Stevens and the Cast Tradition

Wallace Stevens’ Best-Known essay, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” focuses on Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni in Venice as the visual embodiment of its central subject: the concept of nobility. His justly famous description of it is the heart of the essay. Calling the Colleoni “a form of such nobility that it has never ceased to magnify us in our own eyes,” he continues:

It is like the form of an invincible man, who has come, slowly and boldly, through every warlike opposition of the past and who moves in our midst without dropping the bridle of the powerful horse from his hand, without taking off his helmet and without relaxing the attitude of a warrior of noble origin. What man on whose side the horseman fought could ever be anything but fearless, anything but indomitable?

(CPP 646)

Stevens’ powerful description brings us directly into the presence of this noble rider who seems to “[move] in our midst.” That he deliberately calculated this effect is clear later in the essay when he remarks that “A description of Verrocchio’s statue could be the integration of an illusion equal to the statue itself” (CPP 663). The passage clearly implies that Stevens himself has stood in the sublime presence of the Colleoni. Yet we know he could not have seen the actual statue, since he never traveled to Europe. Did he compose this famous passage having seen only photographs? This seems very unlike Stevens. It was a point of honor with him not to pretend to experience he had not had. As he informed one correspondent, “if I refer to a book as if I had read it, I have in fact read it” (L 453). Would he apply less stringent standards to the visual arts? This seems unlikely.

It is more probable that he knew the statue from seeing a plaster cast of it in a museum, and that on some level he felt, from that encounter, that he had experienced the real thing.¹ The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a cast of the Colleoni in 1906, when Stevens was living in New York and visiting that museum regularly. This cast remained on view at the museum through the late 1930s. In fact, casts of the Colleoni were a common feature of major American museums during the first third of the twentieth century. Usually Verrocchio’s statue was paired with Donatello’s Gattamelata because they were (and are) considered the two greatest equestrian statues of the Renaissance. The custom of displaying these casts together began with the influential Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in the 1850s.² By 1915, it was possible for Vachel Lindsay—an exact contemporary of Stevens³—to write:

There are two bronze statues that have their replicas in all museums. They are generally one on either side of the main hall, towering above the second-story balustrade. First, the statue of Gattamelata, a Venetian general, by Donatello. The original is in Padua. Then there is the figure of Bartolommeo Colleoni. The original is in Venice. It is by Verrocchio and Leopardi.

(116)

Lindsay exaggerates a bit in asserting that these two statues appeared “in all museums.” It would be more accurate to say they were in all major American museums. The Art Institute of Chicago, for instance, showed casts of the Colleoni and Gattamelata side by side in Blackstone Hall. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, also displayed these two statues together.⁴ But the most telling aspect of Lindsay’s remarks is his casual assumption that any American interested in art will have visited at least one major museum and will therefore have seen a full-scale cast of the Colleoni. Stevens counts on such familiarity, too, in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” Certainly he himself would have seen casts of the Colleoni repeatedly whenever he visited museums in New York, Boston, and Chicago—as he did especially in the 1910s and 1920s, when he traveled widely on business.⁵ At...