The Sister Arts Revisited

Ever since Jean Hagstrum published The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (1958), readers of eighteenth-century culture have been on alert for verbal and visual reciprocities. Luisa Calè offers the Swiss painter Fuseli’s Milton Gallery as a ‘case study in the new exhibition culture emerging in late eighteenth-century London’ (p. 5). Such a study, she hopes, will help ‘redefine visual and verbal interactions’ and ‘ways of reading and viewing’ (p. 5). In particular, she emphasises the ‘visual dimensions of the act of reading’, pointing to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘cultural practices’ that cemented viewing and reading (pp. 11, 12). Her attentiveness to the manifold ways in which illustrated books and prints as well as cultural practices such as extra illustration – whereby readers would purchase prints and then have them bound into their books – transformed the gallery into a paper surrogate during this period enriches our understanding of Romantic visuality.

Calè therefore reconstructs the interface between the book and print market in the new public sphere of art, highlighting marketing strategies that rely on the work of literature being perceived as canonical to sell prints even as a Grand Style of British Painting is invented. Especially helpful is her demonstration of how John Barrell’s notion of civic humanism was complicated by an ‘ethos of commercialism’ (p. 18). Indeed, as Gillray’s tart riposte to the Royal Academy, Shakespeare Sacrificed; or The Offering to Avarice (1789), suggests, perhaps civic humanism was the symptom of such commercialism. Throughout, Calè seeks to ‘challenge the ideal of a disembodied viewer’ (p. 122). Invoking Bourdieu’s concept of a ‘field’ because it signals tension and struggle in sites of cultural production (p. 22), she argues that Fuseli transformed the commercial origins of his gallery into the discourse of civic humanism in his public presentations. She thus reads the choice to exhibit at James Christie’s Auction Room in Pall Mall as part of a strategy to situate the Milton Gallery within a network of polite urban landmarks such as the ‘Old Academy Rooms’ and the Prince of Wales’s Carlton House (p. 50). When enough women did not attend – women were a key ingredient in ‘exhibition sociability’ (p. 51) – an outreach programme directed at the female public was orchestrated through The Times and the True Briton. Although the gallery proved to be a financial flop, Calè argues that Fuseli was able to use it to help him garner enough cultural capital to become Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy. He could do so because his Swiss marginality was offset by his ‘transfer of British cultural heritage from the field of poetry to that of painting’ (p. 55).

The book then unpacks the intersections of reading and viewing at exhibitions. Chapter 2 explores the circulation of text at exhibitions, whereas chapter 3 turns to the tensions implicit in the transformation of discrete moments depicted in visual art into a coherent narrative. These chapters show how spectators and readers became interchangeable, and they form a powerful chiasmus. In chapter 2, Calè demonstrates how ‘art treatises and literary gallery catalogues established painting as a rational recreation, arguing its capacity to show everything at one view, contrasted to the length and labour of reading’ (p. 64). Nonetheless, this reading material helped to foster ‘new ways of reading and viewing’ (p. 64), and Fuseli helped to do so by ‘anthologizing Milton’ in his excerpts and abridgements (p. 78). Calè argues that Fuseli ultimately reduced the role of teleology in Paradise Lost. Given that the Romantics generally read Milton so badly, one wonders if Fuseli is part of a larger trend or the initiator of cultural misreading. In chapter 3 Calè examines how ‘viewing depended on the physiological transfer of the perceivers’ movement onto the object of their vision’ (p. 120), culminating with the argument that the Milton Gallery anticipated the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein’s definition of montage: the essence of...