Decadent Portraits

ELT 46 : 3 2003 "God bless you once more, this little picture speaks wonders to me—that bit of clear white sky of hope out of all the Blackness and Dispair—and the eyes of Tannhauser are opening to it—yes, Humanity will come back from Hades one day—it is coming already." Proper Victorians failed to penetrate the surfaces of Beardsley. Whatever "political" slant was perceived , Sutton believes, faded quickly after his death, when, to sanitize his reputation, he was praised, so Symons wrote cautiously, "as decorative artist, and not anything else." In the same vein, Ezra Pound, quoted by Sutton, described the "beauty" of Beardsley's art as "wholly independent of the appearance of the things portrayed." Sutton sees her work as the recovery, through the lens of "Wagnerism ,"of a dimension of Beardsley's intellectual complexity. Generally well researched but strained as well as restrained, her study demonstrates that, with all its faults, examining the ambivalent Wagnerism in Beardsley was worth doing, and that there are still more unexplored nuances . Yet in flawed editing and in an exorbitant price tag, her publishers have done the writer and her endlessly provocative subject a disservice. STANLEY WEINTRAUB __________________ University of Delaware Decadent Portraits Elisa Bizzotto. La Mano e l'Anima: Il Ritratto Immaginario Fin de Siècle. Milano: Cisalpino, 2001. Euro 20,00 193 pp. In Italian. ONE OF WALTER PATER'S most famous epigrams is his frequently quoted dictum from "The School of Giorgione" that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music." The more closely an art object approximates the aesthetic of a piece of music (in which form and matter coincide perfectly), the more successfully will it embody the abstract artistic ideal. The idea that the arts can be grouped together into an evaluative scale that culminates with music necessarily presupposes that the borders between the different art forms must to some extent be permeable and therefore that they can be seen to blend as it were naturally into each other in their ideal points of contact. Pater's interest in the exploration of these hybrid states led him to the composition of his finely named "imaginary portraits," a series of fictional tales that incorporate , thematically and stylistically, elements from literature and the visual arts. In La Mano e l'Anima: Il Ritratto Immaginario Fin de Siècle {Hand and Soul: The Fin-de-Siècle Imaginary Portrait, my translation), Elisa 312 Book reviews Bizzotto looks for common characteristics in a number of mid- to latenineteenth century short stories that embody the desire for experimentation across different art forms, aiming to come to a definition of the imaginary portrait as a literary subgenre in its own right. Following Benedetta Bini's pioneering work on the subject, the 1992 L'Incanto della Distanza: Ritratti Immaginari nella Cultura del Decadentismo, Bizzotto confirms a recent trend according to which the study of the imaginary portrait seems to have more fortune among Italian academics than in the English-speaking world. Influenced by Roland Barthes's formulation in his Writing Degree Zero, Bizzotto presents the nineteenth century as an era of brewing doubt and disintegration, dominated by aesthetic contradictions and social unease. These repressed intellectual forces erupt in the second half of the century creating a widespread epistemological crisis which manifests itself in literature in the loss of faith in the efficacy of language as a coherent representational system and in its ability to recreate the outside world in the supposedly uncomplicated way endorsed by literary realism. It is this altered social and cultural context that the imaginary portrait, and the various other interartistic experiments of the time, attempt to express. Chronologically Bizzotto's study ranges from Rossetti's novella "Hand and Soul" (1850), which gives the book its title and is treated as the archetypal ancestor of the genre, to Arthur Symons's collection of short stories, Spiritual Adventures (1905). Within this time frame she traces the evolution of the genre from what she calls a "historicalmythological " model, through its formal and thematic completion in the work of Pater, to its latest phase in the fin de siècle, in which it takes on the character of "history of...