Trans-Atlantic Codes of Honor: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hiram Powers, and Republican Politics
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Trans-Atlantic Codes of Honor: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hiram Powers, and Republican Politics
Wendy J. Katz, Associate Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
In a chapter of the Marble Faun (1860) in which the narrator describes an American sculptor's studio in Rome filled with portrait busts of illustrious American men, Nathaniel Hawthorne comments that <<it ought to make us shiver, the idea of leaving our features to be a dusty-white ghost among strangers of another generation, who will take our nose between their thumb and fingers (as we have seen men do by Caesar's), and infallibly break it off if they can do so without detection!>> The Jewish or mixed race or - her identity is veiled, but she is oppressed - painter Miriam Schaefer adds that it will be a <<better world when it flings off this great burden of stony memories>> (Hawthorne 1961, 92). This quote is part of Hawthorne's general critique of the ideal and monumental, as well as expressive of the disappointment he like other American tourists felt when they failed to experience the expected rapture in front of classical and Renaissance masterpieces, especially the many incomplete ancient statues. But that particular gesture of contempt described by Hawthorne, to pull a man's nose, was more than just a generic sneer. In the U.S., it was an insult akin to (if milder than!) caning someone, because it suggested one regarded the man as a social inferior. President Andrew Jackson had to be physically restrained from killing a naval lieutenant who tweaked his nose.
This culture of honor, in which one responded to accusations of dishonesty by an attack on the accuser's face, or by a duel, whether with weapons or with print, as in an "exchange" of letters, cards, pamphlets or statements in partisan newspapers, played an important role in developing political discourse and codes of political representation in both the United States and Italy. A man's honor is often thought of as a personal quality, but in both countries it functioned politically to cement party bonds, particularly ties to party chiefs, which was also the purpose of the cross-Atlantic purchase, circulation and display of portrait busts of statesmen. Hawthorne was an active participant in that culture of honor, as was the expatriate sculptor Hiram Powers, in whose Florence studio Hawthorne spent many hours. Though the preface to the Marble Faun cites members of a younger and less classicizing generation of sculptors as inspiration for the novel’s American hero, Kenyon, Powers’ conversations with Hawthorne about ancient and modern art (and politicians), were equally influential. Both Powers’ sculptures and Hawthorne’s interpretations of art engaged with rapidly changing concepts of male and female honor in Italy as well as New England. Because of their ties to political elites who were actively defining republican citizenship in Italy and the U.S., both would struggle with conflicting ideas over whether honor was an inner virtue, or a character conferred - or lost - by recognition from peers.
The Duel and Republican Nationalism in Italy
In Italy, dueling along with the classicism that elevated Italian sculptor Antonio Canova’s reputation, returned to Italy with Napoleon’s army. Many of the heroes of the Risorgimento in this period of foreign domination fought well-known duels that became symbols of patriotism and brotherhood. Engaging in the duel, defending one’s honor, became a cornerstone of Italian nationalism; it displayed the valor that would redeem Italia’s disgraced honor (Hughes, 2007a). Aristocratic Piedmontese novelist, painter and advocate of the Risorgimento Massimo D’Azeglio, in his historical novel Ettore Fieramosca (1833), included a challenge to the French from Italian knights. That the duel had its origins in Renaissance Italy gave it even greater force as a national symbol in the nineteenth century. In D’Azeglio’s paintings, similar precedents for Italy's current fight against the French are again set in Italian landscapes. Such formulations of the duel in early nineteenth-century Italy helped correlate the individual’s honor with national honor, the soldier's challenge with the nation’s freedom from foreign insult and oppression. If despotism had supposedly made Italians servile, the duel displayed Italian willingness to defend their rights.
In the Piedmont, where there was a parliament and a relatively free press, dueling also demonstrated republican equality. Indeed, with the failure of unification in 1849, Piedmontese moderates - those who wanted some limits on popular political participation - gained control of the movement for independence, and perhaps because of their ties to elite or to military culture, the duel and its accompanying honor code also gained influence. As this political class sought to legitimize its governing role, dueling flourished in places like Florence and Lombardy in the 1850's and even earlier. As in the U.S., these clashes were often publicized and partially conducted through partisan newspapers. By dueling with pen and sword, a man not only asserted himself in public to a broad audience, but set himself apart from the working class. The duelist’s sword was contrasted to the murderous knife, just as duelists with pistols in the United States set themselves apart from working-class eye gougers (Hughes 2007b, 212-235). Realist portraits of the patriot and democrat Giuseppe Garibaldi by Silvestro Lega and Giovanni Fattori, artists who were active supporters of the Risorgimento, though they emphasize the hero’s simple dress and brotherhood with his fellow Italians, also prominently feature his military saber[1].
Italian politics even after unification granted the franchise and the right to hold office or sit on juries - the right to become a public man of honor - to a relatively small segment of the population: the educated, the student, the literary man, the military officer, the property owner, the taxpayer. To call someone a plowman or a carter was a challenge to a duel, precisely because it implied one was not a man of honor, which is to say one was not fit to be part of the governing class. The ritual of the duel, the exchange of blows or shots, said that the participants recognized each other’s claims to equal - honorable - standing. The very popularity of the duel among nationalists helped underscore the limits being imposed on the inclusiveness of the new republic. So too the culture of honor in the United States in the wake of the formation of the new republic was tied to politics and to public men: those men who wished to hold public office, men who received the honor of a classicizing marble or bronze portrait, and men who dueled. This included Hawthorne.
The Duel and Slavery in the United States
Hawthorne’s appointment to the Salem Custom House, an office granted as a political favor, is well known because of his preface to the Scarlet Letter (1850), but it is less often remembered that he also participated in a duel that had its own political implications. In Salem, he had become infatuated with Maria Silsbee, the daughter of Whig Senator Nathaniel Silsbee, who would later support Hawthorne's ouster from the Custom House. Chester Harding, a Boston portraitist closely associated with Whig Senator Daniel Webster, painted Senator Silsbee’s portrait in 1833[2]. Maria Silsbee in 1837 told Hawthorne that John O’Sullivan, editor of the <<Democratic Review>>, a journal that had just started to publish Hawthorne’s stories, had attempted to seduce her. Hawthorne challenged O’Sullivan, who defended himself in an exchange of letters that resulted in the two men becoming friends, a friendship that would continue for the next twenty years as each supported the other’s efforts to get patronage from Democratic administrations. Hawthorne even recommended O’Sullivan to his friend and fellow Democrat President Franklin Pierce for the consulate in Rome. O’Sullivan had tried to create a Young America set of Democrats in the U.S., and Hawthorne may have felt that he would be particularly sympathetic to advocates for Italian revolution (Sampson 2003; Pearson 1958).
Maria Silsbee gave up her flirtation with Democrats and in 1839 married Jared Sparks, a Whig historian, Unitarian minister and Harvard University professor perhaps best known now for correcting George Washington’s writing style in his edition of that president's letters; a writer named "Friar Lubin" in poet William Cullen Bryant's Democratic newspaper the <<Evening Post>> would expose his alterations. Sparks’ students commissioned a portrait of him from Powers in 1857, to replace an 1835 bust by Italian neo-classical sculptor E. Luigi Persico. Both Hawthorne and Powers had reasons to dislike the bust; Hawthorne called it <<lifeless and thoughtless>> (Hawthorne 1980, 279)[3]. Later, in Rome, when the unmarried sculptor Louisa Lander, a friend of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne from a prominent Democratic family in Salem, was accused of improper behavior, the married Hawthorne this time refused to speak or act in her defense (Dabakis 2014). Lander's 1858 bust of him, commissioned by Hawthorne before his rejection of her, with its bare chest, raised brows, and uplifted chin, has an energy and vitality missing from the more conventional, high-collared, portrait painted of him by one of Lander’s accusers, Hawthorne’s friend Cephas Giovanni Thompson[4].
Unlike these seemingly apolitical affairs over women’s honor, which was defined as their chastity - an honest woman was a chaste one - the next duel that Hawthorne would be involved in received national attention. When Democratic Congressman Jonathan Cilley was killed in a duel in 1838 by a southern Whig politician over comments made during a debate in the House of Representatives, O’Sullivan asked Hawthorne to write a biography of Cilley for the <<Democratic Review>>. Cilley had been a college friend of Hawthorne’s and an adviser to him in his encounter with O’Sullivan. But if Cilley’s death was personal for Hawthorne, O’Sullivan saw it as a chance for a political attack on a powerful rival, Whig editor James Watson Webb, who had been the real catalyst for the duel. When a man in New York publicly accused Webb of murdering Cilley, C.G. Thompson’s younger brother, also a painter, would serve as an emissary on Webb’s behalf[5]. Such public expressions of personal loyalty in an era of intense partisan politics were key to advancing politically or socially. O’Sullivan would use Cilley’s death again later to help derail Whig hero and southerner Henry Clay’s 1844 campaign for President. Clay’s reputation for dueling by then implied his involvement with slavery, too.
Drawing on notorious duels like Cilley’s, Northern moralists identified dueling and its attendant code of honor as particularly prevalent in Southern society, as did Hawthorne, who in his article for O'Sullivan suggested that Cilley had betrayed Northern standards of behavior. Rather than proof of an egalitarian white republic where men met each other as equals, for Northerners the duel increasingly became a symbol of allegiance to a society divided between masters, who possess honor, and slaves, who do not (Wyatt-Brown 1982; Greenberg 1996; Spierenburg 1998). Indeed, a famous anti-dueling sermon by New England minister Lyman Beecher, whose family, including his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe, lived near Powers in Cincinnati, Ohio, was reprinted as an anti-slavery treatise in 1838 (Mulders-Jones 2013, 88). Only one word in Beecher's sermon was changed: dueling was replaced by slavery. Both were being reconstructed - in the North - as dishonorable, as outside human and higher law, and so not capable of demonstrating equality under the law. Given Hawthorne’s immersion in a New England society where the clergy, important opinion-makers, regularly attacked the morality of the duel, it's evidence of the force of honor's ties to elite status and politics that he, at least for a time, was willing to consider participating in them.
"Giving the Lie" to the Man of Honor in Fiction and Sculpture
Hawthorne's notebooks nevertheless indicate that he shared the Northern interest in revising the duel and its idea of honor as a pre- or anti-modern (aristocratic not republican) practice. For example, in the American Notebooks, his comment on the death of a British lord in a duel emphasizes the callousness of an aristocracy that practices such rituals. In another story of a military duel in Massachusetts, the moral seems to be that the inveterate duelist reforms after he literally has a change of heart: that is, he fires after his heart has been shot away, so he misses. More interestingly, many of Hawthorne’s ideas for plots involve the author giving other men "the lie," exposing how their appearance or reputation, their projection of themselves in public, differed from their true nature, in a kind of unmasking, as if he is pulling off the nose or face of his male characters, or showing contempt for their public image, by exposing and shaming them. Thus he imagines a character in Boston of the “nicest honor” who turned out to be an intriguer who had ruined many men, or another man whose credit was baseless, his patriotism assumed and his honor and honesty a sham, a man totally false (though no one was aware of it), and totally miserable. And before his duel, he described Cilley as a man who appears to be of the most open nature yet is really crafty, concealing like a "murder-secret" anything that it is not good for him to have known. With his "wonderful tact," he "deceives by truth," and this "consummate art" means he will always possess influence in government and be able to repel accusations of dishonorable behavior (Hawthorne 1972, 229, 167-168, 180, 61-62).
This description expresses mistrust of the changeability of the politician as courtier, his art that conceals art, a style associated with deceptive naturalness in painting. Hawthorne, after seeing Thompson's portrait of himself, complained that painted portraits are all delusions, in which a man never appeared recognizably the same; he preferred the more stable reality of a bust (Mellow 1980, 319). His concern about illusion, especially in the portrait, points to his awareness of the modern politician's creation of a public image, shaping himself for party purposes, rather than assuming the inflexible or "stony" face of the man of honor. Daniel Webster seems to serve as the type of this in Hawthorne's 1850 story The Great Stone Face, published in an abolitionist newspaper in Washington D.C., the <<National Era>>. In the story, the statesman's rhetoric was so persuasive that his auditors had no choice but to believe him; wrong looked like right, and right like wrong. Though he has a massive lofty brow, and deep caverns for eyes, he is, like the duelist, missing a sympathetic heart (Worley 2001, 53-58). Hawthorne, however, at the end suggests that the stone face of the mountains, the community's admired ideal of statesmanlike greatness of principle, because it is just a pile of rocks, it too represents only what viewers think it represents, rather than having any inherent (divine) merit. In good democratic fashion though, it is the simple, uneducated "natural" man, who has the least to do with public honor, who most closely resembles the rocks' sublimity.
Unlike his musings on the unreliability of honorable public appearances, much of Hawthorne’s writing and commentary about sculpture, and his own commission of a portrait bust from Lander, stemmed from his travels in Britain and Europe in the 1850s. He stayed in Florence across the street from Hiram Powers for several months in 1858, and recorded their conversations in his notebooks. Powers had lived in that city since the 1830s, and his busts of politicians, known for their realism, like his allegories of liberty, had been shaped amid the Risorgimento’s increasing demands for historical truth as well as its connection of personal honor with nationalism (Panczenko 1982, 28-39; Olson 1992). In the contrast between Powers' Roman verisimilitude in his portrait busts and the romantic Grecian naturalism of his female statues, Powers articulated a conservative, because still tied to ideas of aristocratic honor, desire for a unified republic in Italy and the U.S. Hawthorne’s own ironic treatment of the classical past, and his employment of the Gothic romance to distance himself from repressive social conventions (the faun rather than the peasant), similarly articulates a desire to throw off some, but not all traditional distinctions.
Hiram Powers' Honorable Slave in Italy and the U.S.
Hiram Powers’ best known statue, the Greek Slave (fig. 1), is a symbol of personal resistance to foreign oppression, and in that sense served as a symbol of Italy (Fryd 2016). But it also foregrounds the concept of honor. In the U.S., men of honor (an identity that included Hawthorne) perceived American (black) slaves as dishonored. They could not testify in court, their physical bodies and appearance were controlled by their master, and their presence did not require social acknowledgement. For the public to see a slave who had been stripped and chained as honorable, even a white one, required looking beneath her famously flesh-like surface to her inner nature, still "dressed" in moral virtue. Since a woman’s honor, her chastity, depended on her ability to preserve its public appearance, which a slave cannot do, the Greek Slave instead signaled honor through signs of self-possession. Not surprisingly, conservative observers in New York found the sharp angle of her head, self-controlled expression, and upright stance unwomanly. Rather than honor being located in her physical body, where it could be attacked and required masculine defense, Powers' design identified it with an inner character that could not be "touched" by others (Kasson 1990, 46-72).
Hawthorne and Powers seemed to agree that in interpreting sculpture one should look past the surface to the inner ideal or emotion, to enter into the figure's sentiments, to even empathize with her situation. Hawthorne wrote in his French and Italian Notebooks that the ancient statues he saw in Europe mostly seemed "veiled" to him, and he wondered if other people were more fortunate in being able to <<invariably find their way to the inner soul of art>>. But when he saw Powers' busts of Proserpine and Psyche, Hawthorne thought that the <<light of a soul>> seemed to shine <<from the interior of the marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly the eyes>>. Though maintaining reservations, as he had earlier greatly admired the Medici Venus, Hawthorne credited this soulfulness to Powers' greater truth to nature: <<there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty, intelligence, feeling and accuracy of representation in these two faces and in that of the Venus de' Medici>> (Hawthorne 1980, 165-166, 311).
Powers encouraged viewers to see contemporary women, not classical prototypes, in his statues, and on the Greek Slave's tour of the United States in 1847, a Democratic New York penny paper invented a "Yankee," a rustic from New England, who in his lack of sophistication demonstrated natural (albeit comic) nobility in correctly viewing the statue: <<it's kinder goin agin human natur to have the gal treated in that aire way and such an awful pretty gal too. If she were down to home I'd bet the biggest punkin that Nancy Cummins and the rest on'em would have them aire ugly chain fixins off her wrists quicker than Squire Winslow can toddle to meeting [...] I'd like to court her amazin well, I would>>[6]. The commentary is a would-be humorous tribute to the statue's appeal to empathy, its ability to stir women - like Hilda in the Marble Faun, women as emotional creatures are better than men at sympathy - to her defense, and acknowledgement of her honorable (chaste) character. But as was typical of most sympathetic American commentaries, it also underscored her whiteness. Efforts by anti-slavery Whig journals like the <<New York Tribune>>, which was a fervent supporter of the Risorgimento, to link the Greek Slave to the plight of American slaves were countered by the suggestion that she might equally well represent exploited white or Irish workers, whose situation received less attention from abolitionists (Green 1982).
The Greek Slave was popular in both the American South and North because of its strong associations with ideals of female honor; one woman from a prominent Democratic Southern family married with the Greek Slave serving as the altar, and busts of Proserpine and Psyche were wedding gifts (Lessing 2010). Its ties to Italian nationalism, a cause Powers supported, were not explicitly argued in the U.S., though it was exhibited in New York at the same time as a Pietro Gagliardi portrait of Pope Pius IX. That portrait was greeted warily, even by admirers of the Pope's then liberal policies. Perhaps significantly, there was concern over whether Gagliardi's portrait (and the Pope's appearance as a reformer) was a fraud or a truthful likeness[7]. Some of the ardent Whig supporters of Powers' slave as a symbol of female virtue (not as a symbol of liberty), like Webb at the <<Courier and Enquirer>>, were reluctant for Americans to actively support democratic revolutions in Italy and elsewhere. Powers himself fought a newspaper duel in 1845 that may in the U.S. have distanced him from European democratic movements. Backed by Whig editors, he accused Charles Edwards Lester, a Young America (Democratic) politician who translated D'Azeglio and was appointed consul to Genoa in 1842, of lying about him. The ensuing exchange between partisan presses may have to some extent set Powers and his sculptures apart from Lester and his political causes (Wunder 1991, 1:145-151)[8].
In Italy, statues by other sculptors sympathetic to the Risorgimento, like Vincenzo Vela's Spartacus (Museo Vincenzo Vela, Switzerland, 1847) or Rafaelle Monti's Circassian Slave (lost, 1850), featured slaves, with strong elements of realism. These more naturalistic male and female figures took on a more distinctly political meaning in Italy than in the more liberal climate in the U.S. If French domination had supported neo-classicism in Italy, the more lifelike sculpture promoted by Lorenzo Bartolini at the Florence Academy of Art offered a representation of the victims of injustice that extended the definition of the honorable in ways that better suited a republic's expanded citizenry. Viewing ideal (narrative or imaginative) sculptures in Italy had potential to combine the private sympathies evoked by the defiant Greek Slave, with public, nationalist feeling, supporting a more inclusive if still restricted model of citizenship.
Classical Portraits of the Man of Honor
In the U.S., one regarded the bust or statue of a statesman rather differently than ideal sculptures. One praised its likeness, its truthfulness, or else one questioned what it purported to be, one knocked it over and broke its nose. Owning a copy was a public statement of political (albeit also personal) loyalty, implicitly in competition with the loyalties of other men. The ways in which the Greek Slave differed from the busts of Powers’ statesmen underscores the difference in how the two kinds of sculpture were to be interpreted. Powers' bust of Andrew Jackson, for example, modeled in 1835 when Jackson, a Democrat, slaveholder and duelist, was President, was cast in marble in 1839 (fig. 2), and toured the U.S. with the Greek Slave in 1849. It's now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The stern brows, deep wrinkles, compressed lips, pronounced tendons and sagging jaw of the bust suggest the artist’s literal adherence to the physical surface of the man; the sharply cut lines and rigid material do not convey art or grace. Its verisimilitude and marks of age propose that he was a man who did not adopt rhetoric or persuasion, or shape and reshape himself to please audiences as a party politician must. Compared to the Greek Slave, which rotated on a pedestal, surrounded by red curtains that cast a rosy glow on the statue's graceful curves and fine grained surface, the truncated bust on its pedestal was immobile, designed for libraries, lecture halls, and legislative corridors, where public men in their speech display similar fixity of character, embodying the man of honor, who acts only from unchanging principle (Katz 2002, 137-171).
Given his understanding of this sort of honor as a superficial and likely deceptive projection, Hawthorne is critical of this kind of statuary. When he tours Italy, he sees historic examples of such monuments, dead princes honored with classicizing marble statues, who he says are men of a bad breed who only deserved a dunghill. Like Miriam, he preferred that these monuments be burnt, for when galvanized into false life in subsequent generations, they do harm instead of good. In a nod to posterity's hoped-for freedom from tyranny, he describes children running races over the tombstones in the pavement of a church, <<treading remorselessly over the noseless effigies of old dignitaries, who never expected to be so irreverently treated>> (Hawthorne 1980, 329, 360, 568) Hawthorne’s encounters with Hiram Powers included discussions of such men and their monuments. Though Powers had significant patronage in the South, including a statue in South Carolina of Democrat John Calhoun as an orator in a toga, most of his allies were Whigs, and he had trouble getting commissions from Democratic administrations. By the mid-1850s he was increasingly anti-slavery, while his support for Garibaldi and the Risorgimento remained enthusiastic (Yellin 1986). So when Hawthorne and the sculptor compared opinions of Andrew Jackson, the founder of modern party politics, Powers was a good deal more Whiggishly critical of <<all the ugly sounds of popular turmoil>>, the piercing shriek, the wildest yell, that Hawthorne understood to be <<inseparable from the life of a republic>>. Hawthorne, however, defended the ex-President's intuitive brilliance in words that evoked his friend Pierce (Hawthorne 1980, 280, 366; Mellow 1980, 513).
To Powers then, Jackson resembles not the progressive who brought the franchise to propertyless white men, but the Southern man of honor who compels more knowledgeable people to defer to him, not by the truth of his statements but by fear of challenging him to his face. This is the inflexible and immobile politician of Powers' bust, and may explain why Powers like almost all Whigs and many Democrats, including Hawthorne, despised Clark Mills' equestrian statue of Jackson for the federal government, which shows him more theatrically dashing forward[9]. But Hawthorne, taking up an intermediate position that permits some movement and social change, wished Raphael could have painted General Jackson. Raphael, portraitist of the "warrior Pope" Julius II, and the artist to whom Kenyon and Hilda in the Marble Faun pay tribute in the Pantheon, was the master of sprezzatura (the courtier's art that conceals art, or gives a graceful illusion of nature). Fresh from his consulship in Liverpool, Hawthorne defines Jackson as a model of the New World man of action. British politicians are orators because tradition and custom, founded on an <<obsolete state of things>>, assign value to parliamentary oratory, though the modern (American and democratic) world only cares about newspaper paragraphs. Jackson and newspaper politics, which reach the masses like a piercing shriek (perhaps those of the ragged newsboys hawking the papers on the streets), are republican action and nature, while Europe and Britain practice aristocratic, classical, and perhaps false, rhetoric. Hawthorne at the end of the Marble Faun returns the narrative to Kenyon's studio, where the artist is carving a portrait of Donatello, the Italian count. As heir to the greatness of Italy's Renaissance, he has been transformed into a man of honor by his instinctive defense of Miriam, a victim of a tyrannical government. Kenyon's bust of Donatello, far from being fixed like Powers' Jackson, is admired for revealing that it is in process, in what is a moral and surely also national progress (Fernie 2011).
Perhaps that is partly why Hawthorne had reservations about Powers’ colossal bronze sculpture of America’s greatest orator, Daniel Webster (fig. 3), a powerful Whig politician from Massachusetts, and a man who was understood by Democrats to be allied with the English aristocracy. Hawthorne suggests that rather than dressed as if ready for persuasive oratory at a mass political meeting, a truthful portrait of Webster should show him in the costumes in which he lived his most real life: his dressing-gown, his drapery of the night. Hawthorne adds that though Powers succeeds in making Webster look like a pillar of the state, and even captures the warmth of his great heart, Webster was not altogether the man he looked. His physique helped him out when he fell somewhat short of its promise of grandeur, and <<if his eyes had not been in such deep caverns, their fire would not have looked so bright>> (Hawthorne 1980, 320, 434, 741). Though Hawthorne respected Webster's compromises with slavery in order to preserve the Union, he despised the Fugitive Slave Act's infringement on New England's moral convictions, in requiring Northerners to capture fleeing slaves (Bercovitch 1991). It's telling that Julian Hawthorne dismissed Lander's bust of Hawthorne precisely because he thought it resembled Daniel Webster (Hawthorne 1980, 741).
Hawthorne’s suspicion of Webster’s illusions, the artifice of the orator who chooses the best light for his subject, was shared by other critics. Many believed he had sacrificed anti-slavery principles not so much for Union - in the statue, he points a rolled-up copy of the Constitution towards the fasces, its symbol - but because of his ambition to become President. The <<New York Tribune>>, for instance, though usually a supporter of Powers (its Italy correspondent Margaret Fuller had thought his Webster bust an American Jupiter), had been greatly disappointed in both Webster’s compromises and Powers' statue, erected in Boston. It described the response in Boston to Powers’ bronze in something of the same equivocal tone as Hawthorne. The <<Tribune>> framed the disagreement over whether the statue resembled Webster in terms of whether one thought he was honorable. Thus Webster’s elite defenders and personal friends, even those he owed money to, say they should know the statue if they met it. They back up his public face. But the "mere mob" takes the other side—as they never had the pleasure of eating mutton and Madeira wine with Webster at his near-feudal country estate, they only know of his reputation from the newspapers, and the statue, the <<Tribune>> notes, does not resemble this sort of exaggerated--perhaps false--acclaim. A weekly paper connected with the <<Tribune>> accordingly observed that "barbarians" had threatened the nose of the great "defender" of the Union. Webster as a deal-making merchant, rather than a Republican hero, deserved scorn[10].
The <<Tribune>> doesn’t precisely recommend tweaking Webster's nose to determine his "true" character, but does propose erecting the statue on Boston Common on its head, to better judge of its likeness, or dressing it as a scarecrow to frighten birds. Like Hawthorne, the <<Tribune>> is wary of statues and monuments of public men, as incapable of unifying their audience, the public—as likely to excite contempt instead. To sympathetically enter into a sculpture like the Greek Slave was a private act, a display of sentiment tied to the domestic sphere and middle-class status; whereas a portrait sculpture of a public man that idealized him in order to arouse a shared feeling was suspect as a disguised political move. Like subsidized newspapers, such statues and busts were paid for by partisans, who contradictorily wished to present their heroes as statesmen outside politics, and so as men of honor. Hawthorne was skeptical of the culture of honor and its false stone pieties, and he <<always sided with the mob,>> but he shared with Powers and the <<Tribune>> a conservative doubt about whether the taste of the ordinary American voter was good enough to admit them to full equality as viewers and judges of art. Thinking of the way that commissions for artworks were given as political favors, as were political offices like the ones he had held, Hawthorne wrote that <<we have the meanest government and the shabbiest and - if truly represented by it - we are the meanest and shabbiest people known in history […] the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average at best>> (Hawthorne 1980, 330, 431-432).
The Gothic Alternative
Resistant to classical art’s exclusive appeal, resistant as well to contemporary realism with its indiscriminate inclusiveness of the meanest and shabbiest, the "multitudinous richness" of the Gothic offered an alternative. In describing the cathedral in Siena, he wrote of
the thousand forms of Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marble and express whatever it liked, and allow it to harden again to last forever. But my description seems like knocking off the noses of some of the busts, the fingers and toes of the statues, the projecting points of the architecture, jumbling them all up together, and flinging them down upon the page. This gives no idea of the truth, nor, least of all, can it shadow forth that solemn whole, mightily combined out of all these minute particulars, and sanctifying the entire space of ground over which this cathedral-front flings its shadow, or on which it reflects the sun. A majesty and a minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting the other; this is what I love in Gothic architecture. (Hawthorne 1980, 444-445)
The romantic ideal - anti-classical, even grotesque in its changeability, but still commanding respect - of the Gothic kept the high and the low in an organic but still hierarchical relationship, while liberally preserving difference. For Hawthorne and American artists, this unifying alternative existed in an Italian context as it did not in the U.S., perhaps because so too did an authoritative neo-classicism. In the U.S., sectionalism and slavery had put an end to the duelists’ code of honor, rendering the neoclassical sculpture that represented it dysfunctional as a unifying national symbol and consigning it to the private realm. But in Italy, where the culture of honor persisted, ideal sculpture and its modes of viewing could still persuasively evoke a republican national ideal (Boime 1993).
In images of the Risorgimento in Florence, busts of public men still appear as part of cementing political loyalties. In Gerolamo Induno’s painting Triste Presentimento (Sad Presentiment, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) of 1862, a woman in a neatly appointed bedroom, with a particularly lovely embroidered bedcover, mourns her lover who has left to fight for his country. A patriot, she has a somewhat classicized Garibaldi in a niche by her bed; hanging near him, a copy of Francesco Hayez's Il Bacio (The Kiss, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) of 1859 links her patriotic sentiments and her lover’s to that of Renaissance Florence, the private to the public. But Induno's composition revolves not around Garibaldi but a living symbol of Italia, dressed in a simple white gown that partially bares her shoulder, inviting empathy for her feelings and her patriotism, which she sees reflected in the portrait she holds in her hand. Her absent lover acts on her (the nation’s) behalf; she stirs the middle-class viewer (watched by the bust of Garibaldi) to represent her as well. Even more radically, in Pietro Magni's sculpture of a Leggitrice (Girl Reading, 1861, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), Garibaldi's portrait becomes a medallion around a working-class girl's neck, worn while she concentrates with fierce dedication on her text, partially dressed in a classicizing robe that once again suggests she allegorizes the emerging nation. In Enrico Fanfani's La Mattina del 27 Aprile 1859 in Firenze (27th of April, 1859, 1860, Palazzo Pitti, Florence), the day of the raising of the national tricolor in Florence, the action is paralleled by Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus (1545) raising the gory dripping head of Medusa. There are no orators or generals in Fanfani's view of the Piazza della Signoria, but the crowd, the anonymous citizens, act anyway. Their sculptural companion, given Perseus' <<physical vulgarity>>, is not quite the classical ideal; indeed, it is now the crowd, as the unified nation, who judges what is good (Symonds 1848, I:liv).
The neo-classical vocabulary continued to be employed to eternalize great deeds and great men for public honor, especially once the new republican government became involved, as for example in the call for monumental equestrian statues of monarchs Vittorio Emanuele and Napoleon III, as the two champions of Italian independence. But the pressure to include the plowman and the cartman in political representation continued to support naturalism in painting and sculpture. Hawthorne predicted the same for American art. In the chapter of the Marble Faun where Hilda carries Miriam’s family papers to the Jewish ghetto, that symbol of Papal and reactionary dis-enfranchisement, Hilda’s devotion to the past and its tradition is weakened. Hilda, a painter who like Hawthorne’s friend Thompson had imitated too closely the old masters, marries Kenyon, who, disillusioned by his experiences in Rome, finds that he too cannot care any longer for even the most perfect classical Venus. Their marriage pleasantly intimates that the European tradition will be combined with a more democratic - rougher, more sketch-like - and natural future American art. After all, Kenyon had gone further than Powers in including Nubian features, not just Greek ones, in his fiery statue of Cleopatra.
The Italian protagonists, Miriam and Donatello, cannot achieve an equivalent liberal unity, despite their lives being welded together more closely than a marriage bond (Hawthorne 1961, 131). Miriam’s associations with Risorgimento intrigues and oppressed classes (women, slaves, Jews, the populace at Carnival), lead to a life of penance in the shadows. Donatello transforms from an aristocrat, a primitive, and a faun (Hawthorne would later compare fugitive slaves to fauns), who in any of these terms is a figure outside republican honorable manhood, into a man from Tuscany willing to act to liberate Miriam from the past and the church. This only leads to prison. Yet this is not Hawthorne being skeptical of the possibility for a republic in Italy, as so many conservative Americans, like Webster, were.
In a Rome where gendarmes, infantry and papal dragoons with stacked muskets and sabers lined the streets to chain the "tiger cat" of the people, Hawthorne's style of shocking visual effects and harsh contrasts, especially when he describes Hilda's passage through the Ghetto, comes quite close to the strategies of Risorgimento writers and artists. D'Azeglio described the ghetto as a "formless mass of houses" where the people "vegetate" amid narrow streets choked with dirt, and Telemaco Signorini's picture of Il Quartiere degli Israeliti a Venezia (The Ghetto in Venice, 1860, fig. 4) shows a gloomy, grimy, rough and broken existence (Boime 1986, 60). Hawthorne's style is equally pitiless in describing the ghetto's degradation (<<maggots overpopulating a decaying cheese>>), and he draws a harsh contrast between the <<confusion of black and hideous houses>> and the temples, columns, triumphal arches and palaces near at hand (Hawthorne 1961, 279-280). Only his humor and perhaps, his love of the Gothic grotesque, bars this passage from being as subversive as Signorini's exposure of oppression. Though Hawthorne starts with a realist list of how the dirt encrusts streets, edifices, roofs, and foundations, that dirt then starts to take on a life of its own. It lies on thresholds, it looks out windows, it takes on sex as she (the Roman mud, the national soil) gives birth to children who seem impelled to defile every Roman monument, who are undoubtedly ready to break off their noses.
Bibliography
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1991 Hawthorne's A-Morality of Compromise, in Philip Fisher (ed.), New American Studies: Essays from Representations, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, pp. 43-69.
Boime, Albert
1986 The Macchiaioli and the Risorgimento, in Edith Tonelli and Katherine Hart (eds.), The Macchiaioli, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, pp. 33-71.
1993 The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press.
Dabakis, Melissa
2014 A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome, University Park, Penn State Press.
Fernie, Deanna
2011 Hawthorne, Sculpture, and the Question of American Art, Farnham, Ashgate.
Gantz, Ted
2008 Hiram Powers and Joel Tanner Hart: Two Sculptors, a Voyage from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Florence, Italy, and the Friendship that Developed, in Proceedings of the City and the Book, V, http://www.florin.ms/CBVc.html#Gantz.
Fryd, Vivien Green
2016 Reflections on Hiram Powers's Greek Slave. <<Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide>> 15 (2) Summer, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/
Green, Vivien M.
1982 Hiram Powers's Greek Slave: Emblem of Freedom, << American Art Journal>>, Autumn, pp. 31-39.
Greenberg, Kenneth
1996 Honor and Slavery, New Jersey, Princeton UP.
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1961 The Marble Faun, New York, New American Library, Inc.
1972 The American Notebooks, in Claude M. Simpson (ed.), The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 8, Columbus, Ohios State UP.
1980 The French and Italian Notebooks, in Thomas Woodson (ed.), The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 14, Columbus, Ohio State UP.
Hughes, Steven C.
2007a Politics of the Sword: Dueling, Honor and Masculinity in Modern Italy, Columbus, Ohio State UP.
2007b Swords and Daggers: Class Conceptions of Interpersonal Violence in Liberal Italy, in Stuart Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 212-235.
Kasson, Joy
1990 Marble Queens and Captives, New Haven, Yale UP
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2002 Regionalism & Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio State UP.
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1980 Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company.
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1982 Florence, in Italian Paintings, 1850-1910, Williamstown, Clark Art Institute, pp. 28-39.
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Illustrations
Fig. 1. Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1850, marble, Yale University. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of Karl Thomas Moore/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0.
Fig. 2. Hiram Powers, Andrew Jackson, 1839, marble, Metropolitan Museum, New York. Gift of Mrs. Frances V. Nash, 1894. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org.
Fig. 3. Hiram Powers, Daniel Webster, 1858, bronze, State House grounds, Boston, Massachusetts. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of Daderot/Wikimedia Commons.
Fig. 4. Telemaco Signorini, Il Quartiere degli Israeliti a Venezia (The Jewish Ghetto in Venice), 1860, private collection. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of The Athenaeum, www.the-athenaeum.org.
[1] For example, Fattori's Garibaldi at Aspromonte, ca. 1862; Lega's Portrait of Garibaldi, ca. 1850, Modigliana, Museo Civico.
[2] Harding's 1849 full-length portrait of Webster was released in August 1851 as an engraving in support of Webster's nomination for president. Harding's My Egotistigraphy (Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son, 1866) includes an eyewitness account of the Senate debate between Webster and Robert Hayne of South Carolina over the indivisibility of the Union. That famous debate was painted by G.P.A. Healy, who included Silsbee in the picture, and who would be hired by Franklin Pierce to paint Hawthorne's portrait after his election. Harding also painted Sophia Peabody. Healy called Hawthorne a "poetical Webster."
[3]Persico’s most important patron was James Buchanan, the Democratic successor to Pierce as President. Buchanan had helped Persico win commissions for the Capitol in Washington D.C., commissions Powers aspired to and never received under either Pierce or Buchanan. Powers' bust of Sparks is still at Harvard.
[4] Thompson's 1850 portrait, engraved and purchased by Ticknor & Co. for their edition of Twice-Told Tales (1851), is at the Grolier Club, New York City. Thompson was, like Hiram Powers, a follower of mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and married into a wealthy Whig family in New York. Lander's bust is at the Concord Free Public Library, but in 1860 it was displayed at the Cosmopolitan Art Association gallery in New York, an organization sympathetic to Lander and female artists.
[5] Jerome Thompson, a portrait painter, carried the challenge to a duel from Webb's friend to Webb’s attacker at the Pacific hotel. Both men (but not Thompson) were arrested, <<New York Herald>>, 1838 March 3, p. 2. Webb, editor of the influential <<New York Morning Courier and Enquirer>>, was a notorious dueler, who would even be imprisoned for it, though Whig Governor William Seward pardoned him. The <<Courier and Enquirer>> March 15, 1860, praised the Marble Faun as an "Art Novel," but had sharply criticized Hawthorne for writing a campaign biography for Democratic presidential candidate Pierce.
[6] The Yankee and the Greek Slave, <<New York Sun>>, September 2, 1847.
[7] Webb was a patron of Powers and his paper endorsed Gagliardi. <<Courier & Enquirer>>, September 30, 1847; November 23, 1847. Anti-Catholic sentiments rather than democratic sympathy may lay behind antagonism to Gagliardi in the Whig <<Evening Mirror>>, "Humbug Detected," October 20, 1847, p. 2, and November 4, 1847, p. 2. The <<Mirror's>> editor, Hiram Fuller, was related to Margaret Fuller of the <<Tribune>>.
[8] Lester served as consul in Genoa under Democratic president James Polk until 1847. Like many Democrats, Lester compared English workers to American slaves in his book The Glory and Shame of England (1841). His account of Powers in The Artist, Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici (1845), caused the controversy. President Pierce's charge d'affaires to the Kingdom of Sardinia, John Daniel, a Democratic editor in Richmond, VA, had in 1852 fought a duel over the Greek Slave against a Whig editor; Daniel was not an admirer of Powers.
[9] Powers was a rival to Mills for the commission in Washington D.C. Hawthorne also agrees with Powers that Mills' bust of Democratic Senator William Rufus King of Alabama (a near-duelist with Whig Henry Clay and a longtime companion of President Buchanan) is wretched and ridiculous.
[10]Wanted a Site! <<Tribune>>, June 18, 1859, p. 4. Whig minister and historian J.T. Headley, who authored letters on Italy for the <<Tribune>>, and essayist Henry Tuckerman, also a writer for the <<Tribune>>, were also supporters of Powers (and Tuckerman admired Hawthorne); that newspaper's City Items editor had energetically endorsed the Greek Slave in 1847. But in the 1850's, the <<Tribune>> increasingly disliked Powers' art as too materialist. The Webster Statue, <<Century>>, March 12, 1859. The <<Century>> and <<Tribune>> shared a publisher.
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