Title: British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 by Maureen McCue (review)
Abstract: BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND THE RECEPTION OF ITALIAN OLD MASTER ART, 1793-1840. By Maureen McCue. Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 204. ISBN 978-1-4094-6832-5. £60.As a result of the French revolutionary period and the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars (particularly the Italian campaigns of 1792 to 1802) Old Master paintings flooded onto the London art market from the great French and Italian aristocratic collections. In her absorbing new study of Romantic writers' responses to these cultural treasures, Maureen McCue points to the public exhibitions of the Orleans collection in London in 1793 and 1798 as key moments in the awakening of broader British audiences to the extraordinary riches of Italian Renaissance art. She also highlights the importance of the Musee Napoleon-briefly accessible to British travellers during the short-lived Peace of Amiens (1802-03)-for displaying the artworks looted by Napoleon's forces, and brought together in Paris for the benefit of the masses. She vividly evokes this extraordinary period in which, first, Italian Old Master paintings poured into Britain, and then, post-Waterloo, the British themselves flooded through the Continent into Italy as tourists hungry to absorb the culture of a land made exotic and enticing through art and literature. The democratising impetus of this period was vital, McCue suggests, for encouraging a move away from the aristocratic Grand Tour, focused primarily on Rome and the remains of Classical art, and towards a new interest in Italian Renaissance art, and specifically the art of Tuscany, explored by the growing class of less 'grand' tourists.This is familiar territory for art historians and those studying the history of collecting, but McCue is to be commended for melding the study of Romantic literature with texts more frequently studied within the history of art, and also with travel writing. All of these fields tend to be separated out in an entirely artificial manner; bringing them together illustrates how richly interwoven these areas were in Romantic-era culture and in the minds of British audiences. Exploring an admirable range of sources, from travel guides and picture gallery catalogues, to poetry and novels inspired by art, to periodical articles aimed at educating the culture-hungry middle classes, and to be published art criticism, private journals and correspondence, McCue amply demonstrates that art and writing imaginatively enriched each other in this period, and that knowledge of Italian Renaissance art was spread to a far wider public, encouraging readerviewers to engage with art in creative new ways. However, one reservation about this book is that in attempting to cover such a wide territory, McCue frustratingly does not have space to explore some of these intriguing publications and authors in greater depth.One can also quibble with other aspects of McCue's argument. Admiration for Italian Renaissance artists was not such a new phenomenon as she suggests; in terms of cultural status, Raphael and Michelangelo had long reigned supreme in the minds of British collectors, artists, and writers on art (for example, Richardson and Reynolds). Nor did the Classical tour cease to interest the British traveller in Italy, as McCue seems to imply; Antique art continued to maintain its hold over the imagination of British travellers. If there was a growing focus on Florentine artists and rulers, this emerged alongside the long-standing acknowledgment of the superiority of Italian art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, there is certainly much to be said for McCue's overall thesis that in Romantic writing on art there is a move towards exploring the impact of art's imaginative power within the mind of the viewer. Writing by Byron, Shelley and Hazlitt embodies this shift towards the inner, emotional landscape of the viewer, and away from the standardised classical canon of taste characteristic of eighteenth-century writing on art. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot