Republics and empires

Italian and American art in transnational perspective, 1840–1970

Melissa Dabakis, Paul Kaplan, Melissa Dabakis, Paul Kaplan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526154613
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art moderne

Republics and empires provides transnational perspectives on the significance of Italy to American art and visual culture and the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture. Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War, it reveals the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two relatively new nations together. It also gives substantial attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States. While American art history has tended to privilege French, British and German ties, these chapters highlight a rich body of contemporary research by Italian and American scholars that moves beyond a discussion of influence as a one-way directive towards a deeper understanding of cultural transactions that profoundly affected the artistic expression of both nations.

Part I: Hybrid republicanisms

1

Past glories, present miseries: nationality, politics, and art in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home

Leonardo Buonomo

Recalling her entrance into Italy, in her 1841 book Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, Catharine Maria Sedgwick evokes the rich historical associations connected with the Alpine mountain pass she and her companions had crossed: ‘this was, I believe, always the route by which the Frederics and their successors brought their German barbarians down upon the plains of Italy’.1 In short, Sedgwick and her travelling companions had literally followed the footsteps of the invaders of old. This is the first of several historical allusions by which Sedgwick, more or less explicitly, aligns herself and, by extension, all foreign visitors (but especially Anglo-American visitors) with barbarians, uncultivated intruders from vaguely defined northern lands, bent on getting as much as they can out of their Italian experience. In so doing, Sedgwick sets the tone for the entire Italian section of her travelogue, where she makes a consistent effort to challenge what she believed to be her Anglo-Saxon Protestant audience’s deeply ingrained superiority complex. For example, while describing her transactions with locals, she repeatedly tries to disprove popular generalisations and cautionary tales about the supposedly innate propensity of lower-class Italians to take advantage of foreigners. When she does take notice of types of behaviour she finds offensive, Sedgwick tends to place them in their proper context, by relating them to relevant historical, political, social, and cultural circumstances. And while she refers to her own country, on more than one occasion, as a happy and fortunate land because of its prosperity and form of government – as opposed to impoverished, foreign-ruled Italy – she also points to other areas (the arts and, more generally, the cultivation of non-utilitarian pursuits) where the comparison between the two countries was not to America’s advantage.

When Sedgwick offers her readers what they would have expected to find in a travelogue – namely descriptions of famous paintings, statues, and buildings – she frequently prefaces her comments with confessions of lack of expertise. As we shall see, this rhetorical strategy allows Sedgwick to present a non-technical and non-canonical reading of Italian art, one in which Italy’s artistic heritage could be perceived as providing insight into the country’s predicament. But if Sedgwick, by her own admission, was not particularly conversant with art history and architecture, she could bring to the Grand Tour genre her knowledge of the Italian language and Italian literature, which sets her apart from the majority of American and British authors, and which gave her unfiltered access into Italian society. That knowledge, combined with what she had absorbed through her interaction with Italian political exiles in the United States, informs the Italian section of Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home and renders it an important chapter in the history of American literary transatlanticism.

In her time, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) was a leading figure in American letters. From her debut as a novelist, with A New-England Tale (1822), she showed her commitment to a distinctive and original national literature by emphasising local settings and character traits. Although she introduced herself to American readers in the apologetic fashion that was expected (if not demanded) of early-nineteenth-century women writers, Sedgwick made it clear that she was doing her part in the creation of a national literature. However ‘humble’ (as she put it), hers was an effort ‘to add something to the scanty stock of native American literature’2 and, as such, was part of the larger project of nation building in which the best American minds of the time were involved. By publishing her first American novels and short stories at a time when to do so was still a somewhat risky enterprise, Sedgwick earned recognition alongside Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant as ‘a founder of her nation’s literature’.3 Equally adept at mining her country’s past for literary materials or portraying the contemporary scene, Sedgwick moved skilfully and freely between fiction and non-fiction. Although in both her fiction (including her last novel, Married or Single?)4 and her private writings Sedgwick indicated that ‘marriage is usually preferable to a single state’,5 she herself chose not to marry and committed herself fully to her profession. Furthermore, she transgressed traditional gendered boundaries between literary topics, delving into the supposedly masculine domains of history, politics, and economics, as well as into areas such as sentiment, domesticity, and piety, widely believed to be the woman writer’s special province. Deeply invested in the question of American cultural independence and the creation of a distinctively national literature, Sedgwick was also remarkably cosmopolitan in her tastes and interests as testified, in particular, by her travelogue Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home.

Based on her European travels of 1839–40, this book fits into the Anglo-American Grand Tour genre, with its route through well-known locations, its descriptions of historical and artistic landmarks, and its emphasis on the picturesque; but it also departs significantly from that tradition in its pronounced interest in contemporary social and political issues. Sedgwick’s concern about the here and now is particularly evident in the second volume of her book, devoted almost entirely to Italy. Instead of focusing mostly on the past, as many British and American authors of books about Italy invariably did, Sedgwick used her observations about the country’s history and glorious artistic heritage to throw into bold relief its present state of near-paralysis and despondency, which she saw as the direct result of political oppression. While duly taking her readers on a guidebook-sanctioned visit to celebrated cities, landscapes, and monuments, she also tried to make them aware of the effects of foreign occupation and despotism on contemporary Italy and the special relevance of Italy’s situation for Americans.

Sedgwick chose to convey her observations in epistolary form, structuring the book as a series of travel letters nominally addressed to her brother Charles back home. But these published letters differ significantly from her surviving private correspondence with Charles and other members of her family, both in size (they are considerably longer) and content (favouring as they do descriptive passages over personal references). They are much closer to passages found in Sedgwick’s travel journal. The published letters, then, constitute, in the words of Lucinda Damon-Bach, ‘a literary strategy calculated to create a sense of intimacy between author and audience’.6 Together with Charles, other relations, and friends of the family, all of Catharine’s readers are the ‘kindred at home’ whom, as the book’s title announces, she addresses from across the Atlantic. It seems to me that particularly in the Italian section of the book Sedgwick extends the meaning of ‘kindred’ even further so as to include, in general, her fellow Americans. She appeals to them as the citizens of a democracy born out of a revolution, and, as such, a people capable of relating to and sympathising with the Italians, then engaged in a struggle for independence and the achievement of nationhood.

As a student of Italian language and culture, Sedgwick was certainly well equipped to read and interpret the Italian scene for her readers. In antebellum America, an acquaintance with the Italian idiom, accompanied by a fascination with things Italian, was not rare among cultivated upper- and middle-class women (as evidenced, for example, by the fairly astounding number of Italy-related stories, sketches, poems, and pictures published in the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book).7 But Sedgwick’s interest in Italy went far beyond the narrow confines of what was regarded as a highly desirable accomplishment in a lady. In the 1830s Sedgwick and her family welcomed to the United States, befriended, and provided essential assistance to some of Italy’s most prominent patriots who, originally condemned to death by the occupying Austrian government, had had their sentences commuted to exile after being confined for years in the notorious Spielberg prison.8 Of the Italian exiles Sedgwick wrote the following: ‘several of them became intimate in my family, and closely bound to it by reverence and affection on our side … Confalonieri, Foresti, Albinola, and our Castillia became our dear friends’.9 While Sedgwick was not alone in her sympathy for the Italian cause, it is fairly safe to say that no other major American writer at the time became so actively involved, or developed such a close relationship, with the representatives of the Italian political diaspora. And only Margaret Fuller, after she took up residence in Italy as the correspondent for the New-York Tribune in the late 1840s, gained a keener awareness and a deeper understanding of Italy’s predicament in the Risorgimento era.10

The encounter with the Italian exiles had a powerful impact on Sedgwick’s opinions about national character, ethnicity, and religion. It forced her to question some of her beliefs which, although more progressive and liberal th...