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Reviewed by:
  • Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection, and: Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth-Century
  • Chloe Chard
Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection Exhibition: British Museum, London, 13 March–14 July 1996. Catalog: Edited by Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan. London: British Museum Press, 1996. Pp. 320. £ 25.
Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth-Century Exhibition: Tate Gallery, London, 10 October 1996–5 January 1997. Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome 5 February–7 April 1997. Catalog: Edited by Andrew Witon and Maria Bignamini. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996. Pp. 328. £37.

Vases and Volcanoes is an exceptionally pleasurable exhibition: while focusing on one particular Englishman in Naples at the end of the eighteenth century, it induces in the visitor a powerful sense of the more general curiosity and delight with which northern Europeans of the time approached the city and its environs. This is due partly to thoughtful and imaginative design, muted colors, and a well-judged sequence of spaces, and partly to a selection of exhibits that emphasized the array of different objects of inquiry to which Hamilton was attracted during his thirty-seven years as British envoy in Naples. Among the objects on show, for example, are a cork model of a tomb at Paestum, antique vases, engravings of these vases, cameos and intaglios (both ancient and new), paintings and prints related to Hamilton’s interest in volcanoes (including some dramatic watercolors by Giovanni Battists Lusieri), and ancient bronzes, bas-reliefs, and stone fragments. The exhibition also includes representations of contemporary Neapolitan life, and intriguing oddities such as an eighteenth-century fake Egyptian mummy, and the wax phalluses known as St. Cosmo’s “big toes,” that Hamilton collected after discovering “the Cult of Priapus in as full vigor as in the days of the Greeks and Romans, at Isernia in Abruzzo.”

Curiosity was viewed by Edmund Burke and by many other eighteenth-century writers as a passion that “has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness and anxiety.” Kim Sloan’s essay in the catalog on Hamilton’s collections of paintings notes the addictive, destabilizing character of his need to indulge his spirit of inquiry by collecting antiquities and works of art, a need that prompted him to expenditures beyond his financial means. Eighteenth-century suspicions about curiosity, moreover, are evident in some of the caricatures included in the exhibition, such as James Gillray’s A Cognoscenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique (1801), an image that elides Hamilton’s interest in antiquities with his passion for his second wife [End Page 449] Emma. By evoking classical art in her famous “Attitudes” (and in some of the many portraits of her that her husband commissioned), Emma was readily perceived as a supplementary item in Sir William’s collection. In Gillray’s etching, a thin, stooping, elderly Hamilton peers libidinously at a bust of Emma labeled “Lais,” while a proliferation of horns remind the viewer of the envoy’s role as Emma’s cuckolded husband, during her notorious affair with Nelson.

Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth-Century also makes use of caricatures, and of a range of comic and ironic images. The impression of eighteenth-century travel in Italy that these images produce is, however, a rather different one; works such as Thomas Patch’s The Golden Asses (1761) leave the visitor with the impression that the Tour was the preserve of “finished connoisseurs and coxcombs” whom Tobias Smollett describes being “poxed and pillaged” in Rome: doltish members of British gentry and aristocracy, traveling in a spirit of bland cultural complacency.

Travelers on the Grand Tour were, of course, often portrayed in this way. Such figures, however, often served to define, by opposition, a concept of a more satisfactory approach to the foreign: that of the traveler who succeeded in merging pleasure with cultural benefit. Responses such as curiosity and wonder were seen as crucial to the task of establishing this continuity between pleasure and “improvements.” The exhibition contains many images that evoke these two reactions: for example, John Robert Cozen’s watercolor A Storm over Padua (after 1782) and Pierre-Jacques Volaire’s...

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