Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reception studies offer an attractive framework to make sense of the Victorians' obsessive interest in the past, their pervasive engagement with historiography, and their drive to historicise their own modernity. The thirteen essays in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance add to this growing area of study. The book's precedents in Anglophone scholarship are Hilary Fraser's The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (1992) and J. B. Bullen's The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (1994). These earlier studies mapped the literary and cultural contexts of the reception of the Renaissance in Victorian England and remain the canonical accounts of the field. The vague notion of "response" is an apt choice to describe the eclectic quality of the present volume, which, in the words of one of the editors, sets out to analyse the Italian Renaissance "through the minds, eyes, pens and purses of the Victorians and Edwardians"; from these responses "emerges a phenomenon which is as multi-faceted and complex as the nineteenth century itself" (1).

It is inevitable that a project like this, which originates from a conference, should present gaps and discontinuities. The most surprising amongst these are an almost complete lack of attention to the reception of Italian Renaissance literature and a comparative disregard for the Venetian Renaissance, which was of paramount importance to such major figures as John Ruskin and Walter Pater. There is also very little on the reception of the Renaissance in the visual arts or in poetry (Robert Browning is a striking omission). These gaps are made more prominent by the tantalising brevity of the otherwise helpful introduction, which limits itself to sketching some of the book's overarching themes and does not provide a comprehensive context for the essays. Similarly questionable is the editors' decision not to break the volume into thematically-grouped sections, which could have emphasised the connections between some of the pieces and given the collection a stronger sense of cohesion and direction.

The essays are arranged chronologically and cover the period from the 1860s to the First World War. There is little here to interest early-Victorian scholars, but this is partly an honest reflection of a reception history that gathers momentum after the mid-century. The real focus is on the decades around 1900. The volume therefore mainly deals with a generation of writers and critics whose work spans the two centuries, and who are still too often squashed between the canonically strong fields of Victorian writing on one side and literary modernism on the other. There is an evident difference in the treatments of the periods before and after 1900: while the Victorian contributions explore the impact of the Italian Renaissance on the literary and artistic cultures of the period, the Edwardian side is centred on the recovery of lesser-known figures such as Oxford historians Edward Armstrong and Cecilia Ady, and Arthur Burd, editor of Niccolo Machiavelli's Il Principe (1891). These pieces are more ploddingly historical and regrettably do not engage with the ways in which the Italian Renaissance contributed to the imaginative and cultural contexts of Edwardian writing. Walter Pater emerges as the towering figure on either side of the turn of the century: his promotion of the aesthetic ideal of the Renaissance and his general views on art and culture exercised a strong influence both on his Victorian contemporaries and on a number of the Edwardian authors discussed in the essays, who were either personally connected to Pater (Armstrong, Robert Langton Douglas) or seduced into Renaissance studies by his writings (Edward Hutton).

What the book lacks in comprehensive coverage is made up by the richness of its approaches. In this respect the Victorian contributions are more successful in bringing to life the complexity and the variety of forms that these responses to the Renaissance could take. They range from Graham Smith's original analysis of how the new medium of photography...