Why 21st Century Shakespeare Still Looks Like 19th Century Shakespeare

Our century now lays claim to our own Shakespeare—a 21^st century Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s on Twitter, on Facebook, and even on Second Life, just like any modern producer and consumer of social media. But as much as we want a shiny, new Shakespeare just like us, 21^st century Shakespeare looks a lot like 19^th century Shakespeare. No matter how we want to shake the Romantics, we’re all still their children. Take away the Tweets and the Facebook updates, and our Shakespeare resembles their Shakespeare, especially in how artists saw him and depicted his creations. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why 21^st Century Shakespeare Still Looks Like 19^th Century Shakespeare."

[Image: Robert Thew after Henry Fuseli. Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus and the Ghost. Published 29 September 1796. Stipple engraving on paper, 500 x 635 mm.]

Brotherly Love

Before you even open Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, edited by Katherine Lochman and Carol Jacobi, you know that this is a different kind of art history book. The faux Victorian exterior design and endpapers transport you back to that time and prepare you to see the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and others through their eyes and not through the distorting lens of a century and a half of critique, including the help (and sometimes harm) of fellow Victorian John Ruskin’s writings. In his 1905 book, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt railed against depictions of Rossetti as the clear leader of the group, calling himself the “true” Pre-Raphaelite adhering to the original tenets of the Brotherhood. “The book ends with an attack on decadence [i.e., French Impressionism and Modernism in general] and an expression of anxiety about the downfall of the noble British artistic tradition,” Carole Silver writes in her essay, “Visions and Revisions.” In a painting such as Hunt’s The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry on the Eve of Saint Agnes (above, from 1848), taking a scene from Keats’ poem The Eve of Saint Agnes, Hunt rewrites Keats’ lines to emphasize his moralizing mission. In casting the fleeing lovers as moral rather than the drunken partiers, “Dreams are compared with truth, appetite to love, social rules and rituals to personal freedom,” Carol Jacobi writes in “Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion: Brotherly Love.” As Jacobi puts it, the Pre-Raphaelites arose from “[s]tylistic innovation… generated by a shared interest in vision that was part of a timely and sophisticated inquiry into the nature of subjectivity… artists, poets, and critics alike debated the predicament of the individual in modern circumstance and the role of art in a material age.” This collection sets out to show how Hunt and his “brothers” set out to save the world through art by reaching back to the “Pre-Raphaelite,” pre-corrupted age of morality that the materialism of their society had left behind.

The most concrete example of Hunt’s personal mission to spread the word remains The Light of the World (above, the second, 1854 version). In “The Light of the World: Mission and Message,” Jonathan Mane-Wheck retraces the steps of the most traveled artwork in history, seen by more than seven million people on a 1905 tour of the British Empire, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Mane-Wheck sees modern distaste for Hunt’s Light originating in confusion between the work itself and the “kitsch industry” surrounding and, in many ways, stemming from it. Hunt paints Christ holding a lantern and knocking on a door—an embodiment of opportunity knocking, in this case the opportunity to embrace salvation. Hunt himself, however, rejected harsh dogma. “Possessing a more synthetic, universalist concept of religion,” Mane-Wheck asserts, Hunt “was open to Judaism and Islam.” In fact, when Hunt created a smaller version of his Light in 1854, he modified the lamp with a star and crescent as a nod to Islam “to show the breadth of the Christian system, which takes in other systems,” Hunt told an interviewer at the time. Unfortunately, over time, Hunt’s personal intentions have been clouded not only by a religious intolerance he did not practice, but also by political appropriation. “In its journey across the globe,” Mane-Wheck writes, “The Light of the World had become an icon of British Imperial Protestantism.” Hunt certainly believed in the nobility of British art and its power to save, but may have been uneasy in his Christ being “drafted” in the battle for colonization.

In “Textile Background: Cloth and Costume,” Linda Parry examines Hunt’s life-long relationship with fabrics and costume and how that experience played out in his painting. Both Hunt’s father and grandfather worked in the London textile industry. Hunt grew up in a home just above the textile works and even worked in the industry for two years before devoting himself to art. The drawings of the clothing designers were among the first artworks Hunt saw firsthand. This world of color and textures easily translated into the opulence of such works as The Finding of the Savior in the Temple (above, from 1860)—Hunt’s retelling of the story of the young Christ found lecturing in the temple. Many of the rich colors in Hunt’s painting copy newly developed dyes of the 1850s. (Joyce H. Townsend and Jennifer Poulin discuss elsewhere Hunt’s painstaking approach to pigments to the point of pointing out defects to the manufacturers.) Photographs of costumes Hunt designed for his models accompanying Parry’s essay as testimony not only to Hunt’s love of fashion, but also of his exacting brand of realism. Thanks to his travels in the Middle East and the Holy Land, Hunt developed a taste for exotic dress that he satisfied with costumes for himself, which allowed him to feel closer to the religious subjects centuries in the past that he painted in the Victorian present.

It is Hunt’s relentless search for fidelity in his depiction of matters of faith that truly sets him apart from his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. As a pilgrim in the Holy Land, Hunt identified with the plight of the Jewish people to the point of becoming an outspoken Zionist in support of the founding of a Jewish state. As Nicholas Tromans explains in “Palestine: Picture of Prophecy,” Hunt “saw himself as a kind of avant-garde Christian intellectual, looking confidently (on the whole) to the future of an ever-changing world in which a divine centre nevertheless held steady.” Neither Darwinism nor Zionism could shake Hunt’s faith. In fact, Hunt saw a continuity not only between the symbolic typology of Judaism and of Christianity but also between, as Tromans puts it, “divine revelation and modern science.” Hunt’s humanism spurs him to paint works such as The Shadow of Death (above, from 1871), which combines the realism of Hunt’s research in the Middle East with the symbolism of the cross-like shadow in the rear that horrifies the Virgin Mary. In fact, Hunt’s humanism as played out in the realistic depiction of Christ as carpenter stretching his limbs drew criticism for being too real and ignoring the divine side of the savior. In his religion, his politics, and his art, Hunt refused to draw the same lines of distinction that others did. Tromans paints a picture of Hunt the Zionist as a Victorian Bono. “Like a rock star of today seeking to shame politicians into acting on African poverty,” Tromans writes, not naming names, “Hunt’s credibility to speak [on a Jewish state] lay paradoxically exactly in his political inexperience and overt individualism.” I couldn’t help smiling at Tromans comparison, which cast Hunt, the “stodgy” “pious” Victorian in a whole new light. I almost immediately put amber, wraparound sunglasses on Hunt in my mind’s eye.

Carole Silver sums up the whole Hunt (above in his Self-Portrait of 1867) nicely: “Today we see him as a man of his era, replete with its visions and blindnesses, at times a rebel, at others deeply conventional, intensely nationalistic and filled with British imperialist ideology, yet capable of great religious and ethnic tolerance, at times patriarchal, at others somewhat radical in view of relations between the sexes.” As much recent research on the Victorian era suggests, the Victorians were never as “Victorian” as we believe them to be. They were as inconsistent, intolerant, and individualistic as any other age but perhaps slightly more conscious of the modern turn towards materialism and away from the spiritual to the point of wanting to reverse the course. In his 1867 Self-Portrait, Hunt paints himself as painter-prophet adorned in the richly colored dress of a Middle Eastern wise man while holding a palette full of colors with which he could paint his next tale of moral instruction. Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision wipes away much of the false imagery of intervening discourse and takes us back to the source, lighting the path back to The Light of the World and other works to illuminate their original intent, which is invariably more interesting than the conventional wisdom handed down to us. The Victorians stood on the brink of the modern life that we continue to deal with today. William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood tried to turn back the clock to the fundamentals of life and art that they believed would make the future brighter and better.

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, edited by Katherine Lochman and Carol Jacobi.]

Getting Schooled

One of the highlights of my tour of the Vatican years ago was the opportunity to see in person Raphael’s The School of Athens (above, from 1511) in the Stanza della Segnatura. Born April 6, 1483, Raphael snuck portraits of himself and many of his fellow artists into his group snapshot of the glory days of Greek philosophy. I especially sought out Raphael’s portrait of Heraclitus, a portrait of Michelangelo inspired by Raphael’s sneak peak at the almost completed Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Raphael even painted Michelangelo in a Michelangelo-esque style, which makes Heraclitus stand out even more from the crowd. With Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael comprises the grand triumvirate of the High Renaissance. Even into the early twentieth century critics as renowned as Bernard Berenson ranked Raphael above his two esteemed contemporaries. Thanks to the papal desire for high-quality decoration, Raphael and Michelangelo rubbed shoulders quite frequently in a school of shared respect and healthy competition. The spirited arguments recounted in The School of Athens could easily stand in for the aesthetic battles waged between these geniuses.

Just a few years after The School of Athens, Raphael opened up his own school of sorts, with the Loggia (above) of the triple portico of the Vatican Palace as his schoolroom. As related in Nicole Dacos’ The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure (my review here), just before Donato Bramante, designer of the triple portico of the Vatican Palace, died in 1514, he suggested to Pope Leo X that Raphael could best finish the job. Raphael assembled his team of assistants and added artists from other countries over time to complete the multimedia work of creating sculptures and paintings to fill the Loggia. Nothing in the Loggia is actually by Raphael, but everything found there comes from his vision of a kindler, gentler idea of the Bible. Raphael wanted to create the perfect atmosphere of tolerance and peace for the pope to show to visitors while discussing diplomatic matters. Raphael’s Loggia essentially became a laboratory in which young artists were steeped in a new way of looking at the role of Christianity in the world.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Raphael died at the age of 37 after a night of wild sexual passion in the arms of his mistress Margherita Luti, the subject of Raphael’s portrait La Fornarina (aka, The Bakeress; above, from 1519-1520). Vasari’s Lives focuses throughout on the elevation of Michelangelo as the greatest of all artists as well as a paragon of virtue, so scripting a licentious end for Raphael, one of his chief rivals, made Michelangelo look all the better. Raphael’s reputation suffered another blow in the late nineteenth century thanks to John Ruskin and the artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Raphael may be the only artist to have a school explicitly NOT named after him, by name. Providing the theory for the Pre-Raphaelites' artwork, Ruskin condemned Raphael’s art, claiming that “execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.” Ruskin made Raphael the turning point in art history where everything went wrong. “in medieval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second,” Ruskin wrote. “The medieval principles led up to Raphael, and the modern principles lead down from him.” The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to turn back the clock and erase Raphael’s bad influence. Fortunately, their success in art didn’t translate into a success in art history. Raphael remains a powerful presence in the history of the Renaissance—another great teacher in that grandest of schools.

Serious Business

Few critics wielded as much power for so long as John Ruskin, shown above in the highly flattering 1853-1854 portrait by John Everett Millais amidst the natural world Ruskin loved and studied so deeply. Born February 8, 1819, set the standards for artistic taste for both the Victorian and Edwardian ages, championing J.M.W. Turner in the 1840s and getting into a famous legal scrap with James McNeill Whistler in the late 1870s. An autodidact Renaissance man who dabbled in poetry and art himself in addition to criticism on the arts and social conditions, Ruskin today seems just another odd figure in the pantheon of odd figures that come down to us from the repressive Victorian times. As Millais painted the scenery behind Ruskin in this portrait, Millais fell in love with Ruskin’s young wife, Effie Gray. eventually marrying her after helping her annul her marriage to Ruskin on the grounds of “incurable impotency.” Ruskin disputed the charge of impotency, but he certainly couldn’t dispute the charge of incurable seriousness. As hard as I try, I just can’t imagine Ruskin ever laughing, even as a child. Ruskin’s dryness is that of the late Wordsworth, Ruskin’s early poetic hero, who became staid and sclerotic when the radical flow of ideas ceased. Unfortunately, Ruskin was never a radical, even in his youth.

Ruskin took up the cause of Turner when critics began to question Turner’s importance. Ruskin even sent a fan letter to Turner asking the artist’s permission to defend his name, but Turner gently tried to dissuade Ruskin, to no avail. Ruskin’s greatest work of criticism, Modern Painters, amounts to a long defense of Turner as the greatest artist ever. It’s a long trudge to get through, but I remember coming away from Modern Painters with a whole new appreciation of the natural world. Ruskin looked longer and harder at natural phenomenon than perhaps even Turner himself, as drawings by Ruskin such as his Study of Gneiss Rock, Glenfinlas (above, from 1853) attest. Sadly, the revolutionary naturalism of Turner was as revolutionary as Ruskin was willing to go. The late, visionary works of Turner dismayed and saddened Ruskin to the point that Ruskin barely acknowledges them at all. The modern idea of Turner as the precursor of Impressionism and all modern art would give Ruskin a fainting spell were he alive today. After Turner’s death, Ruskin took on the task of classifying Turner’s work, thus setting the tone for all Turner studies for decades. Coming across erotic works by Turner, Ruskin fought the urge to destroy them and preserve his vision of Turner as a morally upright man and artist. Although sorely tempted, Ruskin didn’t burn the erotic Turners, although he told others that he did, but he did bury them so deeply in the archives that they weren’t found for almost 150 years.

When you add up the ledger of Ruskin’s good deeds versus his bad deeds, I still think the positives come out ahead. Ruskin’s fidelity to Turner’s genius and his fostering of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood helped promote those artists to a wider audience that they might never have found, even today. Like Giorgio Vasari before him and Bernard Berenson after him, Ruskin waded into the vast sea of centuries of Italian art and salvaged many names lost to memory. Ruskin haunted the untraveled paths of Italy and ventured into near-forgotten churches to rediscover and copy for his own use works such as Carpaccio’s Saint George and the Dragon (Ruskin’s copy above, from 1870-1872). Unfortunately, Ruskin couldn’t resist making forceful statements that cost some artists and schools dearly, such as the Bolognese Baroque School of Ludovico Carracci, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and others. Ruskin condemned the emotionalism of the Bolognese Baroque as false and untrue and, therefore, unworthy of study, effectively burying those artists for nearly a century under the weight of his powerful opinion. I find it highly ironic that such an unemotional man could sum up the nerve to question the emotions of others, but Ruskin never considered the consequences of his critical actions. It is this strange mix of affinity for nature yet lack of human empathy that makes Ruskin such a unique figure in art history, one more at home with rocks and frescoes than with the flesh and blood people who make and enjoy art.

Attention to Detail

If you think that’s a photograph above, you’re wrong. It’s hard to believe, but William Trost Richards’ Forest Interior (above, from 1865) is just one example of the incredibly photographic draftsmanship of one of America’s truly great landscapists of the nineteenth century. Born November 14, 1833, Richards falls within an art historical crack—born too late to be considered truly part of the Hudson River School and born on the wrong side of the Atlantic to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Richards’ painting is too clinically precise to join the ranks of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and other more spiritually oriented Hudson River School artists. On the other hand, Richards’ precision matches that of Pre-Raphaelite greats such as John Everett Millais except for one major detail—an almost complete lacking of the human figure. Occasionally Richards would set a person into his landscape as an almost grudging concession to convey a sense of scale. The literary flights of fancy the Pre-Raphaelites painted over and over, however, never enter into Richards’ signature style. Just the facts, he seems to say. Just the facts are magical enough for me.

Richards grew up in Philadelphia but studied for years in Europe before returning to live in Pennsylvania. Upon his return, Richards brought back much of the grand style of Romanticism ala Caspar David Friedrich, but, again, devoid of human presence. Moonlight on Mount Lafayette, New Hampshire (above, from 1873) demonstrates how Richards could depict effects of light on the landscape and on clouds beautifully. Looking through Richards’ oeuvre, you never get the sense that he repeated himself. From fire-red autumnal scenes to cool-blue moonlit landscapes, nothing seemed beyond Richards’ reach. Yet, for all his technical proficiency, he’s little known today, just a footnote in the histories of American art. Perhaps he’s too good, almost too photographic. Realism this real seems somehow unreal without some sense of the artist’s personality mixed in. Unfortunately, Richards never provides a clue to who he is other than a great recorder of nature.

As great as Richards was with oils, he paints in watercolor even better, as can be seen in works such as Beach with Rising Sun, New Jersey (above, from 1870-1875). In the last stage of his career, Richards concentrated mainly on marine scenes, as if he had mastered the inland and now set out to conquer the seas. A trip to England in the 1870s during which he saw the watercolors of J.M.W. Turner most likely inspired Richards to put the water in his watercolors. Turner ranks among the greatest watercolorists ever thanks to his combination of technique and Romantic feel for nature. In these final works, Richards seems to approach a Turner-esque level of Romanticism yet still somehow falls short. It’s difficult to look at these great works and say they fail on some level, but it’s more difficult to say they satisfy completely. These works lack the personality we in the West look for in art. But, in the East, the absence of the artist doesn’t disqualify a piece as great art. Maybe Richards achieved a type of Zen in his art that the uninitiated just can’t relate to.

Banished Angel

When Oscar Wilde wrote his long 1895 letter from prison, De Profundis, to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, he mourned for all that he had lost to bankruptcy, including art by Simeon Solomon, one of the last of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Born October 9, 1840, Solomon knew what Wilde was going through, having himself been arrested for his homosexuality in 1873. The fallout from that scandal threw him from the upper echelon of the art world and forced Solomon to work in poverty for the last thirty years of his life. Before the arrest, Solomon flirted with danger in such homoerotic works as Love in Autumn (above, from 1866), which shows a scantily clad angel with flaming red hair banished from an unseen Eden in the background. The chill winds blowing the angel’s drapery around may symbolize the chilly reception Solomon knew his sexuality would bring once the secret was out. Solomon cultivated an outlandish personal style that set him apart even in the flamboyant circle of artists surrounding Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Often wearing Oriental dress and allowing his red hair to grow excessively long (like the angel’s), Solomon drew all eyes to himself and painted a bull’s eye for the authorities.

In addition to his sexuality, Solomon’s Jewish faith set him apart from the rest of the Pre-Raphaelite circle in England. While artists such as Edward Burne-Jones relied heavily on Christian imagery, Solomon instead looked to more classical Greek and Roman models. Those ancient cultures and their tolerance of homosexual behavior may have offered a safe haven for Solomon as well. In a watercolor painted before his 1873 arrest, Solomon paints Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene (above, from 1864). In this painting, the famed lesbian poet Sappho embraces another female poet Erinna. It took a lot of daring to paint such a subject, which surely make suspicious viewers even more suspicious. Putting aside the subject matter, however, you can see the wonderful draftsmanship and approach to the human figure that made Solomon a rising star and drew the praise of the Pre-Raphaelites while he was still just a student.

Alcoholism ravaged Solomon after the scandal. He died in 1905 from complications related to his addiction. Solomon lived in such poverty that he often couldn’t find the money to buy canvas to paint on. Rumor has it that Solomon actually painted on the street in charcoal at one point, hoping that passers-by would drop a coin into his cup. One of the rare oil paintings of Solomon’s late period, The Moon and Sleep (above, from 1894), shows Endymion visited by Luna in the Greek myth turned into Romantic verse by Keats. Although Luna is female and Endymion is male, Keats’ poem’s homoerotic overtones made it a code word for “the love that dare not speak its name” in Wilde’s England. Luna and Endymion both share long, reddish hair, perhaps symbolizing the female and male elements in Solomon’s soul. Yet, Endymion sleeps and he and Luna never connect, just as Solomon himself never connected with the intolerant age that banished him and his art literally to the streets.