Florence as Muse: Byron and Shelley’s Tuscan Competition

ABSTRACT

Florence’s art and poetry captured the imaginations of Byron and Shelley. During the nineteenth century, the city-state and the surrounding countryside inspired literary tourists and Byron and Shelley were no exceptions. This article focuses on the Florentine dimension of the Byron-Shelley relationship. It considers Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry inspired by the art each saw in Florence, before going on to discuss each poet’s response to Dante’s and Petrarch’s examples. It shows that the influence of Florence’s art and Florentine artists was the centerpiece of Byron’s and Shelley’s connection to the city. First considering Byron’s stanzas on the Medici Venus from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, and Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, in the Florentine Gallery,” this article claims that The Triumph of Life reveals a sea change in Shelley as he approaches Dante and Petrarch in the wake of Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante. Shelley rejects Byron’s technique of “centring the self” in favor of poetry woven from carefully controlled allusion that places the visionary mode at its core. Reading Shelley’s creative relationship with Byron through their responses to Florentine art shows how Shelley found a distinctive voice designed to counter and even surpass Byron’s.

Notes

1 Byron’s poetry is quoted from Complete Poetical Works.

2 Chard defines “imaginative geography” using Christian Jacob’s definition of the concept of a map as “a space of privileged projection for desires, aspirations, affective memory, the cultural memory of the subject” (10; quoting Jacob 16 [Chard’s translation]).

3 “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, in the Florentine Gallery” will be quoted from Poems of Shelley: Volume 3 221–23.

4 See, for example, Alastor line 639 or Hellas line 39. For the complete range of Shelley’s use of “hope,” see F. S. Ellis 335–36.

5 For more on the fragment and why I rule out the sixth stanza accepted by some critics, see Maxwell 173–74.

6 Shelley’s poetry and prose, unless otherwise specified, is quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works.

7 Sir Philip Sidney argues that “our tongue is the most fit to honour poesy, and to be honoured by poesy” (53).

8 I retain the spelling “Mazenghi” following the editors of The Poems of Shelley: 1817–1819, though I note that Rossetti and Hutchinson change this to “Marenghi.” “Mazenghi” is quoted from Poems of Shelley.

9 For other discussions of The Triumph of Life and Petrarch, see Stawell 104–31, and Bowers 145–68.