Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity

Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity

Simon Goldhill

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780691149844
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400840076
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: History

How did the Victorians engage with the ancient world? Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity is a brilliant exploration of how the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome influenced Victorian culture. Through Victorian art, opera, and novels, Simon Goldhill examines how sexuality and desire, the politics of culture, and the role of religion in society were considered and debated through the Victorian obsession with antiquity.


Looking at Victorian art, Goldhill demonstrates how desire and sexuality, particularly anxieties about male desire, were represented and communicated through classical imagery. Probing into operas of the period, Goldhill addresses ideas of citizenship, nationalism, and cultural politics. And through fiction--specifically nineteenth-century novels about the Roman Empire--he discusses religion and the fierce battles over the church as Christianity began to lose dominance over the progressive stance of Victorian science and investigation. Rediscovering some great forgotten works and reframing some more familiar ones, the book offers extraordinary insights into how the Victorian sense of antiquity and our sense of the Victorians came into being.


With a wide range of examples and stories, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity demonstrates how interest in the classical past shaped nineteenth-century self-expression, giving antiquity a unique place in Victorian culture.

PART 1

Art and Desire

Chapter 1

THE ART OF RECEPTION: J. W. WATERHOUSE AND THE PAINTING OF DESIRE IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

In the 1880s and 1890s, the art galleries of London flared with a burst of painting on classical subjects. Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Leighton, Waterhouse, and a host of less celebrated figures, produced an extraordinary profusion of classicizing canvasses, especially for the Royal Academy, but also for other galleries in London and for exhibitions around the country—pictures which were gazed at by hundreds of thousands of visitors, discussed intently in the press, and which helped form the visual imagination of a generation.

This excitement over imaging classical antiquity takes to a particular height the embracing fascination with ancient Greece and Rome, so much in evidence throughout the broader cultural milieu of nineteenth-century Europe. Classics was an integral part of the furniture of the Victorian mind, bolstered through the elite education system, spread parodically and aspirationally through popular culture, visible in the physicality of the architecture and sculpture of the capital; disseminated in opera, in theatre, in literature, and even in the battles over religion that dominated the spiritual crises that commentators loved to descry in the final years of the century.¹ After the First World War, Virginia Woolf could still write, “it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its conclusions of our own age.”² Romantic poets had long longed for the “isles of Greece, the isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung.” The Renaissance was precisely the rebirth of the privilege of the classical. But, for all the long backstory of neoclassicism, and the still unending history of the classical tradition, the 1880s and 1890s in London were a special time for the Greek gods and the Roman emperors. And the art of these decades was a sign and a symptom of this passion for antiquity.

Nineteenth-century commentators, especially from the middle of the century onward, turned out essay after self-conscious essay on “the girl of the period,” “the signs of the times,” the “art of the age,” the perils and delights of “the modern era.” It was a commonplace of nineteenth-century writing that Victorian England was a great age of progress and was acutely aware of it. Yet it is also striking just how intensely and repeatedly the rapidly changing culture of Britain expressed its concerns, projected its ideals, and explored its sense of self through images of the past. Ye olden days of medieval England, the Renaissance glories of Elizabethan imperialism—Shakespeare and the Armada—and, above all, biblical times and the past of Greece and Rome, provided a repertoire of narratives and images whereby modernity found its ancestors, explanations, and alibis. In the first section of this book, I want to look at how paintings depicting the classical past became a way of talking about—or not talking about—sexual desire, in a period that has become celebrated for its (modern) discovery of sexual science, from the invention, as we say, of homosexuality to Freud’s archaeology of the psyche. How did the passion for antiquity depict and explore passion through antiquity? How did images of ancient desire find a privileged place amid the loud claims of modernity to a new vision of sexuality? These paintings, which became and have remained deeply unfashionable, will be shown not only to reach the heart of a Victorian discourse of erotic desire, but also to raise profound questions about how we see ourselves within the history of sexuality.

In the second chapter of the section, I will look in detail at a single painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which concerns the space of desire—a Greek scene, the gap between a man and a woman, the touch of a girl and a woman—and how this space is traversed by critics and viewers, then and now. In this first and longer chapter, I want to make a broader survey of the art of J. W. Waterhouse, a figure who has suffered markedly from shifts in taste in the twentieth century. His paintings are among the most reproduced of all Victorian art: as posters, postcards, and Internet images, Waterhouse’s work has been for forty years, again, hugely popular (and populist). At the same time, his lush classical realism has been largely ignored (at best) by critics, and (more often than not) despised as the epitome of sentimentality—chocolate-box art—or as dubious lasciviousness by a modernist teleological narrative that privileges nineteenth-century impressionism in the move toward abstraction. Yet Waterhouse was at the very center of the turn toward classicizing art in the 1880s and 1890s. His pictures were highly valued, critically and financially, and were triumphantly successful across Europe and America. His art is paradigmatic of later Victorian London’s visual imagination.

My interest in Waterhouse, however, is not just because he epitomizes the fashion of the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the perils of fragile reputation. One complaint frequently aired against Waterhouse’s art by twenty-first-century critics—both in journalistic jibes and from within a more extended and politically informed discussion—focuses on his representation of female figures as sexually available teenagers, dreamily exposing their underdeveloped bodies through flimsy silks. Indeed, from the 1880s until today, Victorian nudes, as we will see, have repeatedly provoked such moral qualms, centered on the prurience or false innocence of a viewer’s response to the art of exposure. It must be right to worry about such images: It is not as if the inheritance of Victorian modeling of gender has simply or cleanly passed away from our cultural or visual imagination, let alone from contemporary social behavior. But one claim of this chapter is that Waterhouse’s engagement with the undoubtedly patriarchal regime of the visual in Victorian Britain is more sophisticated and engaged than the standard critical denigration suggests. In particular—and in part by tracing the critical anxiety about the erotic in Waterhouse’s painting—I shall be exploring how Waterhouse represents the male subject of desire, and how his representational devices position, manipulate, and implicate the viewer—a topic that has been largely ignored in the scant discussions of his work, and is strikingly absent from the most influential attempts to see Waterhouse’s art in its Victorian context.³ This discussion will place Waterhouse at the center of a Victorian worry about male self-control and erotic openness, in which the imaging of the classical world plays an integral role. My point is not simply that Waterhouse is a more complex and provocative artist than is customarily thought. His case is also a telling example of how one strategy of modern self-definition loves to oversimplify “the Victorians” as a contrastive other to today—and nowhere more obviously than in the field of sexuality. Waterhouse’s visualization of the classical becomes a paradigm of how viewers place themselves within a history of sexuality.

My second aim in turning to Waterhouse is to contribute specifically to current debates about art and text within the general arena of Reception Studies. Waterhouse’s classical subjects are not just the familiar icons of tradition—Hercules, the Sirens, Venus, and so forth—from the familiar masters of classics—Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. He also depicts far less familiar figures—Mariamne, St. Eulalia—taken from far less familiar authors—Josephus, Prudentius—and often explicitly so: Many of Waterhouse’s paintings come with titles and catalogue entries which announce that their subjects are taken from specific classical texts. Where a work of art explicitly cues a text in this way, scholars have inevitably been tempted to offer a formalistic analysis, which focuses on how the individual artist has taken a (verbal) image from the classical past and turned it into a (pictorial) image in the present. Art is conceptualized as illustration, and (thus) reception as a unilinear process—where the artist reads a text and then transforms it into an image: Titian’s version of Ovid, Waterhouse’s Prudentius.⁴ There are some obvious ways in which this seductively simple model immediately needs nuancing. Images are constructed also within iconographic traditions: Waterhouse’s Prudentius may be formulated through Caravaggio’s St. Paul, say, as much as through the Latin poem. Readings of texts also always need their historical, intellectual, and political contextualization: The depiction of a martyr is inevitably formed within a religious agenda. Artists also work within frames of cultural polemic, technical experimentation and limitation, and market forces, all of which mold the creative act. Part of this chapter’s work will be to provide the elements of the cultural history that Waterhouse’s pictures require, if their richness as cultural products is to be appreciated.

But the citation, explicit or indirect, of specific classical sources, attached to a picture, exhibited in a gallery in Victorian London, also establishes a wonderfully layered scene for the performance of cultural authority—as the viewer reads and evaluates the painter’s allusive reference to a privileged classical source, in relation to the image of the classical world on display, in the light of his or her own differing levels of classical knowledge and interest, and with an eye, too, on other viewers’ and critics’ expressed or projected opinions—and on the dictates of propriety in the public domain.⁵ And the painter’s title or catalogue entry for the painting anticipates this scene. The exhibition of the painting in the gallery becomes a site where classical knowledge is deployed in response to an image of the classical world—arrogantly, foolishly, desperately, longingly, knowingly, mistakenly, brilliantly (etc.)—and this deployment is part of the cultural performance of reception. Viewing, said the late Michael Baxandall famously, is “a theory-laden activity”: viewing classicizing art in the Victorian gallery comes laden with particularly heavy baggage; and the interplay of citations of classical texts with depictions of the classical world brings the artist’s and viewer’s purchase on antiquity—the baggage—into the limelight. Waterhouse’s text-labeled and text-laden images are a paradigmatic site for reflecting on the complexity of the circulation of classical knowledge in Victorian culture—reception in action.

Fleshliness and Purity

I shall begin my argument with a painting that will put the representation of erotics, the place of an artwork within cultural history, and the relation of art and text, firmly on the agenda. Plate 1 is one of Waterhouse’s first great successes, his painting Saint Eulalia, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885, and now in the Tate in London. The painting is huge—six feet tall—and it is a very striking theme, strikingly depicted. The subject is novel and bold: there are no other modern pictures of Eulalia that I have been able to trace, although there is one formulaic mosaic image of her in the procession of virgin martyrs in the basilica of S. Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna.⁶ Immediately after the exhibition of this canvas, Waterhouse was elected to the Academy, and critics wrote at length on the technical skills of the work. These same critics, however, remained surprised and even confused by the choice of topic—and their surprise cues a question of its choice and treatment. Eulalia is taken from Prudentius’s Peristephanon, a fourth-century collection of religious poems about martyrs that, even in the heady days of Victorian classicism and religious fervor, was not a text he could expect his audience to recall immediately and fully. Hence he adds a brief comment in the catalogue: “Prudentius says that the body of St Eulalia was shrouded ‘by a miraculous fall of snow when lying exposed in the forum after martyrdom.’”⁷

The third poem of the Peristephanon tells the story of Eulalia with Prudentius’s customary combination of blood, torture, and verbal pyrotechnics.⁸ Eulalia is a twelve-year-old girl who lives in the country. She willfully flees her mother’s control, to go to town in order to refuse to do a sacrifice, so she can bear witness to Christ. The Romans duly punish her. The executioners slice her breasts with an iron claw, and cut her sides to the bone. She revels in her triumph (Perist. 3.136–40): “Look Lord, your name is being written on me. How I love to read these letters, which record your victories, Christ, and the purple of the blood itself as it is drawn forth speaks your holy name.” As she dies, her hair covers her nakedness, and a white dove, her pure spirit, escapes from her mouth, and finally a sudden heavy fall of snow covers her body from prying eyes. It is a poem that revels in violence to the female body as a vindication of Christian suffering—both an image of Christ’s suffering and a witness to it.

It should be immediately clear that Waterhouse’s summary of Prudentius for the catalogue is remarkably thin—or, rather, seems deliberately to remove the bloody violence and verbal exuberance of Prudentius’s narrative. Prudentius’s fervid enthusiasm becomes the barest of identifications—and the sentence that Waterhouse puts into inverted commas as a quotation from the Latin does not actually occur in the poem: it is Waterhouse’s own summary of some glorifying and highly charged expressions of the early Christian poet.

Waterhouse’s construction of the visual image is equally distinctive. The picture is, first of all, a remarkable exercise in foreshortening,⁹ technically expert, and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Discipline and Revolution: Classics in Victorian Culture
• Part 1. Art And Desire
• Part 2. Music And Cultural Politics
• Part 3. Fiction: Victorian Novels Of Ancient Rome
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index