1.  The City of Statues

1 As scholars of cultural intersections know, in the 18th and 19 th centuries Rome was interpreted and described as“the city of statues.” The same physical space that in the 2nd century A.D. was occupied by almost two millionpeople, in the 1850s hosted no more than 180.000 inhabitants (Corridore 564-574; Martinelli; Bartoccini; Vidotto).Soon after their arrival, travelers noticed the sense of void that haunted the vast empty areas, separating theenormous monuments that dwarfed passers-by, intimidating foreigners, and establishing ambiguous dialogueswith the natives. As they walked through the streets of the city, visiting museums, churches, and noble palaces,the grand tourists were met by an army of statues, that they interpreted, in turn, as silent witnesses of local history,fascinating icons of eternal beauty, symbols of ancient fables, pale ghosts from the past, or disquieting muses.These obsessive presences concealed in every corner, “freaks in marble,” archetypes of truths that only in Romecould be revealed, after a number of days became discreet interlocutors in implicit conversations involving crucialmoral themes. Anglo-American tourists were no exception, including Louisa May Alcott, as we discover readingthrough the Roman pages of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag: Shawl Straps (1873), although the text is deliberatelyconceived and written in an irreverent, occasionally sarcastic mood. As the three protagonists of the book enterthe Eternal City in the infamous winter of the great flood (1870-1871), they expect to find fountains, splendidpalaces and, even more, statues.1 In the spring of 1871, during a garden party near Albano, in the CastelliRomani, the three ladies are delighted by the food, the dances, the charades, but, above all, by “stories andstatues”—an expression that I have no hesitation in interpreting as “stories of statues,” since, as we shall see,Roman statues regularly had and told stories (189; italics are mine). In addition, many Roman statues had wings, and seemed ready to fly: there were statues ofangels everywhere, starting with the most important one, on top of Castel Sant’Angelo. But also, statues withoutwings appeared to be able to fly: see Melville’s interpretation of the statues on the façade of St. John’s Lateran asstorks, and his mention of the horses of the Dioscuroi in the Quirinale Square, as two Pegasuses. If some statuesdid not show the attitude to movement and action, at least in potentia, their fans forced them to lose their staticcountenance, visiting them by night, in the light of torches, contemplating the various “expressions” they manifest:the proof of an early dissatisfaction with the neoclassical self-sufficiency of sculpture, and a change in taste towardsproto-expressionism.

2  Considering the question in broader terms, we observe that in the history of western culture there has always beena complex sense of embarrassment before the often too significant presence of statues. We start, in the Bible,with the statue of Nabukadnezar (Book of Daniel, 2, 24-28) and continue with Shakespearean statues: see TheWinter’s Tale and Leonte’s desperate appeal to the icon of his lost wife Hermione. There have also been frequentinterpretations of classical statues as ominous (in contrast with the myth of Pygmalion), as in the myth of Juno’ssimulacrum in Samos, that was so thoroughly similar to the goddess, that Zeus had to possess it. In Plutarch,Caesar’s statue bleeds on the eve of his assassination. Sometimes statues became stone guests (as in Tirso deMolina’s Don Giovanni), or destructive “agents” (the monument of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg, in Pushkinand Gogol’). In Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille a bronze statue, even when turned to a church bell, keeps its perversewill, ruining the harvest of a whole community. No less dangerous can be the statue when it is not the protagonistof a story, but the antagonist par excellence, as in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s La Gioconda and in Thomas Hardy’sBarbara of the House of Grebe (Thomas 246-272).

3 In Anglo-American culture the presence of statues is not only pervasive but extremely significant. We find statues inworks of artists who never visited Rome, or were in the city for a limited span of time: in Charles Brockden Brown’sWieland (1798), in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, in Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen” and “The Assignation,”in Rebecca Harding Davies’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861). Even simple busts can become over-determined, due totheir thickness of meaning, as the “placid bust of Pallas,” upon which the raven finally perches, in Poe’s “The Raven,” and the bust of Socrates, firmly embraced by a “brown boy with a William Penn style of countenance,” inAlcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats (1873, 1569). In analyzing such semiotic intersections we have to keep in mindthe fact that, every time a statue or a piece of sculpture enters a written text, it becomes, in the language of Frenchsemiology, “signe de signe,” that is to say, a verbal construction that does not refer to a concrete or metaphoricallevel of “reality,” but to a “sign,” already employed/exploited by an artist in a different epistemological field.

4  When we concentrate on American artists in Rome and their responses to ancient statues, we detect anotherreason for their embarrassment: Rome, more than most cities in the world, proved to be a palimpsest, and forcedthe passionate pilgrims to endure hard itineraries, in order to organize a cognitive mapping of the environment.And if this is what happened on the diachronic axis, on the synchronic axis the city appeared as a maze, anintricate text, hard to decipher: a puzzle with many missing pieces. The former vision of Rome is bestexemplified by Henry James, whereas the latter finds its best expression in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (Rivas, in Ludovici-Pisapia 7-11.)

5  The Roman cultural milieu in the second half of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century was, in fact, veryheterogeneous (Heiser). On the one hand, the predominance of neoclassicism is undeniable; on the other hand,also evident is the emergence of romantic traits, original experimentations, and “modern” interpretations.Winckelmann’s theory of imitation/emulation included the possibility of individual variations: opposite ideologiescould co-exist in the personality of an artist or within the texture of a work of art.

6 In 18th-century Roman architecture, for instance, we see the impact of a Palladian revival (exported from Italy to England and to the Jeffersonian United States, and later re-imported from England to Italy), an “archaeological”classicism (originated by the enthusiasm which followed the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii), Neoclassicism proper and, finally, an academic/eclectic late Neoclassicism. The general background of the19th century, therefore, presents the scholar with “lags” in the different transatlantic areas. If I were asked tosimplify my discourse, I would say that neoclassicism in Northern Europe and in the U.S. was never felt to be incontrast with something that had dominated before it; whereas in Italy and in other Catholic countries it was seenas an aesthetic movement in strong opposition to baroque and rococo.

2.  The Chronological Pattern

7 I think it useful, now, to reconsider a few dates and some protagonists of the Roman scene, in the long period thatmarked the transition from baroque to the decline of the “idéal classique.” Far from being of marginal importance tothe history of U.S. culture, the chronological context enables us to better find our ways as we study the humus thatmade possible the production of 19th-century Anglo-American sculpture.

8  It would obviously be incorrect to start without mentioning Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who arrived in Rome in 1740. In his series of Carceri (“Prisons,” 1745-65), the sophisticated traveler saw the heritage of classicism, the firsthints of neoclassicism, and that pre-romantic atmosphere, which accounts for the artist’s great fortune in England,in the wake of the debate around the idea of the sublime. A few years later, Johan Joachim Winckelmann settled inRome (1755), establishing his “headquarters” in the famous Villa Albani, a perfect example of a neoclassicalbuilding, with strong classical reminiscences. The villa was destined to become the center for the diffusion of Neoclassicism. The years of Winckelmann’s stay in Rome correspond to the acme of the archaeologicalexcavations in Herculaneum (1738-65) and Pompeii (1754-70), whose cultural impact can hardly beoverestimated.

9 Winckelmann advocated a style that is radically neoclassical, insisting, for instance, that ancient Greek statues berestored and polished till they looked brand-new. Three major works were regularly quoted by Winckelmann asemblems of the art of sculpture: the Apollo Belvedere, one of the versions of the so called Antinous, and the Laokoon.2 These statues (plus the Faun from Praxiteles, and a few Venuses, Junos and Minervas) were used byAnglo-American writers in their works; but it is important to underline that Anglo-American culture could not refrainfrom stressing the narrative and historical, as well as the symbolic, dimensions of the masterpieces the grand tourists were supposed to meet, face, anddeal with.

10 Winckelmann’s writings sound, in retrospect, as a premonition of the kind of sculpture that Antonio Canovaproduced, from the moment he arrived in Rome (1780), where he dominated the art scene for forty years. The firstdecade of the 19th century was conditioned by the project of Napoleon’s triumphal entrance into Rome. The event,that never took place, kept both Canova and architect Giuseppe Valadier busy for years. Canova carved a heroicportrait of the Emperor, interpreted as a Greek god, and the more famous portrait of his sister Paolina – the wife ofRoman Prince Borghese, and a host of George Bancroft (1821-22) – as “Venus victrix” (1804-1808), in which asubtle vein of sensuality creeps under the apparently cold surface of polished marble.

11 Valadier started planning the Bonaparte Forum in the late 1790s. After Napoleon’s disappearance from the politicaland artistic scene the plan, reduced in scale, kept some of its initial grandeur, becoming Piazza del Popolo, withthe fountain of four lions, the obelisk, and the panoramic terrace on the Pincian hill, later a favorite meeting placefor members of the art colony and the Roman upper classes, as characters in James’s Daisy Miller testify.

12 After Canova’s death, the role of leader of the artistic community was taken over by another sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, who worked in Rome between 1796 and 1818, and again between 1830 and 1840. The Welshsculptor John Gibson (in Rome after 1817) began gaining some fame during Thorvaldsen’s culturalpredominance, but only after the Danish sculptor’s departure did he become a central—though controversial—figure. In the light of Winckelmann’s aesthetics, his famous/infamous “Tinted Venuses” are abominable, thoughwe know that in ancient Greece statues were indeed colored, at least in some parts. Gibson’s productionexemplifies another change in taste and ideology: evidently by the mid-1840s Winckelmann’s authority did notmonopolize the artistic debates any longer. Needless to say, an excessive adherence to the truth, in particular inthe nude, could never be accepted by the North American puritanical mind.

13 Sometime in the 1860s, the center of the European art world moved from Rome to Paris. In 1870, the year ofAlcott’s arrival, Rome became the capital of Italy, rapidly losing its Romantic aura. However, the city continued toappeal to expatriates and cosmopolitan travelers, precisely for the changes due to its new political role and thetransformations in the cityscape (Vance in Stebbins 94-111).3 Modern sculpture—now mostly in bronze, rather thanmarble—was produced in France (cf. Auguste Rodin), and the marble outputs of late neoclassical epigones, suchas Hendrik C. Andersen (in Rome since 1897) revealed their preposterous, pathetic quality even to friends andpatrons like Henry James.

3.  The Anglo-American Contribution

14 Anglo-American sculptors had to come to terms with a more problematic sense of responsibility than painters ormen of letters. A sculptor is, in fact, par excellence, the artist who rivals with the God of Genesis, molding his“creatures” in clay! The relationship with ancient statues and the best production of fellow European sculptors,therefore, proved a double challenge.

15  In this sense, Benjamin West is an emblematic figure; his profession as a painter did not prevent him from visiting theVatican Sculpture Galleries as his first cultural “exploration” of Rome (1760). His expression of wonder in front ofthe Apollo Belvedere, recorded by his biographer, soon became legendary: “My God, how like it is to a youngMohawk warrior.” The episode is indeed paradigmatic, but more interesting than the words themselves, is the harshdebate that was the result of West’s response, revealing a sure awareness of an American identity, since the“noble savage” was indeed mentioned with admiration and pride (Galt 105-106). West could not accept the sense ofcultural inferiority that Europeans expected from a naïve “innocent abroad,” supposedly deprived of a prestigiouscultural heritage (Prown 28-49).

16 Washington Allston’s response to the same masterpiece is Romantic in a different sense. The painter was in Romeduring his extended European trip of 1808-1810. Visiting the Vatican Museums, he commented on the statue inwords that “eliminated Apollo’s pride and disdain and his physicality altogether. He is simply a sublime intellectualexperience” (Vance 291-292). The spiritual character of allegorical figures that people his pictures is evident, evenmore of those inhabiting his late novel Monaldi (1841); still the reader has the impression that the symbolicinterpretation of his Apollos and Venuses was made possible only by the experience of actual statues, in the densityof their classical beauty.

17 Horatio Greenough is another interesting case. After a short but intense stay in Rome (1825-28), the sculptormoved to Florence. This is the description of his figure in H. T. Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists (1867): his heroicfigure reminded the scholar of “the triumphs of ancient games… perfectly symmetrical… sensitive and athletic,” aman who remained, also in his maturity, “a good horseman, swimmer” (251, 249). The implicit idea is that, sincehe can create beautiful forms, the sculptor cannot but be handsome himself; a concept that was resumed severaldecades later, in James’s description of Roderick Hudson (1907).

18 Greenough’s group The Rescue, showing a family of pilgrims attacked by a violent native warrior, reveals an attitudetowards the American Indians in sharp opposition to that of Benjamin West. In spite of its undeniable structuralqualities, it could not survive as an emblem of the nation’s multicultural history, in periods of progressiveanthropology. Thence the refusal of its ideological implications in the 1930s, and its removal from the pedestal ofthe Capitol.

19 Greenough’s worship of classic culture and Greek art comes to the foreground in this passage (from his Form andFunction):

Let us now turn to the human figure, the most beautiful organization on earth.… This stupendous form, toweringas a light-house… tells the majesty and domination by that upreared spine.… It is all beauty, its motion is grace.…The savage who envies or admires the special attributes of beasts maims unconsciously his own perfection toassume their tints, their feathers, or their claws; we turn from him with horror, and gaze with joy on the nakedApollo. (120-121)

20 Greenough’s art is dramatically connected with Margaret Fuller’s death; in fact, the cruel coincidence was that,when a storm hit the Elizabeth, the ship that carried Margaret Fuller, her husband Count Ossoli, and their child, afew miles off the coast of Fire Island (1850), the vessel sank because it was overloaded with tons of marblepurchased by Greenough and sent to his studio in America. But Fuller does not play only a tragically passive rolein my discourse. Apart from her significance in the history

of political relationships between Italy and the United States, she wrote a remarkable essay on Canova (The Dial,III 454-484), full of expressions of disappointment, in contrast with her great expectations. But her judgment of thesculptor’s art was based on copies and casts, seen many years before the direct contact with Canova’s originalproducts. However, Fuller’s conclusions, i.e., that Canova was “a man of taste” and a great critic of his art, wereinstrumental in spreading the Italian sculptor’s fame in North America, promoting, at the same time, the interest incontemporary American artists, who followed Canova’s aesthetics.

21 The following three sculptors have unequal significance in terms of aesthetic achievements, but similar historicalimportance, since they all produced fundamental pieces of the cultural puzzle I have described. They all lived andworked in full awareness of their cosmopolitan milieu, exploiting every possible connection, including the inter-semiotic debates around the vicissitudes of ancient and modern arts (Gerdts in Stebbins 66-93). Thomas Crawford(in Rome from 1835) was, in my opinion, the most gifted of the three, the one who best succeeded in accepting theinfluence of classical heritage without the customary sense of inferiority, or the embarrassing uneasiness thatcharacterized his fellow expatriate sculptors. His Orpheus reveals the influence of Bernini’s David; his Indian ChiefContemplating the Progress of Civilization (1856) shows a genuine romantic attitude, in keeping with a nostalgicvision of the Indian: the obvious classical model is Marius Meditating among the Ruins of Carthage by SalvatorRosa (1650). Crawford’s experience of Western cultural tradition was as varied and inclusive, as it was functionaland “operative.”

22 A more limited capacity to deal with the cumbersome presence of ancient statues is evident in William WetmoreStory (in Rome between 1850 and 1880). But Story has other merits, perhaps more literary than artistic. He wasa writer himself (Roba di Roma, The Evil Eye), and a great friend of both Hawthorne’s and James’. For threedecades, his apartment at Palazzo Barberini became a salon and meeting place for the English and American artcolony in Italy. Louisa May Alcott met him and was impressed by his strong personality (in Shawl Straps thenarrating voice defines him tout court “a great sculptor”). He is the model for Kenyon in Hawthorne’s The MarbleFaun (where we find a graphic ekphrasis of his Cleopatra), as well as the protagonist of Henry James’ WilliamWetmore Story and His Friends. Story had the merit of introducing Hawthorne to Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, whoappears in many vivid pages of the novelist’s French and Italian Notebooks.

23 Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, an ante litteram feminist no less than Alcott, arrived in Rome in 1852, soon becoming apupil of John Gibson’s. Her free and self-sufficient behavior impressed the three protagonists of Shawl Straps, asis evident in one of the most entertaining episodes of the book, in the Castelli Romani. Her extraordinary figure offemale artist would deserve greater analysis; but since her importance in the history of American women has beenalready acknowledged in gender studies, I can limit myself to stressing the fact that she was the first womansculptor to study anatomy from male live models, and one of the first to work both in marble and bronze, starting inthe early 1860s. Her much acclaimed Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (1857-59) shows Hosmer’s preference for strongfemale figures, whose dignified countenance expresses much more energy than the conventional “fiery” attitudeof Story’s Cleopatra. On the contrary, the male nude of her Sleeping Faun (a chaste version of the Barberini Faun inMünich) is smooth but not eroticized, perfectly balanced, and all but aggressive.

24 I conclude my survey with Augustus Saint-Gaudens who, following the change in fashion, worked mostly inbronze. His stay in Rome was very brief (again, in the crucial year 1870), but there he met the American artstudent Augusta Fisher Homer, who became his wife, and obtained his first commission, Silence, a subject matter“of an abstract nature” that seems, at first, very distant from all shades of neoclassic taste. However, as ErnstScheyer argues, it foreruns Saint-Gaudens’ much later masterpiece, the Adams Memorial in Washington. Theenigmatic, genderless statue that dominates the funeral monument at Rock Creek Cemetery, in fact, is equally“of an abstract nature,” and confirms the idea that all statues possess a mysterious, ambivalent aura. Theuncanny simulacrum dialogues with observers precisely through its austere presence, refraining from sending amessage that can easily be translated into words (Scheyer 216-17).

4.  The Writer’s Ambivalent Response

25 I concentrate now on the response to statues and the art of sculpture in Melville, Hawthorne and James, startingwith two preliminary remarks: the first, that it is obviously no coincidence if all three major American novelists of the19th century were so deeply concerned with the themes I have discussed, and so much impressed by themasterpieces I have mentioned; the second, that in all three cases the epistemological boundaries within whichtheir response took shape can be summed up in a question: ambiguity or ambivalence?4

26 Unlike Hawthorne and James, Melville was in Rome only for a few weeks (1857); but the impression of the city and itsmonuments was great, and lasted long. Melville was a good connoisseur of Greek and Roman history andarchaeology, thoroughly aware, from the beginning of his career, of the ambivalent, indeed polyvalent nature ofclassical statuary. References to classical art, ancient myths and famous statues abound in his writings, beforeand after his Roman sojourn. The paradigmatic text, in this sense, is his essay Statues in Rome, based on a lecturehe gave in several cities of the East Coast and Midwest, upon his return from Europe and the Near East (Sealts144-45). As the novelist wrote in a letter to George William Curtis, his intention was to use his reminiscences of theRoman statues to describe “the Daily Progress of man towards a state of intellectual and moral perfection.” Thissocio-historical interest, so much in keeping with Melville’s frame of mind, does not exclude perceptiveobservations, that could easily be defined as examples of archetypal criticism. The layers of interpretation depositone on top of the other, enriching the overall result (Letter to George W. Curtis, October 26, 1857, qtd. in Sealts17).

27 A statue of Minerva is of crucial symbolic meaning in his late poem “After the Pleasure Party” (1881); the simulacrumof the virgin goddess of wisdom, seen under the porch of Winckelmann’s Villa Albani, acquires a density ofallusions that reverberates throughout the poem; in a late reminiscence of Byronian attitude towards the oldglories of Italy, Rome is defined as an apt shelter for “discrowned queens.” It is to Melville that we owe thedefinition of statues as the real inhabitants of Rome; Melville, as we have seen, compared the statues on thefaçade of St. John’s Lateran to storks, and saw the horses of Castor and Pollux in the Quirinale square as twowinged Pegasuses. Statues can, therefore, be semantically and symbolically heavy, as well as aestheticallypleasant in their apparent levity.

28  Billy Budd’s physique, in Melville’s unfinished masterpiece, hints at “the reposeful good nature bestowed on a statueof Hercules”; but the innocent, “handsome sailor” is likened also to an incredible, contradictory series of pagandeities, mythological figures, and statues. Since the text never reached its final form through publication, I refrain,on the one hand, from accepting ambiguity as its ultimate dictum, while, on the other, I appreciate the old master’sunflinching tension towards Truth, no matter how ambivalent and, perhaps, unspeakable.5 A truth that, in hisopinion, classical statues not only suggested and promised, but guaranteed.

29 A similar tension towards truth, and an analogous, fascinating use of ambivalence, are present in Hawthorne’streatment of classical and neoclassical statues. As in Melville, what is most fruitful is the discovery, on the part ofthe novelist, that the so-called “ambiguity” and elusiveness of sculpture is, instead, the “multi-valency” of that art.In this respect, he seems to echo Charles Baudelaire’s observations in the essay “Pourquoi la sculpture estennuyeuse,” where the French poet, contradicting the title of his “revue” of the 1846 salon, underlines the“tantalizing suggestion of an interior to so much exterior” (Fernie, “Introduction” I-XII; see also Hamrick 110-131).

30  Sculpture and statues are present in many Hawthorne’s stories (“The Great Stone Face,” “The Snow-Image,”etc.), again, as in Melville, also prior to his European grand tour; they constellate his French and Italian Notebooksand appear—almost obsessively—in The Marble Faun (1860). In the novel the author, the narrator, and hischaracters, describe, discuss, dialogue “through silence” with numberless significant statues (Mukai 163-214). Transatlantic criticism analyzed their symbolic, allegorical, political role: some are seen as archetypes,and therefore are crucial on a psychological level. The ambivalence that underlies the text is the result ofHawthorne’s mixed feelings towards Rome, as towards all major historical and social questions; the statues,therefore, acquire multiple meanings. For instance, Miriam has strong perplexities as to both ancient andmodern sculpture. Before the Dying Gladiator, she is embarrassed by the “expression” of a fleeting moment,crystallized in the marble that imprisons it, and wonders why the dying warrior doesn’t die, “without any furtherado.” The disquieting fact that the Gladiator is portrayed “frozen” as eternally almost dying is echoed in Alcott’sShawl Straps and demonstrates that her impression of the masterpiece depended not on her first-handexperience, but on the use of it by a writer as generally admired as Hawthorne was in the Alcotts circle. Anotherdisturbing idea is the fact that the numerous statues produced in vain competition with the unparalleledmasterpieces of the past, were destined, unlike them, to remain in a permanent perfect shape, withoutundergoing the changes caused by the passing of time. Here Hawthorne foreruns a passage in MargueriteYourcenar’s Le temps, ce grand sculpteur, in which the 20th-century writer appreciates the fact that, due to thecenturies that have gradually modified them, the pieces of ancient sculpture have become almost products ofnature, similar, for instance, to “calcinated bones on a shore” (Yourcenar 52).

31 Omitting the nth discussion of the faun—simply observing, by the way, its/his “polyvalent” nature of man, statue,animal, mythical creature, and archetype—I mention two other interesting loci classici in the novel. The first is theepisode of Kenyon’s meeting with the statue of Venus on the via Appia, showing the usual embarrassment of the“innocent”/prude puritan before the nude, though in fragments. Only after the arm that is to cover the intimate partsof the goddess has been put back in the right place, can the sculptor try to establish a form of communication withthe

face, as his hand eliminates a few remains of earth from the lips (in the source episode, reported in the Notebooks,William Wetmore Story uses a twig as intermediary). Finally, the statue reacts with a smile of gratitude. Whereasthe faun asked for a “responsive smile,” here it is the statue that “responds,” gratifying its worshipper, and almosttaking life. But Kenyon is ashamed of his excessive interest in a marble piece and flees in search of Hilda. Whenhe retrieves her, the two leave Rome for good. Returning to their motherland, Kenyon gives up his profession!

32 But probably the most intriguing interpretation of a piece of sculpture (almost an ekphrasis in movement) pertains tothe clay sketch for Donatello’s portrait, modeled by Kenyon at Monte Beni: an artistic output that, refusing to complywith the will of its creator, decides its own destiny, shape and expression. When the sculptor leaves the studio, thereader is told that the sketch, after an autonomous transformation, finally resembles the “character” of the modelbetter than the result of a conscious intention: another example of a proto-expressionistic taste, with the grimacebestowing an element of grotesque on the product of a 19th-century sculptor (Mariani 1992 108-113).

33  In the case of Henry James, I also have to limit myself to a few emblematic examples. In The Last of the Valerii(1874) the protagonist falls in love with a statue; not with a Venus, though, but with a Juno: the hypotext isMérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille. The protagonist’s interest shifts from the affection for a human being to the adoration ofa pagan statue, from the ordinary reality of a marriage deprived of intellectual and ethical stimuli, to the world ofeternal beauty and, as recent criticism clarifies, to the worship of a personal religion (Monfort 69-80). James’s textproceeds through accumulation: the connotations of the statue’s symbolic reading increase in number. At the endof the story, after the statue, that had been “unearthed,” accepts being put back underground, the fact that theCount keeps one of its hands in a cabinet of his studio alludes to fetishism. Apparently, the husband can loveagain the whole of his wife, provided he can worship a part of his divine mistress, in secret (Izzo 59-80).

34 Also in Roderick Hudson (1875) the protagonist (who, this time, is a sculptor, like Kenyon in The Marble Faun) falls inlove with a statue of Hera/Juno, but, in contrast with the tale, shifts his attention from statue to woman (ChristinaLight), experiencing love, and losing his artistic inspiration. The strategy of ambivalence is confirmed, theaccumulation of materials, in plot and rhetoric of narration, is impressive. The relationship between Roderick andhis patron Rowland Mallet can be read as the sublimation of a homoerotic affair: a same-sex enactment of the mythof Pygmalion, in which the statues produced by the young artist act as mischievous go-betweens, as well as objectsof the older man’s scopophilia (Mendelssohn 512-541). Roderick moves among contrasting tensions, and seems,in turn, intellectually naive and artistically engagé. His style, sometimes, suggests an early evidence of proto-expressionistic taste, but the justification of his poetics is commonplace (a belated compliance to Winckelmann’sideas): once the artist declines, the man cannot survive.

35 Another use of ancient statues is documented in The Portrait of a Lady (1881, Chap. XXVIII). In the first part of thechapter Isabel, at the opera house in Rome, disturbed by the coming-and-going of visitors in her box, seeks invain to concentrate on what happens on stage; a full immersion in the passions expressed by singers might haveafforded a clue to clarify her doubts about her future choices. A better chance is offered, a few days later,by the silent spaces of the Capitoline sculpture gallery, that she visits in complete solitude. When her wordless,but evidently intense, dialogue with

the statues is interrupted by Gilbert Osmond, she confesses that the “dumb” but discreet works of art are “the bestcompany.” As Anthony Lane observes, Osmond will soon prove “an anti-Pygmalion, quenching Isabel’s vital fireand nailing her into place like a statue” (2012. See also Gorra). But, for the time being, before friendly marblearchetypes, Isabel seems to establish the first coordinates in her inner world.

5.  Conclusions

36  What do we make of this “scenario” and of the actors that played major and minor roles in it (when I say“actors,” I obviously mean statues no less than people)? The complex and varied phenomenology can bedescribed according to the following lines:

1.  a positive response, embodied in the responsive smiles of Hawthorne’s faun and Venus

—a mysterious fascination that persists and gradually finds a justification in a discovery, an epiphanic moment, aprivileged dialogue;

2.   a negative response, when the statue tends to become possessive, absorbing, totalizing, vengeful: adangerous relationship often implying a morbid, masochistic, late romantic, pre-decadent sensitivity;

3.     an ambiguous/ambivalent response, that can produce passion but also embarrassment, curiosity andhelplessness, doubts more than revelations—and therefore implies a cautious safety distance;

4.   an “imaginative” response, when the statue is only a pretext, an excuse for the introduction of the narrativeelement—a reaction against the neoclassical ideology of “absolute self-sufficiency” of the work of art. In this case,the statue is “overdetermined,” betraying intentions the author/observer/narrator super-imposes on it, in a patentmechanism of projection;

5.   the statue can be interpreted as the final stage of a “story,” a context, the quintessential “condensation” of anevent (in Lessing’s words, “einzigen Augenblick”). A bust, the portrait of a man, the head of a woman, tell theirstories, reveal their characters and that of a society, a phase in the development of taste; no more a timelesspresence, the statue becomes a historical document, in a philosophical discourse. In all cases, the silentcommunication between statue and human being promotes the subject’s meditation upon explicit and implicitmessages, fostering self-definition, as the marble piece reflects and sends back a message that in fact comesfrom the subject.

37 The function of the statue that I prefer to stress is that of the embodiment of the archetype. Through the statue,American travelers and expatriates could meet (and face) what they were looking for (perhaps withoutknowing), when they came to Rome: that is, in Jungian terms, the shadow side of their psyche, and the Europeancomponent of their collective and political unconscious; both had to be “integrated” within their consciousness.Thus, they had to acknowledge that what apparently seemed so different and “alien”—in turn, or at the sametime, discomforting and mysteriously stimulating—was the priceless instrument through which they could reachthe stage of mature self-individuation. But since their identity had to be ceaselessly re-negotiated, the functionof the archetype also changed incessantly. In fact, no matter how long they lived in Rome, thesepassionate pilgrims had to adjust themselves to the awareness of the multiple, ambivalent value of themessages from the works of art that challenged and unsettled their certainties. Fortunately, in so doing, theytransferred

the complexity of these debates to the visual and verbal texts they produced, enriching the history of NorthAmerican culture, and of culture in general.

38 A fundamental observation serves as a concluding note: if we consider what the statues did to the texts produced bythe protagonists of our story—providing them with priceless instruments of signification—and what the texts did tothe statues—enlarging their metaphorical and symbolic density, their capacity to echo tensions and intentions

—we observe that the statues were never neutral. Motionless but not inert, temporarily dormant but neverindifferent, discreet but not marginal, they acted as operative sources of suggestions, productive in so far asthey regularly set in motion a train of consequences, refusing to be mere decorative elements, or passiveoccasions for narcissistic ekphrases.

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NOTES

1.  The book (1873) is based, above all, on May’s letters home (Shealy 2008). But the author feels free to“distribute” the various, often contrasting impressions, among the three protagonists, vividly creating three distinctcharacters. In Rome Alcott began writing Little Men. The flood of late 1870 (portrayed by Anglo-American painterElihu Vedder—see his canvas at the Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi) created serious problems, so much sothat the King of Italy postponed his move from Florence to the new Capital city, visiting it only for a day trip. Theprotagonists of Shawl Straps saw him at least once, describing him as less unpleasant than his fame would havehim, though “certainly not an Apollo” (a reference to the statue of Apollo Belvedere, in the Vatican, more than to theGreek god) (Daniele “Spinsters for Ever!”).

2.  None of these statues is a classical Greek original, though, since the Apollo is a 2 nd century A.D. Roman copyof a Greek original in bronze of the 2nd century b. C.; the Laokoon is a Roman copy of a Greek original in bronze ofthe 2nd century b. C., and the so called Antinous (Hermes Psicopompos) is a Roman original of the 2nd century A.D.

3.  George P. A. Healy’s portrait of Louisa M. Alcott was painted in Rome during the writer’ stay, between late 1870and the spring of 1871.

4.  I do not consider ambivalence and ambiguity as synonymous. The latter, in fact, suggests the idea of a subtleuncertainty, implying the writers’ choice of leaving their messages elusive, the gist of their discoursesepistemically unsolvable. The former, instead, testifies the authors’ struggle towards a solution, in which thecoexistence of various options, far from being felt as a utopian wishful thinking, can be considered feasible. Bothtechniques and narrative structures are fascinating and aesthetically fruitful, but ambivalence produces, in myopinion, texts of a richer ethic density (Mariani 1995 41-62).

5.  Recent Melville criticism, with its varieties of interpretations even of single specific themes, like the ones I havediscussed here, seems to confirm the horizon of my reading (Flory; Ludot-Vlasak).