Fawning over marbles: Robert and Gerardine Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures and the Role of Photography in the Reception of the Antique

ROM E PALA!S DC VATICAi\ !CHAPEL LE S!XTlNEl

Art and the Early Photographic Album

Edited by

STEPHEN BANN

National Gallery of Art, Washington

Distributed by Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Copyright© 201 l Board of Trustees, National Ga llery of Art, Washington. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and ro8 of the U.S. Copyright Law, and except by reviewers from the public press), without written permiss ion from the publishers.

This volume was produced by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Publishing Office, Nationa l Ga llery of Art, Washington www.nga.gov

Editorial Board JO HN O LI V ER H A N D, chairman

SUSAN M. AR ENS BER G

SARA H FI SHE R

THERE SE o'MA LLE Y

Editor in Chief

JUD Y M ETRO

Deputy Publisher and Production Manager

CH RIS VOG EL

Series Editor TH ER ESE O'MA LLE Y

Managing Editor

CYN THI A WAR E

Program Assistants

LA U RA PLA ISTED

BA ILE Y SK ILE S

Design Manager W ENDY SC HL EICH ER

Assistant Production Manager

JO H N LONG

Assistant Editor

MAG DA NAKASS IS

Prepress production by Marquand Books, Inc., Seattle Typeset in Sabon and Whitney by Marissa Meyer

Layout by Zach Hooker Color separations by iocolor, Seattle Printed on Gold East Matte by Toppan Printing

in China

Distr ibuted by Yale University Press New Haven and London www.ya lebooks.com

Abstracted and indexed in BHA (Bibliography of the

History of Art) and Art Index

Proceedings of the symposium "Art and the Early

Photographic Album," organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Ga llery

of Art, and sponsored by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. The symposium was held March 9 - ro,

2007, in Washington .

The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts

was founded in 1979 at the National Ga llery of Art to foster the study of the history, theory, and criticism of art, architecture, urban ism, photography, and film , through programs of meetings, research, publication, and fe llowships, and through the formation of a

community of scholars.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Art and the early photogra phic album/ edited by

Stephen Bann. p. cm.- (Studies in the history of art ; 77) (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts symposium papers;

LIV) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-13 590-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Art and photography- Congresses. 2. Photograph

albums-Congresses. I. Bann, Stephen.

N72.P5A78 2ou

I SBN 978-0-300-13590-9 I SSN 0091-7338

Frontispiece: Adolphe Braun et Cie, Delphic Sibyl,

carbon print from a wet collodion glass plate (negative number 71) made in 1869. Bibliotheque centrale des musees nationaux, Paris; courtesy of Direction des musees de France

Contents

vu Preface

ELI ZA BET H C RO PPER

l Introduction

ST EPHEN BANN

7 The Photographic Album as a Cultural Accumulator

STEPHE N BANN

3 l Before Photography: The Album and the French Graphic Tradition in the Early Nineteenth

Century

B EN EDI CT LE CA

5 5 Art History in the Age of Photography: Constant Leber's Pantographie of 186 5

and the "Painful Birth of the Art Book"

PAS CA L GR IE N ER

69 The Mystery of the Album of the Socifae heliographique

AN D R E G U N THE RT

77 Camille Silvy: The Photography of Works of Art as Record and Restoration

MARK HAWOR T H - BOO TH

9 l Fawning over Marbles: Robert and Gerardine Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures

and the Role of Photographs in the Reception of the Antique

ELI ZAB ETH A N N E MCCAU LE Y

123 Facsimile, Scholarship, and Commerce: Aspects of the Photographically Illustrated

Art Book (1839-1880)

AN TH ONY H AMB ER

l 5 l Michelangelo's Frescoes through the Camera's Lens: The Photographic Album

and Visua l Identity

PH ILIP P E JAR JA T

173 Vetting the Canon: Galerie contemporaine, 1876-1884

A U STE N BARRON BAIL LY

Ro bert Macpherson, Chiaramonte, fro m Macpherson 's Vatican Sc11lp­

tures, c. 185 8/ 1860, a lbumen pri nt

Research Library, Getty Research lllst itute, Los Angeles (91-F44)

I n 1863 the Scottish photographer Robert Macpherson began producing bound albums of photographs bearing the rather

pretentious title Macpherson's Vatican Sculp­tures. Even though he had lived in Rome since r 84 r and had already established a reputation for outstanding views of the city's most celebrated buildings, Macpherson had little right to claim the canonical classical sculptures in Pius rx's collection as his own. Nonetheless, the impressive compilation of albumen prints, representing r 28 statues in addition to 6 overviews of galleries in the Vatican Museum, justified their creator's braggadocio, for it constituted one of the first systematic photographic records of a museum collection. Furthermore, Macpher­son's initial idea, which included an illus­trated written guide and a lecture series in addition to the photographs themselves, reveals how the Victorians envisioned a new, popular art history dependent on the latest technologies of reproduction and pro­jection. Why did Macpherson conceive this project? What was his intended audience? And what impact would photographic re­productions of sculptures, in contrast to the originals, engravings after them, and plaster casts, have had on viewers in the r86os?

My goals in examining Macpherson's albums are thus twofold: on the one hand, to locate them within the history of taste for antique sculpture, and, on the other, to under­stand them as alternatives within a field of reproductive options rather than steps in a linear, teleological progression toward greater "realism,'' moving from originals to handmade copies to photographs to cinema, as construed by writers such as Walter Benja­min, William M. Ivins, and many other art historians and media theorists. 1 As Stephen

9 3 MCCAULEY Fawning over Marbles

Bann has demonstrated by examining the status of reproductive engravings and painted copies in the nineteenth century, techniques such as engraving, casting, and photography coexisted with, rather than replaced, earlier modes of preserving the direct experience of objects (such as drawing or ekphrasis), but they affected the viewer in different ways. 2 Furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century the "auratic," or original, objects that were subject to such reproductions (or perhaps a better word might be "invocations") had, thanks to the growth of museums and traffic in artworks, already undergone geographical and spatial displacements, restorations, and reinstalla­tions that further problematized the defini­tion of what exactly was being "reproduced."

In the case of classical sculptures such as those photographed by Macpherson, the relationship between an "original" and a

"reproduction" was even more vexed than that between a two-dimensional painting and its transcription onto an engraving plate. Many of the Vatican marbles were viewed as epiphenomena, Roman copies of imagined but lost "Greek" originals described by classical authors but recon­structed only by the composite mapping of extant versions scattered throughout the world and brought together by a growing corps of antiquarians and art historians. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classicists thus debated the relative degree of remove of the copy with which they were dealing, somewhat as naturalists sought a mythical Adam and Eve derived by tracing common traits of living races. Like Georges Cuvier reconstructing a species from a fragment of a skeleton, early scholars of the Vatican sculptures attempted to excise Renaissance

patches and misapplied limbs and heads to find the pure carved stone that, in its resemblance or superiority to other marbles, could be placed higher up the chain of being and closer to the exalted status of "Greek original."

Photographic prints of the Vatican sculp­tures were thus copies of copies, inexpensive multiples that transparently froze what had become expensive and rare multiples. For antiquarians, they vastly surpassed engrav­ings in their ability to show surface restora­tions and details of carving but failed to give a sense of the three-dimensional contours of a piece.3 For the general public, they more satisfactorily invoked the fleeting glimpse of a museum display that already precluded a view in the round (most of the Vatican pieces were firmly backed up to a wall or niche) and served as trophies of Roman tourism to be shown off to envious friends back home. Despite the different expectations consumers brought to these photographs, the perusal of Macpherson's small prints inspired over­laid memories that drew on the viewer's accumulated knowledge of classical works of art and history; visits to Rome and to the Vatican galleries; comparisons with other versions of the sculptures seen at home or while traveling; and inevitable associations with actual bodies that all life-size marble sculptures inspire.

Robert Macpherson, as the author of record of these photographs, assumed a large role in their conceptualization and marketing, but he was surrounded by a bril­liant coterie of family members and friends who materially and intellectually shaped his project: his wife, Gerardine Bate; his wife's aunt, the celebrated art historian and femi­nist Anna Jameson; the Edinburgh-born novelist Margaret Oliphant and her brother, Willie Wilson, who worked in the studio and lived with the Macphersons; Jameson's friend, the sculptor John Gibson; and the larger circle of American artists and writers who passed through Rome in the 1850s and l86os. Even though contemporary descrip­tions locate Macpherson within the male­dominated studio life of Anglophone Rome,

94 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

a close reading of the records of his activi­ties reveals the importance of intellectual women, particularly Anna Jameson and her friends, to his success. Thus, contrary to most accounts of nineteenth-century commercial photographic practice, which focus on the titular head of a studio, this essay aims to feminize Macpherson's project by recogniz­ing women's contributions to his knowledge of classical sculpture, the fabrication of his albums, and the ongoing existence of his photographic business.

Macpherson has been the object of several recent biographies, but his life remains some­what shadowy.4 Born in Scotland in 1814, he may have spent his youth in Canada before returning to study medicine at Edin­burgh University from l 8 3 l to l 8 3 5. 5 At some point after ending his medical classes (he did not graduate), he became friends with several young painters who constituted the newly founded Scottish Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (including David Octavius Hill, who served as its secretary during the 1830s before he took up photog­raphy in the 1840s, as well as William Borth­wick Johnstone, James Drummond, Horatio McCulloch, Robert Scott Lauder, Daniel Macnee, and Noel Paton). 6 What Macpher­son produced as a painter remains unclear: 7

Marjorie Munsterberg has located one land­scape painted in Italy, and an obituary from 1872 claimed that in Rome he "labored assiduously with palette and brush until he had acquired considerable proficiency in his art, particularly in portraiture." 8 The reasons for his departure to Rome in 1840 are also unknown: he may have had a failed romance or have contracted an illness en route to India to work as an army surgeon and thus stopped in Italy. 9 Rome was cer­tainly a locale where he could live more cheaply than in Scotland. Regardless of the motivations for his move, Macpherson knew little about classical art and apparently little about painting when he arrived in the city. Margaret Oliphant, whose husband Francis Wilson Oliphant (1818-1859) had known Macpherson in Edinburgh while studying art at the Trustees' School, noted

later that he was " the son of a very poor man in Edinburgh with the humblest con­nections . .. himself a poor painter-literally a poor painter, never good for very much, yet always, as I have been told, in society, and with friends quite beyond his apparent position." 10

By all accounts, Macpherson's character was that of a bohemian bon vivant rather than an introverted scholar. He was a hot­tempered redhead with long hair who loved drink, parties, and entertaining his friends with stories. Margaret Oliphant described him as "a big, bearded, vehement, noisy man, a combination of Highlander and Lowlander, Scotsman and Italian, with the habits of Rome and Edinburgh all rubbed together, and a great knowledge of the world in general and a large acquaintance with indi­viduals in particular to give force to the mix­ture." 11 The American artist James Edward Freeman, who met him in 1841 in Rome and was more sympathetic than Oliphant to the congeniality and talents of his friend "Mac," admitted that" [h]e had intellect and a very decided artistic organization; but he was not partial to patient and unflagging exertion, and too often, when he should have been combating the difficulties of anatomy, per­spective, and composition, he allowed his friends, for the sake of his agreeable compan­ionship, to allure him off upon excursions to various parts of Italy, or to accompany them to their picnics, dinners, suppers, and sight­seeing." 12 The consistency of such anecdotes and the tendency of Victorians to speak euphemistically about personal matters such as mental illness or marital discord have led Alistair Crawford to conclude recently that Macpherson may have been an alcoholic. 13

Macpherson's range of friends and social standing rose considerably after he met Gerardine Bate and her aunt, Anna Jameson, in 1847 and married the young, well-bred girl back in England in 1849. Jameson had introduced Gerardine to Robert and Eliza­beth Barrett Browning in Florence and then presented her to friends passing through or residing in Rome, including sculptor John Gibson, Ottilie von Goethe (Goethe's

9 5 Mc c Au LEY Fawning over Marbles

daughter-in-law), statesman Richard Cobden (in Rome in 1847), journalist Francis Syl­vester O'Mahoney (Fa ther Prout), German archaeologist J. W.J. Braun, the Nazarene artists Cornelius von Overbeck and Pieter Cornelius, Lord Walpole, Lord Compton, Elizabeth Jesser Sturch Reid, and many others. After the marriage, the Macphersons' connections with British literary and artistic celebrities living in Rome made their home another essential stop on the Grand Tour for American literati mixing visits to the Vatican with dinner parties attended by like-minded, proper elites residing in the city. Annie Fields, the author, abolitionist, and clever wife of the Boston publisher James Fields, during her stay in Rome in 1860 spent her days visit­ing museums and her evenings dining with friends Charlotte Cushman and Cushman's lover, sculptor Emma Stebbins, as well as Harriet Hosmer, the William Wetmore Storys, the Brownings, and the Macphersons. After

"look[ing] over Macpherson's photographs" on March l 5, she "passed the evening at Macpherson's" on March 22, when "[h]e talked much of Walter Scott whom he often saw as a boy and of [Thomas] De Quincey whom he knew later in life. He saw the latter one morning when he was recovering from a severe dose of opium and a more suffer­ing creature he never beheld. Macpherson himself had previously inclined to the use of opium but De Quincey effectively fright­ened him away from it." 14 Such evenings at the Macphersons' were repeated with visi­tors including William Makepeace Thack­eray (1853, 1858-1859), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ( l 8 6 9), James Lowell, and the Brownings. 15

The coincidence of Macpherson's mar­riage in l 849 and his turn to photography shortly thereafter suggests that he was responding to pressures to earn a living as well as to the excitement generated by the commercial potential of negative/positive printing. 16 His advantage over local Italian operators (such as Giacomo Caneva) was that he preserved a foreigner's vision of the city as well as personal connections with trendsetting and famous foreign visitors

(and journa lists) who could buy and publi­cize his landscape views. The same facrors

that contributed to the commercial explosion of photograp hy in the earl y 1850s (industri­aliza t ion, the desire ro undercut la bor and

production time fo r images, curiosity about the ph ysical world, the Benthamite idea tha t knowledge was power) fed the growth in European tourism among the ha ure bour­geoisie and professiona l classes. T he intro­duction of glass negatives (first the slower a lbumen-on-glass process, which Macpher­son ini tially preferred, a nd then, after 1851,

wet collodion on glass) further contributed to the relatively rapid production of spar­kling, clear landscape a nd architectural views

that supplemented the traditional engravings an d lithographs of the city's monuments.

Like the Alinari firm in Flo rence, whose fi rst one-page catalogue, published in 1856, concentrated on canonical Tuscan architec­tural views, Macpherson honed his craft through recording brightly lit outdoor scenes

before turning to the untested market fo r reproductions of artworks. Selling primarily out of his stud io at 192, via di R ipetta, near the Spanish Steps, rath er than di stributing overseas, 17 he in itially marketed picturesque

a lbumen prints trimmed .into artist ic ovals before turning to closer exa minations of the sculptural details of the a rches of Titus and Constantine. One might say that his fi rst business model was to produce beautiful , long-focus la ndscapes of the rolling hills of

the city, marked by the eternal silhouettes of the Colosseum or Saint Peter's dome, that echoed the fantasies of Piranesi a nd func­

tioned as ideali zed mementos for affluent tourists steeped in Byron or Sa m uel Rogers. In contrast, close-ups of Roman sculptural reliefs and fragments of buildings addressed a learned a udience of former Latin school students, connoisseurs, archaeologists, and a ntiquarians as well as institutional patrons

such as the newly fo unded schools of design, art museums, and universit ies concerned

with the dating and iconography of arti facts and the hisrory of the Roman Empire. The growth of the ma rket for photographic art reproductions must be seen as dependent

96 ART AND THE EARLY PH OTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

on the simultaneous expa nsion of educa-tion into the middle (and even working)

classes and government support for man­datory primary education, vocationa l train­ing, international exhibit ions, the ten-hour work day, and public heal th initiatives.

Whi le in the aftermath of the 1848 revolu­tions these initiatives were just beginning, and Macpherson's clients remained sta unchly elite, the ta rgeting of photographic sales to an educated middle class and the new cul­tural institu tions that it patronized was easy

to foresee. 18

Rather than turn to paintings, which were sti ll extremely d ifficu lt to capture on collo­dion or a lbumen negatives, 19 Macpherson

decided by 1855 to begin recordi ng sculp­ture, w hose immobil ity and whiteness had made it a natura l subject ever since the invention of photography. Sculpture was also a medium that Macpherson knew well , thanks to his connections to Anna Ja meson's

o ld friend John Gibson, the senior neoclassi­cal sculptor in the ci ty s ince the death of hi s teacher, Antonio Canova. Gibson, who made

a posthumous marble bust of Jameson in 1862 as an expression of his admirat ion (fig. l ), 20 was attracting much attention and controversy in the early 1850s for reinstat­ing polychromed sculpture in imitation of what he argued was Greek practice; his poly­chromed Venus, which Eliza beth Browning

condemned as "not too decent" and "a grisette rather tha n a goddess" when she

saw it in 1853, was to provoke much con­troversy in the 1862 London Exhibit ion.21

One can posit that Macpherson's route toward the photographic documentation of classical sculpture was encouraged by his concomitant commissio ns to record recent

works by Gibson and o ther sculptors he and his wife had befriended, such as W illiam Wetmore Story, T homas Crawford, Emma

Stebbins, a nd Harriet Hosmer. The practice of using phorographs ro ad vertise sculptures in exhibitions o r encourage commissions was established in the 1850s. Hosmer, for

example, in 1859 sent photographs of her statue of Zenobia to Anna Jameson a nd to her friend Lydia Child in Massachusetts,

r. John Gibson, Anna Brownell Jameson, 1862, marble

National Portrait Galler)~ Lo11do11.

who commented on the distortions apparent in the flattened image.22 Macpherson photo­graphed versions of the plaster maquettes for Thomas Crawford's statue of Freedom for the dome of the United States Capitol (executed in Rome in 1856) that the artist forwarded to his patrons in Washington. After Crawford's premature death in 1857, Macpherson joined Gibson and other artists in Rome in signing a letter of sympathy to Crawford's widow and marketed photo­graphs of Crawford's statue of an Indian, a piece designed for the east pediment of the Capitol and intended to be cast in bronze by Crawford's friends. 23 By l 8 5 8 he was listing for sale photographs of Gibson's bas-reliefs The Hours Leading Forth the Horses of the Sun and Phaeton Guiding the Chariots and Horses of the Sun (praised by Lady Eastlake as two of Gibson's best works and acquired by Lord Fitzwilliam) as well as three views of Gibson's celebrated Venus. Furthermore, in the same catalogue Macpherson included prints after Ulysses and His Dog Argus ( l 8 5 5), by his Scottish friend and longtime Roman resident Lawrence Macdonald; Sabrina (1852), by the British sculptor and Gibson student Holme Cardwell ( l 8 l 3 -

97 Mc c Au LE v Fawning over Marbles

1895); and two works by Benjamin Spence, another Gibson student. 24 Gibson thus emerges as the pivotal link between Mac­pherson and photographic reproductions of contemporary sculpture.

Even though these expatriate sculptors in Rome were better known in the l 8 5 os than they are today, the market for such photographs was limited to the tourists who traipsed through their studios in search of small bibelots to ship home or had seen their works in London exhibitions. Macpherson knew that the Greco-Roman sculptures that inspired most living sculptors working in Rome had a much larger potential appeal, and he selected pieces to photograph that conformed to the canon established by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and per­petuated in the teachings of John Gibson. Thomas Crawford, for example, upon arriv­ing in Rome in l 8 3 7, wrote immediately to his mentor, R. E. Launitz: "You can imagine my surprise upon seeing the wonderful halls of the Vatican-after leaving Barclay Street and the National. Only think of it-a green one like me, who had seen but a half-a-dozen statues during the whole course of his life­to step thus suddenly into the midst of the greatest collection in the world." 25 For an American art student in the 1830s raised on engravings and written descriptions of classical sculpture, a trip through the Vatican galleries was the climax of a life spent in anticipation. Such initial, indiscriminate enthusiasm was the target of John Gibson's injunctions to his students to learn to differ­entiate between the best and the worst of the Greco-Roman sculptures scattered in the Vatican and Capitoline collections. In his autobiographical notes, he condemned inferior works - "stiff, hard repetitions"­and directed students to original master­pieces such as the Minerva Medica in the Braccio Nuovo; the stat~e of the Nile, which

"is not a repetition but an original production finished by the master himself"; the Belve­dere Torso, admired by Michelangelo and

"one of the finest monuments of Grecian art"; and the Apollo Belvedere, which Gibson's teacher, Canova, had first had him copy and

which was "refined to the highest degree of beauty, even celestial beauty." 26 Gibson's posthumously published memoirs constitute a veritable guidebook to Roman collections, no doubt consistent with his advice to his students and reflecting his own aesthetic judgments of which pieces were authentic and which contained the greatest expressive power and truth to nature.

Anna Jameson, who had extolled Gibson's works in the pages of the Art-Journal in the 1840s, shared with him a worship of Greek sculpture but was cognizant that it appealed to a classically educated public whose num­bers were diminishing. As she wrote in an 1849 essay, "Some Thoughts on Art," Greek art could never be experienced the way the Greeks saw it but possessed expressive pow­ers that transcended time:

We may stand and look at the Sister Fates of the Parthe­

non in awe and in despair; we can do neither more nor

better. But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What

in it is purely ideal is eternal; what is conventional is in

accordance with the primal conditions of all imitative art.

Therefore, though it may have reached the point at which

development stops, and though its capability of adapta­

tion be limited by necessary laws, still its all-beautiful,

its immortal imagery hangs round us, haunts us: still

"doth the old feeling bring back the old names," and with the

old names, the forms; still in those old familiar forms we

continue to clothe all that is loveliest in visibk! nature.27

Jameson's sensitivity to the impact of mod­ernization and the decline of a classically educated public on the appreciation of Greek sculpture was quite unusual in l 849, but her belief in the importance of studying verifiably autographic Greek works such as the Elgin marbles ("the Sister Fates") aligns with Gib­son's own exaltation of what he thought were Greek stylistic features. To supplement the firsthand scrutiny of the masterpieces of Greek art recently reinstalled in the British Museum, the enlightened traveler in Rome or connoisseur in London needed accurate records of the classical statues preserved in Roman collections, such as those now made possible by photography.

If Macpherson's decision to sell photo­graphs of classical sculptures was overdeter-

98 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

mined by his milieu, his project was none­theless ambitious, since gaining access to the Vatican was extremely difficult. The author of Murray's Handbook of Rome and Its Environs complained in l 8 5 8 that" [t]he catalogues of the Vatican Museum are not worthy of the collection; their price is exor­bitant, considering the information they convey-a circumstance to be attributed to their being a monopoly in the hands of the principal custode." 28 Even such a well­connected notable as Henry Cole, director of the recently established South Kensington Museum, had to contact Odo Russell, the British attache in Florence, to try to obtain permission to photograph in the Vatican during an l 8 5 9 trip, but he nonetheless failed to gain entry. 29

Only friends of Pope Pius IX could hope to pierce the Vatican bureaucracy. Gibson, Jameson, and Macpherson, a Catholic at least by the time of his marriage to Gerar­dine, were all defenders of the new pope, who had been greeted upon his election in 1846 as a liberal reformer whose first act was to pardon political prisoners. Gibson, in Rome at the time, recalled in his memoirs:

Pio Nono is the first pope who has inspired me with

feelings of warmth towards him -the grand improve­

ments he was making. One proof of his liberal intentions

was selecting Count Rossi for his prime minister. He was

a man of first-rate abilities, and a well-proved Liberal.

The Romans proved themselves unworthy of liberty­

they assassinated that great man [in November 1848],

and in an hour the Corso windows were waving with gay

flags, and thousands were rejoicing in the streets, thus

celebrating and rejoicing in assassination. They proved

themselves unworthy of liberty when they fired into the

palace of their benefactor and shot his Latin secretary­

and murdered harmless priests in the streets.30

Noting that during "the turbulent times we could not pursue our labours so comfortably" and that " [ t ]he Muses are said to be silent amid the clash of arms," 3 1 Gibson was no sympathizer with the cause of the Roman Republic and preserved his faith in law and order under a paternalistic papacy. Similarly, Gerardine Macpherson recalled the situation in Rome when she arrived in 1847 with her

aunt: "It was the first year of the reign of a new pope, and Pius IX ... was already astonishing Europe in general and his sub­jects in particular by a line of political con­duct altogether opposed to the old papal regime of centuries." 32 After the pope's retreat to Gaeta in November 1848, the dec­laration of the Roman Republic on Febru­ary 9, 1849, and the chaos that ensued during the French and Austrian attacks on the city, culminating in the defeat of the frag­ile republic in July, expatriate artists identi­fied papal governance of the city with calm and economic prosperity. According to Anna Jameson, writing during the siege of Rome in July 1849, "the last news we hear is that Gibson and many other artists, who remained till the last moment, had fled from Rome, and Macpherson would soon fo llow and come to England."33

During the 1850s, as the pope's policies became more reactionary and relations with Britain remained tense, the Macphersons' and Jameson's continuing faith in Pius IX stood out against the strong antipapal sen­timents of many of their British and Ameri­can visitors. The papal bull of September l 8 50, proclaiming a Catholic hierarchy for England and Wales and the elevation of Nicholas Wiseman as a cardinal and arch­bishop of Westminster, provoked anti­Catholic agitation and charges of papal attacks on British sovereignty; the ongoing attempts by Irish priests to advocate politi­cal independence from Great Britain further fueled British suspicion of the Catholic church's encroachments on domestic politics. The declaration in 1864 of the Syllabus of Errors, which condemned the separation of church and state, pantheism, the reign of reason, the existence of free public schools, socialism, and the fai lure to consider the Bible a literal text, was the final blow that convinced many progressives (particularly Americans, who saw it as an attack on their constitution) of the papacy's hardening resis­tance to the modern world.34

Macpherson, as a Scot, may have shared Irish Catholics' hostility to English rule, but he undoubtedly also appreciated the aesthetic

99 MCCAULEY Fawning over Marbles

appeal of Roman Catholic ritual and the church's longstanding patronage of the fine arts. In his reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun (a novel inspired by the circle of expatriate artists around Macpherson), Robert Levine has demonstrated its author's distaste for anarchy and popular uprisings and attraction to the spiritual transcendence and salvation offered by Catholicism (if not always fo und in its lusty priests). Anglo­phone travelers, from James Jackson Jarves to Charles Eliot Norton, similarly defined an idealized Catholicism embodied in the unity of the medieval church and its magnificent artistic heritage (still visible in the city of Rome) in contrast with the fallen condition of the Italy they visited in the l 8 5 os and 186os.35 More overtly pro-papal authors, such as the Irish journalist and politician John Francis Maguire, writing in 1857, noted Pius IX 's outstanding efforts to preserve antique art, restore the Colosseum, drain the areas around the Arch of Constantine, and disburse 244,000 scudi in l 8 5 6 alone for the restoration and conservation of antique monuments. 36

Regardless of what inspired the Macpher­sons' papal sympathies, their connections with the Vatican were profound. Among their friends were such clerics as Francesco Pentini (made a cardinal in 1863), whose villa in Frascati they frequented, and Irish Catholic priests such as the journalist Francis Sylvester Mahony (also known as Father Prout) and Father Burke.37 As Margaret Oliphant, who was more liberal than others in this group, disdainfully noted, Macpherson had been in Rome "during the bombardment [in 1848], and I suppose had rendered some services to the papal side, for he was always patronized more or less by the priests, and was nero to the heart, standing by all the old institutions with the stout prejudices of an old Tory quite inaccessible to reason."38

Profiting from good relations with the papacy, Macpherson began photographing inside the Vatican collections by at least l 8 5 5. Works such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Torso, and the Laocoon had a lready been daguerreotyped, but most

images had been shot from plaster casts that had been circulating in Western Europe since the first molds had been made under the supervision of Primaticcio and Jacopo da Vignola at Fontainebleau in the sixteenth century.39 Macpherson could claim that his works were from "originals," and he exhib­ited the most famous of them as lux urious, large albumen prints from albumen-on-glass negatives: the Apollo Belvedere, in the l 8 5 5 show organized by the Glasgow Photo­graphic Society to coincide with the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Laocoon, in l 8 5 6 in the Edinburgh Photographic Society exhibition. 40

Aware that James Anderson, a fellow Scot photographing in Rome, had exhibited simi­lar pictures in the l 8 5 5 Glasgow show, 41

Macpherson decided to move forward with a comprehensive plan to photograph huge numbers of sculptures. By l 8 5 8 he had shot a few more pieces in the Vatican collection42

and, according to a letter of August 1860 to his friend William Borthwick Johnstone, who had just been appointed the curator of the new National Gallery of Scotland, was "still at work in the Vatican" and would have

"upward of a hundred subjects from that gallery alone the Cream of the Vatican." He went on: "Then there will be the best from the Capitoline & Lateran Galleries besides the finest in the private palaces in Rome and Villas 'Albani', 'Ludovisi', 'Borghese' etc. I shall be ready in about eighteen months from this time but it may be later." 43 Accord­ing to Philippe Jarjat, Macpherson's name does not appear in the registry of authorized workers in the Vatican between 1860 and 1888 (apart from two mentions in 1867 and 1869); its absence suggests that the Vatican negatives were virtually completed by 1860.44

What Macpherson envisioned was more ambitious than a mere compendium of pho­tographs from all the famous collections in Rome. He proposed to Johnstone a series of three to four popular lectures based on his personal interpretations of the sculptures accompanied by a " libretto to be purchased"

I OO ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

with "outlines of different sculptures cited." Following this performance, Macpherson envisioned projecting lantern slides "the size of the originals or even larger according to the size of the Lecture Room and Audience." 45

With characteristic bombast, he claimed that he already had offers to lecture in America, but "should like first to begin with my own Country and that means Edinburgh and Glasgow, then Liverpool & Manchester." In addition, a "great institution at London" had expressed interest, and "I have been spoken to in the interest of Oxford and Cambridge Universities where of course they would pay me[?] and it would suit such schools of instruction to have Rome and the Vatican brought to them within their own walls." 46

This proposal is remarkable in its awareness of the power of the new glass lantern slides to popularize art and in its idea of projecting the pictures as life-sized images akin to tab­leaux vivants or phantasmagorical entertain­ments. Macpherson intended to generate artificial light from the combustion of hydro­gen and oxygen, presumably in the presence of lime (so-called limelight, with which Michael Faraday and others had experi­mented), and he planned to use rear-screen projection on fabric so that the sculptures would appear as human effigies floating in space with no visible apparatus. Since Macpherson's technological knowledge was limited, he envisioned hiring an assistant to do the actual projecting and lighting, thus freeing him to be the ballyhooing showman before an eager audience.

A little over a year after his proposal to Johnstone, Macpherson charged off a similar solicitation to the celebrated London pub­lisher John Murray, who had been advertis­ing Macpherson's studio in his guidebooks to Rome since l 8 5 6 and was underwriting many art-historical publications, including John Archer Crowe and Giovanni Cavalca­selle's catalogue of Italian painting:

Having been engaged for 12 years in studying and photo­

graphing the sculptural monuments in this city and its

neighborhoods and having in that time made studies of

these works and acquired information about them not

commonly known, I have conceived and partly executed

a handbook on them which I propose to produce in a

popular form and should naturally prefer that this work

should be published for the use of English readers and

travelers by yourself. My studies and part of my MSS

have been seen by Mr. Hepworth Dixon [editor of The

Athenaeum] who has recommended me to lay these

details before you. My first publication, of which I wish

for artistic reasons to retain the copyright feeling sure

that by leaving myself free to add and alter I can amend

it in successive editions, would comprise a series of

views & description of the chief works in the Vatican &

it might be produced so as to form an illustrated com­

panion to your popular handbook of Rome.

My wife, who is possibly known to you as the niece of

the late Mrs. Jameson & the artist of many of the illus­

trations of her work upon Legendary Art has drawn the

figures from my photographs[;] some specimens of the

reductions are enclosed. All my photographs are from

the originals in the Vatican. I propose to give about 110

or 120 of these illustrations, the woodcuts of which have

been executed by Williams of Gloster Road Holloway,

& electrotyped in London under his superintendence.

A short explanatory and artistic description will accom­

pany each figure.47

Macpherson assured Murray that he could "take 500 of the first years [sic] edition and should hope to dispose of a portion of every edition in this city among my connections." He also noted that he was "making arrange­ments to lecture in England Scotland and Ireland on these Vatican treasures" and re­peated the idea that the book could serve as a "sort of libretto to my lectures."

As he had no previous experience as a public speaker (apart from recounting anec­dotes over dinner), Macpherson's scheme of touring England as a lecturer seems far­fetched. But the idea may have come to him because of his awareness of an earlier, similar campaign by the American author Herman Melville, who had visited Rome in 1857. Although Melville does not explicitly men­tion meeting Macpherson in his abbreviated journal entries, he notes going to the "Cafe Greco" and visiting an "'English sculptor' with dirty hands" on February 26; looking for American painter William Page the next day; and visiting "the English sculptor, Gib­son" on March rn, when he "[t]alked with him" and studied his colored Venus. On

IOI MCCAULEY FawningoverMarbles

March 13 Melville "[c]alled on Page" and on March 18 toured "Crawfords [sic] studio."48

Melville also assiduously visited the Vatican and Capitoline collections, noting on his second day in the city (February 26): "Dying Gladiator. Shows that humanity existed amid the barberousness [sic] of the Roman time as it [existed] now among Christian barbe~­ousness. Antinous, beautiful."49 On March 2

he recorded: "From 12 to 3 in Museum .... Staid [sic] in Vatican till closed. Fagged out completely, & sat long time by the obelisk, recovering from the stunning effect of a first visit to the Vatican." March 3 marked another visit to the Mosaic Museum in the Vatican, followed by March 9, "Vatican day­Deliberate walk through the galleries.-Hall of Animals," followed by a last "Vatican day" on March 16.50

Upon his return to the United States later that year, Melville, in need of funds and plan­ning a lecture circuit, hit upon "a good, ear­nest subject," which he entitled "Statues in Rome." 51 Between November 24, 1857, and February l 8 5 8, he traveled throughout New England, Ohio, New York, Tennessee, and even to Montreal, attempting to "paint the appearance of Roman statuary objectively and afterward to speculate upon the emo­tions and pleasure that appearance is apt to excite in the human breast."52 Although these lectures can be reconstructed only from vari­ous local newspaper reports, Macpherson may have had accounts of M elville's enter­prise from any number of American visitors in Rome (such as Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was there in 1858 - 1859 and is known to have met Macpherson). Confirming this link between Melville's lec­ture series and Macpherson's idea is a copy, now in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, of the guidebook that Macpher­son would publish in 1863, Vatican Sculp­tures, inscribed: "Mr. Herman Melville from the author, Rome, May 4, 1866." 53 Why Macpherson waited until 1866 to send Mel­ville this work is unclear, but it suggests Macpherson's awareness of the American author's interest in the Vatican collection in l 8 57 (Melville never returned to Rome) or

2. Titl e page of Robert Macpherson , Vatican Sculptures (London , 18 63), placed on the title page of Giambat­tista and Ennio Quirin o Visconti , II Museo Pio-Clem entina, volume I

(Rome, 178 2)

Author photograph

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r o , 110 PRI.;7£0 D EDI C · TO

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possibly subsequent hearsay about Melville's lectures (or possibly even an as yet undiscov­ered letter from Melville to Macpherson).

Macpherson's ambitious project to im­prove upon Melville's amateurish lectures on classical sculpture with his own more learned and illustrated versions never materialized. However, the illustrated handbook proposed to Murray finally found a London publisher in the firm of Chapman and Hall in l 8 6 3. The result, Vatican Sculptures, Selected, and Arranged in the Order in Which They Are Found in the Galleries, Briefly Explained by Robert Macpherson, Rome, contained small vignettes drawn by Gerardine from the pho­tographs, marking each short text by Robert. Despite its modest size, the book filled a gap in Roman travel literature. There were no inexpensive guides to the Vatican collections apart from unillustrated travel books (like Murray's), in which individual sculptures were referred to by their catalogue numbers. Without a picture to help locate, say, a small bust within hundreds of objects, often crowded into tight spaces, Vatican visitors often had trouble finding a piece. On the other hand, the most extensive illustrated catalogue of a Vatican collection, the Museo

102 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

Pio-Clementino, published by its curators Giambattista Visconti and his son Ennio Quirino Visconti in seven volumes from 1782 to 1807, was an object for antiquarians, wealthy collectors, and connoisseurs who could pore over its elephant folio pages on broad reading tables. Macpherson's hand­book was much smaller than the Visconti catalogue (fig. 2) and embodied the image of a "popular" publication.

Macpherson marketed the printed guide­book as a stand-alone volume that would facilitate the tourist's visit through the Vati­can's dense and confusing sculpture collec­tions, but he must have intended more wealthy tourists or scholars to buy both the letterpress handbook and the photographic album, known as Macpherson 's Vatican Sculptures, that in a sense "illustrated" and completed it. The information provided in the text alone was often summary, culled from the Viscontis' catalogue or even Mur­ray's guide, and peppered with personal anecdotes attesting to Macpherson's insider knowledge of Rome or the art world. One has the impression that it was Gerardine more than Robert who did the research here; she had already in l 8 5 7 worked with her aunt on the engraved illustration for Jameson's Legends of the Madonna. Certainly the selection of remarks from Goethe's "Intro­duction to the Propylaea" (1798), which had appeared in his Essays on Art, translated by Bostonian Samuel Gray Ward in l 84 5, as the epigraph for Vatican Sculptures bears the mark of Gerardine and Jameson's friend­ship with Goethe's daughter-in-law and helpmate during his last years, Ottilie von Goethe, who subsequently spent time in Rome. The epigraph itself encapsulated the philosophy of Jameson and Gibson regard­ing the need to experience firsthand the great works of the past: "To speak suitably, and with real advantage to one's self and others, of works of art, can properly be done only in their presence. All depends on the sight of the object. On this it depends whether the words by which we hope to elucidate the Work produce the clearest impression, or none at all." 54

or TH( VAT I CAN PALACE

LOWER HOOR TJH VATI CAN

l St~ ruiu h •ht ?i o.Clt ~ -m 1nl1 nt /'\11 u um

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~ ~1tafo1d $ tf llit Ap1ll1 h!~efo :; I!: thaptl or S. Ltrenu

~ 1 bmGn,/'\ertury,Pt rscus, SllaU el lh t 8iga

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8 an ' 8n trs . ·- ~ Sc ulpl urt )

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:U Ru111: tf li ~r ar y 9 8r1nus

12 Archivit S1s rel 1 lOP11nti n9s

l3 Christi~n Antlq11iliu 11 H~ ~ 1f Papi Au.font u

1f Papyri ltAall 1f !lu lrnmatu1 att C1ncept iQn

15 (arfy Chrisl1an P11nlin,s :C.

16 R1ma n fru~us,)'uuics

11 ?ri n ~1 4 eu b .;

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.; 'lO Bm 1 F i ~1 hr1!i1 n[t!umn l \St1irslta, in~ l 1 td ; !L anOrd.llm~, ! Pinacothea.

3. Map of the Vatican Museum, from H.J. Massi, Compendious Description of the Museums of Ancient Sculpture, Greek and Roman, in the Vatican Palace, 3rd editi on (Rome, 1889 )

By citing Goethe's call for direct sensual and visual contact with art, Robert Macpher­son primed the reader to welcome him as a skilled verbal and photographic interpreter of the Vatican collections. His opening re­marks touted the faithfulness of the wood engravings to the photographs and thus to the sculptures themselves and boasted that his text was "quite beyond that contained in ordinary guide-books either English or Ital­ian" because, presumably, of his long resi­dence in Rome. 55 Amid the recitations of historical details of the statues' discoveries, their iconographical features, and aesthetic evaluations credited to Winckelmann and the Visconti catalogue, Macpherson inserted first­person asides that suggested his equal foot­ing with famous people, such as his reference to "our own [John] Flaxman,'' whose Royal Academy lectures on sculpture proclaimed Italy " the university for the arts of design." 56

Author photograph

The printed handbook's superficial scholarship might have satisfied an Anglo-

1 03 MCCAULEY Fawning over Marbles

phone tourist with five days to see Rome, but it was the much more expensive photo­graphic albums that Macpherson hoped would make him rich and famous and al-low a new mode of close study of classical sculpture. Since the surviving photographic albums are undated, it cannot be determined if they were marketed before or merely con­current with (or subsequent to) the 1863 handbook. They mirror the sequencing estab­lished in the printed handbook and feature l 2 5 photographs of single statues, l photo­graph showing five busts, and 6 long shots of entire galleries that precede the photo­graphs of individual pieces in those rooms (labeled "A. Braccio Nuovo," "B. Chiara­monte," "C. Hall of the Animals,'' "D. Hall of the Statues,'' "E. Hall of the Greek Cross," and "F. Hall of the Candelabra"). While the sequencing is fixed, the actual prints some­times vary from album to album, suggesting that the negatives were reshot as the original set deteriorated or that multiple exposures were made at one sitting to speed up the pro­cess of contact printing (all albumen prints must be sun printed in contact with a glass negative) . Furthermore, the cropping of prints made from identical negatives also varies slightly in different albums, undoubt­edly as a result of different episodes of print­ing over several years as stocks ran short. The leather bindings also vary in color, mate­rial, and lettering, suggesting that the albums were not mass produced but were more akin to custom-made portfolios of loose prints (both engravings and mounted photographs) available in most Roman print and photo­graphic dealerships.

The organization of Macpherson's tour in the photographic albums took its general inspiration from Murray's guide but in cru­cial ways differed from the path followed by a walking visitor. Skipping over Bramante's Gallery of Inscriptions, which led to the main papal palace, the volume starts in the Braccio Nuovo, the newest, transverse gallery con­ceived by Pius VII and built in 1817 (fig. 3). Whereas a short historical description of the architectural features of each ga llery precedes discussions of individual pieces

4 . Robert Macpherso n, Braccio Nuouo, from Ma cphersoll's Vatican Sculptures, c. 18 58/r860, a lbumen prin t

Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (9r-F44)

5. Robert Macpherson, Chiaramonte, from Macpherson's Vatican Sculp­tures, c. 18 58/1860, a lbumen print

Research Library, Getty Research institute, Los Angeles (9r -F44)

104 ART AND THE EARL Y PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

6. After a draw ing by Ge ra rdine Macp herson after a photograph by Robert Macpherson, Fragment of a Draped Female Statue, c . 1860, Vatican Scu/ /;tures (Lond on, 1863), p late xxv, electrotype print from a wood engrav ing

Author photograph

7. Robert Macpherso n, 25 . Frag­ment of a Draped Female Statue, from Macpherson's Vatican Sculp­

tures, c. 1858/1860, a lbumen print

Research Library, Getty Research /11stitute, Los Auge/es (91-F44}

XXV.-FR.AGMENT.

THIS fragment ofi a female ststuc without head or arn'Y3,

has {ortunately been left unrestored, probably from the

difficulty of determining the subject in the absence of any

symBol, and the action likewise being doubtful, al~hough

full of movement and energ:r. Some suppose it to be n.n

Ariadne rushing to the sea-shore in quest of Theseus; others,

taking the action as expressive of surprise or interest in

some near object, believe 'it may represent Diana descending

from her car to contempla.te Endymion- a subject frequent

in antique bas-reliefs. Certain indica.tions at the spring of

the neck suggest the idea that the J1ead may have been

thrown backwards, in which case it may possibly have been

a Niobe ; but whatever the s.ubject is, it is undoubtedly

one of the finest works of art in the V a.tic1.l-n-spirited,

dashing, and grand in style. It came from · Hadrian's

Villa nt Tivo1i 1 and is five feet six inches in hoigl1t.

in Murray's guide, the large, wide-angle overview of the coffered barrel vault, mod­ern skylights, and alternating busts and full-length statues of the Braccio Nuovo orients the reader and captures the sumptu­ous porphyry and rich mosaic decorations that signify the luxury of the Vatican instal­lation (fig. 4). Much more discriminating than Murray's writer, Macpherson picked out only two of the seventy-two busts and twenty-two of the forty-three larger statues featured in niches from the 230-foot gal­lery. Closing off the end of the hall was the Apoxyomenos, excavated in 1849 in Trastevere and positioned before a black backdrop that Macpherson introduced to block off a view of the gate leading into the north wing of the library.

Macpherson's virtual tour in his printed guidebook and in his photographic albums then continues back out to the long corridor known as the Museo Chiaramonti (which he misspells as "Chiaramonte"), founded by Pope Pius VII and divided into thirty com­partments crammed with small busts and

Io 5 Mc c A u LE v Fawning over Marbles

minor statues and badly lit by high lunettes (fig. 5 ). Gerardine's contour tracings could isolate noteworthy statues from the packed spaces (fig. 6), but, in making his photo­graphic views, Macpherson had to resort to odd vantage points, black backdrops, and close cropping to extract objects from their claustrophobic installations. In recording the soaring fragment that he dubbed "one of the finest works of art in the Vatican-spirited, dashing, and grand in style," he could not get rid of the intrusive right hand of a neighbor­ing male statue that cut into the camera's field of vision (fig. 7 ). The result is a surreal­istic juxtaposition of suspended limbs that distracts from the focus on the frozen motion of the central sculpture. When Macpherson decided to include a series of busts sitting on a horizontal slab, he was forced to inter­pose a black cloth to separate the heads from the tonally similar wall behind them (fig. 8) . Since he could not move or eradicate two unnumbered and minor busts, he provided label information only for the three largest pieces - "Bust of Cato," "Bust of Ariadne,"

8. Robert Macpherson, 37. Bust of Cato, 38. Bust of Ariadne, 39 . B11st, Called a Me/eager, from Macphersoll's \faticall Sc11/pt11res, c. r8 58/r860, a lbumen print

Research Library, Getty Research /11stitute, Los Angeles (9r -F44}

9 . Robert Macpherson, 47. The Torso Belvedere, from Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures, c. r858/r8 60, a lbumen print

Research Library, Getty Research /11stit11te, Los Angeles (9r-F44}

106 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

and "Bust, called a Meleager" - to define their importance.

Apart from its reversal of the visitor's normal movements through the Braccia Nuovo and the Museo Chiaramonti, Mac­pherson's printed guidebook and photo­graphic albums followed the trajectory of Murray's Handbook through the Museo Pio-Clementina, Hall of the Animals, Hall of the Statues, Hall of the Muses, Rotunda, and Hall of the Greek Cross and then upstairs to the small Hall of the Biga and Hall of the Candelabra. However, on occa­sion Macpherson differed from the popular English guide in the pictorial interest given to various galleries and the weight of his written opinions on the pieces. The core of the Vatican Museum, the Museo Pio­Clementino collection, which included masterpieces such as the Apollo Belvedere, Belvedere Torso, Mercury, and Laocoon, was if anything underemphasized in his text, as he referred readers to Visconti, Winckel­mann, and Flaxman for scholarly opinions. For the Apollo Belvedere, for example, Macpherson humbly noted, "I have only to add an observation made to me by the late George Combe, the phrenologist, that

ro. Giuseppe Perini after a drawing by Vincento Dolcibene (top left ), Giacomo Bossi a fter a drawin g by Aglio Ricciolini (top right), and Alessa ndro Machetti a fter a draw­ing by Vincento Dolcibene (bottom ), Simu/acro d 'Ercole Mutilato, Giambatti sta and Ennio Quirino Visconti , II Museo Pio-Clementina (Rome, 1784), volume 2 , plate x, engra vings

Author photograph

'the temperaments are here so balanced as to make his proportion superhuman, this being a perfection not to be met with in common nature."' 57 With the exception of the Belve­dere Torso, photographed with a beautiful, dramatic chiaroscuro effect against an artifi­cially constructed black background (fig. 9 ),

these already canonical sculptures appeared with the same formulas of framing and lighting used for all the other images in the album. Whereas Giambattista and Ennio Visconti's illustration in the catalogue of the Museo Pio-Clementino combined three dif­ferent views of this enigmatic, heroic torso on a single engraved plate to mark its impor­tance (fig. ro), Macpherson never included more than one view of any piece, regardless of its fame. Furthermore, he omitted even an overview of the octagonal Belvedere Court­yard, although it was originally designed by Bramante and was one of the most famous features in the Vatican Museum.58 His strat­egy in both versions of Vatican Sculptures seems to have been to force a more personal appreciation of the sculptures based on

-~J .JZiff177.d Cl? o .z;· .Eft CtJ.Z.Z!: .h/172'7/,_,,.JTt l

I 07 Mc c Au LE v Fawning over Marbles

original observations rather than repeating familiar praise of canonical works.

Although he never clearly articulated what he was trying to accomplish by preserving for the viewer the two-dimensional traces of forms that needed to be understood in the round, Macpherson's scientific approach to the photographic recording of artworks­placing them whenever possible against a neutral ground, isolating each object at an equal distance from the camera, exposing so that every plane was in focus and light revealed forms even in the deepest recesses ­differed from his creative use of atmospheric perspective in his landscape views. His goal here was not to make a picture, but to recon­struct (for persons who had visited the Vati­can), simulate (for persons who had never crossed the Alps), or even improve upon the lived experience of being in close proximity to the world's most outstanding examples of classical art, the highest achievements of Western civilization. In comparison with graphic reproductions, primarily engravings, that had stood as representations of the stat­ues for three hundred years, glossy albumen prints seemed transparent windows onto the Vatican's spaces without the intervention of human hands. As a writer in the Art-Journal reviewing photographs after sculptures in the I862 London Exhibition remarked,

"[I]f the marble is ever true to the life, the photograph is always true to the marble." 59

The photographs, when compared with Vis­conti's famous and widely distributed plates, must have shocked viewers with their fidel­ity to the pocked surfaces and variegated grains of the marbles and their preservation of the actual proportions of the facial fea­tures. For example, the eighteenth-century engraving of the Apollo Sauroktonos, when compared to the photograph, presented the god as effeminate and flabby with a pro­nouncedly simpering expression and wind­swept curls that may have appealed to the painter Jacques-Louis David's students in I 800 but were no longer fashionable in the I86os (figs. I I and 12).

Whereas the engraver could adjust his hatching and stippling to suggest the

II. C. P. P. Carl o ni , after a drawing by Agli o Riccio lini , Apollo

Saurokto11os, Giambattista and Enn io Qu irino Vi sconti, 11 Museo Pio -Clementino (Rome, 1782), vo lume 1 , plate x 111 , engraving

A uthor photograph

r 2. Robert M acpherson, 6 5. Apollo Sanrocthonos, from Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures, c. r 8 5 8 I 1860, a lbumen print

Research Library, Getty Research /11stit11te, Los Angeles (91 -F44}

roundness of the marble contours, Macpher­son confronted considerable challenges when trying to shoot with natural light in the often crowded and penumbra! galleries of the Vatican. Nathaniel Hawthorne had noted in a letter from Bath after he had left Rome in 1860 that there were no photographs or engravings of his favored version of the Faun of Praxiteles (the inspiration for The Marble Faun) in the Capitoline Museum, "on account, I suppose, of its standing in a bad light." 60 The British photographer Roger Fenton had encountered similar problems when he began photographing sculptures for the British Museum in r 8 5 6: small

108 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

objects could be removed to a new rooftop studio, but larger pieces had to be shot in situ, unless they happened to be relocated during renovations, as was the case in Fen­ton's r 8 5 9 stereo view of a plaster cast of the Discobolus "standing temporarily in a good photographic light," as was inscribed on the stereo card (fig. r 3). Fenton's installa­tion shots of the British Museum, some of which show beams of bright sunlight from overhead skylights (fig. 14), contrast with Macpherson's control of the lighting through the use of drapes and reflectors, as seen in his view of the Biga or the one shot that he took in the Egyptian (now Gregorian

I 3. Roge r Fenton, The Egyptian Sa /0011, British M11se11111 (s tatue of a Discobolus), c. 1857, from The Stereoscopic Cabinet, or Monthly Packet of Pictures for the Stereo­scope ( r 8 59 ), albumen prints

Courtesy of George Eas tman House, /n teruatio11al Museum of Photography and Film

r 4. Roger Fenton , Statue of Paris, British Museum, 18 59, from The Stereoscopic Magazine (Ma rch r86o}, a lbumen pri nt

Courtesy of George Eastman House, Iuternatio11al Museum of Photography and Film

Egyptian) M useum, which seems to have been taken using reflectors to bounce the light from below. Furthermore, as reported in the Photographic Journal in 1862, Macpher­son experimented with a combination collo­dion and albumen negative process (probably a variation of the Taupenot process, in which the negative could be exposed dry and thus for a longer period of time) in order to allow exposures of up to two hours so that forms in the dark reaches of the collection could imprint the plates. In one or two cases he reputedly made two-day exposures.61 The lighting effects recorded in the photographs were thus unlike anything an actual viewer

109 MCCAULEY Fawning over Marbles

could have experienced in the gallery and varied depending on the time of day and season in which Macpherson and his assis­tants returned to the galleries.

Original sculptures also presented difficul­ties for the photographer that plaster casts did not. The Boston artist Frank Preston Stearns, meeting up with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's brother Samuel in Rome in r 8 69, scoured the city to find photographs of statues of Marcus Aurelius. When con­fronting the statue of their favorite emperor in the Campidoglio, Longfellow observed,

"I do not think .. . that we can obtain a sa tis­factory picture of it. The face is too dark to

be expressive, and it is the man's face that I want; and I suppose you do also." 62 Hunting out the bust of the young Aurelius in the Capitoline Museum, the two "discovered from the earth-stains on portions of it why the photographers had not succeeded better with it. We decided that our best resource would be to have Mr. Appleton's copy of it photographed." The copy was being cleaned in William Wetmore Story's studio, so the men "found a photographer named Giovanni Braccia on the floor a piano above Mr. Story; and after a lengthy discussion with him ... he agreed to take the photographs at two napo­leons a dozen." 63 Since collectors were inter­ested in the character of the Roman general's face as expressed in its details (reflecting the ongoing viability of physiognomic interpreta­tion in the nineteenth century), photographs of original marbles shot in situ, whether in museums or public spaces, were in this case less valuable than those of bright, white plas­ter casts in which each curve of the lip and wrinkle of the cheek could be measured as a physical sign of mind.

At the time Macpherson began his Vatican Sculptures photographs, there were other reasons why photographs of plaster casts might have been considered more valuable than photographs after "original" marbles. One faction of the British art world, repre­sented by W.R. Hamilton, Lord Elgin's for­mer secretary, and Richard Westmacott III,

professor of sculpture in the Royal Academy, believed that drawing students learning to master subtle gradations of tone would be better advised to work from casts of classical sculptures than from the originals, which not only often had dingy and yellowed surfaces but had suffered through multiple genera­tions of inaccurate restoration. Before a par­liamentary commission convened in l 8 5 3 to examine the fate of the National Gallery and the disposition of the British Museum collections, Hamilton testified that it was unwise to let beginning students wander at will among museum installations and that he would "presume that casts are preferable to the originals, because they cast a purer and a more direct shadow, whereas in a fragment

IIO AR T AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

of ancient sculpture you can hardly distin­guish the dirt, as it were, from the shadow." 64

Even in an age of photographic reproduc­tion, casts maintained their popularity as modes of access to the antique, and, if any­thing, became more sought after in the late nineteenth century as newly founded Ameri­can and European museums bought them en masse. For example, Macpherson's friend William Wetmore Story in l 8 5 8 was given $1,000 by the Boston Athenaeum to pur­chase casts of classical sculptures in Rome;65

the Athenaeum apparently did not acquire Macpherson's photographic album, although the printed handbook entered its collection. 66

Despite Macpherson's proclaimed selling point that his photographs were after "origi­nals," the differences between a photograph of a classical marble (itself often a copy of a Greek original) and a photograph of a plaster cast were often imperceptible, as we can see in the albumen prints illustrating an intrigu­ing catalogue of casts assembled by William Tufts Brigham in 1874, in which tipped-in photographs show sample products to be ordered from vendors throughout the world (fig. 15).67 Brigham, an 1862 Harvard gradu­ate who in 1864-1865 traveled in Hawaii and China, where he began anthropometric investigations of racial types, was also an amateur photographer who appreciated the strengths and limitations of photographs after sculpture:

Photography, although the cheapest means, is also the

least satisfactory when taken alone; for, if the pictures

are large, the proportions are distorted, and the stained

surface of most ancient marbles and their position in

ill-lighted halls, where it is often impossible to obtain

a good view, render the photographer's work often un­

sat isfactory. On the other hand, it preserves to us the

marking and defects of the marble, and often allows

us to distinguish modern restorations and repairs. So

a collection of casts should also be accompanied by a

collection of photographs of the origina ls. Those who

wish finer pictures will select photographs taken from

casts, as casts have a better surface, and can be placed

in a better light.68

The comparative strengths of plaster casts, better for art students and connoisseurs

r 5. Attributed co H.G. Smith or H. W. Tupper, title page, William Tufts Brigham, Cast Catalogue of Antique Sculpture fl/ustrated by Photographs with an Introduction to the Study of Ornament (Boston , r874 ), c. r 873 , albumen print

Author photograph

r6 . Ro bert Macpherson, 7 r. Menander, from Macpherson 's Vatican Sculptures, c. r8 58/r860, a lbumen print

R. esearch Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Auge/es (91-F44}

interested in form, and photographs, more accurate for readings of repairs, are clearly outlined here.

What, then, did photographic albums such as Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures contrib­ute? How was the experience of looking through an album different from either visit­ing the Vatican or studying life-sized casts? On one level, studying a reduced image in an album was much more private and allowed the connoisseur to dwell on the various phys­ical attributes of the heroic male or female body in the confines of the parlor or bed­room. In Macpherson's most successful shots, the sculptures begin to assume an almost lifelike appearance (in the same way that snapshots of Madame Tussaud's wax figures obscure the sheen of the wax and allow mom and Gandhi to look equally "real") . Moments from republican or imperial Roman history

11 1 Mc c A u L EY Fawning over Marbles

come alive, particularly in photographs of works that depicted the figure in an attitude of arrested movement, such as Macpherson's views of the statues of Menander or Posidip­pus in the Hall of the Statues. Installed to the left of the archway opening onto the imposing Jupiter Verospi, the Menander depicts the Greek poet as unusually grim (for a writer of comedies), casually resting his left arm on the chair and seemingly lost in thought (fig. 16). By moving close enough to the figure to cut off the base slightly below the level of the feet, shooting from left of the figure's gaze, and allowing the face to disap­pear into shadow, Macpherson enhanced the illusion that he was making a portrait, not a reproduction of sculpture. Perhaps inspired by popular tours of the Vatican galleries by torchlight, which George Eliot in 1860 felt

"left a sense of awe at these crowded, silent

forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life," 69 Macpherson played on the power of absence and mystery to transform the best of his photographs into stills of dra­matic motion, rather than archaeological records of dead matter.

On the other hand, photographs of nude figures became more erotic when removed from the echoing galleries of the Vatican. For Americans such as Frank Stearns, com­menting on Hawthorne's outrage over nude statues, the direct confrontation with a three­dimensional, undressed statue could itself be shocking: "We can make pretty good Venuses, but we cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as the contemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michel Angelo did." 70

Americans presumably no longer had the power of distanced objectivity that the Greeks or Florentines maintained in their freer concourse with art or actual nude bod­ies. The Vatican galleries in particular had already been styled in literature as backdrops for romantic trysts, places where Northern Europeans were awakened to the glories of the classical past amid suggestive displays of pagan, marble flesh. For example, Mme. de Stael, in her novelistic travel guide, Corinne, ou l'Italie, has the beautiful, mysterious poetess introduce the dispirited Scottish peer, Oswald, to the Vatican galleries: "She observed that statues representing an action suspended at its height, an impulse suddenly checked, create, sometimes, a painful aston­ishment; but an attitude of complete repose offers an image that thoroughly accords with the influence of southern skies." 71 Through the contemplation of "the human form ... dei­fied by paganism," the repressed northern soul could achieve the desired mixture of corporeal and intellectual sustenance. For George Eliot's Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch, the realization of his love for Dorothea Brooke comes in the Hall of the Statues when he catches a glimpse of "a breathing, blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery." 72 Contrasting "antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the

1 1 2 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

complete contentment of its sensuous perfec­tion" with "beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom," Eliot anticipates Dorothea's emo­tional (and eventually sexual) awakening through her exposure to art and Ladislaw. 73

This metaphoric use of classical galleries of sculpture as sites of corporeal and sensory awakening parallels the more literal func­tioning of small, flattened photographs as stand-ins for desirable bodies. Further minia­turizing and fetishizing the depicted object while allowing it to be secreted away for solitary pleasures of all sorts, photographs of nude male or female marbles, like the pornographic photographs that were also first marketed during the 1850s, could be held, stroked, and studied up close for as long as the viewer desired. Many of the most erotic descriptions of classical sculp­ture in the late nineteenth century, such as John Addington Symonds' luscious evoca­tions of each dimple and nostril of a statue of Antinous, had to have been written while gazing at a photograph; no museumgoer could have taken such lengthy notes before the actual piece, no remembered vision could be so exact, and no engraving could have captured the subtle pout and curling locks that Symonds exalts. 74 Although the close-up view was unknown to Macpherson and his contemporaries, his Vatican photographs and more detailed shots of Roman busts made by other photographers could have inspired unconscious obsessive fantasies in the viewer, at the same time that they contributed in the 1890s to the founding of the new, scien­tific art history of scholars such as Heinrich Wolfflin or Bernard Berenson.

For someone like the Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, intent on proving the degen­eration of the body as a result of miscege­nation and on defending polygenesis and inherent racial properties, the ideal female Caucasian form could be represented only through a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo, reproduced in a cabinet print by a commercial German firm (fig. 17). In the photographic album that he assembled after a scientific trip to Brazil in l 8 6 5, during

r 7. Dr. Stolze & Cie, Ve1111s

Milo/Antik-Paris, from the album assemb led by Louis Agassiz, Agassiz-Thayer Expediti on, c. r 868, a lbumen print

©zoo7, Harvard University, Peabody Museum, 2oo+r.436. 77

r8 . Unidentified photographet; Brazilian Woman, from the a lbum assembl ed by Loui s Agass iz, Agass iz-Thayer Ex pedition , c. 1865 , album en print

©1007, Harvard University, Peabody Museum, 2004 .r.436 .78

which his staff documented dressed and undressed natives of Spanish, Indian, and mixed descent, Agassiz used the comparative method to juxtapose the perky, well-shaped orbs of the Greek virgin with the sagging breasts of the "mixed-breed" woman, who stoically stares away from the camera (fig. r8). 75 The substitution of a classical statue for a "white" model undoubtedly reflected Agassiz's prudish reluctance to try to locate an American girl willing to pose for such a subject (the squeamishness of his Brazilian sitters could be overcome through money and the exertion of power based on the gender, class, and racial identity of the photographers), but it may also have stemmed from his ignorance of the actual bodies of young girls and mistaken belief in the "realism" of Greek art. At a time when sexual relations occurred with female under­garments on, bourgeois wives had separate bedrooms, artistic nudes were always shown with smoothed, hairless bodies, and proper Bostonians would not have been caught looking at French pornography, Agassiz per­haps could have justified to himself using statuary to stand in for flesh as a way of

rr 3 MCCAULEY Fawning over Marbles

maintaining scientific objectivity. He was also consistent with his period's general acceptance of the whiteness of marble sculp­ture (both classical and contemporary) as the measure of ideal beauty against the threat of actual bodies, whether Negro or Caucasian. Nonetheless, for our purposes, Agassiz's effective equalization of a photograph of a plaster cast with a photograph of a living being confirms the slipperiness of perceptual realms and the potential for nineteenth­century viewers to imbue carved forms with lifelike properties. I would argue that this Pygmalion effect, today diminished by the decline of classical education and the expec­tations spawned by ever more realistic media such as color film or video, figured promi­nently in the experience of visitors to the Vatican Museum and even more so in the viewing of photographs in albums such as Macpherson's.

Despite the relative novelty of Macpher­son's Vatican Sculptures in the r86os, the project never garnered the financial rewards that its creator envisioned. Prices for his loose prints dropped 50 percent in the r86os, and other firms such as James Anderson,

19. Robert Macpherson , r 8. Venus A 11adyomene, from Mac/Jherson's

Vatican Scul/Jtures, c. r 8 5 8 I r 860, albumen print

Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (9r-F44)

Alinari, and a host of stereoscopic publishers gained access to the Vatican. Gerardine's feminist friend Bessie Parkes, who was stay­ing with the Macphersons in 1866, wrote,

"[T]he last five years have not been very good ones for Robert. The American war cut off a number of purchasers; & even yet that mar­ket has hardly recovered. Then the fear of cholera has hindered visitors this winter." 76

Gerardine Macpherson, who always had worked in the studio and had been the prac­tical mainstay in the family, 77 continued to earn money by writing newspaper articles and drawing illustrations. It was through her and her late aunt's ties with Parkes that Mac­pherson's advertising broadsides had been published in the l86os by Emily Faithful! of the Victoria Press in London, a feminist print­ing press founded in 1860 and appointed

II 4 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC A LBUM

publisher in ordinary to the queen in 1862.78

Gerardine's abilities as an artist, which undoubtedly aided her work in the photo­graphic studio, can be judged from the illus­trations she drew for Margaret Oliphant's serialized novel, Madonna Mary (1865), the story of a struggling widow unjustly compromised by a foolish husband who dies and leaves her to fight for her respectability and her children's inheritance, somewhat akin to Oliphant's own experience. 79 For a scene in which Oliphant contrasts the pro­tagonist's boisterous but lovable children with her rich brother-in-law, a desiccated antiquarian who values his bibelots over his kin, Gerardine drew upon the sketches that she had made for the Vatican Sculptures handbook, including one of the statue of Venus threatening to crash down in the background (necessarily reversed in the illustration; figs. 19 and 20). 80

Macpherson's wife confronted other finan­cial and personal challenges in the late l86os. In l 8 67 Macpherson launched a public attack on John Murray, whose Handbook of Rome and Its Environs had buried his firm's name within a long list of Roman pho­tographers in the 1862 and 1864 editions and then cited the photographer in the 1867 edition as "Mr. Macpherson a Canadian." In a flurry of letters in March and April 1867, published in the Athenaeum and in a sepa­rate broadside put out by Macpherson, the photographer accused Murray of using an agent to extort photographs from him in exchange for advertising and slandering him by calling him a Canadian rather than a Scot. Murray calmly denied any awareness of the demands for prints made by his Roman agent and retorted that Macpherson seemed to have gained little for the bribe of photo­graphs, since "you promulgate to the world the melancholy story of your own want of success." 81 Furious, Macpherson broke off all relations with the Murray firm and on March l, 1868, reprinted the title page for the Vatican photographic album to advise:

"Visitors traveling with Murray's 'Hand Book' are informed that a correspondence with Mr. Murray, on the subject of misrepresenta-

2 0. After a drawing by Gerardine Macpherson, illustration for Margaret Oliphant, Madonna

Mary, c. I 86 i , wood engraving

From Good Words, March 6, r866, opposite page r57; author photograph

tions contained in the Handbook for Rome, has been printed: copies of which may be had on application to Mr. Macpherson." Macpherson's paranoia and fear of encroach­ment on his rights was further expressed in the catalogue he published in 1871, which warned that "all of his photographs are stamped with his name on the mounting­board; and also that they are not exposed nor to be had at any of the shops, and are only sold at his Studio N.12 Vicolo d'Alibert,

II 5 MCCAU LE Y Fawning over Marbles

Via del Babuino; near the Piazza di Spagna." Likening himself to an artist with a "Studio" and asserting his individual authorship and sole right to the distribution of his works, Macpherson obviously was struggling against the massification of the photographic market.

Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures, which in 1871 he described as "a volume of the choic­est sculptures in the Vatican" accompanied by a "small volume of descriptive remarks," which he sold together for l 5 o francs (or less than half of the three francs per print that he advertised in 1863),82 had undergone its own transformation. In 1868 Macpherson announced what we might define as a second edition in which new prints appeared and the order subtly changed. In part, this revi­sion reflected adjustments in the installation of the galleries: the impressive full-length portrait of Augustus Prima Porta, discovered on April 20, 1863, displaced the Antinous (which, since it was no longer in the Braccia Nuovo, was removed to the end of the list), and the group of Bacchus and a faun was moved from the Rotunda to the Chiaramonti, where it displaced the Venus Gabina (no longer on view, but transferred to the end of Macpherson's album). A second new photo­graph showed the gilt bronze Hercules, found in 1864 and proudly displayed in the Rotunda. Macpherson also tried in l 871 to promote a separate, much larger album of works in the Capitoline Museum, which boasted more than twice as many prints and cost three hundred francs. Given the rarity of both the Capitoline album and the second edition of Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures, one can assume that sales were few. 83

Like the desiccated bachelor in Oliphant's novel, Macpherson's Vatican albums were destined to remain Victorian period pieces, vestiges of an earlier age in which the classi­cal was the standard for moral truth and beauty. As a new, modern Italy was born from the strife of the Risorgimento and against the wishes of the pope, the Vatican collections themselves began to lose their aura. Howard Payson Arnold in 1864 admitted that the Vatican and Capitoline museums were "the two most complete

collections on ancient works of art now remaining." But, he continued, "All these preserve some lineaments of their former beauty, though showing abundant traces of the desolation through which they have passed."84 George Eliot in 1860 had com­plained that "there is no historical arrange­ment of them, and no catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history of their collection by the different popes, so that for every other purpose but that of securing to each pope his share of glory, it is a system of helter-skelter." 85 Not only was the primacy of classical art eroding under the impact of modernization, but the organi­zation of the galleries, with their papal imprimatur and increasingly retardataire museology, frustrated visitors now looking for education more than inspiration. Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures, linked to the power of the papacy and the hegemony of the antique, was destined to languish on the back shelves of dusty libraries. It has re-emerged, paradoxically, as a result of the astonishing late twentieth-century market for early photography and interest in the impact of reproductive technologies, rather than its insights into an increasingly alien and forgotten classical civilization.

116 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

NOTES

This essay sta rted with a visit to the archives of the John Murray publishing firm , still in its o riginal home on Albemarle Street in London , as part of work that I was doing on the impact of photography on the devel­opment of art history as a discip line. In the process of looking for traces of John Archer Crowe and Giovanni Cava lcase lle's commission by Murray to pu bli sh books on Italian pa inting, I came across letters from Ro bert Macpherson. The CASVA conference provided a perfect excuse to explore Macpherson's Vatican pro ject in more deta il. I thank the following individuals and institutions for their help with this proj ect: Joh n Murray v 11 ; Anne Havinga, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ; Sa ll y Pierce, Boston Athaeneum; Philippe Jarjat; Concord Free Public Library, Concord, M assachusetts; Massachusetts His­torical Society, Boston; H oughton Library, Harvard Uni versity; Schles inger Library, Harvard University; The J. Paul Getty Resea rch Institute; Archivio Alinari, Flor­ence; Kate Perry, Archive and Specia l Collections, Girton College Library, Cambridge; Theresa O 'Malley, Gregory Most, and Cynthia Ware of the National Ga llery of Art; Julie Brown, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethno logy, H arvard University; the staff of Marquand Library at Princeton; and my class icist co lleagues, Wi ll ie Chi lds and Hugo Meyer. This research was funded in part by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda­tion and Spea rs Grants from the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

r. Although Walter Benjamin was awa re of the history of methods of reproduction, he categorized photography (and film ), w hich he consistently ca lled " technische Reproduction" in the original German edition of "The Work of Art in the Age of M echanical Reproduction " (transla ted va riously as "mechan ica l," or "process" reproduction ), as different in kind from early processes, or " manual " reproductions. Citing the period around 1900 as the threshold for the impact of " technica l repro­duction " on the public, the point at which art itself and the perceptua l framework of the viewer changed, Ben­jamin set up a dichotomy (he referred to " two po lar types") between the "origina l" (with its aura , cult va lue, distance, and particular location in time and space) and the image after photography (including all art after the advent of photography as well as the photographic multiples themselves), wh ich has suffered a loss of aura but attained an increase in exhibition va lue, an emphasis on proximity of view ing, and an appea l to a mass (and often distracted ) public. Although to some extent this construction of polar opposites was a rhetorical device to advance his points about the potenti ally dangerous effects of 1930s popular culture, Benjamin nonetheless overlooked or ignored the extent to which earlier (pre-1900) modes of reproduction or even normalized practices of copying challenged his reified and Eurocen­tric idea of an "o rigina l." For exa mple, in an insightful refl ection on the impact of historica l context on viewing, he stated that "a n ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditi onal context with the Greeks, who made it an o bject of venera tion , than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol." But he then concluded that " [b ]oth of them, how­ever, were eq ua ll y confronted with its uniqueness, that

is, its au ra ." In other words, Benj amin was sensitive to va riations in the ritua listic functioning of obj ects in different cultural and historical contexts, bur he was unwilling ro engage with the relativity of the concept of originality itself and rhe possibility rhar even rhe Greeks (and certainly the Romans) may nor have looked upon class ical sculpture as "a ura tic," with a ll the va lues of aesthetic distance and venera tion that Benj amin gave to rhar term. Walter Benjamin , "The Work of Arr in the Age of M echanica l Reproduction,'' in Illuminations, ed. H annah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 21 7 -25 r.

2. Stephen Bann has masterfully detailed the importance of reproducti ve engrav ings in the nineteenth century and their interrela tionships with pa inting and photog­raphy in his Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 2001) . For a shorter account of the press debates over the impact of photography on engraving in the 18 50s and 186os, see my Industrial Madness: Commer­cial Photography in Paris, r848 - r87r (New Haven, 1994), 292 - 300.

3. Adolf Furrwiingler, in his seminal Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (published in English in l 89 5 ), addressed the role of photographs in the assessment of copies: "This kind of study is as yet only in its infa ncy; but it is precisely here that photography is of inva luable ass istance, and by its aid we may hope to make rap id progress." Claiming that he discussed only works that he had persona lly examined, he conceded that " [o]cular examina tion can, however, be at times replaced by good photographs; but rhe illustrated works, and the large one by Cla rac in particular [Frederic, comte de Clarac, Musee de sculpture antique et moderne .. . (Pa ri s, 1841-18 5 3 )] are as good as useless for our purpose. It is of course my wish that my readers should be in a position to compare for themselves as many originals, casts, and photographs as poss ible." Adolf Furrwiingler, Master­pieces of Greek Sculpture (New York, 189 5), ix. The editor of the English edition, Eugenie Sellers, added photogra phs to the German edition but conceded that in some cases photographs of casts had to substitute for photographs of originals in badly lit Italian ga lleries . Eugenie Sellers, editor's preface to Furrwangler r 89 5, xii- xiii . The willingness to admit casts into the connois­seurship of class ica l statues will be touched upon aga in later in this essay, but this text is consistent with the ongoing display of casts as well as copy photogra phs after prints and paintings in museum ga lleri es in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries .

4. The bes t sources on Macpherson's life are Marjorie M unsterberg, "A Biographica l Sketch of Robert Macpherson,'' Art Bulletin 68, no. r (Ma rch 1986): 142- 153; Pietro Becchetti and Carlo Pietrangeli, Robert Macpherson, un inglese fotografo a Roma (Rome, 1987); and Alistair Crawford, "Robert M acpherson, 1814- 72, the Foremost Photographer of Rome,'' Papers of the British School at Rome 67 (1999) : 3 5 3- 403 .

5. Macpherson's birth dare has been va riously identified as r8u and 1814. An obituary published in the Phila­delphia Inquirer, which conta ins some correct informa­tion rhar suggests rhar its author knew M acpherson

117 MCCAULEY Fawning over M arbles

(even though the writer cla ims that Macpherson was born in Edin burgh in 1816), states that " while still a lad he went wirh his parents ro Canada, whence he retu rned ar the age of 17 to study medicine in his native town."

"Obi tuary -Robert Macpherson,'' Philadelphia Inquirer, December 23, 1872, 4. Macpherson refuted the cla im made in John Murray's Handbook of Rome and Its Environs of 1867 that he was "a Ca nad ian" (Robert Macpherson, Correspondence between Robert Macpher­son Photographic Artist and j ohn Murray Publisher on the Subject of Misrepresentation in "Murray's Hand­book of Rome," Rome, M ay IO, 1867, broadside, Houghton Libra ry, H arvard University) . However, he never denied spending time in Canada, and the repeti ­tion of this story in different contexts suggests rhar it conta ins some truth.

6. In a letter to Johnstone wr itten in 1860, M acpherson asked to be remembered to McCull och, M acnee, Hill , Drummond, Lauder, Paton, and others (Crawford 1999, 3 54 ). Whether he mer these Scotti sh artists while he was living in Edin burgh in the 1830s or during subsequent visits after he moved to Rome is unclear. Paton (b. 1821) was younger than rhe rest and became a member of rhe Roya l Scottish Academy only in 1847, so he was prob­abl y not known to M acpherson in the 1830s. Most of the other artists were roughly the same age as or slightly older than M acpherson. "Lauder" could have been either Robert Scott Lauder (1803 - 1869) or his less celebrated younger brother, James Eckford Lauder (18u - 1869 ); both lived in Rome between 1834 and 1838 (before M acpherson 's arriva l). Drummond and Johnstone sa t fo r Hill's photographic portra its, and Drummond himself beca me an amateur photographer. Most of the arti sts Macpherson mentioned studied at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, a d rawing school founded to train ind us trial arts designers; one can surmise that M acpherson's earliest exposure to art ca me through that in stitution.

7. Crawford posits that Macpherson could be the "Robert Trumbull Macpherson" who exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy from r 8 3 5 to r 8 3 9. Crawford

1999, 357·

8. "Obituary" 187 2, 4 .

9 . Munsterberg 1986, 142- 143; the Philadelphia Inquirer obituary a lso mentions the Indian army doctor position.

IO . Mrs. Harry Coghill , ed ., Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Margaret O liphant (origina lly p ublished 1899; Leiceste r, 1974), 5 8.

rr. Coghill 1899 (1974), 57, 59 . She had only seen him once in London ar some point between l 8 5 5 and r 8 5 9 (she did nor dare rhe meeting in her autobiograph y) , before she moved with her famil y to Rome in 18 59 on account of her husband 's fa iling hea lth .

12. James E. Freeman, Gatherings from an Artist's Portfolio in Rome, 2 vols. (Boston, 1883), 2:202.

13. Crawford 1999, 400 .

14. Annie Fields papers, M assachusetts Historica l Society, diary entry, Ma rch 22, 1860, microfilm P28r. Among rhe fri ends and a rri srs whose studios Fields

visited in Rome were William Page, William Rogers, Thomas Crawford (Crawford died in 1857, bur his studio was still open), Johann Friedrich Overbeck, James Freeman, and Theodore Parker (who was to die later that year in Florence). There is a very large litera­ture on this circle of midcentury American and British artists in Rome, including Otto Wittman Jr., "The Italian Experience (American Artists in Italy (1830-1875)," American Quarterly 4, no. r (spring 19 52): 2- 15, and Theodore Stebbins Jr., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760 -1914 (Boston, 199 2) .

r 5. Freeman 188 3, 2:20 5.

16. According to the obituary in rhe Philadelphia Inquirer (see n. 5 ), Macpherson had an eye disease that caused him to consider abandoning painting, but

" the accidental arrival of an old Edinburg collegian, Dr. Clark (late of Capri), gave him a fresh start in his arrisric career. The doctor had come ro Rome with a camera and lenses and all the apparatus of the then novel and fascinating arr of photography. Macpherson, single-handed, overcame all the difficulties with which photography was at that time beset; and perceiving irs va lue in a place so rich in antiquarian and arr treasures as Rome, applied ir in the reproduction of the various objects of interest around him." " Obituary" 1872, + While this story undoubtedly contains a kernel of truth, it is unlikely that anyone who could not see enough to paint could see enough to focus the camera on a ground glass under a black cloth. The exact identity of the amateur photographer, Dr. ]. Clark, has not been determined.

17. Macpherson listed the via di Ripetta address in his 18 58 catalogue, and ir appeared in the 1862 edition of Murray's Handbook of Rome and Its Environs. How­ever, the Vicolo d'Alibert address appears in a letter to John Murray written in 1861, and Macpherson contin­ued to use that address into the r 87os.

18. Crawford has analyzed Macpherson's prices and concluded that his large landscape photographs were rhe most expensive in Rome; rhe cost of four photo­graphs represented the equivalent of one month's lodg­ing for a visiting arrisr in 1853. Crawford 1999, 362.

19. Albumen and collodion negatives translated colors into tones in a way that was nor comparable to the color perception of the eye. The emulsion was extremely sensitive to blues and insensitive to greens. Also, the varnish on paintings made them very difficult to photo­graph. For more on the problems of photographing paintings, see McCauley 1994, 284-286, and Anthony Hamber, "A Higher Branch of the Art": Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839-1880 (Amsterdam, 1996), 81-87.

20. Gibson wrote Charles Eastlake from Rome on April 5, 1861, rhar he had made a clay bust of the la re Mrs. Jameson that Jameson's sister, Mrs. Bare (Gerardine Macpherson's mother), had seen and de­clared "very like." The clay was translated into the marble piece currently in the collection of rhe National Portrait Gallery in London . Correspondence of Sir

rr8 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

Charles Lock Eastlake, Special Collections, Getty Research lnsrirure, acc. no. 870174, folder 3.

2r. Letter to Anna Jameson, December 21, 18 53 , in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon (London, 1897), 2:148. Browning added, '"Tis over pretty and petite, the colour adding, of course, to this effect." Browning's comments need to be read in light of the treatment of the subject by Gottfried Semper,

"On the Study of Polychromy and Its Revival," The Museum of Classical Antiquities r (18 51): 228-246.

22. Child responded in a letter dared October 5, 1859, to Hosmer's comments on the photograph: "You say the photograph has imparted some degree of 'peevish­ness' to the mouth. I do not think so. Peevishness belongs to weak characters and this mouth indicates strength of character .... The photograph does nor con­vey to me the idea of grasping, or clutching, as sup­pressed impatience would." Hosmer sent the same photograph to Anna Jameson, who used it as the basis of her own critique of the sculpture. Harriet Hosmer Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Insrirure, Harvard University, series r, folders rr and 17.

23. Copies of these prints are in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Crawford was sending photographs of his sketches for this project to Washington as early as 1853, bur it is not known if these were by Macpherson. Macpherson's closeness to Craw­ford is reflected in his signature on the resolution of sympathy sent to Crawford's widow on November 4, 18 57, and organized by John Gibson. Macpherson's 1858 catalogue included "106. The Indian, by Craw­ford," today known as The Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization, and considered at the rime of Crawford's death as one of his finest creations. Sylvia E. Crane, White Silence: Greenough, Powers, and Craw­ford, American Sculptors in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Coral Gables, FL, 1972), 361, 4o r.

24. For more information on Lawrence Macdonald, see Helen E. Smailes, "Thomas Campbell and Lawrence Macdonald: The Roman Solution to rhe Scottish Sculp­tor's Dilemma," in Virtue and Vision: Sculpture and Scotland, 1540-1990, ed. Fiona Pearson (Edinburgh, 1991), 65-7r. Photographs after Cardwell's Sabrina and Amor Victor and Gibson's Marriage of Cupid and Psyche and Venus are contained in an album assembled by Macpherson, Photograph ic Pictures of Rome in 1862, in the Alinari Collection, Florence. In the list of photo­graphs for sale bound with the guidebook Vatican Sculptures published in 1863, Macpherson also included reproductions of The Finding of Moses (shown in the London International Exhibition of 1862) and Hector and Andromeda by Benjamin Spence (18 22- 1866) . Many of these Scottish and English sculptors in Rome are profiled in "A Walk through the Studios of Rome­Part IV," Art-Journal, December r, 1854, 351 -352.

2 5. "Reminiscences of Thomas Crawford [Thomas Crawford to R.E. Launitz, 27 June 27 1837]," The Crayon 6 (January 1859): 28; cited in Robert L. Gale, Thomas Crawford: American Sculptor (Pittsburgh, 1964), 7.

26. Eliza beth Rigby, ed ., The Life of John Gibson, R.A . (London, 1870), 172 - 187.

27. An na Jameson, "Some Thoughts on Art," Art­]ournal, March l, 1849, reprod uced in Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, ed. Gerardine Macpherson (Boston, 1878), 3 50. The text printed by Macpherson and credited to this Art-journal article in fact is much longer than the published essay and may include a subsequent section that either was unpublished or appeared elsewhere.

28. John Murray, Handbook of: Rome and Its Environs; Forming Part 11 of the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, sth ed. (London, 1858), 179n.

29. Cole's diary entry for January lO, 18 59, reads: "Called on Lord Granville who introd uced me to Mr. 0. Russell attache at Florence but staying in Rome in a so rt of half recognized post. He promised to ask for permission to photograph in the Vatica n." Cited in Martin Barnes and Christopher Whitehead, "The

'Suggestiveness' of Roman Architecture: Henry Cole and Pietro Dovizielli 's Photographic Survey of 18 59," Architectural History 41 (1998): 196. The published li st of Dovizielli 's photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum collection does not include views shot in the interior of the Vatican.

30. Rigby 1870, 170.

3 r. Rigby 1870, 171 - 172.

32. Gerardine Macpherson 1878, 237.

33 . Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Goethe, June 2, 1849, in Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Goethe, ed. G. H . Needler (London, 1939), 168. Jameson had written earlier, in 1848, that her niece's wedding to Macpherson had had to be postponed, " for Macpherson has suffered, like others, fro m the tumultuous state of things at Rome" (Needler 1939, 162). Margaret Fuller, an American sympathizer with the cause of Ita lian unification, wrote to her friend Emelyn Story (wife of William Wetmore Story) from Rome on January 7, 1849: "I do not know whether Macpherson is here or not: poor fel low! His loss was that his apartment was stripped by robbers early in the Winter." Robert N. Hudspeth, ed. , The Letters of Margaret Fulle1; 6 vols. (Ithaca, NY, 1988}, 5:169.

34 . On papal and British relations in th is period, see Matthias Buschkiihl, Great Britain and the Holy See, 1746- 1870 (Dublin, 198 2), chaps. 5- 6.

3 5. Robert S. Levine, "'Antebellum Rome' in The Marble Faun," American Literary History 2, no. l (spring 1990): 19 - 38.

36 . Maguire praised the pope's fo unding of a new acad­emy in Bologna and his establishment of a new profes­sors hip to teach elements of a rchitecture; his purchase of casts of the Parthenon and Egina sculptures; and his addition of guards and lighting around the Colosseum. Also under Pius IX, excavations on the Appian Way, the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the Roman Forum were continued. Furthermore, the pope added gas lighting to the Vatica n. See John Francis Magu ire, Rome: [ts Ruler and Its Institutions (London, 1857), 343-380. Mary

I I 9 Mc c Au LE v Fawning over Marbles

Bergstein has wonderfu lly demonstra ted how Pius IX

used archaeologica l excavations and the promotion of the Vatica n co llec tions to further his in ternational reputation as an enlightened ruler. Mary Bergstein,

"The M ystificat ion of Antiquity under Pius IX: The Photography of Sculpture in Rome, 1846-1878," in Geraldin e A. Johnson, ed. , Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (New York, 1998), 3 5- 50.

37. Freeman 1883, 216, 221, 226.

38 . Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Margaret O li­phant 1974, 5 5. O liphant was considera bly more auda­cious and li beral than her husba nd Frank in 1860, when they witnessed the unification of Tusca ny with the government of Victor Em manuel II. Admitting that they did not exactly know what was happen ing, O liphant described her sympathetic feelings as she watched the "great Italian tricolour-the green, white, and red" unfurl amid shouts of "Viva l'lta lia !" Her husband, in contrast, " had no desire to be in the hea rt of the revolution, if it was a revolution, as I had."

39. For an exce llent history of plaster casts after antiq­uity in France, see Florence Rionnet, L'Atelier de mou­lage du musee du Louvre (r79 4 - r928) (Par is, 1996).

40. Photographs Exhibited in Britain r 839-r865 (by Roger Taylor), http://peib.dmu.ac.uk (2.002; accessed 6/9/2006).

4 r. Anderson was M acpherson's closest competitor and seems to have been working alongside him from the ea rl y 1850s to the 186os. A fe llow Scot who also became a Catho lic, Anderson, li ke M acpherson, appears in Rome by c. 183 8 as a topographical artist under the pseudonyms Isaac Atkinson and William N ugent Dun­bar. He is li sted in the guestbook of the Caffe Greco in l 84 5 as "James Anderson, Fotografo fu ori Porta del Popolo No. 1932," and after 18)1 distributed his photo­graphs through the bookseller Joseph Spithover, who speciali zed in Catholic publications. Tellingly, Macpher­son's name does not appear among the artists and photographers who signed the Caffe Greco's guestbook. Most of the photographers associated with this fa mous expatriate hangou t were French calotyp ists, including Frederic Flacheron and Eugene Constant. Since eye­witness accounts by Freeman and others reca ll that American a rti sts freq uented the cafe, I suspect that Macpherson was often there but did not mix with the French group, which included art students from the Villa Medici. On Anderson, see Dorothea Ritter, Rom r846 - r870: James Anderson und die Maler-Fotografen ­Sammlung Siegert (Munich, 2005). The best study of the Ca ffe Greco photographers is Musei Capitolini, Roma r850: Tl circolo dei pittori fotografi del Caffe Greco (Milan, 2003). In this catalogue Anne Ca rtier­Bresson deta ils the group's connections with French photographic suppliers such as Cheva lier and their experiments with wet paper negatives and the a lbumen­on-glass process of N iepce de Saint-Victor (which Macpherson used) . On Giacomo Ca neva, who made paper-negative reproductions of the Laocoon and the Belvedere Torso circa 1847 - 1848, see Piero Becchetti, introduct ion, Giacomo Caneva e la scuola fotografia romana (r847/r855) (Florence, 1989). For a particula r

study of photographic reproductions of the Laocoon, including Caneva's, Anderson's, and Macpherson's prints, see Maria Francesca Bonetti, "Documentazione e forruna fotografica del Laocoonte (18 40- 1870)," in Francesco Buranelli er al., Laocoonte: Alie origini dei Musei Vaticani (Rome, 2006), 79 - 8r. I thank Philippe Jarjar for ca lling this publication to my attention.

42. These included views of the Hall of the Philosophers and the Ha ll of the Animals, profile and fronta l views of Livia, and a view of Ariadne, a ll shown in the Architec­tura l Photographic Associa tion exhibition of 18 5 8 in London.

43. The letter from Macpherson to Johnstone in the archives of the Roya l Scottish Academy, dated August 20, 1860, is cited in Crawford 1999, 354 and 363 .

44 . Philippe Jarja t, "Robert Macpherson," in Buranelli er a l. 2006, l 87 - 189.

4 5. Crawford 1999, 363 .

46. Crawford 1999, 363 .

4 7. Robert Macpherson dossier, John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, letter dared November 12, l86r.

48. Herman Melville, journals, vol. 15 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evan­ston, IL, 1985), lo6 - II 2.

49 . Melville 198 5, l5:ro6.

50. Melville 1985 , l5 :ro8- II2. Melville's fami liarity with the visual arts, particularly prints, is outlined in Douglas Robillard, Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint (Kent, OH, 1997); see particularly 31-32, 34-35. M elville owned De Stael's Corinne, Goethe's Notes from Italy, and Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art.

5r. Herman Melville to George W. Curtis, September 15, 18 57, in Herman Melville, Correspondence, vo l. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford et a l. (Evanston, IL, 1993), 314. M elville's itinerary and the fees co llected for each lecture (which ranged from ho to $s o) are listed on 314 - 322.

52. Herman Melville, "Reconstructed Lectures: Statues in Rome," in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston, IL, 1996), 399 .

53. The printed Vatican Sculptures in rhe Houghton Library co llection is not accompanied by the photo­graphic album, and there is no way to confirm that Melville ever owned photographs of any class ica l sculp­tures. Furthermore, there is no evidence char Macpher­son ever trave led co the United Scares, a lthough he did regularly go to London and Scotland. T he book there­fo re wou ld have to have been mailed in 1866 to Mel­ville or rransporred by an American visitor. As will be noted later in chis essay, M acpherson was suffering from financia l problems by 1866 and may have thought he could benefi t from increased connections wi th the U.S. market in the afte rmath of the Civil War.

54. Robert Macpherson, Vatican Sculptures (London, 1863), title page. Given what we can deduce about

120 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

Macpherson's character, it seems unlikely that he was much of a bibliophile; Gerardine in contrast was a writer as we ll as an a rti st and had connections to her aunt's friends that predated her marr iage to Robert. She wou ld have known ocher admirers of Goethe, such as feminist Margaret Fuller, who spent 1847 - 1849 in Rome and had published on Goethe as early as 1841, and Samuel Gray Ward, Emerson's friend, who trans­lated the rexr quoted by Macpherson and whose wife, Anna Barker Ward, converted to Catho licism in Rome in 18 58. See Anne C. Rose, Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America (Ca mbridge, MA, 2001), 96-98 .

5 5. Macpherson 1863, in troduction, n.p.

56. John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (originally published 1829; London, 1906), 24.

57. Macpherson 1863, pl. X L V ll. George Combe, origi­na ll y from Ed inburgh, was a fr iend of sculpture student Lawrence Macdona ld during the 1820s and organized a subscripti on to send Macdonald back to Rome in 1832. Macdona ld was himself admitted in 1827 to the Edin­burgh Phrenological Society, founded by Combe and others in 1820. Macpherson apparently met Combe in Ed inburgh in rhe 1830s; Com be died in 18 58, long after his theories on phrenology had been cha llenged.

5 8. Since his self-proclaimed task was to cata logue not merely "Vatican sculptures," but classica l sculptures, Macpherson omitted Canova's Perseus, which adorned one of the four corner niches in the courtyard a long with the Laocoon, the Mercury, and the Apollo Belve­dere. The Belvedere Torso was located in the middle of its own vestibule, thus allowing a full 360-degree view.

59. "Photographs of Sculpture of the Grear Exhibi tion," Art-journal, April l, 1862, 68.

60. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Mr. Bright, M ay 5, 1860, The Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, r857 - r864, ed. Thomas Woodson er al. (Columbus, O H , 1987), 276.

6r. "Meeting of the Scottish Photographic Society," British journal of Photography, December 15, 1862, 184.

62. Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches (Phila­delphia, 1905), 343 - 344.

63 . Stearns 1905, 345-346. Stearns remarked in a footnote that "these pictures proved to be fine reproduc­tions, and are still to be met with in Boston and Ca m­bridge parlors" (346). Tellingly, Macpherson himself was not hired to rake these photographs, even though Henry Wadsworth Longfe llow, who was in Rome with his brother in 1869, is sa id to have visited Macpherson's home (cited in Freeman 1883, 226) .

64. Cited in Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, r800 - r939 (London, 1992), 34.

65 . T he trustees of the Athenaeum voted $1,000 (about $25,000 in contemporary do llars) in 1858 for the pur­chase of casts. Mabel Munson Swan, The Athenaeum Gallery, r825 - r873 (Boston, r940), r57. Wi ll iam Wetmore Story bought cases of Menander (from the Vatica n), Silen us and Infa nt Bacchus, the Dying Glad ia-

tor, the Barberini Faun, Demosthenes, the Apollo Belve­dere, the Discobolus, an athlete, and the Vatican Mercury.

66. However, the Arhenaeum did acquire an impressive a lbum of Roger Fenron's photographs of sculptures in the British Museum; I thank Sally Pierce for showing me this album. The only copy of the photographic a lbum entitled Macpherson's Vatican Sculp tures that survives in the Boston area and was purchased by a New Eng­lander in the nineteenth century is in the Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts. This copy came from the bequest of the library's founder, William Mun­roe, who traveled in Europe intermittently between his retirement in 1861 and his death in 1877. His brother, Alfred Munroe, was in Europe in 1879-1880 and was a lso an amateur photographer who might have acq uired the album. According to the library's acquisition register, bo th the pnnted and photographic Vatican Sculptures were acquired from the "legacy of William Munroe recei.ved June, 1909"; the prinred handbook is curr~ nrly missing from the collection. The copy of Macpherson 's Vatican Sculptures in Houghton Library, Harvard Uni­versity, which bears the bookplate of "Smith Sligo," was acquired recently as part of the H arrison H orblitt co llection.

67. William T. Brigham, Cast Catalogue of Antique Sculpture Illustrated by Photographs with an Introduc­tion to the Study of Ornament (Boston, 1874). In this unusual book, one of the ear liest to use photographs to advertise products but published for altruistic, rather than commercia l, purposes, Brigham (1841-1926) deta iled the techniques of casting, listed the major international vendors, and ca ta logued a ll the vers ions and prices of each well -known piece currently ava ilable fo r purchase. For example, the Vatican's Apollo Belve­dere was listed as sold by Malpieri in Rome for 125 francs and a bust version by Gherardi (Paris) for eigh­teen francs; an excellent cast "quire as good as those in Rome" was ava ilable from the Bureau du moulage (Louvre) for l 50 francs. Directed to an American marker, Brigman's catalogue confirms the widespread purchases of casts by new American collectors and museums after the Civil War. For more information on the role of plaster casts in ear ly American art educa­tion, see James K. McNutt, "Plaster Casts after Antique Sculptu re: Their Ro le in the Elevation of Public Taste and in American Art Instruction," Studies in Art Educa­tion 31 , no. 3 (1990): 158-167.

68. Brigham 1874, 25. The illustra tions to Brigham's ca ta logue are albumen prints after col lages of five to nine extant photographs mounted on a si ngle page. In one plate devoted to decorati ve patterns, seventeen views of the Parthenon frieze and pediment statues as well as acanthus and foliate re liefs were combined into a claustrophobic grouping. Brigham was very concerned about the quality of his photographic illustra tions and wrote in his preface: "The photographic illustrations have been made from casts wherever that was poss ible; 1n other cases from photographs of the originals. Unfor­tunately, no process of pigment-printing [carbon prints] has yet been introduced into this country, a lthough common abroad, which is capable of fa irl y represent­ing statuary. The prints, however, have been prepared

l 2 I Mc c Au LEY Fawning over Marbles

with such care that they may be considered permanent photographs." H e thanked H. G. Smith and H. W. Tup­per "who have taken infinite pains in making rhe photo­graphic illustra tions." Brigham 1874, iv.

69. J. W. Cross, ed ., George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and journals (New York, 188 5), 2:13 l.

70. Stearns 1905, 368 - 369.

7r. Mme. de Stael, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Isabel Hill (New York, n.d.), l 3 5.

72. George Eliot, Middlemarch (origina lly published 1871-1872; London, 1985), 220. This effect of an imat­ing a sculptu re through the use of ca ndlelight or torch­light was also the theme of Joseph Wright of Derby's An Academy by Lamplight (1768 - 1769), in which young ma le arr students express a range attitudes, from the distanced contemplation of the fema le form to rhe enraptured enchantment of the boy on the left, w ho rests his head on his hand whi le smiling drea mily at the enticing nude body.

73· Eliot 1871 - 1872 (1985), 220. Eliot was influenced by D.e Stael's Corinne as well as H awthorne's recently published The Marble Faun (1860), which opens in the Capitoline rather than the Vatican Museum wi th the fateful recognition of the resemblance between the Ita lian boy Donatello and the statue of the Dancing Faun. The tendency to find uncanny resemblances between class ica l statues and living fl esh is of course at the heart of the Pygmalion myth and has been ana lyzed by Sigmund Freud in his discussion of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva. It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the enormous fasc ina tion with this theme in the nine­teenth century, but the responses to photographs of sculpture certainly re itera ted en abfme the psycho­logical jolt felt in front of the statues themselves. The doubling of photography and the doubling of sculpture (and casts made after sculpture) have often been re lated. See Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York, 1998) for an expansive (if rather incoherent) romp through the manifestat ions of copies in the modern era. Kenneth Gross, in The Dream of the Moving Statue (New York, 1992), has p robed the psychological sources for the pervasive fantasy of sculptures as frozen life in litera ture but does not consider photography as another medium ' in which life appears suspended.

74 . John Addington Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Southern Europe, 2 vols. (New York, 1880), 1:29 5- 296. Symonds effuses that the "l ips, ha lf parred, seem to pout; and the distance between mouth and nostr il s is exceptiona lly short. The undefinable expression of the li ps, together with the weight of the brows and slum berous ha lf-closed eyes, gives a look of sulkiness or voluptuousness to the whole face" (296). By his own admiss ion, this essay on Antinous was written in Davos Switzerland, while consulting scholarly texts forwarded ' by H oratio Brown (338). Even though he had often visite.d the Vatican and other collections (his first expo­sure 111 1863 provoked the comment that the Vatican was a "wilderness of sculptu re" that wou ld take him

"weeks to see"), Symonds was also an av id co llector of photographs of both artworks and li ving male nudes. In

the Antinous essay he comments on the Ildefonso group in Madrid: "As a work of art, to judge by photographs, it is inferior to others in execution and design" (3 3 2) . However, he illustrates this work with a stipple engrav­ing by J. C. Armytage.

7 5. This photographic album has been discussed in Gwyniera Isaac, "Louis Agassiz's Photographs in Brazil: Separate Creations," History of Photography 21, no. I (spring 1997): 3-n, and Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY, 2001), S5-n9. Isaac observed that one of the fi ve areas Agassiz defined for his comparative analyses of the physical effects of racial interbreeding was the "breasts and inguinal region " (99 n. 3 2). The full-length photographs in the Agassiz album were shot out of doors by Walter Hunnewell ; the bust-length views are of a higher quality and appear to have been made by a commercial firm.

76. Bess ie Parkes was an intimate friend of An na Jameson and the Macpherson fa mily, whom she visited in Rome in 1S 57 when Jameson was also there. During her 1S66 visit, she sent a deta iled description of the Macpherson household to fe llow feminist Mary Merry­weather: "I am very kindly and comfortably lodged at Mr. Macphersons; & I think if you were there you wou ld rea lly enj oy Rome at the time as well as after. Geddie is greatly altered & improved; much more matronly & has now the upper hand of Robert instead of he of her-a consummation greatly to be desired./ They have an immense bare palazzo of a place under the Pincian Hill; a costly house, but suitable for the Photography." She then described the Macpherson children (Willie, who was studying in England; Peicino Uoseph], a cherubic redhead; and four-yea r-old Ada) and Geddie's mother, Mrs. Bate. Bessie Rayner Parkes to Mary Merryweather, March 29, 1S66, Personal Papers of Bessie Rayner Parkes, Girton College Archive, Cambridge, GCPP 6/92.

77. Bessie Parkes observed in 1S57 that "Mrs. Macpher­son is so pretty and so intelligent. A great deal of her time is spent over the Photographic business, which becomes very profitable." Bessie Rayner Parkes to her mother, Rome, March 29 , 1S57, Personal Papers of Bessie Rayner Parkes, Girton College Archive, Cam­bridge. Margaret Oliphant was more critical of Geddie's temperament, ca lling her " full of fau lts, untidy, disor­derl y, fond of gaiety of every kind, incapable of the dull domestic life which seemed the right thing to me," but at the same time kind and "working like a slave-nay, as no slave ever worked-at the common trade, the photographing, at which she did quite as much as, if not, people said, more than, he did ." Autobiography and Letters of Mrs . Margaret Oliphant 1974, 60.

7S. A credit line for the Victoria Press appears at the bottom of the title page of the copy of Macpherson's Vatican Sculptures in the ]. Paul Getty Research Institute. The Victoria Press was the publisher for The English Woman's Journal, found ed by Bessie Parkes, Barbara Smith Bodichon, and Charlotte Cushman's former lover Matilda M. H ays, who left Rome to return to London in IS 57. In 1S66 Hays published a novel, Adrienne Hope, based in part on her life in Rome, in which she described visi ts to Gibson's studio, complete with debates on his

I 22 ART AND THE EARLY PHOTOGRAPHIC ALBUM

polychromed Venus and an introduction to H arriet Hosmer (1 :40 - 47); long discuss ions of the merits of the Venus de Milo (I: 160 - 161), and even remarks by George Combe on genius as expressed in the plastic arts (1 :161 - 162). Matilda M. Hays, Adrienne Hope: The Story of a Life, 2 vols. (London, 1S66). The connections between the Macphersons (particularly Gerardine and her aunt) and the so-ca lled Langham Place circle, a group of early British feminists named after the place of publication for the English Woman's journal, were therefore extensive.

79 . Margaret O liphant, Madonna Mary (Leipzig, 1S67), 1:155 - 156.

So. The four illustrations, signed "GM," first appeared with the seria lized novel in the family magazine Good Words on March I, April 2, May I, and June ·I, 1S66 (pages 157, 230, 299 , 37 5).

SI. Macpherson 1S67 (see n. 5).

S2. Macpherson 's Photographs, December 1S71, repro­duced in Becchetti and Petrangeli 19S7, 49 - 52.

S3. The printed hand book seems also to have been reissued in 1870 by E. Calzone in Rome. Whereas many li braries today own the small Vatican Sculptures hand­book, the photographic albums are rarer. In addition to the copy in the Concord Free Public Library, I have seen copies in Houghton Library, Harvard Univers ity; the ]. Paul Getty Museum; the Archivio Alinari (1S68 edition ); and the National Gallery of Art Library, Wash­ington. In some cases, such as the copy in the Concord Free Public Library, the photographs fo llow the 1863 seq uencing, but the sections deta iling the date of issue, address, and ordering information have been cut out of the letterpress plate list, with the list of photographs collaged onto another sheet of paper. This treatment suggests an attempt to save the money of reprinting the plate li st and a dating before 1868 but after 1863.

84. Howard Payson Arnold, European Mosaic (Boston, 1864), 18 5.

85. Cross 1885, 131 - 132 (comments written in 1860).