Vital Matter(s): Shelley, Herder, and Sculpture

ABSTRACT

The winter of 1819–20, which Percy Shelley spent in Florence, coincided with a period of extraordinary literary productivity. But in spite of the time Shelley was clearly spending at his desk, he devised a plan to carefully study the sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery. This undertaking resulted in a set of descriptive notes, containing sixty or so entries, that aim to capture—in the act of observation—the vital energy caught by human forms in stone. This article examines how Shelley’s engagement with sculpture was informed by a way of thinking about materiality and ideality in the artwork that intersects suggestively with Herder’s writings on the subject. Both writers, close readers of Winckelmann, praise the products of Greek antiquity for their formal, ideal beauty and living qualities—and ground their observations in a nuanced distinction between painting and sculpture, and in Herder’s case, sight and touch. Shelley’s notes on such famous statues as the Venus Anadyomene and the Niobe group, read alongside his ekphrastic poem on a painting of the Medusa, attest to how perception (actively) animates, reciprocally, both subject and object—making sculpture, contra its critics, a fit medium for conveying health, life and motion.

Notes

1 Mary Shelley’s journals inform us of a first visit to the gallery on October 11, and there are notes of P. B. Shelley returning thereafter (Journals 1: 298–99). Percy Shelley comments in a letter to Hogg of April 1820 that they had spent the “severe” winter at Florence, and that he “dedicated every sunny day to the study of the gallery there” (Letters 2: 186).

2 Although eight had been published by Thomas Medwin in The Athenaeum (1832), the first full edition was that of Harry Buxton Forman, in The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Reeves and Turner) in 1880, in which the Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence were in fact reprinted from a limited edition published by Forman the previous year. For a detailed account of the publication history, see Murray. See also Colwell, “Shelley on Sculpture.”

3 For readings of Zoffany’s painting in context, with reference to contemporary exhibition practices, see Solkin (1–2) and Pascoe (65–67).

4 It is possible that the Tribuna was closed to visitors during much of Shelley’s stay: the only explicit reference to it comes in Mary Shelley’s journal just before they leave Florence for Pisa, where she writes, “Go to the Tribune at the Gallery” (Journals 1: 306). See among others Colwell, “Shelley on Sculpture” (62). Colwell’s informative essay helpfully identifies the sculptures Shelley writes about, by reading the notes alongside contemporary descriptions of the gallery, and, when they remain in the collections of the Uffizi, cross referencing them with their current catalogue numbers and names (as assigned and recorded by Guido Mansuelli in 1958).

5 Shelley read Winckelmann’s The History of Art Among the Ancients in French translation on a daily basis while at Naples in 1818–19, and again in Rome (Colwell, “Shelley on Sculpture” 70–72). For a comprehensive discussion of the impact of Winckelmann, see Potts. On Shelley and Romantic Hellenism, see in particular Ferris and Wallace. For other influences, such as Shelley’s dialogue with the popular travel books of Eustace and Forsyth, see Larrabee (182–83).

6 All references are to volume 6 of Complete Works.

7 The link between Prometheus Unbound and Shelley’s notes has been identified and analyzed by Wallace (172), Weinberg (114–17), and especially Goslee (“Shelley’s Notes on Sculpture”; Uriel’s Eye, ch. 5).

8 Elisabeth Décultot, in the introduction to her edition of Winckelmann’s descriptive texts, argues that Herder in particular drew upon a notion of projective empathy implicitly animating the relationship between the observer and the work of art, in a way that emphasizes the agency of the spectator (Winckelmann 14–15).

9 For a detailed account of Shelley’s response to Italian painting, see Colwell, “Shelley and Italian Painting.” Although she does not discuss Shelley’s notes on sculpture, Sarah Peterson argues that Shelley’s verbal accounts of visual art, such as these very descriptions in his letters to Peacock, mediate “the threat of imprinting posed by visual art”—that is, Shelley uses language (ekphrastic description) to pre-empt being seized, so to speak, by the immediate impressions artworks create in the mind (114). One might infer here that acts of perception are suggestively like sculpting, and threaten to turn the mind into a gallery of objects. See Shelley’s first letter to Peacock from Bologna (2: 49), where he characterizes his brain as “like a portfolio of an architect or a printshop or a connoiseurs common place book.”

10 It is perhaps not irrelevant to recall that Shelley’s study at Great Marlow contained a number of statues. According to Leigh Hunt’s report, “He used to sit in a study adorned with casts, as large as life, of the Vatican Apollo and the celestial Venus,” though which Venus that might have been is not certain (qtd. in Larrabee 184). And, as Medwin asserted, “statuary was his passion” (Memoir 52).

11 Interested readers may consult the painting, and a hypertext edition of the poem, on the Romantic Circles website at https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/shelley/medusa/figA.html.

12 Rogers was the first to connect Shelley’s poem with this painting and to include this apparently discarded fragment in his reading of the relationship between the two. The fragment was set aside by Mary Shelley, who was, it must be noted, responsible for composing the poem from existing fragmentary drafts, and giving it a title for its posthumous publication in 1824.

13 For a full account of the complications introduced by ekphrasis itself as a form of re-representation in relation to Shelley’s poem, and of the extensive commentary on this subject, see my essay “Ekphrasis and Terror: Shelley, Medusa, and the Phantasmagoria.”

14 Shelley, in the Defence of Poetry, extolls language as a

more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the controul of that faculty of which it is the creation. (Works 7: 113)

See Goslee, Uriel’s Eye (139–40), for a subtle account of how that acknowledgment, which is beyond the scope of this paper, plays out in Shelley’s Notes.