PREFACE
1. But cautionary advice continues. Giovannini finds fault with some discussions of the relationship between the sister arts and generalizes that often “the area of analyzable affinity is relatively small” (193). Merriman expresses his “misgivings” about “the parallel of the arts” but finds some “faint affirmation” when he discusses “rhetorical devices,” and adds that the “kinds and amount of information offered to the reader are controlled by the author’s selection of what is rather confusingly called point-of-view in regard to literature.” Such a treatment seems to Merriman “a real possibility” (312).
2. In addition to Witemeyer, excellent discussions of the art analogy as applied to specific authors and works can be found in Viola Hopkins Winner, who uses such devices as “framing” to express what Henry James is attempting in his descriptions of paintings; in Wendy Steiner, whose discussions of Keats and Hawthorne show clearly how each author fits ekphrastic description within the framework of narrative; in Marianna Torgovnick, whose “vocabulary that suggests several methodologies” provides a useful “continuum” that “begins with decorative uses of the visual arts and continues through biographical, ideological, and interpretive uses” (13). Two studies of Eliot and the visual arts build on Witemeyer’s work: Hilary Frasier, “Titian’s Il Bravo and George Eliot’s Tito: A Painted Record,” Nineteenth Century Literature 50(Sept. 1995): 210–17; and Abigail S. Rischin, “Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative, and Desire in Middlemarch,” PMLA 111 (Oct. 1996): 1121–32.
3. A census of the prints that Melville had available for study reveals the large dimensions of his knowledge, for in addition to the expected artists, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Rubens, Dürer, and many others, there are engravings of works by lesser-known artists, including Claude Joseph Vernet, Spagnoletto, Nicholas Lancret, John Van Huysum, J. B. Oudry, Paul Potter, Sebastian Bourdon, and Nicholas Berghem, among others.
1. For a good analysis of the fortunes of “iconic” and other terms, see Lund chap. 1. In Museum of Words James Heffernan surveys the topic in its broadest aspects and sets useful parameters for considering the limits of ekphrasis. See also Aisenberg for a specifically gendered reading of pictorialism. Kurman and Alpers discuss the use of the technique in two specific literary genres.
2. See my “Wrestling with the Angel” for fuller discussions of the art analogy in some of the poems in Timoleon. Shurr and Stein offer extremely helpful readings of Melville’s poetry.
3. Melville read Haydon’s Encyclopedia Britannica article on painting and his autobiography with journals, a book that gives an appealing account of the artist’s life and work, likes and dislikes in the art world, and encounters with artists, poets, and friends in the early years of the nineteenth century (Sealts #262, #263).
4. See Steiner chap. 3 for an excellent, full discussion of Keats’s use of pictorialism in “The Eve of St. Agnes” and comments on several other Keats poems. In her view, the eighteenth-century argument (Lessing and others) against ut pictura poesis did not succeed in “eliminating paintings from romantic symbolism, the dichotomizing of the spatial from the temporal arts and of mimesis from expressivity” (56). Jack presents a convincing account of Keats’s sources in the sister arts and his use of the art analogy in his poems.
5. Melville’s probable knowledge of Browning’s poetry is discussed in Hershel Parker’s supplementary notes to Clarel, where attention is called to the publication of “My Last Duchess” under the title of “The Duke’s Interview with the Envoy” in The Literary World on September 8, 1849. Baker observes that Melville may have used some characteristics of Browning himself in the depiction of Derwent and may have had occasion to use The Return of the Druses as well (14–15). Parker prints an interesting marginal note from the copy of Vasari that Melville owned. Melville writes “Attain the highest result— / A quality of Grasp,” and Parker associates these remarks with the lines from “Andrea del Sarto” which assert that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp” (647). The injunction to “Get in as much as you can” applies well to the packed paragraphs of Melville’s prose and to the condensed, solid lines in much of Clarel.
6. Richard J. Zlogar discusses Irving’s use of Dutch genre painting, which “serves as a reference of central importance and lends its characteristic mode of composition to the tale” (62). See also Ringe.
7. For a good account of James’s use of a number of pictorial devices, see Winner. She discusses “framing,” where “through visual imagery or description it is circumscribed and set apart from the rest of the narrative” (70). As a part of framing, “an art object itself sometimes provides the center of James’s living pictures” (71–72). Tintner treats the use of Holbein, Pinturicchio, and Daumier in James’s fiction, as well as other fascinating topics, and speaks engagingly of James’s use of “a variety of devices to call the reader’s attention to a well-known painting or, occasionally, a piece of sculpture” (x) and, in the essays, calls our attention to these devices.
8. It is possible that Melville read Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846), a brief, quick sketch of travels. The chapter on Venice, “An Italian Dream,” may not have held much in the way of art talk; but letters to John Forster spoke of “thinking over again those silent speaking faces of Titian and Tintoretto,” and his observation that “it is something past all writing of or speaking of.”
1. Accounting for this American craze for the Cenci portrait, Barbara Novak speaks of Guido’s paintings as offering “a suitable blend of bathos and sentiment quite in keeping with some of the more lurid nineteenth-century American examples” (207). Spencer Hall’s essay on the Cenci painting concentrates on its use in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. In considering the effect of the picture upon novelists, Louise K. Barnett asserts that buyers of the prints after the portrait “were attracted not by art but by the titillating Cenci history which the portrait mediated” (170). Melville, like his contemporaries, liked pictures that told stories, as mythological paintings did, or were associated with narratives. It is possible that his desire to see the Cenci portrait was stimulated by a book that he seems to have acquired during the art tour, Valery’s Historical, Literary, and Artistical Travels in Italy (Sealts #533). Valery described the painting as “the pathetic head of La Cenci, dressed with elegance and coquetry… supposed to be the work of Guido’s early youth,” quoted Beatrice’s supposed speech to the executioner on the scaffold, and provided a translation, to the effect that “you loosen my soul for immortality.” She was “the true type of an Italian maiden, and the head attributed to Guido has wonderfully expressed this ardent, simple, and tender character” (Valery 568–69).
2. See Gollin and Idol for an account of Hawthorne’s attitude as being American: “Like his countrymen who came to Italy in increasing numbers at mid-century, Hawthorne brought high expectations of particular works of art, which were often fulfilled but sometimes thwarted” (87). James Jackson Jarves put it another way by condemning “American tourists” who pass through a Venetian church “without once noticing the paintings on the ceilings, turned away in disgust from Tintoretto, hurried into the church, paused a moment before some flashy modern trick of art, and in five minutes had made the tour of a building which contains enough, if properly studied, to have occupied them for as many months” (3).
3. Hawthorne liked to say that his love of Dutch art was probably proof of “a taste still very defective” (Notebooks 317). But the influence of the Dutch masters was strong in American art, and painters like William Sidney Mount had these precursors firmly in mind as they painted genre pictures of the commonplace in American life. As Barbara Novak points out, “Dutch art did not have the intellectual credentials that would have rendered it acceptable to official criticism,” quoting Jarves: “‘Those whose aesthetics are in sympathy with its mental mediocrity will not desert it for anything I can say’” (Novak 232).
4. Sophia Hawthorne was especially interested in the art of Flaxman, “the modern ancient,” and knew his illustrations for Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Dante. At the Old Manse, she and Hawthorne possessed some of Flaxman’s prints (Gollin and Idol 25, 30). There seems to have been a general American interest in the Englishman’s work; the illustrated Dante and Homer, in Bohn editions, were widely advertised.
5. See Gretchko, “New-York Gallery of Fine Arts.” The Literary World published accounts of exhibitions at the New-York Gallery and the showings of the Art-Union.
6. John F. McDermott’s offers an excellent account of Charles Deas’s brief career, his mental illness, beginning around 1849, and his early death. Pictures of a Wounded Pawnee, Sioux Ball-Playing, and Western Scenery were among those offered for distribution by the Art-Union in 1848(McDermott, “Deas” 310) and might have been seen by Melville.
7. See Soria 22, 122–55, 184–85, 188. The volume illustrates the varied forms of Vedder’s artworks and suggests some of the themes that might have interested Melville. Soria’s biography of Vedder gives valuable information about his continued contacts with America in the years after he had settled in Italy. Vedder did not know of Melville’s dedication until some time after Melville’s death, but he did correspond with Elizabeth Melville about the volume.
8. See Clark 84. Clark offers a useful account of trends in American art during the second half of the nineteenth century.
9. See The National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1861–1900, 340–42, 969–70.
10. I am indebted to Robert C. Kaufmann, reference librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, for the information about Mrs. Allan Melville.
11. Wallace’s record of the Reese collection is provided with excellent reproductions of some of the buildings shown in Melville’s prints. See Short and Marovitz in Sten, Savage Eye, and Boudreau for discussions of Melville’s knowledge of architecture and use of it in his writings.
12. In Melville and Turner, Robert Wallace has given an excellent account of Melville’s reading, and probable reading, of art materials for the early years, up to 1851. Christopher Sten extends our knowledge of Melville’s reading in his “Overview” to his edited volume, Savage Eye. See also my “Melville’s Reading in the Visual Arts” in ibid.
13. For an interesting account of Goethe’s many encounters with the sister arts, see Robson-Scott.
14. For James’s use of Lambinet in The Ambassadors, see Winner 74–78. Tintner discusses the uses made of Pinturicchio and Daumier.
15. In other letters, Melville comments on the visual arts. An 1869 letter to Elias Dexter, who framed a mezzotint of The Healing of the Blind (possibly after Nicolas Poussin’s painting) for him, gave Melville the opportunity to say, “I am glad, by the way, that my chance opinion of the picture receives the confirmation of such a judge as yourself.—Let me thank you for the little print after Murillo” (Correspondence 409). Writing to John C. Hoadley in 1877, he spoke of a ship “from Girgente” whose mate “has in his possession some stones from those magnificent Grecian ruins, and I am going to try to get a fragment, however small, which I will divide with you” (Correspondence 453).
16. The careful unraveling by Berthold in his essay on Dürer and by Wallace in his study of the engravings in the Ambrose group demonstrates how much can be learned from close study of the visual sources of Melville’s literary works. During the last long period of his study and writing (1857–91), Melville turned more and more to his books and magazines to give him the direct experience of the sister arts, and his familiarity with the subjects of his studies led him often to use these sources with little regard for the reader’s knowledge of them. Hence, the simplest-sounding poem, line, or allusion often requires a careful search through what the author may have been reading or recalling as he wrote.
17. The March 1846 issue of The Eclectic had Sartain’s engraving of Caius Marius on the Ruins of Carthage, after a painting by John Martin. In 1847, a Sartain engraving of The Cave of Despair, after Charles Eastlake’s painting, was featured. Among the “Shakespeare Gallery” engravings were pictures of Miranda, Mistress Page, Viola, and a number of other Shakespearean heroines. In addition to “The Ship Essex, stove in by a whale,” Duncan’s big collection of stories featured illustrations of the Burning of the Kent, Explosion of the Steam Boat Helen McGregor, Loss of the Ship Hercules, and some less calamitous scenes, including The Eddystone Light House and the Frigate Constitution, Commonly called “Old Ironsides.”
1. Wallace suggests that the picture “corresponds quite closely” to one of the engravings in Melville’s collection, a scene after Claude Joseph Vernet’s Figures on a Shore in a Storm (Melville and Turner 9), but the toasted brown waves suggest a quieter scene than a storm. For the second picture, Wallace suggests another engraving that Melville owned, A Storm by Willem Van de Velde (9–10), but it seems odd that Melville would use a Dutch picture to make a point about a picture that he insists and establishes is French by his reference to Froissart. The canvas that Redburn describes appears to feature a calm scene rather than a storm, and Melville seems to be working from paintings he has seen rather than from engravings, as his emphasis on color shows.
2. Commenting unfavorably on Goupil’s assuming some of the functions of the American Art-Union by setting up an “International Art-Union,” The Literary World (141 [Oct. 13, 1849]: 317–18) did find some good things to say about the French firm, notably that it had brought pictures, “some of them of high merit,” to New York, including Paul Delaroche’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps. One page of The Literary World (116 [Apr. 21, 1849]: 366) contained a Goupil advertisement for statuettes of “Powers’s Greek Slave” in bronze, porcelain, and plaster. Colman, as well as Williams & Stevens, advertised their wares on the same page. The February 1849 issue of Knickerbocker’s Magazine reminded readers in its editorial section that Goupil offered opportunities to see examples of recent European art.
3. See Wallace, “Melville after Turner” for a careful analysis of Ruskinian theory and its influence on Melville’s work. The comment on detail is on page 290. The Ruskin quotation, from the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), came much later than Melville’s Redburn, but the use of painterly detail was a staple of art discussion.
4. When Modern Painters, “by a graduate of Oxford,” appeared in America in 1847 under the imprint of Wiley and Putnam, the lengthy review in North American Review in January 1848 (vol. 66:114–16) took sharp issue with Ruskin’s uncomplimentary remarks about Salvator and Dutch art and enunciated some principles about landscape painting that American artists and writers continued to cling to. Melville might have agreed more with William Hazlitt, who reviewed Lady Morgan’s biography of Salvator (1824) at length, and concluded that the paintings “have a boldness of conception, a unity of design, and felicity of execution, which, if it does not fill the mind with the highest sense of beauty and grandeur, assigns them a place by themselves, which invidious comparison cannot approach or divide with any competitor.” There is no definite evidence that Melville read Modern Painters as early as 1847 or was influenced very much by it in the composition of Redburn or Moby-Dick. Wallace finds much evidence of Ruskinian thought, some gained, no doubt, secondhand, behind Melville’s writings of this period. But I am not sure that Melville’s formal aesthetics progressed very far beyond an old-school appreciation of Salvator Rosa. In a poem like “At the Hostelry,” written in the 1870s, perhaps, he is still puzzling out the possibilities of a term like “picturesque.” His imaginative and creative appropriation of ut pictura poesis for his fiction and poetry is a different matter; it soars while his rationalization of it is busy limping.
5. Peter Bellis argues that the older Redburn, as narrator, “maintains a steadily ironic distance from the boy’s linguistic inexperience” (86). Bryan Short usefully refers to the subtitles given to Redburn as “a source of identity in between the maturity implied by the narrative art and the lost paternal or childhood origins responsible for Wellingborough’s disabled sense of self” (69). The “older” Redburn intrudes as narrator in such passages as the account of the Moorish arch that he sees and seems to remember having seen before. His “perplexity in this matter was cleared away” by seeing a print of the scene that he recalls having seen before (206).
6. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 4.278–79; Keats, “Lamia” 1.45–47. Henry F. Pommer cites the Miltonic passage for its apparent influence on The Confidence-Man (82). His examples of Miltonic influence on Redburn do not cite the Aladdin’s Palace scene.
7. A description of the temple of Cholula appears in Prescott’s “Appendix, Part I.” The history gives a vivid account of the storming of the temple in Book 5, chapter 2. A passage in Book 1, chapter 4 exhibits Prescott’s pictorial sense, which Melville may have been able to draw upon: “In casting an eye over a Mexican manuscript, or map, as it is called, one is struck with the grotesque caricatures it exhibits of the human figure; monstrous, overgrown heads, on puny misshapen bodies, which are themselves hard and angular in their outlines, and without the least skill in composition. On closer inspection, however, it is obvious that it is not so much a rude attempt to delineate nature, as a conventional symbol, to express the idea in the most clear and forcible manner.” Prescott’s language, like Melville’s, is suggestive rather than specific in its descriptions of an art form strange to European or American eyes. In Moby-Dick, Melville will have Ishmael react in similar ways to “primitive” art.
8. For Melville’s use of theurgic magic in The Confidence-Man, see P. L. Hirsch’s “Melville’s Ambivalence toward the Writer’s ‘Wizardry.’” For the connection with Bulwer-Lytton, see my note on sources for goetic and theurgic magic. Melville’s interest in Pompeii and its art continued to his last years. In “‘House of the Tragic Poet,’” Robert A. Sandberg reprints a pencil draft of the short prose piece that Melville composed, apparently as part of an unfinished book, about the “Burgundy Club.” The sketch begins with an allusion to the name of the “disinterred” house, calling it “a hypothetical name bestowed by the antiquarians, and probably, because of the gravely dramatic character of certain frescoes on the walls within” (4). Unfortunately, Melville does not describe the frescoes. In “‘The Adjustment of Screens,’” Sandberg gives an interesting account of the place of this sketch in Melville’s uncompleted book and relates it to “At the Hostelry,” the poem about a symposium of artists (433–36).
9. Bryan Short’s references to “Harry Bolton’s unspoken secret, his unrevealed inner self” (71) and to “Harry’s peculiarities” (78) offer promising hints about Harry’s character and his behavior in the episode in Aladdin’s Palace. Toward the end of the novel, Redburn observes that Harry is “not unlike the soft, silken, quadruped-creole, that, pursued by wild Bushmen, bounds through Caffrarian woods” (253). To be a creole is to be native to, and nourished by, a particular region—and, in Harry’s case, an exotic region. The Caffrarian woods, with variants of kafir and kafara, are the woods of infidelism and skepticism. This, too, offers to Redburn’s visual imagination a vivid picture reinforced by references to “the girlish youth,” to Harry’s being “put down for a very equivocal character,” and to “his effeminacy of appearance.”
4. MOBY-DICK
1. Melville’s 1849–50 journal comments on what he viewed of the arts, and Horsford’s edition, with extensive notes, is indispensable. See also Wallace’s long account of Melville’s art tour in England and on the Continent (Melville and Turner 249–306). See Sealts as well as my “Melville’s Reading in the Visual Arts” 40–45.
2. In “The Glassy-Eyed Hermit” Gretchko suggests that Melville’s addition of the hermit and crucifix to the landscape is derived from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Temptation of St. Anthony, which shows a hermit occupying a hollow tree. Other elements in the painting correspond to the description Melville gives (14–15). Richard S. Moore analyzes the passage as an attack on “the pastoral vision upon which it is based” and adds that the picture’s “effects depend upon a deadening of the sensibility rather than heightened awareness” (66–67).
3. John Bryant’s Melville and Repose gives an excellent account of backgrounds and discusses some of Melville’s works using the picturesque. As Bryant indicates, Hussey provides a clear treatment of the subject. See also Hipple and Manwaring.
4. There would have been little in artworks from colonial New England to support Ishmael’s characterization of the Spouter-Inn painting. It may be that Melville was thinking of such later paintings as Saul and the Witch of Endor, a subject treated by Benjamin West and Washington Allston, or of West’s Death on the Pale Horse.
5. The elements in this portrayal of the inn have some things in common with the Dutch paintings that Melville admired. The bar resembling a right whale’s head links Ishmael’s thinking to the Dutch genre. He will later view such a head in homely terms, seeing an “inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe” where “that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged” (Moby-Dick 333).
6. For pictures of an idol resembling Yojo and the kinds of tattooing that Melville must have had in mind for Queequeg, see Jaffé (41–48). Bryan Wolf argues that Ishmael, with all his ability to explain and interpret, is surrounded by “a world that repeatedly asserts its otherness to him” (164). “What Ishmael recognizes in Queequeg,” Wolf continues, “is a system of language different from his own” (171). This is true as well of Queequeg’s carvings on the coffin lid. Unable to decode the communication, Ishmael sees it only as artwork. John F. Birk argues that the voyage of the Pequod “is nothing less than a modern-day journey of the Egyptian god-peopled ‘cosmic ship’” and that, as an Osiris figure, Queequeg reenacts the legend of that god. A chest “set off with all the ornaments of art” is made as a coffin by his enemies to hold the body of Osiris. The play of the chapter on “Queequeg in His Coffin” would then be a playful misrepresentation of the catastrophe of the murder and dismemberment of Osiris (291). Like Osiris, Queequeg is brightly garbed, though his colorful clothing is the tattooing on his body.
7. Melville’s fondness for topographical prints is displayed in Robert Wallace’s two accounts of the prints surviving from the Melville collection. “The Reese Collection” is especially rich in showing churches, other buildings, and landscapes.
8. See Wallace’s Melville and Turner 7–8, 453–62 for the relationship of this painting to Turner’s Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore.
9. Ibid. 456–57. It seems unlikely, however, that Melville saw the Turner painting. Manfred Putz rightfully characterizes the chapel painting by speaking of “a tone of irony which occasionally borders on satire and parody. What eventually emerges from the ironies is that the joke is rather on the viewer than on the picture (162).
10. A copy of The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, after the painting by Guido Reni, was acquired by the Boston Athenaeum in 1838 (Harding 72). The long article in the North American Review contains other matters that would have interested Melville. It mentions a painting of the Bay of Naples as well as Domenichino’s Jacob Wrestling with the Angel and canvases by Claude and Salvator Rosa. Among the copies cited in the piece are de Brackelaer’s of the Rubens painting Descent from the Cross. The author quotes from Sir Joshua Reynolds on this work as well as on the companion painting of Simeon Bearing Christ in his Arms. Ahab, who stands before his officers “with a crucifixion in his face,” is being represented as such paintings would present him. The expression on Christ’s countenance as he was taken from the cross was a challenge for painters and sculptors of many pietas. Vasari, required reading for Melville, described the pieta of Michelangelo by saying, “There is besides a most exquisite expression in the countenance, and the limbs are affixed to the trunk in a manner that is truly perfect.”
11. See Piazza Tales 403–04, 742–43. Melville’s concealed allusion seems to be based on Byron’s description but may have been bolstered by engravings of the statue.
12. See Short, “Like Bed of Asparagus” 106. The language of antique architecture is predominant in the writings of Austen Layard and other writers. Reviewers of Egyptological studies used architectural terms. See North American Review 41 (Oct. 1823): 233–42 for an article on Saint-Martin’s book on the Zodiac of Denderah, with comments on Vivant Denon’s study of the same subject.
13. Stuart M. Frank reproduces many iconographic representations of the whale that Melville mentions. It seems fairly unlikely that Melville could have seen some of the artworks that Ishmael catalogs in these chapters. Mansfield and Vincent 748–50 offer some sources for Melville’s knowledge.
14. Moore suggests that Melville had the engravings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in mind as the source of his references to the “finest Italian line engravings” (148–50). He certainly knew Piranesi’s work, and at least one Piranesi engraving still exists from the large Melvillean collections. See Furrow. The Piranesi engravings are used prominently in Clarel.
15. See Piazza Tales 401. Melville seeks familiar analogies for facial expressions of busts and statues by alluding to “a countenance more like that of a bacchanal or the debauchee of a carnival” to describe a Socrates, who also bears “the broad and rubicund phiz of an Irish comedian.” A Julius Caesar might be “a good representation of the President of the New York and Erie Railroad,” and a Seneca has a face “like that of a disappointed pawnbroker, pinched and grieved.” The “delicate features” of a Nero “are only those of a genteelly dissipated youth, a fast and pleasant young man such as those we see in our own day.” A sense of narrativity infuses Melville’s prose as he tries to find the suitable terms for the abstractions of sculpture.
16. As Berthold points out, the publication of articles in The Illustrated Magazine of Art on Dutch painters was in 1853–54, and The Works of Eminent Masters, a selection of the articles with illustrations, appeared in 1854 (227–29). All of this came too late to affect the composition of Moby-Dick, but Melville’s acquisition of The Works in 1871 and, even later, of books that featured the Dutch painters attests to his long and continuing interest in the genre. As Wallace notes, Melville’s collection of prints includes works of Metzu, Mieris, Cuyp, and Ostade (Wallace, “Melville’s Prints and Engravings” 80–83).
17. On April 24, 1857, Melville visited Holland, where he saw an “old galliot” and pictures by Rembrandt, Teniers, Potter, and Breughel. He “Passed through Haarlem” but apparently did not stop to see the great organ (Journals 127). Vincent points out that the source of Melville’s “cranial details come from Scoresby,” including the comparison to the shoemaker’s last (Trying-Out 255).
18. A copy of Judith with the Head of Holofernes, after the painting by Christofano Allori (1577–1621), was acquired by the Boston Athenaeum in 1838 (Harding 71, Plate 3). Melville was especially acquainted with the work of Veronese. At Versailles, on December 6, 1849, he saw “Titan overthrown by thunderbolts &c.” (Journals 34, 345), likely a painting by Veronese. Samuel Rogers, whose collection Melville viewed, had at least one Veronese painting. The references in Moby-Dick to “Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull” (189) and to the first view of the white whale, which contrasts him with “the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns” (548), may be at least partially indebted to the Veronese Rape of Europa, though Gretchko (Loomings 35–37) perceptively suggests Titian’s The Rape of Europa as a source.
19. Lorenz Oken’s inaugural lecture at the University of Jena in 1807 outlined his theory “that the head is none other than a vertebral column, and that it consists of four vertebrae, which I have respectively named Auditory, Maxillary or Lingual, Ocular and Nasal vertebra” (Elements of Physiophilosophy xii). When Goethe claimed precedence for this discovery, a long drawn-out feud erupted between the two men. For a good account of the event, see the biography of Goethe by G. H. Lewes. Melville was familiar with Elements of Physiophilosophy; he quoted from the book in a presentation note to John C. Hoadley. See my “Lorenz Oken and Moby-Dick.”
20. During his tour of the gallery at Dulwich, Melville saw “Titians.” As Horsford points out, the gallery contained a Europa that “was attributed to Titian.” The St. John that Melville reported seeing at Dulwich is identified by Horsford as possibly, Guido Reni’s St. John in the Wilderness (Journals 20, 298–99).
21. Novak, American Painting in the Nineteenth Century 46–47. A similar whiteness can be found in West’s Saul and the Witch of Endor and in Allston’s painting of the same subject (50–51).
22. A convenient reprint of The Magus was issued by University Books in 1967. The volume is divided into two books, the first dealing with a variety of subjects under the rubric of the occult philosophy. Book 2 contains magnetism, cabalistical and celestial magic, and an account of the lives and writings of “ancient and modern magi, cabalists, and philosophers.” Its subjects include the numerology that is treated by Sachs in her study of Moby-Dick as well as the astrology that Melville uses in Mardi, according to Maxine Moore’s study of the author. Like other such books, The Magus is amply provided with plates illustrating cabalistical, geomantic, and zodiacal signs and symbols.
23. See Clarel 1.6.10. Bezanson’s note to this line (723) identifies the organ as the kind of instrument providing music for Banvard’s showing of the panorama. See Carothers and Marsh, who discuss Moby-Dick as a verbal panorama. McDermott’s The Lost Panoramas of the Mississippi offers an informative account of Banvard’s life and work as well as a fascinating study of this outdated and evanescent art form. See also McDermott, “Newsreel—Old Style,” Antiques 44 (July 1932): 10–13. Collamer M. Abbott offers a good account of the panoramas that Melville might have seen in Boston and New York.
24. McDermott, Lost Panoramas 136. Lewis’s interesting account is published in Motion Picture in 1848: Henry Lewis’ Journal of a Canoe Voyage from the Falls of St. Anthony to St. Louis, ed. Bertha L. Heilbron (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1936). Abbott’s “Melville and the Panoramas” offers many suggestive details of panoramic art that Melville might have seen and discusses “the hyperbolic panoramic technique as an important element in Melville’s style” (14).
25. See the excellent illustrated article by Elton W. Hall for views of whaling scenes by Russell. The whaling panorama “was a painting 8½ feet high and approximately 1, 300 feet long” (26). The article gives a good account of the many whaling prints designed by Russell.
26. In addition to Denon, there were other possible sources open to Melville. Edward Everett’s article “The Zodiac of Denderah,” appearing in the North American Review in October 1823, presented much relevant information. Henry Wheaton’s “Egyptian Antiquities,” in the North American Review in October 1829, a review of Denon, offered valuable information about the temple.
27. Gretchko’s “Melville’s Hindu Sources” is indispensable for tracing out the complexities of Melville’s borrowings and fabrications for this passage. He carefully disentangles the extent of Melville’s debt to William Ward and Thomas Maurice and shows how the two sources were joined in Melville’s composition. An illustration of the Matse Avatar that Melville might have seen is reproduced in Frank, along with an illustration of the cavern-pagoda (6–7); see also Dorothee Finkelstein’s comments on the illustration and its associations (156–57).
5. PIERRE
1. Melville knew Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, Zanoni, and The Pilgrims of the Rhine. For relationships between the novel and Zanoni, see the “Historical Note” (Pierre 370–71). Simms’s Beauchampe (1842), a novel closely based upon the “Kentucky Tragedy,” is a particularly tantalizing source, dealing with murder and with suicide and attempted suicide in prison. One contemporary reviewer of Pierre thought that Melville “has dressed up and exhibited in Berkshire, where he is living, some of the ancient and most repulsive inventions of George Walker” (Pierre 380). Walker’s sensational novels included Haunted Castle (1792), The Three Spaniards (1800), and The Midnight Bell (1824).
2. Pierre was a “long brain-muddling soul-bewildering ambiguity,” and “a torrent rhapsody uttered in defiance of taste and sense,” a “compendium of Carlyle’s faults” with “incoherent ravings, and unearthly visions” (Pierre 380–84).
3. See Nathalia Wright, “Pierre: Melville’s Inferno”; Charles Watson, “Melville and the Theme of Timonism”; James Duban, “The Spenserian Maze of Melville’s Pierre”; and Paul A. Smith, “Melville’s Vision of Flux and Fixity in Pierre.”
4. Dennis Berthold gives an admirable account of Dutch genre painting and the prints Melville owned (218–45). Books purchased in later years continued to demonstrate the pleasure Melville gained from the works of Dutch artists; see Gower’s The Figure Painters of Holland (1880; Sealts #233) and Cundall’s The Landscape and Pastoral Painters of Holland (1891; Sealts #169). Melville’s interest in Flaxman’s pictures drawn from Dante is documented by Schless, who reproduces the Flaxman drawing of the lovers (68–69). Flaxman’s Homeric illustrations appeared in the Pope translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, published in many editions during the nineteenth century
5. Among many other pieces, The Literary World included a review of Tuckerman’s Artist Life (Oct. 30, 1847, 297–99), notices of a Thomas Cole exhibition (Apr. 8, 1848, 186–87), a note on “third-rate copies” of old masters (Apr. 27, 1848, 228), a sonnet on Murillo’s Flight into Egypt (June 17, 1848, 389), a sonnet on The Greek Slave (Aug. 5, 1848, 530), a review of Lanzi’s History of Painting (Feb. 10, 1849, 124), a notice of Lodge’s translation of Winckelmann (Mar. 17, 1849, 251), and a story about the opening of a new gallery at the Art-Union (Sept. 22, 1849, 253–54). In addition to these and many other stories, notices, poems, and reviews, the magazine frequently carried advertisements for books about art. A typical full-page advertisement for July 8, 1848, listed among its thirty-one items for sale Haydon’s Lectures on Painting and Design, Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art, Lanzi’s History of Painting in Italy, Pilkington’s General Dictionary of Painters, Goethe’s Theory of Colors, and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Literary Works (457).
6. Smith’s middle name is given sometimes as “Rubens” (in The Dictionary of American Biography) and as “Ruben” (in Lynes). He was said to have an “assertive personality” that made him unpopular, but was a good teacher. His topographical water colors of Boston and environs are attractive. From his father he learned the art of mezzotint, and his work in that medium was that “of an able draftsman.” The portrait of Allan Melvill is now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum.
7. Murray calls attention to the resemblance between this description and Ames’s portrait. Ames also painted a portrait of Melville’s mother, a famous one of Governor Clinton, and portraits of Solomon Allen, Leonard Gansevoort, Charles Genet, and General William Irvine. His miniatures are well known. Melville may not have known Ames but was probably well enough acquainted with his work as a painter.
8. The quotation is taken from Henry F. Cary’s translation of Dante (1814), which Melville purchased in 1848 in the Bohn edition of 1847. The Flaxman illustrations play an important role in this passage. See Nathalia Wright, “Melville’s Inferno”; and Hillway 203.
9. Twitchell (1820–1904) is a more obscure artist than either Smith or Ames. Neither The Dictionary of American Biography nor The National Cyclopedia of Biography contains a sketch, and he is not to be found in the standard histories of American art. He lived near Troy, New York, and was associated with artistic circles in Albany. Two of his portraits are in the New-York Historical Society (see Catalogue of American Portraits, New-York Historical Society, New York City). One of these is a copy that he made of a portrait of James Fenimore Cooper painted by his teacher, Charles Loring Elliott.
10. See The Literary World 106 (Feb. 10, 1849): 127–30; 107 (Feb. 17, 1849): 153–54, which reprint, from the London Examiner, a long portion of a review of Layard. In the July 7, 1849, issue (127:9–10) is a review of The Monuments of Nineveh.
11. See Finkelstein (148–49) for information on Fraser (1783–1856), who wrote colorful romantic novels of Eastern adventures and accounts of travels and explorations, including Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, 1821–22 (1825), Travels and Adventures in the Persian Provinces (1826), and Travels in Koordistan, Mesopotamia … (1840).
12. Murray cites Tschudi’s Travels in Peru and a review of the book appearing in The Literary World (Feb. 27, 1847, 80–83; Murray 466–67). Tschudi and the magazine excerpt deal with the veil and skirt as “useful auxiliaries in the numerous intrigues” of the Limean women. Melville used the terms effectively in “Benito Cereno” in his description of the figurehead of the Spanish ship, a sculpture gruesomely completed by the skeleton of Aranda, masked for most of the story by a “manto” of canvas.
13. Among the prints in the Reese collection are views of Woburn Abbey, Llanthony Abbey, Ostenhanger House, Croyland Abbey, and Barfriston Church (Wallace 40–42).
14. Horsford’s extensive notes for the journal offer many details (Journals 262, 271, 275, 281, 289, 300, 333, 337, 339, 348–49).
15. Murray conjectures that the original of Melville’s church may be the First Associate Presbyterian Church (1803–24), which continued as the South Baptist Church (1824–48), and finally was converted into business and office space in 1848 (484).
16. See Bamberg’s edition of The Confession of Jeroboam O. Beauchamp for an account of literary treatments of the case. Ridgely’s study of Simms (86–88) is useful, as are the essays by Jillson and Gates, and Yaggy calls attention to the connection with Simms’s novels.
17. Hillway finds in the Enceladus passage an intimation that “man partakes, therefore, of the divine substance of the god and the evil substance of the Titans.” He “thus reveals his semi-divinity by seeking truth and independence of action but finds himself tightly bound by his earthly limitations” (209–10).
18. Fuseli’s name and works were better known in America than those of many of his contemporaries. Dunlap recommended his writings to anyone who wished to study art. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe evokes Fuseli’s nightmarish pictures in his attempt to describe the paintings of Roderick Usher. In addition to the Lectures, Fuseli wrote and translated much. Lavater’s Aphorisms and Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art were among his translations, and his edition of Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters was much-used.
19. The firm of Goupil was praised by The Literary World for seeming “desirous to identify themselves, in some measure, with American art” (Apr. 22, 1848, 228). The issue for September 30 contains a full-page advertisement for a lithograph of W. S. Mount’s The Power of Music and paintings by contemporary French and German artists (700). The issue of April 21, 1849, has Goupil’s advertisement for statuette reproductions of Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave. On October 13, 1849, the magazine printed a story about Goupil’s plan to establish an “International Art-Union,” debated the propriety of such a move, and disapproved of it (317–18).
20. Melville’s poem “The Marchioness of Brinvilliers” is an ekphrastic description of a picture of the marchioness by Charles Le Brun. The story of the marchioness features another poisoner, another execution, and another ambiguous portrait. Cohen, ed., Selected Poems 238–39, and Shurr 244–46 tell the story, discuss sources, and analyze the poem.
6. CLAREL
1. Horace Vernet (1789–1863) traveled in Palestine in 1840 and produced a number of paintings of biblical scenes. He apparently “took the view that as all the characters of the Bible had looked like Arabs, it was legitimate to paint Judah as a bedouin sheikh, Tamar as a rather forthcoming and leggy houri” (Shepherd 100). Wilkie went to the Holy Land and was drowned on the return voyage to England in 1841. Among the engravings in Melville’s collection is one after Turner’s Peace—Burial of Wilkie. We have no record of what pictures of Wilkie Melville might have seen, but his interest in the painter continued for many years. At some time after 1881, he acquired John William Mollett’s Sir David Wilkie (1881), which offered a brief account of the painter’s life and career and reproduced engravings of a number of Wilkie’s works.
2. In his biography of Hawthorne, Edwin Haviland Miller describes the Concord Manse with its bust of Apollo and quotes a Channing poem (210, 222). The description of the house in the Berkshires includes pictures by Leonardo da Vinci and Salvator Rosa and a bust of Antinous as well as the Apollo bust (305–06).
3. Melville’s knowledge of Boccaccio is supported by the conjecture that he either owned a volume or borrowed one from Evert Duyckinck. Sealts quotes from an entry in Duyckinck’s diary on October 1, 1856, that Melville “cited a good story from the Decameron the Enchantment of the husband in the tree” (#71a). The date coincides with Melville’s setting off for Europe and the Holy Land on October 11. In Italy, on March 28, 1857, he would record a visit “to Fiesole. Boccaccio’s villa” (Journals 116). Duyckinck may have owned any of several nineteenth-century editions: the Bohn edition of The Decameron or Ten Day’s Entertainment of Boccaccio (1849), translated by W. K. Kelly and, alas, not illustrated; an edition published in London and New York (1845, 1851) and “embellished with twenty-one engravings on steel by G. Standfast”; or The Decameron, with Coloured Aquatint Plates by J. Findlay (London 1822). Melville may also have had access to Stories of Boccaccio “with eleven original etchings by Leopold Flameng” (London 187?). See F. S. Stych, Boccaccio in English (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995) 14–15. Melville was always keen for knowledge about the Italian writer. In reading Table Talk (Sealts #266a), he marked Hazlitt’s remark in the essay “On Reading Old Books” that “The only writer among the Italians I can pretend any knowledge of, is Boccaccio, and of him I cannot express half my admiration. His story of the Hawk I could read and think of from day to day, just as I would look at a picture of Titian’s!” In a back flyleaf of the Hazlitt volume, Melville carefully noted “Story of the Hawk (Boccaccio)” with the volume and page number (Cowen 1:651, 653).
4. Bezanson correctly identifies the temple of Sunium as one dedicated to the worship of Poseidon (Clarel 747); however, that attribution did not occur till 1898, when an inscription was discovered that made it clear. All during the nineteenth century, the fane was identified as a temple of Minerva. In addition to Wordsworth, see, for instance, Henry M. Baird’s Modern Greece: A Narrative of a Residence and Travels in That Country (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856) 292. Both Baird and Wordsworth provide engravings of the ruins of the temple.
5. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton recites the details of man’s iniquity: “The greatest enemy to man is man himself.” Melville acquired a copy of Burton in 1848 and also a volume entitled Melancholy; as it Proceeds from Disposition and Habit, the Passion of Love, and the Influence of Religion (Sealts #102, #103).
6. Sharon Furrow quotes an interesting passage from De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater in which De Quincey and Coleridge discuss Piranesi’s prints, alluding to the “mighty engines and machinery, wheels, cables, catapults, etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, or resistance overcome” (249). It seems that Melville did own a Piranesi print that shows a Roman arch rather than the labyrinths of his poetic ekphrasis.
7. THE VISUAL IMAGINATION
1. Daniel Göske suggests that a painting of St. Michael and the Dragon, a subject treated by Raphael and Guido Reni, is the source of Melville’s description. In Göske’s view, Melville reverses the iconography of the picture, which would usually portray the saint with his foot upon the prostrate demon. He sees a similar device in Hawthorne’s later treatment of the theme in The Marble Faun (212–13, 219). He is, perhaps, straining too hard to find a plausible source. The masked figures in Melville’s ekphrasis hardly seem to match any picturable concept of demon and angel, even the one proposed by Hawthorne some seven years after “Benito Cereno.” A “satyr” and a recumbent figure would seem to argue the “mythological” source that Melville quite properly attaches to it rather than a bit of religious allegory.
2. Duban’s suggestion that Melville could have read about diptychs in Sir Charles Eastlake’s Materials for a History of Oil Painting, a book withdrawn from the Boston Athenaeum during a visit to the family in that city, is excellent further proof of Melville’s absorption in the literature of the sister arts. In Melville and Turner, Wallace makes an equally convincing case for Melville’s probable study of Eastlake’s various publications (156–71).
3. Marovitz makes very good use of the engravings that Melville studied in William M. Thomson’s The Land and the Book; or, Biblical Illustrations …of the Holy Land. Melville seems to have been acquainted with Thomson’s 1859 book from the date of its publication (Sealts #523). There are excellent prints of scenes in Jerusalem and at the Mar Saba monastery, and Marovitz supplements these with photographs he has taken.
4. Gretchko links the landscape of the “Tartarus” sketch with “a sublime painting by Thomas Cole,” The Notch of the White Mountains (“White Mountains” 127–38). As he points out, Melville would have been very aware of the quality of Cole’s artistry and almost surely had seen numerous examples of his work.
5. The Civil War was covered in great detail in all sorts of pictorial modes. Photographs rendered scenes and portraits. Engravings printed in the magazines such as Harper’s Illustrated Weekly offered a running account of persons, engagements, and weapons. As Hennig Cohen points out in his edition of Battle-Pieces, the battlefield art of Alfred and William Waud probably influenced the poetry of Melville’s volume (25–28).
6. Vincent’s rendering of the prose passage in Collected Poems needs to be compared with the manuscript of the text (30–31) and genetic text (236) in Ryan’s dissertation on Weeds and Wildings. John Bryant’s “Toning Down the Green” provides an excellent and suggestive reading of “Rip van Winkle’s Lilac” as a central element in Melville’s idea of the picturesque.
7. See, for example, “Art: The Academy Exhibition,” Appleton’s Journal 11 (Apr. 25, 1874): 540; “The National Academy of Design,” Frank Leslie’s 26 (Oct. 1888): 385–94; “Fine Arts: Forty-Second Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” The Nation 4 (May 2, 1867): 359; “Literature and Art,” Galaxy 7 (Jan. 1869): 138–9; “Art,” Atlantic Monthly 31 (Apr. 1873): 503–05, a review of the last volume of G. Henry Lodge’s translation of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art; “The New York Art Season,” Atlantic 48 (Aug. 1881): 193–202.
8. Stein finds that “Melville’s astonishment at the unusual execution hints at his dissatisfaction with the stylized abstractions of Artemis, their neutralization of her role as the patron of the life-giving powers of nature” and believes that “he is probably thinking of the stereotyped association that he once incorporated in ‘The Tartarus of Maids,’ her fatal punishment of the hunter Actaeon who glimpsed her in the nude” (131). But in this fragment of basso-relievo, her nudity would be somewhat in question since she has “a quiver thrown / Behind the shoulder” and is bent over to adjust “her buskin light,” so that the Actaeon element, famous in paintings, doesn’t seem quite relevant.
9. It is hardly possible to know if Melville kept up his interest in the paintings of Sanford R. Gifford or read critiques of his work, but Gifford was often praised for producing paintings in which, as Angela Miller puts it, “Resonant, light-suffused atmosphere melded topographic divisions into a virtually seamless whole” (243). This distinctive “luminism” or, as Miller puts it, “atmospheric luminism” (244), was a characteristic of Gifford’s work throughout his career and is a part of the late paintings he produced after a journey to the Middle East and Palestine. In her study of Gifford’s paintings, Weiss devotes her first chapter to observations on luminism and points out that “Since air, in light, is the heart of Gifford’s aesthetic, I have preferred to distinguish his personal style as ‘aerial-luminism’” (19).