Vernon Lee in the Vatican: The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archaeology

Author(s): Stefano Evangelista

Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 52, No. 1, Special Issue: Papers and Responses from the Seventh
Annual Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association, held jointly with
the British Association for Victorian Studies (Autumn 2009), pp. 31-41
Published by: Indiana University Press
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Vernon Lee in the Vatican:

The Uneasy Alliance of Aestheticism and Archaeology
Stefano Evangelista

n the second half of the nineteenth century, authors and critics

linked with aestheticism argued for the necessity of moving away
from the double emphasis on didacticism and moral judgment
that dominated Victorian art criticism. Aesthetic critics such as Walter
Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, and
Oscar Wilde rejected the doctrine that art objects possess inherent
qualities that determine their artistic, ethical, and cultural value and
instead shifted the emphasis onto the act of reception, understood as
the relationship between the object and its viewer or critic, a relationship that is invariably contingent on history and therefore in continual
flux. The meaning of works of art is consequently unstable as they are
subjected to vital cycles of rereading and semantic renewal by each
successive generation of viewers. In Paters well-known polemic with
Matthew Arnold in the preface to The Renaissance (1873), the business of
the critic is not to see the object as in itself it really is and define beauty
in the abstract, but rather to analyze it in its relation to him- or herself:
What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life
or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it
give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? (xix-xx).
Art criticism cannot aspire to the condition of science because it inevitably bears the traces of psychology and emotion, as well as of the critics
individual instincts and traits. Paters aesthetic critic always looks inward

Abstract: From the 1860s onward, aesthetic critics attempted to free the study of ancient
Greek art from the frameworks of institutional education and professionalized criticism. In
this process, aestheticism entered an uneasy alliance with archaeology, a discipline that was
likewise challenging traditional modes of classical learning practiced in public schools and
the old universities. In The Child in the Vatican (1881), Vernon Leewriting under the
influence of Pater and from a position of cosmopolitan female amateurismexamines the
uses of archaeological science in the study of classical art. Her analysis of the sculptures of
the Niobe Group at once relies on the archaeological method and asks readers to doubt
scientific approaches to art that dim the sublime power of the art object.

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Stefano Evangelista

as well as outward. Contact with the materiality of the art object triggers
a journey of introspection and self-knowledge.
Aestheticism had been profoundly interested in classical antiquity ever since its early days (see Evangelista). This was partly because
some of its main exponents were trained as classicists: Pater, Swinburne, Symonds, and Wilde all studied Literae Humaniores at Oxford
between the 1850s and the 1870s. But it was partly also because these
writers wanted to signal a clear sense of departure from the medievalism championed by John Ruskin in the mid-century, with its ideological anticlassicism and its notoriously ambivalent attitude toward
the notion of pleasure. Foundational aesthetic texts such as Swinburnes Atalanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866), Paters
essay on Winckelmann (1867), and Symondss two series of Studies of the
Greek Poets (1873 and 1876) all aligned the innovative art-critical
discourse of modern aestheticism with classical antiquityespecially
Greek antiquity. The Greek world was recreated for modern readers
through the new and experimental medium of aesthetic language,
rich in visual energy and synaesthetic effects. Drawing on German and
French Romantic Hellenism (the most frequently cited authors
included Winckelmann, Goethe, and Gautier), aesthetic writers
presented the ancient Greeks as the original source of the modern
notions of aesthetic criticism and art for arts sake. In so doing, they
indirectly also claimed cultural authority for their experiments in critical writing by investing them with the high status of the classical
tradition.
Greece was ideally suited to the aesthetes emphasis on reception. Knowable enough, but also fundamentally unknown, ancient
Greece could be shown to be exciting and modernto be, in fact,
always modern, as every age recreates its meaning and value by productively contaminating the past with the ideas of the present. Even though
several aesthetic critics wrote, like Pater, from within the academy,
their use of impression and imaginative reconstruction took the knowledge of antiquity out of academic institutions and divorced it from
history and philology, which at this point were the normative disciplines of classical studies. By privileging imagination over scholarly
training, the aesthetic reception of ancient Greece therefore aided a
popularizing turn in classical studies, opening Victorian classicism to
the intervention of women and social groups that had traditionally
been excluded from institutionalized education.

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Vernon Lee in the Vatican

33

During those late-Victorian decades, archaeology shared

aestheticisms position of being within the academy but at the same
time somewhat marginal to it. The archaeological reconstruction of
antiquity, supported by ever more frequent excavations on Greek soil,
challenged important certainties about classical art inherited from the
eighteenth century. In the 1870s and 1880s conservative classical
scholars regarded the archaeological method with suspicion, not least
because it privileged the visual and the material object over the written
text (something, incidentally, that could also be said of aestheticism);
in so doing, it threatened to make redundant established modes of
classical training linked to social privilege, such as the extensive Greek
and Latin drilling that was practiced at boys public schools. Like
aestheticism, archaeology promised to show its readers a new ancient
Greece. It was therefore natural that aestheticism should look to the
new science of archaeology as an ally in its own redefinition of the
significance of the classical art object in the present.
An early instance of this productive alliance of aestheticism
and archaeology was noted by the archaeologist Lewis R. Farnell, who
was a student in Oxford in the 1870s. Farnell remembered that Paters
lectures on archaic Greek art marked an epoch in the history of
Oxford studies; for he was the first to give this practical expression to
the idea that Greek art was a fitting lecture-subject for a classical
teacher (7677). Paters innovation was to elevate the soft discipline of
Greek art to the terrain of serious study and hard knowledge on which
classics, as an academic discipline, was built. Punning on the aesthetes
name, Farnell calls Pater the father of archaeological teaching in
Oxford (77). But the fusion of the two disciplines is not uncomplicated. Farnell, who would go on to study archaeology in Berlin and
Munich, adds that in Paters lectures there was no archaeology or
teaching, only his characteristic daintiness and charm....And though
these lectures were wholly unscientificin the German sensefor
neither in Greek nor in any other art was Pater an authority, I enjoyed
the faint fragrance of them and resolved to go further afield in this
line (77). Pater is credited as an innovator but his scientific authority
is undermined in the unfavorable comparison with the German model.
Rehearsing what was by 1934 a well-established modernist critique,
aestheticism is reduced to daintiness and charm and its intellectual
content eclipsed behind its preoccupation with form. The conflict
between science and faint fragrance that is set up here is paradig-

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matic of the relationship between archaeology and aestheticism as it

appears in the writings of one of the female critics whose art-historical
writings were most directly indebted to Pater: Vernon Lee.
After a hostile modernist reception, Lees vast body of work is
now the object of renewed attention (see, for instance, Maxwell and
Pulham, Pulham, and Zorn). Born Violet Paget in 1856, Lee was
brought up in Continental Europe and spent most of her life outside
Britain. She was a cosmopolitan intellectual who read extensively in
the major European languages and participated in the intellectual life
of several nations. Lee belongs to a pioneering group of female art
specialists who, as Hilary Fraser has argued, made a lasting contribution not only to art history as a discipline, but to the evolving public
culture of art of the nineteenth century. To gifted female intellectuals
like Lee, aestheticism offered a way into mainstream art criticism that
bypassed male-gendered discourses of professionalism and academic
training, which, needless to say, at this point still almost completely
excluded women.
The young but incredibly ambitious Lee modeled her critical
voice on Paters aestheticism. In the introduction to her early collection,
Belcaro (1881), she insists that pleasure is the fundamental function of art
and rejects academic approaches in favor of an impressionistic technique, which is of clear Paterian derivation. Lee, who could not claim the
type of intellectual authority of her university-educated male peers,
writes that she had gone to school...to art itself, to pictures and statues
and music and poetry, to my own feelings and my own thoughts (5).
Lees authority as critic, in other words, does not rest on bookish knowledge but on a greatly preferable experience of art that is based on immediacy of sensation, actual physical contact with the object, and emotional
investment in it. Lee places great emphasis on the fact that her insights
are contingent on the time she has spent in the presence of the art works
she discusses: her familiarity with the collections of antiquities in Italy
and Germany is presented as a type of authenticity, validated by her
cosmopolitan credentials. To enhance this effect, she often adds a
dramatic quality to her essays, setting them during precise visits to a
certain gallery or reporting a conversation with a stranger that took
place in front of an art object. Lee also insists on understanding art as
purely sensual material, attacking the practice of interpreting the visual
arts of antiquity in relation to textual and other external sources such as
history, literature, and myth. These, she provocatively argues, are some-

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Vernon Lee in the Vatican

35

thing accidentally or arbitrarily connected with it (6162). In this

context, aestheticism offered Lee a framework to argue that the gifted
amateur and the artist, not the classicist, make the best art critics.
Dismissing the importance of academic training, Lee appeals to an
influential discourse of late-Victorian female amateurism described by
Yopie Prins, which represented an important medium for the transmission of classical knowledge into the twentieth century, as it fell between
the professionalization of classical scholarship and the popularization
of Classics (Prins 592).
Yet, for all Lees skepticism about the professionalization of art
criticism and modern scientific methods, her reliance on archaeology
in Belcaro is extensive. This is most evident in the opening essay, The
Child in the Vatican, where she offers an analysis of the classical sculptural ensemble known as the Niobe Group. Much more than any
isolated statue, this group seems by its nature to call for an interpretation based on the very historical and literary sources frowned upon by
Lee. The individual statues can be related to each other through the
textual techniques of narrative and storytelling, the more so because
this ancient group, of which we know there were several examples in
antiquity, now survives only in fragmented and dispersed form: single
statues that were once next to each other are now scattered in museums
around Europe, from Rome to Florence and Munich, in artificial isolation and arrested attitudes. This fragmentation encourages a process
of interpretation that naturally tends toward the reconstruction of a
dramatic setting or plot: the well-known story of the slaughter of
Niobes children by the hands of the gods Artemis and Apollo. Surprisingly, Lee argues that precisely the opposite is true. After a detailed
reconstruction that shows the ancient Greek artist at work, she
concludes that he has cared for the subject only inasmuch as it
afforded suggestions for beautiful forms: and we therefore have
perceived the beautiful forms, and forgotten the subject (3637).
Lees essay develops a detailed aesthetic argument about the relationship between artistic medium and subject matter that is largely
indebted to Gotthold Ephraim Lessings treatise Laocoon: or, The Limits
of Poetry and Painting (1766). Her conclusions are in line with canonical
ideas of late-Victorian aestheticism: the ancient Greek artist is portrayed
as an aesthete avant la lettre who realized the important axiom that art
is about form and that it should be detached from utilitarianism and
morality. Viewed from the present, the classical object therefore lends

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authority to the modern theory that the understanding of art should

be rooted in the experience of visual pleasure: art for arts sake.
The most notable example of the Niobe Group to have survived
into the modern age is the famous Niobe Group of the Uffizi, in Florence, to which Lee devotes most of her discussion. From the time of
their recovery to the present, these statues have caused endless debates
among archaeologists (see Brilliant; Geominy; and Mansuelli I:
10122). The statues were first found in the Horti Lamiani in Rome in
1583; they were then transferred to the Villa Medici, also in Rome, and
from there to the Uffizi in the eighteenth century. Here they were
arranged around the walls of one of the galleries, built especially for
them in the 1770s, as if to encourage the viewer to read the individual
statues as isolated and self-sufficient art works. At the time when Lee
was writing, the group had attracted the attention of several European
archaeologists. Earlier in the century, the statues had been the objects
of a well-known experiment conducted by the British archaeologist
Charles Robert Cockerell, who inserted them in a reconstruction of
the front of the temple of Apollo Sosiano in Rome, following a description found in Plinys Naturalis Historia. In more recent years, the
German archaeologist K. B. Stark had published his authoritative Niobe
und die Niobiden (1863), a study on which Lee might have been silently
drawing.
Whatever the case, in Belcaro Lee is wholehearted in her
embrace of the archaeological method: she dismisses the conservative
arrangement of the group in the Uffizi as idiotic confusion (32) and
uses, instead, Cockerells experiment as the model for her own imaginative reconstruction of the group. She builds on the archaeological
method when she invites the reader to make an effort to imagine the
statues as if they were back in the gable of an ancient temple. In fact,
Lee asks us to turn our eyes away from the material objects in the
gallery and follow her on an imaginative reconstruction that sets the
antiquities back to their original setting.
Think of this Niobe group, twice humansized, standing on the weather-mellowed,
delicately painted marble temple front; the amber-tinted figures against the dark
hollow formed by the projecting roof; the sun-shine drawing on the black background, as with a luminous pencil, the great solemn masses of light and shadow,
the powerfully rhythmed attitudes, the beautiful combinations of lines and light
and shade produced by gesture, which now raises, now drops the plaits; and to the
strong broken shadows of the drapery, the shining smoothness of the nude. (33)

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Vernon Lee in the Vatican

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The statues are taken out of the Uffizi galleries and imaginatively
restored to their home in the open air in the luminous landscape of the
South. Lees ekphrasis of the statues, written in the genre of aesthetic
prose pioneered by Swinburne and Pater, appeals to the imaginative
capabilities of the readers, asking them to think...what must the lost
original have been (33). In other words, she warns readers that classical
art works emerge from a history of loss and destruction. Museums and
galleries, for Lee, are home to this sense of dispossession and to what
she calls a sort of negative vandalism (18). They are evil necessities
(18) that guarantee the preservation of antiquities, but they do so by
domesticating ancient objects and, ultimately, distorting their meaning.
The Vatican museum is thus described as
a dismal scientific piece of ostentation, like all galleries; a place where art is
arranged and ticketed and made dingy and lifeless even as are the plants in a
botanic collection. Eminently a place of exile, or worse, of captivity, for all these
people of marble: these athletes and nymphs and satyrs, and warriors and poets
and gods, who once stood, each in happy independence, against a screen of laurel
or ilex branches, or on the sun-heated gable of a temple, where the grass waved in
the fissures and the swallows nested, or in a cresset-lit, incense-dim chapel, or high
against the blue sky above the bustle of the market place; poor stone captives cloistered in monastic halls and cells, or arranged, like the skeletons of Capuchins, in
endless rows of niche, shelf, and bracket. (18)

This passage is structured around a persistent organic imagery through

which antiquities are humanized (the athletes and poets, the people of
marble) and associated with vegetable and animal life. Lee dramatically moves from sensuous intensity (the colors, smells, sounds, and feel
of the ancient world are all reconstructed) to the chilling image of the
crypt. She argues for an emotional understanding of antiquities and
appeals to a narrative of exile as an antidote to the sterile approach of
science, embodied in the modern museum, where art works are cataloged and subjected to the cold gaze of the expert (on this see Siegels
critique of the modern museum as mortuary, 314).
The specter of vivisection emerges from between these lines.
Indeed, the type of sepulchral imagery employed by Lee belongs to a
larger trend within aesthetic criticism, which, by reducing the ontological distance between the art object and the body (the extension of
Paters What effect does [art] really produce on me?), particularly in
discussions of sculpture, opens up reflections on the corporeality of
artifacts, often with gothic undertones. In a risqu instance of this
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confusion between bodies and art objects, Pater had memorably shown
Winckelmann as he fingers...pagan marbles with unsinged hands
(177); but, in the same essay, he had also spoken of the plasticity of
ancient sculptures as the sharpness of suddenly arrested life (166). In
the aesthetes art-historical writings, the knowledge of antiquity made
possible by archaeology is often rewritten as a perverse pleasure, as a
form of necrophilialiterally, love of deathand given a very distinct
type of crepuscular sublime. Symonds, for instance, tells the story of
how, in the Renaissance, during the search for buried relics of classical
times, people unearthed the inexplicably well-preserved corpse of a
beautiful Roman noblewoman, which was laid out in state and became
the object of pilgrimage and of a macabre form of neo-pagan worship
(2324). Aesthetic writers like Symonds, Pater, and Lee systematically
presented archaeological objects through images of spectrality
inscribing them within natural and supernatural cycles of death,
burial, exhumation, and haunting. While drawing on archaeological
knowledge and scholarly practices, these writers were also keen to
resist the professionalization of the study of antiquity, a field in which
they had placed a strong emotional investment that, in the case of
Symonds and Pater, had entailed a pronounced homoerotic component. In Belcaro, Lee physically revisits the Vatican Galleries, which had
been, since Winckelmann, the theater for a culturally sanctioned type
of lovemaking between the male critic and the male body as represented in ancient statues like the Apollo Belvedere or the Antinous.
But she appeals to the growing authority of cosmopolitan female
amateurism to claim a place of her own both in the canon of aesthetic
criticism best represented by Pater and in the very contemporary critical turn toward specialization.
In Belcaro Lee openly rejects the classifications and canonizations of art proposed by art historians and classicists such as Winckelmann and Karl Ottfried Mller, which teach viewers to admire only
one or two schools, and abominate all the others as barbarous,
decaying, Graeculan, etc., without even looking at them (29). Her
aesthetic method is based on close observation and emotion, not evaluation. She urges her readers not to be guided by the experts in a quest
after perfection, but rather to seek after a sublime experience of the
archaeological object, which takes it outside the terrain of science and
precise knowledge. Her ekphrastic technique, as we have seen, asks us
to go beyond the plastic qualities of the object or indeed to go alto-

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Vernon Lee in the Vatican

39

gether beyond the art object to what has been entirely lost. In this
journey toward sensation, Lees reader might abandon the galleries
dreary labyrinth of brick and mortar (17) and might turn instead to
the discarded and half-forgotten fragments of statuary that lie, overgrown with grass, in the open-air courts of the Vatican museums.
This critique of the modern museum and of professional
approaches to art is characteristic of Lees essay, which continually
disrupts archaeological science even as it uses its findings and method.
Lee essentially asks herself the same questions that interest archaeologists, such as whether the statues originally made up a single group
and, if so, how they were once arranged and how they should now be
viewed. But she is also eager to distance herself from science and
discourses of scientific specialization in art criticism. This anti-theoretical gesture is characteristic of aesthetic criticism, with its desire to
expose and subvert the role of institutions in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge.
The uneasy alliance between aestheticism and archaeology is
a topic that would preoccupy Lee throughout her career. In 1895, she
published a review of Adolf Furtwnglers Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture
(1895), an influential archaeological study that had been translated
into English by Lees close friend, the female classicist and archaeologist Eugnie Sellers (later Strong). The review opens with a programmatic statement about the domain of art, which, however properly it
may be regarded as so much matter for scientific investigation..., is
yet, originally and in the last resort, a matter of perception and sentiment (221); and it closes with the provocative claim that archaeology
is not an historical science, but a science uniting the methods of the
naturalist with those of the student of human thought and emotion
(222). Lee defends her position outside professionalized art criticism,
claiming her authority as a person who has sought pleasure chiefly
and constantly in the domain of art (221). As in The Child in the
Vatican, pleasure replaces science as a signifier of critical authority,
and the values of inwardness, receptivity, and softness replace hard
science as a means for providing a true understanding of art.
Furtwnglers scientific study is praised for increas[ing] enormously the possible pleasure of the unlearned and imaginatively
transporting them to some happier land and time, before galleries
had been invented (221). Readers of Belcaro know that this is high
praise for Lee. But Lee is a notoriously litigious writer, and her readers

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cannot have been surprised when she went on to debunk Furtwnglers

academic achievement by arguing that his learning is really a kind of
intuition of organic necessities due to the perfect training of an originally exquisite artistic sensitiveness (222). To this Lee adds the paradoxical claim that the professional archaeologist does not make a
good reader of this study because scientific training is bound to focus
his or her interest on isolated points of controversy (221), while the
non-expert, missing the distracting technicalities, actually gains a
more desirable understanding of the wholeness of the work. Archaeology, in other words, must be practiced and reread through aestheticism and amateurism in order to manifest its real value. This process
takes place in two steps: first Sellers, the female classicist, translates
and edits the book for English readers; then Lee, the female amateur,
instructs these readers how to read it. This alliance of the two English
women (both somewhat marginal to the academic establishment) over
the male German professor seals the victory of female high amateurism
over specialization. The 1895 review also prepares the ground for Lees
experiments in psychological aesthetics and her collaboration with
another female amateur, Clementina Anstruther Thomson. With
psychological aesthetics, Lee will take her engagement with archaeology further still, forging a new productive relationship between
aestheticism and science that, she thought, would pave the way for the
aesthetic criticism of the new century.
Trinity College, University of Oxford
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Vernon Lee in the Vatican

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