Abstract
During the 1790s, Emma Hamilton, wife of collector and diplomat Sir William Hamilton, developed an innovative form of performance art, tableaux vivants known as the ‘(Grecian) Attitudes’. Notoriously transgressive both sexually and socially, Emma also transgressed materially, transposing the scenes depicted on Sir William’s vases into a kinaesthetic medium. That performance remains a subaltern or illegitimate mode of relating to ancient material culture (as opposed to visual display) is a cultural bias rooted in economic relations. Outside the context of the Attitudes, contemporaries were anxious to (re)place Emma in terms of class, describing her as promiscuous, ‘common’, and ‘vulgar’. Modern scholarship has proved similarly anxious to limit her agency through the repeated assertion of a ‘Pygmalion’ paradigm in which responsibility for developing the Attitudes is assigned to Sir William. I argue that, on the contrary, Emma should be credited with a mode of embodied reception alternative to that of the collector and connoisseur.
In the summer of 1786, Emma Hart arrived in Naples to take up residence as the companion—later mistress, and afterwards wife—of collector and diplomat Sir William Hamilton. By the spring of 1787 she had begun performing the sequence of tableaux vivants known as the ‘Grecian Attitudes’. During the 1790s, these would make her into a Grand Tourist attraction as unmissable as Vesuvius or Virgil’s tomb. Her performances derived in part from the images on the vases in Sir William’s collection, but it is far from clear what part (if any) Sir William himself played in the development of Emma’s practice. Even as her skill was admired by contemporary observers, Emma’s background made her an object of derision and frank sexualization. She was treated as an addition to Sir William’s collection, referred to as his most ‘delightful … object’, a ‘magnificent marble’, a whole ‘gallery of statues’.1 The objectification of Emma persists in modern scholarship, attesting to the tenacity of the Pygmalion paradigm in which a young, unformed, uncultivated woman is shaped and moulded by the older, more expert man into the embodiment of his desires. I will argue that this tendency conforms to an epistemological bias which tends to privilege certain relationships to material culture above others. The transferable knowledge of the collector, whose authority rests not least on the ownership articulated through purchase, is valued above the subjective, incommunicable knowledge of the performer who lends her body to the interpretation of ancient art.
Objects designated as antiquities are enmeshed in a particular array of sensory restrictions and prerogatives. As Fiona Candlin has shown, it was during the nineteenth century that museums became predominantly scopic domains, the knowledge they imparted available to non-elite visitors visually, or not at all.2 Visitors could no longer touch nor handle (nor, to be fair, could they poke or break) exhibits which were now preserved within the showcase of the vitrine.3 Today, touch is permitted to a class of professionals, the curators and museum specialists whose expertise has subsumed and superseded that of the connoisseur, and to those in the art market, a separate but by no means altogether divergent class comprising the dealers and investors for whom ancient artworks represent a different type of capital. Both groups are essentially members of an economic and/or social elite.4 In conventional sensory hierarchies, vision predominates as the ‘intellectual’ sense, while touch, being carnal, dumb, and atavistic, has a much lower cognitive status. Kinaesthesia, the sense of self-movement, is omitted altogether.5 As this article will show, however, alternative forms of interaction—such as dance—can generate different ways of understanding both antiquity and ourselves.
Like any other historical performances, the Attitudes are accessible only obliquely, through other media, translated into images or text. Although this translation itself displaces Emma’s experience, the line drawing standing in for a performance event with distinctive live properties of duration, context, materiality, and rhythm, such displacement does not strip her experience of value. Just because a performance is in essence irrecoverable does not reduce the performer herself to nothing but the substance of an image. Emma may have been repeatedly objectified by those who viewed and represented her, but there is scope for fresh exploration of the available evidence with methodological approaches of the twenty-first century. Examining the media in which the Attitudes are now extant separates these residual artefacts from the ephemeral dance behind them.
The main visual sources for the Attitudes consist of a series of twelve engravings by Tommaso Piroli after line drawings by Friedrich Rehberg, entitled Drawings Faithfully Copied from Nature at Naples; and two etchings by Pietro Novelli, The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, showing eight and nine of Emma’s poses respectively.6 Rehberg, head of the Prussian Academy of Arts at Rome, visited Naples in 1791, and the Drawings Faithfully Copied …, dedicated to Sir William, were published in 1794 (Rehberg 1794). Rehberg’s associate Johann Tischbein, another member of the German expatriate art community in Italy, was concurrently responsible for cataloguing the second Hamilton vase collection, published in three volumes between 1791 and 1795. Rehberg’s representations of Emma are not an unmediated record of her performances, but draw upon both contemporary conventions of neoclassical art and elements of ancient vase-painting.7 Nevertheless, the extent to which Emma herself was also capable of crafting her performances according to these sources and conventions should not be underestimated. The Attitudes occupy a liminal zone between the visual and performing arts in which the model steps out of the frame and exercises creative autonomy. Although Rehberg claims that his drawings were copied ‘from Nature’, they were of course copied instead from art, albeit a case of ars latet adeo arte sua (‘art concealed by its own artistry’, Ovid, Met. 10.252), the purportedly ‘natural’ tableaux crafted by Emma from an amalgam of Grecian vases, classical mythology, frescoes, sculpture, and tempered by her working knowledge of gesture in contemporary painting and theatre.
Pietro Novelli, a member of the Venetian Academy whose patrons included Catherine the Great, had been based in Rome since the late 1770s. His sketches of Emma were engraved by his son, Francisco Novelli, sometime after 1791 (fig. 1). Other contemporary depictions of the Attitudes include sketches by Richard Cosway, Friedrich Bury, and William Artaud.8 Emma also sat for portraits in character. Her long-standing professional relationship with George Romney is discussed below; while at Naples she was painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, among other artists, in mythological guises which included a dancing bacchante and a reclining Ariadne. Vigée Le Brun’s portrait of Emma as the bacchante bears a distinct resemblance to Plate 8 in Rehberg’s series, while both images also reference the well-known frescoes of dancers from Herculaneum, artwork of which Emma would certainly have been aware.9 Less flatteringly, Emma was also the subject of caricatures by Rowlandson and other satirists which interpreted her dancing as sexually provocative.10 As Amelia Rauser has argued, some of the hostility towards Emma may have derived from her refusal to remain artistically passive,11 and it also seems to have centred around her refusal to respect the boundaries of social status.
Pietro Antonio Novelli, The Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, after 1791. V&A Inv. E.253-2000. V&A Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Like the idea of ‘Classics’, the idea of ‘class’ requires some unpacking.12 The operational phenomenon of ‘class’, like ‘race’ and ‘gender’, is the product of intersecting identity narratives, and considerably more complex than the commonplace tripartite division along lines of economic inequality (‘working class’/‘middle class’/‘elite’) or the classic Marxist binary (‘proletariat’/‘bourgeoisie’). Social class, while determined partly by material factors such as control of wealth or resources and labour relations, is also a matter of identity based on access to power, authority, and status, as well as a cultural phenomenon coded through patterns of speech, dress, and behaviour.13 Education, supposedly a mechanism of social mobility, does little to alter the fundamental perception that certain types of human knowledge, occupation, and ownership are more valuable than others. R. S. Neale makes the point that early nineteenth-century class consciousness involved manifold minute but concrete distinctions in social rank made manifest in titles and the etiquette of address.14 Socio-economic barriers could become porous, for instance through commercial success, loss of capital, or marriage, but acquiring the associated cultural capital was less than straightforward. This is what makes Emma Hamilton’s apparent mobility such a useful site for interrogating both gendered assumptions of what constitutes class, and class-based assumptions of what constitutes knowledge.
Much of what is known about Emma’s background and early life comes from a sensationalized biography published anonymously in 1815 as Memoirs of Lady Hamilton(Anon 1815). Born in Cheshire in 1765, she moved to London, where she worked at first as a domestic servant and subsequently as a dresser or backstage assistant at the Drury Lane Theatre.15 Her career reputedly continued at an establishment called Dr Graham’s Temple of Health, where sluggish libidos could be revived by a range of techniques including a mechanical bed attended by Grecian nymphs and their presiding Goddess Hygeia en déshabillé.16 Whether or not Emma ever actually posed nude for the Royal Academy, as her biographer claims, in the early 1780s she became a regular model for the classicizing painter George Romney and began entertaining a circle of young aristocrats, eventually becoming the permanent mistress of William Hamilton’s nephew, Charles Greville. When Greville married, however, he sent her on an extended ‘holiday’ to stay with his uncle in Naples. Initially distraught when she realized Greville had no intention of recalling her, Emma reconciled herself to her new situation and attained a degree of security when Sir William married her in 1791. Later Lady Hamilton would begin a notorious affair with Admiral Nelson that settled into a long-term ménage-à-trois and did her reputation no favours in English drawing rooms. Following the deaths of both her male partners and ruined by debts, Emma herself died in poverty in 1815.
By marrying into the aristocracy, Emma Hamilton née Amy Lyon gained access to consumables and services beyond the wildest dreams of a drudge from Drury Lane.17 Nevertheless, she never accumulated the cultural capital necessary to make the transition one of identity. As noted by Beverley Skeggs, working-class women (like popular entertainment) are typically branded as excessive, shameless, promiscuous, and unruly, their voices too strident and their cosmetics too bright.18 Emma, too, was censured for her ‘vulgarity’ and impropriety, depicted in caricatures by Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray as overweight and/or overly carnal, displaying too much female flesh in both senses.19 Too large and too loud, her image did not suit her acquired status.
Emma’s social status, moreover, is complicated by intersectional considerations of gender. Exploitation certainly features in her narrative, and sexual labour is still labour, but Emma’s disempowerment in this sense was shared by contemporary women regardless of their social rank.20 If ‘class’ is restricted to a description of access to property and power, it is inadequate as a matrix for accommodating nineteenth-century gender dynamics. Floya Anthias prefers the term ‘social asymmetry’ to account for ‘forms of social inequality which are not derived from the labour market’.21 In other words, defining Emma Hamilton simply as intractably ‘working class’ eliminates precisely those factors which make her position unique. A more granular approach is needed.
Emma’s forced passage from Greville to Hamilton would today be defined as trafficking, an act that reduces an individual to property. However, this compromise of her personal autonomy did not automatically entail a compromise of intellectual autonomy. In other words, although commodified, Emma the trafficked commodity retained the capacity for independent thought and interaction with her environment, including the classical artefacts within it. Her knowledge of classical antiquity was undeniably unorthodox. Unlike other women whose contributions as textual critics and translators are now receiving scholarly recognition,22 Emma’s exposure to and transmission of ideas about antiquity relied almost exclusively upon non-literary sources. The repertoire at Drury Lane would have introduced her to vignettes from Greek and Roman history via revivals of Addison’s Cato, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Bonduca [Boudicca], Lee’s bombastic Death of Alexander or the Rival Queens, and Murphy’s tear-jerking The Grecian Daughter.23 In its onstage manifestation, the ancient world was histrionic and highly strung, populated by divas who struck melodramatic poses while declaiming their pain in blank verse. Classical antiquity was also, if Emma’s sojourn at Dr Graham’s is an authentic episode, pornographic, or at least licentious, semi-nudity aestheticized by virtue of its occurrence in ancient art. The slippage between connoisseurship and titillation is well documented, recurring as a theme in Rowlandson’s cartoons and paintings such as Cosway’s Lecture on Venus’s Arse (1775).24 Pagan antiquity accommodated libertinism. Emma’s experience of classical myths as artistic resources continued in Romney’s studio, where she impersonated characters as diverse as Circe, Cassandra, Medea, and Ariadne,25 entering these narratives from the perspective of the iconic female roles which she embodied for the considerable duration of the portrait’s development. As Rauser has shown, Emma’s adoption of white drapery for her tableaux was an influential factor in transferring this signature element of elite women’s fashion from portraiture to everyday dress.26 Effective manipulation of the shawls and sheer muslin that comprised costume à l’antique was also part of her training in modelling and theatre. The final stage in Emma’s classical education occurred in Naples, at the cutting edge of proto-archaeological discovery, as she attended the opening of tombs and examined first-hand the pottery that emerged.27 Her engagement with the vessels was shaped by the impressions of antiquity that had preceded it: material, sensual, palpable in the reconfigurations of her own body. Albeit performative and non-verbal rather than literary, it is precisely this embodied mode of reception that prompts serious consideration of the Attitudes in their capacity as an intermedial translation practice.28
When Emma arrived in Naples in 1786, Sir William had already been resident there for some twenty years. His first vase collection, catalogued by ‘Baron’ d’Hancarville, had been sold to the British Museum and dispatched to England in 1772, so although it was accessible to Emma via its luxury catalogue, it is primarily Hamilton’s second collection—illustrated by Tischbein—with which the Attitudes are interwoven.29 Unfortunately, the ship carrying this second collection to England was wrecked and the majority of the vases lost, so Tischbein’s engravings supply an important record.30 The lost vases, like Emma herself, are absent behind their extant images. As Viccy Coltman and others have demonstrated, the catalogues give a very different impression of the scenes from the vases, not least because they are flattened onto the page and framed in the manner of a neoclassical painting, groupings and figures often subtly altered to give their appearance the anticipated grace and decorum.31 Tischbein’s line drawings, moreover, excerpt sequences of particular characters, for example Hercules or Amazons, to facilitate a scholarly focus on the detail of attributes such as weapons and garments. The catalogues present the vases as an artistic and antiquarian resource, and indeed they were used as such, providing the inspiration for Wedgwood and other designers of replica Grecian homewares.32
Based on the illustrations of Emma in action by Rehberg and Novelli, there are no exact correlations between her Attitudes and any figures depicted on the Hamilton vases, but three types of convergence can be discerned: physical posture and gesture, manipulation of costume and cloth, and the use of the vessels themselves as props. Emma’s seated Sibyl (Rehberg Plate 1) resembles similarly seated female figures from both Hancarville’s catalogue (e.g. 3.47 and 3.97) and Tischbein’s (e.g. 2.2). These figures perform a corkscrew twist of the torso, looking back over one shoulder so that their knees appear side-on, the chest faces the front and the head is in profile while the gaze, distracted, turns away behind. Many of these seated figures support themselves on a hand, but Emma holds one fist to her forehead to indicate meditation while her other hand lowers a scroll. The fabric of her shawl, wrapped partially into a turban, cascades from wrist to floor so she seems to be leaning against a column of cloth. Variants of the bacchante with a tambourine (Rehberg Plate 8) recur on several occasions (e.g. Hancarville 4.107; Tischbein 1.51). Rehberg’s Emma holds the instrument playfully out of reach of a small child who stretches up for it, perhaps corresponding to the diminutive Erotes who dance with female partners in images such as Tischbein 3.28. The child, who may be the young Adèle de Boigne, also appears in Rehberg Plate 12 as a dead Niobid and as Medea’s daughter in Novelli.33 Rehberg Plate 6, depicting the dancer with her flying mantle, also has a number of analogous vase images, such as Hancarville 1.130 and 4.83. Two features in particular stand out. Arrested motion is indicated by a combination of the leg kicked backwards as though caught mid-stride and the balance on tiptoe, while Emma again reproduces the contrapposto twist that here suggests a suspended pirouette. The vase dancers, like those depicted on sarcophagi and other relief sculptures, hold their mantles in both hands to float like hoops in the slipstream of their illusory speed. Emma’s challenge was to find a way of recreating these signs of rapid motion, and to sustain the resulting pose—as apparently effortless as an arabesque, and equally demanding—without losing either balance or form. Another figure frequently encountered is the priestess bearing libations (Rehberg Plate 9). Less animated in her stance than some of the other Attitudes, her recognizability depends more on the props she carries than the shape of her body and clothing. Nevertheless, Emma likely based her handling of the two vessels on the images that show them in use (e.g. Hancarville 3.60 and 4.75; Tischbein 2.49). The flat phiale is held at waist height on an open palm while the oinochoe, containing the wine to be offered in libation, swings at her side.
In other respects, Emma’s creative process is one of synthesis and dramatization. She integrates smaller components such as the inclination of the head, the extension of a hand, and above all the way women interact with their own garments, wrapping them around or plucking them away. Whereas these gestures in the vase-paintings are uninflected, Emma appears to have invested them with affective purpose and narrative function. As ‘Cleopatra’ (Rehberg Plate 10), she indicates supplication not only by an arm upraised imploringly as she kneels, but also by the sweep of cloth that amplifies it, following the line of both gesture and gaze to exhort an imaginary Octavian. ‘Sophonisba’ (Rehberg Plate 4) engineers a similar enhancement, expanding the space commanded by the hand that holds aloft a fatal poisoned cup. Adèle de Boigne comments that Emma ‘takes inspiration from antique statues, and brings them to life without servile imitation’;34 one such resource was evidently the Niobid group, as personified explicitly in Rehberg Plate 12 but also notably behind the articulate use of cloth in a number of Novelli’s engravings and in Rehberg Plate 10. In some cases, multiple ancient sources can be identified: the dancer and the bacchante also reference the fresco of dancing women found in Herculaneum’s ‘Villa of Cicero’,35 and it is likely that Emma’s prostrations of grief owe something to the Vatican’s ‘Sleeping Ariadne’ as well as the Ariadne frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Ariadne was incarnated by Emma for George Romney in 1785 as a demure and patient stranded bride; for Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in 1790, her Ariadne, abandoned now in every sense, reclines on leopard-skin, already anticipating Bacchus’ advances. Her collaboration with Vigée Le Brun as model during this period almost certainly influenced the development of the Attitudes, although Vigée Le Brun almost certainly overstates her own contribution.36
In several of the illustrations by Rehberg and Novelli, Emma appears to be using antique vases as props. Novelli shows her as Agrippina, embracing a large amphora, then as an intoxicated bacchante squinting myopically after it as it rolls away. In the tragic role of Sophonisba, as previously noted, Emma toasts her death by poison in a kylix (chalice) while the lekythos (flask) containing her liberation remains close at hand. Her ‘Priestess’ carries an oinochoe (a wine-jug) in one hand and a phiale (a flat dish) in the other. Emma’s use of each vessel appears to be based on the vase-paintings themselves, which often show pots being handled within the depicted scenes. Lekythoi, for instance, regularly depict mourners carrying such vessels as offerings at tombs, while kylikes show symposiasts drinking. Women carry water both on and in hydriae. The actions performed by Emma are suggested by the very vessels involved in their enactment. The inclusion of vases by Novelli and Rehberg could be dismissed as artistic license or interpreted as Sir William’s possessive imposition,37 but their use in performance is also attested independently by an anecdote in which Emma is reported as ‘lying down in the pose of a water nymph’, her head resting on a Greek vase. Rehberg Plate 5 also shows her reclining as a Danaid or river nymph holding an oinochoe by the handle. ‘Don’t be afeard Sir Willum; I’ll not break your joug’, said the nymph’.38 This vignette illustrates Emma’s need to reassure her husband, suggesting that she has indeed appropriated one of his genuine antiques.
It also suggests a sneer at Emma’s low-status accent, which the author, Lady Elizabeth Holland, felt it was necessary to reproduce phonetically. Chloe Chard has written on the troubling contrast perceived by Emma’s elite spectators (both men and women) between her silent, dream-like embodiment of classical heroines and the unrefined tones of her strident, disruptive voice.39 Other observers had similar reactions to Lady Holland’s: Elizabeth Foster writes that ‘No Grecian or Trojan princess could have had a more perfect or commanding form’, but that in person, by contrast, she came across as ‘coarse and vulgar’.40 Gilbert Eliot, the Earl of Minto, found ‘the very refined taste which she discovers in this performance’ incongruous beside her everyday ‘conversation, manners, and figure’.41 Aesthetic philosopher Johann Herder, who was reportedly otherwise enchanted with the Attitudes, found Emma’s more bacchantische poses embarrassingly explicit, and condemns her as ‘fundamentally such a common (gemeine) person, without finer feeling for anything at all’.42 The common theme here emerges as the observers’ inability to reconcile Emma’s impoverished background and lack of formal education with her evident capacity for analysing ancient works of art and re-presenting them in a novel medium.
Similar assumptions regarding Emma’s inferiority arguably inform the continuing habit in contemporary scholarship of attributing the invention and development of the Attitudes to Sir William. The two pieces of actual evidence behind this assertion are circumstantial at best. In an anecdote related in a letter by Emma herself from the autumn of 1787, Sir William deploys her talent at the expense of a visiting priest by instructing her to veil her head and raise her eyes—that is, to adopt her ‘Virgin Mary’ pose—whereupon the priest ‘burst into tears and kist my feet’. This humorous incident, however, occurred well after Emma had begun exhibiting the Attitudes publicly and is therefore unrelated to their genesis. One traveller, Isaac Gerning, claims in 1802 that the attitudes were inspired by ‘a poor restoration of the arm of a Pallas’, but in the absence of any further details any extrapolation from this is purely speculative. Nevertheless, the overwhelming consensus is that Sir William, as well as acting as Emma’s ‘impresario’,43 must also have been the creative mastermind behind her performances. ‘Let us assume, then, that he coached her’,44 writes Flora Fraser, Emma’s biographer; this is quoted approvingly by Lori-Anne Touchette, who states explicitly that ‘the attitudes were indeed a specific response by Sir William to the stimulus of ancient sites and ancient art … [which] inspired [him], like an eighteenth-century Pygmalion, to fashion Emma’.45 Gail Holmström likewise asserts that ‘Sir William must be given the credit. It was entirely due to him that the poses of the gifted model became a free scenic form’, and that somehow ‘he therefore trained Emma’ in the use of her body as an expressive instrument.46
This claim does not stand up to scrutiny, however. As Jean-Georges Noverre’s 1760 Letters on Ballet emphasize, to be an effective choreographer, capable of suiting gestures to character and emotion so as to be recognizable but not trite, impassioned but sincere, exaggerated but still natural, was a skilled profession. Although a renowned polymath, Sir William is not otherwise noted as a maître de danse. Emma herself, on the other hand, had a theatrical background, was taking dancing lessons from an Italian ballet instructor, and most significantly had worked for several years as the model and indeed the muse of painter George Romney. Although modelling for him over sixty times, Emma rarely sat in propria persona but rather as a variety of classical and other figures. This should not be taken as an opportunity simply to transfer the role of Pygmalion, as David Constantine does,47 from Hamilton to Romney. Rather, it should prompt us to re-evaluate the mode of classical reception at work in the Attitudes. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun attributes Emma’s skill in incarnating Grecian figures to her apprenticeship with Romney, but at the same time stresses Emma’s own creative innovation. ‘He had her adopt a thousand graceful poses [attitudes], which he pinned down in his paintings. It is there that she perfected her talent for the new art form that made her famous’.48Elle perfectionna ce talent: during hours of establishing and holding what were deemed evocative positions, Emma became fluent in the body language of history painting, seizing the opportunity in Romney’s studio to refine aptitude into craft by dint of constant practice. Romney no doubt contributed to her training, but the execution was Emma’s, and it was through the vector of her embodied practice that artworks became performance art.49
Contemporary theory regarding the effective communication of emotion recognized a repertoire of gestures common to the studio and the stage. Handbooks recommended that painters attend the theatre to study how actors conveyed their passions and vice versa, that actors should hone their craft with reference to painting—particularly history painting—and sculpture.50 This interchange reinforced the development of gestural conventions supposedly derived from nature, but sufficiently stylized in form to be at once immediately comprehensible and gracefully executed. Just as Greco-Roman pantomime dance shared an emotional palette with the visual arts in order to create meaningful physical imagery,51 so the eighteenth-century theatre and ballets d’action sought common representational ground with painting.52 The exaggerated gestural expression which a generation later would be popularized as melodrama, and subsequently come to be derided as ‘melodramatic’ in the derogatory sense, was at this time a technique generally acknowledged for arousing sympathy in the viewer.53
Emma’s tableaux evidently participate in this gestural circulation. One of the most widely consulted handbooks of stagecraft, Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, recommends for example that to indicate pathos, the actor should ‘cast the eyes upwards, clasp the hands, and sigh’, which accords with Rehberg Plates 7 and 11 and also two of Novelli’s illustrations. Meanwhile, ‘grief arising from sudden and afflicting intelligence covers the eyes with one hand, advances forwards, and throws back the other hand’, as do Rehberg’s Niobe and Sophonisba, and the ‘feminine expression’ of shame ‘sinks on its knee and covers the eyes with both hands’ (compare Novelli).54 The point here is not that Emma was consulting handbooks such as Austin’s directly, but rather that they serve as evidence for the milieu in which she was operating. In fact, having been a professional model for history painting, Emma occupies a pivotal point of overlap between the two art forms, revealing the skill of the model herself as a form of dance.
When Goethe visited the Hamilton household in the spring of 1787, he was privileged not only to witness one of Emma’s earliest soirée performances, but also to be given a backstage tour of the storeroom housing the overflow of Sir William’s collection. Among the clutter he noticed an upright cabinet, painted black inside and ‘large enough to hold a standing human figure’. It was framed like a picture with a heavy gold frame. Its purpose was precisely to display Emma as a painting: ‘standing against this black background in dresses of various colours, she had sometimes imitated the antique paintings of Pompeii or even more recent masterpieces’. Goethe then goes on to remark that ‘This phase, it seems, is now over.’55 If it was already over by the spring of 1787, it must have been one of Emma’s earliest experiments with recreating ancient artworks in a new medium. Having been previously known to Sir William mainly as a model in classical paintings—some of which he already owned or had commissioned56—it seems natural for Emma to have expanded his collection in a virtual sense by posing live in this specially constructed frame. As the apparatus proved cumbersome to move and difficult to light, however, it was rapidly dispensed with.57 Liberated from the gilded casket, Emma brought her Attitudes out into the three-dimensional air of the salon, and began discovering new applications for her mimetic talent. The precise genesis of the Attitudes remains obscure, but this is a much more plausible sequence of events than those which insist on Sir William’s sole Pygmalionic agency.58
It should also prompt us to re-evaluate the Attitudes as an instance of classical reception in their own right, as Emma’s response to ‘the stimulus of ancient sites and ancient art’. That Emma took an independent interest in the vases is suggested by the frontispiece to Tischbein’s catalogue which shows her present at the opening of a tomb. Her primary interest was not antiquarian, however, but performative, and it availed her of a different type of knowledge. For Sir William and other collectors, the vases represented capsules of information about ancient Greece that could be objectively apprehended: that is, it resided encoded in the vessels themselves, and especially in the images they depicted. Thora Brylowe has written persuasively about the translation of the Hamilton vase paintings into their catalogue form.59 This type of knowledge can jump medium. It is transferable; it is portable; it is exchangeable; in other words, it is saleable. When the British Museum acquired the Hamilton vases, they also purchased access to an apparently stable repository of data about the ancient world. Similarly, in purchasing a copy of the catalogue, one comes to own a virtual version of the same data set. Vision is the sense which enables the catalogue to function as an epistemological equivalent to the physical collection. As I have argued elsewhere,60 the contrast between antiquarian and performative knowledge can most readily be conceived as a contrast between the visual and the kinaesthetic.
It is the relationship between viewer and image that has been the dominant paradigm in the fifty years since Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay on the phallocentrism of cinematography.61 Images, so the theory goes, especially images of women, are a fetishized commodity. They are consumed, circulated, objectified. Owning the image of a woman’s body, like owning a painted landscape,62 symbolizes ownership of the thing depicted. Gaze theory implies Emma’s disempowerment once transferred to the canvas. William Hamilton purchased and commissioned paintings of Emma from Romney both before and after she came into his life. The gaze, a masculine prerogative, is understood as aggressive, dominant, and phallic.63 In crude terms, female bodies in the canon of Western art are silent, passive, often anonymous, and typically—unless the sitter is of sufficient social status that the painting becomes a portrait—nude. Viewers are gendered male, enjoying the sublimated erotics of a power dynamic based on women’s inability to escape the lascivious eye (the lens, the frame, the sculptor’s chisel). Pygmalion, a favourite myth for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage adaptation,64 still has considerable cultural currency.65 For Pygmalion, however, his eburnea virgo (‘ivory girl’) and the woman into whom she dissolves are one and the same, a conflation which is confounded by Emma’s takeover of the creative process. Her art may be non-verbal, but it is not inarticulate. There is a materiality and subjectivity behind and around the image which is not entirely accounted for by gaze theory;66 although masculine viewers (and gaze theory itself) treat her as a disempowered image, the model can be permitted to retain some agency. Her desires and actions persist off-camera, independently of the artefacts that circulate in her place. Fetishizing stone or oil or pixels as proxies for a living body is Pygmalion’s error, and although within the confines of the Ovidian myth his delusion is magically resolved, this gratification should not be mistaken for material truth.
The power dynamics in the Attitudes can also be understood as subversive in the way they translate antiques from property into props. Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes give us a means of dismantling the regime of sensory privilege which associates ownership with the right to touch. When we talk about ‘embodied’ or ‘procedural’ knowledge, we mean knowledge acquired through kinaesthesia, or the sense of self-movement. In Emma’s case, this takes two forms. Firstly, she understands what it feels like to occupy physical positions similar to those depicted on the vases, and how to manipulate similar clothing. She understands also how these postures can be broken down and recombined with other elements of ancient art to produce tableaux that are both recognisable and affective. This she has achieved through long-term practice and repetition, discovering with her body how these ancient figures move, how particular nerves and muscles remain active even in stillness. Her knowledge of anatomy is as sensitive and technical as a painter’s, albeit that the anatomy in question is her own.
Secondly, Emma understands about handling pots in a way that restores to them a function: perhaps not the same function they performed in antiquity, but endowing them nevertheless with a positive identity other than the decorative, the fetishized, or the economic. Emma perceives the pots in their pragmatic capacity, as a stimulus for action. Rather than signifying abstract facts about ancient society or religion—or indeed, signifying the price they might fetch on the antiquities market—to Emma they signify opportunities for interactive movement. The knowledge acquired through this kind of interaction inheres in the individual herself, and can only be acquired through practice; it is intrinsically personal. Kinaesthetic occupation represented for Emma an alternative way to take possession of ancient material culture and enter a world from which she was otherwise excluded due to her gender and her class.
Footnotes
‘He is proud of so magnificent a marble, belonging so entirely to himself’, Lady Palmerston, correspondence; ‘possessing so delightful an object under my roof’, William Hamilton, correspondence; both quoted in Touchette 2000: 131–32. ‘Sir William Hamilton has actually married his Gallery of Statues’, Horace Walpole, correspondence in Lewis 1944, vol. 11: 249.
See articles by C. Meyer and A. Baker in this issue of BICS.
Candlin 2010. Candlin 2010: 80 quotes a satirical article from 1754 attributing the ‘ruinous condition’ of ancient statues to ‘the depredations made upon them by connoisseurs’, and Robert Southey from 1807 remarking on the ‘barbarous habit which Englishmen have of seeing with the sense of touch. They can never look at a thing without having it in the hand, nor show it to another person without touching it with a stick, if it is within reach.’ It is not necessarily gendered; the accident-prone Lady Anna Miller destroys fragile cloth by fingering it, almost knocks down a wall at Pompeii, and purloins handfuls of small objects from Cumae. Miller 2009 [1777]: 70–71, 99, 126.
Candlin 2010: 91–95, 106–10. Candlin 2010: 119 also makes the point that the only other groups permitted to touch exhibits are those targeted by access programmes, such as children, the visually impaired, or visitors euphemistically designated ‘hard-to-reach’—another sensitive sensory issue. See article by C. Meyer in this issue of BICS.
On the recuperation of touch, see Classen 2005 and 2012; Paterson 2007. On kinaesthesia as unacknowledged but cognitively crucial, see Sheets-Johnstone 2013; Sklar 2008.
Rehberg's Drawings may be viewed online in the British Museum Prints Collection: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1873-0809-131-143.
See Barnett 1987 on gestural convention in neoclassical art and stage performance. It is not possible to determine the extent to which Rehberg is representing Emma, and the extent to which they are both drawing on the vases as a common source. Cf. Nolta 1997 and Rauser 2015 (on Emma’s use of sources) and Brylowe 2008 on the ‘classicization’ of Hamilton’s vase-paintings.
Cosway: National Portrait Gallery NPG2941; National Maritime Museum, PAF4385; Friedrich Bury: Lady Hamilton im weißen Gewand mit fliegenden Haaren, Weimar; William Artaud: British Museum, BM (Prints) 1973-12-8-85(7).
Rauser 2015: 467–68. These wall-paintings are from the ‘Villa of Cicero’.
In particular Rowlandson’s print, Lady H****’s Attitudes (V&A E.122-1952).
Stead and Hall 2015: 1–19 establish a useful distinction between upper-case ‘Classics’ (the discipline), and lower-case ‘classics’ (the diffusion of cultural references to antiquity), e.g. ‘Some of the richest encounters with classical culture appear to have had very little to do with the academic field of “Classics”’ (p. 3).
This is ultimately derived from Bourdieu 1977.
Neale 1972: 29.
On Emma’s early life and transition to London, see Williams 2006: 3–45.
Altick 1978: 82–83.
Lyon and Hart were both used as her surnames. It is partly for this reason that I refer to her as ‘Emma’ throughout this article, and partly to distinguish her from her husband, Sir William.
Skeggs 2005: 49–64.
Gillray, Dido in Despair; Muse of Dance, in an Edition Considerably Enlarged (Lewis Walpole Library).
Pateman 1988 outlines the idea of a ‘sexual contract’, subordination legalized through marriage, as the patriarchal counterpart to the ‘social contract’ on which civil society is founded. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first to point out in 1792 that there can be no social equality without gender equality.
Anthias 2005: 32 and 25.
For example Bellamy, Laurence, and Perry 2000.
Van Lennep et al. 1960–68, vol. 5. Classical mythology during the 1770s and 1780s tended to generate ballets and oratorios, but occasional performances of Medea, Hippolitus [sic], and Iphigenia may also be noted, alongside other regularly performed history plays featuring Artaxerxes, Zenobia, and Junius Brutus, among others. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Julius Caesar were also sometimes revived during the period of Emma’s residence in London.
Richard Cosway, aka Charles Towneley with a Group of Connoisseurs (Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum BURGM:paoil195; Thomas Rowlandson, e.g. The Cunnyseurs (V&A E.138-1952); The Sculptor (Royal Collection RCIN 810559); and The Antiquarian (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1963.24.573). For comment see Coltman 2009, 159–90; Guilding 2014, 230–46; Bermingham 1995, 502.
Circe: Waddesdon Manor 104.1995; Medea: Norton Simon Museum F.1965.1.058.P; Ariadne: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich BHC2736. Emma was known especially for her portrayal of bacchants, e.g. National Portrait Gallery NPG294, and another in the Jean Kislak collection. Romney also painted Emma as non-classical heroines such as St Cecilia, Mary Magdalene, and Shakespeare’s Titania.
Rauser 2015; see also Ribeiro 1995.
Tischbein depicts her at the opening of a tomb. On the archaeological significance of Hamilton’s excavations, see Higginson 2011: 11–52; Lyons 1997.
On the translation of vase imagery into dance, see Macintosh 2012. The concept of intermedial translation is taken from Scott 2012.
Hancarville 1767–76; Hamilton/Tischbein 1791–95. On Hancarville’s colourful life see Haskell 1984, and on his contribution to the perception of ancient ceramics, Vickers and Gill 1994: 6–14.
A portion of Hamilton’s second collection was transported separately (later purchased by Thomas Hope), and fragments were also recovered in the 1970s from the wreck site. Smallwood and Woodford 2003.
See article by A. Petsalis-Diomidis in this issue of BICS.
De Boigne recalls participating in the Attitudes as Medea’s daughter and a Niobid. Quoted in Chard 2000a: 164–65.
De Boigne quoted in Chard 2000a: 182.
Naples Archaeological Museum, Inv. 9295.
Vigée Le Brun 1984: 201 claims credit for Emma’s costume, but Emma had already been performing the Attitudes prior to the artist’s arrival in Naples.
Holland quoted in Fraser 1986: 207.
Chard 2000a and 2000b.
Foster quoted in Chard 2000a: 163.
Eliot quoted in Chard 2000a: 160.
Herder, Italienische Reise, March 1789 (1989: 361).
Constantine 2011: 164.
Fraser 1986: 122.
Touchette 2000: 132.
Holmström 1967: 137 and 139.
Constantine 2011: 164.
‘Il lui faisait prendre mille attitudes gracieuses qu’il fixait dans ses tableaux. C’est là qu’elle perfectionna ce talent d’un nouveau genre, qui l’a rendue célèbre.’ Vigée-Lebrun 1984: 90ff (emphasis added).
Emma was rehabilitated as an artist in her own right by the National Maritime Museum’s 2016 exhibition ‘Emma Hamilton: Seduction and Celebrity’. Colville and Williams 2016.
Quoted in Barnett 1987: 44, 67, 302.
Goethe 1962 [1816]: 315–16.
Jenkins and Sloan 1996: 87–89 and 266–73.
As stated by Goethe 1962 [1816]: 316.
Marshall 1998; Stoichita 2008 discusses the cultural persistence of the Pygmalion myth.
Mitchell 1994, esp. 15 on the commodification of landscape under capitalism; cf. Bermingham 1994 in the same volume.
As in e.g.Fredrick 2002, arguing for the equivalency of phallus and gaze. Salzman-Mitchell 2005:, 6–13 gives a helpful summary of gaze theory and its complications, for example the question of how a ‘feminine’ gaze might look.
e.g.Stoichita 2008.
For similar critiques of gaze theory, see e.g.Kaplan 2010 on whether there can be a feminist cinema; also Snow 1989.
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Anon.
