The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures [1 ed.] 9781443864404, 9781443849524

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The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures

The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures

Edited by

Frank O’Gorman and Lia Guerra

The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures, Edited by Frank O’Gorman and Lia Guerra This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Frank O’Gorman and Lia Guerra and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4952-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4952-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Off the Beaten Track—The Marginal in Mainstream Cultural Connections between Great Britain and Italy: An Introduction .................. 1 Lia Guerra Literature Towards a History of Digression: A Marginal Form at the Centre of the Canon .............................................................................................. 12 Rosamaria Loretelli Letters from London: A “Bridge” between Italy and Europe .................... 36 Lidia De Michelis From Clarissa’s Sensibility in Samuel Richardson’s Novel to the Romantic Dream of Self-realization in Ugo Foscolo’s Ortis ..................................... 56 Patrizia Nerozzi Periphery and Centre in the Evolution of the Novelistic Genre in Venice: Carlo Gozzi’s 1764 Translation of John Cleland's Fanny Hill .................. 68 Cindy Stanphill and Clorinda Donato The Margins at the Centre: Giuseppe Baretti’s Uncharted Italy ................ 87 Matteo Ubezio Philosophy, Arts and Science The Marginal and the Mainstream as Aesthetic Categories in Eighteenth-Century Thought ............................................................... 108 Andrea Gatti From “Gothic Atrocities” to Objects of Aesthetic Appreciation: The Transition from Marginal to Mainstream of Early Italian Art in British Taste during the Long Eighteenth Century .............................. 117 Carly Collier

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Table of Contents

Tiberio Cavallo: A Natural Philosopher between Italy and Britain ......... 140 Silvia Granata Autonomy and Marginality in Foreign Artists Circles in Rome (c. 1760–1800) ........................................................................................ 155 Tomas Macsotay The Fluid Nature of Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Reputations at the Margins and at the Centre—The Case of Blagrove and Batoni ..... 172 Rosalie Smith McCrea Index ........................................................................................................ 188

OFF THE BEATEN TRACK: THE MARGINAL IN MAINSTREAM CULTURAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND ITALY* LIA GUERRA UNIVERSITÀ DI PAVIA

An Introduction I would like to advance a few reflections that will probably take me “off the beaten track,”1 as a well-known metaphor of travel writing would suggest, in an effort to highlight what is marginal in mainstream connections between the two countries under scrutiny—Great Britain and Italy. If we examine the terms “margin” and “centre,” the OED for Margin n. is not particularly illuminating, providing the obvious definitions most of which are still in use, a fixity which proves curiously at odds with the instability of the relevant frame of reference. In point of fact, according to current usage (Collins Cobuild 1995), the two terms “margin” and “centre” are usually employed to mean absolutely opposite referents— “margin” and “centre,” “marginal” and “mainstream,” are contrary and parallel terms, and are hard to connect. Actually, the interesting thing is *

Most of the topics discussed in the essays published in the following pages were at the core of a two-day rendezvous in York in September 2011. What is here finalized in essay form is the development of those discussions and it is hoped it can constitute a useful and stimulating investigation into a fascinating issue:“The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures.” Professor Frank O’Gorman and myself took it upon ourselves to stimulate responses from eighteenth-century scholars from different areas of the world who had something to say on the topic from the point of view of various disciplines. The results can easily be inferred from the Table of Contents: a shared emphasis on Literature and on the Visual Arts and a solitary but highly emblematic foray into Science, with Philosophy playing a connecting role in the form of Aesthetics.

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Off the Beaten Track

the instability of their connotations not only in the period we are analyzing but, as a matter of fact, in almost all historical periods. One thing that guided our discussions here was the necessity of avoiding the anachronism implicit in any talk of what is conventional and normal and what is different and marginal, since these categories are by no means “given” once and for all, but are continuously redefined. Andrea Gatti’s paper will discuss these theoretical problems with competent philosophical insight in the opening paper of the Section on “Philosophy, Arts and Science.” Therefore, in order to establish and to determine what and how—in eighteenth century culture—was marginal, and what eventually struggled to become central and mainstream, it is necessary to take up a definite stance with regard to the cultural process that took place during the century. The movement from periphery to centre will be followed and witnessed in the capacity of different forms of culture to speak for themselves through a process of becoming “public” in one way or another (for example print, painting or scientific experiment). Categories such as marginal and mainstream, and the actual relationships between them, can also become a privileged stance for analyzing and understanding the mechanisms through which the eighteenth century identity process was being built. I would also point out from the start that culture marginality in itself could be taken as—perhaps paradoxically—a quality allowing greater freedom in comparison with the mainstream. It is true that centrality affords authority, strength, belief in one culture, one perspective, while marginality is the locus of exposition to solitude and differences (in cultures and perspectives). But being at the margins can definitely shape and influence subjects, entailing higher awareness and wider perspectives. Moving at the borders is certainly not easy, but also only slightly conditioned by rules and customs. Next, at the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to briefly point out some peculiarities of the two countries Great Britain and Italy and their cultures in terms of marginality and centrality. Great Britain in the eighteenth century, though geographically and structurally marginal (as an island in the northern sea), had gradually but steadily gained a central position among the European powers, especially after 1763, and was rapidly expanding its power to the East, the West and the South of the globe, thus taking on a centrality whose boundaries now extended to include the Orient. On the other side Italy, the former core of European civilization, was an open air museum to travellers but economically and politically at the margins.2 Within Great Britain, literally the most marginal of places were the colonies, but the impact of India on British culture at large is acknowledged as a complex aspect of the cultural

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negotiations taking place in the last part of the eighteenth century. It is in fact in this century that the two concepts of centre versus margin/periphery start to make sense, where the centre is obviously Great Britain and the periphery the new colonies. Italy, on the other hand, was itself a borderline country, separating Europe from the exotic culture of the East and the South. From the standpoint of a scholar of literature, similarly, there is no doubting the instability of the canon of national literatures—a kind of instability capable of moving mainstream works from the centre to the periphery, and marginal ones into focus. Of course, no official canon of English Literature as such3 existed before Samuel Johnson’s first ordering of the Poets (1779–81), in spite of his protestations;4 however, a canon of sorts had been evolving both before and during the century. Still, the fundamental stance of the eighteenth century for modern conceptions of the canon is probably also undeniable—witness Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) that, together with his edition of the first vast compilation of The British Poets (44 vols., 1773), could stand as a Scottish precursor to Johnson's English Poets. A cursory browse through the English Literature handbooks available to Italian undergraduates in the 1960s reveals the central position of authors and texts that are now considered to only partially reflect Western culture and the canon, marginal genres and authors having in the meantime moved into the main sphere. According to a very picturesque term employed by Rosamaria Loretelli,5 the canon of eighteenth century literature appears to be now “frastagliato ai bordi” (indented, jagged at the margins) thanks to the inclusion of many female writers who are also being translated into Italian. The eighteenth century circulation of culture not only provided stimuli to the theory of reception but also the process of translation. Thus, a good history of reader response should allow us to establish a viable map of movements to and from the mainstream and to study the circulation of texts within and across countries. Translation is a focal aspect of this process and a very interesting document in this direction is provided by Stanphill-Donato’s joint paper on Carlo Gozzi’s translation of Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1764). Thus, a number of texts that used to be marginal to the point of not even being mentioned in footnotes are now quietly assumed to be part of the canon of the individual national literatures. It is reasonably well acknowledged that genres that had been relegated to the margins of the literary world in fact exhibited an extremely solid anchorage in contemporary culture, and were actually writings at the margin of history. I am referring in particular to those genres that were not received as

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Off the Beaten Track

literary proper, like letters, journals and private notes, frequently the medium for the very popular genre of travel literature, and sometimes just a mode of it. Autobiographical writing was also marginal, remaining for a great part of the century a utilitarian or practical prose form, particularly with women’s production. The metaphor of the “beaten track” employed at the beginning of this introduction is taken from a seminal book on nineteenth-century tourism that undertook to record the shifts in tourists’ attitudes. It serves my purpose here mainly as a fair image of “common” versus “unusual,” easy roads versus untrodden paths, and as an introduction to the topic of travelogue that I mean to assume as a paradigmatic example. Travel literature in the eighteenth century in fact provides both extremes of the picture—from the repetitive stereotypical itineraries and reports (from Addison on) to rare but fertile forays into wild areas, Mary Montagu’s oriental scenes at the beginning of the century compared with Elizabeth Craven’s late Eastern Journeys (1789), or Mary Wollstonecraft’s northern travels at the end of the century (1796). The shape-shifting quality of travelogues is probably responsible for both the initial marginality of its literary role and also for its subsequent slide into the mainstream channel of literature. Lidia De Michelis and Matteo Ubezio both take up the stance of the eighteenth-century traveller in order to question stereotypes, cultural differences and cosmopolitan urges. Travel literature, the “most polyphonous of genres” as Mary Louise Pratt once defined it,6 and the English gaze on Italy it prompted in the eighteenth century, is a strong instance of the relationships between the two countries, especially in light of the reason Pratt gives for such a polyphonic quality—its resistance to the “disciplined mediation of cultural differences.” The Italian-traveller’s gaze on Britain, as is well known, only attracted the careful attention of scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century, even though the relationships between the two countries were at the core of noteworthy research carried out and published in Italy as early as 1911 by Arturo Graf.7 However, very marginal attention was paid to travel books in that pioneering work. Although marginal in terms of recognition, the genre was certainly relevant for the number of published works and the impact on the mutual relationships between the two countries (Matteo Ubezio’s paper plunges into this issue dealing with the infamous case Sharp-Baretti). Within a marginal genre, the marginality of women travelling with their companions or by themselves and sometimes writing their own travel accounts provides the interesting phenomenon of a marginalized gaze on marginal subjects.

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Travel literature took it upon itself to thematize cultural differences, displacement and the possibility to offer a vicarious experience to the reader. If a travel book like Berkeley’s journal of his travels to the south of Italy had been published in the course of the eighteenth century, a different picture of Italy would have been available, and a lot of information would have made southern Italy central to the analysis of British travellers, instead of being a terra incognita. Especially when compared with the almost contemporary Addisonian travel book, Berkeley’s description of the most marginal of “Italies” acquires a tremendous poignancy. Certainly in the eighteenth century the traveller’s gaze is not on the Book of God as it was with the pilgrims of the Middle Ages, and not yet on the Book of Nature of the late eighteenth century; rather, it is on the Book of Man. Most of the British writers, from Gibbon to Sharp to Smollett to Northall in the 1760s, communicate a stereotypical image of Italy as a superstitious land, to some extent brutalized and rendered idle by tyranny, yet still, in some respect, centred around human institutions and activities. De Michelis’ paper on Alessandro Verri’s letters from London highlights the sharp contrast between an attractive cosmopolitan centre (London) and the marginality of his Milanese milieu. Travel can be transformed into a “transitive” action when both the traveller and the travellee are part of the picture. The writer of travel books works according to a metonymic procedure—from the detail of a road, from a family picture, a picture of the whole nation can be gleaned, an anticipation of what the art of photography was to effect by indicating the details, the particulars, and by losing the panoramic perspective. I think the best example is the Sternian Yorick “locus” of liminality, whose identity is constantly moving and ever defining itself, living on the border of fragility and duplicity. It is only when pushing beyond the limits that he can discover his identity. But to resume our paradox about the freedom of marginality, I would like to examine the genre of the novel as it started to develop in the eighteenth century. The traditional picture is one of experiment, even anarchy, with experimental forms very different from one another popping up at various times during the century, but all in the end contributing to the settlement of the complex form we now recognize as the novel. Thus, a marginalized genre, possibly the most marginalized of genres, could capitalize on a freedom that mainstream genres could not afford, and in so doing gaining for itself the access to mainstream culture. Its movements from margins to centre have been related in many important books and still arouse the interest of scholars. Here, three papers are engaged with complementary issues. Rosamaria Loretelli’s opening essay on Digression,

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Off the Beaten Track

which seemed so ground breaking and encompassing as to serve as a perfect introduction to the whole literary section, illuminates the issue of form, while Nerozzi’s paper on Ugo Foscolo’s Ortis approaches the momentous shift to the sentimental novel and the role Richardson’s Clarissa played in shaping the emerging Italian novel. Finally, StanphillDonato’s paper on the Italian translation of Fanny Hill opens up the whole scene of translation and the Italian book market behind it. Sometimes, the transition from marginal to mainstream could take many decades, as is instanced by the curious history of the Della Cruscans. This movement produced a very internationalist and poetically heterogeneous poetry thanks to a coterie of English poets who happened to be living in Florence in 1785 (among them was Hester Thrale Piozzi). They produced The Arno Miscellany (1784) and The Florence Miscellany (1785), a collection of amateurish works by British and Italian poets such as Pindemonte and Parini, addressed by the members to each other in an international climate and with very composite poetical characteristics, including a dominant theme of strong sentimentalism and sometimes erotic hues. In the Preface to the Florence Miscellany, Hester Piozzi insists on the occasional nature of the poems, whose authors had “no ambition to success” and were “aware that their book of poetry will have little influence on the present and future generations of readers.”8 However, the Dedication by William Parsons, who acted as editor, advanced a political dimension to the enterprise, refusing all patronage from the Prince, in order to “signal the opposition of the poets to the repressive Tuscan government of their day.”9 The name Della Cruscan was itself significant—the liberal Accademia della Crusca had been suppressed by Duke Leopold of Tuscany just a couple of years before in 1783. To refuse all patronage from the Prince meant to open for the poets a free space for literary expression. The poets acted in tight cooperation with Italian literati,10 translated from the most famous authors like Dante and Petrarch, and actually contributed to introduce that strict link with Italian poetry that was to play such an important role in the Italian Risorgimento. The Della Cruscans were probably “the first to call British attention to the political situation of Italy” and can also be seen as anticipating Byron’s experimentation in 1822 with The Liberal, also the product of a few British exiles in Italy and also advertised as an Anglo-Italian journal, in spite of Byron’s denial of his interest in the movement.11 Thus, marginal genres were not necessarily minor genres in terms of popular impact and dialogism, rather fostering exchanges and debates that went to the core of the culture of the time.

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Sometimes the issue of marginality comes close to attaining the status of a mainstream field of research but without receiving the amount of light necessary to be visible. This is the case discussed in Silvia Granata’s paper on the Italian natural philosopher Tiberio Cavallo, whose books in English she was able to approach thanks to the rich patrimony of eighteenthcentury scientific books that is part of Lombardy’s Enlightenment legacy. As to the visual arts, a rich panorama is provided by three essays in the second section, where the connotation of marginality seems to shift to Britain and centrality to pertain to Italy. But in fact the balance is reestablished as we examine the papers. Carly Collier discusses the significance of a strict canon of artistry for art patronage and production and the way British artists tried to resist it through the case studies of Thomas Patch and Augustus Wall Callcott, who published the first copies in England of important fresco cycles by Tre- and Quattrocento Italian artists. In his analysis of foreign artists’ circles in Rome in the second half of the century, Tomas Macsotay focuses on the role played by British collector George Cumberland and on how the “Cumberland bequest” can allow us to reconstruct some aspects of the Roman market for contemporary art, so momentous for eighteenth-century British travellers. Finally, Rosalie McCrea really plunges us between the most marginal of British countries—Jamaica—and Rome through her analysis of the portrait painted by famous Pompeo Batoni of John Blagrove, apparently the only portrait of an Anglo-Creole Jamaican planter painted by an established Italian artist. This Introduction would not be complete without at least a brief reference to a paper that should have been published here because of the interest it had aroused in York, but that cannot because its author is not with us any more. Angelo Canavesi, from the Università di Pavia, left us less than three months after our meeting at York. He left no written track of his essay, so it is only the memory of what he said that can provide some hint. He spoke of what, at the time, was the focus of his research— the philosophical and juridical notion of “person” and “individual” through a subtle analysis of eighteenth-century narratives, with Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker as a case study. I can only conclude with someone else’s words: Che la terra ti sia finalmente lieve Io non ho bisogno di denaro. Ho bisogno di sentimenti, di parole, di parole scelte sapientemente,

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Off the Beaten Track

di fiori detti pensieri, di rose dette presenze, di sogni che abitino gli alberi, di canzoni che facciano danzare le statue, di stelle che mormorino all’ orecchio degli amanti. Ho bisogno di poesia, questa magia che brucia la pesantezza delle parole, che risveglia le emozioni e dà colori nuovi. (Alda Merini, Terra d’Amore, 2003)

Notes 1

James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918, (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993). 2 Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: British Political and Social History, 1688–1832 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997) 3 The OED for “canon,” DRAFT ADDITIONS JULY 2002, has: a. Literary Criticism. A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now freq. in the canon). Also (usu. with qualifying word): such a body of literature in a particular language, or from a particular culture, period, genre, etc., and provides examples from 1929 on. b. In extended use (esp. with reference to art or music): a body of works, etc., considered to be established as the most important or significant in a particular field. Freq. with qualifying word. Again examples start in 1977. So not only the concept was unknown, but no proper word existed to define what was valuable and what not. As a “rule” or “standard” quite obviously the idea of what is worth remembering has always existed. It was just the judgment of the contemporaries. 4 The label “Johnson's Poets” appeared on the spines of 58 volumes of poetry, including two volumes of indexes, from Cowley to Gray. Johnson’s reaction in his Letters complains rather sharply: “It is great impudence to put Johnson's Poets on the back of books which Johnson neither recommended nor revised. This is indecent.” Samuel Johnson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson 1731–1772, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton: The Hyde Edition, 1992–94), 5:32. 5 Rosamaria Loretelli, “Gli studi inglesi. Problemi e possibili prospettive” in Anna Maria Rao, Alberto Postigliola (eds) Il Settecento negli studi italiani. Problemi e prospettive, (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), 468. 6 Mary Louis Pratt, “Scratches on the face or the Country: or, what Mr Barrow saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in Critical Inquiry Vol.12, No.1 (1985), 141. 7 Arturo Graf, L’Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Torino: Loescher, 1911) 8 Silvia Bordoni, “Lord Byron and the Della Cruscans,” The Byron Study Centre, The University of Nottingham, 2006.

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Silvia Bordoni, “Lord Byron and the Della Cruscans.” Michael Gamer “’Bell's Poetics’: The Baviad, the Della Cruscans, and the Book of The World,” in The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period, ed. Steven E. Jones (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 31–54. 11 Silvia Bordoni, “Lord Byron and the Della Cruscans.” 10

LITERATURE

TOWARDS A HISTORY OF DIGRESSION: A MARGINAL FORM AT THE CENTRE OF THE CANON1 ROSAMARIA LORETELLI UNIVERSITÀ DI NAPOLI “FEDERICO II”

The chapters of a recent book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains1 are interspersed with four sections each labelled “a digression.” The term recalls an ancient narrative form that was challenged, became marginal and was discarded between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but appears to be resurfacing today in the hypertextual discourse discussed in the work. The digression has a long history and one that, to the best of my knowledge, has yet to be written in full.2 Only by doing so, however, can we ever understand the reasons for its existence, its transformations, the forces acting against it, and the possibility of its reappearance in the present. While the space of an article is certainly not enough to provide sufficient evidence for such a history, it does allow us to sketch out a framework and put forward a plausible interpretive hypothesis grounded on a body of sector-specific but consolidated studies, some of which are by the present author. The digression stretches back as far as the oral epic, of which it is the constituent form. In a world where information was mostly passed from mouth to ear and lasted in time only if memorised, the oral epic recognised the digression as its structural element—not as simple rhetorical artifice but as absolute necessity. As is known, the oral poets composed (and indeed compose, where they still exist) their songs in the act of public performance, adapting them on every occasion to the particular audience 1

A slightly different Italian version of this article is in L’antico nel moderno. Il recupero del classico nelle forme del pensiero moderno, Annali della Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello Foundation, 1, Concetto Nicosia, Gianfranco Tortorelli eds. (Bologna: Pendragon, 2013).

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and situation. The stories were always the same and universally known, being drawn from the vast treasury of tradition and collective memory, but descriptions and themes were added for development in relation to the context and the listeners. As we know, this is how the Iliad, the Odyssey and the earliest medieval poems were born. The singer’s problem was speed. The song had to be constructed one verse after the other with no interruption so as to hold the listener’s attention, and it was precisely for this reason that set modules were developed during the years of training for mechanical repetition in order to gain time. Some of these modules were of the lexical type, the so-called formulae, with descriptive epithets used to refer to characters always in the same terms—Hermes the Argeiphontes or slayer of Argus, flashing-eyed Athena, Odysseus the man of many devices.3 Others were authentic digressions, “themes” found not only in the Homeric poems but also in the Golden Ass, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland and the Arthurian cycle, like the banquet gathering of gods, peoples or warriors, lamentation over the death of a hero—which occurs six times in the Iliad alone—and festive scenes, of which the Odyssey presents no fewer than thirty-two.4 Albert Lord engaged with Milman Parry, the revolutioniser of Homeric studies, during the 1930s through field research in areas characterised by the highest rates of illiteracy and the survival of the oral epic. He observed that the oral poets had a story they meant to tell and a plan very clearly in mind when they began a song. But since they lacked any form of written aid and had to proceed at a certain speed so as to hold the listener’s attention, they sometimes ended up being sidetracked into other tales: “a word may set off a chain of associations which the performer follows into a cul de sac from which only the skilled narrator can extricate himself.”5 These other tales are in fact narrative digressions that can—if everything works out and the singer does not lose the thread—become “stories within the story”6 and constitute the labyrinthine pathways of the oral epic. As shown by Milman Parry, the narrative structure of the oral poems is therefore the result of bricolage, an “additive style,” in which digression is the norm.7 As the oral narrative obviously did not codify its forms, it is not there that the digression found its theoretical legitimisation. This happened later in the oratory of the fifth century BC, where it was placed in the division of speech after the proemium and the narrative of the case as argued on either side, and before the epilogue. Aristotelian rhetoric, which is above all the art of reasoning, proof and truth, subsequently placed it at the service of argument and persuasion. Aristotle wrote in the Rhetoric about the departure from the subject of the discourse as enthymeme and

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Towards a History of Digression

paradeigma (example), which are two different forms of digression. The former is more incisive, being syllogistic, deductive and general in character (II(B), 22), whereas the latter persuades by less obvious means. In the paradeigma, the causes and the effects are embodied in the facts related and it is by induction that those listening to the orator discover the analogy with the case constituting the object of the discourse and let themselves be convinced (II(B), 20). The truth thus emerges by itself in a certain sense.8 Digression was developed as a way of introducing new material in Cicero’s rhetoric but without being assigned a precise position. Anywhere would do, as shown by the inclusion of the praise of Sicily and the abduction of Proserpine in the speeches against Verres (II, 2; IV, 106), as well as the celebration of the merits of Pompey in the oration in defence of Gaius Cornelius (Pro Cornelio, VII, 47). Enthymeme and example are still fundamental in Quintilian, but importance is also attached to amplificatory digressions, albeit in full awareness of the risk of losing the thread of discourse. As Quintilian wrote, “This part the Greeks call the ʌĮȡਕțȕĮıȚȢ (parekbasis), the Latins the egressus or egressio. But such sallies, as I remarked, are of several kinds and may be directed to different subjects from any part of the cause, as eulogies of men and places, descriptions of countries, or recitals of occurrences true or fictitious … as a speech may swerve from the right path in so many ways.”9 The period from the second to the fourth century AD saw digression broken down into a series of “pieces,” syntagmatic units juxtaposed in accordance with a rhapsodic model, from which the later medieval topoi probably originated. As Roland Barthes wrote, “Such a unit (landscape, portrait) … easily fits into the narrative, the continuum of the novel,”10 which in any case maintained links with oratory. We refer to the Greek and Latin “novels” written in the period from the first century BC to the fourth AD,11 in which digressions are frequent both as extended descriptions of places and as long narratives that interrupt the main story and halt its temporal flow. This “proclivity for the parentheric,” to quote Shadi Bartsch,12 emerges in Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Daphnis and Chloe by Longus and Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius13 but above all in the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, of which they form the constituent element. Though composed in writing, the Aethiopica appears to have been usually read aloud at the time, as suggested by the presence of various hallmarks of orality,14 including the exceptional length of the sentences which must have necessitated examination before reading in order to comprehend their meaning; the abundance of aphorisms and set themes

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borrowed from tradition; and meta-narrative indications showing that reading to listeners was envisaged.15 A further mark of orality is the rapid flow of events, which gives the impression of quick and superficial succession when silently read from a printed book today, an effect that probably did not obtain when the text was read aloud to an audience with all the accompaniment of gestures, tones of voice, movements of the body and pauses that slow down the narrative, arouse emotion in the listeners, and impart substance to the meaning.16 This is probably what prompts the parallel frequently drawn today between Greek novels and modern paraliterature and described by Massimo Fusillo as based on factors like “the repetitive character of their topoi and narrative situations, elementary psychological characterisation, absolute sentimental dominance, snobbish upper-class setting, reassurance in the inevitable happy ending, and abundant recapitulation to assist the reader.”17 In actual fact, some of these features—recapitulation and repetitive topoi—are directly connected with the oral tradition, and the others, although appearing also in many modern novels, are there represented in verbal forms that rid them of any sense of artless simplicity. As a matter of fact, ancient narrative has this effect on us today because the way we read it is not appropriate to the medium for which it was created. We have direct, individual contact with these texts, now printed and hence susceptible to quick reading. Our impression of superficiality is largely attributable, in my view, to its lack of the verbal fullness to which modern narrative has accustomed us, being the result of the gradual replacement over the centuries of the physical context of oral performance with one created by the narrative word in texts. To quote David Olson, “The history of literacy … is the struggle to recover what was lost in simple transcription.”18 As stated above, digressions constitute the structural body of the Aethiopica and their elimination would leave us with precious little. While the story begins with a narrator recounting the tale of Chariclea and Theagenes in the third person, Cnemon steps in almost immediately to tell his own long story to the listening protagonists. He is then followed in turn by Calasiris, Charicles and Sisimithres in an accumulation of first-person narratives embedded within one another—a series of narrative digressions. Nor is there any lack in this text of descriptive digressions where cities, natural landscapes and people appear. Here is one example: When they had gone about two furlongs by the seaside, they moved straight toward the crest of the hill, and left the sea on their right hand. And having with difficulty gone over the top of the said hill, they hastened to a pool that lay on the other side thereof, the manner whereof was thus. The

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Towards a History of Digression whole place is called by the Egyptians The Pasture Land, about the which is a low valley which receiveth certain exundations of the Nile, by means whereof it becomes a pool, and is in the midst very deep, while about its brims are marshes or fens. For look, as the shore is to the sea, so are the fens to every great pool. In that place have the thieves of Egypt, however many they be, their commonwealth. And as there is but little land above the water, some live in small cottages, others in boats, which they use as well for their house as for passage over the pool. In these do their women serve them and, if need require, be also brought to bed. When a child is born, they let him suck his mother’s milk a while; but afterwards they feed him with fishes taken in the lake and roasted in the hot sun. And when they perceive that he begins to go, they tie a cord about his ankles and suffer him only to crawl the length of the boat or the cottage, teaching him even at the first after a new fashion to go by a halter. Many a herdsman is born and bred in the pool, which he accounts to be his country and a sufficient defence for the safety of the thieves. And for that cause all such people flock thither, for they all do use the water instead of a wall. Moreover the great plenty of weeds that groweth there in the moozy ground is as good as a bulwark unto them. For by devising many crooked and cumbrous ways, through which the passages to them by frequent use are very easy but to others hard, they have made it a sure defence, so that by no sudden invasion they may be endamaged. And thus much as touching the Lake, and those rogues that inhabit the same. About the sun setting cometh home the captain with all his retinue. Then took they the young couple from their houses and laid their prey aboard certain boats, and the rest of the robbers that tarried at home, who were a great number, ran to meet the captain from out of every part of the fen, and welcomed him as if he had been their king.19

“The manner whereof was thus”—here the landscape appears almost as it would in a periegesis, which describes a place minutely without a story as a basis for selecting the elements for inclusion. While the vegetation and water that conceal the robbers and protect them from attack are relevant details with respect to the rest of the story, the information about children is not; it is a simple excrescence that contributes nothing to its overall economy. Yet, though partially extraneous and devoid of emotional colouring, this description is placed at a strategically opportune moment, namely when the protagonists, taken prisoner by a band of robbers, reach the top of a mountain from where they can see the lake beside which the community lives. The point which should be recalled here is that the Aethiopica was written at the peak of Greek and Roman literacy. After the fourth century there came the great contraction of the Middle Ages, when the epic rose again in the sphere of orality, this time in the

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vernacular. Here, too, descriptive digressions are completely detached from the narrative. This can be seen in one of the many recordings transcribed by Albert Lord in Yugoslavia during the 1930s: Now the old woman went to the chest and took from it a bundle of clothing. First there were line breeches and a shir—not made on a loom, not spun, but woven of gold from Stambol. Then she gave him a breastplate and vest. The breastplate was made throughout of golden chain mail. On his shoulders she placed two golden caftans and on them two grey falcons. All this billowed on the young man’s shoulders. Then she gave him a cloak, with twelve buttons, each one containing a litter of gold. And she gave him breeches of fine cloth, even of green Venetian velvet. They were of Bulgarian make. All the seams were covered with gold braid. Along the calves of his legs were concealed fasteners, and on them were woven serpents, their heads embroidered on the knees. At every step he took the snake swayed, and they might well have frightened a hero! Then she gave him his belt and weapons, in the belt two mother of pearl pistols, neither forged nor hammered, but cast in Venice. The butts were decorated with golden ducats, and their barrels were of deadly steel. The signs were of precious stones. Two small pistols they were, which shot well. Then he girded on golden powder boxes, and above them a curved sabre. The whole hilt was of yellow ducats, and the scabbard of deadly steel. On the hilt was a precious stone. He put on his head a four-cornered hat with twelve crosses. On one of them was the name of Niko, the standard-bearer, from ûpanur hard by the Turkish border. Then he drew on his boots and leggings and took the saddlebags of Moroccan leather.20

What we have here is the arming of the hero, a traditional scene of the oral epic, and a recurrent theme like the banquet and the assembly. It appears strange to us because it does not take place realistically just before the battle but when the hero decides to set off and face the enemy, and therefore long before he needs to don his armour. This detailed scene of arming, the specific purpose of which is not our concern here, thus has no connection with the point in the narrative at which it occurs and interrupts the tale abruptly—digression in the highest degree. As narrative gradually lost contact with the voice and the context of vocalised reading over the centuries, digressions in the form of occasional blocks of prolonged narrative or description became increasingly linked to the rest of the story. Gradual impoverishment of the situation (context) and reduced presence of the body—gestures, movements and voice reading aloud—was accompanied by progressive enrichment in the utterance (text), into which digressions dissolved to become one with the action. This long, slow process was not completed until the eighteenth century.21

18

Towards a History of Digression

Up to the fourth century AD, when the practice of reading attained its greatest extent in the Greek and Roman societies before the medieval hiatus, digression was still a fundamental element of the story, the only way to combine a number of narrative threads. With the subsequent rebirth of the oral epic in the Middle Ages, this time in the vernacular, we find it once again firmly rooted in the method of composition until the invention of printing with movable type. In the second half of the fifteenth century, however, it began to constitute a problem. As Elizabeth Eisenstein writes with respect to the first generation of printer-scholars, contemporaries of Machiavelli: the preparation of indexes and other procedures entailed in copy-editing pointed scholarly activities in a somewhat different direction than had the preparation of orations, dialogues, and other occasional commemorative pieces which had preoccupied earlier humanists. Objections posed by the latter to the barbarous language and bookhands used by the schoolmen were supplemented by new objections to the barbarous arrangement of medieval compendia with their great mass of elaborate digressions and seemingly unrelated details.22

Digressions then became a subject of cultured debate, criticised on the one hand and recognised on the other as endowed with potential that made them irreplaceable, at least for the time being. Let us now see what the criticism and the potential were, starting with the words of the first modern theorist of literature to identify the roles assigned to digression. In the early decades of the twentieht century Viktor Shklovsky pinpointed three particular functions: First, it makes it possible to bring new material into a novel. Don Quixote’s discourses thus enabled Cervantes to introduce critical, philosophical and suchlike material into the novel. Much more important is the second function of digressions, namely to slow down the action … The third function of digression is to create contrast.23

We shall first translate this passage into still more modern terms and then take a look at what was said in this connection between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Digressions introduce a variety of materials that may also clash with one another. They make possible, at least in principle, the presence in narrative of a polyphony of dialogically juxtaposed voices, which is the fundamentally democratic hallmark of the novelistic form. These are the first and third functions attributed by Shklovsky to digression, while the second is “to slow down the action,” which can work for better or for

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worse—better because it prevents a story from beginning and ending in no time at all. What would the hundreds of pages of the Aethiopica boil down to without digressions? Theagenes and Chariclea have decided to marry (their meeting and this decision are recounted in an analeptic digression, not as part of the primary narrative thread). They are taken prisoner for a couple of pages, then again for another couple of pages, and in the end are brought before Chariclea’s parents, who recognise her as their daughter and give their consent to the wedding. This is all, perhaps a score of pages. The rest is digression, sometimes descriptive but mostly narrative. The second function that Shklovsky identifies—and considers the most important—is therefore the one that makes digression essential to the story as a way of slowing down the action and delaying the conclusion. What did the rhetoricians and theorists of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries call these functions? They conflated the first and third in the term “variety,” a characteristic of the world and an aesthetic element that gives pleasure when encountered. Digressions endow texts with variety, a positive element that can, however, also have the drawback of impairing the “unity” of the story, another source of pleasure and moreover one possessing cognitive and ethical value. While they prevent the story from reaching a conclusion too soon, digressions interrupt it, suspending its development and halting narrative time. In short, they distract the reader from the main thread. It is in these terms that digression was discussed between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Unquestionably an integral part of Baroque poetics and encountered at every turn in that era, it is, however, a form of discourse that extends beyond it in both directions. This must be stressed, otherwise there is the risk of reasoning only in terms of poetics and styles without seeing that some mental and aesthetic attitudes have broader implications and constitute the emergence of spontaneous tastes and needs with an epistemological basis. In point of fact, digression already existed in the Renaissance and outlived the Baroque. Clear proof of this is provided for the French Renaissance by Gérard Milhe Poutingon’s recent work Poétique du digressif. La digression dans la littérature de la Renaissance, which gathers together and examines a vast array of material on digressions in the expanded sixteenth century.24 In the Hispanic and Italian territories, as is known, the debate developed around chivalric romance such as Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. As an example, we have chosen a passage from the Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi (1543), where the author Giambattista Giraldi Cintio discusses whether a romance should recount a single action or a number of actions and states that he prefers

20

Towards a History of Digression appigliarsi a molte attioni d’un huomo, che ad una sola. Perché mi pare che più sia atto questo modo al comporre in forma di Romanzi, che una sola attione. Però che porta questa diversità delle attioni con esso lei la varietà, la quale è di condimento del diletto, et si da largo campo lo Scrittore di fare Episodij, cio è digressioni grate.25

He also notes, however, that digressions “rompono la continuatione e fanno vitiosa la favola.”26 While digressions are not condemned: deve in queste digressioni essere molto avveduto il Poeta in trattarle di modo, che una dipenda dall’altra, et siano bene aggiunte con le parti della materia, che si ha preso a dire con continuo filo et continua catena, et che portino cõ esso loro il verosimile.27

Digressions are therefore pleasing and lend variety, but at the same time interrupt narrative continuity by their very nature. This humanist was not the only one28 to consider the significance and value of digressions. The dilemma of variety and unity was to remain unresolved until the late eighteenth century, when a way was found to secure both without resorting to digressions. If the disappearance of the gestures, tones of voice and pauses used in reading aloud to endow digressive tales with unity induced silent readers to perceive digressions as irreparable interruptions, in the eighteenth century it was the narrated context that took over the integrating function. Digressions were thus swallowed up by contexts created and enriched within the story itself; they were broken down into a host of details—adjectives, verbs denoting habitual and repeated actions, passing comments, and conversations that present the reader with a range of different viewpoints. Let us now return to our survey of pre-eighteenth-century discussions about digression. Le Bossu, who took a keen interest in the narrative framework, wrote as follows in his Traité du poème épique (1674): “But can an author place in his poem nothing other than its subject matter? Or will he instead be free to include whatever he wants and, as Horace put it, to sew on some piece of rich and striking material unrelated to the background?” The answer is that an author does enjoy this freedom but only if what he includes also makes it possible: “to infer some incident that serves to account for a part of the action.”29 Further on, in a general discussion of “episodes,” he states that these are acceptable only if they are “necessary parts of the action developed in plausible circumstances,” and upon which the story as a whole rests (161). Those unconnected with one another are instead condemned: “This irregularity can be recognised when it is possible to remove an entire episode without putting anything in

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its place and without this elimination causing any gap or defect in the poem” (157). In this case, the episode would be a digression. The “episodes” lacking any connection with the rest of the text, and hence constituting digressions, are seen most decidedly as “irregularities.” But what does this really mean? As suggested by Du Plaisir and stated a long time afterwards in lucidly convincing terms by Henry Home, Lord Kames, it is a cognitive element that has to do with the psychology of reading. In the Sentimens [sic] sur les Lettres et sur l’Histoire, avec des scrupules sur le style (1683), Du Plaisir writes that digressions should be eliminated because: “the mixing of particular stories with the main story goes against the reader’s wishes … Readers are annoyed and irritated when they are interrupted with the details of the adventures of people who interest them little.” Their memory and patience are thus sorely tried.30 It is therefore a question of perception and memory. Readers are irritated because they are forced to turn their attention from the characters in whom they have taken an interest and with whom they presumably identify. And who are these readers? Certainly the ever-increasing ranks of those silently engrossed in reading and captivated by the text,31 whose numbers attained critical mass when the eighteenth century was in full swing. “Narrative cohesion”32 was the indispensable prerequisite to keep these readers glued to the text and so entranced as to go on reading all the way to the end. The efforts made to keep the positive functions of digression alive while eliminating the negative ones are evident in eighteenth-century British writers. Joseph Addison criticised this device repeatedly in the Spectator at the beginning of the century, demonstrating a clear understanding of the problem but not of the existence of a solution. Having stated in one of his essays on Milton that Paradise Lost, the Iliad and the Aeneid are too full of episodes and digressions that constitute simple excrescences rather than parts of the action, he makes this assertion: “Digressions are by no means to be allowed of in an Epic Poem. If the Poet, even in the ordinary Course of his Narration, should speak as little as possible, he should certainly never let his Narration sleep for the sake of any Reflections of his own.” Then, with reference to the slaying of Pallas by Turnus, he goes on to say that Virgil “went out of his way to make this Reflection upon it,” and is therefore to be criticised for thus interrupting the story. His censure is, however, attenuated by acknowledgement that without a digression: “so small a Circumstance might possibly have slipped out of his Readers’ Memory.”33

22

Towards a History of Digression

Daniel Defoe is still more drastic with respect to digressions. He wants none in his narrative and prefers not to follow the stories of various characters. For example, Moll Flanders, the protagonist and narrating voice of the novel of the same name, listens attentively when her “Lancashire husband” tells her about his life during their long separation, but nothing of what he says is recorded in the text. As Moll says: “this is my story, not his.” Nor is the primary narrative thread interrupted when one of Moll’s lovers tells her about his wife’s unfaithfulness: “he went on to tell me all the circumstances of his case, too long to relate here.” The same thing happens when the friend who taught her the art of picking pockets recounts her adventurous life: “she … played a hundred pranks, which she gave me a little history of.”34 This is all we are told. In three situations where the narrative of antiquity and the sixteenth and seventeenth century would have embarked on long digressions, Defoe deliberately refrains. Two more fathers of the novel expressed their views on this subject. While Samuel Richardson deplores works: “where the Novelist moves on, at his own dull Pace, to the End of his Chapter and Book, interweaving impertinent Digressions,”35 Henry Fielding is prevented from eliminating them entirely by his aim of representing the “prodigious variety” of human nature, but seeks in any case to multiply their links with the main story.36 Finally, Samuel Johnson joins in with an attack on authors guilty of “losing themselves and their Auditors in the Wilds of Digression, or the Mazes of Confusion.”37 In short, the question of digressions was still unresolved halfway through the eighteenth century. Ten years later the Scottish philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames, published the Elements of Criticism (1762), a book that was to prove very influential, and not only in the English-speaking world.38 Its stated purpose was to “explain in what manner we are affected by uniformity and variety.” Attention is focused on the reception of the text but within a perspective that goes beyond the elements of poetics to encompass an overall epistemological vision: The world we inhabit is replete with things not less remarkable for their variety than their number. These … furnish the mind with many perceptions, which, joined with the ideas of memory, of imagination, and of reflection form a complete train that has not a gap or interval39 … Some emotions, by hurrying the mind from object to object, accelerate the succession, where the train is composed of connected objects the succession is quick … An unconnected object, finding no ready access to the mind, requires time to make an impression.40

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The picture is clear—the great variety of things and people in the world offer stimuli to the human mind, whose thoughts are seamlessly connected with one another through relations of similarity, contiguity and causality. Literature, whose task it is to represent the variety of this world, must seek to recreate its effect in the reader’s mind in accordance with the mind’s rules of operation. Writers will therefore structure their stories so as to connect a diversity of elements through a narrative form capable of creating a virtual experience during the act of reading, similar to the one encountered by the mind in reality. With the classical rules discarded, we find the “subject of artistic perception” at the very centre. It was this philosophical leap that led to the solution of the age-old problem of digressions and the creation of a narrative form that “silent readers could perceive” as endowed at once with unity and variety.41 This marked the end of the long process during which digressions were progressively absorbed into the narration of facts, thus giving shape to the richly detailed plot acutely described, albeit within theoretical perspectives differing from mine, by Lia Guerra and Franco Moretti,42 and for which empiricism initially supplied the vocabulary.43 In this way, written narrative discourse takes over all the functions that oralised reading assigned to gestures, tones of voice and pauses. It is certainly no coincidence that digression was the last characteristic of the oral epic to disappear.44 In my view, it is against this background that we must observe the use and misuse of digressions on the part of Laurence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760–67) is usually interpreted, following Viktor Shklovsky, as a text seeking to debunk an already codified novelistic form. Proof of this is supposedly provided by the use of a digressive style for which the Russian Formalist sees precursors only in Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. He regards the novel form in Sterne, like Futurist writing and the paintings of Picasso, as “the violation and shifting of customary forms.”45 In actual fact, no codified form of the novel as yet existed in 1760, and Sterne’s was a narrative experiment like others, albeit certainly one that was deliberately impracticable and took aspects of contemporary culture, not least philosophical associationism, to paradoxical extremes.46 Shklovsky was therefore mistaken. It should be noted, however, that his interest in Sterne was of an exclusively formal rather than historical or generative nature. He chose Tristram Shandy in order “to illustrate the general laws of the plot,” distinguished in his theory from the fabula by the presence of “inserted material.” It is from this standpoint alone that his

24

Towards a History of Digression

view of Laurece Sterne’s novel as the most typical in world literature does not prove contradictory. Described by the author as “rhapsodical” (I,13). Sterne’s compositional system is the one attributed by the associationist philosophy and psychology of the age to the “idiosyncratic” mental processes, which he uses for comic purposes. At the same time, his assertion that “I shall confine myself neither to his (Horace’s) rules, nor to any man’s rules that ever lived” (I, 4) simply repeats in different words the programme of Richardson and Fielding, who also opposed the classical rules. The problem clearly highlighted by Sterne was once again how to reconcile variety and unity, which he places in the very centre of his stage: Digressions incontestably are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—and he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All hail; brings variety, and forbid the appetite to fail. (Tristram Shandy, I, 22)

How splendid this agent of variety is! But a perverse force is at work within it. If an author “begins a digression,from that moment, I observe his whole work stands stock still,—and if he goes on with his main work,— then there is an end of his digression” (I, 22). But, the author assures us, “I constantly take care to order affairs so, that my main business does not stand still in my absence.” The last assertion is another paradox, but not one to be addressed here. We shall rather point out that Sterne says nothing in the three quotations other than what had been repeated for centuries—it is necessary to ensure that the digressive material does not block the main story and sever its narrative thread. While Tristram Shandy was not translated into Italian until 1922, it circulated in Italy throughout the nineteenth century in a French version.47 As Giancarlo Mazzacurati wrote, it had a crucial influence on the development of the Italian tradition of humour, particularly the work of Ippolito Nievo,48 upon which the critic called for scholarly efforts—now marshalled by Ugo Olivieri49—to examine the “exchange and elaboration of material.” In discussing digressions in Italian narrative, however, attention is immediately attracted by Alessandro Manzoni,50 who addressed this point in the drafting and organisation of his novel. Let us take a brief look at some aspects of this with all due caution and humility.51

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In the transition from Fermo e Lucia, where digressions are numerous and substantial, to I promessi sposi, Manzoni eliminated some and shortened others drastically so as to blend them smoothly into the story. Lanfranco Caretti summarises this transition as: a radical reworking designed to constitute a balanced and homogeneous arrangement of the inner form of the novel (with better handling of the relations between events and reflection, between history and invention, between the various narrative nuclei and between the characters), whereas the initial draft, due also to its agitated and reversible gestation, presented a discontinuous and abnormal score born out of the feverish accumulation of heterogeneous and inadequately correlated materials, the schematic juxtaposition of blocks of history and blocks of fiction, and indulgence in prolonged digressions.52

It is in any case widely believed that the length of the digressions and the precarious connection of the narrative threads of Fermo e Lucia display: “the compositional processes … still exposed in a sort of centrifugal and multifunctional experiment.”53 Olivia Santovetti quotes a passage from Fermo e Lucia to explain the function that Manzoni assigned to digressions: il lettore è avvertito, io trascrivo una storia quale è accaduta: e gli avvenimenti reali non si astringono alle norme artificiali prescritte dall’invenzione, procedono con tutt’altre loro regole, senza darsi pensiero di soddisfare alle persone di buon gusto. Se fosse possibile assoggettarli all’andamento voluto dalle poetiche, il mondo ne diverrebbe forse ancor più ameno che non sia: ma non è cosa da potersi sperare. Per questo incolto e materiale procedere dei fatti, è avvenuto che Fermo Spolino ….54

She interprets this as follows. Wishing to represent the “disorderly and material progression of events”—i.e. reality, which is varied and not subject to rules—Manzoni devised a new type of plot in which digressions inevitably proliferate: “Manzoni explored and adopted a digressive structure in Fermo e Lucia in order to express his poetic of dissonance and his commitment to the ‘vero’.”55 Giovanni Macchia’s observation that digressions in the initial version enabled Manzoni to “present the contradictory matter of the world”56 in its harshest aspects is then taken up but developed somewhat hazardously. Taking it for granted that it is only in the form of digressions that a text can encompass the complexity and contrasts of the real world, Santovetti thus claims that Manzoni is substantially forced to make use of these by his desire to represent the dissonant polymorphism of reality.

26

Towards a History of Digression

Something very different emerges, however, from the history outlined above, and indeed from Manzoni’s theoretical writings, which we shall now examine in connection with the aspects of interest here. In the above passage from Fermo e Lucia, the rules that would satisfy “people of good taste” are evidently the rules of classicism, which Manzoni had rejected a few years earlier in the preface to Carmagnola (1820): “La verosimiglianza non deve nascere in lui (lo spettatore) dalle relazioni dell’azione con il suo modo attuale di essere, ma da quelle che le varie parti dell’azione hanno tra di loro.”57 The Lettre à Monsieur Chauvet sur l’unité de temps et de lieu dans la tragédie, published later but written around the same time, contains this passage: “Perché questa unità d’azione esista nel dramma bisogna—voi dite—che, fin dal primo atto, l’atteggiamento e le intenzioni di ogni personaggio siano definiti … Dov’è la ragione della sua necessità? Certo, perché si interessi all’azione è necessario che lo spettatore conosca l’atteggiamento di coloro che vi prendono parte: ma perché proprio fin dal primo atto? Purché l’azione, nel suo svolgersi, faccia conoscere i personaggi via via che essi naturalmente intervengono, ci sarà interesse, continuità, sviluppo; e perché non unità?58

Together with his rejection of the classical rules, Manzoni saw the connection between actions as the structural element providing unity—in this case to tragedy—not as the product of static and unchanging fixity but as continuity in development and therefore in change. He also mentioned the spectator’s interest, a point to which we shall return shortly. In 1822, while writing Fermo e Lucia, Manzoni made the following observation on the novelistic form in a letter to Claude Fauriel: In tutti i romanzi che ho letto mi sembra di scorgere un impegno per stabilire rapporti interessanti e inattesi fra i diversi personaggi, per riportarli insieme sulla scena, per trovare avvenimenti che influiscano a un tempo e in modi diversi sui destini di tutti, per trovare infine una unità artificiale che nella vita reale non si verifica.59

In other words, we could say that the writer noted how the presence of peripeteia and coincidence in the romances he read endowed them with an artificial unity differing from life. Well, peripeteia and coincidence are precisely the expedients that ancient and, in its wake, classical narrative used in order to obtain a sort of unity without sacrificing variety, and they took concrete shape precisely in digressions. In short, it is true that Manzoni sought a new narrative form, but with no certainty that he could rely on digressions for it. Proof of this is

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provided both by their elimination or reduction in the transition from Fermo e Lucia to I promessi sposi, and by some significant theoretical observations. In the Lettera a D’Azeglio sul Romanticismo (1823), Manzoni takes the same view of rules as Fielding and Sterne—“in order to be accepted by people, every rule must have its basis in the human mind”—and insists that the classical precepts are an obstacle to those hailed by all the world as “authors of genius” (a phrase in use at the time but also to be found much earlier in David Hume),60 as well as “a weapon in the hands of those known by all the world as pedants.”61 A huge operation of rejuvenation was also thus undertaken in this respect by Manzoni, who found Italian narrative lagging behind the British and French.62 For him, seeking to represent “reality” meant creating a story that was indeed organised on the basis of “rules,” but those identified by eighteenth-century Scottish and French philosophy and psychology as guiding the human mind rather than the classical unities. When a writer follows these rules, the reader perceives the narrative as “natural” (the term used by David Hume precisely in this connection), almost like a window opened onto a known world. It is for this reason that digressions, understood as long narrative or descriptive blocks detached from the rest of the story, no longer work in the age of silent reading. Because they prevent that window from remaining open all the time they shut it every so often and thus disconcert the reader. In non-metaphorical terms, we can say that digressions impair the unity that readers must perceive in a story in order to be interested enough to go on reading to the end. Albeit developed with different aims and not within the framework of a theoretical hypothesis like mine, an important study by Corrado Bologna provides support for these views. I refer here to the section devoted to Manzoni’s digressions and metaphors of the text as a unified fabric. For Manzoni, according to Bologna, the “story” is like “a thread” to be woven, and this explains the “pegging (imbricamento) of digressions” in the transition from Fermo e Lucia to I promessi sposi. This is the sense of the weaving metaphor employed frequently by the writer and examined by Bologna. Following the occurrences of the term “digression” in Manzoni’s first version, the critic shows how the writer indicates such elements as breaking the narrative thread and threatening its continuity. Here I shall quote just one of the examples he gives. It is from chapter 9 of the second volume of Fermo e Lucia: “questa fatale digressione è venuta appunto a gettarsi nella storia nel momento più critico, sulla fine d’un volume, dove il ritrovarsi ad una stazione è un pretesto, una tentazione fortissima al

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Towards a History of Digression

lettore di non andar più innanzi.”63 Digressions are fatal indeed. If, according to Manzoni, the rules by which a writer must abide are those whereby the human mind functions, then he cannot but observe the effect of digressions on the reading mind. In this perspective they prove “fatal” because they destroy the desire to go on reading. Corrado Bologna’s essay is far too rich to summarise and readers are referred to the text itself. Suffice it for the moment to say that it provides support for the thesis put forward here. I am convinced that if the torment Manzoni expressed in his Saggio sul romanzo storico—which appears to respond, as Daniela Mangione points out, “to all the questions that had presented themselves in the previous decades: dose of fiction, dose of moral benefit, assertiveness of the author; [and where] the uncertainty of an author almost dependent on the reader is actually represented on the page”64—is considered from the viewpoint indicated here, it will be possible to obtain further insight into its ambivalence. I refer to the ambivalence existing between the requirements of literature and those of the historical truth; in other words, between the requirements of silent reading, which necessitates the absorption of digressions and narrative cohesion, and those of documentary accuracy, which is ensured precisely by historical digressions maintained as such. Before concluding, I should perhaps make it clear that a digression is something very different from a fragment. The former is a spontaneous form of narration, the second an intentional modernist module of extraordinary aesthetic and epistemological effectiveness. At this point we can take up our opening remarks again. Is the digression returning as a present-day compositional form? The answer will be provided by a chapter of history still to be written, the somewhat inchoate experience of the present day. The hypertextual pathways we take on the internet appear to differ little from the graphic representations of digressions that Sterne inserted into Tristram Shandy and resemble the blind alleys that inexperienced oral poets could get themselves into on losing the narrative thread and not knowing how to return to the initial theme. But nothing comes back in identical form over time, and this probably holds also for digression. Its history does show us one thing, however, namely that our narrative culture is moulded by linguistic practices, by the technologies of the word and our access to them—in other words, by reading practices. There is no escape from the power of practices; they penetrate us materially, aesthetically and cognitively.

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Notes 1

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains (New York-London: Norton & Company Ltd., 2010). 2 According to rhetoric, "the 'digressio'" is "an optional component of the speech … especially of the 'narratio'." Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: a Foundation for Literary Study (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 158. From a narratological perspective, as it will appear in the present article, digressions introduce some loose material, thus interrupting the narrative thread and producing fragmentation. 3 Examples drawn from Book 1 of A. T. Murray’s translation of the Odyssey. 4 For the composition of the oral epic, suffice it to mention here the classic work by Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960) and John Miles Foley’s important book How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). For a competent overview of the very intricate question of the transcription of the epic from its oral form to the written text, which can certainly not be addressed here, see John Miles Foley, “Textualization as Mediation. The Case of Traditional Oral Epic,” in Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, Raimonda Modiano, Leroy Searle and Peter Shillingsburg eds. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 101– 20. It should also be recalled that Jack Goody notes the atypical character of the structure of the Odyssey, which he described as very different from the “looser constructions of oral poetry” (The Interface between the Written and the Oral, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 99). For a discussion of the ancient epic from the standpoint of narrative structure, see my book L’invenzione del romanzo. Dall’oralità alla lettura silenziosa (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2010), 65– 84. 5 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (LondonNew York: Methuen, 1982), 165, which refers in any case to Berkeley Peabody, The Winged Word. A Study in the Technique of Ancient Greek Oral Composition as Seen Principally through Hesiod’s Works and Days (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), 235, 457–64. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, 109. 6 For the episodes in Beowulf, see “Episodes and Digressions,” in A Beowulf Handbook, Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles eds. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), which shows how the theme of the voyage is adapted to relate the burial of a hero at sea. 7 For the additive style and parataxis, see Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, 54–55 and 65, and John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, 106. 8 For a general overview about the oratorical discourse in ancient Greece see David M. Timmermann and Edward Schiappa, Greek Rhetorical Theory and the Disciplining of Discourse, 143 ff. For digressions in the oratory of that period, see Sabry Randa, Strategies Discursives: Digression, Transition, Suspens (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes études en sciences sociales, 1992), Chapter I; and Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique. Aide-mémoire,” Communications 16 (1970): 190–91.

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Quintilian, Institutes of oratory (Intitutio oratoria), transl. John Selby Watson (London: George Bell, 1891), IV, 3, 12–14. 10 Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique. Aide-mémoire,” 205. 11 For a general overview, see Il romanzo antico. Forme, testi, problemi, Luca Graverini, Wytse Keulen, Alessandro Barchiesi eds. (Roma: Carocci, 2006), which also provides a useful bibliography including studies such as those by Erwin Rohde, B. E. Perry, Bruno Lavagnini and Thomas Hägg. I should also like to draw attention to Consuelo Ruiz-Montero’s masterly study “The Rise of the Greek Novel,” in The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Gareth Schmaling (Leiden-New York, and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1996), 29–85. 12 Shadi Bartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel. The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). This book also provides a useful and precise presentation of the themes of digressions of the two authors. In speaking of the reader, however, it assumes that people read then as they do now, i.e. quickly and in silence from a readily manageable text like the modern printed book. 13 Digressions in this text are examined analytically by Helen Morales in the chapter entitled “Description, Digression and Form” of her Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 14 Hans Gärtner, “Charikleia in Byzanz, ” Antike und Abenland 15 (1969): 42–69. As regards the possible readers of these works and their number, see the excellent study by Ewen L. Bowie, “The Ancient Readers of the Greek Novels,” in The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Gareth Schmaling, 87–106. See also the monographic issue of Ancient Narrative entitled Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel, Michael Paschalis, Stelios Panayotakis, Gareth Schmeling eds., supplement 12 (2009). For Heliodorus and the Aethiopica, see Gerald N. Sandy, Heliodorus (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), and John R. Morgan, “Heliodorus,” in The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Gareth Schmaling, 417–56. 15 Jack Winkler, “The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodorus,” Yale Classical Studies 27 (1982): 93–158. 16 It is no coincidence that in ancient Greece the reader was regarded as an actor, the same word ȣʌȠțȡȚIJİı being used for both, while language was understood as a flow (ijȠȞȒ) rather than something stable and visually organised in space. See Gioia M. Rispoli, Dal suono all’immagine. Poetiche della voce ed estetica dell’eufonia (Pisa-Roma: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1995), Chapters V and VII, and Maria Luisa Catoni, La comunicazione non verbale nella Grecia antica (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). 17 Massimo Fusillo, “Letteratura di consumo e romanzesca,” in Lo spazio letterario della Grecia antica, vol. I, La produzione e circolazione del testo, Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora, Diego Lanza eds. (Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1994), 233–73. For psychological characterisation in texts produced for oral utilisation, see the overview in Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Chapter II.

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18 David R. Olson, The Word on Paper. The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 111. 19 The Æthiopica: “Heliodorus. An Aethiopian Romance,” translated by Thomas Underdowne (1587), revised and partly rewritten by F. A. Wright (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd., New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1958). 20 Here is Albert Lord’s comment at the end of this passage: “This is the arming of the hero before he sets forth to do mighty deeds, sung by a Jugoslavian singer in the thirties. From Salih Ugljanin’s song of the rescue of Mustajbey by Hasan of Ribnik (I, No. 18, p. 180); the hero being prepared is Osek Osmanbey.” Lord, The Singer of Tales, 87. 21 As I have shown, albeit with little specific reference to digressions, in L’invenzione del romanzo. 22 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 101. See also William W. E. Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 23 Translated from the Italian version of Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose: Viktor Sklovskij, “La letteratura estranea all’intreccio,” in Teoria della prosa (Torino: Einaudi, 1976), 276. 24 Gérard Milhe Poutingon, Poétique du digressif. La digression dans la littérature de la Renaissance (Paris: Garnier, 2012), which examines the material in both linguistic and thematic terms. Great importance for our thesis is attached to Y. Delègue, “La digression ou l’oralité dans l’écriture,” in Logique et littérature à la Renaissance, Marie-Luce Demonet-Launay, André Tournon eds. (Paris: édtions Honoré Champion, 1994), 155–64, where digressions are identified as the places of the presence of the oral word on the basis of close analysis of Erasmus’s De duplici copia verborum ac rerum and Montaigne’s Essais. 25 “to follow the actions of many rather than one alone, because this seems to me more suitable for composition in the form of romance. This diversity of actions brings with it variety, which adds spice to pleasure, and the writer is given much space for episodes or pleasing digressions” (my translation). Reference is made here to a later edition: Discorso di M. Giovambattista Giraldi Cinthio nobile Ferrarese, et Segretario dell’Eccellentiss. Duca di Ferrara, intono al Comporre Romanzi, A. M. Giovambattista Pigna, con Molte Considerazioni, MDLIIII, 25. 26 “interrupt continuity and impair the story,” 54. 27 “The poet must take great care in these digressions to handle them in such a way that they depend on one another, are well connected with the parts of the material presented with a continuous thread and concatenation, and lend verisimilitude,” ibid. 28 Further examples are to be found in L’invenzione del romanzo, 106–17. 29 Traité du poème épique par P. R. Le Bossu, Chanoine Régulier de Sainte Geneviève, a Paris, Chez Michel le Petit ruë S. Jacques, à la Toison d’or, 1674, 134.

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Sentimens sur les Lettres et sur l’Histoire, avec des scrupules sur le stile, a Paris, chez C. Blageart MDCLIII, 1683, 4. 31 Giuseppe Sertoli discusses the appeal of reading, its silent nature being taken for granted, with great acumen in an excellent paper entitled “La seduzione della letteratura,” in Letteratura e Seduzione & Discourse Analysis, atti del VI Congresso Nazionale dell’Associazione Italiana di Anglistica (Pavia 22–24 October, 1983), Tomaso Kemeny, Lia Guerra, Antony Baldry eds. (Fasano: Schena Editore, 1984), 25–42. 32 As defined and described in my L’invenzione del romanzo, Chapters IV and V. 33 297, 5 January 1712. Joseph Addison, Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator of Steele and Addison, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 427. 34 The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1975), 115 and 183 respectively. 35 Clarissa, “Hints,” cit. in Joseph Bartolomeo, A New Species of Criticism: Eighteenth-Century Discourse on the Novel (London-Toronto: University of Delaware Press-Associated University Presses, 1994), 56. 36 The most conspicuous digressions are the adventures of Mrs Heartfree in Jonathan Wild, Leonora and Mr Wilson in Joseph Andrews, and Mrs Fitzpatrick and the Man of the Hill in Tom Jones. 37 Rambler 122 (1751). Samuel Johnson, Prose and Poetry, ed. Mona Wilson (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970), 230. 38 See Helen Whitcomb Randall, The Critical Theory of Lord Kames (Northampton, Mass.: Department of Modern Languages of Smith College, 1944). 39 Henry Home Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1762 (Hildershei-New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), 381. 40 Ibid., 384. 41 For a precise formal description and a discussion of the philosophical aspects, readers are again referred to L’invenzione del romanzo, Chapters IV and V. 42 Lia Guerra, “The Practice of Description: Araby and The Boarding House,” in her Interpreting James Joyce’s Dubliners. An Experiment in Methods (Udine: Campanotto, 1992); Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol.I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 364. Moretti uses the term “riempitivi” (fillers). 43 Riccardo Capoferro, Empirical Wonder: Historicizing the Fantastic, 1660–1760 (Bern-Berlin-etc.: Peter Lang, 2010) has clearly shown the gradual introduction of circumstantial and empirical language into British narrative. 44 In eighteenth-century Britain, both grammar and rhetoric (now of written discourse) condemned digressions and episodes, which they indicated as linguistic characteristics of orality to be found amongst ignorant peoples. See Carey McIntosh, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 45 Translated from the Italian version of Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose: Viktor Sklovskij, “Il romanzo parodistico. Tristram Shandy di Sterne,” in Teoria della prosa, 223.

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See my “‘Digressions are the sunshine of reading’: varietà e unità nel Tristram Shandy,” in Letteratura e Seduzione & Discourse Analysis, 75–82 (now also on Paola Carboni’s website www.tristramshandyweb.it). 47 For Sterne in Italy, see the bibliography in Olivia Santovetti, Digression. A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (Oxford-Bern-etc.: Peter Lang, 2009), 14, n. 2; and Daniela Mangione, “Fielding and Sterne: Reception, New Debts and Echoes in the Italian Novel of the first Hundred Years,” in Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century. Literary and Art Theories, Rosamaria Loretelli, Frank O’Gorman eds. (Newcastle upon Thyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 194–204. Santovetti’s book addresses the digressions in Manzoni, Dossi, Pirandello, Gadda and Calvino. 48 Effetto Sterne. La narrazione umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello, ed. Giancarlo Mazzacurati (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1990); Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Il fantasma di Yorick. Laurence Sterne e il romanzo sentimentale (Napoli: Liguori, 2006), a collection of essays edited by Matteo Palumbo and published over a decade after the author’s death. On Nievo in Il fantasma di Yorick, see “Nievo dall’epistolario all’Antiafrodisiaco: la catastrofe dell’amore romantico” and “Segnali e tracce di Sterne nell’opera di Ippolito Nievo. Nievo e il ‘sentimental humour’.” 49 Ugo Olivieri, Narrare avanti il reale. Le confessioni di un italiano e la forma romanzo nell’Ottocento (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1990); Idem, L’idillio interrotto. Forma romanzo e generi intercalari in Ippolito Nievo (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2002), with an appendix including articles from the mid-nineteenth century that show Sterne’s marked influence on their authors, including Nievo. 50 Whose library included a French translation of Tristram Shandy (Bastien, 1803). See Giovanni Macchia, Tra don Giovanni e don Rodrigo: scenari secenteschi (Milano, Adelphi, 1989), 41. 51 I have drawn initially on the splendid work of Francesco De Cristofaro, Manzoni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), who also focuses on the suppression of digressive intervals (69–110). 52 The transition examined is from the Fermo e Lucia of 1823 to the 1827 edition of I promessi sposi: Lanfranco Caretti, “Romanzo di un romanzo,” Introduction to Alessandro Manzoni, Fermo e Lucia (Torino: Einaudi, 1971), ix–xxvii, xv. 53 Ezio Raimondi, Il romanzo senza idillio (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), 131. The works pointing out this experimental character include the following: Giorgo Petrocchi, Manzoni. Letteratura e vita (Milano: Rizzoli, 1971), 125–39; Angelo Marchese, Guida alla lettura di Manzoni (Milano: Mondadori, 1987), 107; Daniela Delcorno Branca, Strutture narrative e scansione in capitoli tra Fermo e Lucia e I promessi sposi, Lettere italiane 32, 3 (1980): 314–50; Sergio Romagnoli, Manzoni e i suoi colleghi (Firenze: Sansoni, 1984), 29; Luca Toschi, La sala rossa: biografia dei promessi sposi (Torino: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1989). Santovetti (Digression, 39) informs us of a symposium devoted to Fermo e Lucia in 1984 at which the discussion focused on the digressions. 54 “The reader is forewarned. I transcribe a story as it happened and real events do not comply with the artificial norms laid down by invention but proceed on very

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different rules without bothering to satisfy people of good taste. If it were possible to impose the course desired by poetics upon them, the world would perhaps become a more pleasant place, but this is something we cannot hope for. Through this disorderly and material progression of events, it so happened that Fermo Spolino …” (my translation). Olivia Santovetti, Digression, 36. 55 Ibid. 56 Giovanni Macchia, “Nascita e morte della digressione. Da Fermo e Lucia alla Storia della colonna infame,” in Giovanni Macchia, Tra don Giovanni e don Rodrigo, 31. 57 “The impression of verisimilitude must not be born in them [the spectators] through the relations of the action with its actual way of being but through the relations that the different parts of the action have with one another” (my translation). Alessandro Manzoni, Scritti di teoria letteraria, ed. Adelaide Sozzi Casanova (Milano: Rizzoli, 1981), 42. 58 “If this unity of action is to exist in drama it is necessary—you say—for the attitudes and intentions of every character to have been defined right from the first act … Where is the reason for this necessity? If the spectators are to take an interest in the action, it is certainly necessary for them to know the attitudes of those involved in it, but must this happen in the first act? As long as the action makes the characters known in its unfolding as they are naturally introduced, there will be interest, continuity and development. Why should there not be unity too?” (my translation). Ibid., 66. 59 “In all the novels I have read, there appears to be an effort to establish interesting and unexpected relations between the various characters, to present them together on the stage, to find events that affect the destinies of all of them at the same time and in different ways, and ultimately to find an artificial unity that does not manifest itself in real life” (my translation). Ibid., 304. 60 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section III. The part of this section in which the expression appears was eliminated from the edition of 1777, the last published while Hume was still alive. See the critical edition with variants: David Hume, The Philosophical Works, Thomas Hill Green, Thomas Hodge Grose eds. (Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964), vol. IV, 19. 61 Alessandro Manzoni, Scritti di teoria letteraria, 174. 62 For this backwardness and its causes within the perspective of interest here, see Daniela Mangione, Prima di Manzoni. Autore e lettore nel romanzo del Settecento (Roma: Salerno editrice, 2012), and the following works by Marina Roggero: L’alfabeto conquistato. Apprendere e insegnare nell’Italia tra Sette e Ottocento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999) for impediments to the spread of the reading of books in Italian; and Le carte piene di sogni. Testi e lettori in età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006) for the widespread practice of reading aloud in Italy, also at a late date. Adriano Prosperi points out in “Censurare le favole. Il protoromanzo e l’Europa cattolica” (in La cultura del romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti, Torino: Einaudi, 2001, 71–106) that the Index of 1554 banned not only all the works of Erasmus but also the Facezie of Poggio Bracciolini, and the Index of 1558 launched the fiercest attack on the world of books. For a contribution of great

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cultural richness on what happened in the world of books, see Libri di lettere. Le raccolte epistolari del Cinquecento tra inquietudini religiose e “buon volgare” (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2009), where Lodovica Braida traces the publishing history of various Italian collections of letters and points out the gradual decrease in free inventio (precisely where ideas derived from Erasmus or Protestantism are expressed), both through the reduction or elimination of the letters of suspect authors and through the hardening of forms of discourse into the controlled modalities of dissimulation all the way to the total closure after 1549, the year when Cardinal Pole failed to secure the papacy by just one vote. 63 “This fatal digression has come to throw itself into the story at the most critical moment, at the end of a volume, where arrival at a station offers the reader a great temptation and pretext to go no further” (my translation). See Corrado Bologna, “Il filo della storia. ‘Tessitura’ della trama e ‘ritmica’ del tempo narrativo fra Manzoni e Gadda,” Critica del testo 1, 1 (1998): 369. Let us recall by the way that Fielding’s Tom Jones is full of metaphorical references to reading as a journey. For weaving as a narrative metaphor in the English novel, readers are referred to my essay “Middlemarch, Santa Teresa e la tela del ragno,” in Middlemarch: il romanzo, Anita Weston, John McRae eds. (Napoli: Loffredo, 1987), 129–39. 64 Daniela Mangione, Prima di Manzoni, III, 7.

LETTERS FROM LONDON: A “BRIDGE” BETWEEN ITALY AND EUROPE LIDIA DE MICHELIS UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO

In a letter to his brother Alessandro, while heading for Paris and London with Cesare Beccaria in the autumn of 1766, Pietro Verri famously suggested that their journey would help, in Gianmarco Gaspari’s words, to build “a bridge” between Milan and Europe.1 The bridge metaphor conveys the full import of the cosmopolitan drive underpinning the debates and works of the former Caffettisti—the founders and contributors of the Milanese journal Il Caffè (1764-1766)2—and their awareness of being agents for modernization and reform within the Lombard intellectual milieu. At the same time, this image conveys their clear perception of being somewhat marginal, on political, social and geographical grounds, to the mainstream network of the European Lumières, and highlights their determination to acquire full and active membership in the international community of learning. This double-edged relationship is nowhere more explicit than in Beccaria’s answer to André Morellet’s first letter to him (January 3, 1766). Introducing his own translation of Le Traité des délits et des peines, the French intellectual maintained that men of letters were “cosmopolites et de toutes les nations,”3 and invited Beccaria to come to Paris with Pietro Verri as guests of Baron d’Holbach, in order to reap “les remercimens et les marques d’estime que vous avés méritées”, and establish a “commerce d’idées et de sentimens qui sera avantageux à vous et à nous”.4 As is known, not only did Beccaria gracefully praise Morellet’s unsolicited reshuffling of his text in a way more agreeable to the French genius5; he also attempted to consolidate the exceptionalism of the côterie of young Milanese intellectuals who were thriving on the experience of the Accademia dei Pugni and Il Caffè, and portrayed the mainstream social and political culture of his native community as sadly conservative and marginal (“Les milanois ne pardonnent pas à ceux qui voudroient les faire vivre dans le 18e siècle”).6 Lamenting that, “Dans une capitale peuplée de

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120 mille habitans, à peine y a-t-il vingt personnes qui aiment à s’instruire, et qui sacrifient à la vérité et à la vertu”,7 he ended his letter with a felicitous stroke of linguistic and metaphorical code-switching: “Pensate, o signore, che i filosofi francesi hanno in questa America una colonia di veri discepoli, perché lo siamo della ragione”.8 The “colony” metaphor was readily appropriated by Morellet in his answer of July 17–30, 1766: “Oh! la bonne colonie que nous avons là, ce sont vos termes que j’emploie; la metropole auroit bien lieu d’en être jalouse”.9 In this way, he was concurring to enforce the “program to supplant Italy as cultural star” which, according to Clorinda Donato, “was cunningly and effectively carried out through the pen and social persona of Voltaire in the early decades of the 18th century.”10 Against this backdrop, and despite the Milanese côterie’s fertile correspondence and engagement with the philosophes, Pietro Verri’s piqued reaction to Morellet’s patronizing neglect of his work in a letter to Alessandro of January 25, 1767 is not surprising. A certain impatience is also apparent in Alessandro’s description of Morellet as “l’Agente generale di tutte le cose nostre” (October 25, 1766),11 thriving on privileged access to Cesare Beccaria, his Milanese “celebrity guest.” Distrust of the cultural-hegemonic agenda of the French Enlightenment could also account—in part, at least, against more divisive cultural, aesthetic, ideological and religious rifts—for the fiery anti-French positions articulated by other Italian artists of the epistolary genre living in England at that time. Among them were the old Tuscan man of letters Vincenzo Martinelli (who attacked Montesquieu and Voltaire, only to be famously flailed by the latter in his “Lettre XII. Sur le Dante, et sur un pauvre homme nommé Martinelli”),12 and, to much greater impact and resonance, Giuseppe Baretti. Baretti’s sulphurous invectives against the Italian adepts of the Encyclopédie and the “anglofili a distanza”13 have commanded exhaustive critical attention,14 and his works are discussed extensively in another essay of this volume. It suffices here to mention Gianni Francioni’s compelling analysis of the Turinese’s war on the Caffettisti in issue XXI of La Frusta Letteraria, where Pietro Verri is dismissed as one of those “politicastri infranciosati” who: dopo d’aver letti di volo trenta o quaranta autori franzesi parte buoni e parte cattivi, si sono ficcata questa matta opinione nel capo d’essere tanto filosofi quanto Locke, Arbuthnot o D’Alembert, ed atti per conseguenza a maneggiare le scienze più astruse, come si maneggia una scatola di tabacco.15

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Letters from London: A “Bridge” between Italy and Europe

Matteo Ubezio, too, has highlighted the extent to which, despite his unparalleled role as a “London correspondent” and paradigm Anglo-Italian “intercultural mediator,”16 Baretti was committed to an agenda which entailed a notion of “essential alterity between the Italian and the English world” and ruled out the very possibility of a “via Inglese” to the civic reformation and collective happiness of the Italian nation.17 I shall draw, instead, on the rich crop of academic scholarship on the Lombard Enlightenment which, building on the ground-breaking work of Franco Venturi, has marked the last thirty years or so. I am referring, in particular, to the National Editions of the Works of Cesare Beccaria, edited by Luigi Firpo and Gianni Francioni, and the Collected Works of Pietro Verri, edited by Carlo Capra. Together, these substantial critical editions and their scholarly fall out (which include the current proliferation of new translations of seminal primary texts)18 have contributed significantly to shed light on the intense statecraft and reformist activity undertaken by the Milanese governing bodies and cultural elites in the late eighteenth century. They provide crucial evidence, as well, of Cesare Beccaria’s and Pietro Verri’s essential roles in this new progressive milieu, where—in fertile dialogue with the French and English Enlightenments—political administration, economic theory and cosmopolitan civic concerns were becoming increasingly consequential in networking Milan with Europe. Against this backdrop, the correspondence of Alessandro and Pietro Verri in Viaggio a Parigi e Londra 1766–1767, edited by Gianmarco Gaspari in 1980 and translated into French with a “Preface” by Michel Delon in 2004,19 stands out for its protagonists’ avowed awareness of representing the self-appointed “spearhead”20 of the Italian “margins” of the Enlightenment, and their conscious bid for cultural recognition and appraisal of their original brand of applied philosophy by the European “centre.” Their epistolary commerce also highlights, as Matteo Ubezio has noted, a generational revolt against “inadequate” biological, political and cultural fathers and the search for new, inspiring guidance from the French philosophes and England’s “freschissimo mito di civiltà.”21 In line with the bifocal, intercultural perspective of this volume, I shall try to address the discursive tension, in Alessandro Verri’s letters from Paris and London, between the attraction of London’s cosmopolitan “centre” (itself a sign of the inspirational status of English culture during the Enlightenment) and the gravitational pull represented by the “marginal” and somewhat oppressive home milieu that the Milanese group of friends were determined to reform. This ambivalence is embodied, on the one hand, in the textual haunting of the two brothers’ correspondence by Beccaria’s ghostly presence as a recursive topic, long after his shocking

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decision to interrupt the journey and return to Milan, abandoning his fellow traveller after only five weeks instead of the scheduled six months. On the other hand, this tension is at the core of Alessandro’s narrative agenda of comparative analysis and cultural mediation, and is further complicated by the changing perceptions of, and affective attachment to, Milanese culture on the part of the two brothers at different moments in history and across differing literary genres. Interestingly, this dual perspective is articulated through networks of triangular patterns and relationships. They include, among others, the three great cities spacing out the journey (Milan, Paris and London), the epistolary and temperamental triangulations among Alessandro Verri, Pietro Verri and Beccaria, and, most importantly, the interference of French cultural and linguistic hegemony on the formation of Italian imaginaries of London and the English way of life.22 For all his intention, announced in a letter to his father of November 12, 1766, “to look at things rather than people in London,”23 Alessandro Verri did not look at London—just as he had not looked at Paris—through a wholly unprejudiced moral and aesthetic gaze. This is apparent even from his first, often quoted description of his arrival in the English metropolis in a letter to Pietro of December 9, 1766: Quanto io già non vi dovrei parlare di Londra! Figuratevi che Parigi mi è infinitamente decaduto nella immaginazione. Qui tutto è in grande, in Parigi tutto è gentile. Se Parigi è grande, Londra è immensa. Io non ne ho veduta fin ora che una piccola porzione, ma ne giudico da questo solo fatto, ed è che questa città è illuminata di notte sei miglia all’intorno. Arrivando ieri notte, quando vidi delle contrade ben illuminate dissi “eccoci in Londra”. Un compagno che aveva con me si pose a ridere e mi diede la nuova che v’erano ancora sei miglia. Ciò m’ha veramente sorpreso. Ma è così. I Soborghi di questa città cominciano a sei miglia dal suo centro (December 9, 1766).24

Alessandro’s first encounter with London is so charged with positive anticipation that its account defies the sensorial experience of arrival. His narrative is characterised by a failure to take in the actual measure of the city, whose material boundaries and thresholds are made to disappear under an “excess” of street lighting, and are eventually apprehended by means of conversation with a fellow traveller. Alessandro’s deceptively candid gaze inscribes London metaphorically within the imaginative repertoire of Italian “anglomania”25 as the new and more powerful capital of European Enlightenment—the advanced workshop of philosophy, modernity and progress, on the verge of eclipsing the myth of Paris. This

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paradigm becomes more and more evident in the unfurling of his letters, even though Alessandro’s determination to infiltrate and map out a model society sometimes gives way to optimistic hyperbole, as in his comment— soon to be dramatically contradicted by Godwin’s Caleb Williams—that the English seldom resist arrest “perché la prigione non è un luogo orribile, e perché anche in prigione son cittadini che altro non temono che le leggi.”26 It is worth noting, however, that in his letters the subject of street lighting soon becomes a matter of empirical observation and utilitarian appraisal, as his practical mind, bent on improvement, quickly triangulates between London and Paris in order to sadly reflect on the backwardness of Milan: Essa è poi illuminata come non v’è n’è altra in Europa. Vi sono lampade d’ambe le parti, e lampade ben fatte, come lo sono tutte le cose che servono agli usi della vita qui in Londra. Parigi è male illuminato, perché lo è colle candele di sego. A proposito d’illuminazione: quando codesti buoni Milanesi vorranno poi, colla solita loro flemmatica prudenza, pensare a porre delle lampade di notte per tutta la Città, come veramente sarebbe opportuno, potrò citare per esempio Torino, Lione, Parigi, Lilla, Dunkerke e Londra, ch’io stesso ho vedute co’ miei occhi illuminate di notte (December 9, 1767).27

Verri’s account of his own arrival is strikingly at odds with Baretti’s well-known descriptions of the many rundown areas of the city and even with the latter’s famous bird’s-eye view portrait of London in La Frusta Letteraria, seething with topographical strokes and factual details: Londra dunque, a misurarla colla vista, come ho fatto dalla vetta di san Paolo, suo principal tempio, mi pare quattro, e anche cinque volte più grande del vostro Milano. Ella è divisa in due parti dal Tamigi, e queste due parti sono riunite da due gran ponti, uno chiamato il ponte vecchio, l’altro il ponte nuovo. La parte che è alla destra del fiume non é che una striscia di case lunga forse dieci miglia, e fa figura di borgo, che da sito a sito va mutando nome.28

Climbing to the top of St Paul’s in order to take a view from above is a canonical representational strategy in eighteenth-century travel writing on London, a discursive practice which establishes the narrator’s authority as an all-seeing, reliable witness. At the same times it provides a rational, almost cartographic technology for imposing order on the semiotic instability of a city which—often referred to as a paradigm of prodigious urban change and growth—must appear to newcomers to be indecipherable

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and disorienting.29 By contrast, Alessandro’s choice to postpone the account of his own climb by a whole month after the moment of arrival is quite telling as to his innovative approach to representing London. “L’uno di questi giorni sono stato in cima della cupola di S.t Paolo, da dove si vede tutta Londra,” he writes to Pietro on January 8, 1767, only to disappoint the reader by effacing the anticipated view behind a smoke screen of pollution and urban fumes: “cioè, quanto ne lascia vedere il fumo. Non è mai possibile di vederla tutta.”30 Particularly interesting, by contrast, is Verri’s street level alertness to, and fascination with, the commercial “beauty” of London, its economic opulence, which is always seen as coterminous with a national genius for industry and the reward for a progressive way of life, where individual enterprise is unrestricted and wealth does not coincide with affectation and luxury: io ti dirò che basta fare un passeggio in Londra per aver voglia da spendere un milliaia di Luigi: tante sono le bellissime e ricchissime botteghe dappertutto risplendenti e fornite d’infinite bigioterie e mercanzie d’ogni genere.31

Neither is his admiration merely aesthetic; he eagerly collects English artefacts and sumptuary goods with a view to selling them back in Milan and, in repeated exchanges with Pietro, imagines rich returns (“Io sono pazzo, al mio solito, col mio commercio. Andando per Londra, non osservo che le botteghe, cosicché non ho niente imparato le strade, né so fare da me due passi”).32 In contrast with Baretti’s famous rebuke of the superficiality of English travellers going on the Grand Tour in An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768)—“They travel to see things and not Men”33— Alessandro Verri’s engagement with “things” is in line with his announcement to his father in the above mentioned letter of November 12, 1766, and his intention to “dir tutto”34 disclosed in a letter to Pietro of October 27, 1766. Alessandro’s enthusiastic yet soundly empirical approach to material culture as a means to grasp and domesticate an alien social reality almost gives rise, in his letters, to a new technology of seeing, characterized by “purpose.” Inspired by his enlightened frame of references and civic agenda, he portrays the customs, institutions and “things” of these more advanced societies with a constant view to opening up a viable path to progress and improvement for his own “peripheral” native community. In Paris, and particularly in London, Alessandro casts himself, in Gaspari’s words, as a perceptive observer and “descrittore minuzioso e curiosissimo della realtà sociale che vedeva tradotta in

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pratica nelle consuetudini alimentari, nella struttura delle case, nella libertà dei costume.”35 In this way, he redirects his fascination with novelty into terse and ingenious descriptions of what, in current critical lexicon, would be termed “a whole way of life.”36 This attitude can be noticed, to mention but a few examples, in Alessandro’s comments about the English meat diet and its effects on everyday social practices (December 15, 1766); or in a letter of December 9, 1766 in which English furniture is praised no less for its material characteristics of solidity and comfort than as evidence of the celebrated “common sense” of the English (“Amico, se hai da spendere danari a mobigliare l’appartamento, io ti consiglierei di farlo all’inglese. Il buon senso è impresso su tutti i mobili inglesi. Sono prodigiosamente semplici, comodi e modesti”).37 Alessandro’s approach is consistent not only with “the opposition cose/parole” that Lia Guerra has highlighted as a fundamental script in Il Caffé, and a crucial evidence of the influence of The Spectator model on the Milanese journal.38 It can be associated, also, with the burgeoning discourse of public economy which, at around the same time, was being articulated by Antonio Genovesi, Cesare Beccaria and the école de Milan, and that Philippe Audegean has recently defined “leçon de choses” (“elle n’est pas un savoir fondé sur l’interprétation des textes, mais sur la connaissance des ‘choses’, des faits, et de leurs régularités”).39 This spectatorial attitude is enhanced in London, Alessandro repeatedly recounts, by the extraordinary comfort and good maintenance of pedestrians’ sidewalks which encourage people to stroll rather than commit themselves to bumpy street pavements: A proposito di marciapiedi, io dirò che vedo veramente che chi comanda in Londra sono piuttosto quegli che vanno a piedi che quegli che vanno in carrozza, perché si è benissimo pensato a caminar bene a piedi, e niente a chi va in carrozza (January 1, 1767).40

“La mattina”, he writes, “gran passeggiate, vedere le cose del paese, qualche visita, qualche piccola spesa” (December 25, 1766).41 And again, to his father: “Le strade sono larghe, dritte la maggior parte e fiancheggiate da due marciapiedi di vivo sasso molto comodi. Quando fa asciutto, è come passeggiare in camera” (December 19, 1766).42 Drawing on Miles Ogborn, Göran Rydén has noted how street paving can be understood “as a sign of creating a public space and the making of a modern metropolis,” and could be seen by eighteenth-century Londoners as “a way of making this new modern urban world with their feet.”43 Alessandro’s letters set off his superb skills at sparkling, clear-sighted description and highlight his enhanced responsiveness to the way social

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reality is reflected in the spatial organization of the city and in the commerce and customs of its inhabitants. Nonetheless his London, in the wake of Voltaire’s, is characterized from the beginning as a seat of liberty and free thought, to the extent that the young Count wishes he could take all the Caffettisti there44: In somma l’Inglese ha idee e sentimento chiaro della giustizia, nato da ciò: che in quest’isola tutto possono le fredde e ceche leggi, e nulla l’uomo; questo sentimento di giustizia, comune ad ogni Inglese, produce quest’effetto, che non si soffra un delitto od una soperchieria, ma che tosto ogni cittadino si presti per vendicarlo od impedirlo (December 15, 1766).45

This sense of liberty is not derived only from the freedom from human arbitrariness and error which is granted by the supremacy of the law (this last point is famously refuted in many pages by Baretti where judicial injustices and the devastating conditions of the London poor are forcefully rendered).46 As Pietro Verri perceptively suggests on January 8, 1767, it is a consequence, also, of Alessandro’s newly acquired independence after Beccaria’s shameful retreat and hurried return to Milan: L’entusiasmo con cui mi scrivi a favore del soggiorno a Londra, non posso io attribuirlo in parte all’assenza di Beccaria? non posso io pure attribuirlo alla libertà con cui esisti da te, pianeta qualunque e non più satellite eclissato da un tuo eguale pei suffragi di una Società non mai tranquilla, ma appassionata e capricciosa in ogni sua lode o biasimo? 47

Pietro Verri’s profound embedding in French culture, and his somewhat wary attitude towards the “ferocity” of the English, provide a recurring counterpoint to Alessandro’s sweeping love of London (“Io son troppo Inglese per amar Parigi!”)48: Quel fior d’urbanità e di dolcezza nel commercio, ch’io ho veduto quasi universale ai Francesi, non l’ho ritrovato in nessun Inglese. […] tu potrai liberarmi da un errore, se tale è la mia opinione sul fondo di ferocia che sin ora ho creduto essere la base degl’inospitali Britanni (January 8, 1767).49

Alessandro’s defence of the London people resonates with his impatience for the much flaunted politesse of the Parisians, which, as an onlooker—or, quite aptly, a satellite—in Beccaria’s shadow, he has come to resent at times as a veneer for shallowness, and an excess of conviviality.50 The frank “brutality” of the Londoners is derived instead from their attachment to justice and individual freedom: “Egli non fa tanti

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complimenti come i Francesi, ma non sa ingannare il forastiero, com’essi fanno superlativamente; egli non è così urbano, ma è più giusto: egli dà de’ pugni, il francese ammazza” (February 2, 1767).51 While Alessandro’s letters can be traced back, as a whole, to the mainstream tradition of Enlightenment travel accounts, one of the most intriguing aspects in the Viaggio a Parigi e Londra is its multi-focused construction of the traveller’s gaze, encompassing at once London, Paris and Milan and staging a constant interplay of absence and presence. This correspondence, as Irène Passeron has suggested, forms not only “un roman épistolaire à trois voix”—including Beccaria’s spectral one—but, more interestingly, it creates “une relation de voyage avec répondant”52 that opens up multiple perspectives on the already dialogical structure of Alessandro Verri’s letters. In this way, the comparative reflections of the two brothers on the French and the English, which most often unfurl to the disadvantage of the Milanese,53 take on the vernacular and engaging familiarity of a conversation, and reveal a mutual effort to shore up the progressive agenda of intercultural mediation put at risk by Beccaria’s “betrayal.” This betrayal, pertaining primarily to the ethical and societal spheres, is seen at the same time as an attack on the anticipations and conventions of Enlightenment travel, for not only does Beccaria’s at the very least “whimsical” behaviour subvert the usual “older-mentor/younger disciple” pattern of the Grand Tour. His refusal to co-author a joint travel journal peremptorily undermines Alessandro’s intended tale of a rewarding cultural embassy and harmonious brotherhood of learning even at the level of narrative praxis: “Beccaria ha cominciato a disgustarmi col volere far a parte il suo giornale e quasi farmene un mistero: io avea progettato di farlo insieme. Ho veduto ch’egli era geloso” (October 19, 1766).54 A notion of collective authorship also underpins Pietro’s investment on his brother’s correspondence. When Alessandro announces he will record his journey through letters instead of keeping a journal, Pietro reassures him that their correspondence (“il nostro commercio”) is being copied out and archived for deferred amusement and revision, so as to enable Alessandro to perform his duty as an enlightened cultural mediator and “regalare all’Italia un libretto delizioso, istruttivo e interessante per ogni verso” (February 14, 1767).55 This project was later to be rejected by Alessandro, who refused to add his voice to the plethora of more or less repetitive published travel accounts circulating at the time, and insisted on the private, introspective nature of an exchange which he preferred to regard as a “documento perpetuo della nostra amicizia.”56 Nonetheless, his stylistic choice to

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convey his impressions through “informal” letters, although by no means naïve ones, has a significant impact not only on the narrative structure of Alessandro’s travel account, which on the ground of erratic mail delivery can therefore transcend the straitjacket of mere chronological ordering and resume or revise topics and qualify opinions at will. It also affects the development of the Italian epistolary genre as a whole. By concocting a form which is flexible and spontaneous, elitist but not figé, dialogic and intimate, Alessandro’s “voice” is uniquely suited to accommodate new meanings and perspectives within a seamless texturing of reason and narrative gusto, information and comment. At the same time, his account helps to project the idea of a viable progressive future by establishing a discursive web of cosmopolitan relations. In the process, as Michel Delon has suggested, the Viaggio a Parigi e Londra stands out as an unparalleled repository for a much wanted “history of male sensibility.”57 Discussing the details of the almost pathological unease (“la mia incurabile malattia, come per compiacenza per voi altri voglio chiamarla”)58 which prevented Beccaria from completing his journey and fulfilling his public relations agenda, and the increasing tensions between the two travellers which eventually led to certify the breakup of the Caffettisti’s intellectual alliance, is beyond the scope of my analysis. This issue, which has long exercised scholars of Beccaria and the Verris, has been explored in terms not only of temperamental dissonance, but also of a latent philosophical rift by Bartolo Anglani in Il dissotto delle carte. Sociabilità, sentimenti e politica tra i Verri e Beccaria (2004).59 Gianni Francioni, too, has provided an insightful analysis of Beccaria’s and Verri’s difficult cohabitation in Paris, its impact on Pietro Verri and its resonance among the philosophes in his recent essay “A Parigi! A Parigi! Gli illuministi milanesi e la Francia” (2010). Transformed into an emblem of the “melancholic traveller,”60 Beccaria found himself unable to bear the psychological cost of celebrity and the separation from his family. Problematizing and relativizing the very meaning of “margin” and “centre,” and in a style which was conspicuously at odds with contemporary ideals of the philosophe and eighteenth-century generic conventions of epistolary travel writing, within days of his arrival in Paris he was already writing to his wife: ad ogni cosa, a tutto Parigi, a tutto ciò che qui vi possa esser di aggradevole preferisco la cara mia sposa e i miei figli, la mia famiglia, gli amici miei di Milano, e te sopra tutto (October 19, 1766).61

And again, on 25 October:

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Letters from London: A “Bridge” between Italy and Europe Cara sposa, ti prego a riflettere quanto sia il mio affetto per te. Io sono in mezzo alle adorazioni, agli encomi i più lusinghieri, considerato come compagno e collega dei più grandi uomini d’Europa, guardato con ammirazione e curiosità, invitato a pranzo, a cena a gara, nella capitale dei piaceri, in mezzo a tre teatri, uno dei quali (cioè la Commedia Francese) è lo spettacolo il più interessante del mondo ecc.; e pure io sono infelice e malcontento perché son lontano da te.62

More relevant to my perspective, however, is the disruptive haunting of the Verri brothers’ correspondence by Beccaria’s ghostly presence which, as a metonym of a possible cross-fertilization of the margins and centre, increasingly takes on the function of a compulsive structuring device.63 Throughout their correspondence, Beccaria looms large as “the one” issue which cannot be put to rest, as the “imbecille,” frail vampire portrayed by Pietro in the act of surfing the Milanese cultural scene, after his inglorious return, like a “dead undead” who, due to his celebrity, still holds the power to dry up the very lymph of the dream of internationalization of the two brothers. Well known are Pietro’s cris de coeur in a vain attempt to dissuade his acclaimed “testimonial” from interrupting the European tour: “L’affare è dell’ultima importanza: agli occhi miei egli sta per giuocare in un sol colpo la stima altrui e forse la propria morale”; “non lasciate che si converta in una risata di tanti ciarloni milanesi un viaggio che fa onore a voi tre e alla Patria” (November 13, 1766).64 And again, after Beccaria’s return: “Eccoti lo stato della nostra società finita per sempre” (January 8, 1767).65 An obsession with Beccaria’s “celebrity ghost” and his possible jeopardizing of the Verri brothers’ best hopes of philosophical networking haunts even Alessandro’s return stay in Paris as a kind of déja vu, where known places (notably Versailles) are revisited and described as though seen for the first time, and an unmediated “correspondence” with the philosophes is at last re-negotiated along more rewarding lines. So much so that Pietro is even able to imagine a phoenix-like rebirth of the experience of Il Caffè on an inspiring intercultural basis: “Si tornerà a riedificare la Gerusalemme con te, Lungo, Lambertenghi e me, se tu porti buoni corrispondenti potremo forse intraprendere un giornale.”66 Again, Alessandro’s accounts of his own rise in esteem and popularity among the Parisian intellectual milieu thrives on the comparison with Beccaria’s seeming decline: “Morellet lo chiama un matto, ed esclama: “Oh che matto, oh che matto […]. Il Barone [d’Holbach] lo risguarda come un uomo da nulla” (February 22, 1767).67 While this is in line with wellknown assessments of Beccaria’s behaviour by some of the philosophes, it

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is also strikingly at odds with the Baron’s comments in a letter to Servan (4 December 1766): C’est un homme très aimable, qui, en retournant à Milan, vient de laisser des grands regrets à ceux qui ont eu l’avantage de le connaître [...]. Au reste, il vie dans une ville où la philosophie a des partisans respectables; il paraît qu’elle commence à répandre ses influences dans toute l’Europe.68

Showing once more that ideas and books are stronger than men, and consistent with the cosmopolitan myth of circulation of the European Lumières, Cesare Beccaria, “the traitor,” seems to retain his full power as a testimonial of the Milanese breakthrough into the “centre.”69 Out of the sixty letters exchanged by the two brothers during Alessandro’s stays in Paris and London, Beccaria goes unmentioned only on six occasions.70 Like an aching phantom digit, his absence frames and defines Alessandro’s own understanding of London, a “manly,” vigorous city, where “Beccaria? Ha fatto bene a non andare. L’Inghilterra è un posto da veri uomini” (December 15, 1766).71 Alessandro’s London journal (and even his lodgings, belonging to the publisher Molini) is haunted almost literally by Beccaria when, like a textual ghost, the first anonymous English translation of the Essay on Crimes and Punishments is announced: “Il libro di Beccaria si traduce in Inghilterra per la prima volta, ed è interessato nella stampa il mio ospite Molini. Ne porterò meco una copia a Parigi perché esce tra pochi giorni” (January 15, 1767).72 Revising his earlier opinion that in England the Essay was not so acclaimed as in France because, due to the celebrated superiority of the English penal system, its maxims were “la maggior parte qui ricevute e da lungo tempo poste in pratica” (December 15, 1766),73 Alessandro is obliged to come to terms with the fact that, regardless of the shortcomings of their authors, ideas can travel all the way to the centre. In fact, scholarship on the impact of Beccaria’s thought on English penology74 trace the special attraction of the Essay back to precisely this nearcontiguity and the existence of an ongoing national debate on the death penalty. This is made explicit in the “Translator’s Preface” which, while praising the excellence of English “laws and government,” gives way to “the melancholy reflection, that the number of criminals put to death in England is much greater than any other part of Europe.”75 In praising the clarity and strength of Beccaria’s book—a “work which … must be particularly acceptable to the English from the eloquent and forcible manner in which the author pleads the cause of liberty, benevolence and humanity”76—the “Preface” relates the circumstances of the tract’s composition, the way “it was read out at different occasions

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among a learned society of Men in Milan.”77 Despite his “betrayal” and his rejection of enlightened sociability, Beccaria’s unwitting power as testimonial remains undiminished; his alleged marginality is even advertised as the uncontested mark of an irresistible natural genius, flourishing against the odds of a more provincial milieu to the point where “perhaps no book, on any subject, was ever received with more avidity, more generally read, or more universally applauded.”78 It is this deeply-felt commitment to the cultural politics and ethics of the Accademia dei Pugni and his lifelong reformist project which prompts Pietro, in the last pages of the Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, to proudly reposition Milan as the “centre” of at least Italy: “Troverai i Milanesi preferibili alla maggior parte degli Italiani e meno ridicoli di essi nel fondo.”79 A similar feeling informs Alessandro’s more disenchanted approach to the philosophes (“tutti superati nella logica da Beccaria … e né d’Alembert istesso né tutti gli altri … hanno la sua precisione, né la vostra, né, fors’anco dirò modestamente, la mia”).80 The same applies to England itself which, on one occasion at least, is rhetorically if not philosophically diminished to “un’isola in un canto d’Europa ove approda ogni brigante per far fortuna.”81 At the end of his journey Alessandro exchanges life in Milan for a new, independent life in Rome, outside the diverging orbits of both Beccaria and Pietro Verri. A temporary answer is perhaps to be found in the powerful synthesis of the concluding quote of this essay, taken from a letter from Florence (May 10, 1767) in which Alessandro conjures up the playful image of a cultural mediator’s perfect dream and, possibly, an inspiring map for a imagined European community of learning: Trovo l’Italia bellissima e non v’è paragone con la Francia e forse nemmeno con l’Inghilterra. Ma gli uomini vi sono più tristi che altrove. Il Francese e l’Inglese è più buono di noi cento volte; e per me vorrei che una nazione fosse composta di caratteri mezzo francesi e mezzo inglesi, e poi metterla in Italia. Allora sarebbe il più bel paese e la miglior nazione.82

Alessandro’s decision to spend the rest of his life in Rome—the former imperial “capital” which he himself had bitterly criticized in Il Caffè83 and which was unsympathetically regarded by the Milanese intellectuals as the abhorred symbol of Popish tyranny and Italian division and decadence—further complicates the notions of “core” and “periphery.” This choice, which has generated an abundance of historical and philosophical research and literary criticism, brings to

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the fore the inherent instability of these concepts; an instability which is even more conspicuous if it is considered how Rome, and its emplaced myths of timeless beauty and political decadence, was the venue that no European traveller on the Grand Tour could ever forego seeing.

Notes 1

Viaggio a Parigi e Londra (1766–1767). Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, ed. Gianmarco Gaspari (Milano: Adephi, 1980), x. This is the most polished and reliable edition to date of the Verri brothers’ correspondence from Paris and London. 2 Il Caffè (1764–1766), Sergio Romagnoli, Gianni Francioni eds. (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). This critical edition includes an introductory essay by Sergio Romagnoli, “Il Caffè tra Milano e l’Europa”, xiii–lxxix, and two essays by Gianni Francioni: “Storia editoriale del Caffè”, lxxxi–cxlv, and “Nota al testo”, cxlvii– clxxvii. On the influence of The Spectator on the Milanese journal, see: Lia Guerra, “Giambattista Biffi and His Role in the Dissemination of English Culture in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2) (2010): 245–264. 3 Carteggio, ed. Carlo Capra, Renato Pasta and Francesca Pino Pongolini, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Cesare Beccaria, vol. IV (Milano: Mediobanca, 1994), 182–183. Morellet’s translation (Traité des délits et des peines, Traduit de l’Italien d’après la troisiéme Edition revue, corrigée et augmentée par l’Auteur, Avec des Additions de l’Auteur qui n’ont pas encore paru en Italien) was published in Paris at the end of December 1765 with the false imprint of Lausanne, 1766. 4 Ibidem, 185–186. All the quotes in this article retain their original spelling. 5 Ibidem, 220: “Io l’ho letta con un indicibile piacere ed ho trovato che voi avete abbellito l’originale.” In his above mentioned letter of January 3, 1766, Morellet reported D’Alembert’s and Hume’s preference for the French version of the work (Ibid., 189). By contrast, Morellet’s translation was harshly criticized, among others, by Diderot (see Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 611) and Melchior Grimm, who made fun of the “bel esprit français” who had pretended “que Mr Beccaria ne savait pas ordonner ses idées, et qu’il avait besoin de lui, abbé Morellet, pour l’ordre dans lequel il fallait les présenter” (ibid., 750). Fania Oz-Salzberger, in “The Enlightenment in Translation: Regional and European Aspects,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 13 (3) (2006): 385–409, 402, alerts to the importance of “mistranslations” throughout the eighteenth century in furthering the “process of intercultural translation.” She also highlights the way that, as a consequence of the hegemonic status of French culture, “French translations were most typically host-oriented” (ibid., 404). Resistance to French cultural-hegemonic attitudes may have influenced Beccaria’s first anonymous English translator in his decision to criticize Morellet in his Preface: “As to the translation, I have preserved the order of the original, except in a paragraph or two,

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which I have taken the liberty to restore to the chapter to which they evidently belong, and from which they must have been accidentally detached. The French Translator hath gone much farther; he hath not only transposed every chapter, but every paragraph in the whole book. But in this, I conceive, he hath assumed a right which belongs not to any translator, and which cannot be justified” (“Preface of the Translator”, in An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, Translated from the Italian; with a Commentary, Attributed to Mons. de Voltaire, Translated from the French [London: J. Almon, 1767], v–vi). 6 Carteggio, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Cesare Beccaria, vol. IV, 224. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 225. 9 Ibid., 355. 10 Clorinda Donato, “Review of La letteratura delle riforme, by G. Gaspari, Palermo Sellerio, 1990,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, 2 (1992–1993), 363–366: 365. “By cleverly paying homage to Italian as a social grace and relegating its literature to a salon activity,” Donato goes on, Voltaire: “clinched the noose of poetic obsolescence and quaintness around the entire culture, ‘ghettoizing’ it for posterity, while he became the filter and self-appointed authority on things Italian” (ibid.). 11 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 37–38. 12 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet de), Lettres Chinoises, Indiennes et Tartares (Londres, 1776), 69–74. On Vincenzo Martinelli, see: Arturo Graf, L’Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia (Torino: Loescher, 1911); Franco Venturi, Settecento Riformatore, vol. III, La prima crisi dell’Antico Regime (Torino: Einaudi, 1979), 388–396; Benedetto Croce, “Un letterato italiano in Inghilterra: Vincenzo Martinelli”, in Benedetto Croce, La letteratura italiana del Settecento (Bari: Laterza 1949), 257–273; E. H. Thorne, “Vincenzio Martinelli in England, 1748– 1774”, Italian Studies XI (1956), 92–107; Carla Sodini, “Vincenzio Martinelli. Un cosmopolita toscano del ’700”, part I, Rassegna storica toscana I (1999), 85–140; Carla Sodini, “Vincenzio Martinelli. Un cosmopolita toscano del ’700”, part II, Rassegna storica toscana I (2000), 61–106; Elisabetta De Troja, “Strategie epistolari di un toscano a Londra: le ‘Lettere familiari e critiche’ di Vincenzo Martinelli”, Studi italiani XVI, I (2004), 31–45. 13 Matteo Ubezio, “L’Inghilterra vista da vicino. Note barettiane a uso dei connazionali,” ACME 63, II (2010), 171–211, 171. 14 Recent criticism includes Francesca Savoia, Fra letterati e galantuomini. Notizie e inediti del primo Baretti inglese (Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2010), and Matteo Ubezio, “Un inedito postillato barettiano dell’Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy”, Studi e problemi di critica testuale 84 (2012), 31–72. 15 La Frusta Letteraria di Giuseppe Baretti, vol. II (Milano: Società Tipografica dei Classici Italiani, 1838), 185. See Francioni, “Storia editoriale del Caffè”, cii. 16 See Ubezio, “L’Inghilterra vista da vicino”, 179; 175. 17 Ibid., 182. 18 Among the most recent translations of Beccaria’s masterpiece, see: Cesare Beccaria, Des délits et des peines/Dei delitti e delle pene, introduction, traduction

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et notes de Philippe Audegean, texte italien établi par Gianni Francioni (Lyon: ENS éditions, 2009); Cesare Beccaria, De los delitos y de las penas, prefacio de Piero Calamandrei, edición bilingüe al cuidado de Perfecto Andrés Ibáñez, texto italiano establecido por Gianni Francioni (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2011). The latest translation of the work into Japanese, by Masao Kotani, appeared in 2011 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2011), whereas the first ever Arabic translation was published in 2008 (FƯ al-÷arƗ’im wa-l-’uqnjbat (Lebanon: DƗr al NahƗr, 2008). 19 Voyage à Paris et Londres, Trans. and notes by Monique Baccelli, “Préface” by Michel Delon (Paris: Laurence Teper Editions, 2004). 20 Arnaldo Bruni, “In margine al carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 24 (1982), 101–125, 102. 21 Ubezio, “L’Inghilterra vista da vicino,” 177. 22 English thought and literature were widely popular among the Milanese intellectuals who approached them through French translations. Among the contributors to Il Caffè, only Giambattista Biffi could access English works in the original. See Lia Guerra, “Giambattista Biffi and His Role in the Dissemination of English Culture in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy,” 245–264. 23 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 452 (emphasis added). 24 Ibid., 138–319. 25 See Graf, L’Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia. 26 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 146. 27 Ibid., 139. 28 La Frusta Letteraria, vol. II, 114. 29 See, among others, Göran Rydén who, in “Viewing and Walking: Swedish Visitors to Eighteenth-Century London”, Journal of Urban History 39 (2) (2013): 255–274, 255, reports the words of the Swedish traveller Samuel Schröder in 1749: “A traveller does well at the arrival in London a beautiful and clear day go to the top of St Paul’s church-tower which is the largest church in the city and from where one at once can make a General Idea about London, which otherwise would take a lot of time.” As to the idea of London as a site of monstrous, nonapprehensible growth, see, for instance, Vincenzo Martinelli, “Lettera al Conte Finocchietti, Plenipotenziario del Re delle Due Sicilie all’Aja sul viaggio a Londra” (November 29, 1748), in Lettere Familiari e Critiche di Vincenzio Martinelli (London: Nourse, 1758), 11–12: “Il secondo giorno si fece il sospirato ingresso in questa immensa Città di Londra. Cinque miglia traversammo per l’abitato prima di giugnere alla Casa del Signor Cappello Ambasciatore Veneto, nelle cui vicinanze era fissato il nostro alloggio. Lo scabroso pavimento e la mal congegnata carrozza facevano una tempesta … assai più terribile della marittima. La folla e il rumore del Popolo delle carrozze e de i Carri era così grande, che a fatica potevamo procedere innanzi, e parlando, udire l’un l’altro.” 30 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 219. See also Alessandro’s letter to his father of December 19, 1766 (ibid., 465): “Londra è quasi sempre involta nel denso e grasso fumo de’ tanti camini ove arde il minerale carbone di terra, solo fuoco qui in uso.”

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31 Ibid., 165. Verri’s fascination with goods and “things” is strikingly at odds with Baretti’s ironical dismissal of London’s opulence and inordinate excess: “Lungo questa strada di qua e di là, come anche di qua e di là di moltissime altre, le botteghe sono a migliaja, e piene di tante e sì diverse sorte di robe, che a registrarne solo i nomi saria mestiero un vocabolario venti volte più grosso di quello della Crusca. Ohi quanti milioni di cose vi sono in quelle botteghe, che non m’abbisognano!” (La Frusta Letteraria, II, 115; see also Savoia, 15–19). In describing his first arrival in the capital, on the contrary, Vincenzo Martinelli picks out the magnificent spectacle of unending shopping malls as indisputable evidence of London’s extraordinary wealth and greatness: “Ma quello che ci rinfrancò da tanti disastri fù la continuazione delle Botteghe di qua e di là per tutto quel lunghissimo tratto, tanto copiosamente d’ogni sorte di Mercanzie provvedute, che esse sole bastarono a darci un’idea della grande opulenza della Capitale del Regno” (Lettere Familiari, 11). 32 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 204. Alessandro’s interest in retailing English goods is again apparent in a letter to Pietro from Rome of October 21, 1767: “Veggo che delle bigiotterie di Londra, rasoi e forbici, non ne rimangono. Questo era il meglio quanto ai prezzi. Sarà così codesta la seconda sfortuna nel mio commercio, che pure non lascio di guardare come la mia vocazione” (Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri, ed. Emanuele Greppi and Alessandro Giulini vol. 1 [Milan: Cogliati, 1910], 102). 33 Giuseppe Baretti, An Account of the manners and customs of Italy (1768), 327, quoted by Natalie Hester, “Geographies of Belonging: Italian Travel Writing and Italian Identity in the Age of Early European Tourism,” in ed. Luigi Monga, Hodoeporics Revisited/Ritorno all’odeporica, Annali d’italianistica 21 (2003), 287–300, 296. 34 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 46. 35 Ibid., x. 36 Raymond Williams, “Culture is ordinary” (1958), in ed. Robin Gable, Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), 3–18, 4. 37 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 140. 38 Guerra, “Giambattista Biffi,” 249. 39 Philippe Audegean, “Leçons de choses. L’invention du savoir économique par ses premiers professeurs: Antonio Genovesi et Cesare Beccaria,” Astérion 5 (2007), 56–85, 70–71. 40 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 207. 41 Ibid., 174. 42 Ibid., 464. 43 Rydén, “Viewing and Walking,” 259. See also Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998). 44 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 142. 45 Ibid., 146–147.

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46 In his above-mentioned description of London, Baretti laments the fate of “tante migliaja di creature umane che s’incontrano ad ogni passo per queste strade, avviluppate in lacerissimi stracci, e cariche d’ogni sorta di putente sudiciume”, and points to the many “formicai di pezzenti” existing in London, only to conclude that “l’opulentissima Londra contiene tanti poveri, che se ne popolerebbe una provincia delle grandi” (La Frusta Letteraria, II, 119). 47 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 155. 48 Ibid., 362. 49 Ibid., 155 (emphasis added). In a letter of October 4, 1766, Pietro had already warned Alessandro that, in comparison to the French, the English would appear to him as a nation “ch’io credo troverete feroce” (ibid., 4). 50 “Veramente i Francesi sono chiacchieroni terribili. Vogliono parlare di tutto, filosofare di tutto, e portano nella conversazione la declamazione teatrale. Disprezzano la ragione mentre sembra che ne vadino in traccia. Basta che non manchino parole alla conversazione, il che non succede mai: non importa come si parli” (ibid., 39; October 25, 1766). This is in line, of course, with stereotypical representations of the French in eighteenth-century travel literature. 51 Ibid., 293–294. 52 Irène Passeron, “Revue de ‘Pietro et Alessandro Verri, Voyage à Paris et à Londres 1766–1767,” Recherches sur Diderot et l’Encyclopédie 38 (2005). http://rde.revues.org/ 4518. 53 See, for instance, Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 292: “la crassa ignoranza del popolo milanese io non l’ho trovata in Francia; molto meno qui in Inghilterra ... I Milanesi sono scimmiotti.” 54 Ibid., 28. 55 Ibid., 280. 56 Letter to Pietro from Rome of 24 August 1768. There Alessandro also writes: “Si sono stampati tanti viaggi, se ne stampano, che le stesse cose sono in molti libri; poi è troppo secondario l’onore che se ne ricava. L’ultimo viaggiatore ha sempre ragione, e fa dimenticare gli altri. Finalmente ognuno riceve differenti impressioni dagli oggetti de’ viaggi, e mi troverebbero chimerico e inesatto: forse anche lo sarò in parte, perché mi sono trattenuto poco. Io provo che, parlando con chi è stato a Londra, e cogli inglesi istessi, giudichiamo diversamente, sentiamo diversamente delle stesse cose” (Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri dal 1766 al 1768, II, 11–12). 57 Michel Delon, “Préface,” in Voyage à Paris et Londres, 12. 58 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 476 (empasis added). 59 Bartolo Anglani, Il dissotto delle carte. Sociabilità, sentimenti e politica tra i Verri e Beccaria (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2004); Gianni Francioni, “A Parigi! A Parigi! Gli illuministi milanesi e la Francia,” in ed. Maria Bettetini e Stefano Poggi, I viaggi dei filosofi (Milano: Raffaello Cortina, 2010), 113–133. See also: Carlo Capra, I progressi della ragione. Vita di Pietro Verri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), 177–231; 266–269. 60 Anglani, Il dissotto delle carte, 21. 61 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 449.

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62 Ibid., 455. Anglani, Il dissotto delle carte, 25, highlights how Beccaria radically subverts the generic conventions of travel writing. For instance in Chambery he: “capovolge l’etica (nonché l’estetica) del Viaggiatore Settecentesco precipitandosi a scrivere ‘due parole’ alla moglie senza poterle ancora dir nulla del paese: ‘perché appena arrivato scrivo, poi vado a metter le lettere alla posta e a vedere la città’ (8 ottobre 1766).” 63 Here are but a few examples of Beccaria’s recursive presence: “Bisogna sempre ch’io ritorni al mio soggetto” (Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 26); “Io non posso lasciar questo punto” (ibid., 40); “Ritorniamo un momento a Beccaria” (ibid., 158); “A proposito di Beccaria” (ibidem, 160); “Tu mi parli ancora di Beccaria” (ibid., 164); “Che fa Beccaria?” (ibid., 208); “Torniamo al nostro eterno argomento di Beccaria” (ibid., 209); “Abbi pazienza e lasciami parlare di Beccaria anche quest’oggi” (ibid., 339). 64 Ibid., 64. 65 Ibid., 154. 66 Ibid., 229. Pietro is referring to Alfonso Longo and Luigi Lambertenghi, among the members of the Accademia dei Pugni and the contributors to Il Caffè. 67 Ibid., 325. 68 Delon, 3. 69 Pietro Verri seems to be fully aware of this fact when he dismisses Alessandro’s suggestion to anonymously debunk On Crimes and Punishments: “Non moviamo la guerra ad un’opera ch’egli ha pubblicata a nostra insinuazione e che abbiamo sostenuta tanto” (March 17, 1767; Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 350). 70 Gaspari’s edition of the two brothers’ travel correspondence includes ninety-one letters, spanning from Alessandro’s departure with Cesare Beccaria from Milan on October 2, 1766 to Pietro’s answer to his brother in Florence, dated May 23, 1767. An appendix of twenty-three letters comprises the exchanges between Beccaria and Pietro Verri, Alessandro’s letters to his father, and other relevant correspondence. The sixty letters which I refer to in the text are the ones exchanged over the actual periods of Alessandro’s spells in Paris and London. Twenty-seven of them (December 9, 1766 to February 10, 1767), only three of which do not mention Beccaria, were exchanged during Alessandro’s stay in London. 71 Ibid., 149. 72 Ibid., 249. 73 Ibid., 148. 74 For an updated bibliography on this issue, see: Anthony J. Draper, “Cesare Beccaria’s influence on English discussions of punishment (1764–1789)”, History of European Ideas 26 (2000), 177–199, and John D. Bessler, “Revisiting Beccaria’s Vision: The Enlightenment, America’s Death Penalty, and the Abolition Movement,” North Western Journal of Law and Literature 4, 2 (2009), 195–328. On the contemporary debate on Beccaria’s treatise and its influence on European penology, see: Franco Venturi, “Raccolta di lettere e documenti …, in ed. Venturi, Dei delitti e delle pene (Torino: Einaudi, 1965); Luigi Firpo, “Le edizioni italiane del Dei delitti e delle pene,” in ed. Gianni Francioni, Dei delitti e

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delle pene, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Cesare Beccaria, vol. I (Milano: Mediobanca, 1984), 369–702; Marcello Maestro, Cesare Beccaria e le origini della riforma penale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977); Aa.Vv., Cesare Beccaria tra Milano e l’Europa. Convegno di studi per il 250° anniversario della nascita (Milano: Cariplo-Laterza, 1990); ed. Vincenzo Ferrone and Gianni Francioni, Cesare Beccaria. La pratica dei Lumi (Firenze: Olschki, 2000); Sara Garofalo, “La sensibilità, la pena, l’educazione: osservazioni sui rapporti di Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri e i materialisti francesi”, Studi (e testi) italiani 21, 1 (2008), 157–176; Philippe Audegean, La philosophie de Beccaria. Savoir punir, savoir écrire, savoir produire (Paris: Vrin, 2010). 75 An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, v. 76 Ibid., vii. 77 Ibid., v. 78 Ibid., iv. 79 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 434. The Verri brothers’ correspondence shows significant evidence of their affective and intellectual ambivalence about Milan over the years. Their opinions, often unfavourable to their fellow citizens unable to embrace the reforming spirit of the age, record their frustration and are discussed at length in Anglani, 264–265; 285–296. 80 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 426–427. 81 Ibid., 189. It must be noted, however, that this image occurs in the context of Alessandro’s discussion of Italian “rascals” flocking to London. 82 Ibid., 425. 83 Alessandro Verri, “Discorso sulla felicità de’ Romani,” in ed. S. Romagnoli and G. Francioni, Il Caffè, 83–92. On the ambivalent cultural significance of Rome in the works of Alessandro and Pietro Verri, see: Francesco Bartolini, “La Roma dei lumi e la Roma dei Papi. Pietro e Alessandro Verri a confront,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2004), 1–25; Anglani, Il dissotto delle carte; Bartolo Anglani, La lumaca e il cittadino. Pietro Verri dal benefico dispotismo alla Rivoluzione (Roma: Aracne, 2012); Capra, I progressi della ragione. Vita di Pietro Verri.

FROM CLARISSA’S SENSIBILITY IN SAMUEL RICHARDSON’S NOVEL TO THE ROMANTIC DREAM OF SELF-REALIZATION IN UGO FOSCOLO’S ORTIS PATRIZIA NEROZZI I.U.L.M. MILANO

“Simply the thing I am / Shall make me live” — William Shakespeare Anime sensibili leggete questa Pittura delle umane passioni, e trattenete se pur potete le lagrime. Un giovane suicida … per amore! ... Oh Italiani! E’ questa forse una delle poche opere sentimentali, che sulle tracce dei Richardson, dei Bouflers, degli Arnaud, de’ Rousseau , sia capace di formare lo spirito e intenerire il cuore.

With this advertisement, the Vera Storia di due Amanti infelici o sia Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis was presented to the Italian reader on July 5, 1800 in the Monitore Bolognese, a three-weekly review issued in Bologna.1 In launching Ugo Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis, the publisher, Jacopo Marsigli, also the journal’s owner, addressed his appeal to both anime sensibili and Italian readers. The newly published book, a “Philosophicaltragic-sentimental” story, is placed not only within what Marsigli deemed the “great” tradition of English and French “sentimental” novels, heralded in by Richardson, but also within the turmoil of contemporary Italian patriotic upheavals. Direct reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is discretely omitted, probably for fear lest the tragic destiny of its protagonist, so widely famed throughout Europe, as “the Werther effect,” could appear to deprive Ortis of originality. The Advertisement is, of course, an adroit concoction of fashionable bywords and patriotic allusions to the Italian political scene which was “burying in silence such a well deserving work.” This edition, which is known as “1799B,”2 was rejected by Foscolo, together with its French version, in January 1801.3 The first complete edition of Jacopo Ortis approved by the author is the 1802

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edition, where, as we know, the political dimension of the text acquires more importance and narrative interest. The novel met with great success, numerous editions followed, some of them spurious and, in differing degrees, unfaithful to the original. Foscolo’s repeatedly expressed intention to work on a revised edition was taken up during his exile in Switzerland. Jacopo Ortis was published in Zurich by Füssli in 1816 but with the inscription “London 1814” on the title page to avoid censorship. When Foscolo arrived in London in September 1816, Zotti’s 1811 edition of Ortis, spurious but “unabridged and also of elegant format, typesetting and paper,” was out of print. The situation was particularly favourable for a new edition when Murray’s two-volume edition came out in London in 1817. The Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis were followed by Foscolo’s translation of a few chapters from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, published by Didot in Pisa in 1813. However, to return to the Advertisement quoted at the beginning of the intricate story of the Jacopo Ortis editions, which starts out in Bologna and ends up in London, the reference to Richardson, or rather “the Richardsons,” in connection with Ortis is, to my knowledge, the only overt one. It is for this reason that I took up the connection between the two authors as a challenging starting point for a short excursus over an arc of fifty years on the tracks of “sensible souls.” Thus, the authors cited in the present chapter, despite inevitable omissions, have been selected in order to reveal a fine network of associations and cross-references which highlight aspects of “sensibility” as a communicative dimension in different cultural contexts in the second part of the eighteenth century. Let’s start with a few general considerations. The idea of the Self, which indelibly marks the transition to modernity, began to take on consistency in the eighteenth century when different disciplines— literature, law, art, medicine and philosophy—intersected and worked in unison to shape the emerging “science of man” in a way which was to remain unique in Western intellectual history. It is at this seminal crossroads that the great cultural myth of “modern individualism” was born.4 Re-writing,5 or re-inventing the Self, can be considered as one of the great utopias of the eighteenth century. It is within this frame that, in the middle years of the century, the concept (we could even risk the expression “the category”) of “sensibility” was rapidly emerging as a complex of values, tendencies and attitudes destined to confer individual personality to subjectivity. The process could be investigated from the anthropological, philosophical and literary points of view. Moreover, “sensibility” surfaced as a border-zone, envisaging new and different

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From Clarissa’s Sensibility in Richardson’s Novel to Self-realization in Ortis

modes, just when sharply-defined and outworn aristocratic models were beginning to wane, gradually ceasing to be the accepted standard. In English literature, the experience of sensibility came to the foreground in the new realistic genre, the novel, where humanistic parameters were programmatically reformulated in order to embrace and support emerging middle class values in contrast to traditional ones. Samuel Richardson’s narrative, from Pamela to Clarissa to Sir Charles Grandison, offers an ideal corpus in which to observe the development of sensibility in all its finer shadings and many-faceted manifestations. It presents and embodies, in the protagonists’ love stories, a compendium of motifs, values, tendencies and attitudes, ranging from the religious and erotic to the political and economic, which are either resolved or remain unsolved. The happy ending of Pamela ratifies the integration of values and the birth of a new society, resolving the initial mésaillance through the marriage between the virtuous lower middle class heroine and the newly reformed Mr. B., while Sir Charles Grandison celebrates the bourgeois, domestic virtues of the aristocratic hero. By contrast, in Clarissa, the story of Lovelace and Clarissa has a diegetic structure which, given the ideologically emblematic nature of the protagonists, precludes the possibility of a happy erotic solution. The narrative develops around the conflict between two antithetical visions of life, the aristocratic and libertine vision of Lovelace against the middle-class and puritan vision of Clarissa. Each of these visions is built on its particular use of language, the former—Lovelace’s—draws on the performative power of language to impose ceremony and exercise authority, while the latter—Clarissa’s— seeks to implement language as a tool for the exploration of inner consciousness. It is worth noting here that in Clarissa the term “sensibility” appears twelve times and “sensibilities” seven times– surprisingly few when one thinks of the number of letters and pages of the novel. We can only suppose that Richardson, though presenting an arena where antithetical theories and personalities could be performed and analysed, was being careful to avoid the use of terms whose semantic freight had still to be established. Nonetheless, the nature of sensibility lies within a range of meanings scattered throughout the text of the tragic love story. Instinctual, educational, ethical and reasoning faculties seem to converge on the territory of sensibility which thus becomes a locus of conflict. Consequently, in Clarissa sensibility is the area where education, in terms of cultural models, penetrates character to become part of its very nature; behavioural norms become part of one’s disposition, in marked contrast to the fixed aristocratic ideals of behaviour based on scorn and indifference. For the heroine, sensibility is a source of profound feeling

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indistinguishable from the very nature of the individual. In Letter XLII of Book I the word “sensibility” is used to define an attitude in which generosity, benevolence and unselfishness are no longer seen as the result of reflection and calculation, but rather as the spontaneous reaction of a particular nature.6 At the same time, however, Clarissa’s every feeling is subject to ongoing ethical and rational analysis, whereby sensibility is somehow insistently moralized. The novel’s strong class-conscious and pedagogical thrust projects sensibility as the end effect of an educational process geared to produce a new kind of humanity. Thus, the wavering between nature and education/culture flows into a modern, complex idea of sensibility which contains an early acknowledgement of the crucial cognitive function of sensibility, but also its identification with bourgeois patterns and, ultimately, with sentimentalism. The heroine’s sensibility harbours the germs of incipient sentimentalism. This is couched perhaps in her easily offended susceptibility or disposition to be morbidly attracted and moved—an excess of reactivity that must either be accepted or blocked depending on whether it is seen as demonstrating nobility of heart or as a mere surrender to passions. With reference to Lovelace, sensibility can be seen as a form of “contamination” which imbues him with a new quality of feeling. In these privileged moments he unaccountably rises above himself to display virtuous human qualities (Letter CXVII of Book II).7 In letter LI of Book III sensibility is shown to be a part of Clarissa’s very nature which Lovelace, instead, declares to be an unknown territory for him.8 Sensibility is alien to the libertine, generating as it does joys and sorrows whose nature and import Lovelace is unable to assess, just because (as Clarissa declares) he lacks “a heart.” As a result, while affirming his ignorance and thus blamelessness, he is nevertheless forced to recognise in the heroine’s extreme sensibility the very barrier that will forever exclude him from her world.9 The intensity of Richardson’s moral inspection conveyed through the instantaneous flow of emotion was bound to converge into the mainstream—Clarissa was destined to become a sort of manifesto in the history of the novel. From Prévost to Diderot, from Rousseau to Choderlos de Laclos, from Sterne to Puškin, from Goethe to Foscolo, authors were forced to come to terms with this new rhetoric of sensibility. Her tragic destiny turned Clarissa into the paramount model for the innumerable virgins in distress and men of feeling who crowd the pages of popular fiction both in Great Britain and on the Continent. The world of feeling was transmuted into a fully-fledged sentimentalism where the implications

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of moral sense were submerged by the visible manifestations of the intensities of sensation. However, the question of eighteenth-century sensibility cannot be discussed without drawing upon the new scientific discoveries in physiology. Turning our attention to the relationship between science and art, it is interesting to observe that during the course of the century visual strategies and theories were put forward for “imagining the unseen.”10 The scientist, the writer and the painter all felt compelled to look inside man and explore “the internal fabric” in order to discover the relationship between exteriority and interiority, public conduct and private pathos, the social and the private self. In his lessons on anatomy at Oxford’s Christ Church, Thomas Willis (1621–75) had already experimented with a new way of dissecting the brain and, for the first time, had located the functions of specific nerves in localized areas.11 Nerves were found to be ruled by the brain, operating as a sort of heart. Sensibility could therefore be described as the effect of “the nerves in the heart” (Spectator 281) and seen to produce a physiological communicative effect—tears flooding the eyes of sentimental heroines and “men of feeling”12 make public what is inwardly felt. The interplay of body and mind cannot be interrupted or overlooked. Dr Cheyne, Richardson’s doctor and the author of Essay on Health and Long Life (1724) and The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, printed by Samuel Richardson in 1733, described the interaction of the vascular and nervous systems with the brain. As Diderot wrote: “It is very difficult to think cogently in metaphysics or ethics without being an anatomist, a naturalist, a physiologist, and a physician.”13 The diseases of the mind, including “melancholy,” were referred to the diseases of the body, conceived as a hydraulic machine. The rational part had to be defended, so defects were attributed to the corporeal part. All the senses were held to depend on “the precise workings of the nerves.”14 The human being could be envisaged as a clockwork mechanism.15 The comparison of the human body with new mechanical knowledge was dominated by the pervasive presence of the clock, not only as a seductive metaphor but as an increasingly sophisticated instrumentation dedicated to measuring the centrality of man in time and space. The mind was seen as incarnated in the body: “[Our minds] are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood” (Tristram Shandy, Vol. I, Chapter XXIII).16 Proceeding along the tracks of sensibility, Laurence Sterne represents a milestone, a landmark standing at a crucial juncture in eighteenth-century imagination. In Tristram Shandy, both a major novel about subjectivity and an encyclopaedic treatise on the ego, the protagonist

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presents himself as a decomposable being, the result of a hybridization which has assembled heterogeneous materials, both natural and cultural. Body and soul are compared to a jerkin and its lining “rumple the one and you will rumple the other” (Vol. III, Chapter IV).17 In the novel each mind is engaged in creating a private cosmos, but the author and his characters are also engrossed by the problem of communication through language, visual images and gestures either mechanical, as if suggested by the newly invented artificial creature of the eighteenth century, the automaton, or imitating the theatrical performances of the “great Garrick,” Sterne’s friend. However it was A Sentimental Journey (1768) (Ugo Foscolo began his translation of the text in 1803 while serving in the Napoleonic army in Calais) which spread the physical and emotional constituents of sensibility throughout Europe, with its interactions of the ethical and the esthetical in the many-sided adventures of his sentimental traveller.18 In his “quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE,” 19 where body and soul appear connected by sympathetic bonds, sensibility furnishes him with a magnifying glass while giving way, opening the door to the unpredictable, the indefinite, the unsaid. “—Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!”20 Yorick cannot but invoke the divine spirit of sensibility in his quest for man’s attainment of sympathetic imagination, either when feeling the pulse of the grisset in a Parisian shop or when discovering that a lady’s green purse can be much more interesting than Notre Dame. The “Age of Sensibility,” as termed by Northrop Frye, was neither Augustan nor Romantic but related to both.21 The appearance and growth of an identifiable “sentimental” vocabulary during the period is one of the most substantial pieces of evidence both for the existence of a sentimental tradition and for its dynamic character. According to the OED the word “sentiment” was “rare until the middle of the eighteenth century” and the adjective “sentimental” first came into vogue sometime in the 1740s. As stated in Jean H. Hagstrum’s book, Sex and Sensibility: “‘Sentiment’ which once meant moral judgment and then in its period of transition came to stand for the combination of the head and the heart, now refers primarily to feeling, sometimes passionate but more often delicate, refined, civilizing, and always copious and irrepressible.”22 “Ah, what I know, everybody can know—my heart is only mine.”23 The Sorrows of Young Werther (written in 1774 and radically revised in 1787) opened up a literary watershed, celebrating the centrality of the suffering ego alienated from society. Werther is proud only of his heart, privileged by his sensibility and at the same time condemned by his failure

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to create his own individual life against social conformism. In his longing for personal freedom and “for the rapture of one great emotion,” the excess of sensibility entraps him, exercising a paralysing effect on his personality. “Alas! I feel it too sensibly,—the heart alone makes our happiness.”24 Werther finds his only release in death. Significantly, his beloved Lotte reads Goldsmith, whereas he reads Ossian to her before going off to commit suicide. Goethe acknowledged a wide spectrum of literary references for his character: “I owe much to the Greeks and the French and I am infinitely indebted to Shakespeare, Sterne and Goldsmith.”25 But it was Werther’s own blue tail-coats and yellow waistcoats which were destined to popularize the unique and moving intensity of his destiny throughout Europe. “Je sens mon coeur, et je connais les homes.” In his Confessions, even while glorying in his possession of a feeling heart, Rousseau complains that it is the natural origin of all his moral and political troubles.26 His anatomy of self-awareness goes through what Jean Starobinski has called “the perils of reflection.” Rousseau makes a distinction between “a physical and organic sensibility, merely passive, whose only aim appears to be the preservation of our body and our species, through pleasure and pain” and “an active and moral sensibility, which is nothing else but the faculty to inspire our feelings for other beings.” It is the combination of the two which produces the fascinating terrain of his Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire (1782), proceeding from darkness to light to innocence and the feeling of happiness in the rediscovery of the autonomy of the self in isolation.27 “What misery does a man of sensibility suffer!” writes the somewhat neurotic Boswell in his autobiography,28 whereas Mrs Radcliffe’s gothic stories illustrate the parodic effects of unrestrained sensibility in her heroines’ permanent inclination to transform reality into a terrifying nightmare. Tears of sensibility flood their spectacular adventures in gothic castles or exotic convents, thus demonstrating the physical reaction of their sensibility in distress. In the eighteenth century, while the new science of physiognomics— the “science of sciences” as it was called by Lavater—was exploring the visible effects of a person’s inner self, the character of the hypocrite was seen as the ideal subject through which the challenge of penetrating the mystery of the human soul, both in the novel and the figurative arts, could be posed. But should the effects of sensibility be shown, should one’s heart be revealed by the facial lines of expression ? “… the bad man, if he be a hypocrite, may so manage his muscles, by teaching them to contradict his heart, that little of his mind can be gather’d from his countenance,”29

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writes William Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty.29 In Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame de Merteuil celebrates the necessity of learning how to hide behind an impassive social mask, thus eliminating any connection of sensibility with visible emotion. At the end of the century the 1797 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica (3rd edition) offers an interesting definition of “sensibility,” deemed to be a fine mechanism of perception and as such a domain of privilege and education: a nice and delicate perception of pleasure or pain, beauty or deformity. It is very nearly allied to taste; and as far as it is natural seems to depend upon the organization of the nervous system…It is capable…of cultivation and is experienced in a much higher degree in civilized than in savage nations, and among persons liberally educated than among boors and illiterate mechanics.30

“Nell’anno in ch’io nacqui morivano Voltaire e Rousseau” Ugo Foscolo wrote to Bettinelli on August 24, 1802 to mark his awareness of the end of an era. In his “Plan of Studies,” drawn up in 1796 when he was eighteen, among the authors he had read or planned to read or imitate, he assigns an exemplary value to the Greek and Latin classics together with Shakespeare, Montesquieu and Rousseau, whose Contract Social he says he has started to translate. They are mentioned together with Voltaire, Boileau and Fénelon for his Telemaque and Baculard d’Arnaud as the author of Epreuves du Sentiment in twelve volumes, which became wellknown in Europe. Foscolo places his Délassements de l’Homme Sensible in twelve volumes side by side with Richardson among those who have innovated the narrative genre, thanks to the prominent role assigned to sensibility, the rights of the heart and the intensity of passions.31 “Il sacrificio della patria nostra è consumato: tutto è perduto; e la vita, seppur ne verrà concessa, non ci resterà che per piangere le nostre sciagure e la nostra infamia. Il mio nome è nella lista di proscrizione.” 32 The incipit of Jacopo Ortis, the letter dated October 11, 1797, portrays the protagonist as condemned for his patriotic endeavours, haunted by the experience of political disillusionment and furious with Napoleon for his country’s iniquitous destiny. As we know, the Treaty of Campoformio which included Napoleon’s decision to give up Venice to the Austrian Empire was signed on October 17, though the content was previously known. From the very beginning of the book Jacopo Ortis is presented as having no hope for the future. He feels banished from the world of action not only by his political defeat but also by his awareness of a more general loss. “E però tu mi udivi assai volte esclamare che tutto dipende dal

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cuore!”33 he writes to his friend. In his defence against accusations of plagiarism, Foscolo claimed that he began Ortis before reading Werther. Jacopo Ortis abounds in numerous quotations and explicit literary references from Virgil to Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, Montaigne, Monti, Parini and Alfieri, from Sterne to Goethe, Wieland and Rousseau, Ossian, Thomas Gray and Edward Young and the Bible, which after Jacopo’s death is found closed on his desk. However, Jacopo himself, as if searching for an absolute freedom even from literary models and books, just before dying asks that from among his many books only those containing his written notes will be kept: “Umana vita? Sogno, ingannevole sogno.”34 Jacopo feels trapped between antithetical forces. He feels that running away from Venice is as pointless as running away from his desperate love for Teresa. Hounded by both his erotic and political passions, Ortis abandons his Romantic dream of self-realization in the face of his experience of disillusionment, in his inability to turn the man of feeling that he is into a man of action. Concluding, we can say that sensibility absorbs different moods, transforms and modifies itself, leaving the moral engagement of the new rising classes as a positive force, able to shape a new system of values. Sensibility colours the mood of the times after the middle years of the eighteenth century in a crescendo of egotistic variations which rise to a climax in the cleft between the protagonists’ inner world and the world of action. “Gli pendeva dal collo il ritratto di Teresa tutto nero di sangue, se non che era alquanto polito nel mezzo; e le labbra insanguinate di Jacopo fanno congetturare ch’ei nell’angoscia baciasse la imagine della sua amica” 35; “—even the little picture which I have so long worn, and so often have told thee Eliza, I would carry with me into my grave, would have been torn from my neck.”36 Was this in memory of Eliza’s portrait in A Sentimental Journey?

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Notes *

“E’ uscita in questi giorni un’opera Filosofico-tragico-sentimentale composta da due sventurati Genj d’Italia, e che dall’infelicità de’passati tempi fu sforzata ad essere sepolta nel silenzio e nelle tenebre. Il suo titolo è Vera Storia di due Amanti infelici o sia ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. L’opera è divisa in due tometti tascabili ed eleganti e d’una nitida edizione con un rame inciso da famoso Professore bolognese al prezzo di paoli 5.” Quoted in Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. Giuliana Nuvoli (Milano: Principato Editore, 1986), 218. 2 The first plan of Ortis goes back to 1798, for some other critics to 1796 under the influence of Werther and La Nouvelle Héloise, even if Foscolo declared he had started Ortis before reading Werther. The protagonist’s name was given after the name of a Padua student, Girolamo Ortis, who had committed suicide. As Foscolo had to interrupt his writing after letter 45 to join the Napoleonic army, the publisher, Jacopo Marsigli, asked a certain Angelo Sassoli to complete the story. The book came out at the beginning of June 1799. However, owing to the Austrians’ presence in Bologna the publisher decided to withdraw all the copies and edited a new edition omitting references concerning religious and political questions. See Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. Giuliana Nuvoli. As Rosamaria Loretelli writes in her brilliant essay: “… the editorial history of this novel is controversial and partly conjectural, with some aspects still shrouded in darkness. While the first edition to be officially acknowledged by Ugo Foscolo came out in the year 1802, four earlier editions had already appeared with a partly different text. All of these were published in Bologna by the publisher/printer Marsigli and repudiated by Foscolo as not his own work but only vaguely based on some of his manuscripts. He later said that they contained material written by ‘a certain’ Angelo Sassoli. Although recent scholarship tends to see Foscolo’s contribution as greater than he cared to admit, the question of how much can be attributed to him and how much to others is still debated amongst critics. According to Pino Fasano, Marsigli himself was involved more than one would expect of a publisher, being most probably responsible for assembling the material and filling in some of the gaps. All this is of interest here in that it may help to explain the presence of fleuron’s in these first four editions and the function to be attributed to them. If Marsigli was directly involved in the writing of these books, he might have decided to make use of non-verbal printing characters (to which he had more immediate access than other authors) in order to represent time.” See Rosamaria Loretelli, “Fleurons as Temporal Markers in Richardson and Foscolo,” Britain and Italy in the Long Eighteenth Century: Literary and Art Theories, ed. Rosamaria Loretelli and Frank O’Gorman (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 150, 154–155). 3 “Onde fino a che mi concedano i tempi di riprendere la stampa dell’autografo delle Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis io protesto apocrife e contaminate in ogni loro parte quelle che saranno anteriori al 1801, e che non avranno in fronte questo rifiuto”. Quoted in Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, ed. Giuliana Nuvoli, 217–218.

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4 See Patrizia Nerozzi Bellman, “On the Sciences of Man in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Art,” in Bioethics and Biolaw through Literature, ed. Daniela Carpi (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 162–177. 5 See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1989); Roy Porter, Rewriting the Self (London: Routledge, 1977). 6 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa. Or, the History of a Young Lady (London: Dent, 1962), vol. I, 219. 7 Ibid., vol. II, 461. 8 Ibid., vol. III, 281. 9 “What Sensibilities must thou have suppressed!—What a dreadful … hardness of heart must thine be; who canst be capable of such emotions as sometimes thou hast shown: and of such sentiments as sometimes have flowed from thy lips; yet canst have so far overcome them all, as to be able to act as thou hast acted …” Ibid., vol. III, 152. 10 Barbara M. Stafford, Body Criticism. Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1991). 11 G. S. Rousseau, “Science” in The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Rogers (London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1978), 192. 12 See Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771) ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13 Quoted in R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress. Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974), 45. 14 G. S. Rousseau, “Science,” 192. 15 “ For man is as frail a piece of machinery, and, by irregularity, is as subject to be disordered as a clock,” as Mr. B ostentatiously affirms in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Samuel Richardson, Pamela or, Virtue Rewarded (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1980), 394. 16 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Howard Anderson (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980), 53. 17 Ibid., 114. 18 See Patrizia Nerozzi Bellman, “Il viaggio di Laurence Sterne” in Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia, trad. di Ugo Foscolo (Milano: Bompiani, 2009). 19 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Illustrated Classics, 1938), 125. 20 Ibid., 171. 21 Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” English Literary History, 23 (1956), 144–152. 22 Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility. Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 248. 23 J. W. von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. R. D. Boylan, ed. Nathen Haskell Dole. www.gutenberg.org (accessed January 2013), 39. 24 Ibid., 23. 25 Quoted in R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 260.

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Ibid., 271. Jean Starobinski, “Introduzione” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le fantasticherie del passeggiatore solitario (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1979), 50–51. 28 Quoted in John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability. The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 212. 29 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997), 96. 30 Quoted in Everett Zimmerman, Admiring Pope no more than is proper: Sense and Sensibility” in Jane Austen: Bicentenary essays, ed. John Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 113. 31 Enea Balmas, “La biblioteca francese di Ugo Foscolo”, Acme, n. 38/3, 1985, 5– 22. 32 Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 5. 33 Ibid., 39. 34 Ibid., 47. 35 Ibid., 211. 36 Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey, 13–14. 27

PERIPHERY AND CENTRE IN THE EVOLUTION OF THE NOVELISTIC GENRE IN VENICE: CARLO GOZZI’S 1764 TRANSLATION OF JOHN CLELAND'S FANNY HILL CINDY STANPHILL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

CLORINDA DONATO CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

The origins of the novel, its evolution and history, have been the object of study since the seventeenth century, when this new brand of prose fiction prompted Frenchman Pierre Daniel Huet to reflect on its unique and growing literary stature and to speculate about its history and genesis in his 1670 Traité sur l’Origine des romans. By the eighteenth century in Britain and France, the novel flourished as a genre that was as ideally suited to the narrating and fashioning of new lives as it was to the spread of the enlightened ideas that informed them. Enlightened views in the novel took issue with class, gender, sexuality, social norms and taste. Novels demonstrated how new values could be acquired and performed in the absence of good breeding or family connections; through reading, one could observe and learn how people with such propitious origins behaved, and one could imitate them. Yet while heroines like Clarissa, Pamela, Fanny, Julie, Manon and Roxanne offered new models of female worldliness in England and in France, in Italy, on the contrary, authors struggled with the transition to narrating the lives of these new heroines through prose fiction. The documenting and depicting of everyday life, especially the sexual education and exploits of young women and men, had rapidly become the stuff of British and French novels alike, often through a reciprocal crossfertilization by means of translation back and forth across the channel. This activity is now seen as crucial to the formation of the novel, with translation a salient feature in the evolution of the genre. However, the

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ways in which genre formation through translation might have operated on the Italian peninsula has as yet to be fully explored. Thus we turn our attention to Venice and, indeed, the entire Veneto region, for they became the birthplace of the Italian novel. Indeed, no other city-region possessed such a unique set of conditions, such as close ties to both London and Paris, and a flourishing book market with a particular niche for translation and French-language publishing.1 While the novel was the artistic form that best reflected and narrated the aspirations, dilemmas and characteristics of a growing European middle class, this new readership, the developing middle class, did not emerge until much later on the Italian peninsula. For this reason, the novel took a different path in form and development from England and France— one that has yet to be fully understood, yet one in which translation also played a decisive role. Thanks to Mary Helen McMurran’s 2009 The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century, the role of translation in the emergence of the novel in both Britain and France has prompted scholars to rethink what was at stake as this new genre unfolded, and more importantly how the novel, when translated, became a site where foreign author and domestic reader merged, mediated through the figure of the translator. Indeed, McMurran’s thesis is that the novel was born as a function of translation where authors engaged in amplificatio and brevitas within the text itself as they tailored novelistic content to local, national or personal criteria and identities. Thus, as translators sought to render life stories from one language into another they modified their source texts in such a way as to reflect their personal agendas as well as to either adhere to or challenge established social and political constructs. They did this by either expanding the text to include specific local cultural and linguistic details, or by reducing texts through a process of intensive cutting that removed questionable material or features that did not coincide with the translator’s agenda. Thus, the novel became a place where cosmopolitanism and national identity could be forged. McMurran’s work, then, adds a new element to our understanding of the origins of the genre and its evolution, particularly in a national context. In much the same way that networks focusing on centre and flow in the study of eighteenth-century epistolary contacts have revolutionized our understanding of knowledge production and transmission, the same methods of translation networks, when applied to the study of the novel, are reaping similar rewards. McMurran’s approach can tell us much about the evolution of the novel in Italy, though it requires refocusing for Italian regional contexts. This is particularly true for Venice, a city within the Italian context that

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can be considered, somewhat comparatively with London and Paris, as a centre of publishing in Italy and an area where the readership of nonliturgical writings grew.2 Booksellers’ catalogues, periodicals and letters report the rise in popularity of both the English and French novel in Italian translation around the 1750s, as Luisa Giari’s work on the Italian translations of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, amply demonstrates.3 Her analysis of the changes wrought in the Italian translations and their reception underscores the “domesticating” that McMurran refers to in her monograph, while at the same time providing insight into the evolving identity of the mid-eighteenth-century Venetian population. For a volume that addresses the periphery and centre in British and Italian cultural interchange in the eighteenth century, the translation of the British erotic novel into Italian constitutes a case that engages both temporal and geographical questions of centre and periphery, questions that may ultimately shed light on larger issues of cultural transmission, which involve the seventeenth-century reception of Pietro Aretino in Britain and his influence on the novelistic genre, as well as the eighteenthcentury translation of British novels into Italian and their role in the development of the Italian novel.4 Geographically, our case study of the translation of Cleland into Italian focuses on Venice, a city that can be considered as both peripheral, in the context of the evolution of the European novel, and central, for Venice was not only a centre for theatrical flowering and the periodical press in the eighteenth century, but it was unquestionably the birthplace of the modern Italian novel, especially if we reflect upon the careers of Pietro Chiari (1712–1785) and Antonio Piazza (1742–1825), whose novelistic production, long ignored for its purported inferiority to the British and French narrative traditions, is finally beginning to receive serious attention.5 Our research on the Italian translations of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure extends this line of inquiry to the erotic novel. Our study focuses on the 1764 translation, reflecting many of the literary tensions at play in Venice during the 1760s, including personal vendettas, the debate over literary taste, and the struggle to dictate public and private morality among a growing number of literary consumers, within whose ranks women figured prominently. Let us briefly chart the translation history of Fanny Hill into Italian. Research to date has uncovered four translations of Cleland’s Fanny Hill into Italian, from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.6 The first three appear to constitute instances of intertranslation, i.e., the translation of a work from another translation, rather than the original, in this case from French into Italian; yet the first Italian translation, published in 1764, was

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clandestine, bearing neither the imprint of a major publisher nor the name of the translator, but instead the false imprint Cosmopoli, used for books that had been published secretly, thus eschewing censorship.7 It is this translation that we address in this article.

John Cleland—a Brief History of the Author and his Text John Cleland’s (1709–89) controversial epistolary novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was first published in two parts in 1748 and 1749. Cleland’s novel was immersed in controversy from the time of its release, soon after which it would be banned. In 1750 Cleland issued a bowdlerized version but the text continued to be forbidden, published only in pirated editions, some of which included a very explicit homosexual scene that Cleland denied having ever written. In fact, the book was placed on the “banned reading list” in the United States and remained on it well into the 1960s when the ban was finally overturned in the “Memoirs vs. Massachusetts” case of 1966.8 While Cleland came from an upper-middle class family and had two brothers who successfully finished their schooling and were able to eventually support themselves, Cleland was constantly in dire straits, having been expelled from school and subsequently cut-off from all financial support by his father. The reasons were never entirely clear but it has been speculated that Cleland was homosexual, which would have accounted not only for his estrangement from his family but also for his troubles at school. He never married, was constantly in debt, and struggled to support himself throughout his life. He died destitute and alone in 1789. Fanny Hill was the only real success that he ever had as an author, although he did publish at least two other novels, several “never performed comedies” and one dramatic work, as well as a hodgepodge of writings in various genres, including philological treatises, pamphlets on sexuality, a dictionary on love, and monthly reviews. Some scholars and critics have suggested that Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was written while Cleland languished in prison for unpaid debts, with the text standing as payment for some of what he owed. Fanny Hill, as the novel became immediately known in reference to its heroine, is an intriguing and controversial work, a masterpiece of the epistolary genre, not to mention a foundational libertine text that continues to offer grist to scholars of gender and sexuality studies. Though undoubtedly sexually explicit, it curiously contains not one foul or vulgar word within the entire text— nothing that would mark it as obscene at the level of language, a narrative strategy that would also become the model for French libertine prose.

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H. Montgomery Hyde’s description of the text in the introduction to his 1973 edition comments on the impact of Cleland’s language. He finds that the novel is “expressed in the elegant language of the period” and has “great historical value in the relation to the development of the novel itself and it has similar value in relation to its subject matter in the age in which it was written and while it does not rank with the works of Dickens and Scott, it is, in its way, a little masterpiece.”9 Today we no longer feel compelled to measure Cleland’s impact with the likes of Dickens and Scott, a somewhat anachronistic comparison, but one that is nonetheless interesting as it reminds us of how daring it was to write about Cleland only a few short decades ago.

Carlo Gozzi—a Brief History of the Author and his Adaptation of “Fanny” In 1764 Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) translated Fanny Hill with the title La Meretrice under the false imprint of Cosmopoli. We are able to attribute the translation to Gozzi through the Marquis de Paulmy from a reference by Apollinaire in his introduction to the 1923 French translation of Cleland’s novel.10 Gozzi himself sent the published translation to the Marquis; today that copy can be found in the Arsenal. Paulmy was a wellknown bibliophile and art collector whose 100,000 volume book collection was annotated and catalogued by him personally. In 1785 the collection was sold to the Comte d’Artois, brother of the king, and became the founding collection of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, since in his position as Grand Master of Artillery he housed his personal library in the Arsenal. Further research on eighteenth-century networks will certainly reveal more about the relationship between Paulmy and Gozzi over time, but for our purposes we can be confident that Paulmy’s careful notes and annotations make this a reliable attribution. Cleland’s Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is an intriguing choice for Gozzi when one considers other novels published in the same year or earlier that he might have chosen to translate, such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, neither of which was as contentious or controversial as Fanny Hill. Speculation about Gozzi’s choice of novel immediately evokes his fraught relationship with his brother, Gasparo Gozzi, and Gasparo’s poetess and protofeminist wife, Luisa Bergalli. As the Gozzi’s were considered “impoverished Venetian nobility,” Carlo, to improve his fortunes, joined the Dalmatian army for three years. When he returned, he became a member of the Accademia dei Granelleschi, whose own name referenced the Renaissance

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Accademia della Crusca’s “bread” and “flour” theme. Both academies supported Italian literature, but above all they sought to promote Tuscan as the preferred literary tongue and drew heavily on classical references. The Accademia dei Granelleschi was immensely popular throughout northern and central Italy. Though both brothers were members of the Accademia, their literary tastes could not have been more divergent. Both Gasparo Gozzi and Luisa Bergalli translated French works for the theatre of Sant’Angelo in Venice, but Gasparo is known mainly for his work at the Gazzetta Veneta, recognized among periodicals for its elevated style; he also worked as the press censor in Venice for many years and published translations of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Jean-François Marmontel’s Tales. For these reasons, even though Cleland’s novel contained not a single vulgar word, the subject matter, with its sexually explicit details, albeit chastely recounted, would certainly have offended Gasparo and Luisa’s sensibilities. Carlo Gozzi, therefore, may have been attracted to this text precisely because of its controversial status, and more specifically, as a response to Gasparo’s reflections on the relationship between the epic poem and the novel that he published in Il Mondo morale, where he claimed the highest of moral inspiration for the emerging genre: The objective of poems and novels is to narrate tales and lies; and without realizing it, these writers leave us their books that are actually full of a truthfulness that shines out from all sides. The customs of all centuries and all nations are illustrated in such works, where one sees, as if reflected in a mirror, from one end to the other, to such an extent that if novels from every period and every nation, from the Diluvian until now, had survived, we would know the virtues or vices that prevailed among those peoples, and how in a particular century, one held sway over the other. But let us come to my statement, so that it doesn’t appear that I am mad. Poetry and narration are both imitations of nature, invented to give pleasure, some say, to serve a useful purpose as well, but this comes later. In order for imitation to be pleasurable, it must keep an eye trained on nature, drawing a certain verisimilitude from the truth it sees.11

The purpose of literature, and of the novel, as a mirror of reality that gives pleasure by reflecting nature and reinforcing useful social values, could not have been further from Carlo Gozzi’s perspective. Thus, we can speculate that Carlo Gozzi translated Fanny Hill to contradict both the moral standard held by his brother, Gasparo, and the literary style promoted by both his brother and his brother’s wife, Luisa Bergalli, thus placing him at the centre of controversy. Gozzi sought and enjoyed such wranglings, judging from his very public clashes with Goldoni, Gratorol

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and his own family members Gasparo and Luisa Bergalli, who were part of the eighteenth-century Venetian literary establishment. Carlo Gozzi was an inveterate defender of Italy’s poetic tradition and an outspoken opponent of the celebration of quotidianità that was the stuff of Carlo Goldoni’s theatre and the Commedia dell’arte before it. Indeed, Carlo Gozzi most certainly took perverse pleasure in translating a work whose contents parodied Gasparo’s picturesque praise of the novelistic genre in Il Mondo morale. While Carlo Gozzi is best known for his comedies, Le droghe d’amore, Analisi riflessiva della fiaba, and L'amore delle tre melarance as well as his use of fairy tales and magic, two controversial practices in the “secolo dei lumi,” he also wrote in prose. His autobiography, Memorie inutili della vita di Carlo Gozzi, scritte da lui medesimo, e da lui pubblicate per umiltà, was written in 1780 and finally published in 1797, after the fall of the Venetian republic. His disparaging consideration of women is evident in his Memoirs, most explicitly in his “condescending descriptions of the actresses in Sacchi’s company,” as Emma Dassori has noted in her work.12 Other scholars have also remarked on Gozzi’s troubled view of the public sphere of changing sexual mores in the eighteenth century. Ted Emery, in particular, has probed this issue in the preface to his translation of Gozzi’s Fiabe by comparing their animus against women with ideas expressed in the Memorie inutili. Emery finds that Gozzi thoroughly rejects the freedoms afforded to the enlightened woman and the agency granted her by his contemporaries in their writings. Gozzi views women’s less-guarded behaviour, now developing unchecked as a function of greater intellectual freedom, as a threat to the social order, and his translation of Fanny Hill may be considered from the same suspicious perspective.13 The Memorie inutili chronicle his various amorous affairs, often with married women and actresses, and his overall daily life as an inveterate bachelor. Memoirs, like Rousseau’s momentous Confessions, were increasing popular during this period and were read like novels, adding to the demand for prose narratives. Yet lengthy prose works were still far from being the preferred literary genre in Italy, with theatre and verse still occupying the primary position.

The Novel and Translation in Italy and England— Gozzi’s Adaptation of Cleland’s Text We must first briefly consider how British/ Italian cultural relations during this period are reflected in the history of translation. Indeed, a

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survey of Italian texts translated into English over the course of the eighteenth century reveals considerable interest in and familiarity with those genres of Italian writing that the Milanese, Neapolitan and Venetian centres of Illuminismo produced, i.e. legislative and religious reform, historical and philosophical reflection, theatre and opera. However, the Italian fictional prose produced in the eighteenth century is conspicuously absent on the international scene, although verse translations of Ariosto and Tasso abounded in English and French.14 Yet the innovative features of new genre formation in Italy can be found in the translations of English or French novels into Italian, and it behoves us to examine them by identifying the changes wrought in the translated novels and comparing them to other forms of prose writing by the translators themselves. In the case of Gozzi, this means examining his autobiography Le Memorie inutile and his letters, both of which have been greatly overshadowed by his contributions to theatre. His impassioned and contentious relationship with his rivals has further branded him as an outlier, juxtaposing him with the traditionally “enlightened” Venetian writers who are more easily accommodated under the overarching history of literature studies. Gozzi’s translation of Cleland has thus remained relatively unknown. It is within this “traditional” vision with an expressed cultural preference for poetry as the privileged literary mode that Gozzi translates Cleland’s pornographic novel into Italian. Despite his reticence to embrace the new genre, we note that Gozzi, nonetheless, was tempted to experiment, realizing (though certainly without admitting it) that the classical literary system was in crisis. Gozzi tried to renew from within, operating at the centre, through classical theatre genres. Yet as Shelly Yahalom has pointed out in her work on change in French literature in the first half of the eighteenth century, the burgeoning of the peripheral sphere of translated English novels into French eventually transformed, through the sheer volume of translations, the literary centre, thus making space for the novel.15

John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Carlo Gozzi’s Translation Like much eighteenth-century prose translation, Gozzi’s product is an adaptation of Fanny Hill and an acculturation of Cleland’s text.16 Indeed, Gozzi has domesticated Cleland, localizing and Italianizing Fanny Hill, not to mention personalizing the work, matching the text to his personal set of cultural and moral criteria for which there is resonance in his autobiography and his letters.17 In part, his translation also reflects what we might define as a uniquely Italian sensibility in licentious literature. Indeed, we find echoes of Pietro Aretino’s I Ragionamenti in Gozzi’s

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rendition. However, we cannot consider Gozzi’s translation of Fanny Hill in a vacuum, but rather we must consider it within the context of the other British novels that were being translated, as well as the novels being written by his rival, Pietro Chiari, in particular his best known novel La Filosofessa italiana, published in 1753. The conceit of Cleland’s novel is comprised of two lengthy letters written by Fanny to a friend as a de facto confession of her past life as a prostitute, left to fend for herself in the world upon the demise of her parents. Within the context of the British novel, the subject matter had been treated before in earlier novels of education such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa Howe, which, like Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, were also presented and read like autobiographies, blurring the line for readers between fiction and reality. As Christoffer Fogleström has pointed out, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is a distinct kind of Bildungsroman, one in which a very specific type of education takes place, an education in sexual pleasure.18 Indeed, the innovation of Cleland’s work lies in the sexual agency displayed by Fanny who narrates her licentious experiences with the immediate, rollicking and curious delight with which she experienced them.19 Though Fanny ostensibly repents her former life during the course of the letters, explaining how she was compelled to sell herself for survival, her account is told with such vivid detail and unabashed enthusiasm that it is clear she is not only unrepentant in expressing her sexual enjoyment but even inclusive, inviting our voyeuristic participation so that we, too, might learn and prepare for similar exploits in our own boudoirs. Moreover, although her account of the sexual act is surprisingly, perhaps even shockingly detailed, as if it were a manual for pleasure, it is devoid of any actual vulgar words, as discussed earlier. Though Fanny is delving into the world of high-end prostitution as we might classify it today, we almost forget that she is being paid for her services. Cleland refers to her as a “lady,” “mistress” and true to the title “a woman of pleasure,” a term whose meaning is wholly reversed, for this woman of pleasure is as actively engaged in the procurement of her own pleasure as she is in that of her companions. In his translation, however, Carlo Gozzi, has most decidedly removed any notion of Fanny’s self-fashioning inherent in Cleland’s title, relegating Fanny, instead, to the ranks of prostitute, whose lot was the subject of intense debate in Venice at the time this translation was published. Though it is possible that Cleland translated from the French, he did not follow the French translator’s lead with regard to the title. The title of the first French translation of 1751, La Fille de joie, is actually a partial calk on the .

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English title Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, though the agency demonstrated by the young woman who writes her own “memories”— indeed, the literary self-fashioning assigned by Cleland but absent in Gozzi’s translation—is also absent from the French title. The French translation was also published anonymously, though it was later attributed to the erotic French novelist Jean-Louis Fougeret de Montbron, author of Margot, la ravaudeuse (1750), a novel that drew heavily from Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.20 However, the translation does refer explicitly to the book’s English provenance by means of the phrase ouvrage quintessencié de l’anglois added just below the title. Statistical information on the rate of books translated from English into French during the eighteenth century shows a marked increase in the middle of the century, which coincides with the 1751 publication of Fougeret de Montbron’s translation of the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. By midcentury, the French reading public had become aware of the sheer numbers of British novels being diffused through France, but specifically in Paris; as their own novelistic production began to wane, English-language novels translated into French easily filled the gap.21 These considerations explain the later appearance of Italian translations, many of which were translated from French into Italian and not from the original English. The French translations became available in Venice where they were in turn translated into Italian. The first French translation of Fanny Hill was published with the false imprint of “Lampsaque,” which is French for Lampsacus, a small town of the Hellespont where the cult of Priapus was actively celebrated.22 This practice is carried over into the Italian translation with the false imprint of “Cosmopoli,” an indicator, as was “Lampasaque,” of the novel’s licentious nature. Intensifying the original licentious tone and forcing a very different cultural and personal stamp on the protagonist of the Memoirs and thus on the overall novel, Cleland’s progressive Fanny is negated by Gozzi’s insistence on such base and vulgar terms like “meretrice” [whore], “puttana” [whore] and “ruffian” [procuress or female-pimp.] Thus, while the act of prostitution may be socially acceptable to Gozzi on one level, a woman enthusiastically writing about her sexual pleasure unapologetically is not. So Gozzi, for the most part, eliminates this aspect of Fanny’s narrative voice, abandoning the elegant euphemisms in her “confession” for more direct and morally weighted terms. Gozzi does not, in other words, maintain Cleland’s aim to write licentious material without the use of licentious language, and in this particular case, we see, fully enacted, the Aretino tradition mentioned earlier.

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From the outset, Gozzi vulgarizes the text. While Cleland euphemizes even the title, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Gozzi calls his translation, La Meretrice or The Whore—reducing Fanny’s subjectivity to its former déclassé status, which her narrative is explicitly trying to transcend. However, the translator/author makes his presence known through a double set of interventions that make the reader aware of the male gaze and voice overseeing the prostitute’s narrative. The first of these interventions consists of four lines of verse, while the second, a de facto preface, disclaims its prefatory status. The lines of verse were taken from canto 25 of Il Vendemmiatore, a work by Luigi Tansillo, written 1530–34, which casts a libertine eye on the joys of the grape harvest. It was considered so licentious that Pope Paul IV placed it on the index. The selected four lines of verse appearing on the frontispiece of Gozzi’s translation send yet another signal to the reader about the subject matter of this work. Only the last four lines of the octave appear on the frontispiece; in our example below, however, the first four lines are also provided to facilitate meaning: Nell’età d’or, quando la ghianda e ’l pomo Eran del ventre uman lodevol pasto, Nè femmina sapea, nè sapeva uomo, Che cosa fosse onor, che viver casto; Trovò debil vecchion, dagli anni domo, Queste leggi d’onor che ’l mondo han guasto, Sazio del dolce, già vietato a lui, Volle dar legge alle dolcezze altrui. In the golden age when acorns and apples Were for the human appetite a worthy meal Neither woman, nor man knew What honour was, or chaste living either Tamed by the years, the feeble-minded old man discovers These laws of honour that have ruined the world Sated by the sweet things he has already tasted He now legislates the enjoyment of others.23

Gozzi has also rearranged the introduction, and contrary to Cleland’s Fanny, who begins by addressing the recipient of the letter apologetically, Gozzi’s Fanny instead begins by stating that the text does not need a preface at all. In this way he silences Fanny’s confessional voice from the beginning. In addition, Gozzi’s Fanny addresses her readers with the

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informal “tu” rather than the formal “voi” more common in this type of writing. Of course, the ability to change register in Italian makes a strong statement in La meretrice, a linguistic element not rendered in English and that cannot be present in Cleland’s original. Gozzi’s “adaptation” of Cleland is thus both a literary and a communicative act. He is rewriting Cleland’s intellectually inclined and sexually progressive woman, reforming her into a simplified, palpable and disreputable version for his Italian reading public and himself. Gozzi reduces the novel by half (just one letter instead of two), removing all truly reflective moments in which Fanny begins to examine her movement into the licentious world of prostitution, her understanding of social classes and of men’s and women’s desires—especially those desires that lie beyond the bed. Gozzi chooses to eliminate all text in which Fanny is truly reflective, thus rendering a much less intellectual protagonist. While with Charles, Fanny’s first love, she recollects: I was in a little time enabl’d, by the progress I had made, to prove the deep regard I had paid to all that he said to me; repeating it to him almost word for word; and to show that I was not entirely the parrot, but that I reflected upon, that I enter’d into it, I join’d my own comments, and ask’d him questions of explanation. My country accent, and the rusticity of my gait, manners, and deportment, began now sensibly to wear off, so quick was my observation, and so efficacious my desire of growing every day worthier of his heart.24

Gozzi’s translation of this passage eliminates Fanny’s reflection on her ability to learn, making her a far more Rousseauian heroine, one who depends completely on a man: “Posso dire senza insuperbirmi, che le di lui attenzioni non furono inutili. In breve tempo acquistai le maniere gentili, e la buona pronunzia. Tanto è vero, che non v’ha miglior maestro dell’amore, e del desiderio di piacere.”25 Gozzi is doing two things by choosing to translate, or adapt, Fanny in this way. He is imposing a particular Italian cultural standard on women, one that he wants to promote; as Venuti would argue, he is “localizing” the text on a linguistic level but also, just as importantly, on an ideological level. This becomes even more pronounced later in the text when Fanny reveals her understanding of class difference while contemplating her new situation with Mr H (her second lover): … he was much my superior in every sense, that I felt too much to the disadvantage of the gratitude I ow’d him, thus he gain’d my esteem, though he could not raise my taste; I was qualified for no sort of

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Just as Fanny is about to close her first letter, and thus the first part of her experience, she reflects on her experiences with Charles, Mr. H and Will, Mr. H’s servant, acknowledging that she is better suited to Will, the servant, than to Mr. H. Fanny ends her letter with the dissolution of her relationship with Mr. H and her choice to move into a real house of pleasure. In all instances up to this point her “prostitution” has been at the hands of another and she went into it almost unwillingly or unconsciously. Additionally, there is a clear development in Fanny’s character between the chronology of the two letters. In the first, Fanny is passive and demure, while in the second she is more active, even aggressive. Gozzi cuts or condenses most of Fanny’s self-examinations and reflections on her affairs at the close of her first letter, completely ignoring the clear break in the narrative of the original text. Gozzi’s text is unified, with no chapters, and thus does not contain a second letter. In fact, this caesura is not as necessary because Gozzi’s Fanny lacks the intellectual depth and growth of Cleland’s. While he strips Fanny of her intellectual tendencies by cutting the very scenes and moments that render her more reflective and independent, he also imputes a very clear set of values in the text—distinctly Italian ones— if we use Italian literature as the defining national point of reference. Gozzi consistently adds specific classical references that are not present in the original, which a contemporary educated Italian reader would have immediately recognized. With these conspicuous insertions, Gozzi is able to import a host of inferences and references that change the description, and thus the understanding of each character in the text. For example, Fanny, at the very start of her journey, seeks work through a labour house, managed by an “elderly woman.”27 After she is told that “places for women were exceeding scarce,” especially for those of her slight build and size, Cleland has her draw back into the room where the following internal monologue is reported. She was “most heartily mortified at a declaration which carried with it a killing uncertainty, that my [her] circumstances could not well endure.”28 Gozzi, however, adds a whole new dimension to the scene with the addition of just one word: sibilla. Gozzi’s Fanny recollects that ‘mi allonatanai confusa, e disperata, per la risposta della vecchia sibilla’29 This is a turning point in Fanny’s life, and by referring to the old woman as a Sybil Gozzi creates a prophetess that gives Fanny an ambiguous, yet foreboding, response. It is unclear to Fanny how to take these words in Cleland’s text but in Gozzi’s rendition of the scene the

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response is much more ominous, fully imbued in the Italian context with the oracle’s ancient tradition of delivering prophecies that bode ill for those asking their fate of them. Gozzi has no qualms with this seemingly weak and pliable nature of Fanny, and thus of the female in general. Therefore, he retains all of the sexual initiation scenes from Cleland including two explicit homosexual scenes between Fanny and an older, more experienced girl from the house. Acts of lesbianism constituted a well-established subject matter in Italian literature (we have already mentioned Aretino). However, explicit description of male homosexuality was not acceptable within the Italian literary tradition. Thus it is not surprising that Gozzi excludes a detailed male homosexual scene from Cleland’s original, where Fanny inadvertently watches through the curtains in an inn while a young man “mounts” another young man. Gozzi’s exclusion of this “perverted” sexual act between two men is very much a betrayal of Cleland’s rendition of Fanny’s experience in the sexual underworld as panoramic—aptly recalling “traduttore, traditore” [translator, traitor]—for here Gozzi, in fact, betrays the text and allows a rigid cultural standard to dictate the section of his “adaptation.” “L’amore contro natura” was deemed too extreme and does not fit into the acceptable Italian social-sexual code.30 Gozzi’s contemporary, Pietro Chiari, on the other hand, comments positively on homosexuality, both male and female, in the La filosofessa italiana, where ideas are discussed and explained by a new kind of woman, not unlike Goldoni’s Mirandolina in La locandiera, a woman who has agency and who thinks of herself on the same level as men. On the other hand, Gozzi’s autobiography and letters are rife with preoccupations about declining morals and the need to combat the encroachment of free-thinking and material pursuit. In a letter dated July 12, 1770 Gozzi writes the following to the actress, Caterina Manzoni, to whom he was particularly close: You prefer to await insight from the passing of time. I don’t want to fool you. Humanity, once released from the solid principles of good upbringing, will become entangled in ever deepening abysses of evil, reducing all qualities of the mind to the most material of the senses. Having reached the age in which our senses move us from ridicule to misery, we are no longer capable of either counsel or reacquiring for our souls that tranquillity of which we have lost every trace. Open your eyes, Cattarina, or you will lead a life with few momentary pleasures, extremely long troubles, the cruellest of desires and agitations, and you will die in despair.31

Gozzi’s words to Caterina offer insight into his translation of Fanny Hill, but also into the context for prostitution and courtesan culture in

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eighteenth-century Venice. As Thomas Madden has observed in his recent book on Venice, “Prostitutes, and prostitution, were notoriously visible in eighteenth-century culture, a visibility that was amply reflected in political and cultural discourses.” 32 As the protagonists of an ever-growing number of eighteenth-century novels, prostitutes certainly gauged the “moral temperature of society” as Madden reminds us, but they inhabit the new literary genre of the novel and are fully present, no longer excluded from literary forms such as the epic, where their agency had no role. Here, though, we can draw a fascinating line between Ariosto and Tasso’s rewriting of the epic poem to include women. Now, in the novel, Angelica and Clorinda have found a literary home where their entire stories can be told. Although Gozzi’s intention may have been that of forming in the reader’s mind a moral reprimand of Fanny as La Meretrice, (and she evokes a far different female persona than does Cleland’s delightful Fanny), she is still the protagonist of his translated adaptation. To better understand the heavy moral overtones of Gozzi’s translation, we turn to Alison Conway’s The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative & Religious controversy in England, 1680–1750, in which she comments on Cleland’s decoupling of sexuality and sinfulness: “The separation of sexuality from discourses of sinfulness is particularly apparent in Cleland’s 1748 pornographic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill). Its treatment of Fanny’s sexuality as secular and apolitical marks a midcentury shift in courtesan representations.”33 Gozzi’s translation returns Fanny to the sinful courtesan model of the earlier British whore; certainly a more comfortable perspective for Gozzi. By reuniting sin and sexuality, Gozzi has weighed in on the debate raging over the prostitute and women’s role in society. True to form, he throws down the gauntlet on women as a challenge to the work of his contemporaries and rivals, Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni. Both writers had brought forth modern models of women in La filosofessa italiana (1753–1756) and La Locandiera (1753), where sexuality is sacrificed in favour of the performance of knowledge and common sense. Ultimately, Gozzi’s Fanny, juxtaposed with Chiari’s “filosofessa” and Goldoni’s “locandiera” reminds us that the professions of “meretrice” and “attrice” demand our consideration of them as women in an ever-vaster arena of female protagonists. While the female protagonists of Goldoni’s plays have been the subjects of articles, dissertations and books, it is impossible to understand the transformation of the female protagonist in Venetian literature without considering the oeuvre of Chiari, Goldoni and Gozzi together. To be sure, female protagonists have all moved to the

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centre from a crowded periphery where they had resided for far too long. Gozzi’s Fanny Hill amply demonstrates the interplay of centre and periphery with regard to the translation of the British novel in Venice. More importantly, however, for our understanding of the evolution of the Italian novel overall, Gozzi’s Meretrice clearly delineates a Venetian context in which authors, some through translation, some through new work, vie among themselves for the centre in the contest to provide literary models that will shape and educate the Venetian subject, man and woman alike, over the next century.

Notes 1

On French language publishing in the Venetian Republic, see Clorinda Donato, “Writing the Italian Nation in French: Cultural Politics in the Encyclopédia méthodique de Padoue,” New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century, volume 8, Spring 2013, 12–27; for cultural relations between Paris and Venice in the eighteenth centure, see Parigi/Venezia. Cultura, relazioni, influenze negli scambi intellettuali del settecento, ed. Carlo Ossola (Venezia: Leo S. Olschki, 1998). 2 See Mario Infelise, L’editoria veneziana nel ‘700 (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 8th edition 2008) for a thorough exploration of Venetian publishing in the eighteenth century. Infelise charts a publishing industry in full expansion by 1735 when he calculates that some twenty-six publishers ran a total of ninety-four presses. For an analysis of the French market see Thierry Rigogne, Between state and market: printing and bookselling in eighteenth-century France, (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation), SVEC 2007:05. In his preface to Rigogne’s work, Darnton cites the number of printers in Paris as in decline, at seventy-five in 1644, fifty-one in 1692 and only thirty-six in 1777, with numbers declining in the provinces as well. Darnton discusses the importance of the underground press in this regard, as well as the circulation of foreign books, which by 1770 accounted for half of the books for sale in France (pp. xvi–xvii). Book publishing in London is far more diffuse, with 802 printers resulting as active between 1750 and 1770 according to the University of Birmingham’s British Booktrade Index, (BBTI), http://www.bbti.bham.ac.uk/results.htm. 3 Luisa Giari, “Le Peripizie delle prime traduzioni del Tom Jones tra Francia e Italia,” in Problemi di Critica Goldoniana, vol. 9, 2002: 229–249. 4 See Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. 2000); for the evolution of the erotic/pornographic genre in seventeenth-century England and a defining of terms, see R. Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears. A Study of Pornographic, Obscene and Body Words Written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century (London: Macmillan 1979), IX–X. 5 The most salient studies of these authors can be found in the following publications, all of which have emerged over the past fifteen years. While Luca Clerici and Carlo Madrignani focus exclusively on Chiari, Valeria Tavazzi

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analyzes Antonio Piazza together with Chiari to initiate a more inclusive discussion about the beginnings of the novel in Italy. See Luca Clerici, Il romanzo italiano del Settecento: il caso Chiari (Marsiglio: Venice, 1997), Carlo A. Madrignani, All’origine del romanzo in Italia: il “celebre abate Chiari” (Liguori: Rome, 2000), Valeria Tavazzi, Il romanzo in gara. Ecchi delle polemiche teatrali nella narrativa di Pietro Chiari e Antonio Piazza (Bulzoni Editore: Rome, 2010). 6 The Italian translation of Fanny Hill that is currently available, Fanny Hill. Memorie di una donna di piacere, translator F. Garrone, 2004 makes no mention of these earlier Italian versions, citing (in translation) only from Cleland expert Peter Sabor’s classic introduction to his edition of Cleland’s novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, (Oxford University Press: Oxford and New York, 1985). 7 “Cosmopoli” was an imprint for texts published clandestinely in Venice during the eighteenth century that had skipped the censor’s gaze. By appearing to have been imported into Venice and published elsewhere, the otherwise scandalous and blasphemous texts that the Council of Ten sought to block succeeded in circulating. 8 For a more in-depth history of the ban history of Fanny Hill, see Charles Rembar’s commentary in: Cleland, John. Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, intro. by Gary Gautier (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 229– 247. 9 H. Montgomery Hyde, Foreward to, Cleland, John, Memoirs of Fanny Hill (New York: Peebles Press International, 1973), 2. 10 Guillaume Apollinaire, Introduction,, Mémoires de Fanny Hill, L’oeuvre de John Cleland, (Paris: Bibliothèque des Curieux, 1923). 11 “I poemi e i romanzi fanno professione di narrare favole e bugie; e gli scrittori di quelli senza punto avvedersene ci lasciano ripieni i libri loro d’una verità che risplende da tutte le parti. I costume di tutti i secoli e di tutti i paesi sono dipinti in cotali opera, e vi si veggono, come in uno specchio, dall’un capo all’altro, tanto che se ci fossero rimasti di tempo in tempo romanzi dal diluvio in qua d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, noi vedremmo quali virtu o quali vizi regnarono ne’ popoli, e come in un secolo regnò più l’uno che l’altro. Vegnamo alla dichiarazione, che non paresse ch’io farneticassi. La poesia e la favola sono un’imitazione della natura trovata per dar diletto, dicono alcuni anche per utilità, ma questo ne venne dopo. Perché l’imitazione sia dilettevole, la dee dunque aver l’occhio alla natura, traendo dal vero che vede una certa verisimiglianza.” Gasparo Gozzi, Il mondo morale, Venice, Colombani, 1760, VII. pp. 101-02, also quoted in Gilberto Pizzamiglio, “Le Fortune del romanzo e della letteratura d’intrattenimento,” Storia della cultura veneta, 5/1, Dalla controriforma alla fine della Repubblica, Il settecento, (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985), 171–196, 173. 12 Emma A. Dassori, Carlo Gozzi's Zobeide: An annotated translation (ProQuest: UMI Dissertation Publishing, 2011), 54. 13 Ted Emery, “Carlo Gozzi in Context,” Introduction, in Carlo Gozzi, Five Tales for the Theatre, edited and translated by Albert Bermel and Ted Emery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1–20.

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14 See Clorinda Donato, "Charles-Joseph Panckoucke's Translations of Ariosto and Tasso and His Treatise on Translation," in Forma e parola Studi di italianistica in memoria di Fredi Chiappelli (Roma: Bulzoni, 1992). 15 Shelly Yahalom, "Relations entre les littératures anglaise et française au 18e siècle." (M.A. Diss.; Hebrew, French summary). (Tel Aviv: Department of Poetics and Comp. Lit., 1978), 42–52 and 74–75. 16 For an in-depth discussion of the translating of novels in the eighteenth-century, see La Traduction Romanesque au XVIIIe siècle, eds. Annie Cointre, Alain Lautel, et Annie Rivara (Artois: Artois Presses Université, 2003). 17 Lawrence Venuti discusses the “domestication” of the translated text as a strategy of adaptation in Chapter 1, “Invisibility,” The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation, (Routledge: London and New York, 1995), 1–43. 18 Christoffer Fogleström, “The Bildung of Fanny Hill: John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” thesis from Linneaus University, Sweden, permanent link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-13573. 19 Fanny’s recollections are certainly akin to Nanna’s in Aretino’s I ragionamenti, except that Aretino’s text is essentially a sex manual and political commentary while Cleland’s text takes on a very different role, a much more progressive role. 20 See Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, “The French Adventures of Fanny Hill,” in Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson, Eds., Launching ‘Fanny Hill’. Essays on the Novel and its Influence (New York: AMS 2003), 127–151. 21 McMurran. 130. 22 Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon 130, n2. 23 This translation is ours. 24 John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, intro. by Gary Gautier (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 62. 25 Carlo Gozzi,. La meretrice (Cosmopoli: Milano – Braidense, (1764) 54. 26 Cleland, 77. 27 Ibid., 9. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 La Meretrice, 8. 30 See Massimo Cattaneo, “Vitio Nefando e Inquisizione Romana,” in Diversità e minoranze nel Settecento, eds. Marina Formica and Alberto Postigliola (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2006), 54–77 for a discussion of “l’amore contro natura” in eighteenth-century Italy. 31 Voi volete attendere lumi dal tempo. Non posso ingannarvi. L’umanità sciolta da’ principi sani della educazione, si va invescando d’uno in un altro abisso di mali, riduce tutte le qualita dello spirito a’ soli sensi materialissimi, e giunta quella età in cui i sensi formano il nostro ridicolo a la nostra miseria, non siamo piu capaci né di consiglio, né di ristabilire nell’animo quella calma di cui abbiamo perduta ogni traccia. Aprite gl’occhi Cattarina, o voi condurrete una vita con pochi momentanei piaceri, lunghissimi affanni, crudelissime voglie ed agitazione, e morrrete disperata. Carlo Gozzi, Lettere, a cura di Faio Soldatini (Venezia: Marsiglio, 2004), 89. This translation is ours. 32 Thomas Madden, Venice: A New History (London: Viking Penguin, 2012).

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Periphery and Centre in the Evolution of the Novelistic Genre in Venice

Alison Conway. The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious controversy in England, 1680–1750 (Toronto-Buffalo-London: The University of Toronto Press, 2010), 250.

THE MARGINS AT THE CENTRE: GIUSEPPE BARETTI’S UNCHARTED ITALY MATTEO UBEZIO UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO

From Margins to Mainstream The Italian writer and scholar Luigi Meneghello was used to saying that he realized what the world was like outside fascist Italy when he moved to the Perfida Albione, after World War II. There he learnt how to write and, still more important, to think. In one of his latest books, evoking his experience as an Italian intellectual expatriate in Great Britain, he wrote: Star fuori dalla mainstream sembra in certe circostanze un impegno primario, ma in altre è così consolante sentire che contro le piccole correnti locali e i flussi di melma della moda, ci muoviamo con la corrente maestra della comune civiltà.1

Such a notion of “mainstream,” relative and shifting, seems to me a good starting point for a discussion on Giuseppe Baretti, another Italian man of letters who made Great Britain his home two hundred years before Meneghello. Born and educated in Piedmont, Baretti experienced what his countryfellow Vittorio Alfieri would have later called spiemontizzazione—not just a mere settling abroad but a deep, dramatic and even traumatic process of inner conversion. Alfieri is very eloquent when he comes to evoke the moment he asked the King of Sardinia to be freed from his feudal duties (he renounced in return to his feudal rights and handed over his real estate to his sister): “egli [the King] consentì subito a quella mia spontanea spogliazione; ed ambedue fummo contentissimi: egli di perdermi, io di ritrovarmi.”2 Alfieri was to become a world’s citizen and Baretti a naturalized Englishman. But whichever their new identity, they both made their choice with a strong critical and polemical awareness, as an act of moral and intellectual responsibility. That had not been the case with the

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number of artists, musicians, scientists and writers who had happened to leave Piedmont before.3 Baretti’s flight from his native place goes unquestionably from marginality toward the mainstream. From the point of view of cultural life, eighteenth-century Piedmont was an absolutely marginal country in the Italian context. Nobody can read Alfieri’s Vita and forget the grotesque portrait of Piedmontese education as it was given to young aristocrats at home, and then at school and university. Every time Baretti touches upon his countrymen’s astounding ignorance it goes hand in hand with Alfieri’s account. Even though he did not attend a regular course of studies, set as he was by his father on the career of priest, then architect and finally lawyer, he acknowledged that the Piedmontese educational system was producing a class of men and women scandalously ignorant of the Italian literary tradition and of the Italian language itself, if not openly inclined to despise culture as a whole. The anecdote of Baretti’s father giving him his first push toward humanistic studies is pretty well known: Più d’una volta il buon uomo me ne strappò la grammatica di mano, e me la battette in capo con molte parole di contumelia, avendomi più d’una volta trovato a studiarla di straforo. Così erano fatti i nostri vecchi! Lo studiare il greco a non pochi d’essi pareva uno scialacquo di tempo: e il mio buon padre in particolare aveva osservato che il marchese d’Ormea era divenuto primo ministro di Vittorio Amedeo senza aver saputo mai uno jota di greco.4

When his brother Filippo showed some hesitation to set his young son Pino on the study of Latin and classic literature, Baretti cut short: “Né tu né alcun padre piemontese,” he wrote, “sa la via d’educare figlioli.”5 Actually, his emigrant’s experience afforded him overabundant material to set up a very harsh comparison between British noblemen, generally learned and aware of the importance of a good education, and their Piedmontese counterparts: i quali se ne stanno serenamente a sedere sulla seggetta della sciocchezza senza mai mostrare d’essere nauseati dall’infinito puzzo che di quella esce; e che anzi si fanno un animalesco pregio di essere riputati asinacci in ogni sorta di buone lettere, fidando unicamente alla riverenza che l’antichità della prosapia e l’abbondanza de’ quattrini naturalmente procurano.6

Here, Baretti is speaking out of his personal aversion, and his style is characteristically above the line as well as his humours; in fact, he is not far from the truth. Historians agree on the very bad state of Piedmontese

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schools and universities in the eighteenth century, wherein illiteracy was almost universal outside the court. As a matter of fact, Vittorio Amedeo II’s reformation was meant to break the Jesuits’ monopoly and bring education under the full control of the Crown, rather than to foster free studies.7 It is not by mere chance that eighteenth-century Piedmont produced scientists and mathematicians of international level and renown, while nothing similar happened in the field of humanistic and “critical” studies. Generally speaking, Piedmont lacked what we used to call militant culture as a consequence of a formidable alliance of old and new factors. Traditionally oriented toward France through Savoy, Piedmont had never taken an active part in the century-old process that gave Italy, despite political division, its national identity and unity in terms of literary language. The poverty of the modern cultural background arose first of all from such a long isolation. In addition, the Savoy monarchy was directly responsible for a cultural policy that was conservative, suspicious, positively hostile to free studies and the free circulation of ideas, tightfisted and heavily censorious.8 As soon as Baretti had the opportunity to try his luck abroad, he fled to Milan, then to Venice, unquestionably the most promising and seductive towns in Italy for a young writer of the time. But the decisive leap was to take him much farther—to Great Britain. As the epitome of Great Britain, London was rightfully considered along with Paris to be the heart of modern Europe. As Johnson had it: “when a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”9 Yet, what is more relevant is Baretti’s attitude. When he threw himself into that dazzling and exciting new world, the last thing he intended to do was to play the adventurer. Though he had left Italy in order to get a job and an income, lacking Alfieri’s aristocratic revenue, he was not the emigrant escaping indigence and ready to embark in all sorts of adventures. He was looking for a more favourable context in which to get social and intellectual reputation together with economic reliability. He had the strongest “sense of horror” at the mere idea of being excluded from respectability and would have never tolerated surviving at the margins of society, literary society included. He intended to become a member of learned and polite society through intellectual and highly qualified work. At first he worked for the Italian Opera, probably as a translator and botcher of librettos10 (positively not in the role of director, as old biographers used to say). However, as soon as he could, he left that world and he never spoke of those years again. He was well aware of the difference between writing in tune with the public, on commission for

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publishers, and selling one’s pen like a Grub Street writer. And although he had been one of the Italian teachers who wore out their shoes running London’s streets after their pupils, out of such a scarcely gratifying training he was able to make the Easy Phraseology, one of his most intriguing books, leaning toward Swift and Sterne on the line pointing to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland.11 We just have to look once more at Baretti’s friends to confirm his personal ambition to join that élite which was, or at least aimed to be, the intellectual and moral guide of England. But let us make a step backward. Since his first literary attempts in Italy, Baretti had felt urged to exhibit, rather deliberately and confusedly, his non-conformism. His first works, however, did not rise above conventionality. Feeling different from everybody else but not sure of whom or what he was fighting against, uncertain as well on how to express his dissenting opinion, the young Baretti played the rebel within the literary conventions that tradition afforded. He applied to the comic and satirical genre of “poesia bernesca” and to polemics—one with its trite and perfectly harmless rhetoric, the other with a disheartening disproportion between the investment of linguistic ferocity and the petty subjects of the contests. Had not Baretti left Italy, he would probably not have risen much above mediocrity. When, after his first decade of British therapy, he went back to Italy he brought along a much greater maturity, and yet he could not help to wear the mask of the all-out antagonist again. He embarked in the adventure of the Frusta letteraria with a better view both of the national situation and of his own position of militant critic; however, where the literary mainstream consisted in Arcadic poetry, archaeological erudition, futile academies, literary libertinism and Voltairian nonsense, to be an outsider became a moral imperative. Aristarco Scannabue, Baretti’s alter ego and best literary attainment on the side of his Italian activity, is a dissenting, isolated and marginalized voice. He is by definition an exotic extravagance, a national idiosyncratic version of Montesquieu’s Persians, a bomb thrown against contemporary fashion in literature and thought. Aristarco is Johnson, as far as his imitation of the Doctor’s journalism is concerned, but he is also Don Quixote, the mad knight errant always out of line and fighting alone against the whole world. Unpredictable, outrageous and outraged, Don Quixote sees threats and monsters everywhere, not just because of his madness but because he knows what his blind fellowcountrymen do not know—that the world is full of threats and monsters, though in disguise.12 Settling down in London, Baretti experienced what Meneghello would have described as a drastic shift in his feelings toward “la mainstream.”

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Baretti discovered the fascinating side of conformism—a virtuous conformism fostered by the best thinking minds. It was no longer the Evil but “la corrente maestra della comune civiltà.” Set against ethic and literary vulgarity, it was a synonym of intellectual earnestness, clear reason, healthy common sense, discipline, morality, good taste, faith in the Arts, sense of tradition, sound pragmatism. Great Britain had what Italy desperately wanted—a learned and accomplished society used to producing ideas and sharing them in brilliant conversation. Baretti’s new acquaintances were distinct gentlemen, often with major political commitments, who considered it perfectly respectable to produce and print intellectual works of public utility, and even sell them for money! To become one of them did not mean to give up one’s humours, as much as to support them with new authority. Polemics did not spring from the always doubtful authority of the outsider speaking in his own name any longer, but were felt to come from a highly reputed community in which nobody had to rave or wear Turk’s clothes to make themself conspicuous. In other words, Baretti’s self-imposed exile from Piedmont meant to him a twofold experience of migration from the outskirts to the centre—as he moved from an utterly marginal area of Italian culture to the country that stood for the heart of modern world, he changed his own intellectual attitude accordingly, leaving his original Aristarco Scannabue’s quixotic antagonism to attain the authority of “classic” common sense in Johnson’s style.

From the Margins, against the Mainstream Nonetheless, Baretti’s literary works appear to be animated by strong centrifugal forces balancing that centripetal tendency. As a matter of fact, Baretti is at his best when he is led astray by his humours and leaves the main road to venture along side streets, marginal, even weird perhaps, but perused with sincere curiosity and strong personality. In the Preface to Easy phraseology, whether it belongs to Baretti’s pen or not (Fanny Burney in her Diary reports she made Johnson confess he was its author, and Boswell also attributes it to the Doctor), it is said: Of every learned and elegant people the language is divided in two parts: the one lax and cursory, used on slight occasions with extemporary negligence; the other rigorous and solemn, the effect of deliberate choice and grammar accuracy … No language can be said to have been learned till both these parts are understood: but to reach the colloquial without the opportunities of familiar conversation, is very difficult. By reading great Authors it cannot be

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The Margins at the Centre: Giuseppe Baretti’s Uncharted Italy obtained, as books peak the language of books; and those, who in England intend to learn Italian, are seldom within the reach of Italian conversation. This deficience I have, by a bold experiment, endeavoured to supply, in the following Dialogues, in which I have undertaken to comprize not the gross and barbarous but the careless and airy diction of casual talkers … the humble author … knows already with full conviction, the levity of his subjects, and the unimportance of his personages. His design is not to refine the language of the senate or the school: it is only to teach Italian; to teach those words and phrases, which are appropriated to trifles; but of which, as life is made of trifles, there is a frequent use.13

Here we have a very acute self-portrait of Baretti. The importance of what is “rigorous” and “solemn,” concerning “the senate and the school,” is taken for granted. But then Baretti writes a book on what is “lax” and “cursory,” “careless” and “airy.” “Trifles” are made of nothing and yet life is made for the greatest part of them. It is not by chance that the same observation on the paradoxical importance of “trifles” is to be found in An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, where the dialectics between marginal and mainstream is absolutely relevant, and the preference accorded to the outskirts at the expense of the centre becomes an ideological and methodological assumption. Rejecting the trivial image of Italy imposed upon the English public by “inaccurate” travel writers, Baretti endeavours to trace the map of a different, uncharted Italy. Travellers, says Baretti, run the peninsula and write of it in so repetitive a way that they appear to have seen not so much Italy as the fictitious country they had already in mind—and despised— before crossing the Channel. The most deplorable mixture comes out of blindness, ignorance and a bad disposition, associated with the desire of gratifying English readers’ expectations and prejudices. Although something was changing in the way the Italian Grand Tour was being travelled by Englishmen—such that Baretti’s statement that “No English traveller that ever I heard, ever went a step out of those roads, which from the foot of Alps lead straight to our most famed cities”14 sounds a little excessive—it is true that the Addisonian heritage was still conspicuous in works like Sharp’s Letters from Italy or Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (both 1766). Addison had taught to squeeze Italy in the vice of a double, fatal comparison—that is to say a comparison with the glories of Imperial Rome and sixteenth-century Renaissance on the diachronic axis, and with British efficiency, freedom, wealth and solid common sense on the synchronic one. What Baretti attempts to do is to outline an alternative portrait of his native country. First of all he makes a standpoint of avoiding any comparison with the past. He chooses to focus

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on the present and actual state of things; then he brings to the centre of his account what the “official” cartography usually overlooks, on the belief that the seemingly marginal details throw light on the real character and the truth of Italy better than anything else. He intends to show what stands behind the public sceneries of palaces, theatres, cathedrals, introducing English readers to the Italians’ everyday life, to their occupations, their feelings, their ambitions and fears, to the simple joys and the many hardships of their lives, and above all to their talents and their capital of creative resources. The celebration of Italian “variety” is one of the major leit-motifs of An Account. Baretti rejects the idea of Italy itself, which is rather a cluster of nations, an aggregate of exceptions without a common standard: “No nations,” he writes, “distinguished by different names, vary more from each other in almost every respect than those which go under the common name of Italians.” Political fragmentation, though the cause of several practical disadvantages (for example the difficulty in prosecuting crime and securing criminals to the law), is but the institutionalized expression of a deeper, anthropological variety. And there lays the authentic wealth of Italy, for it is through its diversity, on the local and individual scales, that the Italians express their virtues at best. The case of dialects is exemplary. Baretti deplores linguistic fragmentation on the grounds that the many dialects spoken throughout the peninsula hinder the rise of a common language for oral communication and, what is worse, make the Italians— even the learned ones—strangers to their own literary tradition, Tuscanbased. On the other hand it must be allowed that all dialects answer the needs of communication in ordinary life perfectly, given the coherence which nature grants between idioms and the places where they are spoken.15 In the Journey, Baretti goes as far as to say that parents should leave out any prejudice and spur their children to learn as many dialects as they can, both from the masks of Commedia dell’arte at theatre and from the rustic mouths of country folk, in order to exercise their intellect and improve their linguistic skills. Such a training will help them in adult life to learn foreign languages such as French or English and speak them with perfect pronunciation.16 We are induced to think that if the Italians abroad stand out for their quick intelligence, great flexibility and an attitude to understand and respect other people’s points of view (things seem quite changed indeed!), this depends on their native familiarity with variety at home. But what seems to me still more remarkable is the stress Baretti puts on vernacular literary value. The linguistic variety becomes a positive cultural patrimony when the dialects are used as literary idioms. The five translations into as many Italian dialects (Venetian, Neapolitan, Bergamasco,

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Bolognese and Milanese) of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata produced in the previous two hundred years won Baretti’s greatest admiration;17 and most noteworthy is that, unmerciful censor of poetry as he was, he would speak of Domenico Balestrieri’s translation into Milanese in terms of “l’unica poesia moderna che m’abbia dato piacere senza la menoma misura di disgust.”18

Destroying the Italian Literary Mainstream Baretti presents Italy, intellectually speaking, as languishing under a thick pall of conformism. On the one side there is the traditionalistic conformism, whose sponsors are the too many academies swarming all over the peninsula, with the famous Arcadia and Crusca heading the list; the so-called poets “cinquecentisti,” fanatics of the golden age of the sixteenth century; the antiquarians, archaeologists and erudite pedants, and in general all those men of letters ascribable to the party of “we were” (“noi fummo”) in opposition to the positive advocates of “we are” (“noi siamo”). However, prompted by a commendable sense of tradition, they prove, in their exclusive devotion to past glories, self-referential, parasitical, puerile and totally unfit to produce anything valuable in terms of learning, public utility or even mere beauty. Academies in particular, which could and perhaps ought to be the cradle of a national culture in a country such as Italy, lacking in channels for the elaboration and circulation of ideas, and ought to promote that “republic of letters” Muratori envisaged at the beginning of the century, far from giving any help to the progress of arts and sciences, provide their members with nothing but innocent entertainment, with the dangerous tendency to lose that same innocence and turn into as many haunts of idlers, good-fornothings and libertines in search of adventures. The most stunning case is that of Arcadia, which Baretti describes as reduced to the shameful scale of a folkloric institution depending on tourism: The Arcadia Romana consist [sic] now only of a few Abatino’s who still persist to meet sometimes in order to recite their meagre verses to each other; and they still chuse a Custode Generale, or Chief Herdsman, whose most important business is to make a penny of his place; and this he chiefly effects by sending Arcadian patents to the English travellers on their arrival at Rome: by which trick he aggregates their lordships and honours to the august body of the Roman Arcadians. Those patents are seldom refused, as they never cost above nine or ten shillings given to the Abatino’s, who offer them gratis.19

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The chapter on Italian academies ends in the key of irony. I own that arts and sciences are not generally forwarded much by our academies, as far as I can observe: yet they are upon the whole rather useful than pernicious, and answer the ends of society if not of science. They stand in the place of the clubs in England, which bring people together, and give them the means of becoming friends.20

On the other end of the scale there is the “fashionable” conformism of the Enlightenment—deliberately modernist, cosmopolitan and, in Baretti’s opinion, specious and devoid of ideas as well as arrogant and vulgar. The spokesman of the great French bluff of the age, Voltaire, had his followers in Italy, but so fierce is Baretti’s contempt for the young authors of Il Caffé that he does not even mention their names in the Account, as if Dei delitti e delle pene by Beccaria had never been written or made public dominion in the French translation. Reluctant to understand (and secretly afraid of) the real nature and strength of the new philosophy, Baretti thought it would shortly pass away and get back to its suitable darkness, like a meteor, as rapidly as it had appeared and mesmerized Europe. In a letter he speaks of the Enlightenment explicitly in terms of “fashion” and “(main)stream”: Lo so quanto voi che i savi e prudenti all’ultima moda non avrebbono trattato il conte Verri come io lo trattai in quel mio Discorso in francese [the Discours sur Shakespeare and Monsieur de Voltaire, 1777]. Ma io non mi picco d’essere un savio e un prudente all’ultima moda; e se il mio soavissimo signor Carlo è tanto immodernito da lasciarsi portar via dalla corrente senza muovere piè né braccio, tal sia il mio signor Carlo soavissimo.21

In the field of “fashionable literature,” Baretti lists also his old enemy Goldoni, whose comedies gained the universal favour of the “Venetian rabble” as well as Voltaire’s commendation. Baretti does not make any explicit connection between Goldoni’s theatre and the Enlightenment, but in fact he was fighting against the same revolution. Goldoni’s comedies showed how literature could do without a great deal of the traditional rhetorical devices, imagery and settings, and make use, instead, of realistic, “unpoetical” elements. Such a thing was inconceivable to Baretti, who thought of it in terms of mere fashion. The fashion would sooner or later pass, and Goldoni’s name, like the two Verri’s, would disappear once and for all from literature. And finally, which was one of the most widely exported and characteristic Italian issues? Music, no doubt; especially opera music, with

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its train of composers, writers of librettos, musicians and singers. The last, known as the castrati, were the unquestioned stars of European stages. Once more Baretti rides upstream. He declares that the Italians hold that world in contempt. At most they consider the whole thing one of the many entertainments to be enjoyed in society. Foreigners make a great fuss about nothing when they protest against the habit of Italian audiences of making conversation and eating and playing cards during the performances, instead of devoting religiously all their senses to what is acted on stage. Here we perceive Baretti’s personal hatred for the prima donna’s behaviour of castrati, considered as clownish beings rather than sublime musical instruments to idolize. And we perceive also the scepticism which he shared with his fellow countrymen, whose suspicious distrust for artistic enthusiasm, above all when taken too seriously, is still nowadays one of their acknowledged features (esagerúma nèn!—“let us not exaggerate!”—is one of the most typical Piedmontese sayings). There is a kind of music that really holds the Italians spellbound and reveals their true character, says Baretti—it is the popular music that common people play and sing in the streets at night, far from the baroque pomp of theatres. Here a rare note of lyricism slips out of Baretti’s pen: At Venice it is a thing really delightful to rove on a summer night about the Laguna in a gondola, and hear from several boats bands of musicians playing and singing, the moon shining bright, the wind hushed and the water as smooth as a glass. These serenata’s, as we call them, are seldom or never disturbed by riots, as would probably be the case in England, were such entertainments customary: and this is perhaps the only music which the Italians enjoy in silence, as if unwilling to spoil the calm and stillness of the night.22

In conclusion, if modern Italy is lacking in public channels capable of promoting good literature, good philosophy, good learning on a national scale, where does Italian culture dwell? Baretti is resolute—nowhere but in the hands of extraordinary individuals. Italy is not at all the decayed country travellers waffle about, it is swarming with learned people. The problem is that their number forces the greatest part of them to live in the obscurity of private life. For the use of his British public Baretti draws a heroic portrait of Italian men of letters, whose merits shine in proportion to the hardships they face in order to carry out their studies. The Italian book market is absolutely unfit to provide sufficient earnings to independent writers. On the other hand, patrons can sustain a very small portion of the enormous number of authors. Let us add the fact that authors in Italy have to reckon with civil and ecclesiastical censorship, and it is evident that

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they write books with an angelic spirit of disinterestedness, just out of personal satisfaction and love of learning per se: When an Italian acquires knowledge without a view towards the university, he does it merely for the sake of doing something, and can scarce have any other reward than the consciousness and satisfaction of doing well.23 Our learned stare when they are told that in England there are numerous writers who get their bread by their productions only … They can scarcely be brought to believe such wonders, as not one in a hundred of them ever got with his quill as much in a twelvemonth, as the worst hackney-scribbler in London can get in a week.24

Italian authors are “volunteers in literature,” and since they cannot aspire to universal fame for want of incentives, they are generally contented with local reputation. I do not intend to discuss whether such an argument is a good defence of Italian culture. Most probably it is not, since it suggests the unintentional acknowledgement of a severe cultural stall. What matters, however, is that it paves the way for paradox, leading Baretti to emphasize the merits not of the great “stars” of letters but of the lesser known, the most marginal and obscurest authors. Of course he mentions with praise Metastasio, together with a series of scientists whose names were well known abroad (Morgagni, Frisi, Boscovich, Lagrange, the mathematician Laura Bassi), and a few literary figures provided with some national reputation, like Parini, Passeroni and Gozzi. But he also lists, without any critical distinction, a multitude of minor local authors, for the greatest part now perfectly forgotten. And above all he dedicates not less than eleven pages (against Parini’s ten lines!) to Bonifacio Finetti, a Dominican friar, biblist and philosopher, nowadays known only among specialists for his polemic against Vico’s anthropology. Father Finetti, we are inclined to suspect, is a character out of Borges’ imagination; he never left his cell in Venice, his town, where he had been collecting “all sorts of books and manuscripts that could facilitate the study of the remotest tongues”25 over the last sixty years. Of course he is almost completely unknown not only in Italy but even in his own town because of his total seclusion. His masterpiece and fruit of his long, solitary labours is a monstrous Trattato sopra i linguaggi di tutto il mondo, a universal linguistic atlas conceived in order to give notice of and to describe all ancient and modern languages; whose most remarkable peculiarity is that it has never been written! Such a work, says Baretti:

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The Margins at the Centre: Giuseppe Baretti’s Uncharted Italy would have reflected infinite honour upon his country, as it would have added immensely to that stock of philological knowledge already possessed by Europeans; and what is still of greater importance, would have apprised the studious part of mankind by a striking example, of the vast and most incredible acquisitions the human mind can make, when long and incessantly employed upon the pursuit of knowledge. But alas! the noble specimen that he gave us of the intended work which he printed at his own expence, for a long time did not sell. The strangeness of his title [Trattato della lingua Ebraica e affini … offerto agli eruditi per Saggio dell’opera … sopra i linguaggi di tutto il mondo], the obscurity of his author, the stupidity of his fellow-friars, the barbarous inattention of the Venetians, and other causes, unfortunately concurred to make this grand performance be neglected: and, as father Finetti … had no money to spare for the printing of it, he did not care for the trouble of writing it.26

Baretti admits that when he first heard of such an enterprise, he thought immediately of a “literary quack or madman,” but he changed his mind as soon as he read an essay of the intended work. I think Baretti is speaking here in total earnestness. Did he suspect the hidden irony in his words? It seems slightly surreal that the author and the book Baretti celebrates as the highest specimen of Italian genius are purely hypothetic, potential entities. Actually, they are destined to dwell forever in the world of fabulous failures, for we come to know that father Finetti is by now too old and weak to resume his work on the imaginary treatise.

Material Culture—An Uncharted Reality Moving from literary questions to what we may call “material culture,” or more simply everyday life, things do not change, being as removed as one can be from any spirit of social engagement. Baretti devotes, however, a considerable part of his work to common people. His point of view is pragmatic and not rhetorical at all—common people have the right to stay at the centre of any honest account of Italian life, simply because they represent the majority of the Italian population. Besides, while the Italian aristocracy is undergoing a process of homologation after the French style, common people pass through history, generation by generation, more or less unchanged and unchangeable. So, they are the legitimate depositaries of the native Italian character. In spite of that, Baretti observes, they seldom arouse travellers’ interest. Samuel Sharp insists on their “diabolic nature” and the generality of travel writers do not go further than the folkloric triad of poverty-superstition-moral baseness, regularly dwelling on their unrestrained sensuality and their supposed tendency to draw their daggers. The Account’s polemical-apologetic urgency often makes Baretti

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indulge in annoyingly paternalistic exaggerations. Italian peasants and townspeople are childish, simple, generous, cheerful, tender-hearted, lacking malice, violent only out of their passionate spirit, faithful in marriage, lovely with children, religious, obedient, not riotous, respectful of superiors, contented with their place within society and of their fate, and so on. But his sympathy for the vitality and the ingenuity by which common people in Italy cope with their hard lives is unquestionably authentic.27 “The artisans and the peasantry … are the best part of the nation,” he says, because of their industry and their unequalled ability in farming the land.28 Likewise, “the Genoese are the most laborious and industrious that ever fell under my observation,” for they have snatched every square inch of land from their rocky mountains and made them fertile and fruitful to an incredible degree.29 Baretti knew northern Italy much better than the rest of the peninsula and knew as well that foreign travellers had always been used to crossing it in haste on “the great road of Rome.”30 It is not surprising that he would present this as the place most worthy of travellers’ knowledge, and its inhabitants as the epitome of Italian good qualities. He reminded Englishmen of the virtue of curiosity they claimed to possess in the highest degree, inviting them to leave the abused itineraries and discover an uncharted Italy: No English traveller that ever I heard, ever went a step out of those roads, which from the foot of the Alps lead straight to our most famed cities. None of them ever will deign to visit those places whose names are not in every body’s mouth. They travel to see things, and not men. Indeed they cannot help crossing both the Alps and the Appennines in two or three parts; but always do it in such haste, that their inhabitants are as much known to them as those of the Arimaspian cliffs … Their poor curiosity will scarcely extend farther than pictures and statues, or carnival festivities and holy-week ceremonies; nor could any of them ever be forced half a mile out of the most beaten tracks by my frequent expostulations.31

With an enthusiasm that reminds us of some pages by Carlo Emilio Gadda devoted to his rural Lombardy, Baretti commends the happy integration between natural richness and human industry characterizing the Po Valley. From the Collina in front of Turin, through the Brianza in Lombardy, an unbroken enchanting landscape stretches as far as the Venetian Laguna, where the variety of rivers, brooks, forests and meadows joins with the beauty of farmed land, marked everywhere by canals taking waters where needed, swarming with cattle, dotted with mills and innumerable villages and towns in an almost unbroken stretch. Noblemen build their villas all over these sweet hills at the feet of the Alps and in Summer leave their palaces in towns and resort in mass to that earthly

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heaven to spend the happiest days of their life there. But the charm of these places, remarks Baretti stingingly, is: “seldom or never enjoyed by strangers, because the towns and villages thick-scattered all over them, are not famed for pictures, statues, and carnival-diversions.”32 And when travellers do write about Turin, Milan or Brescia, they never spend a word on the surrounding country which provides those towns with everything they need to keep their opulent standard of life. The same delightful variety of landscape, with its blend of wild nature and farmed lands, extends to the Alps and the Apennines, in spite of the travellers’ stereotype of their horrid desolation. The last ten chapters of An Account are devoted in particular to “the occupations and amusements of … domestic life”33: those trifles are mentioned in the Preface of the Easy Phraseology: I will indeed endevour … to put together some little facts, in order to assist his [the English reader’s] imagination in forming an idea of the manner in which life is commonly spent amongst us. But should chance direct me chiefly toward trifles and follies, I hope he will readily grant me his pardon, if he considers that I am here attempting to describe that which all the world over is generally spent in follies and trifles; and what is still worse, is not only so spent by the vulgar, but, alas! by the very deepest thinkers and most supercilious philosophers.34

Focusing on low and middle class people, with occasional observations concerning noblemen, Baretti tells his readers how the Italians in general spend the day from their morning prayer to the night prayer before going to bed; when and how they have meals, what they usually eat and drink, some details of their social galateo, their clothes, their pastimes and diversions; how their routine is affected by changing seasons, the peculiarities of climates, the animals they breed and the fruit trees they grow, and so on. Everything sounds very ordinary and reasonable. By doing so, Baretti intends to show that, far from being satanic, perverted creatures devoted to mischievously absurd ways of thinking, feeling, praying and living, Italians share the same experience of humanity with the rest of mankind. He deliberately stresses his countrymen’s normality in order to shorten the distance between the Italian and the British world, that prejudices tended on the contrary to widen. But in Baretti’s apologetic design, normality turns out to be extremely significant. Italian talents, in fact, shine through trivial things not less than in the higher efforts of learning, poetry, arts and sciences. For example, their physical games (or “palestrical games” as Baretti has it) show the courage and the muscular vigour they cannot display on the battlefield in an age of peace. Some of these games are typical of urban contexts and require a pretty high level of

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organization, such as Calcio fiorentino, Pallone or the Venetian Regata. Others are more popular and practised by peasants, such as the grassypole, the races with farm carts pulled by drunken beasts, horses and bulls’ races without jockeys, and fights with stones and sticks. On the intellectual side, the Italians’ ability in playing very complex card games with their minchiate and tarocchi is to be regarded as a sign of their swift intelligence and strong mental powers. While their ingenuity is clearly shown by the numberless systems for hunting and bird-catching they have devised, such as the Roccolo, a very elaborate trap for little birds that Baretti describes in detail through four brisk and novel-like pages. This inquiry reaches an almost fabulous pitch with the celebration of the jumart. The jumart—we are told—is one of the best animals for transportation, commonly used by the natives of Piedmont and Savoy along their mountain paths. Baretti spends a full five pages satisfactorily describing the jumart’s physical features and qualities—he has seen hundreds of them personally and has mounted one along an Apennine trail in his last visit to Italy, with full satisfaction. Born of a cow and a horse or a mare and a bull, the jumart is something very like a Bonifacio Finetti of the animal kingdom, for it doesn’t exist but in the realm of fantastic zoology.

Conclusion—An Invitation to Curiosity It is not surprising that “curiosity” is a key word in the Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy. The adjective “curious” applies, in English and in Italian as well, both to the mind approaching reality, implying a certain attitude on the side of the observer, and to reality itself, denoting a peculiar quality of things. Baretti argues that foreign travellers ought to be curious in order to catch the true character of Italy, since Italy tends to veil its truth out of a natural sense of decency, habit, vanity or weakness. Below this surface, sometimes poor, pitiable and even grotesque, Italy hides an amazing variety, unquestionably worthy of the wise travellers’ labours to discover it. From every point of view the Account is an invitation to overcome appearances and prejudices and to make a personal acquaintance with the Italians. The British are exhorted to visit their houses, sit at their tables, let them tell their story, and never be satisfied with looking at things from the outside. I have brought many an Englishman acquainted with many a friar, and both parties were always pleased. Nor judge by the faces they put on at the altar or in a procession; or ten to one you will judge wrong. See them in their cells; walk with them; eat and drink with those who are permitted by their

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Should we make a list of the “nations” which Baretti regards as the most worth knowing among the Italians, the Venetians would gain the first place. They are a sort of enchanted nation—their portrait is in fact a splendid tribute to vitality and unpredictability, of joyous excess. The Venetians are the most contradictory people in the world—sensual and devoted, diffident and childishly sensible to the most enormous praise, proud as one can possibly be and matchlessly amiable with friends, machiavelian and endowed with such a delicate soul that even their dialect “seems almost composed of nothing else but of kind words and endearing epithets.” Utterly ignorant of the world outside the Laguna, they are accustomed to consider themselves equal to the kings of Europe. From the greatest noblemen down to the last servant they behave like sovereigns, which of course tends to repel foreigners; but: let acquaintance ripen a while into familiarity, as it soon does with the help of some dexterity and patience: and the oddest compositions in the world will be found among them … One may soon discover amongst them so many instances of openness and reserve, of sagacity and imprudence, of courage and timidity, of prodigality and thriftiness, of knowledge and ignorance, and many other opposite qualities so perfectly blended together in the same individual, that I know no set of men in Europe so much worth the trouble of being thoroughly sifted as the noblemen of Venice.36

Dwelling on islands and secluded from the rest of Italy not so much by the sea as by their laws and way of thinking and living, the weirdest among Italians are paradoxically those whom foreigners are recommended to know in order to appreciate the Italians. Any curious Englishman is invited to seek their friendship—but let him never forget to prove a wise and, above all, “joyous” man: “because without such a quality nobody is welcome to a Venetian. Co no i se mati no li volemo, ‘if they are not joyous, we will not have them’ is another of their most frequent sayings.”37 Such is Baretti’s “uncharted Italy,” for the greatest part unknown to foreigners inasmuch anonymous and too domestic for superficial travellers, or eccentric as according to fable. A country made up of margins, and from the margins drawing all that makes it good.

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Notes 1

Luigi Meneghello, Il dispatrio (Milano: Rizzoli, 1993), 103. See Alfieri’s autobiography, La Vita di Vittorio Alfieri. It is useless to say that Alfieri uses the neologism “spiemontizzarsi”—to renounce to one’s Piedmontese nationality—in a technical and juridical meaning, while it takes on a more generic meaning when applied to Baretti’s experience. 3 See Carlo Dionisotti, “Piemontesi e spiemontizzati,” in Appunti sui moderni: Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni e altri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), 11–31. 4 Letter to Baretti’s nephew Pino, 25 gennaio 1775, published with some changes in the Scelta di lettere familiari fatta per uso degli studiosi di lingua italiana (1779), now in Giuseppe Baretti, Scelta delle lettere familiari, ed. by Luigi Piccioni (Bari: Laterza, 1912), 119–120. As a matter of fact, the marquis d’Ormea was Carlo Emanuele III’s Prime Minister and not Vittorio Amedeo II’s. 5 Letter to Filippo Baretti, 26 December 1769. 6 Giuseppe Baretti, Lettere familiari a’ suoi tre fratelli Filippo, Giovanni e Amedeo, in Opere di Giuseppe Baretti, III (Milano: Soc. Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1839), 41. 7 See Marina Roggero, “Professori e studenti nelle università fra crisi e riforme,” in Ruggiero Romano, Corrado Vivanti (eds.), Storia d’Italia, Annali IV. Intellettuali e potere (Torino: Einaudi, 1981), 1039–81, in part. 1060–68; and Marina Roggero, Scuola e riforme nello stato sabaudo. L’istruzione secondaria dalla Ratio Studiorum alla costituzione del 1772 (Torino: Deputazione subalpina di storia patria, 1981). 8 Baretti himself did not fail to point out that his countrymen’s indifference to literature depended only in part on their native sulkiness and lack of natural wit, but mainly on the King’s policy: “Ma gli è un pezzo che fra i nostril ministry e consiglieri del Re predomina la meschina politica di fargli dar poco a molti, invece di fargli dar molto a pochi; dal qual procedure ne nascerebbe che ciascun suddito nella sua rispettiva linea si adoprerebbe ferocemente col cervello per farsi distinguere fra tutti gli altri individui della sua classe, sapendo che, toccandogli finalmente un premio, sarebbe un premio degno d’essere avuto. Seguendo le massime, che si seguono, di far cento bocconi d’uno stronzo (perdonate la metafora), chi è quello che voglia esercitare la mante con ogni sua forza, quando è sicuro innanzi tratto che il suo premio non sarà che di pochi bajocci? Ed eccovi la principale ragione perché nel nostro paese non abbiamo mai, né avremo forse mai degli uomini comparabili a que’ grandissimi di quasi tutte le nazioni auropee; ché, a dirvela com’ella è, non v’ha neppure un solo Piemontese la cui fama sia universale” (letter to Vincenzo Malacarne, 2 nov. 1782). See Carlo Dionisotti, “Piemontesi e spiemontizzati,” in Appunti sui moderni: Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni e altri (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), 11–31; and for a good general sketch, Franco Fido, “L’Illuminismo centro-settentrionale e lombardo. Pietro e Alessandro Verri. Cesare Beccaria,” in Enrico Malato (ed.), Storia della letteratura italiana, 2

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VI. Il Settecento, I. L’età dell’Illuminismo (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1995), 495– 567; in part. 498–504. 9 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. by Augustine Birrell, IV (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co, 1896), 181 [1777]. 10 See Francesca Savoia, Fra letterati e galantuomini. Notizie e inediti del primo Baretti inglese (Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2010), 73–80. 11 Very unsatisfactorily studied in Italy, as Baretti’s English works are, in general. But see Giovanni Iamartino, “Baretti maestro di italiano in Inghilterra e l’Easy Phraseology,” in Renzo S. Crivelli, Luigi Sampietro (eds.), Il passaggiere italiano. Saggi sulle letterature di lingua inglese in onore di Sergio Rossi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1994), 383–419. 12 Don Quijote’s influence on Aristarco was detected for the first time by Umberto Cosmo in his study about Baretti and José de Isla: “che a mettere in mano la frusta ad Aristarco Scannabue, Don Chisciotte e fra Gerundio non abbiano proprio operato per nulla?” (Umberto Cosmo, “Giuseppe Baretti e José Francisco de Isla,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, XLV (1905), 193–314, quot. 219), but the subject is still waiting for proper investigation. 13 Joseph Baretti, Easy Phraseology for the Young Ladies who intend to learn the colloquial part of the Italian language (London: Robinson and Cadell, 1775), [iii] –iv. 14 Joseph Baretti, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy … (London: T. Davies and L. Davis, 1769), II, 327. 15 See also what Baretti says in his Prefazione a tutte l’opere di Machiavelli (1772), now in Giuseppe Baretti, Prefazioni e polemiche, ed. by Luigi Piccioni (Bari: Laterza, 19332), 199–200. 16 Joseph Baretti, A Journey from London to Genoa … (London: T. Davies and L. Davis, 1770) I, 106. 17 Baretti, An Account, II, 185. 18 “ho già letto il primo tomo del Tasso; e, a dirvela in un tratto, mi piace quasi da per tutto più che non l’originale … Degli uomini come il Balestrieri il mondo non ne produce più d’uno o più di due in un secolo, se non il Metastasio. Per Dio, dategli un buon paio di baci per me e ditegli che il suo Tasso è la sola poesia moderna che m’abbia dato piacere senza la menoma misura di disgusto” (letter to Francesco Carcano, 31 August 1780, in Giuseppe Baretti, Epistolario, ed. by Luigi Piccioni (Bari: Laterza, 1937), II, 250). With regard to Balestrieri’s work, see Michele Mari, “La Gerusalemme liberata milanese di Domenico Balestrieri,” in Momenti della traduzione fra Settecento e Ottocento (Milano: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1994), 47–112. 19 Baretti, An Account, I, 254–255. 20 Ibid., I, 260. 21 Letter to Francesco Carcano, 1778, rewritten to be published in the Scelta delle lettere familiari (Baretti, Scelta, 368). 22 Baretti, An Account, I, 308.

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Ibid., I, 228. Ibid., I, 231. 25 Ibid., I, 203. 26 Ibid., I, 210–211. 27 Hester Thrale, who cannot be suspected of partiality toward Baretti, wrote in verse of his natural sympathy for defenceless people, children and servants: “… Tenderness, Temper, and Truth he despises,/ and only the Triumph of Victory prizes./ Yet let us be candid, and where can we find,/ So active, so able, so ardent a Mind?/ With your children more soft; more polite with your Servant,/ More firm in Distress, or in Friendship more fervent./ Thus Etna enrag’d his Artillery pours,/ and tumbles down palaces, Princes and Towers;/ While Peasant more happy who lives at his foot/ Can make it a Hothouse to ripen his Fruit.” The verses accompanied the famous Baretti’s portrait by Reynolds in the Thrales’ private portraits gallery at Streatham house. See the whole collection together with Esther’s poetic comments in the Thrale family’s website: www.thrale.com/library_and_streatham_worthies. 28 Baretti, An Account, II, 122. 29 Ibidem, II, 128. In 1770–71 Baretti was in Italy to spend the winter in the warm climate of Genoa, and once back in London he worked on a revised edition of the Account. For some reason the book didn’t come to light, but Baretti’s manuscript notes have survived. It is remarkable that the largest of these notes, far from being of the literary or polemical kind as we would expect from our author, is about the cultivation of orange and lemon trees in the Genoese territories, including an anecdote on the agronomist Gerolamo Gnecco’s garden in Nervi. So far went Baretti’s partiality for his countrymen’s industry (see Matteo Ubezio, “Un inedito postillato barettiano dell’Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 84, I, 2012, 31–72; in part. 64–67, the transcription of the said note). 30 Baretti, An Account, II, 270. 31 Ibid., II, 329. 32 Ibid., II, 296. 33 Ibid., II, 188. 34 Ibid., II, 189. This passage is chronologically prior to the Preface. This idea of “trifles” being the stuff of life must have been a topic shared by Baretti and Johnson. 35 Ibid., I, 320. 36 Ibid., II, 151. 37 Ibid., II, 152. 24

PHILOSOPHY, ARTS AND SCIENCE

THE MARGINAL AND THE MAINSTREAM AS AESTHETIC CATEGORIES IN EIGHTEENTHCENTURY THOUGHT ANDREA GATTI UNIVERSITÀ DI FERRARA

The subject of the marginal and the mainstream in eighteenth-century Great Britain is fascinating for more than one reason. Firstly, it encourages us to raise questions regarding categories which, on close scrutiny, are far from given or defined by clear and distinct ideas; and secondly, it prompts us to reconsider the validity of traditionally accepted practices of critical classification. In the cultural history of the period under examination there is of course a well-established distinction between what is mainstream and what is marginal, or major and minor; and the intellectual canon featured in secondary literature, in editorial projects and the predominant approach of scholars, has long remained unchanged. It is not my intention here, however, to cast doubts on the validity of that canon, and even less to produce an inventory of names which one has hardly heard of, remonstrating that they have been unfairly relegated to the margins of cultural history, and claiming for them an intellectual standing that is hardly less prominent than that of the most acclaimed “mainstream” authors. What I would like to do instead is to develop some general reflections on the theoretical assumptions that generally underpin this particular kind of historiographic reconstruction; to consider what kind of categories the marginal and the mainstream represent from a conceptual point of view; to clarify our attitude in evaluating them; and to identify the reasons why in critical practice a positioning at the margin or in the mainstream occurs, and the reasons why such positioning can change in the course of time. Now, to clarify the underlying assumptions of my analysis right from the outset, let me say that the concept of centre (which I take as synonymous with mainstream) is clear to me—it has clearly delimited spaces like the bull’s eye inside a target and, in its most reduced form, it can be contracted down to a point that is perfectly identifiable by way of

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measurement. The concept of margin, by contrast, is a vague and blurred one,1 and the borders within which it can be circumscribed are less clearly defined and less certain—except, obviously, in geometry. Night runs insensibly into dawn, and this last one into day—who could fix the precise point where one ends, and the other begins? Precisely due to its indefinite nature, the margin establishes a problematical relationship with the mainstream, or centre, from which it is perfectly distinct at the conceptual level, though less so at the practical level. The suburban periphery lies at the margins of the historical city centre—it is (something) other than the latter, but it branches off from it and partakes of its “being a city.” At the same time, the outer edges of the periphery may subsume portions of the surrounding countryside. The margin seems to stretch between the perfectly defined object (historical city centre) and its otherness, i.e. that which is completely other than itself (the countryside), embracing and blending within its own space the traits of both extremes. Dawn and sunset are the margins of day and night because, within those margins, the light and its opposite coexist; while the middle of the night is made up of un-lightened darkness, the middle of the day is made of un-darkened light. The mainstream is pure being—it is the expression of a perfectly defined category (hence the “masters” of Romanticism, Impressionism, Neokantianism and so on). In the marginal, on the other hand, that perfection does not seem to be accomplished, since “being” coexists with “non-being,” i.e. that which does not properly belong to the category. The marginal would thus seem to be impure not by default, but by excess; that is, for the undue presence of unessential elements. I have felt it necessary to make this preliminary clarification because I think it provides a key of interpretation for the relationship between the marginal and the mainstream in the intellectual and artistic sphere. An empirical test comes from the observation that, in eighteenth-century British philosophy, for example, the authors who were considered mainstream or central were those who swelled the ranks of Empiricisim, having consistently applied its principles up to their extreme consequences, and with outcomes which immediately aroused the kind of speculative interest that they still kindle today. The authors who are considered marginal, by contrast, are those who did not pursue or investigate—or oppose—empirical principles with an equal degree of rigour, from the theoretical point of view. If today James Beattie does not stand at the same level as David Hume, or Joseph Priestley at the same level as George Berkeley, it is because their theories are hybridized by persistent influences from Scholastic or Neo-platonic thought, or by

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theisms of a Christian stamp, which makes them less definite in their principles, less daring in their procedural methods and, it has to be said, less original in their speculative results. In art, Raphael and Perugino are superior to their contemporaries because the latter maintained some fifteenth-century rigidities which the two masters had overcome, producing new standards and stylistic features of execution, and initiating a new era in the history of art. John Constable is a mainstream painter in late eighteenth-century British art because he brought to landscape painting that purity of inspiration and wellspring of sentiment, whereas other landscape artists, less admired or less wellknown today, remained influenced by Flemish or Mediterranean ideas. The margin is the locus of perfection in potency; the mainstream is the locus of perfection in act. Regarding the “practice” or the “effects” stemming from our ideas of the marginal and the mainstream, it needs to be made clear that these are not absolute, but relative terms, since they do not point to any positive data whose application can be justified in a self-evident manner, are liable to fluctuations in taste, where taste is meant in the Kantian terms of “universal subjectivity,” or the universality of the subjective conditions of estimating objects. The most obvious consequence, which I have no intention of addressing at any length here, is that the relativist character of the terms can render marginal today that which in the past occupied a mainstream position, and vice-versa. The Cambridge Platonists, from Benjamin Whichcote to Ralph Cudworth and Henry More, were central figures in the philosophical debate between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Baruch Spinoza, for example, was excluded from that position since, as has been noted, he: “seems hardly to have had any direct influence on eighteenth century thought. His name is carefully avoided, and knowledge of his teachings flows only from diluted and often torbid springs.”2 Well, if the hierarchy today seems to have been completely overturned, and Spinoza looms large over History of Philosophy textbooks, while knowledge of the Cambridge Platonists is entrusted to specialists, this is because evaluation of the marginal or the mainstream in intellectual production is a subspecies of the judgement of taste and, like the latter, is exposed to diachronic variations due to historical factors, or to the natural development of the knowledge and sensibility of the public. A development, in this case, helped by the fact that “collective” time scales are no longer compared to “individual” time scales. This, however, is only one aspect of the problem. In the definition of the marginal and the mainstream, temporal relativism becomes more

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interesting when we inquire into which authors were marginal and which were central in the view of the men of the eighteenth century; and particularly when we consider why, in general, a canon is subject to variations, or secures persistence. This kind of in-depth investigation has several surprises in store for us. We learn, for example, that Shakespeare was still marginal at the beginning of the century but was central by the end of it,3 and that, in the field of criticism, errors of judgment were not alien even to top ranking intellectuals such as David Hume who, in his treatise Of the Standard of Taste (1757), observed: “Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.”4 Hume is incidentally proving that the question of the marginal and the mainstream was felt even at that time; and yet today, at least his second comparison sounds rather “extravagant”—in the literary sphere, Addison does not seem to be so superior to Bunyan as to make such a juxtaposition unthinkable. Besides, Voltaire in his Temple du goût (1731) dared to show some of the flaws in the work of Corneille, Racine, Molière and other legends of his time, attracting many detractors and fierce comments. But, in the short space of half a century, it became universally acknowledged that Voltaire’s judgements were well-founded and even the most demanding critics eventually agreed with them. What is interesting about the diachronic vision of the marginal and the mainstream displayed in these few examples is that it shows how necessary it is to distinguish between the intellectual and the historical frameworks, which frequently do not coincide at all. In practice, we cannot assume that what we regard as crucial today has necessarily commanded the same degree of influence historically. Giambattista Vico is recognized as being one of the most interesting and original thinkers in eighteenthcentury Europe, but that recognition was far from immediate. We owe the rediscovery of Vico’s greatness and the full appreciation of his doctrines to scholars of subsequent centuries such as Benedetto Croce and, more recently, Isaiah Berlin.5 In Great Britain, no less than in Italy, as demonstrated by the many studies dedicated to him from the nineteen seventies, the leap from the marginal to the mainstream which time has made possible is not enough to allow us to forget that Vico was totally uninfluential on his contemporaries. Indeed, he himself voiced his awareness that his work, “almost thrown into the dust during his time, would find a more attentive audience in posterity, and not just in his own homeland, which was sparing in awarding him any honours and recognition.”6

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Judgements on the marginal and the mainstream can depend on a variety of causes; but once those judgements are formed, in one way or another, the critical tradition can create prejudices, instituting different mechanisms of evaluation between what lies in the mainstream and what lies in the margin. Put extremely simply, we can say that as we move from one case to the other, and our attitude has a tendency to change from the theoretical to the historical. From a “major” thinker we expect illuminations that can broaden or alter the structure of our beliefs or sentiments; in the case of a “minor” author, on the other hand, our interest may have no other purpose than to increase our knowledge, or to satisfy scholarly curiosity. In some cases, however, this attitude can be invalidated when we experience an expansion of our mental universe, which provides us with new tools of evaluation and changes our perspective or breadth of vision. In this sense, Sigmund Freud’s studies, for example, have had a huge impact in bringing about a revision of acquired judgements, and in transferring to the mainstream that which up to that time had been relegated to the margins, and vice-versa. In art in particular, I think no other current of contemporary thought has proved to be more influential than Freud’s in changing the forma mentis, or mindset, of an era. We know that van Gogh’s letters to his brother contributed in no small measure to the posthumous rediscovery of his art; but it was by virtue of new psychoanalytical interests that those letters were able to provide a key of interpretation of his paintings as revolutionary and shocking mirrors of psychic disorders and existential anguish. Another emblematic case is that of William Blake. Excluded from the artistic mainstream in his own time, at the centre of which his “rival” Reynolds stood out in all his glory, Blake today enjoys almost divine status in Great Britain. He is one of the national heroes to whom the British devote an obsessive number of exhibits, catalogues, monographic studies and expensive reproductions of the original manuscripts, and whom they most frequently cite in literary or figurative works, as shown by the statue of Newton in the courtyard of the new British Library. Once again, therefore, the situation has been completely overturned, so that today the public at large worships Blake more than Reynolds. But this, I am sorry to say, is a critical teratology from the pictorial point of view: as a painter, Reynolds is infinitely superior to Blake, but I agree that the Olympian and orthodox classicism of Reynolds is not very congruent with the restless and confounded spirit of the contemporary “one-dimensional man.” Reynolds could have painted like Blake if he had had the slightest interest in doing so, while the opposite could certainly not have been the

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case. The important thing to note here, however, is that such a shift mirrors the onset of subjectivist aesthetic conceptions, including, among others, the romantic idea of genius oscillating between saturnine melancholy and sturm und drang;7 a conception of art no longer as an exemplum virtutis, but as a free expression of inner turmoil; an interest for the catharsis of private passions and not for the edification of public morality; a relish for style not Apollonian but Dionysian. This takes us to the final problem. What is it, then, that determines the classification of an author as marginal or as mainstream/central? The answer is almost tautological—mainstream authors are those who create margins. Those whose theories engender a philosophical or critical debate which other authors can actively participate in, but from the margins, as commentators, and not as the subjects of comment. In this sense, the study of the marginal is crucial for understanding the significance of the mainstream, since it is precisely on the number and intensity of discussions taking place at the margin that the centrality of a theory is defined. I do not want to indulge in facile Hegelianism, arguing that a term does not exist except by virtue of its antithesis, but it is clear that if a theory does not create marginal actions (or debates) then it is at the centre of nothing. Alfred North Whitehead claimed that Western philosophy is nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato.8 Whether or not this is true, Whitehead’s axiom seems anyhow to confirm the criterion according to which the positioning of certain authors in the mainstream of our thought is determined by the notes they have generated at the margins. I will conclude by observing that, ultimately, all the eighteenth-century intellectual production in Great Britain can be read as a great allegory of the relationship between the marginal and the mainstream. Most of eighteenth-century British art and literature is based precisely on the theme of the shift—either accomplished or failed—from the marginal to the mainstream of society. Consider the lead characters not only of the bourgeois novel—from Tom Jones to Pamela, and Moll Flanders—but also of Hogarth’s engravings. In A Harlot’s Progress (1731) the young and gullible Mary (or Moll) Hackabout leaves York for London, and the shift from the margin to the centre will turn out to be no less ruinous for her than for the negative hero of A Rake’s Progress (1733). In Marriage à la Mode (1743–45), the disastrous marriage whose unhappy ending is chronicled in a series of paintings was originally intended to reintroduce the son of a bankrupt aristocrat into the mainstream of London society thanks to the wealth of a rich trader, whose aspiration in turn was to secure his daughter’s social climbing through her marriage to a member of the aristocracy.9

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Alongside its representation of the risks associated with ambitious shifts from the margins to the centre, the British eighteenth century also makes the opposite shift extremely interesting; namely, the shift from the centre to the margin as a zone of otherness, of the unknown, of the unpredicted. It can refer to “places” at the margin, like in the cases of Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Rasselas, and Yorick in France and Italy (the Grand Tour itself, incidentally, is a shift from centre to margin and vice versa), but also to habitats (like Jonathan Wild’s underworld) or “characters” marginalized from the previous narrative tradition (John Gay’s beggars). A symbolic shift from the mainstream to the margin can also be seen in the eighteenth-century exploration of “subversive” genres and styles. Side by side with the Augustan classicism of Reynolds and West and Romney, there were other artists, like Füssli, Barry, Runciman and Blake, who were seeking more perturbing and less orthodox inspirations, preferring the tigers of wrath to the horses of instruction, and the disquieting vision of the sublime to the serene grace of the beautiful. It was this kind of attitude which gave rise to the Gothic revival, the painting of the nightmare and the Ossianic and graveyard poetry.10 Even Constable’s charming vision of nature is powerfully eccentric and schismatic, since it brings into the foreground that which in the academies was kept in the background, and gives a central place to that which is marginal among the classics. The landscape in Constable is an end in itself, not a means for narrating a story or a heroic deed, or for the decorative characterization of a portrait. In the same way, in philosophy Locke reinstated into the gnosiological processes those obscure and confused ideas which Descartes had expunged as unessential and obstructive to knowledge. The authors of the Enlightenment investigated the cognitive potential of obscurity, sparking off an intense debate on Molyneaux’s Question and new theories of perception. In aesthetics, the ugly, the sublime, the grotesque and all that is eccentric in relation to beauty, serene grace and refined wit become subjects of treatment that is far from marginal, and a prelude to the new poetics of Romanticism.11 The importance of the marginal therefore lies in the possibility of delineating a different framework for the mainstream; perhaps a less exciting one, but without doubt a more veridical one. As we well know, the history of ideas is made not only by sublime geniuses or unsurpassed masters, but also by those who, with low-key diligence and muted reflection, have contributed to disseminating, correcting and stimulating the work of major figures.

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By some kind of inappropriate causal link it is thought that dealing with major authors brings the immediate status of a major scholar, which is utter nonsense. By no logical or empirical law has the intelligence of an author ever been communicated to their exegetes, and no modest scholar becomes more interesting exclusively by virtue of their choosing to devote themself to commenting upon Kant or Wittgenstein. In fact, the opposite rule holds true, for whenever the top masters have given their attention to minor authors—from Croce to Burckhardt, from Samuel Johnson to Kristeller—they have once again shown their clearness of thought and depth of insight. These scholars have been able to infuse life and meaning to neglected or forgotten authors, delivering them to the interest and familiarity of their successors, making them into individuals, not just names, and securing a fairer judgement for them. Of course, this is not sufficient to bring a marginal author into the mainstream of thought; but even if they remain at the margins, at least they will stay there with more adequate consideration and regained dignity, and that is no marginal matter.

Notes 1

B. Saint Girons, Les marges de la nuit. Pour une autre histoire de la peinture (Paris: L'Amateur, 2006), along with my review in Itinera, 2 (2011), 250–256. 2 E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) (Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press, 1979), 187. 3 Lord Shaftesbury wrote in 1709 his Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author II 1: “The British Muses … may well lie abject and obscure. They lisp as in their cradles: and their stammering Tongues, which nothing besides their Youth and Rawness can excuse, have hitherto spoken in wretched Pun and Quibble. Our dramatick Shakespear, our Fletcher, Johnson, and our epick Milton preserve this style” (in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, London: J. Darby 17142, I, 215). And again: “Notwithstanding his natural Rudeness, his unpolish'd Style, his antiquated Phrase and Wit, his want of Method and Coherence, and his Deficiency in almost all the Graces and Ornaments of this kind of Writings; yet by the Justness of his Moral, the Aptness of many of his Descriptions, and the plain and natural Turn of several of his Characters, he pleases his Audience, and often gains their Ear …” (Soliloquy II 3, 275). 4 David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757), in Essays Moral, Political and Literary (New York: Cosimo, 2006), 231–255: 235. 5 B. Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1911), a c. di F. Audisio (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1997); I. Berlin, Vico and Herder. Two Studies in the History of Ideas (1960) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), also available in Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, ed. by H. Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–242.

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A. Verri, “Introduzione” a I. Berlin, Vico ed Herder. Due studi sulla storia delle idee (1976), trad. it. di A.V. (Roma: Armando ed., 1978), 7–16: 8: “Vico era consapevole che la sua opera, al suo tempo quasi gettata nel deserto, avrebbe trovato più attenti uditori fra i posteri, e non solo della sua terra, che gli lesinò riconoscimenti ed onori.” 7 M. & R. Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists. A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (1963), Introduction by J. Connors (New York: NY Review Books, 2007); E. Kris & O. Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Legend of the Artist. A Historical Experiment (1943), Preface by E. H. Gombrich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 8 A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology (1929), ed. by D.R. Griffin & D.W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1979), 39: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” 9 On Hogarth as an author of modern moral subjects: F. Antal, William Hogarth and his place in European Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); W. Busch, Das sentimentalische Bild. Die Krise der Kunst im 18. Jahrhundert und die Geburt der Moderne (München: C.H. Beck Verl., 1993), 242–250 (492 s.); J. S. Uglow, Hogarth. A Life and a World (1997) (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). 10 W. J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (1946) (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). 11 On questions relevant to the «Molyneux’s Question» see. J. D. Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism. Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1993), and my review in Quaderni Utinensi VII (15–16) (1990), 425–427; D. M. M. Lopes, “Art Media and the Sense Modalities: Tactile Pictures”, Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997), 425–440: 432 s. («Molyneux’s Question»); and A. Gatti, La Molyneux’s Question e le teorie della visione nell’età dei Lumi: alcuni riflessi estetici, in Il secolo dei Lumi e l’oscuro, a c. di P. Giordanetti, M. Mazzocut-Mis & G. Gori (Milano: Mimesis Edizioni, 2008), 48–63.

FROM “GOTHIC ATROCITIES” TO OBJECTS OF AESTHETIC APPRECIATION: THE TRANSITION FROM MARGINAL TO MAINSTREAM OF EARLY ITALIAN ART IN BRITISH TASTE DURING THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CARLY COLLIER UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

The majority of art-historical scholarship regarding eighteenth-century British taste has illuminated what was mainstream in art appreciation, criticism and practice.1 This was the aesthetic preference for classical and High Renaissance painting and sculpture, as is manifested in what is probably the most recognised and infamous visual evocation of the grand tour—Johann Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–7). Indeed, letters, sketchbooks and journals written by the English in Italy amply demonstrate the preoccupation with those Italian artists whose work was widely considered to represent “the highest development of the art.”2 Painters such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Guido Reni and Domenichino are continually name-checked by tourists seeing the sights of Rome, Florence and Venice.3The dominance of this briefly-summarised aesthetic canon was of extreme significance for art patronage and production in Britain, as is revealed in the polemic of William Hogarth, who steadfastly contested the pervasive influence of all things Italian.4 Moreover, it meant that any art that antedated the era of Raphael (i.e. of the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth centuries) was thought to be “gothic.” This term derived etymologically from that of “Goth,” denoting the race of warriors who sacked ancient Rome, and was first mobilised in the early Renaissance as a clear, negative, aesthetic value judgement about contemporary medieval architecture. “Gothic” began to be recovered in eighteenth-century Britain in the fields of literature and architecture by an intellectual coterie who imbued it with more positive and nationalistic

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associations, but due to a comparable lack of national production and achievement in the arena of the fine arts its usage in relation to painting and sculpture continued to function as a signifier of things judged barbaric and ugly.5 Moreover, coterminous with the qualitative use of the term “gothic” was the wide-spread use of the pejorative appellation “primitive” to denote medieval and early Renaissance artists themselves.6 Although early Italian art was popularly marginalised in British visual culture throughout the long eighteenth century, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards it became mainstream in British taste. The impression that the rediscovery of the primitives was largely a mid-nineteenth century phenomenon—one exemplified by the writings of John Ruskin and the paintings of the Pre- Raphaelites—has long been a commonplace in this subject’s historiography.7 Thus, this account of British taste is clearly constructed as the following binary—in the 1700s, connoisseurs and collectors demonstrated a predilection for the classical and High Renaissance, but from the midnineteenth century the focus shifted to the Gothic. Such a statement is somewhat of an over-simplification, however, as concomitant with the mainstream eighteenth-century taste for the classical was a burgeoning interest in the paintings and sculptures executed by the primitives. The various demonstrations of this interest range from mentions of paintings by generally ignored Quattrocento artists such as Taddeo Gaddi or Simone Martini in Grand Tour literature, to the famous collector of classical marbles Charles Townley importing the first known Trecento fresco fragments into England in the mid-1770s.8 This chapter, however, is concerned particularly with artists, rather than collectors or travellers. There are multiple examples of British painters and sculptures, both at home and abroad, looking at early Italian art either for general educative purposes or for source material for their own compositional repertoires. This chapter shall briefly outline one such example of an eighteenth-century British artist noting primitives in Italy by way of introduction. The main focus of this inquiry, though, will be a pair of case-studies detailing the activities of two British artists whose interest in early Italian art achieved a greater and more public expression. Both Thomas Patch and Augustus Wall Callcott (the latter in conjunction with his wife) published the first copies in England of important fresco cycles by Tre- and Quattrocento Italian artists. The genesis, context, aims and influence of these publications will be both explicated and examined in relation to the overall theme of the essays in this collection—the marginal and the mainstream in eighteenth-century British and Italian culture.

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An Early Example of Artistic Interest in the Primitives As is widely known, one of the dominant cultural phenomena of the eighteenth century was the Grand Tour, whereby tourists (a large proportion of whom were British) travelled to Italy with the ostensible aim of intellectual, cultural and moral self-improvement.9 As the establishment of an English school of painting became an increasingly pressing concern of eighteenth-century cultural life, British artists flocked to Italy with progressive frequency in order to imbibe the lessons of both the ancients and the titans of Italian Renaissance art first hand.10 Studying the Old Masters was a deeply ingrained tenet of artistic training by the second half of the eighteenth century. Joshua Reynolds advised young artists to imitate (which he distinctly differentiated from copying) other artists, stating: “when we have had continually before us the great works of Art to impregnate our minds with kindred ideas, we are then, and not till then, fit to produce something of the same species.”11 He was, of course, advocating the study of those esteemed Old Masters in whose work it was commonly held that art had reached its highest expression, and indeed there exist numerous examples of British artists who made copies after Raphael and Titian, both at home and abroad.12 Copies after the primitives, however, are much less prevalent. The contemporary discourse surrounding the development of an English school of painting reveals that copying or imitating the “more or less undeveloped forms” of fifteenth-century art was highly undesirable,13 for fear of “infecting our school with a retrograding mania of disfiguring Art,” as the influential Art Journal put it as late as 1847.14 Another reason for the paucity of copies after early Italian art was the lack of examples of such works in Italy itself; as painting techniques developed and later painters outshone the achievements of their predecessors, works by the masters of the Trecento and Quattrocento were systematically supplanted and, if not destroyed or dismantled, removed to positions of obscurity in churches.15 An early and arguably surprising example of a British artist demonstrating an interest in early Italian art is Reynolds himself, the primary exponent of the classicising “grand style.” A sketchbook dating from Reynolds' Italian tour of 1750–2, now in the British Museum, contains both textual and artistic responses to the art he saw on his journey from Florence to Rome in 1752.16 As an expression of personal taste, the sketchbook largely conforms to orthodox eighteenth-century views; the choice of artworks that Reynolds thought worth recording ranges in date from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and three of

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the most prominent artists are Raphael, Michelangelo and Giulio Romano. However, there are glimmers of an unusual response to the early Italians.17 The first is only written, but it is notable for the singularity of the reference: “S. Maria Novella is the first picture ever Cimabue painted in colours, in the cloister the works of the Grecian painters.” Although Cimabue was a point of reference for British artists and connoisseurs thanks to the wide dissemination of Giorgio Vasari's Vite—a compilation of biographies of Italian artists which constitute a teleological model of the history of art in which Cimabue (whose biography begins the narrative) was accorded the honour of “shed[ding] first light upon the art of painting”—mentions of him were scarce in English travel literature prior to the mid-eighteenth century.18 Of more significance, however, is the sketch of a figure from an early fresco which, as far as can be ascertained, was overlooked by Reynolds biographers and scholars until it was first published by Giovanna Perini in her 1988 study of the artist's Italian sketchbooks.19 Reynolds annotated the sketch as follows: “in the church of the Carmine at Florence a death bed this figure turns from the bed and the company to weep. An old picture before Raffaele.”20 Reynolds did not identify the artist and/or work from which the figure derives, and a devastating fire at Santa Maria del Carmine in 1771 which destroyed many of the extant fresco cycles means that a comparison of the figure with the original source is impossible.21 Notwithstanding the inability to gauge the veracity of Reynolds' copy, his attraction to Italian art “before Raffaele” at this early stage distinguishes him from the vast majority of his other artistic contemporaries in Italy in the early 1750s. As Perini hypothesised, he may have been pointed in that direction by Ignazio Hugford, important artist, restorer and collector of primitives; Reynolds himself was later to assemble an enviable collection of Italian paintings and drawings, with some of the latter having the credentials of having originally been in the Vasari collection.22

Thomas Patch's Pioneering Publications after the Italian Primitives Discussion of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence focuses the narrative of this chapter on what is believed to be one of the earliest published artistic responses to the early Italian masters—three volumes of engravings by Thomas Patch (1725–1782) after works by Masaccio, Giotto and Ghiberti. Patch's name does not feature strongly in accounts of the eighteenth-century British school, primarily because he spent almost

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the entirety of his artistic career in Italy; Patch travelled to Rome from his native Devon in 1747, and then on to Florence in 1755 where he resided until his death.23 However, he was an integral member of the Florentine artistic circle, and is a prominent figure in the afore-mentioned Tribuna of the Uffizi, in which he is depicted discoursing to his friend and patron Horace Mann on the aesthetic merits of Titian's Venus of Urbino. Patch is known today primarily for his Florentine view paintings and caricatures of English milordi on the Grand Tour. Indeed, his publications—which took as their subject-matter artists who were considered marginal in the eighteenth century—have sometimes themselves been somewhat marginalised in historiographies of British taste, for reasons that will soon become clear.24 Their scholarly nature, augmented by the introductions that preface each edition, however, necessitate a reassessment of their place in the rediscovery of the primitives. Originally, Patch conceived of publishing a series of books of engravings which would encompass, in his own words: “every celebrated author [i.e. artist] in Tuscany.”25 Judging by this statement, therefore, it was not his original intention to specifically enlighten his audience, for whom he presupposed a certain degree of connoisseurship, as to the artistic merits of the Florentine primitives.26 As Sam Smiles has suggested, Patch's statement seemingly indicates that the series of engravings was conceived of as presenting something akin to an extraillustrated version of Vasari's Vite, in response to the call made by the eighteenth-century scholar Giovanni Bottari (1689–1775) for visual evidence—in the form of engravings—to compliment textual accounts of paintings by Italian artists from the early Renaissance onwards.27 Only four volumes were ever published: La Vita di Masaccio (1770); La Vita di Fra Bartolommeo (1772); La Vita di Giotto (1772) and Porta del Battistero di San Giovanni di Firenze (1775). That relating to Fra Bartolommeo will be largely ignored in this chapter, as the friar was a contemporary of Raphael's and therefore publishing copies after his paintings conformed much more to contemporary canons of taste. Further, epistolary evidence attests to the fact that Patch produced the Fra Bartolomeo volume at the request of Horace Walpole and not on his own initiative, which was the case, as far as we know, with the others.28 Indeed, there is evidence that Patch personally had an aesthetic appreciation for those frescoes of Masaccio and Giotto that he chose to engrave. Horace Mann, the British Resident in Florence and a great supporter of Patch’s, wrote that Patch: “was always an adorer of the heads of Masaccio in [the] Carmine, and both drew them and engraved

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them himself.”29 The term “adoration” suggests a depth of aesthetic appreciation for the Brancacci chapel frescoes atypical for the time; again, however, contemporary evidence—in addition to the artist's own works—relates that Patch was very interested in physiognomy, which must have played a role in his attraction to the Brancacci frescoes.30 Patch himself also wrote in the introduction to the Giotto volume that he had already begun making copies for his own pleasure from a fresco cycle depicting the life of St John the Baptist, then attributed to Giotto, which was also in the church of the Carmine, and that it was the almost total destruction of the cycle by the 1771 fire that led him to publish the engraved versions of his drawings as important historical records.31 In the absence of evidence illuminating Patch's approach to his last volume it seems reasonable to suggest that the debate surrounding the preventative painting-over with dark green oil paint of the Baptistery's famous bronze Gates of Paradise by Lorenzo Ghiberti (the city's reaction to Anton Raphael Mengs' offer to clean them), may have encouraged Patch's engraving of the reliefs.32 If the decision to publish engravings after Masaccio's work was indeed prompted by Patch’s personal taste for them, he would no doubt have been extremely gratified by the fulsome reaction of Horace Walpole, no less, to the volume as expressed in a letter to Mann of January 20, 1771: “I am impatient to thank you for a present that I have received, and that you never mentioned having sent me. Sure it is not so insignificant! It is the volume of ‘Masaccio's designs,’ brought by Mr Coxe. I am transported with them! They are Nature itself, and evidently the precursors of Raphael. He plainly availed himself of their dignity but scarce reached the infinite truth of their expression. The action of the mouth in every head almost surpasses any other master, and seems to have been caught only by this. Oh! if there are more, make your Patch give us all. I cannot be content under all. They are admirably touched and executed: he must engrave the rest.”33

Walpole’s comments are worth quoting in their entirety for their illumination of his appreciation of Masaccio, as the implied negativity concerning Raphael’s borrowings from the Brancacci frescoes—that he almost failed to replicate Masaccio's skill in expression—is extremely noteworthy. One senses an almost proto-Ruskinian sensibility in Walpole's emphasis on the “truth” and sincerity of the frescoes. A decade later, following Patch's death, it was the Masaccio engravings for which Walpole believed the artist would be remembered.34 Although the volumes were not conceived of as a series introducing

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the art- loving public to the merits of the primitives, Patch's engravings are a significant marker in the reception history of the early Italian artists. However, that they have frequently received only cursory scholarly attention is no doubt due to the significant errors in attribution made by Patch. The engravings by him from the Brancacci chapel frescoes in the Carmine for La Vita di Masaccio were almost all painted by Filippino Lippi, although it has just been demonstrated that Horace Walpole, along with Mann, accepted Patch's attributions without question.35 Similarly, documentary evidence uncovered in the nineteenth century proved that the frescoes in the Manetti chapel, engraved by Patch as being after Giotto, were actually executed by Spinello Aretino.36 In Patch’s defence, however, he was only adhering to Vasari’s established attribution, although he did dispute Vasari’s dating. Giotto’s alleged work in the Carmine, where he painted “the entire life of [St John the Baptist] divided into several different pictures,” is located early on in Vasari’s narrative, prior to Giotto’s work in Assisi and Rome.37 Patch, however, placed the frescoes within the last five years of Giotto’s life (i.e. the 1330s).38 Spinello Aretino is often characterised as the Trecento artist who most successfully assimilated Giotto’s artistic principles, and there are certainly more stylistic affinities between the surviving Carmine fresco fragments and Giotto’s late work than, for example, the frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua.39 This example of Patch exercising independent critical acumen in the case of the “Giotto” frescoes illustrates his scholarly approach to early Italian art. This is compounded by a concern for visual accuracy which manifested itself in his faithful rendering of both the underlying synopie that became visible on the chapel walls following the destruction wrought by the fire, and the modern restorations (which took place in 1763–4), allowing the reader to formulate a clear understanding of the artist's original idea.40 Furthermore, in both the Giotto and Ghiberti volumes there is ample evidence that Patch deliberately cast himself in the role of historian and scholar. By offering the first publications of frescoes by “Giotto” he hoped to contribute to the long-running debate concerning the origins of the Italian Renaissance.41 Likewise, Patch identified a weakness in the scholarship concerning Lorenzo Ghiberti, and made a significant attempt to rectify it in his fourth and final publication. In the introduction to this final volume he wrote that: “The Authors, who have wrote so much of Lorenzo Ghiberti who made it [the Gates of Paradise] and of the restoration of Sculpture have left so many doubts both in regard to the time and circumstances of this work that we have thought it most proper in publishing it to add an authentick abstract from a Manuscript

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which is kept in a public office called l'arte de Fabbricanti and is entitled an account of the second and third Gate of S. John in Florence.”42 Patch's transcription of the document he identifies in the introduction is of even more scholarly importance as the manuscript he cited no longer exists. The intrinsic value of Patch's volumes, however, has to be weighed up against the wider impact they had upon British taste. Each of the four volumes are prefaced by introductions in both Italian and English, suggesting that they were intended for sale in both countries. It is logical to assume that Patch would not have had his engravings after early masters published in either country had he not been assured of an audience for them, and his comments concerning his own ingenuity at being the first to publish copies after early masters further indicate his astuteness. As has been demonstrated, it was his friendship with Horace Mann that was the primary conduit for bringing his work to the attention of influential figures in the British art world, as it was through Mann that Horace Walpole became acquainted with Patch’s engravings. Walpole believed that Patch's contribution to introducing the British cognoscenti to early Italian art was immeasurable, writing upon the occasion of Patch's death in 1782 that Patch had had “great merit … in bringing to light the admirable paintings of Masaccio, so little known out of Florence till his prints disclosed them.”43 Furthermore, Walpole was so enamoured with the Masaccio volume that he showed it to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the President of the Royal Academy.44 It has been suggested that Patch's work on Masaccio may have been the catalyst for Reynolds' lecture on the same artist, delivered to the Royal Academy students in 1784. This, Reynolds' twelfth discourse, contains the only extended discussion of a “primitive” artist; in the discourses, the formative literature of British artistic theory in the second half of the eighteenth century, Reynolds takes as his exemplars those artists who reflected mainstream aesthetic taste, unsurprising when one considers that much of his audience comprised aristocratic connoisseurs and patrons.45 Reynolds qualified Masaccio’s achievements historically in relation to those of Raphael and, although his praise of the earlier artist is not as extensive as that afforded him by Patch, Reynolds singled out a number of laudable elements of Masaccio’s style.46 This, perhaps, is unsurprising given that the context of Reynolds’ referencing of Masaccio is a defence, within the discourse of artistic practice, of borrowing or imitation as developmental and emulative processes.47 There is a direct correlation between the Brancacci subjects that Reynolds analyses and those reproduced by Patch.48 If Patch's volume was indeed the sole visual source-material used by Reynolds in his lecture

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preparation, then it was Patch's understanding and translation of Masaccio's achievements and stylistic merits that was disseminated by Reynolds in late eighteenth-century Britain, and which were, in fact, inimical to Reynolds' own theoretical beliefs as expounded in the Discourses. As the heads demonstrate, Patch's representation of Masaccio's art focuses on the depth and naturalness of his individual characterisation. Further evidence of the importance accorded to Patch's volumes in the immediate decades following their execution is the proposition made by John Flaxman in 1810 that the Royal Academy purchase Patch's book of engravings after the Ghiberti reliefs, meant that visual examples of his work, and not just literary descriptions, were available to British artists who found mainland Europe inaccessible at this time.49 The academy also owned the Fra Bartolommeo volume by 1802. On a final note, although tracing the provenance of the various copies of Patch's volumes has proven difficult thus far, a bound volume containing the engravings after Masaccio, Fra Bartolommeo and Giotto now at the Getty, which belonged at some point to an Earl Nelson, possibly the elder brother of Horatio, was bought by Lord Lindsay, who of course provided a huge impetus to the rediscovery of early Italian art with threevolume Sketches of the History of Christian Art in 1847.50 This shows that Patch's copies of the Giotto and Masaccio frescoes were still considered valuable source material, particularly for those who had more than a passing interest in the subject. As Patch's Masaccio volume was the first published record after the Brancacci chapel frescoes, so too was the final volume, to which this chapter shall now turn, being the first published record of an equally important monument of early Italian renaissance art. This publication was essentially a collaborative effort between an artistic couple who, it has been posited, were the precursors, as joint arbiters of taste, to the most famous partnership in British nineteenth-century cultural life—Charles and Elizabeth Eastlake.51

The Callcotts and the First Monograph on Giotto's Arena Chapel Between May 1827 and June 1828, the Royal Academician and landscape painter Augustus Wall Callcott (1779–1845) toured first Germany and then Italy following his late-in-life marriage to the writer Maria Graham (1785–1842).52 Both the Callcotts kept journals of their tour, and these provide ample evidence that their over-riding preoccupation was to familiarize themselves with and deepen their understanding of late

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medieval and early Renaissance art, both Italian and Northern European.53 One of the ways in which the Callcotts achieved this aim was through acquainting themselves with the connoisseurs, collectors, artists and curators who were at the forefront of what was now, fifty years after Patch's efforts, a more sustained aesthetic interest in the primitives. Maria's more detailed journals in particular reveal the thoughts, impressions and opinions of the Callcotts on viewing some of the German Nazarene painter Overbeck's cartoons for the Villa Massimo in Rome, for example, as well as recording their meetings with people such as the Boisserée brothers in Munich, and Carlo Lasinio, the keeper of the Campo Santo in Pisa. According to the journals, the topic of conversation always centred on the development of modern art, and the technical and expressive merits of artists from various eras were endlessly debated. Additionally, Maria frequently invokes literature focusing on the primitives (Ottley’s The Italian School of Design and the only recently-published plates after the “most eminent masters of the early Florentine school,” and Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire d’Arte, for example); one surmises that some of these books were taken by the couple on their trip for reference. The other strand of the Callcotts’ connoisseurial endeavour was, of course, to see such works first-hand, and almost no destination was left without at least one medieval or early Renaissance painting or sculpture having been commented on, whether an art work about which they had prior knowledge or one stumbled across. Significantly, it was the experience of visiting and examining Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua which gave the Callcotts the material for their first joint scholarly endeavour. Description of the Chapel of the Annunziata; or, Giotto's Chapel is a slim volume of only twenty pages.54 According to the title page and preface, it was written by Maria Callcott and the ten wood engraving illustrations are based on sketches made by Augustus Wall Callcott in 1827. This chapter contends, however, that this work was a product of the shared connoisseurship developed by the Callcotts during their honeymoon tour and refined thereafter, and that they made joint decisions on all aspects of the production of the volume, such as, for example, which subjects to illustrate and that the pronoun “we” is in evidence throughout the text of the publication reflects this. Beginning the volume is a general introduction to the history of the chapel and its decoration, and this is followed by a listing of the individual frescoes in Giotto's decorative scheme. The catalogue of frescoes includes, in each case, their scriptural sources, but more frequently some form of aesthetic judgement. The function of the volume, according to Maria Callcott, was to preserve a visual and

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literary record of “this interesting relic” which she was afraid was “likely to perish in the next few years.”55 What is strange, however, is that despite her concern, the Description was not published until 1835 and privately, meaning that it reached only a select group of connoisseurs. Further obfuscation of the situation is caused by a letter in the National Library of Scotland written by Maria to the publisher John Murray. It opens: Dear Sir, About ten days ago we sent you a copy for yourself & another for your son, of a description of Giotto’s chapel at Padua. It is printed strictly for private circulation, & being anxious that no copy sh.d fall into wrong hands I should be glad to know whether you received the copies intended for you ….56

This seems somewhat dramatic. The private printing of specialist material, to be disseminated amongst select groups of like-minded connoisseurs, was by no means uncommon in the mid-nineteenth century, following the model of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press (1757–89). Perhaps Maria was concerned that the subject matter of the volume could be considered inflammatory or contentious? When John Ruskin came to write his analysis of the Arena Chapel fresco cycle for the Arundel Society twenty years later, he expressed concern that the subject of the first tier of frescoes—the Life of the Virgin—would not find favour with a Protestant public who were intensely suspicious of mariolatry.57 It is feasible that this was a significant concern for the Callcotts, too, and that their decision to publish privately may have been made so as to not alienate some of Augustus Callcott's powerful patrons. Curiously, however, the Description appears to have entered the public market in 1845 after the deaths of the couple and, although this event is again shrouded in mystery, a document in the National Art Library seemingly suggests that it was published at Augustus' behest through the agency of his nephew, John Callcott Horsely.58 As with Thomas Patch, intrinsic problems with the Callcotts' representation of Giotto has led to their work being overlooked, and this can be demonstrated through a comparison of just one of Callcott's illustrations with its original source—the illustration depicting the meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate, as told in Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend. The differences between Callcott's illustration and its source are acute, and terming it an “interpretation” rather than a straightforward copy would be much more accurate. This differentiates his work from Patch's publications which, although the attributions were wrong, were impressively faithful copies. Perhaps the major problem with

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this particular illustration, notwithstanding the general reminder one gets of the work of an artist such as William Dyce, is that Callcott has misrepresented the physical contact between Joachim and Anna. In changing Giotto's kiss between husband and wife to a mere embrace, Callcott altered (missed?) a fundamental moment of the master's narrative.59 The kiss given by Anna to Joachim prefigures that given by Judas to Jesus at the moment of the betrayal which, of course, is not actually depicted by Giotto, meaning that the realisation of the kiss in the Joachim and Anna scene provides a strong visual counterpoint to the later fresco. Moreover, this means that the Callcotts missed an essential component of Giotto the artist, who was interested in the human condition, representing human emotions. This is additionally revealed by the fact that there are no illustrations in the Description of either Giotto's psychologically intense betrayal scene nor the very moving Nativity. Callcott admitted to the disparity between his copies and the originals in the preface to the volume, which demands quoting in its entirety: The wood engravings accompanying this description are to be looked upon as recollections rather than as fac-similies of the designs they are taken from. The circumstances under which I sketched and obtained the memoranda from which the present drawings for the engraver were made, will not allow of my doing more than I have done. The rigid Critics in Art will, no doubt, object to such renderings, from the absence of those peculiarities and even defects belonging to the age in which the works were executed; but the features which mark an artist’s strength and originality, and which constitute the beauty of his work, are essentially distinct from those which arise out of the accidents of the time in which he lived.”60

David Blayney Brown suggested that Callcott’s preface makes clear that he was predominantly concerned with the spiritual quality of the Arena Chapel decoration, rather than with its pictorial expression.61 The main frame of reference, however, seems to be artistic, and Callcott’s justification for his intentional stylistic amelioration of Giotto’s frescoes is rooted in the Vasarian conception of the infantile state—lacking a knowledge of perspective and anatomy—of the first era of Italian Renaissance painting, in which Giotto “accident[ally]” lived. However, Callcott's simplified and somewhat mannered illustrations of the Giotto frescoes were well received in Britain, both amongst the circle to whom the work was disseminated privately, and also in a fairly substantial review in the Athenaeum when the Description was published in 1845.62 If this seems strange now, it must be remembered that the

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Arena Chapel was not easily accessible to tourists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and thus is not often identified or discussed in travellers’ accounts. Furthermore, Giotto, as an artistic personality, was a very different construct then from now. Examples of his authorship work were scarce, as the frescoes in Santa Croce were whitewashed until the mid-nineteenth century but, paradoxically, unscrupulous dealers in both Italy and Britain often claimed a variety of paintings which appeared vaguely medieval as Giotto’s due to his name being fairly well known thanks to Vasari and Dante63. However, the Description was also praised by people who had seen Giotto’s meisterwork with their own eyes, such as Callcott’s fellow academician Thomas Phillips (although, admittedly, in a polite thank you letter to Maria Callcott herself), and the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen.64 Despite the frequent absence of visual fidelity in Augustus Wall Callcott's copies, a generally unpardonable sin for Ruskin, the understanding of Giotto propounded in the Description is analogous to that elucidated by Ruskin in the Arundel Society project of the 1850s in the most fundamental way. Both authors stressed that Giotto was really the first artist to look to nature and to strive to combine naturalism with deep religious feeling, a characterisation that was entirely inimical to the Rioist school of thought.65 Furthermore, the Callcotts' clear conservationist concerns, and their decision to take a practical step to alleviate these, anticipated both the concerns and activities set out in the Arundel Society's prospectus by over a decade. Perhaps the final word on the Callcotts’ achievement—and it should indeed be considered so, regardless of those issues outlined above—should be left to one of their contemporaries. Frances Trollope, a middle-class travel writer, novelist and a member of the “public” whose taste the National Gallery was aiming to improve, published an account of her Italian tour in 1842. Her section on the Arena Chapel, in no way notable or differing from similar accounts of the period, ends simply: “I would have given much to have had [the Callcotts'] splendid pages with me at Padua.”66 In the same way as Ruskin's Stones of Venice became the ultimate authority for a traveller’s appreciation and understanding of that city’s monuments, and Lucy Honeychurch in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View had to make recourse to her Baedeker in order to ensure she was “feeling what was proper” when contemplating Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce, the Callcotts' publication was the first to perform the role of guide and conduit to the Arena Chapel frescoes, if sadly not for Frances Trollope.67

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Conclusion The name of Ruskin reintroduces the general theme and thus the specific premise of this chapter—the transition from marginal to mainstream of early Italian art in British taste during the long eighteenth-century. The material produced by Thomas Patch and the Callcotts differs in a number of ways—predominantly accuracy, scope and ambition, all of which can be understood as a consequence of the authors’ differing situations. In terms of the latter two categories, Patch’s position in Italy in the 1770s was arguably a more comfortable one from which to attempt to spotlight the artistic achievements of early Italian artists who, in the climate of 1830s Britain, were frequently identified as a religious “other,” and sometimes even a threat. Moreover, Patch’s physical proximity to his source material allowed for an infinitely more detailed and accurate study, and subsequent reproduction, of the works of his chosen artists than the Callcotts were capable of. As this chapter has argued, though, that their scholarship shares with Patch’s a progressive curiosity about and appreciation for a period of the visual arts then largely disregarded by the masses. Incrementally, the volumes produced by Patch and the Callcotts percolated through British culture on a multiplicity of levels. Through donation by Maria herself, the Description joined Patch’s Fra Bartolommeo and Ghiberti volumes in the Royal Academy in 1835, meaning that all students and members of the institution had access to it as a visual resource. It would also seem that Anna Jameson mined both Patch’s illustrations and those of Augustus—the first acknowledged, the second not—in her Memoirs of Early Italian Painters (1845), further demonstrating that both sets of authors’ publications continued to be widely read and disseminated. Thus, the tangible impact that Patch and the Callcotts had on mainstream art knowledge, theory and taste necessitates that their work be integrated into the more established narrative of the rediscovery of the primitives. This chapter has aimed to take the first steps in that direction and illuminate these two scholarly contributions both to the history of British art and taste.

List of Art Works Cited 1. Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772–7, Royal Collection. 2. Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Sketchbook, bound in vellum, of drawings of Old Masters, made at Florence and on the journey from Florence to Rome, 1752.” BMPD 201 a 10, folio 52r. 3. Thomas Patch, The Life of Masaccio: La Vita di Masaccio (Firenze,

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1772). British Library GRC 130.h.18. (this edition also contains the volumes of engravings after Giotto and Fra Bartolommeo). 5. Meeting at the Golden Gate, Giotto, c. 1305, Arena Chapel 6. The Golden Gate, after Giotto, Augustus Wall Callcott in Maria Callcott, Description of the Chapel of the Annunziata; or, Giotto's Chapel (London: T. Cadell, 1835). British Library GRC 7816.i.4.

Notes 1

See, as a representative sample, Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003); Jeremy Wood, “Raphael Copies and Exemplary Picture Galleries in Mid Eighteenth-Century London,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 62 (1999) 394–417; and chapter 9 (“English Interest in Italian Painting, Sculpture and Architecture”) in Charles P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 137–158. 2 “Bolognese School of Painting,” The Penny Cyclopedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Vol. V: Blois-Buffalo (London: Charles Knight and Sons, 1836), 93. A plethora of survey texts illuminate the reception of Italian art in Britain during the long eighteenth century. See, for example, John Steegman, The Rule of Taste: from George I to George IV (London: Macmillan & Co., 1936); John Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and Frank Hermann, The English as Collectors, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1999). 3 The subsequent fate of the reputations of these artists is further indicative of shifts in taste; whilst the name of Raphael, Michaelangelo and Titian continue to denote artistic mastery, those of Guido Reni and Domenichino are now primarily known only to a specialist audience. 4 Hogarth took exception to the preference demonstrated by art collectors for Italian art over British, and the accommodations in that direction made by many British artists—particularly in their making grand tours—in order to secure patronage. He wished British visual culture to develop independently of that of Italy or France, writing: “the fact is, that every thing necessary for the student, in sculpture or painting, may at this time be procured in London.” John Nichols, ed., Anecdotes of William Hogarth: written by himself (London, 1833) 32. 5 The Oxford English Dictionary offers a series of quotations, spanning 1695 to 1841, illustrating the following definition of the term “gothic”: “Barbarous, rude, uncouth, unpolished, in bad taste. Of temper: savage.” "Gothic, adj. and n." OED Online. October 2012. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80225?redirectedFrom=gothic (accessed October 29, 2012). A chapter by Terry Castle entitled “The Gothic Novel” sets out a concise account of the usage of the term “gothic” in multiple cultural contexts.

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Terry Castle, Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex and Writing (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 73–108. A definitive and magisterial historiographical work is Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). 6 The term “primitive” has undergone a number of transformations in its usage in relation to the canon of art history. In the context of this chapter, the term will be employed in its nineteenth-century incarnation, when it was used to denote those artists antedating Raphael; although initially referred to derogatively, their paintings came to be seen to embody a spiritual sincerity, unhampered by illusionistic devices, that was admired by connoisseurs and artists. See Ernst Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive, (Oxford: Phaidon, 2002) for a wideranging explanation of the shifting historical constructions of the term “primitive.” 7 The literature concerning the rediscovery of the primitives in the nineteenth century far outweighs any explorations of the subject within the temporal framework of the previous era. Survey texts have tended to provide the forum for appraisals (albeit somewhat limited ones) of the consumption of early Italian art before it reached its zenith in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Giovanni Previtali's seminal text, La Fortuna dei Primitivi (Torino: Einaudi, 1966), is distinguished by its discussion of both literary and visual reactions to early Italian art from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, embracing the responses of artists and connoisseurs from a variety of Western European countries. Gombrich's The Preference for the Primitive is one of the most complete modern treatments of the subject. In Gombrich's discussion of early Italian art, however, he focuses primarily on the nineteenth century. 8 The artist John Flaxman, for example, admired works by such generally disregarded names as Pietro Cavallini (c. 1240-c. 1330) and Lorenzo Maitani (fl. 1290-d. 1330). See Hugh Brigstocke, “Flaxman: Refocusing the Grand Tour”, Walpole Society Journal, 72 (2010). See Gerald Vaughan, “An EighteenthCentury Classicist's Medievalism: The Case of Charles Townley,” in Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002), 297–314. 9 The literature on the phenomenon of the Grand Tour is vast. Solid, multifaceted accounts include, but are no means limited to: Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour (London: Frank Cass, 1998); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel writing and imaginative geography 1600– 1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) and Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 10 Joshua Reynolds, Jonathan Skelton, Richard Wilson and George Romney are just a few of the names of British artists who undertook grand tours in the eighteenth century. 11 From the Sixth Discourse, delivered on December 10, 1774. Joshua Reynolds, Seven Discourses delivered in the Royal Academy, (London: T. Cadell, 1778), 211. It is worth noting, as W. Hipple pointed out in an article of

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1953, that Reynolds' discourses were full of contradictions, and his position on imitation was no exception. See W. J. Hipple, “General and Particular in the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Study in Method,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 11 (1953): 231–247. 12 See, for example, Sir Robert Strange's drawing of the Madonna della Sedia, of 1762 (BMPL, British Unmounted Imp PIIIb) and William Tavener's copy after Gaspar Dughet (Lindsay Stainton, Nature into Art, exh. cat., (London: British Museum Press, 1991), 82. 13 This phrase is taken from a letter written by the eminent German art historian Gustaav Friedrich Waagen to The Times in 1854, in which he urged British artists (directing his comments at the “so-called” Pre-Raphaelites and their wider circle) not to imitate the technical deficiencies of the primitives in their quest to “elevate the character of modern art.” Gustav F. Waagen, “To the Editor of the Times”, London Times, 13 July 1854, 792. 14 Quoted in Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Taste, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 98. 15 Taking Giotto briefly as a case study; although Vasari attributed a considerable number of paintings to Giotto in the mid-sixteenth century, the majority of those he mentioned were either no longer in situ or had been covered by the Grand Tour era. In addition to explaining the lack of copies of his work by British artists, this also, to a degree, accounts for the certain narrowness of vision apparent in the early guidebooks written by British travellers in Italy. The same few works frequently reoccur in the literature—the Navicella mosaic in S. Pietro, Rome, the campanile at Florence and the (wrongly attributed) frescoes decorating the Campo Santo in Pisa. See Hayden B. J. Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University State Press, 1997), for an accomplished study of Giotto historiography. 16 Sketchbook, bound in vellum, of drawings of Old Masters, made at Florence and on the journey from Florence to Rome, 1752, BMPD, 1859,0514.305; PRN: PDB29729. The British Museum Prints and Drawings collection also holds another Reynolds sketchbook dating from the same year, containing sketches after and comments on paintings and sculpture seen on his journey from Florence to Venice. Again, Reynolds copies works by the traditionally esteemed Venetian painters—Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. 17 Jonathan Richardson's brief description of Giotto's Navicella mosiac, on the facade of St Peter's in Rome, is worthy of mention as an earlier artistic response to early Italian art than that of Reynolds for the aesthetic nature of Richardson's evaluation of the work. This appeared within the popular and influential travel guide An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, published in London in 1722. 18 Le Vite piu eccellenti pittore, scultore e architettori was first published in Italy in 1550, and in a second, enlarged edition of 1568. The Lives were not published in a full English translation until 1851. Vasari told the story of the history of Italian renaissance art in three parts, within an obviously Christian framework. Cimabue was of importance as the precursor of Giotto, the source of the

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revival of Italian art. The second phase of development was initiated by Masaccio, and the third and final by Leonardo, although Italian art reached its apex in the figure of Michelangelo. Vasari’s account of the Tre and Quattrocento was generally regarded as the ultimate source in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Europe; his status as an eyewitness and thus authority on sixteenthcentury art and artists reflected positively on his interpretation of the art of the preceding centuries. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. There is no mention of Cimabue in either Lassells (1670) or Addison (1705), for example; Smollett, in 1766, only identifies him as Giotto's master, neglecting to mention any of his works. 19 Giovanna Perini, “Sir Joshua Reynolds and Italian art and literature. A study of the sketchbooks in the British Museum and in Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 51 (1988) 141–68. See also Perini’s newly-published and more detailed study of this sketchbook: Giovanna Perini, Sir Joshua Reynolds in Italia (Firenze: Olschki, 2012). 20 Perini, “Joshua Reynolds”, 161 and BMPD 201 a 10, folio 52r. 21 See Ugo Procacci, “L'incendino della Chiesa del Carmine del 1771”, Rivista d'Arte, 14 (1932), 141–231 for a discussion of the fire and a reconstruction of the lost fresco cycles. One potential hypothesis as to the source for Reynolds' sketch is that the figure came from the fresco cycle attributed to Giotto in the Manetti chapel, which was almost entirely lost in the fire. Reynolds’ admiration for Michelangelo is well-known, as is the passage in his discourses where he praised the Masaccio fresco cycle in the Brancacci chapel in the Carmine and posited their influence on Michelangelo. Further, Vasari referred to the young Michelangelo making copies after Giotto’s Santa Croce frescoes, and the linking of Giotto, Masaccio and Michelangelo as the three main figures in the development of Italian painting is a dominant theme in the Lives. Given the various links, it is therefore not unreasonable to conjecture that the unidentified figural sketch in the British Museum could have been taken from the aforementioned fresco cycle, now known to have been executed by a Quattrocento follower of Giotto's, Spinello Aretino. 22 Perini, “Joshua Reynolds,” 161. On Reynolds' collection, see Editorials, “Sir Joshua Reynolds' Collection of Pictures I, II and III,” Burlington Magazine, 86 and 87 (1945) 133–4; 210–17; 262–73. 23 The standard account of Patch's life and work is Francis J.B. Watson, “Thomas Patch (1725–1782). Notes on His Life Together with a Catalogue of His Known Works”, Journal of the Walpole Society, 28 (1939–40), 15–50. Additional scholarship on Patch (not focusing on his publications after the primitives) includes Francis J. B. Watson, “Thomas Patch: Some New Light on His Work”, Apollo, 85 (1967) 348; Francis Russell, “Thomas Patch, Sir William Lowther and the Holker Claude”, Apollo, 162 (1975) 115–119; Ulrich Middledorf, “Due inediti di Thomas Patch”, RILA, 15 (1989); and, recently, Hugh Belsey, “Reading the Caricature Groups of Thomas Patch”, Burlington Magazine, 153 (2011) 229–31. Fabia Borroni Salvadori, “Il caricaturista Thomas Patch alla

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Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze”, Almanacco dei Bibliotecari Italiani, (1973), 159–172 offers a more detailed analysis of Patch's position in the Florentine artistic milieu. 24 A number of eminent scholars have referenced Patch's publications in the context of late eighteenth-century visual culture and the rediscovery of interest in the Italian primitives, including Hugh Brigstocke, Francis Haskell and Christopher Lloyd, but the only in-depth study of Patch’s publications after the primitives to date is Edward A. Maser, “Giotto, Masaccio, Ghiberti and Thomas Patch”, Festschrift für Klaus Lankheit, Köln, 1973, 192–199. However, Sam Smiles is currently preparing the MS of a paper entitled “Thomas Patch and the Early Renaissance,” (given at the conference Reinventing the Renaissance at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004) for publication in the British Art Journal, in which he seeks to redress the general dismissal of Patch's art historical works. I would like to thank Professor Smiles for generously sharing this paper and discussing his research on Patch with me, and offering advice on the subject of tracing the interest in the primitives in eighteenth-century Britain. 25 Thomas Patch, The Life of Masaccio: La Vita di Masaccio (Firenze, 1772), 3. 26 The first volume of engravings was addressed to “the lovers of the art of painting,” who were “conversant with the Fine Arts.” Thomas Patch, La Vita di Masaccio, 1. Thomas L. Pridham, author of the 1869 publication Devonshire Celebrities, wrote in his entry on Patch (which, interestingly, focused exclusively on his engravings after the primitives) that the artist published the volumes for his “relations and friends.” No doubt this was to a certain degree true, but from the Walpole-Mann correspondence we know that Patch charged for the volumes, and presumably, therefore, they were intended for a wider audience. Thomas L. Pridham, Devonshire Celebrities (London and Exeter, 1869) 83–4. 27 Ibid., note 24. 28 Patch came to Horace Walpole's attention through the agency of Horace Mann, British Resident in Florence and, by all accounts, close friend of both the artist and the connoisseur. After receiving Patch's first publication, that after Masaccio, Walpole wrote the following to Mann: “there is one more work [Patch] must perform, too. I remember at Florence a very few pictures of Fra Bartolommeo, another parent of Raphael, and whose ideas I thought, if possible, greater: as there is such a scarcity of his works, and as they have never that I know been engraved, at least not so well I am persuaded as these by Patch, make him add them to another set of Masaccio's heads. It will immortalize you both to preserve such works.” Walpole to Mann, dated January 20, 1771. Wilmarth S. Lewis, ed., Walpole, Horace, 1717–1797. Correspondence (Yale edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence), vol. 25 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), 48. 29 Letter from Mann to Walpole of 1771, quoted by Maser, “Thomas Patch,” 193. 30 The above-quoted letter from Mann illuminates Patch's long-standing interest in physiognomy. All the biographies of Patch relate an anecdote concerning his umbrage at the theft of his book about physiognomy prior to its publication by a French count, which is seemingly attested to by the inclusion of a self-portrait of

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Patch holding a book entitled Le Regole del del Fisionomizare in a painting of 1774. Watson, “Thomas Patch (1725–82),” 30. This interest in physiognomy is also present in the volume on Giotto, published two years later; almost half of the engravings for the volume are of single heads. 31 Patch, Masaccio, 6. Although both the Giotto fresco cycle and that jointly executed by Masaccio, Masolino and Filippino Lippi in the Brancacci chapel were described by Vasari, the church of the Carmelites was certainly not a standard stop on the traditional Florentine tourist itinerary in the eighteenth century; as Rosemary Sweet has pointed out, the geography of Florence for eighteenth-century British tourists was severely limited, with most visitors confining their visits to the Duomo, the Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi. Rosemary Sweet, “British Perceptions of Florence in the Long Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 837–859. Santa Maria del Carmine was mentioned by Lalande and Martyn, but without reference to its artwork. However, the attention that would undoubtedly have been directed towards the church and its artworks following the fire seemingly convinced Patch that it would be expedient to publish the Giotto frescoes. 32 See Gaetano Milanesi, “A Proposito della Tintura delle Porte di San Giovanni,” Arte e Storia, 4 (1885) for a full discussion of the controversy. 33 Ibid., n. 30. 34 See note 43. 35 Although conflating Masaccio and Lippi seems a grave error now, the Brancacci chapel frescoes are quite likely to have been the only examples of Masaccio's work ever seen by Patch; the majority of the Tuscan altarpieces attributed to Masaccio by Vasari had been dismantled and dispersed by the eighteenth-century, and the famous Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella was obscured from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries by, ironically, an altarpiece executed by Vasari. 36 See Stefan Weppelmann, Spinello Aretino e la pittura del trecento in Toscana (Firenze: Edizione Polistampa, 2011) cat. no. 42. 37 Vasari, Lives, 18. 38 Patch, Masaccio, 1772, 9. He cited the Florentine historian Cinelli’s description of the commission. 39 Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School, vol. 1 (London: Phaidon Press, 1963), 202–206. Spinello Aretino’s artistic personality was frequently conflated with that of Giotto in nineteenth-century Britain. It is interesting to note that all the Giotto frescoes sold at auction during the long eighteenth-century are now given to Spinello. Although the latter artist also received a biography in the first and second editions of the Lives, he was largely an unknown quantity in Britain, as no works attributed to him appeared on the art market prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Undoubtedly, Giotto was the better known and more highly regarded artist of the two, which may have led dealers to knowingly pass off his works as Giottos to make more money. 40 “I have marked out the places where only remains the outlines in red, under the coat of plastering where the painting was … I have likewise marked out with a

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dotted line, the parts which have been modernly repainted in the original lines.” Patch, Masaccio, 16. 41 This debate centred on the rivalry between the Florentine and other Tuscan schools for the title of restorers of painting. Maginnis, Age of Giotto, 38–63 offers a thorough account of the main protagonists and their arguments. 42 Patch, Masaccio, 3. 43 The entire reference reads: “I am concerned for your loss of Patch. He had great merit in my eyes in bringing to light the admirable paintings of Masaccio, so little known out of Florence till his prints disclosed them.” Walpole to Mann, dated May 18, 1782, Ibid. no. 30, vol. 26, 244. 44 “I am expecting Sir Joshua Reynolds, our best painter, whom I have sent for, to see some wonderful miniatures I have bought, and these heads of Masaccio. I think they may give him such lights as to raise him prodigiously. I must repeat it, the mouths, and often the eyes, are life itself.” Walpole to Mann, January 20, 1771. Ibid., no. 30, 49. In the same letter, Walpole requests two more copies of the Masaccio volume to give to other (unidentified) people. It is interesting that Walpole was the instrument for Reynolds receiving a copy of the Masaccio engravings (if indeed he did; the Phillips sale catalogue of Reynolds's collection of drawings, scarce prints and books of prints records only “the works of Bartolomeo, with his life by T. Patch.” London, 1798, 34). The Masaccio volume is referenced in relation to Reynolds’ visit to the Carmine during his visit to Italy by the editor in William Cotton, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Notes and Observations on Pictures (London: John Russell Smith, 1859); a collection of Reynolds’ writings containing, amongst other material, the excerpted written observations from two of Reynolds’ Italian tour sketchbooks. 45 Similarly, as an artist Reynolds had to operate in accordance with the tastes of his aristocratic patrons in order to secure commissions—and was evidently very successful at doing so—and naturally would have imbibed their preferences, concerns and preferences. Did Reynolds’ position as an arbiter of taste thus only gain its authority because it was a reflection, and validation, of the standard of taste exhibited by prominent connoisseurs? William Blake certainly thought so: “… Reynoldss[sic] Opinion was that Genius may be Taught & that all Pretence to Inspiration is a Lie and Deceit … The Enquiry in England in not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemens Opinions in Art & Science.” David Erdman, The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (New York and London: Anchor Books, 1982), 642. 46 Compare “… it will be sufficient to say that both Michelangelo and Raphael studied after [the Brancacci chapel frescoes] and that the latter even condescended to introduce some of those figures into his own compositions having besides learnt from Masaccio the surest method of varying his Characters by taking them from nature” (Patch, Masaccio, 3), and “Raphael, as appears from what has been said, had carefully studied the works of Masaccio; and indeed there was no other, if we except Michael Angelo, (whom he likewise imitated), so worthy of his attention; and though his manner was dry and hard, his compositions formal,

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and not enough diversified, according to the custom of Painters in that early period, yet his works possess that grandeur and simplicity which accompany, and sometimes even proceed from, regularity and hardness of manner.” Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. by Robert Wark (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 218. 47 See Reynolds, ed. by Wark, Discourses, 216–221. 48 This assertion of a relationship between Patch's engravings and Reynolds’ discourse is made by Sam Smiles. Given the strong previous connection between Reynolds and Patch—the two shared lodgings in Rome in 1750—this argument is a particularly convincing one. See Previtali, Primitivi, 225. 49 Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, “The 'Diffusion of Knowledge and Taste': John Flaxman and the Improvement of the Study Facilities at the Royal Academy,” Walpole Society, 53 (1987) 226–38. 50 See Hugh Brigstocke, “Lord Lindsay as a Collector,” The Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 64 (1982): 287–333 for a mention of Lindsay's ownership of the collated Patch volumes of engravings after Giotto, Masaccio and Ghiberti. 51 Haskell, Rediscoveries, 93–4. 52 There is very little literature devoted to Augustus Wall Callcott, despite his being considered Turner's greatest competition during their lifetime. More has been written about Maria Callcott who, as Maria Graham, published travel literature, an art historical monograph and translations of European literature amongst other things. See James C. Dafforne, Pictures by Sir Augustus Wall Callcott, R. A., with a Biographical Memoir, London, 1875 and David Blayney Brown, Augustus Wall Callcott, exh. cat., (London: Tate Gallery, 1981) for Augustus Wall Callcott, and Rosamund Gotch, Maria, Lady Callcott, the Creator of Little Arthur (London: John Murray, 1937) and David Blayney Brown and Christopher Lloyd, The Journal of Maria, Lady Callcott, 1827–8 (Oxford: Oxford Microform Publications, 1981) for his wife. 53 The two major corpora of Callcott MSS, including all the known 1827–8 honeymoon journals, are held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford and the Courtauld Institute Library, London. 54 Maria Callcott, Description of the Chapel of the Annunziata; or, Giotto's Chapel (London: T. Cadell, 1835). 55 Ibid., i. 56 Murray Collection, National Library of Scotland. MS 40186, ff. 105–6. 57 See Tanya Ledger, A Study of the Arundel Society, 1848–97 (D. Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1978) and Matthew Plampin, “'A Stern and Just Respect for Truth': John Ruskin, Giotto and the Arundel Society”, Visual Culture in Britain, 6 (2005), 59–78. 58 Strangely, the advertisements for the 1845 edition (published by the Roman Catholic firm Dolman) all state that the work was “printed privately for the author in 1839.” The document now in the archive of the National Art Library (V&A, London) which could be interpreted as evidence that it was John Callcott Horsely who authorised the 1845 publication, is entitled “Extract

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from the Instructions left by Augustus Callcott”; one paragraph reads as follows: “I likewise wish to be given to [John Horsely] together with Lady Callcott's M.S.S. on Art & her journal of our Tour to Germany & Italy in 1827 my books of notes on the various pictures that came under my inspection on that occasion. Trusting that he will preserve them in a way respectful to both our memories.” National Art Library, MSL/1973/4012/54. 59 The Callcotts spent about a day and a half sketching in the Arena Chapel at the beginning of November 1827, and therefore presumably were hampered by poor light conditions. There is no mention in either of their journals as to how, exactly, they sketched, but the height of the top row of frescoes (within which Joachim and Anna is situated) means that accurately copying details would have been extremely difficult from the ground. 60 Ibid., n. 54. 61 David Blayney Brown, The Life and Work of Sir Augustus Wall Callcott R.A. 1779–1844, (Ph.D thesis, University of Leicester, 1978), 166. 62 “ Fine Arts,” The Athenaeum, August 2nd 1845, 770. 63 According to the Getty Provenance Index Database of Sale Catalogues, there were over fifty Giottos in Britain during the period 1775–1840. This total excludes both those works collected by British connoisseurs whilst travelling or living abroad and also drawings attributed to the artist. A comment made by Maria Callcott in a letter to the antiquary Dawson Turner indicates her awareness of this problem: “I have wondered, I own, that so few drawings have been made after Giotto's genuine work.” Letter from Maria Callcott to Dawson Turner, Trinity College Cambridge, Dawson Turner Letters, Jul–Dec 1835, f.147. 64 The letter of thanks from Thomas Phillips survives, along with others, in Maria's copy of the Description, now in the National Art Library (II,RC.F.7 copy[B]). Waagen made his opinion of the work public: “[Mrs Callcott] presented me with a description, lately published by her, of the paintings by Giotto in the Chapel dell’Annunziata dell’Arena, at Padua, in which her ingenious observations are illustrated and confirmed by admirable woodcuts of the finest figures and most striking parts, after drawings by Mr. Callcott. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Works of Art and Artists in England, vol. I. (London, 1838), 155. 65 Alexis-François Rio saw fourteenth-century Italian art as illustrating a binary between naturalism/classicism and religious sentiment, the latter being the artistic influence that he extolled. Alexis-François. Rio, De l'art chrétien (Paris: Librarie de L. Hachette et Cie, 1861-7). Ruskin's Giotto was an artist who had “a stern and just respect for truth”; an assertion that related both to his interest in naturalism and his faithful adherence to the scriptures in the devising of the programme. 66 Mrs Trollope, A Visit to Italy, vol. II. (London: R. Bentley, 1842), 62. 67 See Graham Smith, “Florence, Photography and the Victorians,” in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance, John Law and Lene Østermark-Johansen, eds., (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 7.

TIBERIO CAVALLO: A NATURAL PHILOSOPHER BETWEEN ITALY AND BRITAIN SILVIA GRANATA UNIVERSITÀ DI PAVIA

Tiberio Cavallo's name does not often appear in histories of eighteenthcentury science; until recently, he has only featured in studies of his more famous friend and correspondent Alessandro Volta, to whom he provided scientific equipment.1 In recent years, however, Italian historians have begun to take interest in Cavallo's life and work, focusing in particular on his role as a mediator between the Italian and the British scientific community and on his contribution to specific fields of research. These valuable studies unveiled previously-unknown details of Cavallo's career and of his many personal and professional contacts, allowing a better (although still incomplete) knowledge of the role he played within the scientific community of his time.2 Few biographical details are available on Cavallo’s life, especially on his early years; he was born in Naples in 1749 and arrived in England in 1762, where his father hoped he would start a career in trade. However, his passion for science soon led him to a different professional choice: in London, he began experimenting with atmospheric electricity, thus acquiring visibility in scientific circles (he was especially acclaimed for an ingenious electrometer of his own devising). Indeed his “experimental skill and inventiveness brought him quickly to the notice of some of the leading natural philosophers of the day.”3 In the 1770s, he passionately devoted himself both to experiments and to the writing of a compendium of the electrical knowledge then available; here, he systematised acquired data and suggested new routes to be explored, with particular attention to the practical aspects of research. Electrician William Henley, inventor of the “Henley electrometer,” recommended the manuscript to Charles Dilly for publication, and the Complete Treatise on Electricity (1777) eventually earned Cavallo the praise of the Royal Society, of which he became a fellow in 1779.4

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The renown acquired by his mechanical skills also allowed him to become a much-esteemed provider of scientific apparatuses for his colleagues all over Europe. This activity, for which he received unanimous praise, further enlarged his circle of acquaintances and enhanced his fame; he was actually chosen to furnish the Gabinetto di Fisica of the University of Pavia, and he provided instruments to Volta and Marsilio Landriani, who had both visited England in 1782 to look for equipment for the new laboratory of the University.5 It is important to note that, although he remained in England for the rest of his life, he kept closely in touch with Italian scholars. Besides the above-mentioned friendship with Volta, Cavallo corresponded with Giambattista Beccaria, Marsilio Landriani and Barnaba Oriani,6 all prominent figures in coeval Italian scientific research. From 1799, he was also a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Naples. His colleagues agreed in describing Cavallo as a scrupulous and dedicated natural philosopher, whose precision and seriousness were universally commended. Indeed Cavallo can be seen as a focal point in a complex net of professional relations between scientists from different countries, whose correspondences and collaborations were at the core of the lively cultural exchanges that characterised scientific research in the second half of the eighteenth century. His prominent role within this network is testified also by the frequency with which his works were quoted by coeval scientists—Cavallo was so popular that: “per chi studia la filosofia naturale del tardo Settecento imbattersi in Cavallo, o come autore di un testo, o come inventore di uno strumento, o come ambito corrispondente, è praticamente inevitabile, qualsiasi autore si studi.”7 His importance has just begun to be explored by critics, and further work, both on his epistolary contacts and his multifaced contribution to research in different fields, would add much to our understanding not only of his career, but also of the “collaborative” way in which science developed during this period in Europe. Cavallo, however, was also a much-respected figure within the British scientific community,8 and he could count among his friends all the most prominent scientists of his time, including Joseph Banks and Joseph Priestley.9 After obtaining the fellowship of the Royal Society, he became a member of the Chapter Coffee House Society in 1781, and from 1782 to 1792 he also held the post of Bakerian lecturer at the Royal Society, displaying notable qualities both as experimenter and communicator.10 But Cavallo was also a scientist in his own right, and carried on investigations in all those fields of research that were “mainstream” at his time. He presented numerous papers to the Royal Society, and published books and articles on electricity, electrical medicine, lightning, magnetism, the nature

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of gases and aerostation. His works were always grounded on precise information about his own experiments, described in a clear and elegant style. They display a scrupulous attention to method and a sincere commitment to a model of research that emphasised sensorial evidence. Indeed, Cavallo enthusiastically endorsed the Baconian view according to which scientific research and innovation should lead to both technological progress and to the enlightenment of society.11 His works, all published in English, enjoyed various reprints and translations, and were widely read around Europe: his Complete Treatise on Electricity in Theory and Practice, with Original Experiments (1777) and his Theory and Practice of Medical Electricity (1780), were both translated into Italian;12 Treatise on the Nature and Properties of Air and other Permanently Elastic Fluids (1781) saw a German translation in 1783, while History and Practice of Aerostation (1785), the first history of aerostation ever published, was translated into German and French in 1786. Cavallo's fame also crossed the ocean, as his Elements of Natural and Experimental Philosophy (1804) was issued in 1813 in Philadelphia, enjoying a huge success and many reprints.13 Thus, Cavallo's professionalism was widely acknowledged by his contemporaries; he was well-connected in Britain and abroad, and his published works enjoyed an enduring popularity.14 In this essay, I will address his book on aerostation; the choice to focus on ballooning, among the many fields to which Cavallo applied himself, is due to three main considerations. In the first place, it provides the chance to investigate his contribution to a field of research very fashionable at the time; in the second, this will allow us to re-discover one of his least remembered texts, as critics until now have mainly focused on his work on electricity;15 lastly, this text throws some light on interesting aspects of his ideas and personality; in particular, I will deal with his insightful discussion on method, on the social aspects of science and on their impact on the advancement of research. Experiments in aerostatics are one of the most characteristic scientific enterprises of the late eighteenth century: after the first successful ascents, a balloon-mania quickly spread across Europe, involving not only academicians and professional scientists, but also the public at large.16 Cavallo published a book on the History and Practice of Aerostation in 1785.17 Cavallo’s interest for aerostatics probably stemmed from his study of air, in which he repeated Priestley’s experiments and added some of his own, eventually inducing him to reject the flogistic theory endorsed by Priestley e Stahl.18 The idea of writing the history of a science which had begun only two years earlier19 may seem puzzling or futile, but a close

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reading of the text immediately dispels this impression. To begin with, Cavallo includes in his history supposed attempts at flight reported in ancient texts, discussing them in detail. This approach answers a need for completeness, but also allows the author to display a solid classical culture, and to clarify his opinions on method both as a scientist and as a science historian.

Making the History of Aerostation Cavallo's concern for a thorough method is foregrounded in the Preface, where he states that the historical part of his work does not only aim at providing a general overview of past experiences and failed attempts, but has a precise scientific function for the advancement of the science itself; in fact, he has omitted those experiments “which seemed either trifling or evidently absurd" but, on the other hand, he has “endeavoured to record every particular that deserved to be remembered, or that appeared likely to open for farther discoveries” (iv). Thus, he does not present himself as a historian in the strictest sense, but aims at discerning, thanks to his scientific competence, those past experiences that might be useful and provide clues for further advancement. The same attention to method also applies to the second part of the book, which concerns the practice of aerostation. Most importantly, the author rejects any dogmatic approach, clarifying that he has: not confined himself within the limits of any particular theory; since the present state of knowledge, relative to the subject, has not yet established all the necessary particulars; he has therefore comprehended in this part of the work under such general principles, as will be useful in case of any subsequent improvement (iv).

Cavallo's history of aerostation is thus presented from its very beginning as an important part of research itself; not separated from the progress of knowledge, but inherently connected to it, in a relation of mutual exchange between past and present, theoretical scrutiny and practical experience. However, this does not make his text a handbook for experts only; he manages to render it quite enjoyable even for the general reader, without renouncing to “accuracy and perspicuity” (v). These are so important for him that he openly invites “any person, who would inform of any necessary correction or interesting particular that has been omitted, in order to render the work more perfect, in case of another edition” (v). After a short excursus on ancient accounts of flight, which the author labels as “allegorical” (2) and only worth the “investigation of antiquarians”

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(3), Cavallo moves on to specific theories and projects, explaining either the reasons why they failed, or why we should distrust the account.20 It becomes clear that Cavallo is endorsing a Whig view of history, for instance when he remarks that: whilst oppression and ignorance kept Europe in slavery and superstition, it is no wonder that accounts, generally absurd, and always doubtful, of flying machines, flying vessels, flying saints, and flying witches, were very common; and the religious historians, as well as other writers, make frequent mention of them (9).

At times, Cavallo doubts the accounts not so much from a practical point of view but for the unreliability of the source itself, as when he doubts that John Muller could build a machine and fly to meet Emperor Charles the Fifth on the grounds that Muller died in 1436 while Charles was born in 1500. These remarks testify to Cavallo's historical alertness, which acquires further importance within his view of science as a collective enterprise in which it is fundamental to choose very carefully who deserves to be trusted and who doesn’t. With regard to more recent projects, as those by the Italian scholar Giovanni Lana (Brescia, 1631– 1687), Cavallo focuses more specifically on scientific details, analysing the projects and the reasons why they didn't work. He admits that Lana was a remarkable scientist, and that “his reasoning and his thoughts are deserving of notice” (21). However, time was not yet ripe, since: “the writers of that age … proposed schemes either entirely hypothetical, or without any description and calculation of particulars” (21). He is fully aware of the distance between the spirit of the preceding age and the improvements in method achieved by eighteenth-century science. Then Cavallo moves to the present age, explaining that the discovery of the proper method for flying was made possible by two recent findings: the specific gravity of inflammable air and that of heated air. He provides a brief account of each, being very precise concerning their “paternity”— about inflammable air for instance, he does not only name Henry Cavendish, but also specifies the exact date of the report’s publication (1766) in the Philosophical Transactions (30). The same precision applies to Joseph Black’s letter to James Lind, in which the Edinburgh scientist discusses his project of a vessel “filled with inflammable air, [which] might ascent into the atmosphere” (31). Black's idea was mentioned to Cavallo by “two or three different persons,” but then Black himself gave a written account of it in a letter which Cavallo transcribes since he has “permission to publish it” (31). In this same letter Black admits that he “never made the experiment,” considering it as “merely amusing” (33).

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At this point we find the passage that explains why Cavallo does not figure prominently in histories of ballooning, although he spent so much time researching it. In fact, he admits that the idea of building a vessel filled with inflammable air that could ascend into the atmosphere also occurred to him when he first started studying air and other elastic fluids about eight years before. Moreover, in 1782 he (unlike Black) actually tried the experiment (34); however, “the only success I had, was to let soap-balls, filled with inflammable air, ascend by themselves rapidly into the atmosphere; which was perhaps the first sort of inflammable-air balloons ever made” (34). As a scrupulous and expert scientist, he fully understands the importance of the finding he was so close to, and feels bound to further explain why, being so near, he “missed” the discovery: “I failed in several other attempts of the like nature, and, at last, being tired with the expenses and loss of time, I deferred to some other time the prosecuting of those experiments.” Indeed, Cavallo was thoroughly conscious that lack of money is the first obstacle to scientific research (later in the book, he comments enthusiastically on the financial help that French scientists could enjoy thanks to fund raising). However, aware as he is of the importance of precedence and publication in the politics of science, he also specifies that, although the experiment did not lead to any further discovery, he duly made it public: “I contented myself with giving an account of what I had done to the Royal Society, which was read at a public meeting of the Society in June 1782” (34). A long transcription of his report (from page 34 to page 42) follows, concluding the first chapter of the book. The second chapter starts with the account of the Montgolfiers' work, thus closing the “pre-history” of flight and entering the realm of concrete achievements. The choice of placing the report of his own experiment as a hinge between the two chapters does not merely follow chronological order—it seems to suggest full awareness of the fact that his attempt was just a step away from a tremendous discovery; however, with the honesty that characterises him, he does not even try to claim a prominent place among the contributors to the practical science of flying. It appears that Cavallo’s account of his “missed chance” deeply struck coeval readers (as stories about discoveries and missed discoveries usually do); in fact, reviews of his book give ample space to the passage quoted above, always coupled with Black’s letter. For instance, the English Review 32 (1785) underlines that Black and Cavallo equally missed the point. According to the reviewer, Cavallo was even more unfortunate—while Black never tried the experiment, Cavallo did, but had to abandon it for “the expenses and loss of time.”21 The same episode is also given great emphasis in the

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Critical Review, which observes (with scarce accuracy) that: “Mr. Cavallo and Dr. Black indeed contest, with justice, the priority of invention of airballoons.”22 In general, both reviewers are full of praise for Cavallo’s book. The Critical Review was quite hostile to aerostation in general, deemed useless and described as “childish trials,” often accompanied by “extravagant and exaggerated relations.” However, it praised Cavallo’s text as “a very rational and entertaining performance.”23 The English Review is even more explicit in commending the book as an entertaining and useful text, “very fit for the perusal and attention of those who are desirous of pursuing or undertaking this new and singular method of travelling.”24 It is worth noting that the stress given by coeval reviewers to the “missed discovery” has remained a permanent focus of later criticism, contributing perhaps to originate the view of Cavallo as a “protagonista mancato” of aerostatics.25 This view, which portrays Cavallo as a potentially great scientist, unjustly excluded from the history of science, was promoted in particular by early twentieth century Italian historians.26 As noted by Bertucci though, this perspective may be misleading, since “il contributo di Cavallo alla filosofia naturale settecentesca non è da misurarsi secondo i parametri di una storia agiografica della scienza, fatta di grossi nomi e di grandi invenzioni.”27 Indeed, Cavallo had chosen a very specific role for himself within the manifold world of coeval natural philosophy, and the image of a man struggling toward a great discovery in order to enter a kind of “hall of fame” for scientists does not really fit, as testified by his writings.

Spectacular Enterprise Thus, Cavallo articulates his history of aerostatics through careful “ordering” principles which involve issues of method (which discoveries are “valid,” verifiable, and so on) and of accuracy in the politics of science regarding precedence and reliability. However, the Italian researcher’s discussion of ballooning is not limited to strictly technical and scientific issues; aerostatics was indeed a very special field of research, and Cavallo’s treatise demonstrates a thorough awareness of this, in particular with regard to a more general discourse on the wider socio-economic context in which scientific research took place at the time. In the first place, the “heroic” quality of the enterprise had a great appeal for scientists, since a successful experiment in ballooning gave instant fame, beside the thrilling experience itself. Experiments with balloons involved scientific ability, technical expertise, inventiveness and

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a great deal of courage.28 Secondly, there was the symbolic significance of the performance—ballooning represented for most people the ultimate victory of science, embodying, in a very visible way, the age of progress and enlightenment and the amazing results that could be achieved by research. For the first time in history man could fly, fulfilling an age-long dream and bravely defying what was traditionally seen as an impassable natural boundary.29 Not less importantly, balloon ascents provided an impressive show, and as such they were often exploited. Due to the uniquely spectacular nature of ballooning, scientists were quickly joined by amateurs with no scientific goals in mind. It is true that the intermingling of science and spectacle was at this time common to many other sciences, but aerostatics reached a degree of spectacularity never seen before. As we will see, the intermixing of science and spectacle in this particular field also generated tensions between different discourses, which did not escape Cavallo’s analysis. Most importantly, we should not forget that the spectacular nature of ballooning had important economic repercussions, as great sums were involved at various levels. Building a balloon required skill, but also a relevant investment of money, often obtained by raising subscriptions and selling tickets to look at the ascent from the ground; seats in the cars could be sold too, for both tethered and untethered flights. Successful ascents were often rewarded by authorities with impressive sums or pensions; besides this, aeronauts could exploit their fame by selling pieces of the beautifully decorated ballons after the flight, by exposing them in galleries, or by publishing accounts of their experience; there was also money to be made (or lost) by gambling on the success of single enterprises (bets on the ascents were quite common, and could reach very high sums), or by selling related items. After the first public ascent organised by the Montgolfiers in 1783, experiments in aerostation multiplied, and the new science underwent an amazingly rapid progress. People flooded to see the “shows,” which were widely advertised, and reports written by eyewitnesses or by the aeronauts themselves enjoyed great popularity; prints and newspaper reports further contributed to spread the “mania.” However, it is worth remembering that the first ascents were not only characterised by blind enthusiasm; they also involved obvious scruples and fears. Before Rozier's first ascent, the king of France was about to forbid the experiment, deeming it too dangerous and suggesting that convicts should be used as guinea pigs; the insistences of Rozier eventually convinced the dubious king, and the ascension successfully took place in front of authorities and a wide public including Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, heroism and glory were not marginal motives in inducing

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people to incur such a great risk, as noted by Cavallo: if we consider for a moment the sensations which these first aerial adventurers must have felt in their exalted situation, we can hardly prevent an unusual sublime idea of ourselves … Reflect on the prospect, the encomiums, and the consequences; then see if your mind remains in a state of quiet indifference (80).

The success of the first ascents was so great that the fashion for ballooning quickly spread around Europe, and experiments, improvements and performances multiplied. In Cavallo’s words, the first performance in England was by Lunardi: amidst the exclamations of the multitude; the greatest part of whom never expected that the experiment would have succeeded, imagining that the foreign accounts of aerial voyages performed abroad, were aerial in the metaphorical sense, in which that word was understood before Montgolfier’s discovery (160).

Cavallo refers to the many puns that connected ballooning with an “airy” or futile enterprise, quite common among sceptical, disparaging views of aerostatics; however, he is far from a derogatory perspective of the science itself. It is true that, concerning Lunardi’s ascent, Cavallo observes that “beside those romantic observations which might be naturally suggested by the prospect seen from that elevated situation, and by the agreeable calm, which he felt after the fatigue, the anxiety, and the accomplishment of the experiment, Mr. Lunardi seems to have made no particular philosophical observations, or such as may either tend to improve the subject of aerostation, or to throw light upon any operation of nature” (163–164). However, as observed by Bertucci, the scarce scientific value of Lunardi’s ascent was probably the reason behind Cavallo’s dismissive tone.30 The popularity of aerostatics among the wider public, due to the spectacular nature of demonstrations, was a strong incentive for the rapid progress of the science, as Cavallo well understood. One of the most fascinating aspects of his text is indeed the attention he pays to the public’s reaction to demonstrations; describing the ascent performed near Lyons in January 1784, he provides a lively and vivid picture of the emotional reaction of the public:31 Vociferations of joy, shrieks of fear, expressions of applause, the sound of martial instruments, and the discharge of mortars, produced an effect more easily imagined than described. Some of the people fell on their knees, and

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others elevated their suppliant hands to the heavens, some women fainted, and many wept (120).

Indeed what makes Cavallo’s book so interesting today is the fact that he does not limit himself to a history of the experiments made by colleagues, but deals extensively with the social aspects of science, for instance underlining the fact that ballooning soon spread into a fashion with its own merchandise, as small balloons: soon began to be manufactured by those who were anxious to derive a pecuniary profit from the improvements of philosophy [… so that] almost every family satisfied its curiosity relative to the new experiment, and in a few days time balloons were seen frequently flying about Paris (64).

Apparently, the balloon-mania quickly invested all manners of articles, as if buying something called “balloon” could make people feel part of that huge collective advancement, and “the epithet of balloon was annexed to articles of dress, house-furniture, of instruments, &c. Thus, one commonly heard of balloon hats, balloon colours, balloon coaches, and such-like empty phrases” (136). Such insistence on spectatorship and fashion indeed testifies to a keen awareness of the politics (and economy) of science. For the wider public, ballooning indeed was nothing more than a spectacle from every point of view. The long hours needed to prepare the balloon were often filled with marching bands, various kinds of performances and street vendors, and pickpockets too flooded to the ascent-sites. The huge crowds could even create problems of public order. Cavallo himself reports that in France, before the ascent of the Roberts’ inflammable-air balloon in August 1783: “a guard of soldiers, both horse and foot, was procured, in order to prevent the outrages of the multitude, which at last broke through the prescribed limits, and crowded to behold the extraordinary object” (59). Crowds could turn dangerous especially if the expected ascent failed to take place—various accounts report the fury of enraged mobs (at times trying to destroy the balloon itself), as occurred in Southwark in 1787. Unlike some coeval commentators that despised ballooning, deeming it merely “childish spectacles,”32 Cavallo understood instead that this spectacular side was indeed very important for the development of the science, especially since at the time aerostatics was devoid of practical applications, due to the impossibility of directing the balloon, which obviously checked possible commercial or military uses.33 Without the “wonder” attached to it, aerostatic research might have been soon

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abandoned but, also thanks to this “unscientific” aspect, experiments continued at an impressive rate. With his usual honesty Cavallo also admits that the spectacular side of the science may have hindered a careful application, diverting the attention from actual experiments to other aspects of the enterprise: In regard to philosophical observations, very few have been made … many, if not the greatest number of the aerial voyages … were performed by persons absolutely incapable of accomplishing this purpose; and who, in reality, had either pecuniary profit alone in view, or were stimulated to go up with a balloon, for the sake of the prospect, and the vanity of adding their names to the list of aerial adventurers (200–201).

However, he also justifies the enthusiasm of aeronauts, and recognizes the important role of the public as an incentive to both scientists and authorities, not least for the readiness with which this field of research was financed. In particular, he reports that a subscription was opened for the planned ascent of the Roberts brothers’ inflammable-air balloon, and “persons of every rank ran with eagerness to sign their names; so that the required sum was raised with a quickness, which does honour to the French nation, and to the scientific spirit of the present age” (52). To those who criticized the craze for ballooning, Cavallo answers that, notwithstanding the current scarcity of practical applications and the fact that some performances were only great shows of no scientific relevance, the importance of aerostation remains tremendous as one of the “the greatest discoveries of human industry” (191). Here Cavallo seems to imply that a balance should be found between expectations of “utility” accompanying scientific discoveries and the advancement of knowledge, independent from practical application; this is even more significant in light of the already widespread criticism of ballooning as a useless pursuit. Cavallo also specifies that his object is “to inform those, who wish to know what has been done in this subject, and not to persuade the unwilling” (194). Cavallo thus sums up the experience of ballooning with vivid prose and emotional participation: wherever those experiments have been made, persons of every rank have gazed with the greatest anxiety, and have shewn unequivocal marks of astonishment and satisfaction; the aeronauts, returning from their aerial excursions, have been generally received with the greatest applause, have been carried in triumph; medals have been struck, and plates engraven, in commemoration of the persons who have most distinguished themselves in such performances, or of their particular experiments; premiums and

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pensions have been granted them by learned societies, and by many great persons, especially by the court of France, whose patronage and generosity, in this respect, must be ever acknowledged and praised by all impartial and discerning people. Thus mankind, by these acts of admiration, of satisfaction, of generosity, have shewn and confirmed its approbation of the discovery. The vicissitudes of human affairs, may at times retard or accelerate the use and improvement of aerostatic machines; but the interest and curiosity of man will doubtless for ever retain the knowledge of the subject—a subject infantile indeed, but endowed with manly features (196–197).

Quite significantly, he does not launch into a list of the hypothetical applications of aerostatics (as Thomas Jefferson and others had done), but evaluates it as an advancement of human knowledge, including also all those aspects which, although not strictly scientific, actually belonged to this multifaceted enterprise. Cavallo’s text thus offers some interesting insights into his personality and ideas—in the first place, his attention to method, both in scientific experiments and in the writing of history; moreover, his awareness of the politics of science regarding for instance precedence and publication. Most importantly though, the author provides a vivid insight into the practice and meaning of ballooning, investigating its appeal for scientists, its symbolic significance and the role played by the public, underlining how popularity became an incentive to experiments, and how public enthusiasm for ballooning also helped to fund research. In this, he opposed those who (like his friend Joseph Banks), criticised ballooning for its lack of immediate “utility” in favour of a more open, forward-looking approach.34 Finally, he celebrated enthusiasm and curiosity as important motors for research. Thus, although he cannot claim a prominent place in the advancement of the science itself, Cavallo should definitely be reevaluated as an impressively acute and very perceptive historian of aerostatics.

Notes 1

Cavallo met Volta in 1782, when the latter visited London: “ten years later it was through Cavallo that Volta’s memoirs on Galvani’s experiments on muscular motion were published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions.” Paola Bertucci, “Cavallo, Tiberius (1749–1809)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2 I am referring in particular to the studies by Paola Bertucci and Davide Arecco quoted below.

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Bertucci, 2004. Ibid. 5 Alessandra Ferraresi, “Il gabinetto Pavese di fisica sperimentale nella seconda metà del secolo XVIII: didattica, divulgazione, ricerca nella politica asburgica della scienza,” in Annali di Storia delle Università Italiane, vol. 7 (2003), 91–110. 6 Davide Arecco, Mongolfiere, Scienze e Lumi nel tardo Settecento. Cultura Accademica e Conoscenze Tecniche dalla Vigilia della Rivoluzione Francese all’Età Napoleonica (Bari: Cacucci Editore, 2003), 115. 7 Paola Bertucci, “La Biblioteca di Tiberio Cavallo (1749–1809),” in I Castelli di Yale, VI (2003), 74. 8 Contacts between the Italian and British scientific communities have been investigated in a variety of critical works. See for instance Renato Pasta, Scienza, politica e rivoluzione: l'opera di Giovanni Fabbroni (1752–1822) intellettuale e funzionario al servizio dei Lorena (Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1989). 9 Arecco, 103. 10 Bertucci, 2004. 11 See Arecco, 97–98. Arecco also observes that “legato in questo a un’immagine anglicana della scienza, l’elettricista napoletano vedeva nel fine umanitario e nel rigore etico della ricerca il più potente incentivo all’uso pratico del sapere, sino a una concezione quasi tecnocratica del rapporto tra iniziativa politica e benessere economico.” Ibid., 100. 12 In 1779 and 1784 respectively. 13 See Arecco, 101–118. 14 According to J. L. Heilbron, Cavallo’s Complete Treatise of 1777 was the best book on electricity available at the time. J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries. A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 18. 15 For Cavallo’s work on medical electricity, see Paola Bertucci, “Medical and Animal Electricity in the Work of Tiberius Cavallo, 1780–1795,” in Marco Bresadola and Giuliano Pancaldi (eds.), Luigi Galvani International Workshop Proceedings (Bologna, 1999), 147–166, and Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi (eds.), Electric Bodies: episodes in the history of medical electricity (Bologna: Università, Dipartimento di filosofia, Centro internazionale per la storia delle università e della scienza, 2001). 16 Many studies have been published on the early history of ballooning, all of which in some measure devote attention to the spectacular side of the enterprise. Among the most recent, see Michael Lynn, The sublime invention: ballooning in Europe, 1783–1820 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010); Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Paul Keen, “The ‘Balloonomania’: Science and Spectacle in the 1780s,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (4) (Summer 2006), 507–535. 17 Tiberio Cavallo, History and Practice of Aerostation (London, printed for the Author and sold by C. Dilly, P. Elmsly and J. Stockdale, 1785). Page references to this volume will be given within the text. 4

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Cavallo’s researches on airs were published in 1871, in Treatise on the Nature and Properties of Air and other Permanently Elastic Fluids. Arecco, 108. 19 The first hot-air balloon (without aeronauts) made its public ascent from the Cordillera Square of Annonay in June 1783, in the presence of Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier and local authorities. The first untethered ascent with human passengers was performed in November 1783 by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis François d’Arlandes. 20 For instance, discussing the supposed flight of Archytas’ wooden pigeon as reported by Aulus Gellius, Cavallo observes that: “if the flying of this artificial bird was executed by such means, the simplicity of the principle, when once discovered, could have hardly passed so easily into oblivion” (8). 21 The English Review, or, an Abstract of English and Foreign Literatures, vol. 5 (London: printed for J. Murray, 1785), 367. 22 The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, by a Society of Gentlemen, vol. 59 (London: printed for A. Hamilton, 1785), 339. 23 Ibid., 342. 24 The English Review, 369. 25 See Arecco, 112. 26 For instance, Giuseppe Boffito, Il volo in Italia: Storia Documentata e Aneddotica dell’Areonautica e dell’Aviazione in Italia (Firenze: Barbera, 1921); Mario Gliozzi, L'elettrologia fino al Volta, (Napoli: Loffredo, 1937); Ferruccio Tofanelli, Primato del Genio Italiano: Rivendicazioni (Milano, Istituto Editoriale Nazionale, 1929); Carlo Volpati, “Volta e l’aeronautica,” (1927); this view was later resumed, for instance, by A. Mondini, who published the essay “Un precursore dimenticato: Tiberio Cavallo,” Le Macchine, II, (1969–70). 27 Bertucci (2003), 73. 28 The heroic side of balloning was emphasised in the newspapers all around Europe (notably by the Gentleman’s Magazine), or in the celebratory literature of the time, as in the famous ode by Vincenzo Monti, “Al Signor Montgolfier” (1784). 29 This aspect too had a very significant impact on the literature and culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as testified for instance by Anna Laetitia’s Barbauld’s poem “Washing Day.” On the impact of ballooning on the Romantic poets, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon, 2009), chapter 3. 30 See Bertucci (1999). It has to be specified, however, that Lunardi did not receive wide sympathy in the English press (notably in the Daily Universal Register), especially after an accident during his ascent in 1786 in which a young man was killed. 31 While not usually prominent in scientific treatises, descriptions of amazed crowds soon became a staple of literary compositions on balloning; in Monti’s words for instance “Il gran prodigio immobili/i riguardanti lassa,/e di terrore un palpito/in ogni cor trapassa./Tace la terra, e suonano/del cielle vie deserte:/stan mille volti pallidi/e mille bocche aperte./Sorge il diletto e l'estasi/in mezzo allo

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spavento,/e i piè mal fermi agognano/ir dietro al guardo attento.” Vincenzo Monti, “Al Signor Montgolfier,” in Opere (Milano: Ricciardi, 1953). Staring crowds also featured conspicuously in coeval illustrations, like Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s George Biggins' Ascent in Lunardi' Balloon (1785), or in the prints depicting Lunardi’s balloon exhibited at the London Pantheon. 32 The Critical Review 59, 342. 33 It is true that sporadic attempts at military applications of the discovery were made during the 1790s, especially in order to survey enemy troops; however, due to the impossibility of directing the balloons and the danger that aeronauts would have faced if landing beyond enemy lines, this system of reconnaissance was not widely adopted. 34 On coeval debates concerning the issue of the “use” of balloons, see Clare Brant, “The Progress of Knowledge in the Regions of Air?: Divisions and Disciplines in Early Ballooning,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (1) (2011): 71–86.

AUTONOMY AND MARGINALITY IN FOREIGN ARTISTS’ CIRCLES IN ROME (C. 1760–1800) TOMAS MACSOTAY UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA

“I can say now, what I never could say before, that I am worth several hundred pounds —We Romans enjoy the appearance of religion and the reality of art.”1 —John Deare, 1792

Troubled letters in the Cumberland Bequest Among the papers of George Cumberland (1754–1848), a wealthy British collector, poet and amateur printmaker, best known today for his links to William Blake, is a series of artists’ letters. The first set is signed by James Irvine (1757–1831), a Scottish painter and dealer who acted as Cumberland’s liaison in Rome from 1781 until he left the city in 1791.2 During his European travels in 1785–90, Cumberland spent a number of years in Rome, befriending several British artists there, and in subsequent years it was a whole circle that cultivated Cumberland by reporting to him. Most of his artist friends had voluntarily chosen a temporary or nearpermanent exile from London in the hopes of coining reputations as torchbearers of a British classical vocabulary, or at least gaining artistically from the cosmopolitan painters’ world around William Hamilton and Anton Raphael Mengs, or to emulate the new rising star of sculpture, Antonio Canova. To Cumberland, the artists seemed prepared to reveal their every concern. They wrote as many artists did, sharing gossip, bonhomie and even spiteful remarks for Cumberland’s directives to artists in such pamphlets as the 1796 Thoughts on Outline.3 The Cumberland bequest permits us to form an image of Rome and its market for contemporary art through rare personal accounts. Above all, these letters

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reveal a troubling picture of the Roman traveller market, in which Cumberland’s countrymen were heavily involved. Of the many wealthy travellers completing the Tour in the latter half of the eighteenth century, few spent on the modern art available at the Roman studios anything similar to the formidable amounts they lavished on acquiring excavated and restored fragments. As Viccy Coltman has shown, collectors were manipulated patron-costumers, responsive above all to the congenial letters they received from agents and antiquity dealers informing them of the newest coveted find. As collector-dealers such as Irvine knew well, the British collector cared most deeply about questions of what represented a safe investment and reliable vehicle of prestige.4 This almost invariably led him to prefer fragments of classical architecture and sculpture, reserving smaller resources for the acquisition of portraits, for landscape paintings and for amalgamated “modern antiques” from fulllength marble copies to purpose-made chimneypieces.5 Cumberland’s Thoughts on Outline suggests that fashionable expenditure was the enemy of true engagement with great statuary and painting, and that the integrity of the classical style depended on subtleties of outline whose secrets had been mastered by all but a select class of modern artists. Although Cumberland directed the reader to find these qualities in Canova and Flaxman, sneaking in his Roman friend John Deare, he was fully aware, through his friends’ letters, that he was confronting British Grand Tour collecting, a culture most of his friends disliked, as it was difficult to parse in terms of notions of grand painting and sculpture.6 This disjunction between genteel taste and the fabric of production, between the fancies of the collector and the Royal Academy’s Grand Manner, took a strange toll on Rome, as it was a city where spending on fine art took on a performative quality, a meaningful gesture that signalled British “proximity” to classical antiquity.7 Perhaps more than in the great cultural capitals of Paris and London, Rome rewarded unconventional artists, those who understood the traveller’s unmoored imaginary of antiquarian self-projection. This essay examines artistic autonomy and the different forms it can be seen to have taken, ranging from commercialism to libertinism, and from eccentricity to political radicalism. It wishes to link the parenthetical nature of “being in Rome” for British collectors and artists to Rome’s standing as a ground for odd and unusual personal expression, in short as a brief for lifestyles at the margins. This argument starts with some remarks on why autonomy is an important theme that must be considered in the context of Roman eighteenth-century artistic life. This is done in the first section, which identifies the forms that autonomy took for British artists in the Roman market. After this, the

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closing section shows how artistic communities in Rome configured forms of radicalism, and how the study of literature may assist scholars in understanding the complicated psycho-geographical map of artistic marginality of this period, and how it became redirected to Western antiquity and to sixteenth-century high Renaissance art. The rise of Marxist and sociological accounts of eighteenth-century cultural politics and the commodity culture has tended to interpret artistic particularism as little more than a means of counterbalancing the powerful demands and impositions of a new public that tended to domesticate and neutralize art. John Brewer, a prominent scholar in the sociological critique of eighteenth-century cultural history, singled out the function of the artist’s life as a potent means by which artists could erase the marks of market servility and tout the path of individuality, artistic pride and idealism.8 This idea that artistic particularism appeared in the shape of a self-conscious cult of the artist does not play well with the observation that marginality had a role to play as an identity-building form of sociability in cities such as Rome. I will argue that the phenomena of libertinism and individualist non-conformity must be seen as elite cosmopolitan heritage, and that they traversed Rome through groups of artists rather than through individual hero-worship. Towering figures in the Roman art-world, those who had achieved true artistic success, tended to be both complacent and idiosyncratic: Antonio Canova or Angelika Kauffman achieved success not by being rebels but by their solicitous stance towards patrons, the wellplaced public and academic authority. The fringe figures, marked by their defiant radicalism, operated in small constellations, whether it was the “Fuseli circles” in the 1770s, the French radicalized art students around Joseph Chinard in the early 1790s (Chinard even served a sentence in Castel Sant’Angelo), or the Deutschrömer around Asmus Jacob Carstens in the chaotic mid-1790s.9 Neither art histories sympathetic to artistic particularism nor socio-culturally determined accounts have made much of the collective nature of marginalism and radicality in Rome. It seems fair to object to the idea of artistic particularism as a mere cosmetics of the art market by noting that collectivity tended to act on the market, and that radicality could, at least for some time, have represented an attempt to intervene in, moderate and even undo the commercializing of painting and sculpture.

The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Club in Rome New arrivals to Rome, from James Barry in the 1760s to GirodetTrioson in the 1790s, complained of the spirit of profiteering, which they

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attributed both to the impoverishment of the Italian nobility and the maverick work of dealers.10 In 1790, Flaxman viewed the transactions taking place in the Roman art market with “vexation,” as he put it in one of his letters, because “the spirit of impiety & profligacy … is a governing angel here.”11 Such bemusement over the wheeling and dealing that began in the Caffè degli Inglesi, and continued in studios and over breakfast, was a little hypocritical—all foreign artists, except perhaps for the French royal pensioners, had to compete in this way.12 In 1802, Joseph Forsyth saw travellers being misled into buying forged antiques and was amused at how many artists and craftsmen were able to thrive on the constant demand among travellers for petty portraiture, gem impressions and miniatures.13 In this unsettling, restless environment, where a form of liberalized patronage dictated the terms for the modern art market, perceptions of quality were no longer upheld by an academic insistence on literary and didactic subject matter and classical form. The aforementioned Canova and Kauffmann, the German landscape painter Philipp Hackert, and the Swiss sculptor Alexander Trippel (some writers mention Flaxman and Deare as well), were considered princely exceptions in what appeared to be a free-for-all of artistic manufacture. An amusing observation in Lady Murray’s notebooks about a sculptor by name of McDonald specializing in busts, may illustrate how disingenuous relationships had become between British art-lovers and British artists: (MacDonald) received a great deal of encouragement from his own countrymen; his resemblances are strong, but not always agreeable. He is a phrenologist, and often obtains commissions for a bust by telling persons they are like such and such great characters.14

In this atmosphere, Angloromans had become openly combative for clients. In a letter from November 13, 1790, Irvine admitted that because of such rivalry he and other members of his circle were tarnishing their reputation in Britain. He reported to Cumberland the most recent fall-out, concerning the British painter Guy Head, who, after complaining to Frederick, 3rd Earl of Bristol, that his peers were “most infamously debauched with respect to women,” had become the target of retaliations. These in turn exacerbated Head’s determination to defy Irvine, Deare, Charles Grignion and other British artists.15 Irvine may have been right to dread the consequences of the infighting among British artists, although the artists seemed more preoccupied with how to engage with the Tourist. The rule of thumb in dealing with clients in Rome was far from uniform. The Angloromans may have had to predict the weaknesses and proclivities of the costumer, as in the case of Lord

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Bristol, who probably represented the greatest challenge to the entire community during the 1790s. He quickly built up a reputation as an erratic, boisterous man who liked to tease and intimidate the young British artists with a combination of passionate partisanship, personal condescension and a renewable memory for business agreements.16 To the British artistic colony, Lord Bristol, known today as the commissioner of Flaxman’s major Roman achievement, his Fury of Athamas (Fig. 9.1), was a demanding “eccentric Character,” who needed a following of artists to replenish his desire for ostentation.17 The example he set was objectionable by all standards. Charles Heathcote Tatham, a young architect residing in Rome for his studies and as an agent in the antiquities trade to Henry Holland, assured his patron that “the strange life [Lord Bristol] leads abroad makes it highly probable he may not live to return to England, being in a constant state of inebriation.”18 It was clear that artists and the titled were plunged into mutual suspicion. Irvine made this clear when he wrote to Cumberland in 1784: A Mr. Banks M. P. was here about two years ago & is returned lately, brings a very indifferent account of the Exhibition [at Somerset House]: but notwithstanding he had seen the fine things of Italy before, I do not rely much upon his judgment, for these people gabble up everything in such a hurry head & tail good and bad without having any previous preparation that their ideas are quite confounded & jumbled together.— Accordingly when they pronounce judgment upon a piece of art they do it to be seen with great confidence but so confusedly & contradictorily that one does not know what to make of it after all.19

Any niceties exchanged were the result of a ritual dance, where artists and dealers lured costumers and conceited travellers indulged in soliloquies about the value and merit of painters. The masquerade no doubt infected the bonhomie that Irvine had seen and cultivated in the 1780s. The need for greater union among artists was beginning to be felt. In 1790, Irvine, then a dealer and cicerone, proposed a scheme that would put an end to these disputes and raise the appeal of modern art to the traveller. In order to renew bonds with the Royal Academy, Irvine pressed every British artist to send “a work of some consequence” to the following year’s Summerset House Academy exhibition. To re-establish a bond of trust among expatriate artists, he proposed funding a simple club-house: Such a scheme, I think, would do us more honour than splitting into parties and abusing one another—and those who were formerly most active in such business seem now heartily tired of it and have regretted that so few

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Autonomy and Marginality in Foreign Artists’ Circles in Rome opportunities of meeting together occur and propose instituting a club under certain regulations and taking a room for the members to meet in.20

After Irvine’s departure from Rome in 1791, Cumberland learned through different accounts about the diplomatic impasse unfolding among British artists in Rome. The letters point to the inevitable economic underpinnings of the yearly fight for irregular clients, the impositions of dealing with the pompous Lord Bristol, and the relevance of channels of information established by the Tour and by Roman agents in determining long-term ambitions as to a favourable return to Britain. The rough-hewn, non-conformist mindset may be easily explained from these pressures, and a similar point can be made about the supposed “debauchery” towards women. Roman expatriate libertinism, as far as it has left a record among letters of artists and their protectors, was a traveller affliction before it became an part of the city’s artistic moral economy. The manners, sense of self, and indeed something close to a philosophical outlook of the libertine were made available in part by educated cosmopolites, in particular the rakish British milordi, who at a post-adolescent age indulged heavily in drinking and sexual conquests. However, the conjunction of libertinism and individualism does offer some chilling passages. John Deare, one of the most talented artists in the Cumberland circles, wrote the enigmatic lines to his family in Liverpool in 1792: I have a small group of Adam and Eve to execute in marble for a Mr. Boehm, of London, for which I am to have 250 l; and a small basso-relievo of Bacchus for Mr. Poore, for 45 l … I can say now, what I never could say before, that I am worth several hundred pounds—We Romans enjoy the appearance of religion and the reality of art.21

Deare was not above exploiting the libidinal potential of his work as a way to open travellers’ purses. The drives that motivated Poore to commission a homoerotically charged Bacchus, squeezing his grapes to a submissive panther in front of a Priapic statue, and Boehm to commission a cheekily religious Adam and Eve, may have given a different artists some pause. But Deare welcomed the money, as well as the knowledge that the most recent Tourist season that stretched from February to April of 1792, turned him, finally, into a sought-after artist. Most accusations surfacing in the Cumberland correspondence referred to the predatory style with which some artists competed for the encouragement of the Grand Tour traveller, dishonourably snatching potential patrons away from their competitors. But establishing a club made sense for several reasons. For one, its members found common ground in a shared hatred

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that pitted them, as Academic laureates and as artists with academic ambitions, against that other British community in Rome consisting of antiques traders, restorers and opportunistic craftsmen.22 Because travellers were in such a hurry to acquire antiquities and old master paintings, they were more likely to become clients to these entrepreneurs and applied artists than to modern artists charging for their academic ambitions. In 1790, 1792 and 1793, the Club oversaw the distribution of special printed bills containing an overview in alphabetical order of over twenty British artists, naming their specialties (for example sculpture, history painting, portrait) along with the exact locations of their workshops, luring potential customers to British artists’ studios by means of impartial advertisement.23 Even so, the creation of the artist’s Club did little to appease a combative mood. At best, the truce that the society represented drew strength on joint attacks against a non-practicing set of Angloromans whose presence in Rome was more prolonged than that of the usual traveller, but who used their time to guide travellers even before they had secured the services of a cicerone (the latter, like Irvine, on behalf of some artists whose studios they frequented). Thus, in 1790 the Club signed a letter by the painter Hugh Robinson admonishing Mrs Hare-Naylor, an important supporter of John Flaxman, to refrain from confiding her opinions about artists to travellers. In 1792, the Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson admitted to Cumberland that budding discontent was being channelled towards those who may be called Practical Dilettanti, who presume to guide nostri benefattore ignorant … who are likewise so good as to favour one or two other Artists with a fair word, but damn all the rest to a man.24

After this, the studios were plagued by a decreasing number of commissions. Early in 1793, Rome lived through its first revolutionary crisis, as the populace stormed the French artists’ residence, Palazzo Mancini (Fig. 9.2), causing all French students to flee the city and creating local hostility towards anyone speaking in a foreign language. Rumours circulated about the radicalism of (uneducated) young artists. The Club, already a desperate attempt to rule out discord, collapsed amidst bitter accusations in 1794, as we learn from Deare’s letter to Cumberland: Our Club was knocked up in a very short time by several who thought they were led by the nose. Durno’s jealousy was chiefly the cause, but he and some of the ringleaders set up some young cuffs (sic) to speak and quarrel for them, whilst they lay quiet & operated by secret influence

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Autonomy and Marginality in Foreign Artists’ Circles in Rome only—we wroughting souls (sic) came off with great credit, being the last to leave it.25

The Moral Marginal There may have been too many young artists in Rome. They made friends in places such as the life drawing class at the French Academy on the Corso, or the expanded studios of Italian artist-princes such as Cavacceppi, or even in the Vatican and in Rome’s churches. British and other northern artists, perhaps seeking to escape anonymity, gravitated away from institutional schools, to join independent societies accessible only to the likeminded.26 Even when on friendly terms, the British sometimes led a relatively secluded life, as we can see through the testimony of a painter like James Northcote, visiting Rome in the late 1770s. Two decades before the unfortunate British Club, protestant painters and sculptors that included Henry Fuseli, Thomas Banks, Nicolai Abilgaard and Johann Tobias Sergel formed a close bond that in its aversion to the common traveller and the institutional school has been fittingly described as an early instance of a counter-culture.27 It was to Fuseli, who pursued the career of a painter after abandoning a more respectable religious institution, that scholars have imputed a growing sense of self-awareness. Fuseli resented the impositions of civil society, second-guessed the legitimacy of academic institutions and neglected the injunction to treat those of high rank with due reverence. Where throughout the eighteenth century mainstream artists in Rome adopted a utilitarian stance, observing courteous propriety and social bon ton, Fuseli coined an image of the artist’s career as a utopia of artistic freedom, voluntarily shedding social acceptance in favour of deeper truths of genius and more “natural” ideals of individual freedom.28 Fuseli, and the Prussian painter Carstens after him, sought refuge in abstracted notions of the public, whereby the wealthy, polite, concrete audience visiting Rome were disparaged in favour of some higher agent of progress, a virtuous and morally authoritative universal public sought in the future. In even more pronounced ways, the Fuseli circle harked back as artists to a “heathen vitality” firmly placed in a distant past. As the century progressed, the sexual caprices of expatriate artistic communities in Rome were becoming more problematic. They were the object of reports that evince a nexus of disdain for art students’ modest social backgrounds and concern at their seduction by intellectual and political radicalism. As Holger Hoock recently remarked, the Royal

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Academy tended to interpret a painter’s commitment to an austere stylistic classicism as a sign of radical politics.29 Rome was the clearest stage of this disjunctive individuality. It is here that one can see that moral transgression and high Enlightenment vocabularies begin to overlap, and that foreign artists became particularly susceptible to following trends of “libertinism” counter-culturally. In 1778, James Northcote recalled the colourful ideas he heard, while preparing copy drawings after frescoes in the Vatican, from a French sculptor who struck him as “a very sensible young man and quite a free thinker.”30 A dozen years on, the French Academy’s pensionnaires, who caused the unrest that culminated in the Palazzo Mancini booties of February 1793, were no longer hiding their impiety. Goujon de Thuisy was a royalist and devoted Knight Hospitaller, who shortly after the unrest in Rome wrote an account of spiraling radicalization: … les jeunes artistes de l’Académie de France surtout etoit, depuis longtemps, le foyer corrumpu et corrompeur des espérances du jacobins de Paris, pour porter au contrée de Rome et de l’Italie leur sacrilège et initiatives fureurs. Ils travaillait sans main, corrompoient et seduisoient les esprits et trouveaient, dans la classe mitoyenne, assez de partisans de la liberté françoise, assez de torts, ou de capables admirateurs d’une Révolution faite avec deux seuls mots qu’on admire et qu’on n’entend pas. Et dans la classe du peuple qu’ils travailloient aussi, il y a tant de sans coulotte, à Rome comme à Paris, tant de gens qui voudroient avoir une occasion de piller, qu’il etoit très facile de leur en rendre l’espérence agréable et propice. Déjà ces élèves du Bienfaisant générosité du Roi de France, ces pensionnaires d’une Académie célèbre, inspirés par leur folie et leur fanatisme, se répandoient dans Rome par les propos le plus licencieuses et les plus insolens contre toute autorité, ils narguoient et insultoient même les vertueuse filles de nos Roi … Je tiens de Madame Adelaide, qu’ils venoient se mettre sur leur passage, qu’ils affectoient de se couvrir devant elles, et de les narguer!31

As this passage suggests, the problem of “debauchery” signalled earlier to Cumberland struck a chord with anxieties about class, anxieties that after 1793 were inflamed by the patent violence of the French revolution. However, the sexual life of artists in Rome could also be recruited towards moral pursuits that seemed less directly political or class-inspired. Sergel, who as an artist had close affinities to Fuseli, is known to have congregated with “libertine” artists of French and Spanish origins to organize orgiastic retreats with hired women at Strada Gregoriana. Most recently, the drawings with bacchanalic themes composed by this loose club have drawn comment from British scholars such as Martin Myrone

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and Matthew Craske.32 What gives them their special interest is that they operate at the margins of artistic activity itself, and therefore seem to propose that libertine excess connects with artistic entitlement. Indeed, sex seems for a time to have fulfilled the role of an artistic laboratory, allowing heroic and sexual male conquest to move to the centre stage of Sergel’s oeuvre—an oeuvre that never left the academically respectable domain of Homeric subject-matter and a vivid stylistic neo-hellenism, as in his famous Mars and Venus from the mid-1770s (Fig. 9.3).33 Sergel’s celebrations of heroic virility were never placed in a contemporary setting; they were always legitimized by a form of antique revival. This raises the question of whether this brand of “libertinism” was ever meant to translate into public radicalism. This seems unlikely. Later on, this classically legitimate, aestheticized exposition of sexual life re-emerges in John Deare’s work. Drawings by this friend of Cumberland’s from a small sketchbook, now kept in his home town of Liverpool, attest to a new interest in homoerotic themes, but the use of nudity and stylized outlines underscores a timelessness that refuses the beholder a too hasty conflation of the image with Deare’s personal life (Fig. 9.4). As pointed out above, promiscuity was a familiar infraction of cosmopolitan sociability in Rome, rampant among the parties of wealthy bachelor travellers, and similarly the sending of unsupervised groups of young artists to Rome had registered as a risk to public morality among French academicians. However, the aesthetization of the libidinal drive (either in the explicit Sergel bacchanal or in the more hushed eroticism of the Deare sheet) points to the intervention of a late Enlightenment vocabulary that insisted on the countercultural potential of antiquity. Indeed, there was no shortage of intellectual stimuli that buttressed the enactment of male sexual excess in Rome as a tribute to a lost, natural self. The best known example of this intellectual defence of an antiquity of carnal pleasures was Richard Payne Knight’s Worship of Priapus, but other examples could be found among his close antiquarian friends—the adventurer and speculative historian Pierre François Hugues, self-styled d´Hancarville, and of course the revered antiquities collector William Hamilton. Their speculations about religious rituals that revolved around nude virgins and celebrations of male fertility were acceptable enough to garner a following among British sculpture collectors. Indeed, Payne Knight’s preoccupations with priapic rituals look conservative next to the sexually explicit prints of copulating groups in d´Hancarville’s Monumens de la vie privée des XII Césars, published in 1780, or Fuseli´s Roman erotic drawings from the 1770s, two series of unique “phallic” scenes circulating almost simultaneously among Rome’s expatriate elites and set

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in classical antiquity.34 The 1773 De l’homme, a countercultural, atheist manifesto believed to have been authored by Helvétius, eulogized the laws of Lycurgus and Spartan soldiering life, holding up for emulation its circuit of courage and hedonism, comprising sexual systems of reward that allowed men to maintain their combative ego and soldiering technique on a knife’s edge. A work of amateur anthropology, De l’homme conjured a natural state of masculine self-assertion, where male sexual license was regarded as the cement of a model egalitarian order.35 The underlying rationale behind these imaginations of antiquity consisted in a radical enlightened, materialist view of an uninhibited, natural self as articulated in Payne Knight and Helvétius, but also widely available to educated travellers who leafed through Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse. The efforts of Payne Knight and other writers gave a scientific sheen to these imaginings of the classical world as a distant domain of carnal pleasure and as an image of uninhibited personal emancipation. Similarly, a work such as Sergel’s Mars and Venus, originally commissioned by Richard Payne Knight and reproduced here, shows what looks like a version of this literary, elite imagining of antiquity, with its playful receptivity for the male muscular nude and the erotic energy of sexual violence. Deare’s sheet does the same for the beauty of boys.36 In 1787 a former traveller to Rome who had been told of the Sergel bacchanals, the German Wilhelm Heinse, used the continuum between aesthetic idealism, a persistent sensual abandon and a political creed for virile emancipation to compose his novel Ardinghello und die Glückseligen Inseln. Heinse’s novel was set in sixteenth-century Italy and portrayed a passionate artist whose sensitivity is guided by the beauty of Greek statuary and the joys of the Italian natural scenery to enact a sensual and moral return to a forbidden pantheist order that repeats forgotten rituals for communal celebrations of nature and the flesh.37 Amid nude athletic contests and youthful orgies, bare skin never recedes from view in the Ardinghello, whose main protagonist finds through his love of art a limpid political radicalism. The “blissful islands” in the book’s title call to mind a literary utopian tradition, and like older narratives of secluded ideal communities, Ardinghello finds beauty, then politics, as outlets for his desire to secede from mainstream morality. Surrendering to the male procreative drive is not the only instinctual force or emancipatory dream that came to preoccupy the radical counterculture that produced the Ardinghello. It is in a Hobbsian allusion to Bellum omnium contra omnes in Heines’ notebook that the connection between abandon to one’s primary drives and individualist transgression,

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situated by Helvetius in a Spartan past, and by Heinse in sixteenth-century Florence, is most clearly stated: “The times, when bellum omnium contra omnes was the rule, have always been the happiest ones for mankind”; “man is a beast of prey, and certainly the most rapacious.”38 Through the mouthpiece of Ardinghello, Heinse pushed this reverence for organic drive to a limit: Bellum omnium contra omnes is the time when the mob murders and ravishes, while the great individual holds power and spreads the abundance of his vital energies like precious plants in a thousand pleasures.39

Heinse’s renegades, like the characters that inhabit Roman drawings by Sergel and Fuseli, flaunted authority in their quest for a new, moral rule. As their imaginings of a pagan past makes clear, they were driven in their transgressive morality not by a prospect of individual autonomy, but by a contrived scheme of a new collectivity with more authentic links to nature. Goethe, who visited Italy in the 1780s, similarly took an interest in the autobiography of sixteenth-century sculptor and founder Cennino Cellini. He translated into German for Die Horen the Italian artists’ ego-document, recording a life of adventure and a staunch discontent made manifest in a string of subversive or outright criminal episodes.40 Cellini’s behaviour worsened under the pressure of courtiers and other well-placed figures that impinged on his artistic license. As in the Ardinghello, the sculptor was given to committing fraud, marital infidelity and murder. Goethe took notice of these excesses, but unlike Heinse, he resisted sympathizing with them. He coupled Cellini’s visceral, countercultural life to the plight suffered by an artist who has discovered the cleft between society and art, but who cannot bring themself to create a new artistic morality that would provide a safe-haven for art’s survival. He highlighted the interest that such a story of moral disarray may have for a modern public—in spite of his dishevelled life, his crimes and excesses: “Our hero had the image of ethical perfection as something unattainable but constantly in mind.”

Conclusion By examining the space of autonomy available to artists in Rome, this contribution has attempted to suggest the modern foundations of late eighteenth-century marginality. The mainstream world of Roman artists was modern in the sense of its combined commercial and consumerist character, and its lack of State involvement. The marginal life of artists in that city was in part a modern effect—artists found such unconventional personal expressions as non-conformist individualism and aestheticized

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“natural” morality amidst a formless modern market. The British artists whom Cumberland met in the late 1780s instituted a community that sought to balance the pressures of the market and academic respectability, and of individualism and collective autonomy from the contingent demands of a British public. If they failed, perhaps it was because their exposure to the Grand Tour market demanded highly prized individuals for safe capital investment rather than deviant communities. Yet some British noblemen found ways of accommodating their elite taste to what artists like John Deare were able to procure in their studios. Fringe artists were in this sense the product of travellers hoping to gain access to a moral arena of licentious classical revival that might have been troubling to mainstream audiences. Between around 1775 and 1795, disorderly artistic collectives in Rome were capable of holding some ground. Their complicity in the Roman art market, in combination with their willingness to tweak propriety—not in the direction of artistic particularism, but of radicalism and moral marginality—represents a fascinating object that begs for renewed examination. Thomas Crow has provided perhaps the best example for how such a survey can be undertaken—taking the David circles and the relationship forged between master, students and competitors within the studio, he has shown that a societal vision was inseparable from the personal and aesthetic aims formulated within it.41 Even Crow spends precious little words on the role played by exile, disillusion and utopia in the work of Roman artists. A history of the artistic utopia should have a dystopian Rome for its first chapter.

Illustrations Fig. 1 John Flaxman, Fury of Athamas, 1790–94. Marble, Height: 208.5 cm, National Trust, Ickworth, Suffolk. © Image copyright The National Trust, U.K. Fig. 2 Piranesi, View of the Palazzo Mancini on the Corso, 1752. Etching, 38 x 62 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 2013 Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence. Fig. 3 Johann Tobias Sergel, Mars and Venus, c. 1773–78. Terracotta model, Goeteborg, Goeteborg Kunstmuseum. © Online archive Thorvaldsens Museum, photo released by Goeteborg Kunstmuseum Fig. 4 John Deare, Outline drawing of two boys, approx. 1790. Pen and ink on paper, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. © Photo by the Author

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Notes 1

John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and his Times, comprehending … memories of several contemporary artists from the time of Roubilliac, Hogarth, and Reynolds, to that of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 228. 2 On James Irvine see John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 545. Irvine first visited Rome to launch his career as painter, but like many unproductive artists in the city, he abandoned painting and settled for the position of dealer and cicerone. He left again in 1791, briefly returning from 1797 to 1798. 3 See George Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline. Sculpture and the System that guided the Ancient Artists in Composing their figures and groups. On Cumberland´s activities as an art theorist, see G. E. Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 4 Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49–83. 5 The most complete account of British patronage directed at modern painters is David Marshall, Susan Russell and Karin Wolfe eds., Roma Britannica: Art Patronage and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Rome (London: British School at Rome, 2011). My own account takes a bleaker view of the market than some of these essays, although that difference might be explained by my focus on the 1790s. On the important trade in new marble and modern sculpture see Cinizia Sicca and Alison Yarrington, The Lustrous Trade: Material Culture and the History of Sculpture in England and Italy, c.1700–c.1860 (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999), and María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui Alpañés and Scott Wilcox eds. The English Prize. The Capture of the Westmorland, An episode of the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2012). On the prominent role of portable memorabilia see Antonio Pinelli, “L’indotto del Grand Tour settecentesco: l’industria dell’antico e del souvenir,” in Carole Paul and Louis Marchesano eds., Viewing Antiquity. The Grand Tour, Antiquarianism and Collecting (Roma: Carocci, 2001), 85–101. 6 As Peter de Bolla has shown, the wealthy elite in Britain could not be counted upon to moor their taste on history painting and a publically sanctioned, didactic subject-matter; it looked for ocular stimulus and a variety that depends on the beholder’s ability to move about in space. Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 7 Christopher M. S. Johns, “Visual Culture and the Triumph of Cosmopolitanism in Eighteenth-Century Rome,” in Marshall and Russell 2011, 13–21. Johns argues that British colonial expansion was the foundation for a British sense of kinship to Roman antiquity, finding an outlet both in dilettante antiquarianism and in the famous series of Pompeo Batoni portraits, which are discussed elsewhere in this volume.

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John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997). 9 The fullest account of the circles of British artists who consorted with Fuseli in Rome remains Nancy L. Pressly, The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s (New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art, 1979); for radical politics among the Deutschrömer see the letters of Carl Ludwig Fernow. Herbert von Einem, Carl Ludwig Fernow. Roemische Briefe an Johann Pohrt 1793–1798 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1944), 50–61. 10 See Girodet-Trioson’s letters from Rome in P. A. Coupin, Oeuvres Posthumes De Girodet-Trioson, vol. 3 (Paris, 1829). 11 See Flaxman’s letter in London, British Library, Flaxman Papers, Mss Add 39780, fol. 48 [letter dated 1790]. 12 For Flaxman’s dismissive remarks on Caffè degli Inglesi see David Irwin, John Flaxman, 1755–1826: Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (London, 1979), 48. 13 See Keith Crook ed., Joseph Esq Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy in the years 1802 and 1803 (London 2001), 134. 14 London, Mellon Centre, Brinsely Ford Archive, Box 104, Lady Morgan Diary, vol. 2, fol. 330: “Miss Trotter, Colonel Hunter Blair, Lord and Lady Stratraven, and Gibson, the sculptor, were some of those who had sat to him.” 15 On Guy Head (1760–1800), see Ingamells 1998, 479–480. 16 Asides from references in the Cumberland papers, see Nino Strachey, Ickworth (Suffolk, The National Trust, 2006), 42–45. 17 An anecdote from Deare’s letters on his first meeting with the 3rd Earl of Bristol in 1785 captures these qualities: “I was introduced to my Lord Bristol, who called on me and offered me ten pounds per annum in addition to my pension, which, I politely refused, as it was such a trifle; and as I thought he did it only to affront the King and Academicians, as he is an ex-ministerial man.” Smith 1828, 321. 18 See Susan Pearce and Frank Salmon, “Charles Heathcote Tatham in Italy, 1794– 96: Letters, Drawings and Fragments, and Part of an Autobiography,” Journal of the Walpole Society 67 (2005): 1–93: 24 [letter dated Rome, February 15, 1795]. 19 See London, British Library, Cumberland Papers, add. Mss. 36518, fol. 339 v., 14 June 1784, [Irvine to Cumberland]. 20 See London, British Library, Cumberland Papers, add. Mss. 36496, fol. 220, 13 Nov 1790 [Irvine to Cumberland]. 21 Smith 1828, 412. 22 On the artificial divide between traders and academic painters and sculptors see Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding. British Historical Artists in London and Rome and the remaking of the heroic ideal c. 1760–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 275–294. 23 “List of English Artists residing at Rome in the Year 1793,” which I know from a copy at London, Mellon Centre, Brinsely Ford Archive. 24 Hewetson’s letter from May 4, 1792 is in London, British Library, Cumberland Papers, add. Mss. 36495, fol. 333.

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25 London, British Library, Cumberland Papers, add. Mss. 36495, fol. 288, 1 March 1794 [Deare to Cumberland]. 26 M. F. MacDonald, “British Artists at the Accademia del Nudo in Rome,” in A. W. Bosschloo ed. Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. [Special issue Academies of Art between Renaissance and Romanticism] 5–6 (1986–87): 77–94. 27 On Fuseli see Myrone 2006, which includes an extensive bibliography. On Sergel see Per Bjurström (ed.), Johan Tobias Sergel-Kunst um 1800 (Hamburg: Prestel Verlag, 1975); Jorgen Andersen, De Ar I Rom. Abilgaard Sergel Füssli (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers’ forlag, 1989) and Jorgen Andersen ed. Sergel (Stockholm: Nationalmusei, 1990). On Thomas Banks see Julius Bryant, Thomas Banks 1735–1805. Britain’s First Modern Sculptor (London: Soane Museum, 2005), 25–35. 28 Artistic utopia, as I wish to employ this term, points to the idea that art can serve as a non-violent means to groom, articulate and recreate a radical disconformity with the social world. In this form, it was arguably given its first formulation in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education from 1793–95. See on this Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42–61. 29 Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Historical Studies Series, 2003), 115. 30 See Northcote’s letter at London, Royal Academy of Arts, Manuscripts, NOR/47 [5 November 1778]. 31 See Goujon de Thuisy’s unpublished account “Voyage en Italie: Rome en 1792, 1793 et 1794,” London, British Library, Add. Mss. 64100, fol. 418–19. 32 Myrone 2006 and Matthew Craske, Art in Europe, 1700–1830: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95–110. 33 On Sergel see Louis Olaf Larsson, “Zwischen Depression und Neugeburt. J. T. Sergel und Thorvaldsen in Rom,” in Max Seidel (ed.), L’Europa e l’arte italiana (Venice 2000), 517–528, with a full bibliography. 34 Payne Knight’s Worship of Priapus has inspired much commentary. I have adapted the recent account in Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti. Archeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 241–266. There has been sustained interest in the moral origins and public interest in the writings of the triumvirate d’Hancarville, Payne Knight and William Hamilton. Kelly argues that their playful interest in GrecoRoman sexual ceremonies belonged to a widespread Enlightenment anthropological project focusing on primitive societies and the origins of religious experience in organic life and the natural world. See in addition Francis Haskell, “The Baron d’Hancarville: An Adventurer and Art Historian in EighteenthCentury Europe,” in Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 30–45, and Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collections from 1750 to 1920,” in Michael Camille and Adrian Rifkin, Other Objects of Desire. Collectors and Collecting Queerly (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 85–11. The idea that these writings were studied by British sculpture collectors is

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found in Ruth Guilding, Marblemania. Sculpture Galleries in England 1640–1840 (London: The Soane Gallery, 2001), 9–14; the idea that they are likely to have influenced Fuesli’s erotic drawings I derive from Marion de Zanger and Gertjan Zuilhof, “De grijns van Priapus. Enkele sprekende voorbeelden van achttiendeeeuwse verbeelde erotiek,” Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw (1985), 67–89. 35 The argument in De l’homme, which was said to have been found among Helvétius’ papers after his death, contrasted the law-making, but vital and patriotic Spartans to the “despotic” Orient and the “murderous” societies of savages he imputed to North America or Africa. “Peut-on de bonne foi oublier qu’ il n’ est qu’ un principe (de sociabilité), la sensibilité physique? C’est à ce seul principe que l’on doit & l’amour de soi & l’amour si puissant de l’indépendence,” De l’homme. De ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation (London, 1776), 91 36 On the homoerotic self and elite cosmopolitan circles in eighteenth-century Florence see Clorinda Donato, “Where ‘Reason and the Sense of Venus are Innate in Men’: Male Friendship, Secret Societies, Academies, and Antiquarians in Eighteenth-Century Florence,” Italian Studies 65 (3) (2010): 329–44. 37 On the Ardhingello see Erich Meuthen, Eins uns doppelt oder Vom Anderssein des Selbst. Struktur und Tradition des deutschen Kuenstlerromans (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), 20–41. 38 Cited after Max L. Baeumer, “Wilhem Heinse and His Relationship to English Thought and Literature,” Modern Language Studies 15 (1) (1985): 60–68: 66. 39 Baeumer 1985, 66. 40 Nicholas Boyle, Goethe The Poet and the Age. Vol. II Revolution and Rnunciation (1790–1803) (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2000), 296–7. 41 Thomas Crow, Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006).

THE FLUID NATURE OF EIGHTEENTHCENTURY BRITISH AND ITALIAN REPUTATIONS AT THE MARGINS AND AT THE CENTRE: THE CASE OF BLAGROVE AND BATONI ROSALIE SMITH MCCREA UNIVERSITY OF KUWAIT

Introduction John Blagrove was born at Cardiff Hall in the Parish of St. Ann, Jamaica, in 1753. Cardiff Hall, the home of the Jamaican Blagroves, had been in the family for over 285 years. It was a “Great House” of rare distinction in the annals of sugar estates on the island and its features were noted by contemporary and modern writers.1 Records show that a Daniel Blagrove, one of the signatories in the death warrant of Charles I, was given Cardiff Hall for supporting Cromwell.2 On the early death of his father, Thomas Blagrove, John inherited, at age three, many estates and pens from his grandfather.3 The Blagrove estates included vast acreages of land in Hanover and St. Ann Parishes. Besides sugar cane estates, there were pens for breeding livestock, horses and mules.4 As a minor, he was placed under the guardianship of Colin Currie5 and spent his childhood and early adulthood in England where he was educated at Eton and Oxford. Blagrove entered Oxford at nineteen but did not take a degree, given his not holding the “Dominus” courtesy title awarded to bachelors at the time.6 There is no evidence that he wielded any particular influence as a young adult in England; nor are there inserts under his name in early and updated editions of the Dictionary of National Biography. One comes across inserts for his British relatives from the Berkshire side. The Ford/Ingamells Dictionary states that, after leaving Cambridge [sic], Blagrove arrived in Venice on November 9, 1773 and, two months later,

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he with two friends (Sir William Cunynghame and Steddy Grinfield) gave on January 12, 1774, “una magnifica e sontuosa festa di ballo in Siena.”7 His portrait which hangs in the Historical Collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston is signed by Pompeo Batoni at Rome and dated 1774. The painting was accepted as an “autograph portrait” by the late Anthony Clark, American museum director and art historian specialist in Batoni’s lifetime work. The painting is signed and dated lower left by Batoni. (P. Batoni: Rome PINXIT. AN 1774).8 Clark came to be considered the “dean of Roman Settecento Studies”; he worked with other art historians, such as Ellis Waterhouse and Brinsley Ford, to produce a catalogue raisonné of the painter’s lifework. Since its publication in 1985, one leading scholar to further Batoni studies has been Edgar Peter Bowron (2007).9 The portrait of Blagrove is the only known portrait of an AngloCreole Jamaican planter and, perhaps, of a West Indian plantation owner painted by a leading Italian eighteenth-century master in the “Age of Abolition.”10 The portrait is significant as little research has been done to produce monographs on Anglo-West Indian plantation owners of the period outside of the synopses in manuscript files or in dictionaries of Jamaican biographies.11 One recent exception is David Lambert’s book White Creole Culture, which builds a framework for continued research in the area and more of which will be said further on. The portrait is equally relevant to “Grand Tour” studies as it deepens our knowledge about the catholic nature of Batoni’s clientèle, underlying the fact that how his sitters made their wealth was of no importance to the painter.

Method The method adopted here is a hybrid one. The article seeks to add to Batoni Grand Tour portraiture and it intersects with history and postcolonial deconstruction analysis. It relies on primary sources such as letters, memoranda, journals and secondary sources. Much work has been done on postcolonial analysis, mostly from the perspective of history and literature.12 A recent work which examines how art history’s methods have changed over time is Dana Arnold’s Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method.13 The book underlines the importance of other art histories (social art history, feminist, queer) that underlies the transdisciplinary nature of contemporary art historical methodologies. While my reading of the Blagrove portrait will rely on aspects of postcolonial deconstruction, it will apply a social art historical method

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which, in its first phase, contributed to conceptions of history and the importance of images within culture.14 In its second phase from the 1980s and referred to as the “New Art History,” writers argued that visual expressive communication can and does play an active role in the shaping of culture; that, at particular times in the past, some images became noted for being of equal importance to historical events.15 This idea has much to do with how the visual image or motif may cross borders in culture and attach itself to other media and genres, a notion given to the postmodern term in art history as “discursivity.” An eighteenth-century example is the printed and published Plan of the Slave Ship Brooks of Liverpool by James Phillips and Thomas Clarkson in 1788–1789. The print directly conjured up the dreaded theme of the Middle Passage’s trauma and drama. “This, I confess, is the most wretched part of the whole subject,” cried Wilberforce: “so much misery condensed in so little room, is more than the human imagination has ever before conceived.”16 The image subliminally underpinned much of the British Debates on the Abolition of the Slave Trade which ended in 1807,17 and which was discursively alive in Hansard, visual print, pamphlet and the poetic text.

Publications and Archival Sources Published sources on the Anglo-Jamaican Blagrove are limited, although the historiography on eighteenth-century British West Indian slavery is vast.18 A work, published in 2005, looks specifically at the war of abolitionist representations of the white West Indian Creole and what constituted white Creole identity, mainly in Barbados.19 Lambert’s book investigates the place of “whiteness” in the controversy over Abolition and explores the relationship between white creoles in the colony and in the metropole, drawing out their competing notions of preferred identity and place of belonging.20 Although his case study looks at Joshua Steele, a reformer from London who came to Barbados in 1780 to manage his sugar estates, the book is useful in providing a framework for further understanding the “in-between” mindset of individuals such as Blagrove. Equally, it underscores the symbolic importance for the plantation Creole sitter in having a Batoni portrait, should one afford it. For Blagrove, I have consulted old curatorial and Mss. files at the National Library of Jamaica, the National Gallery of Jamaica, both in Kingston and the National Archives of Jamaica in Spanish Town. Most available sources focus on inventories addressing his estates, slaves, pens and furniture in overseers’ houses.21 E-mail communication with librarians and archivists was undertaken in Jamaica and the Bodleian Library at

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Oxford. Data on two internet sites provided biographical details, and a Memorandum Book concerning the Berkshire Blagroves and their Jamaican plantations at Cardiff Hall, Orange Valley, Unity and Pembroke was consulted. 22 This article concentrates on the fashionable reputation of the painter over the decades and highlights it with the wealthy gentlemanly reputation of the sitter. The article documents the decline in the collectability of the Batoni portrait by ca. 1790 as well as the rise in British abolitionist rhetoric that played a role in undermining the status and identity of the gentleman Blagrove.

The British Eighteenth Century Grand Tour and Batoni’s Reputation at the Time Grand Tour Scholarship shows that, from the 1720s, Italy was a key destination for British aristocrats. Travellers went not only to “admire the past and scorn the present” but also to be educated further, to be entertained and to acquire antiquities both legally and fraudulently.23 Regarded as the new “Parnassus, the seat of Allegory and idealization,” Italy was thought to be a source of knowledge and beauty. Rome, Florence, Naples and Venice were central locations. Grand Tour writers assert that it was undertaken “as a great luxury and considerable outlay”, and that the English were the most numerous and that it is they who evolved the codes concerning destinations, itineraries and guidebooks.24 Illaria Bignamini notes that, in 1730, Charles des Brosses wrote that the English: “were more numerous than other tourists: that they regarded it as an education and that they spent more money than anybody else in buying works of art.”25 Once on the Tour of Rome, the British Grand tourist, in seeking a portrait, could choose from one of two portraitists working at the time: Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79) or Pompeo Batoni. It is Batoni the Portraitist and History painter with whom this article is concerned. From the 1740s to the 1780s, Batoni was deemed preeminent in the specialized genres of Portraiture and History Painting; his reputation and the collectability of his works fell following his death in 1787. From the 1740s he became the leading painter of the major European courts, representing monarchs and prelates such as the Empress Maria Thèresa and Popes Benedict XIVth, Clement Xth and Pius VIth. His reputation with British Grand tourists became legendary. It was built on his skill in delineating the human face, often alluding to the subtle personality traits that would emerge later in the sitter’s life. Together with these skills and technique were the qualities of perfectionism in his studio practice which

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are aptly captured in his declaration that: “My honour requires me to dispatch no work that isn’t finished with the greatest attention and diligence, for the reason that one single slipshod work could make me lose all the credit acquired up to now.”26 Scholars agree on the subtle effects he achieved in the nuances of handling colour. Most, if not all, of his twohundred and twenty-five known individual sitters, including 120 English, 30 Irish, 20 Scottish and 5 Welsh, were male tourist aristocrats and uppergentry.27 Between 1727 and 1730 Batoni refined his drawing abilities by copying after the antique in the Vatican collections as well as at the Palazzo Farnese and in the private academies and studios of local artists.28 His reputation as a “notable citizen of Rome” came from the quality of his painting of religious themes and allegories and pictures from GrecoRoman mythology. He also had a love of music. The musical evenings at his home, where his gifted daughters sang to the accompaniment of invited violinists-composers, such as Pietro Nardini (1722–1793) from Florence, a pupil of the Baroque violinist-composer Giuseppi Tartini (1692–1770), were renowned internationally. Dr. Charles Burney, Britain’s leading eighteenth-century musicologyist, left us with an account of one of those evenings in 1770. Burney writes that: We went together to the celebrated painter il Cavalier [sic] Battoni, who is always visited by the great: the Emperor Prince of Brunswick, Gr. Duke of Tuscany, Archduke of Austria, Duke of York have all been with him and painted by him over and over. He has a very large house and lives in a great way. He received me very politely and conversed a great deal together on the arts. We were then introduced to Madame and the Missess.29

Even as late as 1814, Benjamin West (1738–1820), once again President of the Royal Academy in London, wrote, in a letter to Joseph Farington, of his first going to Rome between 1760 and 1763 where Italian artists “thought of nothing, looked at nothing but the work of Pompeo Batoni.”30 The pictorial quality of the Batoni portrait and his ability to convey information about his sitters’ status and private interests, through their clothes, posture and selected attributes or signifiers, became features of his renowned signature. Those fortunate enough to have their likenesses represented would leave Italy with an object of value which inscribed their “personhood” within the impress of taste and acquired virtù.

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Batoni’s Studio—His Methods, Prices and the Social, Aesthetic and Symbolic Resonance of his Portraits Anthony Clark has left us with a detailed account of Batoni’s painting methods that I shall now outline. Batoni placed great emphasis on drawing in developing any commissioned work. His assistants were his sons. He came out of the eighteenth-century Italian Roman-Bolognese tradition as taught at the Academia di San Luca, an institution that dated from 1630 and which placed an emphasis on drawing. Of the over three hundred remaining Batoni drawings, Clark writes that these included copies after the old masters, studies from live models, and studies of individuals and groups.31 Batoni began with small, rough compositions in black or white chalk on blue prepared paper. Drawings were usually anatomically realistic and poses and costumes were worked out directly on the canvas in oil sketches. Batoni required two or three sittings of his patrons. It is thought that many were completed after the sitter’s leaving Rome. Often, studies of the heads and hands were undertaken. It is thought that, in the end, his dependence on the live model allowed him flexibility to paint more original images. His portraits conveyed a meticulous naturalism which was admired by contemporaries at home and abroad. Concerning prices for his portraits, Clark, Bowron and Kerber point out that, grumblings from some Britons regarding Batoni’s grasping and difficult business affairs aside, his prices, when compared with those of Sir Joshua Reynolds in London, were less expensive. For example, in 1760 a full-length would have been £25 for a Batoni while Reynolds charged £150. Again, in 1780, while Reynolds asked £200 for a full-length, Batoni asked only £50. As a three-quarter length picture, Blagrove’s portrait would have required at least seven months to complete.32 The decision to commission a Batoni portrait would have stemmed from a steady cash outlay and an acknowledgement to complete this aspect of the Tour’s ritual. What, for Blagrove, would have been the social, aesthetic and symbolic importance in having sat for Batoni for an individualized portrait? In terms of the “social,” the portrait became a signifier of one’s class in British society. The scholarship holds that British sitters came from the “highest social standing,” writers citing Debrett’s and Alan Valentine’s publications on the British Establishment between 1760 and 1784. Several were members of Parliament, in Law, the Military and the Navy as well as the Church.

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The “aesthetic” value of the portrait was allied to Batoni’s method of painting, as cited above—the formal elements brought to bear on the likeness of the sitter such as the amount of paint, colours, light/shadow techniques and, equally significant, the reputation of the portrait painter. Batoni’s portraits also held subtle symbolic meaning—a likeness of a British gentleman carried notions of “taste” and “virtue” within that twodimensional frame. For British “connoisseurs” and “virtuosi” at the time, this was important.33 “Symbolic” resonance alluded to Old Master influences observed in the portrait. In the case of Blagrove’s likeness, these influences, I suggest, pointed to portraitists from the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries, such as the Venetian Titian [c.1487/90–1576] and the Dutch Van Dyck [1599–1641]. Scholars have documented several of Batoni’s influences, of which Van Dyck and Titian are included.34

Pompeo Batoni’s Representation of John Blagrove When, in 1774, John Blagrove showed his face and person to the celebrated Batoni to take a likeness thereof, he was twenty-one years old; he had 181 enslaved people working at Cardiff Hall and the painter had thirteen years to live.35 The portrait was executed the year after Thomas Day’s and John Bicknell’s publication of the The Dying Negro: A Poem, a work now thought to be the first mainstream abolitionist plea against slavery, representing slavery as an unbridled and promiscuous form of commerce and bringing public awareness to the plight of those in bondage.36 Batoni’s representation of Blagrove had nothing to do with British Abolitionist rhetoric. As a fashionable master, he kept his studio in Rome. Specialists go out of their way to point out that because his sitters came from the highest social standing, “it is understandable why there is an absence of merchants, financiers and other businessmen.”37 They name five exceptions—men whose families accrued wealth from various kinds of trade, such as distilling for the East Indian Co. or financial advising to the aristocracy and gentry.38 Clark, Bowron and Kerber fail to mention the portrait of Blagrove, planter and owner of slaves as chattel, who represented the sixth exception. The portrait shows a youthful and facially unsullied Blagrove, standing with ease and confidence in a three-quarter length. He is bewigged, wearing a cravat, an inner satin vest and a coat with fur trimming. Batoni highlighted his riding habit, cap and gloved left hand, allowing his right arm to rest on a table on which stands his attribute, the Minerva Giustiniani. Chalk drawing and oil sketches were produced so that poses and attitudes could be discussed and refined. The catalogue raisonné

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shows that Batoni focused on capturing facial likeness directly onto the canvas.39 Writers acknowledge that there were two guidebooks known to Batoni’s British clients that helped in the choice of accessories.40 The Minerva Giustiniani, chosen to accompany Blagrove, was an antique marble, a Roman adaptation from a fourth-century B.C.E bronze now in the Musei Vaticani. Ingamells writes that Britons lucky enough to go on the Grand Tour, looked toward an “Augustan Age in which the polite arts would replace war and that boys attending Eton or Westminster knew that the Goddess Minerva presided over both.”41 For the ancient Greeks, Minerva was called Pallas Athena or Athene. For both Greeks and Romans, she was thought to be a goddess who carried benevolent and civilizing influences. As a war goddess, Minerva was thought to have fought for just causes as opposed to Mars, who started wars for their own sake and who was linked to destruction. During the Renaissance and after, Minerva came to represent “wisdom.”42 If Blagrove suggested the attribute, it is in all likelihood owing to his awareness of the military and social roles that he was expected to play in a future life once back in Jamaica. Outside of financial independence, his decision to sit for Batoni suggests an appreciation of the role that art could and did play in the social and political spheres of his time, in and outside of Britain. Batoni gave greater attention to Blagrove’s face, deportment and hands. Still, it is his riding hat, jodphurs and held glove that gives us a clue into Blagrove’s life-passion of horsemanship and racing. Still, this representation conforms to a Batoni convention that had taken root from the 1760s. From Clark’s work, we know that the repertoire of features, which kept Batoni’s high esteem alive amongst British tourists, consisted of variations on a theme reflected in various poses and the air of fashionable nonchalance, given to his sitters in interior spaces, as they stand in front of painted backdrops of either the Roman Campagna or of the Colloseum. Central to any reading of the portrait-sitter was the inclusion of the antique marble attribute or signifier. In this case, it is the Bust of Minerva. This bust appears in the portraits of Sackville Tufton, 8th Earl of Thanet (1752–4), John Crewe, later 1st Baron Crewe (1760–2), John Monk (1764), Thomas Peter Gifford (1768) and Robert Udney (1770) and Sir Sampson Gideon, later 1st Lord Eardley (1745–1824). Each of these portraits varied slightly. Neither are there visual pointers to suggest that Robert Udney and Sir Sampson Gideon were linked to trade. Batoni favoured the inclusion of either thoroughbred dogs (Sackville Tufton), the opening of a book showing a particular page (John Crewe), or a background reference to a Roman Temple (Thomas Peter Giffard). By 1770, his repertoire had become formulaic, while still appealing to his

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British patrons.43 In the portrait of Sir Sampson Gideon and an Unidentified companion (1766–67), the young and seated Sir Sampson shows a miniature locket portrait of his betrothed to a friend. The distinctive Neoclassical emphasis on the costumes of the day (gold embroidery on scarlet overcoats contrasted with hues of blue, warm grey and buff), worn by the two sitters, and facets of Grand Tour Roman architecture in the background make this double portrait by Batoni one of his most sumptuous. In order to secure his financial and professional reputations, Batoni was clearly more interested in his sitters’ ability to afford his portraits rather than how they became wealthy. The Blagrove portrait ultimately highlighted the power of land for landowners in the period, for the ownership of land could transform a relative nobody into a “gentleman” of status who could afford to buy “taste” if not virtù. 44

The Declining Fortunes and Reputation of Batoni Anthony Clark’s work shows a falling demand for Batoni’s portraits from 1780, owing to less tourist travel. In 1786 Batoni’s eyesight began to fail and that October he suffered a first stroke; in February of 1787, he suffered another and died three days later. Bowron and Kerber note that the War with France, at the time, closed sea routes to England and this, in all likelihood, led to the end of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. 45 By 1800, interest in Batoni’s work had fallen with the war, the changing tastes in art and the influence of the Royal Academy in London (1768) with Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) as its first President. The Grand Tourist portrait was rarely seen at exhibitions in London; they hung mostly in privileged country-houses. Batoni’s Portraits lost their historical value, given sitters were represented in early adulthood before later achievements and his formulaic method clashed with the new taste for “individuality” in the British School and the rising style of European Romanticism at large.

British Abolition Before and after 1787—the Growing Marginalization of West Indian Planters Although, as a movement, British Abolition started in the 1760s, it was not until the case of Sommersett before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1772 that British public opinion came to uphold the plight of the slave.46 Specifically, lawyers took issue with notions of “bondage” (in slavery-free England) as opposed to “liberty.” By 1774, events would allow Horace

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Walpole to write that: “Africa is indeed coming into fashion.”47 Threatened by Mansfield’s ruling, proslavers in Jamaica, such as the colonial administrator and historian Edward Long, wrote his rebuttal Candid Reflections.48 More problematic for the long term fortunes of the young Blagrove was Long’s The History of Jamaica published the year Blagrove sat for Batoni.49 Long’s descriptions of “the Negro” swelled the chorus of those who sanctioned the traffic in men, women and children as chattel commodities mainly for profit on the islands. Such views were acceptable to many in and outside Parliament, and in London where their business interests melded with the interests of the “West India Lobby,” a group of merchants, agents and insurers working on behalf of plantation owners, such as Blagrove. 50 Historians of slavery have made the distinction between slavery in the ancient and medieval worlds and slavery in the modern Americas. Whereas earlier slavery was ethnically more diversified and less commercial, eighteenth-century British colonial slavery was highly commercial in character, with the enslaved coming exclusively from Africa as unpaid chattel under sordid and cruel conditions.51 Litigation brought before Mansfield, in defence of Sommersett, argued that the contradictions in the laws, which defined slaves as chattels to be sold, bequeathed and transferred like any other commodity, were at odds with other laws that treated them as “persons” with rights. This ambiguity created a dilemma for Mansfield who, in the end, rather than face the wider issue of institutional slavery overall, ruled only on the legality of whether a slave could be compelled to return to his master’s service when in England.52 Slaving and slavery, as issues, could only be settled before the British Parliament. In 1787 the Society to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade, under the chairmanship of Granville Sharp, was established.53 That year, Blagrove and his wife Anne Shakespear, his third cousin, returned to Jamaica and to Cardiff Hall.54 Meanwhile, debates in Parliament led by Wilberforce forced the issue into what became known as the “Great Cause” for Abolition and, gradually, references to the white West Indian Anglo-Creole planter became a contested figure in the rhetoric of Antislavery. The West Indian “torrid zone” came to represent nouveau riche planters who, while in London, rode about in equipages with attendants in pretentious livery. Antislavery rhetoric came to view planters as “profit obsessed degenerative Creoles,” as they assertively declared their loyalty to Britain while being defensive over the issue of slavery.55 The “West India Lobby” emphasized the West Indies’ importance to the imperial project, stressing

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the islands’ economic and strategic worth to Britain as well as their loyalty to the “mother country,” as shown in light of their adherence to the Crown rather than to the American colonists in the War of Independence.56 By the 1790s, Abolitionist and Proslavery frenzy had overtaken Britain in word (press and pamphlet), image (prints, art, artifact) and the form of caricature and satire (Gilray and Rowlandson).57 Equally, Blake’s imaginative lampoons on the “West Indian Planter”58 for Gabriel Stedman affected West Indian slave owners who felt increasingly beleaguered as an interest group as they became more marginal to the fortunes of the Empire.59 Abolition was realized when Parliament, in 1807, decided to end British Atlantic slaving.

Blagrove’s Return to Jamaica—1787 and After Blagrove returned to Jamaica in 1787 and became the MP for St Ann’s Parish. He “occasionally took part in discussions in the House of Assembly and was eventually returned an MP for St. Ann.”60 From here onwards the records are fragmented. He is mentioned as having been a “Vestry-man [at] St. Ann” in 1793. In 1794, he served as “Captain in St. Ann’s Militia,” and in 1795 Blagrove acted as Justice of the Peace for the Parish of Trelawney as well as an Assistant Judge for the Court of Common Pleas in 1804. He served in the local militia during the Jamaican Maroon Wars of 1796, acting as an aide-de-camp and Lt Col.61 His reputation as an absentee-landlord is known today by a miniscule number of Jamaicans and is grounded on his having improved the island’s breed of cattle while importing European horse bloodstocks for champion breeding. Blagrove’s breeds of racing horses became highly prized. Although Jamaican born and owning many estates that were the means to his wealth, Blagrove identified “home” as his place of “belonging” in England. The fact that he left Jamaica in 1805 never to return (two years before Britain abolished the Transatlantic slave trade) to settle and rebuild Ankerwycke House in Wraysbury, Buckinghamshire, is proof of this. His leaving Jamaica when he did suggests that Blagrove, in all likelihood, foresaw the coming of abolition and its implications for himself and his family. Blagrove would go on to buy another country house, Great Abshott in Titchfield, Hampshire, while maintaining Wrasbury as lord of the manor. He died at Great Abshott in 1824.62

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Conclusion Both painter and sitter knew glory, social and professional success, as well as marginal reputations at certain points in their lifetimes. This article has argued that historical events, politics and cultural shifts were catalysts in processing these competing correspondences. For Batoni, a pre-eminent portraitist and History painter, these forces materialized mainly in Italy, while for John Blagrove, who came from an old, leading Anglo-Jamaican slave and landowning family, they were enacted in Jamaica and Britain. Batoni became a highly skilled technician. His esteemed reputation was based on quality and the meticulous naturalism given to his sitters’ portraits. Britons upheld the lure and the veneration of Italy for its history, art, literature and architectural civilization. These perceptions were held by them from earlier times, and going on The Grand Tour allowed them to add to the lustre of an individual and their families’ status and learning. His British Grand Tour sitters became his main customers and they supported him up to the year of his death. To own a Batoni portrait was to hold an object which lent social, aesthetic and symbolic markers for the aristocracy, collectors, connoisseurs and the British gentlemen of the time, and they usually remained in the family seat. Batoni’s reputation suffered after his death, and there was little patronage of his work following the war with France. Aesthetic tastes shifted from the formulaic solutions for representations to more individualistic expressions. Scholars argue that the eighteenth-century Grand Tour tradition had started to wane. For those such as Blagrove, who was not an aristocrat, his wealth, allowed him to “buy” these attributes, signals of class and status. While plantation slavery was not a difficulty for colonial Jamaica, which thrived on sugar as a monoculture, absentee planters became a problem for British abolitionists who questioned slavery from a legal, religious and social perspective, especially after the Society to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787. That year, Pompeo Batoni died and Blagrove left England for Jamaica, remaining there for eighteen years. He returned to England in 1805 for good, two years before the Abolition of Atlantic Slaving, leaving his portrait behind. In the end, Batoni had created a masterly l’anima di persona of a young man who had played in the drama of conventionally constructing his identity. Not only does the viewer grasp the image of youthful optimism and noblesse oblige but a face that belies the buying and selling of human souls. I graciously thank Phillip McCrea for his dedicated editing of this chapter.

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Notes 1 James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica, from Drawings made in the Years 1820 and 1821 (London: Hurst and Robinson, Pall Mall; E. Lloyd Harley Street, 1825); Frank Cundall, Historic Jamaica. Published for the Institute of Jamaica by the West India Committee (London: 1912, 1914, rept; New York and London, 1971), 292; N.W. Kieffer, “Jamaican Great Houses,” The Daily Gleaner 1937, n.p. and Linton Swapp, “The Blagroves of Cardiff Hall, The Sunday Gleaner, May 30th 1954, n.p. in H/N Estates and Great Houses, National Library of Jamaica, Kingston. 2 Pedigree of the Blagrove and Blagrove Line 7/261/1 National Archives Spanish Town, Jamaica. 3 “John Blagrove (1753–1824) West Indian Plantation Owner at: http://www.heritagearchives.rbs.com/wiki/John_Blagrove Junior, 1–2. 4 Plan Showing the Blagrove St. Ann Properties 4/93/1 Nat. Arch. Sp. Twn and Memorandum Book, D/EX 1271/7 18c, Berkshire Record Office, Reading. 5 Blagrove’s maternal grandmother was Elizabeth Currie. Colin Currie was either a granduncle, or a distant cousin. See “Of Cardiff Hall Jamaica,” www.merchantnetworks.com.au/genealogy/web/campbell,1-3. 6 My gratitude to Michael Riordan, Archivist, St. John’s College and The Queen’s College, Oxford, who wrote: “the College kept few records of its commoners (nonfellows) in the eighteenth century so our information is solely from the University’s matriculation register which is also Foster’s main source. The information I have taken comes from the Computus Anuus (Annual Accounts of the College from 1772–8). The reference for these are St. John’s College Archives ACC 1.A. 123–9. However, the College accounts (unlike other Colleges) do list the batells [term bills] of every member of the College, so it is possible to confirm that Blagrove entered the College, in the third term (between Easter and the end of June) in 1771–2, which fits with the matriculation date of 30th June, 1772. It seems likely that he left the College in the course of the academic year 1777–8 as his batells then become nominal—a way of keeping his name in the books of the College. He does not seem to have taken a degree as he is not given the “Dominus” courtesy title that is given to bachelors in the accounts.” Michael Riordan to author, Wednesday, July 27, 2011. See also, J. Foster’s Alumni Oxoniensis 1715– 1886, 6. 7 John Ingamells, Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800 compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 97. The editors are in error as Blagrove attended St. John’s College Oxford. A literal translation would be: “a magnificent and lavish dance in Sienna.” 8 National Gallery, Kingston, Jamaica. See Anthony M. Clark, Pompeo Batoni: A Catalogue of His Works with an Introductory Text. Edited and Prepared for Publication by Edgar Peter Bowron. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 331, cat. no. 372. 9 Edgar P. Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

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In eighteenth century Italy, other leading artists were: Giovanni Antonio Canaletto (1697–1768), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) and Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79). 11 For instance: Official and other personages of Jamaica from 1655 to 1790 to which is added, a chapter on the Peerage, etc. in Jamaica (Kingston, 1896). 12 See: Bill Ashcroft et al., Post-Colonial Studies:The Key Concepts (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), for texts concerned with politics and history see, H. K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” reprinted in Bhabha, Ch 4. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) and for the deconstruction of Western perceptions of the Orient see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1979). 13 (Oxford: Wiley- Blackwell, 2010). 14 Arnold Hauser, “The Scope and Limitations of a Sociology of Art,” in Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon, 1996), 3–17 and 201–213. 15 Norman Bryson et al., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation (Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). 16 Hansard, “Debate on Mr. Wilberforce’s Motion for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” (Commons), 12 May, 1789 in Parliamentary Debates vol. 28. col.45. 17 Smith McCrea, “Antislavery and British Painting of the Black 1760–1841” Ch. 6. PhD Thesis, University Of Manchester, England, 2001. 18 For a transnational approach in Slave Studies see Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard, The Routledge History of Slavery (London: Routeledge, 2010). 19 David Lambert, White Creole Culture: Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), “Introduction.” 20 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Abolition, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) and Lambert, Ch. 1 and for J. Steele, Ch. 2. 21 Pens were usually devoted to the rearing of cattle, horses and other animals as opposed to estates where sugar was grown as a monoculture. 22 Memorandum Book D/EX 1271/1 18c Berkshire Record Office, Reading, England. 23 Francis Haskell, “Preface” to Andrew Wilton and Illaria Bignamini, Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997). 24 Cesare de Seta in Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy, 13–14. 25 Bignamini, “The Grand Tour: Open Issues,” in Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy, 32. 26 Pompeo Batoni to Bartolomeo Talenti, 19 December, 1744 in Bowron and Kerber, vii. 27 Clark, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue, 43. 28 Clark, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue, 15–16. 29 Burney, Music Men and Manners in France and Italy, 1770 (1969), 149. 30 Clark quoting Denys Sutton, “The Art of Pompeo Batoni” in Country Life Annual, London, 1958: 144–7.

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For details see, Clark, 34–41. Clark, 40. 33 The former, and collector, had an aesthetic sensibility, the latter, could discriminate and be able to identify authentic work. 34 Clark, Pompeo Batoni, 30–32; Bowron and Kerber, 51. 35 “List of Slaves belonging to Cardiff Hall Est. July 1st, 1774”. D/EX 1271/1, Berkshire Record Office. 36 Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Esqs., The Dying Negro: A Poem To Which is added a Fragment of a Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes (London: John Stockdale,1773, rept: 1793). 37 Clark and Bowron, (1985), 43, Bowron and Kerber (2007), 42. 38 Five exceptions were: Phillip Metcalf, a distiller, Robert Udney, a West Indian merchant who acquired “taste” and possibly “virtue” by collecting drawings, Sir Matthew Fetherstonough, who inherited his fortune through holdings in the East India Company as well as part-ownership of merchant ships, and Sir Sampson Gideon, later Lord Eardley, who inherited wealth from his father Sampson Gideon, a former financial adviser to the British Government. There is mention of Thomas Dundas, who made his fortune in trade. See Clark, 45 and Bowron and Kerber, 42– 3. 39 Clark, 35–39. 40 Bowron and Kerber, 78. Guidebook examples for gentlemen were: Jonathan Richardson’s An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy (1772), and Thomas Nugent’s The Grand Tour (1749). 41 Ingamells, “Discovering Italy: British Travellers in the Eighteenth Century” in Wilton and Bignamini, 21. 42 James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London: John Murray, 1974), 209–210. 43 Sackville Tufton, 8th Earl of Thanet, 1752–4. Private Collection, England, John Crewe, later 1st Baron Crewe 1760–2, Private Collection, London, John Monk, 1764. Geffrye Museum, London, Thomas Peter Giffard, 1768. Peter Giffard, Chillington Hall, Staffordshire, and Robert Udny, 1770. Whereabouts unknown. 44 For land owning from the seventeenth century see Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840, and W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). 45 Clark, 20 and Bowron and Berber, 51. 46 See “Negroes Run Away” in the Public Advertiser, Tuesday May 11, 1769 in Smith McCrea, “Antislavery,” n.18, 24. 47 Walpole to Mann, July 10, 1774 in W. S. Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 21. 48 Edward Long, Candid Reflections Upon the Judgment Lately Awarded by the Court of Kings Bench (London: Printed for T. Lowndes, 1772), vol 2, 270. 49 Long, The History of Jamaica: or: General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of the Island… etc. (London: T. Lowndes, 1772), vol 2, Book 3. Ch. I, 351– 353. 32

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For an early study of the “West India Lobby” see Lillian M. Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies (London, 1924) repr: Frank Cass Library of West Indian Studies, 1971. 51 Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776–1848, (London and New York: 1988), Introduction, 310. 52 Smith McCrea, “Antislavery,” 29–31. For details see, Folarin Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (1974), 82–103. 53 “List of the Society Instituted in 1787” B. L. Tracts, T/472 (2) 54 This information concerning his third cousin and wife is taken from http://heritagearchives.rbs.com/wiki/John_Blagrove_junior 1753-1824, 1. 55 Lambert, Introduction, 3. See D. Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (1996) and C. Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (2002), 70. 56 Keith Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4 57 Smith McCrea, “Antislavery,” vol. 2. 58 J. G. Stedman, Narrative of Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes in Surinam in Guiana on the Wild Coast of South America from the Year, 1772 to 1779. 2 vols. (1796). 59 Lambert, Introduction, 3, and J. P. Greene, “Liberty, Slavery and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition, 21 (2000). 60 Kiefer, “Jamaican Great Houses” and Hakewill, A Pictuesque Tour, Introduction. 61 These pieces of information are from manuscript files under: Blagrove, Henry John, a later descendant, MS B/N (National Library of Jamaica, Kingston). See also Mavis Campell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796 (1988). 62 See “John Blagrove junior (1753-1824), West Indian Plantation Owner at: http://heritagearchives.rbs.com/wiki/John_Blagrove_junior

INDEX

Abolition of Slave Trade 174,18082,183 Academies 94-5 Accademia dei Pugni 36 Addison, Joseph 21,92,111 Aethiopica 14-16,19 Alfs 99 Affieri 87-8 Anachronism 2 Anglo-Italian cultural relations 36,74-5 Appenines 99,102 Arcadia 94 Ariosto 19 Aretinio, Spinelli 123 Arnold Dana 173 Aristotle 13 Art History 117 Artists Club of Rome 157-9 Art Journal 119 Athenaeum 128 Ballooning 147151,152n16,153n19,153n28 Banks, Joseph 141,151 Baretti 38,40-41,43,87-102 Baroque 119 Barthes, Roland 14 Bartsch, Shadi 14 Batoni Pompeo 175-8 Beccaria 36-8,42-3,458,50n18,54n74,54n79,95,141 Berkeley, George 109 Black, Joseph 144,146 Blagrove 172-84 Blair's Lectures, 3 Blake,William 112 Bologna 56,94 Bologna, Corrado 27-8

Boswell, James 62 Brescia 100 Brewer, John 157 Bridge metaphor 36 Britain 2-4,7 British Artists 155-7,1604,166,169n2 British Club 162 British Exiles, 6 British Library 112,119 British Travellers 6-7 Bulgaria 17 Bunyon, John 111 Burckhardt, Jacob 115 Burney, Charles 175t Callcott, A.W. 118-31 Callcott, Maria 125-9 Cambridge Platonists 110 Campo Formio 63 Canavesi, Angelo 7 Cavallo Tiberio 7,140-54 Cennino Cellini 166 Centre 1-2,8n3,45,79,82-3,87-102 Cervantes 18 Chariclea 15,19 Chinard, Joseph 157 Cicero 14 Cintio,G.G. 19 Clarkson, Thomas 174 Cleland, John 3,6,68-86 Clocks 60-61,65n15 Cnemon 15 Colonies 2-3 Collier, Carly 7 Constable, John 110,114 Craske, Matthew 164 Craven, Elizabeth 4

The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures Cultural History 25-6,37-8,441,45,58,68-9,87-8,108-9,157. Cumberland, George 1556,158,160,163-4 Cumberland Bequest 155-6,160 D'Alembert 37 Dante 6 Dalla Crusteans 6 Defoe, Daniel 22w,76,114 De Michelis, L. 4,36-55 Descartes, R. 114 D'Holbach 36 Diderot 60 Digression 1235,29n2,29n9,29n14,29n26-7 Donato 3,6,68-86 Don Quixote 18,23,90 Du Plaisir 21 Egypt 15-6 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 18 Empiricism 108-9 Encyclopaedia Brittanica 63 England 4,38,41-3,44,47,68-,9,141 English Review 145 Enlightenment 36,689,95,114,174n38 Fanny Hill 3,6,68-86 Fauriel, C.26 Female Characters 68 Fielding Henry 22,24,27,70,73 Finetti, Bonifacio 97-8 Florence 6,117,119,121,126 Forster, E.M. 129 Foscolo, Ugo 56-7,59,61,634,65n1,65n2 Franklin, Benjamin 147 French Philosophes 27,37-9,434,49n5,68-9 Freud, S. 112 Fusillo, Massimo 15,162,1646,170n27. Gaspari, G. 36,41

189

Gatti, Andrea 2,106-16 Gay, John 114 Genovesi, Antonio 42 Genres 3-5,75,83n4,108 Gideon, Sampson 180 Giotto 3-5,75,83n4,108 Godwin, William 40 Goethe 62 Goldoni 95 Gothic 117-18 Gothic Revival 114 Gozzi, Carlo, 72-83 Grand Tour 3-5,49,91,10102,114,118-19,121,175,17980,183 Graf, A. 4 Granata, Sylvia 7,140-54 Great Britain 2-5,91-2,96-7 Guerra, Lia 1-9,23,42 Hagstrum, J.H. 61 Hamilton, William 155 Heinse, Wilhelm 165-66 Helvetius 165 Henley, Willliam 140 Hogarth, Willliam 63,113,117,131n4 Homosexuality 81 Hume, David 27,109,111 Humanism 20 Humphrey Clinker 7 Il Caffe 36 Iliad 13 India 2 Irvine, James 157-9,168,168n2 Italian Aristocracy 98 Italian Art 118,131n2,155-8 Italian Audience 96-98 Italian Dialects 93-4 Italian 'Illuminismo' 75-6,80-81 Italian Literature 95-6 Italian Middle Class 100 Italian Opera 89 Italy 2-4,38,48,69,80,92-4,98-9,101

190

Index

Jefferson,Thomas 151 Jesuits, 89 Johnson, Samuel 3,8n4,22,89,115

Morellet, A. 36-7 Moretti, F. 23 Myrone, M. 163

Kames, Lord 21-2, Kant, I. 110,115

Napoleon 63 Nature 61 Nerozzi 6,56-67 New Art History 174 Newton,Sir Isaac 112 Northcote, James 163 Novel 5,68-86 Novel: erotic 70-2 Novel, female characters 68-9

Lambert, David 173 Lana, Giovani 144 Landscape Painting 110 LeBossu 20 Lind, James 144 Liverpool 164 Locke, John 37,114 Lombardy 7,99 Lombard Enlightenment 7,38 London 39,40-45,47,51n29, 57,69,70,89,91,140 Lord, Albert 13,17 Loretelli, Rosamaria 3,5,12-35,65n2 Macchia, G. 25 Machiavelli, N. 18 Macrae, R.S. 172-89 Macsotay, T. 7,155-71 Mails 45 Mainstream 3-7,87-102,108-16 Mangioni, D. 28 Mann, Horace 121 Manzoni, A. 84-8 Margin 1-2,5-7,45-89-102, 1089,118 Masaccio 121,123-5 Material Culture 98-9 Mazzacurati, G. 24 McMurran, M.H. 69-70 Meneghello, L. 87 Michaelangelo 117,120 Middle Ages 118 Middle Class 69,91 Milan 38-46,48,89,94,99 Milton, John 21 Minerva 179 Modernity 57 Moll Flanders 22,76,113 Montequieu 90

Odyssey 13 Olson, David 15 Oral Narrative 13-5,17,29n8 Oral Poets 12-3,15,17,29n4 Orlando, Furioso 19 Oxford 60,172 Paris 39-41,44-7,69-70,89,156 Parry, M. 13 Parsons, W. 6 Patch, T. 118-31 Payne Knight, Richard 164 Pavia 141 Perugino 110 Petrarch 6 Phillips, James 174 Piedmont 87-89,91 Piozzi, Hester Thrale 6 Pisa 126 Plato 113 Polemics 91 Pope, Alexander 73 Poutingon, G.M. 19 Pre-Raphaelites 118 Press 83n2 Prostitution 82 Priestley, Joseph 109,141 Primitives 117-21,131n6 Publishing 69-72,83n2 Protestant Artists 162 Quattrocento 118

The Centre and the Margins in Eighteenth-Century British and Italian Cultures Quintillian 14 Raphael 110,117,119-20 Renaissance 92,117-19,125-6 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 112,114,119,1245,137n34,137n45,180 Richardson,Samuel 22,24,5666,73,76 Romanticism 114 Rome 16,18,29n11,29n12,489,92,117,119,126,155-7,160-62 Rousseau 59-62,74 Royal Academy 125,130,14022,145,156,162-3 Ruskin, John 118,122,129-30 Santovetti, O. 25 Science 59-63,97,140-4 Scottish Philosophy 27 Self 57-8 Sensibility 57-61,64,110 Sentimentalism 59-60 Shakespeare, William 111 Sharp,Granville 181 Shklousky, V. 18-19,23 Sisimithres 15 Slavery 181-2 Smollett, Tobias 91-2 Somerset House 159 Spectacle 42,146 Spectator, The 42 Spinoza, Baruch 119 Stamphill 3,6,68-86 Steele, Joshua 174 Sterne, Lawrence 23-4,27-8,59,90 Swift, Jonathan 90 Switzerland 57

Tasso 19,94 Theagenon 19 Titian 117,119 Tom Jones 113 Translation 36-7,49n.5,69-86,95 Travel Literature 4-5,51n29,91,101 Tristram Shandy 23-4,28 Turin 99-100 Ubezio, M. 4,38,87,102 Van Gogh, V. 112 'Vanity' 19 Vasari, G. 120-21,127,129 Venice 17,63-4,69-70,745,83,83n1,83n2,89,96,99,102,11 7,172 Venturi, Franco 38 Verri, Alessandro 36-48 Verri, Pietro 36-48 Versailles 46 Virgil 21 Volta, Alessandro 140-1 Voltaire 43,95,111 Vico 97,111 Walpole, Horace 121-2,127,180-1 West, Benjamin 176 West Indies 173-4,180-83 Whitehead, A.N. 113 Whig Interpretation of History 144 Wittgenstein 115 Wollstonecraft, Mary 4 Women 4,74-9 Yahalom, Shelley 75 Yugoslavia 17 Zurich 57

Tansillo, Luigi 78

191