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DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 6/01 c:/ClRC/DaieDue.p65-p. 15 CLASSIC GROUND: AMERICAN PAINTINGS AND THE ITALIAN ENCOUNTER, 1848-1860 By Paul Andrew Manoguerra A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Program in American Studies 2002 Professor Kenneth Haltman ABSTRACT CLASSIC GROUND: AMERICAN PAINTINGS AND THE ITALIAN ENCOUNTER, 1848-1860 BY Paul Andrew Manoguerra As a result of their mid-nineteenth-century Italian travels within a “Grand Tour,” Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Robinson Gifford, George Loring Brown, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and other American painters created a body of work featuring Italian landscapes, people, buildings and life. By employing material culture methods, I situate several American paintings with Italian subject matter within the context of politics, gender, ideology, religion, and high and low culture. I also look at the reception of these images within artistic institutions, in the United States art market and among patrons, and against the backdrop of the social and cultural climate of late antebellum America to expose the layered meanings within each work. Copyright by PAUL ANDREW MANOGUERRA 2002 For Michelle iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation is the result of the most gracious and generous assistance of many people. I am particularly indebted to the faculty of the American Studies program at Michigan State University for their encouragement for this project. I owe special thanks to my dissertation advisor, Kenneth Haltman, for his keen and always constructive criticism, good humor, and unfailing support. Thanks to Raymond Silverman, Victor Jew, and David Cooper for their interest, advice, and aid as members of my dissertation committee. I am grateful for the generous financial support of the American Studies program, the Graduate School, and the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University (MSU). I want to register a special thank you to my colleague at MSU, Patrick Lee Lucas, for his moral support, editorial advice, and friendship. Over the course of this project, the staffs of numerous libraries and museums have provided assistance and advice. I thank them all. Other individuals took the time to read and comment on various drafts of the whole manuscript or specific chapters. I am indebted to them for their insights: Kimberly Little and David LoRomer at Michigan State University, and Bruce Levine at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I thank the attendees and commentors at various association meetings and public lectures, including those attending my presentations at the Great Lakes American Studies Association, the 2nd Biannual Fall Festival of the American Arts and National Conference at MSU, the Great Lakes History Conference, the Western Social Science Association, and the Georgia Museum of Art. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers of refereed journals for their attentive criticism of various drafts of my chapters. I could never have completed this dissertation without the loving support, understanding, and encouragement of my parents, Anthony and Margaret Manoguerra, my mother-in-law, Jane Darnell, my late father—in-law, Richard Darnell, and my children, Isabella Rose, Anthony Richard, and Jolina Michelle. Above all, I cannot begin to suitably and justly thank my wife, Michelle, for all of her years of patience, encouragement, faith, and love. This dissertation would not have been possible without her. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ........................... Viii INTRODUCTION .................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 ....................................... 21 This Cause is Ours: Martin Johnson Heade’s Roman Newsboys and American Reaction to the Roman Republic of 1848-49 CHAPTER 2 ....................................... 67 “Bound Together in an Indissoluble Chain”: American Tourist Representations of the Waterfalls at Tivoli and in America CHAPTER 3 ....................................... 94 Diana's Mirror: History and Gender in Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Lake Nemi CHAPTER 4 ....................................... 122 “Like Going to Greece”: American Painters and Paestum CHAPTER 5 ....................................... 150 Anti—Catholicism in Albert Bierstadt's The Arch of Octavius: A Maze of Bewildering Inconsistencies? BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................... 187 ILLUSTRATIONS ................................... 216 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Thomas Cole, Dream of Arcadia, 1838. Oil on canvas, 39 x 63 in. Collection of the Denver Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lindsey Gentry. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 179. 2. Martin Johnson Heade, Roman Newsboys, about 1848-49. Oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 24 3/8 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 202. 3. George Loring Brown, Tivoli(The Falls of Tivoli), 1850. Oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. Collection of The Newark Museum, Purchase 1957, The G.L. Brown Fund. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 289 4. Sanford Robinson Gifford, Lake Nemi, 1856—57. Oil on canvas, 39 5/8 x 60 3/8 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 296-97. 5. Jasper Francis Cropsey, Temple of Neptune, Paestum, 1859. Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 51 in. Collection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. viii 6. Albert Bierstadt, Ruins of Paestum, 1858. Oil on canvas, 22 x 36 in. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund. 7. Bierstadt, The Arch of Octavius (Roman Fish Market), 1858. Oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 37 1/2 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 215. 8. Thomas Hicks, Margaret Fuller, 1848. Oil on canvas, 16 x 13 in. Priavte collection. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 199. 9. Richard Caton Woodville, war News from Mexico, 1848. Oil on canvas, 27 x 24 3/4 in. The National Academy of Design, New York. Illustrated as Plate 1 in Johns, American Genre Painting. 10. Frederick R. Spencer, The Newsboy, 1849. Oil on wood, 21 x 17 in. Private collection. Illustrated as Pl. 1 in Husch. 11. “The Judgment of the Times,” Plate 35 from G. Daelli, A Relic of the Italian Revolution of 1849 (New Orleans: Gabici’s Music Stores, 1850?). Michigan State University Library Special Collections. ix 12. “Impediments to Liberty,” Plate 2 from Daelli. Michigan State University Library Special Collections. 13. Heade, Roman Newsboys II, 1849. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 203. 14. Cropsey, Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, 1865. Oil on canvas, 22 3/8 x 36 3/8 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. Illustrated in Adams, 57. 15. Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1835—36. Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 76 in. The New-York Historical Society. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 87. 16. Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836. Oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 63 in. The New-York Historical Society. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 88. 17. Cole, The Cascatelli, Tivoli, Looking Towards Rome, c.1832. Oil on canvas, 32 3/4 x 44 1/2 in. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walker Knight Sturges and Family. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 61. 18. Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill, 1826. Oil on canvas, 43 x 36 in. Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 52. 19. Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857. Oil on canvas, 42 1/4 x 90 1/2 in. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Illustrated in Johns, New Worlds, 165. 20. Cole, Past, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 x 61 in. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 94. 21. Cole, Present, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 x 61 in. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 95. 22. Daniel Huntington, Italia, 1843. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 23. Detail of an 1851 billhead for “North American Electric Washing Fluid,...Warranted Perfectly Harmless in its Operations, and to Possess Double the Power of Any Thing of the Kind Ever Discovered,” 1851. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. xi 24. Cropsey, Evening at Paestum, 1856. Oil on wood, 9 x 15 1/2 in. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of Matthew Vassar. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 267. 25. Flavius Fischer, The Dismal Swamp, 1857?. Oil on canvas, 30 x 50 in. Maier Museum of Art, Randolph—Macon Woman’s College, Lynchburg, VA. Illustrated in David Miller, Dark Eden, 39. 26. “IRISH BEGGAR to generous Young Lady...,” Harper’s Weekly, November 6, 1858, 720. 27. “Political Market,” Harper’s Weekly, November 6, 1858, 720. 28. Barberini Faun, c. 200 BCE. Marble. Staatliche Antiken-Sammlungen, Munich. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 228. 29. William Wetmore Story, Medea. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Henry Chauncey. Illustrated in Joy Kasson, 220. 30. Unidentified photographer, stage image of Adelaide Ristori in character as Medea with her children, n.d. Houghton Library, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Illustrated in Joy Kasson, 229. xii 31. Statuary Room of the Boston Athenaeum. Wood engraving from Ballou’s Pictorial, Vol. 8, March 31, 1855, 201. 32. Currier & Ives, “Preparing for Market,” 1856. Hand-colored engraving. 33. “Faneuil Hall Market Before Thanksgiving,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, December 6, 1851. Illustrated in Nylander, 268. xiii Introduction This dissertation examines the cultural history of a group of art objects, and their reception and context, in late antebellum America. As a result of their mid-nineteenth-century Italian travels within a “Grand Tour,” Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Robinson Gifford, George Loring Brown, Jasper Francis Cropsey, and other American painters created a body of work featuring Italian landscapes, people, buildings and life. In their images, these artists shaped and reshaped American political, religious and cultural ideologies through the construction and manipulation of their subject matter. These artists encoded the values, ideas, and beliefs of antebellum America within their works. A portion of the dissertation relies upon the travel stories told by the numerous mid—nineteenth—century American painters who, along with tourists, writers, and sculptors, traveled to Italy. Much of these painters’ art addresses seminal questions about faith, nature, and national destiny. By employing material culture methods, described further below, I situate these images in the context of politics, religion, and high and low culture. The upper- and middle-class patrons and the painters of these images established and used art organizations like the National Academy of Design, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I look at the reception of the paintings within these institutions, in the United States, and against the backdrop of the social and cultural climate of late antebellum America to expose the layered meanings within each work. The arguments and issues that compose this dissertation focus on detailed analyses of individual works or of a group of works with similar subject matter. The emphasis is on the text as much as the context, and, in particular, on the creation of visual texts from other texts (verbal or visual) over the late antebellum era. Some of the specific research questions that will frame my project include: Why visit and depict Italy? What does that tell us about American artists? What does the Grand Tour, as a whole, explain about the world-view of American artists? How might intersections of race, class, and gender, implicated in questions of power and hierarchy, inform readings of American paintings on Italy? How might close readings of specific paintings reflect and encode the beliefs, values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions of antebellum Americans? The special relationship with Italy that antebellum Americans constructed for themselves found its base in a distinct allegory which explained the United States as the heir to the democratic ideals of the ancients. One task of this project involves exploring the manner in which the visual and textual representation of a “foreign” land -- Italy -- ultimately becomes a commentary, not on the visited place, but on the homeland -- the United States -- temporarily left behind, as well as the place the homeland occupies within the larger world. American visitors often experienced their Italian sojourn as if they were traveling into some distant, noble past, with the contemporary Italians remaining a colorful, sometimes disdainful, distraction from ancient experiences. American tourists (including the painters discussed in this dissertation) believed that they knew and understood more about the great and ancient history of the tourist sites -- Rome, the campagna, Paestum, and Tivoli, among others -— than the Italians themselves. This American “knowledge,” objectified and culturally transferred through travel accounts, souvenirs, sculptures and paintings, allowed Americans to use Italy to confirm and advance an American sense of history, perpetuating important beliefs in American exceptionalism. The dissertation has been titled “Classic Ground” because of the multiple and useful meanings of the two words. The American paintings contextualized in this dissertation are “classic” in the sense that they serve as outstanding representatives and models of antebellum American image-making. As part of museum collections, these “classic” paintings hold lasting significance and recognized value. The artists painted in a “classic” manner -- in accordance with established principles and methods. And the primary subject matter of the images centers on the ruins (the actual remains of architecture and the remnants of past ideals hidden by contemporary Italy) of the classical era —- of both ancient Greece and ancient Rome. The ground, the preparatory coat of paint on which these pictures were painted, becomes an area of reference for several beliefs and premises encoded within the images. Often landscape paintings, these images use the ground of Italy as a symbolic area of land designated by the painters for constructing meaning related to the American experience. Although the individual chapters often deal with only a few paintings each, I attempt to synthesize the close textual reading of paintings with concerns for cultural and social analysis. Instead of discussing these paintings only as objects of aesthetics and high art, and completely free from the concerns of antebellum Americans, I conceive of the images as participants in a discourse of politics, race, gender, and religion. These paintings, created by Americans, and imagining Italy, take part in the defining and construction of a national identity prior to the Civil War. I focus this discussion of antebellum American painting with Italian subject matter on the years 1848 to 1860 because of several convenient benchmark events: in 1848 -- the close of the Mexican War, the death of “the father of American landscape painting” Thomas Cole, and the American reactions to the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe (especially the Risorgimento movement in Italy); in 1860 -- the election of Abraham Lincoln and events leading to the Civil War, and the unification of Italy minus the Papal States in that same year. Moreover, as Van Wyck Brooks notes, “a Roman winter became ‘the fashion’”1 and this period represents the peak of American tourists (and artists) in Italy for the antebellum era. The overall goal of the dissertation involves synthesizing close textual readings of paintings of Italy created by American artists with an understanding of the context of the paintings within the social and cultural history of the late antebellum United States. The dissertation is also based upon the premise that paintings, like historical events, do not just happen; they are the results of causes. My approach to antebellum American paintings of Italy utilizes a material culture methodology. The method derives from the analysis recently outlined by Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman. The methodology involves a rigorously practical approach to understanding things, and analysis followed by interpretation. Prown and Haltman outline the basic approach: (1) choose an object; (2) thoroughly describe the object; (3) make clear intellectual and sensory responses to the object; (4) elucidate emotional responses; (5) entertain hypotheses concerning what the object signifies and the cultural work it might have accomplished; (6) think creatively about what research would be necessary to test the interpretive 1Van Wyck Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy 1760-1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1958), 85. hypotheses; and (7) compose a polished interpretive analysis.2 My goal in using a material culture approach embraces a grounding of the social context of the paintings within the messages encoded in the works of art themselves. In addition to material culture method, my dissertation builds upon scholarship in three areas: (1) historical texts on republicanism, Neoclassicism, cultural identity, and the social and political aspects of the antebellum United States; (2) art historical literature on art production in antebellum America; and (3) art historical works on the history of the Grand Tour of Europe, and the English and Americans as tourists in Italy. Numerous recent works on antebellum America focus on the social, political, and cultural history of the “new” country between the Revolution and the Civil War. In his The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood states that within a single lifetime there was a “reconstitution of American society”, the overthrow of the “bonds holding together the older monarchical society —— kinship, patriarchy, and patronage.” He goes on to state that equality and, in a certain sense, democracy were the unintended consequences of the “forces 2Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman, eds., American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000). See Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?,” 11-27, and Haltman, “Introduction,” l-lO. For a discussion of the material culture methodology within the context of art historical scholarship in the United States see Wanda Corn, “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” Art Bulletin 70 (June 1988): 203. unleashed” by the radical and republican reconstitution of 3 I investigate questions of cultural American society. identity -- how Americans of the antebellum era explored not only who they were but also who they wanted to become. How does this set of paintings within antebellum visual culture reflect questions of self-government, republicanism, class, race, and gender? How might issues of cultural hegemony appear in this specific images and in the larger antebellum visual culture? Artists of antebellum America depicted Italy as the subject in many of their works. Modern-era museum exhibitions on American artists in Italy began in 1951 with a Detroit Institute of Arts and Toledo Museum of Art exhibition and publication entitled Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy, 1830—1875. Other exhibitions since 1951 include the University of Kansas Museum of Art show in 1972, with an essay by Barbara Novak, and the Bowdoin College exhibition in 1987, with a catalogue essay by John W. Coffey.4 The 19808 and the early 1990s brought 3Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 4E.P. Richardson and Otto Whittmann, Jr., introduction, Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy, 1830—1875 (Detroit and Toledo: Detroit Institute of Arts and Toledo Museum of Art, 1951). See also Otto Whittman, “The Attraction of Italy for American Painters,” Antiques LXXXV, No.5 (May 1964): 552-557. The Arcadian Landscape: Nineteenth-Century American Painters in Italy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1972). See also Barbara Novak’s chapter “Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy” in Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting 1825—1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, rev. ed., 1995). about an increasing interest among American scholars in the attraction of Italy for American artists including Regina Soria’s Dictionary of American Artists in Italy, 1760-1914 and the three symposia organized by Irma Jaffe at Fordham University.5 The 1993 traveling exhibition entitled Classical Taste in America 1800—1840, originating at the Baltimore Museum of Art, explored the American interest in the “art, learning, interior decoration, fashion, and furnishings in imitation of the ancients.”6 Ultimately, William Vance's 1989 America's Rome and The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience 1760—1914 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, synthesized the scholarship into a comprehensive two volume work and a blockbuster exhibition, respectively.7 All of this scholarly work discussed the many reasons that American artists went to Italy: to view the classical world, to learn ancient history, to celebrate classical 5Regina Soria, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century American Artists in Italy, 1760-1914 (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1982). Irma B. Jaffe, ed.,The Italian Presence in American Art 1760-1860 (New York and Rome: Fordham University Press and Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1989) and The Italian Presence in American Art 1860-1920 (New York and Rome: Fordham University Press and Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1992). 6Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America 1800—1840 (New York: The Baltimore Museum of Art and Abbeville Press, 1993). 7William L. Vance, America’s Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and The Italian Experience 1760-1914 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992). moral virtue, and to have a personal adventure. They went to copy famous paintings, to behold the galleries of Rome, Florence and Venice, and to see the sights, the light and the local color. These books and exhibitions considered American artists’ endeavors “to come to terms with the European past, which they recognized as their own, and their sense of living in the American present.”8 They dealt with the Romanticism and Neoclassicism in American art and their strong Italian influences. They discussed Italy as historic, picturesque, and un-American. Their focus was often on landscape painting or on neoclassical sculpture. They often utilized the writings of American literary figures -- Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James, among others -- to cast light on the American art produced from an Italian sojourn. The late antebellum Americans in Italy were continuing the English tradition of the Grand Tour. Paul Hazard, in referring to seventeenth century individuals including Christina of Sweden, John Locke and Gottfried Willhelm Leibnitz, states that “philospohers went abroad, not to go and meditate in peace in some quiet retreat, but to see the wonders of the world. For eighteenth century Englishmen, the Grand Tour almost always involved a trip to Paris and a 8Jaffe, “Editor's Preface,” vii. tour of Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome. From this itenerary, various other sites were added to the Grand Tour, often including Amsterdam, Bruege, Brussels, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Munich and Geneva. Travel was education and valuable life experience for a proper English gentleman and thinker. For British tourists, “Rome was the goal...In a culture dominated by the classics, Rome was the focus of interest.”All of the ancient republics -- Athens, Thebes, Sparta, and Rome -- were familiar to people in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century English were also fascinated by the Roman writers, including Cicero, Virgil, Sallust, Tacitus and others, and their emphasis on political and social virtues. By the mid—ninteenth century, an elaborate cultural apparatus had attached itself to the landscape of Italy. Guidebooks provided detailed lists of sights and towns to visit according to specified routes. Followed repeatedly for decades, the routes achieved canonical status. Each site held its own associations with historical, artistic, and literary traditions. For all American painters in Italy from 1848-1860, especially for those working for patrons while on a Grand Tour, the veduta tradition and the imagery of Claude and Nicholas Poussin served as a constant influence. They had been preceded in Italy by the British watercolorists, including John Robert 10 Cozens, Richard Wilson, and J.M.W. Turner, and by generations of French, German and Dutch painters.9 But these pre-Civil War American artists also had an American tradition of depicting Italy to build upon. Gordon Wood writes that “Classical republican values existed everywhere among educated people in the English speaking world, but nowhere did they deeper resonance than in the North American colonies...The Americans did not have to invent republicanism in 1776; they only had to bring it to the surface.”10 American republicanism carried with it an affinity for the ancient history of the Italic peninsula, especially for pre—imperial Rome. During the formative years of the early republic in the United States, the classical world bewitched America. The promise of perfect beauty and a model of austere civic virtue (and American 9Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Pheonix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1992), 48. For the British origins of the Grand Tour, see Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour (London: Frank Cass, 1998), and Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London: Thames Methuen, 1987). The social and cultural impact of the Grand Tour and British tourism on Rome is detailed in the chapter “Letters, Art and Visitors” in Maurice Andrieux, Daily Life in Papal Rome in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Mary Fitton (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968). For European artists on the Grand Tour in Italy, see Andrew Wilton, The Art of Alexander and JOhn Robert Cozens (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1980); Cecilia Powell, Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987); Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Peter Galassi, Corot in Italy: Open Air Painting and the Classical—Landscape Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991); and Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, eds., Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996). 10Wood, Radicalism, 101. 11 patriotism) were some of the ideals that classical taste held for wealthly Americans.11 In the colonial era, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley sought the fellowship and artistic life of London and Rome. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Rembrandt Peale, John Vanderlyn, and Washington Allston, among others, went to Italy to View the tourist sites and to sketch scenes made famous through historical associations. The more famous a location, the more noble a subject the site became. Primeval wilderness, as in the New World, was almost unknown and the character of Italy had been shaped not only by the passage of centuries but also the rise and fall of human civilizations. For Americans, the golden age of Italian travel, beginning with the 18408, coincided with the age of romanticism and the vision of the United States as involved in a democratic experiment. Italy operated as a museum of the past and an atmosphere of golden historic dreams. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the opening chapter to The Marble Faun, notes the vague intermingling of history, memory and texture that Italy impressed upon many American visitors: “Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman past, all matters that we handle or dream of nowadays look evanescent and visionary alike.”12 Utilizing Italy as a “land evoking llSee Richard L. Bushman, “Introduction,” in Wendy Cooper. 12Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun or the Romance of Mente Beni (New York: New American Library, 1980), 14. 12 the classical ideals of harmony and prosperity,” Thomas Cole’s Dream of Arcadia (fig. 1, 1838, Denver Museum of Art) is often talked about in terms of Cole’s belief that “the pastoral state represents man existing in harmony with f.”13 For American artists of the nature, and with himsel generation after Cole, Italy was established not only as a great “museum” of the past with classic beauty but also as a site of beautiful light, interesting local people, and sublime and picturesque views. Thomas Cole serves as a seminal figure in understanding American artistic approaches to Italy in 1840-1860. His death on February 11, 1848, just ten days after his forty-seventh birthday, precipitated an outpouring of printed and painted eulogies. The New-York Evening Post described Cole's passing as a “public and national calamity.” William Cullen Bryant, in his Funeral Oration, compared it to a violent convulsion in the natural order that “amazes and alarms us.” Concluding, Bryant asserted that “[Cole] will be reverenced in future years as a great master in art.” Later that year the members of the American Art-Union, the National Academy of Design, and the New—York Gallery of the Fine Arts cooperated and displayed a Memorial Exhibition of Cole’s painting at the Art—Union building. This exhibition, which included many of Cole’s 13Eleanor L. Jones, catalogue entry for Dream of Arcadia in Stebbins, Lure, 178-179. 13 Italy—inspired paintings, had a significant impact on a younger generation of landscape painters -- many whose works appear in this project -— and their potential patrons.l4 Artists were a solid constituency in the sites and scenery of Italy during the years following Thomas Cole’s death. American newspapers and journals reported on the actions of artists abroad. Tourists served as patrons while the guidebooks were quick to offer the addresses of artists’ studios. .Murray’s Handbook mentions that the “intellectual traveller” in Rome should visit “the studios of the artists” beacuse they afford a visit of “the highest interest” and fewer sites “possess a greater charm.” American artists in Rome became part of a larger fraternity of mostly young men. MUrray’s romanticizes the artists’ community and notes that “it is an honourable circumstance that men speaking so many different languages meet at Rome upon common ground, as if there were no distinction of country among those whom Art has associated in her pursuit.” American painters made up a significant proportion of that “honourable cirsumstance” l4New-York Evening Post, 19 February 1848, 4. William Cullen Bryant, Funeral Oration Occasioned by the Death of Thomas Cole (New York: D. Appleton, 1848), 3 and 37. See J. Gray Sweeney, “The Advantages of Genius and Virtue: Thomas Cole’s Influence, 1848-58” in William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven, London, and Washington, D.C.: Yale University Press and National Museum of American Art, 1994), 113-135; and Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union, Exhibition Record 1816-1852 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1953). 14 and, in 1858, William Cullen Bryant would estimate the number of American artists in Rome at “thirty or more.”15 Most of the people who produced, commissioned, or collected these paintings belonged, or aspired to belong, to a northern Protestant urban professional and business culture. The patrons and painters established and used art organizations like the National Academy of Design, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Richard L. Bushman has argued that “the culture of the educated elite in the eighteenth century had become by 1840 the primary stylistic vocabulary of the entire nation.” The majority of American images of Italy reflect the perspective of those best able to travel to Europe -- Protestant men and women representing a Northeast, upper- and middle-class. The preponderance of classical allusions in American civic culture expose the nation’s longing to fulfill greatness comparable to that of Periclean Athens or Republican Rome, under the leadership of men who personified the virtues of the ancients. For the painters themselves, it was widely held that European subjects were more readily salable —- a fact that sent more than one young American artist abroad with sketchbook in hand looking to store up a reservoir of 15A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, V01. 2: Rome and its Environs, third edition (London: John Murray, 1853), 224 and 12. Letter to the Evening Post, May 21, 1858, from William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss, eds., The Letters of William Cullen Bryant (New York: Fordham University Press, 1984), vol. IV, 34. 15 scenes for future large canvas commissions. The paintings of Italian scenes reflect, encode, and encapsulate the issues and concerns which were forefront for the patrons, art association, and museums of the 18403 and 18503. The images help us to understand questions of race, gender, immigration, politics, religion, and aesthetics in the years leading up to the Civil War in the United States.16 Chapter One deals with the involvement of Americans in the political and religious affairs of Italy in 1848 to 1849, centered upon Martin Johnson Heade’s painting Roman Newsboys (fig. 2). In 1848, and for several succeeding years, a array of liberal and nationalistic revolutions transpired in Europe. Italian, French, German, and Hungarian nationalism and republicanism stimulated American sympathies. Americans, both at home and abroad, commented upon these “revolutions.” Three individuals —- Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Hicks, and Margaret Fuller -- were linked together by friendship and the events of the revolution in the Papal States in central Italy, a region including Rome and controlled by the pope. Heade created Roman Newsboys as one painting resulting from his stay in Rome during this tumultuous time period. Despite the overall sympathy among Protestant Americans for the Roman Republic, Heade’s image expresses the belief that the l6See Bushman’s “Introduction” in Wendy Cooper, 14. 16 inability of the Italians to combine the spiritual with the secular, to overcome the machinations of anti-republican forces, and to comprehend the responsibilities of a democracy led to the failure in 1849 of the movement to politically unite Italy under a liberal government. The second chapter explores an image by George Loring Brown titled Tivoli (The Falls of Tivoli) (fig. 3) within the context of mid-nineteenth century landscape painting. Antebellum tourists visited Tivoli, an ancient town outside of Rome, to View the waterfalls and to experience the historic associations of its countryside. Drawing upon a litany of images from Claude Lorrain to Thomas Cole, Brown creates a View of the falls and the town which celebrates their picturesque nature and their relationship with the past. Contemporary with Brown’s painting of Tivoli, American artists produced images of waterfalls in North America, especially at Niagara. Frederic Church’s Niagara Falls, when compared with Brown’s Tivoli, reinforces Italy as a site of the picturesque past and connects the American landscape with a sublime present and future. The next chapter explores an image -- Lake Nemi (fig. 4) —- by Sanford Robinson Gifford created during the winter of 1856-57. Atmospheric and luminous, Lake Nemi exhibits a brillant sunset amid Italian hills. Known as “Diana’s Mirror,” Lake Nemi had previously attracted numerous artists, including Claude Lorrain and J.M.W. Turner. Gifford built upon an artistic discourse that defined the 17 Italian landscape as feminine. Though he captures the panoramic beauty of a popular stop for artists on an Italian tour, Gifford renders Lake Nemi, “the mirror of Diana,” as a gendered landscape formalizing a progressive interpretation of history and espousing mid—nineteenth—century American perspectives on female virtue. Gifford's traveling companion in Italy, Albert Bierstadt, and Jasper Francis Cropsey each created paintings of Greek temples in Southern Italy which operate as the focal images for the fourth chapter. These American images of the ruins at the ancient Greek colony, known by its Roman name as Paestum, represented a substantial connection between the democratic traditions of the ancients and the new democratic promise of the United States. The temples, having stood the test of time, signified the importance and efficacy of democracy while their surrounding swamp, “cursed by malaria,” operated as a metaphor of degeneration. The paintings Temple of Neptune, Paestum (1859) by Cropsey (fig. 5), and Ruins of Paestum (1858) by Bierstadt (fig. 6), linked the Greek past and the American present in a cyclical theory of history. But they also cautioned Americans of the possibilities of moral disintegration and imperial decadence presented by the slavery issue in the late antebellum era. The fifth and final chapter focuses on a single image painted by Albert Bierstadt in Massachusetts in 1858 —— The Arch of Octavius (Roman Fish Market) (fig. 7). The canvas was one of several paintings created by Bierstadt as the 18 artistic result of a sojourn around Switzerland and Italy in 1856 and 1857. Bierstadt sold the work to the Boston Athenaeum for four hundred dollars, where it was subsequently displayed in annual exhibitions fourteen times between 1858-1879. Bierstadt, as an artist using the “picturesque” contrast between the ruins of antiquity and the squalor of contemporary Italians, responded to popular opinion and explored the tensions and limitations of immigration and American republicanism. Bierstadt’s only known urban image, Roman Fish Market held meanings for urban, elite, Protestant Northeasterners, and represented their anxiety regarding economic and political changes, and their fears of a working-class, Catholic, Irish consciousness. Despite the painting’s picturesque aesthetic and popular interest in ancient Rome, Bierstadt’s dramatizing of the situation of a Yankee tourist couple surrounded by poor, swarthy, Catholic Romans resonates as an allegory of anti—Catholic, anti—Irish sentiment for its mid-nineteenth century Protestant Bostonian viewers. The virulent nativism of the Know-Nothings in the Massachusetts of the 18503 gave way to other political forces and issues -- primarily the debates over slavery and the nature of the Union —- only to re-emerge after the Civil War. The United States after the Civil War differed in numerous ways from antebellum America. Emancipation and the effects of war revolutionized the social and economic order of the United States. During the Civil War and 19 Reconstruction, a powerful national government -— possessing greatly augmented authority and a new commitment to the ideal of national citizenship -— came into being. The end of slavery in the United States produced extensive discussions over the role former slaves and their offspring would play in American life and freedom. Economic developments and changes brought new political issues to the foreground and re-determined concepts of race, class, and labor ideology in both North and South. But perhaps the most profound impact of the Civil War on American society was its human cost. As historian David M. Potter writes, “Slavery was dead; secession was dead; and six hundred thousand men were dead.”17 Many of the issues confronting American artists, writers, critics, and art patrons of the Reconstruction era differed grealty from pre-Civil War concerns. By the 18703 and 18803, Italy was no longer the primary pilgrimmage site for young artists, overshadowed by the more cosmopolitan and modern Paris. Yet, paintings by antebellum Americans, either created in Italian studios or from numerous sketches made abroad, reflect the social, economic, religious, and artistic concerns of the pre-Civil War Americans who created, purchased, disseminated, and displayed these images. 17See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863—1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); and David M. Potter, and Don E. Fehrenbacher, comp. and ed., The Impending Crisis 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 583. 20 Chapter One THIS CAUSE IS OURS: MARTIN JOHNSON HEADE’S ROMAN NEWSBOYS AND AMERICAN REACTION TO THE ROMAN REPUBLIC OF 1848-49 HUmanity must answer when God speaks, As sure as echo to the human voice. And every grand o’ertopping lie which breaks With furious flood and century—deafening noise In the eternal symphony that joys Along, is but some baser pipe of chord That shall be tuned again when Reason sits as lord.18 The year 1848 witnessed, in the United States, the concurrence of an extraordinary number of significant social, political, and natural events. In early 1849, a Baptist, antislavery periodical noted the gravity of world-wide events during the previous year: “[This] has been an era in the annals of the world from which, in ages to come, the philosopher will draw lessons of instruction, the poet his most inspiring themes, the artist hi3 noblest subjects for chisel or pencil, and the preacher some of the most striking proofs of God manifest in history.” Some “proofs of God manifest in history” —- including American success in the Mexican War -- had begun before that year. The United States had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico in March 1845, declared war in May 1846, and signed a peace treaty in July 1848 following military successes at 18Christopher Pearse Cranch, “The Bird and the Bell,” LV, 19, from Bird and the Bell, With Other Poems (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875). 21 Veracruz and Mexico City. The war with Mexico brought vast territory under American control but envenomed serious rivalries between North and South by intensifying antagonism over the spread of slavery into the newly acquired territories. News of the discovery of gold in California in 1848 brought thousands of migrants into the territory. At Seneca Falls, New York, in the summer of 1848, the rights of American women were announced in one of the most significant protest gatherings of the antebellum era. Modeling their “Declaration of Sentiments” on the Declaration of Independence, the women at Seneca Falls proclaimed that “all men and women are created equal” and that men had usurped the God-given freedom and dignity of women. At the end of 1848, cholera-infected sailors entered New York and New Orleans, becoming a full-blown epidemic by the summer of 1849. And 1848 was also a presidential election year which saw Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War, defeat Democrat Lewis Cass and Free-Soiler Martin Van Buren.19 19“The Past Year," Christian Watchman and Reflector, 4 January 1849, 2. See Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 152-153. On the Mexican War, see Carol and Thomas Christensen, The U.S.-Mexican War (San Francisco: Bay Books, 1998); Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Mbntezumas: The Mexican war in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973). See Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Given the revolutionary climate of Europe, the New York Herald compared the changes taking place abroad to a place where the “political 22 Events outside of the United States, however, were also fashioning changes within American society. By the end of 1848, the ongoing impact of the Irish Potato Famine facilitated the movement of thousands of poor, Catholic immigrants to American ports, especially the Northeast cities of Boston and New York. In 1848, and for several succeeding years, a series of liberal and nationalistic revolutions occurred in Europe. Italian, French, German, and Hungarian nationalism and republicanism stimulated American sympathies. American tourists and writers, both at home and abroad, commented upon the European revolutionary events. For some Americans, the revolutionary upheavals in Europe indicated that the recent victory in Mexico did indeed mark a pivotal moment in the great contest between monarchism and republicanism —- a contest that was now continuing throughout Europe. Yet events specific to Italy and social fabric of the world” was “crumbling”: “By the intelligence, however, which we have lately received, the work of revolution is no longer confined to the Old World, nor to the masculine gender. The flag of independence has been hoisted, for the second time, on this side of the Atlantic, and a solemn league and covenant has just been entered into by a Convention of women at Seneca Falls.” Quoted in Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 55. On the Women’s Rights Movement, see Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Mbvement in America, 1848—1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), and Keith E. Melder, Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman’s Rights Mbvement, 1800—1850 (New York Schocken Books, 1977). For more on the cholera epidemic, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For the election of 1848, see Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 284—382. 23 and Rome offered Protestant Americans an opportunity for providential conjecture, given Protestant antagonism to the pope. Anti-Catholicism was fundamental to a large section of American society, which viewed the progression of history as republicanism and Protestantism versus monarchy and Catholicism. Caroline Kirkland, author and editor of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art, traveled and noted that “visiting Europe in the Year of Revolutions, the aspect of things was naturally very interesting to Americans, and it seemed worth while to catch what one could of the flying picture.”20 But not all Americans, including artists, remained passively curious in the ever—changing atmosphere of 1848 in Europe. In particular, several American artists, tourists and writers in Rome during the short-lived Roman Republic of 1848-49 became actively involved in Italian political events. Three individuals -— Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Hicks, and Margaret Fuller -— were linked together by their friendship and the events of the revolution in the Papal States. Fuller covered the revolution for the New York Tribune, edited by the reformer Horace Greeley, and became 20Arthur Gribben, ed., The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. J. Matthew Gallman, Receiving Erin’s Children: Philadelphia, Liverpool, and the Irish Famine Migration, 1845-1855 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Nathan 0. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), especially 184-189. Caroline M. Kirkland, Holidays Abraod; Or Europe from the West (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849), vi. 24 America’s first ever war correspondent —- male or female. She commissioned a portrait of herself from Hicks. Meanwhile, Hicks’ fellow artist and Pennsylvanian, Martin Johnson Heade, “a highly political person,” created Roman Newsboys (fig. 2) as one painting resulting from his stay in Rome during this tumultuous time period. Fuller, Hicks, and Heade were among the Protestant Americans who supported the moderate reforms in Italy by Pius IX and other leaders. But with the flight of Pius IX from Rome at the end of 1848 and strong Austrian and French intervention in Italian affairs, some Americans -- especially Fuller in her writings -- placed their sympathies with a Roman Republic and favored radical revolution in Italy over moderate reform. Despite their fear of the inevitable failure of the revolution of 1848 in Italy, these Americans used their conviction in the providential nature of American governmental and intellectual forms to sustain their hope that the “childlike” Italians would eventually learn to be “good” republicans. By condensing “four phases of the political ‘news’ of Rome” into a single image, Roman Newsboys serves as a distinctly American, politically moderate interpretation of Italian events in 1848 and 1849. Through the use of highly detailed compositional elements, Heade’s painting reflects American exceptionalism and support for the notion of a fusion of “liberty” with “religion,” of “freedom under God.” Despite the overall sympathy among Protestant Americans for the Roman Republic, Roman Newsboys 25 expresses the belief that the inability of the Italians to combine the spiritual with the secular, to overcome the machinations of antirepublican forces, and to comprehend the responsibilities of a democracy led to the failure in 1849 of the movement to politically unite Italy under a liberal government.21 In Martin Johnson Heade’s Roman Newsboys, two pre-teen boys sell their “penny” papers.22 Standing on a 21Gail Husch argues that “an unusual concentration of paintings that depicted transformative moments of revelation and envisioned divine judgment or millenial promise was produced and exhibited in the United States in the years immediately following 1848.” See Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid—Nineteenth—Century American Painting (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2000), 3. In Italy during these tumultuous years, Pennsylvanian artist Thomas Hicks painted an Italia, described as “a half-length ideal female figure.” Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. argues that “Heade in this painting clearly sides with the Risorgimento” [emphasis added]. See Stebbins’ catalogue entry for Roman Newsboys in Lure, 201. In calling Roman Newsboys “a history painting masquerading as a genre scene,” Stebbins also observes that “Heade was a highly political person whose views blended social conservatism, economic populism, and a defiant individualism -— libertarianism, in today’s terms.” See Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Jehnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 10. As shown later in the essay, other American observers of the events of 1848-49 believed that the intellectual and moral incapacity of the Italians would keep the Italian nation from “progressing” in the near future. Many Americans believed that God had ordained a special role to America through its unique combination of Protestant evangelical religion and democratic republican governmental structure. William Vance notes the compression of the four phases -- the election of Pius IX and his initial reforms, the arrival of Gioberti in Rome in 1848, the flight of Pius from Rome, and the Republic -- in America’s Rome, II, 126. A basic premise of my argument here is that the American analysis of th failure of the revolution in 1848 says more about Americans than the Italians. 22Roman Newsboys resulted from Heade’s trip to Italy in 1848-49. Heade, born in 1819 at Lumberville, Pennsylvania, received his earliest training from Edward Hicks and Thomas Hicks, the young cousin of Edward Hicks, painted a portrait of Heade about 1841. For further interpretations and contextualization of Roman Newsboys, see Vance, vol. 26 crack-filled sidewalk in the glow of full sunlight, the first boy, at the left side of the composition, offers forth multiple copies of a short, one-page newspaper with his outstretched right arm. Wearing a white shirt, faded red pants, golden suspenders, and a tattered green jacket, he casually leans against the wall with his left knee bent and foot up. The fly of his pants remains unbuttoned and a toe emerges from his right shoe. Generally disheveled in appearance, this newsboy wears a golden cap with the name of the pope, Pio IX, emblazoned across its front. The second newsboy, to the right of the composition, sits atop a post -- designed to keep carriages and carts from hitting the palazzo —- along the sidewalk and higher than the other boy. He wears the tricolors of republican governments including a white shirt, blue pants, and a too—large blue and red military—style cap. Without shoes, the boy grasps an orange-glowing cigar in his left hand. With his face and torso almost entirely in shadow, he holds out a newspaper II, 105-138; Husch, 53-54; and Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 7-12. Stebbins' catalogue lists Roman Newsboys as no. 16. According to Stebbins, at least two other currently unlocated paintings resulted from Heade’s trip to Italy -- Street Scene in Rome, The Roman Goat-Herd, exhibited in Cincinnati in 1849 or 1850, and Beatrice Cenci (After Guido). His friend Thomas Hicks may have had a role in Heade’s Italian soujourn during these years although there remains no concrete evidence as to whether they saw each other during this period. The only word of Heade in Rome occurs in the Literary Word, whose Rome correspondent reported on 31 January 1848, “Heade of Philadelphia is here, but I know not what about.” “Foreign Correspondence," from Rome, dated 31 January 1848, in The Literary World 60 (Mar. 24, 1848), 148, quoted in Stebbins, 10. 27 with his right hand. Strikingly readable in the sunlight, and at the center of Heade’s composition, the paper’s title clearly states “PIRLONE.” Through a very faded poster with the number “48” at the head level of the standing boy, Heade dates the image, and its associated events, for the painting’s viewers. The partially-decipherable posters and scrawled graffiti, decorating the palace wall behind the two newsboys, suggest the “flying picture,” the rapid movement of the Italian political events. A stick-figure caricature labeled “cardinale” appears on the wall to the far left of the composition, directly adjacent to the first boy’s papers. On the wall behind the seated boy’s “PIRLONE” paper, someone has scribbled “Pio IX.” Behind the sidewalk post, other graffiti declares “Wlita” -- perhaps “Viva L’Italia” or “Viva liberta.” The final, clearly—legible scrawling, above a small bench in the lower right of Heade’s image, shows a profile caricature portrait labeled “PAPA.” Two posters have been placed high on the wall. The lower of these broadsides reads “ROMAN —- RE - SED / TUE -- / A WEEKLY JOURN --.” Overlapping and above that broadside, another poster, in blue, clearly reads “GIOBERTI AI ROMANIII” Strong shadows play across the gutter, sidewalk and the wall. Emblematic for Heade and American tourists of Rome's urban decay, small sections of the palace wall have had the plaster facade chipped away. One of those sections, shaped like an arrow or a dagger, visually pierces the right leg of 28 the seated boy. At the far lower left of the painting, a figure, unseen except for the ominous shadow cast by the shoulders and quite broad hat, approaches the boys and draws their attention. In its layering of symbols and text, Heade’s Roman Newsboys established an American understanding of specific events within Italy during the late 18403. In the first of these events, liberal moderates in the College of Cardinals engineered the election of Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, fifty-four—years old, as Pope Pius IX on 16 June 1846. In central Italy the Pope ruled absolutely a large area stretching across Italy from Bologna and the Adriatic to Rome and the Tyrrhenian. The pope’s temporal domain, divided by the Apennine Mountains, consisted of several disparate regions. Rome itself was important not as an economic center for the region, but as the capital of the Catholic world. Unique in Italy, Rome and its surroundings were ruled by an elected sovereign. In his first official act, Pius IX appointed a commission to study the question of an amnesty for political prisoners, demanded by popular opinion. The pope also promptly announced a package of reform proposals for his government in Rome. He showed a sensitivity to popular wishes that led him to relax the ecclesiastical censorship and allow minor participation by laymen in the administration of Rome. The anti-Jewish laws in Rome were relaxed. Pius IX ordered a program of public works and took measures to relieve the severe famine 29 prevailing in the Papal States. These reforms created great excitement, especially in liberal national circles all over Italy, Europe, and the United States.23 Margaret Fuller and like—minded Americans saw the hope for a united and republican Italy in the 1847 reforms of Pius IX. Arguably one of the greatest female intellectuals of her day, Fuller covered European events for the New York Tribune, edited by the Whig reformer Horace Greeley. Ralph Waldo Emerson called Fuller “quite an extraordinary person for her apprehensiveness, her acquisitions [and] her powers of conversation.” She was born Sarah Margaret Fuller at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, near Boston in 1810. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a Harvard graduate, served as a U.S. Congressman and Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. A contributor to literary journals beginning in her mid 203, Margaret Fuller taught at Bronson Alcott’s school in Boston and at Greene Street School in 23My understanding of the revolutionary events in Italy in 1848 and 1849, as discussed at this point in the essay and later, comes from several secondary sources: Clara M. Lovett, The Democratic Mbvement in Italy 1830—1876 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982); Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Spencer M. Di Scala, Italy: From Revolution to Republic 1700 to the Present (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); Denis Mack Smith, “The Revolutions of 1849—1849 in Italy,” in R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe 1848—1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55-81; Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolution, 1848-1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); David LoRomer, Merchants and Reform in Livorno 1814-1868 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 30 Providence. She began a life-long friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson in the mid 18303, was an intimate of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife, and served as the editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial. Fuller became a center of Boston cultural life with her “Conversations,” salon—type meetings focusing on issues of politics, gender and spirituality in which over 200 women participated. In 1844, she published Summer on the Lakes, an account of her observations on travels to Niagara Falls, Chicago, the Illinois prairies, Milwaukee, and the Great Lakes. That same year she accepted a position as the literary editor for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune, eventually publishing about 250 essays. Fuller’s own politics represented Whig views. In 1845, her Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published describing Fuller’s view that the gender prejudices of the era prevented women from realizing their full spiritual potentials. In Europe from 1846 until 1850, she met Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, Giuseppe Mazzini, George Sand, Frederic Chopin, Adam Mickiewicz, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others. Like Emerson, Fuller believed that reform in institutions came about when a majority of those affected changed from within and insisted on external changes to accommodate the new reality.24 24Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson to William Emerson, Aug. 8, 1836, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 8 vols. (New York, 1939), 2: 32. For more on Margaret Fuller, her writings, and her 31 Yet Fuller still held tempered hopes for a new reality in Italy and for the positive effect of Pope Pius IX’s reforms. Fuller wrote to the readers of the Tribune that Rome mistakenly “seeks to reconcile reform and priestcraft.” Echoing Fuller’s appreciation of the difficulty of attuning years of Catholic traditions to American—style democracy, Heade shows “religion,” in the guise of the newsboy to the left, and “liberty,” embodied by the seated newsboy, as separate and disconnected. For Fuller, as for Heade and other Americans following Pius’ reforms, the question was not whether or not liberal political changes were necessary in Italy but whether Pius IX could accomplish reform in a Catholic nation. In May 1847, Fuller called Pius IX “a man of noble and good aspect” and his reforms “something solid for the benefit of man.” But she realized that Pius’ political reforms should be only the beginning of a revolutionary movement toward republican government in Italy. Fuller feared that the pope did not have “the means cultural impact, see Donna Dickenson, Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Madeleine B. Stern, The Life of Margaret Fuller, second edition (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Joan von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); and Van Wyck Brooks, “The Risorgimento: Margaret Fuller” in The Dream of Arcadia. For an anthology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century responses, including essays by Orestes A. Brownson, Edgar Allan Poe, Matthew Arnold, and Henry James, to the works of Margaret Fuller, see Joel Myerson, ed., Critical Essays on Margaret Fuller (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980). William H. Gilman, ed., The JOurnals and Miscellaneous Netebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960-82), 11:445. 32 at his command to accomplish these ends.” Instead, according to Fuller, Rome needed to renounce its history as an ecclesiastical capital and re-embrace its ancient history of republicanism. Expressing her view of American exceptionalism, she called upon Americans to support the democratic movements in Italy: “I earnestly hope for some expression of sympathy from my country toward Italy...This cause is OURS, above all others; we ought to show that we feel it to be so.”25 Like Fuller and Heade in Rome, some Americans in the United States took a civic interest in the reforms within the papal states. Interested citizens of Philadelphia, in Heade’s native state, held a meeting at the Chinese Museum on 6 January 1848 for the purpose of “expressing their cordial approval of the wise and liberal policy” of Pius IX “to elevate and improve the condition of the people of Italy.” Philadelphia Democrat John K. Kane called the meeting to order the attendees “unanimously adopted” (and later published) a public speech. The address began by pointing out the privileged position the United States held 25Margaret Fuller Ossoli, At Home and Abroad; Or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe, Arthur B. Fuller, ed. (Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860), 224, 243, and 248. The New York editor Theodore Dwight, in his preface to The Roman Republic of 1849; with Accounts of the Inquisition, and the Siege of Rome, published in 1851, echoes Fuller by stating that the Italian “question” is “essentially our own.” (New York: R. Van Dien, 1851), and pronounces that American Protestant principles and education were far superior to Rome's system of religion and government, 135-136. 33 in the history of the world: “Blessed with a fertile territory of boundless extent and resources; enjoying free institutions, framed with wisdom and administered with moderation,” the meeting attendees “acknowledge, with gratitude to God, that we experience a degree of individual and national prosperity not often vouchsafed to any people.” The speaker attributed the God-granted prosperity “to the wisdom which framed our institutions.” In noting that the reforms of Pope Pius IX “tend to the melioration of the social, and the enfranchisement of the political condition,” of the people of a once great and powerful empire,” the speaker praised the possibility of a united and free Italy. The “liberal and enlightened” Philadelphians had invited a broad political spectrum of notable Americans to attend their public meeting. In the published version of the address, the citizens of Philadelphia also included the letters they received in response to their meeting. All of the letters, across political party lines, stated strong support for the goals of the Philadelphia meeting and the reforms of Pius IX. The published “regret” letters included statements of support from Senator Daniel Webster, Massachusetts Whig and former presidential candidate, John A. Dix, a Free Soil gubernatorial candidate in New York later that year, and John Van Buren, son of the former president. In a letter from New York City dated January 5, 1848, John Tyler, former president of the United States and Whig candidate for vice-president in 1840, called the 34 purposes of the Philadelphia meeting “entirely agreeable to my own feelings and inclinations” and called Pope Pius IX “the great Reformer of the age.” Northern Democrat and Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, Polk’s secretary of state, bade the Pope “God speed! in the career of benevolence and liberty which he is now pursuing,” while eventual 1848 Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass of Ohio (father of the American diplomat to the Vatican in 1849) longed for a Rome, “endeared to us by so many associations,” that would offer “the example of free institutions to the rest of Europe.” Some response letters published with the Philadelphia address supporting the papal reforms not only gushed over the moral character of Pius IX but made striking comparisons between the “liberty” of a new Italy and the “liberty” proclaimed in Philadelphia in 1776. One letter stated that “the movement of Pius IX in favor of free principles is regarded by me as among the most important that has ever been made in Europe.” The letter noted: “[Pius IX] will place the Seven Hilled City next to Philadelphia, and the present Pontiff next to Washington upon the page of history, and in the grateful memory of mankind.” But the longest letter of response came from Philadelphia’s three-term congressman, Joseph Ingersoll. Ingersoll compares Pius IX to the apostle St. Peter and calls Pius, “if [he] is sincere,” the greatest reformer of intolerant exclusiveness since Luther.” The congressman 35 continued: “All [the Italians] need is what we enjoy, perfect union, national independence, and the blessings of liberty, to become again a great and happy nation.” Then Ingersoll’s thoughts moved from the philosophical to the practical: “The happier and richer all Italy is, the better and richer will be these United States.” He noted that he had suggested that Congress should empower the president to appoint a special ambassador to Italy so that “the Declaration of American Independence proclaimed from Philadelphia to Rome, may be echoed from Rome to Washington in a Declaration of Italian Independence.” Ultimately, Ingersoll also put forth an argument, centered on trade, international commerce, and economic possibilities, for an active United States involvement in the foreign affairs of Europe. Two other letters linked the concepts of “Liberty” and “Religion” —- symbolically embodied and separated by Heade through the trope of the two newsboys -- to the idea of a rejuvenation of lost greatness among a people. The Boston patrician Robert C. Winthrop responded that “the establishment or advancement of free institutions in any part of the world, must always be a spectacle of the highest interest to an American eye.” Winthrop then took notice of the special nature of “liberty” returning to a once great nation: But when we witness such a movement of classic ground; when a spirit of Liberty is seen rising amid 36 the ruins of Greece or Rome; when one of these mighty nations of antiquity seems about to start up from its slumber of centuries, and to re-assert its long-lost freedom and independence, we may well be excused for something of enthusiastic emotion. George M. Dallas of Pennsylvania, James K. Polk’s vice-president, noted the duality of “Religion” and “Liberty,” calling them “sisters” that “delight in Union.” He continued: “No exhibition can be more interesting and attractive than the Head of a Church laboring to surround his spiritual Faith with the institutions of temporal Freedom.” These well-known and prominent Americans believed that combining faith in God with faith in republicanism brought about the best form of human government.26 As these public statements of the Philadelphians and as Heade’s Roman Newsboys attests, Pius IX was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as an Italian patriot. Americans and moderate and liberal Italians hoped that Pius IX could combine religion with liberty in a new republican government. The pope’s popularity soared among the general Italian populace. American visitors to Italy in 1848 made note not only of the popularity of Pius IX and his reforms, but also of the ubiquitous graffiti supporting Pius IX. Margaret Fuller recorded the omnipresent scrawls 26Proceedings of a Public Meeting of the Citizens of the City and County of Philadelphia, Held January 6, 1848, to Express Their Cordial Approval of the Liberal Policy of Pqpe Pius IX. in His Administration of the Temporal Government of Italy. (Philadelphia: Jos. Severns & Co., 1848). 37 acknowledging papal reforms and Pius’ renown in a letter from Milan on 9 August 1947: “Tranquil as Assisi was, on every wall was read Viva Pio IX.! and we found the guides and workmen in the shop full of a vague hope of him.” Fuller, however, did not hold the same enthusiasm for Pius IX which the Italian people held for him. Her desire to see a new, republican Rome brought her to make comparisons between Pius IX and the ancient founder of the Eternal City, Romulus: “Thus we may see that the liberty of Rome does not yet advance with seven-leagued boots; and the new Romulus will need to be prepared for deeds at least as bold as his predecessor, if he is to open a new order of things.” Fuller wanted Pius to succeed in uniting Italy under a republican government, but she understood that “bolder deeds” would most likely be needed to accomplish that end.27 Pius IX’s success or failure in leading a united Italy rested in his fulfillment of the ideas put forth by an 27Ossoli, 230. In describing the perception of the reforms of the new pope by Italians living abroad in Constantinople, conservative Englishman (and eventual apologist for monarchy and the King of Naples in the events of 1848-49) Charles MacFarlane wrote: “[A]ll the Italians were wondrously united by love and admiration of the reforming Pope; and while the enthusiasts were anticipating a perfect millennium, all looked forward to a greatly improved state of things in their native country. ‘Long life to the Pope!’ (Viva Pio NOno!) were words chalked upon the walls, written on paper, and placarded at the turning of nearly every street.” Charles MacFarlane, A Glance at Revolutionized Italy, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1849). vol. I, 4-5. Harry W. Rudman calls MacFarlane “the most reactionary of Victorian publicists” in Italian Nationalism and English Letters: Figures of the Risorgimento and Victorian Men of Letters (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), 228. Ossoli, 226. 38 exiled priest, Vincenzo Gioberti. Heade’s first newsboy, wearing faded red, white and green clothing, and a golden cap with “Pio IX” on its front, operates not only as a symbol of “religion” but also of the pro—Pius IX, moderate Italian view of unification, as expressed by Gioberti. Heade also expresses the significance of the pro-papal views of Vincenzo Gioberti to the events in Italy of 1848—49 by including a broadside that clearly reads “GIOBERTI AI ROMANI!!,” or “Gioberti to the Romans.” From the election of Pius IX in 1846 until the spring of 1848, Italians hoped that the pope would unite Italy under his control. Americans in Italy were keenly aware of the powerful influence of Gioberti’s writings. Charles Edwards Lester, a Democrat and great-grandson of preacher Jonathan Edwards, served as United States Consul at Genoa from 1842 to 1847. In 1853, Lester published his My Consulship, in which he describes the history of Italy in the years leading up to the Roman Republic. Lester makes Pope Gregory XVI a villain, attributing to him all that was wrong with Rome in the 18403, and calling the death of Gregory in 1846 “the first happy day the Roman people had seen for fifteen years.” In Lester’s narrative of the years leading up to the Revolutions of 1848, Pius IX becomes a noble, tragic hero unable to unify and reform Italy because of the machinations of the Austrians, French, and Jesuits, of the incompetence of King Charles Albert, of the political and intellectual incapacity of the Italian people, and of the 39 indifference of the British. Lester believed that “Gioberti wrote with a fearless pen. He tore the veil recklessly away from the hideous form of tyranny and ecclesiastical corruption; the foul abominations of [Gregory XVI’s] Jesuitical Pontificate were dragged into the blinding glare of sun-light.” Calling Gioberti the “greatest” political writer “to prepare the way for Pius IX,” he also notes that Gioberti prophesized of “some bold reformer” becoming pope. Margaret Fuller also commented upon the influence of Gioberti on the events of 1848: “The thought of Gioberti had been at first the popular one, as he, in fact, was the seer of the so—called Moderate party...He assailed the Jesuits, and was of real use by embodying the distrust and aversion that brooded in the minds of men against these most insidious and inveterate foes of liberty and progress.”28 From the 18303, Italian intellectuals and liberal politicians, including Vincenzo Gioberti, fiercely debated over how Italian unification might take place and what its 28C. Edwards Lester, My Consulship, 2 vols. (New York: Cornish, Lamport & Co., 1853), esepcially vol. II, 5—79. Lester, II, 52. Lester, II, 169. Englishman Charles MacFarlane also comments, with irony, on the many pamphlets by Gioberti available, even in a small town like Foligno (which MacFarlane was visiting): “[T]here were the works of Vincenzo Gioberti, the great apostle of Italian Unitarianism, down to the last pamphlet which the post had brought from Turin (but this last pamphlet, though new in Foligno, would be old by to—day in Turin, for Gioberti -- eternally scribbling -- seems to publish a pamphlet as often and as regularly as he eats his daily dinner." MacFarlane, I, 322. Ossoli, 355-356. In August 1847, Fuller made one other note of the popularity of Gioberti among Italians: “In Tuscany they are casting [a cannon] to be called the ‘Gioberti,’ from a writer who has given a great impulse to the present movement.” Ossoli, 249. 40 future would be. Gioberti’s fame in Italy dates from 1843 when he published his Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (The Mbral and Civil Primacy of the Italians). Starting with the greatness of ancient Rome, he traced history down through the splendors of the papacy, and recounted all that science and art owed to the “genius” of Italy. Mac Farlane described his understanding of Gioberti’s political and religious position: Vincenzo Gioberti...set himself —- in journals, pamphlets, and books too numerous to be named, and far too heavy and pedantic to be read through by any Englishman -— to work out the double proposition, that Italy must be one with liberty presiding over her, and that the religion of the world must be one, with the Pope presiding over the Church. Not a compliment did he pay to liberty without giving a concurrent compliment to Pius IX.29 Gioberti declared that the Italian people were a model for all nations, and that their current insignificance was the result of their political weakness. The beliefs, rituals and language of the Catholic Church united Italians, argued Gioberti, in ways that a sense of secular nationhood did not. He presented the moderate and nationalistic ideals which matched the political expression of large landowners, progressive nobles, and liberal clergymen eager to rejuvenate Italy’s fortunes but unwilling to throw over their religion, social status, and traditional values. Most 29MacFarlane, I, 111. 41 importantly, he reconciled Italy’s political independence with its spiritual mission by envisioning a loose confederation of existing states under the pope’s “presidency” —~ ideas which directly influenced Pius IX. For some Italians who wished to be free of Austrian control, the goal of a national Italian federation under the presidency of the pope seemed within the range of possibility. For some Americans, including Lester and Fuller, the linking of Italian religion and liberty under a “presidential” pope seemed to offer a fulfillment of their desire to see Italy unified and republican.3O At the point that events in Europe and Italy appeared to be coming to a crisis and the prophecy of “Gioberti to the Romans” seemed to be fulfilled, the United States Consul Lester took a tour of Italy before returning to the United States. The climax of Lester’s story about his consulship comes when he meets Pope Pius IX in the spring of 1848 and 3OVincenzo Gioberti was born at Turin in 1801 and studied theology at Turin University. He was ordained a priest in 1825, and appointed Piedmontese court chaplain and professor. Gioberti wrote articles under the pen-name “Demofilo” in Guiseppe Mazzini’s “Young Italy.” In 1833, Gioberti resigned as court chaplain and was arrested on suspicion of political intrigues. He was expelled from Turin and went to Paris and Brussels. Gioberti returned from exile to Turin with the events of 1848, and became a minister in Charles Albert’s Piedmont government. For more on Vincenzo Gioberti, see G.F.H. Berkeley, Italy in the Making 1815 to 1846 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932). Orestes Brownson, in providing an American Catholic perspective on the events, argues that Gioberti’s too-liberal actions in 1848-1849, which seem to contradict the intent of his philosophical and political writings, are instead evidenced in Gioberti’s philosophical errors. See Brownson’s Quarterly Review 4, new series (October 1850): 409-447. 42 receives a benediction for his whole family. During their long conversation, as related by Lester, Pius IX states: I am persuaded...that in all ideas of rational liberty, your people are not only better educated, but that in fact you are the freest people in the world...Christ has undertaken the salvation of mankind, and in his immense benevolence and power, he has begun to achieve the miracle of the emancipation of the race. Europe, we hope, will soon be as free as you; and then we must unite all our forces in aid of this glorious design of redeeming our suffering world’...I could not speak -- I only felt that I was carrying away with me the blessings and the prayers of the best man I had ever seen.31 Lester’s hope in “the best man” he “had ever seen” reflected the longings of some Americans that the Italian nation would link under “rational liberty” -- a republican government —- and under God -- “for the religious salvation of mankind.” But events in Italy would prevent that goal from being permanently achieved in 1848-49. The first European insurrection in 1848 took place in Sicily, as an anti-Bourbon revolution, some weeks before more substantial revolutions in Paris and Vienna. Sicily elected a parliament on restricted suffrage and sent a token force of a hundred soldiers to northern Italy to help defend a possible Austrian counter-revolution. The news from Sicily prompted citizens in Naples to call for their own 31Lester, II, 202-205. 43 representative parliament. On 10 February 1848, Ferdinand II, King of Naples, conceded a parliamentary constitution that maintained his royal prerogatives. In Milan, men boycotted, in a deliberate copy of the Boston Tea Party, the state lottery and the tobacco monopoly -— two important sources of Austrian revenue. On 14 March, Pope Pius IX published a constitution for the Papal States establishing two legislative houses but giving himself and the College of Cardinals supreme power over legislation; the constitution also banned the secular legislature from passing laws in areas of mixed secular—ecclesiastical concern -- extremely difficult to define —— and conferred political rights only on practicing Catholics. Other rulers of Italy, including in Tuscany (Leopold, an archduke of Austria) and Piedmont-Sardinia (King Charles Albert), also granted constitutions to their subjects early in 1848. At the end of March, spurred on by events in Vienna and the resignation of Metternich, anti-Austrian insurrections took place in Venice, where a republic was proclaimed, and Milan. King Charles Albert declared war on Austria. With Austrian military victories over Peidmont at Custoza and Milan, Pius issued -- on 29 April 1848 -- an allocution declaring that, as leader of all Catholics, he would not wage war on the Catholic Austrians, and affirming his neutrality. On 15 November, a zealot stabbed Pius’ appointment to head the Roman government, Pellegrino Rossi, to death. Demonstrations ensued, and the crowd imposed a cabinet 44 committed to Italian independence and the removal of all papal temporal power. On 24 November, Pio Nono fled (according to tradition, disguised as a groom on the box of the Bavarian ambassador’s coach) to Gaeta, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On 9 February 1849, an elected assembly voted to make Rome an independent republic. And the Roman Republic put itself in the hands of Guiseppe Mazzini. Roman Newsboys records the quick-changing fortunes of the papacy and the rise of the Roman Republic. Heade positions the second newsboy —- an embodiment of “liberty” and of the Roman Republic under Mazzini -— at a higher elevation than the “papal” newsboy, suggesting Heade’s own sympathies. This second boy wears red, white and blue, including a “liberty” cap. Heade marks the contrast between this “republican” boy’s age and his maturity by showing him holding a cigar in his left hand. English tourist Charles MacFarlane experienced children in Italy very similar to Heade’s representation of the “republican” newsboy: Nearly every man and boy wore some uniform or other. Even the little children were dressed up like national guardsmen; and here [in Ancona], as afterwards at Rome, Florence, and too many other cities, we saw urchins not ten years old strutting about with swords by their sides and cigars in their mouths. In the puerile affectation and miserable cant of the day, these children dressed as soldiers are called “Le Speranze della Patria” -- the hopes of the country. Margaret Fuller, in February 1849, also noticed that many Romans had donned the “liberty cap”: “I passed into the 45 Corso; there were men in the liberty cap, -- of course the lowest and vilest had been the first to assume it; all the horrible beggars persecuting as impudently as usual.” The liberty cap worn by Heade’s republican newsboy became a symbol of the Mazzini-led Roman Republic.32 Heade marks the Mazzinian, “republican” phase of events in Rome through the “Wlita” graffiti behind the sidewalk post in Roman Newsboys. Giuseppe Mazzini renewed the republican movement in Italy following the flight of Pius IX from Rome. Margaret Fuller characterized the transition of popularity from the pro—papacy Vincenzo Gioberti to the pro-republic Mazzini with her 20 March 1849 letter to the New York Tribune: “The ‘illustrious Gioberti’ has fallen...Now the name of Gioberti is erased from the corners of the streets to which it was affixed a year ago...Mazzini is the idol of the people.” Mazzini had established Young Italy, an organization supporting Italian unification, in 1830, and was forced to live in exile from his native Genoa. Following a failed uprising against Piedmont in April 1833, Mazzini received a death sentence in absentia and fled to England. In London, he evolved his powerful model of the new Italy: a democratic, indivisible republic based upon popular sovereignty and fashioned on the ideals of the American Revolution. Mazzini believed that only republican 32MacFarlane, vol. I, 310-311. Ossoli, 358. 46 institutions could enact the social legislation to make Italians “free, equal, and brothers.” His slogans —- “God and the People” and “Italy will do it by itself” -- reflected his desire to liberate Italy from Austrian and papal control. Mazzini arrived in Rome in March 1849 and became the recognized leader of the new Republic.33 Margaret Fuller, as a friend to Mazzini and as an interested American, became actively involved in the short-lived Roman Republic. Mazzini often visited with Fuller in Rome. In a June 1849 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fuller defended Mazzini: “Speaking of the republic, you say, ‘Do you not wish Italy had a great man?’ Mazzini is a great man. In mind, a great, poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; in action, decisive and full of resource as Caesar. Dearly I love Mazzini.” Fuller believed that she was a part of the great romantic drama of the Roman Revolution. She also had another personal connection with the Republic. In April 1847, the forty-year-old Fuller met the twenty—nine-year-old Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, the youngest son of a Roman aristocratic family which had distinguished itself in the papal service since the 33Ossoli, 364-365. For more on Mazzini, see Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). L. Mariotti, Italy in 1848 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851) offers contemporary opinions on Mazzini and the Roman Republic. For the links between the idoelogy of the United States and Mazzini's thought, see Joseph Rossi, The Image of America in Mazzini’s Writings (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954). 47 seventeenth century. In September 1848, Fuller, probably married to Count Ossoli, gave birth to their son. Due to the interreligious nature of the union and the political situation, they would keep both the child and their likely marriage a secret from most family and friends. During the eventual siege of Rome by French troops, Fuller ran the hospital of Bene Fratelli on Tiber Island while Ossoli served as captain in the Civic Guard. Her writings profess her love for the ideals of the Roman Republic but also show her realistic understanding of the poor military and political outllook for the Republic.34 The combination of personal anxiety and the doomed political situation of the Roman Republic weighed heavily on Fuller in 1848 and 1849. Martin Johnson Heade’s friend, Thomas Hicks, painted a portrait of her in Rome in 1848 (fig. 8). Hicks had met Fuller shortly after she had arrived in Rome and they both traveled to Venice in the summer of 1847. His cabinet portrait of Fuller shows her sitting on a richly-upholstered red bench and amid a Gothic arcade along the Grand Canal. A small garden of flowers rises behind the bench while the Eros of Centocelle (Vatican Museums, Rome), likely a symbol of her amorous relationship 34Ossoli, 436. Since there exists to date no documented proof of their marriage, much has been written about Fuller keeping her relationship with Ossoli a secret. For some of the many discussions and debates regarding the likely marriage to Count Ossoli, see Von Mehren, 299-300, 316-317, and 323-324; Dickenson, 188-196; Stern, 284-325; and Brooks, 110-121. 48 with the young Ossoli, looks down upon her. Gondolas float along the canal while a courting couple talks in the left middleground. A dropped blossom lies at Fuller’s feet. Fuller, wrapped in a long white shawl, appears melancholy. Hicks, who saw himself as standing “in the relationship to her of a brother,” was most likely familiar with Fuller’s liaison with Count Ossoli.35 In spite of Fuller’s personal situation, she remained the voice of the Roman Republic for Americans through Horace Greeley’s Tribune. In comparing the plight of Rome to the American colonies, she pled with her fellow Americans to support and officially recognize the Republic: “Some of the lowest people have asked me, ‘Is it not true that your 35Born in Newtown, Pennsylvania in 1823, Thomas Hicks, like Heade, studied with Edward Hicks, his cousin, before briefly attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He moved to New York to study at the National Academy of Design, where he exhibited for the first time in 1839. Hicks traveled in Europe from 1845 until 1849. By October 1845, Hicks was in Rome and sharing a studio with John Frederick Kensett. In the spring of 1846, on Fat Tuesday, Hicks was stabbed in the back with a stilletto on the Corso, but recovered. He supported himself by making copies of European masters for American collectors. In June 1848, Hicks left Rome for Paris and London before returning to New York. His statement of his relationship with Fuller comes from a letter written to Fuller’s mother in the Fuller Manuscripts, Houghton Library, vol. 16, no. 65. Hicks’ warm feelings were returned by Margaret Fuller. In May 1847, she commented that “[Hicks’] pictures are full of life, and give the promise of some real achievement in Art.” In March 1849, she stated that “Of Hicks I think very highly. He is a man of ideas, an original observer, and with a poetic heart." Ossoli, 222 and 368. On Hicks’ portrait of Fuller, see Susan Cragg Ricci, catalogue entry for Thomas Hicks’ Margaret Fuller in Stebbins, The Lure of Italy, 198-200. Fuller commented on her experience of Venice: “Of Venice and its enchanted life I could not speak; it should only be echoed back in music...It seems to me as if no one ever yet had seen it, -- so entirely wanting is any expression of what I felt myself.” Ossoli, 233. 49 country had a war to become free?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then why do they not feel for us?’” In May 1849, she noted that the American community in Rome donated $250 to help support the Roman hospitals during the siege. She called for the new presidential administration of Zachary Taylor to assist the Republic, even if just through words: “Send dear America! to thy ambassadors a talisman precious beyond all that boasted gold of California.” Yet, even as Fuller continued working on a written history of the Roman Revolution, she knew that European forces had aligned themselves to ensure the failure of the Republic and the restoration of Pope Pius IX. Heade implies the ominous counter-revolutionary forces aligned against both moderate and radical reformers in Italy through the forbidding shadows closing in on the two young vendors in Roman Newsboys.36 By 1849 reactionaries had regained control in Austria and Germany and, in May and June 1848, French radicals who might have supported Italian liberty suffered defeat. Under the leadership of Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the republic held out -- with a small army of volunteers -— until July 1849 against armies sent from France, Spain, and Naples to destroy it. A heroic defense by the Roman Republic defeated Louis Napoleon’s army at first, but the French commander violated an armistice and sneaked in 36Ossoli, 387, 385 and 387. Later, American consulates and ships would provide refuge for Italian political refugees. 50 reinforcements. French troops restored Pope Pius IX to his throne, and remained in Rome for the next twenty years to defend the temporal power of the pope against another nationalistic, radical revolution. Margaret Fuller, Count Ossoli, and their son fled to Rieti in mid-July 1849, then to Florence in September. On 17 May 1850, she and her family sailed for New York on the 5.3. Elizabeth; all three tragically drowned when the ship wrecked off the shore of Fire Island, near Long Island, New York, in a storm on 19 July. The manuscript of her history of the Roman Revolution which she had been working on was also lost. The American public would never read Fuller’s narrative or her assessments of the failure of the Republic. American politicians and newspaper editors, along with the general public, had strong reactions to the failures of the revolutions not only in Rome but elsewhere in Europe. The first news in American papers of the February Revolution in Paris -- having begun on George Washington’s birthday -- arrived on 20 March 1848. It had been two weeks since the United States Senate had ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending a victorious war against Catholic, monarchical Mexico that brought huge territorial acquisitions. For some Americans it seemed that just when the United States had confirmed its supremacy over the North American continent news arrived of turmoil in reactionary Europe. America’s greatness, ideological superiority, and providential destiny seemed to be confirmed. Different 51 groups in American society seized upon different aspects of the revolutions to validate their own purposes and biases. The year of revolution was a presidential election year in the United States, and the American reception of events in Europe was colored by domestic political allegiances. Ideologically, the Free Soil Party of 1848 celebrated equal opportunity and self-help, ideals that it saw exemplified in at least some aspects of the revolutions in Europe. The Democratic Party pointed with pride in its national party platform, adopted in May 1848, to “the sovereignty of the people.” According to the Democrats, Europeans -— in imitation of the United States -— were building republics on the ruins of despotism in the Old World.37 Political ideologies mingled with religious ones in the American interest in the revolutions of 1848. Some evangelical preachers seized upon events as heralding the overthrow of the papacy, the long-deferred culmination of the Protestant Reformation. Revolutionary enthusiasm manifested itself in fashions of dress as well, such as the liberty cap of the French, the red attire of the Italian carbonari, or the fur hats and boots of Hungarian leader 37See Timothy M. Roberts and Daniel W. Howe, “The United States and the Revolutions of 1848,” in Evans, 157-179; and Holt, 284-382. New York City held a public demonstration of support for Pius IX on 29 November 1847. See the sixty page pamphlet Proceedings of the public demonstration of sympathy with Pope Pius IX and with Italy in the city of New York on Monday, Nbvember 29, A.D. 1847 (New York: W. Van Norden, 1847). 52 Louis Kossuth. But any direct impact on the United States of the European revolutions of 1848 involved international commerce. On 5 November 1849, the New York Herald aptly stated that although Americans could not condone the brutalities of either the revolutions or their suppression, “we can console ourselves with a rise in the cotton market, [creating] as great a sensation in Wall Street and in New Orleans as the recent revolutions did among speculators in the destiny of the human race.” The immediate failure of the revolutions only strengthened American ideological exceptionalism.38 Meanwhile, there existed a strong streak of humanitarian sentiment in the United States among the Whigs that manifested itself in sympathy for middle-class reformers in Europe. Whig newspapers like Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which employed Margaret Fuller to report on the situation in Rome, reflected this attitude. Greeley had a genuine compassion for the plight of the poor, and was sincerely interested in their advancement. He founded the New York Tribune to reach the masses through the inexpensive concept of the penny daily endowed with idealistic Whig principles. With Whig backing, Greeley promoted utopian ideals, including women’s suffrage, temperance, and labor unions. To support workers, Greeley advocated a protective 38The New York Herald, 5 November 1848, qouted in Evans, 171. 53 tariff to protect industry and jobs. To promote expansion, he lobbied for the Homestead Act to provide free land in the West. Believing in the Protestant ethic of frugality, diligent work, and sobriety, he published the weekly Tribune for more than three decades to provide tips and moral support to the new farmers. He famously employed the slogan “Go west, young man” to advocate westward movement to relieve pressure on the growing Eastern cities. Greeley had a very public and ongoing argument with Bishop Hughes of New York, who called for the restoration of papal temporal power in Rome, over whether or not American Catholics should support the Roman Republic. For Greeley, his newspaper became a means of educating citizens in a democratic society.39 Heade employs newspapers in Roman Newsboys as a paragon not only of the immediacy of the revolutionary events in Italy but also of the significance of information to a 39William E. Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833-1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). Michael Holt argues that Greeley successfully summed up the perceived differences between the Whigs and the Democrats in an 1845 editorial: “'The Whig party is the champion of general CONCORD or united interests, and thrives upon these,’ Greeley contended. The Democratic (‘Loco Foco') party ‘is the party of DISCORD, or divided, repugnant, hostile interests and is prospered by whatever makes the separation of interests and classes more broad and palatable’...’”THE COMMONWEALTH” is the best term expressing the Whig idea of a State or Nation, and our philosophy regards a Government with hope and confidence, as an agency of the community through which vast and beneficent ends may be accomplished.'” Horace Greeley, New York Tribune, November 29, 1845, quoted in Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 70. See also Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 23. 54 democratic society. When the dissemination of information seems threatened, as the powerful shadows of counter-revolution surround Heade’s young newsboys, the success of republican governments become endangered. Several other antebellum paintings present the newspaper as visual evidence of America’s urbanization and democratization. Richard Caton Woodville’s war News from Mexico (fig. 9) from 1848 proposes “the newspaper’s immediacy and the intensity of focus it required of its audience.” Woodville, like Heade in Roman Newsboys, place the newspaper at the center of his composition. Under the porch of an “American Hotel” in war News, American males of all ages, and marginalized women and African-Americans, read the news from America’s foreign war against a Catholic, monarchic country. The emotional reactions from the Americans to the bits of information in the paper mark Woodville’s emphasis on the powerful cultural impact of the newspaper. Frederick R. Spencer, in The Newsboy (fig. 10), takes the compact nature of the newspaper and spreads its pages out on an urban wall through the use of informative broadside after broadside. Although Heade utilizes fewer posters on the palace wall in Roman Newsboys, the effect remains one of news publicly displayed for interested citizens.40 4OHusch, 61. Woodville’s painting was executed while the artist was studying in Dusseldorf and was exhibited at the American Art-Union in 1849. For more on Woodville’s War News from Mexico, see Elizabeth 55 Antebellum artists like Heade, Spencer, and Woodville viewed newspapers as vehicles which encouraged political debate and the spread of progressive, perhaps even subversive or revolutionary, ideas. The penny papers in the United States were inexpensive, manageable for readers, included more local and crime news, and more news of interest to women and laborers than the larger, often weekly, papers. These penny papers relied on distribution and not on subscriptions. Publishers sold their papers to vendors at two-thirds of a cent per copy. These vendors distributed the paper to newsboys, like Spencer’s and Heade’s subjects, who then hawked them to the urban public on the streets. In America, these affordable and accessible newspapers, often directly associated with a political party, reached the masses with news and with their respective political and social agendas. In Europe, including Italy, inexpensive papers in the 18403 were one aspect of a vast circulation of newspapers, illustrated papers, and placards which helped create “something of a revolutionary culture which was appreciated by a growing number of people.”41 Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 1, 121—122, and Francis S. Grubar, “Richard Caton Woodville: An American Artist, 1825 to 1855” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1966), 232-239. For more on Spencer’s The Newsboy, see Husch, 1-80. 41. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 35-36. For the role of the newspaper within American politics and culture, see Huntzicker; 56 The “penny paper” Don Pirlone, placed in full sunlight at the center of Heade’s composition and offered on the street by Heade’s “republican” newsboy, operated as the satirical voice of Rome’s revolutionary culture. That Roman satirical voice also found its way into the minds of Americans, both at home and abroad. Writing from Rome in December of 1848, Margaret Fuller took note of “Don Tirlone [sic], the Punch of Rome.” Fuller continued by describing in detail one of the political cartoons parodying the pope as a parrot, held “captive” in a birdcage by the King of Naples. An abridged version of the complete Don Pirlone political cartoons was published in New Orleans about 1850. The Italian-American editor of this abridged edition of fifty plates notes that the “principal object of these illustrations was to unmask all the political tricks of European diplomacy which, through its machinations, threatened the young [Roman] republic and greatly endangered the whole liberty of Europe.” The editor made note of American exceptionalism by commenting that “the supreme condition of liberty” -- meaning republican governmental institutions -- existed in modern times only in Switzerland and the United States. Arguing in English, Italian, and and Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994) . The opinion of the role of newspapers in fostering a “revolutionary culture” in Europe comes from Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “1848-1849: A European Revolution” in Evans, 3. 57 French that Pius IX was “obliged to submit to the will of Providence and the rights of the nation,” the editor displays his strong support for Italian unification and democracy.42 Heade, in Roman Newsboys, references the freeing of political prisoners by the republican government of Rome, and the return of political exiles to their native Italy, through the poster on the palace wall which reads: “ROMAN -- RE - SED / TUE -- / A WEEKLY JOURN --.” In the twenty-second plate of the American version of the II Don Pirlone prints, a helmeted female allegory of Liberty, holding a key and a staff labeled “S.P.Q.R.” opens the prison of “Sant’Uffizio” and releases elderly prisoners “of the Holy Inquisition." In another plate, “The Judgment of the Times” (fig. 11) shows Pope Pius IX, viewed bust-length and in full papal robes, standing before winged History. With a fiery pen, History writes “PARRICIDE” across the forehead of the pope. The editor’s note for the plate states, “History, that rules the people, will write of Pius IX.: He possessed himself of the Papal throne of St. Peter 420ssoli, 345. G. Daelli, A Relic of the Italian Revolution of 1849. Album of Fifty Line Engravings, Executed on Copper, By the Mbst Eminent Artists at Rome in 1849; Secreted from the Papal Police After the “Restoration of Order,” And Just Imported into America (New Orleans: Gabici's Music Stores, 1850?), 7-23. Daelli based his abbreviated, fifty plate American version of the engravings on the multi-volume work by Michelangelo Pinto, Don Pirlone a Roma: memorie di un italiano dal 1 settembre 1848 al 31 dicembre 1850, 3 vols. (Torino: Alessandro Fontana, 1850). 58 on the 213t of June, 1846, and died...guilty of parricide towards his country.” Providence had already ordained a united and republican Italian nation, and Pope Pius IX had only temporarily thwarted the inevitable progress of humankind. The editor of the New Orleans version of the plates wanted his American viewers not only to find “gratification” in the images, but to reflect on the connections “with the security of their freedom.” According to the editor, the failures and shortcomings of the Roman Revolution needed to be didactic tools for antebellum Americans in appreciating their own God-granted liberty.43 One group of contemporary American comments on the failure of the Roman Revolution of 1848-49 blamed the Italians themselves. In April 1848, Margaret Fuller presaged the failure of the democratic unification movement. Aware that the question of Italian unification was potentially intractable, she believed that the problem “was one of such difficulty, that only one of those minds, the rare product of ages for the redemption of mankind, could be equal to its solution.” Although Fuller would hope that Mazzini was “one of those minds,” numerous other commentators hypothesized that the Italians were incapable of creating such a “rare product of ages.” For some, the Italian “race” was simply incapable of “progressing” to 43Daelli, 7-23. 59 republicanism. In his.My Consulship, despite his praise for Pius IX, Charles Edwards Lester states: It will not be disputed, at least by American statesmen, that the ultimate cause of the failure of European nations, in the establishment and maintenance of liberal institutions, during and after the Revolution of 1848, was the political incapacity of the people...Nor have I much confidence in the capacity of any race of men, to found and perpetuate even free Constitutional Governments, except the Anglo Saxon. Henry T. Tuckerman believed that the “the hope of [Italy’s] state” lied not with its adults, who were “priests and beggars, spies and traitors,” but “in the instinctive and characteristic life of her children.” The children of Italy could be instructed in the moral and civic responsibilities of republicanism.44 Other American commentators compared the political incapacity of Italians for understanding the responsibilities of republicanism with that of children. By employing two boys in his painting, Heade builds upon the comparison of mid-ninteenth-century Italians to children —- perhaps ready to learn how to be “good” republicans -- which appeared in many accounts of travels and events in Italy both before and after 1848. As American ideology assigned to mothers the moral instruction of the nation’s future male 44Ossoli, 321. Lester, II, 226-227. Henry T. Tuckerman, The Italian Sketchbook, 3rd ed. rev. and enl. (New York: J.C. Riker, 1848), 408, quoted in Vance, II, 122. 60 citizens, Italians still needed to be instructed in the basic of republican institutions. The idea that the Italian nation was still “childish,” not yet “grown up” and worthy of the responsibilities of democracy, penetrated into the writings on Italy by Americans during the late antebellum era. Nathaniel Hawthorne, through the allegory of the naive and emotional Donatello in The Marble Faun, compares his symbolic contemporary Italian to the Faun of Praxitiles, animals, and a child. Hawthorne’s fellow writer, Margaret Fuller, in talking about the first Carnival of the new Roman Republic, likens the state of the post-revolution Italian people to adolescents, referring to the Italians as “after childhood.” In one of her earlier letters, she used the trope of childhood to describe the readiness of the Italians to embrace republican reforms: In the spring, when I came to Rome, the people were in the intoxication of joy at the first serious measures of reform taken by the Pope. I saw with pleasure their childlike joy and trust...The Roman people, stigmatized by prejudice as so crafty and ferocious, showed themselves children, eager to learn, quick to obey, happy to confide. Fuller’s positive yet patronizing view of the Romans defines them as “good children,” ready to be educated in the responsibilities of republican political life. Lester, following the failure of the revolutions in Italy, comments that the majority of Italians had yet to be ready for democracy: “Men must be educated to democracy to make them 61 democrats.” Likewise, Heade situates his portrayal of the events in Rome in 1848 and 1849 within this discourse of Italians as “children.” Heade’s two boys -- stand-ins for Italia -- still need to be educated in democracy in order for Italy to “grow up” a “good” republican nation.45 Although many contemporary writers did view the Italians as “children,” not yet ready for -- or racially incapable of -- the responsibilities of republican government, many of these same Americans also blamed the Jesuits and their influence in Italy, France, and Austria for the failure of the Roman Revolution in 1848-49. Heade includes the Jesuits, as threats to both the pro-papal, Gioberti-styled moderate reformers and the Mazzini-led 45Genre images of young boys were popular in the nineteenth century. Paintings of young newsboys and other urban boys from the late 18403 and 18503 often commented upon the issues of reform, social perfection, and politics. For a discussion of the meaning of nineteenth-century images of rural children, see Sarah Burns, “Barefoot Boys and Other Country Children” in Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth—Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 297-332. Other images of young newsboys and other urban boys from the 18403 and 18503 include David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, 1856-1860, oil/canvas, The Butler Institute of American Art; Blythe, The News Boys, c.1846-1852, oil/canvas mounted on board, The Carnegie Museum of Art; George Henry Yewell, The Bootblack (Doing Nothing), 1852, oil/canvas, New-York Historical Society; and Thomas Le Clear, Buffalo Newsboy, 1853, oil/canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among many others. Both Elizabeth Johns and Gail Husch read some of these images of urban boys. See Johns, 176-196, and Husch, 34-80. For one example of an antebellum author expressing the concept of republican motherhood, see Protestant minister John S.C. Abbot’s The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty, Familiarly Illustrated (New York: The American Tract Society, 1833), 159-161. Hawthorne consistently plays upon the idea of Donatello as “child” in the “pre-murder” chapters of the book. See Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 19-65. Fuller, 346-347 and 242. Ossoli, 242. Lester, II, 254. 62 republicans, in his narrative of the history of the Republic in Roman Newsboys. The powerful shadow, approaching both newsboys from the left, appears to have the broad hat of a Jesuit. The Jesuit ominously approaching as “shadow” adheres to contemporary American criticism of the Catholic society’s role in the failure of the 1848 revolution and in the subversion and destruction of all liberal ideas. Charles Lester, in making Pope Pius IX the “hero” of his narrative in My Consulship, turns the Jesuits into another villain of his story. Lester opined that “from the first moment [Pius IX] made known his intentions of reforming the Pontifical Government, the Jesuits, and the leaders and instruments of the retrograde party, brought all machinery they could, to bear against him.” He called the Jesuits the “most efficient and subtle spies...treacherous, wily...smooth, cool, [and] snaky.” In the middle of his section discussing the reforms put forth by Pius IX, Lester foreshadows the revolutionary events and the “ruin” of Pius noting that the French soldier “has been the master-workman of the Society of Jesus.” Margaret Fuller, in noting that “the influence of the Jesuits is still immense in France,” feared that the “sly” Jesuits would influence opinion in France against the Roman Republic and for papal restoration.46 46Lester, II, 231, 20, 177, and 107. Ossoli, 382, and 19-20. 63 Like Heade’s inclusion of a shadowy Jesuit in Roman Newsboys, Il Don Pirlone often included the Jesuits, with large-brimmed hats, as evil scoundrels plotting against the Roman Republic and Italian unification. In “Impediments to Liberty,” a poor, classically-garbed, “Cinderella” version of Liberty, straddling “the boot” of Italy, swings her broom and angrily attempts to strike at a military officer, already prone on the ground (fig. 12). The officer, almost defeated despite his chest covered in medals of victory, holds an open shackle and chain in his left hand. He desperately clings to “the boot.” The head and arms of the pope emerge, from clouds at the horizon, preventing “Italy” from taking her swing. Meanwhile, prepared for a surprise assault and lurking inside “the boot,” a fiendish Jesuit, easily-identifiable by his large hat and dark robes, holds a stiletto in each hand. The note for the plate in the New Orleans version, in interpreting the image for its American viewers, implies the anti-Providential nature of Pius’ actions: “The Pope, the Jesuits, and the generals are the jailers of liberty in Europe. That same Italy which so readily trampled under foot those very generals cannot divest herself of them, chained, as she is, by that ROMAN CATHOLIC SULTAN, whose JANIZARIES even threaten her at the iooint of dagger.” Heade’s inauspicious and potent shadows, iJicluding that of the unseen Jesuit, in Roman Newsboys 64 foreshadow the eventual failure of the revolution at the hands of “the jailers of liberty in Europe.”47 Like the Italian-American editor of the American version of the Don Pirlone prints, Heade designed Roman Newsboys both as a collapsed rendition of the revolutionary events in Rome in 1848-49 and as a warning to Americans to be watchful of their freedoms. Ultimately, Heade created a second version of Roman Newsboys (fig. 13) in which the barred window at the upper left looms larger, and many of the posters and graffiti no longer decorate the walls -- except for a large cross at the right. The “republican” boy wears a regular street cap instead of his “Liberty” cap from the earlier version. Finally, the shadows have grown darker and the “republican boy” does not hand out Il Don Pirlone, but a paper simply with “Roma” in its title. In this version, the military and political defeat of the Roman Republic, and the restoration of the papacy have apparently taken place. Yet the boys still offer forth the symbols of democratic information -— their newspapers. Theodore Stebbins dates this later version to after 4 July 1849, following the return of Pope Pius IX to Rome and the fall of the Republic. In July 1849, Margaret Fuller expressed the idea that Americans needed to be watchful and contemplative about “freedom? around the world: “Friends, countrymen, and 47naelli, 19. 65 lovers of virtue, lovers of freedom, lovers of truth! be on the alert; rest not supine in your easier lives, but remember ‘Mankind is one,/ And beats with one great heart.”48 Utilizing the Italian scene as a symbol of the past glory of ancient civilizations, American landscape painters created images of the Old World to satiate the desires of American patrons for art with classical associations. The ancient “freedoms” and “truths” of Greece, and her captor, pre-imperial Rome, had found themselves reborn, not in contemporary Rome, but in the New World -- in the sublime landscape of the United States. 48Stebbins, Martin Johnson Heade, 202. Ossoli, 421. 66 Chapter Two “BOUND TOGETHER IN AN INDISSOLUBLE CHAIN”: AMERICAN TOURIST REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WATERFALLS AT TIVOLI AND IN AMERICA In 1853, Nathaniel Willis Parker, in his Pencillings by the way: Written During Some Years of Residence and Travel in Europe, spent a few pages describing his visit to Tivoli, one of the more popular tourist sites outside of Rome. Tivoli, a small town about twenty miles east of Rome and perched high on one of the lower slopes of the Apennines, would have been an essential part of a one-day, mid-nineteenth-century carriage trip from Rome or of an extended stay in the Roman countryside. At Tivoli, the Anio river plunges in cascades into the Roman campagna before joing the Tiber and flowing through Rome to the Mediterranean. Parker first compares the falls at Tivoli to the many falls he has seen in Europe and America: “I have seen many finer falls than Tivoli; that is, more water, and falling farther; but I do not think there is so pretty a place in the world.” He continues his description of the cascades and the landscape, marking their nature with hackneyed picturesque diction, including “broken,” “crag,” and “twisted”: We passed through a broken gate, and with a step, were in a glen of fairy-land; the lightest and loveliest of antique temples on a crag above, a snowy waterfall of some hundred and fifty feet below, 67 grottoes mossed to the mouth at the river’s outlet, and all up and down the cleft valley vines twisted in the crevices of rock and shubbery hanging on every ledge, with a felicity of taste or nature, or both, that is uncommon even in Italy.49 For Parker and the many other American tourists who visited Tivoli beginning in the 18303, the cascades and the respective scenery offered a prime example of the beautiful and the picturesque in Italy. Late antebellum Americans continued an ongoing European tradition of visiting Tivoli and experiencing its numerous picturesque features. A visit to the sights of Tivoli, including the Villa of Maecenas, the Villa Gregoriana, the Temple of the Sybil, and the Villa d’Este, was a required component of any Grand Tour. Antebellum artists, including George Loring Brown in his View of Tivoli at Sunset and his Tivoli (The Falls of Tivoli), built upon the classical, idyllic tradition of portraying Tivoli in the works of Claude Lorrain, Hubert Robert, Honore Fragonard, Richard Wilson, Samuel Palmer, and various other European artists who toured the site.50 But American tourists and painters defined and discussed the falls at Tivoli in specific contrast with North American scenery. As part of a mid—nineteenth—century tourist 49Nathaniel Willis Parker, Pencillings by the Way: Written During Some Years of Residence and Travel in Europe (Detroit: Kerr, Doughty & Lapham, 1853), 307-308. 50For European artists at Tivoli as part of a Grand Tour, see Wilton and Bignamini, 120-122, 141—143. 68 discourse, the cascades at Tivoli served as symbols of the Italian civilization of the past while waterfalls in North America, including Niagara, stood as emblems of unblemished and powerful wilderness. Adapting eighteenth-century British definitions of landscape traits -- the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque, and the work of Thomas Cole, mid-nineteenth century American painters and writers, including Brown and Parker, constructed an Italian landscape of the picturesque past while associating the American landscape with a sublime present and future. George Loring Brown’s Tivoli (The Falls of Tivoli) (fig. 3) exemplifies the American picturesque image of the tourist site. Brown, born in Boston in 1814, left for his second trip to Italy in 1840, and remained nineteen years. During the 18503 in Rome, Brown had a studio (visited by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1858), and was part of the American artists’ community that included Worthington Whittredge, Thomas Crawford, and Randolph Rogers. His paintings of Italian scenes were often directly commissioned as Grand Tour souvenirs by American tourists. Between 1847 and 1855, Brown painted numerous views of Tivoli. In Tivoli (The Falls of Tivoli), the artist includes the craggy cliffs, steep waterfalls, and primeval vegetation of the landscape around Tivoli. Brown combines intimacy with vastness. He details the foliage, architecture, and sky while observing the enormous scale of the site. Brown’s use of a framing tree at the right of the composition, the scattered 69 contrasts of shadow and sunlight, and the sketchy quality of the rocky hillside recall the syntax of the eighteenth-century picturesque. He employs rich impasto and texture to accentuate the picturesque qualities of the landscape. He emphasizes the man-made nature of the largest of the falls, the Cascata Grande, created when a double tunnel was cut in the mountain to divert the oft-flooded Anio from the center of the ancient town. Brown positions the nineteenth-century engineering feat, meant to control these natural floods, adjacent to the medieval and ancient architecture, including the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli. Brown emphasis on the human altering of the flow of the cascades insinuates that the entire natural order, in spite of any apparent external beauty, has also been retailored.51 American tourists made note of the human altering of the falls at Tivoli. Nathaniel Parker describes his tourist experience of the cascade: 51Brown traveled to Italy due to the support and recommendation of Washington Allston. He painted at least nine views of Tivoli and created a series of etchings in 1853-54. Brown returned to the United States in 1860. See Thomas A. Leavitt, “The Life, Work, and Significance of George Loring Brown, American Painter” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1957); John W. Coffey, Twilight of Arcadia: American Landscape Painters in Rome, 1830-1880 (Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1987), 81-82; and K. Mathews Hohlstein, catalogue entry for Tivoli (The Falls of Tivoli) in Stebbins, The Lure of Italy, 288-290. Sir William Gell mentioned one of the many floods: “The walls of Tibur [the ancient name for Tivoli] were much damaged by one of those extraordinary floods by which the Anio is not unfrequently swollen...The great flood of November 1826, carried away the church of Santa Lucia, and thirty-six houses situated not more than two hundred yards from the 'temple of Vesta.” See Gell’s The Topography of Rome and Its Vicinity (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), 418. 70 From beneath [Tivoli’s] walls, as if its foundations were laid upon a river’s fountains, bursts foaming water in some thirty different falls; and it seems to you as if the long declivities were that moment for the first time overflowed, for the currents go dashing under trees, and overleaping vines and shrubs, appearing and disappearing continually, till they all meet in the quiet bed of the river below. ’It was made by Bernini,’ said the guide, as we stood gazing at it; and, odd as this information sounded, while wondering at a spectacle worthy of the happiest accident of nature, it will explain the phenomena of the place to you -- the artist having turned a mountain river from its course, and leading it under the town of Tivoli, threw it over the sides of the precipitous hill upon which it stands. For mid-nineteenth-century Americans like Parker, the guide’s invoking of Bernini only further marked Tivoli’s falls as pure decorative fiction and artifice. Few Americans admired the work of the seventeenth-century architect and sculptor. For example, Charles Eliot Norton wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1857: “I love Rome more and more...[in] spite of Berninis and Borromonis, of priests and forestieri [foreigners].” American visitors attributed the topographic chaos of contemporary Rome to the Baroque achitects and designers. Protestant American artists tended to downplay Catholic references in their images and primarily ignored the great basilicas and palaces, with the .notable exception of the dome of St. Peter’s, of the (haunter-Reformation. George Stillman Hillard even argued ‘that “[i]t would have been well if architecture could have 71 stopped in the middle of the sixteenth century.” Baroque art represented decadence and regression to most antebellum American viewers. The fact that Bernini, the master artist of Baroque Rome, had attributed to him the alterations of the falls at Tivoli only re—affirmed the American, neoclassical standards of taste. To many American visitors, the cascades at Tivoli were interesting but unsober, artificial and sensual. The Italians had altered the landscape, compromising the natural order.52 Landscape paintings showing the intrusion of technology into the landscape of the New World, unlike those of Italy, occassionally stressed that the natural order in the New World continues in spite of the encroachment of economic advancement. In Jasper Francis Cropsey’s Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (fig. 14) from 1865, the artist paints the stone bridge, carrying the tracks of the New York and Erie Railroad, as it spans the wide valley near the Susquehanna river at Lanesboro in northeast Pennsylvania. Cropsey originally sketched the man-made wonder, following his European trip of 1847-49, in October 1853. He painted his scene from the site of a train stop that allowed passengers to get off the train and enjoy the scene. A train, moving out of the misty mountains in the background, emits white smoke while two young boys in the foreground look out over 52Parker, 309, emphasis about Bernini in original. Norton, Letters, I, 161, 144, and Hillard, Six Months, I:281, quoted in Vance, II, 77-102. 72 the valley. Cropsey de—emphasizes the train, a symbol of progress and civilization, in the midst of the autumnal pastoral setting of the valley. Art historians often have compared Cropsey’s picture to those of Tivoli, calling Starrucca “an echo of Italy in the American landscape.” The structure of the viaduct recalls the ruins of ancient aqueducts in the Roman campagna. Cropsey associates the technological advancements of the ancient Romans to the engineering feats of his contemporary railroad magnates. He also succeeds, by extension, in linking the civilization and achievements of ancient, republican Rome with nineteenth-century, democratic America.53 Brown’s Tivoli juxtaposes the immensity of the falls and the modern Italian engineering feats with the tiny, round Sibyl’s Temple. Also known as the Temple of Vesta due to its round nature, the Sybil’s Temple at Tivoli dates from the late republican era of ancient Rome. Built of travertine, the exquisite structure makes use of the 53The version in the Toledo Museum of Art is a smaller composition, perhaps an “engraver’s copy," probably similar to a much larger painting, destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871. The comment on the painting’s Italian “echoes" comes from Richardson and Whittman. See Talbot, 180-185, and 428-431. For Cropsey’s sketches of the viaduct, see the exhibition catalogue An Uhprejudiced Eye: The Drawings of Jasper F. Cropsey (Yonkers, NY: The Hudson River Museum, 1979), 44-45. Carrie Rebora argues that “Cropsey was in sympathy with the concerns of railroad magnates” and had several as patrons. See her catalogue entry for Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, 210-213. Also see William S. Talbot, Jasper F. Cropsey 1823-1900 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), 90-92. 73 Corinthian order. Brown’s inclusion of the round temple in his painting of Tivoli reflected the compulsory nature of image-making -- as painted by numerous European and American artists for decades -— at the historic locale. In his Course of Empire series, Thomas Cole makes use of a structure similar to Tivoli’s Temple of the Sybil. A pastoral Republic has turned into an urban Empire in the third painting of the series, Consummation (fig. 15) of 1836. The round temple, in glorious marble splendor, sits atop the city’s heights and overlooks the pomp and decadence recalling imperial Rome. In Cole’s Desolation (fig. 16), the final image of the series, he returns the cycle of history to its end and its beginning. The ruins of the past Empire, with a giant single column in the foreground, the remains of great bridges and temples in the middleground, and a setting sun in the distance, mark the scene as one of wildness. Cole places the ruins of Tivoli’s round temple atop a hill in the far left background. Alan Wallach argues that Cole “set forth in allegorical form his pessimistic philosophy of history and his essentially agrarian-republican critique of Jacksonian democracy.”54 The pristine round temple in Brown’s painting operates as a symbol of republicanism during the era of an empire at its .height while the ruined temple serves as an emblem of decay. 54A1an Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” in Truettner and Wallach, 90. 74 Brown’s inclusion of the round temple at Tivoli reflected its moral claim on American tourists: the trip to and around the falls at Tivoli operated as a ritualistic experience and the recollections of the sojourn among American tourists are strikingly similiar. Travelers associated the countryside around Rome, the extensive plain of the Campagna bounded by the Sabine hills to the east and by the Alban hills to the south, with the ancient civilization of Republican Rome. The remains of tombs, villas, monuments, and temples filled the landscape and elated foreign tourists looking for tangible evidence and remembrances of the ancient past. Nineteenth-century Americans also found in the Campagna an evocation of the pastoral ideal given visual form by European artists of the previous century. Tivoli, called Tibur in ancient Roman times, had been a favorite retreat from the city for emperors like Hadrian and for poets like Horace. These classical associations expressed themselves through the ruins of architecture left behind by the ancients. American paintings of Tivoli fit within the eighteenth-century tradition of the veduta and its standard series of views for the famous place. Through repetition, the viewpoint looking up at the hillside town but out across the Roman plain acquired an iconic status. Ropes and Brown, .like their European and American predecessors to the site, cfldose a viewpoint that juxtaposed ancient ruins and modern Innildings, invoking the living, tangible past of Italy in a 75 visual equivalent of the layers of historical associations provided by the guidebooks and travel writers. The land in the Italian landscape paintings rarely appears cultivated and its figures are often the pastoral shepherds or peasants of an Arcadia. American painters valued the pastorals of Claude Lorrain for associations with the classical, and more especially their relationship to the late republican Rome of Virgil. American landscape painters, in depicting the scenery of Tivoli and its historical associations, showed the influence of the eighteenth-century British landscape aesthetics associated with the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. Based in the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others, the concept of the “beautiful” drew upon the ideal qualities of nature and involved close observation and study. An orderly, balanced, and harmonius design -- evoking a pastoral ideal -- often characterized the beautiful. The “picturesque” customarily involved the use of irregularity and variety, of light and shadow, of a roughness in texture and, on a philosophical level, the capacity to affect the imagination. The mood of a picturesque landscape, in contrast to the more classical, beautiful landscape, becomes one of wild, uncultivation instead of idyllic repose. Craggy trees, medieval towers, .rustic peasants, animals, rolling hills, cottages and farms fill.picturesque landscapes. The “sublime,” the third cxategory of British aesthtic response to landscape, draws 76 upon the spiritually and emotionally stimulating elements of nature.55 Tourist reactions to Tivoli were remarkably similar to each other and followed the nineteenth-century discourse of the “picturesque.” The physical setting of Tivoli provided a space for symbolic, ritualized activity. The literature of American accounts of travel to Tivoli tends to be repetitious, a rehashing of hackneyed picturesque landscape motifs. Reverend John E. Edwards descibed his 1856 trip to the falls at Tivoli: We were standing under the shadow of, what passes for an old temple of Vesta, overlooking the vast chasm into which the foaming waters of the cascade of Tivoli are poured over a rocky bed, dashed into feathery spray that rose up like the smoke from an iron forge in some of the mining districts of our mountains in Virginia. The sun was shining in full, unclouded, noonday splendor, and the bold, glorious arches of two great rainbows were spanning the deep, dark ravine, and mingling their beautiful tints with the diamond spray, that rose, mist-like, from the hidden depths below. 55For primary source material on eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics see Henry William Beechey, ed., The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, First President of the Royal Academy, 2 vols.(London: T. Cadell, 1835); Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London: T. Payne, fourth edition, 1808); and John Sunderland, “Uvedale Price and the Picturesque,” Apollo 93 (March 1971): 197-203. On the semiotic and political nature of landscape painting, see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For connections between British and American landscape aesthetics, see Joseph D. Ketner II and Michael J. Tammenga, The Beautiful, The Sublime, and The Picturesque: British Influences on American Landscape Painting (St. Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1984). 77 Reverend Edwards describes a particular event rooted in a tradition of confronting a panoramic, picturesque tourist landscape.56 Yale geologist and naturalist, Benjamin Silliman, began a written reprensentation of the environment around Tivoli using the visual vocabulary of the picturesque: “The town itself is mean, with narrow and dirty streets, and a squalid population of 6300 people meanly representing its former grandeur.” The dirt and squalor of Tivoli become the backdrop for the natural beauties of the tourist site. In spite of the “squalid” people and the “mean” streets, Silliman noted that the renown of the views accorded by the falls was not undeserved: “The whole world have heard of the beauties of Tivoli. Have they been exaggerated? I think not.” His words move the reader from visual foreground to background: Down the side of the mountain nearest to us, a delicate ribbonlike cataract was precipitated, with a gentle movement, and lost itself in the abyss, hundreds of feet below. A little farther off, a much larger stream rushed down the mountain-side, in a splendid river, snowlike, resounding as it fell, while a cloud of spray glittered in the sunbeams, and revealed a brillant rainbow. 56John E. Edwards, Random Sketches and Notes of European Travel in 1856 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857), 163. 78 Silliman then lapsed into a typical aesthetic response, using the vocabulary of the picturesque -— to the scenery of the falls at Tivoli: At every step, the view was unfolded more and more beautifully. Tivoli, perched upon the top of the opposite mountain, appeared like a castellated fortress, and in its numerous wars it has often sustained that character. As we proceeded, cataract after cataract was disclosed, -- larger and smaller, -- threading their way down the mountain from the Tivoli side. Seven cataracts were in View at one glance. They were beautifully contrasted with the rude rocks above, and the intense verdure below: the entire scene formed a delightful panoramic view, and it added no small interest to the prospect, that it had been seen and admired for more than 2000 years, by illustrious men and women, whose names glitter in these ever passing and ever renovated streams, and are inscribed by memory upon the everlasting mountains. Silliman delights in the falls at Tivoli because he recognizes the scene as a spatially unified picture and he appreciates the interconnectedness and constrast of the visual elements that comprise the experience of seeing the location. For Silliman, the categoriztion of the landscape of Italy as “picturesque” allows him to pass through the “squalor” of the town, to encounter the “everlasting” truths of God’s nature, and to sense the “illustrious” historical assocations of “more than 2000 years.” Even a scientific Isook like Sir William Gell’s Topography of Rome recorded the Edicturesque nature of the scenery at Tivoli: “All these gjlens, and especially the ruins of the ancient aqueducts, 79 are worthy of a visit, if only on account of their picturesque beauties.”57 Numerous American travel writers noted the many opportunities the scenery and historical associations at Tivoli provided to the artist. Long-time resident in Rome, William Wetmore Story, described the countryside around the falls: All around Tivoli wherever you go are massive remains of these Roman [aqueducts]...Most travellers who go to Tivoli content themselves with making the tour of the falls and cascatelle, visiting the villa of Maecenas, and the romantic villa D’Este, and luncheon in the Temple of Vesta; but few ever see...the adjacent country, so rich in picturesuqe ruins of the ancient time. Yet here and artist might fill his portfolio with new and characteristic sketches of great beauty, and the antiquarian might spend weeks of purest pleasure.58 Nathaniel Parker compared the view of the scenery around Tivoli to one of Thomas Cole’s images -- meshing the picturesque travel account and the picturesque landscape painting together: “A mile farther on I began to recognize the features of the scene, at a most lovely point of View.” Parker then connects the “lovely” scnenery to an artistic one: “It was the subject of one of Cole’s landscapes, which 57Benjamin Silliman, A Visit to Europe in 1851, 2 vols. (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1854), I, 281-284. Gell, 420. 58William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma, (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889), vol. II, 491. 80 I had seen in Florence; and I need not say to any one who knows of this admirable artist, that it was done with truth and taste.” Parker comments in a footnote: On may way to Rome...we passed an old man, whose picturesque figure, enveloped in his brown cloak and slouched hat, arrested the attention of all my companions. I had seen him before. From a five minutes' sketch in passing, Mr. Cole had made one of the most spirited heads I ever saw, admirably like, and worthy of Caravaggio for force and expression.59 American tourists expected the landscape and people of Tivoli to fulfill their pre—determined understanding of the picturesque nature of Italy. American tourists were following a scenic path that had been well worn by European tourists for generations. In Italy, romantic writers and artists had transformed the landscape into “sublime” and “picturesque” scenery. But scenery, as described in the written word and as painted on canvases, was a marketable commodity. From this perspective, artists like Brown and writers like Parker were scenic entrepeneurs. They hoped to create and sustain careers for themselves out of their mediation between the landscape and its viewers or readers. American art patrons anticipated that images of the landscape around Tivoli would satisfy their desires for images of the European picturesque. 59Parker, 308 . 81 Cole provided images for American collectors looking for the historical associations provided by the landscape of the Old World. His The Cascatelli, Tivoli, Looking towards Rome (fig. 17) includes an Italian peasant family and Sylvan goats amid primeval vegetation in the right foreground. Across the valley, the ancient waterfalls flow from a hillside topped by ancient and medieval vestiges of human civilization. The painting’s viewers followed the flow of the waterfalls and the river into the distant plain and “towards Rome.” European scenes, like Cole’s painting of the falls at Tivoli, stood for history and the past. But Cole’s images of American waterfalls, including The Falls of Kaaterskill (fig. 18), were about the present and the future: The painter of American scenery has indeed privileges superior to any other; all nature here is new to Art. No Tivoli’s[,] Terni’s[,] Mount Blanc’s, Plinlimmons, hackneyed & worn by the daily pencils of hundreds, but virgin forests, lakes & waterfalls feast his eye with new delights, fill his portfolio with their features of beauty & magnificence and hallowed to his soul because they had been preserved untouched from the time of creation for his heaven-favoured pencil. Unlike the “hackneyed” and well-worn tourist paths of European sites like Tivoli, Cole believed that American .scenery remained relatively “untouched” by human (Jivilization and its historical associations. In The Falls (1f Kaaterskill, he shows the scenic and tumultuous beauty of true American locale long before they were visited by 82 European and American settlers and tourists. His lone Native American figure, dwarfed by nature at the center of the composition, defines this American landscape as savage wildnerness yet to be touched by civilization.6O Many American landscape painters of the 18503 believed that the ideas of religion, nature, and art were intertwined in the landscape category of the sublime. Years earlier, in his famous “Essay on American Scenery,” Thomas Cole expressed the belief that nature was both sublime and sanctified. Revelation could be experienced through the sublime. American artist Asher B. Durand, Cole's friend, published nine “Letters” on landscape painting in The Crayon from January to July of 1855. In these letters, Durand argued that the first principle of landscape painting was the individual study of nature, rather than the study of art. A close study of an individual nature object would influence the heart and the mind, as well as the painter’s eye and hand. Durand declared that landscape art should embody a religious integrity through the sensing of transcendent beauty and significance. He stressed that an artist should limit artistic license to the variety found in nature itself: “One should modify nature only in the degree which Nature herself includes variety.” An accurate 6OMarshall Tynn, ed., Thomas Cole: The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches (St. Paul: John Colet Press, 1980), 131; quoted in Truettner and Wallach, 51. 83 depiction of a natural site operated as a metaphor for the divinity of God’s creation.61 The Home Book of the Picturesque, a presentation book published by George P. Putnam and Son in the early 18503, embodied the link between God and nature for American intellectuals. Featuring steel engravings after American landscape paintings and numerous essays, the volume featured two tracts which confronted the role of religion in relation to the individual and the landscape. The collector Reverend Elias Magoon, in his “Scenery and Mind,” writes that man’s perception of beauty and his ability to feel the sublime served as proofs of mankind’s inherent immortality. A confrontation with magnificent scenery fed the capacity to experience sublimity and to experience God’s presence in the viewer’s life. In attempting to convince the reader of the deep psychological and philosophical effects of scenery on the human mind, Magoon argues that the great thinkers of history were close observers and admirers of nature.62 61Asher B. Durand, “Letter from a Landscape Painter,” The Crayon, July 11, 1855. Roger Stein has argued that this American attitude toward art and nature was influence by the writings of English critic John Ruskin. Stein states that “the fundamental importance of Ruskin’s writing in America in these years before the Civil War was his indentification of the interest in art with morality and religion as well as with the love of nature.” He writes that Ruskin proposed a “convincing system where art, religion, and nature were inextricably intertwined.” See Roger Stein, thn Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America 1840-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 41. Also see Novak, “Sound and Silence: Changing Concepts of the Sublime,” in Nature and Culture, 34-44. 62See The Home Book of the Picturesque, Or American Scenery, Art and Literature (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1851). 84 James Fenimore Cooper’s essay “American and European Scenery” in The Heme Book of the Picturesque divulges his attitudes about the relative moral and philosophical values of different types of landscapes and locales. Cooper argues that American scenery lacked evidence of man’s manipulation or construction as evidence of civilization and past heroic deeds. These civilized elements -- castles, fortresses, medieval towers, ancient ruins, fields tilled for generations -— made the scenery meaningful and picturesque. Unlike Europe, American towns could only claim only a few “ill-shaped and yet pretending cupolas, and other ambitious objects, half of them in painted wood...while the most aspiring roof is almost invariably that of the tavern.” American artists needed to dwell on the scenic magnificence and emphasize the rough crudity of the native North American landscape.63 The lack of an American iconography of ruins, castles, and olive groves meant that American artists looking to depict the New World landscape needed to rely on objective naturalism and a sense of moral importance through conveying the grandeur of the American scenery. By mid—century in New York, the National Academy of Design, the American Art-Union, The Crayon, and other art organizations promoted 63James Fenimore Cooper, “American and European Scenery” in The Home Book of the Picturesque, Or American Scenery, Art and Literature (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1851), 69. 85 a national artistic culture allied in evoking the deeper meanings of nature. Most leading landscape painters were associated with the so-called Hudson River School and looked to define their nation’s landscape by capturing the essential quality of nature, utilizing new scientific awareness regarding creation, and incorporating evolving ideas of the sublime. Late antebellum painters employed bigger, Romantic-style canvases -- the “great pictures” of Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt and others -- to support their widening thoughts of the American landscape. George Stillman Hillard, and other American visitors to the falls, compared the cascades at Tivoli to those at Niagara, Lowell, Trenton, Rochester and other sites in the Northeast of the United States. Nothing in America had been painted and described more often then Niagara Falls. The Falls had been sketched and described by numerous eighteenth-century travelers. Artists including John Venderlyn, John Trumbell, Edward Hicks, and Thomas Cole painted the falls during the early nineteenth century. In popular art, from inexpensive engravings to miniatures, the sublime Niagara Falls had become the most widely circulated and.best-known image of American nature. In the new lunerican tradition of landscape painting in the nineteenth century, the primitive New World wilderness, with its grandeur and immensity, and its untamed and savage elements, inspired the sublime. While the cascades at Tivoli were arguably the European falls most commonly depicted in 86 ninteenth-century art, Niagara Falls was the most frequently depicted North American natural wonder in the nineteenth century. Tourism performed a potent role in America’s creation of itself as a culture. It granted a way of illuminating America as a place and of taking pride in the unique features of the New World landscape. American intellectuals sought to meet European standards of culture while developing a distinct national image.64 Ninteenth-century American tourists departed from their everyday lives as they set out on their sojourn to places like Niagara Falls, arguably the most famous American destination of the antebellum era. Niagara Falls served as the major stop on any American “Grand Tour” and “visiting the Falls became one of the primary rituals of democratic life in nineteenth-century America.” Niagara suggested transcendent meanings and functioned as a sacred place in a nation where God’s plan would be fulfilled. 64George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853), II, 214. Jeremy Elwell Adamson, et al., Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697—1901 (Washington, DC: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 11. For more on tourism, Niagara Falls, and its nationalistic meanings, see Elizabeth bthinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York: (Zambridge University Press, 1985); John F. Sears, Sacred Places: jhnerican Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, paperback edition, 1998), especially 12, for the quotation of the ritual nature of Niagara tourism; and William Irwin, The New Niagara: Tourism, Technology, and the Landscape <1f Niagara Falls, 1776-1917 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 87 The experience of both Tivoli and Niagara Falls for tourists was often tainted by the commercialization and industrialization of the sites. Margaret Fuller, writing from Niagara on June 10, 1843, noted the sublime power of the falls: “Yet I, like others, have little to say, where the spectacle is, for once, great enough to fill the whole life, and supersede thought, giving us only its own presence.” Viewing the spectacle of Niagara as a reflection of boundless divinity, Fuller remarks: [T]here is no escape from the weight of a perpetual creation; all other forms and motions come and go, the tide rises and recedes, the wind, at its mightiest, moves in gales and gusts, but here is really an incessant, an indefatigable motion...It is in this way I have most felt the grandeur, -- somewhat eternal, if not infinite. But that grandeur was also dangerous in Fuller’s interpretation. In commenting on the many complaints of visitors that the natural scenery of Niagara was being ruined by the buildings and collateral of the tourist industry, she states, “[T]he spectacle is capable of swallowing up all such objects.” By 1871, Henry James would complain that at Niagara the “hackmen and photographers and vendors” made the experience “simply hideous and infamous.” For Thomas Cole, water in motion over cataracts or waterfalls became the sublime “voice of the landscape” and the “silent energy of nature.” Cole asserted that Niagara Falls was “that wonder of the world! —- where the sublime 88 and the beautiful are bound together in an indissoluble chain.”65 Frederic Church’s Niagara Falls became one of the iconic mid-nineteenth century images of “that wonder of the world.” An “epiphanic, apocalyptic landscape of Romanticism,” Church’s Niagara Falls (fig. 19), painted in 1856, presents the famous tourist attraction as a symbol of the power and energy of the New World. As a grand-scale painting, over ninety inches in width, the panoramic Niagara Falls overemphasizes the breadth of the waterfall. Church brings the water all the way to the bottom edge of the canvas, eliminating any ground for the viewer to “stand on,” tending to cause uneasiness in the viewer through a sense of vertigo. Church’s Niagara functions as a picture about power -- the relentless kinetic energy of the blue-green water flowing toward the brink of the precipice and then plunging to the depths below. He leaves out any suggestion of a foreground upon which a person could stand forcing the viewer to be confronted by God’s creation. In commenting on Church’s painting, one viewer stated: [I]t is grand and sublime; it is natural to the nation, since nature herself, has given the type; it is wild and ungovernable, mad at times, but all power is —‘ 65Henry James, “Niagara,” in The Art of Travel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), 90-91. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” The New England Mbnthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 1-12; quoted in John W. McCourbey, ed., American Art 1700-1960: Sources «10d Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 103 and 105. Ossoli, “Summer on the Lakes” in At Home and Abroad, 3-6. 89 terrible at times. It is the effect of various causes; it is a true development of the American mind; the result of democracy, of individuality, of the expansion of each, of the liberty allowed to all; of ineradicable and lofty qualities in human nature.66 Church provides the viewer every sense of the “wild and ungovernable” falls through the power of the flowing, dark emerald water, the sense of mistiness provided by the spray, and the precipitous drop. The critic quoted above links the American wildnerness, symbolized by Niagara, with an “American mind” and an ideology of democracy, individuality, and liberty. Gordon Wood has argued that equality, in a certain sense, and democracy, were the unintended consequences of the “forces unleashed” by the American Revolution. The “reconstitution of American society”, the overthrow of the “bonds holding together the older monarchical society —- kinship, patriarchy, and patronage” —- made the United States as wild and powerful as Niagara Falls. Niagara was viewed as a sign from God of the millenial promise of America. Church painted the rainbow, a Biblical symbol of God’s covenant with Noah and of rejuvination and redemption. But the sublimity and awe created by Niagara Falls, and by extension Church’s iconic image, also provoke fear, not calmed by the broken rainbow in the painting’s left half. The falls were an American ‘ 66Adam Budeau, The Vagabond (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859), as quoted in David Carew Huntington, The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church: Vision of an American Era (New York: Braziller, 1966), 67—68. 90 icon representing the strength and potential of the New World, and the United States in particular. James Fenimore Cooper, in his essay “American and European Scenery Compared,” stated that “Americans may well boast of their water-falls” and considered statements denigrating Niagara Falls for lacking nearby Alpine terrain as “hypercritical.” Calling Niagara Falls a singular example of nature “the wild, the terrific, and the grand,” Cooper continued: “The Alps, the Andes, and the Himmalaya, would scarcely suffice to furnish materials necessary to produce the contrast, on any measurement now known to the world.” The size and grandeur of Niagara Falls operated as a symbol of national strength in comparison with European nature. Niagara’s association with the Deluge -- and the rejuvenating and purifying floods of the Bible -- resonates within the democratic, providential promise of America. However, Church’s Niagara Falls suggests the millenial promise not yet fulfilled by the American experiment in republican government.67 67Wood, Radicalism, 229. Martin Christadler categorizes Church’s Niagara as “heroic wilderness sublime.” See “Romantic Landscape Painting in America: History as Nature, Nature as History,” in Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Heinz Ickstadt, eds. American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth— and Nineteenth-Century American Art (Santa Monica and Chicago: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities and the University of Chicago Press, 1992), 93-117. The quotation in the text is from 105. David Huntington sees in Church’s image a consummate imagining of the young American nation. Bryan Wolf calls Church’s images a “melodrama of pigment and impasto” which speak “more t0 the God of Armageddon...than to the transparent eyeball of Emerson.” See Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in lNineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University 91 American artists and tourists to Tivoli made aesthetic use of its nature and historical associations. They looked at the scenery and understood the landscape in its totality -- for its hills and mountains, the Roman plain, and the distant coastline. They also noticed its striking landmarks -- the ancient ruins, grotesque rock formations, unusual vegetation, caves, old trees, and waterfalls. American tourists and painters delineated the falls at Tivoli in specific contrast with North American waterfalls like those at Kaaterskill and Niagara. As part of a mid-nineteenth-century tourist discourse, the cascades at Tivoli, operating as symbols of the Italian civilization of the past and marked by human achievements, were a long-standing part of tourist and artistic discourse dating back to the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, waterfalls in North America, often functioned as emblems of unsullied and commanding wilderness. George Loring Brown created works of Tivoli for American patrons interested in “hackneyed” picturesque European associations. In contrast to the sublime images of the American landscape -— associated with the present and future -- Brown created Italian landscapes of the past to fulfill centuries old understandings of of Chicago Press, 1982), 247. Also, see Amy Ellis' catalogue entry for Church’s Niagara Falls in Elizabeth Johns, et al., New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian & American Landscapes (Canberra and Hartford: National Gallery of Australia and Wadsworth Athenaeum, 1998), 165. Cooper in Home authors and home artists; or, American scenery, art, and literature (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1852), 56-57. 92 European nature and civilization. The European landscape traditions of the picturesque, with all its historical associations, functioned within a metalanguage of gender, from which American painters would also draw. The landscape of Italy was not only about the Past, it was also, in contrast to the masculine power and majesty of the New World landscape, feminine. 93 Chapter Three DIANA’S MIRROR: HISTORY AND GENDER IN SANFORD ROBINSON GIFFORD’S LAKE NEMI Sanford Robinson Gifford conceived his first major painting of an Italian scene, Lake Nemi (fig. 4), on an excursion from Rome in early October 1856 with fellow American artists Worthington Whittredge, William Stanley Haseltine, William Beard, and Thomas Buchanan Read. They walked fourteen miles down the Appian Way, across the campagna, to Albano. Gifford and his artist friends continued the next morning to the hilltop town of Gensano, on the west side of Lake Nemi. For the rest of that day, they circled the lake, arriving at the town of Nemi, on the opposite side from Gensano, in the early afternoon of October 6. Gifford sketched the lake and the surrounding hills twice in pencil from the window of his lodgings. His first sketch -- extending across two sheets in his sketchbook -- accentuates the landscape through a panorama which includes the town of Nemi and a cypress tree. Gifford compressed the View in another sketch, and made an oil sketch of a sunset over the lake on the following day. .Returning to Rome, he later painted another sketch, dated Ckztober 21, which reduces the emphasis on Nemi’s hilltop knaildings, takes an even broader view of the landscape, and enuaggerates the height of the cypress. Moreover, these last tun) sketches both contain the added effect of a setting sun 94 illuminating the Italian atmosphere. Gifford worked on his large oil on canvas of Lake Nemi during the winter of 1856-57 and sent the painting on to New York sometime after April 4. Atmospheric and luminous, Lake Nemi shows a golden sunset amid the hills southeast of Rome, as seen from near the town of Nemi. Known as “Diana’s Mirror,” Lake Nemi had previously attracted numerous artists, including Claude Lorrain and J.M.W. Turner. Though he captures the panoramic beauty of a popular stop for artists on an Italian tour, Gifford renders Lake Nemi, “the mirror of Diana,” as a gendered landscape formalizing a linear interpretation of history as progressive and espousing mid-nineteenth-century American perspectives on female virtue.68 68Commissioned by C.C. Alger, of Hudson, New York, as a large exhibition canvas, Lake Nemi hangs 40 by 60 inches. Gifford was born in 1823 in Greenfield, New York. He attended Brown University from 1842-1844, then studied under John Rubens Smith in New York City. Gifford became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1854. During the Civil War, Gifford served in the 7th New York Regiment but he never saw action. For more information both on Gifford in Rome and the background and chronology of the painting see William Hutton, ed., The Toledo MUseum of Art American Paintings (Toledo: The Toledo Museum of Art, 1979), 54; Ila Weiss, Poetic Landscape: The Art and Experience of Sanford R. Gifford (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 69-80, 194-197; Millard Rogers in a “Memorandum for the Document File” for Lake Nemi at the Toledo Museum of Art dated October 18, 1961, quoting from Gifford’s European Letters; Eleanor L. Jones’ catalogue entry for Lake Nemi in Stebbins, Lure, 296-298; Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists: Preceded by an Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of Art in America (1867; New York: James F. Carr, 1966 reprint), 525; and Soria, 144-145. For Gifford’s other European paintings also see the exhibition catalogue for America and the Grand Tour: Sanford Robinson Gifford at Home and Abroad (Vassar College Art Gallery, 1991). Gifford went abroad from 1855 to 1857, traveling on a Grand Tour to England, Wales, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy. He would travel abroad two more times during his lifetime -- in 1859 and in 1868-69. 95 Situated in the Alban Hills, a ring of volcanic mountains pockmarked with craters that have become lakes, the town of Nemi became fortified as a castle-village during the Middle Ages. In Gifford’s time, wild strawberry meadows and chestnut trees covered the hillsides while olive groves and vineyards dotted the lower slopes of the Alban Hills. Lake Nemi, formed in the crater of an extinct volcano about seventeen miles southeast of Rome, holds a nearly circular shape (about 3 1/2 miles in circumference). The nearby wooded hills slope steeply allowing hardly a breeze to disturb the surface of the lake’s water. Known to the ancient Romans as Speculum Diana, Lake Nemi had been famous since antiquity for the strange rite of succession for the high priest of the cult of Diana Nemorensis. The high priest, usually a runaway slave, gained the office by slaying his predecessor after plucking a golden bough from a certain tree amid the groves on the shores of the lake. Lake Nemi was also known to nineteenth-century American tourists as the resting place of two ships built during the reign of the Emperor Caligula (37-41). The two ships had been discovered on the bottom of the lake by Leon Battista Alberti in 1446. These ships under the lake were commonly discussed, amid impressions of the beauty and history of the site, in the nineteenth-century travel guides.69 69Sir William Gell’s book on topography made note of both the view and the history of the ships: “Though nothing can exceed the beauty of this Speculum Diane, its chief celebrity in modern times has arisen from the 96 Lake Nemi lured generations of tourists, not only with these historical associations, but also with its beautiful scenery. Nathaniel Willis Parker, in 1853, described his visit to the Lake Nemi region: A mile from Albano lies Aricia, in a country of the loveliest rural beauty. Here was the famous temple of Diana, and here were the lake and grove sacred to the “virgin huntress,” and consecrated as her home by peculiar worship. The fountain of Egeria is here, where Numa communed with the nymph, and the lake of Nemi, on the borders of which the temple stood, and which was called Diana’s mirror (speculum Diane), is at this day, perhaps, one of the sweetest gems of natural scenery in the world.70 In 1860, E.K. Washington linked the splendor of the scenery with its historical associations in noting that the “views around [Nemi] are lovely, exhibiting hill and mountain slopes vine-clad, and the sea-like Campagna below -— all seemed classical, antique, and beautiful, as we wound among the hills on the smooth, hard road.”71 Gifford recorded his own impressions of this “sweet gem” of “classical” scenery discovery, at the bottom of the lake, of a great ship of one of the Roman emperors, five hundred feet in length.” See Gell, 325. Also see Janet L. Comey, catalogue entry for George Inness’ Lake Nemi in Stebbins, Lure, 310-311; Jones, in Stebbins, Lure, 296-298; Weiss, 194-198. Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid, plucks a golden bough which koecomes a symbol of his right to rule. The two ships themselves were finally raised under Benito Mussolini by partially draining the lake. 'Fhe ships were later burned by retreating Germans in 1944. 70Parker, 373. -rlE.K. Washington, Echoes of Europe; or, Word Pictures of Travel (FN1iladelphia: J. Challen & Son, 1860), 544. 97 in his European Letters. Except for the time of day, Gifford describes a scene very similar to the canvas he painted that winter: The lake, which is in a deep cavity of the mountains (over the crater of a volcano), is fringed with fine trees which droop in to its waters; back of these rise the lofty banks, in parts richly wooded, in parts showing the bare cliffs...The view from our window was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. We were high above the lake. On one side in the foreground were some picturesque houses and ruined walls -- a tall dark cypress, rising out of a rich mass of foliage, cut strongly against the lake, distance and sky. Far below, the still lake reflected the full moon, and the heights of the farther shore, which crested by the walls and campanile of Gensano, were relieved richly against the light and misty expanse of the campagna, while still further beyond, a long line of silver light, the reflection of the moon, told where the sea was.72 Gifford, upon his return to the United States, exhibited the painting in 1857 and 1858 at the Century Club and the National Academy of Design in New York, and at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. Critics received Lake Nemi enthusiastically. The Crayon noted the painting’s “rich and warm Italian atmosphere in early autumn.” The journal went on to announce that Lake Nemi would “greatly advance Mr. Gifford’s 72Gifford, European Letters, vol. II, 122; quoted by Jones, in Stebbins, Lure, 296; and Weiss, 146. 98 reputation.” “The Lounger,” in Harper’s Weekly, opened a review of the 1858 National Academy exhibition with a discussion of Lake Nemi: Mr. Gifford is among those who exhibit better pictures in the Academy this year than usual. No. 460, Lake Nemi, is a lovely recollection of one of the loveliest landscapes in Italy. It is full of tenderness and tranquillity, and entirely Italian in its sentiment and impression. One would not soon tire of watching it; and its beauty would steal unobtrusively upon every mood. There is always in a painting very much more than the mere subject, however skillfully treated. Incidents of life and views of place may be often rendered as to command our admiration, but we presently exhaust them; we drink the sweet draught, and nothing remains...In Mr. Gifford’s pictures this year there is a general similarity of color and tone. But his works are thoughtful and careful, and well worthy attention.73 Others offered not-so-positive assessments of Lake Nemi. Worthington Whittredge, in a memorial speech for Gifford in 1880, relates a different reception for the painting: [Gifford] went about the Campagna and over the distant hills a great deal to make sketches, but he painted few pictures in Rome. Finally however he produced ‘Lake Nemi.’ The picture pleased the English and American artists, but a French artist who saw it criticized it. The subject was one which was familiar to every artist in Rome, and which possessed strong characteristics of the Italian landscape...The 73Crayon 4:219. Crayon 5:25. “The Lounger,” Harper’s Weekly, May 8, 1858: 291. 99 Frenchman however...criticized it from another point of view. Gifford had painted the sun in his picture, and few objects as there were introduced, this was one object too many. Whether Gifford ever heard or not that the Frenchman was displeased with the sun I do not know. He would have challenged him to give him a good reason why a landscape-painter should not paint the sun, but especially he would have said to him, ‘paint what you like,’ and he would have left him with the impression that he would do the same.74 The Frenchman and Whittredge make note of one of the most striking features —- the glowing, setting sun -- that made Gifford’s conception of the lake different from ones painted by the many previous artists of all nationalities who had visited and painted the site. Gifford’s large Lake Nemi differs strikingly not only from other artists’ conceptions of the Italian tourist site but from his own earlier sketches of the vista.75 In the 74“Address by W. Whittredge,” Gifford Memorial Meeting of the Century Association (New York: Century Rooms, 1880), 37. 75Gifford’s trip to Lake Nemi continued the English and American tradition of visiting the site as part of a Grand Tour. The site had attracted numerous painters, including Claude Lorrain, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and Joseph Wright of Derby. John Robert Cozens painted nine versions of the view from the town of Nemi, seen at different times of day, all between 1778 and 1790. In 1828, J.M.W. Turner painted at the site. Thomas Cole set his painting Il Penseroso, based upon the Milton poem, at Lake Nemi. John Kensett sold a view of Nemi at the American Art-Union in 1849. Jasper Francis Cropsey also painted two views of the lake, from about the same vantage point as Gifford, between 1848 and 1852. Numerous artists and travel writers, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1828, recalled Lord Byron's description of the lake from Childe Harold: “Lo, Nemi! navelled in the Woody hills.” See Longfellow’s July 11, 1828, letter to his mother in Puuirew Hilen, ed., The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Cambridge: Belknap, 1966), 274. Also see Coffey. 100 final canvas, he creates a meticulously painted panoramic view of Lake Nemi, the Albano hills outside of Rome, and the hilltop town of Nemi. A bold, golden orange sun, slightly to the left of center in the composition, shines above the horizon. The viewer looks west at the distant Tyrrhenian Sea and Gifford marks the horizon line with a strip of yellow and gray pigments. The Alban Hills, a wall of rosy purple, separate the freshwater lake from the briny sea. Water and haze fill the atmosphere and serve to diffuse the light from the setting sun throughout the image. The silhouette of distant towns, with their medieval towers and buildings with sloped roofs, sporadically decorate the tops of the hills. Sitting at the base of the purple basin created by the hills, the volcanic lake appears in the oval shape of a mirror. A tranquil Lake Nemi obliquely reflects the light from the setting sun. At the left of the composition, olive groves lead down the hill, from the foreground to the lake. Two Sylvan white goats, attesting to the ancient nature of the place, climb the rocky terrain at the center foreground. To the right, a steep, uneven rise of rocks and overgrown plants leads to the town of Nemi. Here, Gifford creates a private space on the hill, behind the town’s buildings. On that hill, four peasant women, in colorful, traditional Lazian costumes, collect their laundry. One woman walks with laundry on her head While another stoops over to fold and gather the textiles laid out upon the ground. Another woman, an amphora-like 101 vase upon her head, moves back in the direction of town. The fourth woman stands at the top of a ladder, partially hidden amid the buildings and the dramatic evening shadows. Separating the painting into two unequal halves, a vertical cypress tree —— a symbol of both the Roman goddess Diana, and of death and rejuvenation -- visually sections off the town of Nemi from the lake. The two sides of the painting read in a diachronic manner. Previous American painters, most notably Thomas Cole, made use of a series of images to convey change over time at a specific site. For example, Cole, in his The Course of Empire series and his Past and Present, created chronological narratives. Both Past (fig. 20) and Present (fig. 21) evoke a fictional, storybook Middle Ages of knightly heroism, jousting, \\ romantic love, and chivalry. Past, Cole wrote, was an illustration of Feudal power and splendor.” The feudal glories of the Past contrast with the ruin and desolation of the Present. Alan Wallach argues that the pair of paintings “allegorized aristocracy in decline, idealizing strength and authority while at the same time mourning their passing.” Gifford, however, collapses past and present onto a single canvas. Like Cole’s pair of paintings, the two unequal halves of Lake Nemi -- separated by the towering cypress -- serve as tropes of the past, on the larger left side, and present, on the smaller right half.76 K 76Truettner and Wallach, 98. The power of Gifford’s tropes of history 102 The hazy, illuminated atmosphere fills the left section —- the past -- of Lake Nemi. The landmarks, towers, and towns in the distance, like past historical events, appear unclear -— partial remnants of themselves. Writing from Italy in the summer of 1847, Margaret Fuller discussed the constant historical associations that an American tourist in Italy feels: “Every stone has a voice, every grain of dust seems instinct with spirit from the Past, every step recalls some line, some legend of long-neglected yore.” Twilight, or what Henry David Thoreau would call “[t]he serene hour, the Muses’ hour, the season of reflection!,” serves Gifford as a symbol of the past. Such sentiments mark the literature of the era. In his poem “Evening Thoughts,” pre-dating Gifford’s painting by more than a decade, Thomas Cole writes: “Or is it that the fading light reminds/ that become ideological through what Alan Wallach has termed the “panoptic sublime.” In the panorama, the artist presents the world as a form of totality; “nothing seems hidden; the spectator, looking down upon a vast scene from the center, appears to preside over all visibility.” The panoptic sublime draws “its explosive energy from prevailing ideologies in which the exercise of power and the maintenance of social order required vision and supervision, foresight, and, especially, oversight -- a word equally applicable to panoramic views and to the operation of the reformed social institutions of the period: the prison, the hospital, the school, and the factory." Wallach argues that The Oxbow compresses a diachronic development in its composition. See Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” in David C. Miller, ed., American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 80-91. Angela Miller argues that Cole’s The Course of Empire embodies his personal political concerns over the United States’ potential transformation from virtuous republic to decadent empire. See Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory” in Mary Ann Calo, ed., Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 59-76. 103 we are mortal and the latter/ steal onward swiftly, like the unseen winds,/ And all our years are clouds that quickly pass away."77 In The.Marble Faun, based upon observations by its author from travels in 1857 to 1859, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of an Italian vista resonates both with Cole’s view of sunset as symbolic of the past and with Gifford’s painted version of the Italian sunlight amid the ancient landscape: Before them again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinly scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it a mist, it seems a mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so much light being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to the scene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hills are visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance of a dream.78 Lake Nemi, and the nearby woods, resonate with the dream-like history of ancient Rome -- from the wanderings of Aeneas to the time of the Emperors. Murray’s Handbook to Rome and Its Environs, published and reissued throughout the 18503, mentions the emerged ships, the ancient cult of Diana, a quote from Ovid, the medieval history of the hill towns, and the fact that the panoramic View from near Nemi 77Ossoli, 229; Henry David Thoreau, A Writer’s Journal, ed. Laurence Stapleton (New York: Dover, 1960), 103. Cole is quoted in Coffey, 60. 78Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 215. 104 covers “the scene of half the Aeneid.” Reflective of geological time, Gifford’s Lake Nemi provides a revelation of the epiphanic, apocalyptic history of humankind. In the ancient rocks, volcanic crater, and venerable woods -- so exhilarating to the numerous romantic poets and artists who visited Nemi -- resided crucial clues to Creation and the Divine Order of history. Italy, the landscape, its architecture, and its people, functioned as a didactic window, a living museum, of the past.79 The setting sun not only works as a allegory of the past but as a metaphor of waning power: empires, symbolized by the sun, have a way of coming to an end, leaving behind their landscapes and their buildings as relics and ruins. Expressively for Americans like Cole, Hawthorne and Gifford, the sun in the 18503 had “set” on two European “empires” of the past: Rome and Britain. James Fenimore Cooper, in his essay “American and European Scenery,” in 1851, expressed the view that nature (and, by extension, politics and power) in Europe represents the past while nature (and the New World republic) in America symbolizes the possibilities for the future: We concede to Europe much the noblest scenery, in its Alps, Pyrenees, and Apennines; in its objects of 79Novak, Nature and Culture, 203-225; A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs; Forming Part II of the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (London: John Murray, fifth edition, 1858), 362-363. Also see Martin Christadler, “Romantic Landscape Painting in America: History as Nature, Nature as History,” in Gaehtgens and Ickstadt, 93-117. 105 art, as a matter of course; in all those effects which depend on time and association, in its monuments, and in this impress of the past which may be said to be reflected in its countenance; while we claim for America the freshness of a most promising youth, and a species of natural radiance that carries the mind with reverence to the source of all that is glorious around us.80 For Cooper, America, with its “freshness” and “promising youth,” represents a continuation of the “noblest” elements of the European past. In Gifford’s Lake Nemi, the Italian past resembles a visible vapor, ideally beautiful but like a dream. The clarity provided by a noonday sun instead lies somewhere to the West. The special relationship with ancient, republican Rome that Americans construed for themselves centered on a single metaphor, particularly convincing and synoptic, which explained the United States as a new Rome, a New World republican experiment and a favored nation in history.81 In Lake Nemi, the setting sun reflects off the volcanic lake, oval as a mirror and primary actor in the narrative of the “past.” The lake, and the grove of trees adjacent to the lake, were held as sacred in Roman times to the goddess 80James Fenimore Cooper, “American and European Scenery” in The Home Book of the Picturesque, 69. 81The evening sun and the illuminated atmosphere continued as motifs for Gifford throughout his career. He would return to the setting sun and hazy atmosphere for Italian scenes in works like St. Peter’s from the Pincian Hill (1865) and Tivoli (1870). 106 Diana, the daughter of Jupiter and Leto, and sister of Apollo. As the Roman goddess of the hunt, wild animals, and the moon, Diana also operated as the protector of children. Greek myth showed Diana as aloof and free-spirited, not constrained by hearth or husband. For the Greeks, she remained eternally a virgin. Indeed, those who in some way compromised her strict requirements for chastity were severely punished by the maiden goddess. The Romans, however, developed Diana into the role of mother and goddess of childbirth (she was believed to grant easy childbirth to her favorites). Diana was often linked with nature through her common symbols, the deer and the cypress.82 The emblematic nature of both Diana’s lake and mirror serve to link Gifford’s landscape to basic concepts of looking and perceiving. W.J.T. Mitchell observes that the metaphor of lakes parallels that of a mirror: the reflection in the water of a lake presents Nature representing itself to itself, “displaying an identity of the Real and the Imaginary that certifies with the reality of our own images.”83 In his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, first 82For a nineteenth-century explanation of the goddess Diana’s symbols and history see Sir William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 3 vols. (London: Taylor and Walton, 1844-49). For a more recent classical dictionary see Pierre Grimal, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, trans. A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986). 83W.J.T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 15. 107 published in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne utilizes a description of a mirror to relate his own artistic inspiration: Glancing at the looking glass, we behold -- deep within its haunted verge -- the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. The mind’s eye, in observing, imagining, and transforming, operates as a mirror. Henry David Thoreau compared self-understanding with the stillness of a lake: “We become like a still lake or purest crystal and without an effort our depths are revealed to ourselves. All the world goes by and is reflected in our deeps.”84 The Reverend Elias L. Magoon (a patron of Gifford for four small paintings of other European subjects), in his 1851 essay “Scenery and Mind,” comments on the psychological effect of lakes on their viewers. Magoon states that people enjoy the “placid and quiet feelings which belong peculiarly to a lake.” His description notes the significance of the reflective nature of a lake, as a body of currentless and still water: “reflecting therefore the clouds, the light, and all the imagery of the sky and surrounding hills; expressing also and making visible the changes of the 84Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Signet Classic, 1999), 31-32. Thoreau, A Writer’s Journal, 38. 108 atmosphere.” Magoon notes that “one cannot easily walk unmoved” emotionally by a lake. Ultimately, he compares a lake to a mirror: “Around this central mirror, prone to the dazzling sun, let shubbery and trees wave to the touch of zephyrs, terraces display their tangled beauties, fields and gardens, studded with elegant villas, swell toward bleak hills.” Gifford’s lake serves as a mirror onto nature and Creation.85 Mid-nineteenth-century American landscape painters believed that nature could be animated and spiritualized through the use of anthropomorphic symbols or emblematic personifications. In Lake Nemi, Gifford created symbols to announce the gendered nature of the landscape. Nineteenth-century American landscape paintings, travel writings, and literature set in Italy utilize eighteenth-century British and continental aesthetics and the tradition of viewing Italy as female, apolitical, and noncommercial. Anglo-American tourists saw contemporary Italy in terms dramatized by gender typologies; they constructed a feminine Italy as a counterpoint to the normative and masculine world identified with England and, 85E.L. Magoon, “Scenery and Mind” in The Home Book of the Picturesque, 30-31. For the Reverend Magoon as Gifford’s patron, see Weiss, 203. For links between “Luminist” painting and literature of the 18503, see John Wilmerding, “Luminism and Literature” in American Views: Essays on American Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 69-81; and F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Enerson and Whitman (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 109 later, the United States. America was the masculine sphere of language, history, power, intellect, and artifice, while Italy was conventionalized as a convergence of the feminine and silent properties of space, painting, nature, and the body.86 Daniel Huntington imagined a version of this understanding of Italy in his Italia (fig. 22), painted in 1843. The allegorical, attractive female figure, dressed in Renaissance-era clothing, sketches within a landscape. Utilizing, as Gifford does in Lake Nemi the duality of past and present, Huntington paints classical ruins and a lake on her right while to her left he depicts a church campanile. Huntington’s female allegory dominates and becomes part of the landscape. George Hillard, in his Six.Mbnths in Italy, characterized the passive viewing of the “agreeable” and “enchanting” Italian landscape as “not...of the manly virtues.” Harper’s Weekly’s “The Lounger” review of Lake Nemi, cited earlier, also utilizes gendered diction, calling Gifford’s “lovely” landscape “full of tenderness and tranquillity” as if the image were a virtuous woman. The lake and the entire left side of Gifford’s canvas contribute to the idea of a metaphorical mirror reflecting the past -- 86W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 110. Brigitte Bailey indicts Thomas Cole and James Fenimore Cooper for the use of gendered language to understand Italy in “The Protected Witness” in David Miller, American Iconology, 92-111. 110 a world of republican Rome and of ancient womanly virtue related to the Diana and the rearing of children and the home. Nature, the landscape, and the lake operate as gendered spaces related to “Italia” as female and to the cult of Diana. Symbolized in Lake Nemi by the stillness of the lake itself, Italy -- an inactive culture in the nineteenth century -- became a “female” place outside of history where temporal motion had ceased.87 Gifford’s View of the scenery around Lake Nemi sets up a visual contrast between what he describes as the “deep cavity” of the feminine lake basin and the erect, masculine cypress. Isolated from the sea -- symbolic as the “male” realm of commerce and activity -- the “female” lake remains separate and silent. The left side of the composition anthropomorphisizes the ideal virtuous woman from the past. The phallic cypress, pointing upward (and westward) toward the sun, separates the metaphorical “past” from the “present.” The cypress, as an evergreen, symbolizes rejuvenation and orders the picture space for the viewer of the image. Substantially, while discourses about domesticity and women’s rights were competing for expression in late antebellum America, white men were simultaneously developing an ideology of the nature of being male. White male assumptions of their absolute autonomy as men 87Hillard, I, 11-12, quoted by Bailey, “The Protected Witness,” in David Miller, American Iconology, 93-94. 111 reinforced the justification of separate spheres for the sexes. Brigitte Bailey argues that “Touring the Italian scene” presented Americans, like Gifford and his fellow artists, “a pedagogy of identity” in which they and other learned visitors used “vision both to encounter and to control difference.” The dichotomy between the United States and Italy ultimately undergirded the cleavage between public and private realms characteristic of middle-class American life.88 With a poetics of detachment, Gifford provides Lake Nemi’s viewers with the landscape and life of rural central Italy. As pictured in his panoramic scene, the 88For the role of anthropomorphism in American landscape painting see J. Gray Sweeney, “The Nude of Landscape Painting: Emblematic Personification in the Art of the Hudson River School,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art Fall 1989: 43-65. Gifford’s use of “deep cavity” to describe the location of the lake was quoted earlier and is from a letter to Elihu Gifford dated October 7, 1856 in his “European Letters”; also quoted by Jones in Stebbins, 296. Charles Anthon, in his mid-ninteenth century geography textbook, linked the landscape around Nemi to issues of fecundity: “The country around...was remarkable for fertility and beauty.” See Charles Anthon, A System of Ancient and Mediaeval Geography for the USe of Schools and Colleges (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850), 323. Whether as overt or latent content, Gifford’s “deep cavity” and erect cypress in Lake Nemi exist within an ongoing tradition of linking landscape to gender and sexuality in both language and art. Among numerous examples, David M. Lubin, in his essay on John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos, 1809-1814, argues that Ariadne’s “rounded forms” hint at “a close relationship bewteen nature and woman.” Charles Harrison uses the sexuality of a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape image “to illustrate a form of gap between that which is overtly pictured and that which might be considered as latent content." See Lubin, “Ariadne and the Indians,” in Calo, 47-58; and Harrison, “The Effects of Landscape” in Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 203-239. Brigitte Bailey also argues that “the conventions of tourism...provide ways of managing [erotic] contemplation without a <30ercive recourse to narrative.” See her essay in Miller, American .Iconologyr 92-111. 112 mid-nineteenth-century outskirts of Rome operate as a site for a drama of humans, history, and nature. Gifford’s tourist version of ancient nature treats this aesthetic and popular locale as a recognizable source of pleasure. As a popular stop for tourists, Lake Nemi created discrete experiences for its visitors. Gifford re-creates his own travel to the site for his viewers, allowing them to remove themselves from their “ordinary” to discover, in a multi-layered experience, the painting’s “extraordinary.” He focuses on the outstanding features of the landscape around Nemi -- the high-rise hills, grotesque rock formations, silver lake, and ancient trees. Here, utilizing a major site along the tourist route, he provides the opportunity to penetrate into the life world of nature and history, and to access the commonplace.89 89See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 62. For other theoretical discussions of tourism and modern society see John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990), and Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1989 edition). For an art historical application of “tourist theory” see John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Alan Wallach, in discussing Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow, notes the ideology of tourism and its link to Cole’s painting: “Two factors determined tourist experience: the physical setting, by which I mean both the apparatus of tourism (the road, the log shelter) and the landscape that tourism constituted as its object...; and what can be called the ideological context: the ensemble of texts and images having to do with Mount Holyoke and with landscape generally. The physical setting provided a space for symbolic and ritual activity; the ideological context supplied the materials out of which meanings were produced.” See Alan Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke” in American Iconology, 80-91. 113 Gifford provides his American viewers not only with an ancient, gendered landscape but also with a “sequestered” region of the town of Nemi, and one specific, everyday chore of its women. The right side of Lake Nemi, with its powerful and theatrical shadows, serves as the “present” -- the mid-nineteenth century. On the hillside behind the town of Nemi, Gifford has created a natural stage, a room, in which four Alban peasant women work on their laundry. Sir William Gell, in his 1846 work The Topography of Rome and Its Vicinity, twice uses the trope of a monastery or a nunnery to describe the town of Nemi. He writes that Genzano “overlook[s], on one side, the plain and the distant sea, and on the other, dominat[es] the low and beautifully wooded lake of Nemi, and its sequestered village on the opposite shore.” He later states, “There is scarcely any place so beautifully sequestered as Nemi, though not far from the high road from Rome to Naples.” Gifford visually sequesters the space in which the four women work on their laundry from that of the town itself, marking the space as entirely a separate female domain.90 The image of the home, centered upon a sequestered mother and wife, informed the efforts of American middle-class reformers (both male and female) who set out to change the behavior of virtually every group outside the 90Gell, 275 and 324. 114 white middle class to fit this domestic mold. This image also shaped the hostile environment in which the debate on the role of women in American society grew in the 18503 into a full-fledged women’s rights movement. Within the middle-class, widening commercial opportunities for men during the Jacksonian era accentuated the ideological separation between the private sphere of female domesticity and the public sphere of male activity. Separate-sphere ideology emphasized the home as women’s habitat and took as given a host of assumptions about female character. Unlike rational, purposeful men, women were weak, dependent, sentimental and emotional. But women were endowed with a higher degree of piety and benevolence. Women were seen as the moral guardians of the home and the community during the late antebellum era. Middle-class wives and daughters did not work outside the home, instead, as can be learned from both the contemporary prescriptive literature and historical accounts, their roles were predicated on the two interrelated ideals of “true womanhood” and refined gentility. Women were responsible for projecting the image of their families’ gentility, an important issue for negotiating the family’s position in antebellum America’s developing class structure.91 91The historiography on this topic is large and substantial. The more helpful works for this essay include: Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989); Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Barbara L. 115 Harriet Martineau, during her visit to the United States in 1835, noted the ideological nature of separate spheres, marking them as an invention, by upper- and middle-class men, intended to keep women under control: [A woman] has the best place in stage-coaches; when there are not chairs enough for everybody, the gentlemen stand; she hears oratorical flourishes on public occasions about wives and house, and apostrophes to woman; her husband’s hair stands on end at the idea of her working, and he toils to indulge her with money; she has liberty to get her brain turned by religious excitements, that her attention may be diverted from morals, politics, and philosophy; and, especially, her morals are guarded by the strictest observance of propriety in her presence. In short, indulgence is given her as a substitute for justice.92 Mothering (symbolized in ancient Rome by the goddess Diana) was an expression of an innate ‘womanly’ nature, as upper- and middle-class society saw it, which took the particular psychological and material forms of emotional nurturance and Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Karen Hulttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830—1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, second edition, 1997), especially Part II, “Divided Passions, 1780-1900,” 53-167; and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986). 92Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (1837; New York: AMS Press, 1966 reprint), 3: 105-106, quoted in Johns, American Genre Painting, 141. 116 a comfortable home. By the 18403, domesticity had evolved into a social program with a religious, Protestant base, devoted to what Catherine Beecher, a preeminent exponent of true womanhood, called in her A Treatise on Domestic Economy “the building of a glorious temple” to American republicanism and citizenship. Virtuous women would provide the foundation upon which the American experiment in freedom could succeed.93 The relationship between women and the home often found comment in American images during the antebellum era. In Lily Martin Spencer’s The Jelly washerwoman, a woman pauses from her laundry task to acknowledge the viewer. With rosy cheeks, the laundress crinkles her nose and offers a wide grin. Her shining black hair parts down the center and comes together again in a bun at the back. Torn beneath her right arm, the woman’s brownish dress strains in the shoulders and in the sleeves to accommodate the woman’s body. Her cheerfulness contradicts the strenuousness of her task. David M. Lubin demonstrates that Spencer’s work operated as both ideological, in that the paintings encouraged accommodation to middle class norms, and utopian, in that the images resisted class or gender domination. Her Paintings “are instead ambivalent, dual-edged ways of thinking about [domesticity], representing it, and 93 Catherine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841; New York, 1977), 14, quoted in Stansell, 197. 117 maneuvering within its contradictions.” Of all the household tasks in the mid-nineteenth century in America, those associated with laundry were the ones most often despised by homemakers and servants alike. Companies and advertisers occasionally marketed products to women with the idea of alleviating the burden caused by laundry. In a detail of an 1851 billhead for “North American Electric Washing Fluid,...Warranted Perfectly Harmless in its Operations, and to Possess Double the Power of Any Thing of the Kind Ever Discovered” (fig. 23) an American woman stands amid her arrangement of laundry equipment. Her laundry has been hung on lines with pins instead of spread on the grass or on bushes to dry. Laundressing work, as a means of earning income for working-class women, was available year round. Washing clothes was an onerous task that required strength and submitting to extremes of hot and cold. Black women often took on this lowly labor, one of the few employment they could obtain. Popular literature of the era fostered a corresponding set of gender roles that associated men and women with their respective spheres. Although the home remained an arena of heavy, difficult work, as Spencer’s The Jolly washerwomen suggests, the work for women was meant to remain domestic and not public in its origins.94 94Inherent in Lubin’s discussion of Spencer and her work lies the notion that late antebellum culture in the United States was diverse and self-opposing. See David M. Lubin’s “Lily Martin Spencer’s Domestic 118 Gifford’s Italian peasant laundresses, working in their private space behind the town, reflect the American ideology of separate spheres. In the second volume of his Six.MOnths in Italy, George Stillman Hillard spends an entire chapter comparing a village in the Alban Hills outside Rome to Berkshire county in New England -- making the “otherness” of Italians explicit to his New England readers. But Hillard’s writing also exposes -- as an American male -- his understanding of gender roles. In New England, women manage the household -— the “lighter tasks” -- and exist in a domestic, private sphere; outside of Rome, women “share to a considerable extent in field labors.” With an Anglo-Saxon ethnographic and a class bias, Hillard continues: Were a scale of civilization graduated by the amount of labor done by women -- putting our North American Indians, whose women do all the work, at the zero point —- our country would stand at the top. We have a right to be proud of the general consideration paid to women among us, and of the lighter tasks assigned to her in the common struggle for subsistence. No American abroad can look with any composure upon a Genre Painting in Antebellum America” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 159-203; Elizabeth L. O’Leary, At Beck and Call: The Representation of Domestic Servants in Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 66-108; Elizabeth Johns’ “Full of Home Love and Simplicity” in American Genre Painting, 137-175; and Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home 1760—1860 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 137. 119 woman toiling in the sun with a hoe or sickle in her hand.95 New Englander Caroline Kirkland, a traveler in Europe in the late 18403, made a similar contemporary observation of women in the central Italian village of Levane. Known for its “crop” of beggars, according to Kirkland, Levane (“one long paved street”) also produces hay. But only the women of Levane complete the hard labor of bringing in the hay from the fields while the men stand smoking in the doorways. Kirkland expresses her view that the men of Levane (and, by extension, rural Italy) appear unmasculine due to their idleness while the women have lost all aspects of femininity due to their work. She continues: “All is gaiety and good humor, for Italian women never resent being unsexed or made beasts of burden.”96 Gifford’s Italian peasant women in Lake Nemi work not with a hoe or sickle in the field labors mentioned by Hillard or Kirkland, but at the still difficult task of laundry within the confines of a sequestered, gendered space. Margaret Fuller, in a letter from 1847, expresses hope that Italian women might still achieve the ideal of womanly virtue: “The women of Italy are intellectually in a low place, but -— they are unaffected; you can see what Heaven meant them to be, and I believe they will be yet the mothers 95Hillard, II, 220-257. 96Kirkland, 245-246. 120 of a great and generous race.” Henry T. Tuckerman, writing in 1867 about Gifford’s career, chose feminine diction in noting that Gifford’s landscapes “do not dazzle, they win; they appeal to our calm and thoughtful appreciation; they minister to our most gentle and gracious sympathies, to our most tranquil and congenial observation.” In capturing the panoramic and “tranquil” beauty of an ideologically-gendered Italian landscape and reaffirming the United States as a favored nation in history, Gifford creates his vision of “the mirror of Diana” within the context of late antebellum American perspectives on the “woman question” and sustains a middle-class attitude toward female virtue.97 Italy, seen as a gendered landscape or viewed through genre images, operated as a site of picturesque and historical associations steeped in warnings for Americans of what decadence and immorality could bring to New World landscape and institutions. 97Ossoli, 262. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 525. 121 Chapter Four “LIKE GOING TO GREECE”: American Painters and Paestum In 1847, Jasper Francis Cropsey traveled to Europe on a honeymoon with his wife, Maria. They went to England, Scotland, France and Switzerland before arriving in Italy in the that fall. The following summer, the Cropseys shared a villa with William Wetmore Story and his wife in Sorrento. With the political and military turmoil in Italy during the spring of 1849, the Cropseys left Italy for France and England. They arrived back in the United States in mid-summer. While on this extended honeymoon, however, Cropsey, Christopher Cranch, and Story traveled by boat in Southern Italy from Amalfi to Salerno, and then took a carriage across a swampy plain to Paestum, the ancient Greek colonial town. Cranch later described his reactions to the magnificent Greek ruins at the site: As we approached them we could none of us resist the most enthusiastic exclamations of delight. Never had I seen anything more perfect, such exquisite proportions, such warm, rich coloring, such picturesquely broken columns; flowers and briers growing in and around, and sometimes over fallen capitals. Right through the columns gleamed the sea, and beyond, the blue, misty mountains. And over all brooded such a silence and solitude. Nothing stood between us and the Past, to mar the impression. Mysterious, beautiful temples! Far in the desert, by the sea-sands, in a country cursed by malaria, the only 122 unblighted and perfect things -— standing there for over two thousand years. It was almost like going to Greece.98 Through a tourist adventure that many Americans would complete in the 18403 and 18503, Cranch, Story, and Cropsey came face to face with “the Past.” Cropsey’s sketches, based upon his encounter with the ancient historical ruins at Paestum, would lead to the painting of numerous canvases over his painting career. Prior to the Civil War, other American painters, including Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and John Frederick Kensett, among others, created images of Paestum. The ancient Greek “past” met the American “present” through paintings displayed in exhibitions at the National Academy of Design and in the homes of American art patrons in the 18503. Images of Paestum sought to remind Americans that they were heirs to a Greco-Roman tradition and to encourage their viewers to build a civilization as noble as that of the ancient Greeks. For these artists and the paintings’ viewers, the American images of the ruins at Paestum represented a solid link between the democratic traditions of the ancients and the new democratic promise of the United States, promoting American exceptionalism. The temples, having stood the test of time, symbolized the importance and strength of democracy while the surrounding swamp, “cursed by malaria,” operated 98Lenora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1917), 147. 123 as a metaphor of degeneration. The paintings Temple of Neptune, Paestum (1859) by Cropsey, and Ruins of Paestum (1858) by Bierstadt, linked the past and present in a historical cycle, but also warned Americans of the dangers of decadence and moral decay presented by the issue of slavery.99 The ancient Greek town of Poseidonia, better known by its Roman name of Paestum, is located near the western coastline of Southern Italy, towards the southern end of the Bay of Salerno, about fifty miles south of Naples. A thriving commercial city founded around 600 BC, Paestum had little modern archaeological work done until the twentieth century. Although not unknown, Paestum’s temples went almost unvisited as a tourist locale until the 17003, 99For more on Cropsey’s travels to Paestum, see William S. Talbot, “Jasper F. Cropsey 1823-1900” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1972). Talbot mentions Cropsey’s Paestum images on 105, 387-388, and 412-413. Also see Talbot, Jasper F. Cropsey 1823—1900, 19-22, and 78. Cropsey painted numerous scenes of Paestum. Some of those recorded during his career include Temple of Ceres, Paestum, sold to a Mr. Hawks, February 1853; two Temple of Paestum images sold to E.L. Magoon (one of which is now in the collection at Vassar College); and Evening at Paestum, exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1856. See the Object Research File for Temple of Neptune, Paestum at the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, and for Evening at Paestum at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. Also, see K. Mathews Hohlstein, catalogue entries for Evening at Paestum and Temple of Paestum by.Mbonlight in Stebbins, The Lure of Italy, 267-269. John Frederick Kensett’s oil sketch The Temple of Neptune, Paestum (Oberlin College) stresses the simplicity and austerity of the ruins. See Wolfgang Stechow, Catalogue of European and American Paintings and Sculpture in the Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1967), 92. For Albert Bierstadt’s Ruins of Paestum, see its Object Record at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber’s chronology in Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Hudson Hills, 1990), 122-124. 124 perhaps due to the malaria-breeding swamps at the site. Paestum appeared on maps of the eighteenth century and functioned as a landmark for sailors. But it was not until about the middle of the century that a dignitary and a architect of the Neapolitan court announced the “discovery” of the town’s temples. A number of scholars and travelers visited at about the same time, including the French architect J.G. Soufflot and Thomas Major, whose The Ruins of Paestum otherwise Poseidonia in Magna Graecia published in London, appeared in 1768. From the 17603 onward, interest in Paestum coincided with the Doric Revival in Europe. Goethe visited in 1777, while Hubert Robert, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Antonio Joli and other continental artists created views of Paestum during the last half of the century. John Singleton Copley visited Paestum in 1775 while Thomas Cole sketched there in 1832. Tourism, especially by English and American travelers, at Paestum flourished with the improvement of roads from Salerno and the arrival of the railway. By the 18503, Murray’s Handbook for Southern Italy stated that “of all the objects that lie within the compass of an Excursion from Naples, Paestum is perhaps the most interesting....A journey to the South of Italy can hardly be considered complete if Paestum has not been visited.”100 ¥ 100For the history of Paestum from 600 BC to the present, see John Griffiths Pedley, Paestum: Greeks and Romans in Southern Italy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990). For Europeans at Paestum, see Wilton and 125 Cropsey’s large canvas (fig. 5) of the so—called “Temple of Neptune” at Paestum, resulting from his journey to Southern Italy in the late 18403, shows the Greek ruins reflected in a swampy pond. Dominating the foreground, the marsh includes a wading bird and broken columns amid the mirrored reflection of the temple. Full of overgrown vegetation, the temple looms on the flat plain. Cropsey paints the Temple of Neptune with a broken pediment and three broken columns. Over the broken section of the ruins, a thin crescent moon and an evening star emerge from the evening sky. The orange-red light of the setting sun catches the facade of the temple, allowing for numerous details -- metopes, triglyphs, and the fluting of the Doric columns -- to become visible to the painting’s viewers. Paestum’s other Greek temples come into view in the distance at the horizon line on the right side of the composition. Cropsey’s smaller oil sketch of the “Temple of Neptune” (fig. 24) does not include the wading bird but does contain powerful bands of blue, yellow, and red and more stars in Bignamini. Mark Sullivan argues that images of Paestum “provided mid-century Americans with what Henry James called a ‘sense of the past,’ a feeling of belonging to something larger and more venerable then the American experiment...[Later,] Americans no longer felt the same pressing need to connect with their Greco-Roman heritage.” See Mark Sullivan, “American Artists at Paestum,” American Arts Quarterly 11.2/3 (Summer/Fall 1994): 27-31. A handbook for travellers in Southern Italy: being a guide for the continental portion of the kingdom of the two Sicilies; with a travelling map and plans (London: J. Murray, 1858), 267. I will hereafter list the Handbook in this chapter as Murray, Southern Italy. 126 its evening sky. A crescent moon still appears over the broken columns of the remains of the Greek temple. The Reverend Elias Magoon, the purchaser of a small oil sketch by Cropsey of the ancient ruins, wrote to Cropsey about his Paestum image: “Our Father in Heaven has endowed you with fine capabilities, and may you long be spared to use them well in the cultivation of sacred beauty.”101 Temple of Neptune, Paestum portrays, with notable attention, the Doric nature of this partially ruined temple. Cropsey presents his viewers, even in the small oil sketch, with the ability to recognize the lack of a base, as the columns rise straight from the stylobate, and the echinus and abacus which mark the temple columns as Doric. As a young man, he held an apprenticeship with the New York architect Joseph Trench and eventually set up an architectural office, in the Granite Building on Broadway and Chambers Street in New York, at the age of twenty. Cropsey’s interest in rendering a detailed image of the lOlCropsey was not alone in misidentifying the deities for whom the temples at Paestum were dedicated. Murray notes the “Large Temple of Neptune,” the “Basilica,” and the “Supposed Temple of Peace” in the map in Southern Italy, 268. Modern archaeology knows these ruins as the Temple of Hera II, the Temple of Hera I (sometimes erroneously still called the Basilica), and the Temple of Athena, respectively. See Pedley. Elias L. Magoon to Cropsey, 17 Oct. 1856, Newington Cropsey Foundation, quoted in James F. Cooper, Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Meral Landscape (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 30. A painting by Cropsey, listed as The Temples of Paestum, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859 and was mentioned in the Cosmopolitan Art JOurnal. See “Foreign Art Gossip,” Cosmopolitan Art JOurnal 3 (June 1859): 131. 127 temple at Paestum likely reflects his early training but also announces the Doric significance and history of the temple. Using the common diction of magnificence and antiquity, Sir William Smith, in his A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology and Geography, observes that “The ruins of Paestum are striking and magnificent...The two temples are in the Doric style, and are some of the most remarkable ruins of antiquity.” For Cropsey and other American visitors to the site, Paestum’s temples represented the greatness of Greek civilization and the importance of democratic institutions. James Fenimore Cooper, visiting Paestum about a decade before Cropsey, noted the antiquity of the temple Cropsey’s paints: “Comparing the temple of Neptune with anything else of the sort, in Italy, would seem quite out of the question. Its history and its style prove it to be one of the most venerable specimens of human art of which we have any knowledge.” Thomas Cole, Cooper’s contemporary, remarked that his traveling party “came within sight of the temples of Paestum, just as the first beams of the sun were breaking upon them...as it had done for two thousand years.” E.K. Washington, visiting in the late 18503, observed: “They are in the earliest Grecian style, and are reckoned the most remarkable existing of the genius and taste which inspired the architects of Greece, with the single exception of one building at Athens.” And Murray’s Handbook, like the 128 Americans carrying the tourist guidebook with them to Paestum, also notes the dignified nature of the temples: These magnificent ruins are, with the exception of those of Athens, the most striking existing records of the genius and taste which inspired the architects of Greece...[T]hey are doubtless the most venerable examples of classical architecture in Italy. All of these writers, in commenting on their visits to the Doric ruins at Paestum, noted the inspiring ancientness and majesty of the temples.102 The discussion of the history of Paestum in travel accounts and guidebooks appears remarkably uniform among the many authors. Murray’s Handbook in the 18503 mentions that commentators remain unsettled about the historical origins of the site: “The origin of PAESTUM, or POSEIDONIA as it was called previous to the Roman conquest, has been attributed by some antiquaries to the Phoenicians, and to the Etruscans by others; while many have endeavored to assign it to a more remote origin still.” James Fenimore Cooper noted that “The history of Paestum is not very well settled.” Misdating 102See Talbot, Ph.D. diss., 18-26. William Smith, 591. James Fenimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe: Italy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 163. Originally receiving a commission from a Miss Douglass, Thomas Cole painted (now in a private collection) Ruins of the Temples at Paestum, a pastoral and sublime View of the site with the rising sun shining through the columns of the “Temple of Neptune,” in 1832 and exhibited the painting at the National Academy of Design in 1833. In commenting on the painting upon Cole’s death in 1848, William Cullen Bryant called Paestum “the grandest and most perfect remains of the architecture of Greece.” See An Exhibition of Paintings by Thomas Cole N.A. from the Artist’s Studio, Catskill, New York (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1964), 8, quoted in Wendy Cooper, 91-92. Washington, 610. Murray, Southern Italy, 270. 129 either the temples or the pyramids at Giza by about two thousand years, Cooper expressed his fascination with the ancientness of the ruins: “The temples that remain are certainly of very remote antiquity; probably little less ancient, if any, than the Pyramids of Egypt.” He then re-emphasized their antiquity by observing that “[The Roman Emperor] Augustus is said to have visited the very temples that are now standing, as specimens of ancient architecture!" In the light of the past at Paestum, the very new democratic traditions in the United States become “a speck” in the “long vista of events -- what a point the life and adventures of a single man!” Cooper also linked the history of Paestum to Biblical history in referencing that from “about the time of the Deluge” the temples represented “one of the best specimens of architecture that succeeded the new civilization.” For Cooper and other Americans, Paestum represented solid evidence of the ancient nature of democratic institutions.103 For many antebellum American architects and thinkers, the Doric style of places like Paestum, represented not just the remote origin of democracy but also order and simplicity. In his 1843 text delineating how to build “classic dwellings” in “rural" America, Edward Shaw outlined his interpretation of American architectural history to that 103Murray, Southern Italy, 269. James Fenimore Cooper, 161—164. 130 point. Unlike in Europe, where the Catholic and Protestant hierarchies have supported great architectural achievements, the Puritans, through “the simple severity of their architecture...appear to have been desirous of entirely obliterating the memory of the magnificent churches, and pompous ceremonials, attendant on the worship of their oppressors.” But in recent times, Shaw argues, “the spirit of this new age is an enterprising spirit...the spirit of the age is locomotive.” The more modern enterprising spirit, fueled by greater economic and political equality for white male citizens, permits the United States to create extraordinary and imposing architectural structures -- in the Doric style. Shaw provides one example: “In Philadelphia we have the United States Bank, a faultless specimen of the pure Doric; classic, chaste, and simple in its proportions, it is a building of which we may well be proud.” But Philadelphia was not alone in erecting “pure Doric” structures: “Among [Boston’s] specimens of Doric, worthy of mention, are the new Custom House, the United States Branch Bank, the Hospital at Rainsford Island, the Washington Bank, and Quincy Market, a plain but noble structure of hewn granite, about five hundred feet in length, constructed by, and an honor to, our city.” For Shaw and other American architects, creating grand Doric city and public buildings or Greek-style porches on vernacular architecture mirrored the original Doric style at Paestum and in Greece. Recalling the admired virtues of the 131 great ancient republican orators like Cicero and Cato, E.K. Washington calls the temples at Paestum “mute, impressive, stern, and eloquent.” The Doric style in America also reflected the democratic ideals of the nation, passed on from the republican Romans and the ancient Greeks.104 The reflection of the ancient temple in the stagnant pool in the foreground of Cropsey’s image functions as a metaphysical impression of the past. Although many American tourists to Paestum in the antebellum years would evince the antiquity of the Doric temples, those same tourists would remark on the supernatural and sublime qualities of the same temples. Murray’s Handbook announces that the temples, with “their huge dusky masses standing alone amidst their mountain wilderness, without a vestige nigh of any power that could have reared them...look absolutely supernatural.” E.K. Washington paraphrazes and references Murray’s Handbook: “It has been remarked that they look supernatural -- they are so lofty and grand, and so stern and noble in 104Edward Shaw, Rural Architecture: Consisting of Classic Dwellings, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Gothic, and Details Connected with Each of the Orders (Boston: james 8. Dow, 1843), especially 60-63. Washington, 610. Patrick Lee Lucas argues that “a common democratic language emerged in the Old Northwest and the Frontier South in the decades leading toward the Civil War. The Grecian style, based on the architecture of Ancient Greece, provided Americans a means to express their nationality in built form. Cutting across building types and class lines, architecture demonstrated the ability to create a democratic image for individuals, communities, and landscapes in the trans-Appalachian West.” See Patrick Lee Lucas, “Constructing Temples of Democracy and the Landscape of Nationhood: Grecian-Style Architecture as Metaphor on the Trans—Appalachian Frontier” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2002). 132 their proportions, of such unquestioned antiquity -- and yet there is nothing in character with them around, nothing that could have erected them.” But Washington adds his own observation of the immortality of the temples: “The columns of these temples stand firmly on their bases, not having moved a particle. Time, with respect to them, would seem to be almost a mere illusion.”105 In a very Romantic and spiritual vein, he continues: I have been in places, and Paestum is one, where you feel the past -- could read it, and write its history. 13 it because it is all there yet -- though in the shadow land? 13 there any thing past? Are not all things haunted? The refined, subtle, enjoying Greek seems here with his genius, and the ruination around seems the phantasm. Is not the phantasm of one world the real of the other? and the desolation here now, the mere shadow of the unseen world?106 The powerful historical associations of the site became tangible for Washington and blurred the lines between the past and the present, and between reflection and reality. The learned, astute, pleasured American tourist replaces the “refined, subtle, enjoying Greek” as “genius.” The American, democratic present had resurrected the “unseen phantasm? of the Greek past. Cropsey, utilizing the supernatural and sublime qualities felt by American tourists at Paestum, employs a 105Murray, Southern Italy, 271. Washington, 610 and 612. 106Washington 613-614, emphasis in original. 133 crescent moon, as it looms over the temple, as a symbol of renewal and resurrection. The moon appears in both his smaller oil sketch and the full-sized canvas, Temple of Neptune, Paestum. Often “female" in European cultural discourse because of its passivity as a receiver of the sun’s light, of its ever-changing nature, and of the similarity of the lunar month and the menstrual cycle, the moon contrasts greatly with the structural, sturdy masculinity of the Greek temple. The temple, through its aesthetics, embodies the rational, and very “male,” elements of the past. The waxing and waning of the moon, and the inevitable return of the same lunar form, combine the ideas death and rebirth. Ancient Christian writers viewed the sun and the moon as dualistic symbols -- the sun as God; the moon as humanity, a reflection of God. Other theologians interpreted the moon as a symbol of the Church, which receives illumination from God and then transmits it to all believers. Cropsey's crescent moon signifies the regeneration of republican traditions -- once “full” in the ancient Greek and Roman world but long since waned and as broken as the temple’s columns. The waxing crescent moon decorating the sky over Paestum communicates the recent re-emergence of republican institutions in the United States. That natural and inevitable re-emergence of republicanism in America, following the thread of Christian thought, receives its illumination from a divine source. The Greek sense of harmony and proportion, a celebration of 134 the faculties and knowledge of humankind, represented the mirroring of the order of the universe. The sense of sublime natural beauty reflected God’s order.107 The sublimity of the Greek ruins at Paestum were secondary to Albert Bierstadt in his image Ruins of Paestum. Traveling with fellow artist Sanford Robinson Gifford during the late spring and early summer of 1857, Bierstadt sketched at Paestum. In mid—May 1857, Gifford and Bierstadt left Rome on a six-week tour of the Abruzzi, Naples, and the Amalfi coast. They climbed Vesuvius in late May, and sketched at Capri for a month. Then, on the twenty-ninth of June, 1857, Gifford and Bierstadt took a carriage to Paestum to see its imposing Greek ruins. On the plains nearby, where they were collecting marble fragments, Gifford sketched a pastoral scene with a column fragment and travertine slabs in the foreground. According to Gifford’s letters, Bierstadt accidentally leaves his sketchbook behind at Paestum and walks back from several miles away to retrieve his sketches from the ruins. Most likely painted in New Bedford, Massachusetts in early 1858, Ruins of Paestum went on display at the Boston Athenaeum in September 1858 and at the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in the spring of 1859.108 107Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism, trans. James Hulbert (New York and Oxford: Facts On File, 1992), 224-226. 108For Gifford and Bierstadt’s Southern Italy sojourn, see Weiss, 76-80; Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New 135 Bierstadt’s medium-sized canvas (fig. 6) of the ruins at Paestum de-emphasize the majesty of the ancient temples and highlight the desolation of the ruins’ location. The swamp dominates the right foreground of Bierstadt’s image. With its two wading birds -- one taking flight -- the marsh consumes one massive column while a long broken column survives, a fragment still rising from a stylobate. Adjacent to this lone column on the picture plane, but at the horizon line of the painting, Bierstadt paints the ruins of two temples. In the far left background, the distant ruins of the “Temple of Neptune” become visible. In the right background, an Italian town and mountains rises from the plain. In the left foreground and middleground, Bierstadt places lush vegetation, a picturesque tree, and several roaming European buffalo. Murray’s Handbook comments upon the roaming buffalo amid the ruins: “The plain extending...to Paestum is tenanted by wild horses, buffaloes, swine and sheep, guarded by fierce dogs.” Murray continues: “The Salso, which formerly flowed by the walls of the city, is now choked with sand and calcareous deposits, and it overflows the plain, forming stagnant pools, the resort of herds of buffaloes.” Bierstadt also includes a solitary man on horseback.109 York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), 44; and Anderson and Ferber, 122-124, and 143. 109Murray, Southern Italy, 269. 136 Bierstadt’s lone man on horseback generally recalls Salvator Rosa’s seventeenth-century landscape paintings, depicting Italian bandits -- an alarming reality for travelers in Italy into the nineteenth-century. American visitors to Paestum and Southern Italy were familiar with the stories of ambush and murder of tourists by banditti on horseback. Murray’s Handbook relates the story of a famous murder in 1824 at the ruins of Paestum: The spot where Mr, Hunt and his wife were murdered...is on the road to Eboli. They had slept at that town, and his servant had placed on a table near the window the contents of a dressing-case, which were mounted in silver, and Mrs. Hunt’s jewels. A girl belonging to the inn saw them, and spread the report that an Englishman, carrying with him enormous treasures, was going to Paestum, upon which 18 men set out from Eboli, to intercept the spoil. Mr. and Mrs. Hunt, after visiting the Temples, were returning..when they were stopped...Mr. Hunt at first showed some resistance, but his wife having implored of him to surrender at once, he stooped to take the dressing-case lying at the bottom of the carriage. One of the brigands, who was at the window of the carriage, fancying that Mr. Hunt was going to seize the pistols, instantly fired; the ball mortally wounded Mr. Hunt and his wife. Another of the brigands exclaimed, ‘What have you done?’ and the murderer coolly answered, ‘Cio ch’ e fatto é fatto.’ These facts were brought out by the judicial investigation, the result of which was that 17 out of the 18 robbers were identified by a shepherd boy, who witnessed the whole affair while concealed in a thicket. These men were executed, and the 18th confessed on his death-bed. 137 James Fenimore Cooper mentions the Hunt murder in his tale of his visit to Paestum: “The coachman stopped the carriage by a copse of bushes, and told us the spot was the scene of a recent robbery and murder.” The story of the cold-blooded murder and robbery, set against the backdrop of the ennobling ancient Greek temples, emphatically critiqued not only the mid-nineteenth-century Euro-American view of contemporary Italians but also on the lost greatness of the ancient republican past. Paestum, for all its historical associations, history of republican democracy, and sublime beauty, remained in the mid-nineteenth century a site also exemplifying the degradation of civilization into chaos and turmoil.110 The sublime beauty of the Doric temples, symbols of civilization and democracy, exists with a landscape of decay, sin, and wildness. Both Cropsey, in his Temple of Neptune, Paestum, and Bierstadt, in his Ruins of Paestum, foreground a swamp. The “swamp,” as a specific landscape type, held ambiguous metaphorical meaning for mid-nineteenth century Americans. The discourse on swamps -— and their related landscapes, “deserts” -- centered in the basic theological symbolism of these places as regions of evil, of temptation, and of death. These designations recall the 110For Rosa’s banditti, see Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), especially 22-23, and 226-227. Murray, Southern Italy, 272. Cooper, 161. E.K. Washington also relates the story of the murder, 614. 138 “wilderness” of both the Old and New Testaments, with the most apparent suggestion being to that of the Israelites in the wilderness. The encircling swamp performs, in one sense, as a relic of the hardship endured by those who struggled for a better and righteous life. The Greek temples, tangible relics of a democratic past, have survived amid the wilderness of Paestum’s swamp.111 American tourists to the plain at Paestum often referenced the discourse of “swamp” places -- usually referring to the area as a desert or wasteland. In the 18303, James Fenimore Cooper blamed the Italians for “the appearance of neglect rather than of barrenness.” The landscape at Paestum, in Cooper’s estimation, was not an Old Testament desert allied with “that of solitude,” but instead one associated with “the idea of wildness.” In contrast, E.K. Washington, two decades later, poetically alludes not only to an Old Testament-type desert but also to death by asphyxiation as he comments on the landscape, “desolated by the miasma,” around the Doric ruins: [T]he once flourishing, commercial, and elegant Greek city has been a desert for one thousand yearsmThe desert, time-cursed plain, whence death exhales, is all 111See David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For Miller, the transformation of the swamp as “both image and symbol” occurs in the years around the Civil War and involves a change from the swamp as “moral emblem” to “object of aesthetic delight.” The paintings by Cropsey and Bierstadt of the swamp at Paestum merge both the moral symbolism and aesthetic enchantment alluded to by Miller. 139 aroundeeyond [the temples] stretched a suffocated river, lost and choked in a swamp, as it attempts to ~ find its way to the sea n being obstructed by the fallen ruins of the city. The dismal croaking of a frog seemed a proper accompaniment of the scene. For Washington, and many other American visitors, a “flourishing, commercial, and elegant” city required the progressive use of a river for commerce, trade, and travel. Paestum had long since ceased to thrive. Bierstadt and Cropsey both evince the uncultivated nature of Paestum’s landscape through the inclusion of wildflowers, briers, and other overgrown plants. Washington, Cooper, and other tourists would often include the ongoing threat posed by malaria in their descriptions of Paestum’s choked river. Many visitors would also contrast the contemporary swamp -- a place of “briers, and weeds” -- with Paestum’s ancient renown as a site for beautiful flowers, especially roses.112 Numerous legends and stories exist in the Euro-American tradition about the rose and its origins. Noting the “rose of Paestum,” Charles Fraser, in a July 1858 essay on gardening, comments that the rose in America had become the subject of innocuous adoration: “The offerings of taste and genius, of beauty and innocence, have diffused an atmosphere of joy around [the rose], and made it the object of universal but harmless idolatry.” Fraser continues: “No 112James Fenimore Cooper, 161 and 165. Washington, 611. For one example, among many, of the mention of malaria and Paestum as “briers, and weeds,” see Washington, 609-610. 140 doubt the celebrated rose of Paestum...is to be found among the varieties that adorn our own gardens.” But most of the traditions deal with the rose as a metaphor of earthly values and as a symbol of love, death, sensuality, or sin. One myth says that a white rose turned red with the kiss of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Another traditional ancient tale claims that the Roman goddess of flowers, Flora, created the rose -- with the assistance of other deities -- from the corpse of a favorite nymph. According to traditional accounts, Cleopatra used red rose petals as a carpet so that the flowers’ scent would encompass and bewitch the approaching Marc Antony. In ancient Rome, the rose operated as a symbol of death and heaven. It became a custom to place roses on graves and on the foreheads of the dead as tokens of enduring love. During the Roman Empire, roses became associated with the degeneracy of the emperors -- according to one legend, a number of virtuous Romans were suffocated under tons of rose petals dropped on them during an imperial orgy.113 113Charles Fraser, “Gardening -- Its History, Attractiveness, Etc.,” Debow’s Review 25.1 (July 1858): 64. For more on the rose, see Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); and the entry for “rose” in Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, revised and expanded edition (New York: Facts on File, 1997), 578-579. I appreciate The Most Rev. James Murray, Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kalamazoo, for alerting me to the symbolic meaning of the rose in the Roman Empire during his homily, “Pro-Life Sunday,” on January 22, 2002, at St. Augustine Cathedral, Kalamazoo, Michigan. 141 Mid-nineteenth-century American and British tourists to Paestum were cognizant of its history as the ancient site for seeing and experiencing beautiful roses. Murray’s Handbook mentions that “Paestum was celebrated by the Latin poets for the beauty and fragrance of its roses...These roses have disappeared.” E.K. Washington notes that “the poets have celebrated its roses, which bloomed twice a year,” while Sir William Smith’s textbook records that “in the time of Augustus [Paestum] is only mentioned on account of the beautiful roses grown in the neighborhood.” American intellectuals and landscape architects were also familiar with the “rosebeds of Paestum? from Virgil and other ancient Roman poets. In a paper given at the dedication of a building in 1857, New Englander George Lunt commented that Paestum’s roses “ages ago stirred and mingled with the sublimest of human emotions” yet now no longer reside “amidst the ruin’s of man’s less durable achievements.” The beautiful roses of Paestum, flowering during the age of the degenerate Roman Emperors, had long since succumbed to the swampy, choked river encountered at the locale by American tourists to the ancient temples.114 The swamp at Paestum functions as a paradoxical emblem, as a place of both death and renewal. Cropsey and Bierstadt 114Murray, Southern Italy, 271-272. Washington, 610. Smith, 591. George Lunt, Three Eras of New England, and Other Addresses, with Papers Critical and Biographical (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857), 192. 142 both utilize a common motif of swamp images -- a lone bird or birds -- in their paintings of Paestum. Eighteenth- century naturalist William Bartram described “the solitary bird” in a “pensive posture” as looking “extremely grave, sorrowful, and melancholy, as if in deepest thought.” Images of American swamps, including Flavius Fischer’s painting of Virginia’s The Dismal Swamp (fig. 25), utilize the “solitary bird” and, in Fischer’s image in particular, the symbolic crescent moon as symbols of personal reflection and regeneration, respectively. Paestum’s swamp manifests the concept of the wild, savage, and pre-civilized, operates as a site of both death and renewal, and becomes a place for personal thought and inner reflection. As David Miller writes, “The universe fall into proper moral perspective along this axis: light, life and [God] are embodied in flowing water; darkness, death, and the withdrawal of the divine presence are exemplified in stagnant water.” The Doric ruins, metaphors of past democratic greatness, exist amid an uncertain landscape of decay, pensiveness, and renewal.115 Besides the majesty of the temple ruins and the wildness of the swamp, many American tourists to Paestum 115William Bartram, Travels of William Bartram, Mark Van Doren, ed. (New York: Dover, 1955), 138, quoted in Miller, Dark Eden, 6. Miller argues that the cultural interest in and the use of the swamp became “an exhilarating and self-renewing experience” and “a metaphor of newly awakened unconscious mental processes,” 3. Miller, Dark Eden, 81. 143 noted that on the plain near the temples Crassus defeated the army of Spartacus.116 For many Northerners in the United States, the ancient civilization of Greece and Rome degenerated due to moral excess and slavery -- with the legend of Spartacus as the most famous example of slave revolt in ancient history. In his 1857 work Connexion of Sacred and Profane History, David Davidson describes the ancient event: In the centre of that country, Spartacus, a Thracian, and famous gladiator, raised an alarming insurrection among the slaves. His army, at one time, amounted to one hundred and twenty thousand men. They laid waste the greater part of Italy, and were not conquered by Crassus till many thousands of them were slain in battle. The revolt began in 73 B.C., at a training school in Capua, nearby to Paestum, and the gladiators and slaves defeated the armies of two Roman praetors. Eventually, Spartacus fell in battle and six thousand of his followers were crucified. Many mid-nineteenth century authors of ancient historical accounts argued that the defeat of Spartacus marked the moment that Rome began to degenerate from republican government into despotism. In an 1855 chapter titled “The Fall of Rome,” Thomas Bangs Thorpe maintains that “[t]he defeat of Spartacus took place [when] the 116Paestum was not the only set of ruins in Italy which Americans associated with the institution of slavery. Charles C. Eldredge argues that American images of the Torre dei Schiavi in the Roman Campagna were “readily tied” to “legendary slave battles” of ancient times. See Eldredge’s article “Torre dei Sciavi: Monument and Metaphor,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 (Fall 1987): 15-33. 144 haughty tyranny of [Rome’s] nobles was at its greatest height, and when the degradation of its industrial classes was most insupportable.” Ultimately, Thorpe notes that “It was at this juncture, when the last glimmering light of liberty had vanished, that the dark reign of despotism began.”117 Northern and anti-slavery writers were quick to link the ancient historical figure and story of Spartacus to the American situation in the 18503. Noting that “No such broad political freedom was ever heard of before, either in Greece or Rome,” Thorpe attests that the American “mighty empire” faces a moment of crisis over the issue of slavery.118 Using “the followers of Spartacus” as an example, the Reverend Charles Eliot, not hiding his contempt for the “peculiar institution,” expresses one opinion of what slavery does to civic virtue: “But [slavery], while it binds the body, corrupts the mind. The outrages which men commit when they first regain their freedom, furnish the strongest argument against the condition which can render human nature 117Murray notes the connection between Spartacus and Paestum. See Murray, Southern Italy, 267. David Davidson, Connextion of Sacred and Profane History, Being a Review of the Principal Events in the World (New York: R. Carter & Brothers, 1857, 3 v. in 1), vol. II, 106. For a quick overview of the revolt of the gladiators, see William G. Sinnigen and Arthur E.K. Boak, eds., A History of Rome to A.D. 565 (New York: Macmillan Publishing, sixth edition, 1977), 198-199. Thomas Bangs Thorpe, A voice to America; or, The model republic, its glory, or its fall: with a review of the causes of the decline & failure of the republics of South America, Mexico, & of the Old World; applied to the present crisis in the United States (New York: E. Walker, 1855), 64-65. 118Thorpe, especially 13—24. 145 capable of such crimes. Idleness, and treachery, and theft are the vices of slavery.” In an 1850 speech delivered in the U.S. House of Representatives, Horace Mann longed for a “Spartacus withmlofty heroism,” or another Nat Turner, to serve as a leader among slaves in the South, which “fosters within its homes three millions of latent rebellions.”119 American anti-slavery politicians and writers viewed the revolt under Spartacus in ancient Rome as having derived from intolerable conditions on the ancient latifundia and from the desire of the slaves to be free. Abolitionists connected the ancient slave conditions with those of the South. Many American abolitionists, both black and white, linked the “swamp” and the “desert” with the issue of slavery. Whig politician Daniel Webster, in speaking about the possibility of Civil War over the slavery issue and states’ rights in 1851, employed the diction of mid-nineteenth cnetury swamp discourse, in a statement that reads much like American tourist descriptions of the landscape at Paestum: “But secession and disunion are a region of gloom, and morass and swamp; no cheerful breezes fan it, no spirit of health visits it; it is all malariam[T]he traveller through it breathes miasma, and 119Charles Eliot, The Bible and Slavery (Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt & A. Poe, 1859), 273. Horace Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches (Boston: B.B. Mussey, 1853), 222-223. 146 treads among all things unwholesome and loathsome.” Others often used the metaphor of the “children of Israel” making “a grand exodus” from “the land of bondage” and traveling through the desert wasteland to a promised land of redemption. During the years prior to and during the Civil War, Northerners often saw the swamp as an emblem of the depredations of slavery on Southern society. In the minds of Northern abolitionists, escaping into the woods or swamps of the great plantation districts of Lousiana, South Carolina or Virginia became one way in which a slave could resist the hegemonic and corrupt economic structure of the South. A powerful form of resistance, hiding out in a nearby wood or swamp fulfilled the need to experience a period of freedom away from the restraints and discipline of slave life. The so-called Compromise of 1850 and the federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 brought the popular image of the runaway slave amid the swamp into the abolitionist discourse. Images of the escaped or escaping slave hiding in the swamp were prevalent in both literature and art. For example, Thomas Moran’s 1865 painting Slaves Escaping Through a Swamp makes use of the swamp as a dangerous spot of anxiety, fear, and death. The runaway slaves, pursued, fearing for their life, and longing for their freedom, pass through and amid a dusky, desolate swamp. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her novel Dred, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856), used the swamp image, according to David Miller, “as the metaphor for a 147 II ‘grotesque’ social condition, like that of late republican Rome, “festering” with the “revolutionary potential” that could be taken advantage of by a Spartacus (or, three years after the publishing of her novel, a John Brown). Stowe exploits “the popular image of the fugitive slave in the swamp, an image perhaps pivotal in focusing and dramatizing Northern attitudes to the South’s peculiar institution.”120 In Temple of Neptune, Paestum, and Ruins of Paestum, the swamp and the history of Spartacus’ slave insurrection assist in focusing the viewers’ attention toward the contemporary issue of slavery in the United States. Although the United States was the heir to the noble democratic traditions of the Greeks, the country risked degenerating into a malarial “swamp” over the moral issue of slavery. James Fenimore Cooper compared the setting of the plain at Paestum, formed by the “blue Mediterranean” and the Apennines, to a “beautiful amphitheatre” upon which humans had “performed” the “play” of history for centuries.121 120See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 648—657. Daniel Webster, The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903), vol. 13, 434; quoted in Miller, Dark Eden, 10. For one example of the Israelite metaphor, see Henry Highland Garnet’s 1843 speech before the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo in Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life (New York, 1848); and the Weekly Anglo-African (New York), 28 March 1863; quoted in Roy E. Finkenbine, ed., Sources of the African—American Past (New York: Longman, 1997), 63-66. Miller, Dark Eden, 57 and 90. Thomas Moran’s painting Slaves Escaping Through a Swamp, from 1865, is in the Laura A. Clubb Collection, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK. 121James Fenimore Cooper, 165. 148 Temple of Neptune, Paestum and Ruins of Paestum reminded their mid-ninteenth century American viewers that, linked closely with the republican past in a historical cycle of death and rebirth, the United States would need to face and withstand its moral challenges. The images of Paestum, created by Bierstadt and Cropsey for upper- and middle-class patrons and institutions in the Northeast, resonate with an anxious question for their American viewers: Would the new democratic experiment, the United States, created as a natural and divinely-inspired re-emergence of republican institutions “like Greece,” also disintegrate into ruins over the role of slavery in American society? In another image, painted the same year as Ruins of Paestum, Bierstadt continued to explore the anxieties of the northern anetebellum elite. Rendering a scene filled with contemporary Romans, picturesque yet odious in behavior to “true” American democrats, Bierstadt offers a guide for avoiding the mistakes of past republican civilizations. 149 Chapter Five ANTI-CATHOLICSM IN ALBERT BIERSTADT’S THE ARCH OF OCTAVIUS: A MAZE OF BEWILDERING INCONSISTENCIES? By the end of 1858, Albert Bierstadt had come home to New Bedford, Massachusetts from four years of study in Europe, made his exhibition debut at the National Academy of Design where he had been elected an honorary member, and sold “near four thousand dollars worth of pictures” since his return to America. One of the paintings Bierstadt sold that year was The Arch of Octavius (Roman Fish Market) (fig. 7), recently described as “one of the artist’s most accomplished genre paintings.” Roman Fish Market was one of several paintings created by Bierstadt as the artistic result of a sojourn around Switzerland and Italy in 1856 and 1857. Bierstadt sold the work to the Boston Athenaeum for four hundred dollars, where it was subsequently displayed in annual exhibitions fourteen times between 1858-1879.122 122Bierstadt's title The Arch of Octavius is inaccurate; the actual site in Rome is the Portico of Octavia. Although the painting is mentioned briefly by The Evening Standard of New Bedford, Massachusetts on 8 July 1858, there is no record of criticism or contemporary interpretation from the painting's exhibition in the 18503 through the 18703. The quotation “near four thousand...” is dated 1 November 1858 in correspondence between H. Lewis to G. Lewis, Henry Lewis Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and quoted in Anderson and Ferber. The second quotation records Linda Ferber's Opinion of Roman Fish Market. The selling price and exhibition information come from the object record for Roman Fish Market, Arch of Octavius in the American Paintings Department of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For more on the painting, see Marc Simpson, The Rockefeller Collection of American Art at The Fine Arts Museums of San 150 What was the appeal of Bierstadt’s Roman Fish Market to the patrons, visitors, and trustees of the Boston Athenaeum? How and why would a painting with a Roman subject matter gain the attention of an American, specifically a New England, audience, or be intended for a Northeastern art market? What cultural work might such a genre painting have accomplished in the Massachusetts of 1858, and in the years that followed? The painting’s ostensibly picturesque portrayal of the fish market at the Portico of Octavia in Rome reveals paradoxes that attest to demonstrative feelings toward Catholic immigrants among antebellum, Northern Protestants. A virulent anti-Catholic sentiment inflected popular opinion in late antebellum America, especially among travel writers, newspaper editors, and politicians. Bierstadt, as an artist using the “picturesque” contrast between the ruins of antiquity and the squalor of contemporary Italians, responded to popular opinion and Francisco (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1994), 138-140; and Matthew Baigell, Albert Bierstadt (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1981), 18—19. For a detailed list of works of art exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum during the antebellum era, see Robert F. Perkins, et al., The Boston Athenaeum Art Exhibition Index 1827-1874 (Boston and Cambridge: The Library of the Boston Athenaeum and MIT Press, 1980). Roman Fish Market is listed as Arch of Octavius, Jew’s Quarter, Rome. In 1901, a few months before his death, Bierstadt sought to exchange a more recent painting with the Boston Athenaeum for Roman Fish Market. In a letter at the Athenaeum dated 21 November 1901 from C. Loring to C. Bolton, Bierstadt requests the painting back “because he has never of late done work equal to this early specimen. This is a question of 20 years standing. More than once...I have referred him to the Trustees of the Athenaeum.” Quoted in the chronology provided by Anderson and Ferber. 151 explored the tensions and limitations of immigration and American republicanism. Bierstadt's only known urban image, Roman Fish Market held meanings for urban, elite, Protestant Northeasterners, and represented their anxiety regarding economic and political changes, and their fears of a working-class, Catholic, Irish consciousness. Despite the painting’s picturesque aesthetic and popular interest in ancient Rome, Bierstadt’s dramatizing of the situation of a Yankee tourist couple surrounded by poor, swarthy, Catholic Romans resonates as an allegory of anti—Catholic, anti-Irish sentiment for its mid-nineteenth century Protestant Northeastern viewers. Roman Fish Market resulted from Bierstadt’s stay in Rome in the winter of 1856—7. In the image, a stone-brick road extends from the center foreground to the background, passing through a fish market in Rome and into the Jewish Ghetto, down a long and narrow street. Crumbling brick and concrete arches, stripped of their original ancient marble grandeur, serve as a setting for the market at the Portico of Octavia. The shape of the first archway echoes the shadowy archway that dominates the middleground. A rectangular opening in the second arch provides the viewer a window on an aspect of urban Rome -- clothes draped on lines hung over the narrow street and between multiple-story apartment buildings clutter a bright blue Italian sky. The sunlight falls dramatically from upper left to lower right, casting powerful theatrical shadows across the market in the 152 foreground. One shadow, from the front archway’s right capital, falls diagonally in the direction of an American tourist couple. That Yankee couple -- a man, dressed in a light blue coat and red vest, and a young woman, wearing a yellow dress, green shawl, and hat with veil -- walk amid the confusion and untidiness of smelly fish and native Romans. The American man, a prim and proper gentleman, carries a bright red copy of Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs, plainly visible under his left arm. His companion glances backward as if shocked, bewildered or nervous about something behind them. Following the plan laid out in his guidebook and looking for ancient sites, the man attempts to ignore a beggar, dressed in brown, with a tipped hat, open mouth and palm, to his right. Italians fill the portico and the market, creating a noise and chaos under the ancient archway. Torn and partially faded theater announcements decorate the walls to either side of the nearer archway. Gigantic displaced composite capitals, instead of topping columns or bracing grand architecture, support slabs of marble being used by Roman fishmongers to display a cluttered variety of fish.123 123My characterization of the tourist couple in Roman Fish Market as “Yankee” relies on the similarity of the male tourist to other images of Northeastern Protestant American males in the 18403 and 18503. See Johns, American Genre Painting, 24-59. Bierstadt clearly makes these tourists Anglo-Saxon and distinguishes them from the physiognomy of the native Romans in the image. There are several examples of the popularity of Murray's handbook among American tourists to Italy, including Caroline M. Kirkland. She writes that “a faithful reading of Murray’s Guide Books will give more [information] than one can use,” vi; 153 Prior to spending a winter in Rome in 1856-57 and painting Roman Fish Market, Bierstadt studied in Germany and traveled elsewhere in Europe. He had been born on January 7, 1830, near DDsseldorf, Germany. Bierstadt’s family emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts when he was just two years old. Little is known about Bierstadt’s artistic training as a child, but by 1851 he was offering a course of his own in monochromatic painting. In 1853, he traveled from Massachusetts to Ddsseldorf with plans to study under Johann Peter Hasenclever, a distant relative. The city on the Rhine and its art academy had become an international artists’ colony but, when Bierstadt arrived, he found that Hasenclever had died. Although Bierstadt never did attend the academy, he discovered and worked closely with Americans compatriots, including Emanuel Leutze and Worthington Whittredge. At the end of two and a half years of study, in June 1856, Bierstadt, along with Whittredge and William Stanley Haseltine, conducted a sketching tour in southern Germany and into Switzerland, where they met up with fellow artist Sanford Robinson Gifford at Lake Lucerne. After and, in commenting on the “interesting objects” that “thicken upon us as we approach Rome” Kirkland mentions that “they are of a kind of which our good friend Murray discourses at full length,” 278. The Reverend John E. Edwards notes that his touring party “followed the suggestion of Murray’s most excellent guide—book” in Random Sketches, 99. Ohioan Samuel S. Cox mentions that “Not only guides in the human shape become essential, but Murray himself began to compensate us for lugging him about,” in A Buckeye Abroad; Or, Wanderings in Europe, and in the Orient (Cincinnati: Moore, Anderson & Company, 1854), 109. 154 weeks of hiking and sketching in the Alps, the group traveled the Saint Gothard Pass to Lago Maggiore. Following a brief time in Florence, Bierstadt continued on to Rome, and thence, with Gifford, on foot throughout Abruzzi, to Naples, Capri and the Amalfi Coast, camping and sketching. Paintings based upon these European travels, including Roman Fish Market and his Lake Lucerne (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), were among those he showed in 1858, in New Bedford and Boston, and at the National Academy of Design, respectively.124 The people of Massachusetts, where Bierstadt returned home to in 1858, were being impacted by the ongoing influx 124Bierstadt’s first trip to Italy in 1856-7 has been documented but only as a brief early career stop on the way to painting his large canvases of the Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains. Modern-era museum publications and exhibitions on American artists, including Bierstadt, in Italy include “Arcady Revisited: Americans in Italy” in Novak, Nature and Culture, 203-225; Soria; Jaffe; Vance; and Stebbins, Lure. For some of the more detailed descriptions of Bierstadt's first European tour see, Hendricks, 21-45; Soria, 66-67; Diana Strazdes, catalogue entry in Stebbins, Lure, 214; and Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 388. For artists from DUsseldorf in Rome, see Martina Sitt, “Die Dfisseldorfer ‘Compagnie’ in Rom 1830-1860: Auf Goethes Spuren,” in C.G. Boerner, Goethe, Boerner und KUnstler ihrer Zeit (DUsseldorf: C.G. Boerner, 1999). For a study of picturesque images of the poor in eighteenth century English painting, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The influence of the British landscape categories of the Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque on American painting is the subject of Ketner and Tammenga. Much has already been written in some of the above scholarly works about the “picturesque” nature of Italy and its historical associations. Numerous authors have demonstrated how the issues for Americans viewing “picturesque” images of Italy, including Roman Fish Market, centered upon the way monarchies and anti-democratic governments degraded their people, contrasted with the relative wealth of opportunities provided individuals in republican America. 155 of thousands of poor, Catholic immigrants. Unskilled Irish laborers and their effect on the American republic and the city of Boston caused concern for upper- and middle-class Protestants, including members and patrons of the Boston Athenaeum, the purchasers of Roman Fish Market, in the 18503. Protestant, Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of England’s eighteenth-century North American colonies and the eventual United States had felt animosity toward the Irish as a patriotic and religious concern. But when a terrible blight attacked and destroyed the potato crop of Ireland, some 914,000 Irish came to the United States in the 18503, with 170,000 arriving in 1852 alone. According to the 1850 census, just over forty-eight percent of Boston’s labor force and fifteen percent of Boston’s domestic servants consisted of Ireland-born workers. The “Annual Report of the Chief of Police, 1865,” mentions that 75.8 percent of arrested and detained individuals were born in Ireland. The huge numbers of “famine Irish” who came to Boston occurred at a time when the upper- and middle-class of the city viewed itself as emblematic of a progressive national culture. Recent scholarship has examined how the still regional culture of New England was inclined to present itself as the national culture. The Boston Athenaeum, at the time of its purchase of Roman Fish Market in 1858, operated as one of many organizations in antebellum America through which an urban upper class expressed and represented its specific interests and social preferences. “The Boston 156 elite was not...the Athenaeum subscription list,” mentions Ronald Story, but the fit was “extremely close.”125 Members and patrons of the Boston Athenaeum were among the voters who, in the Massachusetts state elections of 1854, amazingly gave the Know-Nothings -- a primarily grass-roots political party with an anti-establishment, nativist outlook —— the governor’s seat, the entire state Senate, and all but two seats in the state House of Representatives. Members of the American party (called “Know-Nothings” because of their secretive response to inquiries: “I know nothing”) in 1854 promised to protect the “vital principles of Republican Government.” Catholicism would and did, in the eyes of Know-Nothings, subvert 125The statistics come from Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, revised edition, 1979). They note that at least ninety percent of the Irish immigrants to Boston were Roman Catholics. Examples of scholarship on New England and national culture include Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Ronald Story, “Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807-1860,” American Quarterly 27.2: 196-198, quoted in Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 10. For more on the Athenaeum, see Pamela Hoyle, A Climate for Art: The History of the Boston Athenaeum Gallery 1827-1873 (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1980), especially Johnathan P. Harding’s section “The Picture Gallery.” A group of “prominent Bostonians” formally incorporated the Boston Athenaeum in February 1807. The Athenaeum was, according to the A Climate for Art exhibition catalogue, “an organization designed to serve...a3 a library of literature and science, a museum of natural and artificial curiosities, a repository for models of machines and works of art, and a laboratory for natural philosophical inquiry and geographical improvements.” 157 American freedom and republican values. Poor and uneducated, even beyond being Catholic, the Irish were seen by New England nativists as easily duped by “bread and circuses" and the rhetoric of shifty demagogues. By the time Bierstadt painted Roman Fish Market in 1858, the nativism and anti-Catholicism of the Know-Nothings continued but became politically secondary to the issues surrounding the role of slavery in the nation. However, potent political nativism did not disappear but rather became subordinate to larger North-South sectional concerns, only to reemerge in the political arena following the Civil War.126 In November of 1858, about two years after Bierstadt’s winter in Rome and the same year he completed and exhibited Roman Fish Market, an art journal -- The Crayon -— commented upon recent immigration and offered its “Reflections on the [Upcoming] Census.” The Crayon, “the most substantive, 126The historiography of American politics in the 18503 is large and substantial. Some of the works that were of great value to this essay include: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945); Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) and The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; and Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). An ongoing debate exists among antebellum political historians over how strong the anti-slavery convictions of the Know-Nothing leadership were during the early 18503, and how nativist the Republican party’s mainstream was in the late 18503. For a recent dialogue on the historiography of the political history of late antebellum America see essays in The Journal of American History 86 (June 1999): 93-166. 158 pioneering, and enduring art periodical of the period,” presented the concepts of Nature, art, and criticism. Its editors, according to their own words, sought to place art “within the wider context of a desire for human progress and perfection.” But in dealing with the upcoming 1860 census and noting that the expected population increase of thirteen million in the United States was partially created by the influx of three million immigrants, the editors opined: “As far as the masses of foreigners are concerned, who contribute so much to swell our population, they have long ceased to offer any charms of novelty.” The Crayon termed the majority of immigrants “inferior in education and intelligence to corresponding American classes,” and the Irish “childlike” to those who manage to see through their “most grotesque stupidity.” In a nativist harangue, the editors continued to berate the Irish: “With a physique supported by diseased potatoes of modern times, and his spiritual nature fed by the rapturous food of the middle ages, the Irishman comes before us in a maze of bewildering inconsistencies, which, although unaesthetical in appearance, are instinct with picturesque philosophy.” According to The Crayon, the “picturesque” Catholic Irish, “inferior” to Protestant Anglo-Saxons, threatened to ruin the republican freedoms of the United States.”7 127Janice Simon, “‘The Crayon’, 1855-1861: The Voice of Nature In Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts" (Ph.D. diss., The University of Michigan, 1990), 1-2. See also Marion Grzesiak,‘The Crayon’ and the 159 Nativist, Know-Nothing ideology, frankly condemned the influx of non-Anglo-Saxons into the United States. Massachusetts’ Know-Nothing governor, Henry J. Gardner, in his 1855 inaugural address, mentioned that four million foreigners would arrive in the United States in the 18503 alone, exhibiting a disproportionate incidence of beggary, crime, and pauperism among the Catholic immigrants. Far-reaching measures were needed “to purify and ennoble the elective franchise” and “to guard against citizenship becoming cheap.” Gardner was specifically referring to the American Landscape (Montclair, N.J.: Montclair Art Museum, 1993), especially Alan Wallach's “Introduction: Formulating a High Art Esthetic.”; The Crayon 5.11 (November 1858): 315-316. The Crayon does note that all hope is not lost for even the poorest Irish immigrants: “[In the United States] a world of romance unfolds itself; for, while the [immigrant] children begin to stammer smart and enterprising Yankee words...some of the gipsy [sic] genius which American progress presents, is undoubtedly due to international amalgamations." Bierstadt's personal political and religious views on Catholic immigration to the United States, and his overt intentions for the painting are not made clear by his biographers or by existing written documentation. Bierstadt’s family did emigrate from Germany in the early 18303 to the United States. Notwithstanding antebellum nativist sentiment that occassionally singled out German immigrants, a proportion of German immigrants, unlike the large Irish populations in the Northeast, settled in communities in the West. As well, as Matthew Frye Jacobson states, “By longstanding tradition in the high discourse of race, the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic traditions were closely aligned.” He continues: “Anglo-Saxondom represented one branch of a freedom-loving, noble race of Germanic peoples.” A noticeable, well-defined “racial” gap, however, existed in the minds of some Americans between Roman Catholic Celts and Protestant Anglo-Saxons. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45—47. Whatever Bierstadt’s specific religious beliefs may have been can perhaps be deduced from the place of his wedding and of his funeral service -- Grace Episcopal Church, Waterville, New York, on 21 November 1866, according to Hendricks, 165, and St. Thomas’s Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City, according to the New York Times, February 19, 1902, respectively. 160 ethnoreligious minority, Irish Catholics, in Boston. Many citizens of Massachusetts in 1854 were less concerned by the threat of slavery entering Kansas and Nebraska than by the presence nearer to home of poor, Irish Catholic immigrants who might force native-born Americans to move to Kansas and Nebraska. The sense of urban filthiness and decay in Bierstadt’s depiction of Rome in The Arch of Octavius (Roman Fish Market) resonates on a level that portrays the Protestant anxiety toward what Boston, and the republican institutions of the United States, might become under the population pressure of unskilled, poor, and Catholic immigrants.128 The squalid Roman fish market operates in the space beneath the arches of the Portico of Octavia, built as part of the ancient Augustan building program. Named for Octavia, the sister of Augustus, the Portico originally bordered on the Forum Holitorium, the ancient vegetable 128Despite the different set of associations given by Protestant Americans to German Catholic and Italian Catholic immigrants during the antebellum era, the brunt of anti-Catholicism in Massachusetts in the 18503 (due to the sheer numbers of immigrants) fell on the Irish. For Protestant Bostonians, the Irish ethnicity of the immigrants was inseperable from the Catholic religious identity of those same immigrants. See Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nethings and the Politics of the 18503 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 103. The history of politics in antebellum Massachusetts is the subject of Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culutre: Massachusetts Parties, 17903-18403 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Boston Daily Advertiser, January 9, 1855, and Gardner, “Inaugural Address of 1855,” quoted in John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Mbvement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 94. 161 market. The Roman fish market occupied this site from the twelfth century until the late nineteenth century. The surrounding area became Rome’s Jewish Ghetto, the gated city within the city where Jews were confined until the Risorgimento. Bierstadt framed his view of the filthy fish market from inside the portico with his back toward the Church of Sant’Angelo in Pescheria. The brick and concrete arches that mark the facade of the portico represent the slowly crumbling remains of a grandeur destroyed when barbarians and Baroque popes stripped away original marble for their own purposes. The fifth edition (1858) of Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs, popular with American tourists, specifically describes the Portico of Octavia as “ruins...situated in the Pescheria, the modern fish—market, one of the filthiest quarters in Rome.”129 129“Aware that [Rome] was architecturally unworthy of her position as the capital of the Roman Empire...Augustus so improved her appearance that he could justifiably boast: ‘I found Rome built of bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.’” Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (London: Penguin Books, 1957), 69. See also MUrray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs; Forming Part II of the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (London: John Murray, fifth edition, 1858), 80. Murray’s handbook continues: “This vestibule had 2 fronts, each adorned with 4 fluted columns and 2 pilasters of white marble of the Corinthian order, supporting an entablature and pediment. The portico was destroyed by fire in the reign of Titus, and was restored by Septimius Severus and Caracalla...The 2 pillars and pilasters in the front, and the 2 pillars and 1 pilaster in the inner row, towards the portico, are sufficient to show the magnificence of the original building.” Choosing to depict the Portico of Octavia and the “American other,” Bierstadt, makes reference simply via the setting to the ultimate “other” in Rome itself -- the Jews in the Ghetto. Vance points out that Bierstadt includes a “long-bearded rabbi who is the primary indication that the arch demarcated one boundary” of the Jewish Ghetto. Vance also deals with contemporary commentary on the Jewish neighborhood in vol. II, 153-156. 162 The foreground scene of contemporary Romans in Bierstadt’s painting, framed by the proscenium-like archway, has the feeling of a tableau vivant or an opera setting. Roman Fish Market, with its juxtaposition of antique site, contemporary Italians, and Yankee tourists, moves beyond simple paradox. Many American travelers, including Bostonian Charles Eliot Norton, blamed the Italian natives for the decay of the city in general: “What war and fire and the ravages of barbarian conquerors left of ancient splendor, the Romans themselves, still more barbarian, -- people, princes, and popes, -- have conspired to destroy.”130 William Wetmore Story, in his Roba di Roma from 1862, describes the marketplace more particularly in the following terms: The splendour of imperial Rome has given place to the Pescheria -- the fish market. Step under this arch and look up that narrow, dirty, but picturesque street on the left -- that is the Pescheria. Stone slabs, broken and grappled by iron hooks, stretch out on either side into the street, and usurp it so as to leave no carriage-able way between them. If it be market-day you will see them covered with every kind of fishes. Green crusty lobsters, squirming crawfish all alive, heaps of red mullet, baskets of little shining sardines, large spigole, sprawling deformed cuttle-fish -— in a word, all the inhabitants of the Mediterranean are there exposed for sale.131 130Charles Eliot Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1855), 226. 131Story, 408. Art historian Diana Strazdes has noted that Bierstadt’s 163 In the space which once was a grand architectural achievement of Augustus’ reign as “republican prince,” nineteenth-century Romans maintained a fish market with all its grime and odors. A3 a mole’s-eye view, Roman Fish Market conveys its viewer into the center of the Eternal City, filled with unskilled, poor, Italian Catholics. Bierstadt’s Romans serve as prime visual evidence of beggary and pauperism -- of alien ne’er-do-wells who have an incapacity for republicanism and who have turned an ancient, ennobling site into a dirty, smelly environment. Bierstadt’s meticulous painting of the Roman site shows the portico and its inhabitants as picturesque, charming, and vivid. But unlike the eighteenth-century views of the Portico of Octavia by Giovanni Battista Piranesi or Hubert Robert’s The Octavian Gate and Fish Market, which emphasize the grandeur, scale and antiquity of the Roman ruins, Bierstadt chose to focus on the chaos and disarray of the fish market set against the backdrop of the deteriorating splendor of ancient, pre-imperial Rome. For the American visitor to Rome, the ruins of antiquity provided an exhibition from the past of great historical interest. Charles Edwards Lester, a Democrat and great—grandson of preacher Jonathan Edwards, selection of fish amplifies the “shabbiness of the place.” She suggests that he intentionally left out some of the higher quality fish -- sea bass, whiting, and sole -- for cheaper fish -- dogfish, sardines and eels; see Stebbins, Lure, 214. 164 served as United States Consul at Genoa from 1842 to 1847. In commenting on the number of monuments dating from antiquity in Italy and on what the government in Washington could learn from the “moral power” of those monumets, Lester states: “Monuments of all kinds are intended to illustrate noble deeds, and the feelings of the beholder partake of the associations they are designed to awaken.” American tourists in Italy sought out those ennobling associations from antiquity. Politically and intellectually, however, contemporary Catholic Rome was anathema to pre-Civil War American democratic values. By selecting an everyday scene from contemporary Rome and setting it against its backdrop from antiquity, Bierstadt’s misnamed yet picturesque “Arch of Octavius” contrasts greatly with the dirt and grime of the fish market and its idlers, beggars and gamblers. One American traveler to Italy wrote in 1853, “The charm of cleanliness belongs neither to Rome nor its people...But in Rome even dirt becomes picturesque.” Thus, Roman Fish Market functions as a recognition of characteristic ironies and incongruities, and emblematic of American ambivalence about Rome. Rome may have been picturesque to Americans, but that “picturesqueness” underscored the degeneration of people living under Catholic, monarchical institutions.132 132Hubert Robert’s painting The Octavian Gate and Fish Market, from 1784 is an oil on canvas, 63 x 45 in, and is in The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Bequest of Henderson Green. Diana Strazdes, in The Lure of Italy, concludes her remarks on Bierstadt’s “picturesque realism” with: “While wishing to convey the decrepitude of contemporary 165 Bierstadt utilizes sunlight in Roman Fish Market to draw our attention to specific acts of immoral degeneracy in the right foreground. Symbolic of movement from one realm into another, his use of light and dark qualifies the market as a site of contrast. Augustus J.C. Hare, in the 1874 version of his walks in Rome, recommended that the Portico of Octavia be viewed by just this morning light: Through the brick arch of the Portico we enter upon the ancient Pescheria, with the marble fish-slabs of imperial times still remaining in use. It is a striking scene —- the dark, many-storied houses almost meeting overhead and framing a narrow strip of deep blue sky, —- below, the bright groups of figures and rich colouring of hanging cloths and drapery.133 Through the use of Chiaroscuro, Bierstadt throws theatrical spotlights of bright mid-morning light on the interaction between the American tourists and a Roman beggar. Bierstadt’s presentation of the Italian beggar pestering the American tourists strongly evokes the feelings Rome, Bierstadt seems to have been unwilling to detach it entirely from an artful ideal,” Stebbins, 214. For William L. Vance, Bierstadt’s The Arch of Octavius (Roman Fish Market) is full of irony and paradox. Bierstadt represents “the effort to move toward democratic realism from a starting point in the picturesque, if only by...a sympathetic quick sketch depicting popular activities.” See Vance, II, 145. Vance sets his discussion of the painting into a section entitled “Politics of the Picturesque”, vol. II, 139-160. See also note 3 above for more on the meaning of the picturesque for Americans. Lester, I, 241. Hillard, II, 21. 133Augustus J.C. Hare, Walks in Rome (New York: George Routledge & Sons, fourth edition, 1874), 164-65, italics in original. Hare’s recommendation for a morning light viewing of the portico appears on 5-6. 166 of Protestant New Englanders towards the poorer citizens of Catholic countries. Tourists in Rome expected to experience beggars and, because it confirmed deeply held convictions, the encounter, as a desired part of the trip, strengthened the authenticity of the tour. Here, in Bierstadt’s interaction between the tourists and the beggar, the contrast between the United States and Rome becomes most explicit. Bierstadt presentes the tourist couple’s disgust for the “real life” of these degenerate urban Italians, figuring mid-nineteenth-century Rome as a stage setting that prompts performances from tourists as well as the local inhabitants. Guidebook in hand, the tourists enact a ritual movement from ancient site to site, gathering knowledge and experiences as they travel. Here Bierstadt’s usage calls to mind what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has termed “the major tropes of ethnographic display.” His American tourists, like the painting’s viewers, as vicarious tourists, penetrate the back streets of Rome. His image captures the life world of the Romans, allowing the tourists and the painting’s viewers to experience “the people” at moments when they are most “themselves.” The emotions of Bierstadt’s tourists, with the frightened, turned head of the American woman and the contrived, stoic pose of the American man, express a heightened, liminal state. The American tourists and the painting’s contemporary viewers have removed themselves from their New England “ordinary” to discover, in a multi-layered experience, Rome’s 167 “extraordinary.” Bierstadt has enframed the scene in the portico archway, much as the tourists themselves, guidebook to lead them, attempt to enframe and control their experience of Rome. The viewers of Bierstadt’s painting encounter a tourist event -- an American couple lost in a bewildering labyrinth of Catholic vice -- charged with meaning.134 The lazy and chaotic Italians in Roman Fish Market all symbolize problems that antebellum Protestant Americans believed were created by the Catholic Church and monarchical governments. American writers apparently could not help but comment on vice, especially beggary, in Rome. William Wetmore Story notes that “begging, in Rome, is as much a profession as praying and shopkeeping. Happy is he who is born deformed, with a withered limb, or to whom Fortune sends the present of a hideous accident or malady; it is a stock to set up trade upon.” Story, making connections between idleness and the Catholic Church, continues: The splendid robes of ecclesiastical Rome have a draggled fringe of beggary and vice...Industry is the only purification of a nation; and as the fertile and 134My interpretation of the tropes provided by Bierstadt’s tourist couple relies on Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, especially 62. Brigette Bailey, in her essay “The Protected Witness: Cole, Cooper, and the Tourist’s View of the Italian Landscape,” writes: “Touring the Italian scene offers a pedagogy of identity in which middle- and upper-class tourists learn to use vision both to encounter and to control difference and, therefore, to reconfirm their function as bearers and shapers of the American social vision.” See Bailey’s essay in David Miller, American Iconology, 92-111. For theoretical discussions of tourism and modern society, see Urry, and MacCannell. 168 luxuriant Campagna stagnates into malaria, because of its want of ventilation and movement, so does this grand and noble people.135 For Story, “the restrictive policy of the [Roman] Church,” in opposition to the “industrious” designs of the Protestant churches in the United States, created idleness, beggary, and vice; if only the Church of the “grand and noble” Romans would promote freedom of thought and action, then beggary would disappear. As understood by Americans in the 18503, Rome was prevented by the tradition and power of the Roman Church from achieving advancement in science, art, and technology. The Church allowed superstition and indolence to be widespread. The Church fomented beggary and idleness. And the Church was as tyrannical and undemocratic as possible. The mainstream antebellum American press often commented on perceived social problems created in the United States by the same traditions of the Catholic Church and its Irish immigrant adherents. For example, a series of anti-Irish cartoons occupied large sections of a single issue of Harper’s weekly on November 7, 1857. One exhibited a footless and disheveled beggar, clearly marked as Irish by both his physiognomy and by the caption (fig. 26). The 135Story, 46. Story’s chapter from Roba di Roma on “Beggars in Rome” also appeared in Boston’s Atlantic Mbnthly 4.12 (August 1859): 207-219. For more on beggars as “social counterfeits” in the American city, see John F. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 70-111. 169 caption “IRISH BEGGAR to generous Young Lady, ‘Thank’ee, Miss; but I niver takes country money’” expresses the view that Irish beggary, like Roman vice, was not only a Catholic but an urban phenomenon. Thomas R. Whitney, writing about Irish Catholics in the United States in 1856, argued that “to believe that a mass so crude and incongruous, so remote from the spirit, the ideas, and the customs of America, can be made to harmonize readily with the new element into which it is cast, is, to say the least, unnatural.” But his statement could just as easily be a late 18503 reading of Roman Fish Market, where “crude and incongruous” Italians (symbolized by the Roman beggar) contrast with the “spirit...of America” (symbolized by the Yankee tourist couple and the ancient archway), and create an anxious, unnatural situation for the Americans on travel. The chief virtue a poor, urban man could display was industry. Nonetheless the poor Irish, like Bierstadt’s idle Romans, serve as hazards which Americans must endure and maneuver around and through.136 The other images of the Irish from that issue of Harper’s Weekly deal with political corruption and Irish 136Thomas R. Whitney, A Defence of the American Policy, as Opposed to the Encroachments of Foreign Influence, and Especially to the Interference of the Papcy in the Political Interests and Affairs of the United States (New York: De Witt & Davenport, 1856), 165. The emphasis is in the original. For more on the role of Whitney within late antebellum politics, see Bruce Levine, “Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-Nothing Party,” The Journal of American History 88 (September 2001): 455-488. 170 unfitness for the franchise. The Irish in these images fight, live among dogs, imbibe alcohol, and openly corrupt the naturalization and American political processes. This too has its analogue in Roman Fish Market, where, standing directly in front of the American tourists, four men appear to be playing Mbrra, a game of chance. One of the men in a green coat, standing to the right, points with his right hand while sneaking his left hand into his jacket pocket, counter-balanced by another standing male figure who looks down. Two other men also look downward and hunch over. William Wetmore Story describes the game of Mbrra in his Roba di Roma: Two persons place themselves Opposite each other, holding their right hands closed before them. They then simultaneously and with a sudden gesture throw out their hands, some of the fingers being extended, and other shut up on the palm, -- each calling out in a loud voice, at the same moment, the number he guesses the fingers extended by himself and his adversary to make. If neither cry out aright, or if both cry out aright, nothing is gained or lost; but if only one guess the true number, he wins a point...the [number of points to win] is generally five...So universal is this game in Rome, that the very beggars play away their earnings at it...A bottle of wine is generally the stake.137 l373tory, 117-119. 171 Instead of actively participating in the commerce of the market, these Roman men spend their time gambling their money and wine away. Similar to the Romans misuse of the ancient republican site, the Portico of Octavia, for gambling and fishmongering in Bierstadt’s painting, a cartoon from November 6, 1858 in Harper’s weekly (fig. 27) shows the “fitin’, drinkin’, or votin’” Irish appropriating an American republican locale -- the polling place. In the image “Political Market,” votes -- not fish -- are for sale. A politician approaches “Contractor McDabber,” offering to pay one dollar per man for “good and trusty voters.” At the left, the willing Irishman, thin pipe in his mouth, reaches out to receive cash for votes. The background abounds with simian-looking Irishmen simply milling about. According to the caption, McDabber barters with the politician, requesting not only a hundred cents but also a drink of whiskey for each of his prospective voters. The cartoon parodies both the professional politician and the Irish understanding of the American right to vote. The Irish, having emigrated from a Catholic environment that, according to nativists, created sloth and drunkenness, become willing dupes in political corruption. Irish votes in America are bought and sold for cash and whiskey just as the wages of Bierstadt’s Mbrra-playing Romans, ignoring their republican background, are wasted on petty gambling and wine. 172 The other colorful and dirty contemporary Romans who fill Bierstadt’s image embody the unfitness of Catholics for a republican environment. Three sculptural, posed figures -- two lazy males and a standing young female -- to the foreground side of the marble fish tables, enhance Roman Fish.Market’s theatrical feel. The male figure to the right, broom propped on his arm, awkwardly sleeps on the job. The pose of the figure closely echoes that of the marble, early second century Relief of Endymoin Asleep in the Stanza dei Imperatori of the Capitoline Museum in Rome on display during Bierstadt’s visit there. Through this male figure in Roman Fish Market, Bierstadt transforms the greatness of classical art into a contemporary lazy Italian. Bierstadt's exposure of this devaluation of Rome’s ancient splendor continues in the barefoot and dirty fisherman asleep on the mat of straw on the pavement. This figure directly quotes an ancient sculpture that once was also part of the collections on the Capitoline, the Barberini Faun (fig. 28), a drunken satyr lying sprawled on an animal skin draped across a rock. The sleep of both ancient faun and Bierstadt’s dirty fisherman seem troubled and uneasy. Bierstadt encapsulates the notion that contemporary Romans lack a Protestant work ethic. As tourist James Jackson Jarves noted in 1856, “The Romans, of all Italians, have...the most profound aversion to labor.”138 138Jarves, 319. William Sidney Mount’s Farmers Nooning, 1836 (The 173 In the shadows on the wall behind and above the sculptural figures, a weathered broadside announces a production of the tragedy Medea, starring the Italian actress Adelaide Ristori, at the Teatro Metastasio. Ristori was performing Ernest Legouvé’s.Medée on a tour throughout Italy during the winter that Bierstadt spent in Rome. Legouvé’s play adapts Euripides’ tragedy, based upon the story of the quest for the Golden Fleece. The plot involves immigration, as Jason and Medea flee to a new home in Corinth. When the play opens, Medea has just discovered that Jason, her lover and father to her sons, has secretly married the daughter of Kreon, the King of Corinth. Kreon, out of fear of retaliation, has decided to exile Medea with her two young sons. Seeking shelter in Athens, Medea poisons Kreon and his daughter. The story of an internal conflict of emotions ends in Medea’s act of infanticide, the killing of her sons to punish Jason. Euripides and later adapters, including Legouvé, carefully build the suspense toward this shocking climax. A major theme of the play centers on uncontrolled emotions of anger and jealousy which Museums at Stony Brook, New York. Gift of Mr. Frederick Sturges, Jr., 1954) also quotes the Barberini Faun. Elizabeth Johns argues that Mount utilizes an African-American-turned-drunken-satyr in this image to “unequivocally” announce to the painting’s viewers that the “main allusion" was to slavery, and that the “unambiguously lazy” African-American affirmed the beliefs of anti-abolitionist New Yorkers like Mount and his patrons. See Johns, American Genre Painting, 33-38. For another antebellum American quotation of the Barberini Faun, see William Holbrook Beard's A Lesson For The Lazy, 1859 (Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of Matthew Vassar, 864.1.6). 174 overcome reason and bring disaster to all. But the story of Medea’s treachery for ancient Athens resonates strongly with Catholic immigration to the United States. In a moment that reads like Manifest Destiny patriotism, the Athenian chorus in Euripides’ play, refers to itself as “children of the blessed gods,/ born from a sacred, unravaged land,/ feeding on cleverness/ that is most glorious.” Euripides’ Medea is not Athenian, not even Greek, but a foreigner from the distant land of Colchis, both an ultimate Other and a sinister, magical transgressor. The chorus of the play asks how Athens, in light of its most cherished values, could incorporate the story of Medea into its civic character, while Bierstadt, in Roman Fish Market, poses a similar question for the mid-nineteenth-century viewers of his painting: How can a nation, with specific cherished values, incorporate individuals so seemingly different into its civic body?139 The pose of the third sculptural figure, a standing Lazian female, in the foreground of Bierstadt’s painting closely resembles a version of Medea created, originally in clay in 1865, by William Wetmore Story (fig. 29). This figure, a young peasant girl with embroidered outfit, 139For a version of Euripedes’ Medea, see Ruby Blondell, et al., trans. and eds., Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripedes (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 169-215. Especially helpful for my understanding of the play was Ruby Blondell’s “Introduction,” 149-169. The quotation from the chorus is from lines 826-829 of Medea. 175 meditative countenance, and distaff and spindle in hand, stands on the same side of the marble fish-covered slabs as the drunk and sleeping males.140 She (and Story’s Medea) perhaps suggest a female sculptural work, a draped woman in the Vatican Museums sometimes identified as Livia, Augustus’ wife, or Pudicitia, Modesty. The modesty and nobility of ancient womanhood has become a poor Lazian woman in Bierstadt’s picture. The female peasant, dressed accurately in contemporary garb, thus functions in the same way as her two male counterparts, as a not-so-subtle reminder of the lost glory of ancient Rome and the diminished moral standards of nineteenth-century papal Rome. Bierstadt’s “Medea” stands at an angle to the picture plane, and her head twists in the direction of a seated female figure, child in arms, and a nature morte —- an array of sprawling dead fish. Adding an element of empirical realism to the image, Bierstadt’s use of nature morte contains certain elements of a vanitas painting. The dead fish thus symbolize the brevity of all life and the transience of earthly pleasures and achievements. Meanwhile, the pose of the seated female and child recall Michelangelo’s Vatican Pieta, but also resemble a scene from Legouvé’s play where Medea, played by Ristori, caresses her 140Noticing the number of women with spindles, the Reverend John E. Edwards described their actions: “[S]ome [were] spinning in a style that must be seen to be understood. The flax was attached to a distaff and drawn off to form the thread, which was twisted by twirling the broach on which it was wound with the fingers.” See Edwards, 164-165. 176 children prior to killing them (fig. 30). The dead dogfish and rays surrounding the mother and child, the association of the mother and the standing woman, separated by space but back-to-back, and the diagonal line that connects poster, standing figure and mother’s lap, connect the figures with the story of Medea. The play's scene of a destructive- but-wronged female would have been calculated to encourage feelings of fascination, pity, and repulsion in its viewers. Rome itself, in the mid-nineteenth century, had the same affect on American visitors. The paradox of death and beauty, of theater and fish market -- the strong contrast between dirty fishermen in the disorder of a smelly market and the connotation of high art and order in an artistic performance -— would only have added to the exotic nature of the city for Bierstadt’s viewers as for American tourists like Bierstadt’s Yankee couple. Both the story of Medea and the city of Rome engaged their viewers as sites of fascinated ambivalence.141 141For more on Ristori and Medea, see Adelaide Ristori, Memoirs and Artistic Studies of Adelaide Ristori, trans. G. Mantelli (New York: Doubleday, 1907), 45: “At the beginning of 1857 I visited, for the first time, the beautiful city of Naples, where on the evening of June 14th, at the Regio Teatro del Fondo, I began with ‘Medea,’ a short series of my performances.”; and Henry Knepler, The Gilded Stage (London: Constable, 1968). For nature morte, a still-life motif originating in ancient Rome and particularly popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in the Netherlands and Italy, see Charles Sterling, La nature morte de l’antiquité a nos jours (Paris: Editions Pierre Tisné, 1952). Joy F. Kasson discusses Story’s sculpture in “Domesticating the Demonic: Medea,” in Joy F. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 203-240. On 223, Kasson identifies Ristori, and her American tour in the mid 18603, as the inspiration for Story's sculpture. Leslie 177 The theatricality of Bierstadt’s foreground figures in Roman Fish Market recalls sculptural replicas in the collections and exhibit galleries of nineteenth-century American art museums. These collections of casts and reproductions were, according to the trustees and founders of early American museums, “the means by which the museum-going public was to acquire the benefits of higher civilization.” The nineteenth-century role of plaster cast collections in museums reveals a favoritism for the “masterpieces” of ancient and Renaissance sculpture, even in replica. The Boston Athenaeum, a combination library and art gallery like Augustus' buildings at the portico, for instance owned and displayed numerous such cast reproductions (fig. 31). In the Athenaeum’s first sculpture show in 1839, eighty pieces were exhibited; over one third of the pieces were classical replicas. The Athenaeum exhibited a reproduction of the Barberini Faun, upon which Bierstadt based his drunken fisherman, as part of its regular displays from 1858 through 1867. American art institutions, with their Greek, Roman, and Renaissance reproductions, would “civilize and refine a ‘raw’ American public, would tame ‘the barbarian’ and enhance the lives” of all Americans. From its purchase in 1858, Roman Fish Market Furth also utilizes American interest in Ristori and Medea in “’The Modern Medea’ and Race Matters: Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s Margaret Garner," American Art 12 (1998): 36-57. 178 and its posed figures functioned as a painted ethnographic “sculpture” display for visitors to the exhibitions at the Boston Athenaeum. But Bierstadt inverts the “civilizing potential” of ancient sculptures. His three “replicas” in the foreground represent the civilized turned barbarian. The plaster cast reproductions in nineteenth-century American museums claimed the humanism and the heritage of the ancient world and the Renaissance for Protestant America.142 The exotic nature of Rome constitutes the thematic core of Bierstadt’s image. In the late antebellum years, many 142The politics of defining and representing “others” has more to do with the interests of those with the power to represent other cultures than it does with understanding the groups being represented. Collections have helped establish positions of authority, dominion, and social imperialism over the “collected ‘other’” in the service of individual or state sovereignty. See “The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the Institutional Definition of Art,” in Wallach, 38-56. For more on the Boston Athenaeum's sculpture collection, see Hoyle, especially Rosemary Booth, “A Taste for Sculpture,” 23-35. The cast replica of the Barberini Faun is listed in Perkins. Perkins quotes from previous Athenaeum catalogues which cite “Winckelmann” and another author: “'The beautiful Barberini sleeping Faun is no ideal, but an image of simple, unconstrained nature,’” and “’The sleep in which he lies sunk after fatigue, and the relaxation of all the muscles of the limbs, are expressed in a manner whcih cannot be improved; it is, indeed, inimitable. We can almost hear the deep respiration, see how the wine swells the veins, how the excited pulses beat,’” respectively. Bierstadt has transformed the famous ancient sculptures on display in Rome, and in reproductions in the United States, into physiognomic types. These types and their racial implications were presented in galleries of nations, “types of mankind” exhibitions, crowd scenes, and group portraits of life in European and American cities. For examples of the importance of physiognomic types in nineteenth-century exhibitions see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett; Charles Coleman Sellers,.Mr. Peale’s MUseum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980); and Richard D. Atlick, The Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 179 Americans travelers to Italy made note of its otherness. For American traveler and writer James Jackson Jarves, the city deserved criticism: Real Rome is dirty, comfortless, and torpid; the home of beggars, indolence, and superstition. This is the true city of the Church...[which] prefers the millinery and acting of her ritual, the multiplication of her holidays, the robing of her priests and the tawdry decoration of her altars, the propagation of a new dogma and the discovery of a new relic, to all that science, art, and progress are doing elsewhere for humanity.143 Rome was thus held to be the opposite of everything that progressives in the United States were striving to shape their country into in the 18503. Just as the United States embodied Progress, Rome represented stagnation. When Americans described (or in Bierstadt's case, depicted) Italy and compared it to the United States, they emphasized the differences rather than the similarities. Bierstadt’s tourists appear “bewildered” by the confusion of contemporary Italians before them. Yet their erect and protected attitude toward the chaos of their surroundings exemplify their unwillingness to fraternize truly with the Romans. The Italy which Bierstadt’s tourists have come to see is the Italy of the past, not of the present. In classifying Italy as the site of antiquity and Catholicism, Americans were thus able to define -- or to redefine -- 143Jarves, 351-352. 180 themselves as modern and progressive, as culturally (and morally) distinct from the contemporary Romans.144 The idleness of Bierstadt’s Italian Catholics and the strewn-about fish in Roman Fish Market contrast greatly with the efficiency and orderliness which characterize some images of Americans and the marketplace, for instance the 1856 Nathaniel Currier print Preparing for Market (fig. 32) and the Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion illustration “Faneuil Hall Market Before Thanksgiving” (fig. 33). In the former, based upon Jerome Thompson’s painting of the same title (displayed at the Boston Athenaeum in 1855), viewers encounter an agricultural bounty linked to progress and innovation. The live adult animals and profusion of baby animals in Currier’s image bring into even sharper relief the death, inactivity, and decay Bierstadt depicts in his Roman market scene. Unlike the strewn-about fish in the Roman market, the poultry, pork, and other items for sale in Boston's Faneuil Hall hang neatly amid the columns of the market, even on a busy shopping day before 144Leonardo Bounomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831-1866) (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 14. According to Buonomo, nineteenth-century Americans felt themselves more aligned with the deeds of the ancient republican Romans. See also Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), where she argues “that anti-Catholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture,” xv11. 181 Thanksgiving. In nineteenth-century America, the public market served as a trope of a civic, moral economy -- an ancient concept dating to the Forum Holitorium (the site of the 18003 fish market) and the Forum Boarium in Rome. But the order and action in the image of Boston’s Faneuil Hall, absent from Bierstadt’s mid-nineteenth-century Roman market, reflect the civic economy of a republic. For Americans, the marketplace had become a metaphor of stable, orderly civic life. In Roman Fish Market, the viewer sees the civic plenitude and morality of ancient Rome reduced by its Catholic inhabitants to moral degeneracy.145 Although the Romans of Bierstadt’s Roman Fish Market would have been considered more “aesthetically pleasing” in appearance than the poor Irish immigrants of urban Boston, the criticisms in the political and religious discourse of the 18503 conflated the Romans’ “bewildering inconsistencies” and their Catholic Church-fed “spiritual nature” with the Irish. Bierstadt’s outward profession of belief in aesthetics mirrored those of the editors and the readers of The Crayon. Whether or not Bierstadt consciously intended Roman Fish Market as an openly anti-Irish, anti-Catholic statement, his depiction of contemporary 145Perkins lists Preparing for Market as by Jerome Thompson (1814-1886). The shared nature of American market spaces serves as the subject of Helen Tangires, “Meeting on Common Ground: Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington University, 1999). 182 Romans resonated close to home for its Bostonian viewers. Both the Romans in his painting and the Irish in the United States were almost exclusively Catholic. Just as Romans litter the portico of the antique locale in Roman Fish Market and already fill the shadows of the place, the tens of thousands of Irish in the 18503 were considered by many Americans to “litter” the port cities of the United States. The Know-Nothings feared that the American laborer was being debased by Irish immigrants; that the economy of the United States would become as indolent and backwards as that of Rome. The papacy kept the Romans at its beck and call; professional and corrupt politicians (especially, in the eyes of Know-Nothings) kept the Irish voters, who were viewed to have little capacity for republicanism, at their “beck and call.”146 146Some Americans conflated all Catholics —- for example, in 1848, the victory over Mexico marked a pivotal moment for Americans in the great battle between Protestant republicanism and Catholic monarchism. See Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Mbntezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Bierstadt’s inscription of political allegory in Roman Fish Market is not unique to that painting. In his painting Donner Lake from the Summit (c.1873, New York Historical Society) and his oil sketch for the work, currently in the collections of The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, View of Donner Lake, California (1871-72), Bierstadt subsumed the Central Pacific railroad’s achievement of crossing the Sierra Nevada range in California to the natural grandeur and picturesqueness of the mountains and Donner Lake. Although the painting was commissioned by one of the leading railroad promoters of the 18703, Bierstadt did not focus on the railroad itself -- for in the large canvas version the evidence of the railroad is only the small line of snowsheds stretched across the rocky side of the mountain peak to the right of the image. The message of Bierstadt’s subtlety was, according to Nancy K. Anderson, “a powerful endorsement of the transcontinental enterprise." Roman Fish Market might be characterized as a “powerful endorsement” of New England Protestant, anti-Catholic enterprise. For a more detailed discussion of 183 The crumbling stucco and decaying bricks, the misuse of antiquity in the capitals as table legs and marble slabs as fish stands, the general filthiness of the city, all attested to the fact that Catholicism itself enfeebled human enlightenment. Standing amid the swarthy Italians, a proud yet fearful American couple, attempts to use a guidebook to maneuver their way from one ancient historical site to the next. Bierstadt’s Roman Fish Market served as a “guidebook” itself —- to enhance knowledge, and to detail what to see and how to see it —- for Protestant Bostonians as they sought to make sense of their surroundings. In Roman Fish Market, the American man’s red, white and blue clothes include a faded red vest and blue jacket. As he stands attempting to ignore the nearby beggar, his “Americanness” seems already diminished and faded by the presence of people of questionable whiteness and religion. The New Bedford Mercury, in commenting on the sale of Roman Fish Market to Donner Lake from the Summit in the context of Western landscape painting, see Nancy K. Anderson, “’The Kiss of Enterprise': The Western Landscape as Symbol and Resource,” in Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, eds., Reading American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 208-231. Also, Andrew Walker at The Art Institute of Chicago makes a link between Bierstadt’s MOuntain Brook (1863) and the American Civil War. Walker claims that Bierstadt “took a...subtle approach” in Mbuntain Brook, “envision[ing] freedom in the actual terrain of the nation.” The painting “functioned as an emblem of more peaceful times.” Using Beirstadt’s compositional elements, a poem by abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, and Mbuntain Brook’s central figure, a kingfisher, as allegory, Walker shows that the painting has deeper meaning when held against the backdrop of the Civil War. See Andrew Walker, “American Art & the Civil War,” American Art Reveiw 11.5 (1999): 126-131, 207. The New Bedford Mercury notation comes from 14 December 1858, and is cited in the chronolgy provided by Anderson and Ferber. 184 the Boston Athenaeum, remarkably confuses the subject matter of the painting and conflates the Romans and the Irish: “Mr. Bierstadt has disposed of his oil painting...of the ‘Irish Market’ or ‘Arch of Octavius'.” In Boston and other cities of the Northeast United States, in the late 18503, the people of questionable whiteness and dubious religious affiliation were recent Irish Catholic immigrants. Although anti-Catholicism and nativism became secondary issues during the Civil War, concerns over the religion, education, and poverty of Catholic immigrants to the United States returned to the political center many times in the years following the war and in the twentieth century. Almost immediately following the sale of Roman Fish Market to the Boston Athenaeum, Bierstadt joined the survey party of Frederick W. Lander to the Rocky Mountains. During the Civil War and in the ensuing years, Bierstadt would paint giant canvases of the mountains of the American West, influenced by his numerous travels there. Landscape paintings of the classical past, so prevalent during the antebellum years, declined in their popularity. Whereas American artists and writers, in great numbers, still visited Italy, a republic beginning in 1860 (minus the Papal States), generally their desires to see the sights were no longer steeped in classicism but in romantic notions of travel and medievalism. Still influenced by the old masters, George Inness, in Italy for his second time in 1870-1874, created moody images with misty atmosphere unlike 185 the meticulous and picturesque paintings of antebellum artists. 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Thomas Cole, Dream of Arcadia, 1838. Oil on canvas, 39 x 63 in. Collection of the Denver Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lindsey Gentry. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 179. 216 m ain'...‘-o...33-n . ...... .. . ._., fig. 2. Martin Johnson Heade, Roman Newsboys, about 1848-49. Oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 24 3/8 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 202. 217 fig. 3. George Loring Brown, Tivoli (The Falls of Tivoli), 1850. Oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 32 1/2 in. Collection of The Newark Museum, Purchase 1957, The G.L. Brown Fund. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 289. 218 fig. 4. Sanford Robinson Gifford, Lake Nemi, 1856-57. Oil on canvas, 39 5/8 x 60 3/8 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 296-97. 219 fig. 5. Jasper Francis Cropsey, Temple of Neptune, Paestum, 1859. Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 51 in. C01- lection of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation. 220 fig. 6. Albert Bierstadt, Ruins of Paestum, 1858. Oil on canvas, 22 x 36 in. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Putnam Dana McMillan Fund. 221 fig. 7. Bierstadt, The Arch of Octavius (Roman Fish Market), 1858. Oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 37 1/2 in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 215. 222 fig. 8. Thomas Hicks, Margaret Faller, 1848. Oil on canvas, 16 x 13 in. Private collection. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 199. 223 fig. 9. Richard Caton Woodville, War News from Mexico, 1848. Oil on canvas, 27 x 24 3/4 in. The National Academy of Design, New York. Illustrated as Plate 1 in Johns, American Genre Painting. 224 fig. 10. Frederick R. Spencer, The Newsboy, 1849. Oil on wood, 21 x 17 in. Private collection. Illus- trated as Pl. 1 in Husch. 225 r/ .75 z :- .. f4, [,0 fig. 11. “The Judgment of the Times,” Plate 35 from G. Daelli, A Relic of the Italian Revolution of 1849 (New Orleans: Gabici’s Music Stores, 1850?). Michigan State University Special Collections. 226 fig. 12. “Impediments to Liberty,” Plate 2 from Daelli. Michigan State University Special Collec- tions. A‘— L- fig. 13. Heade, Roman Newsboys II, 1849. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 203. 228 fig. 14. Cropsey, Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, 1865. Oil on canvas, 22 3/8 x 36 3/8 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. Illustrated in Adams, 57. 229 fig. 15. Cole, The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1835-36. Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 76 in. The New-York Historical Society. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 87. 230 fig. 16. Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836. Oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 63 in. The New-York Historical Society. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 88. 231 ‘ "S: .31". ."»".-~::’ , mutt , fig. 17. Cole, The Cascatelli, Tivoli, Looking To— wards Rome, c.1832. Oil on canvas, 32 3/4 x 44 1/2 in. Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walker Knight Sturges and Family. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 61. 232 fig. 18. Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill, 1826. Oil on canvas, 43 x 36 in. Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Illus- trated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 52. 233 fig. 19. Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857. Oil on canvas, 42 1/4 x 90 1/2 in. The Corcoran Gal- lery of Art, Washington, DC. Illustrated in Johns, New Worlds, 165. 234 fig. 20. Cole, Past, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 x 61 in. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 94. 235 fig. 21. Cole, Present, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 x 61 in. Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts. Illustrated in Truettner, Thomas Cole, 95. 236 fig. 22. Daniel Huntington, Italia, 1843. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 237 Tho m. inventive plun- Italian upo- away-day“ I.“ “I . fig. 23. Detail of an 1851 billhead for “North American Electric Washing Fluid,...Warranted Perfectly Harmless in its Operations...,” 1851. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. 238 fig. 24. Cropsey, Evening at Paestum, 1856. Oil on wood, 9 x 15 1/2 in. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Gift of Matthew Vassar. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 267. 239 fig. 25. Flavius Fischer, The Dismal Swamp, 1857?. Oil on canvas, 30 x 50 in. Maier Museum of Art, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, VA. Illustrated in David Miller, Dark Eden, 39. 240 ,1 luv-Mun , m r... fun-fl-ylau “y. II can, “IRISH BEGGAR to generous Young Lady 3 Weekly, 26 fig. 720. 1858, November 6, I Harper 241 “‘1'...“ Mi hm " “at: "'""""‘ :ntVw: ‘ I... IrDA-n “9t! Inn—M' “pita-“1M3?” :tz'lfi" :71. 1:17‘..."'“'.:.':...“":..."‘ '..'-'"~'-'-_..: .. ' Why-U7 Yunnan-:Iu‘ann- fifi-‘b-‘fih h LL W“ W...“ 1‘ fig. 27. “Political Market,” Harper’s Weekly, Novem- ber 6, 1858, 720. 242 fig. 28. Barberini Faun, c. 200 BCE. Marble. Staatliche Antiken—Sammlungen, Munich. Illustrated in Stebbins, Lure, 228. 243 fig. 29. William Wetmore Story, Medea. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Henry Chauncey. Illustrated in Joy Kasson, 220. 244 fig. 30. Unidentified photographer, stage image of Adelaide Ristori in character as Medea with her chil— dren, n.d. Houghton Library, Harvard Theatre Collec- tion, Havard University, Cambridge, MA. Illustrated in Joy Kasson, 229. 245 Wood Statuary Room of the Boston Athenaeum. fig. 31. engraving from Ballou’s Pictorial, Vol. 201. 1855, 8, March 31, 246 fig. 32. Currier & Ives, “Preparing for Market,” 1856. Hand—colored engraving. 247 fig. 33. “Faneuil Hall Market Before Thanksgiving," Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, December 6, 1851. Illustrated in Nylander, 268. 248