1. See Whitney Davis, Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud’s “Wolf Man” Case (Bloomington, 1996), and Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, 1996).
2. See Whitney Davis, “Sexuality,” in Michael Kelly, ed., The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols. (New York, 1998), 4:282–85.
3. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave, intro. Alex Potts (Los Angeles, 2006).
4. Johann Michael Francke, Catalogus Bibliothecae Bunavianae, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1750–56).
5. See Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann Divided,” in Replications, pp. 257–65, and “What Is Formalism?” in The General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, 2010).
6. Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London, 1892), pp. 239–51.
7. Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London, 1909 [1902]), pp. 262–64.
8. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, pp. 248, 250.
9. G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures in Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Harmondsworth, 1999), p. 69. In the preceding sentence, Hegel wrote that “Winckelmann had been inspired by his observation of the ideals of the ancients in a way that led him to develop a new sense for the contemplation of art.”
10. Croce, Aesthetic as Science, p. 264.
11. Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism, trans. Charles Marriott (New York, 1936), pp. 153–58; and Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, rev. ed. (Bloomington, 1954), pp. 298–304.
12. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1960), pp. 375–76. Gombrich glossed over the fact that Schäfer became a National Socialist and that his theory of schematic or “conceptual” imaging in ancient Egypt was mired in racialist assumptions.
13. Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (New York, 1966); Francis Sparshott, The Structure of Aesthetics (Toronto, 1963), pp. 334–35.
14. Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic, p. 248. I cite the divisions of Winckelmann’s History given in the nineteenth-century English translation used by Sparshott and Beardsley. In the new Getty translation, Winckelmann’s doctrine of ideal beauty (“Beauty in General”) appears in part 1, chapter 4, section 2.A, pp. 191–96.
15. Alex Potts, “Winckelmann,” in Kelly, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4:xx–xx.
16. Carl Justi, Die ästhetischen Elemente in der platonischen Philosophie (Marburg, 1860); see pp. 42, 72, and 119 for remarks on the affinities between Platonic art theory and Schopenhauer’s aesthetics.
17. I owe my perspective on this crucial point in large measure to Todd Cronan, whose studies of Winckelmann’s thought in relation to genealogies of materialism in art theory have identified this nexus; see “The Despair of the Physical: Materialism in George Santayana and Henri Matisse 1900–1950,” Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2005.
18. Louis Rose, The Survival of Images: Art Historians, Psychoanalysis, and the Ancients (Detroit, 2001), p. 248.
19. For Warburg’s comments on Winckelmann in his dissertation of 1893, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” see Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity—Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), p. 117. In a lecture of 1914, “The Emergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Painting,” Warburg repeated the misleading claim that his art theory of the Classical tradition was “diametrically opposed to Winckelmann’s view of the essence of antiquity” (ibid., p. 273). Strictly speaking, Warburg elaborated one half of the duality (namely, the pole of expression as opposed to the pole of beauty) that Winckelmann understood to be essential to the Classical style. Still, Warburg’s framing of the matter was intended in some measure as a criticism of academic Winckelmannian Kultur in his own generation. It was not presented as a fully adequate interpretation of Winckelmann’s historical and critical project.
20. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, 1994).
1. For representative applications of the terminology in art history and cognate fields of visual and cultural studies, see Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (New York, 2002); Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, 1994); Moe Meyer, ed., The Politics and Poetics of Camp (New York, 1994); Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yoland Retter, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Seattle, 1997); and Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, eds., Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (Urbana, 2002).
2. Christoph Vogtherr, “Absent Love in Pleasure Houses: Frederick II of Prussia as Art Collector and Patron,” Art History 24 (2001), p. 239. For the sculpture, see Gerhard Zimmer and Nele Hackländer, eds., Der betende Knabe: Original und Experiment (Frankfurt am Main, 1997).
3. For full examination of the figure of Prince Hal in the context of Gower’s career (it was marked by homosexual scandals that eventually ruined him), see Whitney Davis, “Lord Ronald Gower and ‘The Offending Adam,’” in David John Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (London, 2004), pp. 63–104.
4. For the Adorante, see Conrad von Levezow, De iuvenis adorantis signo ex aera antiquo (Berolini, 1808). For Frederick’s Antinous-Genius, restored by the sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, see Konrad Levezow, Ueber den Antinous dargestellt in der Kunstdenkmaelern des Alterthums (Berlin, 1808), pl. 6.
5. For these replications, see Jörg Kuhn, “Der ‘Betende Knabe’ von Sanssouci: Die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Knaben vom 18. Jahrhundert bis heute,” in Der Betende Knabe, pp. 35–50. Oddly, however, Kuhn does not discuss Levezow.
6. For the faun, see J. J. Winckelmann, Monumenti Antichi Inediti (Rome, 1767), 1:73, vol. 2, no. 59; and Hans Diepolder and Walther Rehm, eds., Briefe (Berlin, 1952– 55), 2:309, 316. The sculpture was probably a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. It was not wholly Phidian or Polykleitan (“high style”) in stylistic vintage. The faun’s voluptuous smile inflects its bland high-classicistic beauty. Moreover, the youth’s head (probably intended to represent an ephebic athlete) included faun’s horns. Apparently it had been reworked to add these details, although I have not been able to ascertain whether the reworking dates to the eighteenth century. Possibly it should be attributed to the circle of Winckelmann’s colleagues and friends, which included sculptors and sculpture restorers such as Cavaceppi. One might even imagine that Winckelmann had commissioned the elaboration. On one occasion, however, he was duped into accepting a modern forgery as an ancient painting of Zeus and Ganymede; in addition to abetting the contemporary appetite for all things “antique,” the deception must have traded specifically on Winckelmann’s fascination with the pederastic contexts and contents of ancient art. For this convoluted episode, see Thomas Pelzel, “Winckelmann, Mengs, and Casanova: A Reappraisal of a Famous Eighteenth-Century Forgery,” Art Bulletin 54 (1972): 301–15.
7. For the relief of Antinous from Tivoli and its reception in the eighteenth century, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, 1981), pp. 144–46, from which I draw my quotations. For the display of the collections at the Villa Albani, see Herbert Beck and Peter C. Bol, eds., Forschungen zur Villa Albani: Antike Kunst und die Epoche der Aufklärung (Berlin, 1982).
8. For the painting, see Anthony M. Clark, Pompeio Batoni, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron (Oxford, 1985), no. 230; a life study also survives (ibid., no. 229). At one time Batoni’s sitter was incorrectly said to be Emperor Joseph II of Austria; to date he has not been identified definitively. It is reasonable to speculate that he was someone known to Winckelmann.
9. Winckelmann admired Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates; his studies of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Symposium began when he was a schoolteacher in the mid-1740s.
10. I have explored these relations in more detail in Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann’s ‘Homosexual’ Teleologies, in Natalie Boymel Kampen, Bettina Bergmann, Ada Cohen, Page duBois, Barbara Kellum, Eva Stehle, eds., Sexuality in Ancient Art (New York, 1996), pp. 262–76. In the interest of economy I will not repeat the account here. As it is crucial to the perspective pursued in this chapter, however, the reader might wish to consult it.
11. For the Justiniac decline of Greek art (the moment of its final morbid efflorescence affirmed the value and beauty of the entire Classical tradition in ancient art), see Whitney Davis, “Winckelmann Divided,” in Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, 1996). In chapter 5 I consider natural and cultural decadence in more detail.
12. See Whitney Davis, “The Renunciation of Reaction in Girodet’s Sleep of Endymion,” in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Hanover, 1994), pp. 168–201; Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Ist Endymion schwul?” in Männlichkeit im Blick: Visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2004), pp. 15–34; and Satish Padiyar, “Who is Socrates? Desire and Subversion in David’s Death of Socrates (1787),” Representations 102 (2008): 27–52.
13. J. W. von Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, trans. Wallace Wood (New York, 1901), February 16, 1827: “Winckelmann is like Columbus, not yet having discovered the new world but inspired by a premonition of what is to come. One learns nothing new when reading his work, but one becomes a new man!” A similar point was made in elaborate detail in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1805; Hegel offered a dialectical or “logical” restatement of Winckelmann’s history of ancient culture as Nachahmung. Of course, Hegel’s push to describe the Aufhebung of the self-conscious Greek self (and Greek works of art as an image of that self) reintroduced an essentially Platonic element, a dynamic of sublation or negation-transcendence and supersession-absorption, into Winckelmann’s rather more Lucretian or stochastic portrayal of the surprising—the dialectically unpredictable—swerves of Greek art.
14. J. J. Winckelmann, Abhandlung von der Fähigkeit der Empfindung des Schönen in der Kunst, und dem Unterrichte in Derselben (Dresden, 1763); for the letters to von Berg that could have been read by Kant, Goethe, and others, see Lettres familières de M. Winckelmann, 3 vols. (Yverdon, 1784).
15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, 2000), p. 118.
16. Gottlob Zeibig, Athleta paradoxos: E monumentis Graeciae veteris conspectui expositus (Vitemberg, 1748).
17. Aristophanes, The Clouds, ll. 973–76.
18. As Kant noted in pursuing the “analogy of optical presentation,” these images could be compiled and averaged in a “mechanical” fashion, perhaps in a literal overlay. But our imagination collates the ideal “in the repeated apprehension of such figures on the organ of inner sense,” building it up over time and adjusting it, “averaging” it, as we go along. This process of assimilation can properly be characterized as dynamic in contrast to the mechanical procedure of overlaying an array of images in a discrete, final operation of superimposition.
19. In this regard neither Winckelmann nor Kant proposed that the perfected ideal of beauty in fine art constitutes a panhuman universal, as some critics of the idealist tradition have claimed. Kant’s theory implied only that the norm must be relative to the history of a particular community; likely enough, as Kant specified, it will vary between historically disjunct societies. (In the psychological terms adumbrated in § 17, it will be exceedingly difficult to extract a single canonical image from the process of “concentration” if the starting points of individual judgments to be registered in the matrix are extremely diverse; the cultural diversity of ideals follows from the fact that the ideal must be based on the empirical comparisons and amalgamation making up the Normalidee, the “normal idea” or correctness.) In fact, if Winckelmann or Kant should be charged with an error, it would be the error not of universalism but of culturalism and its tendency to reify racial or ethnic characters: subjective universality might be taken to denote a shared habit of mind, literally a sharing of mind, that is characteristic of particular social groups defined in terms of their racial, ethnic, religious, or national identity. In Hegel’s aesthetics this essentialist culturology tended to take over the dialectical history. In turn, sub-Hegelian historians correlated the phases of the dialectic of human consciousness with the essential cognitive characters of well-defined ethnic groups. But Winckelmann and Kant had only gone so far as to remark the plain empirical fact of geographical and historical variation in the psychosocial constitution of perfected ideals.
20. Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” especially part 3, “The Sans of the Pure Cut,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, 1987 [1978]), pp. 15–148. In French, to describe Kant’s “framing” of the ideal artwork Derrida wrote sans pur—the “without of the pure cut.” As the translators note (ibid., p. 83), the term is homophonic with sens pur (pure sense) and sang pur (pure blood).
21. Friedrich Karl Forberg, Dissertatio Philosophica De Aesthetica transcendentali (Jena, 1792); Apologie seines angeblichen Atheismus (Jena, 1798); Antonii Panormitanae Hermaphroditus: Apophoreta (Coburg, 1824). For the Latin text of Beccadelli, corrected by Forberg, see Barthélemy Mercier de Saint-Léger, Quinque illustrium poetarum: Ant. Panormitae… lusus in Venerem (Paris, 1791).
22. Friedrich Karl Forberg, The Manual of Classical Erotology (De figuris Veneris) (“Manchester” [i.e., Brussels], “1884” [prob. circa 1895–1900]). Forberg’s Manual, i.e., the text of Beccadelli and Forberg’s commentary or Apophoreta, was later edited by F. Wolff-Unterreichen and A. Kind, Antonii Panormitae Hermaphroditus… mit einem sexualwissenschaftliche Kommentar (Leipzig, 1908). This edition reflected the researches conducted by sexologists following in the footsteps (and often simply repeating) the philological and archaeological labors of Forberg.
23. As Paul Crowther pointed out to me in a discussion of an earlier version of this chapter, section 17 of the Third Critique has often been seen as the “ugly duckling” of the text, difficult to integrate analytically with the conceptual architecture of the whole treatise and often ignored by commentators despite its immense influence in providing a theoretical rationale for the practices and prescriptions of the European academies of art, especially in modernizing their conventional idealisms. This might be contrasted with the sensitive commentary that has been devoted to section 16 and its exposition of Kant’s doctrine of “adherent beauty.”
24. The illustrations to Forberg’s publication in 1824 were reproduced wholesale from a pornographic publication by P. F. Huguès d’Hancarville, a colleague and collaborator of Winckelmann, i.e., Monumens de la vie privée des douze Césars (“Capri,” i.e., Nancy, 1780). Hancarville’s pornography, like Forberg’s Apophoreta, partly functioned as a pungent satire of earnest antiquarian Winckelmannianism. For the complex bibliography and reception of these works, see Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920,” Art History 24 (2001): 247–77. Similar points could be made about the pornographic illustrations produced for various editions of various works of the Marquis de Sade in the 1790s. The classical style of later eighteenth-century pornography was not simply a continuation of long-standing formal tradition inherited from the Renaissance. Given the philosophical and political valences of modern neoclassicism and its aesthetic justifications, it acquired new figurative resonance. Where Renaissance erotic visualizations legitimated pornography by way of classicism, such pictorializations as d’Hancarville’s and Forberg’s delegitimated classicism in pornography—and thus, in a roundabout way, claimed to rediscover the artistic legitimacy of the erotic domain.
1. Freud’s collection has been partially published as Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, ed. Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (Binghamton, 1989).
2. Important nineteenth-and early twentieth-century collections of “ancient” phallica and erotica (including some modern replications) included Franz Fiedler, Antike erotische Bildwerke in Houbens roemischen Antiquarium zu Xanten abgebildet (privately published, 1839); Theodor Birt, De amorum in arte antiqua simulacris et de pueris minutis (Marburg, 1891); Gaston Vorberg, Die Erotik der Antike in Kleinkunst und Keramik (Munich, 1921); and Gaston Vorberg, ed., Ars erotica veterum: Ein Beitrag zum Geschlechtsleben des Alterthums (Stuttgart, 1926).
3. Aby Warburg, Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum (Leipzig, 1902), translated as “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeois,” in Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity—Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999), 185–221; Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (Leipzig and Vienna, 1910), 3d ed. (1923), translated as “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (London, 1953–74), 11:59–138; the text is quoted here in the Norton reprint, intro. Peter Gay (New York and London, 1964).
4. The essential nineteenth-century publication was L. Barré, Herculanum et Pompéi: Recueil général des peintures, bronzes, mosaïques, etc.… , vol. 8, Musée sécret (Paris, 1839–40). This volume was not, however, a comprehensive publication of the phallica and erotica retrieved from the buried cities and surrounding territory since the mid-1700s; see G. Fiorelli, Catalogo del Museo Nazionale di Napoli, Raccolta pornografica (Naples, 1866); and Jules Lacour, Le musée sécret de Naples, et le culte des organes générateurs (Brussels, 1914). An unauthorized publication was equally influential: M[onsieur] C[ésar] F[amin], Peintures, bronzes et statues érotiques, formant la collection du cabinet sécret du Musée Royal de Naples (Paris, 1836/1857 [1832]). It was translated into English and published by John Campbell Hotten: Colonel Fanin [sic], The Royal Museum at Naples… “Cabinet Secret” (London, 1871). For Winckelmann’s remarks on contemporary replications of ancient erotic frescoes, see Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Dresden, 1762), pp. 31–32, 39.
5. Warburg, “The Art of Portraiture,” pp. 189–90.
6. Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” p. 52.
7. The English translators and editors of the Standard Edition (p. 52) supplied the date incorrectly in the main body of the text (i.e., “1768”) and correctly in the bibliography.
8. For Knight’s bronzes acquired from Hamilton, see Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny, eds., The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824 (Manchester, 1982), pp. 69–70; and Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection (London, 1996), pp. 216–17, no. 126.
9. The erotic connotations of the gestures of the men portrayed in Reynolds’s portraits have been investigated by Shearer West, “Libertinism and the Ideology of Male Friendship in the Portraits of the Society of Dilettanti,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (1992): 76–104.
10. Richard Payne Knight, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, Lately Existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples: In Two Letters; One from Sir William Hamilton, K.B. His Majesty’s Minister at the Court of Naples, to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. President of the Royal Society; and the Other from a Person Residing at Isernia: To Which Is Added, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and Its Connexion with the Mystic Religion of the Ancients, by R. P. Knight, esq. (London, 1786).
11. Brian Fothergill, Sir William Hamilton: Envoy Extraordinary (London, 1969), p. 173; Fothergill quotes Hamilton’s frank and satirical comments about the ex-votos in his unpublished correspondence with Banks.
12. [William Hamilton, Richard Payne Knight, and Thomas Wright], A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients.… (A New Edition). To Which is Added an Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of Western Europe (London, 1865; another edition was released in 1894). It will be cited here in a repaginated reprint of 1992 published by Dorset Press under the title A History of Phallic Worship; this is by far the most accessible edition of Knight’s text. It is important to note, however, that the edition of 1865 and its later reprints do not include the complete text of Hamilton’s report to Banks as published in 1786.
13. Thomas Wright, The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages in Western Europe, reprinted in A History of Phallic Worship (New York, 1992), p. 17, and pl. 3.
14. Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” p. 32. Wayne Andersen has been one of the few historians, if any, to consider Knight and Wright as a crucial context for Freud’s work, but he does not mention the relief of the phallic vulture from Nîmes; see Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Vulture’s Tail (New York, 2001), pp. 196–200.
15. Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, pp. 238–39, no. 142.
16. Hamilton’s published letter, dated December 30, 1781, says that the phalli were secured “last year.” He could mean “in the preceding twelve months,” i.e., 1781, or “the previous twelve-month,” i.e., 1780. On balance it seems likely that Hamilton did not collect the artifacts in person. They came to him from his informant in 1780. The point is important, as we will see, in view of the confusions promulgated in his account.
17. William Hamilton, “On the Worship of Priapus in the Kingdom of Naples,” reprinted in A History of Phallic Worship (New York, 1992), pp. 21–23.
18. Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, p. 239. These objects have been illustrated by Catherine Johns, Sex or Symbol? (London, 1985), p. 25, fig. 11; and by me (in color) in a publication of an earlier version of this chapter, “Wax Tokens of Libido,” in Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure (Los Angeles, 2008), figs. 2, 3.
19. Giancarlo Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus (London, 1996). Carabelli’s studies of eighteenth-century aesthetics augmented his research on Hamilton and Knight; see On Hume and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics: The Philosopher on a Swing (New York, 1985).
20. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, rev. ed. (Cambridge, 1983), p. 385 (bk. 4, chapter 10 [689a]). About the penis, Aristotle continued, “its increasing in size is useful for copulation, its contraction for the employment of the rest of the body, since it would be a nuisance to the other parts if it were always extended. And so it is composed of substances which make both conditions possible: it contains both sinew and cartilage; and so it can contract and expand and admits air into itself.”
21. Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (London, 2000), no. 281 (illus. p. 59).
22. See Monika von Düring, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Marta Poggesi, Encylopaedia Anatomica: A Complete Collection of Anatomical Waxes (Cologne, 1999), p. 624 (demonstration of erection), pp. 629–30 (detached penises and testicles).
23. Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, p. 128.
24. See Carl Roebuck, Corinth XIV, The Asklepieion and Lerna (Princeton, 1951); Mabel L. Lang, Cure and Cult in Ancient Corinth: A Guide to the Asklepieion (Princeton, 1977).
25. For the sites mentioned, see T. W. Potter, “A Republican Healing-Sanctuary at Ponte di Nona near Rome and the Classical Tradition of Votive Medicine,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 138 (1985): 23–47.
26. For eighteenth-century treatments, see Carl Friedrich Pezold, “Membra humana diis gentilium consecrata” (diss., Leipzig, 1710); and Johann Jacob Frey, “Disquisitio de more diis simulacra membrorum consecrandi” (diss., Altdorf, 1746); these works addressed problems in biblical exegesis as well as Greco-Roman sources. The scholarship in the later nineteenth century was synthesized by W. H. D. Rouse, Greek Votive Offerings (Cambridge, 1902), pp. 212–216, which remains a standard handbook.
27. Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, pp. 1, 13.
28. Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, reprinted in A History of Phallic Worship (New York, 1992), p. 26.
29. Hamilton, “On the Worship of Priapus,” p. 13.
30. Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, p. 14; in the passages quoted here, Carabelli has selected, translated, and sequenced several extracts from the Italian and English texts provided in Hamilton’s letter in order to present a coherent picture of this aspect of the mysterious events at Isernia.
31. Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, pp. 80–82, pl. 5, no. 3; the quoted text is on p. 81. For the object, see Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, pp. 102–3, fig. 51.
32. Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, p. 196, no. 73.
33. Ibid., p. 192, no. 65; the catalog provisionally dates the artifact to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
34. Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, pl. 3, no. 3; I use the illustration of this object published by Vorberg, Antiquitates Eroticae (ca. 1910), p. 89, no. 5. For comparanda, see Fanin, The Royal Museum, pl. 16; L. Barré, Herculanum et Pompéi: Recueil général des peintures, bronzes, mosaïques, etc.… Musée secret (Paris: Didot, 1872).
35. For this drawing, see Gerhard Femmel and Christoph Michel, eds., Die Erotica und Priapea aus den Sammlungen Goethes (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), pp. 174–75, no. 10, fig. 6. The possible attribution to Goethe (my suggestion) is plausible in view of Goethe’s interests in phallica; for discussion of examples from Goethe’s collection, see Whitney Davis, “Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920,” Art History 24 (2001): 247–77.
36. Hamilton, “On the Worship of Priapus,” p. 13.
37. Nikolas Pevsner, “Richard Payne Knight,” Art Bulletin 31 (1949): 297, 298. An early appreciation of Knight’s hermeneutic achievements can be found in Karl Boettiger, “Über Richard Payne Knight,” Amalthea 3 (1806): 408–18; like Knight, Boettiger (a well-known German classicist) collected phallica.
38. See J. J. Winckelmann, Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst (Dresden, 1766); Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape, a Didactic Poem (London, 1794), and An Analytical Inquiry Into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805); and Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, A Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful (London, 1801).
39. Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, pp. 72–77; in 1792 in Naples, Torcia published his Saggio itinerario nazionale pel paese de’Peligni, in which he dealt with the folkways of the Abruzzo.
40. Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, pl. 2, nos. 1–2; Wright, The Worship of the Generative Powers, pl. 1, nos. 3–4.
41. Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, pl. 2, no. 3.
42. Ibid., pl. 7. This illustration was not in the edition supervised by Knight in 1786. Therefore it was added by Wright or the publisher, Hotten, to the edition of 1865.
43. Hamilton, “On the Worship of Priapus,” p. 14.
44. For the figure, see Fanin, The Royal Museum, pl. 19, no. 1, and Barré, Musée sécret, pl. 37. As the antiquarians pointed out, the figure is not Priapus, as Hamilton thought, but probably a buffoon or mime.
45. Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance” [1893], in Aby Warburg, p. 89.
46. Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, p. 75.
47. Ibid., fig. 15, reproduces a photograph of wax phallic votives from Palmi (Reggio Calabria) “still in use around 1950.” Ancient writers recommended operations for phimosis; Etrusco-Roman votives of phimotic penises, presumably intended to supplicate the healing god for relief, have been published by Pierre Declouflé, La notion d’ex-voto anatomique chez les Étrusco-Romains (Brussels, 1964), p. 7, pl. 3, figs. 3, 4 (two examples in Florence; no provenance given).
48. Ibid., p. 53.
49. After this chapter had been written, I learned about another early Italian phallic representation that has parallels with the one considered here: the mural painting at Massa Marittima in Tuscany, clearly very old, that depicts a phallic tree, an extremely rare iconography. Upon its recovery in the 1990s, local townsfolk—who knew it to be a late medieval painting—called it the tree of fertility, and the first art historian to explicate the representation concluded that it had been a “symbol of fertility” in the time in which it had originally been made, supposedly the middle of the 1200s. Alessandro Bagnoli, Massa Marittima: L’albero della fecondità (Massa Marittima, 2003), pp. 18–19. Redating the painting to the early 1300s, however, George Ferzoco has argued that it originally symbolized the social disorder, moral license, and maybe even the heretical witchcraft attributed by a Guelf pictorialist to the Ghibelline faction that had previously dominated the town. See Il murale Massa Marittima/The Massa Marittima Mural (Florence, 2004). Ferzoco’s interpretation is compelling. Still, some details of the picture, such as a female figure being “sodomized” by a floating phallus, seem to signify sexual pleasure, and Ferzoco does not fully account for the seeming fact that one side of the “penis tree” seems to depict a beneficent (and perhaps a fertile) economy. As the example of the phalli of Isernia might suggest, perhaps we should not choose between overlapped interpretations of the quasidisembodied phallus.
1. References are to Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. J. F. Payne, 2 vols. (Indian Hills, CO, 1958; rpt. New York, 1969); I provide both the book and section number in the text and the volume and page number in the translation. Schopenhauer’s art theory is presented in bk. 3, §§30–52 (1:169–267).
2. For comprehensive documentation of the reception of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in the second half of the nineteenth century, see the bibliography published in André Fauconnet, L’esthétique de Schopenhauer (Paris, 1913), pp. 446–60.
3. Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. H. Loiskandl, D. Weinstein, and M. Weinstein (Amherst, 1986 [1907]), pp. 81, 84.
4. William Desmond, “Schopenhauer, Art, and the Dark Origin,” in Eric von der Luft, ed., Schopenhauer: New Essays in Honor of His Two Hundredth Birthday (Lewiston, NY, 1988), p. 113.
5. Julian Young, “The Standpoint of Eternity: Schopenhauer on Art,” Kant-Studien 78 (1987): 424–41.
6. Christopher Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art,” in Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge, 1996), p. 52.
7. For the notes, see Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, trans. E. J. F. Payne (Oxford, 1988), 1:8; discussion in Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility,” pp. 40–41.
8. Ibid., p. 58; see also Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Plato’s Critique of the Arts (Oxford, 1995). For Plato’s praise of Egyptian art, often overlooked in expositions of his art theory, see Whitney Davis, “Plato on Egyptian Art,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 65 (1979): 121–27.
9. George Santayana, “Lotze’s Moral Idealism,” Mind 15 (1890): 191–212; Paul Grimley Kuntz, ed., Lotze’s System of Philosophy (Bloomington, 1971). Perhaps it is unfair to Lotze to call him academic; he was a creative intellectual rather than an unthinking epigone of idealism.
10. George Santayana, “A General Confession,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of George Santayana (Evanston, 1940), p. 17; see George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (New York, 1916).
11. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York, 1896), p. 52.
12. Ibid., p. 12. At the time of his lectures on aesthetics at Harvard, Santayana was exploring this question in concrete critical projects: see especially “Walt Whitman: A Dialogue” [1890], in James Ballowe, ed., George Santayana’s America: Essays on Literature and Culture (Urbana, 1967), pp. 97–104, and “Platonism in Italian Poets” [1896], in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York, 1900).
13. Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility,” p. 46, in turn quoting bk. 3, §34; 1:179. Compare Dale Jacquette’s suggestion that according to Schopenhauer “art imaginatively expresses the Platonic Ideas in nature by which the world as Will is manifested in the world as idea”: “Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Appearance and Will in the Philosophy of Art,” in Dale Jacquette, ed., Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 13–14. I cannot quite find the textual reasons to suppose that Schopenhauer considered the Platonic Ideas to subsist “in nature” (although they would seem to be natural features of human consciousness so far as it makes and appreciates art). Janaway works the other way around: the Platonic Ideas subsist as human Vorstellung when divested of individual willing, that is, when it makes and appreciates art. But admittedly the status of the Platonic Ideas as a third kingdom between Will and human ideation renders the question somewhat moot. In the discrepancy between Janaway’s and Jacquette’s formulations we can locate the peculiarity of Schopenhauer’s ontology of art.
14. Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, p. 100.
15. Ibid., p. 104 (my emphasis).
16. George Santayana, “Apologia Pro Mente Sua,” in Schilpp, The Philosophy of George Santayana, pp. 530–31.
17. Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge, 2002), p. 126. The epithet quoted in the previous sentence is also Hammermeister’s (ibid.).
18. Ibid.
19. See Arnold Gehlen, Zeit-Bilder: Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei, 3d ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), cited by Hammermeister as his guide to the modern painting in question in this genealogy; and, especially, E. H. Gombrich, “The Vogue of Abstract Art” (1958; originally titled “The Tyranny of Abstract Art”), in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London, 1963), pp. 143–50. Both Gehlen and Gombrich were well aware, of course, that fascist art theory had denounced abstract, expressionist, and experimental arts—so-called degenerate arts—for the very same reason they did: supposedly abstraction and expressionism in art jettisoned or corrupted objective knowing.
20. Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, trans. W. H. Woglom and C. W. Hendel (New Haven, 1950), pp. 277–80.
21. Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility,” p. 49.
22. In a suggestive analysis, P. F. H. Lauxtermann has argued that Schopenhauer’s researches on vision and colors motivated his metaphysical system; see Schopenhauer’s Broken World-View: Colours and Ethics Between Kant and Goethe (Dordrecht/Boston, 2000), especially pp. 65–72 and 91–102. As Lauxtermann puts it, Schopenhauer asked how “the world can be in my head yet my head be in the world.”
23. Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility,” p. 51.
24. Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. J. F. Payne (Oxford, 1974), 2:420.
25. Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility,” p. 52.
26. Young, “The Standpoint of Eternity,” pp. 434–36.
27. Janaway, “Knowledge and Tranquility,” p. 54. The term universal is Janaway’s.
28. Richard Bernheimer, The Nature of Representation: A Phenomenological Inquiry (New York, 1961), especially pp. 108–24 (on “legal representation”); Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, 1970); Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1985). In chaper 10 I return to Wollheim’s interest in the relation between what he called representationality and the political instrumentality of art, including its ability socially to represent the personal identity of its makers. Early in his career, Wollheim worked on the theory of representative democracy and political participation. To my knowledge, however, he did not set forth a formal thesis of the relation between this “representation” and what he called representationality in painting, although I believe he assumed it.
1. See The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (Detroit, 1967–69), vol. 2, 1869–1884 (hereafter Letters), March 27, 1873 (to Dakyns).
2. Contemporary Review 29 (1876–77): 552–66.
3. “Latter-Day Pagans,” Quarterly Review (July 1895): 31–58 (quotation from p. 58); see Horatio F. Brown, John Addington Symonds: A Biography Compiled from His Papers and Correspondence (London, 1895). On Wilde’s admiration for Symonds, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), p. 31. As Ellmann points out, Symonds was Wilde’s source for his story of Dorian’s fascination with the crimes of the Italian despots (ibid., p. 299).
4. Symonds, Letters, March 6, 1877 (to Dakyns).
5. John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, vol. 1, The Age of the Despots (London, 1875), vol. 2, The Revival of Learning (London, 1877), vol. 3, The Fine Arts (London, 1877); hereafter cited in the text by page number. In these years Symonds also published a book of travel studies, Sketches in Italy and Greece (London, 1874), as well as the second series of essays on Greek poetry (1876) and did much of the work for his first public volume of poetry, Many Moods (London, 1878).
6. See Symonds, The Fine Arts, 317–19, and appendix 2 (pp. 375–90); documents in the Buonarotti family archives that Symonds had personally consulted supposedly proved Michelangelo’s “warm love” for Tomasso (pp. 318, 324). The question of Michelangelo’s homoeroticism became one of the centerpieces of Symonds’s later Life of Michelangelo Buonarotti, published in 1892.
7. Symonds, Letters, November 2, 1875 (to Dakyns), November 22, 1875 (to Charlotte Symonds Green).
8. Symonds, Letters, November 22, 1875 (to Charlotte Symonds Green).
9. Symonds, Letters, November 2, 1875 (to Dakyns).
10. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (London, 1984), p. 79. Elsewhere I have described the chain of erotic visualizations that Symonds believed began in his earliest childhood (Whitney Davis, “Symonds and Visual Impressionability,” in John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire, ed. John Pemble [Manchester, 2000], 62–80).
11. See James Cowles Prichard, On the Different Forms of Insanity in Relation to Jurisprudence (London, 1842); Dr. John Addington Symonds, “On the Life, Writings, and Character of the Late James Cowles Prichard, M.D., F.R.S.” and “Criminal Responsibility in Relation to Insanity,” in John Addington Symonds, ed., Miscellanies by John Addington Symonds, M.D. (London, 1871), pp. 116–44 (the quoted phrase is from p. 136), pp. 325–35; and Daniel Hack Tuke, Prichard and Symonds in Especial Relation to Mental Science (London, 1891).
12. Symonds, The Memoirs, pp. 112–17, quotations from pp. 97, 116, 127. For the Vaughan affair, see Phyllis Grosskurth, The Woeful Victorian: The Life of John Addington Symonds (New York, 1974), pp. 35–38.
13. Symonds reverted to the subject of his supposed insanity through his Memoirs, and see also the unpublished volume of “Miscellanies,” c. 1885–89 (MS., Houghton Library, Harvard University), esp. pp. 52–77. The “black broad-arrow of insanity” appeared to him in a dream in which he responded to the gaze of a handsome young groom (“In Dreamland,” ibid.; I discuss the dream in more detail at the end of chapter 8). The physiological correlates of moral insanity were considered by writers such as J. H. Lloyd, “Moral Insanity: A Plea for a More Exact Cerebral Pathology,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases NS 11 (1886): 669–85; and Havelock Ellis; see E. S. Talbot and Havelock Ellis, “A Case of Developmental Degenerative Insanity, with Sexual Inversion,” Journal of Mental Science 42 (1896): 340–46.
14. Symonds, The Memoirs, p. 41.
15. “Sleep and Dreams,” in Miscellanies by John Addington Symonds, M.D., p. 163, and see also “On Apparitions” [1832], ibid., pp. 209–64.
16. Symonds, The Memoirs, pp. 57–58.
17. Ibid., pp. 58–59.
18. Ibid., p. 62; the account given in the Memoirs of this “repeated and habitual” erotic reverie differs somewhat from the version published in Sexual Inversion, which emphasizes its masochistic homosexual dimension. Dr. Symonds addressed hypnagogia in “On Apparitions,” pp. 237, 244–47; and he made an explicit link to the excessive interests, the fascinations, found in moral insanity.
19. John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (London, 1873), pp. 412–13. Some part of Symonds’s knowledge of Greek eroticism and its mythology derived from Richard Payne Knight’s treatises on ancient art and allegory (chapter 2). As a boy, Symonds had pored over his father’s copy of Knight’s Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology (London, 1818).
20. The earliest clear statement of Symonds’s interest in the homoerotic constitution of Greek art can be found in an essay on beauty in Greek sculpture that he read to the Old Mortality Society at Oxford in 1862. This is probably the holograph published by Peter Holliday, though he suggests that it might have been written in the early 1870s. “John Addington Symonds and the Ideal of Beauty in Greek Sculpture,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies 2, no. 1 (1989): 89–105.What Symonds called a “long essay” on ancient Greek pederasty, in part privately printed in 1883 as A Problem in Greek Ethics, began in researches conducted as early as 1866. Later Symonds asserted that he began the “long essay” after reading Whitman in 1865. In the summer of 1868 he began to write poems about historical Greek lovers known from literary and epigraphic sources. As he told Dakyns, however, one of these poems really devolved from a visit to the Victoria Swimming Baths in London in order, as he said, “to learn the secrets of Form” (Symonds, Letters, July 29, 1868). In this context, as he acknowledged, he was “afraid of forming a permanent double consciousness in [his] own mind, of being related to this world of [poetic] phantoms, & moving meanwhile in the world of fact” (ibid.).
21. J. A. Crowe and J. B. Cavalcaselle, A History of Painting in Italy (London, 1903), 1:106, 108, 109.
22. Ibid., p. 109.
23. C. C. Perkins, Historical Handbook of Italian Sculpture (New York, 1883), p. 13.
24. For example, G. Rosini, Descrizione delle pitture del Campo Santo di Pisa coll indicazione dei monumenti ivi raccolti, 3d ed. (Pisa, 1829), p. 196, no. 49 (vase), and 202, no. 21 (sarcophagus). Rosini noted that Nicola imitated “diverse figures” from the sarcophagus.
25. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, History of Painting in Italy, p. 111.
26. Symonds, Letters, March 10, 1874 (to Dakyns).
27. The Hermaphrodite found by Ghiberti at San Celso does not survive; Symonds quoted from the artist’s remarks in his Commentaries.
28. See Symonds, Letters, March 27, 1873 (to Dakyns). I use Symonds’s loose rendering of Goethe’s apothegm.
29. Symonds included a more extensive discussion of the Perseus in the introduction to his translation of Cellini’s autobiography. Here he noticed its “physical vulgarity” and “vacancy of expression” and made a number of criticisms of the modeling and casting; he preferred Cellini’s wax model in the Bargello (as “light and airy” as Gian Bologna’s Mercury), illustrated here (fig. 27), to the final bronze: The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. John Addington Symonds (New York, 1927): xlv–xlvii.
30. Edgar Quinet, Les revolutions d’Italie (Paris, 1848–51), p. 358.
31. In his translation, Symonds accurately rendered Cellini’s famous reply: “You madman! You exceed the bounds of decency. Yet would to God that I understood so noble an art as you allude to; they say that Jove used it with Ganymede in paradise, and here upon this earth it is practised by some of the greatest emperors and kings. I, however, am but a poor humble creature, who have neither the power nor the intelligence to perplex my wits with anything so admirable” (The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, p. 377). Previous English translations had been omitting Cellini’s speech.
32. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, p. xxxv. By this point, Symonds knew that Cellini had been “imprisoned in 1556 on a charge of unnatural vice”; see Adolfo Mabellini, Delle Rime di Benvenuto Cellini (Rome, 1885), pp. 106, 129. But it is unclear whether he was aware of the relevant documents in writing The Fine Arts in the mid-1870s.
1. See Joyce Stewart, “The History of Orchids at Kew,” in Joyce Stewart, ed., Orchids at Kew (London, 1992), pp. 1–26 (information on pp. 14–15).
2. Robert Schomburgk, “On the Identity of Three Supposed Genera of Orchideous Epiphytes,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 17 (1837): 521–22 (pl. 21 illustrates the specimen).
3. Arthur W. Holst, The World of Catasetums (Portland, 1999), p. 32; for Rolfe, see Phillip Cribb and Joyce Stewart, “Orchid Taxonomy, the Herbarium and Library,” in Orchids at Kew, pp. 97–99.
4. John Lindley, The Vegetable Kingdom; or The Structure, Classification, and Uses of Plants Illustrated Upon the Natural System, 3d ed. (London, 1853), p. 178. Lindley reported Schomburgk’s example inaccurately; according to him, the catasetum was the female while Monacanthus was sterile. Reporting that a “similar specimen” had appeared in the Duke of Devonshire’s garden at Chatsworth, Lindley appeared to accept these anomalies; as he put it, they “prepare the mind for more startling discoveries than could have been otherwise anticipated” (ibid.). Schomburgk had already observed other inflorescences like the one he presented to the Linnean Society; because it was not unique, it could not be considered to be “one of those freaks of Nature which not unfrequently occur” but rather suggested to him the idea that “the genera Monachanthus, Myanthus, and Catasetum form but one genus” (“The Identity of Three Supposed Genera,” p. 521). But this provisional conclusion, while on the right track in noting “traces of sexual difference in Orchideous flowers,” did not resolve the problem; it simply resettled it at a more generalized rung on the typological ladder.
5. See Darwin’s remarks in the Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, no. 37 (September 14, 1861), p. 831 = The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett (Chicago, 1977), 2:41.
6. Charles Darwin, “On the Three Remarkable Sexual Forms of Catasetum tridendatum, An Orchid in the Possession of the Linnean Society,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society (Botany) 6 (1862): 151–57 = The Collected Papers, 2:63–69. For the main publication integrating his researches on catasetums, see Charles Darwin, The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, 2d ed. (London, 1877 [1862]), p. 180 (description of catasetums), pp. 193– 206 (description of C. tridentatum). In 1862 Darwin described the orchid (now C. macrocarpum) as “trimorphic,” belonging to the “polygamous class” recognized by Linnaeus; later he called it “heterostyled”: The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (London, 1877): 2, 11. It would now be described as heterogamous (bearing sexually different flowers) and polymorphic (having two or more different forms of the species). According to recent research, in C. macrocarpum “sometimes flowers are found with intermediate polymorphic flowers ranging from male-like to female-like, combining the features of male flowers and female flowers in one sterile entity. Flowers previously thought to be hermaphroditic [as in the case of “Monacanthus”] are in most cases non-functional and appear to be ‘errors.’” N. A. van der Cingel, An Atlas of Orchid Pollination: America, Africa, Asia and Australia (Rotterdam, 2001), p. 84. It is not my purpose here to consider post-Darwinian orchidology.
7. Darwin, The Various Contrivances, p. 1.
8. Ibid., p. 293. Cf. Charles Darwin, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (London, 1877): “In 1862 I summed up my observations on Orchids by saying that nature ‘abhors perpetual self fertilisation.’ If the word perpetual had been omitted, the aphorism would have been false. As it stands, I believe that it is true, though perhaps rather too strongly expressed; and I should have added the self-evident proposition that the propagation of the species, whether by self-fertilisation or by cross-fertilisation, or asexually by buds, stolons, etc., is of paramount importance” (p. 8).
9. See Darwin, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation, pp. 16–18, 20, and “Pangenesis,” Nature 3 (1871): 502–3 = The Collected Papers, 2:165–67. Darwin amplified his account of pangenesis in the second volume of The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (London, 1876).
10. For Huysmans’s sources, see H. Brunner and J.-L. de Coninck, En marge d’À Rebours de J.-K. Huysmans (Paris, 1931), pp. 109–50; this collation, though it overlooks a great deal, has been repeated in subsequent scholarship. Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, 1955), pp. 83–84, mentions Huysmans’s “abstracts of his [reading] notes for each chapter” of the novel.
11. See Merlin Holland, ed., Irish Peacock and Scarlett Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003), pp. 96–100; this book prints a previously unknown complete transcript of the trial that turned up in 2000.
12. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, 1959), p. 97; hereafter cited in the text.
13. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe, ed. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor (Baltimore, 2002), p. 80. Bernheimer emphasizes that “what is factitious and artificial [in Des Esseintes’s world] exhibits the spectacle of life in all its putrescent decomposition but without the biological motor that generates its entropic energy” (p. 79).
14. For Des Esseintes’s orchids as symbols of female sexuality, see Angela Nuccitelli, “À Rebours’ Symbol of the ‘Femme-Fleure’: A Key to Des Esseintes’ Obsession,” Symposium 28 (1974): 336–45.
15. See Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirrepedia, 2 vols. (London, 1851–54); for comments on the nauplius and adult forms, ancient and modern (degenerate), see E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration, a Chapter in Darwinism (London, 1880), pp. 34–37.
16. Charles Darwin, “The Doctrine of Heterogeny and the Modification of Species,” Athenaeum, Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, no. 1852 (April 25, 1863), pp. 554–55 = The Collected Papers, 2:79.
17. Notebook E, March 12, 1839; Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter H. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Ithaca, 1987), p. 429.
18. Charles Darwin, A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae or Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain, 2 vols. (London, 1851–54); see Lankester, Degeneration, pp. 23–25.
19. Similar complaints about the breakdown of tradition can be found, of course, in Classical Greek contexts, not to speak of ancient Egypt two thousand years earlier. But the metaphor specifically of decline and decadence has a peculiarly Roman vintage, Julio-Claudian and perhaps even specifically Tiberian; see Gordon Williams, Change and Decline: Roman Literature in the Early Empire (Berkeley, 1978).
20. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (London, 1984), p. 77. Symonds partly connected his vision with his reading of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and with his identification of himself with Venus loving the beautiful youth who loved him/her in return. In chapters 7 and 8 I will turn to Freud’s analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s memory of a childhood dream that Freud could have seen to have striking overlaps with Symonds’s recurrent dream (if, of course, he had known of it).
21. Marie-France David, Antiquité latine et Décadence (Paris, 2001).
22. For the Villa Lysis, see Roger Peyrefitte, Amori et Dolori Sacrum: Jacques Fersen—La Scelta di Capri (Capri, 1990).
23. Perhaps the most powerful statement of the so-called moral alternative to Darwinism appeared in St. George Mivart’s famous critical review of On the Origin of Species in The Quarterly Review (as well as the amplification Mivart published as The Genesis of Species [London, 1871]). But it was also palpable in the writing of Darwin’s professed supporters, such as Asa Gray in the United States; see Darwiniana: Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism, ed. A. Hunter Dupree (Cambridge, 1963 [1876]).
24. Schopenhauer’s metaphysical ethics was essential reading in later nineteenth-century Decadence; it provided Des Esseintes with his preferred philosophical literature. In remarks on “Human Values and Decadence,” Georg Simmel contrasted the Schopenhauerian (and Decadent) “negation of life” with Nietzsche’s “total acceptance and maximization of life”: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein (Amherst, 1986 [1907]), pp. 136–60. Despite his recognition of Will (inorganic, organic, or specifically human) outside Representation, Schopenhauer tried to preserve the ideational structure of aesthetic creations (even as he recognized their proximity to Will in his sense) in his doctrine of art as a replication of “Platonic Ideas,” a conception addressed in chapter 3.
25. Notebook B (1837–38), p. 36; Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, p. 180; a photograph of the page and the diagram is supplied by Mea Allan, Darwin and His Flowers: The Key to Natural Selection (New York, 1977), p. 161. A more rudimentary sketch appears on p. 21 of the same notebook; according to Howard E. Gruber, it should be taken as the “first intimation” of the more developed model: Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1981), p. 142.
26. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London, 1859), pp. 116–17.
27. Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, pp. 25, 37–38.
28. Darwin, On the Origin of Species, foldout plate between pp. 116–17.
29. See Gruber, Darwin on Man, p. 197.
30. Havelock Ellis, The New Spirit (New York, 1930), p. 267 (despite its appearance in this volume, the essay had originally been written for Affirmations, published in 1898).
1. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 1876), p. x.
2. See Whitney Davis, “Symonds and Visual Impressionability,” in John Pemble, ed., John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire (London, 2000), pp. 62–80.
3. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis Grosskurth (New York, 1984), p. 76. British empirical aesthetics before the absorption of Kantian thinking about aesthetic judgment had more or less openly admitted homoerotic dimensions to the pleasures that some people take in objects and human bodies. As Richard Meyer has shown, Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty dramatically figured the possibility in its very first plate, in which a dancing master, presumably French, was shown contemplating (evidently appreciating or admiring) a sculpture of Antinous; see “‘Nature Revers’d”: Satire and Homosexual Difference in Hogarth’s London,” in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds., The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference (Princeton, 2001), pp. 162–75. In representing the homoerotic psychological and social circuitry in this episode of aesthetic judgment, Hogarth preceded Winckelmann’s essay on the homoerotic self-emulation of Greek culture by one year. Of course, Hogarth’s plate was sardonic, even somewhat censorious; the foreign dancing master was figured by the artist to be an anomalous, unnatural creature.
4. Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp. 96–97, 513, 590–93, 603–5, 618. In 1837–38 Darwin’s earliest notebook entries on this topic addressed the notion of “selective sexual repugnance,” that is, the tendency of animals (including human beings) actively to shun ill-fitted possible mates. As Howard E. Gruber has pointed out, then, “the idea of sexual selection [made] its first appearance… in a negative form”; Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1981), p. 188. But it does not seem necessary to imagine, as Gruber tentatively suggests, that “as [Darwin] approached marriage (he became engaged to Emma Woodward on Nov. 11, 1838) the positive virtues of sexual attraction found their way more explicitly into his biological theorizing” (ibid.).
5. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 593.
6. For example, see Lucien Arréat, Sexualité et altruisme (Paris, 1886), and Récents travaux sur l ’hérédité (Paris, 1890), and J. Arrufat, Essai sur un mode d ’évolution de l ’instinct sexuel: pédérastie (Lyons, 1892), with comments by “Dr. Laupts” (i.e., Georges Espé de Metz Saint-Paul), Perversion et perversité sexuelle (Paris, 1895), pp. 244–48.
7. The principal exception to this trend can be found in Neoplatonic philosophies of androgyny and bisexuality, in which the appearance of the two and opposite sexes, male and female, could be portrayed as a degeneration of “perfect bisexual beings” (now extinct) in turn somehow precipitated into modern-day anatomical hermaphrodites—creatures “having ovaries and testes separately developed” but copresent; I quote from Francis H. Buzzacott and Mary Isabel Wymore, Bi-Sexual Man or Evolution of the Sexes (Chicago, 1912), p. 60. If conceptions of “unisexuality” as the hermaphroditic degeneration of the ur-androgynes can be found, I have not, however, been able to identify a Darwinian narrative of this history. The most popular statements went in another direction altogether—toward mysticism and hermetics. For one example, see Camille Spiess, Pédérastie et homosexualité (Paris, 1915), L’amour platonique: la connaissance de soi ou L’homme normale (Paris, 1925), and especially Le sexe androgyne ou divin: essai psychosynthétique sur la régénération de l ’individu ou de la race (Paris, 1928).
8. Alfred Russel Wallace, Academy 2 (1871): 177–83; see also Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection (London, 1889).
9. Gerald Handerson Thayer, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern, Being a Summary of Abbott Thayer’s Discoveries (New York, 1909).
10. Grant Allen (not signed), “Cimabue Brown on the Defensive,” Belgravia: An Illustrated London Magazine 45 (September 1881): 284–97. A novelistic satire, sometimes vicious, of Wilde’s aestheticism was published by Robert Hichens in 1894 with the title The Green Carnation, referring both to Wilde’s distinctive gestures in dress and comportment and to his status as a sexual bizarrerie.
11. See Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp. 618, 638, 648.
12. St. George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (London, 1871); see also Nature and Thought: An Introduction to a Natural Philosophy (London, 1882).
13. The history of the observation of homosexuality in animals is a complex topic that I cannot pursue here. In his “brief history of the study of animal homosexuality,” Bruce Bagemihl has dated the “beginning of the modern study of animal homosexuality” to 1859, the year in which Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Unsystematic observations had been made in the eighteenth century. According to Bagemihl, “one of the first general surveys of the phenomenon” appeared in 1900 (Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity [New York, 1999]).
14. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York, 1896), p. 13.
15. Darwin, The Descent of Man, p. 619.
16. John Addington Symonds, “The Philosophy of Evolution,” “On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature,” and “Notes on Style,” in Essays Speculative and Suggestive (London, 1893), pp. 1–28, 29–57, and 169–241. Allen’s volume was a banal attempt to rewrite ordinary histories of stylistic development and differentiation in more overtly biological terms. It is deservedly forgotten. Hirn’s treatise was an extraordinary synthesis of knowledge and conceptualization that had never been articulated in the same way anywhere else.
17. See especially John Addington Symonds, “On the Relation of Art to Science and Morality” and “Realism and Idealism” in Essays Speculative and Suggestive, pp. 103–16, 117–38.
18. John Addington Symonds, The Fine Arts (London, 1876), p. 39 (holograph annotations in Symonds’s copy now in Bristol University Library). For Symonds’s appreciation of Whitman in terms that mingled Hegel, Darwin, and homoeroticist aestheticism, see John Addington Symonds, “Democratic Art with Special Reference to Walt Whitman,” in Essays Speculative and Suggestive, pp. 255–88, and Walt Whitman: A Study (London, 1893).
19. For Symonds’s thoughts on Solomon and Clifford, see Whitney Davis, “The Image in the Middle: John Addington Symonds and Homoerotic Art Criticism,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester, 1999), pp. 188–216.
20. Symonds’s last essay on the Renaissance took its title, “The New Spirit,” from Havelock Ellis’s book on the nineteenth-century sensibility, The New Spirit, published in 1890. Ellis did not limit himself to scientific realism; his book contained the best essays that had yet been written in Britain on Huysmans and Whitman.
21. John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics (London, 1873).
22. John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics (London, 1891).
23. Edward Carpenter, “The Human Body in Its Relation to Art,” in Angels’ Wings: A Series of Essays on Art and Its Relation to Life (London, 1898), p. 79.
24. Edward Carpenter, “The Individual Impression,” in Angels’ Wings, p. 129.
25. Carpenter, “The Individual Impression,” p. 127.
26. Carpenter, “The Human Body in Its Relation to Art,” p. 81.
27. Ibid.; for Darwin’s treatment of the evolution of the tail of the Argus pheasant, see The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 1873), pp. 90, 143.
28. Carpenter, “The Human Body in Its Relation to Art,” p. 82.
29. Ibid.
30. Carpenter, “The Human Body in Its Relation to Art,” pp. 83, 79.
31. Carpenter, “The Individual Impression,” pp. 136–37.
32. Ibid., p. 132, and Carpenter, “The Art of Life,” in Angels’ Wings, p. 218.
33. Vernon Lee, “Aesthetic Empathy and Its Organic Accompaniments” (first published in 1907), in Beauty and Ugliness (London, 1912), p. 45. Beauty and Ugliness contains the texts of the earlier publications.
34. For further detail, see Whitney Davis, “The Stylistic Succession,” in The General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, forthcoming).
35. William James, “What Is An Emotion?” Mind 34 (1884): 188–205; Carl Georg Lange, Ueber Gemüthsbewegungen, trans. Hans Kurella (Leipzig, 1887 [1885]), and Sinnesgenüsse und Kunstgenuss: Beiträge zur einer sensualistischen Kunstlehre, trans. Hans Kurella (Wiesbaden, 1903). For selections, see C. G. Lange and William James, The Emotions, ed. Knight Dunlap (Baltimore, 1922).
36. It is worth noting that the motions and flexions in questions were not limited to the responses of the locomotor system. They also included movements (for example) of the eye. Gross locomotor empathy was a staple of empathy theory well into the twentieth century; a discussion (including photographs putatively illustrating people actively “empathizing” with one another) was included, for example, in Gordon Allport’s classic Personality of 1937. Ocular empathy was discredited in the early 1900s by (inter alia) pioneering experiments proving that eye movements have little or nothing to do with the forces or relations that one might identify in an artwork as its formal or compositional structure or balance; see especially George Stratton, “Eye-Movements and the Aesthetics of Visual Forms,” Philosophische Studien 20 (1902): 336–59.
37. See Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 220, 253–55, and 328–29. Löwy’s ideas were best known from his Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (Vienna, 1900), translated as The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, trans. John Fothergill (London, 1907). But they had been available to specialists in art history, and probably to Lee, as early as the late 1880s, when Löwy published his studies of the sculpture of Lysippos.
38. See Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 112–14, 249, 326.
39. Vernon Lee, Art and Man (London, 1923), pp. 223–31. As noted, this volume printed texts Kit had written much earlier.
40. For the Titian experiment, see Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 228–35. Sargent was a lifelong friend of Lee’s. They corresponded regularly, and Lee frequently cited his work, especially in an essay devoted to him that she published in the Fortnightly Review in 1897 in the same year that she and Kit published Beauty and Ugliness; see also Vernon Lee, “J. S. S.: In Memoriam,” in John Sargent, ed. Evan Charteris (New York, 1927), pp. 233–55.
41. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 110–11. Needless to say, the debate about the proper interpretation of this sculpture dated to the late eighteenth century if not before.
42. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 18, 331; see further Vernon Lee, “Introduction,” in Richard Wolfgang Semon, Mnemic Psychology, trans. Bella Duffy (London, 1923), pp. 28–32.
43. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, pp. 319–20.
44. Ibid., p. 322.
45. Elsewhere Lee used the Swirl to contrast the collaborators’s approach to empathy with the laboratory researches of Oswald Külpe, who investigated the responses of his informants to simple, regular geometric shapes rather than the complex, dynamic patternings of Egyptian, Arab, or “Greco-Asiatic” design (as the mosaic in the Baptistery was then taken to be); see his The Conception and Classification of Art from a Psychological Standpoint (Toronto, 1905). Lee criticized contemporary psychophysiologists and perceptual psychologists, including Külpe; according to her, they failed to attend to the iconographic and formal multiaspectivity of art.
46. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 331–32. Lee referred, of course, to G. E. Lessing’s interpretation of the Laocöon as showing the priest, jaws clamped, groaning or moaning, neither “roaring like a bull” (as Virgil had it) nor nobly enduring his pain in silent suffering (as Winckelmann supposed). As Lee’s understanding of the portrait of the (loudly?) singing lady suggested, however, she could properly take Laocöon to be bellowing; aesthetically powerful images, like the Swirl or the sculpture, can find satisfying ways to incorporate “sudden, rapid, fleeting movements.” In the diary Lee gave a second example of “alluring the ‘Eye,’” namely, drawings of the Alps by John Ruskin; she chose these, it would seem, because throughout the text “mountainousness” had served as her own metaphor for artistic coherence (e.g., ibid., p. 275) and because discursive constructions such as “the mountain rises” often provided scholarly illustrations of Einfühlung.
47. In the interest of economy, I can only outline the complete dynamics of this complex circuitry. In notes prepared shortly after studying Lipps’s newly published Grundlegung einer Aesthetik (1903), Lee modeled the interaction of 1. our own corporeal condition (“the most vivid datum of consciousness”), 2. its projection into an object, and 3. our perception of the “movement” of its form(s) by way of 4. our “inner imitation” or muscular mimicry or (in the terms Lee adopted later) by way of our motor image of this movement. In turn, the muscular imitation or motor image (re)constitutes our corporeal condition 1., pushing the cycle (i.e., 1–4) round itself again and again in a spiral of affects that can be said to be increasingly constituted aesthetically or in aesthetic interaction with the object of art. All this mental activity, and corporeal accompaniment if any, is 5. largely “automatic” or subconscious. But sometimes 6. it rises into consciousness when we overtly apprehend our empathetic bodily movements. Weaved together with 7. our understanding of the subject matter or iconography and 8. of the represented movement of the depicted objects, the entire affective complex undergoes 9. many cycles, fluctuations, and discontinuities of attention and fatigue; these have mental (or imaginative) and corporeal (or nervous) origins both inside and outside the aesthetic complex devolved specifically in interacting with the object of art. Finally, 10. oscillations and perturbations can be introduced by the “associations” that we make between the work and other things or situations (ibid., pp. 334–36; for comments on the subconscious dimension, see pp. 236, 270–71).
48. Ibid., p. 266.
49. Ibid., quoted phases from pp. 260, 317, 322, 318.
50. Ibid., pp. 44–46. As a philosophical parallel, Lee cited Schopenhauer’s notion of “Vorstellung as the assertion of man’s will as against the world of Wille of which he is a dependent, but a separate and self-consistent part” (ibid., p. 347). Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s Mikrokosmos, first published between 1856 and 1864, was also a clear predecessor.
51. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, p. 347.
52. In the 1920s, Lee, like Santayana, dismissed the Freudian theory of libido and did not endorse Freudian sexology or psychology. As a model of the mnemic retention of stimuli, she preferred Richard Semon’s theory of the engram (she provided an exposition in her long introduction to the English translation of Semon that appeared as Mnemic Psychology in 1923). In turn, then, she had no use for the Freudian doctrine of repression, which assumed 1. that homosexual stimulations and attractions are traumatic, thus repressed, or 2. that traumatic stimulations and attractions, when repressed, lead to homosexuality and other aberrations. Still, her emphasis on the self-preservative or “egoistic” basis of the sense of beauty was compatible with Freud’s fundamental idea that the nervous system has been evolved to handle stimulation defensively. As Lee’s remarks in the “Gallery Diaries” suggest, in the “walled garden of the soul” that is aesthetic contemplation the ego develops a Reizschutz, a “shield against stimuli” that threaten to overwhelm it. Freud had developed his concept of the Reizschutz in a letters to Wilhelm Fliess in the mid-1890s and in related essays published in 1896; the model of the System Unconscious as the reflexive sedimentation of the Reizschutz, its psychic encysting, was not fully formulated by him until 1899. But I doubt that Lee’s sources were Freudian. They were outgrowths of earlier philosophies of the human mind in nature or as naturally evolved (see n. 50, this chapter).
1. For autoerotic narcissism, see Havelock Ellis, Auto-Erotism: A Psychological Study, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York, 1935 [1898]), part 1, 1:206–208; for Ellis’s review of Freud’s study of Leonardo, see Journal of Mental Science 56 (1910): 522–23.
2. For Stein, see Eva Brabant et al., eds., The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi, vol. 1, 1908–1914, trans. Peter T. Hoffer (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 40, 43, 83, 110, 226.
3. See Johann Ludwig Casper, Practisches Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin, Biologischer Theil (Berlin, 1858), 1:182 (recounting the case and the trial of one Count Cajus); Carl Westphal, “Die conträre Sexualempfindung,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 2 (1870): 73–108. A precursor to Casper and Westphal was Dr. [August?] Fränckel’s “Homo mollis,” a short report in the Medicinische Zeitung des Vereins für Heilkunde in Preussen (1853), 22:102. It described a cross-dressing man who pursued other men sexually; as a child, Fraenkel thought, he had been given too many overly feminine tasks by his mother.
4. For this fascinating text, see now Der Roman eines Konträrsexuellen: Eine Autobiographie, ed. and intro. Wolfram Setz, trans. Wilhelm Thal (Berlin, 1991 [Leipzig, 1899]); Thal’s 1899 translation was accompanied by an introduction on “Der Uranismus” by Raffalovich.
5. C.-F. Michéa, “Des déviations maladives de l’appétit vénérien,” Union médicale 3, no. 81 (July 7, 1849): 338–39. Needless to say, class and cultural conflict marked all these points of view.
6. Still, pleas for an absolute distinction between pederasty and homosexuality were common in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially on the part of right-wing thinkers who rejected innatist theories of homosexuality (and usually disdained it as degenerate) and often approved Neoplatonic doctrines of spiritual androgyny and bi-or polysexual transcendence. For an extended polemic along these lines, see Camille Spiess, Pédérastie et homosexualité (Paris, 1915). Spiess’s confused occultist philosophy, Psychosynthetism, was quite popular in some circles; in defending it, he argued among others with Freud (who analyzed homosexuality) and with André Gide (who espoused pederasty).
7. Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserrinerung des Leonardo da Vinci (Leipzig and Vienna, 1910); 3d ed. (1923) translated in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London, 1953–74), 11:59–138.
8. For an example, see George Bedborough, “Editorial,” in the Adult: The Journal of Sex 1, no. 5 (December 1897): 74; subsequently prosecuted for obscenity, Bedborough was commenting on recent writing about “an unknown people,” that is, “‘Urnings’ or homosexualists”; see especially Edward Carpenter, An Unknown People (London, 1897). In the twentieth century the term homosexualist was used by the American writer Gore Vidal to apply to himself and his kind, especially to the aesthetic of self-consciously performing one’s homoerotic inclinations.
9. I have discussed Gower’s form of life in detail in “Lord Ronald Gower and ‘The Offending Adam,’” in David John Getsy, ed., Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930 (London, 2004), pp. 63–104. Protected by his exalted social status, Gower, unlike Wilde, took care to stay on the safe side of the criminal law, though he was embroiled in several scandals and was eventually ruined by a blackmailer.
10. See, for example, Theodore Wechniakoff, Savants, penseurs et artistes: biologie et pathologie comparées (Paris, 1899), pp. 48–50 (on Leonardo). During the time that Freud was working on Leonardo, it is possible that he also considered writing a study of Walt Whitman, the subject of a long homosexualist (and sexologically informed) psychobiography by Eduard Bertz that had been published by Hirschfeld in the same year as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: “Walt Whitman: Ein Charakterbild,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 7 (1905): 153–288. Not surprisingly, Hirschfeld made sure to publish a summary of Freud’s study of Leonardo for his homosexualist readers; see “Leonardo da Vinci,” Jahrbuch der sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1909/10): 421–25.
11. Julien Chevalier, De l’inversion de l’instinct sexuel au point du vue médico-légal (Paris, 1885), L’inversion sexuelle: une maladie de la personnalité (Lyon, 1893). Here I quote from Albert Moll’s critical characterization of Chevalier’s ideas; according to Moll, an instinctualist, “there is nothing more false” than the notion that homosexuality could be “willed.” Albert Moll, Perversions of the Sex Instinct: A Study of Sexual Inversion, trans. Maurice Popkin (Newark, 1931 [1891]), p. 15.
12. Nino Smiraglia Scognamiglio, “Nuova documenti su Leonardo da Vinci,” Archivio storico dell’arte, 2d ser., 2 (1896): 313–15.
13. Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, Le Roman de Léonard de Vinci, trans. Jacques Sorrèze (Paris, 1901). As early as 1898 Freud had pointed out to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that “no love affair [of Leonardo’s] is known”; therefore he wondered whether Fliess could use Leonardo in his studies of bisexuality. Leonardo’s bilaterality (that is, his ambidextrous left-handedness) was, Fliess thought, a possible correlate of bisexuality; see Jeffrey M. Masson, ed. and trans., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Fliess (Cambridge, 1985), October 9, 1898. In his essay on Leonardo, Freud did not try to make anything of Leonardo’s ambidextry, or to interpret his famous mirror writing, even though he connected it in a vague way with the artist’s supposed bisexuality. As he told Ernest Jones, “I have not inquired further into [Leonardo’s] handwriting, because I avoided by purpose all biological views, restraining myself to the discussion of the psychological ones”: Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1953–57), 2:347. At the time, this was true. But in later editions of Leonardo Freud added material that did address Leonardo’s manual and visual plays with—and difficulties in—telling right from left and back from front.
14. Review of Merezhkovsky, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 5 (1903): 1076–77.
15. Magnus Hirschfeld, Der urnische Mensch (Berlin, 1904), p. 123; compare his Homosexualität, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1920), pp. 508, 666–67. A similar project was undertaken by Iwan Bloch, Beiträge zur Ätiologie der Psychopathia sexualis, 2 vols. (Dresden, 1902–3), cited by Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and by Moll, Berühmte Homosexuellen (Wiesbaden, 1910).
16. I have considered this dream-image, its pictorialization, and its psychoanalytic context in detail in Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud’s “Wolf Man” Case (Bloomington, 1996). For Freud’s comment to Jung, see William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, 1974), March 6, 1910.
17. According to Greco-Roman legend, there are supposedly no males of the vulture species (all vultures are female), and, according to ancient Egyptian mythology, to which Freud appealed several times, the vulture was the “symbol of maternity and the female principle,” to quote Jean-François Champollion’s Panthéon égyptien (Paris, 1823, 6 ter). The Egyptian goddesses Neith and Mut were sometimes represented with a vulture’s head as well as the “special sign of the male principle,” that is, the erect phallus (ibid.). An illustration of a bird-winged and ithyphallic vulture-headed Mut could be found in Lucien von Römer’s study of the iconography of androgyny, one of Freud’s principal points of reference in Leonardo (see chapter 8). In chapter 2 I have identified another possible pictorial determination for Freud’s conflation of Leonardo’s nibbio with the image of a vulture.
18. McGuire, The Freud/Jung Letters, October 17, 1909.
19. Namely, Nino Smiraglia Scognamiglio, Ricerche e documenti sulla giovinezza di Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1482) (Naples, 1900).
20. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 4 vols. (New York, 1962–75), 2:338–52 (no. 89).
21. Magnus Hirschfeld, “Das Ergebnis der statistischen Untersuchungen über den Prozentsatz der Homosexuellen,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 6 (1904): 109–78. Hirschfeld asked his male correspondents anonymously to return a preprinted postcard noting whether their “love instinct (sex instinct) is primarily directed to female, male, or both female and male persons.” In 1908 Hirschfeld developed a more detailed questionnaire to investigate the personal histories of self-identified inverts; see Nunberg and Federn, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, April 15 and 22, 1908.
22. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Craddock (Philadelphia, 1895 [1892]); Freud cited the second edition of 1899.
23. In the second edition, published in 1909, Freud cut this sentence; he felt confident enough to say at this point that psychoanalysis “has produced decisive alterations in the [inverts’s] anamnesis by filling in their infantile amnesia.” And he added a long footnote to the section on the “Sexual Object of Inverts” outlining his new theory (based in part on the study of Leonardo) of the “narcissistic basis” of homosexuality. It must have irritated him, then, when his erstwhile disciple Wilhelm Stekel declared in 1913 that he had “not seen one complete cure of a homosexual by way of psychoanalysis”: “Die Ausgänge der psychoanalytischen Kuren,” Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse 3 (1913): 200.
24. In an important lecture of December 1904, “On Psychology” (The Standard Edition, 7:258–68), Freud contrasted the techniques of suggestion therapy, such as Schrenck’s, and his own psychoanalysis. To make his point, he recalled Leonardo’s famous contrast between painting per via di porre (by the method of putting in) and per via di levare (by the method of taking out): whereas hypnotic suggestion “superimposes” a new idea to “restrain the pathogenic idea,” psychoanalysis “concerns itself with the genesis of the morbid symptom and the psychical context of the pathogenic idea which it seeks to remove.”
25. Review of Freud, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 8 (1906): 729–48. Despite the fact that Freud had largely begun his inquiries into bisexuality in exchanges with Wilhelm Fliess, his greatest friend in the mid-1890s, he later credited the idea that bisexuality was the origin or precursor of homosexual inversion to other writers. But Freud’s information about them was probably derived from Chevalier’s historiography in L’inversion sexuelle and Numa Praetorius’s regular abstracts of studies of homosexuality in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. The texts that he actually cited were not really in line with Fliess’s or with his own perspectives on bisexuality.
26. Magnus Hirschfeld, “Die gestohlene Bisexualität,” Wiener klinische Rundschau 38 (1906): 706–7.
27. See Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst Freud, eds., A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907–1926, trans. B. Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham (New York, 1965), May 19, 1908; January 31, 1909; and April 28, 1910.
28. Ibid., January 17, 1909, and October 11, 1911.
29. Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexualpathologie, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1922 [1917]), p. 192.
30. See Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 2:342, and Free Associations: Memories of a Psycho-Analyst (London, 1959), p. 169; however, in Sigmund Freud Jones remarked Sadger’s “series of valuable contributions” from 1907 onward (2:10). Freud’s comments on Sadger’s study of Kleist as well as Sadger’s response were recorded in Nunberg and Federn, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, for May 5, 1909; see further Isidor Sadger, Belastung und Entartung: Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom kranken Genie (Leipzig, 1910).
31. Nunberg and Federn, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, October 14, 1908; see Wilhelm Stekel, Dichtung und Neurose: Bausteine zur Psychologie des Kunstlers und des Kunstwerkes (Wiesbaden, 1909). Homosexualist treatments of Grillparzer included Ludwig Frey, Der Eros und die Kunst: Ethische Studien (Leipzig, 1896), pp. 178–87. Wittels’s own effort to describe sexual perversion in terms of sublimation, using the examples of Michelangelo and Leonardo, did not find Freud’s favor either; Freud complained that he had already covered all the necessary ground in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; see Nunberg and Federn, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, November 18, 1908; and Mc-Guire, The Freud/Jung Letters, November 29, 1908.
32. Soon after Freud’s study of Leonardo appeared in print, Jung wrote to him that he and Pfister had noticed vultures or vulturelike forms in the painting (Mc-Guire, The Freud/Jung Letters, June 17, 1910). Freud immediately checked for himself, deciding that Jung’s vulture was not as “neat and beyond doubt” as Pfister’s (ibid., June 19, 1910). Thus encouraged, Pfister wrote up his observations as “Kryptolalie, Kryptographie und unbewusstes Vexierbild bei Normalen” in the Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen in 1913 (5:146– 51). Freud incorporated the point in the second and third editions of Leonardo in 1919 and 1923, as well as important new material, suggested by Rudolf Reitler in 1911 as a supplement to the text (see Nunberg and Federn, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, March 29, 1911), on a supposedly ambiguous or confused drawing of sexual intercourse that had purportedly been distorted by the artist’s homosexuality.
33. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal (New York, 1964), p. 45, cf. 41. Similar comments about Sadger can be found in the correspondence of other Freudians at the time and in Nunberg and Federn, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Sadger seems to have been especially irritating to Freud’s other disciples, and to Freud himself, because of his “fanatical” orthodox faith not only in Freud and psychoanalysis but also in the Talmud and Judaism; see McGuire, The Freud/ Jung Letters, March 5, 1908.
1. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 5 (1903): 707–940; around 1920 the monograph was released as a separate publication.
2. Sigmund Freud, “A Case of Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London, 1954–73), 10:3–147.
3. The Standard Edition, 9:207–26. Despite its earlier date of publication, this essay was written after the study of Little Hans.
4. For example, in describing an “admirable” cameo that depicts Hermaphrodite, in the early 1780s Géraud de la Chau and Gaspar Michel Leblond, pioneering iconographers of ancient art, asserted that a similar creature could be seen in their own day in the hermaphrodites of America. But these creatures, they pointed out, were known to be monsters. How was one to reconcile this with Pliny’s remark in the Natural History (bk. 7, chapter 3) that hermaphrodites were one of the “delights of his time”? It was possible, as they put it, that “men have outraged nature in order to vary their pleasures”; as we have seen in chapter 2, the supposed phallic licentiousness of the pagans was widely remarked by eighteenth-century antiquarians. Nonetheless, was it really possible “that there has been a century or a country in which hermaphrodites have been regarded as instruments of pleasure and eroticism?” To the contrary, they asserted, “everyone in the world has been averse to them, as the irregularity of their conformation is truly revolting.” For this reason, the two iconographers distinguished firmly between the ancient fiction, “the most perfect that it is possible to conceive,” and the real phenomenon. In this respect, representations of the ancient myth, such as the Borghese Hermaphrodite, could be said to be aesthetically pleasing precisely because “the sexual organs… are little expressed” (even though the Borghese type shows the erection of the figure!); Description des principales pierres gravées du cabinet de S. A. S. Monseigneur le duc d’Orléans (Paris, 1780–84), 1:106–10. By the mid-nineteenth century it was a commonplace that hermaphroditism was “nothing but an imperfection, a defect,” despite the “divinizations” performed by ancient cultures on the original images; A. Debay, Histoire des métamorphoses humaines et des monstruosités (Paris, 1845), p. 147.
5. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 5 (1903): 1182–84, 1208–11, 1242–44; see also “Fälle von Kleidungsmetamorphose,” Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft 1 (1908): 55–61, a contribution (along with an essay on bisexuality by Freud) to the inaugural issue of Hirschfeld’s new journal.
6. For a survey of clinical observations of one kind of hermaphroditism that was sometimes correlated by homosexualist sexologists with “psychical hermaphroditism” or inversion, namely, the appearance of a uterus in a person sexed as male, see Franz Ludwig Neugebauer, “103 Beobachtungen von mehr weniger hochgrädiger Entwickelung eines Uterus beim Männe (Pseudohermaphroditus masculinus internus),” Jahrbuch der sexuelle Zwischenstufen 6 (1904): 215–76. The earliest published study of this hermaphroditic formation, J. F. Ackermann’s Infantis androgyni historia et ichonographia, had appeared in Jena in 1805. Early photographic demonstrations of hermaphroditism—that is, of hermaphroditic formations of the genitals being “demonstrated” or exhibited clinically—include Nadar’s of 1860: see Maria Morris Hambourg, Françoise Heilbrun, and Philippe Néagu, Nadar (New York, 1995), pl. 94, 95.
7. “Ralph Werther” (i.e., Earl Lind), Autobiography of an Androgyne (New York, 1919); and see also The Female-Impersonators: A Sequel to the Autobiography of an Androgyne and an Account of Some of the Author’s Experiences During His Six Years as a Female-Impersonator in New York’s Underworld, Etc. (New York, 1922). It had long been claimed that the Borghese Hermaphrodite depicted an actual somatic phase of sexual function or sexual activity; as Eugen Holländer put it straight-forwardly in 1912, the sculpted figure was an “artistic and indeed naturalistic representation of orgasm” (Plastik und Medizin [Stuttgart, 1912], pp. 251–55), “well expressing the peace of desire fulfilled,” as Louis Menard had written forty years earlier (Eros: étude sur la symbolique du désir [Paris, 1872], p. ii).
8. Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexualpathologie, 2d ed. (Berlin, 1922 [1917]), p. 94.
9. Arnold Heymann, “Heterotypischer Hermaphroditismus femininus externus,” Wiener klinische Rundschau 26 (1906).
10. Ambrose Tardieu, Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs, 7th ed. (Paris, 1878), p. 250; Tardieu cited a report by Paul Horteloup, “Sur un cas de meurtre avec viol sodomique,” Annales d’hygiène publique et de médicine légale 41 (1870): 419. Tardieu was here referring to the case of a “passive” pederast or patient; other corporeal signs of passive pederasty supposedly included a fissured, funneled, torn, or inverted rectum. The signs of active pederasty, by contrast, could supposedly be found on the penis. The tendentious assumptions and inconsistencies of Tardieu’s criminological recommendations are too obvious to rehearse. But his approach was conceptually congruent with the view of contemporary anatomists (in turn relaying earlier stereotypes of eunuchism) that anorchism in the male leads to lethargy, weakness, and pliancy, identifying him sexually as feminine and thus constituting him as the natural object of male sexual desire—a position that implicitly opened him to sexual violence; see, for example, Ernest Godard, Recherches tératologiques sur l ’appareil séminal de l ’homme (Paris, 1860), pp. 66–68.
11. For Krafft-Ebing’s views on the intrinsic connection between onanism and the sexual perversions, see “Über Irresein durch Onanie bei Männern,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie 31 (1875): 425–40; although the literature was vast and diverse, this text can stand for the ideas that were current in the medical circles in which Freud had been trained.
12. For the case, see Isidor Sadger, “Psychiatrisch-neurologisches in psychoanalytischer Beleuchtung,” Zentralblatt für das Gesamtgebiet der Medizin und ihre Grenzgebiete 718 (1908).
13. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 1st ed. (London, 1873), p. 150.
14. The Standard Edition, 11:68 = Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 117–18. Ernest Jones drew Freud’s attention to the passage in April 1910, but Freud replied that he knew it already and had used it in his essay; see Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York, 1953–57), 2:111.
15. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 150 = The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (London, 1970), pp. 366–67.
16. Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (London, 1901), p. 8.
17. I quote and compress basic propositions of “What Self We Love in Self Love” in The Principles of Psychology (Boston, 1890), pp. 317–28.
18. Quoted here, Symonds’s review of Solomon’s prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (London, 1871) appeared in Academy 2 (April 1871): 189–90.
19. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, vol. 1, 1844–1868 (Detroit, 1967), November 18, 1866 (to Henry Graham Dakyns). Despite the private, often clandestine status of many publications, including a good deal of Symonds’s poetry, “Uranianism” remained vital well into the time that Freud wrote on Leonardo; John Gambril Nicholson’s A Garland of Ladslove, a volume of poetry published in 1911, can be regarded as its very apogee in terms of the ideological and rhetorical investments discussed here.
20. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, vol. 2, 1869–1884 (Detroit, 1968), October 7, 1871.
21. John Addington Symonds, “In Dreamland,” in “Miscellanies” (MS. c. 1890; Houghton Library, Harvard University).
22. Symonds, Carpenter, Wilde, and others, including fellow travelers in sexual liberation such as Bertrand Russell, believed that homosexual emancipation required not only the reform of marriage as well as female suffrage. It also depended on the eradication of class stratifications and archaic systems of land tenure and primogeniture. Michel Foucault updated this line of thinking in the 1970s and early 1980s (chapter 9). He suggested that urban gay subcultures of his own day could be understood historically as a long-term devolution of medieval rules of primogeniture, aristocratic alliance, and “proprietary courtship.” As he saw it, the “clone culture” of like-meeting-like in the “gay ghettoes” of New York and San Francisco had come into being as the upending of the social institutions that had made it impossible for Symonds, a hundred years earlier, to imagine finding his same in togetherness.
23. William McGuire, ed., The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, 1974), October 17, 1909.
24. For Sadger’s presentation, see Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 4 vols. (New York, 1962–75), vol. 1., November 3 and 10, 1909; the case was published shortly thereafter as “Ein Fall von multipler Perversion mit hysterischen Absenzen,” Jahrbuch für Psychanalyse 1 (1910): 59–108, and see also “Über Urethralerotik,” Jahrbuch für psychoanalytischer und psychopathologischer Forschungen 2 (1910): 409–50.
25. To be more exact, the evidence suggests that Freud both claimed to disdain and proceeded to adopt Sadger’s work; this was common in his relation with his disciples at the time. Although he complained to Jung about Sadger (McGuire, The Freud/Jung Letters, January 2, 1910), in the second edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, published in 1909, he had added a note to the chapter on the sexual aberrations in which he acknowledged that “the data obtained from the psycho-analytic investigation of inverts are based upon material supplied to me by I. Sadger and upon my own findings.” And in the following year, as noted in chapter 7, Freud was willing to acknowledge Sadger as one of his chief precursors in writing the pathographies of artists.
26. In addition to Kupffer’s essay on Sodoma, Freud could have read Numa Praetorius’s shorter essay on “Michel Angelo’s Urningthum,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 2 (1900): 254–67; in turn, this study was founded on Symonds’s careful exploration and critical reevaluation of the historical evidence for Michelangelo’s pederastic homoeroticism (see chapter 4).
27. Despite his opposition to aspects of Freudianism, in the 1970s and ‘80s Foucault pursued a similar line of thinking (see chapter 9). As we will see, however, he identified sociological reasons for the historical devolutions of homosexuality that were markedly different from the ones that Freud identified in the history of Leonardo. And, where Freud had seen a pervasive frustration and distortion of love in homosexuality, Foucault saw its persistence. According to him, same-sex love has unexpectedly survived despite ongoing attempts to administer it out of existence. Sometimes, in fact, same-sex has flourished because of attempts to eliminate it.
28. For the frontispiece of the second edition of his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1877), Walter Pater used what had usually been taken to be the drawing of this model in the Louvre (thought at the time to be Leonardo’s autograph drawing): “a face of doubtful sex, set in the shadow of its own hair, the cheek-line in high light against it, with something voluptuous and full in the eyelids and lips” (ibid., 90–91). Melzi was also thought to be Leonardo’s model for several depictions of young angels. In his list of famous homosexuals in history, Hirschfeld described Melzi as the “love pupil” of Leonardo, citing Pater and Freud as his authorities; Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin, 1914), pp. 666–67. The pictures thought to have depicted Salai and Melzi—or a pictorial admixture of their aspects—have been collated and discussed in detail by Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 140–70; and Carlo Starnazzi and Carlo Pedretti, L’ “Angelo incarnato” tra archeologia e leggenda (Florence, 2001). The latter work addresses the spectacular phallic drawing of a Salai-like youth, clearly also related to St. John and Bacchus, that turned up in 1991, practically as if art-historically confirming Freud’s much earlier speculations about the phallic-maternal and phallic-homosexual directions of Leonardo’s fantasmatic iconicity.
1. “Dans le cas de l’École Militaire, la lutte contre l’homosexualité et la masturbation est dite par les murs”: “L’oeil du pouvoir,” in Jeremy Bentham: Le Panopticon (Paris, 1977) = Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with Jacques Legrange (Paris, 1994), 3:193 (my translation). The interview is translated in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York, 1980), and differently in Foucault Live (Collected Interviews 1961–1984), ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York, 1996); in both cases the rendering is slightly incorrect.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980 [1976]), p. 44.
3. Jacques-Alain Miller and Michel Foucault, “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,” Ornicar? Bullétin périodique du champ freudienne 10 (July 1977) = Dits et écrits, 3:298–329 (quotation from p. 320); translated as “The Confession of the Flesh” in Power/ Knowledge (quotation on p. 219).
4. See Michel Foucault, “Lacan, le ‘libérateur’ de la psychanalyse,” Corriere della sera 106, no. 212 (September 11, 1981) = Dits et écrits, 4:204–5. To be sure, Foucault was not unwilling to criticize the psychoanalytic approach specifically to homosexuality: see “Michel Foucault: El filósofo responde,” Jornal da Tarde (November 1, 1975), pp. 12–13 = Dits et écrits, 2:814–15.
5. For Freudian fetishism as “dehomosexualization,” see Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, 1996), pp. 318–46.
6. Conversation overheard by Simon Wade and reported by James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York, 1993), p. 254.
7. Michel Foucault, “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits, 3:321 = “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 220.
8. “De l’amitié comme mode de vie,” Gai Pied 25 (April, 1981) = Dits et écrits, 4:165 (my translation; the interview is also translated in Foucault Live, pp. 308–12). Foucault made similar points for American readers of Christopher Street in 1982: “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will: A Conversation with Michel Foucault,” Christopher Street 6, no. 4 (May, 1982): 36–41 (translated into French in Dits et écrits, 4:308–14). Challenging the readers of Arcadie, he asked “do we truly need a true sex”?: “Le vrai sexe,” Arcadie 27, no. 328 (November 1980) = Dits et écrits, 4:116; the magazine printed the French text of the preface that Foucault had written for the American edition of Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (New York, 1980), which had not appeared in the French edition; quotation on p. vii.
9. “An Interview: Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Advocate, August 7, 1984, p. 28 (the interview was conducted in 1982)..
10. Clark Henley, The Butch Manual (San Francisco, 1982).
11. Richard Sennett and Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” London Review of Books, May 21–June 3, 1981, p. 3.
12. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act” (interview translated from the French), Salmagundi 58–59 (Fall 1982–Winter 1983): 19–20 = Foucault Live, p. 330.
13. Foucault, “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” p. 43 = Foucault Live, p. 384.
14. “Michel Foucault: à bas la dictature du sexe!” L’Express 1333 (January 24, 1977): 56–57 = “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” Foucault Live, p. 74.
15. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, 1991 [1989]); Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London, 1993).
16. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, 1995); Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991); David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York, 1995); Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham, 2004 [1999]).
17. Alexander Nehamas, “Subject and Abject,” New York Review of Books, February 15, 1993, p. 35; see also The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley, 1998).
18. Although homosexuality does not make much explicit, specific appearance in Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1974 and ’75, sexual psychopathology and sexual deviancy in general (as well as the casuistry of lust, sodomy, and masturbation that interested Foucault in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality) were conceived as historical objects parallel to madness and crime; see Michel Foucault, Abnormal, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni (French, 1999), trans. Graham Burchell, intro. Arnold Davidson (London, 2004 [1974–75]).
19. Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (Paris, 1986).
20. Foucault explicitly remarked this transfer: see “Conversazione con Michel Foucault,” Il Contributo 4, no. 1 (1980) = Dits et écrits, 4:55, 58.
21. For unthinkability, see “Entretiens avec Michel Foucault,” Masques 13 (Spring 1982) = Dits et écrits, 4:287 (translated in Foucault Live, pp. 363–70). For Foucault’s course at the Collège de France in 1979–80 on the “Alcibiades” and other Platonic-pederastic texts, see “L’hermeneutique du sujet,” Annuaire du Collège de France, 82e année, Histoire des systèmes de pensée, 1981–1982 (Paris, 1982) = Dits et écrits, 4:353–65. For normative Athenian pederasty as a “technique of the self,” see “Usage des plaisirs et techniques du soi,” Le débat 27 (novembre 1983) = Dits et écrits, 4:552. In all of this Foucault depended on the historical investigations of the British classicist Kenneth Dover, who used literary (and to a lesser extent epigraphic and iconographic) evidence to clarify the homosexual roles that had been validated in Athenian pederasty. When Dover’s work was fully published in 1977, its conclusions were quite novel for many readers, including Foucault; for his review of Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (Oxford, 1977), see “Des caresses d’hommes considérées comme un art,” Libération 323 (June 1, 1982) = Dits et écrits, 4:315–17). Certain earlier scholars had traversed much of the same ground as Dover. But their work had faded from view, or, as Dover intimated, had been ignored by other historians. And the earlier scholars had been less able to distinguish what the Greeks actually did sexually from what they idealized; consequently they had been less able than Dover to assess the relation of roles and rules or acts and norms. Still, the question—the “problem in Greek ethics”—that had originally been identified by Symonds (see chapter 4) remained Dover’s central topic, and in turn it caught Foucault’s interest: what was honorable and desirable in homoerotic romance and what vicious in homosexual sensuality, and how did the lovers regulate their sexual drives and social interactions accordingly?
22. “Michel Foucault: An Interview with Stephen Riggins,” Ethos 1, no. 2 (1983); the interview was conducted in June 1982, reprinted in Foucault Live, pp. 371–81, quotation on p. 378.
23. “Le gai savoir,” Mec 5 (June 1988): 36. Though I have some doubts about the authenticity of this text (the interview was said to have been conducted ten years earlier, in 1978), the language is characteristically Foucault’s.
24. “Le gai savoir,” p. 34.
25. Michel Foucault, Résumé des cours, 1970–1982 (Paris, 1989), pp. 13–14; my translation.
26. Foucault, Herculine Barbin, p. xiii (my italics).
27. “Limit attitude” and “permanent critique”: Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 334; “permanent oppression”: “Conversazione con Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits, 4:82–83; gay “becoming”: Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” p. 27.
28. “De l’amitié comme mode de vie,” Dits et écrits, 4:166.
29. See especially Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Dits et écrits, 4:742–43.
30. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” p. 218.
31. Interview of November 1989, quoted by Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 261.
32. Ibid., p. 259.
33. Michel Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” Dits et écrits, 4:313.
34. For Foucault’s interest in Preston and Rechy, see Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, pp. 259, 265. In general, Foucault voiced antipathy to “gay novels,” which, he said, are as “hard to believe in as gay painting” (“Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Dits et écrits, 4:737 = Foucault Live, p. 383; cf. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” p. 330 = Foucault Live, p. 326). In Foucault’s view, it seems, the work of Preston and Rechy did not fall into the category of “novels of reminiscence,” by which Foucault probably meant such gay coming-of-age stories as Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), Fritz Peters’s Finistère (1951), Gordon Merrick’s The Lord Won’t Mind (1970), or John Reid’s The Best Little Boy in the World (1976). Foucault’s writings and interviews record little or no awareness of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959), Wild Boys (1982), and other works, or of Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1965), though these novels of “queer” forms and fantasies of life in America, praised by many critics, were widely read inside and outside gay culture.
35. Michel Foucault, “Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume II,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), pp. 338–39 (this text was replaced by another one, without the quoted remark, in the preface that was actually published by Foucault in volume 2).
36. See especially David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, 1990); for parallel Foucauldian projects, see Daniel Juan Gil, Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Minneapolis, 2006), and Thomas A. Foster, ed., Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (New York, 2007).
37. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 270. For another (more implicit) comparison between the ascesis demanded in the Institutes and Conferences of John of Cassian in the early fifth century ad (the subject of Foucault’s seminar in 1978–79) and gay S & M, see Michel Foucault, “Le combat du chasteté,” Communication 35 (1982) = Dits et écrits, 4:295–306. Readers of the later volumes of The History of Sexuality had to read between the lines in order to recall these equivalences, for, as noted, Foucault did not deal with them explicitly.
38. For all these terms deployed in perspicuous fashion, see Sennett and Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” pp. 5–6.
39. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York, 1981), and see Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1991). For Foucault’s response to Faderman’s work, see “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits, 4:289, and “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Dits et écrits, 4:742.
40. Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” Dits et écrits, 4:313.
41. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990). As the full title suggests, Halperin’s book dealt largely with the social relations of “Greek love” in the ancient world—that is, with pederasty and its variants.
42. See especially Michel Foucault, “Omnes et singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason,’” in Sterling M. McMurrin, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1981 (Cambridge, 1982), 2:224–54.
43. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” pp. 329–30.
44. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” pp. 201–2. Foucault did not cite particular works by Duby, his colleague at the Collège de France, but Georges Duby’s (many) relevant studies of medieval erotic sociability and marriage(s) included Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Foster (Baltimore, 1978 [1977]) and Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du feodalisme (Paris, 1978). Here there is no need to go into debates about the historical shape—even the historical reality—of medieval “courtly love,” first identified in that phrase by later nineteenth-century writers; overall Foucault seems to have adopted their interpretations, with the added explications of the supposed phenomenon proposed by Duby.
45. Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Dits et écrits, 4:740.
46. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” p. 332. Presumably Foucault was referring to the very same magazines in which his interviewers published their conversations with him: Christopher Street, the Advocate, and so on.
47. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” Dits et écrits, 4:291.
48. This point may seem far-fetched to historians writing in English. Like other French scholars of his generation, Foucault was thoroughly familiar with the work of Indo-Europeanists such as Georges Dumézil and Georges Devereux, and he was deeply interested in their identifications of the patterns or “structures” of Indo-European language and discourse; see especially Devereux’s “Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality and the ‘Greek Miracle,’” Symbolae Osloenses 41 (1968): 69–92; Foucault’s seemingly pedantic description of pederasty as “Dorian” marked his sense of its millennial genealogy. For early examples of Foucault’s hommages to Dumézil, whom he regarded as the first real structuralist, see “La folie n’existe que dans une société,” Le Monde, no. 5135 (July 22, 1961), p. 9 = Dits et écrits, 1:167–69 (translated in Foucault Live, pp. 7–10), and “Sur les façons d’écrire l’histoire,” Les lettres françaises, no. 1187 (June 15–21, 1967), p. 69 = Dits et écrits, 1:590 (translated in Foucault Live).
49. Foucault, “De l’amitié comme mode de vie,” Dits et écrits, 4:163.
50. Ibid., p. 164.
1. For Wollheim, an especially important Kleinian contribution seems to have been Bion’s short essay “Attacks on Linking” (1959); W. R. Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis (New York, 1984), pp. 93–109; Wollheim referred to it several times in various contexts.
2. On this matter, see Wollheim’s highly critical review of Peter Gay’s Art and Act: On Causes in History—Manet, Gropius, Mondrian (1976) in History and Theory 16 (1977): 357–58.
3. Richard Wollheim, “Introduction,” in Sigmund Freud, The Case of the Wolf Man: From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (San Francisco, 1993), pp. 17–19.
4. Ibid., p. 22.
5. For the preoedipal sadistic-aggressive origin of the Wolf Man’s neuroses, see ibid., p. 26. Wollheim found his prime warrant for his reading of the Wolf Man’s history and memoirs in Ruth Mack Brunswick’s reanalysis of the Wolf Man in 1926, “A Supplement to Freud’s ‘History of an Infantile Neurosis,’” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): 439–76; cf. “The Pre-Oedipal Phase of Libidinal Development,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 9 (1940): 293–319. In The Psycho-Analysis of Children, published in 1949, Melanie Klein endorsed Brunswick’s findings (implicitly contradicting Freud’s interpretation) about the preoedipal organization of the Wolf Man’s ego.
6. Richard Wollheim, “The Good Self and the Bad Self,” Proceedings of the British Academy 61 (1975): 373–98 = The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 39– 63.
7. Ibid., p. 398.
8. Richard Wollheim, “Identification and Imagination: The Inner Structure of a Psychic Mechanism,” in Richard Wollheim, ed., Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1974), pp. 189–90.
9. Wollheim, “The Good Self and the Bad Self,” p. 395 (my emphasis).
10. Richard Wollheim, “The Bodily Ego,” in Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins, ed., Essays on Freud (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 124–38, considerably revised in The Mind and Its Depths, pp. 64–78.
11. Rob van Gerwen, ed., Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting: Art as Representation and Expression (Cambridge, 2001). Only one essay gives “psychoanalysis” more than a passing mention: Graham McFee, “Wollheim on Expression (and Representation),” ibid., pp. 151–70.
12. Richard Wollheim, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50 (1969): 209–20 = On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 31–53.
13. See Richard Wollheim, “Identification and Imagination,” and “Memory, Experiential Memory, and Personal Identity,” in G. F. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer and His Replies to Them (Macmillan, 1979), pp. 186–234, shortened and revised as “On Persons and Their Lives,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Explaining Emotions (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 299–321.
14. The term representationality first appeared in Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects in his account of seeing-as (and later seeing-in); see Art and Its Objects, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 205–26. A continuation of the argument (the representationality of a configuration is an unavoidable feature of its visual aspectivity) served in Wollheim’s critique of formalism, On Formalism and Its Kinds (Barcelona, 1995), and in his account of pictorial organization, On Pictorial Organization (Lawrence, Kansas, 2002). See also Richard Wollheim, “Representation: The Philosophical Contribution to Psychology,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 709–23 = The Mind and Its Depths, pp. 159–70.
15. Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions (New Haven, 1999), p. 177.
16. Ibid., p. 199.
17. In order of date of publication: for “Imagination and Identification: The Inner Structure of a Psychic Mechanism,” see Richard Wollheim, ed., Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (London, 1974), pp. 183–96 (n. 8); for “Memory, Experiential Memory, and Personal Identity” (1979), see n. 13; for “Wish Fulfillment,” see Ross Harrison, ed., Rational Action: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 47–60; for “The Bodily Ego” (1982), see n. 10.
18. Richard Wollheim, “A Critic of Our Time,” Encounter 12, no. 4 (1959): 41–44; see Adrian Stokes, Greek Culture and the Ego (London, 1959). Wollheim reused parts of this review (notably the brief but illuminating discussion of Klein’s psychoanalysis) in his introduction to Richard Wollheim, ed., The Image in Form: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes (New York, 1972), pp. 9–34.
19. Wollheim, “A Critic of Our Time,” all quotations from pp. 41–42.
20. Ibid., both quotations from p. 42.
21. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977 [1936/1949]).
22. See Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park, 1996), pp. 280–81.
23. Richard Wollheim, “The Cabinet of Dr. Lacan,” New York Review of Books, January 15, 1975, pp. 36–45, and Sigmund Freud, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1990), xli–xliii (quotation from p. xliii).
24. See especially Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, 1986), and “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape,” Representations 20 (1987): 25–76.
25. In this chapter I have not tried to comment in any detail on Wollheim’s biography in relation to his philosophy. For his childhood and early intellectual development, see Richard Wollheim, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood (London, 2004), as well as the thinly veiled autobiographical novel A Family Romance (London, 1969). Wollheim’s socialism and his model of art did, however, interconnect dramatically at the practical level, as advocated in his tract Socialism and Culture (London, 1961). He was one of the central participants in the reform of the art schools in Great Britain, assisting in the formulation of the innovative Coldstream Report, published in 1960, that opened access to the art schools and insisted on the role of historical and theoretical training in the studio education of young artists. For Wollheim’s work on the theory of democracy, see “Equality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 51 (1955–56): 281–300, “Democracy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 225–42, and “How Can One Person Represent Another?,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 1960, pp. 209–24.
26. Richard Wollheim, The Sheep and the Ceremony: The Leslie Stephen Lecture 1979 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 35.
27. Richard Wollheim, On Formalism and Its Kinds; “Pictures and Language,” Art Issues, no. 5 (1989), pp. 9–12, revised in The Mind and Its Depths, pp. 185–92. An example of Arnheim’s formal analysis can be found in his discussion of Paul Cézanne’s 1889 portrait of his wife, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley, 1964), pp. 22–26; Loran’s approach is best known from his Cézanne’s Composition, 3d ed. (Berkeley, 1964). The Latent Formalism of semiotics in art criticism could be found, Wollheim thought, in such writings as Yve-Alain Bois’s study of Mondrian’s so-called grid paintings, Painting as Model (Cambridge, 1990).
28. Richard Wollheim, “Kitaj: Recollections and Reflections,” in Richard Morphet, ed., R. B. Kitaj (New York, 1994), pp. 35–42, all quotations from pp. 40–42.
29. Michael Podro, “Formal Elements and Theories of Modern Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 6 (1966): 329–38; Richard Wollheim, “Form, Elements and Modernity,” British Journal of Aesthetics 6 (1966): 339–45.
30. Ibid., p. 340 (my emphasis).
31. Ibid., p. 341.
32. Wollheim, “On Persons and Their Lives,” p. 305; a fuller account was provided in “Memory, Experiential Memory, and Personal Identity” and in chapter 3 of The Thread of Life (Cambridge, 1984).
33. Richard Wollheim, “Professor Gombrich [Review of Meditations on a Hobby Horse],” New Statesman, no. 6711 (January 3, 1964), p. 19. Wollheim drew attention to the importance of a “transposition” in the organization of “centrally imagining” in Leonardo’s case. As he read Freud’s reconstruction, Leonardo centrally imagined himself as his mother imagined him: “it is himself whom he centrally imagines but she who provides the material” (ibid., p. 188), and even if the result was “not that which Leonardo wishes for” (ibid., p. 194)—Leonardo, “whose imagination was intrepid, who struggled with the riddles of nature, who left many things half-finished, and who was haunted by images of androgynous beauty” (The Case of the Wolf Man, p. 13).
34. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987), pp. 283–84, and cf. p. 273. Wollheim’s long paragraph on Ingres’s Death of Leonardo can be taken to stand for his method, his analytic worldview, as a whole. Of course, I refer only to his method; I will not try to address the psychoanalytic substance of his interpretation. And it must be noted that Wollheim insisted that our interpretation of unconscious meaning and secondary meaning cannot stand or fall in relation to the dynamics of a single painting. It must be worked out in relation to many paintings, and indeed in relation to a historical view of the painter’s entire life—in relation to a view, that is, of the entire “thread of [the painter’s] life” revealed in his career of “painting as an art.”
35. Ibid., p. 8.
36. Psychologically speaking any reordering of the external world—any social transformation—must follow from reordering the internal world and must be predicated on it. For Wollheim’s skepticism about merely sociological explanations of the power and the point of symbolic form, that is, explanations of the instrumentality of art that make no reference to the psychodynamic history of fantasmatic iconicity, see “Art and Marxism,” Encounter 5, no. 5 (1955): 68–71, and especially “Historicism Reconsidered,” Sociological Review 2 (1954): 76–97. For his critical comments about sociologistic tendencies in art-historical scholarship dealing specifically with the painting of Ingres, see Painting as an Art, p. 372, n. 36.
37. Wollheim, “Imagination and Identification,” pp. 194–95.
38. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 8.