Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture by Timothy Erwin (review)

Nabokov's metaphor, "a lawn-sprinkler that waltzed on one spot with the ghost of a rainbow in its dewy arms," serves as an "example of the modern vernacular image" that "may be found in prose as well as poetry." As Mr. Erwin observes, "It's only with the dawn of the Romantic era that what we call imagery becomes figural." For readers today, "the terms 'image' and 'imagery' are shorthand for textual vision across the genres," a view he "would like to complicate." He asks, "What other kinds of word pictures have appealed to the mind's eye historically?"

His answer is that a "classicizing linear aesthetic of design" was the theory that the "discourse of the empirical image with its verbal coloring" actively "meant to challenge." As he explains, the former "likens the perspective and arrangement of painting to narrative emplotment," while the latter "proposes a linguistic analogy of vivid description or striking figuration to visual coloring." He identifies the discourse of design "in the higher genres of epic and history painting, and in related forms like the mock-epic," saying that it "understands the aesthetic realm to be a reliable vehicle for public-minded sentiment." In later seventeenth-century Britain, there is a "shift" from the discourse of design toward "figural imagery" that "involves the beauty of coloring." This "shift" originated in a "quarrel between the rubénistes, the partisans of coloring after Peter Paul Rubens, and the poussinistes, the partisans of idealizing design, after Nicolas Poussin, in the French academy."

In chapter 1, Mr. Erwin compares the Swiss artists Henry Fuseli and Angellica Kauffman to lay the groundwork for the main subject of this chapter: its persuasive exploration of Pope's "continuing affinity for the discourse of design" throughout his career. Fuseli and Kauffman both studied painting in Italy and later joined the British Royal Academy. Although their careers were parallel, the "mannered style of Fuseli, with its striving for a novel effect" and attraction to the "empirical sublime," contrasts sharply with the "delicate classicism of Kauffman." Mr. Erwin astutely compares the classicism of Kauffman's Venus Attired by the Graces with Fuseli's Flora Attired by the Elements, which he reads as a "parody of the entire Carracci tradition," Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) being the artist "revered for restoring the art of painting to Renaissance standards." Carracci's Venus Adorned by the Graces is one of the book's handsome color plates; unfortunately, the quality of its twenty-eight black-and-white "figures" is inconsistent. For example, illustrations from the sixth corrected edition of Pamela (figures 3.10 and 3.11) are fully legible, but the illustration for Shakespeare's Richard the Third, engraved by James Neagle after Fuseli, is dark and slightly cropped, making it difficult to identify the features that Mr. Erwin mentions; he speaks of "a pair of candles at left," when only one made it into the reproduction, a fault attributable to the publisher rather than the author.

In chapter 2, Mr. Erwin argues that Samuel Johnson's Life of Richard Savage (1744) was a response to Pope's aesthetic as well as a "complicated effort to rescue the reputation of Savage from the taint of his association with The Dunciad." Savage's practice of carrying "tales to Pope about other writers for more than a decade" as he was composing the mock-epic earned Savage enemies. As Mr. Erwin sagely observes, the "word design occurs thirty-odd times" in the Life of Savage; through this repetition, it "name[s] increasingly desperate narrative aims, choices [by Savage] that willfully ignore the careful moral consideration urged by John Locke" and advanced by the "non-conforming divine and hymnodist Isaac Watts." As Mr. Erwin explains, "Both Johnson and Watts affirm an empirical moral code of self-improvement closely supported by scripture at the expense of another code urging the exemplary imitation of virtue, a discourse of design...