Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance

John E. Law, Lene Østermark-Johansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351875981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The historiography of the Italian Renaissance has been much studied, but generally in the context of a few key figures. Much less appreciated is the extent of the enthusiasm for the subject in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the subject was 'discovered' by travellers and men and women of letters, historians, artists, architects and photographers, and by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance explore the breadth of the responses stimulated by the encounter between the British, the Americans and the Italians of the Renaissance. The volume approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. While recognising the abiding importance of the familiar 'great names', it seeks to draw attention to a wider cast of people, many of whom led colourful, energetic lives, knew Italy well, and wrote eloquently about the country and its Renaissance. Several essays show that 'Renaissance studies' became a field in which female historians could explore areas of relevance to the 'New Woman'. Other chapters examine the aims and politics of collecting and the place of the collector in literature and in the rediscovery of Renaissance artists. The contribution of teachers and other less formal champions of the Italian Renaissance is explored, as is the role of photographers who re-framed and re-viewed Florence - the Renaissance city - for Victorian and later eyes.

Chapter 1
Florence, Photography and the Victorians

Graham Smith

Admirers of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View will remember that Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy and photographs by the Alinari are important motifs in the book and in the Merchant Ivory film based on it. At the beginning of the second chapter, the ‘clever’ Miss Lavish undertakes to emancipate’ Lucy Honeychurch from her Baedeker. Later that morning she abandons Lucy on the steps of Santa Croce, carrying away her guidebook. It is in Santa Croce that Lucy has her first extended contact with old Mr Emerson and his son George, and it is there that we get our first insight into Lucy’s uncertain identity. Two chapters later, photographs by the Alinari play an important role in initiating the tortuous romance between Lucy and George that is the connective tissue of Forster’s story¹

In the second chapter Forster pokes fun at the notion of the indispensability of Baedeker. Describing Lucy’s unsuccessful search for the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels and for a sculpture that Ruskin particularly admired in Mornings in Florence, Forster assures the reader that Lucy was capable of ‘feeling what was proper’ in front of Giotto’s frescoes. However, he makes it clear that she needed the authority of Baedeker or Ruskin to release those feelings. Alone in Santa Croce with no Baedeker and unable to tell which chapels contained Giotto’s frescoes, Lucy walked about disdainfully unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date’.²

In chapter four Lucy asserts her independence by walking from the Pension Bertolini, where she was staying with her chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett, to the Alinari shop on the Via degli Strozzi. Lucy’s revolt was itself a compromise, a substitute for the freedom promised by riding outside one of the electric trams that circled Florence. At the Alinari establishment she compounded her rebellion by buying a photograph of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus– this in defiance of Charlotte’s earlier warning that ‘Venus, being a pity, spoiled the picture, otherwise so charming’. Photographs of other works of art depicting male and female nudes were added to this purchase – Giorgione’s Tempesta, the Polykleitan Idolino, some of the Sistine frescoes by Michelangelo and the Apoxyomenos by Lysippos. ‘She felt a little calmer then’, Forster tells us, ‘and bought Fra Angelico’s Coronation, Giotto’s Ascension of St John, some Della Robbia babies, and some Guido Reni Madonnas. For her taste was catholic, and she extended approval to every well-known name.’ That Lucy’s purchases all depicted the human figure – many of them nude – was a reflection of her unsettled state of mind, a restiveness brought on by ‘Too much Beethoven’.

Although she had spent almost seven lire in the Alinari shop, ‘the gates of liberty seemed still unopened’, and Lucy walked on to the Piazza della Signoria, reflecting that nothing ever happened to her. Moments later a violent quarrel erupts in the square and the photographs become participants in the resulting tragedy. More importantly, however, they play a pivotal role in bringing about Lucy’s first intimacy with George Emerson. Of the quarrel, Forster observes, ‘Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. … They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly on the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.’ ‘That was all’, he concludes. Then, ‘A crowd rose out of the dusk. It hid this extraordinary man from her, and bore him away to the fountain.’

Lucy faints and drops her photographs. On recovering consciousness, she discovers that ‘one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms’. There follows a tense pas de deux in which Lucy attempts to flee while George retrieves the photographs. Lucy recovers swiftly, however, and discourses on the Italian character while walking towards the Arno. At the embankment George throws something in the river. ‘Where are the photographs?’ asks Lucy, ‘I believe it was my photographs that you threw away’ ‘I didn’t know what to do with them’, George responds, ‘They were covered with blood.’ George knows that ‘something tremendous has happened’, something that binds him to Lucy, but she retreats into conventionality, vexed that ‘She had been in his arms, and he remembered it, just as he remembered the blood on the photographs that she had bought in Alinari’s shop.’

Forster surely intended to introduce an element of irony by having Baedeker and the Alinari photographs take on such portentous roles in A Room with a View. It is ironic also that Lucy’s excursion to the Alinari shop should be the prelude to such dramatic events, for Forster certainly knew that such an outing was itself conventional. Indeed, in the Victorian and Edwardian periods the purchase of photographs from the Alinari was as much part of the typical visitor’s experience of Florence as was Baedeker.

Discovery and Recognition

In her Observations and Reflections, published in 1785, Hester Lynch Piozzi, a member of the circle of Dr Johnson, observed that ‘Italy … is only a fine well-known academy figure, from which we all sit down to make drawings according as the light falls, and our seat affords opportunity’³ Mrs Piozzi’s metaphor suggests that an English visitor to Italy might approach the familiar scenes with some freedom and creativity. In practice, however, the traveller gravitated to ‘seats’ from which the ‘best’ views might be enjoyed.

‘The greater part of the pleasure of the whole tour … consisted not in discovery, but in recognition’, observed the historian John Hale in his introduction to the journal of Samuel Rogers, author of the immensely popular poem Italy.⁴ It was also the case that literary and visual traditions affected the manner in which these sights were experienced. The terms in which Hale characterized Rogers’s experience of Italy are again illuminating:

Careful preparation for the tour helped to dull the eye … by emphasising the memory. … Every stone, every road had its historical association. A scene could not be fully appreciated unless the memory peopled it with illustrious shades. … nothing was seen for its own sake; the burden of appreciation fell more heavily on the memory than upon the eye; between the actual object and the watcher hung a gauze of association painted with figures and words.⁵

And again:

The light from whatever Rogers saw was doubly refracted. It first passed through the lens of association, and took from it some literary or historical colour. It then passed through the lens of pictorial reminiscence and took a little more. What Rogers saw was already a picture of itself.⁶

The importance of historical or literary association for the traveller’s experience is made clear by Rogers’s own observation that ‘in Italy memory sees more than the eye’. ‘Let the living wander where they will’, he writes in Italy, ‘They cannot leave the footsteps of the dead’.

Convention and tradition were important in establishing what was of interest to the English traveller, but this was also codified by travel writing, in the form of journals, memoirs and practical handbooks. Among the handbooks, those most familiar to British visitors to Italy were certainly Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy and Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy. These publications were taxonomic works that codified the experience of Italy, instructing the traveller on what was noteworthy. In short, the guidebook was educational as well as practical, providing a regimen that would enable the traveller efficiently to do’ Italy. To quote Hale once more: ‘for the traveller who had prepared carefully for what he was going to see, the greatest pleasure lay not in coming upon the unexpected, but in a measured reaction to the familiar’. Despite the vision of freedom conjured up by titles such as E.V. Lucas’s ‘A Wanderer in Florence’, travel for the British tourist was a form of work.⁷ Like any work, it had to be performed expeditiously and was expected to produce discernible outcomes. For the Victorian traveller, the vision of self-improvement justified both the pleasures and the travails of tourism.

Pictorial Reminiscence

‘Joyous it is’, wrote Virgil in a famous passage in the Georgics, ‘to roam o’er heights, where no forerunner’s track turns by a gentle slope down to Castalia.’⁸ William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of negative-positive photography famously employed these lines – in the original Latin – to serve as the epigraph for The Pencil of Nature, his groundbreaking book illustrated with photographs.⁹ The Virgilian motto provides a fitting metaphor for Talbot’s journey of discovery, which began at Lake Como and led to his invention of photography. However, it does not accurately describe how the new medium was applied to the art of travel.

Although photography provided a new means of recording, the subjects it captured were usually quite conventional. In short, the taste for the familiar was also a powerful force influencing the production of travel photography. Convention and common sense predisposed the earliest photographers to familiar subjects and to depicting them from traditional points of view. The first photographers followed well-trodden paths and their cameras functioned literally as new lenses of pictorial reminiscence. It is therefore not surprising that the earliest photographic views of Florence taken by British travellers connect with existing traditions in the graphic arts and painting and with contemporaneous photographs made by Italian and other practitioners.

Alexander Ellis made three full-plate daguerreotypes in Florence between 29 June and 3 July 1841. These photographs form part of an extensive collection of 159 daguerreotypes that he made during a tour of Italy that began in 1840 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Florence, Photography and the Victorians
• 2 ‘Let agents be sent to all the cities of Italy’
• 3 The Art of Alessandro Botticelli through the Eyes of Victorian Aesthetes
• 4 On the Motion of Great Waters
• 5 Renaissance fin de siècle: Models of Patronage and Patterns of Taste in American Press and Fiction (1880–1914)
• 6 Illustrating Lorenzo the Magnificent:from William Roscoe’s The Life of Lorenzo de Medici called the Magnificent (1795) to George Frederic Watts’s Fresco at Careggi (1845)
• 7 John Addington Symonds and the Despots of Renaissance Italy
• 8 Writing a Female Renaissance: Victorian Women and the Past
• 9 Vernon Lee and the Renaissance: from Burckhardt to Berenson
• 10 Edward Armstrong (1846–1928), Teacher of the Italian Renaissance at Oxford
• 11 Cecilia M. Ady
• 12 L. Arthur Burd, Lord Acton, and Machiavelli
• 13 Medieval and Renaissance Siena and Tuscany c.1900: Civic Life, Religion and the Countryside
• Index