the passage of atoms and fluids of various denominations, circulate in every direction.”95 These pores, moreover, “allow or admit the passage of superfluous fluids from every part of the human body.”96 Mesmerism, like the nascent fields of electric medicine and physiology, laid particular emphasis on the human body as a network of channels or nerves through which sensations and fluids travel; it was a body whose interior and exterior surfaces are permeable and whose healthy operations include the ready reception and transmission of immaterial agents. De Loutherbourg’s human actors, physically overpowered and formally penetrated, dramatized the problems that inhere in a body defined by its receptivity to an external force over which it lacks control. As one contemporary source on Mesmer had observed, “the dominating power” contained in the body of the magnetizer “acts so astonishingly” on its subject that “nothing can stop them. This power is so strong in M. Mesmer that he can magnetize from the tip of his cane.”97 Recall, as well, that his patients were said to collapse and faint; to grow weak and fall into a deep sleep; to tremble, convulse, and stiffen; to shriek, cry, laugh, stutter, or go completely silent; or any number of involuntary physical responses. Even the most politically and socially privileged were powerless in the face of animal magnetism. For example, one treatise from 1784 related an episode in which the doctor demonstrated his powers to a small audience gathered in the gardens of the Prince de Soubise. Shortly after Mesmer applied a “magnetical” force to a nearby tree, “three ladies of the company fainted away. The Duchess de C–, the only remaining lady, supported herself upon a tree without being able to quit it. The Count de Mons–,

58

De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects

unable to stand, was obliged to throw himself upon a bench. The effects upon M. Ang–, a gentleman of a very muscular frame, were more terrible.” When the doctor’s assistant arrived to release the party from this paralytic state, he, too, came under the influence of the magnetized plant-life, and “the whole company were obliged to remain in this situation for a considerable time.”98 A similar incident was recounted a few years later in England, when, as the result of a mesmeric demonstration, the “Duchess of Devonshire was thrown into Hysterics, Lady Salisbury put to sleep the same morning – And the Prince of Wales so near fainting that he turned quite pale and was forced to be supported.”99 These effects resulted from, on the one hand, a concentration of power in an external source and, on the other, a body defined by its receptivity, its total availability to be acted on and controlled. De Loutherbourg not only brings to mind the late eighteenth-century proliferation of competing systems for understanding and accessing the natural world. He points to the unreliability of perceptual experience in this process and to a natural world populated with immaterial forces that overwhelm the human subject. His paintings foregrounded the very observational practices that were under contestation; or, rather, they mark their reinvention from tools to authenticate scientific knowledge to mechanisms that can be productively manipulated for entertainment. The favored Gothic tropes of pictorial obscurity, dramatic luminous effects, and unfixed meaning coincided with a weakening consensus as to what constitutes empirical truth, how such truth is verified, and what status the human body might claim in this process. When de Loutherbourg took up the study of animal magnetism in the mid-1780s, it had already been widely discredited by Europe’s leading scientific authorities. Yet it remained a concentrated expression of the limitations of and challenges to certain empiricist ideas about knowledge and what role the body might play in recording, perceiving, displaying, and authenticating that knowledge. Mesmerism suggested that, rather than stabilizing the operations of knowledge production, bodies are easily manipulated, controlled, and overpowered; that bodies act without or against the will of the individual; and that bodies display external symptoms and experience sensations that do not causally relate to “actually existing” causes. Moreover, although de Loutherbourg wasn’t literally portraying mesmerism in his paintings, they nonetheless cultivate effects of perceptual dissonance and causal obscurity, they dwell on the unfixed relationship between immaterial and material, fluid and solid, and they figure, again and again, human bodies that are

A Hand Reaching Out from the Mist

59

operated on, influenced by, and powerless against forces that cannot be perceptually pinned down. In doing so, they point to the gradual unraveling, well underway in the 1780s, of an empirical epistemology that linked perceptual prowess, a selfevident natural world, and scientific knowledge. If de Loutherbourg’s “effects” remain difficult to draw definitive conclusions about, they are very much in keeping with the operations of mesmerism itself. That is to say, the ambiguities of his case are themselves revealing, for they reflect the historical configuration out of which they were born. For all its ambiguities de Loutherbourg’s work does nonetheless suggest some significant ways that artworks may have been responding to important changes afoot in late eighteenth-century thought. To see how they may have been operative in even more explicitly practical and visual forms alike, we can look, with them in mind, to his contemporary in the British art world, Henry Fuseli.

chapter 2

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

In 1790, the Swiss-born, London-based artist Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) submitted Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (Figure 2.1) to the Royal Academy as his Diploma painting, a work of art traditionally given to the Academy upon one’s election as member. In the center of the composition, Thor – monumental and dramatically foreshortened – prepares to strike the Midgard Serpent, whose slick, sinuous form writhes beneath him. The painting marked Fuseli’s acceptance into Britain’s most prestigious body of professional artists; but much about it would have struck his contemporaries as rather strange. The painting’s subject matter, based on a compilation of Old Norse mythology known as the Prose Edda, was relatively obscure. More than this, though, it was Fuseli’s dramatic vertical composition, forceful contrast of light and dark, and exaggerated treatment of the human body that set it apart from conventional academic history paintings. Thor’s hyperbolic musculature and contorted pose exemplified the artist’s intense and unusual fascination with the expressive capacities of the male nude body, which was subjected to spectacular exaggerations, distortions, and reconfigurations in Fuseli’s work. Redolent of gendered and psychosexual conflict, these bodies appear, to use art historian Martin Myrone’s words, to be “impossible bodies, corporeal conundrums.”1 In a moment when the idealized male body was central to academic neoclassicism, in other words, Fuseli painted bodies that teetered on the edge of simply not making sense to their viewers. Yet Fuseli was significantly invested, both artistically and intellectually, in certain forms of corporeal legibility. For decades the artist was involved with the popular subject of physiognomy, the study of a person’s outer appearance to determine their inner traits. Physiognomy presupposed that, among other things, the visible surface of the body provides its viewer with unambiguous access to truth; and although the subject was well known and widely practiced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Fuseli’s knowledge of it was exceptional. In the late 1770s, the artist’s childhood friend Johann Caspar Lavater published a multivolume treatise 60

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

61

Figure 2.1 Henry Fuseli, Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent, 1790, oil on canvas. Royal Academy of Arts, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

on the subject that sought to remake physiognomy into a modern Enlightenment science. Fuseli consulted extensively on Lavater’s project, providing numerous illustrations and shepherding the book through its translation into English by Henry Hunter. In the years that followed, the text was reprinted, translated, and abridged so widely that it has been characterized as the largest publishing project throughout Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.2

62

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

How might one go about physiognomically analyzing Thor’s body, though? His acutely foreshortened head, far too small for his body, is wedged uncomfortably into thick shoulder muscles. On the left, his arm emerges from a tangle of drapery at an angle that implies its total dislocation from the rest of the body. The leg on the right, whose foot is merely suggested by a few compressed toes, culminates in a boulder-like assemblage of bone and tendon that, despite nominally designating a knee, is difficult to distinguish from the musculature of the torso. The clustered, bulging pockets of flesh that comprise his body indicate neither local anatomical groupings nor their discrete functions: Thor’s extravagant musculature is segmented and detailed without actually being anatomized or specific. In short, it is a body that seems incompatible with the model of physiognomic analysis that, in 1790, Fuseli was still actively helping Lavater to promote. Fuseli, most famous today for his painting The Nightmare of 1781 (Figure 2.14), belonged to a generation of artists in Britain who were following in but also deviating from the Grand Manner tradition institutionalized by first-generation academic history painters. Like de Loutherbourg, who was nearly the same age, he was an immigrant from continental Europe known for his idiosyncratic style; and although there is little evidence to suggest the two men particularly liked each other, both participated in an important period of transition for the Academy as its founding members began to retire and die. Unlike de Loutherbourg, though, Fuseli was a classically educated man of letters who was largely selftrained as an artist. He proved to be much more committed to history painting as a genre, the “classical tradition,” and the pictorial importance of the male body. Unsurprisingly, Fuseli attained a degree of professional acceptance that eluded his Alsatian colleague, eventually becoming a Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. Several of Fuseli’s contemporaries – including James Barry, Thomas Banks, William Blake, Thomas Lawrence, and Alexander Runciman – imagined new, alternative possibilities for the idealized male nude figure in response to an interrelated set of social and artistic transformations.3 Together they pushed back against what Mark Ledbury has described as the “elaborately worked-out gestural and bodily vocabulary” of academic neoclassical history painting then exemplified by the work of Benjamin West and others.4 In this context, Fuseli’s recourse to obscure and dramatic narratives; his portrayal of strange, fantastical, even grotesque bodies; and his courting of sensationalism have been understood as a calculated reply to the demands of an increasingly modern marketplace for art alongside

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

63

a growing audience for various kinds of exhibitions.5 The concomitant rise of consumer culture in Britain was, to be sure, part of a wider set of social transformations to which artists and viewers alike were responding.6 Yet Fuseli’s art, I propose, did more than this: it participated in a debate taking place around the turn of the century about the capacity of the human body to represent certain kinds of scientific knowledge.7 His were not the only paintings to challenge artistic conventions about the portrayal of the idealized male nude in this period. However, as the artist’s collaboration with Lavater makes clear, this had vivid intellectual stakes for Fuseli that extended far beyond the parameters of academic discourse and its social context. Throughout their collaboration, Fuseli and Lavater frequently disagreed about how the science of physiognomy ought to be represented and reproduced. Theirs was a passionate friendship whose latter years were characterized by bitter conflict and eventual estrangement. At the root of their protracted disagreements was the mutually acknowledged fact that Fuseli’s works never really worked according to the conventions of Lavater’s system. Instead of legible bodies Fuseli painted a world rife with narrative dissonances and perceptual obscurities, in which the boundaries between visible and invisible as well as natural and supernatural were thrown into unprecedented disarray.8 Given Fuseli’s extensive familiarity with Lavaterian physiognomy, the degree to which his painted bodies elude physiognomic analysis is all the more striking. Indeed, the pictorial distortions, perceptual obscurities, dramatic compositions, and above all the exaggerated bodies found in the artist’s drawings, prints, and paintings seem, at times, to outright contradict Lavater’s key assertions about physiognomy and several mainstream empirical precepts upon which they were founded. This chapter explores the precise nature of the scientific claims put forward in Lavaterian physiognomy and the status of visual representation within that system, in order to better understand its significance for Fuseli’s artistic production. Doing so suggests how we might come to reconsider some of the formal features of the artist’s work more broadly, beyond its representation of the human body. If de Loutherbourg’s paintings grappled with the limitations of human perception and the elemental instability of the natural world, I propose that Fuseli’s challenged a distinct but related premise, namely that the body can present visible, reliable information about itself. This premise was central to Lavaterian physiognomy and – crucially – to the larger claims Lavater put forward about the evidentiary status of the natural world. Moreover, we can locate these

64

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

claims within larger trends in Enlightenment scientific thought. Lavater called upon widely recognized empirical precepts to shore up the scientific validity of his analysis: the reliability of direct observation; man’s perceptual acuity and rational intellect; and a world whose perceptible features accurately correspond to its imperceptible, underlying truths. These were scientific principles, in other words, that were in no way limited to physiognomy. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, however, Fuseli’s “corporeal conundrums,” by calling into question the evidentiary status of the body’s appearance, expressed significant doubts about the empirical mechanisms through which Lavater proposed that man could produce knowledge about the entire world. Whether or not Fuseli deliberately created artworks that subverted Lavater’s system, it was an intellectual context in which the artist was immersed for a considerable portion of his life; moreover, one of its defining features was the status it accorded to visual representation. To cordon Fuseli’s pictures off from this context would be to suppress the artist’s wide-ranging intellectual concerns, on the one hand, and his quite extensive, detailed knowledge of physiognomic principles on the other. Whereas de Loutherbourg’s engagement with mesmerism was often oblique, Fuseli’s artistic production was directly involved with Lavater’s system. Consequently, this chapter attends closely to Lavater’s ideas about representation, knowledge, and the body. It is these very ideas that, I argue, are amplified, contested, and distorted in Fuseli’s illustrations for Lavater – illustrations in which appearance and reality find themselves misaligned. From this vantage point we can consider how Fuseli’s art, even outside the immediate context of physiognomy, is animated by and dwells on related forms of misalignment, on fractured relationships between what can be seen and what can be known. Fuseli’s work comes into view as a pictorial field that probes both the limitations and failings of Lavaterian physiognomy as well as the broader empirical precepts upon which it relied.

Essays on Physiognomy To understand what was unique to Lavater’s system, it is necessary to first outline how it differed from earlier variants of physiognomy and issued new claims about the subject’s scientific legitimacy. In the most general terms, physiognomy assumes that the visible appearance of the body corresponds to or conveys information about that body’s invisible traits. Practiced with some degree of popularity since antiquity and significantly revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, early systems of physiognomy typically

Essays on Physiognomy

65

linked the visual features of a man’s face to his interior traits through resemblance and metaphor: for example, one might claim that a man whose face resembles a lion is likely to possess leonine traits such as courage.9 The French academician Charles Le Brun departed meaningfully from this tradition in his posthumously published Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière in 1698, which was inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Rather than rely on metaphor, Le Brun followed Descartes in attributing the appearance of the face to mechanisms within the human body itself. Specifically, it was claimed that expression results from the movement of subtle fluids or “animal spirits” toward and away from the brain.10 Unsurprising given that it was penned by one of the most influential French artists of the seventeenth century, Conférence sur l’expression had a lasting impact on French academic training and artistic production.11 Yet by the mid-eighteenth century it was also routinely criticized for its exaggerated illustrations, rigid system of causality, and inattention to nuance.12 Although by no means the only European thinker writing on physiognomy in the final decades of the eighteenth century, Lavater authored what was by far the most well-known and influential treatise on the subject. His was a decidedly Enlightenment model of physiognomy that explicitly claimed to be a scientifically grounded study of the permanent features of the face. Lavater defined it as, “the ability to know the interior of man by his exterior – to perceive by certain natural indices that which does not immediately strike the senses.”13 This brief definition is, among other things, a subtle rejection of the Cartesian rationalism that informed Le Brun’s earlier text. It syntactically aligns Lavaterian physiognomy’s two key operations: “to perceive” and “to know.” Indeed, Lavater was quite explicit on this score, writing that “all the knowledge we can obtain of man must be gained through the medium of our senses.”14 In its emphasis on the authority of man’s observational powers, supported by his perceptual acuity and rational intellect, this Enlightenment variant of physiognomy was likewise sympathetic to the epistemological priority granted to direct observation by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empiricist doctrines.15 The second feature that was central to Lavater’s claims to scientific credibility was his emphasis on man’s permanent facial features rather than his expressions. Doing so, Lavater proposed, facilitated a more systematic and geometrically grounded approach to the body. Lavater’s analysis began with an examination of the frontal “form” of the face, proceeded to the profile, determined the “perpendicular length” of forehead, nose, and chin, and considered their relative “perpendicular

66

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

differences.”16 Thence he imagined a line connecting the root of the nose to the foremost point of the upper lip. Such observations enable one to identify “points which are fixed, and of easy determination” on the face, from which the rest of the analysis can unfold. This process figures the body as a spatial matrix whose features can be mapped according to secure, measurable coordinates. The procedural method the text describes – like the geometric terminology it used – exemplifies Lavater’s efforts to conform to the increasingly codified conventions of scientific writing.17 Indeed, Lavater dedicated an entire chapter of his text to the assertion of its newfound scientific credentials. To this Fuseli was sympathetic, defending Lavaterian physiognomy as a genuine science that required detailed explication.18 Readers took note. As one posthumous review wrote, “The physiognomic science to which Lavater gave much authority and development had been regarded, not even twenty-five years earlier, as a ridiculous art almost as useless as astrology.”19 Despite Lavater’s claims to the contrary, his system of physiognomy, like many earlier variants, was steeped in heterodox and spiritualist doctrines. He was a reputed eccentric and a known practitioner of Puységar’s secondgeneration brand of mesmerism, which Lavater famously used to cure his wife of a vague chronic illness.20 Having been ordained alongside Fuseli as a Zwinglian minister in his youth, Lavater repeatedly referenced the principle of imago Dei (that is, the belief that God created man in His own image) in his text. On the basis of this Divine resemblance, Lavater insisted that the physiognomic study of mankind doubled as a form of Christian worship.21 Regardless of these heterodox associations, his work gained widespread fame throughout Europe. As Lavater’s eulogy in The Gentleman’s Magazine of London affirmed, “in Switzerland, in Germany, in France, even in Britain, all the world became passionate admirers of the Physiognomical Science of Lavater”: In the enthusiasm with which [his books] were studied and admired, they were thought as necessary in every family as even the bible itself. A servant would, at one time, scarcely be hired till the descriptions and engravings of Lavater had been consulted, in careful comparison with the lines and features of the young man’s or woman’s countenance.22

The “descriptions and engravings of Lavater” to which the eulogy refers took many forms but originated as a large folio-sized multivolume book, Physiognomischen Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, published between 1775 and 1778. Lavater was closely involved with an official French edition that shortly followed, the first

Fuseli’s Impressions

67

three volumes of which appeared between 1781 and 1786 and a final installment in 1803. The French edition was no mere translation of the original German; Lavater significantly expanded and drastically reorganized the text as well as its illustrations. Inspired by its success, two competing English translations were begun in the 1780s. The first was modest and sparsely illustrated three-volume octavo set by Thomas Holcroft, which was based on a German-language abridgment by J. M. Armbruster, appearing from 1789 to 1793. The second, a lavish and comprehensive English translation of the initial volumes of the expanded and revised French text, was again undertaken with Lavater’s direct involvement. Three quarto volumes in five parts, translated by Henry Hunter and published by John Murray and Hunter, were printed between 1789 and 1798. Because of its near-comprehensive nature and Lavater’s direct involvement, I take Hunter’s translation to be the definitive original English translation.23 Yet it is critical to acknowledge that, in the years that followed, Lavater’s original text was reproduced, abridged, and translated with a frequency unprecedented and unrivaled in its time. By 1810, there were at least twenty English, sixteen German, fifteen French, and two American editions.24 It is probable that at the turn of the nineteenth century the vast majority Europe’s literate society would have had some direct or indirect knowledge of Lavaterian physiognomy.

Fuseli’s Impressions One of the reasons that Fuseli’s role in Lavater’s project was particularly important lay in the books’ unique reliance upon their illustrations, in both functional and conceptual terms. Lavater’s multivolume treatise put forward a system for analyzing the visible surface of the body in order to determine its underlying truths. As such, it was, implicitly, a system predicated on the foundational correspondence between that body’s appearance and reality. Of course, Lavater’s readers were not trained through the direct study of bodies; they were limited to the study of the books’ illustrations, which were extensively described and analyzed within the main body of the text. On a very practical level, then, the images were of singular importance – his method could only be explicated through reference to printed visual data, which is to say, through reference to engraved illustrations or “plates.” One reviewer remarked that if Lavater’s illustrations were inadequate “the whole work would have been a chaos”:

68

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions In most works where engravings are introduced, the plates can be considered as nothing more than mere embellishments. In the work now before us this is by no means the case. The plates here are essentially necessary: they are indeed the text which the author illustrates.25

The very first mention of Lavater’s project in the British press expressed a similar sentiment: “A set of plates constitutes the basis or most essential part of the work.”26 Katharina Elisabeth Goethe, mother of the Romantic poet and philosopher Johann von Goethe, was more frank in a letter to Lavater: “What would a ‘Physiognomy’ be without plates!”27 Thus Fuseli’s designs for Lavater were critical to the project’s success: without proper illustrations, the text would be meaningless. The collaboration between Lavater and Fuseli, although grounded in years of close friendship, was fraught from the start. Fuseli’s illustrations were deemed too expressive, too exaggerated to accurately convey objective information. In what follows, however, it will become clear that much more significant issues were also at stake. Both born in Zurich in 1741, they had been educated together and later ordained together. Shortly after their ordination in the reformed Zwinglian church, Fuseli and Lavater published a pamphlet decrying the corruption of a local magistrate. The two men went to Germany to wait for the scandal to abate and shortly thereafter Fuseli, already an accomplished linguist, was sent to London as a literary envoy between the English- and German-speaking publishing worlds. Lavater first asked Fuseli to contribute illustrations for his text almost ten years before the initial German edition was published. Unlike many of the European artists who eventually produced illustrations for Lavater’s books, Fuseli corresponded with Lavater on nearly every aspect of the text: its theoretical precepts and practical applications, its illustrations and their reproduction as prints, its translation, and even its physical size as a book.28 As early as 1768, however, the two men were quarreling over the illustrations for the first German edition. Fuseli, who had never undergone formal training and was not yet an established professional artist, bristled at Lavater’s controlling demeanor. At the urging of Academy President Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fuseli then moved to Rome where he lived from 1770 to 1778 studying art and refining his techniques. While Fuseli was in Italy, Lavater grew highly critical of the artist’s physiognomic illustrations, which he deemed too idiosyncratic, dramatic, and exaggerated. Fuseli objected to his friend’s interference and complained about the limitations imposed by small-scale printmaking. In

Fuseli’s Impressions

69

1773, Fuseli threatened to quit the project: “I find myself neither applied nor skilled (and I speak the truth) to draw physiognomies to go nine to a quarter sheet . . . I need space, height, depth, length.”29 With their friendship on the verge of a break Lavater relented in 1774, writing, “draw for me whatever you like, – I was a fool to tell you what to draw.”30 In the end, Fuseli contributed just one attributed drawing to the German edition, the engravings for which were overseen by Johann Rudolph Schellenberg and Johann Heinrich Lips. His Head of a Dying Man was printed as an unsigned stipple engraving by Schellenberg in 1775 and in a smaller format, also by Schellenberg, in 1778. Fuseli’s dispute with Lavater was renewed in the late 1770s and early 1780s during the preparation of the significantly expanded French edition and its subsequent translation by Henry Hunter. In 1779, a desperate and frustrated Lavater asked Goethe to contribute some illustrations in Fuseli’s place but was refused. Goethe demurred that Fuseli would “certainly express the idea stronger, greater, and more accurately.”31 Once he was finally granted greater artistic autonomy by Lavater, Fuseli produced more than two dozen illustrations for the French Essai sur la physiognomonie and subsequent Hunter translation into English. The expanded and reworked manuscript highlighted Fuseli’s contribution, devoting several pages to a discussion of Fuseli’s art and his character. As this brief history indicates, Fuseli and Lavater had conflicting aims from the start. Lavater needed illustrations that conveyed precise and factual information – “epistemic images” in the sense defined by the historian Lorraine Daston: images which provide enough scientific information that they can effectively stand in for the thing they represent.32 Fuseli, on the other hand, was at the beginning of his career as a professional artist. The very features for which his art would eventually become famous – his flair for theatricality, exaggeration, and expression – were at odds with the informational imperatives of an epistemic image. Fuseli had his own reputation to look after and his own style to cultivate. From the perspective of a historian, it would be easy enough to leave it at that, to say that Fuseli and Lavater were simply “mismatched” and, consequently, disagreed about how the text should be illustrated. Yet there are crucial things this assumption overlooks. As reviewers of the books make clear, illustrations were not simply accessories to Lavaterian physiognomy – it was a system exceptionally invested in the mechanisms by which nature’s truths are visually represented and thus known to man. It is to Fuseli’s illustrations for Lavater, then, that we must turn in order to consider how and why those mechanisms could falter.

70

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Facts and Facsimiles The protracted disputes between the two men indicate that the illustrations for Lavaterian physiognomy faced a structural problem that was intimately connected with the production of the books themselves. The very plates register some of the challenges, both practical and intellectual, in which the entire program of illustrations was mired. After Fuseli provided additional illustrations for the expanded French edition, the artist was greatly displeased with the result. He believed that the engravers had done a poor job replicating his designs. When attention turned to an English translation, Fuseli was adamant that the illustrations be reengraved. In this, he was supported by Thomas Holloway, who was responsible for overseeing the illustrations of the Hunter edition. Lavater strenuously objected to new engravings. On a practical level, this posed a considerable expense. More importantly, though, Lavater was concerned that he would have to rewrite some of his text to match the updated illustrations. In the end, a compromise was reached: Fuseli was eventually able to have some of the French plates reengraved under the supervision of himself and Holloway, but these were printed alongside facsimiles of the original French engravings. The resulting edition expanded the French illustrations to include 173 engraved plates and facsimiles as well as 364 engravings within the text produced by over 30 engravers. To more precisely understand the conflict between Fuseli and Lavater, one need only to consult the pages of the Hunter translation itself. For example, the original French and English translations included a portrait of Satan (Figure 2.2), a figure to whom Fuseli returned time and again. In this design, conceived in the late 1770s by Fuseli while on his way back from Rome, power is evoked through the muscular virility of Satan’s neck, which expands from the bottom of the print. In its scale and the breadth of its visible surface, the neck rivals the compact features of the face. Yet it offers very little by way of detail, offering instead a suggestive anatomical pulsing that swells at its base. Detail is concentrated around the nose and brow of Satan, which are both rendered as dense, rippling protrusions. His eyes are unusually round, their pupils dilated and lids pulled back widely, and his lips pucker in a sneer. Lavater identified in the French illustration facial features that are “menacing from rage” but that “are at the same time disturbed by fear.”33 When the illustration was reengraved by Holloway for the second volume of English edition, a footnote was added to the text as corrective from Fuseli: “The Engraver has consulted the designer

Facts and Facsimiles

71

Figure 2.2 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, Satan, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 285.

and followed the Original, the mouth of which expresses contempt instead of fear.”34 This intervention by Fuseli, one of several found in the Hunter translation, suggests that the reader, upon comparing Lavater’s analysis and Fuseli’s revised illustration, will confront a problem: an image that conveys contempt and a textual analysis of the image which claims that it conveys fear. Here we find Fuseli continuing to disagree with Lavater, but not, it should be noted, with the basic premise – namely, that subtle variations in how a face is represented do convey meaningfully different things and that these things will be visually evident to the reader upon comparing them. It is worth recalling that this volume appeared two years after Fuseli submitted Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent to the Royal Academy. In some ways the artist clearly remained invested in the assertion that the human form does communicate precise information to its viewer and that this information resides in the representation of subtle but perceptible visual details. The conflict between Fuseli’s illustrations and Lavater’s text was more pronounced in the artist’s portrait of Lavater’s niece, Martha Hess (Figure 2.3), which first appeared in the French translation. Like most of the book’s

72

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Figure 2.3 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, Martha Hess, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 314.

illustrations, it is presented alongside sustained textual analysis by Lavater, who uses features found in the portrait as the basis for physiognomic interpretation. Hess’s smooth brow, restrained pout, and softly curved chin were among the elements that led Lavater to conclude that “nature has imprinted on [her face] the image of gentleness and benignity.”35 Yet Lavater was sharply critical of the illustration itself, which he believed to be a misrepresentation of Hess’s true profile. He criticizes the “irregular design of the eye, the immoderate lengthening of the nose, and the harshness of several other features . . . which does not belong to the character of this face.”36 He supposes that Fuseli intended to ennoble his subject, “to introduce an expression of greatness, but, as he managed it, that expression has degenerated into hardness.” Fuseli disagreed. His portrait, he protested, was accurate; it was merely the engraver who had disfigured it in the French edition in which the portrait first appeared. Because Lavater had refused to rewrite this

Printed Bodies

73

description for the English reengraving, a facsimile of the French illustration was presented alongside the new plate whose caption served as a riposte: “If the author’s criticisms should to the English Reader appear unfounded on comparing the Text with the Plate, he is informed that the Designer of the Original Head claims the right of restoring his own lines and leaves the Engraver of the French Edition in full possession of the Censure.” Fuseli’s editorial intrusions appear to have been a response to maladroit outline engravings from the French translation, but they create divergent imperatives: an image can resemble the “original” Fuselian design or the “original” Lavaterian text. The closer an image is aligned with one, the greater threat it poses to the other. Beyond the sheer practical necessity for text and image to correspond, Fuseli’s dispute with Lavater had deeper implications. I take it to be a conflict that was also about the evidentiary stability of representation and reproduction – how accurately an illustration could represent the appearance of an individual and how reliably an engraving could reproduce that illustration. If the correspondence between body and image, and between image and plate, could not be secured, then the efficacy of Lavater’s treatise was in doubt. This correspondence, it transpires, was even more foundational for the project. It was one of the precepts on which its dearly held claims to scientific legitimacy were based.

Printed Bodies Lavater’s system proposed that the body itself functions like a printed representation. This was rooted in the very feature that emphatically set Lavaterian physiognomy apart from the versions that preceded it. Whereas Le Brun and others had studied fleeting and superficial facial expressions, Lavater’s method prioritized the permanent bone structure of the skull. He categorized the former as mere “pathognomy,” an unambiguous critique of Le Brun’s “unscientific” study of unreliable, variable facial expressions.37 This distinction was important. Fuseli described it at length in 1789 in an extensive and enthusiastic defense of physiognomy that was printed at the beginning of Hunter’s English translation: “Men in their fears generally confound our science with pathognomy.”38 Pathognomy concerns “whatever relates to habit, whatever arises from the moment of action, the burst of passions,” whereas, Fuseli continues, “physiognomy is the mother of correctness, by ascertaining from the measure of the solid parts the precise portion of the moveable . . . Let the twelfth part of an inch be added to, or taken from, the space between the nose and the upper-lip of the Apollo, and

74

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

the god is lost.” It is a telling passage. First, Fuseli’s language (“our science”) reminds us of the artist’s ongoing affiliation with Lavaterian physiognomy, despite more than two decades of discord with its author. Second, and of greater relevance here, is his use of the Apollo Belvedere as a prime example of physiognomy’s truth. Fuseli attributes the success of that renowned work of classical sculpture to the precise rendering of quantitatively measurable facial features. He indicates that art’s representational capacity is rooted in the accurate depiction of the human body through the proportions uncovered by physiognomic analysis. Put differently, for a work of art to truly represent its subject, it needs to faithfully reproduce the means by which the exterior body represents the inner self. Visual representation is not merely how one illustrates Lavaterian physiognomy; it is how the body itself conveys information. Lavater actually put forward a very specific explanation of how, exactly, this works. Although key to his bid for scientific legitimacy, Lavater’s emphasis on cranial structure would become one of the most disturbing and pernicious legacies of his system insofar as it was used to support ideas about racial difference in the emergent field of comparative anatomy and, later, eugenics.39 The account of bone growth offered by his text was considered by many reviewers to be both the most scientifically legitimate and the most broadly applicable aspect of his system.40 Lavater argued that bone growth begins during gestation, when the fetus’s “soft mucilaginous substance, homogeneous in all its parts,” gradually hardens into cartilage and then bone.41 As it hardens, the skull is “visibly fitted to the mass of the substances which it contains and follows their growth at every age of human life. Thus the exterior form of the brain which imprints itself perfectly on the interior surface of the skull, is at the same time the model of the contours on the exterior surface.”42 What is being described, in fact, is a process of positive and negative impressions being made. The contours of the brain serve as a positive image that “imprints itself perfectly” onto the interior surface of the skull. This surface resembles the brain as an inverted image, which is reversed once again as the design is transferred from the interior surface of the skull to its exterior. The perceptible exterior of the head is the result of a series of repetitions and inversions from brain to skull and from skull to face. As one French reviewer described it, the result of this process “will always be solid, determinate, durable, and perceivable, and will bear the marks of the invariable principles of human character.”43 This applies to more than just the face: although Lavaterian physiognomy primarily addresses the underlying bone structure of the head, it considers the skeletal system as

Printed Bodies

75

a whole, evaluating in considerable detail man’s ears, feet, hands, teeth, and hair. One of the first English-language reviews of Lavater’s French translation summarized this logic as follows: Each part preserves the impression and character of the whole, and is (as our Author speaks) the cause or effect of one individuality. We cannot, continues he, repeat it too often, that every thing in man characterizes man; that . . . we may conclude from the part to the whole, and from the whole to each part.44

The same process that shapes the face takes place throughout the body, making each part representative of the whole individual. This is a form of printmaking that occurs very literally within the body but also in a metaphorical sense, under the supervision of a Divine Printmaker: in his introduction Lavater proclaims that all human beings “bear all the impress of [God’s] marvellous wisdom.”45 Even in the most functional terms, Lavater’s text assumes a reciprocity between looking at a printed illustration and looking at a body. As a treatise exclusively reliant upon prints to illustrate its method, it asks the reader to draw conclusions from the former as if she or he were in the presence of the latter. These acts are so commensurate that Lavater bases conclusive physiognomic analyses on printed and painted portraits as if they were conducted in person, affirming their status as epistemic images. Contemporary reviews of Lavater’s text noted the triadic relationship it proposed between representation, knowledge, and the body. The Monthly Review, for example, wrote that “the mind is painted on the countenance by nature.”46 However, a much more specific configuration was at work: the scientific legitimacy and empirical authority of Lavaterian physiognomy were predicated on the idea that the surface of the body acts like a print, that it is a print. Moreover, this is a print that can be readily and fully apprehended through man’s innate visual acuity. Unlike a conventional print, though, the physiognomic body contains both the matrix and its printed surface, the former being merely concealed internally beneath the visible exterior of the body. As such it constitutes a chain of indexical transfer and resemblance lacking the metaphorics of loss, absence, and death that Georges DidiHuberman and others have attributed to the “imprint.”47 Rather than a print predicated on the absence of that which has left its trace, Lavater’s readers encounter an object of corporeal self-representation – in which the self and its visible representation are causally related and copresent. Returning to the book’s illustrations with this in mind, we can consider how printed bodies might strive but still fail to meet the criteria of self-representation.

76

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Four Heads As I have indicated, Lavater’s was a project that was deeply invested in the evidentiary status of visual representation in both practical and epistemological terms: the prints found in the original German, French, and English editions were essential to the successful explication of Lavater’s method, but they were also emblematic of the model of corporeal self-representation on which that method based its claim to produce legitimate knowledge. Yet, as captured by the dispute concerning Fuseli’s portrait Martha Hess, human-made images can be imperfect, imprecise things. The engraved portraits that comprise most of the book’s illustrations cannot always be relied upon to perfectly represent their subject, whether inaccurately depicted by the original artist or distorted by the hand of the engraver who translates the original design to the printing matrix. Lavater was sensitive to this problem, complaining of the fallibility of outline engravings in his analysis of a portrait of William Shakespeare included in his book. “A copy of a copy,” the text reads. “Add, if you please, a spiritless vapid outline. How deficient must all outlines be! Among ten thousand can one be found that is exact?”48 The “outline” to which he refers is a simple, linear kind of engraving that is less expensive to produce but that is visually schematic and less detailed. In his zeal to demonstrate his awareness of the outline engraving’s formal disadvantages, Lavater has implied, perhaps inadvertently, that they are actually incapable of proffering an accurate representation. Instead, Lavater preferred the silhouette because of the precision it seemed uniquely able to offer: it results from a shadow cast by the head itself, as if the body produces its own representation.49 Despite this he recognized that the silhouette was far too limited in the amount of information it made available to the viewer. Traditional shaded and outlined portraits were necessary to present his readers with sufficient visible data on which to base their analyses. One of the primary strategies used to combat the fallibility of the portrait was to multiply it.50 Consider this triplicate portrait of the mid-eighteenth-century British naval hero George Anson (Figure 2.4), taken from Hunter’s English translation of the original French edition. Like many of the illustrations found in the original volumes and especially the more lavishly illustrated French and English editions, this engraving provides multiple versions rather than a single portrait. It also presents different kinds of portraits, combining the graphic clarity of outline engravings below with a greater detail offered by the finely shaded engraving above. In these ways, the illustration mitigates the contingent flaws of any one portrayal of Anson, a technique that appears to be in keeping with what Galison and Daston have called “truth to nature” – that is, an early

Four Heads

77

Figure 2.4 Thomas Holloway, Caricature of Lord Anson, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), opposite 112.

modern pictorial model of scientific objectivity that suppressed local, particular flaws in pursuit of a more representative general image. Unlike this model, however, Lavaterian physiognomy emphasized the unique features of individual men rather than the unifying characteristics commonly held among a given “type” of person. In other words, the local contingencies that needed to be suppressed here resided not in the specimen but in the illustration: the problem

78

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Figure 2.5 Anonymous portrait, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 270.

was not that an individual might not fully represent his taxonomic class but that a given portrait might not accurately represent its unique subject. Practical constraints meant that a great number of the portraits could not be shown in multiple; but other combinatory methods were available to supplement the informational shortcomings of the single portrait. In one illustration (Figure 2.5), for example, the abstracting precision of the silhouette and the variety of detail provided by the shaded portrait are integrated in a single engraving as if the former were a shadow cast by the latter from an unseen source of illumination. The silhouetted profile is visually contiguous with the shaded three-quarter profile, inviting the viewer to examine them together. In this, as in numerous other portraits for the book, rather than consolidating many possible “imperfect” images into a single representative image, an individual’s likeness was made multiple, both in the quantity and in the mode of its representation. Fuseli produced works for Lavater’s text that adopted some of these strategies but which did so in ways that neither augmented nor enhanced the information they presented to the viewer. While in Italy, the artist

Four Heads

79

executed oil sketches for at least two of the four heads included in the expanded French and English translations as Four Heads from Dante’s Hell (Figure 2.6; shown here from the English). Found on the recto (Figure 2.7) and verso (Figure 2.8) of a single canvas, the painted

Figure 2.6 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, Four Heads from Dante’s Inferno from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 290.

80

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Figure 2.7 Henry Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul from Dante’s “Inferno” (recto), 1770–1778, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago.

sketches of the Four Heads provide evidence of Fuseli’s contemporaneous studies in Italy. The dramatically foreshortened of the head on the recto bears a striking resemblance to the Prophet Jonah found on Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, which was greatly admired by Fuseli. Possible models for additional heads can be found in Luca Signorelli’s fresco The Damned Cast into Hell (c.1499) in the San Brizio Chapel of Orvieto Cathedral. Unlike these Renaissance precedents, though, Fuseli’s painted heads cannot be located within a cohesive decorative framework nor within the narrative world of Judeo-Christian biblical texts. Taking their subject matter from the Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s famous late medieval vernacular epic, The Divine Comedy, they depict sinners, unidentified in Dante’s text, who experienced what Lavater calls, “the most horrible sufferings.”51

Four Heads

81

Figure 2.8 Henry Fuseli, Head of a Damned Soul from Dante’s “Inferno” (verso), 1770–1778, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago.

The painting on the recto hardly seems suited to a physiognomic analysis; the dramatic foreshortening of the face obscures its key features. The figure’s head is cast backward violently, exposing a large, expansive throat whose surface appears, especially in the resulting print, to ripple with activity. Where the flatter expanse of his neck rises upward on the right to meet the head, the paint abruptly stops short, leaving an unbounded and undefined upper jaw and ear. The sinner’s engorged lips are parted to reveal, in the center of the painting, the fleshy cavern of his mouth. Such features are even more exaggerated in the print, where the neck rendered as an unlikely collection of pulsing muscles and tendons, coupled with a distended nose and heavy, folded nostrils. In lieu of an ear, the hatching lines merely darken and curve – a sense evoked in its absence. When Blake later produced a folio-sized engraving of the head, such distortions were amplified and animated far beyond legibility.

82

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

The verso on which the third sinner in Fuseli’s illustration was based, more clearly delineates its subject’s facial features. His deformed brow “could not possibly,” Lavater declares, “belong to a distinguished man.” Yet here, too, much of the face is obscured in shadow and its lower jaw is compromised by an expanse of blue pigment that does not resolve into a definitive shape. His closed eyelids are lined with lighter paint – an allusion, perhaps, to sinners whose eyes were sewn shut as part of their punishment in Dante’s Purgatorio.52 The head on the recto although nominally sighted, likewise has a thick encrustation of white pigment over his eyes. The bright, pigmented opacity that lines the eyes of each sinner suggests that conventional, functional sightedness has been hindered or deranged. Fuseli’s illustrations appear to adopt some of the strategies by which other images supplemented the information encoded in a single portrait. As a group, they resemble other plates on which multiple views of a head are shown, but they do not cohere as a set of legible portraits. The head of the third sinner, like the anonymous portrait (Figure 2.5) from which it is separated by only a few pages, casts a shadow, yet one emphatically devoid of any contours that might suggest a profile. In short, the means by which other prints endeavor to supply additional pictorial information are, in Four Heads, pointedly ineffective. To the extent that these paintings were initially designed for Lavater’s books, it is clear that they were never going to supply the kind of perceptible indices – profile, brow, nose, eyes, chin, ears, and so on – that the text was dedicated to analyzing. These are four heads that, instead, obscure and deform the very features on which a physiognomic analysis might be based and that empty out some of the strategies by which the book’s illustrations present and supplement visual evidence. The portrait of the first sinner in Fuseli’s Four Heads casts a long shadow, metaphorically speaking, over Fuseli’s body of work. The features that characterize his face – the foreshortened head cast to one side, the overly large and muscular neck, the vaguely rendered or altogether absent ear, the parted lips, and the prominent, shaded nostrils – recur frequently in his paintings. They take on a softer, rounded guise in the inverted head of the dreamer in Fuseli’s The Nightmare (Figure 2.14), for example, but are muscular and austere in his Achilles Grasping at the Shade of Patroclus (Figure 2.9). The migration of these features across the artist’s drawings, prints, and paintings ironizes their prior placement within a physiognomic framework. Where they had once been taken to exemplify a specific and fixed set of character traits, they became promiscuous and multivalent,

Deformations

83

Figure 2.9 Henry Fuseli, Achilles Grasping at the Shade of Patroclus, 1803, oil on canvas. Kunsthaus Zürich. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

equally capable of representing an ancient hero, an envious sinner, or a contemporary lady.

Deformations Fuseli’s contributions to the original German, French, and English versions of Lavater’s text – including Four Heads – share with his subsequent work a recurring fascination with the male body and in particular with a body whose defining features are suppressed, exaggerated, or distorted. His contemporaries often remarked on the difficulty

84

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

that inhered in critically evaluating such bodies. As one 1786 review of Fuseli’s art in the Public Advertiser reads, “Pictures are, or ought to be, a representation of natural objects, delineated with taste and precision.” The paper complained, “Mr. Fuseli gives us the human figure, from the recollection of its form and not from the form itself; he seems to be painting everything from fancy, which renders his work almost incomprehensible, and leaves no criterion to judge of them by, but the imagination.”53 Thus far I have limited my analysis to works that were directly connected with Lavaterian physiognomy, which offer the most concrete framework for understanding how Fuseli and Lavater could have been grappling with a shared set of conceptual and pictorial concerns. In what follows, I will suggest that we can see these concerns playing out in artworks that were relatively distant from the two men’s collaboration. Fuseli’s larger oeuvre is typically read alongside a broader artistic reckoning with various forms of political upheaval and economic modernization. To insist upon its proximity to Lavater and also to the empirical precepts upon which Lavater’s system was founded is not to dislodge it from this historical context but to reveal it as at the same time engaged with a widespread set of epistemological transitions underway at the turn of the nineteenth century. Many of Fuseli’s paintings amplify the analytical opacity of his early physiognomic illustrations insofar as they pointedly do not offer cohesive, self-identical, plausible, legible representations of the body. Moreover, the perceptible corporeal traits that can be discerned in Fuseli’s work do not necessarily correspond in a straightforward, reliable fashion to underlying truths. Consider another of his depictions of Satan, this one from 1802. Dante’s was not the only vernacular literature to which Fuseli had been looking for scenes of the underworld while living in Rome; he was likewise gripped by John Milton’s evocative and sublime descriptions of Hell in Paradise Lost.54 Like his contemporaries James Barry, Thomas Lawrence, and Richard Westall (among others), Fuseli was drawn to Milton’s monumental vision of Satan, often portrayed in compositions that set Satan’s muscular immensity against the indeterminate chaos of Hell, which was described by Milton as a “dark illimitable ocean without bound, without dimension.”55 This passage likewise inspired de Loutherbourg in the 1780s, whose popular but short-lived Eidophusikon included a Miltonic scene of “Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of the Fiery Lake.”56 Fuseli’s interest in Milton went much farther, though. His Satanic Call to Beelzebub in Hell (Figure 2.10) was based on at least one of his earlier

Deformations

85

Figure 2.10 Henry Fuseli, Satanic Call to Beelzebub in Hell, 1802, oil on canvas. Kunsthaus Zürich. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

renditions of the scene. By that time, Fuseli had produced dozens of Miltonic paintings, especially in the 1790s when he was preparing a venture modeled on the Shakespeare Gallery and similar undertakings (to which Fuseli, like de Loutherbourg, contributed). However, whereas those ventures had been collective efforts, the Milton Gallery – which was a commercial failure by most measures – only included works by Fuseli himself. Like a number of roughly contemporary works, including Barry’s Satan and His Legions Hurling Defiance Toward the Vault of Heaven (c.1792–1795, British Museum) and Lawrence’s Satan Summoning His Legions (Figure 2.11), Fuseli’s

86

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Figure 2.11 Thomas Lawrence, Satan Summoning His Legions, 1796–1797, oil on canvas. Royal Academy of Arts, London. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Marcus Leith.

painting depicts Satan as a monumental figure, seen from below, with exaggerated physical features and dramatically extended limbs. When Lawrence’s rendition of Satan had been initially exhibited at the Royal

Deformations

87

Academy in 1797, several had seen the painting as a direct challenge to Fuseli, given that it traded in the monumentality, exaggeration, and tension for which he was then widely known.57 Unlike in Lawrence’s painting, however, Fuseli’s Satan is set to the far right of the composition, with his raised arms and foremost leg framing Beelzebub and the indeterminate expanse that surrounds them both. His face, shown in profile, is lacking the visible features of Satan delineated by Fuseli in his earlier physiognomic illustration. Here Satan’s head inclines away from the viewer, revealing only a rounded chin, strong nose, and a shaded fold above the eyes. The rest of the body’s musculature is only vaguely sketched. The upper torso so decisively and emphatically rendered by Barry and Lawrence is faint and ill-defined in Fuseli’s painting. The entire lower portion of Satan’s back leg as well as his hands are darkened and blurred, blending into the background of the painting. His foreshortened back foot seems to have disappeared altogether. This is particularly pronounced in the figure of Beelzebub in the midground, whose arm reaches upward in response to Satan’s call. Beelzebub’s sketchily rendered lower body blends into the darkened depths out of which he rises, its contours dissolving into a pigmented chaos of deep brown and orange. (This can also be seen in the engraving published by F. I. du Roveray in the same year. In the print, which is dominated by nebulous gray vapors, Beelzebub’s bent leg can be seen fading into Hell’s “dark illimitable ocean.”) Fuseli transposed the immeasurable and indeterminate expanse described by Milton onto the level of form. Rather than the swirling, flamelike wisps through which his contemporaries depicted Hell, Fuseli evoked a molten sea of incandescent hues that blend in and out of deep recesses of shadow. Against this backdrop Beelzebub’s upper body takes on a more concrete, bounded shape. Satan’s call-to-arms doubles as a call-to-form, a coming into being through contour, depth, and shadow; and Beelzebub answers the call through his individuation from his surroundings via the elements of pictorial order. This contrast between formed, unformed, and deformed was starkly rendered in a Homeric work produced around the same time (although lacking a fixed date), Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus (Figure 2.12). Having been killed by Hector in the Trojan War, Patroclus is seen laid atop a wooden pyre. The foreground is lined with soldiers, whose rounded, muscular shoulders, swollen necks, and pointed helmets – emblems of irrepressible male virility – are set off in darker shades of wash outlined sparingly with lighter hues. The drawing is dominated by the contrasting upright body of Achilles and the supine body of Patroclus: one dark and the other light, one alive and the other

88

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

Figure 2.12 Henry Fuseli, Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus, 1800, oil and watercolor on paper. Kunsthaus Zürich. © Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings, 1916.

dead, one vigorously rendered in ink and watercolor and the other illdefined, as if fading from view. Achilles, legs extended in stride, pictures an emphatic masculinity marked by taut musculature and robust verticality. The contours of his back, buttocks, and legs are outlined in confident

Deformations

89

brown strokes of ink, with local anatomical details rendered in prominent and rounded passages of wash. Patroclus, on the other hand, clearly lacks such attributes. His face, turned toward the viewer, is given as a single shaded contour covered with faint ink scratches that in no way evoke the features of a face. Instead it looks like the wood on which it rests, almost as if Patroclus is drained of his corporeality, which flows down the page to the wooden funeral pyre below him. The pyre’s defined contours of swelling oblongs, arranged parallel along a light, curving axis as though held together by connective tissue, more closely resemble human musculature than any element of Patroclus himself. It is crisscrossed with ribbon-like blue veins, acquiring the attributes and formal specificity once belonging to the fallen hero, who, in death, becomes deformed. On the right, his legs and feet grow smaller and fainter. The vertical stroke of ink that outlines his ankle is extended to the pyre below, again indicative of their newfound contiguity. As in Satanic Call to Beelzebub, in Achilles Sacrifices His Hair the work’s narrative content is played out in the formal opposition of its figures. This is underscored by the act of sacrifice undertaken by Achilles to grieve his friend and mark the boundary of life and death: the severing of hair from his animate body. We encounter a contrast – a confrontation, even – between bodies accorded legible features and bodies that are not; and this contrast, wittingly or not, allegorizes conflicting ideas about the evidentiary status of body that were very much at stake in physiognomy. Early and mature works alike obscured and withheld the kinds of pictorial information prized by Lavater. Within the context of late eighteenth-century European art, the suppression of pictorial detail had very specific aesthetic resonances. Edmund Burke’s recent A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful was one of the most frequently discussed works in the London literary circles to which Fuseli was introduced in the 1760s.58 Long before his arrival in London, Fuseli was profoundly influenced by Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger while in Zurich, who advocated for literature that activated the generative powers of the imagination – a faculty regarded with suspicion in many schools of thought.59 This could be achieved, according to Burke, by withholding certain kinds of representational specificity, thus encouraging the reader or viewer to imagine vast depths and powerful forces whose immensity would always exceed that which was clearly delineated.60 Fuseli affirmed the opposition of detail and sublimity in his third Lecture on Painting delivered at the Royal Academy in 1801: “all minute detail tends to destroy terror, as all minute ornament,

90

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

grandeur. The catalogue of the cauldron’s ingredients in Macbeth, destroys the terror attendant on the mysterious darkness of preternatural agency.”61 This was typically deployed to evoke atmospheric effects: obscure settings, opaque clouds, and unseen depths – effects we often encounter in Fuseli’s art.62 While there is no doubt that such aesthetic concerns played a significant role in his suppression of pictorial detail, it should now be clear that this was hardly the only – or, for Fuseli, the most immediate – context in which the status and nature of corporeal legibility were being questioned. It is not just any kind of detail that is suppressed in Fuseli’s works. It is the anatomic specificity of the monumental human body, which is narratively central and pictorially foregrounded. Nor is the suppression of its key features the only aspect that made Fuseli’s treatment of the body unassimilable within Lavater’s system. Corporeal detail itself is often a foil to clarity in Fuseli’s art. To take another Homeric work on paper, consider Fuseli’s much earlier pen-and-ink sketch, Thetis Mourning the Body of Achilles (Figure 2.13). On the left is Achilles, his body supine and splayed in defeat, and on the right is his mother, Thetis, encircled by bright diaphanous

Figure 2.13 Henry Fuseli, Thetis Mourning the Body of Achilles, 1780, wash and graphite on paper. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Deformations

91

drapery that billows expansively around her pale form. Achilles’s facial features are characteristically obscured by dramatic foreshortening. He appears, moreover, to lack both eyes and ears. Yet his torso swells with densely clustered parcels of shaded musculature. They emerge and recede as if retaining some of Achilles’s essential vitality. To the extent that it can be taken as indicative of his underlying traits, such frenzied musculature would seem to point to his formidable strength. However, this surfeit of musculature poses two problems for a physiognomic framework. First, Achilles, like many of Fuseli’s heroes (including Thor), is simply too muscular. By this, I mean that his body is so tightly packed with bulging tendons, bones, cartilage, and muscles that they fail to retain any plausible differentiated functions. As a result, they are no longer able to cohere as a local units of a single unified body. The calf muscle on the left bulges awkwardly and is rendered with thin, ovoid contours, whereas the calf muscle on the right, though slimmer, is jarringly angular and is set off in long linear strokes of thick wash. The engorged pectoral muscle to the right of Achilles’s head is awkwardly extended too far from the body. The same could be said of the arm on the left – but not of the arm on the right, which seems to have vanished entirely. (The notable exception here is the feet, which are unencumbered by bones, tendons, and muscles altogether. As is often the case in Fuseli’s work, they instead bear an uncanny resemblance to crakows, which are long pointed shoes that became popular in the fifteenth century.) Rather than a plausible body, the extravagance of the musculature evokes a body in too great an excess of itself .63 This problematic surfeit of corporeal detail can also be found in illustrations produced by Fuseli for Lavater’s text, such as The Death of Abel, included in the French and English translations of Lavater. Again, the face is obscured but the musculature is outlined with great precision; and again, as pockets of flesh accumulate the figure itself ceases to cohere. Its visual determinacy is dissolved into an aggregate of adjacent, but ultimately discrete, bounded forms. The second problem posed by this kind of body has to do with the misalignment of external appearance and underlying reality. With Achilles we encounter the dead body of a once-vital man in which the visual surface of the body is highly variable and dynamic. The viewer’s eye practically vibrates as it glides over its tessellated forms. As such, it differs markedly from Fuseli’s later depiction of Achilles (Figure 2.12), insofar as his muscular specificity has been deactivated upon his death. Earlier works establish a different opposition than that which motivates the later work; the contrast is between the animate surface of the body and its inanimate

92

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

underlying state, between the vitality, strength, and vigor of its appearance and the inert, defeated passivity of its reality. How the body appears, in short, does not reflect how it actually is. In rendering such pointedly incomprehensible bodies, Fuseli sounded a note of deep skepticism about the scientific viability of a physiognomic enterprise. His younger colleague Blake would go further, portraying monumental nude bodies whose perverse musculature suggested deeper ambiguities: between alive and dead, animal and human, interior and exterior. Blake was, famously, more overtly hostile to the notion that the human body – as both a physical materiality and a sensory apparatus – provided one with privileged access to rational truth, in the broader empirical sense.64

Between Visible and Invisible The commensurability of the human body and its pictorial representation was critical to Lavater’s undertaking in a very real and practical manner: the primary evidence on which it based its analyses took the form of printed illustrations. Moreover, as I have argued, this was central to the epistemological framework upon which it based its claims to scientific legitimacy: Lavater’s was a system predicated on self-representation – on the ability of the visual surface of the body to represent its underlying truths. This was informed by an even more fundamental assumption, namely that the human body exemplifies a pervasive alignment between appearance and reality. As such, Lavater’s model of physiognomy drew upon a basic empirical conception of the natural world as something that truthfully represents itself to the human observer in perceptible terms. This was precisely what Georg Hegel brought into focus when defining physiognomy in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. In writing of Lavater’s “science of knowing men,” he observed that “it is the visible as a sensuous presentment of the invisible, which constitutes the object of observation.”65 For Hegel it is not merely the study of the perceptible world; physiognomy takes as its creed that the perceptible world of nature represents the imperceptible world of truth. This took on particular semiotic terms in the context of eighteenth-century German aesthetics, in which, for the philosopher Christian Wolff, “nature is a sign system which – free of all the deficiencies and limitations of the culturally instituted sign systems – expresses only itself.”66 Both observational practices and the semiotics of nature took as given that the entire perceptible world accurately conveys its imperceptible truths.

Between Visible and Invisible

93

Lavater was quite explicit about this. His model of physiognomy, by extension, proffered a means of analyzing not just the body but the entire natural world, a claim elaborately staged in his introductory remarks in the original Hunter translation: Do we not daily judge of the sky by its physiognomy? No food, not a glass of wine, or beer, not a cup of coffee, or tea, comes to table, which is not judged by its physiognomy, its exteriour; and of which we do not thence deduce some conclusion respecting its interiour, good, or bad, properties. Is not all nature physiognomy; superficies and contents; body, and spirit; exteriour effect, and internal power; invisible beginning, and visible ending? What knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on the exteriour; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and imperceptible?67

Lavater’s understanding of the natural world is one in which appearance and truth, visible exterior and invisible interior, coincide; and it is on this basis that man navigates the world. It is so foundational to our experience of being in the world that he asks, “What knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on . . . the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and imperceptible?” The task of the physiognomist, in this light, is the same as that of any other scientists: to study the natural world through direct observation and critical reflection, and thence to draw conclusions about its inner workings. Lavater was not merely publishing a system of “reading faces” – he was putting forward a system of studying the entire world. Lavaterian physiognomy turns on the evidentiary capacity of the human body, its ability to present data about itself. As such, it draws upon the general scientific precepts associated with seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury empiricism, namely that direct observation of the natural world is a privileged vehicle for producing valid scientific knowledge, that man has comprehensive sensory access to the natural world and the requisite rational intellect to evaluate sensory data, and finally, that the perceptible features of the natural world accurately reflect the underlying structures or laws that govern it. However idiosyncratic or heterodox Lavater’s project was, however short-lived its credibility, it was an expression of a model of empiricism that had to do with much more than just “reading” the body to determine a man’s inner traits. At its core, his model of physiognomy was about the terms according to which man can produce knowledge about the natural world more broadly. Lavater took the human body to be the ultimate test case of this paradigm. As I have argued, his method assumes that the body visually

94

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

represents its inner self and that this body can, in turn, be represented pictorially. In spite of this, Fuseli’s bodies insistently do not represent the self, at least not in the sense of conveying reliable information about its underlying truths. Nor can we claim Fuseli’s ignorance on this score; he was actively involved, for over two decades, with Lavater’s project. Fuseli’s disputes with Lavater, his inappropriate illustrations for the book, and his treatment of the body more generally are emphatically at odds with the relationship posited by Lavater between the knowledge, the body, and its visual representation. As such, his work proves itself quite resistant to related precepts at work in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century models of scientific empiricism that propose an evidentiary world populated with reliable, perceptible data points that can be observed, analyzed, and thus known by a rational observer.

Sight Unseen With this broader epistemological configuration in mind, we might begin to reconsider what kind of evidentiary cohesion Fuseli’s paintings, prints, and drawings lay claim to pictorially, and how this shapes the world inhabited by its protagonists and also the viewer who attempts to make sense of it. Perhaps the most straightforward example of this is The Nightmare (Figure 2.14), an unrelentingly enigmatic painting that, for all its strangeness, remains the most familiar of his works. First displayed at the Royal Academy in the spring of 1782, the painting inspired scandal and success in near-equal measure. It was quickly reproduced as an engraving and copies as well as parodies of it circulated widely throughout Britain and Continental Europe. Fuseli himself went on to paint other versions of it. The writer and politician Horace Walpole famously wrote just one word next to its entry in his annotated copy of the Academy’s exhibition catalogue: “shocking.” Yet for all the attention the painting has received, there has been little critical consensus among scholars as to what its constitutive elements or the larger arrangement actually mean. Indeed, the painting’s very ambiguity has been taken by Andrei Pop as key to its operation.68 The confusion largely hinges on the uncertain relationship between its three figures: a reclining woman in contemporary dress, a simian-like creature perched on her chest, and a horse whose head emerges from behind red curtain. The painting’s sexual subtext is palpable. The woman’s clothing is in a state of disarray, revealing much of her bust and clinging suggestively to her exaggerated waist and hip. She is mounted by the

Sight Unseen

95

Figure 2.14 Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts. USA Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischman/Bridgeman Images.

brown-hued demon, often referred to as an incubus; and the bulbous snout of the horse (rendered even more phallic in later versions of the painting) enters the scene through labial folds of red drapery. Although certainly not the first painting to depict a dream (nor the first by Fuseli), The Nightmare lacks a clear narrative source or precedent. Viewers are left to follow the cue offered by its title and consider the nonhuman figures as belonging, in some form or other, to the dream-experience of the sleeping woman. As a result, readings of the painting have situated it within the history of dreams, in relation to the aesthetic of the “mock sublime,” and, more recently, as figuring a bridge between private psychic experience and publicly shared knowledge.69 The Nightmare portrays seemingly incompatible kinds of figures within a unified visual field. There are pictorial elements we take to be “actually there” – the supine woman, the bed, the rounded table and the mirror and small vessels atop it, and so on; but there are also elements that are less obviously so, whether we take them to be allegorical figures, projections of

96

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

the sleeper’s physical and/or psychic state, supernatural creatures, or something else altogether. Yet their presence in the painting is equally “plausible” in representational terms. Note, for example, that the simian-like creature casts a shadow on the red drapery, indicating that he is illuminated by the same light that falls on the sleeping woman. In other words, Fuseli does not offer clear pictorial distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, the real and the imaginary, or the physical and the psychic. Nor does he situate them within a narrative source whose meaning would be obvious to the painting’s viewers or whose diegetic framework would account for the copresence of both “real” and “unreal” creatures (the likes of which can be found in Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian mythology). Rather than offer another interpretation of this painting, I would merely point out that, whatever else it may represent, The Nightmare figures a world that is not visually self-evident, despite being clearly delineated in pictorial terms. The relationship between its human protagonist and animal-like figures, the uncertain ontological status of the latter, and the lack of an established narrative framework within which such ambiguities could be resolved leave the viewer unable to parse appearance from reality. The painting also introduces a theme that Fuseli explored in much of his subsequent work: a human protagonist who is disempowered by such ambiguities. In The Nightmare, we see the concurrence of a world that is not self-evident and a human subject who is dispossessed by that world. It is this very phenomenon that was dramatized in his later Mad Kate (Figure 2.15), a painting inspired by William Cowper’s 1785 poem The Task. (Cowper, it should be noted, was an admirer of Lavater.)70 Fuseli and Cowper were originally due to collaborate on a translation project in 1790, which was abandoned as a result of Cowper’s mental instability. Instead Mad Kate was painted several years after Cowper died in 1800 and was engraved by William Bromley in 1807 for a posthumous collection of Cowper’s poetry that was published by Fuseli’s associate Joseph Johnson. One of the many characters encountered in Cowper’s unconventional long-form poem is Kate, a woman whose lover has died at sea. Yet she continues to wander the coast: “And now she roams / The dreary waste; there spends the livelong day.” Although in a desperate state, she begs of passers-by “an idle pin” but neither food nor clothing. Cowper declares, “Kate is crazed.” Fuseli paints the young woman on a rocky outcropping, around which sea and sky seem to rage and churn. Her madness is apparent in her wide, almost bulging eyes, which peer out of the canvas but do not appear to settle on anything in particular. The intensity of her gaze, unfocused and

Sight Unseen

97

Figure 2.15 Henry Fuseli, Mad Kate, 1806–1807, oil on canvas. Goethemuseum, Frankfurt. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

without a clear object, is likewise foregrounded in Bromley’s subsequent engraving. In this regard, Mad Kate anticipates the nonreciprocal gaze that characterized Théodore Géricault’s portraits of the insane from 1822 – a series of works evoking insanity as a form of self-experience that, Jonathan Crary has observed, is cut off from and incompatible with a collectively experienced external reality.71 With two delicate pins on her foremost shoulder, Kate is encircled by a large swoop of cloth that billows around her. Her hair flows about wildly as if animated by the frenzied activity taking place in her mind. Indeed, her hair, her clothing, and the storm that surrounds her are in a collective state of derangement reflective of her mental condition, particularly in the original French sense of déranger, meaning to dis-arrange or dis-order. The symmetrical turmoil of the painting’s formal and narrative content has the potential to destabilize

98

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

one’s understanding of it. Is the storm itself an imaginary expression of the protagonist’s inner turmoil? To be more precise: Is this painting, like The Nightmare, presenting both its protagonist and a figural rendition of her private psychic experience? Or is the storm merely a representational strategy whereby Fuseli dramatizes her misery? For Mad Kate, such questions will never be resolved, a fact exacerbated by the lack of any specificity in her surroundings. The viewer cannot place her in relation to her environment; nor, it seems, can Kate. Insofar as the primary condition of her insanity is an inability to distinguish between that which she imagines and that which is actually there, it is a condition replicated for the viewer. To look at the painting is to occupy, for a time, a position in which such distinctions are perpetually beyond one’s reach. It is not just the body, as represented by Fuseli, that fails to conform to the expectations of Lavaterian physiognomy; in key artworks, what is disregarded or perhaps challenged is the underlying premise on which it based its claims to produce scientific knowledge – that is, that the world can be relied upon to represent itself in factual, perceptible terms. Specifically, what is at stake here is a relation between appearance and reality, the assumption that they are distinct categories but are nonetheless in perfect accord. Recall Lavater: “What knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not founded on the exteriour; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and imperceptible?” It is not that Fuseli persistently depicts a world void of perceptible clues, or whose appearance has no relation to its narrative content. Nor are his works empty, inexpressive, or completely illegible. Rather than a world whose visual representation is commensurate with its underlying truths, they articulate the breaking apart of this relationship. As a result, Fuseli’s work proves to be a challenge to the doctrine of Lavaterian physiognomy that he knew so well and ultimately remains unassimilable with the broader epistemological structures on which it drew. To the extent that Fuseli’s artworks imagined the consequences of the alternative world evoked therein, they largely concern what it might mean to be an observer of that world. His protagonists are often defined both by their position as a viewer within a scene and by their incapacitation or dispossession as a result of said position. Already in his early designs for Lavater, Fuseli’s protagonists confront a world in which appearance and reality are decidedly misaligned and to which they respond with intense states of physical and psychic alterity. While living in Rome in 1777, Fuseli executed a drawing of Saul and the Witch of Endor in pen and sepia. The resulting print first appeared in the original French translation of Lavater’s

Sight Unseen

99

Figure 2.16 Thomas Holloway after Henry Fuseli, The Witch of Endor, from Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1789–1798), 289.

text and was republished ten years later in Hunter’s English translation (Figure 2.16). Based on a passage from the Hebrew Bible, the illustration portrays King Saul’s attempts to communicate with the dead prophet Samuel. Having been spurned by God for disobedience, Saul consults a spiritual medium, the witch of Endor, to contact Samuel. Once summoned, the apparition predicts that Saul will lose his kingdom and die the following day. The witch of Endor occupies the central foreground in the early sketch, underscoring her narrative function as a spiritual intermediary. Under her robes, her musculature is outlined in long, parallel strokes of ink. In the final engravings, the medium is set farther back and her body is cloaked in heavy folds of drapery. She extends her arms out toward each of the men, connecting them in an emphatic lateral line that is accented and crisscrossed by the symmetrical swells of her robe. On the left, stands the spirit of Samuel, substantial and upright. To the right, King Saul’s nude body sprawls along a diagonal axis, propped up by an attendant. The formal contrast between the erect Samuel and the oblique Saul point to a set of other oppositions: dead and living, spiritual and terrestrial, prophet and king. Saul has fainted upon learning of his imminent defeat. Plunged into the passivity of unconsciousness, his formidable musculature is exposed and intractable. His head is thrown back, exposing his neck and chin while

100

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

concealing much of his face, which is reduced to a single, inarticulate ridge. Behind this, a large curling expanse of hair cascades around him, rolling and swelling in a dramatic sweep that extends past his buttocks; the tail hanging beneath it indicates the presence of animal skin, but it is unclear precisely where one material ends and another begins. A reader of Lavater’s text would struggle to parse what is fur, hair, fabric, and flesh. The exaggerated musculature of Saul’s buttocks, closely resembling that of his ample torso, is yet another example of a heroic body lacking a sense of localized, distinct bodily features. Given its compositional prominence and its placement within a text dedicated to using the visible surface of the body to reveal its inner truths, Fuseli’s depiction of Saul presents some troubling obscurities and ambiguities that should now be familiar to us. The formal slippage between different parts of his body as well as between the body and various materials that surround it is problematic for a system that privileges the unique, individual body and assumes its corporeal self-representation. Saul’s ostensible physical strength, signaled by his elaborately shaded musculature, is set at odds with his state of incapacitation and vulnerability. Moreover, Fuseli presents a scene about the drama of apparition, both in the sense of a spirit and in the sense of something that appears or comes into view: the prophet Samuel is not actually present; he merely appears to be. Samuel’s columnar drapery and wide form imply physical solidity precisely where there is none. Instead, it is Saul’s body that is porous, that is formally continuous with other physical objects. Within the pictorial and diegetic world of the illustration, apparent solidity is paired with actual immateriality and apparent strength paired with actual weakness. Power here is apportioned to the invisible and the spiritual; and Saul, rather than being enlightened by what he sees, is physically and psychically incapacitated by it. More than just thematizing shock or sensationalism, Fuseli’s painted, printed, and drawn protagonists suggest the great difficulty that inheres in being a spectator of a world whose evidentiary authority cannot be relied upon. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wild-eyed and pale as he recoils from the armored figure of his father’s ghost (Gertrude, Hamlet and the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, c.1785, Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Mamiano di Traversetolo) to Hagen of the Nibelungenlied, another extravagantly muscular hero who collapses when shown the Ring of the Nibelungs (Kriemhild Shows the Imprisoned Hagen the Ring of the Nibelungs, 1807, Gottfried Keller-Stiftung) – Fuseli’s protagonists are incapacitated by what they see. Several of them are literally or effectively blinded, and others are confused, terrified, insensible, or unconscious. Nor is this limited to the

The Ends of Self-Representation

101

remote world of heroic epic. One of his most suggestive sketches of contemporary spectatorship, Woman Before the Laocoön (c.1802, Kunsthaus Zürich), shows a woman in modern dress pulling back, startled by the graphically muscular protagonist of the Laocoön, who is glimpsed only as a fragment. Fuseli’s intimate knowledge of the statue and of the eponymous text by Gottfried Lessing are well known.72 In addition to the oft-remarked on sexual subtext of this encounter between a contemporary female viewer and a suggestively exposed classical male nude, the sketch aligns contemporary and historical or narrative acts of spectatorship, designating each as a confrontation between a viewer and their visual environment in which the act of knowledge production is derailed and in which rational self-possession is replaced by a state of surprise, confusion, and relative disempowerment.

The Ends of Self-Representation Fuseli’s art probed and challenged Lavaterian physiognomy. This was not because his work was somehow “scientific” but because his work was significantly invested in ongoing disputes concerning the correspondence between nature’s perceptible appearance and its imperceptible reality, disputes that took the human body as their greatest example. Fuseli’s model of representation was not one that could shore up the significatory powers of the visual world nor its viewers’ ability to make reliable judgments on that basis. Yet Lavater’s model of representation endeavored to do just that – to account for a system of knowledge grounded in human observation alone. Insofar as Fuseli’s art expressed a deep skepticism of physiognomy’s viability in such a system, it should be considered prescient. By the end of the eighteenth century, Lavater’s fame had greatly waned and his method was consigned to the margins as a quixotic endeavor from a bygone era. The version of physiognomy most commonly discussed by historians is its enormously popular nineteenth-century revival, which largely abandoned the epistemological convictions that had been so dearly held by the man responsible for its initial widespread success. Early nineteenth-century efforts to establish its scientific legitimacy took as a given that Lavater’s explanation was gravely insufficient. In his An Attempt to Establish Physiognomy upon Scientific Principles of 1817, for example, John Cross mocked earlier texts that had based their claim “as a distinct independent science” on the belief that “Nature had given all the endless variety of size, shape and colour . . . [to] the animate world for the sole purpose of letting them all into the knowledge of each other’s

102

Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions

character.”73 Man’s appearance, he countered, was not “constructed peculiarly for a physiognomical purpose” but reveals itself only through the cumulative visual effects of anatomically precise and habitual muscular activity (e.g., facial expressions). More to the point, though, the historian Sharrona Pearl has pointed out that such efforts “represent a minority of physiognomic writing and an even smaller minority of physiognomic practice” in the nineteenth century.74 This later variant was largely unconcerned with accounting for its precise mechanisms and tended to emphasize man’s intuitive powers of visual judgment. In practical terms, illustrations played a much smaller role in the cheap, small-scale physiognomic texts that proliferated. Scientific rigor, when it was demanded of nineteenth-century physiognomy, focused instead on using instruments to measure and record the properties of the face, displacing the authority of direct observation onto technical apparatuses that were thought to be immune to the fallibility that had been subsequently attributed to the human senses. Scientific racism was likewise intimately bound up in nineteenth-century ideas about biological determinism and skull measurement.75 Photography in particular became a privileged tool, first used to document individuals in the case of Hugh Welch Diamond and later used by Francis Galton and others to produce composite image of groups or “types.”76 The methodological tenets of nineteenth-century physiognomy and phrenology (which focused on the shape of the head) were inseparable from the emergence of the social sciences as a discipline as well as newly institutionalized methods of quantitative statistical analysis. Physiognomy’s popular analogue, a relatively unsystematic doctrine of using casual observation to evaluate others, has been understood, in contrast, as a response to the rapid expansion of large, industrialized cities.77 Fuseli’s personal and professional conflicts with Lavater, like his art, clarify some of the fault lines along which Lavaterian physiognomy was operating. They anticipated its rapidly approaching obsolescence by undermining the very features that subsequent practitioners discarded as unscientific. Yet, in turn, Lavaterian physiognomy compels us to recognize that there were gripping epistemological stakes in Fuseli’s work – his representation of the body in particular but also key features that populate his larger oeuvre – and, as a result, to acknowledge their hostility to a model of self-representation that was coming under increasing pressure at the turn of the nineteenth century. Like de Loutherbourg, Fuseli produced works of art that sat uncomfortably with Enlightenment precepts about scientific knowledge production that presupposed a legible world readily available to

The Ends of Self-Representation

103

man’s perceptual powers. However, as we have seen, for Fuseli this took a very particular form: it concerned printed pages, bodily surfaces, and the alignment of the perceptible world with its underlying truths. One of the many artists who studied the pages of Lavater’s books would come to raise further questions about the evidentiary authority of the body in the years that followed, although these were organized around a different set of scientific claims about the body. It is to his work, and to France, that we now turn.

chapter 3

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

When the French artist Anne-Louis Girodet exhibited his last major Salon painting, Pygmalion and Galatea (Figure 3.1), in 1819, it was feted as the crowning masterpiece of an artist whose work had at times generated almost as much controversy as praise. The painting depicts a popular myth told by Ovid in which an inanimate statue, Galatea, is brought to life in front of the man who sculpted her, Pygmalion. Galatea’s transformation from lifeless alabaster to supple flesh is indicated by a bright, almost plasmic illumination that radiates from her nude form. The sculptor, in red robes that cling to his thigh and cascade down his back, stares in wonder and reaches out to touch his now-animate creation. At the same time, unnoticed by the two lovers, the small hovering figure of Eros prepares to join their hands and signal their union. Girodet’s celebrated painting, with its cloying hues and saccharine classicism, was thrown into sharp relief by another work exhibited at the same Salon, Théodore Géricault’s stark, macabre, and unorthodox Raft of the Medusa (c.1818–1819). In contrast, Pygmalion and Galatea served as a rallying point for conservative advocates of a French School of painting that remained rooted in academic conventions. Yet the painting was not quite as conventional as it may have initially appeared. As almost every published review noted, “Eros is in the middle, and he seems to conduct (all joking aside) a galvanic experiment.”1 The term “galvanic” would have been familiar to Salon-goers: electricity had, for several decades, been a routine part of popular forms of entertainment as well as mainstream scientific discourses. Named after the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, whose electric experiments with frog legs were widely known throughout Europe, a “galvanic” demonstration entailed the transmission of electricity within human and animal bodies, often to produce movement in a dead or paralyzed limb. More colloquially, an electric experiment suggested to an early nineteenth-century French audience both visual and structural transformations: an intense luminous discharge accompanied by the animation of something inanimate. In the context of 104

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

105

Figure 3.1 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1819, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Le Mage.

Girodet’s Pygmalion and Galatea, then, galvanism would have doubled as a reference to popular electric demonstrations and as an apt metaphor for the process of bringing a statue to life. The painting was exhibited roughly three decades after Girodet had initially risen to fame among a generation of students trained by France’s

106

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

preeminent master of neoclassicism, Jacques-Louis David.2 Although older and better established than its British counterpart, the French académie of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries confronted similar challenges, including a growing audience for contemporary art and a diverse, thriving urban marketplace for various kinds of popular entertainment with uniquely vivid political stakes in the years surrounding the French Revolution.3 Like David’s other pupils – including Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, François Gérard, and JeanGermain Drouais – Girodet’s portrayal of the male body did not straightforwardly replicate the austere, muscular style espoused by their teacher.4 If the expressive capacities of the male nude had long been a mainstay of the neoclassical style taught within the French academy, its significatory power grew even more important during the Revolution when the traditional pictorial vocabulary of the monarchy and the Catholic Church was largely abandoned. Girodet’s painted bodies, usually characterized as ambiguous or fraught, would therefore seem to reflect some kind of crisis within a previously stable formation – whether this be artistic, political, psychosexual, or racial.5 But in the case of Pygmalion and Galatea, it is apparent (or at least, it was apparent to contemporary reviewers) that something quite specific about the body was being represented: its ability to receive and conduct an electric charge. Just a few years earlier, the Anglo-American artist Benjamin West had likewise referenced electric demonstrations in one of his paintings. West’s painted sketch for a large-scale portrait of Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (Figure 3.2) commemorated Franklin’s famous experiment of 1752, in which he proved that lightning is a form of electricity.6 Franklin dominates West’s canvas, confidently reaching his right hand up toward a key that has been tied to a kite. The bright white spark that connects them is an electric current being transmitted from metal key to human hand. Behind Franklin, putti felicitously conduct an experiment that produces a similar spark while jagged streaks of lightning can be seen in the distance. In both Girodet’s and West’s paintings, electricity plays a major narrative role. More precisely, the transmission of electricity to a human body does. Despite their shared subject matter and temporal proximity, though, the two paintings reflect fundamentally different practical and epistemological configurations. West’s portrait of Franklin looked back to an Enlightenment model of electricity dominated by the gentlemanscientist, the heroic activity of self-experimentation, and the sober-minded contemplation thereof by its witnesses.7 Girodet’s Pygmalion and Galatea, in contrast, situated electricity in relation to strange luminous effects, glowing

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

107

Figure 3.2 Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c.1816, oil on slate. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

bodies, and sensual pleasure rather than scientific knowledge; and whereas West’s protagonist was an ingenious polymath and experimenter, Girodet’s were guileless lovers from Greco-Roman mythology. The contrasts drawn

108

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

out by these two paintings do more than illustrate a shift in how electricity was understood. They attest to a series of profound transformations in the larger scientific, political, and spectacular frameworks within which electricity took on meaning in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. As dramatized in the paintings by West and Girodet, the physical and metaphorical power of electricity often hinged on its luminous transmission through human bodies. Electricity had initially become a subject of focused scientific inquiry under the monarchical ruling order of early eighteenth-century France.8 It was quickly incorporated into a variety of popular recreational activities from polite demonstrations in fashionable drawing rooms to spectacular theatrical attractions on Paris’s boulevards. In the final decade of the eighteenth century, electricity also acquired a decidedly revolutionary valence associated with a model of radical political collectivity that reached its fullest expression in the Terror. By the time Girodet referenced its visual and structural features in Pygmalion and Galatea, electricity had become embedded in a densely tangled set of scientific discourses, popular spectacles, and political formations. In this chapter, bodily experience comes to the fore as a category of epistemological contestation. Several of Girodet’s major paintings call into question what it actually means to directly experience electricity and the extent to which one could translate that experience, as evidence, into scientific knowledge. How viable were Enlightenment procedures of embodied knowledge production in the context of electricity? Of equal importance for Girodet was its potential as a model of political subjectivity. Could the physical reception and transmission of electricity point to other forms of collective experience on which a revolutionary citizenry might be based? These concerns are, I argue, precisely what several of Girodet’s large-scale history paintings explore. In doing so, his art opens onto an alternative set of questions to do with spectatorship or, rather, what it might mean to be the witness of an experiment versus the viewer of a spectacle and what kinds of truth-claims could be associated with those different experiences at the turn of the nineteenth century. This chapter first reviews some of the basic features of how electricity was used and understood during Girodet’s lifetime, as well as the scope of his exposure to it. Ultimately, though, it is through close analysis of four of his paintings that the experiential and political implications of Eros’s galvanic experiments come to light. To the extent that being “shocked” ever really had political or epistemological purchase for Girodet, it should become clear that, by the time he exhibited Pygmalion and Galatea in 1819, this possibility had expired.

Electricity and Evidence

109

Electricity and Evidence In the Paris of Girodet’s youth, “everywhere science calls out to you and says, look.”9 So wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier in his introduction to Tableau de Paris, a copy of which could be found in the modest personal library of the adolescent painter.10 The contents of Girodet’s small collection of books at the time affirm Mercier’s claim. Tableau de Paris kept company with a multivolume text on Leçons de physique expérimentale (1743–1764) by the scientist and clergyman Jean-Antoine Nollet. Nollet’s book ranked among the most successful of a flourishing market for books on experimental physics and especially electricity. The study of electricity had begun to thrive decades earlier, when experimenters such as Stephen Gray and John Desaguliers found ways to artificially generate electrical charges and transmit them through various materials. These and related effects were demonstrated at the Royal Society of London, where they drew the attention of experimenters across Europe. The French chemist Charles du Fay, one of many continental scientists who visited London in those years, succeeded in 1733 in electrifying his own body and delivering sparks and shocks to those who touched him. He later replicated Gray’s experiments from the Royal Society with his pupil, Nollet, in Paris. Yet there was not a single, cohesive account of electricity to which one could look in eighteenth-century Europe. Its conceptual underpinnings and practical characteristics remained widely debated into the nineteenth century.11 Electricity had proven an unusually elusive phenomenon to study because, like magnetic and gravitational forces, it did not take a fixed visible form. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “electrical fire is never visible but when in motion and when leaping from body to body,” a feature evident in West’s portrait of him.12 Franklin’s kite experiment had become a popular example of heroic scientific discovery in the late eighteenth century.13 West’s portrait presents the moment that the key delivers a bright white current of electricity to the knuckle of his forefinger. Above all, it was Franklin’s bravery that captured the public imagination: his willingness to physically endanger himself in pursuit of scientific truth.14 Rather than recoil from the pain of a shock, Franklin receives the electric transmission with determined equanimity. Yet (setting aside the question of whether Franklin actually delegated this task to an assistant) the exceptionalism of the episode was somewhat misstated. By the late eighteenth century, it was widely known among practitioners that electricity, more so than any other branch of experimental physics, required the

110

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

extensive use of the experimenter’s body and often the bodies of others as well.15 Electricity, it was said, “continuously penetrates the human body.”16 In several of Nollet’s illustrations, for example, men, women, and children are shown physically manipulating the movement of electricity through various materials, back and forth to each other.17 Nollet’s Leçons de physique expérimentale instructed readers to conduct electric experiments whose outcomes were emphatically sensory. Readers were told to expect a painful pinch in their finger, a sensation on their face “like [touching] a spider web suspended in the air,”18 the smell of “phosphoric urine or garlic,”19 the appearance of bright flashes, a popping sound resembling that of a kernel bursting in a fire, and so on. More than this, the experimenter routinely acted as an electric conductor, receiving and transmitting the force within his own body. This practice accorded with a mainstream eighteenth-century conception of the nervous system as a network of hollow vessels through which a fastmoving substance (possibly electric) was thought to transmit sensation, an idea on which animal magnetism was likewise predicated.20 The basic activities of the experimenter included drawing a spark (tirer l’étincelle), receiving a shock (reçevoir une commotion), forming an electric circuit (une chaîne), and transmitting a jolt or shock (une secousse). In contemporary treatises on electricity it was not uncommon to find accounts of the author electrifying his tongue or teeth or gallantly subjecting his assistant or spouse to similar experiments. Although perhaps uniquely reliant on the human body, electric experiments were part of a broader paradigm that has been memorably described by historian Simon Schaffer as “self evidence.”21 Of course, in the context of an empirical framework that privileges direct sensory observation, it was hardly possible to exclude the body of the scientist.22 Yet this was framed, according to Schaffer, as a very particular kind of body: it could reveal universal truths because it was considered to be like other bodies, insofar as it was representative of how all human bodies supposedly work. It was also unlike other bodies, insofar as it was able to register sensory effects with great subtlety and was therefore less vulnerable to deceptions of the flesh. Experimenters like Nollet exemplified what Schaffer calls a “cartesianism of the genteel,” in which criteria associated with gender, class, nationality, race, and institutional affiliation authorized the white male body of the scientist to produce valid evidence.23 Information based on the experience of the individual body – that is, self-evidence – was transformed into a form of universal knowledge through the act of collective witnessing, a kind of social technology whereby the evidence of the private human body was ratified by the public corporate body of the institution.24

Electric Affinities

111

By the mid-eighteenth century, electric demonstrations were no longer confined – spatially or institutionally – to Europe’s academic societies and other learned bodies. Experimental physics was a routine part of secondary education in eighteenth-century Paris and popular knowledge of electricity spread rapidly through public presentations, particularly through a format sometimes referred to as a “demonstration-lecture.” As the term suggests, this was a presentation that combined oral exposition with experimental demonstrations. It appealed to empirical principles that foregrounded the importance of sensory observation while it simultaneously generated entertaining, spectacular effects – a combination evocatively captured in the paintings of British artist Joseph Wright of Derby. Electricity was particularly well suited to this format (which became the primary vehicle for the public exposition of scientific facts during the Enlightenment) because of the intensely luminous nature of its effects.25 Electric demonstrations coupled earnest instruction with glowing bodies, sudden flashes, and bright sparks, which rendered electricity, in the words of historian James Delbourgo, “a rational curiosity and a wonderful experience.”26 By the 1780s, the audience for electric demonstrations even included the lower classes of Paris and the French provinces. Dozens of public lectures and courses in experimental physics, in which electricity featured prominently, were attended by thousands annually in the capital. As a journalist in L’Année littéraire noted in 1780, “Never has the public taste for experimental physics been more general nor more widespread than today.”27 Demonstrations and courses were concentrated on the left bank near the universities and at the Palais Royale and neighboring Rue St-Honoré. On the boulevards, and especially the Boulevard du Temple, electric demonstrations that were more explicitly presented as entertainment likewise flourished. The diversity and popularity of these electric demonstrations are among the reasons that the eighteenth century is often characterized as a period that witnessed the rise of “public science.” The term captures the unprecedented public interest in and exposure to scientific principles and their application. Yet it should be treated with caution, for it implies that there were fixed distinctions between expert and amateur and between recreation and study, which were never truly functional – distinctions, moreover, that became especially problematic during Girodet’s lifetime.

Electric Affinities Girodet’s familiarity with contemporary science reflected but also far exceeded a growing public engagement with it. His exposure to electricity was fostered in the context of deeply personal and familial relationships,

112

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

with which it remained entwined for the duration of his life. The young artist’s education was overseen by Benoît-François Trioson, a trusted friend of Girodet’s parents who, like them, benefited from the patronage of the Duc d’Orléans. Trioson was a medical doctor firmly established in the elite scientific communities of the Ancien Régime who held several distinguished positions associated with the royal family. Trioson would have met many of the criteria that regulated Schaffer’s “cartesianism of the genteel.” As a gentleman-doctor, Trioson was a well-educated man of significant means whose professional pursuits were integrated into his personal and political activities at court. Trioson spent a great deal of time on his young charge, guiding his tastes and gifting him with books (these included the works of Nollet and the original French translation of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy). The doctor likewise introduced Girodet to some of the foremost scientists of his time. Through Trioson, Girodet met affiliates of Benjamin Franklin and the great naturalist Comte de Buffon and befriended Félix Vicq-d’Azyr, the father of comparative anatomy.28 Girodet likewise developed a meaningful friendship with the eminent physiologist Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis and painted a portrait of his wife in 1804. Deeply affected by his death four years later, Girodet marked Cabanis’s passing with a long poem, which he dedicated to the scientist’s wife. Both Girodet and Trioson experienced the traumatic loss of patrilineal relationships, and both died without having produced a male heir. Born in 1767, Girodet was still on the verge of adulthood when his father died in March 1784 and his mother in October 1787. The painter spent long periods of time staying with Trioson, and the two grew closer following the death of Trioson’s young wife in 1795. He painted several portraits of their only child, Benoît-Agnès.29 With the boy’s untimely death in 1804, Girodet and Trioson were more deeply bound by tragedy. In 1809, Trioson formally adopted the painter and Girodet added the doctor’s name to his own, becoming Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson de Roussy (or, more rarely, Girodet de Roussy-Trioson). Girodet imitated this relationship, to a lesser degree, with his guardianship of his second cousin, Antoine César Becquerel, today known for his influential discoveries in the fields of electricity and luminescence. Although he demonstrated an aptitude for science at a young age, Becquerel was destined by his family for a military career. It was in part due to the painter’s influence that Becquerel eventually decided to resign from the military in 1815 and commit himself fully to his scientific work. In 1816, during the course of their regular correspondence, Girodet was characteristically encouraging to his younger cousin,

Electric Affinities

113

writing, “my dear friend, you understand medicine better than a doctor of the [F]aculty [of Medicine], and almost as well as I do.”30 His words doubled as a subtle reminder that Girodet considered himself to be especially knowledgeable about the sciences. Although much of the artist’s personal correspondence was destroyed, surviving exchanges indicate that Girodet collected and read Becquerel’s scientific works, which they routinely discussed. As one of the painter’s closest friends and relatives, Becquerel served as the executor of Girodet’s estate upon his death in 1824, also publishing some lines in honor of his late uncle.31 Girodet’s knowledge of experimental physics, physiology, mineralogy, optics, and medicine was admittedly unusual for a painter; it was instead cultivated through the adoptive affiliations that constituted the emotional bedrock of his adult life. Fatherless and sonless, Girodet recreated patrilineal relationships – in both emotional and legal terms – with Trioson and Becquerel. Given both the widespread popularity of scientific demonstrations and Girodet’s extensive personal engagement with the scientific communities of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, it is unsurprising that references to electricity can be found in what survives of his personal writings. Yet his exposure to electricity went much further: while a young man Girodet attended a popular twelve-week “course in experimental physics,” which met three times a week for about two hours a day and was given by Mathurin-Jacques Brisson.32 Much of Brisson’s career was spent as a naturalist, but he devoted himself to experimental physics in the final decades of the eighteenth century, eventually succeeding Nollet as the chair of experimental physics at the Collège de Navarre. Although Girodet would have learned the basics of experimental science as part of the standard education on offer at his collège in Paris, it was at Brisson’s course that he would have witnessed the famous electric experiments of the late eighteenth century and been instructed in their theoretical underpinnings. Brisson’s publications included a French translation of Joseph Priestley’s influential The History and Present State of Electricity in 1771, which was one of the first texts to widely disseminate Franklin’s experiments with electricity. Like his mentor Nollet, Brisson would have taught a hybrid account of electricity that did not espouse one specific theory over others.33 Brisson’s Dictionnaire raisonné de physique expérimentale (1781) offered a capacious definition of electricity that summarized the diverse views of Nollet, Franklin, du Fay, and Jean Jallabert. He emphasized that it is a quick-moving substance that is related to and can generate light and heat. Among other things, Girodet would have been taught by Brisson that electrified matter is in a constant state of movement, that a great many

114

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

materials are permeable by electricity, and that electricity is “a very subtle, very elastic fluid that can be found everywhere, inside and outside of [all physical] bodies.”34 Brisson, noting the “porosity” of the body and the “ease with which [electricity] enters and exits,” concluded that “it is consequently inside ourselves.” His experiments largely concerned storing and transmitting electricity within and between different materials, which yielded a wide range of sensory effects – involuntary convulsions, painful shocks, strange smells, bright luminous effects, loud sounds, and the uncanny sensation of static, which Nollet and Brisson both poetically likened to the feeling of bare skin touching a spider web.35 Rather than engage with its more technical aspects, though, in Girodet’s writings electricity chiefly served as a metaphor for a person’s experience of art. Paintings are described as “electrifying” (électrisant), “sparkling” (étincelant), and producing “a jolt” or “a shock” (une secousse) – the very terms Girodet would have encountered in his studies of experimental physics, in which they were used to capture electricity’s luminous effects and its physical impact on the human body. Girodet defines genius as “the sparkling shock of though[t],”36 and he argues that great artworks traverse history as if conductors in an electric circuit or chain: “these sublime models, resembling electric conductors, circulate from generation to generation the sparks of genius among all civilized peoples.”37 This metaphor was not unique to Girodet. Henry Fuseli likewise spoke of an “electric shock” that Michelangelo had created in his Eleventh Lecture on Art.38 For both Fuseli and Girodet, electricity was a critical metaphor for the means by which works of art act upon or influence their viewers; it named an experience in which one could have intense, direct contact with the work of the Old Masters. Romantic poets such as Percy B. Shelley and Samuel Coleridge were among the many who subsequently incorporated the language of electricity into their works, in which it often stood for intense affective and corporeal experiences.39 Electricity was more than a mere metaphor for Girodet, who was well versed in the work of Nollet and Brisson. In what follows, however, my emphasis falls on visual and structural features of electricity that could be found across a diverse body of mainstream practices and that characterized how the broader public would have encountered and understood it, instead of particular principles articulated within ultra-specialized publications and elite institutions. My aim is not to identify Girodet’s paintings as illustrations of a specific view of these scientific concepts but rather to locate his paintings within a cultural field in which certain aspects of electricity were widely demonstrated and discussed – a field in which

The Insensate Self

115

electricity was a physical phenomenon, a generator of luminous effects, and a substance received and transmitted through the human body. The latter characteristic was particularly important: it made electricity vividly, physically present to people but rendered that physical experience unassimilable within the procedures of empirical “self-evidence”; and, as will become increasingly clear, it was key to electricity’s authority as a model of political collectivity during the French Revolution. By the time Girodet produced his first major Salon painting, this constellation of meanings was already coming under enormous strain.

The Insensate Self Girodet’s debut at the Salon of 1793 cemented his reputation among the foremost young stars of the French school of painting and remains the most widely known of his works. The sensational Sleep of Endymion (Figure 3.3) refashioned the familiar académie-style nude into a figure of latent eroticism and psychic ambiguity that did little to conform to the model of neoclassical heroism, principled action, and masculine strength

Figure 3.3 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Sleep of Endymion, Salon of 1793, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Angèle Dequier.

116

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

valorized in the history paintings of Jacques-Louis David and his peers. Instead, Sleep of Endymion took as its subject a mythological narrative concerning a rural shepherd of extraordinary beauty who is submerged in unending slumber. Endymion, with his intense passivity and sensuality, appears to maintain a conspicuous aloofness to the revolutionary events that were then unfolding in France and Italy. According to one version of the myth, Selene, goddess of the moon, falls in love with the shepherd and requests that Zeus put him to sleep in order to preserve his beauty and youth. A text probably penned by Girodet himself for the Dictionary of Fables published in 1801 describes the scene found in Girodet’s painting as follows: “Endymion, almost nude and of an ideal beauty, sleeps in a thicket; Eros, disguised as Zephyr, moves the foliage aside and a ray of moonlight, which exudes all the heat of passion, comes to die on the lips of the beautiful sleeper.”40 Girodet’s eponymous shepherd is shown reclining against a rock in the center of a darkened grove. His staff and clothing are cast aside, and curling locks of hair tumble loosely around his shoulders. To the left, Eros pulls back a vegetal curtain to allow Selene to penetrate the grove and fall upon Endymion’s exposed chest. The romantic contact of Endymion and Selene, who is manifested solely as moonlight, is reimagined here as a vaporous encounter between moonlight and flesh. This effect endows nocturnal illumination with intimate physicality and sets the work at odds with the crisply delineated contours and more uniformly distributed light that characterized the work of Girodet’s teacher, David.41 Rather than heroic action, the painting trades in desire. Girodet’s hero is an object of perpetual longing to Selene and to the painting’s viewer, each of whom encounters Endymion’s beautiful form as a source of aesthetic pleasure. Of course, there are more nocturnal thrills at hand as well, and the erotic subtext of the painting was certainly not lost on its contemporary viewers. The 1801 Dictionary of Fables noted that the coupling of Selene and her sleeping beau resulted in no fewer than fifty children. It is a coupling, however, in which Selene herself is not present in bodily form and in which the only visible actors, Endymion and Eros, are both – if not determinately masculine – at least endowed with phallic members. Much has been made of Endymion’s androgyny, figured in his abundant hair, tapered fingers, and the luscious swoop of his ample hip and trim waist.42 The pointed exclusion or even expulsion of the female protagonist from this erotic union intensifies our sense that the painting depicts an economy of pleasure that does not fall into the binaries through which it is often assumed that heterosexual desire operates.

The Insensate Self

117

More so than the pleasures offered by Endymion, it is his slumber that is difficult to place within the contextual framework of late eighteenthcentury French neoclassical heroism in the early years of the Revolution. The irony of Endymion’s eternal sleep is that the immortality it offers is contingent upon the deathlike inactivity of slumber. A certain interrelationship is evoked between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, that accorded with vitalist theories of the time.43 A similar contradiction surfaces in Girodet’s written accounts of the period during which Sleep of Endymion was conceived, executed, and eventually exhibited in France. Girodet set off for Italy in late April of 1790, having been awarded the Prix de Rome. The year preceding his departure had been rocked by a series of reforms triggered by the fall of the Bastille, an important symbolic event at which Girodet and David had both been present. The National Constituent Assembly, to which much royal power had been effectively ceded, moved quickly to dismantle the judicial, seigneurial, and religious feudal structures of France. In spite of his aristocratic pedigree, Girodet supported the Revolution in its initial phases. Yet his letters from Rome make very few inquiries about the dramatic events then taking place in France. He wrote to Trioson about his apathy and torpor, complaining to his friend that he “has no studio, [and] no desire to travel, only to sleep.”44 When Girodet was forced to flee Rome for political reasons two and a half years later, he again narrated his experience in the language of nocturnal inactivity, an apparent disavowal of his extensive participation in the conflict that drove him thence. Political tensions were running high in Rome in the winter of 1792/3, and Girodet had already been involved with some scuffles for which he was briefly jailed. On January 11, the artist burned much of his personal correspondence.45 On the night of January 12, there was a violent attack on the Académie de France in Rome. Acting on instructions from the French ambassador to Naples, Girodet defended the Palais Mancini alongside his friends Lafitte, Mérimée and Péquignot. As an act of defiance against the hostile crowd gathering outside the Palais, which housed the French academy, they began to paint a large figure of the Republic but eventually abandoned it and fled. In the early hours of the 13th, Girodet was recognized and chased at knifepoint while his friends were pelted with rocks. The following day, Girodet and Péquignot set off for Naples on foot, where they arrived on the 18th. Three days later, the deposed King Louis XVI was executed in Paris. Looking back on this period many years later in his poem Le Peintre of 1808, Girodet described his time in Naples with Péquignot but made no mention of the dramatic circumstances that drove him thither nor of the

118

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

English fleet that blockaded the port in September and prevented his return to France. Instead, the artist wrote of a nocturnal scene of glittering luminous effects and peaceful dreams: “Diana watched us pass entire nights / . . . The cares of the future did not dare to trouble our dreams / . . . Our vows for the future were divided in half: / One for the beaux-arts, and the other for friendship.”46 Like Endymion, Girodet and Péquignot keep company with a goddess of the moon, whose quivering light is described reflecting and scattering off of the dark surface of the Bay of Naples. Instead of political tumult and violence, the two friends think only of art and of each other. In this context, Endymion’s sleep can be read as a profound retreat from the conflicts and precarities of a waking world plagued by unprecedented revolutionary violence and political instability rather than what Crow calls a demonstration of “the bond between the physical perfection of the ancients and the free conditions of their society.”47 The deep passivity of Endymion’s slumber and, moreover, his lack of willful agency within the erotic economy of the painting might instead assert what Whitney Davis has described as “an end to being in male public history as such.”48 Yet insofar as Endymion’s sleep is central to the operations of the painting, it is essential to be more precise about what form that sleep actually takes. Girodet’s protagonist reclines in a darkened grove. By way of an aperture-like opening, a concentrated shaft of moonlight “pierces through the branches,” surrounds Endymion, and “insinuates itself throughout this composition,” as one Salon critic wrote.49 Visitors to the Salon of 1793, where it was first publicly exhibited in France, were struck by the prominent use of blue to depict Selene’s presence, which surrounds Endymion’s pale but intensely luminous body. Selene’s rays trace the bright white outline of Eros’s chest, an effect emphatically contrasted by the contours of Endymion’s torso, which dissolve under her caresses. The brightest passages of Endymion’s skin, particularly below his arm, are barely perceptible.50 Their contact undermines the pictorial distinction between his physical flesh and her ethereal lunar beam. In short, then, one finds in Girodet’s painting a darkened chamber, a glowing body, a concentrated substance that is luminous yet immaterial, and a figure who facilitates the application of that substance to that body. This configuration was a common one indeed among the electric demonstrations of late eighteenth-century Europe. Even the cool blue light that critics found so sensational resonated with popular tricks like the “electric beatification.” In a darkened room, an electric charge was applied to the body of a participant or performer. As the air around the body ionized, it

Anatomy of a Shock

119

would emit a blue glow that was especially visible in the individual’s hair, which would be raised off the head. The result was likened to a nimbus, the radiant disk that often encircles the heads of painted saints, hence its designation as a mock beatification. Endymion’s inactivity has a particular valence in the context of an eighteenth-century empirical culture of self-evidence. Girodet’s protagonist evinces neither the rationality nor the physical self-possession that were critical to experimental procedures. To the extent that Endymion resembles an electrified body, Girodet depicts this state in ways that render it incompatible with the operations of knowledge production. Like the dreamer of Fuseli’s The Nightmare (Figure 2.14), prints of which Girodet would have been familiar with, Endymion slumbers in a state of intense vulnerability. While the protagonists of both paintings abdicate some kind of agency to a set of figures who do not inhabit the waking, diurnal world, this hinges, for Girodet, on a particular corporeal configuration. Eros acts as an experimenter or showman, directing the path of the moonlight. Selene does not merely touch Endymion’s body – she breaches it, dissolves its linear contours in the very act that makes his body visible to us within the painting. Endymion’s body is thus defined by its receptivity to a luminous substance, an immaterial force capable of passing through objects and altering the atmosphere it pervades.51 He inhabits the very configuration upon which experimental effects and popular tricks, of which the electric beatification is just one example, were predicated. It was on these principles that electricity would become an increasingly prominent metaphor for the political aspirations of the French Revolution in the months that directly preceded and followed the Salon of 1793. Rather than an apolitical figure, it will become clear that Endymion articulated a political subject-position that was both empowered and vulnerable in equal measure.

Anatomy of a Shock Despite the absence of a single dominant theory of electricity, certain structural and visual characteristics were nonetheless commonly disseminated in public demonstrations and mainstream discourses. Underwriting both popular and academic electric demonstrations (categories best understood as overlapping rather than opposed) was the basic claim that the human body was an ideal substrate through which to transmit (or “communicate”) electricity. Early experimenters made extensive use of their bodies and particularly their hands to store, direct, and transmit electric

120

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

charges. As the provincial doctor – and, later, revolutionary politician – Jean-Paul Marat explained in his treatise on the medical uses of electricity, “because the human body is permeable, the bones, cartilage, flesh, nerves, tendons etc. transmit [electricity] freely.”52 Following Luigi Galvani’s experiments in the 1770s, the claim that the body contained its own form of “animal electricity” also gained traction. The muscular convulsions Galvani produced in the legs of dead frogs were seen by some as proof that electricity was in fact a vital or animating life force – another claim in common with Mesmer’s “animal magnetism.” One of the earliest electric effects to be popularized was known as the “electric kiss.” It was first conducted in London by Stephen Gray, who suspended a young boy from the ceiling with silk threads. The boy’s feet were given a negative charge, producing a positive charge in his other extremities, which were then able to attract various particles. When the suspended individual was touched by another person, typically of the opposite sex, both would experience a moderate shock. The experiment was reproduced in France and Germany shortly thereafter, an illustration of which can be found on the frontispiece for Nollet’s Essay on Electricity (1746; Figure 3.4).53 The electric kiss became a popular parlor game, and Nollet sold kits containing silk cords to enable his readers to replicate the trick in their homes. Transmitting electricity through the human body could produce bewildering – even deadly – effects. Describing the experiments undertaken by his German colleagues in 1745, Nollet expressed his astonishment upon first learning that “that the hair of a man so electrified became luminous, which [the German scientist Hauzen] jokingly calls beatifying electricity; that sparks from his fingers killed flies; [and] that drops of his blood looked like drops of fire in the dark.”54 In Berlin, a more spectacular experiment was staged in the 1740s by Christian Friedrich Ludolff, in which an electrified person was able to deliver sparks from their fingertips which could then ignite alcohol.55 Electric experiments were known to produce a number of other dramatic corporeal effects, and they often involved animal bodies, too. Birds were popular because they were easily procured and could be dramatically impacted by a relatively small amount of electricity; it was said that they could be killed by the discharge of a single Leyden jar, a device used to store electricity.56 Marat’s texts on electricity from the early 1780s recounted the graphic maiming and killing of birds, frogs, dogs, and cats in the course of his experiments.57 Yet he cautioned his readers against the overzealous application of electricity to the human body, noting that if applied to the head it could result in seizures and death. Edmé-Gilles Guyot similarly warned the readers of

Anatomy of a Shock

Figure 3.4 R. Brunet after N. le Sueur, frontispiece from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Essay sur l’électricité des corps, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1750).

121

122

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

his New Physical and Mathematical Amusements (first published in 1769) to avoid “drawing sparks from their eyes or other delicate parts of the face.”58 Experimenters documented the adverse effects they personally experienced, which included painful shocks, temporary paralysis, nosebleeds, concussions, and violent spasms. The most famous example, which was narrated in many mid-century texts, concerned Pieter van Musschenbroek, an inventor of the Leyden jar. During one of his experiments, Guyot wrote, the Dutch scientist reportedly received a powerful shock “so violent that he was terrified, and protested that he would not [agree to] receive a second one even if they made him the King of France.”59 Musschenbroek’s infamous “Leyden Experiment” (which Brisson taught as a standard part of his course in experimental physics) was memorably illustrated in Nollet’s Essay on Electricity (Figure 3.5). Below, Musschenbroek is on the verge of touching the apparatus that will deliver his great shock. His right hand is already connected to the suspended bar to the lower left. Above him is Nollet’s diagram for the flow of electric fluid, which explodes across the page, starlike and radiant. To “experience” electricity, then, was not necessarily an act of enlightenment insofar as it entailed sensations of pain and physical incapacitation. How could a “self” produce “evidence” if it was electrified? In practical, theoretical, and metaphoric terms, the luminous and penetrable body was central to electric experiments. Electricity has therefore been characterized as “a project in embodied knowledge, [. . .] where enlightenment was experienced as convulsion”;60 but was it really “enlightenment” that was being experienced, as Delbourgo suggests? Or was it tremors, pain, surprise, and involuntary spasms? What of the numbness, temporary paralysis, migraines, and nosebleeds experienced by experimenters and their subjects? Even Musschenbroek’s famous shock elicited “terror,” an affective state decidedly at odds with the impartial, sober-minded judgment called for within the framework of “self-evidence.” Musschenbroek himself alluded to a certain self-defeating or contradictory dynamic within his research when writing to René Réaumur that, “I’ve found out so much about electricity that I’ve reached the point where I understand nothing and can explain nothing.”61 Girodet’s Endymion has much in common with the electric body as it was then understood. His form is porous and penetrable. In a darkened chamber, he emits a bright glow that is not diurnal nor incandescent. Yet Endymion points to a latent problem in this configuration: to use one’s body as an instrument for scientific inquiry was to

Anatomy of a Shock

123

Figure 3.5 Plate 4 from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Essay sur l’électricité des corps, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1750). Credit: Wellcome Collection.

be acted on in ways that were at odds with the cool-headed rationality and physical self-possession that enabled the scientist to convert direct observation into empirical truth. Electric shocks didn’t so much

124

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

enlighten experimenters as incapacitate them, overpower them, and penetrate them. These features likewise informed the latent contradictions of electricity as a model of political collectivity. In the context of electric experiments, Endymion’s passivity was not just a political and psychosexual metaphor but a quite literal state of being acted on by a force beyond his control, a force that illuminated him but did not necessarily enlighten him – indeed, a force that expelled him from the position of selfknowledge and self-evidence. This was a conflict that, for Girodet’s work, had profound epistemological and political consequences.

Apparitions Girodet revisited the notion of porous corporeality several years later, following his return to Paris. The artist had become a prominent figure in the French School and enjoyed limited patronage from Napoleon and his wife Joséphine. The official commission for Ossian (Figure 3.6) in 1801 came from the architects Percier and Fontaine; the painting was to adorn the grand salon of Malmaison, a château whose renovation was being overseen by Joséphine. Girodet drew upon a Scottish cycle of epic poems first published by James McPherson in 1760, which was narrated by the eponymous Nordic bard Ossian. The first translation of Ossian appeared in France in 1777, although the artist had been introduced to the text while living in Rome. Girodet’s first sketches from the Ossian cycle were executed in the mid-1790s, when he was also copying illustrations from the original French translation of Essays on Physiognomy. The Parisian vogue for Ossian, however, was not fully ignited until the French translation was reissued in 1799. Although Girodet’s painting is set within the fictional world of Ossianic mythology, he created an entirely new narrative in which recently deceased French generals are welcomed to Valhalla by Ossian. The generals enter from the right to be greeted by Ossian and a crowd of bright aerial beings. Allegorical figures soar above the central grouping, illuminated by orbs of varying color and intensity. Like Endymion, Ossian eschews conventional forms of light in favor of the radiant haze of celestial effects. As the artist wrote in his catalogue entry for the 1802 Salon, at which Ossian was first exhibited, the vaporous region of clouds is punctuated solely by the lights of meteors and other cosmic effects. The female figure of Victory, for example, floats above the officers with a caduceus of peace and the Gallic Rooster, bearing “a glimmering star on her head,” which “marks its luminous and rapid track by a long groove.”62 Above and behind this

Apparitions

125

Figure 3.6 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes, 1802, oil on canvas. Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et BoisPréau. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

central group, additional trails of light are left by amber meteors and pearlescent stars. A bright shaft of cooler light descends from the upperleft portion of the canvas, reflecting off of Ossian and the crowd of maidens below him in blue and white tones. Ossian’s vaporous forms, obscure luminous effects, and spectral protagonists perplexed critics, one of whom claimed that Girodet had “drowned” the linear contours of his figures “to give them a phantasmagoric appearance.”63 This reference to the Phantasmagoria, which evinced both formal and narrative resemblances, proved to be more precise than the critic for Le Publiciste may have known – for, although Girodet maintained

126

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Figure 3.7 Frontispiece from Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques du physicien-aéronaute E. G. Robertson, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1831). Image: Wikimedia Commons.

official lodgings in the Louvre, he also rented a studio in the same architectural complex that hosted Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s oft-cited Fantasmagorie from 1799 to 1805.64 There, in one of the abandoned crypts within the complex, the phantasmagoria (Figure 3.7) was titillating audiences with spectral apparitions that appeared to advance toward and recede from the spectator in a darkened chamber.65 Robertson had studied optics and electricity in his youth, reading the texts of Nollet and conducting his own playful experiments. In his memoirs, he fondly recounts devising tricks with his growing knowledge of physics, one of which included sending an electric shock through a group of dancers.66 Upon his arrival in Paris, Robertson enrolled in a public physics course given regularly by Brisson. There, he may have found himself seated alongside Girodet, who also attended one of Brisson’s courses in experimental physics. The literal proximity of these two spaces – Girodet’s atelier and Robertson’s phantasmagoria – could, at first glance, be reasonably taken for a coincidence. After all, the former Capuchin Convent that housed them both comprised a sizable lot in central Paris just north of the Place Vendôme and became home to a number of studios and lodgings in the years following the Revolution. Yet Ossian exemplified the readiness with which phosphorescent and electric effects slipped into the register of

Apparitions

127

fairground showmanship and theatrical illusion. Girodet’s very choice of subject matter – the reappearance of the dead as luminous shadows against a dark backdrop – resonated with Robertson’s phantasmagoria, in which images of the dead were projected onto a screen in a darkened chamber. David recognized the painting’s more figurative proximity to popular forms of entertainment and asserted that Girodet had dragged the beau idéal into “the absurdity one applies to Melodramas.”67 In the context of the Revolution, melodrama was a specific theatrical mode that aimed to thrill its audience rather than to narrate or instruct.68 David’s reference thus implies that Girodet’s work not only is contiguous with a debased theatrical genre but that it has similarly abandoned the more substantial operations of history painting. Girodet, too, was clearly thinking about the contrast between his present work and that of his teacher, citing David’s Oath of the Horatii in the arrangement of the legs of the foremost young French heroes. In place of the Oath’s visual austerity, its bare and rigorously organized space, and its united but discrete figures, Girodet presents a total frenzy of objects, activities, and effects that overpopulate the canvas and confuse its symbolic valences. Ossian’s central protagonists keep company with no fewer than four dogs, two drunken soldiers, and the outstretched shadowy hands of a floating mass beneath them. This mass comprises young maidens offering flowers and potables to the new arrivals, their arms and gazes stretching toward them. The soldiers lunge en masse towards Ossian. In the center are the fallen generals of Napoleon’s army, Louis Desaix, Jean-Baptiste Kleber, and Louis de Caffarelli du Falga, greeting Ossian and behind him Fingal. Two indecorous soldiers occupy a slightly lower spatial tier. One, already intoxicated by the potent elixir proffered by the maidens, clutches a large glass. His ruddy face is relaxed into a vacant smile and his hat has fallen down, perhaps displaced by the forepaws of the dog above him. Any sense of spatial depth or organization is lost in a claustrophobic mass of bodies and objects. The only portion of the painting not overpopulated with body parts is the upper-right corner of the canvas, which only boasts a few wispy legs and torsos. In the words of Le Publiciste, the composition is “overcharged with half-expressed objects, as shadows, which the eye cannot distinguish at the slightest distance and when close still loses a crowd of details” which are “multiplied to excess.”69 This effect is largely produced by the painting’s treatment of light and color and the emphatic suppression of linear contour. In the artist’s 1807 text “The Critique of the Critiques of the Salon of 1806,” Girodet ventriloquized the critical confusion surrounding Ossian’s unusual illumination, writing:

128

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

“The air is a large mirror: each object alternately reflects its color and its day (i.e., light) to neighboring bodies.”70 This passage is a sly parody of the blunt conceptual instruments used by art critics to explain his works, but it nonetheless draws our attention to one of the painting’s most distinctive features, namely that light and color within the painting are not determined by intrinsic material properties nor by external light sources.71 Instead, the bodies are reflecting off of one another and entering into a kind of visual sympathy with their neighboring objects. Physical adjacency becomes visual resemblance, constituting a formal collective in which luminous effects are amplified and transmitted locally, laterally, and nonhierarchically. Critics referred to the group as a “crowd” (une foule), an entity whose potential for political agency as well as disruptive and uncontrollable action would have been undoubtedly familiar to the Parisian spectator of 1802, following a nearly decade-long Revolution. The crowd describes multiple individuals united into a single entity, a unity that Girodet transposes onto the level of form. Writing to his friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in 1805, the artist reflected that the figures in Ossian “had to appear porous, penetrable.”72 It was an effect Girodet claimed as “a new conquest for painting.” The young maidens who radiate vaporous light blend into one another. Even the more substantial French soldiers dissolve into an aggregate of limbs and heads. For example, the right arm of Kleber, who is dressed in green, fades into a blue light as it approaches Fingal. The figures occupying the upper-left portion of the canvas are so faint and indistinct that the viewer struggles to identify the mere suggestion of scattered bodies. In Ossian, Girodet painted a crowd that is constituted by the dissolution of the individual body, a body more radically porous than that of Endymion. Their diaphanous skin receives and transmits the luminous effects of neighboring bodies, subordinating the contours of the bounded self to the aggregate body of the crowd. Insofar as Girodet’s painted crowd echoes, if distantly, the real crowds that had participated in the Revolution, it is an entity presented in confusion, disorder, and claustrophobia. The viewer is confronted with a mass of objects, which, according to Le Publiciste, “reject the gaze, which does not know where to fix itself. In the presence of such objects one has the idea of and one even experiences the fatigue of a painful daydream that presents to the mind only the confusion of images and alteration of forms.”73 The dissolution of the individual body, a state that describes both the electric experiment and revolutionary activism, evidently confused Girodet’s viewers. It was a formal – and perhaps

Popular Illusions

129

a political – arrangement that did not appear to be fixed or stable. If, in, Endymion, the linear contours of the heroic male nude are softened and dissolved, here the boundaries of the body are more tentative and insubstantial: the multitudes that welcome France’s military heroes are fused into a single vaporous entity. By 1802, however, the viability of this configuration was already receding into a horizon of expired possibilities; Girodet insisted, in his description of the work, that “all the beings that compose it are fantastical, with the exception of Victory and the symbolic birds, which the artist depicts as really existing.”74 In a stunning reversal of the representational registers of history and allegory, the only “real” figures are those who are purely allegorical: the female Victory, the Gallic Rooster, and the Imperial Eagle.

Popular Illusions Girodet’s Ossian stood somewhere between history painting and theatrical illusionism, ultimately reaffirming their implicit proximity. The diffuse lighting and compressed space suppress the boundaries between individual figures, in some places rendering them completely indistinguishable, a translucent crush of spectral figures. Ossian’s protagonists realize the promise of Endymion: a body that is penetrable and therefore capable of laterally receiving and transmitting effects, be they electric or illusory, spectacular or political. However, for Girodet this was a corporeal modality that had become deeply and irrevocably “unreal.” It was this indeterminate boundary between real and unreal that structured Ossian as well as the electric effects it referenced. Girodet’s dramatic and unconventional compositions were often maligned as the products of a nonrational state. David is said to have once exclaimed, “Girodet, he’s crazy! He’s crazy or I don’t know a thing about the art of painting . . . What a shame that with his great talent this man makes nothing but follies . . . he’s got no common sense.”75 One reviewer claimed that Girodet worked in a “productive fever,”76 another one suggesting that his 1810 Revolt of Cairo “seems to have been composed in the delirium of a fever” as part of “a nervous convulsion.”77 Girodet imitated reviewers of his 1806 Une Scène de déluge, writing that it is not a product of “genius” but of “mania,” whose design causes the viewer’s own “nerves [to be] irritated.”78 However, he was also suspected of insincerity, of knowingly performing his eccentricity to impress patrons and fellow artists. For example, Étienne-Jean Delécluze describes “le petit charlatanisme” whereby Girodet routinely invited members of high society to his

130

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

studio to view an “unfinished” work.79 Girodet would then periodically interrupt conversation to add this or that finishing touch to the work, when the painting had in fact already been meticulously finished and corrected.80 This was an unseemly characteristic in scientists as well: in the context of Enlightenment science, the experimenter’s credibility was tied, in part, to his visible reluctance to perform.81 Girodet’s “charlatanism,” especially his manipulation of the conditions under which his art was seen, hinged on the credibility and sincerity of his actions.82 Like de Loutherbourg and Fuseli, his reputation was not as stable as it might seem; it often strayed somewhere between intellectual rigor and theatrical showmanship, the visionary and the deranged – the same ambiguity that dogged electric experimenters of the mid-to-late eighteenth century. The problems with electric demonstrations, as with the luminous tricks of the phantasmagoria, were twofold. First, electric effects were too promiscuous; they were able to migrate between official and unofficial contexts and between academic and recreational venues.83 In eighteenthcentury Paris, scientific discoveries were discussed at the Académie des sciences as well as in drawing rooms and coffee houses, at fashionable salons and public debating societies. Science was increasingly commoditized for a growing class of individuals with leisure time and financial resources.84 This took many forms, from elite practices such as recreational botany to the use of optical projection (e.g., magic lanterns) in popular fairground entertainments. Experimental physics was well suited to this trend insofar as it relied on live demonstrations for the production and authentication of scientific knowledge.85 From its earliest, most private and academic context, the electric experiment replicated some of the features of fairground attractions, especially those involving a magic lantern: they sometimes took place in the dark, they produced fleeting but impressive luminous effects, and they “surprised” and “amused.” Both could be – and were – described as “a surprising spectacle.”86 Marat observed that no other natural phenomena could “offer a spectacle so singular, so important, and so terrible.”87 Public demonstrations of electricity were initially confined to academic lectures and the private residences of gentlemen-amateurs but were soon appropriated as a form of entertainment by France’s haute monde. In the words of Delbourgo, “spectacular bodily effects became de rigueur in the courts, salons, and coffeehouses” of mid-century Europe.88 The features of electricity depicted in Nollet’s prints (e.g., Figure 3.8) were permanently altered by the migration of electric demonstrations from the realm of the social and institutional elite to a much broader, heterogeneous set of public practices. On the boulevards, electric experiments were

Popular Illusions

131

Figure 3.8 Gobin, plate II from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, vol. 6, 2nd ed. (Paris: chez les frères Guerin, 1745–65). Image: Bibliothèque Diderot de Lyon.

quite literally adjacent to occultism and charlatanry. Popular shows combined electric effects with feats of magnetism, magic tricks, fortune telling, and other visual and auditory manipulations. Many of the initial experts of electricity straddled the established boundaries that separated official academic societies, the showmanship of the fairground, and various occult

132

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

practices. For example, Nicolas-Philippe Ledru, known by his street name Comus, rose to fame with a performance that combined electricity and optics with a magic lantern ghost show and fortune telling. By 1784, he had received the title of “physician to the king” and gained membership in the faculty of medicine of Paris from Louis XVI, becoming a member of the official scientific establishment. However, he never abandoned his cabinet de physique on the boulevards. Charles Rabiqueau, a lawyer, contributed to the scholarly publications on electricity but also peppered his “school of physics” with demonstrations of fairies who lived in a magical tree.89 At the turn of the nineteenth century, electric effects could be found in the lecture theaters of learned societies, in the drawing rooms of the Parisian aristocracy, in public assembly rooms before a paying audience, in performance venues along the boulevards, in the fairground structures used by traveling showmen, and in the abandoned crypts of the former Capuchin Convent. Although they were distinguished by different procedures, social and institutional networks, epistemological stakes, and human actors, these venues nonetheless drew upon a shared repertoire of electric effects. Depending on the particular configuration in which a given demonstration took place, the same effects could be used to instruct or to fool. A second, closely related problem associated with electric demonstrations concerned the effects themselves, which strained against the limits of human perception. Electricity’s movement through and between objects was almost instantaneous and was often accompanied by a bright light that tended to blind rather than illuminate. Electricity itself was incredibly difficult to see, even if one could observe its secondary effects. Moreover, it could produce unanticipated sensations whose visible cause was not always evident. This included electrifying objects that were capable of shocking unsuspecting handlers and concealing wires under the floor of the auditorium that could then deliver shocks to the audience in order to heighten the dramatic power of a presentation. Somewhat akin to animal magnetism, electricity had a tendency to evade man’s everyday observational powers, and this feature was seized upon when it was integrated into magic shows and other fairground attractions. The drama of electricity thrived on the ambiguity that attended many of its effects: Were they real or unreal? And if this couldn’t be conclusively determined, how could one’s observation or experience of it ever be trusted? Girodet’s Ossian serves as a reminder of the close and complex relationship between academic and recreational uses of electricity in the late eighteenth century. It was not simply that Girodet’s studio was literally adjacent to a popular attraction. The painting itself cited the kinds of

A Human Chain

133

colorful glowing effects and nocturnal visions of the dead that would have been on view at the nearby phantasmagoria. Writing of the illumination in Ossian, Girodet insisted that viewers would find none of the commonplace tonalities associated with natural light, unless, at the very least, it was filtered through multiple varied layers of colored glass.90 The artist would have seen glass diffraction and reflection illustrated in the multivolume Nollet text he had owned since his youth. By the time Girodet painted Ossian, these effects would have likewise routinely featured in theatrical shows and would have also been familiar to London audiences of Philippe de Loutherbourg’s spectacles. Girodet’s painting lingered on the threshold between noble history painting and monstrous melodrama and in a larger sense the threshold between legitimacy and spectacle. This was part of a more pervasive problem that electric demonstrations were likewise subject to, a fundamental ambiguity as to where that boundary lay and, more importantly, uncertainty as to how the viewer was able to parse the real from the illusory. Through Ossian, then, it becomes possible to recognize not only the problematic effects electricity had on the human body – specifically those incompatible with the procedures of self-evidence – but also the way in which it strained the limits of human perception and thus slipped into the register of illusion. Electricity fit uneasily within an empirical framework that privileged direct observation: its experiential and perceptual effects emphatically failed to meet the criteria for the production of scientific knowledge and for its ratification through the social technology of collective witnessing: the individual could not reliably “experience” it and the audience could not trust what they “saw.” In this regard, Ossian alludes to a realignment of spectatorial practices more broadly, in which a viewer was not necessarily empowered to actively produce and authenticate knowledge but was instead manipulated, fooled, and amused.

A Human Chain A year after exhibiting Ossian, Girodet set to work on a new painting in his studio located in the former Capuchin Convent.91 Une Scène de déluge (Figure 3.9) was first exhibited at the Salon of 1806, where it invited widespread critical acclaim.92 Indeed, although contemporary art historical scholarship has tended to gravitate toward his Sleep of Endymion, it was Deluge that was widely regarded as Girodet’s greatest work during his lifetime and that remained one of the most famous paintings in France for several years after it was first shown. The composition depicts a family,

134

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Figure 3.9 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Une Scène de Déluge, salon of 1806 and 1814, oil on canvas. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

arrayed along a single axis, fleeing the rising waters of a catastrophic flood. The family’s patriarch is supported by his young son, whose wife and small children struggle to maintain their grip on the ledge below. The work inspired frequent reference to Nicolas Poussin’s Le Déluge from the 1660s

A Human Chain

135

but Girodet disavowed the comparison, insisting that his painting did not represent the biblical flood but merely “a sudden and partial inundation produced by a convulsion of nature.”93 The primary fault for which Girodet’s work was criticized resided not in the painting itself but in the overpowering effects it was said to have on its viewers. A similar charge had already been leveled at Ossian, which La Décade philosophique derided as “a veritable physic for the eyes,” evoking the nowoutdated sense of “physik” as a medicinal remedy commonly associated with violent and involuntary physical purging.94 The striking emotional content of Deluge elicited a refrain of descriptors such as “horrible,” “terrible,” and “shocking,” aligning the work with both melodrama and the sensational idiom of early Romanticism, the latter defined less by a consistent set of visual strategies than by formal obscurities and excesses that evoked a world beyond the threshold of ordinary perception.95 In short, critics associated Girodet’s paintings firstly with affective responses that exceeded normative or acceptable intensity and, secondly, with corporeal effects suggesting states of physical vulnerability.96 Some treated Deluge akin to a public health hazard, claiming that it wounded or strained their eyes. “What does it do to the spectator?” an indignant reviewer asked. “The principal figure, turning his eyes and grinding his teeth in a convulsive attitude, cannot be regarded without horror.”97 One popular anecdote indicated that even the most hardened viewers were not immune to the sentiment of “pure horror”98 described by critics: “Two soldiers looked at his painting in profound silence. One of them, after a few minutes, broke the silence by energetically crying out, ‘Thunder of the Deluge! [. . .] Oh! That poor mother!’ Then, turning to his comrade he said, ‘Come, let’s go. This painting makes me feel ill.’”99 This account was appended to the artist’s “The Critique of the Critiques of the Salon of 1806.” The poem’s annotations, which were probably written by the editor Firmin Didot, add that the artist was displeased to learn that his painting had an effect on its viewers similar to the first performance of Aeschylus’s Eumenides.100 Didot referred to the well-known claim that the shocking appearance of Aeschylus’s Furies in the ancient Athenian theater had caused children to faint and pregnant women to miscarry.101 The emotional extravagance of Girodet’s narrative was heightened by the scene’s strange illumination, a single flash of lightning that mimics the diagonal alignment of the bodies, cutting from the top right into the penumbra of the lower left. Deemed “too trenchant and disagreeable” by critics,102 it was said to produce a “false day.”103 Particularly visible in Girodet’s preparatory oil-on-wood sketch (Figure 3.10), the use of lightning speaks to the artist’s long-standing and intense fascination with

136

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Figure 3.10 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Déluge, n.d., oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Gérard Blot.

alternative forms of illumination. It was while working on Deluge, shortly after exhibiting Ossian, that Girodet is thought to have adopted the form of nocturnal painting for which he would later be known. Unable to complete his work during daylight hours, he painted by candlelight until 2 a.m.

A Human Chain

137

Figure 3.11 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, preparatory sketch for Une Scène de déluge, crayon on paper. Besançon, musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie (inv. D.2792). Photo © Pierre Guenat.

His friend and pupil Antoine-Claude Pannetier eventually created “a mobile lighting apparatus,” which Girodet continued to use until his death.104 Girodet’s reliance on an alternative light source in his studio would thus appear to echo his frequent recourse to nonsolar forms of illumination in his large-scale history paintings. The drama of the painting hinges on the physical connectivity of the individual figures, whose linked hands received careful attention from Girodet (Figure 3.11). It was a configuration that recalled the transmission of electricity in popular demonstrations (e.g., Figure 3.12). The use of the human body as an electric conductor was best exemplified in what became known as the “human chain,” a variation on the experiment first demonstrated at Crane Court and later recounted by Robertson in his memoirs. Nollet famously transmitted an electric shock through 180 royal guards at Versailles in front of King Louis XV and his court. The men held hands and were also connected by pieces of metal; when joined in an electric circuit, each man felt a simultaneous shock. It was reported to members of Britain’s Royal Society in 1746 that “the surprise [of the shock] caused them all to spring up at once; as it will indeed force any person to do that subjects himself to the trial.”105 The experiment was reproduced with 200 Carthusian monks from a nearby monastery. More than 600 people later participated in a human chain at the Collège de Navarre, “all of whom felt

138

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Figure 3.12 Detail from Gobin, plate II from Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, vol. 6, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1745–1765). Image: Bibliothèque Diderot de Lyon.

the shock throughout their body with a violence proportional to the distance of each organ from the point of contact.”106 Eighteenth-century treatises insisted that “the number of people who compose this chain is irrelevant; one hundred people will feel it the same as if there were only three or four.”107 Girodet’s Deluge presents its own kind of human chain whose structure is echoed in the transmission of electricity taking place behind it. The flash of lightning, the luminous discharge on which the visibility of the scene depends, replicates the diagonal alignment of bodies in the foreground. The oil-on-wood sketch more explicitly points to the manual transmission of electrical virtue, the linking of hands that made a human chain possible. As the bright and jagged crack of lightning rends the canvas, it meets the illfated protagonist’s left hand, passing behind and through his torso. The lightning continues just under the point of contact between the young man and his incapacitated wife, growing fainter where their son strives but fails to reach their linked arms. The critic Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard asked of this scene, “One still sees the members of the same family clasping to and leaning on one another: but how can all the rings of this chain be linked to [just] one of them?”108 Chaussard thus identified the figural grouping as a chain, but one that is structurally compromised. Jean-Baptiste-Bon Boutard, a frequent champion of Girodet’s work, similarly expressed concern about “this chain of people,” in which a sudden instability is “communicated [from the father] to the other figures,” producing “a jolt” that pushes their son off the face of the rock.109 Struggling to escape the

A Human Chain

139

rising waters of the flood, this family can only survive if they are able to preserve their physical connectivity. According to Boutard, however, what has been “communicated” along this chain only serves to further imperil them. The human chain illustrated several key elements of electricity then circulating in popular and scientific discourses. Firstly, the human body, porous and permeable, was an ideal conductor through which electricity could flow.110 Nollet reminded his readers that electricity pervades all bodies as well as the atmosphere that surrounds them.111 Indeed, its effects could be transmitted almost instantaneously between a theoretically limitless number of people who were linked by their hands. Because electricity traveled laterally between these bodies, it was understood to be a radically nonhierarchical phenomenon. Moreover, it was characterized by its elusiveness, its lack of intrinsic materiality. Electricity could only be observed in the effects it produced in other bodies or in transmission between them. In the case of the human chain, these effects were experienced as a shock, spark, or snap – characterized by unexpected and brief pain. Electricity was applied to a body defined by its porousness, but it simultaneously provided a way of conceptualizing additional kinds of transmission, communication, and power. Recall that for Girodet this was a metaphor for the experience of art. Most explicitly, Girodet wrote that electricity characterizes the means by which a painting affects its viewers in his long-form poem Le Peintre: The artist of hearts, thus, follows each passion, And knows to trace in them the right expression: As soon as he feels, he makes, and suddenly communicates To the moved spectator an electric spark.112

Girodet drew upon the metaphoric resonances of electricity to articulate the immediacy and intensity with which a successful artist moves his viewer. His use of the technical terms of experimental physics (e.g., “communicates”) also explicitly locates the painting’s spectator within an experiment in which he receives the bright, sharp bite of an electric shock. Yet the human chain had very specific political implications, too, for what it might mean to receive and transmit electricity. They belonged to an earlier, revolutionary moment, that only seemed to come into view in Girodet’s painting once they had already expired.

140

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Broken Circuits Although introduced under the monarchical ruling order of prerevolutionary France, electricity became a potent way of describing and understanding the Revolution. The public display of experimental natural philosophy, and electricity in particular, in the 1780s and 1790s treated the body in ways that transgressed conventional bounds of social control.113 The human chain, as both a scientific demonstration and a revolutionary metaphor, described a corporeal experience in which an immaterial “spirit” or virtue was rapidly transmitted within and between individuals. The resulting configuration was a collective that was physically linked and laterally organized, grounding a revolutionary subject in a body that was capable of receiving and transmitting an invisible force. Unable to direct the electricity that flowed through him, the subject of the human chain was merely a conductor of something larger, a link in a chain with no limit to its size. Even the physical properties of the human chain – difficult to contain or control, producing effects that are uniformly distributed, and joining together large numbers of people – echo the tripartite cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Electricity had long been associated with revolution, and not just in France.114 The English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, known for his political radicalism, was one of many who pitted electricity against political hierarchies: “The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble, even at an airpump or an electrical machine.”115 More specifically for Girodet, references to electricity proliferated in both painted and printed depictions of the French Revolution.116 Seen in the background of David’s sketch for his unfinished Tennis Court Oath of 1791, a flash of lightning marked the transformative nature of the events taking place. Lightning became an especially powerful symbol in the mid-1790s, coinciding with the most radical and violent period of the Revolution, the Terror. It could be seen bursting from the sky alongside the Republican Constitution (Louis Jean Allais, Constitution républicaine, 1793) and emanating from a Gallic Rooster, refashioned as an emblem for the French Republic, to jolt and unseat members of the European oligarchy (Figure 3.13). A key to Mailly’s print describes the rooster “penetrating” the scene with “the sign of equality from a lightning bolt that de-coifs” several monarchs. In Jacques-Louis Pérée’s popular engraving Rights of Man, 1794–1795 (Figure 3.14), a tree bearing emblems of the Church and monarchy has been struck down, presumably with the ax wielded by the muscular nude

Broken Circuits

141

Figure 3.13 Barnabé Augustin de Mailly, Congrès des rois coalisés, ou les tyrans (découronnés), 1793, engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

who occupies the center of the print. Yet it is lightning, cutting diagonally across the composition, that sets the French Crown aflame. Electricity complements and activates the manual activity – implicitly slow and laborious – by which the tree was felled. In contrast to the effects of the ax, the lightning is instantaneous, immensely powerful yet intangible, and cannot be attributed to an individual agent. Man may have laid the wood for revolution, the print suggests, but the righteous electricity of liberty has lit the fire. Even the technical instruments of electric demonstrations were incorporated into prints. The caricature The Mass Fall (c.1793, Figure 3.15) depicts a republican activist sending an “electric shock of liberty” to the corrupt officials of the Ancien Régime. The “shock” is produced by an eighteenthcentury electrical machine in which a rotating disk created a static charge – here, though, instead of a plate, it is the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the same document referenced in Pérée’s print, that creates the electric charge. The device is topped by a Phrygian bonnet, a conical hat often used as a symbol of revolutionary enthusiasm. Text within the print informs us that “republican electricity” is delivering “a shock,” shown

142

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Figure 3.14 Jacques-Louis Pérée, L’homme enfin satisfait d’avoir recouvré ses droits, 1794–1795, etching and burin. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Broken Circuits

143

Figure 3.15 François-Marie Isidore Queverdo, La Chûte en masse, c. 1793, colored etching. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

incapacitating despotic leaders and toppling the political hierarchies to which they belong. The coil that transmits the electricity is accompanied by the words “liberty,” “equality,” “fraternity,” “unity,” and “indivisibility.” Mary Miller has argued that lightning served as a metaphor for purifying and restoring balance to the natural world as well as the moral world, but it is important to likewise consider electricity’s actual and metaphorical operations on the body.117 Crucial for these illustrations is the near-instantaneous and radically nonhierarchical way in which electricity was thought to travel through bodies, thus serving as an apt metaphor for both the form and the aspirations of revolutionary sentiment. Literary uses of the revolutionary metaphor also proliferated. In Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden, written between 1805 and 1806, Heinrich von Kleist likened the spread of republican enthusiasm to the transmission of electric charges between bodies. Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 history of The French Revolution later claimed that, “France is a monstrous Galvanic Mass [. . .]; electrifying one another, positive and negative; filling with electricity your Leyden-jars – Twenty-five million in number! As the jars get full, there will, from time to time, be, on slight hint, an explosion.”118

144

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

The human chain, enabled by the physical connectivity of individual bodies, gave physical form to the “erasure of the self” posited by Hegel in his account of the Reign of Terror.119 Having dismantled a social experience that was organized and subdivided, the Revolution offered in its place, “a single whole”: the concept of absolute freedom, in which “all social ranks or classes . . . are effaced and annulled; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such group and exercised its will and found its fulfillment there, has removed the barriers confining it; its purpose is the universal purpose, its language universal law, its work universal achievement.”120 As the “stubborn atomic singleness” of the individual is dismantled by these social transformations, so, too, are his corporeal boundaries, grounding a revolutionary model of collectivism in a subject characterized by corporeal and psychic porousness. The larger collective produced by the human chain was made possible by a subject who was defined not by his personal self-direction or autonomy but by the suppression of these very properties.121 Creating a subject who is physically and experientially continuous with those around him necessitates transgressing the boundaries of the self and, in so doing, deactivating what we might call one’s “self-possession.” Perhaps this was what Girodet first explored in his Sleep of Endymion, in which the linear contours of the heroic male nude began to dissolve, an effect that coincides with the subject’s psychic suspension and physical vulnerability. By 1802, though, when Girodet imagined a physical collectivity of porous bodies in Ossian, it had already become illusory. Girodet’s Deluge, I am suggesting, depicts a human chain in crisis. This corporeal configuration has been intensely destabilized, set askew along a dramatic diagonal axis. Each link, each point of continuity between the figures is on the verge of breaking. On the lower left, the young boy desperately clings to his mother’s hair, but his fingers are already sliding through her uncoiled locks. Only the foremost tip of one of his feet remains on the rock. His mother has fainted, her neck limp and her knees buckling under the weight of her two children. Unresponsive to her husband’s touch, the mother’s fingers have gone slack. Above, the young man straddles two outcroppings of rock, his elderly father perched atop him. The older man’s withered legs are set in contrast to those of his son, which bulge under the strain. Whereas the older man’s free left hand clutches a purse of money, his son’s hand firmly grips the family’s sole anchor and collective hope: a single tree branch, which has begun to splinter. This configuration invokes, among other things, a patrilineal arrangement, a literal line of fathers and sons, that is about to be broken.

Broken Circuits

145

Rather than part of an empowered model of collectivity united by immediate and shared corporeal experience, Girodet’s protagonists are gravely endangered by the precarity of this organization. Its imminent collapse is anticipated by a single drowned figure on the lower left. Physically and visually isolated from the group, she reveals the consequences of becoming untethered from the human chain. The solitude particular to this fate was described a few years earlier by William Cowper in his 1799 poem “The Castaway,” in which a drowning crew “perish’d, each alone,” despite their physical proximity. The drowned figure’s physical separateness indicates the reinstatement of a subject who is similarly discrete and bounded. The highly articulated musculature and the billowing drapery that entangles both the young mother and the elderly patriarch give evidence of Girodet’s close study of Michelangelo while in Rome. Girodet’s composition, however, presents a kind of foil to the Creation of Adam found on Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. If the Renaissance artist imagined an approaching moment of contact that would result in the transmission of vital energy to unactivated matter, Girodet presents the failure of such a touch. To the extent that the painting does indeed depict a human chain, it seems to indicate that this arrangement has ceased to offer a functional model of collectivism: to belong to this chain is to be endangered and rendered insensate. Whereas the Davidian neoclassical nude had once encoded republican virtue, Girodet reveals the consummate powerlessness of this figure.122 The would-be young hero is incapable of saving his family and can only passively witness his own failure. In the words of one reviewer, “he is gripped with horror at seeing the destruction of his family, which all his efforts cannot prevent; his mouth opens with convulsion.”123 Rather than a hero, Girodet has painted a spectator. The response attributed to Girodet’s protagonist resonates with those narrated by the painting’s critics. “Terrifying,” wrote Le Flâneur au Salon.124 “Horrifying,” suggested the Athenaeum.125 “This sensation,” the Mercure de France complained, “which prevents reasoning, and which is common to all the spectators, proves that the artist has overreached the goal he should have been content to attain.”126 Those who view it, noted the Journal de l’Empire, “must feel their nerves furiously irritated in casting their eyes on a painting such as the Déluge by M. Girodet.”127 Constant among such texts was the implication that the viewer could not control their responsiveness, that “one is involuntarily moved in front of the painting of Une Scène de déluge.”128 Indeed, asked another, “who can look at this painting without shaking?”129 The Gazette de France advised the viewer to moderate their exposure to the work in order to better

146

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

evaluate its aesthetic content: “Terror penetrates every sense when looking at this pathetic composition . . . It is necessary to leave the painting for a minute, to protect oneself from the illusion.”130 These texts connote a mode of spectatorship in which the viewer is overpowered in both affective and physical terms, a mode that is embodied in Girodet’s erstwhile hero.

The Eyes of Endymion At the Salon of 1819 Girodet exhibited his last major painting, Pygmalion and Galatea (Figure 3.1). The work, which had been commissioned by the Italian patron Giovanni Battista Sommariva, returned to and inverted the themes of his first Salon painting, Sleep of Endymion. At the beginning of his career, Girodet pictured a protagonist who had been put to sleep. At its close, a figure awakens. Pygmalion received exuberant, lavish praise at the annual Salon. A laurel wreath was affixed to it, apparently greeted by the joyful cries of an enraptured crowd of onlookers. James Rubin has speculated that this response was probably orchestrated by Girodet himself or perhaps the Institut de France, which may have sought to elevate the painting as a beacon of the traditional French school of painting, a style that was becoming increasingly obsolete.131 Another kind of obsolescence was at play in Girodet’s painting, to do with the expiration of a porous body that could sustain certain political and epistemological structures. On the large canvas, Pygmalion watches with surprised delight as his artistic creation, the statue of Galatea, comes to life. Her feet retain the pale yellowish sheen of stone while her upper body flushes with the rosy glow of life. As one viewer remarked, “[her] blood already circulates, [and] the head and torso breath with life, whereas the legs are still alabaster.”132 In between the two lovers, a small figure of Eros reaches out to delicately touch the hands of the artist and his beloved artwork, and a bright flash passes between the knees of Eros and Galatea. Although surrounded by a thick cloud of luminous incense, the body of Galatea is clearly bounded by an outline of pinks, browns, and blues. Even at the very point where Eros’s spark meets her knee, the contours of her flesh remain unbreached. Describing the bright, concentrated illumination of the scene, Delécluze wrote that it was painted “like the flash of bare electricity.”133 Another compared it to a “luminous, electric explosion.”134 Eros’s agency in particular was coded in electric terms: “It’s the contact of Eros who, like the fire of an electric spark, has given the statue a soul!”135 The Journal des dames et des modes was more explicit, writing, “Eros is in the middle and he seems

The Eyes of Endymion

147

to conduct (all joking aside) a galvanic experiment.”136 Galvani’s experiments decades earlier on frog legs had proven that muscles and nerves could be stimulated into action by electricity. This effect was commonly featured in the electric shows of the 1780s through the “reanimation” of dead or paralyzed birds, as conducted by Comus, Rabiqueau, and countless others. At the turn of the century, Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini traveled throughout Europe demonstrating his uncle’s methods and giving large public lectures that involved applying electric charges to the bodies of dead animals. In London, Aldini famously electrified the corpse of a recently executed man for an audience of professionals, who watched with astonishment as the expired limbs jerked into motion.137 By the 1820s, as John Tresch has shown, immersive aesthetic effects associated with spiritualism were produced by increasingly sophisticated technologies of illusion that seemed to affirm the notion that human perception is fallible, easily manipulated, and perhaps even itself “artificial.”138 Nowhere in Girodet’s oeuvre is the visual language of electric experiments more explicitly cited than in Pygmalion. The bright yellow light that passes between Eros and Galatea transmits life to a previously inanimate being, as if Galatea was Galvani’s frog leg, Aldini’s corpse, or Comus’s paralyzed bird. However, unlike spectacular electric demonstrations, it does not take place in darkness. Warm, almost cloying, yellows and pinks firmly set this during the waking day. The amorous subtext of the electric kiss seems particularly relevant here, but it pointedly lacks the collectivity implied by the human chain. Insofar as Eros is an electrical showman – a role he also played in Sleep of Endymion – and Galatea is his subject, the results are couched in a narrative of amorous and aesthetic pleasure. Moreover, Galatea exhibits none of the involuntary physical responses produced by electric shocks. Instead, she flushes mildly. Pygmalion watches her transformation in wonder, a grateful spectator. Although he is Galatea’s enamored creator, he does not participate in the electric or somatic exchanges taking place between Eros and Galatea. The pearlescent horizontal line that connects their knees in an electric spark is not extended to Pygmalion, who is suspended in the moment before his touch reaches Galatea’s breast. As in Girodet’s Deluge, literal touch coincides with an electric exchange. On the right, the fleshy contact between Eros and Galatea is decisive, with two of his fingers curling as they meet Galatea’s delicately extended forefinger. Yet on the left, Eros’s fingers hover just above Pygmalion’s wrist. The interstice is marked by the flash of vermillion from Pygmalion’s cape peeking through from behind (Figure 3.16). Whereas the ill-fated hero of the Deluge was both an agent in and

148

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

Figure 3.16 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, detail from Pygmalion and Galatea, 1819, oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Thierry Le Mage.

spectator of the unfolding events, Pygmalion has been exempted from such obligations. He is not tasked with participating in or sustaining an electric circuit, in spite of the close relationship Girodet proffers between love, animation, and electricity. (The phallic nature of Eros’s wing, suggestively shown at Pygmalion’s hips, implies that he might be similarly displaced from a sexual exchange.) In Pygmalion and Galatea, the roles of subject and object, witness and experiment, self and evidence, are no longer coextensive. The body of Galatea, the subject of the electric charge, is pictorially bounded and recast as an aesthetic object – something to be looked at rather than identified with. Meanwhile, her spectator is physically proximate to, but ultimately excluded from, the electric transmissions that animate her. Four lines of poetry attached to the painting’s frame during the Salon present a similarly inactive viewer: “Charming painter of Endymion / Come enjoy the transports of an enchanted crowd; / All of Paris for your Galatea, / Has the eyes of Endymion.”139 The lines, which may reference a version of the Endymion myth in which the shepherd sleeps with his eyes open, clearly identify the reciprocity of Girodet’s early and late paintings.

The Eyes of Endymion

149

However, they associate spectatorship with a state of dramatic physical and mental powerlessness: they form an “enchanted crowd” that is “transported” by Girodet’s painting. Such language locates the painting more squarely in the idiom of the nineteenth-century immersive mystical spectacles Tresch calls “the fantastic arts” than to the eighteenth-century electric demonstrations Delbourgo describes as “a rational curiosity and a wonderful experience.”140 Insofar as the male protagonists of the Deluge and Pygmalion and Galatea were both figured as spectators of the scenes in which they were placed, Pygmalion’s compositional displacement and physical disconnectivity from the electrical transmission taking place echo a very different model of spectatorship evoked by the painting’s critics. Ossian had inspired in its viewers “the fatigue of a painful daydream that presents to the mind only the confusion of images and alteration of forms.”141 While looking at the Deluge, worse still, “terror penetrates all your senses.”142 “Withdraw your eyes,” Boutard helpfully suggested.143 In front of Pygmalion, in contrast, the reader of the Journal des dames et des modes is encouraged to, “nourish your eyes, electrify your soul, and remain in ecstasy until they close the doors.”144 Although such overwrought language is not unique to reviews of Girodet, the contrast offered between these two responses points to a significant rethinking of spectatorship, of what it means to experience, to witness, and to look. Girodet’s paintings indicate the expiration of a subject-position in which one’s bodily experience possesses stable evidentiary authority. To be penetrable is to be vulnerable in ways that are deeply troubling on personal, political, and epistemological levels. The electric shock, moreover, unhinges the mechanisms by which the experience of the individual body was admitted to the register of universal scientific knowledge. “Experiencing” was increasingly set at odds with “knowing.” Girodet’s various perversions of the erstwhile neoclassical ideal nude register both the rapid decline of its epistemological purchase and the simultaneous abandonment of some of its political possibilities. Rather than being “enlightened” or even “shocked,” Pygmalion is a submissive viewer whose very perceptions are prey to facile manipulation. The protagonists seen in some of Girodet’s earlier history paintings, including both Endymion and Ossian, had been defined on formal and narrative levels by their porous corporeality. They were galvanized bodies, transmitting and receiving luminous effects, and in this way activated as potential revolutionary subjects. The fleeting electric transmission that illuminated Deluge revealed, in contrast, a corporeal configuration in crisis

150

Girodet’s Electric Shocks

and a landscape in a state of catastrophe. With the collapse of the political collectivism called forth by the human chain, Girodet anticipated, in its place, a spectator who has been ejected from a participatory role of receiving and transmitting. Instead, he was consigned to the powerless passivity of “being shocked.”145 When it was exhibited, Girodet’s Pygmalion and Galatea was a stylistic relic of an increasingly outmoded French school of academic neoclassical painting. Yet it marked other kinds of expiration as well. To the extent that the conception of the body produced and described by electricity once had political purchase, it had become, in 1819, a mere spectacle – a luminous display whose Endymion-like viewer is isolated, yielding, and static. A similar operation had taken place on the level of knowledge production. The body that received a sudden shock or convulsed when applied with electricity was not simultaneously capable of measuring and observing these effects with the cool deliverance of a refined sensory apparatus. The participant in an electrical demonstration was not the knowing subject or the rational witness; he had become the incapacitated spectator whose experience was no longer central to the procedures of producing and authenticating scientific knowledge. Insofar as electricity shaped certain ideas about what it meant to witness an electric experiment and to participate in a political collective, this was reimagined as an act of passively receiving affective and corporeal provocations to which one could merely respond. The terms by which this occurred, and the contours of the model of spectatorship that emerged, crystalized around a very different and specific revolutionary spectacle: the guillotine.

chapter 4

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

On the evening of July 17, 1793, the gates of the Conciergerie prison in Paris opened to allow a wooden cart to pass through. Carrying a young woman by the name of Charlotte Corday, it crossed the Seine and made its way to the Place de le Révolution, where an elevated scaffold was erected. The stagelike structure was surrounded by an unusually large crowd of onlookers that evening, a reflection of the public’s intense fascination with Corday and her crime. Corday had been sentenced to death earlier that day for assassinating the prominent radical Jean-Paul Marat, whose final moments were famously commemorated by Jacques-Louis David’s painting Death of Marat (1793).1 Corday’s death, too, became a widely discussed and richly symbolic event in the years that followed, but not for the reasons one might expect. A little after seven in the evening on the day of her execution, the young Corday, with her hair roughly shorn and her hands bound behind her back, was lowered onto the base of the guillotine. The release of its angled blade swiftly cleaved her head from her body. It was customary for the executioner to lift the severed head in order to show it to the crowd, but Corday’s face was also slapped several times. When it was presented to the throng of people below, many claimed to see a scarlet blush burning on her cheeks. Corday’s postmortem blush proved surprisingly controversial: it was subsequently treated by certain doctors and physiologists as evidence that the guillotine’s victims remained conscious after they were decapitated. Others, especially those sympathetic to Corday’s royalist politics, saw the blush as an expression of the young woman’s innate modesty. Some commentators even refuted its very facticity, instead proposing that it was a mere optical illusion produced by the low rays of the summer evening sun. Corday’s execution was one of the most notorious events that took place on the scaffold of the French Revolution. However, Anne-Louis Girodet did not see it; the then-young French artist remained in Italy for the duration of the Terror. Henry Fuseli, who followed the events with great 151

152

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

interest from London, did not see it either. Nor did the Alsatian-born Philippe de Loutherbourg, who had long since shed his French affiliations. None of them saw Corday’s blush. Yet it was precisely this feature – its “not having been seen” – that came to define not only Corday’s death but also the effects of the revolutionary guillotine more generally. Taken in an expansive sense to connote both physical and metaphorical operations on the body, the guillotine dramatized a number of transformations that were underway at the turn of the nineteenth century, which concerned the relationship between sensation and cognition, the role of the body in the production of scientific knowledge, and the evidentiary status of experience itself. The scientific controversy that emerged around Corday’s execution specifically and the physiology of death more broadly disclosed a bodily configuration that was emphatically at odds with the procedures by which that body might be a privileged source of evidentiary knowledge. In a related manner, the guillotine placed a particular set of expectations on its viewers that implicitly reshaped what it meant to witness and to know. It consolidated latencies and tensions that were already at play in popular mesmeric, physiognomic, and electric discourses and which would remain unresolved long after the guillotine’s deployment on the scaffold of the French Revolution. To trace its history, then, this concluding chapter draws upon a strikingly diverse but interrelated set of thematic concerns, art objects, and scientific claims. If the artworks I have discussed in preceding chapters can be seen as challenging, frustrating, and subverting a certain empirical model of observational practices and experimental procedures, it is here that the forceful, revelatory powers of Fuseli, Girodet, and de Loutherbourg are fully summoned. Although their paintings and prints were not always “about” the guillotine in a narrow sense, these artworks were exceptionally articulate about its key operations. In and through their works we encounter events whose facticity perpetually eludes the viewer and, correspondingly, a model of spectatorship in which experience itself is framed as mediated, indirect, and even belated. Moreover, because the transformations at hand were in no way limited by the temporal boundaries of the revolutionary guillotine, chronology does not prove an especially useful way to structure an analysis of them – indeed, the guillotine’s nonsynchronicity became an important element of how it was understood and experienced. Instead, my discussion moves back and forth between the historical specificity of the guillotine, its expanded discursive context, and various artworks from before, during, and after the revolutionary events of 1789 to 1798.

The Theater of History

153

The decline of “self-evidence” concerns two interlocking developments: first, a recognition that bodily sensation and cognition can be decoupled, that the relationship between them is not exclusively causal, reliable, or synchronous; and second, an understanding that historical events are not necessarily unreal but are always already mediated or illusionistic. Within such a framework it becomes increasingly difficult to assume that direct bodily experience proffers any kind of secure, authoritative link between the external world and our scientific knowledge of it. At stake in both the guillotine, taken in its most expansive sense, and the artworks I will discuss is a radical remapping of the relationship between knowledge and the body taking place at the turn of the nineteenth century. Although this entailed the unraveling of certain Enlightenment configurations, it also opened up new possibilities, alternative forms of cognition and bodily experience that functioned outside of the normative and normalizing procedures of scientific knowledge production.

The Theater of History Something fundamentally theatrical about how the revolutionary guillotine was experienced during this period can be glimpsed in Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (Figure 4.1). While it does not represent the actual machinery of the guillotine, the painting is nonetheless marked by its spectacular public deployment during the 1790s. Fuseli had long been fascinated by Shakespeare’s Macbeth. During his first trip to London, the artist attended a renowned production that featured David Garrick in the titular role, a performance he documented in his drawing Garrick and Mrs. Pritchard as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the Murder of King Duncan (1766, Kunsthaus Zürich). The linear contours and detailed setting found in Fuseli’s 1766 drawing gave way, in the painting created in or around 1812, to shadowy expanses of browns and blacks. His figures move through this penumbra in thin wisps of translucent white pigment. On the left, a bewildered Macbeth holds the knives with which he has just killed Duncan, King of Scotland. Lady Macbeth, entering from behind a curtain on the right, draws a finger to her lips to urge his silence. Bright carmine blood covers Macbeth’s daggers, hands, and torso. Although some precise information about the provenance and subject of the work remains unknown, it was probably meant to be a painted sketch for a larger work. This would partly account for its lack of finely rendered details.2 The indistinctness of the painting’s setting and principal figures also registered an evolution in Fuseli’s mature theory of art, in which he reflected on the

154

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Figure 4.1 Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (possibly exhibited 1812), oil on canvas. Tate Britain.

affective power of formal obscurity and unbounded space. In his Lectures on Painting (originally delivered at the Royal Academy in 1801), Fuseli argued that, “it is not by the accumulation of infernal or magic machinery, distinctly seen . . . that Macbeth can be made an object of terror, – to render him so you must place him on a ridge . . . ; surround the horrid vision with darkness, exclude its limits, and shear its light to glimpses.”3 Rather than on a ridge, though, Fuseli has placed this Macbeth in a doorway: emerging from an unseen room, Macbeth bears the physical evidence of his guilt. The pale streaks of pigment that outline the wooden doorway shield his right shoulder and lower leg from our view. We are shown an upright rectangular structure within which a body – or part of a body – is located, which frames a sharpened metal blade reddened with the blood of a king. However, neither the act of revolutionary regicide nor the instrument that carried it out are actually present. The mandate Lady Macbeth utters to her husband in this scene is one of repression or denial: “These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will

The Theater of History

155

make us mad.”4 If the scene had formerly conveyed the psychological burden of an irreversible act of violence, after the French Revolution it had also come to stand for regicide and its disavowal – a disavowal of particular urgency in the early years of the nineteenth century as European powers sought to quell violent populism and reassert political stability. The spectral presence of the guillotine in Fuseli’s painting – its pictorial evocation and repression – does its own kind of cultural work. It allows us to begin to contend with two of the guillotine’s foundational, seemingly paradoxical characteristics: its consummate theatricality and, as we will see in the section “The Thing No One Saw,” its strange invisibility. The first beheadings that took place during the Revolution were associated with pikes, a tool described by Regina Janes as “the weapon of the common foot soldier . . . old-fashioned, primitive, common, simple, and cheap.”5 These traits made it a convenient and symbolically appropriate instrument of populist insurgency. After the Storming of the Bastille, for example, a vast crowd moved through the streets of Paris bearing the heads of its victims aloft on pikes and pitchforks. Girodet, who, together with David, followed this crowd as it processed from the Place de Grêve to the Palais Royale, recorded the scene in a small drawing (Figure 4.2).6 Bobbing up and down on the page, supported by pikes at various angles, the mutilated heads register the disorganized but dynamic movement of the crowd. Each head is highly individualized, fragmented, and mobile. The fatal instrument that would later become a kind of visual shorthand for revolutionary violence was first introduced to the National Assembly in the fall of 1789 as a relatively minor component of a reformed punitive system put forward by the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Beheading, an erstwhile privilege of the aristocracy, offered a means of execution that was considered the most humane and dignified. While the Assembly debated the penal code, Guillotin began collaborating with Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgery, to redesign and construct a prototype of the beheading machine he had proposed.7 In doing so, both men were not so much “inventing” a beheading machine, which already existed in many guises, as modernizing it.8 At the Hôpital Bicêtre the device was trialed on a bundle of straw, a sheep, and three corpses in front of a small crowd that included Guillotin, the physiologist Pierre Cabanis, and the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson. Following the first successful beheading of a criminal on August 25, 1792, the machine was officially adopted as the universal means of execution in France.9 However, the symbolic power of Guillotin’s beheading machine was not fully realized until the institution of a period of liberal radicalism known as the Reign of Terror (La Terreur,

156

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Figure 4.2 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Heads of Marquis de Launay, Foulon, and Bertier de Sauvigny, 1789, pencil on paper. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Photo © Bibliothèque nationale de France.

September 5, 1793 to July 28, 1794).10 The guillotine was most active during June and July of 1794, when more people were killed in Paris over a sixweek period than had been executed in the preceding fifteen months altogether.11 With the introduction of the guillotine the criminal was no longer subjected to intimate and specific violence that reflected his identity and his crime, and the executioner no longer demonstrated a specialized skill set to communicate them through his direct action on the body of his victim. Instead, the criminal and executioner became largely passive actors in a highly routinized sequence of events. This typically began at the Conciergerie with the prisoner’s “last toilette,” a perversion of the aristocratic toilette during which the victim’s hair was roughly shorn by one of Sanson’s assistants to expose the neck. An open cart transported the condemned over the Pont au change and through the crowded streets, a process that could take one or two hours and sometimes longer.12 Once at the scaffold, to which prisoners were led one at a time, they were tied to an upright board approximately four feet high that could be lowered onto the device. The victim’s head was then braced between two pieces of wood.

The Theater of History

157

Figure 4.3 Villeneuve, Matière à reflection pour les jonglers couronnées, 1793, aquatint and etching. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

Separate baskets were positioned to receive the body and head, and the latter was often lifted up by the executioner to show to the crowd (see Figure 4.3). Although the criminal body was removed, as Michel Foucault argues, from a “spectacle of the scaffold” in which sovereignty expressed itself through legible markings of torture, the visual and structural elements of the guillotine were nonetheless quite articulate and, indeed, spectacular.13 The inverted aristocratic toilette, the austere and lowly cart, the exposure of the condemned to the urban crowd, and the consistency with which the criminal’s individual identity was subordinated to the abstracting populism of routinized execution all reflected the social and political aspirations of the Terror.14 Even the total horizontality of the victim, which differed from the kneeling required by earlier beheading mechanisms, symbolically undermined the hierarchy of the body before the moment of death. The execution was a highly choreographed event that included a set number of “performers” and a clear narrative arc that ended – as most tragic plays do – with the death of its protagonist. All of this unfolded on

158

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

a large, rectangular, elevated wooden platform that closely resembled common stages. Such structural similarities were readily acknowledged by the guillotine’s victims as well as its viewers. In a practice Thomas Carlyle termed “acting the guillotine,” prisoners would recreationally rehearse their own trial and death.15 In the words of Honoré Jean Riouffe, who was imprisoned in the Conciergerie, at the end of the mock trial “the accused was always condemned . . . and the patient came to the foot of the bed to receive the fall of the blade that would strike his head.”16 There were also quite literal points of contact between the theater and the revolutionary guillotine. A number of popular vaudeville shows such as The Guillotine of Love built narratives around the device and performed satirical executions. The journalist Jean-Marie Girey-Dupré, for example, who had published a collection of patriotic songs, sung his way to the scaffold on the day of his execution. Similarly, when a popular actor was condemned, accounts noted that, “as in the theater, this man claimed to play a role in the revolutionary tragedy. He played it courageously, cynically, to the end.” Executed in April of 1794, the actor “died as he had lived – theatrically. Sanson showed his head. The crowd cried, ‘Bravo!’ It was his final hit.”17 The beheading device itself was closely aligned with several representational media. Its exertion of sudden vertical pressure invited comparisons with the printing press, a similarity not lost on engravers. In a related manner, the mechanism’s upright wooden plank was likened in the British press to “the form of a painter’s easel.”18 Monumental sculpture, too, was a medium both referenced and undermined by the guillotine in the early years of its use.19 The fact that this device qua representational medium isolated the head thus rendered it a kind of grotesque “portrait machine,” to use Daniel Arasse’s phrase – it singled out the head and face, removed them from the body, and put them into visible, public circulation in new ways.20 Above all, though, it was the theater, as a genre, that had the greatest impact on the conceptual framework and vocabulary of the device as it was put to use during the Revolution.21 Some insisted that the guillotine was first introduced to Paris not by the National Assembly but as a theatrical prop: François Fortuné Guyot de Fère, author of one of the first nineteenth-century histories of the guillotine, noted certain sources who insisted “that in a play presented before the revolution at the theater d’Audinot, titled Quatre Fils Aymon, one saw the guillotine on the stage.”22 However specious the claim, it indicates that the guillotine was recognized by some of its contemporaries as an object that was always already

The Body in Pieces

159

mediated, an object that had no ontological priority over and above forms of popular entertainment.

The Body in Pieces If the guillotine and its deployment on the scaffold of the Revolution were coded in the register of theater, one thing, we might assume, remained undeniably self-evident: the decisive and immediate effect it had on the body of its victim. The decapitated head, held aloft, was surely a concrete fact and not a conjuror’s trick? While the guillotine itself disappeared from view after the Terror, piecemeal bodies and severed heads became a recurrent feature of postrevolutionary visual culture, particularly in largescale French history paintings of the early nineteenth century.23 In 1809, for example, Vivant Denon commissioned a painting from Girodet for Napoleon to commemorate the suppression of an anti-French uprising in Cairo, a rare episode of triumph in the notoriously ill-fated Egyptian campaign that had concluded a few years earlier. The resulting work, The Revolt of Cairo (Figure 4.4), intended for the Tuileries Palace, was initially exhibited at the Salon of 1810 and later at the Musée Napoléon before eventually entering the collection at Versailles.24 Painted on a massive

Figure 4.4 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, Revolt of Cairo, 1810, oil on canvas. Château de Versailles et de Trianon. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

160

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

scale, the artwork is a dense mélange of bodies in pieces that are multiplied and dispersed within a crush of figures that surge toward the upper-right corner of the canvas.25 As with Fuseli’s portrayal of Macbeth, the guillotine is emphatically not present in Girodet’s painting. Yet it raises important questions about one of the guillotine’s key operations: its disarticulation of a once-continuous human body. In the foreground, a member of France’s light cavalry, known as a Hussar, advances toward a nude Arab Bedouin on the right, who also supports a gravely wounded Mamluk. Below him, an African nude clutches the severed head of a Hussar with one hand and raises a blade with the other. In the background, rebels are armed with bayonets and pikes – familiar tools of insurgency to those who had witnessed the Revolution. The painting is often read as an episode of erotic and colonial contact in which, Darcy Grigsby argues, national and racial boundaries are mapped onto corporeal boundaries.26 More recently, Crow has drawn our attention to the intensely fragmented nature of the bodies it portrays, and thence to the role of the fragment in Girodet’s style more generally.27 In fact, the only figure whose body is fully visible is that of the charging Hussar on the left. His compatriots and combatants alike are piecemeal apparitions of limbs, torsos, and heads. One critic complained that the viewer is “obligated to search for whom certain arms and legs belong to,” a task sure to end in disappointment.28 Perhaps Girodet could no longer imagine a unified, self-identical body through which heroic attributes are conveyed and glorified; perhaps this body was simply no longer available to him after the guillotine.29 At the foreground of his canvas, in the area closest to the viewer’s own space, the artist instead paints a dismembered French soldier. His decapitated body is the most central example of a larger condition Girodet has created in his composition: a profound confusion as to what a whole body could look like, where it would be found, and to whom its agency might be attributed. Instead, this certainty is emphatically withheld, with the sole exception of the four-limbed charging Hussar. However, what the viewer really sees of this Frenchman is not a heroic nude body but rather an exterior scaffolding of richly colored and densely draped clothing. Of particular confusion, then as now, is the body to which the decapitated head in the lower center of the painting belongs. A preparatory sketch (Figure 4.5) confirms that the head has been taken from the fallen Hussar in the immediate foreground, whose right gloved hand and discarded sword point out toward the viewer.

The Body in Pieces

161

Figure 4.5 Anne-Louis Girodet Trioson, study for Revolt of Cairo, 1810, charcoal and pastel on paper. Musée de l’Avallonnais Jean Després, Ville d’Avallon.

The confusion results from a compositional strategy whereby Girodet conceals the figure’s bleeding neck with his fallen helmet. The black tendrils of hair that spill out into the foreground belong to the helmet rather than an obscured head, a fact easily overlooked. The head’s absence is subtly alluded to through the dark opening of the empty helmet: here is where a head should be; here is where a head is not. The helmet points out toward the viewer, encircling a concentrated darkness, a perceptual void. It doubles the viewer’s blindness in its pigmented opacity and in the way it obscures the fatal wound. At the very center of this highly narrative military encounter, played out on a canvas overflowing with surface detail, Girodet places something that cannot be seen. The self-evidence of the guillotined body is perhaps not so straightforward after all. Above the Hussar’s body, the decollated head is radiant, surrounded by blond braids.30 Held aloft, clutched by its hair from a single hand, the head cannot help but recall the conventional representation of victims of the guillotine (e.g., Figure 4.3) – although the act of decapitation has been displaced, here, onto a racial “other.”31 This dynamic also appears in

162

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Fuseli’s Macbeth: such works allude to the visual and structural features of the guillotine but do so in a way that expresses the necessity of suppressing and reassigning them. These paintings, in other words, re-obscure the event of the guillotine. They visualize not its appearance but rather its indistinctness, a point to which I will return. In place of the tendrils of blood that are typically seen beneath the decapitated head, Girodet has painted curling golden locks of hair, a pictorial device that both evokes and conceals the brute physicality of the beheading. The severed head is notably contrasted with the head of the fainting Mamluk supported by the Bedouin on the right. Whereas the Mamluk’s brow contracts and his eyes appear slightly open, the expression on the face of the dead Hussar struck contemporary viewers as surprisingly placid. His lids are closed as if by sleep, his brow is smooth, and his lips even appear to turn upward, inspiring one 1810 critic to ask, “why does the cut-off head smile?”32 This question brings us back to Charlotte Corday and the evening of July 17, 1793, when Corday was guillotined in front of a large crowd. “Immediately the drama has an epilogue,” recalled the journalist and historian Louis-Marie Prudhomme. “The third aid of Sanson, François le Gros, slapped the cheeks of the decapitated head two or three times.”33 When Corday’s head was then presented to the crowd, many claimed to have seen the face blush in response to le Gros’s assault. Jean-Joseph Sue, a well-known military surgeon and anatomist, wrote that, “all the spectators were struck by the color change and demanded immediately, by loud murmurs, vengeance for this cowardly and atrocious barbarism.”34 The British press later attributed Corday’s blush to her modesty, which was supposedly affronted by the partial disrobing required by the device.35 In contrast, the early nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet was among many who intimated that the blush never occurred and was merely “a simple optical effect, perhaps; the crowd, agitated at that moment, had in their eyes the red rays of the sun that pierced the trees of the Champs-Elysées.”36 Corday was not the first victim of decapitation whose head was said to have remained animate and responsive. It was often alleged that severed heads could blink, dilate their pupils, and grind their teeth, lore that predated the guillotine by hundreds of years. Evidence, it was claimed, is all around. One need only consult the twitching merchandise on view at the butcher or consider the chicken, a creature known to run around with its head cut off.

“Why Does the Cut-off Head Smile?” The controversy surrounding Corday’s postmortem blush was part of a larger debate emerging in the mid-1790s that interrogated the moral

“Why Does the Cut-off Head Smile?”

163

legitimacy of the guillotine and probed the uncertain boundary between life and death.37 Scientists asked themselves and each other a variant of the question posed by the critic of Revolt of Cairo. The resulting debate played out in mainstream newspapers through texts usually aimed at a general readership. Although I am not the first to tell a history of this controversy, I propose that it has profound implications for a series of significant changes underway concerning the evidentiary authority of the body, the nature and limitations of experience, and the procedures by which scientific truth can be verified.38 At stake here is not simply the particular mechanisms of scientific knowledge production but questions about the reliability of direct lived experience more broadly. In the fall of 1795, the Prussian journalist Konrad Oelsner published his recent correspondence with Thomas von Soemmering, a prominent physiologist and anatomist, in the general-interest literary journal Magasin encyclopédique. Soemmering and Oelsner opposed the use of the guillotine, arguing that the decapitated head survives for some time after it is separated from the body. Soemmering insisted that sentiment and perception reside in the brain; severed from the body, “sentiment, personality, the ‘I’ remain living for some time.”39 Consequently, the victim must experience their own decapitated state. Soemmering went so far as to claim that, “if air was again regularly circulated through the organs of speech . . . the [decapitated] head would speak.”40 The implication was that the guillotine, far from being a painless and humane mode of execution, inflicted even more torment than older forms of execution. Luigi Galvani’s electric experiments were of particular relevance to the debate, for they revealed the animate capabilities of freshly severed limbs. Consequently, Oelsner and Soemmering reasoned, the headless body could remain alive and responsive for up to fifteen minutes. Their text was met with a swift rebuttal by Michel-Pierre le Pelletier in the widely read Moniteur universel. He countered that consciousness requires the organs of thought and sensation to be linked. Once separated, “the individual loses intelligence and life at the same time, like a strike of lightning, and as soon as that he ceases to suffer.”41 The convulsions observed in decapitated bodies, he continued, were the result of automatic muscle movements and were not evidence of the persistence of life. Ironically, like Oelsner and Soemmering, le Pelletier looked to electricity to explain what was happening to the body, but he used it to argue the opposite point. In referencing electricity, all three scientists echoed the famous words of Guillotin when he first introduced the mechanism: “the blade falls like lightning, the head flies, blood spurts, the man exists no more.”42

164

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Sue agreed with Oelsner and Soemmering and offered a more radical account of the guillotine’s effects on the body. He claimed that the dismembered head continued to think and that the headless body continued to feel after the moment of their decoupling. Pain, Sue reasoned, is felt locally within the body and then transmitted to the mind. Thus, a headless body could still experience pain even if there is not a mind present to register it. Conversely, Sue argued, the sensation of phantom limbs proves that the mind is capable of feeling pain in the absence of the body. The sensation of pain within the body and the perception of that pain within the mind are not mutually reliant and can occur independently. Sue’s implicit distinction between sensation (as neural stimulation) and perception (as the conscious mind’s reception of that stimulation) would become commonplace within physiological discourses in the early nineteenth century.43 Whereas Soemmering estimated that life lasted for up to fifteen minutes after decapitation, he failed to take into account, according to Sue, “that pain which lasts a single minute is of an incalculable duration for he who suffers it.”44 Oelsner had said as much in his preface to Soemmering’s letter, arguing that time is experienced relative to sensation. By proposing that that the guillotine introduced an experience of pain that did not adhere to conventional or collective temporalities, Sue and Oelsner anticipated a broader dismantling of the concept of “absolute time” proposed by Isaac Newton, which is consistent and universal, existing independently of the human perceptions and natural processes that unfold within it.45 (As Donald Wilcox has argued, Newtonian time was “crucial to the certainty implicit in [Enlightenment] scientific methodology.”)46 When Sue and Oelsner insisted upon an experience of time that was variable, individual, and perceptual, they were turning away from a mathematical conception of time that had underwritten a Newtonian epistemological framework and that would be rapidly dismantled in the nineteenth century.47 Two temporalities began to emerge in this debate: the instantaneity of the guillotine, on the one hand, and the prolonged duration of physical and/or psychic experience, on the other. How could the two be reconciled? How could they be mapped on to a single event? Even more elusive questions were rising to the surface: What is the relationship between sensation and cognition? What constitutes selfhood? And where in the human body do these all reside? Three features of this controversy proved especially consequential for the larger transformations under consideration here. First, the public debate about the guillotine hinged, in part, on the problem of its nonsynchronicity. It proposed that the guillotine’s victims might experience

“Why Does the Cut-off Head Smile?”

165

time in a way that differed from that of its spectators. Additionally, it raised the problem of death’s own temporality: scientists on both sides of the debate acknowledged that some of the body’s vital functions persist postdecollation.48 The near-instantaneous operations of the machine were not coordinated with the slower, durational nature of corporeal death. (The public response to Girodet’s Burial of Atala [Salon of 1808] reflected a corresponding anxiety about when, exactly, death occurs. One reviewer asked of the central figure of Atala, “‘What do I see? A woman who has fainted?’ [. . .] ‘No,’ her husband says, correcting her, ‘it’s the death of Atala.’”49 Another paper noted that their review “finds, as plenty of others do, that Atala doesn’t seem sufficiently dead.”)50 This coincided with a problem faced by the observer: the non-synchronicity of one’s perceptual experience and the speed of the guillotine. A second, closely related issue concerned a profound misalignment of sensation, cognition, and bodily fact. Opponents of the guillotine claimed that the mind can survive and feel pain without the body and, conversely, that the body can experience sensations like pain without them being registered by a conscious mind. However, those who defended the guillotine argued that the postmortem convulsions of the body and face (including Corday’s blush) were not evidence of the persistence of consciousness: after all, as episodes of apoplexy and epilepsy affirm, the body often acts involuntarily and independently of the conscious mind. If anything, the doctor Georges Wedekind concluded, postmortem convulsions prove the absence of consciousness; they belong to a body that can only move without its head.51 Both sides of this debate insisted upon an essentially discontinuous self: a body that acts and feels without the conscious mind and a mind that thinks and feels without the body. The key point of consensus between these two sides, the basic assumption on which they both drew, is that there is not a fixed and exclusively causal relationship between bodily experience and mental cognition and, moreover, that neither sensation nor cognition is securely tethered to corporeal “reality,” as such. Finally, then, the debate around the guillotine reflected a number of ideas about the body that rendered it incompatible with the procedures of self-evidence. The guillotine produced a body whose perceptual and cognitive mechanisms could not be relied upon to furnish any kind of stable evidence. This was true both of its victims and of its spectators. As what Foucault called “the medical gaze” was plunging into the depths of the body, that body’s evidentiary capacities were being reconfigured.52 Within the physical and discursive context of the medical clinic, the body could be subjected to procedures and technologies through which it was called upon

166

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

to articulate its own diseased state. Yet beyond the narrow epistemological and ideological confines of the clinic, bodily experience as such had limited scientific authority. The body’s perceptual mechanisms were increasingly recognized as physiological processes to be studied rather than treated as tools through which the material world could be reliably, perfectly, and universally apprehended – a development that, according to Alan Richardson, is central to Romanticism.53 Per the terms of this debate, the guillotine produced a subject whose experiences of time and sensation are variable, contingent, and private. It is a subject in possession of a body and brain that can think, feel, and act independently of one another.

The Thing No One Saw The non-synchronicity of the guillotine with the perceptual capacities of the human body was not limited to its effect on its victims; temporal misalignment came to characterize how it was experienced by spectators as well. The execution, although a highly theatrical event, was simply too quick to be seen even if one were staring directly at it. Consequently, the very features that made the guillotine an attractive instrument of republican ideology – its uniformity and speed – made its actual operations effectively invisible. When Michelet characterized Corday’s blush as an illusion, he in fact articulated something much more fundamental about how the guillotine functioned as a historical event. Many contemporary accounts of the guillotine remarked on the intense temporal compression of the scaffold’s mise en scène. Even the execution of the deposed former King Louis XVI was described for a British readership as taking “no more than two minutes” from start to finish.54 This stood in stark contrast to the sovereign dynasty it was terminating, which dated back two centuries. The revolutionary guillotine’s disorienting effect lay not only in the irreversible break it effected with the past but also in its temporal incongruity: two hundred years of a ruling order terminated in the span of two minutes. This sense of vertiginous temporal acceleration was compounded by the speed of the mechanism itself. Following the first public execution by guillotine, the Chronique de Paris was among several sources to note that, “the people . . . saw nothing; the thing was too quick; they dispersed disappointed, singing to console themselves for the deception.”55 Cabanis characterized it as “the affair of a minute,” evoking both the lack of a clear visual event and the misaligned temporalities of the guillotine and human sentiment: “The spectators don’t see a thing; there is no tragedy for them; they don’t have time to be moved.”56 The Parisian doctor le Pelletier,

The Thing No One Saw

167

writing about the physiological effects of the guillotine, echoed Cabanis, observing that there “is hardly time for the soul of the spectator to be moved, or one finds them more surprised than pained . . . They have declared to ask themselves if they have really seen [anything] or if they have been dreaming.”57 Implicit in such texts is the paradox of the revolutionary guillotine that comes into view in Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth, namely that, in spite of its elaborate and highly visual theatricality, the mechanism’s actual operation was so quick that it was essentially invisible. For Arasse, this constitutes “a blind spot around which there crystalizes a terrible visibility,” which is the visible invisibility of death at the very moment it occurs.58 According to the Chronique, rather than the “thing” itself, the spectator saw “nothing.” A “deception,” offers the Chronique; a “dream,” counters le Pelletier. In all three cited descriptions, this corresponds with the spectator being denied some kind of appropriate or full emotional apprehension of the event. It is here that we might begin to more fully understand the guillotine’s relationship to representation, which is not simply a matter of its resemblance to a given medium, such as theater. Rather, it is the invisibility of the central event – the execution – that entered it into the register of representation.59 The guillotine presents an incongruity between what can be seen and what is actually taking place. It offers a set of visual effects that stand in for something absent. Rumors that the guillotine originated as a theatrical prop proved surprisingly salient: it was, after all, a fundamentally illusory device. When witnessing an execution on the scaffold of the French Revolution, it was impossible to see “the thing itself,” the actual operation of the beheading mechanism. What one saw, instead, was a series of visual effects that stood in for that thing, a series of visual effects that represented it. The indirect nature of the event was well suited to the political ideology motivating public executions during the Terror. The Jacobins advocated for more radical forms of populism in which the people themselves appropriated the sovereign’s “state of exception,” to borrow Giorgio Agamben’s term.60 Public executions were, ostensibly, enacting the common will, yet they did so in ways that appeared evacuated of discernible human actors or agency. Even the executioner merely set into motion a series of mechanized events. To be among the crowds that gathered around the scaffold was to have the uncanny experience of watching one’s own political agency being staged. This political agency was, if not illusory, then at least virtual: one did not actually experience it directly but was instead presented a symbolic visual facsimile of it. In Hegel’s account of

168

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

absolute freedom in the Terror, the individual will had to be completely dismantled in order to be subordinated to the collective will. However, the guillotine qua representation suggests a different configuration: within the framework of the Terror, to be empowered was to be a spectator of rather than participant in one’s own radical collective agency. Correspondingly, the paradigmatic image of the guillotine was the triumphant presentation of the severed head to the crowd – a moment not of action but of belated display. This had a straightforwardly practical function: it proffered evidence of the beheading to a crowd that would not have otherwise seen it. This was especially true of the most famous executions, during which guards would have surrounded the scaffold and enforced a degree of physical distance between the guillotine and the crowd. In an engraving of the Execution of Louis XVI (Figure 4.6), for example, concentric rings of soldiers surround the scaffold and fill the square. In the foreground, members of the crowd cling to one another and raise their hands in celebration – a gesture which parallels that of the executioner raising the deposed king’s severed head. The correlation is underscored by the prominent placement of two figures in the left

Figure 4.6 Detail from Isidore Helman after Charles Monnet, Execution of Louis XVI, 1794, engraving. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The Thing No One Saw

169

foreground, each of whom raises a hat in the same direction as the executioner, thus implying their shared participation, at least symbolically, in the events taking place on the scaffold. Their arms, which are parallel to the wooden rails leading to the scaffold, point not to the severed head but higher up, toward the top of the guillotine. The soldiers in the foreground, beneath the scaffold, likewise point their bayonets toward the device, whose wooden pillars echo the Corinthian columns of the distant buildings; but the muted columns appear as faded emblems of an expired political order that has been replaced by the functional austerity of the guillotine’s unadorned wooden beams. The act of displaying the head was foregrounded in German and British prints of the guillotine, too.61 Cruikshank’s The Martyr of Equality (Figure 4.7) accentuated the gruesome nature of the proceedings by depicting copious amounts of blood issuing from both the head and the body of the deposed king. The print positions the viewer slightly below the figure of the Duc d’Orléans, who notoriously voted in favor of the execution of his cousin Louis XVI only to be charged with treason and guillotined less than ten months later. Shown the severed head frontally, we, as viewers, are placed as if members of the crowd. This dynamic was intensified in prints that completely isolated the head (e.g., Figure 4.3), excluding the scaffold, the beheading mechanism, the crowd, the executioner, and the body of the condemned. The presentation of the head alone served as a kind of visual synecdoche, able to stand in for the entire configuration of public execution.62 In both the event and its printed representations, the display of the severed head issued a call to look, an injunction to witness and verify what had taken place. Yet the presentation of the head could only ever be a visual substitute for that which could not be seen – the execution – and so, in rather literal terms, it was a representation of the event. It affirmed, rather than mitigated, the fact that the execution could not be directly apprehended; it took as given that the viewer’s perceptual acuity was not commensurate with the speed of the guillotine. The executioner’s appeal, therefore, could not actually be for the viewer to witness or authenticate its facticity; it was for the viewer to react. This shift was evident in Fuseli’s 1805 ink-and-wash depiction of beheading, which belonged to a series of illustrations he produced based on the thirteenth-century German epic poem Nibelungenlied. Beheading was a subject that had captured Fuseli’s interest decades earlier in the context of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, for which he had designed two illustrations in which a severed head is presented to the viewer. If these earlier prints anticipated the iconography of the guillotine, Fuseli’s

170

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Figure 4.7 Isaac Cruikshank, The Martyr of Equality, 1793, etching. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

1805 scene of beheading reflected its aftermath. The artist had drawn upon Germanic source material in earlier works, but the Nibelungenlied was notable for its narrative intensity and violence. Fuseli’s drawing (Figure 4.8) depicts the epic’s protagonist, Queen Kriemhild, presenting the severed head of her brother, King Gunther, to his vassal Hagen, both of whom had been conspirators in the murder of her husband King Siegfried years earlier. Nor was this an isolated beheading: the “Songs of the Nibelungs,” as they are known in English, was set within a narrative framework whose moral and emotional economy was often regulated

The Thing No One Saw

171

Figure 4.8 Henry Fuseli, Kriemhild Shows Hagen the Head of Gunther, c.1805, pencil and watercolor on paper. Kunsthaus Zürich. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

through acts of decollation. Gunther’s wife, Brunhild, once an eligible maiden of formidable strength, had decapitated all suitors who failed to beat her at a series of physical feats. Hagen later decapitated Kriemhild’s infant son Ortlieb while he was seated in his mother’s lap, and she in turn ordered the decapitation of her brother Gunther. The threat of decapitation, displaced onto the female figure, looms large. The shift in gender would have had particular resonances in the

172

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

context of la guillotine, a device whose many French nicknames all assigned it a female gender. Even more than that, it recalled the notorious women revolutionaries known as The Furies, whose gender was closely aligned with a brand of unconstrained radical enthusiasm that was subsequently demonized during the Directory. Gunther’s head, clutched by its hair, is luminous against a background of brown wash. The flowing drapery of Kriemhild’s dress both alludes to and conceals the tendrils of blood that often accompanied the severed head when it was presented on the revolutionary scaffold. To the right of Kriemhild, Hagen recoils from the sight of his king’s severed head. The rounded contour of Hagen’s leg and torso answers the upward sweep of Kriemhild’s drapery, which leads the eye from her waist directly to Gunther’s head. On the far right, the chains that imprison Hagen faintly echo this arrangement. Such formal parallels speak to the narrative inevitability of Hagen’s imminent decapitation at the hands of Kriemhild. For all of his formidable musculature, Hagen is powerless to escape this fate. The compositional emphasis falls on Hagen’s response to the severed head, a position Fuseli associates with disempowerment and immobilization. Unable to act, Hagen can only look. This illustration thus captures a particular dynamic emerging around the revolutionary guillotine and its spectator as well as the hallucinatory response it was said to provoke in some of its viewers.63 The event and its visible manifestation had splintered; so, too, had the role of participant and spectator.

Signal Failures If the guillotine was a fundamentally illusory object, what did it mean, then, to see it in action? What kinds of truth-claims could be associated with that experience? Indeed, what would it mean to be a spectator of rather than participant in the political events of one’s own historical moment? In what ways, in other words, was the nature of historical experience itself being reshaped? It is perhaps fitting that these questions come to a head in a work of art produced not in Paris but in distant London, where knowledge of the mechanism was mediated through published descriptions and printed illustrations. Even there, the guillotine was encountered in the register of theatrical performance: a full-sized replica of the device was on display in the London Haymarket, where it occupied a gallery that had recently exhibited Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Old Master paintings. For a small fee, audiences could watch a showman conduct a mock execution of a life-sized dummy.64 The London-based

Signal Failures

173

de Loutherbourg, who maintained a conspicuous aloofness from his Alsatian origins, studiously avoided representing the guillotine. Yet the large-scale paintings he produced during and after the Terror nonetheless reflected the device’s curious hybridity as an instrument of historical effectuality, on the one hand, and of illusionistic display, on the other. In the early 1790s, de Loutherbourg had been gradually rebuilding his reputation and distancing himself – publicly, at least – from mesmerism. By the middle of that decade, de Loutherbourg was producing some of the most successful works of his entire career, including a pair of paintings that depicted recent military triumphs of Britain and its allies over French revolutionary forces.65 The Grand Attack on Valenciennes (1794) and its pendant, Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet (Figure 4.9), disclose some of the ways in which the Revolution itself was being framed as an intensely mediated event, experienced through and as representation. De Loutherbourg’s paintings, moreover, signaled the diminishing power of a model of historical experience that claimed to be direct, unmediated, and evidentiary. The French city of Valenciennes, near the northeast border, fell to a coalition of British and Austrian forces under the command of the Duke of York on July 28, 1793. A little more than a week later, de Loutherbourg signed a contract to commemorate the victory with a largescale painting that was to be publicly exhibited in London and widely distributed as a high-quality engraving.66 As part of his preparatory work, the artist traveled to Valenciennes accompanied by the caricaturist James Gillray, who assisted him in recording details of the event. This appeal to direct observation was, as I discuss in Chapter 1, an important way for de Loutherbourg to preempt critics who complained of his overreliance on the imagination. It doubled as an informational dossier that could enhance the work’s appeal to British viewers keen to learn more about the event.67 Just under nine months after the siege’s dramatic conclusion, The Grand Attack on Valenciennes was privately shown to the British royal family and then put on view at the Historic Gallery in Pall Mall, where it quickly became one of the city’s most popular bourgeois attractions. The success of Valenciennes spurred another commission in June of 1794, this time to celebrate a recent major naval battle between British and French fleets. In late May, the British Channel Fleet, under the command of Admiral Richard Howe, had intercepted a valuable grain convoy en route to France from the United States. Howe, on the flagship Queen Charlotte, confronted the French Atlantic Fleet, commanded by Rear-Admiral Louis-Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse on the Montagne. On

174

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

Figure 4.9 Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet, 1795, oil on canvas. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

June 1, 1794, the two fleets engaged in battle during which the British captured several ships, sunk the Vengeur du Peuple, and forced the French fleet to withdraw. Despite these gains, however, the grain convoy successfully reached France. At its conclusion, both fleets had sustained significant damage and both nations would claim victory as their own. When de Loutherbourg’s commission was announced on June 12, an advertisement in the Morning Chronicle assured the public that great “care and attention will be shown in collecting the material from Nature, and the most authentic information.” Capitalizing on the success of his last painting, the advertisement added that “every exertion will be made to render the picture as correct as that of The Grand Attack on Valenciennes.”68 Shortly after the project was announced, it was reported that “Mr. Loutherbourg sets off immediately for Portsmouth, that [e]very particular in this picture may be correctly represented by an appeal to the objects themselves.”69 As he had done for Valenciennes, de Loutherbourg left London in order to produce preparatory studies closer to the site of the battle. In Portsmouth, de Loutherbourg and Gillray consulted with men who had fought, sketched their uniforms and likenesses, and made precise

Signal Failures

175

drawings of the fleet. Officers took pains to explain some of the ships’ technical details, and one even provided de Loutherbourg with his own personal drawings that he claimed to have made during the battle.70 At every opportunity, advertisements for the painting emphasized its rootedness in direct observation as well as de Loutherbourg’s close consultation with men who witnessed the battle. This promotional tactic once again answered a certain unspoken anxiety about the extent to which a painting by de Loutherbourg could adequately and truthfully represent an event. In shoring up the credibility of the work, advertisements stressed the artist’s faithful adherence to the principles of empirical enquiry and especially to the authority of direct observation. The finished work debuted at Pall Mall in the winter of 1795 and was received with enthusiastic praise. Described by one paper as “the leading object of public admiration,” it was “daily crowded with visitors of the highest rank, fashion, and taste.”71 The Morning Chronicle affirmed that the painting soon became “the most fashionable morning amusement of the Beau Monde.”72 De Loutherbourg’s appeal to documentary precision appears to be on full display in the work, which – unlike his later Defeat of the Spanish Armada – provided the viewer with many of the informational details for which naval battle paintings were typically valued. In the center of the painting, the flagships of each fleet engage one another, easily identifiable through their flags, various details of their ships, and the carefully rendered uniforms of the men aboard them. In the foreground, the French Vengeur is shown sinking while its drowning French sailors are rescued by British seamen. For all the documentary precision demanded by the painting’s commissioners, promised in newspaper advertisements, and singled out for praise by reviews, the work contains a number of striking omissions and inaccuracies. Firstly, the painting superimposes two separate events – a rather obvious distortion of the order of battle.73 Shown in the center, the engagement between Howe’s Queen Charlotte and Villaret-Joyeuse’s Montagne took place long before the sinking of the Vengeur, which is shown on the left. By the time the French vessel sunk and British sailors began rescuing some of her surviving crew, the Montagne was already well on its way back to France, the main engagement having concluded several hours earlier. The primary exchange between the two flagships was likewise inaccurately depicted. For example, the top half of Queen Charlotte’s foremast, shown broken, was still intact at that point in the battle. Even more objectionable to those who had witnessed the actual event, the ship was shown passing the Montagne at close range along its broadside. This

176

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

hypothetical configuration was far more advantageous than the actual conditions under which the British warship fought. Such obvious factual distortions are compounded by de Loutherbourg’s signature flair for dramatic pictorial effects. Much of the scene is shrouded in opaque smoke, concealed behind swelling canvas sails, and shaded by seemingly arbitrary passages of light and dark. While a degree of tension between pictorial drama and documentary precision was endemic to naval battle paintings around the turn of the century, de Loutherbourg’s painting was a clear limit-case of how far one could go, how much one could frustrate and subvert the specific commemorative and documentary functions this genre was expected to serve.74 Why, then, did de Loutherbourg amass a corpus of technical information, gained through direct observation and in consultation with eyewitnesses, only to disregard it? Having gone out of his way to acquire extensive, empirically grounded knowledge of the event, de Loutherbourg’s distortions and omissions become all the more pointed, all the more daring; and although this was remarked upon by some – one reviewer declared the work “too licentious in the point of historic fact to please any nautical observer” – de Loutherbourg’s bald-faced manipulation of the truth had little discernible impact on the work’s mainstream popularity.75 When Nicholas Pocock painted the same battle, it was lauded for its “correctness,” in marked contrast with the theatricality of de Loutherbourg’s work.76 Did those who commissioned the painting miscalculate when they advertised it as a work based on close adherence to “the facts”? The unmitigated success of the painting, despite its obvious misrepresentation of the battle, suggests as much – or, rather, that constant appeals to facticity were strategic rather than earnest. As long as rhetorical overtures were made to the procedures of truthfulness, the work itself was free to deviate from them. Was this simply a typical example of an artist contravening the historical record in order to better express certain stylistic, psychic, or political ideas? In this context, I believe something much more subtle, fraught, and consequential was taking place. Insofar as de Loutherbourg’s painting offered a kind of virtual experience of the naval battle, it was an experience that was suggestive rather than declarative, dramatic rather than factual, atmospheric rather than lucid. The artist successfully wagered that the spectacular appeal of the event superseded its actual facticity. The event’s very “facticity” was not quite as straightforward as one might assume. The battle was beset with various misperceptions and misunderstandings. The initial engagement between the fleets, for example, had to be delayed when a dense, prolonged fog settled among

Signal Failures

177

the ships. The effects were so disorienting that one officer declared to Howe that “the fog is now so thick we cannot see anything beyond our own ship,” adding, “and God knows whether we are standing in our own fleet or that of the enemy.”77 For two days, this thick haze unsettled the men’s sense of place and frustrated the limits of their sight. When the fog eventually lifted, misperception went on to shape one of the most important and dramatic moments in the engagement: Howe’s attack. On the morning of June 1, the Admiral signaled for his ships to each sail toward the French line simultaneously, a highly unusual maneuver designed to break through the enemy line at multiple points.78 However, when the Queen Charlotte turned toward the French line in what was meant to be a coordinated attack, many of the other ships hung back. They had either misunderstood or ignored Howe’s command, which was issued through a combination of hoisted flags. At this, one of the battle’s decisive moments, Howe’s signals had failed. Ironically, few naval officers cared as much about ship signals as Howe did. The systems by which flags were combined and arranged to convey messages to other ships were notoriously fallible in the late eighteenth century. Howe himself authored a popular Signals and Instructions for Ships of War in 1776 and additional texts on ship signals in the years that followed. Many aspects of his system were widely adopted in the British Navy. Yet in spite of Howe’s lifelong efforts to ensure more effective signaling between ships, on the so-called Glorious First of June his own fleet was stymied by signal failures, by the limitations of human perception and communication. Confusion and misinformation similarly colored the event’s aftermath. A number of captive French sailors mistakenly insisted that their fleet had sunk a British ship. Howe’s daughter recounted, in her father’s biography, that, “The [French] officers of the Impeteux . . . assured Captain Payne that they had seen with their own eyes a ship, painted red and black . . . go to the bottom [of the sea].”79 Even after the men were presented with evidence to the contrary, including testimony from officers of the ship that they believed had sunk, “many [of the Frenchmen] declared themselves eyewitnesses of this fact.” Despite each side claiming that their knowledge was based on direct observation of the event, the French and British officers were unable to reach a consensus. Although one could dismiss this anecdotal disagreement as an expression of French patriotism, it registers the declining authority and reliability of the “eye witness,” a concept whose legal status was likewise being demoted.80 De Loutherbourg’s painting seems to acknowledge this shift, in that it both appeals to and contradicts

178

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

the information proffered by the battle’s witnesses in Portsmouth. In his canvas, we encounter not just the imbrication of theatricality and historical fact but the erosion of some of the mechanisms by which such facts could be established. The decoupling of sensation and cognition effected by the metaphorical operations of the guillotine and the larger uncertainties it raised about the epistemological authority of the body coincided with a profound alteration in how experience, more broadly, was understood. De Loutherbourg’s painting presupposes a model of historical experience whose spectacular effects are mediated, variable, non-synchronous, and even illusionistic.

Knowing Bodies On the revolutionary scaffold, subjected to the cleaving operations of the guillotine’s blade, was not just a body but a whole set of ideas about the body. A self-continuous, self-identical body; a body whose sensory experience adequately reflected a material reality; a body whose cognitive experience was causally linked to sensory stimulus; a body whose experience of the natural world – and, crucially, whose experience of itself – was not merely reliable but was in fact the basis on which it could produce knowledge about that world. This coincided with a realignment of what it means to “see,” to “witness,” to “experience,” and to “know.” Recall those who complained of the “invisibility” of the guillotine, whose operations were “too quick” for its viewers to see. Recall the incapacitated, overpowered Hagen who is presented with a severed head in Fuseli’s drawing. Recall, too, those who tried in vain to identify which body parts belonged to whom in Girodet’s Revolt of Cairo. Recall the men in Admiral Howe’s fleet who struggled to see and apprehend key elements of the battle in which they were engaged. We encounter, in and around the guillotine, the radical incommensurability of human perception and historical facticity. One’s experience of an event could not be neatly mapped onto the event itself, and, correspondingly, the act of “witnessing” lacked the kind of authority it once commanded. It pointed to deeper kinds of discontinuities and nonidentities that have been associated with “suddenness” as an aesthetic category.81 In the context of the guillotine, direct experience of the event was reserved for its victims: to know with certainty whether or not the mind can remain conscious without the body, to know whether or not a body can feel pain without the mind is inseparable from the experience of one’s own death.82

Knowing Bodies

179

It bears stressing that the early nineteenth century did not witness the abandonment of “empiricism,” as such, but rather a radical remapping of the relationship between empirical certitude and individual bodily experience.83 Nor did it signal the total abandonment of “experience” as a source of scientific evidence. Although still linked, the gap between experience and evidence widened, and a number of procedures, technologies, and institutions rushed in to regulate the means by which individuals could use one to arrive at the other. Specialized disciplines were defined, practitioners were organized into hierarchical institutional structures, and applied sciences were increasingly set apart from their more abstract counterparts.84 This coincided, in the context of French sensationist philosophy, with the collapse of what John O’Neal has called the “authority of experience.”85 Kenneth Caneva summarizes the attending scientific paradigm shift in terms of “concretizing science” and “abstracting science.” The former was characterized by “the belief that experience is a direct and epistemologically primary source of scientific knowledge.”86 The latter is “marked by an overriding concern with quantitative measurement, by the free use of theoretical assumptions . . . and by the relative abstractness of what is regarded as scientific knowledge.”87 An earlier model of “self-evidence,” in which the scientist trained and used his body as a privileged vehicle for producing knowledge, breaks down around the turn of the nineteenth century. Lissa Roberts has outlined some of the strategies by which chemists, for example, “increasingly subordinated their bodies to the material technology of their laboratories and began erasing the presence of direct sensory evidence from the public records of their discipline’s literary and social technology.”88 As a result, direct sensory evidence “played less and less of a public role in the scientific determination of knowledge.”89 Within a few decades, this Enlightenment formation was supplanted by a model of scientific inquiry marked by the preference for quantitative rather than qualitative data and the ascendant authority of technical instruments in standard experimental procedures. The labor of both producing and recording natural phenomena was filtered through, checked by, and displaced onto increasingly sophisticated instruments. Roberts also notes that instrumentalism entailed “replacing the ‘external world’ with ‘human nature’ as the epistemological and ontological starting point of scientific investigation” – a development that Daston and Galison have traced elsewhere.90 This shift resonates with the emergence of a model of vision that, in the words of Jonathan Crary, makes the subject “simultaneously the object of knowledge and the object of procedures of control and normalization.”91 To the extent that this

180

Self-Evidence on the Scaffold

larger transformation involves the widespread use of systems by which bodily experience is recorded, quantified, centralized, and monetized, such procedures can still be identified today in, for example, forms of wearable technology and self-tracking. What, then, could the “body” actually “know”? What did perceptual experience have privileged access to, if not empirical data about the natural world? The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge narrates one possible answer in an entry in his notebook in April of 1805: In looking at the objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing any new thing. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if the new phenomenon were the dim Awakening of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature.92

Truth, Coleridge writes. Not the truth of the “objects of Nature” – the moon-lit world seen through his window – but the truth of his “inner Nature.” This motif was particularly prevalent in early nineteenth-century Romantic poetry. Within the context of German Romantic Naturphilosophie, likewise, inner selfhood and exterior nature were thought to be deeply connected.93 Of course, there are critical differences to how this played out in various geographical contexts.94 Yet it remains possible to identify, within these diverse traditions, a remapping of individual, perceptual experience onto various psychic or spiritual forms of meaning. However connected these may be to some kind of universal metaphysical conception of nature, this truth remains highly private and individual.95 By proposing as much, I do not wish to affirm the overly simple account of Romanticism as the pursuit of the subjective over the objective, the emotional over the rational, and so on. Nor would it be viable to claim that artistic pursuits branch off from the sciences: Coleridge himself was one of many Romantics whose creative practices were inseparable from their scientific inquiries.96 What is at stake here, instead, is the changing epistemological purchase of individual experience – and the reconfiguring of the relationship between knowledge and the body around a new set of parameters. It is this reconfiguration that came to the fore in the work of de Loutherbourg, Fuseli, and Girodet. Their art did not merely reflect a series of transformations underway in scientific discourse; in their own ways and according to their own terms, these artworks called into question an empirical framework that privileged the human body as the ultimate

Knowing Bodies

181

source of evidentiary knowledge. They participated, as epistemological agents, in a multilayered set of cultural practices that were contesting the evidentiary authority of the body at the turn of the nineteenth century. De Loutherbourg, Fuseli, and Girodet each took up a different thread in this vast and heterogeneous transformation – a transformation whose temporal boundaries are expansive and uneven. These artists withheld at every turn the kind of empirical certainty on which scientific discourses staked their truth-claims. In its place, viewers encountered a world of luminous obscurities and contorted bodies, visionary states and invisible powers, illegible narratives and illusionistic effects, affective intensities and perceptual indeterminacies. Viewers similarly encountered a world in which their own status more closely resembled that of a passive spectator than an active witness, in which their own bodies were characterized not by boundedness, reliability, or autonomy but instead by mutability and vulnerability. One of Romanticism’s tasks, I’d suggest, was to give form to new kinds of corporeal agency and meaning, to reassign the authority of experience to other domains of truth, and to treat empirical evidence as a limited or limiting category. Private bodily experience retreated from the world stage of public scientific knowledge alongside a broader constellation of ideas about how we access and understand the world – including the notion that there existed some kind of stable, workable commensurability between the human body’s ability to produce knowledge about the natural world and the way that world “really is.” Instead, their misalignment was brought to the fore. Whereas some nineteenth-century artists would endeavor to suture them back together, others – including those discussed in this book – used this misalignment as an animating principle through which to explore the sensuous, affective, and political potentialities that emerge when the body is less closely aligned with empirical procedures, when it behaves in ways that cannot be instrumentalized for the production of scientific knowledge. They not only endowed private experience with new psychic powers but also articulated a uniquely modern skepticism about what is lost when the body is subordinated to certain knowledge-making regimes. If we can glimpse, in their art, an alternative experiential modality, it lies beyond the quantifying mechanisms and observational technologies of industrial experimental procedures. Its power – then and now – resides precisely in its unassimilable, elusive properties.

Notes

Introduction 1. On the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of observation, see Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 2. Original orthography. [Unknown journal], Press Cuttings of the Royal Academy Library and Archives, vol. 1, fol. 129. As quoted in Olivier Lefeuvre, PhilippeJacques de Loutherbourg (Paris: Arthena, 2012), 55. 3. Polyphilo, “State of the Arts,” Public Advertiser no. 18285 (January 18, 1793). 4. This text draws on material first consolidated in Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). A much earlier attempt to bring these together, a brief but provocative work, is Ruthven Todd, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1946). 5. Matthew C. Hunter, “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s,” The Art Bulletin 97 no. 1 (2015), 58–76. 6. For an introduction to eighteenth-century European science, I recommend Roy Porter ed., The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See Note 40 in this Introduction. 7. Simon Schaffer, “Late Enlightenment Crises of Facts: Mesmerism and Meteorites,” Configurations 26 no. 2 (2018), 119–148. 8. Jean Starobinski is one of the few who have brought some of these artists together. See 1789: Emblems of Reason (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1982). See also Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). De Loutherbourg and Fuseli, as contemporaries in the Royal Academy, are more often coupled; both artists featured in the 2006 exhibition “Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination” at Tate Britain, curated by Myrone. 9. This coincided with the formation of multidisciplinary “arts-and-sciences institutions” at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Jon Klancher, 182

Notes to Pages 4–5

10.

11.

12.

13.

183

Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). I borrow from Michel Foucault in considering how different spheres of cultural activities engaged with the discursive formations that structured thought and knowledge in a given period. However, the empirical framework I have set out does not meet Foucault’s criteria for an “episteme” insofar as it does not determine or delimit the conditions of possibility for all knowledge in a given moment. It is significantly more tenuous, partial, and variable. For Foucault, eighteenth-century empiricism coincides, temporally, with what he designates as the “classical episteme.” Foucault charts its collapse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and its replacement by a modern episteme in which knowledge and representation are no longer identical or coextensive. Michel Foucault, Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 242. In Restoration London, for example, it was often difficult to distinguish legitimate scientific practices from popular heterodoxies. Hunter proposes the phrase “wicked intelligence” to capture this dynamic. Matthew Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 22–23. Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Noah Heringman, Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003); Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Robert Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); and John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). So great is the reluctance to invoke the term in modern art historical scholarship that one recent book on art in “Romantic Britain” uses the word “romantic” once (p. 115) and makes no mention of “romanticism” in the main body of the text, even though both terms do appear briefly in the preface (pp. xii–xiii). Cora Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). The most

184

14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes to Pages 5–6 influential traditional accounts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Romanticism include Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York: Gardner Books, 1978); Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Westview, 1978); Walter Friedländer, David to Delacroix (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952); and Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism (New York: Viking, 1984). More recent contributions include Dorothy Johnson, David to Delacroix: The Rise of Romantic Mythology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Myrone argues against reading Fuseli in relation to “a sweeping cultural transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism,” instead reading his art as a response to “new forms of publicity” and the rise of modern forms of consumerism. Martin Myrone, Henry Fuseli (London: Tate, 2001), 8. Related texts on this in the British context include Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and David Solkin, Painting for Money: Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). The most recent contribution to this field is Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer, eds., London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820 (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2019). Other key examples include Luisa Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006); Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Solkin, Painting for Money; David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Martin Postle, ed., Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (London: Tate Britain, 2005). On the eighteenth-century French art market, see Colin B. Bailey, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Charlotte Guichard, Les amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2008); Andrew McClellan, “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” The Art Bulletin 78 no. 3 (1996), 439–453. Key texts on the broader French context during this moment include Anne Lafont, L’Artiste savant à la conquête du monde modern (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2010); Ian Lochhead, The Spectator and Landscape in the Art Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982); Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Rolf Reichardt and

Notes to Page 6

18. 19.

20.

21.

185

Hubetus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion, 2008); Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013). Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and Solkin, Art on the Line. Although “classicism” has often been understood to denote forms of stability, authority, and power, few scholars of eighteenth-century art use the term thusly. The nature and chronological boundaries of European “Enlightenment” are even more fiercely contested. Owing in part to its associations with the rise of secularism, individualism, and political liberalism, many in late eighteenth-century Europe saw the Enlightenment’s culmination as well as its betrayal in the French Revolution and a number of other violent conflicts such as London’s Gordon Riots of 1780. Although the Enlightenment is thought of as an “age of reason” in which rational humanism and scientific principles triumphed, it was also a period rife with internal contradictions. In recent decades, scholars have written important counter-histories of the Enlightenment that foreground its “darker side,” drawing attention to, among other things, the spread of occultist heterodoxy and the persistent cultural authority of extreme physical and affective states that are in seeming opposition to the dispassionate authority of reason. John Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013); Alfred Gabay, The Covert Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Counterculture and Its Aftermath (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2004); Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); and Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). The seminal reading of Reynolds’s theory of art remains John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 69–162. Recent scholarship has revealed Reynolds as a figure of great subtlety, innovation, and experimentation. Mark Hallett, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Matthew C. Hunter, Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); Postle, Joshua Reynolds. This has been especially true since the publication of Walter Friedländer’s David to Delacroix (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).

186

Notes to Pages 7–9

22. Barrell, Political Theory of Painting; Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 23. Winckelmann’s text was translated into English by Fuseli in 1765. 24. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. 25. Gilroy-Ware has provided the most recent reminder that the classical nude was emphatically multilayered and polyvocal. Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body, 1–27. 26. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 7. 27. Two seminal texts on this are Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983) and Starobinski, 1789. 28. The historical accounts that have been most influential for this book are Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller (New York: Allen Lane, 1989); Antoine de Baecque, Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths under the French Revolution, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Routledge, 2001); Peter Brooks, “Melodrama, Body, Revolution” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 11–24; and Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 29. Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). This reading was famously challenged by Whitney Davis. Davis, “The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet’s Sleep of Endymion,” in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 168–201. 30. Myrone, Bodybuilding. 31. For Lajer-Burcharth, David’s post-Thermidor representations of the body are a battleground of unfixed gender on which the artist attempted to construct his own subjectivity and desire. Satish Padiyar, who shares Lajer-Burcharth’s interest in a psychoanalytical framework, demonstrates how late works by David and the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova refashioned the neoclassical nude into an aesthetic object – in the Kantian sense – that was explicitly sexed and politicized in the wake of the Revolution. Darcy Grigsby examines the fate of the male nude under Napoleon, arguing that eroticized bodies in paintings by Girodet and others triangulate concerns about colonial contact, racial difference, and sexual desire. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Satish Padiyar, Chains: David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in

Notes to Pages 9–11

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

187

Postrevolutionary France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007); and Darcy Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). On its afterlives, see Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body. This would reach its fullest expression in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Jonathan Crary explores these ideas in relation to Géricualt. Crary, “Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Grey Room no. 9 (2002), 5–25. Although working in a different vein, John C. O’Neal similarly argues that Romanticism be understood as a representational framework in which the relationship between “reality” and “experience” was understood to be reconfigured. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience. This aligns with an emerging sense – particularly in scholarship on the crosspollination of literary and visual practices – that visuality was central rather than ancillary to the cultural operations of Romanticism. Recent work on this includes Thora Brylowe, Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Ian Haywood, Susan Matthew, and Mary L. Shannon, eds., Romanticism and Illustration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach, eds., Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). Other influential examples of this mode of analysis can be found in Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery; J. Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2008); and Richard Sha, The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Peter Otto, Multiplying Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7–11. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 no. 4 (1991), 797. Scott’s article remains an exemplary guide for thinking about the relationship between experience, identity, and the production of historical knowledge. William Galperin, in a related sense, has argued that Romantic subjectivity, divided between the visible and the visionary, stood at odds with the facticity of the visible. Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Key texts that provide an overview of this include Jan Golinski, Science As Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820

188

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

Notes to Pages 11–13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Michael R. Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Simon Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Science 21 (1983): 1–43; Stafford, Artful Science; Geoffrey Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Oxford: Westview Press, 1995); and Colin Russell, Science and Social Change in Britain and Europe 1700–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). For the early history of this, see Matthew Adkins, The Idea of the Sciences in the French Enlightenment (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014); Margaret Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1988); and Larry Steward, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Jeffrey Wigelsworth, Selling Science in the Age of Newton: Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). Antoine Lilte, Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité a Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 260–272. Sutton offers a concise summary of the difference between them: “natural historians collected facts – they observed, they measured, they compiled, and they classified . . . Natural philosophers, on the other hand, sought after the causes of things, attempting to provide mechanisms by which the events they observed might have occurred.” Sutton, “Electric Medicine and Mesmerism,” Isis 72 no. 3 (1981), 376. It could refer to various organized bodies of knowledge as well as to the narrower set of disciplines we recognize today as scientific. For an overview of this language, see Thomas Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10–13. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2008). This builds on the pioneering work done in Robert Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Sutton, Science for a Polite Society, 8. Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, Science and Spectacle, 1–7. Christopher Baugh, “Philippe de Loutherbourg: Technology-Driven Entertainment and Spectacle in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 no. 2 (2007), 251–268.

Notes to Pages 13–14

189

49. For example, Gavin Budge, ed. Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780–1830 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007). A particularly dynamic and important account of romantic epistemology can be found in Tresch, The Romantic Machine. 50. Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 1–17. 51. In the 1770s, for example, Abraham Gottlob Werner, the preeminent German geologist and mineralogist, created a classificatory system based on “color, taste, texture, smell, and hardness” rather than chemical composition or crystal structure. In this context, “the well-trained senses could function without the intervention of instrumental or experimental techniques.” Mott Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 33–34. See also Larry Stewart, “Pneumatic Chemistry, Self-Experimentation and the Burden of Revolution, 1780– 1805,” in Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, eds., The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century (Boston: Brill, 2016), 139–169. 52. My use of gendered pronouns in the book reflects the highly gendered nature of the historical material, which overwhelmingly privileged male bodies and male subject positions when aspiring to describe putatively “universal” phenomena. As noted elsewhere in the Introduction, both the “knowledge” under consideration here and the subjects authorized to produce such knowledge were explicitly coded as white, male, and elite. 53. Steven Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology,” Social Studies of Science 14 no. 4 (November 1984), 481–520. 54. Here I depart from Jonathan Crary’s influential account of the premodern observer whose conception of vision is supposedly decorporealized. Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Firstly, I do not limit my analysis to vision. Secondly, and more importantly, I propose that the (entire) body was indeed central to the operations by which an eighteenth-century observer oriented himself in the world and came to produce knowledge about that world. Although the senses were often theorized in a mechanistic way, knowledge was nonetheless a deeply embodied experience. See Note 56 in this Introduction. 55. For a good summary of this, see Margaret A. Bode, “Psychology As Mechanism – But Not As Machine,” in Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 123–130. However, not all systems had a strictly “mechanistic” view of the senses. See Serge Moravia, “From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing

190

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

Notes to Pages 14–15 Eighteenth-Century Models of Man’s Image,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 no. 1 (1978), 45–60. Charles Wolfe and Ofer Gal have called for historians of science to “reembody our understanding of empiricism,” in Wolfe and Gal, eds., The Body As Object and Instrument of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Springer, 2010), 2. Jessica Riskin goes further, arguing for the importance of sensory experience and sentiment and sensation; she calls this an eighteenth-century model of “sentimental empiricism.” Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Eighteenth-century sensationist philosophy placed particular emphasis on the importance of sensory experience for the formation of knowledge. See John C. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996). Vitalist theories likewise foregrounded corporeal sensation as the basis of human cognition. For a good overview of this, see Catherine Packham, Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Within literary studies this has been explored in relation to notions of sensibility in Henry Martyn Lloyd, ed., The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013). Cultural historians such as Dorinda Outram have identified this as part of a more pervasive state of affairs, arguing that eighteenth-century individuals “viewed the body as the producer of knowledge for its owner. Knowledge was not simply that which subjugated the body into conformity with the social and political order; it was also produced by the body itself in its function as the primary decoder of sense impressions.” Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 20–21. A good overview remains Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: Allen Lane, 2003). Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 18. Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18 no. 2 (1992), 339. Adkins, The Idea of the Sciences. See also Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Lynn, Popular Science, 149. Charles Gillispie, Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See also Russell, Science and Social Change. Schaffer, “Crises of Facts.” In the words of Ailene Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, the audiences of early nineteenth-century scientific demonstrations “saw their role as consumers” rather than producers of knowledge. Fyfe and Lightman, eds., Science in the

Notes to Pages 15–17

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

191

Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3. See also Wigelsworth, Selling Science, 177–180. David Cahan, From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Lissa Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 no. 4 (1995), 507. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 203. For an overview, see Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment, 113–157. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble, 7. Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” 362. Nor were these the only contexts in which modern spectatorship was being formed. Other contested sites included “music criticism, new architectural spaces in which to house public spectacles, ‘bourgeois drama’ and public demonstrations of nature’s truths.” Lissa Roberts, “Chemistry on Stage: G.F. Rouelle and the Theatricality of Eighteenth-century Chemistry,” in Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, eds., Science and Spectacle, 129. Schaffer, “Self Evidence.” A decisive account of the reliance of European Enlightenment liberal thought upon slavery and imperialism has been put forward in Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). See also Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, translated by Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2011). See Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Race and Natural History, 1750–1850, Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer, eds. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). The larger history at work is illuminated in Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 200). The “Racial” Economy of Science, Sandra Harding, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). Olivette Otele is among those breaking new ground on this topic. Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History (London: Hurst Publishers, 2020). Andrei Pop also speaks to the rise of cultural relativism on the horizon of European self-consciousness at the turn of the nineteenth century in Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Anne Lafont, L’Art et la race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’oeil des Lumières (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2019). Robin Mitchell, Vénus noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020). Efforts are also underway in literary studies to rethink

192

74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

Notes to Pages 17–20 white-centric narratives about Romanticism, such as Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017). This approach has been repeatedly used in the context of the early modern era. Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Smith, The Body of the Artisan; Alex Marr, Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of late Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Susan Dackerman, Prints and the Production of Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). For an excellent overview of this field, see Alex Marr, “Knowing Images,” Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016), 100–113. One recent book that has undertaken a similar task in the context of nineteenth-century American landscape painting is Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). The distinction between a “technical image” and an “artwork” in early modern Britain should be recognized as profoundly contingent and variable. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence. One influential model for this approach can be found in Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Kevin Chua, “Girodet and the Eternal Sleep,” in H. Deutsch and M. Terrall, eds., Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 57–92. A great deal of this material was first brought to light in Stafford, Artful Science and Stafford, Body Criticism. There is a growing literature on artistic knowledge that recognizes the way that ideas can inform and be worked through in artistic practices without surfacing in verbally articulated form. One productive way to think about this circulation is the model of “tacit knowing” that Michael Polanyi first put forward in 1966, namely that people continually possess and deploy forms of knowledge of which they are not necessarily aware or cannot readily articulate. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–26. I am nonetheless reluctant to subscribe to a single such account, in part because I engage with a broad spectrum of activities that include both the implicit and the explicit, and in part because of ongoing debates about the suitability of Polanyi and others in relation to artistic knowledge-production; see, for instance, James Elkins, ed., What do Artists Know? (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012). Myrone, “Fuseli to Frankenstein,” in Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination (London: Tate, 2006), 37.

Notes to Pages 20–29

193

81. Henry Fuseli, “Advertisement,” in Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, Henry Hunter, and Thomas Holloway, 1789), n.p. 82. Although more squarely focused on subjectivity, this problem recurred in the late nineteenth century, for example when both artists and scientists in industrialized Europe grappled with the limitations of positivism. Andrei Pop, A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Zone Books, 2019).

1 De Loutherbourg’s Mesmeric Effects 1. The best text on this remains Solkin, Art on the Line. 2. Martin Myrone writes that this painting calls forth “an interpretive struggle with obscurity and shifting meanings which has distinctly Gothic implications.” Myrone, The Gothic World (New York: Routledge, 2014), 328. Marshall Brown and Andrea Henderson are among those who have written on the Gothic as a style that cultivates such ambiguity. Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3. My emphasis. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 15. 4. Maria Tatar has written influentially about a related response within nineteenth-century European literature. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 5. Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 42. 6. This biographic account is indebted to Margaret Goldsmith, Franz Anton Mesmer: A History of Mesmerism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934). 7. Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris (London: J. Johnson, 1785), 25. 8. For a transcript of these letters, see D. M. Walmsley, Anton Mesmer (London: Robert Hale, 1967), 120–122. 9. Mesmer contested the report’s findings and specifically their reference to d’Eslon’s practice rather than his own. Franz Anton Mesmer, Lettres de M. Mesmer, à messieurs les auteurs du Journal de Paris, et à M. Franklin (Paris, 1784). 10. Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, 92.

194

Notes to Pages 29–34

11. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Exposé des experiences qui ont étés faites pour l’examen du magnétisme animal (Paris: Moutard, 1784), 3. 12. The most thorough scholarly source on this, to which the present account is indebted, was published in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 15–67. 13. Ibid., 94. 14. Christopher Baugh, “Philippe de Loutherbourg: Technology-Driven Entertainment and Spectacle in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 no. 2 (2007), 251–268. 15. Roger Shanhagan, The Exhibition, Or a Second Anticipation: Being Remarks on the Principal Works to be Exhibited Next Month, at the Royal Academy (London: Richardson and Urqhart, [1779]). 16. Ann Bermingham, “Technologies of Illusion: De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon in Eighteenth-Century London,” Art History 39 no. 2 (2016), 376–399. 17. James Chalder and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16–17. 18. I particularly recommend the entries by Sunderland and Solkin, K. Dian Kriz, Myrone, Gill Perry, and Bermingham in Art on the Line. An excellent new history of the Summer Exhibition can be found in Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Jessica Feather, eds., The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018). 19. Postle, ed., Joshua Reynolds, explores this extensively. 20. See Al Coppola, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, Science and Spectacle. 21. As Iain McCalman puts it, de Loutherbourg’s ever-fragile public reputation revealed “the social anxieties and intellectual contradictions prevalent among the emerging professional bourgeoisie during the age of reason.” McCalman, “Spectres of Quackery: The Fragile Career of Philippe de Loutherbourg,” Cultural and Social History 3 no. 3 (2006), 342. 22. Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 153. 23. McCalman, “Spectacles of Quackery,” 351. 24. Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment. 25. The term “somnambulism” was first used in 1797. For more on the history of somnambulism and its cultural resonances, see Cox, Body and Soul. 26. This was reported in the English press in “Character of Lavater,” The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (Edinburgh: J. Sibbald, 1786), 154–157. 27. Darnton, Mesmerism, 70.

Notes to Pages 34–38

195

28. The best analysis of nineteenth-century mesmerism remains Alison Winter’s Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 29. McCalman, “Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Romantic Retreat: Magic, Mesmerism, and Prophecy,” in M. Meranze and S. Makdisi, eds., Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 173–190. 30. Numerous examples of de Loutherbourg’s contemporaries identifying his practice as animal magnetism can be found in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 51–55. 31. Cagliostro’s real name was Giuseppe Balsamo. The best source on Cagliostro is Iain McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (London: Century, 2011). 32. Both Girodet and Cagliostro also enjoyed the support of the Duc d’Orléans while in Paris. For more on the pro-Masonic tendencies among young French artists in Rome, see Crow, Emulation, 124–127. 33. Credibility and credit operated along similar fault lines in the emerging consumer-driven marketplace. For an excellent history, see Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 34. “Fresh Anecdotes of Cagliostro,” Whitehall Evening Post no. 6478 (1789). 35. Unknown source, Press Cuttings (National Art Library, P.P.17.G, vol. 2, fol. 445), 1787. 36. A good summary of this can be found in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 105–108. 37. Joseph Pott, Essay on Landscape-painting, with Remarks on the Different Schools (1782/3), 72. 38. Morning Post (May 4, 1784). 39. Bermingham, Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 165–179. 40. Candid, “To the printer of the Morning Chronicle,” Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser 4048 (§782). 41. “Examen du Sallon de l’année 1779,” Journal de Paris, 1779, 27. 42. Pott, Essay on Landscape-painting, 78. 43. Edward Dayes, The Works of the Late Edward Dayes (London: T. Malden, 1805), 335–338. 44. The Times (May 5, 1788). 45. Morning Post (May 8, 1809). 46. A Catalogue of All the Valuable Drawings, Sketches, Sea Views and Studies of that Celebrated Artist Philip James de Loutherbourg, esq. RA (London: Peter Coxe, 1812).

196 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

Notes to Pages 39–47 Report of Dr Franklin, 20. Report of Dr Franklin, 30. St James’s Chronicle (May 15–17, 1788). Morning Post no. 5068 (July 7, 1789). George Winter, Animal Magnetism: History of Its Origin, Progress, and Present State (Bristol: George Route, 1801), 18. Mary Pratt gives 2,000. Pratt, A List of a Few Cures Performed by Mr. and Mrs. De Loutherbourg (London: J.P. Cooke, 1789), 9. George Winter says 3,000. Winter, Animal Magnetism, 18. Pratt, List of a Few Cures, 7. Morning Post no. 5068 (July 7, 1789). The most thorough account of the practical and theoretical politics of mesmerism can be found in Darnton, Mesmerism. Mesmer Justifié: Nouvelle edition, corrigée et augmentée (Paris, 1784), 2–3. Report of Dr Franklin, 92. McCalman, “Spectacles of Quackery.” “Extract of a Letter from Paris,” Public Advertiser no. 17230 (October 7, 1789). Pratt, List of a Few Cures, 3. “Mr. Loutherbourg,” Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser 18 no. 956 (September 10, 1789). Ibid. Diary or Woodfall’s Register no. 412 (July 22, 1790). Evidence of his persisting occult interests can be found in the subsequent paintings and vignettes he produced for Macklin’s illustrated bible. He also remained an avid scholar of Swedenborg. In the 1790s, de Loutherbourg and his friend the engraver William Sharp were also briefly followers of the millennialist prophet Richard Brothers, who, before being institutionalized, preached of the world’s end on November 9, 1795. See Gabay, Covert Enlightenment, 6, 69, and 96. Unknown journal. Press Cuttings of the Royal Academy Library and Archives, vol. 1, fol. 129. As quoted in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 55. Unknown source. Press Cuttings of the NAL, PP-17-G 1686–1825, vol. 1, fol. 486, 1789. As quoted in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 55. Polyphilo, “State of the Arts,” Public Advertiser no. 18285 (January 18, 1793). Bernhard Siegert, “The Chorein of the Pirate: On the Origin of the Dutch Seascape,” Grey Room 57 (Fall 2014), 6–23. De Loutherbourg’s paintings must also be considered in relation to a longer history of British maritime history. Sarah Monks, Marine Painting in Britain 1650–1850: Framing Space, Power, and Modernity (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2018). On the eighteenth-century British seascape tradition, see Eleanor Hughes, ed., Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting (New

Notes to Pages 47–52

70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

197

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); and Monks, Marine Painting in Britain 1650–1850. Eleanor Hughes, “Nicholas Pocock: Accuracy and Agency,” in Hughes, ed., Spreading Canvas, 41–62. David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 8. Another scholar who explores the emergence of “total war” is Tim Blanning: The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Harlow: Longman, 1986) and The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802 (London: Edward Arnold, 1996). Secord writes specifically about marine botany, although I am inclined to apply her term to a broader set of observational practices, which are explored elsewhere in the edited volume in which her essay can be found. Anne Secord, “Coming to Attention: A Commonwealth of Observers during the Napoleonic Wars,” in Daston and Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation, 422. Roy Porter, “‘Under the Influence’: Mesmerism in England,” History Today (September 1985), 29. John Wilson, The Plan and New Descriptive Catalogue of the European Museum (London: J. Smeeton, 1808), 25. Wilson, Catalogue, 26–27. Roger Shanhagan, The Exhibition, or a Second Anticipation: Being Remarks on the Principal Works to Be Exhibited Next Month, at the Royal Academy (London: Richardson and Urqhart, ([1779]), 66. The influence of de Loutherbourg’s past work in theater on the painting has also been noted in Hughes, Spreading Canvas, 264–265, and Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 163–168. Morning Chronicle (February 17, 1776). William Henry Pyne, in Wine and Walnuts (London, 1823). As quoted in Baugh, “Philippe de Loutherbourg,” 298–299, The Porcupine (date unknown). Press Cuttings of the Royal Academy, vol. 2, fol. 35. Pasquin, “Royal Academy no. VIII,” The Morning Herald (May 17, 1810). Bermingham, “Technologies of Illusion,” 396. For an analysis of this system and its implications for cultural production, see O’Neal, The Authority of Experience. Lorraine Daston, “The Empire of Observation, 1600–1800,” in Daston and Lunbeck, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation, 81–113. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Mesmer Guéri, 6.

198

Notes to Pages 53–61

86. Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 14. Riskin gives an excellent account of mesmerism and the crisis of authority that it sparked in pp. 189–226. 87. The relationship between mesmerism and psychoanalysis has been discussed extensively. For a good summary, see Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Even biographies of Mesmer written during Freud’s lifetime cited this lineage, including Goldsmith, Franz Anton Mesmer, 42. 88. Report of Dr Franklin, 84. 89. The precise dates of the two paintings remain somewhat uncertain. I agree with Lefeuvre that Avalanche in the Alps is, in all likelihood, the earlier work. Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 310–311. 90. Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, 56. 91. Sun (May 2, 1804), as quoted in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 311. 92. Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick and Angus MacIntyre, vol. 6, April 1803 to December 1804 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 2290. 93. Now in Petworth House as part of the National Trust Collection, the canvas was originally listed as A Waterspout in the Mountains of Switzerland (NT486258) when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1809. 94. “Fine Arts – Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” The Literary Panorama (June 1809), 544. 95. Winter, Animal Magnetism, 24–25. 96. Ibid., 25. 97. Mesmer justifié, 7. 98. Michel-Augustin Thouret, Recherches et Doutes sur le magnetism (Paris: Prault, 1784), 65. Quoted in Report of Dr Franklin, xii. Rather than translate from the original French, I have chosen to use the historical English translation. The Gentleman’s Magazine published a partial translation in 1784, and a full English translation appeared the following year. 99. Betsy Sheridan, quoted in Patricia Fara, “An attractive Therapy: Animal Magnetism in Eighteenth-Century England,” History of Science 33 (1995), 139.

2 Fuseli’s Physiognomic Impressions 1. Myrone, “Fuseli to Frankenstein,” 37. Myrone discusses Thor in considerable detail in Bodybuilding, 266–274. 2. John Graham, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas (Berne: Peter Lang, 1979), 62. See also Michael Shortland, “The Power of a Thousand Eyes: Johan Caspar Lavater’s Science of Physiognomical Perception,” Criticism 28 no. 4 (1986), 384–386.

Notes to Pages 62–65

199

3. For an overview of this, see Myrone, Bodybuilding; and Nancy Pressly, The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). 4. Mark Ledbury, James Northcote, History Painting, and the Fables (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 59 5. Calè, Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. See also Myrone, Bodybuilding. On the broader context, see Susanna Avery-Quash and Christian Huemer, eds., London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820 (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2019). 6. Solkin, Painting for Money. See also Solkin, “‘This Great Mart of Genius’: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836,” in Solkin, ed., Art on the Line, 1–8. 7. Two earlier efforts to put Fuseli in dialogue with contemporaneous scientific thought are Peter Tomory’s The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972) and the much earlier Todd, Tracks in the Snow. I thank Martin Myrone for pointing me to Todd, an invaluable source. 8. On his mastery of “gothic spectacle,” see Myrone, “Henry Fuseli and Gothic Spectacle,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 no. 2 (2007), 289–310. Franziska Lentzsch, Christoph Becker, Christian Klemm et al., Fuseli: The Wild Swiss (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2005). Christopher Frayling, “Fuseli’s The Nightmare: Somewhere between the Sublime and the Ridiculous” in Malone, Gothic Nightmares, 9–22. 9. For more on the importance of “metaphor” as a rhetorical strategy in physiognomy, see Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” in Mark S. Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 144. 10. Because expression was said to reflect changes beneath the visible surface of the body, some have characterized Le Brun’s system as a form of “physiological determinism.” François Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 38. 11. Le Brun’s theory was part of a larger seventeenth-century interest in knowing and reading the “passions” through the body. See Lucie Desjardins, Le corps parlant: Savoirs et representation des passions au XVIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). 12. On the influence of Le Brun’s physiognomy on French art, see Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29–57; and Melissa Percival, The Appearance of Character: Physiognomy and Facial

200

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Notes to Pages 65–68 Expression in Eighteenth-Century France (Leeds: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1999), 41–64. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essai sur la Physiognomonie, vol. 1 (The Hague, 1781– 1803), 22. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Thomas Holcroft, vol. 1 (London: G.G. J. & J. Robinson, 1789), 11. Marcia Allentuck, “Fuseli and Lavater: Physiognomical Theory and the Enlightenment,” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century no. 55 (1967), 91. This is described in the seventeenth fragment of the second volume, in a section titled “Of the Study of Physiognomy.” Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter, vol. 2, (1792), 395–396. Its modern formation is often traced back to Robert Boyle. See Maurizio Gotti, Robert Boyle and the Language of Science (Milan: Geruini Scientifica, 1996); Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance.” More recently, Inés Lareo and Ana Montoya Reyes, “Scientific Writing: Following Robert Boyle’s Principles in Experimental Essays – 1704 and 1998” Revista Alicantina des Estudios Ingleses 20 (2007), 119–137. Although the review went unattributed in the pages of the journal itself, there is little doubt that Fuseli was its author. “Book Review: Essays on Physiognomy,” The Analytical Review 5 (1789), 454–462. “Variétes: Physiologies, ou l’art de connoître les hommes sur leur physionomie,” Journal des débats et des décrets (March 1, 1802), 3. Detailed accounts of this episode and the surrounding controversy circulated widely. For example: “Character of Lavater,” The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (Edinburgh: J. Sibbald, 1786), 154–157. One can likewise observe the influence of the Swedish philosopher and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that man’s earthly self is a copy of his original spiritual self. Joan K. Stemmler, “The Physiognomical Portraits of Johann Caspar Lavater,” The Art Bulletin 75 no. 1 (1993), 151–168. The Gentleman’s Magazine LXXI (February 1801), 124. In Graham, Lavater’s Essays, 59. The Hunter translation did not include the fourth and final volume of the French translation, which was published in 1803. Graham, Lavater’s Essays, 62. “Art. I. Essays on Physiognomy; Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind,” English Review, or, An abstract of English and foreign literature (January 1790), 2. “Correspondence: Foreign Literature,” Monthly Review, or Literary Journal (February 1775), 190.

Notes to Pages 68–74

201

27. Goethe’s Mother: Correspondence with Goethe, Lavater, Wieland, and Others, trans. Alfred S. Gibbs (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1880), 58. 28. For an overview of the early friendship and later collaboration, see chapters 1 and 5 in John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831). 29. Fuseli to Lavater, Rome, November 4, 1773. Fuseli, Briefe (Basel: Verlag Benno Schwabe & Co, 1942), 154. 30. As quoted in Sybil Erle, Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy (London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2010), 144. 31. Goethe to Lavater, November 1779. Goethes Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, vol. 4 (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887–1912). 32. Lorraine Daston, “Epistemic Images,” in Alina Payne, ed., Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015), 13–35. 33. Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 2, 285. 34. Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 2, facing 285. 35. Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 2, 316. 36. Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 2, 316. 37. Pathognomy was subsequently linked to Romanticism. Barbara Maria Stafford, “‘Peculiar Marks’: Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought,” Art Journal 46 no. 3 (1987), 185–192. 38. Fuseli, “Advertisement,” in Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 1, n.p. 39. See Bindman, Ape to Apollo; Mechthild Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Lafont, L’Art et la race; Richard Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). 40. These claims to scientific legitimacy should be weighed carefully. Lavater’s osteological model echoed popular accounts of gestation that had been in circulation for hundreds of years, which proposed that the thoughts of one or both parents during conception and gestation would be visibly manifested in the appearance of the child. For an excellent account of early modern theories of reproduction, see Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). 41. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. Thomas Holcroft (London: C. Whittingham, 1804), 68. 42. Lavater as quoted in Stemmler, “Physiognomical Portraits,” 157. In the first French translation, “la forme extérieur du cerveau qui s’imprime parfaitement sur la surface interne du crane, est en meme temps le modèle des contours de la surface extérieure.” Essai, vol. 2, 133.

202

Notes to Pages 74–87

43. “Book Review,” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (December 1783), 589. 44. M–e, “Foreign Literature,” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1788), 553. 45. Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 2, 43. 46. M., “Foreign Literature,” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal no. 70 (1784), 145. 47. Georges Didi-Huberman, La resemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008). Recent discussions have focused on the death mask. Patrick Crowley, “Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative,” Grey Room 64 (Summer 2016), 64–103. Marcia Pointon, “Casts, Imprints and the Deathliness of Things: Artefacts at the Edge,” Art Bulletin 96 no. 2 (June 2014), 170–195. 48. This excerpt, from the Holcroft edition, was also reprinted verbatim in “Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind,” The Critical Review, or, Annals of literature (October 1789), 289. 49. This has been written about most extensively by Victor Stoichita, “Johann Caspar Lavater’s ‘Essays on Physiognomy’ and the Hermeneutics of Shadows,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 31 (1997), 128–138. 50. This arrangement has been described as an “image tableau” in which the combination of multiple images on a single plate suggests specific relationships between them. Margarete Pratschke, “Arranging Images as Tableaux,” in Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 81–85. 51. Essays, trans. Hunter, vol. 2, 290. 52. This is described in canto 13 of Dante’s Purgatorio. 53. Public Advertiser (May 22, 1786). 54. Fuseli’s interest in both dates back to his education in Zurich and particularly to the influence of his teacher Johann Jakob Bodmer. 55. John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 2, lines 891–894 (1667). See Marcia Pointon, Milton and English Art: A Study in the Pictorial Artist’s Use of a Literary Source (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970). John Barrell has argued that, for James Barry in particular, bodily deformity was closely linked to the representation of “character” and could play an important role in producing truly moral, civic art. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, 173–181. 56. The best source on this is Bermingham, “Technologies of Illusion.” 57. Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. 3 (September 1796 to December 1798), April 12, 1797.

Notes to Pages 89–102

203

58. James Boulton, introduction to Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Routledge, 2008), xviii. 59. See Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 21–59. 60. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 72–73. 61. Footnote in Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, vol. 2, 140. 62. Fuseli is often associated with a spectacular or parodic take on the sublime. See Myrone, “Sublime As Spectacle: The Transformation of Ideal Art at Somerset House,” in Solkin, ed., Art on the Line, 77–92; Frayling, “Fuseli’s The Nightmare.” 63. Myrone has argued that this evokes a “hyperbolic gender identity.” Myrone, Bodybuilding, 12. 64. Blake’s The Ancient of Days (1794) and Newton (1795) make this point most forcefully, although Nebuchadnezzar (1793) and Antaeus (1795) are among many other works that could be read along such lines. Robin Hamlyn and Michael Phillips, eds., William Blake (London: Tate Gallery, 2000). 65. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1910), 308. 66. David Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 28. 67. My italics. Essays, trans. Holcroft, vol. 1, 28–29. 68. Andrei Pop, “Sympathetic Spectators: Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare and Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes,” Art History 34 no. 5 (November 2011), 934–957. 69. Frayling, “Fuseli’s The Nightmare.” Nicholas Powell, Fuseli: The Nightmare (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 45–58. Pop, “Sympathetic Spectators.” See also Marcia Allentuck, “Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare: Eroticism or Pornography?” in Thomas Hess and Linda Nochlin, eds., The Woman As Sex Object (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 33–41. Angela Rosenthal, “Bad Dreams: Race and the Nightmare of 1781,” in Peter Wagner and Frédéric Ogée, eds., Representation and Performance in the Eighteenth Century (Trier: Landau Paris studies on the Eighteenth Century, 2006), 97–126. 70. William Cowper, writing in 1790: “I am very much of Lavater’s opinion, and persuaded that faces are as legible as books . . . In fact, I cannot recollect that my skill in phyznomy has ever deceived me.” Roy Porter, “Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England,” Études anglaises 38 no. 4 (1985), 394–395. 71. Crary, “Gericault.” 72. For a good summary of this, see Julia M. Wright, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 6–10. 73. John Cross, An Attempt to Establish Physiognomy upon Scientific Principles (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1817), 2.

204

Notes to Pages 102–106

74. Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 12. 75. For example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1981). Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 76. This larger history is clearly laid out in Pearl, About Faces, 3–64, to which the present account is indebted. Galton’s use of photography is critically examined in Allan Sekula’s seminal essay, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64. 77. Pearl, About Faces, 26–46.

3 Girodet’s Electric Shocks 1. “L’Amour est au milieu, et il semble faire (sans plaisanterie) une expérience de galvanisme.” Evariste, “Huit jours à Paris,” Journal des dames et des modes 62 (1819), 510. The popular Journal, one of the first French illustrated periodicals dedicated to fashion, reported on a wide range of cultural activities. 2. The most extensive consideration of Girodet’s art to date is Sylvain Bellenger, ed., Girodet 1767–1824 (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). Another foundational source is George Levitine, Girodet-Trioson: An Iconographical Study (New York: Garland Publishing, 1978). 3. On popular forms of entertainment, art exhibitions, and politics, see Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, Science and Spectacle; Crow, Painters and Public Life; Frédérique Desbuissons, “A Ruin: Jacques-Louis David’s Sabine Women,” Art History 20 no. 3 (1997): 432–448; Stefan Germer, “In Search of a Beholder: On the Relation Between Art, Audiences, and Social Spheres in Post-Thermidor France,” The Art Bulletin 74 no. 1 (1992), 19–36; Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy; Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican Culture under the Directory,” Art History 14 no. 3 (1991), 397–430; and Lilte, Le monde des salons; McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. 4. In Emulation, Crow argues that David’s atelier, as both a space of male sociability and a structure governing a network of personal and professional relationships, embodied both the utopian promises and the failings of the revolutionary years. 5. The relationship between the body and politics is familiar terrain in scholarly accounts of Girodet’s art, although it has often been approached through a psychosexual framework. Influential examples of this include Crow, Emulation; Grigsby’s Extremities, which puts this in dialogue with colonial and racial discourses; Padiyar, Chains; and Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble.

Notes to Pages 106–110

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

205

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s Necklines has also been very influential for my thinking. For more on this painting’s active engagement with contemporaneous theories of electricity, see Michael Gaudio, “Magical Pictures, or, Observations on Lightning and Thunder, Occasion’d by a Portrait of Dr. Franklin,” in Rachel DeLue, ed., Picturing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016), 84–111. Jessica Riskin provides a thorough and dynamic account of Franklin and his propagation of an Enlightenment empirical method in Science in the Age of Sensibility, 105–136. A good introductory text remains John L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Tableau de Paris, trans. Helen Simpson (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 30. Sidonie Lemeux-Fraitot, appendix to “Ut poeta pictor: les champs culturels et littéraires d’Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson” (PhD diss., Université de Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne). For an overview of the many, often divergent ways electricity was understood, see Roderick Weir Home, Electricity and Experimental Physics in EighteenthCentury Europe (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1992) and Heilbron, Electricity. Benjamin Franklin, “Observations and Suppositions, towards Forming a New Hypothesis, for Explaining the Several Phaenomena of ThunderGusts,” (1749). The Complete Works in Philosophy, Politics, and Morals of the late Dr Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed, vol. 1. (London: J. Johnson, 1806), 212. Franklin’s findings were not widely disseminated until the British scientist Joseph Priestley included them in his enormously popular text The History and Present State of Electricity (London, 1767). Ironically, Franklin distrusted the self-mythologizing theatricality of contemporary scientific demonstrations. This came to the fore in his “debunking” of animal magnetism. See Lilti, Les mondes des salons, 260–272. For a material history of the role of the body in American electrical experiments, see James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Paola Bertucci, “Shocking Subjects: Human Experiments and the Material Culture of Medical Electricity in EighteenthCentury England,” in Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, eds., The Uses of Humans in Experiments (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 111–138. Jan Hendrik van Swinden, Recueil de mémoires sur l’analogie de l’électricité et du magnetism (The Hague: Les Libraires associés, 1784), 133.

206

Notes to Pages 110–112

17. Nollet and Franklin had divergent views on the nature of electricity, about which there was little consensus in the eighteenth century. Nollet, who proposed that electric bodies comprise effluent (or outflowing) matter and affluent (or inflowing) matter, subscribed to a more mechanistic model of electricity as a fluidlike substance in a constant state of flow. In contrast, Franklin’s neo-Aristotelian model assumed a degree of mutual sensitivity in the world, in which, he argued, electricity would always seek balance. This led Franklin to propose positive and negative states of electricity. Nollet attacked Franklin’s theories in his Lettres sur l’Electricité of 1753. For an overview of their various disagreements, see Bernard Cohen, Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity As an Example Thereof (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956), 505–511. For the different ways that galvanism was understood and the respective political ideologies such interpretations were connected to, see Iwan Rhys Morus, “Radicals, Romantics and Electrical Showmen: Placing Galvanism at the end of the English Enlightenment.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 63 no. 3 (2009), 263–275. 18. Jean-Antoine Nollet, Leçons de physique expérimentale, vol. 6, 2nd ed. (Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1745–1765), 241. 19. Nollet, Leçons, 300. 20. See Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 21. Schaffer, “Self Evidence.” 22. See Wolfe and Gal, The Body As Object and Instrument. Other sources that deal with this issue in relation to electricity include Cahan, From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences; Delbourgo, Wonders; Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Morus, “Radicals, Romantics and Electrical Showmen”; and Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 70–103. 23. Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” 339. 24. Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance.” 25. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society, 8. 26. James Delbourgo uses the category of “wonder” to describe the combination of entertainment and instruction inspired by electricity. Because electric experiments relied upon the human body, “in no other branch of enlightened science were the act of cognition and the experience of passion more intensely related: to know was to feel, and to feel was to know.” Delbourgo, Wonders, 8–9. 27. As quoted in Heilbron, Electricity, 199. 28. In 1805, Girodet designed a frontispiece for Vicq-d’Azyr’s collected works that featured, in Girodet’s own words, the figure of “Painting” as she prepares to

Notes to Pages 112–116

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

207

draw the human body, illuminated by the “Genius of Science.” Flix Vicq-d’Azyr, Oeuvres de Vicq-d’Azyr, vol. 1 (Paris: Duprat-Duverger, 1805) x–xi. These portraits constellated changing ideas about selfhood and history. Stephanie O’Rourke, “Histories of the Self: Anne-Louis Girodet and the Trioson Portrait Series,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52 no. 2 (2019), 201–223. January 22, 1816. Bruno Chenique, “Biochronologie,” in Bellenger, Girodet, 844. See also Alexandre-César Becquerel, Paroles prononcées sur la tombe de M. Girodet-Trioson, par M. Becquerel, ancien chef de bataillon du génie (Paris: Le Normant fils, 1825). For more on Girodet’s education, including his experimental physics class, see Lemeux-Fraitot, “Ut Poeta Pictor,” 58. Brisson charged 72 livres for his course, effectively restricting it to wealthy attendees. Lynn, Popular Science, 53. Lynn has demonstrated that, “although some popularizers were anxious to spread their own ideas, more often they presented an eclectic blend of various theories.” This was particularly true of Nollet. Lynn, Popular Science, 29. Mathurin-Jacques Brisson, Dictionnaire raisonné de physique expérimentale, vol. 1 (Paris: Hôtel de Thou, 1781), 589. Brisson and Girodet were also linked through their publications: Brisson wrote a physics textbook for the écôles centrales formed under the Directory. Brisson’s Principes élémentaires de l’histoire naturelle et chymique des susbstances minerales was published in 1797 with the Firmin Didot, the publisher Girodet also collaborated with on several projects in the early nineteenth century. Girodet later drew a portrait of Firmin Didot in 1823 (Musée du Louvre). Anne-Louis Girodet, Considérations sur le génie particulier à la peinture et la poésie, in Pierre-Alexandre Coupin, Œuvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson, peintre d’histoire, vol. 2 (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1829), 103–104. Girodet, Sur le génie, in Coupin, Œuvres posthumes, vol. 1, 121. Knowles, Henry Fuseli, vol. 2, 31. The literature on this subject is sizable. Texts that have been particularly influential on the present text include Sha, Imagination and Science; Heringman, Romantic Science; Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism; Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists; and Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life. François-Joseph-Michel Noël, Dictionnaire de la fable, ou mythologie grecque, latine, égyptienne, celtique, persane, syriaque, indienne, chinoise, mahométane, rabbinique, slavonne, scandinave, africaine, américaine, iconologique, etc. Vol. 1 (Paris: Le Normant, 1801), 373. In speaking of the “dissolution” of the bounded contours of the human body, I allude to a brief caesura within or interruption of an increasingly dominant concept of the body as delimited rather than fluid, a thesis put forward by

208

42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

Notes to Pages 116–120 Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World of 1965 and revisited by Dorinda Outram and others. For how this relates to neoclassical art, see Mechthild Fend, “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine 1790–1860,” Art History 28 no. 3 (June 2005), 311–339. For Abigail Solomon-Godeau, the absence of a female body and the incorporation of gender difference, via Endymion’s feminine traits, within an exclusively phallic visual economy makes possible the foundation of a modern bourgeois public sphere predicated on the exclusion of women. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble, 65–69. Chua writes about the painting in relation to the vitalist notion of an “openended cycle between life and death.” Chua, “Girodet and the Eternal Sleep,” 79. Late eighteenth-century vitalism argued for a unique animating principle that defines organic life. Some believed this to be an invisible fluid not unlike electricity or animal magnetism. Vitalism also characterized a broader way of thinking about bodily processes in terms of dynamism, change, and interrelatedness. June 30, 1790, Lemeux-Fraitot, appendix. In early April 1794, Girodet was arrested at Ariano, near Naples. He escaped two assassination attempts and was then imprisoned for having a tricolor cockade and letters from David in his bag. He remained in prison for two weeks. On August 12, 1794, he was again arrested while sketching the city of San Pietro dei Montagnoni, but he was released after a day. Girodet, “Song Three” in Le Peintre, quoted in Coupin, Œuvres posthumes, vol. 1, 132. Crow, Emulation, 174. Davis, “Renunciation of Reaction,” 194. “Salon de l’an 10, no. IV,” Le Publiciste (October 8, 1802), 2. I depart here from Crow, who reads the technical virtuosity of this effect in terms of Girodet’s personal experience of psychosexual and professional competition among David’s students. Crow, Emulation, 133–139. This relationship was first briefly alluded to by Barbara Stafford, who notes that Endymion’s body is “both absorbing and radiating, stimulated and stimulating to produce ‘effects’” informed by contemporaneous ideas about electricity, phosphorescence, light, and the states of matter. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Endymion’s Moonbath: Art and Science in Girodet’s Early Masterpiece,” Leonardo 15 no. 3 (1982), 194. Jean Paul Marat, Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale (Paris: Impr. de J. Lorry, 1784), 189. Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha, “Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art: A Historical Perspective,” Leonardo Music Journal 12 (2002), 18.

Notes to Pages 120–128

209

54. Nollet to E. F. Dutour, April 1745. As quoted in Heilbron, Electricity, 281–282. 55. Siegfried Zielinksi, Deep Time of the Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 165. 56. Famously used in Franklin’s kite experiment, the Leyden jar gave rise to the phrase, “to capture lightning in a bottle.” 57. Jean-Paul Marat published two texts on electricity: Recherches physiques sur l’électricité (Paris: Clousier, 1782) and Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale (Paris: Imrp. De J. Lorry, 1784). 58. Edmé-Gilles Guyot, Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Gueffier, 1786), 254. 59. Guyot, Nouvelles récréations, 223. 60. Guyot, Nouvelles récréations, 223. 61. Delbourgo, Wonders, 122. 62. Musschenbroek to Réaumur, January 20, 1746. As quoted in Heilbron, Electricity, 313–314. 63. “Salon de l’an 10. No. IV,” Le Publiciste (1802): 2. This contemporary review affirms what Sarah Burns has noted about the phantasmagoric appearance of Girodet’s figures. Sarah Burns, “Girodet-Trioson’s Ossian: The Role of Theatrical Illusionism in a Pictorial Evocation of Otherworldly Beings,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 95 (1980), 13–24. 64. Girodet began renting an atelier in the Couvent des Capucines in 1800. He showed the near-completed Ossian to visitors at the smaller studio in his Louvre apartment in 1802, suggesting that he may not have executed that painting at his rented atelier. However, archival documentation confirms that Une Scène de déluge was begun and completed there. Lemeux-Fraitot, appendix to “Ut poeta Pictor,” 36–37. 65. Robertson opened his Fantasmagorie in the former Capuchin Convent in January of 1799, where it remained until 1805. The complex was later cut through by Napoleon to enable the construction of Rue de la Paix. 66. Étienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques, vol. 1 (Paris: Chez l’auteur Blvd. Montmartre no. 12, 1833), 9. 67. “Fragment d’une autobiographie de Louis David, c. 1809,” ENSBA, MS 316 no. 51, fol. 3, v., quoted in “Biochronologie,” 571. 68. See Brooks, “Melodrama.” 69. “Salon de l’an 10,” Le Publicist (October 27, 1806), 1–2. 70. Anne-Louis Girodet, La Critique des Critiques: du sallon [sic.] de 1806: Étrennes aux connaisseurs (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1807), 19. 71. Barbara Stafford and Sarah Burns have both identified affinities between Girodet’s understanding of electricity and the painting’s atmospheric

210

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

Notes to Pages 128–135 effects. See, Stafford, “Les ‘météores’ de Girodet,” Revue de l’Art 46 (1979), 46–51, and Burns, “Ossian: The Role of Theatrical Illusionism.” Girodet to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, [December 1805], Coupin, Œuvres posthumes, vol. 2, 277–281. “Salon de l’an 10,” 1. Explication des ouvrages de peinture et dessin, 111. Etienne Jean Delécluze, Louis David: Son école et son temps (Paris: Didier, 1855), 266. I. G. “Salon de 1819: Lettre de l’artiste à Pasquin et à Marforio,” La Renommée no. 157 (November 19, 1819), 619. Pierre-François Gueffier, Entretiens sur les ouvrages de peinture, sculpture et gravure exposés au Musée Napoléon (Paris: Gueffier Jene, 1811), 45. Girodet, La Critique, 13–15. Delécluze, Louis David, 217. Crow, Emulation, 269–271. Schaffer, “Self Evidence.” An excellent exploration of charlatanry and quackery in the eighteenth century can be found in the special issue Cultural and Social History, ed. Peter Cryle, 3 no. 3 (2006). For a good overview of this, see Bensaude-Vincent and Blondel, Science and Spectacle. An indispensable source on this is Lynn, Popular Science. Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle.” Guyot, Nouvelles récréations, vol. 1, 217. Marat, Recherches physiques sur l’électricité, 1. Delbourgo, Wonders, 88. See Robert Isherwood, “Entertainment in the Parisian Fairs in the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of Modern History 53 no. 1 (1981), 24–48. The meteoric illumination “n’ont ni la teinte des rayons du soleil, ni celle de la lune, ni celles des feux terrestres, à moins qu’on ne les suppose modifiés par l’interposition de verres diversement mais légèrement coloré.” Girodet to Saint-Pierre, October 26/27, 1805, in “Biochronologie,” 515. The earliest sketches for the painting were undertaken around 1795, shortly before his return from Italy. Dale Cleaver, “Girodet’s Déluge, a Case Study in Art Criticism,” Art Journal 38 no. 2 (Winter 1978–1979), 96–101 The confusion stemmed, according to the artist, from an error in the title: it was not d’un déluge but merely de déluge. The mistakenly added pronoun (un) had led its initial viewers to assume that Girodet had painted a biblical Diluvian scene. A. L. Girodet, “Aux rédacteurs du journal,” Journal de Paris (September 21, 1806), 1936.

Notes to Pages 135–138

211

94. “Beaux-Arts: Suite de l’examen du Salon,” La décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique (1802), 551. 95. For examples, see “Salon de 1806 (iiè article),” Mercure de France 26 (1806), 26–31. “Nouvelles concernant les sciences, arts et belles-lettres (Salon de 1806),” Athenaeum ou Galerie français 9 (September 1806). “Suite du Salon de 1806: Tableau de M. Girodet, représentant une scène d’un deluge,” Athenaeum ou Galerie français no. 12 (December 1806). J. B. Saint-Victor, “Vers faits en voyant le tableau d’une scène de déluge, par M. Girodet,” Journal de L’Empire (October 13, 1806), 4. Le Glaneur, “Glanage dans le Salon,” Journal de Paris (1806), 38.1043, Collection Deloynes, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 96. The “physicality” of aesthetic responsiveness in this period has been discussed in detail with regard to the Gothic novel, a genre that rose to popularity in the final decades of the eighteenth century. See, for example, Terry Castle, “The Gothic Novel,” in Boss Ladies, Watch Out! (New York: Routledge, 2002). 97. [D.B.?], “Secondes observations sur le Salon de 1806,” Journal du publicist (1806) 38.1050 Collection Deloynes, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 98. “Suite du Salon de 1806,” 4. 99. Girodet, La Critique des Critiques, 37. 100. Girodet, La Critique des Critiques, 37. 101. For a discussion of this performance and a summary of its context, see Pat Easterling, “‘Theatrical Furies’: Thoughts on Eumenides,” in Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson, eds., Performance, Iconography, Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–236. 102. [D.B.?], “Secondes observations,” 437. 103. F. C., “Lettre sur le salon de 1806,” Journal des archives littéraires, ou mélanges de literature, d’histoire et de philosophie (1806) 38.1047 Collection Deloynes, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 104. Coupin, Œuvres posthumes, vol. 1, xliv. 105. “Extract of a Letter from Mr. Turbevill Needham to Martin Folkes, Esq; Pr. R. S. concerning Some New Electrical Experiments Lately Made at Paris,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society no. 44 (1746), 253. 106. M. Sigaud de la Fond, Précis historique et expérimental des phénomènes électriques (1785) as translated and reprinted in Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 13. 107. Guyot, Nouvelles récréations, vol. 1, 320. 108. P.-J.-B. Chaussard, Le Pausanias français; état des arts du dessin en France, à l’ouverture du XIXé Siècle: Salon de 1806 . . . publié par un observateur impartial (Paris: F. Buisson, 1806), 123.

212

Notes to Pages 138–145

109. Jean-Baptiste Boutard, “Salon de l’an 1806 (No. III),” Journal de l’Empire (1806), 2. 110. It shared this trait with animal magnetism and with the somnambulism that grew out of it. Robert Cox writes that “The somnambular body was . . . porous, fluid, and partible, interconnected with itself and others.” Cox, Body and Soul, 42. 111. Nollet, Leçons, 267. 112. Girodet, Sur le génie, 102. 113. Schaffer, “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle.” 114. For the English politics of electricity more generally, see Morus, “Radicals, Romantics and Electrical Showmen.” 115. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (Birmingham: Thomas Pearson, 1790), xxiii. For more on Priestley’s politics, see Schaffer, “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit,” in Robert Anderson and Christopher Lawrence, eds., Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley (London: Science Museum, 1987), 39–53. 116. For an excellent account of how and why electricity became an important political metaphor during the Revolution, see Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 72–103. 117. Miller argues that lightning had three rhetorical functions in the Revolution: “as a signifier of sovereignty [. . .], as a form of justice that was immediate and necessary to restoring equilibrium [. . .] and [. . .] as a synonym for armed force and, specifically gunpowder.” Miller, Natural History of Revolution, 82. 118. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. 2, pt. 3, chap. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1837), 144. 119. Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 65. 120. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, vol. 2, 595. 121. Paul Gilmore has identified an aesthetic correlate: writing on American Romanticism, he notes that “aesthetic electricity troubles the sense of the self as a stable site of experience, opening the door to reconstituting the self and the biological, economic, political, and ideological forces – all, at times, figured as electric – constituting particular individuals and their society.” Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism, 75. Broader vitalist discourses about “sympathy” provided an important conceptual and social analogue. See Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era (New York: Routledge, 2007). 122. Accounts of the decline of the neoclassical nude are numerous and varied. Key examples include T. J. Clark, “Painting in the Year 2,” in Farewell to an

Notes to Pages 145–150

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

213

Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Crow, “A Child Shall Lead Them,” in Emulation; Padiyar, Chains; and Potts, “Ideal Bodies” in Flesh and the Ideal. F. C., “Lettre sur le salon de 1806,” 443. Le flâneur au Salon ou Mr Bon-homme; Examen joyeux des tableaux mêlé de vaudeville (Paris: Aubry, 1806). “Suite du Salon de 1806,” Athenaeum ou Galerie française 12 (1806), 3. “Salon de 1806 (iiè Article),” Mercure de France 26 (1806), 28. N. “La critique des critiques du Salon de 1806, etrenne aux connoisseurs,” Journal de l’Empire (February 11, 1807), 3. Dandrée, “Suite de la lettre sur la Peinture, insérée dans la feuille d’hier,” Journal de Paris (November 29, 1810), 2286. [Aubry?], Lettres impartiales sur les expositions de l’an 1806 (Paris: Aubry et Petit, 1806), 27. A.D., “Sallon [sic.] de 1806,” Gazette de France (September 17, 1806), 1074. James Rubin, “‘Pygmalion and Galatea’: Girodet and Rousseau,” The Burlington Magazine 127 no. 989 (1985), 517–20. Crow, similarly, describes the public response as “over-manag[ed]” in Emulation, 272. I.G., “Salon de 1819. Lettre de l’artiste à Pasquin et à Marforio,” La Renommée no. 157 (1819), 620. Delécluze, “Huitième lettre,” as quoted in Lemeux-Fraitot, “Ut Poeta Pictor,” 381. Landon, Salon de 1819, as quoted in Lemeux-Fraitot, “Ut Poeta Pictor,” 381. Auguste-Hilarion de Keratry, Annuaire de l’école française de peinture ou Lettres sur le Salon de 1819 (Paris: Maradan, 1820), 238. Evariste, “Huit jours à Paris,” 510. Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, 215. Tresch, The Romantic Machine, 129. Biographie universelle, ancienne et modern ou histoire vol. 55 (Paris: L.-G. Michaud, 1838), 415. Tresch, The Romantic Machine, 127. Delbourgo, Wonders, 8–9. Anon., “Salon de l’an 10. No. IV,” Le Publiciste, 1. A. D., “Sallon de 1806 [sic.],” Gazette de France (1806), 1074. Boutard, “Salon de l’an 1806 (no. III),” Journal de l’Empire (1806), 2. Evariste, “Huit jours à Paris,” 509. This state is closely associated with urban modernity by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s. Although one can find references to this in his seminal 1936 “Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” his discussion of shock is more fully and decisively explored in his 1939 “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Reading Sigmund Freud, Benjamin describes consciousness as a defensive barrier against the shocks of modernity. The formal and

214

Notes to Pages 151–156 technical fragmentations of the filmic medium offer a rare means of penetrating this barrier.

4 Self-Evidence on the Scaffold 1. David’s famous depiction of the murder victim and the rich visual ceremonies enacted around it constitute a key moment of revolutionary self-definition. The most important text on this painting remains T. J. Clark’s “Painting in Year II” in Farewell to an Idea. 2. See Gert Schiff’s catalogue Henry Fuseli 1741–1825 (London: Tate Gallery, 1975), 59. 3. Knowles, Henry Fuseli, vol. 2, 225–226. 4. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (New York: American Book Co., 1904), 2.3.44–45. 5. Regina Janes, “Beheadings,” Representations 35 (1991), 31. 6. Brown and others assert, “there can be no doubt that Girodet was present at the fall of the Bastille” alongside David. Stephanie Nevison Brown, “Girodet: A Contradictory Career” (PhD. diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 1980), 43. 7. For a comprehensive account of these debates, see Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 218–238. 8. Similar devices such as the Scottish Maiden had been in use for centuries and were known through German engravings. Some believe that the French variant took its inspiration from a description of such a device printed in a travel narrative: Voyage historique et politique de Suisse, d’Italie et d’Allemagne (Frankfurt: 1736–1746), as discussed in François Fortuné Guyot de Fère, Notice historique et physiologique sur le supplice de la guillotine (Paris: Chez l’éditeur, Rue Saintonge no. 19, 1830). 9. The first criminal to face its blade was Nicholas-Jacques Pelletier. 10. It is often forgotten that the term “terror,” associated with powerful monarchs, was then used to denote majesty, glory, power, justice, and legitimacy. Ronald Schechter, “The Terror of their Enemies: Reflections on a Trope in Eighteenth-Century Historiography,” Historical Reflections 36 no. 1 (2010), 53–75. For a nuanced account of the role of the Terror within the Revolution’s emotional economy, see Sophie Wahnich, In Defense of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution (New York: Verso, 2012), 49. 11. For a reliable account of these figures, see Hugh Gough, The Terror in the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 38–49. 12. For information about the route, see G. Lenotre, La Guillotine et les exécuteurs des arrêts criminels pendant la Révolution (Paris: Perrin, 1893), 162.

Notes to Pages 157–160

215

13. Foucault describes the guillotine as a transitional object of disciplinary power, still participating in the theatrical model of the scaffold but limiting the contact between the law and the body of the criminal to the time of a mere second. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 13. 14. For a good summary of this, see Philip Smith, Punishment and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 120–127. 15. Carlyle, The French Revolution, vol. 3, pt. 6, chap. 5. 16. Honoré Jean Riouffe, Mémoires d’un détenu pour servir à l’histoire de la tyrannie de Robespierre, in Mémoires sur les prisons (Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1823), 272–273. 17. Hector Fleischmann, La Guillotine en 1793: D’après des documents inédits des Archives nationales (Paris: Librairie des Publications modernes, 1908), 294–295. 18. “Massacre of the French King! View of la guillotine; or the modern beheading machine, at Paris,” 1793, Rare Books, Columbia University DC137.08.M37 1793g. 19. Richard Taws, “The Guillotine As Antimonument” Sculpture Journal 19 no. 1 (2010), 33–48. 20. Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, 134. 21. My account of its relationship to theater in particular is drawn from the excellent discussion found in Daniel Gerould’s Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore (New York: Blast Books, 1992). 22. Guyot de Fère, it should be noted, remained skeptical: “I cannot, by the way, guarantee this fact,” he wrote, “which seems hardly believable.” Guyot de Fère, Notice historique, 6. 23. On the prominence of bodily fragments in history paintings of Antoine-Jean Gros, another of David’s pupils, see Stephanie O’Rourke, “The Sediments of History in Napoleonic France,” Word and Image 37 no. 1 (2021), 6–20. 24. A thorough account of the painting’s history can be found in Bellenger, Girodet, 308–321. 25. I borrow the phrase “body in pieces” from Linda Nochlin, who describes the revolutionary fragment as a symbol of the destruction of France’s repressive past. For this reason, the Revolution fits into her larger account of, “a loss of wholeness . . . that is so universally felt in the nineteenth century as to be often identified with modernity itself.” Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment As a Metaphor for Modernity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 23–24. 26. Grigsby notes that the actual rebels came from Cairo’s urban lower classes, although Girodet depicts the insurgents as a mixture of Bedouin Arabs

216

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

Notes to Pages 160–163 (“whose beauty electrified [Girodet],” Coupin, Oeuvres posthumes, vol. 1, xviii) and Mamluks. Grigsby, Extremities, 105–163. Thomas Crow, “Composition and Decomposition in Girodet’s Revolt of Cairo,” in William Tronzo, ed., The Fragment: An Incomplete History (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009), 175–192. Sentiment Impartial sur le Salon de 1810 (Paris: Chaignieau Aîné, 1810), vol. 1, 8. Recall Antoine de Baecque’s words: “the corpse is the conceptual object that allows revolutionary politics to be thought out.” Antoine de Baecque, Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths under the French Revolution, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Routledge, 2001), 8. Julia Kristeva has described the blond braids encircling the decollated head as an homage to “brave French soldiers, disguised for the occasion of their decapitation as Italian Christs.” Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 84. Crow has also remarked on the head’s possible allusion to the Terror. Crow, Emulation, 120. [Pierre-François Gueffier], Entretiens sur les ouvrages de peintures exposée au Musée Napoléon en 1810 (Paris: Gueffier Jeune, 1811), 46–47. Louis-Marie Prudhomme, Revolutions de Paris XVI (1792), 684, as printed in Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution française (Paris, 1797), 128. Jean-Joseph Sue, “Opinion du citoyen Sue, professeur de médecine et de botanique, sur le supplice de la guillotine,” Magasin encyclopédique, ou Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts IV (1795): 179. For example, in the British review of Desodoard’s History of the French Revolution. “Book Review.” Monthly Review 23 (1797), 562. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, vol. 7 (Paris: A. le Vasseur, 1877), 354. The discourse circulated widely in German-speaking countries too. It had reached Britain by 1799, if not earlier. It also participated in a medical and cultural fascination with the “vital qualities of the skin” at the turn of the nineteenth century. See Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces, 118–119. My account of the debate is greatly indebted to its analysis in the following texts: Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror; Ludmilla Jordanova, “Medical Mediations: Mind, Body and the Guillotine,” History Workshop 28 (1989), 39–52; Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 106–123. Smith, Punishment and Culture. “Sur le supplice de la Guillotine, par le professeur Soemmering, Oelsner aux rédacteurs du Magasin encyclopédique,” Magasin encyclopédique, ou Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts III (1795), 469.

Notes to Pages 163–167

217

40. Ibid., 471. 41. Michel-Pierre le Pelletier, “Au Rédacteur,” Gazette nationale, ou le Moniteur universel 54 (1795), 266. 42. “Assemblée nationale, séance du 1er décembre 1789,” Journal des États généraux (Paris: Étienne Le Hodey de Saultchevreuil: Paris, 1789), 235. 43. See, for example, David Cahan, ed., Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth-Century Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 44. Sue, “Opinion du citoyen Sue,” 179. 45. See Donald Wilcox, The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 27–34. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. For a good overview of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment philosophical conceptions of time, see Harry Jansen, “In Search of New Times: Temporality in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment,” History and Theory no. 55 (2016), 55–90. 48. This came to the fore a few years later with the publication of Marie- François Xavier Bichat’s Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800), in which Bichat influentially defined death as a temporal phenomenon that is coextensive with life. 49. Revue des tableaux du Museum, par M. et Mme. Denis et Benjamin, leur fils (Paris: Imrp. de Gauthier, 1808), 6–7. 50. “Première journée d’Cadet Buteux au Salon de 1808,” in Collection Deloynes 43.1141, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 3. 51. Georges Wedekind, “Sur Le Supplice De La Guillotine, Par Georges Wedekind, Médecin À L’hôpital Militaire De Strasbourg,” Gazette nationale, ou le Moniteur Universel no. 50 (November 11, 1795), 198. 52. Foucault, Order of Things, 135–136. 53. Richardson, British Romanticism. 54. “Unhappy Fate of Louis XVI,” Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, or Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge (February 1793), 98. 55. Chronique de Paris, quoted in Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 114. 56. Cabanis, as quoted in Outram, The Body and the French Revolution, 114. 57. Le Pelletier, 213. 58. Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror, 35–36. 59. This paradoxical doubling of visibility and invisibility offers a spectacular correlate to Lajer-Burcharth’s more psychosexually and politically oriented analysis in Necklines. She argues that the guillotine, as a figure of the Terror,

218

60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

Notes to Pages 167–177 becomes both “unrepresentable” for Jacques-Louis David and yet remains an “insistent factor upsetting the order of the visual sign.” Necklines, 19. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). David Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London: British Museum, 1989), 47–50. The iconography of these prints recalled both the mythological scene of Perseus presenting the decollated head of Medusa and the biblical decapitation of St. John the Baptist. This configuration coincided, moreover, with a historical moment in which discourses of both sublimity and sensibility framed aesthetic experience in terms of heightened physical and psychic responsiveness. See Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). William Whitley, Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700–1799, vol. 2 (London: The Medici Society, 1928), 178–179. De Loutherbourg went so far as to produce a detailed sketch depicting the British Lion violently mauling a Gallic Rooster around 1797. For details of the painting and its execution, see Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 287–289. For an analysis of how de Loutherbourg and his collaborators managed the painting’s affective power, see Phil Shaw, “Picturing Valenciennes: PhilippeJacques de Loutherbourg and the Emotional Regulation of British Military Art in the 1790s” in Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination, eds. Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 249–267. Morning Chronicle no. 7699 (June 12, 1794). Unknown source, press clipping dated June 16, 1794, Press Cuttings of the Royal Academy, vol. 1, fol. 129. As quoted in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 174. Morning Chronicle no. 7984 (May 16, 1795). Oracle and Public Advertiser no. 18961 (March 24, 1795). Morning Chronicle no. 7938 (March 24, 1795). Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 292. An overview of this tension can be found in Hughes, “Nicholas Pocock: Accuracy and Agency,” in Spreading Canvas, 77–85. I also recommend Monks, Marine Painting in Britain 1650–1850. Pasquin (1794) as quoted in Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 292. See Hughes, “Nicholas Pocock,” in Spreading Canvas, 77–85. Jane Bourchier, ed., Memoir of the Life of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 31.

Notes to Pages 177–180

219

78. This became known as “Lord Howe’s Manoeuvre.” 79. As recorded in John Barrow, The Life of Richard Earl Howe, Admiral of the Fleet Etc. (London: John Murray, 1838), 290. 80. Jan-Melissa Schramm argues that significant reforms to the evidentiary authority of the “eye witness” participated in an early nineteenth-century “genuine paradigmatic shift in the representation of fact itself in courts of law.” Schramm, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 20. 81. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 82. Jonathan Strauss contends that this period witnesses the emergence of a model of self-experience predicated on radical negativity, a kind of “deathbased subjectivity.” Strauss, Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel, and the Modern Self (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 83. Indeed, as Riskin has memorably argued, “sentimental empiricism was powerful in 1789, and it has remained powerful.” Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 288. 84. Among the numerous sources on this topic, I recommend Cahan, From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences. 85. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience. 86. Kenneth Caneva, “From Galvanism to Electrodynamics: The Transformation of German Physics and Its Social Context,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9 (1978), 66. 87. Caneva, “From Galvanism to Electrodynamics,” 66. 88. Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist,” 507. 89. Ibid. 90. Lissa Roberts, “Condillac, Lavoisier, and the Instrumentalization of Science,” The Eighteenth Century 33 no. 3 (1992), 252. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 191–251. 91. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 92. 92. Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–90), 2546. 93. For an overview of the German context, see Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life; and David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, eds., Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998). 94. For an introduction to this, see Cunningham and Jardine, Romanticism and the Sciences. 95. Charlotte Klonk frames this shift as a “retreat to the subjective,” in response to the declining credibility of a world view that attributed a unified, “objective ordering principle” to the natural world. Klonk, Science and the Perception of

220

Notes to Page 180

Nature. John O. Lyons associated this with a uniquely “Romantic” notion of truth and selfhood as “private, unique, and experiential” in his The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 175. 96. Trevor Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). A more expansive view has been taken in Nicholas Roe, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Bibliography

Archival Documents and Other Historical Material A.D. “Beaux-arts. Expositions des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure des artistes vivans.” Gazette de France (September 18, 1806), 1037–1039. “Sallon de 1806 [Sic]. (Suite).” Gazette de France (September 27, 1806), 1074–1076. A.D.C. “Salon de peinture.” La Quotidienne (November 16, 1814), 1–3. A.L. “Tableau de Girodet (Ossian).” Journal des arts (June 19, 1802). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 28.762. Aubry. L’Observateur au museum. Paris: Aubry, 1810. “Account of New Books and Pamphlets.” The Town and Country Magazine no. 21 (November 1789), 508. “Account of the Guillotine.” The Literary Magazine and British Review no. 10 (February 1793), 121. “Affairs of France.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (November 1798), 351–352. Archives curieuses. Paris: Chez l’éditeur, Rue Saintonge no. 19, 1830. “Art. I. Essays on Physiognomy; Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind.” English Review, or, An abstract of English and Foreign Literature (1790), 1–7. “Art. vii. Nouveaux memoires de l’academie royale des sciences et belles-lettres, année 1775.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (1778), 512–532. “Assemblée nationale, séance du 1er décembre 1789.” In Journal des États généraux. Paris: Étienne Le Hodey de Saultchevreuil, 1789, 235. Auberive. Anecdotes sur les décapités. Paris: Chez J.F. Sobry, 1796. B–y. “Art. 56. Observations on the Political State of the Continent.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (May 1799), 105–106. Bailly, Jean-Sylvain. Exposé des experiences qui ont étés faites pour l’examen du magnétisme animal. Paris: Moutard, 1784. Barrow, John. The Life of Richard Earl Howe, Admiral of the Fleet Etc. London: John Murray, 1838. “Beaux-arts et littérature.” Journal des arts, des sciences, et de la literature no. 80 (May 20, 1811), 217–227. 221

222

Bibliography

“Beaux-arts. Suite de l’examen du Salon.” La Décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique (1802), 550–553. Becquerel, Alexandre-César. Paroles prononcées sur la tombe de M. Girodet-Trioson, par M. Becquerel, ancien chef de bataillon du génie. Paris: Le Normant fils, 1825. “Bibliotheque nationale.” Magasin encyclopédique, ou journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts 1 no. 22 (1792). Biographie universelle, ancienne et modern ou histoire. 81 vols. Paris: L.-G. Michaud, 1811–1849. “Book Review.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (December 1783), 588–593. “Book Review.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (August 1797), 557–564. “Book Review.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1784), 539–549. “Book Review.” The Analytical Review: or, History of Literature 13 no. 4 (1792), 427–428. “Book Review.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1783), 615–624. Boutard, Jean-Baptiste. “Beaux-arts. Salon de 1808–no. IV. M. Girodet.” Journal de l’Empire (November 19, 1808), 1–4. “Beaux-arts. Salon de 1810–no. XX.” Journal de l’Empire (March 11, 1811), 1–4. “Beaux-arts. Salon de 1812–no. IX.” Journal de l’Empire (December 12, 1812), 1–4. “Salon de l’an 1806 (no. III). M. Girodet.” Journal de l’Empire (September 27, 1806), 1–3. “Salon de l’an 1806, no. XIII.” Journal de l’Empire (November 7, 1806), 1–4. Brisson, Mathurin-Jacques. Dictionnaire raisonné de physique expérimentale. Paris: Hôtel de Thou, 1781. Bruun-Neergaard, T. C. Sur la situation des beaux-arts en France, ou lettres d’un danois à son ami. Paris: Dupont, 1801. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Bouton. London: Routledge, 2008. C. “Beaux-arts. Salon de 1819–no. VIII–M. Girodet.” Journal des débats (November 6, 1819), 1–3. Cabanès, Augustin and Lucien Nass. La Névrose révolutionnaire. Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de libraires, 1906. Cabanis. “Note adressée aux auteurs du Magasin encyclopédique, sur l’opinion de messieurs Oelsner et Soemmering et du citoyen Sue, touchant le supplice de la guillotine, par le citoyen Cabanis.” Magasin encyclopédique, ou Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts 5 (1795), 155–174. Campardon, Émile. Les Spectacles de la foire. Paris: Berger-Levrault et cie, 1877. Candid. “To the printer of the Morning Chronicle.” Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser no. 4048 (1782). A Catalogue of All the Valuable Drawings, Sketches, Sea Views and Studies of that Celebrated Artist Philip James de Loutherbourg, esq. RA. London: Peter Coxe, 1812. “Character of Lavater.” The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (1786), 154–157.

Bibliography

223

Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste. Le Pausanias français; état des arts du dessin en France, à l’ouverture du xixè siècle: Salon de 1806 . . . publié par un observateur impartial. Paris: F. Buisson, 1806. “Correspondence: Foreign Literature.” Monthly Review, or Literary Journal (February 1775), 190–191. Coupin, Pierre-Alexandre. Oeuvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson, peintre d’histoire. 2 vols. Paris: Jules Renouard, 1829. Cross, John. An Attempt to Establish Physiognomy upon Scientific Principles. Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1817. Dandrée. “A Mr. B. auteur de quelques paradoxes sur la peinture, insérés dans une feuille publique.” Journal de Paris (November 18, 1810), 2279–2280. “Suite de la lettre sur la peinture, insérée dans la feuille d’hier.” Journal de Paris (November 19, 1810), 2286–2289. David, Jacques-Louis. Rapport à la Convention nationale sur le jury national des arts. 1793. [D.B.?]. “Secondes observations sur le Salon de 1806.” Journal du publiciste (1806). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 38.1050. de Keratry, Auguste-Hilarion. Annuaire de l’école française de peinture ou Lettres sur le Salon de 1819. Paris: Maradan, 1820. De Peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure, des artistes vivans, exposés au musée Napoléon, 15 Septembre 1806. Paris: Impr. des sciences et des arts, 1806. de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste. Le Secret de l’échafaud. Paris: Marpon et Flammiron, 1888. Delasalle. “Suite de l’examen des tableaux.” [1807?]. Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes 40.1058. Delécluze, Etienne Jean. Louis David: Son école et son temps. Paris: Didier, 1855. “Description of the Guillotine, or Beheading Machine.” The Wonderful Magazine and Marvelous Chronicle; or, New weekly entertainer (January 1, 1793), 69. “Distribution des prix par le jury des arts.” Journal de Paris [6 floréal, VIIè année] (April 25, 1799), 949–950. Du Bois, Louis-François. Recherches historiques et physiologiques sur la guillotine et détails sur Sanson, ouvrage rédigé sur pièces officielles. Paris: Chez France, quai Malaquais, 1843. Dumas, Alexandre. “The Thousand and One Phantoms; to Be Read between Eleven O’clock and Midnight.” London Journal no. 222–255 (1849). Duncan, Andrew, Sr. and Andrew Duncan, Jr. Annals of Medicine for the Year 1799. Vol. 4. Edinburgh: J. Pillans & Sons, 1799. “Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind.” The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (October 1789), 285–297. “Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind.” The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (February 1790), 194–200. “Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind.” The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (March 1790), 265–273.

224

Bibliography

“Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Written in the German Language by J. C. Lavater, and Translated into English by Thomas Holcroft. Illustrated by Three Hundred and Sixty Engravings.” The Critical Review, or, Annals of literature (1789), 285–296. Evariste. “Huit jours à Paris.” Journal des dames et des modes no. 62 (November 10, 1819), 508–510. “Examen critique et raisonné des tableaux” (1808). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 43.1143. “Examen du Salon.” Précis historique des productions des arts, peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure (November 22, 1801). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 26.698. “Exhibition at the Royal Academy, Somerset-House.” Beau Monde, or, Literary and Fashionable Magazine (1808), 344–351. Explication des ouvrages de peinture et dessins, sculpture, architecture et gravure des artistes vivans, exposés au muséum central des arts . . . an X de la République française. Paris: Impr. des sciences et arts, 1802. Explication des peintures, sculptures et autres ouvrages de messieurs de l’académie royale, dont l’exposition a été ordonnée suivant l’intention de sa majesté . . . dans le grand sallon du Louvre (1737–1793). Paris: Hérissant, 1793. F. C. “Lettre sur le salon de 1806.” Journal des archives littéraires, ou mélanges de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (1806). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 38.1047. Fabre, Victorin. “Beaux-arts. Salon de l’an 1806, premier article.” La revue philosophique, littéraire, et politique no. 28 (October 1, 1806), 31–7. “Salon de peinture (deuxième article).” Mercure de France (December 1, 1810). “Salon de peinture (premier article).” Mercure de France (November 10, 1810). Farington, Joseph. The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick and Angus MacIntyre, eds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. “Fine Arts.” Edinburgh Annual Register (January 1808), 326–341. “Fine Arts – Exhibition of the Royal Academy.” The Literary Panorama (June 1809). “Foreign Correspondence.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (December 1778), 457–458. “Foreign Literature.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1782), 481–498. “Foreign Literature.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (April 1776), 317–319. “Foreign Literature.” English Review, or, An abstract of English and Foreign Literature (December 1786), 462–465. “Foreign Literature.” English Review, or, An abstract of English and Foreign Literature (November 1786), 380–388. Franklin, Benjamin. The Complete Works in Philosophy, Politics, and Morals of the late Dr Benjamin Franklin. 2nd ed. London: J. Johnson, 1806. Fleischmann, Hector. La Guillotine en 1793: D’après des documents inédits des Archives nationales. Paris: Librairie des Publications modernes, 1908. Fuseli, Henry. “The Arts.” Analytical Review no. 1 (1788), 216–221.

Bibliography

225

“Book Review: Essays on Physiognomy.” The Analytical Review; or, History of Literature (December 1789), 454–462. Briefe. Basel: Verlag Benno Schwabe & Co., 1942. “Henry Fuseli to ‘Mrs. Moore.’” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, nd. “Henry Fuseli to Dr. James Moore (Sent from Paris).” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1802. “Henry Fuseli to Francis Isaac du Roveray.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1798. “Henry Fuseli to Francis Isaac du Roveray.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1803. “Henry Fuseli to John Knowles.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1825. “Henry Fuseli to Mrs. C[Arrick-] Moore.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1820. “Henry Fuseli to Northcote.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1821. “Henry Fuseli to Thomas Lawrence.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1824. “Henry Fuseli to William Sotheby.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1807. “Collection of 5 letters to James Carrick-Moore or members of his family 1802– 1822, Undated and an Italian sonnet by Fuseli signed ‘Harry’, and 5 letters of Fuseli’s biographer, John Knowles.” British Library: Western Manuscripts, 1802–1822. Remarks on the Writings and Conduct of J. J. Rousseau. London: J. Johnson, 1767. Girodet, Anne-Louis. “Aux rédacteurs du journal.” Journal de Paris (September 21, 1806), 1936–1937. “A monsieur M.B., l’un des rédacteurs du Journal de l’Empire.” Journal de l’Empire (October 1, 1806), 4. “Article autographe avec rature et corrections où Girodet répond aux critiques faites dans la renommée sur son tableau de Pygmalion 1819.” La Correspondance historique et archéologique. Edited by G. Porée, 1907, 283–287. La Critique des critiques du sallon de 1806: Étrennes aux connaisseurs. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1807. Glaneur, Le. “Glanage dans le salon.” Journal de Paris (1806). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 38.1043. Grille. “Sur les tableaux de Mm. Girodet et Lordon.” Journal des dames et des modes no. 60 (October 31, 1808), 475. Gueffier, Pierre-François. Entretiens sur les ouvrages de peinture, sculpture et gravure, exposés au musée Napoléon en 1810. Paris: Gueffier Jeune, 1811. Guizot, François. De l’état des beaux-arts en France, et du salon de 1810. Paris: Impr. de Ph. Hardy, 1810.

226

Bibliography

Guyot, Edmé-Gilles. Nouvelles récréations physiques et mathématiques. 3 vols. Paris: Gueffier, 1786. Guyot de Fère, François Fortuné. Notice historique et physiologique sur le supplice de la guillotine. Paris: Chez l’éditeur, Rue Saintonge no. 19, 1830. H, R. “Royal Academy Exhibition.” The Examiner (May 10, 1812). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan Co., 1910. Holcroft, Thomas. “To the Editor of the Analytical Review.” The Analytical Review; or, History of Literature (January 1790), 110–112. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 1748. I. G. “Salon de 1819: Lettre de l’artiste à Pasquin et à Marforio.” La Renommée no. 157 (November 19, 1819), 619–620. “Institut national.” Journal de l’Empire. 1810, 3–4. “Intérieur.” Le Moniteur universel no. 310 (November 6, 1819, 1418). “Intérieur.” Le Moniteur universel no. 313 (November 9, 1819, 1431). “Intérieur.” Le Moniteur universel no. 308 (November 4, 1819, 1409). Jallabert, Jean. Expériences sur l’électricité, avec quelques conjectures sur la cause de ses effets. Paris: Durand et David, 1749. Knowles, John. “John Knowles to James Carrick-Moore.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1825. “John Knowles to Mrs. Harriet Moore.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1828. The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1831. L., A. “Aux auteurs du Journal, sur les Prix décennaux–1re lettre.” Journal de Paris (September 1810), 1871–1872. “Aux auteurs du Journal, sur les Prix décennaux–2me lettre.” Journal de Paris (September 1810), 1884. “Aux auteurs du Journal, sur les Prix décennaux –3me lettre.” Journal de Paris (September 1810), 1890–1891. L . . . “Sur suelques critiques du Salon.” Journal du courrier français (1806). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 40.1062. L. V. “Tableau de Girodet (Ossian).’ Journal des arts (1802). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 28.761. L’Observateur du musée Napoléon, ou la critique des tableaux en vaudeville. Paris: Labarre, 1806. “La Critique des critiques de salon de 1806, etrennes aux connaisseurs.” Athenaeum ou galerie français no. 12 (December 1806). Landon, C.P. “Liste des artistes . . . et quelques-uns de leurs principaux ouvrages.” Almanach des beaux-arts. Peinture, sculpture, architecture et gravure pour l’an XII–1803. Paris, 1803. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essai sur la Physiognomonie. The Hague: [Chez Jacques van Karnebeek], 1781–1803. Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Henry Hunter. London: John Murray, 1789–1798.

Bibliography

227

Essays on Physiognomy, trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1789–1793. Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: C. Whittingham, 1804. “Lavater’s Physiognomy Abridged.” The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature (September 1792), 105–107. Lawrence, Sir Thomas. “Sir Thomas Lawrence to Mrs. Harriet Moore.” Zentralbibliothek Zürich: Weinglass Collection, 1827. Le Flâneur au salon ou Mr Bon-Homme; examen joyeux des tableaux mêlé de vaudevilles. Paris: Aubry, 1806. Lenotre, George. La Guillotine et les exécuteurs des arrêts criminels pendant la révolution: d’après des documents inédits tirés des archives de l’etat. Paris: Perrin, 1893. Les Tableaux en vaudeville (October 1808). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 43.1127. Lettre à monsieur le Comte de Mirabeau, au sujet d’une brochure contre Mr. Lavater. Fankfurt: chez Jean Philippe Streng, 1786. Lettres impartiales sur les expositions de l’an 1806 par un amateur. Paris: Aubry et Petit, 1806. “Livres qui se trouvent chez Nyon l’aîné, Libraire, Rue du Sardinet.” Le Journal des sçavans (March 1784). Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Beecroft, 1775. M–e. “Foreign Literature.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1788), 545–556. M. “Foreign Literature.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (February 1784), 141–145. Marat, Jean-Paul. Mémoire sur l’électricité médicale, couronné le 6 août 1783, par l’académie royale des sciences, belles-lettres & arts de Rouen. Paris: Impr. de J. Lorry, 1784. Recherches physiques sur l’électricité. Paris: Clousier, 1782. “The Martyrdom of Louis XVI. King of France.” London: S.W. Fores Piccadilly, 1793. Mauduyt de la Varenne, Pierre-Jean-Claude. Avis sur l’électricité médicale. Paris: Impr. de P.-D. Pierres, 1781. Mercier, Louis-Sébastien. Panorama of Paris: Selections from Tableau de Paris, trans. Helen Simpson. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999. Mesmer guéri, ou lettre d’un provincial au R.P.N***, en réponse a sa lettre intitulée, Mesmer Blessé. London, 1784. Mesmer justifié: Nouvelle édition, corrigée et augmentée. Paris, 1784. Mo–y. “Art. II. Essays on Physiognomy.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (January 1801), 11–18. “Book Review.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1789), 526–528. “Book Review.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (April 1793), 583–584.

228

Bibliography

Morel, A. M. Th. Traité pratique des feux d’artifice, pour le spectacle et pour la guerre. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1800. “Musée royal. Pygmalion et Galatée, par M. Girodet.” La Quotidienne (November 16, 1819), 1–4. N. “La Critique des critiques du Salon de 1806, etrenne aux connoisseurs. (IIe et dernier extrait).” Journal de l’Empire (February 17, 1807), 1–4. “La Critique des critiques du Salon se 1806, etrenne aux connoisseurs.” Journal de l’Empire (February 11, 1807), 3–4. Needham, Turbervill. “Extract of a Letter from Mr. Turbervill Needham to Martin Folkes, Esq; Pr. R. S. Concerning Some New Electrical Experiments Lately Made at Paris.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society no. 44 (1746), 247–263. Noël, François-Joseph-Michel. Dictionnaire de la fable, ou mythologie grecque, latine, égyptienne, celtique, persane, syriaque, indienne, chinoise, mahométane, rabbinique, slavonne, scandinave, africaine, américaine, iconologique, etc. Vol. 1, Paris: Le Normant, 1801. Nollet, Jean-Antoine. Leçons de physique expérimentale. 2nd ed. Paris: Chez les Frères Guerin, 1745–1765. “Notte sur cette exposition.” Journal des français (October 11, 1795). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 18.459. “Nouvelles.” Journal des débats (November 8, 1819), 3. “Nouvelles concernant les sciences, arts et belles-lettres (Salon de 1806).” Athenaeum ou Galerie français no. 9 (September 1806). “Nouvelles, republique française.” Journal des débats (October 17, 1802), 2–3. “On Physiognomy.” The Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany (December 1789), 420–425. P., F. Journal de Paris (September 3, 1810), 1739–1740. “Exposition des tableaux au muséums, troisième article.” Journal de Paris (September 23, 1810), 1878–1879. “Exposition des tableaux, 2em article.” Journal de Paris (November 12, 1810), 2233–2235. Pillet, F. “Beaux-arts–peinture. Pygmalion et Galathée, tableau de M. Girodet.” Journal de Paris no. 313 (November 9), 1819, 2–3. “Beaux-arts. Encore quelques mots sur la Galathée de M. Girodet.” Journal de Paris no. 320 (November 16), 1819, 2–4. “Musée royal. Exposition des tableaux.” Journal de Paris no. 310 (November 6, 1819), 2. “Paris, 2 thermidor.” Journal des débats et des décrets (July 22, 1801), 2. Pelletier, le. “Au rédacteur.” Gazette nationale, ou le moniteur universel no. 54 (1795), 213–214. Polyphilo. “State of the Arts.” Public Advertiser no. 18285 (January 18, 1793). Pott, Joseph. An Essay on Landscape-painting, with Remarks on the Different Schools. London: J. Johnson, 1782. Pratt, Mary. A List of a Few Cures Performed by Mr. and Mrs. De Loutherbourg. London: J.P. Cooke, 1789.

Bibliography

229

“Première journée d’cadet Buteux au Salon se 1808.” Paris: Aubry, December 3, 1808. Collection Deloynes, 43.1141. “Premiere lettre de Polyscope sur les ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, etc., exposés dans le grand salon du muséum.” 1795. Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 18.471. Priestley, Joseph. Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. Birmingham: Thomas Pearson, 1790. R, R. “Art. III. Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland.” The Analytical Review: or, History of Literature (February 6, 1790), 154–159. R, R., and Henry Fuseli. “Art. I. A Tour in Switzerland; or, a View of the Present State of the Governments and Manners of those Cantons: with Comparative Sketches of the Present State of Paris. “The Analytical Review : or, History of Literature 27 no. 6 (1798), [561]–571. Rabiqueau, Charles. Le Spectacle du feu élémentaire, ou cours d’électricité expérimentale. Paris: Jombert, 1753. “Récréations.” Journal de Paris (February 11, 1807). “Réflexions sur l’exposition des tableaux, sculptures, etc., de l’an 4 /1795, adressées à un ami.” Mercure de France. 1795. Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 18.470. Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and other Commissioners, Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, as Now Practised at Paris. London: J. Johnson, 1785. Revue des tableaux du museum, par M. et Mme. Denis et Benjamin, leur fils. Paris: Impr. de Gauthier, 1808. Revue du Salon de l’an X, ou examen critique de tous les tableau qui on été exposés, au muséum. Paris: Surosne, 1802. Riouffe, Honoré Jean. Mémoires sur les prisons. Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1823. Rob . . . ., Mr. “Exposition publique des ouvrages des artistes vivans dans le salon du Louvre, au mois de septembre, année 1795, vieux stile, ou vendemiaire de l’an quatrième de la République.” 1795: Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 18.469. Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard. Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques. Paris: Chez l’auteur Blvd. Montmartre no. 12, 1833. Roscoe, M R. “Verses to Henry Fuseli, esq. R.A.” The Poetical Register: and repository of fugitive poetry. January 1805, 259–261. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile: or, treatise on education, trans. William H. Payne. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905. Saint-Victor, J.B. “Vers faits en voyant le tableau d’une Scène de Déluge, par M. Girodet.” Journal de l’Empire (October 13, 1806), 4. “Salon de 1802.” Journal de débats. 1802: Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 28.778. “Salon de 1806.” Journal de Paris. 1806: Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes 38.1042. “Salon de 1806 (IIè article).” Mercure de France no. 26 (1806), 26–31.

230

Bibliography

“Salon de 1808.” Journal de l’architecture, des arts libéraux et mécaniques, des sciences et de l’industrie (1808): Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes 45.1157. “Salon de l’an dix, no. V, Girodet.” Journal des débats (October 1, 1802), 1–3. “Séance du dimanche, September 22, 1793. Le texte de la lettre d’André Dumont d’après le journal de Perlet.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. “Séance du jeudi 19 décembre 1793. Commune de Paris. Fête civique en l’honneur de Chalier, martyr de la liberté.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862. “Séance du lundi 7 janvier 1793, au matin. Discours et projet de décret de Henry Bancal, député du Puy-de-Dome à la Convention nationale, sur Louis Capet et les circonstances actuelles.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. “Séance du lundi 7 janvier 1793, au matin. Sur la peine à infliger à Louis XVI, par J.-B. Jourdan, député de la Nièvre à la Convention nationale.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. “Séance du mardi 23 juillet 1793. Rapport fait au conseil général de la Commune provisoire de Lyon, par l’un des commissaires de section.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. “Séance du mardi 25 avril 1793. Lettre de Collot d’Herbois et Goyre Laplanche, commissaires dans la Nièvre et le Loiret.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. “Séance du mercredi 18 septembre 1793.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. “Séance du mercredi 20 février 1793, au matin. Lettre de citoyen Girodet, pensionnaire de la République.” In Archives parlementaires de 1789 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs & politiques des chambres françaises. Paris: Librairie administrative de P. Dupont, 1862–. Sentiment impartial sur le Salon de 1810. 2 vols. Paris: Chaignieau aîné, 1810. Shanhagan, Roger. The Exhibition, Or a Second Anticipation: Being Remarks on the Principal Works to be Exhibited Next Month, at the Royal Academy. London: Richardson and Urqhart, [1779]. Soemmering, Samuel Thomas von. “Lettre de M. Soemmering à M. Oelsner sur le supplice de la guillotine.” Gazette nationale, ou le moniteur universel no. 48 (November 9, 1795), 189–190.

Bibliography

231

Sue, Jean Joseph. “Opinion du citoyen Sue, professeur de médecine et de botanique, sur le supplice de la guillotine.” Magasin encyclopédique, ou journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts 4 (1795), 170–189. Recherches physiologiques et expériences sur la vitalité, par J.-J. Sue, lues à l’Institut national de France, le 11 messidor, an V de la République. Suivies d’une nouvelle édition de son ppinion sur le supplice de la guillotine ou sur la douleur qui survit à la décolation. Paris: Fuchs, 1797. “Suisse–variétés.” Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts 8 no. 27 (July 4, 1787). “Suite du salon de 1806. Tableau de M. Girodet, représentant une scène d’un déluge.” Athenaeum ou Galerie français no. 12 (December 1806). “Salon de 1806.” Le Publiciste (October 10, 1806), 1–3. “Salon de l’an 10. No. IV.” Le Publiciste (October 8, 1802), 1–3. “Sur le Salon.” Journal du publiciste (1806). Bibliothèque nationale de France Collection Deloynes, 38.1051. “Sur le Salon de peinture.” Le Publiciste (October 27, 1806), 1–3. “Sur le supplice de la guillotine, par le professeur Soemmering, Oelsner aux rédacteurs du Magasin encyclopédique.” Magasin encyclopédique, ou journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts 3 (1795), 463–477. T. “Beaux-arts. Salon. Sixième Article.” Le Moniteur universel no. 319 (November 15, 1819), 1455–1456. “Tableau destiné au Premier consul.” Journal des débats (June 3, 1802), 2–3. Tatillon, Fanny. “Au rédacteur.” Journal des dames et des modes no. 61 (November 5, 1808), 481–483. Tay. “Art. XIII. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism.” Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal (June 1799), 179–181. Thouret, Michel-Augustin. Recherches et Doutes sur le magnetism. Paris: Prault, 1784. “Three Heads and a Fragment, from Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy.” The Town and Country Magazine, or, Universal repository of knowledge, instruction, and entertainment (November 1789). Tisset, François-Barnabé. Compte rendu aux sans-culottes de la République française, par très-haute, très-puissante et très-expéditive Dame Guillotine. Paris: Petit, Denné, la cit. Toubon, 1793. “To Correspondents.” The Analytical Review: or, History of Literature no. 6 (1790), 471–472. “Unhappy Fate of Louis XVI.” Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, or Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge (February 1793), 97–99. van Swinden, Jan Hendrik. Recueil de mémoires sur l’analogie de l’électricité et du magnétisme. 3 vols. La Haye: Chez les Libraires associés, 1784. van Vinkbooms, Cornelius. “Exhibition of the Royal Academy.” London Magazine (July 1821), 66–76. “Variétés.” Journal des débats (November 5, 1819), 2. “Variétés.” Journal des débats et des décrets (July 4, 1803).

232

Bibliography

“Variétes: Physiologies, pu l’art de connoître les hommes sur leur physionomie.” Journal des débats et des décrets (March 1, 1802). Vicq-d’Azyr, Flix. Oeuvres de Vicq-d’Azyr. Paris: Duprat-Duverger, 1805. W. “On the Probable Sensations of the Head, after Being Severed from the Body.” The Medical and Physical Journal 1 no. 1 (March 1799), 51–53. Wedekind, Georges. “Sur le supplice de la guillotine, par Georges Wedekind, médecin à l’hôpital militaire de Strasbourg.” Gazette nationale, ou le Moniteur universel no. 50 (November 11, 1795), 198. Winter, George. Animal Magnetism: History of Its Origin, Progress, and Present State. Bristol: George Route, 1801. Y, Y. “Book Review.” The Analytical Review; or, History of Literature, 6 (April 1790), 426–431.

Secondary Sources Adkins, Matthew. The Idea of the Sciences in the French Enlightenment. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Allentuck, Marcia. “Fuseli and Lavater: Physiognomical Theory and the Enlightenment.” Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century no. 55 (1967), 88–112. “Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare: Eroticism or Pornography?” In Thomas Hess and Linda Nochlin, eds., The Woman As Sex Object. London: Allen Lane, 1972, 33–41. Arasse, Daniel. The Guillotine and the Terror, trans. Christopher Miller. New York: Allen Lane, 1989. Asendorf, Christoph. Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Nina. “Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold.” Art Bulletin 74 no. 4 (1992), 599–618. Avery-Quash, Susanna and Christian Huemer, eds. London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–1820. Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 2019. de Baecque, Antoine. Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths under the French Revolution, trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bailey, Colin B. Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Bajou, Valerie and Sidonie Lemeux-Fraitot, eds. Inventaire après décès de Gros et de Girodet: Documents inédits. Paris, V. Bajou, 2002. Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Bibliography

233

Baugh, Christopher. “Philippe de Loutherbourg: Technology-Driven Entertainment and Spectacle in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 no. 2 (2007), 251–268. Bell, David. The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know It. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Bellenger, Sylvain, ed. Girodet 1767–1824. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Benedict, Barbara M. “Reading Faces: Physiognomy and Epistemology in Late Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Novels.” Studies in Philology. 95 no. 3 (1995), 3110328. Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette and Christine Blondel, eds. Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment. New York: Routledge, 2008. Berger, Susanna. The Art of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Bermingham, Ann. “Technologies of Illusion: De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon in Eighteenth-Century London.” Art History 39 no. 2 (2016), 376–399. Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Bertucci, Paola. “Shocking Subjects: Human Experiments and the Material Culture of Medical Electricity in Eighteenth-Century England.” In Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, eds. The Uses of Humans in Experiments. Leiden: Brill, 2016, 111–138. Bindman, David. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution. London: British Museum, 1989. Blanning, Tim. The French Revolutionary Wars 1787–1802. London: Edward Arnold, 1996. The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars. Harlow: Longman, 1986. Bode, Margaret A. “Psychology As Mechanism – But Not As Machine.” In Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, 123–130. Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Boime, Albert. Art in the Age of Revolution 1750–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Bourchier, Jane. Memoir of the Life of Admiral Sir Edward Codrington, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Bredekamp, Horst, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds. The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Brenneman, David. “Self Promotion and the Sublime: Fuseli’s Dido on the Funeral Pyre.” Huntington Library Quarterly 62 no. 1/2 (1999), 69–87.

234

Bibliography

Brooke, John. “Science and the Secularization of Knowledge: Perspectives on Some Eighteenth-Century Transformations.” Nuncius 4 (1989), 43–65. Brooks, Peter. “Melodrama, Body, Revolution.” In Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1994, 11–24. Brylowe, Thora. Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Brown, Stephanie Nevison. “Girodet: A Contradictory Career.” Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 1980. Bryson, Norman. Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 Budge, Gavin, ed. Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780–1830. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Burns, Sarah. “Girodet-Trioson’s Ossian: The Role of Theatrical Illusionism in a Pictorial Evocation of Otherworldly Beings.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 95 (1980), 13–24. Cahan, David. From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Cahan, David, ed. Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of NineteenthCentury Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Calè, Luisa. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery: “Turning Readers into Spectators”. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Caneva, Kenneth. “From Galvanism to Electrodynamics: The Transformation of German Physics and Its Social Context.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9 (1978), 63–159. Carroll, Victoria. Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing, and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Castle, Terry. Boss Ladies, Watch Out! New York: Routledge, 2002. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. Chander, Manu Samriti. Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Chandler, James and Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Chenique, Bruno. “Biochronology.” In Sylvain Bellenger, ed. Girodet 1767–1824. Paris: Gallimard, 2005, n.p. Chua, Kevin. “Girodet and the Eternal Sleep.” In H. Deutsch and M Terrall, eds., Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012, 57–92. Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Cleaver, Dale. “Girodet’s Déluge, a Case Study in Art Criticism,” Art Journal 38 no. 2 (Winter 1978–1979), 96–101.

Bibliography

235

Coburn, Kathleen, ed. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–1990. Cohen, Bernard. Franklin and Newton: An Inquiry into Speculative Newtonian Experimental Science and Franklin’s Work in Electricity As an Example Thereof. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1956. Coppola, Al. The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in EighteenthCentury Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Crary, Jonathan. “Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Grey Room no. 9 (2002), 5–25. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Craske, Matthew. Art in Europe 1700–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Crow, Thomas. “Composition and Decomposition in Girodet’s Revolt of Cairo.” In William Tronzo, ed. The Fragment: An Incomplete History. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009, 175–192. Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Paris. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Crowley, Patrick. “Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative.” Grey Room 64 (Summer 2016), 64–103. Cunningham, Andrew and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Dackerman, Susan. Prints and the Production of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Dagorne, Rirchar, ed. Au-delà du maître: Girodet et l’atelier de David. Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2005. Damisch, Hubert. A Theory of /Cloud/. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968 Daston, Lorraine. “Epistemic Images.” In Alina Payne, ed. Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015, 13–35. “The Empire of Observation, 1600–1800.” In Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 81–113. Daston, Lorraine and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Davis, Whitney. “The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet’s Sleep of Endymion.” In Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey,

236

Bibliography

eds., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, 168–201. Delaporte, François. Anatomy of the Passions, trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Delbourgo, James. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. DeLue, Rachel, ed. Picturing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Desbuissons, Frédérique. “A Ruin: Jacques-Louis David’s Sabine Women.” Art History 20 no. 3 (1997), 432–448. Desjardins, Lucie. Le corps parlant: Savoirs et representation des passions au XVIIe siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Didi-Huberman, Georges. La resemblance par contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008 Dyck, Erika and Larry Stewart, eds. The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century. Boston: Brill, 2016. Easterling, Pat. “‘Theatrical Furies’: Thoughts on Eumenides.” In Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson, eds. Performance, Iconography, Reception. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 219–236. Elkins, James, ed. What do Artists Know? University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012. Elsenaar, Arthur and Remko Scha. “Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art: A Historical Perspective.” Leonardo Music Journal 12 (2002), 17–28. Erle, Sybil. Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy. London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2010. “Leaving their Mark: Lavater, Fuseli and Blake’s Imprint on Aphorisms on Man.” Comparative Critical Studies. 3 no. 3 (2006): 347–369. Fara, Patricia. “An attractive Therapy: Animal Magnetism in Eighteenth-Century England.” History of Science 33 (1995), 127–177. Farmer, John David. “Henry Fuseli, Milton and English Romanticism.” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago 68 no. 4 (1974), 14–19. Fend, Mechthild. “Bodily and Pictorial Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine 1790–1860.” Art History 28 no. 3 (June 2005), 311–339. Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Figlio, Karl. “Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 12 (1975), 177–212. Finn, Margot C. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fleischmann, Hector. La Guillotine en 1793: D’après des documents inédits des Archives nationales. Paris: Librairie des Publications modernes, 1908. Fleming, John. The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Bibliography

237

Order of Things. New York: Random House, 1970. Frayling, Christopher. “Fuseli’s The Nightmare: Somewhere between the Sublime and the Ridiculous.” In Gothic Nightmares, 9–22 Frayling, Christopher, Martin Myrone, and Marina Warner, eds. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. London: Tate, 2006. Friedland, Paul. Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Friedländer, Walter. David to Delacroix. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952. Fyfe, Ailene and Bernard Lightman, eds. Science in the Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gabay, Alfred. The Covert Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Counterculture and Its Aftermath. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2004. Galperin, William. The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Gascoigne, John. Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Age of the Enlightenment. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gaudio, Michael. “Magical Pictures, or, Observations on Lightning and Thunder, Occasion’d by a Portrait of Dr. Franklin.” In Rachel DeLue, ed., Picturing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Terra Foundation for American Art, 2016, 84–111. Gauld, Alan. A History of Hypnosis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Germer, Stefan. “Gericault and Uncanny Trends at the Opening of the Nineteenth Century.” Art History 22 no. 2 (1999), 159–183. “In Search of a Beholder: On the Relation Between Art, Audiences, and Social Spheres in Post-Thermidor France.” The Art Bulletin 74 no. 1 (1992), 19–36. Gerould, Daniel. Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore. New York: Blast Books, 1992. Gigante, Denise. “The Monster in the Rainbow: Keats and the Science of Life.” PMLA 117 no. 3 (2002), 433–448. Gillispie, Charles. Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Gilmore, Paul. Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Gilroy-Ware, Cora. The Classical Body in Romantic Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Goethe’s Mother: Correspondence with Goethe, Lavater, Wieland, and Others, trans. Alfred S. Gibbs. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1880. Goethes Werke: Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Vol. 4. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887–1912. Goldsmith, Margaret. Franz Anton Mesmer: A History of Mesmerism. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934. Goldstein, Jan. The Post-Revolutionary Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

238

Bibliography

Golinski, Jan. Science As Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goring, Paul. The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Gotti, Maurizio. Robert Boyle and the Language of Science. Milan: Geruini Scientifica, 1996. Gough, Hugh. The Terror in the French Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1981. Graham, John. Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas. Berne: Peter Lang, 1979. Gray, Richard. About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Greene, Mott. Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Grigsby, Darcy. Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Guichard, Charlotte. Les amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Champ Vallon, 2008. Gunning, Tom. “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film.” In Mark S. Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Hallett, Mark. Reynolds: Portraiture in Action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Hallett, Mark, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Jessica Feather, eds. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018. Hamlyn, Robin and Michael Phillips, eds. William Blake. London: Tate Gallery, 2000. Hankins, Thomas. Science and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Hankins, Thomas and Robert Silverman. Instruments and the Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Harding, Sandra ed. The “Racial” Economy of Science. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Haywood, Ian, Susan Matthews, and Mary L. Shannon, eds. Romanticism and Illustration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Heilbron, John L. Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Hemingway, Andrew and Alan Wallach, eds. Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

Bibliography

239

Henderson, Andrea. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Heringman, Noah. Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003. Hofmann, Werner. Johann Heinrich Füssli. Hamburger Kunsthalle: Prestel, 1974. Home, Roderick Weir. Electricity and Experimental Physics in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1992. Honour, Hugh. Romanticism. New York: Westview, 1978. Hughes, Eleanor, ed. Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Hunter, Matthew C. “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s.” The Art Bulletin 97 no. 1 (2015), 58–76. Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography, and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Isherwood, Robert. “Entertainment in the Parisian Fairs in the Eighteenth Century.” The Journal of Modern History 53 no. 1 (1981), 24–48. Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Jacob, Margaret. The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1988. Janes, Regina. “Beheadings,” Representations 35 (1991), 21–51. Jansen, Harry. “In Search of New Times: Temporality in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment.” History and Theory no. 55 (2016), 55–90. Johnson, Dorothy. David to Delacroix: The Rise of Romantic Mythology. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Johnson, Mary Lynn. “Blake’s Engravings for Lavater’s Physiognomy: Overdue Credit to Chodowiecki, Shellenberg, and Lips.” Blake, An Illustrated Quarterly 28 no. 2 (2004), 52–74. Jordanova, Ludmilla. “Medical Mediations: Mind, Body and the Guillotine.” History Workshop 28 (1989), 39–52. Juengel, Scott. “Godwin, Lavater, and the Pleasures of the Surface.” Studies in Romanticism 35 no. 1 (1996), 73–97. Kelly, Veronika and Dorothea von Mücke, eds. Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Klancher, Jon. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Klonk, Charlotte. Science and the Perception of Nature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Kristeva, Julia. The Severed Head: Capital Visions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Kuijpers, Erika and Cornelis van der Haven, eds. Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

240

Bibliography

Labbe, J. Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Lafont, Anne. L’Art et la race: L’Africain (tout) contre l’oeil des Lumières. Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2019. L’Artiste savant à la conquête du monde modern. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2010. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. “David’s Sabine Women: Body, Gender and Republican Culture under the Directory.” Art History 14 no. 3 (1991), 397–430. Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Lareo, Inés and Ana Montoya Reyes. “Scientific Writing: Following Robert Boyle’s Principles in Experimental Essays – 1704 and 1998.” Revista Alicantina des Estudios Ingleses 20 (2007), 119–137. Law, Jules David. The Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Ledbury, Mark. James Northcote, History Painting, and the Fables. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Lefeuvre, Olivier. Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg. Paris: Arthena, 2012. Lemeux-Fraitot, Sidonie. “Ut poeta pictor: les champs culturels et littéraires d’AnneLouis Girodet-Trioson.” PhD diss., Université de Paris I – PanthéonSorbonne, 2003. Lenotre, G. La Guillotine et les exécuteurs des arrêts criminels pendant la Révolution. Paris: Perrin, 1893. Lentzsch, Franziska, Christoph Becker, Christian Klemm et al. Fuseli: The Wild Swiss. Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2005. Lesch, John. Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790–1855. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Levere, Trevor. Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Levitine, George. Girodet-Trioson: An Iconographical Study. New York: Garland Publishing, 1978. Lilte, Antoine. Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité a Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Fayard, 2005. Lloyd, Henry Martyn, ed. The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013. Lochhead, Ian. The Spectator and Landscape in the Art Criticism of Diderot and His Contemporaries. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Lynn, Michael R. Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Lyons, John O. The Invention of the Self: The Hinge of Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Malcomson, Robert. Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Bibliography

241

Marr, Alex. Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. “Knowing Images.” Renaissance Quarterly 69 (2016), 100–113. Mattick, Paul, Jr., ed. Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. McCalman, Iain. “Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Romantic Retreat: Magic, Mesmerism, and Prophecy.” In M. Meranze and S. Makdisi, eds., Imagining the British Atlantic after the American Revolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, 173–190. The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro. London: Century, 2011. “Spectres of Quackery: The Fragile Career of Philippe de Loutherbourg.” Cultural and Social History 3 no. 3 (2006), 341–354. McClellan, Andrew. Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris.” The Art Bulletin 78 no. 3 (1996), 439–453. Miller, Mary Ashburn. A Natural History of Revolution: Violence and Nature in the French Revolutionary Imagination, 1789–1794. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era. New York: Routledge, 2007. Mitchell, Robin. Vénus noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in NineteenthCentury France. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Monks, Sarah. Marine Painting in Britain 1650–1850: Framing Space, Power, and Modernity. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2018. Montgomery, Robert. Terms of Response: Language and Audience in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century Theory. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992. Moravia, Serge. “From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man’s Image.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 no. 1 (1978), 45–60. Morus, Iwan Rhys. “Radicals, Romantics and Electrical Showmen: Placing Galvanism at the end of the English Enlightenment.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 63 no. 3 (2009), 263–275. Mullan, John. “Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians.” Eighteenth Century 25 no. 2 (1984), 141–174. Myrone, Martin. Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. “Fuseli to Frankenstein: The Visual Arts in the Context of the Gothic.” In Martin Myrone, ed. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. London: Tate, 2006, 30–40. The Gothic World. New York: Routledge, 2014. Henry Fuseli. London: Tate, 2001.

242

Bibliography

“Henry Fuseli and Gothic Spectacle,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 no. 2 (2007), 289–310. “Sublime As Spectacle: The Transformation of Ideal Art at Somerset House.” In David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, 77–92. Nochlin, Linda. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment As a Metaphor for Modernity. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Olson, Richard G. Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. O’Neal, John C. The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. O‘Rourke, Stephanie. “Girodet’s Galvanized Bodies,” Art History 41 no. 5 (2018), 868–893. “The Sediments of History in Napoleonic France.” Word and Image 37 no. 1 (2021), 6–20. “Histories of the Self: Anne-Louis Girodet and the Trioson Portrait Series.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52 no. 2 (2019), 201–223. Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. London: Hurst Publishers, 2020. Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Otto, Peter. Multiplying Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Outram, Dorinda. The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Packham, Catherine. Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Padiyar, Satish. Chains: David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Paulson, Ronald. Representations of Revolution (1789–1820). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Payne, Alina. Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015. Pearl, Sharrona. About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pera, Marcello. The Ambiguous Frog: The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Percival, Melissa. The Appearance of Character: Physiognomy and Facial Expression in Eighteenth-Century France. Leeds: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1999.

Bibliography

243

Pointon, Marcia. “Casts, Imprints and the Deathliness of Things: Artefacts at the Edge.” Art Bulletin 96 no. 2 (June 2014), 170–195. Milton and English Art: A Study in the Pictorial Artist’s Use of a Literary Source. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970. Pop, Andrei. Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Zone Books, 2019. “Sympathetic Spectators: Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare and Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes.” Art History 34 no. 5 (November 2011), 934–957. Porter, Roy, ed. The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Flesh in the Age of Reason. New York: Allen Lane, 2003. “Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England.” Études anglaises 38 no. 4 (1985), 385–396. “‘Under the Influence’: Mesmerism in England.” History Today (September 1985), 22–29. Postle, Martin, ed. Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity. London: Tate Britain, 2005. Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Powell, Nicholas. Fuseli: The Nightmare. London: Allen Lane, 1973. Pratschke, Margarete. “Arranging Images As Tableaux.” In Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds. The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 81–85. Pressly, Nancy. The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Raab, Jennifer. Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Reichardt, Rolf and Hubetus Kohle. Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Richards, Robert. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Rivers, Christopher. Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Roberts, Lissa. “Condillac, Lavoisier, and the Instrumentalization of Science.” The Eighteenth Century 33 no. 3 (1992), 252–271. “Chemistry on Stage: G.F. Rouelle and the Theatricality of Eighteenth-century Chemistry.” In Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel, eds.

244

Bibliography

Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, 129–140. “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The ‘New’ Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26 no. 4 (1995), 503–529. “Science Becomes Electric: Dutch Interaction with the Electrical Machine during the Eighteenth Century.” Isis 90 no. 4 (1999), 680–714. Roe, Nicholas, ed. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rosen, Charles and Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism. New York: Viking, 1984. Rosenblum, Robert. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. New York: Gardner Books, 1978. Rosenthal, Angela. “Bad Dreams: Race and the Nightmare of 1781.” In Peter Wagner and Frédéric Ogée, eds. Representation and Performance in the Eighteenth Century. Trier: Landau Paris Studies on the Eighteenth Century, 2006, 97–126. Rubin, James. “Gros and Girodet.” The Burlington Magazine. 121 no. 920 (1979), 708–721. “‘Pygmalion and Galatea’: Girodet and Rousseau.” The Burlington Magazine 127 no. 989 (1985), 517–520. Russell, Colin. Science and Social Change in Britain and Europe 1700–1900. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Schaffer, Simon. “Experimenters’ Techniques, Dyers’ Hands, and the Electric Planetarium.” Isis 88 no. 3 (1997), 456–483. “Late Enlightenment Crises of Facts: Mesmerism and Meteorites.” Configurations 26 no. 2 (2018), 119–148. “Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in the Eighteenth Century.” History of Science 21 (1983), 1–43. “Priestley and the Politics of Spirit.” In Robert Anderson and Christopher Lawrence, eds., Science, Medicine, and Dissent: Joseph Priestley. London: Science Museum, 1987, 39–53. “Self Evidence.” Critical Inquiry 18 no. 2 (1992), 327–362. Schechter, Ronald. “The Terror of their Enemies: Reflections on a Trope in Eighteenth-Century Historiography.” Historical Reflections 36 no. 1 (2010), 53–75. Schiff, Gert. Henry Fuseli 1741–1825. London: Tate Gallery, 1975. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 no. 4 (1991), 773–797. Seamon, David and Arthur Zajonc, eds. Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. Secord, Anne. “Coming to Attention: A Commonwealth of Observers during the Napoleonic Wars.” In Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds. Histories

Bibliography

245

of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011, 421–444. Secord, James. “Knowledge in Transit.” Isis 95 (2004), 654–72. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64. Sha, Richard C. Imagination and Science in Romanticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Shapin, Steven. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology.” Social Studies of Science 14 no. 4 (November 1984), 481–520. Shortland, Michael. “The Power of a Thousand Eyes: Johan Caspar Lavater’s Science of Physiognomical Perception.” Criticism 28 no. 4 (1986), 379–408. Siegert, Bernhard. “The Chorein of the Pirate: On the Origin of the Dutch Seascape.” Grey Room 57 (Fall 2014), 6–23. Smith, Pamela. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Smith, Philip. Punishment and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Solkin, David, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Painting for Money: Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Yale University Press, 1993. “‘This Great Mart of Genius’: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780-1836.” In David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, 1–8. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994. Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. “Endymion’s Moonbath: Art and Science in Girodet’s Early Masterpiece.” Leonardo 15 no. 3 (1982), 193–198. “Les ‘météores’ de Girodet.” Revue de l’Art 46 (1979), 46–51. “‘Peculiar Marks’: Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought.” Art Journal 46 no. 3 (1987), 185–192. Starobinski, Jean. 1789: Emblems of Reason. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1982. Stemmler, Joan K. “The Physiognomical Portraits of Johann Caspar Lavater.” The Art Bulletin 75 no. 1 (1993), 151–168. Stepan, Nancy. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. London: Macmillan, 1982.

246

Bibliography

Stewart, Larry. The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. “Pneumatic Chemistry, Self-Experimentation and the Burden of Revolution, 1780–1805.” In Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, eds., The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century. Boston: Brill, 2016, 139–169. Stoichita, Victor. “Johann Caspar Lavater’s ‘Essays on Physiognomy’ and the Hermeneutics of Shadows.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics no. 31 (1997), 128–138. Strauss, Jonathan. Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel, and the Modern Self. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Sutton, Geoffrey. “Electric Medicine and Mesmerism.” Isis 72 no. 3 (1981), 375–392. Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment. Oxford: Westview Press, 1995. Tatar, Maria. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Taws, Richard. “The Guillotine As Antimonument.” Sculpture Journal 19 no. 1 (2010), 33–48. The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013. Thomas, Sophie. Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle. London: Routledge, 2008. Todd, Ruthven Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art. London: The Grey Walls Press, 1946. Tomlinson, Janis A. Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment. London: Yale University Press, 1992. Tomory, Peter. The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972. Tresch, John. The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Tronzo, William, ed. The Fragment: An Incomplete History. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2009. Turner, Gerard. Scientific Instruments and Experimental Philosophy 1550–1850. Hampshire: Variorum, 1990. Vila, Anne C. Enlightenment and Pathology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Wagner, Peter and Frédéric Ogée. Representation and Performance in the Eighteenth Century. Trier: Landau Paris studies on the Eighteenth Century, 2006. Wahnich, Sophie. In Defense of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution. New York: Verso, 2012. Walmsley, D. M. Anton Mesmer. London: Robert Hale, 1967. Watt, James. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Bibliography

247

Weinglass, David. Henry Fuseli and the Engraver’s Art. Kansas City: University of Missouri-Kansas, 1982. Prints and Engraved Illustrations by and after Fuseli: A Catalogue Raisonné. Vermont: Ashgate, 1995. Wellbery, David. Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Whitley, William. Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700–1799. Vol. 2. London: The Medici Society, 1928. Wigelsworth, Jeffrey. Selling Science in the Age of Newton: Advertising and the Commoditization of Knowledge. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Wilcox, Donald. The Measure of Times Past: Pre-Newtonian Chronologies and the Rhetoric of Relative Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Wiles, David. Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wilson, John. The Plan and New Descriptive Catalogue of the European Museum. London: J. Smeeton, 1808. Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Wolfe, Charles and Ofer Gal, eds., The Body As Object and Instrument of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Springer, 2010. Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Wright, Julia M. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Wyatt, John. Wordsworth and the Geologists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Zielinksi, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Index

Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus (Fuseli), 87, 89 Achilles Grasping at the Shade of Patroclus (Fuseli), 82 anatomy and artistic training, 2 animal magnetism appearance versus reality, 32 causality, 24, 25 de Loutherbourg, 1–2, 3, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 41–45 disrepute, 28–29 evidentiary status of human experience, 29–30, 53–54 Franklin, 1–2, 28–29 Mesmer, 1–2, 26–30 mysticism/spiritualism, association with, 27, 33–35 popularity, 26–28 science, as a, 4 scientific authority of the human body, 32, 53–54 Societies of Harmony, 27, 33, 43 appearance versus reality, 180 animal magnetism, 32 de Loutherbourg, 32 The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 40–41 Fuseli, 98 Thetis Mourning the Death of Achilles, 91–92 human vulnerability, 98–100 Lavater’s natural world, 93–94 see also truth authority of experience, 179, 181 Avalanche in the Alps, in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen (de Loutherbourg), 54–56 Balsamo, Giuseppe (Cagliostro) Egyptian Rite, 34–35 Becquerel, Antoine César Girodet, relationship with, 112–113 beheading, 178 Execution of Louis XVI, 168

French Revolution, 155, 157 guillotine, 158–159 illusiory device, as an, 167 Kriemhild Shows Hagen the Head of Gunther, 169–172 popular entertainment, 159, 168, 172 Revolt of Cairo, 162 see also guillotine Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (West), 106 biological determinism Le Brun, 64–65 scientific racism, 102 Brisson, Mathurin-Jacques, 113–114 Cagliostro. see Balsamo, Giuseppe (Cagliostro) causality animal magnetism, 24, 25, 29 Le Brun’s physiognomy, 65 celebrity de Loutherbourg, 1 collective agency, 128–129, 167–168 collective temporalities, 164 collective witnessing, 13, 110, 133 comparative anatomy, 16, 74, 112 copies, imperfections of, 70–73 Corday, Charlotte, 151, 162 Corday’s blush, 152, 162, 165, 166 corporeal self-representation, 75, 100 decline, 101–103 criminal identity, 156–157 crisis in representation, 9, 16 crisis of authority over the experimental body, 16, 53 crisis of facts, 3 de Loutherbourg, Philippe animal magnetism, 1, 3, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 41–45 artistic engagement with scientific practices, 18 Avalanche in the Alps, in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 54–56

248

Index credibility, 31–32 Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 175 Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet, 173–175 Eidophusikon, 1, 31 Grand Attack on Valenciennes, 173 optical effects, 50–51 A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard, 22–23 scandal, 30 secrecy, 25, 30 set designer, 1, 30–31 Storm and Avalanche near the Scheidegg in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 56–57 success, 30 View of Snowdon, from Llan Berris Lake, 35–36 Death of Marat (David), 151 decapitation. see guillotine, beheading Defeat of the Spanish Armada (de Loutherbourg), 175 deformity, 82, 89 Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus, 87 Four Heads, 82 Lavater and Fuseli, 83–84 Satanic Call to Beelzebub in Hell, 84–87 Thetis Mourning the Death of Achilles, 90–92 A Deluge Scene (Girodet), 133–139 composition, 144–145 emotional response to, 135–136, 145–146 spectatorship, 149 Descartes, René, 65 Dictionnaire raisonné de physique expérimentale (Brisson), 113 direct observation, 13 electricity, 133 physiognomy, 93, 102 reportage and truth, 175, 176, 177 scientific authority and truth, 5, 13, 14, 41, 44, 52, 64, 65, 102, 123 disarticulation of the human body, 20 Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet (de Loutherbourg), 173–176 Eidophusikon (de Loutherbourg), 1, 31, 50, 53, 84 electric demonstrations, 106 popularity, 110–111 self-experimentation, 109–110, 119–122 showmanship, 130–132 electricity broken circuits, 140–146 circuits, 133–139 elusiveness, 109–110 metaphor, as, 139 revolution and, 140–141

249

“liberty,” “equality,” “fraternity,” “unity,” 143 transmission and conduction A Deluge Scene, 137–139 elemental formlessness de Loutherbourg’s landscapes, 54 Avalanche in the Alps, in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 55 Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 48 The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 38–39 emergent consumer culture, 5, 6, 63, 106 experimental science, 109 empiricism empirical certitude and individual bodily experience, 178–179 limitations of, 3, 14, 21 popular scientific activity, 13–14 mesmerism, 52–53 European Romanticism, 4–5 evidentiary status of body’s appearance, 64, 93–94 evidentiary status of human experience, 3–4, 5 scientific authority of the human body, 14, 16–17 animal magnetism, 53–54 Execution of Louis XVI (Monnet and Declos), 168 experimental chemistry, 11 pigments, 2 experimental physics Girodet, 113–115, 126, 139 popularity, 20, 109, 111, 122, 130, 139 fallibility of the portrait re-engraving of illustrations, 70, 76 multiple portraits, 76–83 The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen (de Loutherbourg) appearance versus reality, 36, 40 Fantasmagorie (Robertson), 125–127 Four Heads from Dante’s Hell (Fuseli), 79 physiognomic analysis, 80–83 Franklin, Benjamin animal magnestism, 1–2, 28–29 Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, 106–108 kite experiment, 106, 109 French Revolution, 178 Corday’s execution, 151, 162 disarticulation of the human body, 20 guillotine, 155–159 human body, representation of, 9, see also guillotine Fuseli, Henry, 3 Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus, 87, 89

250

Index

Fuseli, Henry (cont.) Achilles Searching for the Shades of Patroclus, 82–83 artistic engagement with scientific practices, 18 beheadings, 169–172 Four Heads from Dante’s Hell, 79, 80–83 Kriemhild Shows Hagen the Head of Gunther, 169–172 Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers, 153, 167 Lavater, relationship with, 63, 64, 68–69, 102 Mad Kate, 96–98 Martha Hess, 71–73, 76 The Nightmare, 62, 94–96 physiognomy, 20, 60–61 Satan, 70–71 Satanic Call to Beelzebub in Hell, 84 Saul and the Witch of Endor, 98–100 Thetis Mourning the Death of Achilles, 90–92 Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent, 60 Zwinglianism, 68 galvanism. see electricity Girodet, Anne-Louis, 3 apprenticeship, 105–106 artistic engagement with scientific practices, 18 A Deluge Scene, 133–139 electricity and luminosity, 20 exile to Rome and Naples, 117–118 language and metaphor, 114–115 patrilineal relationships, 111–113 Pygmalion and Galatea, 104, 108 The Revolt of Cairo, 159–162 Sleep of Endymion, 115–117, 118–119, 122–124 Grand Attack on Valenciennes (de Loutherbourg), 173, 174 guillotine, 162 disarticulation of the human body, 20, 159–160 The Revolt of Cairo, 160–162 scientific controversy cognition and sensation, 21, 152, 162–166, 178 see also beheading; French Revolution history painting, 129, 173 David, 116 French Revolution, 9, 159 Fuseli, 62–63 Girodet, 108, 127, 133, 137, 149 neoclassicism, 6 human agency, 181 collective agency, 128–129, 167–168 “the crowd”, 128–129 decapitation, 160 limitations of, 47, 54, 118, 119 public executions, 167

human body, representation of artistic training, 7–8 Black body, 17 classical body, 8 crisis in representation, 9 de Loutherbourg Avalanche in the Alps, in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 54 Storm and Avalanche near the Scheidegg in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 56–57 distortion, 8–9, 83–92 exaggerated treatment, 60, 78–83, 100 female body, 16 French Revolution, 9 Fuseli Four Heads from Dante’s Hell, 78–83 Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent, 60 heroic nude, 7 laboring body, 16–17 neoclassical male nude, 7, 17, 54, 145 nonwhite body, 16 physiognomy, 74–75 postrevolutionary Europe, 9 Romantic body, 9–10 white male body, predominance of, 7–8 human perception, 181 conventional or collective temporalities guillotine, 164 limitations, 21, 25, 63, 132, 133, 147, 164, 177, 178 see also witness reliability reliability of experience, 25, 135 The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 40–41 Pygmalion and Galatea, 149 human vulnerability, 3, 181 animal magnetism, 57–58 de Loutherbourg’s natural world, 54, 58–59 Fuseli appearance and reality, 100 Girodet, 135, 149 Sleep of Endymion, 119, 144 idealized male nude heroic nude, 7 neoclassical male nude, 7, 17, 54, 145 psychosexual aspects of the idealised male nude, 7, 9, 124 semiotics, 9 Kriemhild Shows Hagen the Head of Gunther (Fuseli), 169–172 Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (Fuseli), 153, 167 landscape painting de Loutherbourg, 1, 2, 8, 22–23, 45

Index appearance versus reality, 36 Avalanche in the Alps, in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 54 elements, 38–39 The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 36–39 melodrama, 22, 30–32 Storm and Avalanche near the Scheidegg in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 56–57 View of Snowdon, from Llan Berris Lake, 35–36 Lavater, Johann Caspar celebrity, 66–67 Fuseli, relationship with, 61, 63–64, 68–69, 102 physiognomy, theory of authority of observational powers, 65 emphasis on permanent facial features, 65–66 spiritualist influence, 66 Zwinglianism, 68 Le Brun, Charles, 65, 73 Leçons de physique expérimentale (Nollet), 109, 110, 130, 137 light and dark, 146 de Loutherbourg, 22, 38, 176 Fuseli, 60 see also luminosity London Theosophical Society, 33 Louis XVI animal magnetism inquiry, 1, 28 execution, 117, 166 luminosity David, 116 de Loutherbourg, 54, 58 Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 50 Eidophusikon, 1 set design, 31 View of Snowdon, from Llan Berris Lake, 36 Girodet, 20 Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes, 126, 127, 129, 132–133 Pygmalion and Galatea, 146–147 Sleep of Endymion, 119 Romanticism, 10, 36 visual representation of electricity, 108 Mad Kate (Fuseli), 96–98 magnetic therapies. see animal magnetism Marat, Jean-Paul, 120, 130, 151 Death of Marat, 151 Martha Hess (Fuseli), 71–73, 76 The Martyr of Equality (Cruikshank), 169 Masonic tendencies, 32, 34, 35 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 1–2, 26–30 mesmeric somnambulism, 33–34 mesmerism. see animal magnetism

251

natural philosophy, 11 public displays, 140 natural world de Loutherbourg, 41 appearance and reality, 53, 58, 59 elemental formlessness, 63 empiricism, 13, 14, 180, 181 The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 40–41 Lavater, 92 appearance and reality, 93–94 observation of, 93 neoclassicism, 4 decline, 6–7, 9 influence of, 7 neoclassical male nude, 7, 17, 54, 145 The Nightmare (Fuseli), 62, 94–96 Nollet, Jean-Antoine, 109, 120, 130, 137, 139 Oath of the Horatii (David), 127 objectivity, 15, 44, 77 observation and experimentation. see direct observation optical effects, 51, 129, 151, 162 Coalbrookdale at Night, 51 Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 49, 50 see also luminosity; theatrical illusionism optics and artistic training, 2 Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes (Girodet), 124–126 luminosity, 126, 127, 129, 132–133 pathognomy, 73–74 physiognomy distinguished, 73–74 perception. see human perception perceptual obscurities, 10 Avalanche in the Alps, in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 55 Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 49–50 moral and political implications, 49 Fuseli, 63 Storm and Avalanche near the Scheidegg in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen, 56 phantasmagoria. see Fantasmagorie (Robertson) A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard (de Loutherbourg), 22–23 phosphorescence. see luminosity phrenology, 102 physical indeterminacy The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen, 40 Physiognomischen Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (Lavater), 66 illustrations, importance of, 67–68, 69 physiognomy art, relationship with, 63

252

Index

physiognomy (cont.) bone structure, 74–75 bone structure versus facial expressions, 73–74 definition, 64–65 pathognomy distinguished, 73–74 science, as a, 4 scientific legitimacy, 64, 101–102 pigment experimentation, 2, 39, 82, 153, 154 popular status of the sciences, 11, 20, 26–28, 109, 110–111, 113–114, 122, 130 porous corporeality, 130 Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes, 124–126, 127–129, 133, 149 Sleep of Endymion, 122–124, 149 powers of suggestion animal magnetism, 25 psychosexual aspects of the idealised male nude, 7, 9 Sleep of Endymion, 124 psychosexual identity, 9, 17, 60, 106 Pygmalion and Galatea (Girodet), 104, 108 luminosity, 146–147 porouse corporeality, 146 racial difference and comparative anatomy, 16, 17, 74, 160 Reign of Terror (French Revolution), 108, 144, 155, 157, 168 reportage French Revolution Earl Howe’s Victory over the French Fleet, 173–176 The Grand Attack on Valenciennes, 173 misinformation, 175–178 representation and reproduction illustrations, 70–73 The Revolt of Cairo (Girodet), 159–162 rocks and cliffs, dramatic effect of, 36, 38, 39, 55, 56, 144 Royal Academy annual exhibitions, 23, 31 Fuseli, 62, 71, 89, 154 Hunter, 34 Reynolds, 2, 22 Royal Society of London empiricism, 13 Satan (Fuseli), 70–71 Satanic Call to the Beelzebub in Hell (Fuseli), 84 Saul and the Witch of Endor (Fuseli), 98–100 science and artistic training, 2–3 scientific demonstrations, 12, 16, 113, 140 scientific legitimacy aminal magnetism, 4, 27

electricity, 18 physiognomy, 64, 73, 74, 75, 92, 101–102 corporeal self-representation, 76 seascapes de Loutherbourg Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 47–52 self-evidence, 110, 115 cognition and sensation, 179–180 decline, 152–153 electricity, 122, 133 guillotine’s incompatibility with, 161, 165–166 Sleep of Endymion, 119, 124 selfhood, 164 French Revolution, 20 Naturphilosophie, 180 scientific selfhood, 15 semiotics idealized male nude, 9 physiognomy, 92 sensationist philosophy authority of experience, 179 showmanship, 131 de Loutherbourg, 35 Girodet, 127, 130 Mesmer, 32 sleep interrelationship between life and death, 117, 118–119 Sleep of Endymion (Girodet), 115–117, 118–119, 122–124 luminosity, 119 Societies of Harmony, 181 animal magnetism, 27, 33, 43 spectatorship, 5, 101, 152, 181 A Deluge Scene, 135–137, 145–146, 149 electric demonstrations, 106 exposure, 101 guillotine, 21, 150, 166–169 Pygmalion and Galatea, 147–149 science, 11–13, 16 see also witness reliability spiritualism/occultism animal magnetism, association with, 27, 33–35 de Loutherbourg, 34–35 electricity, association with, 147 Lavater, 66 physiognomy, 66 Storm and Avalanche near the Scheidegg in the Valley of Lauterbrunnen (de Loutherbourg), 56–57 sublime aesthetic of the “mock sublime,” 95 Burke, 89–90 electricity, 114

Index formal obscurity, 40, 51, 90 suppression of pictorial detail Achilles Sacrifices His Hair on the Funeral Pyre of Patroclus, 87 Thetis Mourning the Death of Achilles, 90–92 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 33 theatrical illusionism, 25, 36, 162 animal magnetism, 27, 32, 36, 43, 45, 51 Girodet, 129, see also optical effects theatricality de Loutherbourg’s landscapes, 22 Fuseli, 69 guillotine, 154–155, 157, 172 human body, representation of, 60, 83–92, 100 Four Heads from Dante’s Hell, 78–83 Thetis Mourning the Death of Achilles (Fuseli), 90–92 Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (Fuseli), 60 physiognomical analysis, 61–62 Trioson, Benoît-François

253

Girodet, relationship with, 111–113 truth, 100, 180 crisis of facts, 3 evidentiary status of human experience, 5 animal magnetism, 29–30 physiognomy, 92–94, see also appearance versus reality. truth-claims, 14, 15, 16, 19, 108, 181 guillotine, 172 van Musschenbroek, Pieter Leyden jar, 122, 143 View of Snowdon, from Llan Berris Lake (de Loutherbourg), 35–36 vulnerability. see human vulnerability witness reliability, 64, 163, 177, 178, 181, see also spectatorship

cambridge studies in romanticism General editor James Chandler, University of Chicago

1. Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters Mary A. Favret 2. British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire Nigel Leask 3. Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760–1830 Peter Murphy 4. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution Tom Furniss 5. In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women Julie A. Carlson 6. Keats, Narrative and Audience Andrew Bennett 7. Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre David Duff 8. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 Alan Richardson 9. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 Edward Copeland 10. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World Timothy Morton 11. William Cobbett: The Politics of Style Leonora Nattrass 12. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 E. J. Clery 13. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 Elizabeth A. Bohls 14. Napoleon and English Romanticism Simon Bainbridge 15. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom Celeste Langan 16. Wordsworth and the Geologists John Wyatt 17. Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography Robert J. Griffin

18. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel Markman Ellis 19. Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1709–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth Caroline Gonda 20. Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 Andrea K. Henderson 21. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition: in Early Nineteenth-Century England Kevin Gilmartin 22. Reinventing Allegory Theresa M. Kelley 23. British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 Gary Dyer 24. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 Robert M. Ryan 25. De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission Margaret Russett 26. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams and the Medical Imagination Jennifer Ford 27. Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity Saree Makdisi 28. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake Nicholas M. Williams 29. Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author Sonia Hofkosh 30. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition Anne Janowitz 31. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle Jeffrey N. Cox 32. Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism Gregory Dart 33. Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 James Watt 34. Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism David Aram Kaiser 35. Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity Andrew Bennett 36. The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere Paul Keen 37. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 Martin Priestman 38. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies Helen Thomas

39. Imagination under Pressure, 1789–1832: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility John Whale 40. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation, 1790– 1820 Michael Gamer 41. Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species Maureen N. Mclane 42. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic Timothy Morton 43. British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 Miranda J. Burgess 44. Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s Angela Keane 45. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism Mark Parker 46. Women, Nationalism and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 Betsy Bolton 47. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind Alan Richardson 48. The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution M. O. Grenby 49. Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon Clara Tuite 50. Byron and Romanticism Jerome Mcgann and James Soderholm 51. The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland Ina Ferris 52. Byron, Poetics and History Jane Stabler 53. Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 Mark Canuel 54. Fatal Women of Romanticism Adriana Craciun 55. Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose Tim Milnes 56. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination Barbara Taylor 57. Romanticism, Maternity and the Body Politic Julie Kipp 58. Romanticism and Animal Rights David Perkins

59. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History Kevis Goodman 60. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge Timothy Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson 61. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery Deirdre Coleman 62. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism Andrew M. Stauffer 63. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime Cian Duffy 64. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 Margaret Russett 65. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent Daniel E. White 66. The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry Christopher R. Miller 67. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song Simon Jarvis 68. Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public Andrew Franta 69. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 Kevin Gilmartin 70. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London Gillian Russell 71. The Lake Poets and Professional Identity Brian Goldberg 72. Wordsworth Writing Andrew Bennett 73. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry Noel Jackson 74. Advertising and Satirical Culture in the Romantic Period John Strachan 75. Romanticism and the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life Andrea K. Henderson 76. Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry Maureen N. Mclane 77. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 Angela Esterhammer 78. Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain, 1760–1830 Penny Fielding 79. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity David Simpson 80. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 Mike Goode

81. Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism Alexander Regier 82. Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity Gillen D’arcy Wood 83. The Truth about Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge Tim Milnes 84. Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange Sarah Haggarty 85. Real Money and Romanticism Matthew Rowlinson 86. Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 Juliet Shields 87. Romantic Tragedies: The Dark Employments of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley Reeve Parker 88. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness Susan Matthews 89. Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic Richard Adelman 90. Shelley’s Visual Imagination Nancy Moore Goslee 91. A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790–1829 Claire Connolly 92. Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 Paul Keen 93. Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture Ann Weirda Rowland 94. Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures Gregory Dart 95. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure Rowan Boyson 96. John Clare and Community John Goodridge 97. The Romantic Crowd Mary Fairclough 98. Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy Orianne Smith 99. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820 Angela Wright 100. Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences Jon Klancher 101. Shelley and the Apprehension of Life Ross Wilson

102. Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700–1900 Susan Manning 103. Romanticism and Caricature Ian Haywood 104. The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised Tim Fulford 105. Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 Peter J. Kitson 106. Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form Ewan James Jones 107. Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years Jeffrey N. Cox 108. Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770– 1833 Elizabeth A. Bohls 109. The Orient and the Young Romantics Andrew Warren 110. Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity Clara Tuite 111. Radical Orientalism: Rights, Reform, and Romanticism Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud 112. Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s Jon Mee 113. Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel Mark Offord 114. Romanticism, Self-Canonization, and the Business of Poetry Michael Gamer 115. Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814 Ingrid Horrocks 116. Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis E. J. Clery 117. Urbanization and English Romantic Poetry Stephen Tedeschi 118. The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism Jonathan Sachs 119. The Caribbean and the Medical Imagination, 1764–1834: Slavery, Disease and Colonial Modernity Emily Senior 120. Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism Dahlia Porter 121. Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air Thomas H. Ford 122. Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820 Thora Brylowe

123. European Literatures in Britain, 1815–1832: Romantic Translations Diego Sigalia 124. Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News Jonathan Mulrooney 125. The Romantic Tavern: Literature and Conviviality in the Age of Revolution Ian Newman 126. British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 James Watt 127. Print and Performance in the 1820s Angela Esterhammer 128. The Italian Idea Will Bowers 129. The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century Gillian Russell 130. Physical Disability in British Romantic Literature Essaka Joshua 131. William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic Jeffrey Cox 132. Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: The Emergent Ecologies of a Nation Susan Oliver 133. Art, Science and the Body in Early Romanticism Stephanie O’Rourke