The Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts
From the birth of the museum to the explosion of mass-produced illustrated books, the Romantic period (c. 1770-1840) was a moment of rapid change and fruitful experimentation in the fields of art and literature alike. New advances in print production encouraged a wider range of readers to engage with literary forms that opened a path into the once aristocratic field of the visual arts. This Companion captures the way recent engagements with visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period. It brings together 27 research-led chapters that offer a detailed account of the productive, if sometimes tense, interactions between emergent forms of intermedial expression that were redefining culture in the Romantic period — as they continue to do today.
British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793
As a result of Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities. McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, tion
McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.