Text and Image in Modern European Culture

Natasha Grigorian, Margaret Rigaud-Drayton, Thomas Baldwin

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781557536280
• eBook ISBN: 9781612492421
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and image relations under the impact of modern technologies (avant-garde experiments, digital poetry). The discussion encompasses pivotal fin de siècle, modernist, and postmodernist works and movements in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spain. A selected bibliography of work published in the field is also included. The volume will appeal to scholars of comparative literature, art history, and visual studies, and it includes contributions appropriate for supplementary reading in senior undergraduate and graduate seminars.

Part One

Cross-Cultural Networks

The Myth of Psyche in the Work of D’Annunzio and Burne-Jones

Giuliana Pieri

Abstract

In her article, “The Myth of Psyche in the Work of D’Annunzio and Burne-Jones,” Giuliana Pieri analyzes a case of double ekphrasis. “The Story of Cupid and Psyche,” in William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), was the initial stimulus for Edward Burne-Jones, who produced many works inspired by Morris’s retelling of the classical story. In turn, one of Burne-Jones’s watercolors of Cupid Finding Psyche was to inspire the Italian poet and writer Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, in the 1880s and 1890s, went through a distinct Pre-Raphaelite and neo-Renaissance phase. Burne-Jones’s highly personal treatment of his poetic source is contrasted with D’Annunzio’s close reading of Burne-Jones’s watercolor in the poem “Psiche giacente” in the Poema paradisiaco (1893). D’Annunzio’s and Burne-Jones’s Psyche are virginal medieval maidens on the verge of transforming into more fully fledged femmes fatales. Both artist and poet explore ideas of sleep, dream, and stillness and their relations to female imagery in the Aesthetic and Decadent context.

Henry James described Edward Burne-Jones’s painting as an “art of culture, of reflection, of intellectual luxury, of aesthetic refinement, of people who look at the world and at life not directly, as it were, and in all its accidental reality, but in the reflection and ornamental portrait of it furnished by art itself in other manifestations” (qtd. in Spalding 16). The focus on art, beauty, and the aesthetic is also the fundamental characteristic of the work of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the ultimate Italian dandy; a flamboyant and controversial figure who dominated the Italian world of letters, culture, and fashion from his first arrival in Rome in 1881 at the age of eighteen until his death in the late 1930s (Woodhouse, Gabriele D’Annunzio 1-7; Andreoli, D’Annunzio 7-12). D’Annunzio played a major part in the reception of Pre-Raphaelite art in Italy in the 1880s and 1890s and helped create, especially in Rome, a fashionable Pre-Raphaelitism which encompassed painting, the decorative arts, book illustration, and dress history (see Pieri, The Influence). D’Annunzio mentioned Burne-Jones for the first time in an essay in 1887, referring to him as “the greatest contemporary English painter” (“il più gran pittore inglese contemporaneo” [“Un poeta” 937]). D’Annunzio focuses on the spurious Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic poet Adolfus Hannaford and the article has been viewed as proof of D’Annunzio’s confused notion of the Pre-Raphaelite movement wrongly equating the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the Aesthetic school of poetry and painting (see Woodhouse, “Curioser”). Yet, the article did also show how, in D’Annunzio’s mind, Aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelitism were almost entirely interchangeable terms and this helps to explain D’Annunzio’s fascination with the English Pre-Raphaelites. Burne-Jones’s Aestheticism, the idea of art as an alternative to everyday life and the nostalgic but visually accurate evocation of the classical and Renaissance past, was in tune with D’Annunzio’s own poetic Pre-Raphaelitism, which he developed in the 1880s and early 1890s and in which the precise evocation of the meter, style, and language of early Renaissance poetry was the backdrop for his own reworking of medieval and neo-medieval imagery under the influence of European Symbolism and Decadence.

In the present study I focus on a case of double ekphrasis which takes as its starting point the classical story of Cupid and Psyche, originally in book 4 of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, or the Golden Ass, and retold by William Morris in The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). The latter is a long and complex narrative poem which revisits classical and medieval legends. It comprises four volumes and more than 42,000 lines. In 1893, D’Annunzio published a new collection of poems entitled Poema Paradisiaco and in the section “Hortus Larvarum,” the poem “Psiche giacente (Da Burne-Jones)” thus presents the poem as inspired by the English painter. The poem is both an iconotext, which shows a careful and sensitive handling of its visual source, and a testimony to the complexity of D’Annunzio’s Pre-Raphaelite imagery at the time, combining Pre-Raphaelite, early Renaissance, and purely Decadent motifs (see the poem’s full text and first translation into English by Jane Everson in the appendix at the end of this article; Jane Everson’s version is used whenever the poem is quoted in translation).

It was Bianca Tamassia Mazzarotto who first identified the visual source of D’Annunzio’s poem “Psiche giacente” as one of the drawings by Burne-Jones from the series of designs for William Morris’s “The Story of Cupid and Psyche” in The Earthly Paradise. She notes that “it is not a painting but one of the seventy drawings done in 1866 on Cupid and Psyche” (499). Burne-Jones’s designs were intended for the illustrated edition of Morris’s poem and are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. This attribution has so far remained unchallenged, and a note in the most recent edition of D’Annunzio’s collected poems simply states that Burne-Jones “illustrated the story of Cupid and Psyche. The drawing of Psyche found by Cupid while sleeping by a fountain has been transposed into verse by D’Annunzio” (Versi d’amore 1168). However, D’Annunzio could not possibly have seen these drawings, since Morris abandoned the project of an illustrated edition in 1868 and the illustrations were never published during D’Annunzio’s lifetime (see Dunlap). All evidence suggests that Burne-Jones’s original drawings were kept private and they were bequeathed by the artist to John Ruskin and were later part of the Ruskin bequest to the School of Drawing in Oxford on the occasion of Ruskin’s appointment as Slade Professor of Art. Another series of works connected to the drawings are at the William Morris Gallery, London Borough of Waltham Forest: they are the wood-engraved proofs (ca. 1868) for the illustrated edition of The Earthly Paradise (see Marcus 268-83). Two further volumes with preliminary sketches for these illustrations are at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (see Christian, “The Compulsive” 62-69; see also Christian, Edward Burne-Jones).

All of Burne-Jones’s drawings and sketches were done during an intense period of activity and collaboration with Morris between 1858—when Morris published The Defence of Guinevere—and 1867, when Morris was still planning an illustrated edition of The Earthly Paradise. Modeled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, The Earthly Paradise is a series of twenty-four tales with a complex frame narrative, a seasonal pattern, and two stories for each month, one classical and one medieval, each recounted by a member of a group to entertain the others. Morris’s sources are mainly Greek, Scandinavian, Celtic, and Arabian. The work was conceived as an “escape from contemporary problems,” with its tales of romance and adventure set at some indefinite point in the medieval past (Harrison and Waters 78). There is parallel between the stylistic change of Morris and that of Burne-Jones in the second half of the 1860s: “a similar moving away from the earlier Rossetti-inspired paintings; the designs made to accompany The Earthly Paradise show the transition . . . Poet and painter were both leaving the overdominant influence of Rossetti to look for a more personal expression” (Harrison and Waters 79). One of the results of this change is Morris’s emphasis on description and a slowing down of the narrative, which has the effect of “a hypnotic stagnation, remote from reality, which beguiles the reader” (Harrison and Waters 78). In turn, this had a stylistic impact on Burne-Jones, who was becoming increasingly interested in exploiting a sense of narrative stillness and the emphasis on the descriptive through his use of color, form, and surface texture.

“The Story of Cupid and Psyche” is one of eight tales in The Earthly Paradise with Venus as a figure: it is the Classical Tale for May (see Boos, “The Story” 235-51). Psyche is in many ways a quintessential Pre-Raphaelite beauty with golden hair, associated with lilies and music: “So must she fall, so must her golden hair / Flash no more through the city, or her feet / Be seen like lilies moving down the street; / No more must men watch her soft raiment cling / About her limbs, no more must minstrels sing / The praise of her arms and hidden breast” (The Earthly Paradise, lines 304-09). Florence Saunders Boos notes that, like many other female characters in the poem, Psyche seems passive before the agents of her fate, and “in several of its elements Morris’ myth of Psyche follows Victorian paradigms of the ‘good’ woman’s response to sexuality” (“The Designs” 237). Despite being presented as an archetypal Victorian heroine in her faithfulness, patience, and lack of guile, like other good women in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Text and Image in Modern European Culture
• Part One: Cross-Cultural Networks
• Part Two: Ekphrasis and Beyond
• Part Three: Text and Design
• Part Four: Hybrid Texts
• Part Five: Multimedia Encounters
• Part Six: Thematic Bibliography
• Index