Realization of the Gallery Space in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century English Pictorial Poetry

Eleanor Ling, Eleanor Ling
2014 unpublished
Senior Thesis Academic Term B Advisor: Robert DeMaria Ling 4 contesting that it created a "legendary space where possibilities would fuel the imagination of artists, poets and travelers for many generations to come." 2 Here emerges the importance of seeing the image for the artistic imagination. We have evidence that Marvell, Dryden and Pope all traveled abroad and were thus able to partake in this cultural exchange of visual iconography. Italy, and especially Rome, came to represent a common
more » ... ltural heritage for its connection to the classical world as evidenced through its vast collection of surviving fragments of antiquity. These pictorial poets can largely be ascribed to the "Neoclassical" tradition that held the artistic styles of antiquity as an ideal towards which all artists should strive and were measured against. The sense of privilege in viewing the art object is especially potent for these fragments of antiquity, stimulating for many viewers a truly emotional and reverential engagement with the object. The capacity to see with one's own eyes a true masterpiece of art was an opportunity limited to few, and was naught but a legendary activity in the imaginations of many. However, as Jean H. Hagstrum says of the era ushered in by this increase in foreign art collection and international travel, "in no previous period in English literature could a poet assume knowledge of great painting and statuary in the audience he was addressing." 3 How did the world of art transform from an inherently class-based privilege to a more widely consumed exchange of images, icons and symbols? As interest in the arts rose, so did a cultural demand for images, which stimulated the spread of various mediators between the works of art and middleclass people without access to the collections. Perhaps most influential was the intense proliferation of a developing print culture, in which engravings and illustrations of famous works could be easily mass-produced and distributed. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini write that 2 Paula Findlen, "Uffizi Gallery, Florence: The Rebirth of a Museum in the Eighteenth Century," in The First Modern Museums of Art, 73. 3 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 130. Ling 5 through these prints, "fixed monuments that had to be visited to be seen could become known (in their portable printed form) to a much broader public." 4 This is crucial for the pictorial poet as it meant he was able to rely on an embedded visual vocabulary in the minds of many of his readers. The ability to duplicate an exact image brought about the development of a much more concrete communal image repertoire. Elizabeth Eisenstein cites William Ivins, former curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who coins the phrase 'the exactly repeatable pictorial statement' and elaborates that "identical images could be viewed simultaneously by scattered readers," a true revolution in communication. 5 The emblem was a recognizable image, often reproduced in mass amounts and variations and would have held for the viewer an immediately associable abstract concept or moral. The collection of print images was able in a slightly muted fashion to reproduce the mythical status of the fine art collector. Zorach and Rodini explain that through these "paper museums," purchasers could also feel a sense of ownership and even develop their own "connoisseurial eye"-which before had not been possible for any except the very wealthy (vii). They even go so far as to suggest that "prints made the renaissance," not an entirely unbelievable claim, as this was the primary fashion in which the masses were able to access great cultural works and ideas. The print revolution also allowed for the wider distribution of guidebooks to the great art collections of Europe, intended to aid the visits of potential travellers as well as to provide documentation for those back at home of the style and appearance of the great visual works. These guides and handbooks are intriguing to view as an expression of the artistic parallel in their own right, insomuch as they attempt to recreate with words the nature of a visual 4
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