Préambule

On July 2, 1777, The Scots Magazine reported that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield tried a case that was “the most extraordinary that, perhaps, ever happened in this country or any other country,” one “respecting the sex of the Chevalier d’Éon” formerly Ambassador from France to the Court of England (1728–1810).Footnote ¹ Surprising, and always astonishing intellectually, d’Éon lived the first half of his life as male: Baptized, dressed, and educated as a boy, he later received his Doctor of Law, led a troop of Dragoons, was secretary to the Duc de Nivernais during the formation and signing of the Treaty of Paris, stayed in London under the title “Minister Plenipotentiary,” and worked as a French spy. The second half of d’Éon’s life was lived as a woman. As the historian Gary Kates puts it: “Sometime during the year 1770, rumors began to surface that the Chevalier d’Éon was actually a woman.”Footnote ² By 1771, bets had been placed on theirFootnote ³ sex, and one such wager ended up in Lord Mansfield’s courtroom. Mr. Hayes, a surgeon, bought a £100 life insurance policy from a broker, Mr. Jacques, specifying that if the Chevalier was une dame then Jacques would owe Hayes £700.

Mr. Hayes won his bet since the jury ultimately decided that d’Éon was a woman, a decision that “served as a kind of legal declaration” of gender assignment.Footnote ⁴ The verdict largely emerged from the testimony of a doctor, La Goux, who claimed to have examined “parts” that revealed him to be a her. Especially important was Charles Morande, whose unchallenged and, as it turned out, perjurious statements swore that this Chevalière had “display[ed] her Bosom” to him on the “3rd Day of July, 1774,” thereby making a “Disclosure of her Sex to the Witness” and that he had examined “her” wardrobe, which was filled with “Petticoats, and other Habiliments, calculated for Feminine Use.”Footnote ⁵ Six weeks after the ruling that legally determined their sex, d’Éon left for France and, in men’s clothing, immediately met with Foreign Minister Vergennes, expecting another ambassadorial mission. Instead, the Minister, taking what d’Eon had formerly said as true – that they were a woman – and the English verdict as fact, ordered the “mademoiselle” to take on their purportedly biological identity and dress thereafter as a woman, which they did. Evidently, d’Éon had no right to belong with more than one externally prescribed identity, though contemporaries believed that the Chevalière was “born female and had assumed a male role in order to succeed in a patriarchal society.”Footnote ⁶ Reactions to d’Éon’s body became, courtesy of gamblers, jurors, newspapers, acquaintances, and politicians, a widely publicized spectacle; d’Eon even “beseech[ed] each journalist, every hack writer, not to dress up my story in his own way”;Footnote ⁷ in this they resembled how the Venus de’ Medici was discussed without her consent – observers varyingly defining her as modest, immodest, human, graceful, or something of a dominatrix.

Given this jointure between the statue and d’Éon, we should not be surprised that during the trial, Lord Mansfield explicitly invokes the Medici Venus and the touristic ritual of measuring her proportions so as to reaffirm her female perfection. The judge recalls an earlier

As I will discuss further, tourists “visiting” the Tribuna’s Venus de’ Medici (Figure 1.1) were emboldened by the Abbé, who showed the collection and distributed the statue’s proportions, gleaned from physically measuring her parts. This earlier quarrel concerning whose calculations were correct, and the fact that Lord Mansfield remembered and quoted it during the trial, multifariously connects these two celebrity bodies, which were defined by the presence and size of their physical “parts” as well as other curves and bends of their frames. Morande’s testimony describes d’Éon’s breasts, and Joseph Spence’s Polymetis depicts the size and “feel” of the Venus’s: They are “small, distinct and delicate … with an idea of softness …. And yet with all that softness, they have a firmness too.”Footnote ⁹

Figure 1.1

Venus de’ Medici. First-century BCE copy of a fourth-century BCE statue. Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

Credit: Cola Images / Alamy Stock Photo.

The trials, one litigating the accuracy of a statue’s dimensions and the other staking money on a person’s gender, spectacularize how both bets compulsively measure the degree to which humans and things obey “real” gender expectations. Manifestly, Lord Mansfield’s reliance on the Venus dispute as a precedent for ruling on the wager over d’Éon signifies something exceeding legal process, a “something” that undergirds the relationship between the two cases: the necessity and means not only of determining “sex,” but also what relationships among sexual parts constitute not just “woman” but the “perfect” woman. Such a conjoining of the Venus and d’Éon further radicalizes discussions of the Venus de’ Medici, the Queen of Love, since that other queen, Marie Antoinette, who “refused to conform to certain of the strictly imposed, gendered requirements of her station” became the patron of d’Éon, who “flouted the royal authorities’ attempts definitively to establish his sex.”Footnote ¹⁰ The evidence and rulings brought against this figure and the Venus all concerned measuring who and what is certified to belong and to express their embodiment as they wish.

The Venus de’ Medici enters multiple and interleaved storylines that all relate to questions of belonging: First, what belongs in collections? My initial focus, on the Uffizi’s Tribuna Gallery, clarifies what pieces were thought to undermine the room’s nobility, and specifically to detract from the Venus’s presence in the Tribuna. Second, how did audiences try to belong with the statue? As I show, her radiating vitality drew observers into her orbit, making them want to touch her marble flesh. Third, how does the eighteenth-century subject belong if gender models are not adhered to? Viewers observing the Venus de’ Medici find bonds between the human and thing in their measurements of her and in their debates as to whether this perfect female form also perfectly fulfills their contemporary canons of modesty. That is, the statue became the touchstone for British female beauty, while simultaneously being judged on whether she achieved the highest standards of modesty that had been created for the English woman. Fourth, contrary to some scholars working on museum collections, I argue that once lodged in the Tribuna, the Venus was not exiled from history – though the room itself was arranged ahistorically – but instead she came to interconnect with the narrative of political liberty after having been exiled from Florence for safekeeping and then plundered by Napoleon. Surveying the Tribuna’s environment, I scrutinize the collection’s “ecology”: What body parts belong on a statue and in what configuration? For example, what if there are some missing? Accordingly, the Medici Venus manifests a history of artistic restoration given that while she was held in Paris, the Florentines, desiring to repossess her, commit statuary dismemberment by breaking off and replacing the Belvedere Venus’s arms so that she might resemble their lost Goddess.Footnote ¹¹

At the end of the chapter, I move toward belonging with in Belinda, which refers twice to the Venus de’ Medici, inclusions that scholars have yet to discuss. Reenacting the real-life activity of tourists who judged the statue’s modesty and virtue, Edgeworth’s characters “measure” each other; Belinda, however, incorporates these debates to encourage liberation from calculating standards of perfection, ones that lead to negative consequences such as racism and gender stereotyping. Embedded in the novel, la Vénus de Médicis becomes a double of Lady Delacour as the novel splinters engrained perspectives on issues of artistic and moral restoration and on debates concerning perfection versus deformity. The alterations that the Chevalier-“Chevalière,” Lady Delacour, and the Medici Venus experience render them “mixed,” fragmented, and therefore irreducible to one fashion, construction, or fantasy of female or male ideality.

1.1 What Belongs in a Collection? The Tribuna’s Uneasy Neighborhood

If any eighteenth-century thing were to be considered radiant matter, it would have to be the Venus de’ Medici, which held court in the Tribuna from 1688 to 1800 and then again from 1815 to the present.Footnote ¹² For over two hundred years, this chamber held Europe’s most famous art collection. “The Uffizi tribuna was begun in 1585 by Bernardo Buontalenti who succeeded Vasari (d. 1574) as architect of the Uffizi for Francesco de’ Medici”; the room was initially a private sanctuary that held Francesco’s exquisite art objects (Figure 1.2).Footnote ¹³ Once open to the public, so renowned was this chamber that it was itself “collected”: From 1715 through 1793, at least seven great English houses had a “Tribuna,” and even more replicated its cupola.Footnote ¹⁴ Those who sought to know, and feel, and see such sparklers found a small world where these splendors had their own agency and relationships. Certainly, this gallery became the room in which to linger, and its glorified Venus – manifesting the political, aesthetic, and spiritual – circulated, experiencing what Brown would call her “‘social life’ through diverse cultural fields.”Footnote ¹⁵ She was visited by international travelers to Florence, ubiquitously copied, invited into conduct books as a spokeswoman for modesty, introduced into philosophical tracts as the premier example of proportion, taken on tours in travel guides as a standard of excellence, and insistently included in novels and poems.Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 1.2

Bernardo Buontalenti, The Tribuna (1581–1583). The Wrestlers (deep left); Venus de’ Medici (center); The Listening Slave (deep right). The Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

Credit: dbtravel / Alamy Stock Photo.

Tourists’ reactions to the Medici Venus and to the Tribuna lead me to emphasize, as I do throughout Embodied Experience, the connections between and among things and humans. Much has been written on this statue and how it has been objectified, especially sexually: Caroline van Eck says, for example, that Edward Gibbon describes the Venus “as if she were a ‘racehorse or cocotte.’”Footnote ¹⁷ This section, however, spotlights the varying interactions – the ecstasy, the bewilderment, the disquiet – that the Tribuna and especially the Venus aroused in their viewers when they hoped for connection with her. There is no doubt that “the relation between a living being and its image … is an ambiguous, precarious relation, in which inanimate images turn out to possess the same agency as the living beings they represent.”Footnote ¹⁸ Wendy Steiner also theorizes human–thing interactions along these lines, though her topic is beauty, which she finds to be “an unstable property because it is not a property at all. It is the name of a particular interaction between two beings, a ‘self’ and an ‘Other.’”Footnote ¹⁹ Writing about relationships with art in general, Steiner claims that

While Steiner underscores the power relations between object and subject, I emphasize the perplexing “mix” of human–nonhuman engagements between the Venus and her perceivers – anger, ecstasy, or drunkenness – and between observers and the Tribuna, as they embrace certain pieces that they feel are singularly perfect and reject others that do not have the right to belong. These reactions arise from the coilings between witness and statue, from the persistent need to connect to something outside of the self. And rarely indeed are these experiences comfortable or observers complacent.

To understand reactions to the Tribuna and to the Venus, we must envision what the gallery looked like originally, since it has changed over time. In contrast to a modern museum’s typical sterility, the room was lavishly decorated and even the floor, resembling sacred spaces of the time and earlier,Footnote ²¹ was gorgeously made of “polished polychrome marble” (Figure 1.2).Footnote ²² James Wilson (1816) sees “an octagonal room, lighted by eight windows, immediately under the vaulted roof. … The crimson velvet of the walls is almost wholly concealed by pictures, and the choicest examples of sculpture form a magic interior circle round the saloon.”Footnote ²³ During the eighteenth century, the paintings of over twenty artists – including Titian, Rubens, Leonardo, Holbein, Raphael, and Rembrandt – jam-packed the gallery.

The Tribuna, a hybrid collection, was arranged ahistorically and defined belonging with capaciously. Including things dating from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries and from cities all over Italy and Europe, it ignored the disegno/colore paragone, paired Renaissance and Baroque works, and included secular and religious topics. Added to this were six classical sculptures; furniture, such as a cabinet in the form of a tabernacle, Bergeret de Grancourt (1773) described as sumptuously decorated with “rubis, topazes, saphirs, [et] émeraudes,” and smaller items like minerals, goblets, and rock crystal vases, as well as numerous statuettes and miniatures in jasper.Footnote ²⁴ The collection had become less varied by 1794, when Lord Palmerston, who had first seen the Tribuna in 1763, “found the Gallery much alterd, the new director having changed y^e Situation of most of the Pictures upon an Idea of arranging them according to the Schools.”Footnote ²⁵ What remains today are the “rich cornice of the room and the gold and mother-of-pearl arabesques on the blue lapis-lazuli of the cupola,” but many of the features that gave the room its disorienting magnificence have disappeared: The paintings are reduced in number and gone is “the skirting-board with the frieze, designed by Ligozzi, of birds, fish, shells, plants, and stones, and the shelf with drawers, which ran round the room supported on carved and gilded consoles.”Footnote ²⁶ The chamber’s dense visual strata from floor to ceiling would have stimulated the eye but also fragmented attempts to view the gallery as a whole.

Perhaps because of this galvanizing diversity of art objects, what objects could coexist with each other in the Tribuna emerged as a combustive topic. For some tourists, the “ambiance” Leo Spitzer defines as “an anti-Cartesian desire to penetrate ‘les sombres tunnels de l’inexprimable’”Footnote ²⁷ simply embodied chaos; others saw there a neighborhood. To discuss this, I return to Kenneth Reinhard’s theoretical musings on comparative literature. As I said in the Introduction, he coins the phrase “traumatic proximity,” which suggests a “comparative literature otherwise than comparison …, a mode of reading logically and ethically prior to similitude, a reading in which texts are not so much grouped into ‘families’ defined by similarity and difference, as into ‘neighborhoods’ determined by accidental contiguity, genealogical isolation, and ethical encounter.”Footnote ²⁸ Here he energizes the discipline by rethinking how we might group varying texts. The Tribuna, I suggest, functions analogously: Though all representations of “high” Western art, each unique thing gives way to a surprisingly mixed “neighborhood.”Footnote ²⁹

That these paratactically gathered items represented excellence but were intrinsically different, led – even after the room had been “cleaned up” – to Joseph Forsyth’s crisis, when he exclaims, “[w]hat a disparity of forms in a select cabinet! There every picture is a separate unit, and bears no relation to its neighbour”; and no “authority,” neither “Homer nor Virgil … nor Canova, nor the Venus which this Gallery has lost … can defend a mixture so barbarous.”Footnote ³⁰ Distinguishing something more baroque than classical, Forsyth’s observation of “barbarousness” which succumbs to no “authority” recalls most positively matter’s own turbulence. When Diana Coole discusses Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and the baroque, she notes how “matter swirls and metamorphoses,” forming “tiny folds that sustain their internal integrity across a continuous fabric of folds within folds.”Footnote ³¹ This is the animation that the room holds and that Forsyth resists: For him, it does not have the right to be “mixed.”

“A continuous fabric of folds within folds” in fact recalls the fantastic eclecticism found in Johann Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Figure 1.3). Many have discussed this painting’s “indecorous” and problematic sexual politics;Footnote ³² I introduce it here because it offers a kinesthetic composition that recreates some tourists’ sense of being overwhelmed by the “folds within folds” as artistic styles and genres become close neighbors, and visiting connoisseurs crowd tightly in this aesthetic cul-de-sac. Millar interprets the painting as “a mixture of indefatigable industry, cupidity, self-seeking and imagination.”Footnote ³³ Rather than a literal depiction, Zoffany’s Tribuna was, in Wolfgang Ernst’s words, “a marvelous misreflection.”Footnote ³⁴ And yet The Morning Chronicle wrote in 1780 that “this accurate picture has the same effect on the spectator which the gallery itself has on first entering it; the multitude of excellencies contained in it, dissipate our ideas, and it requires some time to arrange them before we can coolly examine the merit of any individual piece.”Footnote ³⁵ Conversely, how can one “restore” oneself after experiencing this room? Thrusting forth a shattering series of images, it forces our eyes to dart from one figure, painting, or sculpture to another, giving the modern viewer an inkling of what it was like to inhabit the eighteenth-century Tribuna.

Figure 1.3

Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1780).

Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023.

Rather than registering chaos, some travel accounts saw the room offering neighborly, though often tense, relations. Contrasting to Forsyth’s discomfort, and in one sense more in accord with Zoffany’s hectically swarming humans and things, Edward Gibbon (1764) listens for encounters between community members. First characterizing the Venus Victrix [the Belvedere Venus] as a “large hussy” in contrast to the Medici Venus, he then notes paradoxically that although the Venus d’Urania “is smaller than the Venus de’ Medici,” she “supports” her “formidable neighborhood … far better than her Companion.”Footnote ³⁶ When he wonders why Titian’s voluptuous Venus of Urbino (see painting at near center of Zoffany’s canvas in Figure 1.3) has not stirred the Medici Venus “to feel more [intensely] the movements that [the painting] inspires,”Footnote ³⁷ he experiences frustration that there is not more exchange and consideration of embodiment in the neighborhood.

Hester Thrale Piozzi, in Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), also thinks of the room as a vibrant neighborhood, but for her each occupant remains sensitive to the other:

Here, the statues broadcast their own agency as they interact: Political and physical difference unnerves the collection’s residents, the wrestlers’ passion and noise bully the Arrotino, and while the Venus and Titian’s “beauty” engage in an apparent beauty “contest,” still they band together to humble the humans visiting the room and taunt future artists. Piozzi’s sense of these statues’ agency anticipates Corinne when the narrator tells us that the Vatican holds “a collection of sculptured images of animals and reptiles, but, by chance, the statue of Tiberius is in the middle of this court. It was not a planned juxtaposition. These marble statues have arranged themselves around their master on their own” (C, p. 141). Piozzi and Staël, conscious of the rhythmic vitality in each of their respective rooms, both affirm the possibility that without any human intervention each neighbor responds to the vibrational pull of the other.

Highlighting each thing’s sentience, Piozzi becomes an optimist in contrast to her future (and Futurist) opposite, F. T. Marinetti, who most dramatically claims, “[m]useums: cemeteries! … Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings.”Footnote ³⁹ Rather than experiencing the alienated and paralytic loathing Marinetti identifies between things, Piozzi sees beings whose existences pulse with intense, knowing engagement and longing for belonging.Footnote ⁴⁰ Because the gallery’s pastiche-like nature stimulates ethical encounters in the things’ varying experiences, I suggest that her gaze does not displace these art works’ agency; instead, Piozzi evidently feels – and values – each thing’s force.

Others reject any neighborly belonging with by claiming that the Venus de’ Medici is not so much a part of the social goings-on but rather the most compelling figure in this Tribuna, a view that drives the community into a state of “hyper-competition.”Footnote ⁴¹ De Grancourt sees six statues, but among them “la Vénus de Médicis … surtout est le chef-d’œuvre de l’art” (“the Venus de Medici, above all, is the masterpiece of art”).Footnote ⁴² Thus, the Arrotino, the Wrestlers, the Dancing Faun, the Venus Belvedere, and the Celestial Venus become second-rate attractions in contrast to the celebrated goddess. Indeed, it comes to pass that she, and she alone, has the right to be there, an attitude that resists multiplicity, establishes hierarchical order, emphasizes possession over belonging, and causes a backlash against the Venuses that had originally lived in the neighborhood. In so doing, these Medici Venus worshippers often employ a taxonomy that defines the collection in terms of this one singular object, rendering her alone the thing that defined space and time in this chamber, even when she was absent from it, as she was between 1800 and 1815. So lauded was her unique power that she inadvertently effected a traumatic violence against her neighbors. For example, Joseph Addison (1703) remarks wryly that “[t]here is another Venus in that same Circle, that would make a good Figure any where else.”Footnote ⁴³ Anna Riggs Miller (1777) notes that the Urania or the Celestial Venus “would appear to much greater advantage, had the Venus of Medici still remained undiscovered.”Footnote ⁴⁴ And Arthur Young (1789) exclaims that “[i]n the same apartment there are other statues, but, in the presence of Venus, who is it that can regard them?”Footnote ⁴⁵ This emphasis on her singularity over either baroque “chaos” or thematic sequentiality eventually led to forced emigration – a literal depopulation and de-diversification occurred by 1782 – when the Medici goddess exerted enough supremacy to exile the other two Venuses into other museum rooms.

Tourists themselves become the collection’s collectors when they “de-collect” the room by ignoring almost everything but the Venus. In doing so, they create another syntax, one defying the singular plural, wherein the statue dominates her environs, and her neighbors and her viewers become her minions. Gibbon himself spent a lot of time “at the feet of the Venus of Medicis”; Mary Shelley, in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, distinguishes the Venus as the “matchless statue of the Queen of Beauty [who] reigns over the whole.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Given that in her History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) Shelley refers to Mont Blanc as the “queen of all,”Footnote ⁴⁷ naming the Venus as such in her Rambles shows the power the author accords to this statue. Belongings that had belonged with each other now belonged apart, except in contention.

1.2 The Pleasure of Measuring the “Humanness” of the Venus de’ Medici

Observers simultaneously idealize and humanize the Venus by seeing her as alive, a response I chart in Chapter 2, where Corinne considers things as animate. This slippage is often seen as reductive: that confusing the two forgets a thing’s representational status, or that such a response, flouting modernist doctrines of disinterest, merely reveals naiveté. Conversely, many scholars, myself included, locate complex and positive reasons for humans’ desire to connect to the nonhuman. From the late seventeenth century, “anthropological and ultimately psychological theories [developed] about what makes … art works exercise [so much] agency or excessiveness that viewers [come to] believe they possess significant characteristics of life”; this shifts in the nineteenth century, when such magical thinking “became increasingly discredited and marginalized in aesthetics, art history and the museum setting.”Footnote ⁴⁸ W. J. T. Mitchell explains that art’s seemingly magical power leads to a “double consciousness,” for viewers “behave as if pictures were alive, as if works of art had minds of their own,” while they simultaneously discern that of course this cannot be true.Footnote ⁴⁹ For the anthropologist Alfred Gell, the arts participate in a “vast … technical system” which he calls “the technology of enchantment”; here an observer’s knowledge of artists’ potency and the materials they use inspires awe.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, those seeing the Medici Venus wonder how the sculptor – an “occult technician”Footnote ⁵¹ – could have rendered stone into breathing, pulsing matter.

I argue that it was the Venus’s life force that magnetized tourists. So, while agreeing with van Eck, Mitchell, and Gell that art’s magically enchanting powers seduce, I am most drawn to Daniel N. Stern’s ideas that, biologically, vitality arouses our attention; the “four daughters of movement,” to use his phrase, galvanize our responsiveness toward dynamic mobility: The first “daughter” “unfolds in … time”; the second brings “with it the perception … of force(s) ‘behind’ or ‘within’ the movement”; this kinesis thirdly demarcates “a sense of ‘space’”; and the fourth daughter of movement “has directionality” and “intentionality” – it has somewhere to go; it is not inert.Footnote ⁵² This theory of vitality as irresistible perhaps partially explains why the Venus thrilled so many observers, for in her composition, these “four daughters” present themselves: Her arms, legs, knee, and her head advance temporally since an action propels her; onlookers perceive the physical impetus – they notice the musculature and sense the blood flow that galvanizes her; and her command of the room establishes her in space. I would further add that among these visitors there seems to be a primal need to experience the Venus’s nonhuman life force, and to feel, even if momentarily, that they live with what is not human. To that end, I analyze ways tourists tried to achieve this inkling of companionship.

In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s emphasis on the Medici Venus’s “blood” and “pulse” alerts us to her vitality. In fact, she metamorphoses before one’s eyes, becoming the nonhuman turning human as “she loves in stone” and we “inhale” her “ambrosial” breath.Footnote ⁵³ He asks, as others had before him, how a viewer’s equilibrium can be restored when in her presence:

Under the statue’s enchantment, “captives” long to belong with – and would never “depart” from – this lively matter, for though enchained, they become more animated, her movement inspiring them: They look and then look away, and their hearts “reel,” as if dancing. Movement ensues again with “Away!” as the narrator exiles the pedants and their static “paltry jargon,” but those with “eyes” feel the Venus’s heart pulsing beneath her marble complexion and, in response, their own blood beats faster.

Spectators wanted to interact with her skin – her marble – since it, resembling sunlight, evidently offered some living gift. Like a diamond’s sparkling quivers, this material is brightly luminous – in fact, as Michael Greenhalgh explains, in Greek “marmàiro” means “to shine”; one is drawn to “its beauty, solidity, and longevity, its colours and polishes, and its ability to reflect light.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Viewed in the round, the Medici Venus’s radiant Parian marble, semi-translucent and glowing, stimulated caressing, another means of breaking down this human–nonhuman binary and offering an omnium-gatherum of meanings. Its reflective material compelled spectators to agree that the sculptor, by giving the statue’s surface such shining brilliance, had fused the gap between marble and human. Here the emphasis was on le sentiment de la chair: “feeling” the statue’s responsive flesh, not simply by looking at it but by stroking it and, as I will discuss shortly, measuring its proportions.

Perhaps no one more strikingly portrayed the Venus as a biotic life force, an organic mélange among marble, human, and nature than Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his famous account from 1774, where she resembles

For Winckelmann, the sculptor has created in the Venus a resonating microsystem of the evolution of life in the kingdoms of flora and fauna, one that fluidly slips into an almost medical assessment of a “tender maiden’s” form. The tourist Anna Miller evinces cognizance of the sculptor’s power when she writes that the Venus’s “flesh seems flexible, and the softness and tenderness, yet justness of the muscles, is truly admirable.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Young senses that “the cold marble seems to acquire the warmth of nature, and promises to yield to the impression of one’s hand.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Gibbon describes the act of looking at the Venus as “[c]’est la sensation la plus voluptueuse que mon oeil ait jamais eprouvée. Les contours les plus moelleux, les plus elegans, une rondeur douce et pleine, la molasse de la chair communiquèe au marbre, et la fermetè qu’on desire encore dans cette chair exprimèe sans duretè” (“the most voluptuous sensation that my eye has ever experienced. The softest, the most elegant contours, a sweet and full roundness, the softness of flesh communicated to marble and the firmness one still desires in this flesh expressed without hardness”).Footnote ⁵⁹ These somatosensory observations about the Venus’s “vessels,” elegance, “flexible” flesh, “warmth,” “contours,” and soft, yet firm “roundness,” all communicated in marble, speak to how these viewers experience her as thrillingly alive and vital.Footnote ⁶⁰

Her movements seemed so alive that the living wanted to imitate them. The Elements of Dramatic Criticism (1775) urges actors to study the Venus to acquire “all the assistances” they could “from art, compatible with the nature of [their] profession” since the Venus and other statues guide actors to “adopt” their “attitudes with ease, as well as to be acquainted with the justness and truth, of their principles.”Footnote ⁶¹ Her élan vital explains why Erasmus Darwin (1796) claimed that she represented healthy womanhood: In lauding the “easy grace” of the Venus de’ Medici and suggesting her as an archetype for British women’s posture, one preferable to the “stiff erect attitude taught by some modern dancing masters,” he renders the statue’s vitality an exemplar of English and female national identity.Footnote ⁶²

Viewing, however, was apparently insufficient. One wanted the right to touch her too, and the measuring of the Venus’s body parts, an activity that affirmed her as a living woman they could intermingle pleasurably with, inspired that physical contact. This experience could be termed “haptic viewing.”Footnote ⁶³ Thomas Watkins (1794) savors “the magic sweetness of her countenance: the proportion and delicacy of her limbs [and] … the softness and fleshy semblance of the marble.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In rendering contiguous the Venus’s “flesh” and her delicate “proportion[s],” tourists recognized that measuring the statue was part of an interactive process that positioned beholders, paradoxically, in physical, intimate contact with “perfection.” Addison’s Interesting Anecdotes (1793) asserts that “the general cause of beauty … is a proportion, or an union and harmony, in all parts of the body”; and of course “[t]he finest example that can be seen … is the Venus of Medici.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Speaking to the persistence of this statue’s “perfection,” Florence Courtenay (1922) included the Venus’s proportions (so women could check theirs against hers) and referred to her as the “Ideal Feminine Form.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus, in belonging with the Venus, viewers might experience glorious excess: She has exceeded art and reality in her perfection, while being approachable enough to “yield to the impression of one’s hand,”Footnote ⁶⁷ her flesh rousing familiarity and interdependence with the nonhuman; touching her, paradoxically, did not function as a “benchmark of cognitive reliability” or “enforc[e] ontological distinctions between the ‘true’ and the ‘true-to-life,’”Footnote ⁶⁸ but made the Venus seem more life-like.

Because calculating her proportions requires touching her “parts,” this measuring exercise potentially inspired viewers to avoid binaries and let their senses and intellect work in enjoyable synchrony. Of course, given that the “flesh” was so lusciously appealing, measuring may have comprised a masking technique for agalmotophilia, experiencing a titillating attraction to the statue. I acknowledge that the Venus’s “pure harmony of proportion” could “safely neutraliz[e] [her] sensuality”Footnote ⁶⁹ since such practice seems to reduce the statue to numbers, a phenomenon Gérard Audran’s engraving illustrates (Figure 1.4), where lines and statistics tattoo her body. And yet, as Audran shows, these were measurements done in the round and so minutely apportioned that one could linger on the Venus’s most private parts. Moreover, the detachment allegedly fueling this exercise paradoxically sanctioned gallery-goers to touch the thing that seemed already so touchable as it literally brought viewers’ fingers into intimate convergence with the Venus’s beautiful “skin,” a practice which augmented the sensory quality of vision. I emphasize, though, that any of these reactions were possible (as well as many more) since there was not only one kind of tourist – a randy heterosexual male, who, in handling the Venus, sexually exploited her; after all, women participated in this pleasuring as well. For example, Miller, measuring the statue, efficiently reports that she turns from the “top of her hair to her heel,” and then gauges the Venus’s other parts, such as the ankles, wrists, waist, breast, and throat.Footnote ⁷⁰ In other words, there were many ways to coexperience her vitality.

Figure 1.4

Gérard Audran, The Venus de’ Medici (c. 1690). Engraving.

Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

Because measurers were engaging in a thing-theory practice with the Venus, it makes sense that they often came up with varying calculations as to her proportions (hence the trial’s subject this chapter’s préambule discusses). These deviations provide evidence that computing the “private” parts of anyone or anything might agitate or distract the measurer, who faces concrete questions about what those proportions might mean for them and for the matter they touch. Measurement can be construed as a “meeting of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social,’ … a potent moment in the construction of scientific knowledge – … an instance where matter and meaning meet in a very literal sense.”Footnote ⁷¹ Of course, the “natural” here in the Tribuna already constitutes the “social,” but in these “experiments,” wherein differing measurements arise, collaborations between statue and measurer demonstrate how “the world” is not “populated with individual things with their own independent sets of determinate properties.”Footnote ⁷² Thus these differences and these varying reactions to the statue underscore the drive to escape from one’s tiny human orbit and approach the nonhuman.

Measuring and pleasuring; sex and spirit. Doubtless, when oglers attributed nefarious, sexually manipulative intentions lurking beneath the Venus’s perfect proportions, they offered, to anticipate Corinne, a more “modern” perspective of alienation and dualism wherein form and content and sexuality and virtue battle. Conversely, humans interlacing with this statue could have sparked a way of measuring and interacting with vitality of another kind – the divine sort, given that classical architecture linked perfect proportions to the cosmic order.Footnote ⁷³ And while one cannot easily measure a building designed according to such laws, running hands over a human-sized statue allows one to read, braille-like, heavenly proportions. Measuring the Venus, then, offered a potential benefit: harmonizing with her balanced ratios, which echo the equilibrium of the universe. The cult-like context of viewing and measuring this statue in fact recalls how in ancient Greece, “the ritual act of touching statues of the gods … provided an opportunity to make tactile contact with the divine, reinforcing an understanding of the statue as divinity.”Footnote ⁷⁴ One of the goals of Embodied Experience is to study how authors connect or disconnect sexuality and virtue, so here I suggest that these two impulses – one spiritual and one sensuous – belonging with each other and felt simultaneously could have generated compound pleasure.

Section 1.3 of this chapter scrutinizes responses to the statue’s sexuality and gender as I examine how the Venus was interpreted as having intentionality – that fourth daughter of movement – as having motivations that for some fulfilled (and for others betrayed) expectations of that specifically female, and paradoxical, human performance known as modesty.

1.3 Something in the Way She Moves: The Venus de’ Medici’s Gendered History

As I have explored, observers do more than merely project their desires and fears onto the Venus de’ Medici – they engage in thing-theory practice when they express a need to belong with her: They ask what she “means” to say; they want to know the source of her vitality (the marble, the sculptor, her movement, her own volition); they want to touch her flesh and embrace her body; and they want to feel the balance of the universe beneath her – and consequently their own – skin. Here, and in Embodied Experience as a whole, I elucidate how hoping and trying to bridge the human and nonhuman is a good thing, though viewers could never know how the statue feels about them or what her discomforting and thrilling discoveries might be. Wanting matter to matter functions as a prerequisite for eighteenth-century debates about whether the Venus conformed to female gender ideals. In contemplating why she spins the way she does, her head turning to the left and her body to the right in a chiastic rhythm, beholders also queried her “morality.” Indeed, very few statues’ gestures or expressions have been scrutinized as thoroughly as the Venus’s for their intentions, as onlookers asked, “is she modest?” or “is she coy?” Assigning such agency and self-referentiality to the statue places her within the perspectives of eighteenth-century British and French fashions in gender taxonomy. At least two factors influenced the dispute: her perfect body measurements and her movement in space.

On the one hand, her perfect proportions – the origin of her “perfect beauty,” as Reynolds makes clear – evidently guarantee her morality, since, given the Venus’s classical origins, her physical form reflects her essence.Footnote ⁷⁵ This complies with classical theories of proportion and symmetry. As Vitruvius writes (about architecture) eurythmy (visual harmony) arises from “beauty and fitness in the adjustments of the members.”Footnote ⁷⁶ On the other hand, something in the way she moves catapults discord as spectators respond to her. For James Beattie (1783) her visual vocabulary offers universal knowledge of morality, since her “bending, shrinking form” expresses “conscious beauty united with modesty”; such doubling arises because “our knowledge of the influence of human thoughts upon the human body … enables us to discern these meanings in [her] attitudes.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Edmund Burke, among others, offers full accolades for her morals, which he finds her body embodies: “[T]his roundness, this delicacy of attitude and motion” in which “all the magic of grace consists, and what is called its je ne sais quoi … will be obvious to any observer who considers attentively the Venus de Medici.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Conversely, the Earl Bishop of Bristol and Derry condemned the statue in 1794 as “détestable – l’attitude d’une Coquette ou d’une Putain,” a prostitute, no less.Footnote ⁷⁹

While it is not precisely “obvious” what the Venus’s movement represents, it is her spiraling – the moment when she tries to move out of her kinesphere, shifting her weight by lifting her foot – that stimulates perceivers to interact with her.Footnote ⁸⁰ In order to demonstrate her refractive energies and to explore the ways her mobility in space led observers to examine her moral intentions, I begin by responding to Barrell’s “‘The Dangerous Goddess,’” which contends that “the extraordinary fascination the Venus de’ Medici exerted over eighteenth-century” viewers arises from the “absence of a narrative context” associated with her; this places her in contrast to the Venus Victrix/Belvedere, who holds an apple “to indicate in what contest she had been victorious”Footnote ⁸¹ – she is easily deciphered since she has won Paris’s beauty “pageant” and the golden apple. But since the Medici Venus lacks “visible signs or tokens,” to quote from Aristotle, she could not be “recognized” within a specific context.Footnote ⁸² For Barrell, absent emblems left her vulnerable to the connoisseur’s own story-crafting powers. So, while sculpture “resist[s] … narrative,”Footnote ⁸³ a “standard” account was concocted: In this, the Venus’s dynamism itself confirms her seductive intentions toward the (male) gazer, she fails to obey canons of female modesty, and instead she concretizes the gender stereotype of the manipulative vamp, the Earl Bishop’s “putain.” This story inevitably ends with the Venus’s victory “over the civic spectator” – since the statue has “conquered his reason.”Footnote ⁸⁴ He quotes from Joseph Spence’s Polymetis to delineate the typical narrative (the italicized lines are those Barrell omits):

While agreeing with Barrell that Spence ridicules this storyline, I add that the latter’s judgment can only arise because of the ways she moves and because, by willingly rotating around her, he willingly practices thing theory. That is, in carefully gazing at the Venus and trying to belong with her, he debates with other connoisseurs’ reactions to construe his own reflections and feelings. Thus, his line, “[h]aving considered her, in this very view,” refers not only to the antiquarian’s view, to the view in which she allegedly seems most seductive – but in relation to other visual perspectives of her body.

This passage reveals Spence experiencing a “haptic twist, the grounding of language in embodiment.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In other words, this “Venus-in-motion” – her radiance unfolding in time and space and her movement expressing force and directionalityFootnote ⁸⁷ – incites variegated responses, which means that no one narrative could ever culminate in just one way or always end “in a conquest.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Further, in addition to questioning that prevailing account, Spence converses with the Venus, herself: His statement that this conquest plot “is not justified by the statue itself” suggests a dialogue with her. That is, the “statue itself” has something to say in this matter. So, although I agree that the “conquering” narrative does feature prominently in male responses to the Venus, I argue that this thing’s movement in space provokes numerous and contradictory storylines to materialize, and that even these accounts run with each other and sometimes collide. I am not, of course, alleging that Barrell claims that the standard version he identifies is the only plot, but I will spotlight just how many there are and how, even when tourists repeat each other’s observations, subtleties abound.

The Venus’s movement asserts the right to prismatic interpretations since gazing at her arouses stereotypes and shatters them. For example, James Thomson’s description of the Venus changes so many directions that it recreates her shimmering movements through poetic space, and, as with Spence, the statue triggers Thomson to dispute the conquest story.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Liberty (1735), the poet’s vignette might seem initially to repeat a hackneyed scenario of seductive calculations, but when he ponders what constitutes the Venus’s intentions, the poet punctures this storyline.Footnote ⁹⁰ In presenting the Medici Venus as uncommonly lively – it bends, looks aside, turns, smiles, and swells – and as literally impressing herself upon the viewer’s body and psyche, Thomson limns “the dangerous moment,” the “moment of animation”:Footnote ⁹¹

The speaker finds himself caught in the agon between his own reaction to the statue and those he has been “taught” to hold. Thus, rather than describing merely a falsehearted marble who has been “well-taught” to flirt with and then subdue men, the compound adjective carries a double, dissenting meaning insofar as connoisseurs, too, have been “well-taught” to duplicate previous observers’ sensations and accounts. This is especially pertinent given how challenging tourists find seeing once they become familiar with the travel descriptions preceding them.

The statue impresses her energy on his. In doing so, the narrator, “dangerously godlike,” becomes both “the sculpting agent” in poetically forming the Medici Venus by deciding what she is thinking, as well as the “sculpting object,” since the statue and the “mainstream” account of her also form him – ultimately steering him from the “well-taught” view.Footnote ⁹³ We see him being “sculpted” when he first presents the statue’s vanity and affectation as unquestionable, but then, in the phrase “As if,” he questions whether the stone actually does subjugate the beholder. These two words refer to a predictable dialogue – “Is it/she really alive? Does it/she really have feelings?” “No of course not” – while they simultaneously question whether this Venus obdurately triumphs and gloats.

The statue continues to resculpt the narrator’s seemingly predictable view by confusing and refining his attitude, as is evident when he declares that the statue seems to him so human that “the deluded eye the marble doubts.” While this familiarly reiterates how artistic skill renders marble flesh human-like, the syntax also suggests that the observer doubts that the statue does subjugate her male ogler. Further, the grammar can also imply that the marble – the Venus, herself – is thinking, is “doubting.” Perhaps she fires up misgivings, causing him to wonder if she judges his eye as “deluded,” one tempted to exploit her as a pornographic image.Footnote ⁹⁴ Accordingly, her gaze transforms him into the subject of her thoughts about his or the stock narrative’s tendency toward sexual power mongering.Footnote ⁹⁵ This “doubting” invites us to reread the earlier lines: Since it is “dubious” whether she mixes “Vain conscious beauty, a dissembled sense/ Of modest shame, and slippery looks of love,” the narrator thus tests whether or not she dissimulates in order to conquer. Further suggestive, the word “mix” intimates her “mixed” – that is, complicated – character, one with prismatically propelled intentions. Readers, then, should remain “dubious” as to whether Thomson’s lines respond predictably to the Venus’s supposedly bewitching powers. The poet’s description, rendered in rapidly fluctuating “slippery” tones, provides a thing theory that defends this nonhuman thing – this statue – as an entity with the right to move toward belonging with, rather than surrendering to the separation endemic in the “conquest” narrative.Footnote ⁹⁶

The common storyline, as I have been suggesting, seems applicable only to a male scopophiliac; thus, what impressions might emerge when the observer is someone else entirely, or when, for example, the observer connects emotionally to the statue’s flight? For example, Jane Waldie crusades against dishonoring the Venus and wants, in the face of the standard narrative, to restore her to nobility. In disputing “that this modest-looking creature represents the shameless Phryne, who, at the celebration of the Eleusinian Games, exhibited herself coming out of the bath to the eyes of all Athens,” Waldie fiercely upholds the statue’s decency, exclaiming that she “can never have patience” with such a “conjecture.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Inherent in Waldie’s defense and in that of others is the ability to belong with the statue, such that one slips from art degradation to the need to secure justice for the nonhuman.

I propose then that a second plot – a “Susanna and the Elders” chronicle – devolves that recognizes the statue’s rights. Here beholders interpret the Medici Venus as having been spied rising from the water by an unknown and/or dangerous intruder and hopes to cover herself with her own hands. Keats, alluding to such a threat, depicts the Venus as “looking sideways in alarm.”Footnote ⁹⁸ William Gilpin (1798) finds the “Susanna” narrative most plausible. Conveying what he imagines as originally causing her pose, he writes, “‘shrunk from herself, / With fancy blushing,’—she received the shot of the prophane eye that surprised her, as our modern heroes in dueling receive a bullet, by instantly drawing her body into a profile. In both cases nature teaches the easiest and most commodious posture.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Here the leering “eye,” not the Medici Venus, is profane; and her movement, protective rather than coquettish, is one conatus – that is, striving to preserve one’s life force – galvanizes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Simultaneously vulnerable and powerful, she uses her hands to armor her body, a modification we will see paralleled in Chapter 5, when women employ hats to disguise their faces. Thus, even the Goddess of Love – even a putain – should be able to assert her right to privacy, should be able to refuse male notice, should be able to exercise the virtue of survival.

Maximilien Misson’s Nouveau Voyage (1691) offers a storyline about the intentions behind her twists and turns that anticipates Waldie’s and Gilpin’s perspectives, only to end with a third, one focusing on the disjunction between her hands and her naked body. The Venus de’ Medici “places her right hand in front of her breast, but at some distance; with her other hand, she covers [her parties génitales] but without touching them; she softly leans down, and moves her right knee a bit forward, as if to hide herself, if that were possible.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Here Misson acknowledges her modest attempts to shield her defenseless body, but then finds such efforts erotically fascinating, given that she shifts her knee only “a bit forward” and distances her hand from her breasts, observations leading him to conclude that she will fail, for to conceal herself is not “possible”: Ironically, her attempts render her even more a casualty of his gaze. How can we read her knee and hands’ inability to cover those private parts? Insightfully evoking the Venus’s – or any object’s – vulnerability to human domination, Barrell underscores how this gap “enabled her to be seen, engraved, and painted, from angles which frustrated her attempt to conceal her sexual parts.”Footnote ¹⁰² Given the emphasis I place on her motility, I would add that her hands do not completely cover her intimate “parts” because she herself is in motion, her velocity preventing her arms from rigidly attaching to anything, while her swirling intensifies the instantaneous “alarm” she experiences.

Gilpin recognizes that the statue and the viewers’ twisting and turning impact how one interprets her morality. Apparently trying to assert justice for the statue, he offers another narrative, that scrutinizing her from the “wrong” point of view sparks accusations of immodesty:

In other words, the statue’s “morality” is relative to the examiner’s station as he or she appraises the Venus’s “attitude” – since from the frontal angle she is “chaste” while from the others she apparently throws out not an alarmed response, but a tantalizingly erotic invitation. For Gilpin, then, the responsibility falls on the spectator to observe her from the most “virtuous” angle, rather than the one showing body parts that she cannot cover. And yet this advice suggests that any woman/thing viewed in the round, from varying angles, will never look completely virtuous.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

To summarize these narratives, the Venus, by whirling in space, stimulates audiences’ self-exploration; vanquishes them; reveals her modesty; is innocently encroached upon; and titillates with “modesty.” Interpreting her kinesis, these tourists historicize the Venus by writing meta-narratives about gender conformity and emancipation from orthodox expectations. Assorted reactions to her reveal that viewing things is an act as unstable and volatile as things themselves. As I consider in Section 1.4, the Medici Venus’s Greek origins, Roman incarnation, and Italian arms and hands (seventeenth-century restorations) destabilize her in further ways: She embodies each period’s fashionable gender styles, and, as I will unearth in Section 1.4, fashionable politics, for it will take a revolution and then an empire to render her an heroic icon.

1.4 History in the Collection: The Venus as Heroic

What validity do collections have? Can they themselves and their belongings be justified? How might their things’ presence – albeit it in an artificial space – remind visitors to connect radiantly with the nonhuman? Susan Stewart argues that “self-enclosure” and ahistoricism characterize the collection, which “replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The museum’s design, Gillen D’Arcy Wood asserts, is partly to blame: “With its open spaces and blank walls, [it] isolates ancient artefacts from their social and geographical origin, creating the … loss Schiller diagnosed in the modern subject’s perception of antiquity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Though applicable to some galleries, these attributions pertain neither to the Tribuna nor to how viewers field their ripostes to its art objects. First, as I discussed in Section 1.1, the room’s diversity eclipses a definition like the one Susan Pearce offers: “[C]ollections are essentially composed of objects which bear an intrinsic relationship to each other in a sequential or representative sense, rather than each being valued for its own qualities.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ “Collection objects,” she continues, have a “quality of separateness …. They are wrenched out of their own true contexts and become dead to their living time and space in order that they may be given an immortality within the collection.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Tribuna’s sculpture had indeed been “wrenched” from its Greek and then Roman origins, but in its afterlife, it was never separate or alienated from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history.

This gallery and its objects show how a collection can “concretize” and render more material our historical awareness. Certainly, Napoleon anachronistically and accidentally contradicts Stewart’s claim that “[a]ll collected objects are … objets de lux, objects abstracted from use value and materiality within a magic cycle of self-referential exchange,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ for, when he first saw – and coveted – the Venus de’ Medici in 1796, he further incarnated her into the temporal and thus into history as a fully material and useful being. Tommaso Puccini, the gallery’s director, knew that the future Emperor lusted after the Venus; anticipating the French conquest of Tuscany, he had her transported to Palermo for safekeeping, though by 1802 she was surrendered to the French and sent on a journey to Paris.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Launched by historical events, her traveling left her pedestal in the Tribuna gapingly empty until 1815, altering the Uffizi and art history. What did it mean to see the room vacant of her beauty? Conversely what did it mean to see her once again illuminating the Tribuna after Waterloo? For Jean Baudrillard, “even though objects may on occasion lead into the realm of social discourse, it must be acknowledged that it is usually not an object’s presence but far more often its absence that clears the way for social intercourse.”Footnote ¹¹¹ This applies trenchantly to the Venus, whose absence defines a new historical moment for her and for her gallery. Her presence in and then absence from her home reminds us that “the ways that people dwell in spaces and spaces respond to people” renders them “habitable to one another.”Footnote ¹¹² Though this nonhuman thing is not a “person,” people treated her as such.

The sense that the Venus de’ Medici belonged with the Tribuna and embodied the museum and Florence is borne out in the ways that perceivers felt her presence as intensely – or more – once she was removed from the gallery as they had when she lodged there. John Chetwode Eustace, traveling to Italy in 1802, claims that the “temple” which once held the Venus is now “abandoned by its celestial inhabitant,” and the gallery, “stripped of its principal ornaments,” displayed “so many vacant frames and unoccupied pedestals, that we found ourselves more disposed to regret its absent than to admire its present beauties.”Footnote ¹¹³ For him, the gallery, having experienced violence, now becomes a spiritual shrine to a revenant – the “celestial” goddess – whose absence renders it impossible for sightseers to enjoy what is there. By 1805, Napoleon’s plunders had left the collection, like a battlefield, a skeleton with empty spaces and spectral images, words which reinforce the need to reunify art objects in their original location, not to unify Europe under Napoleon. And though he did not particularly admire the statue, Kotzebue nevertheless directs our gaze to the “pedestal on which the Medicean Venus stood”: It is “empty; and it is supposed that it can never be occupied again.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Duplicating Kotzebue’s verb, the tourist James Wilson (1816) notes that Canova’s Venus had “occupied the place of the Venus de’ Medici in the Tribune, while she was in captivity at Paris.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Here, the “social intercourse”Footnote ¹¹⁶ that such absence inspires is emphatically political, as the war-imbued words “occupied” and “captivity” resonate with the capture of Florence, the Venus’s incarceration, and the imperialist ambition to conquer the civilization by emptying the museum. In the face of cultural warfare, the Venus anticipates Eugène Delacroix’s The 28th of July: Liberty Leading the People (1830) as an embodiment of hope.Footnote ¹¹⁷

To grasp the Venus de’ Medici’s new historical role as incarnating emancipation it helps to contrast this symbolic status to an earlier one. J. R. Hale suggests that Robert Merry’s Laurel of Liberty: A Poem (1790), dedicated to the National Assembly of France, makes the Venus “the symbol of Florence”:Footnote ¹¹⁸

Written when the Venus was still residing in Florence, Merry can feel that while slavery exists, her power means very little, for injustice against humans vacates the significance of these “treasured gems.” By the time she lives in Paris, however, a sense of her as an embodiment of Florence and freedom renders her a being who needs to be in residence: She is something, for now she represents emancipation. Forsyth also touches on the Venus as embodying national liberty when he invites us to contemplate her possible owners. As he bemoans the lost “treasures of the Tribuna” he catalogues the multiple claims to ownership of the statue.

Who possesses this thing is as unstable as what it signifies since each ruler avows the right to own her. Only Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, recognizes the Venus as a belonging, for he wants her to be multiply shared – by the nation that is. How could the Venus be other than a possession if claimed by such abstractions as a “family” or a “crown” or even an institution holding onto this thing until some “stronger claim should prevail”? Carol Duncan writes that “art museums constitute one of those sites in which politically organized and socially institutionalized power most avidly seeks to realize its desire to appear as beautiful, natural, and legitimate.”Footnote ¹²¹ Certainly these princes’ claims on the Venus as their property, as well as Napoleon’s plundering, truly legitimize the “naturalness” of the statue’s presence in the collection and in the “nation,” since her removal comes to embody the spectacularly “unnatural.” But to invert Duncan’s point, the Emperor’s ransacking made him – and not the museum – the entity that institutionalizes power.

The Medici goddess’s unoccupied foundation reminds travelers of what “institutionalized power” really is when it enhances interest in one particular sculptural grouping that was still present: the Niobe statues (c. 330 BCE–c. 250 BCE). New appreciation for that grieving mother and her fourteen dead children rendered touristic acclaim a patriotic performance, as this parent’s agony came to exemplify the conflict Napoleon propagated; preferring her became a protest against French taste, which found “fault” with the Niobe group, placing it “on the whole much lower in the scale of excellency” than other works of art.Footnote ¹²² Additionally, in 1802, Niobe was a statue onlookers could identify with since she offered to them, as she does to Corinne, “dignity despite extreme grief” (C, p. 355). Finally, these observers could connect to this mythological figure, assaulted by “the vengeance of heaven and not [by] passions born in the human heart” (C, p. 140), given that a God-like force – Napoleon – was also levying destruction on them.

The Venus de’ Medici’s absence from the gallery stimulated historical recall of political and aesthetic liberty – recall of their own rights. And yet, remembrance was insufficient. The Florentines required an embodied Medici Venus – they desired the thing – and in her absence, they sought to restore it in two ways, both of which propel the statue and her constituents into art history’s history. First, they put another statue, the Venus Victrix / Belvedere, who had already been subject to several centuries of “plastic surgeons,” back on the table to make her resemble the Venus de’ Medici.Footnote ¹²³ In Kotzebue’s words, they broke off “the two arms of this Venus,” which once held an apple, and “substitut[ed] two new ones with the bend of the Medicean. It now makes a droll appearance.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Changes that were “droll” to Kotzebue seem in retrospect mutilating attempts to resuscitate what was lost. For D’Arcy Wood, the arrival of the Elgin Marbles in London “interrupt[s]” the “Georgian sentimentalization of Ancient Greece”;Footnote ¹²⁵ however, at least for travelers to Italy, I suggest that that process started much earlier as tourists, from the eighteenth century onward, viewed the fragments of and alterations to both Venuses’ bodies, reconstructions that made visible relationships between the histories of fashion and politics. Not only do the Medicean arms mar the Venus Victrix / Belvedere, but her immobility (no whirling or twisting here) speaks of the despair that liberty will not be restored. Simultaneously, resembling the statue of King Mitys’ mighty power to right wrongs – by falling on and killing the King’s murderer – the Venus de’ Medici manifests the potency to mobilize change and restore justice. These restorations could be said to constitute what Bal has represented as a traumatic event “reenacted as drama rather than synthetically narrated by the memorizing agent who ‘masters’ them,”Footnote ¹²⁶ since in a vain attempt to soothe the human psyche they perform a violent drama against things, disfiguring the statue in their hope that, in its metamorphosed state, it could heal, a point I return to explore further in Chapter 2.

There was another way in which the Florentines tried to belong with the exiled Venus, a move that further grounded her historically. They hoped to fill “la dolente Perdita” of the statue’s absence for the sake of the homeland when, in 1803, Giovanni degli Alessandri, president of the Florentine Academia delle Belle Arti, asked Canova to copy the Venus de’ Medici.Footnote ¹²⁷ Significantly Alessandri requested a simulacra, albeit one that was “corrected,” that is, lacking the “excessively long”Footnote ¹²⁸ Baroque arms and fingers the seventeenth-century sculptor Ercole Ferrata had added to the statue (a restoration I examine also in Section 1.5). Ultimately Canova did not send a reproduction to the Uffizi, but a sculpture of his own “invenzione,”Footnote ¹²⁹ the Venere Italica. Further, he refused to position his sculpture on the Medici Venus’s plinth, which he wanted to remain empty. As a testimony to the necessity of having a Venus de’ Medici, if not the real one, in the Uffizi, the public cheered the 1812 Venere Italica’s arrival in Florence, and poems were written in its honor, evidence of a civic enthusiasm which suggests it functioned metonymically as a sign that the Florentines might at some point reoccupy their own city.Footnote ¹³⁰ However, Canova’s “replacement” diverges so stylistically from the original that it testifies to a point I make in Chapter 4 about how adaptation redistributes the élan vital of any object recreated, restored, recycled, or revised.

Once the purloined original was returned to its home (1815), and Canova’s Venere Italica was transferred to the Pitti Palace, viewers must have seen the Venus de’ Medici with new eyes, given her travels to Palermo, her Parisian incarceration, and her victorious return to Florence. What might it mean that Napoleon touched her, potentially contaminating her with his measuring hands (since he surely did measure her), rendering her a scrap of herself? Or instead, did she seem more complete, having survived and returned from her Parisian internment? Stuart Semmel has suggestively argued that post-Waterloo tourism offered a more “tangibl[e],” a less “mediat[ed]” understanding of history, since “[v]isiting sites and handling objects that had been inscribed by Napoleon now appeared to offer a means of communing with the fallen ruler, or of understanding the recent war and its terrible slaughter.”Footnote ¹³¹ Given this, how could she have been seen as “the same”? Simultaneously evoking a Grecian and then Roman past, a Medician moment, a Baroque refurbishment, a French displacement, and a present Florentine existence, her salmagundi of lives unfolds in historical time. The Venus does not become “dead to [its] living time and space in order that [it] may be given an immortality within the collection”;Footnote ¹³² instead, her position in and out of the Tribuna intensifies her impact on and place in history.

In Section 1.5, I turn to Edgeworth’s Belinda, which draws on the Venus de’ Medici’s histories – her human–nonhuman dynamism; her restorations; and her gendered “behavior,” including claims of her positive and nefarious intentions – to present the statue in another historical role: the feminist work of liberating female characters from ideals of perfection and conformity.

1.5 Lady Delacour and the Venus de’ Medici’s Beautiful Mixtures

The Venus de’ Medici’s celebrity status indicates Edgeworth’s own interest when, in Belinda, she invokes the statue twice, both times in relation to Lady Delacour. Deborah Steiner explains that a statue referred to in a literary work “imports into the text all the powers, properties, and associations that it possesses in the lives of the audience.”Footnote ¹³³ The Venus “imports” such material tidings into Belinda, and via its characters explores the statue’s many narratives as well as the real-life activity of tourists who judged Venus’s modesty, recalculated her perfect measurements, and assessed her brokenness and restorations, those injuries just on and under her body’s surface.

Eighteenth-century and Romantic-era culture seek out quantitative benchmarks by which to calculate behavior as appropriate and seemly, as authentic and reliable, a point I return to in Chapter 3, where I assay Belinda’s repeated references to measuring diamonds. We see this echoed in the ways that the Venus’s presence introduces the classical canon into the novel, as when Hervey is called “a connoisseur in female grace and beauty,” and when Belinda’s match-making aunt offers a “course of documenting,” one instructing young women in how to be favorably measured according to standards of behavior and financial worth (B, pp. 8, 10). The measuring of the Venus reflects ways that during the late eighteenth century, “sculpture bec[ame] a kind of model … for man as species.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Petras Camper, an influential eighteenth-century scientist-aesthete, claiming that Greek sculpture represented a touchstone for beauty because its proportions were perfect, calculated a geometric value for determining nationality, race, and, of course, beauty. He found it “amusing to contemplate an arrangement of [skulls], placed in a regular succession” that demonstrated the supposedly progressive teleology of perfection from an ape to the African to the Chinese to the European to the Greek (represented in sculpture).Footnote ¹³⁵

Given the Venus’s reception history and the novel’s varying stances toward proportion, I suggest that in Belinda, beauty as perfect ratio reveals its own contradictions in questions of measuring and measurements. Hobson observes that “[t]he importance of ancient sculpture as a cultural value in the late eighteenth century is not news. What is perhaps more novel is its relation to the practice of measurement, and to a search for standards of measurement.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Belinda introduces the practice of measuring in kaleidoscopic ways: in regard to emotional strain, when characters are “provok[ed] … beyond measure” (B, p. 67); when weighing moral issues – “the most moral ladies … do not expect men to be as moral as themselves—so we may suit the measure of our external indignation to our real feelings” (B, p. 149); and when reinforcing Lady Delacour’s own witty embrace of imbalance: She is, she reports, “beyond measure astonished that any thing relative to lord Delacour could so far have interested her attention” and she claims that Lady Anne “is kind, beyond measure, to Helena … to provoke me” (B, pp. 189, 120). The activity arises also in instances of objective measurement, as when Hervey cuts Belinda’s hair to test whether it compares to Madame de Grignan’s (B, p. 76), or when Belinda devises an experiment with phosphorous to help Juba see that his belief that “the figure of an old woman, all in flames,” which appeared to him every night is incommensurable with reality. And even when the word “measure” itself does not appear, Belinda incorporates the concept in its exploration of “standards” of skin color, nationality, and of gendered formations of virtue and modesty.

Certainly, what constitutes appropriate measure also impacted this novel’s revisions. Edgeworth must have been made to feel she had gone “beyond measure,” since, when told to do so, she excised from Belinda’s later editions the biracial marriage and the heroine’s engagement to Mr. Vincent, a Creole gambler. In cutting the latter, Edgeworth expunged any indication that her eponymous heroine has flaws – or that she has the right to make mistakes. And that flaw was that Belinda had split feeling from reason to commit herself to Vincent: Her hyper-rational decision to marry him without love lacks proportion and thus goes “beyond measure.” In letting Belinda choose the wrong suitor and listen to the wrong mentor (Lady Anne) – in short to make mistakes – and in offering her a second chance to marry, the early edition reiterates the call for an “ideal” character that is mixed and fragmented, one resembling the Lady Delacour-Venus de’ Medici double. Belinda’s revised edition discards as refuse what is imperfect. Mark Canuel demonstrates that when theoreticians of beauty emphasize symmetry and proportion in their definitions, they delimit the beautiful to the normative, “restrict[ing] membership to those who symmetrically replicate and share the same heritage, looks, or attitudes.”Footnote ¹³⁷ As will become clear, I find that Belinda makes a similar argument, insofar as it criticizes definitions of beauty and reason dependent on sterile, rigid notions of symmetria when they are used to support gender conformity.

In a conversation alluding to the Venus de’ Medici, the characters discuss measurement and its relation to gender, obliquely exploring how or if the classical canon establishing a statue’s proportions could or should be applied to evaluate future wives. Clarence Hervey, delivering a bracelet to Belinda that she has left behind at her aunt’s house, says,

The bracelet works as a go-between to introduce the hero and heroine and to forecast their future marriage, as Hervey places it, like a gigantic ring, on Belinda’s arm. The bangle also then ties the Venus’s arms to standards of proportion and then to female virtue. As tourists did when they observed and judged the statue, here the characters interrogate a thing’s morality, trustworthiness, and artful style, or lack thereof. Their exchange indicates that the proportions of classical statues offered a common conversational topic and a way to adjudicate female beauty. Addison, claiming that “from the Bigness of any one Part” of the Venus de’ Medici, “it is easy to guess at all the rest, in a Figure of such nice Proportions,”Footnote ¹³⁸ reveals how an arm’s individual segments could be seen to calculate as a whole a body’s physical percentages, especially in cultures where clothes covered so much of the physique. In this passage, the characters and the Venus share the same nouns, and literary muscle and tissue belong with marble, rendering contiguous the boundaries between measuring the arms, ankles, and virtues of three women and one ancient statue.

Even the apparently comic reference to the “defects and absurdities of Mrs. Luttridge’s wig,” which in this context implies that it lacks a proportional relationship to her body, links physical ratio and measurement to serious assessments of women and statues.Footnote ¹³⁹ In this way, Belinda satirizes contemporary perspectives urging women to emulate these touchstones. John Bennett’s Letters to a Young Lady (1795) advises his audience to “examine authors of all different persuasions, as the Grecian artist did women, when he wished to paint his Venus of Medici. He selected from every one he saw, the particular limb or feature, in which they separately excelled” so as to form “a perfect whole.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Belinda’s Venus mocks Bennett’s young ladies, those who go to school with the sculptor to learn how to “[c]ollect … distinct charms, and work them up in the crucible of [their] heart, till they produce ‘the very beauty of holiness’ in their life and conversation.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Bennett’s emphasis on collecting parts anticipates Victor Frankenstein, who creates a monster by rendering “his limbs … in proportion” and selecting his “features as beautiful.”Footnote ¹⁴² Indeed, the company, while replicating touristic fashions, reminds us, from a feminist viewpoint, that women viewed the Venus as well as men, and that they forged a likeness between themselves and the statue, though not only according the standard narrative of it as an erotic tease.

Belinda connects the human and nonhuman by bringing the Venus “home,” so to speak. Engendering a complex fantasy, Clarence associates Lady Delacour with the Venus, a bond fashioned when he had first seen the statue in the Tribuna, also the occasion on which he and Dr. X first met. The doctor, however, finding that Hervey still admires Lady Delacour years later, ascertains disproportion in the object itself and in this infatuation’s longevity, valuations he finds that go “beyond measure”:

No doubt Clarence and the doctor measured the Venus when together they visited her in the Tribuna, and this is an act the doctor pursues anew, though he now twists to a painting metaphor so as to make a moral measurement – she wears too much make-up. Hervey, imperfectly seeing Lady Delacour’s body, compares it to the classical statue as perfect; unbeknownst to him, however, the appraisal is apropos, given that both the art object and the character have been wounded and broken into pieces. Here Dr. X, taking on the connoisseur’s and the moralist’s roles, negatively binds Lady Delacour and the Venus by judging the ethics of both and by denying the former the right to age and yet remain beloved. As the novel interlaces perfect proportion and questions of modesty with the restoration of Lady Delacour’s character, it has a rich source to draw on: the “questionable” modesty and the restorations of the Medici Venus herself.

Belinda’s characters, to requote Gilpin, “call” Lady Delacour’s “attitude into question” – assessing her “pose” and the angles from which she should be viewed when Clarence, unbeknownst to Lady Delacour, spurs the doctor to “count” her pulse: “Look through the door at the shadow of queen Elizabeth’s ruff—observe how it vibrates; the motion as well as the figure is magnified in the shadow. Cannot you count every pulsation distinctly?” (B, p. 115). To reuse Gilpin’s phrase, I suggest that in this action, Dr. X “measures” the fictional character with a “shot of the prophane eye.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Viewed from the “wrong angle,” she is “shot” again, this time by eyes, rather than the butt of a gun. The act is “prophane” because the scientific method of medical diagnosis is wholly secular but also because it sacrilegiously violates her right to privacy. Yet medical practice here collides with aesthetic viewing. Reinforcing the interlacing between Lady Delacour and the Venus, Dr. X and his company’s experimentation parallels a fashionable eighteenth-century viewing practice: gazing at statuary by torchlight, a method Winckelmann inspired, one which “isolated each part of each figure by turn” and whetted visitors’ “alertness to minute particulars,” as when he expressed “fastidious anxiety about the depth of the Venus de’ Medici’s navel.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ These overlapping aesthetic and therapeutic diagnostics recall the Susanna and the Elders’ plotline we saw affixed to the Venus, since they render Lady Delacour vulnerable to the doctor’s sharp watchfulness, a critique which, if she were to observe, would no doubt cause her to turn away and try to protect herself with her hands, as the Venus does.

In measuring Lady Delacour’s blood flow as he gazes at her pulse throbbing on the wall, Dr. X reminds us that the character and statue belong together: The former’s hectic palpitations remind us that she faces the literal threat of anatomical dissection in her anticipated mastectomy and that the latter comingles “[b]lood, pulse, and breast”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ with dismemberments and “corrections.” As I said previously in this section, it was commonplace when viewing the Venus to lament not only her physical ruptures, but even more so, the restorations she had undergone throughout history. These responses often veered toward sentimentality or a pretense toward connoisseurship, which included a rote critique of her arms and fingers, which Ferrata had added. Jonathan Richardson (1722) found her fingers to be “excessively long, and taper,”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ rendering them as prostheses rather than organic restitutions. In Belinda, the Venus’s presence – smashed and refurbished – triggers thoughts about what kinds of restorations might be organic enough to preserve both the statue’s and Lady Delacour’s zèle.

Belinda links reclaiming Lady Delacour’s modesty with the rebuilding of her body from illness to health and of her ethics from apparent rake to beloved wife – one who belongs within a circle of authentic friends. The novel maps out these alterations by registering her change in “attitude” or position: how she “places” herself in relation to her husband and daughter and her willingness to rely on Dr. X’s restoration of her health. As we gaze at the Venus resting one hand over her breast, we also see Lady Delacour covering her own wounded breast. In a mise en abyme effect, the fictional character, her body mangled from the face to the waist, gothically embodies the statue’s pose when she “bar[es] one half of her bosom, … reveal[ing] a hideous spectacle” (B, pp. 32). Here Lady Delacour, appearing disjointed physically, belongs with the fractured statue’s demonstrable “wounds.”

Though written later, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1838 description of the Venus seems to do double duty for the mayhem both the statue and Lady Delacour have endured: Recording that she has “suffered terribly,” her arms having been “severed,” her waist “broken,” and her head “snapped off,” he still asserts that “all these injuries do not … impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been re-united. … I am glad to have seen this Venus and to have found her so tender and so chaste.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Hawthorne wants readers and bystanders to “enter into” the statue’s life,Footnote ¹⁴⁸ to feel how “terribly” she has “suffered” in being ruptured into more than forty-two pieces, his verbs – “severed” and “snapped” – palpably recreating the movements that maimed her. For Hawthorne and for Belinda both the Venus and Lady Delacour turn out to be “chaste,” and while the fictional character’s restoration evidently makes her happier, as it does her friends and family, the novel never suggests that she has been rendered perfectly proportioned, that she succumbs to a regulating norm for beauty, or that such a standard is in fact relevant for women. Similarly, neither the Venus nor Lady Delacour operates as a “fantasized specular image of corporeal completeness”;Footnote ¹⁴⁹ rather, their “perfection” and splintering belong together.

The debates about the statue’s modesty and motivations that I canvassed in Section 1.3 and the novel’s endorsement of two flawed heroines disassemble the illusion that a woman should be as perfectly proportioned as a statue or that the Venus de’ Medici represents an ideal woman – or is in fact one. The statue, functioning as Lady Delacour’s doppelgänger, makes much “realer,” so to speak, both of their damaged bodies. And while the perfect, marble breast contrasts to Lady Delacour’s wounded one, the Venus – as Hawthorne reveals – is not “perfect” after all. The statue’s seams and scars thus double back to italicize the fictional character’s lesions. And yet, as Hawthorne says, “all these injuries do not … impair the effect, even when you see where the dissevered fragments have been re-united.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Restoring Lady Delacour, an act undertaken by Belinda, a female “sculptor,” Clarence, a male connoisseur, and Dr. X, a scientist, is quite successful. But I would also highlight how Belinda pierces “the plane of representation through to the thing itself,”Footnote ¹⁵¹ insofar as the novel, via Lady Delacour’s broken body, illuminates how the actual statue’s restorations show – that is, the novel helps us discover the “joinings”Footnote ¹⁵² holding them together. Resembling the seams on the Venus’s arms, revealing where the classical ends and Ferrata’s baroque begins, Lady Delacour, though now “restored,” still “shows” her original state – her scintillating wit, intelligence, and fearless irony; and these qualities now present even more radiantly, given that they contrast to her new restorations: the domestic persona she so self-consciously takes on. My reading of Lady Delacour thus contrasts with that of one contemporary review, which negatively appraises the restored heroine, whom they see in her reformed state as one who no longer “interests” or even “commands some respect,” but as a “comparatively flat and vapid creature.”Footnote ¹⁵³ Instead, I claim that, as the later restorations to the Venus do not transform her entirely into a baroque artwork, neither do Lady Delacour’s restorations force her into someone entirely predictable and “vapid,” a “pattern women,” the type she most despises (B, p. 121). As she says, I am “won, not tamed!” (B, p. 314; emphasis original). With her keenness intact, Lady Delacour retains her right to remain mixed and to preserve her “French” wit, theatrical charisma, and intellectual powers – what we could call her “sculptural” skills. Refusing to conform passively like Lady Anne, Lady Delacour models her own ending, assembling marriages and families, when she physically choreographs the characters and “blocks” their movements on “stage”: “Captain Sunderland—kneeling with Virginia, if you please, sir, at her father’s feet. You in the act of giving them your blessing, Mr Hartley, Mrs Ormond clasps her hands with joy …. Clarence, you have a right to Belinda’s hand, and may kiss it too” (B, p. 478). To shift back to sculpture, Lady Delacour becomes a Praxiteles, sculpting the other characters, while presiding with stature, like the King Mitys statue who decrees justice. She knows who belongs together.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

If the human “is both the sculpted object and the sculpting agent,” and if “[i]mage-making, like thinking for yourself, is a dangerously godlike activity,”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Lady Delacour’s “godlike activity” as sculptor, as well as her embodiment of the perfectly fragmented statue, recall how in ancient Greece, “no sculpture was erected without a function to perform. Whether apotropaic, talismanic, monitory, consolatory, votive, or commemorative in intent, statues were first and foremost regarded not as representational or aesthetic objects”; their beauty was crucial, but most important were their roles as “performative and efficacious agents, able to interact in a variety of ways with those who commissioned, venerated, and even on occasion defaced them.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Vested to act through her own creative powers, Lady Delacour functions in monitory and apotropaic ways, warding off an inappropriate marriage between Virginia and Hervey and directing these individuals into happy couples and family groupings, mirrored by their proper “attitudes.” Belinda, in two turns, sculpts a monument of Lady Delacour and then brings her fully into life, making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary unstable. The character’s victory – and no doubt also the Venus de’ Medici’s – is twofold: The former rearranges the wreckages on courtship’s “battlefield” into attitudes of her and their own pleasing, rather than leaving the job to a “prophane” eye, and both the fictional character and the statue expose the “flaw” latent in definitions of female ideality.

Lady Delacour, however, destabilizes the perfect symmetry her sculptural grouping apparently embodies. She does this first when, after forming her friends’ positions and movements, she adds a line that haunts the novel as well as the viewing of the Medici Venus: “What signifies being happy, unless we appear so?” (B, p. 478).Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Her statement uncannily echoes Gilpin’s brutal truth that moral measurement often arises from how one is viewed or how one positions oneself. Second, she deranges readers and characters by refusing to divide the human and nonhuman when she turns a human into an image by presenting a portrait of Captain Paul Sunderland: Seeing her lover embodied in this form causes Rachel-VirginiaFootnote ¹⁵⁸ to faint. But then Lady Delacour turns an image back into a human when Paul materializes as an “animated picture” – that is, as a man – in front of Virginia; this metamorphosis “accomplishe[s]” all “the fond wishes of [Virginia’s] waking fancy” (B, p. 476). That is, it gives this young woman the right to choose. And yet Lady Delacour alone has not arranged the unlikely union between the characters Paul and Virginia. What some would call another disproportion occurs because nonhuman things, themselves, have precipitated this romantic alliance, for the couple’s marriage will follow a “courtship” constituted by the interactions between a man and a telescope and a woman and a miniature. Virginia has been sensuously and ritualistically connecting to her Paul – a topic I return to in Chapter 4 – by gazing at a miniature of him and reading “their” storyline in Paul et Virginie, and he has fallen in love with Rachel-Virginia while watching her, “the fair woodnymph” (B, p. 475), through his spyglass.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ This, then, is not one of the shoddy recognition scenes that Aristotle bemoans, wherein a “discovery” occurs “in relation to inanimate and trifling objects,”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ but one of the surprising and satisfying recognitions that arise in a world where the human and nonhuman connect and are, indeed, interdependent.

The desire to possess the Venus inspires Napoleon to transform the statue into a symbol of his excellence and of French triumph, and it stimulates the Florentines to undertake statuary mutilation and incongruous acts of replacement to embody tangibly their hope for emancipation. An apt metonymy of these failed attempts can be seen in another object: a medal Napoleon commissioned with his image on one side and the Venus de’ Medici’s on the opposite.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Like the attempts to seize the statue, this medal reveals that once one gives up belonging with and instead embraces possession, human and thing are placed such that they can never gaze on, touch, or connect with each other. The Venus, her empty pedestal, and Belinda turn the coin’s two opposing faces – one of oppression and one of liberty – back toward each other so they can engage in mutual contemplation. Pressures between an endorsement of and challenge to what might constitute a cultural “normal” and an attraction-repulsion toward the Romantic pressure to disentangle beauty from faultless proportion so as to find it in the mixed and fragmentary emerge throughout Belinda and in Corinne ou l’Italie, the subject of my next chapter.