From Ancient Rome to Modern Italy: Italian Art in Melville’s Print Collection

Italian art was important to Melville in the fiction and poetry he wrote, the lectures he gave, the travels he took, the books he collected, and, perhaps above all, in the visual art he collected in his brownstone in New York City during the last twenty-five years of his life. At least one fourth of more than four hundred prints and engravings that have now been documented from Melville’s personal collection feature Italian subjects, painters, or engravers.¹ Sixteen of Melville’s Italianate engravings are after works by Claude Lorrain, the French artist living in Rome in the seventeenth century, whom Arthur Stedman in his 1891 obituary declared to be Melville’s “favorite” among the “fine assortment of prints” he collected (Stedman 100).

The sixteen prints after Claude that Melville is now known to have collected also represent a fine sampling of Claude’s career. Five of the prints depict marine scenes: Embarkation of Queen of Sheba, View of a Sea Port during Sunset, The Sea-Port, The Beacon Tower, and Harbor with a Large Tower. Three of them are pastoral scenes: The Herd Returning in Stormy Weather, Pastoral Landscape, and Le Berger Galant. Melville’s prints after Claude also include two classical Roman scenes (The Roman Forum and Roman Edifices in Ruin), two biblical subjects (The Flight to Egypt and Landscape—Christ Tempted), and four mythological ones (The Enchanted Castle, Europa, and two versions of Cephalus and Procris). Three of the sixteen prints had been engraved by Claude himself; others are interpretive reproductions by French, German, or English engravers. The entire group gives added interest to the image in “The Banker” canto of Clarel of “Holbein’s Dance of Death / Sly slipped among his prints from Claude” (NN Clarel 2.12.30–31).²

By the second half of the eighteenth century, when many of the above prints after Claude Lorraine were being engraved in London, English painters such as Richard Wilson took up extended residencies in Rome, Naples, and the intervening coastline in search of their own images of serene pictorial classical beauty. Melville collected an engraved portrait of Wilson in Italian garb. He also collected engravings of Wilson’s Morning and Evening, Italian landscapes inspired by visits to the Bay of Baiae, between Rome and Naples, in the 1770s. Each expresses pictorially the exact quality that Melville expressed in words after visiting the Bay of Baiae and its environs in 1857: “a singular melting together of art in ruins and nature in vigor” (NN Journal 104).³

In the first half of the nineteenth century, English landscape painters such as J. M. W. Turner made their own visits to Italy in the tradition of Claude and Wilson. Of more than thirty engravings after Turner acquired by Melville, a significant number address subjects of Roman and Italian history: Ancient Rome, Regulus, The Decline of Carthage, and two different renderings of The Golden Bough. Others depict contemporary Italian scenes more directly reflective of Turner’s own travels in the country: Florence, The Grand Canal—Venice, Venice—The Dogana, and Venice—The Bridge of Sighs. Turner’s subtitle for Ancient Rome, painted in 1839, indicates that this painting envisions “the Palace of the Cesars restored” as well as “The Triumphal Bridge and Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus.” Turner’s The Golden Bough, painted in 1834, was directly inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid as well as by the painter’s visit to Lake Avernus. Melville’s deluxe engraving by J. T. Willmore is one of the few today that survives in Melville’s own frame. Its 1856 date brings us to the year in which Melville embarked on the Mediterranean voyage during which he visited Italy in February, March, and April of 1857.⁴

Melville collected engravings of Italian scenes by many other French, Dutch, German, and English artists.⁵ But this essay, prompted by the occasion of the International Melville Society Conference in Rome in June 2011, will focus on those engravings more directly expressive of Italian art, history, and culture as encountered in Melville’s own...