Matter, Form, Abstraction

This chapter addresses the constantly shifting forms that mediated audiences’ experiences of admired antiquities from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth. Literary texts and reproductive prints not only diffused knowledge of ancient art, but shaped new creation in literature and the visual arts, which in turn contributed to the establishment of new aesthetic norms. Through analyses of authors ranging from Lessing to Winckelmann, from Coleridge to Blake, from George Eliot to Henry James, and culminating with Ruskin and Pater, this chapter argues that the emergence of an ever-more abstract and formalist vision of antiquity was shaped by the ongoing shifts in the cultural presence of antique objects.

The Experience of Form (Bewilderment at the Vatican in George Eliot and Vernon Lee)

The consolidation of the fields of art history and archeology in the nineteenth century was characterized by a number of fundamental revisions that were bound to track unevenly with developments in taste. Shifts in aesthetic values and in the history of art itself presented unavoidable challenges to the status of major collections. And yet, some collections were so esteemed that it was difficult for public interest in them to shift along with the vicissitudes of advanced taste. This chapter analyzes the place of the Vatican museum in two distinct but characteristic works of the later part of the nineteenth century in which the intersection of the history of taste and individual aesthetic response is made a matter of deep affective significance: Vernon Lee’s essay, “The Child in the Vatican” and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Whether the experience of the sculpture collection at the Vatican becomes an occasion to represent an unresolvable emotional crisis framed around a formal issue, or an opportunity to address a formal issue given force by its manifestation as a profound emotional turning point, both texts register fundamental shifts in taste that were bound to affect the objects around which that taste had developed. By registering the limits of powerful concepts that had attempted to establish the relationship of subjects to admired objects, George Eliot and Vernon Lee reveal the emotional determinants and uncertainties accompanying and helping to shape the emergence of formal concerns out of material concepts.

“Strange Aphrodite”

This chapter brings to a close the argument of the first part of the book through an analysis of the social crises Ruskin discovers in the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner. Ruskin gave the name “the English death,” to the grim combination of economic and military violence and social indifference characteristic of the nineteenth century, which he finds at the heart of the achievement of his preeminent modern painter. According to this account, even Turner’s most beautiful landscape is shaped by the boyhood experience of urban poverty that determined the painter’s sensibility, and which fitted him to capture the melancholy forms of alienation and suffering in reaction to which the experience of nature derives its force. This chapter puts Ruskin’s claims about the formal evidence of the sources of the painter’s sensibility in relation to later theoretical and artistic attempts to represent the relationship between material conditions and the reactions they provoke. Returning to the split form of Raphael’s Transfiguration and looking forward to arguments about historical crisis in Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, it proposes the recognition of the power of material conditions driving both the nineteenth-century painter and his major critic by highlighting a number of linked displacements that have been difficult for criticism to address: not just the sophistication of the political work entailed in the creation of beautiful objects in the nineteenth century, but the complex forms of solidarity and social analysis that may be discovered in the critical work of the period

Failure and Revision at the Vatican

Every museum is the repository not only of the objects it gathers together, but also of the spoken and unspoken concepts that determined the accumulation of its collections. The previous two chapters have addressed the intersection of idea, experience, and mediation in the reception of antique art in literature. This brief interchapter traces changes in the account of the classical antiquities on display at the Vatican museums as reflected in changes to the text of the most influential travel guide to Rome when it was revised at the end of the nineteenth century. The transformations in these volumes vividly demonstrate the cultural challenges that result when concept and collection no longer match up as they once had. As new claims about the history of classical art emerged, and new kinds of antique objects came to be valued, language had to be found to address the unbridgeable gaps that opened up between history and aesthetic values as a tradition of admiration became ever more distant from the materials on which it has been built.

Desire and the Body of Inspiration

At the core of this chapter is a discussion of what the representation of the life of the artist in verse or in painting demonstrates about what might be considered the baser drives shaping the imagination of art in the nineteenth century. Close attention to these texts and images complicates ideas about interest and disinterest associated with authors as varied as Immanuel Kant and Pierre Bourdieu, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The aim of this chapter is to slow down the speed with which the gesture toward interest forecloses analysis. It argues that characteristic locations toward which the claim of interest drives an argument—notably sexual pleasure, material benefit, and even social advancement—should not be treated as the end points they are often taken to be. The figure of Raphael in art and literature, and especially the traditions associated with his loves and his death, are presented as representative of material preoccupations characteristic of the period—and influential afterwards.

Pater at the Museum/Raphael’s Fortune

For all the losses that anti-museal writing has traced to the emergence of the modern museum (the erasure of the unique value of each piece on display by its placement in a heterogeneous whole; the impossibility of promoting an experience similar to that of the original conditions of making or display of particular works; the undermining of the cultural coherence a work is understood to instantiate, etc.), the institution itself may be understood to open up the possibility of correcting the very idealizing or abstracting sensibilities with which those same losses have generally been associated. In Walter Pater, the museum is a place of real experience, and his career-long reflection on the significance of the kinds of encounters—and so of the kinds of ideas—it makes possible or necessary is the subject of this chapter. The critic’s long engagement with Raphael, I argue, is shaped at every turn by his revisionist engagement with the long-standing convention of viewing the painter as a model for the productive relationship between admired art of the past and a creative modernity. As Pater adds new conceptual subtlety to the nineteenth-century vision of Raphael as model, the artist becomes a figure for the most powerful and meaningful disposition of a material past.

Transfiguration

This chapter introduces two topics that will run throughout the book: the importance of the reproductive print in the period, and of Raphael’s Transfiguration. Reproductive prints were prized objects in the nineteenth century that inevitably shaped the reception of art works in the period. As more accurate, but far less labor-intensive, forms of reproduction took over their role, they have generally been lost to sight as objects and as topics for analysis. But recognition of their physical presence illuminates a number of topics that concern Material Inspirations: the relationship between matter and idea, the pressure of remains on culture, and the effect of forms of mediation on ideas about art. Raphael’s Transfiguration fascinated later periods formally and historically. It was known to be the painter’s last work, and understood to have been finished by his students after his death, and so it had important biographical associations even as it put into question ideas of individual creative agency. The divided form of the painting consistently called out for reconciliation by writers on the work, and was soon linked to the tension between the world and a state beyond it that the canvas represents. This chapter proposes ways in which unresolvable questions of representability raised by the theological program of the painting may be placed in relation to developments in taste in the nineteenth century, including reproduction itself.

The Ruined Cathedral, Black Arts, and the Grave in Engraving

It was not lost on writers on taste in the nineteenth century that developments in technology that made reproductions ever more ubiquitous, like the related phenomenon of the proliferation of museums and temporary exhibitions, would inevitably affect the relationship of the public to both art and mediation. This chapter traces the dark figures around which Ruskin develops his accounts of the psychological effects of the experience of art objects and reproductions in an era in which abundance and transience were coming to dominate in the experiences of the arts. The chapter culminates with an account of the critic’s attempt to reimagine engraving—the human creative act at the heart of reproduction for much of the century—not as an ongoing manifestation of transience or alienated labor, but as a form of carving designed to register meaning for permanent ends.

Ruin and Allegory in Benjamin

To think about allegory in Walter Benjamin is to identify as a fundamentally historical problem matter’s awkward position between compelling idea and unwieldy thing. This chapter locates Benjamin’s first major project, his 1925 study of German drama of the seventeenth century in Origins of the German Trauerspiel, in the context of the nineteenth-century culture of art that shaped that extraordinary work. In a historical displacement, itself typical of the nineteenth-century formulations shaping his thought, Benjamin’s reflections on the creative work of a post-reformation German culture become the occasion to address the sources of emergent forms of meaning-making built on fragments of unassimilable material from the past. The crisis of legitimacy and cultural power manifested most brutally in the Thirty Years’ War revitalizes practices that had come to the fore in another period of unresolved crisis, the transition from classical antiquity to the Christian era. As a creative and interpretative mode depending on the ongoing preservation of forms that took their original meaning from an earlier dispensation now lost, allegory becomes the characteristic manifestation of the culture of an era of profound and ongoing political and religious uncertainty.

Introduction

Material Inspirations is a study of the inextricable relationship between matter and idea that shaped the nineteenth-century culture of art, and of the ways in which those who reflected on that relationship so often returned to art in order to orient their thinking. This Introduction addresses the emotional force of arguments touching on a set of interrelated categories—matter, objects, and things—but especially on reality itself. These categories are consistently evoked by critics and theorists, whether the aim is to lay out a causal explanation for the production of a work of art or to argue for the existence of a special realm of direct experience beyond the realm of analysis. How, the Introduction asks, do art and literature intersect with claims driven by the aspiration to move beyond artifice?