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Victorianized Romans: Images of Rome in Victorian Painting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

George P. Landow
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Extract

Victorian writers and artists gazed at the phenomenon that was Rome and found in it what they wanted and needed to find. Rome cast a longer shadow than did the Bible on the British upper and upper-middle classes, for whom Latin was a second language and Roman history a second past. The Bible's influence pervaded the culture of the classes below them, many of whose members had learned to read precisely in order to read the Scriptures according to evangelical interpretive and meditative practice. Since many individual members of the lower and middle classes rose in power, wealth, and social position during the Victorian period, cultural attitudes based on the Scriptures came into conflict with those based on the classical past. But for those in power, Rome and its grand, diverse, tortured, ambiguous history remained the predominant cultural example, though at times notions of chivalry and Hellenism rivaled its influence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 12 , Spring 1984 , pp. 29 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1. See Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

2. Dorothea's encounter with Rome is thus but one example of the way Hellenism and Hebraism clash in the novel. See Knoepflmacher, U. C., Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965).Google ScholarWitemeyer, Hugh, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 79–87Google Scholar, presents much valuable information about the background of Dorothea's encounter with the Eternal City.

3. In her 1977 Brown University Ph.D. dissertation, “Robert Browning and Biblical Typology,” Linda H. Peterson demonstrates that the poet employs this form of scriptural symbolism as one answer to his career-long concern with the problems of meaning and organization. According to Professor Peterson, Browning organizes The Ring and the Book around such questions. The first and last books employ typology to examine the role of the poetic imagination in correctly apprehending reality. “In the first triad [Books II-IV] the monologuists interpret the Franceschini case by correlating its participants and events directly with the Old Testament types. In the second triad, however, the monologuists do not correlate their experiences with the type but instead link themselves with the New Testament antitype. Almost as if they had heard Rome speak, they complete the pattern of prefiguration and fulfillment, presenting either Guido or Pompilia as the ‘fulfillment’ and thus making the structural arrangement of the first two triads resemble the relationship of Old and New Testaments” (pp. 167–68). “If by Book VII we have already judged the case and established the ‘spiritual guilt’ of the participants, as Chesterton puts it, what is Browning's concern in the remainder of the poem? Quite simply, in Books VIII through XI he tests the validity of the typological method itself, of the patterns it considers authoritative and of the Christian view of history it implies” (p. 182).

4. Wolff, Robert Lee, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (New York: Garland, 1977), pp. 27–107Google Scholar, contains a valuable discussion of these polemical fictions.

5. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952).Google Scholar

6. The first work cited is illustrated in color in the catalogue for the Sotheby's Belgravia sale of 19 March 1979 (no. 28), and the other works by this artist mentioned above appear in both Forbes, Christopher, Victorians in Togas: Paintings by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema from the Collection of Allen Funt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973)Google Scholar and Alma-Tadema, the catalogue (with color illustrations) of the Sotheby's Belgravia sale (6 November 1973)Google Scholar of the Funt collection. Works of Alma-Tadema cited below without present locations formerly be longed to the Funt collection and are illustrated in these works.

7. Magnificent Dreams: Burne-Jones and the Late Victorians (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1978), p. 64.Google Scholar Spalding also suggests that Alma-Tadema's works appealed to “self-made merchants and industrialists,” for they “implied classical learning on the part of the owner, who may well have lacked the classical education of the upper classes.”

8. In addition to depicting major events of Roman history and land scapes filled with Roman ruins, Romantic art frequently employs the destruction of Pompeii as a paradigm for political, personal, and metaphysi cal crisis. See my Images of Crisis: Liter ary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).Google Scholar When Alma-Tadema painted a subject from Bulwer-Lytton's popular The Last Days of Pompeii (1834)Google Scholar, he produced the tranquil Glaucus and Nydia (1867; formerly Allen Funt Collection)Google Scholar, which completely avoids those aspects of the novel upon which other painters concentrated.

9. The first three works following Poynter's, all of which are undated, are illustrated in the catalogue for the Sotheby's Belgravia sale of 24 October 1978 (nos. 225, 222, and 190). Oliver's undated work appears in this firm's catalogue for the sale of 8 March 1977 (no. 180), and the remaining two in that of 6 December 1977 (nos. 94 and 50).

10. The Classical Spirit in American Portraiture, the catalogue of a 1976 exhibition at Brown University, illustrates such classicized depictions of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and others, and it contains a useful bibliog raphy.

11. Gérôme, whose works include a wide range of historical reconstructions and many scenes of Middle Eastern life, including that of the harem, also painted images with powerful political valences, such as the Death of Marshal Ney (Le 7 décembre 1815, neuf heures de matin) (1867; Sheffield City Art Gallery)Google Scholar, L'Eminence grise (1874; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)Google Scholar, and The Conspirators (Ils conspirent) (1892; Forbes Magazine Collection)Google Scholar. See Evans, Bruce H., Ackerman, Gerald M., and Ettinghausen, Richard, Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904)Google Scholar, catalogue of the 1972–19 exhibition at the Dayton Art Institute, Minneapolis Institute of the Fine Arts, and Walters Art Gallery. Boime, Albert's exhaustive Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980)Google Scholar explains how Couture, the artist best known for his Romans of the Decadence (1847; Louvre, Paris)Google Scholar, drew upon Victor Cousin's eclectic philosophy as a means of creating an art that could speak to all political, intellectual, and religious parties and hence serve as a force for harmony. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, a good deal of official and nonofficial art (such as Edouard Manet's Execution of Maximilian; 1867–68Google Scholar; versions in Boston, Copenhagen, and Mannheim) conveyed controversal political themes of the sort rarely found in British art of the period.

12. A French pictorial analogue of one part of Swinburne's intention here appears in Leroux, Hector, The Believers (Prayer to the Goddess Hygeia) (1862; Verdun, Musée de la Princerie)Google Scholar. For an illustration and additional information about this picture, see The Second Empire, 1852–1870: Art in France under Napoleon III (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1978), p. 326.Google Scholar By presenting a moving image of pagans at prayer before an idol, Leroux, like Swinburne, simultaneously dignified pagan belief and removed the privileged position Christianity presumably held in the mind of the spectator.

13. The degree to which such essentially aesthetic treatments of Roman subjects resist meaning perhaps best appears in the obvious fact that one cannot even be certain that a work like Flaming June depicts a Roman subject at all, for with equal accuracy it could be said to represent a Grecian one or one based upon a purely imaginary, quasi-classical world.