Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes some of the key findings of the book, arguing that the projects described here attest to the fact that the Pygmalion myth was a foundational theme for modern aesthetics, offering, as it did, a means of thinking about the way that the perceiving human related to the art object and about what the object, in return, did to its perceiver. It argues that while this historical moment has been understood to see the emergence of autonomy for the individual fine arts, the texts examined in this book have confirmed that, even at such moments of supposed emancipation, the materials of art acted together, partaking of one another’s essences through analogy and cooperation.

Pimmalione

This chapter traces the reception of Rousseau’s melodrama Pygmalion on the Italian peninsula during the final decades of the eighteenth century. It argues that these decades also saw a renewed impetus for a revival of the ancient Greek and Roman speech-song—an impetus that can be found within Rousseau’s musical writings and within the invention and reception of melodrama itself. A kind of Italian opera that drew on the themes and techniques of melodrama came into being in Venice in the 1790s.

Introduction

This book considers the history of aesthetics by taking into account not only theories of the arts but also the rich fabric of practices relating to the world of performing bodies onstage and the music that sounded alongside them and was made by them—the works of art, music, and theater that were conspicuously about art-objecthood. The introduction sketches the broader fashion for animated statues described in the book, asking what readers can hope to gain from a detailed account of this historical phenomenon that was situated at (or near) the emergence of modern aesthetic thought, as well as the birth of a musical canon.

Giuditta Pasta and the History of Musical Electrification

Chapter 5 traces the theme of human plasticity into Italian aesthetic discourse and opera of the 1820s and 1830s. The echoes of the musical statues of the late Enlightenment can be heard in the reception of performers of Ottocento opera, especially the women. Figures like Maria Malibran and particularly Giuditta Pasta were construed as living statues or artificially animated interlopers from an ancient past. This quality of animatedness was described with a very new kind of imagery within music criticism, one that drew on well-known developments in the nascent scientific field later known as electrobiology.

Defining Italy in Haunted Rome

Chapter 3 considers two novels—Alessandro Verri’s Le notti romane (1804) and de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807)—that were concerned with defining Italy politically. These novels can be seen to develop a new and distinct model of the “Italian,” building on the older principle of the spirit of languages, metastasizing this principle from mouths into bodies, and diffusing it onto the Italian landscape. Both novelists construct a single archetype to represent the nation itself: the orator who looks like an animated statue and speaks with a melodious voice about the history and fate of Italy. This chapter argues that the notion of plasticity developed by these novels prefigured Hegel’s in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and in the lectures on aesthetics. Then it notes that the musical speech described in Le notti romane and Corinne was the subject of a first ethnomusicological study of “native” Italian song.

Attentive Statues

Chapter 1 examines the Milanese pantomimes of Gasparo Angiolini, in particular his ballet on the theme of Condillac’s statue, La vendetta spiritosa (Milan, 1781; revived as La vendetta ingegnosa, o la Statua di Condilliac, Venice, 1791), and his project of creating a language of musical gestures that could be understood without training or acculturation. Inspired by Rousseau, Condillac, and Milanese writers such as the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria, Angiolini hoped that this “sign language” that could overcome linguistic and even political boundaries.

Partial Animacy and Blind Listening in Napoleonic Italy

Chapter 4 continues these considerations of the animated statue’s political resonance during the Napoleonic years, but with a particular focus on the ways in which this model was deployed to represent socialization on the stage. First, the chapter marks the final flourishing of the Pygmalion theme on Italian stages in the first years of the nineteenth century. Then it traces the ways in which these fantasies of a plastic-human threshold were relocated to the biological body. Pygmalion narratives came to be applied not only to statues but also to living humans with nonfunctioning senses.