One morning in early 1808, Benjamin R. Haydon stood in his London studio perplexed and anguished. A young painter of twenty-two, Haydon faced his first commissioned painting, a large canvas depicting the tragic death of a Roman tribune. Haydon envisioned the tribune as a heroic idealized figure, but no matter what he did, the figure on the canvas seemed wrong. As he suffered this ‘critical agony of anxiety’, a friend encouraged him to visit some antique sculptures at Lord Elgin's residence.Footnote 1 Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, had acquired them in Athens while serving as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Haydon expected little of the sculptures, but all changed the moment he entered the courtyard where they were placed (Figure 1):
The first thing I fixed my eyes on was the wrist of a figure in one of the female groups, in which were visible … the radius and ulna … [W]hen I turned to the Theseus and saw that every form was altered by action or repose … and again, when in the figure of the fighting metope I saw the muscle shown under the one arm-pit in that instantaneous action of darting out … when I saw, in fact, the most heroic style of art combined with all the essential detail of actual life, the thing was done at once and for ever … I felt the future, I foretold that they would prove themselves the finest things on earth … I felt as if a divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind.Footnote 2
Haydon instantly notices anatomical details in several sculptures. He immediately identifies the sculptures as idealized figures rendered in ‘the most heroic style’. And so acute and ineffable is the feeling they provoke, that he can only describe it as a blazing ‘divine truth’. This, however, is not what happened that morning. The description of his first encounter with the Parthenon sculptures, then known as Elgin Marbles, appears in his autobiography, which he began writing in 1839. Haydon did not fabricate the encounter, but he foreshortened it. It took him nearly eight years to judge the marbles ‘the finest things on earth’. In 1816, in fact, Haydon insisted in public that he had investigated the marbles extensively and painstakingly.Footnote 3
The Elgin Marbles at Park Lane from a sketch by Charles R. Cockerell, early 1810. From A. Smith, ‘Lord Elgin and his collection’, Journal of Hellenic Studies (1916) 36, 163–372, Figure 10. © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1916.
Haydon's inconsistency is not an idiosyncrasy. It represents with clarity discrepancies that characterized taste judgements in the long eighteenth century, when processes that led to pronouncements such as ‘This painting is beautiful!’ or ‘I like this sculpture!’ became objects of scrutiny.Footnote 4 At issue was their epistemic status. For many commentators, instantaneousness of operation and intense immediacy defined taste judgements.Footnote 5 They put taste judgements outside reason's deliberation, reducing them to feeling. They made taste judgements escape will's control, suggesting the existence of an internal sense, as natural as the external sense in the tongue.Footnote 6 Taste judgements could precipitate down the epistemic slope, for the analogy to the tongue implied proximity to mere sensual pleasure.Footnote 7 The slope could be tilted the other way too, however. Another reason for the comparison to gustatory taste was its ability to discriminate between flavors. Likewise, taste judgements identified subtle beauties in artworks.Footnote 8 Feeling could assess beauty with precision, achieving imperceptibly what reason attained slowly, and step by step.Footnote 9 For the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart, taste judgements were acquired in a protracted ‘process of natural induction’ that also yielded laws of nature.Footnote 10 Rather than subjective, the opposite of objective truth judgements, taste judgements appeared semi-objective, and even objective.Footnote 11
These stances mark the long eighteenth century – and Haydon's judgment as a focalizing node – rich contexts for asking, what are taste judgments? Do they have a claim to knowledge?Footnote 12 Certain interpretive tendencies have overdetermined our understanding of taste judgements and precluded the examination of these questions. In an influential account, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu taught us that taste judgements are dictated by a subject's position in a social structure. Not deterministically. Habitus, a collection of behaviors learned over a lifetime but not exactly replicated, negotiates the distance between subjects and their social positions. Crucially, it enables taste judgements to conceal their ultimate function: the preservation of those positions.Footnote 13 Many historians of the long eighteenth century have adopted a hermeneutics of suspicion to identify similar functions. This is a methodological attitude that is wary of subjects’ statements on taste judgements and that counts as valid those explanations that uncover interests, anxieties or ideologies obscured by them.Footnote 14 Haydon's judgement, too, has been explained as promoting his professional standing.Footnote 15 This hermeneutics has given a particular shape to the concept of taste judgements: a thick circumference with well-known behavioural properties, and a core that remains opaque.
There are some means for analyzing this core. Cultural sociologists have produced model ethnographies of communities of connoisseurs that give weight to their experiences and statements.Footnote 16 Inspired in part by these ethnographies, the art historian Charlotte Guichard has shown that eighteenth-century Parisian amateurs grounded taste judgements on shared visual and tactile practices towards objects.Footnote 17 These practices, Guichard and other art historians have recognized, were premised on the cognitive content of taste judgements, often theorized using philosophical empiricism.Footnote 18 Historians of science, for their part, have argued that affective aspects of taste judgements were crucial for knowledge making in natural history, anatomy and beyond. For several seventeenth-century Royal Society members, Alexander Wragge-Morley has demonstrated, taking pleasure in plants served as a measure of one's knowledge of them, and inducing that pleasure in others established an epistemic community.Footnote 19 Cumulatively, these studies demonstrate the value of a hermeneutics of faith: an interpretive approach that aims to describe well and restore the meanings that taste judgements had.Footnote 20 But they also illustrate the challenges involved in recuperating past meanings.Footnote 21 To recover the role of affect in knowledge making, Wragge-Morley has used eighteenth-century discourse on taste as a resource for formulating questions that seventeenth-century actors left implicit. To capture tacit practices informed by aesthetic considerations in the creation of anatomical specimens in eighteenth-century Leiden, Marieke Hendriksen has forged a new analytical category, aesthesis.Footnote 22
This study takes the value and challenges of a hermeneutics of faith as premises and presents an argument that operates on two levels. On the first level, what follows is a description of the formation of Haydon's judgement, based on which I make a normative claim. Haydon's judgement is suited for a description because it constitutes an ‘exceptional normal’: it is representative of the period's positions on taste judgement, while providing an unusually detailed account of its maturation.Footnote 23 The reasons for this anomaly will be addressed, but suffice here to mention that Haydon kept a diary, in which he reflected deeply on his practices and experience. The first section considers why it was difficult for Haydon to instantaneously notice anatomical details and idealized figures among the Elgin Marbles. The second section delineates how Haydon used drawing and anatomical knowledge to see and interpret the surface anatomy of the marbles. The last section outlines comparisons Haydon made between the marbles, human bodies and figures in various media to eventually judge the marbles ‘the finest things on earth’. My description is analytical. I attempt to draw a physiognomy out of the apparent contingency of Haydon's trajectory.Footnote 24 ‘Ladder’ is a metaphor I use to make salient rungs on which Haydon stood, his movement to the next rung, and motivators that impelled each movement. Taste judgements, I argue, are a distinct form of knowledge that involve expertise in three experiential aspects: valuation (prizing an artwork, responding with intense feeling to it), observation (quickly discriminating referential features in an artwork), and evaluation (confidently assigning to an artwork a specific worth in a hierarchical scale). For years Haydon struggled, but thanks to the nature of this struggle, he achieved great facility in all of these aspects by 1815.
On the second level, the argument is methodological. This article aims to complement the analytical focus on communities in recent studies of taste in art history and the history of science. To foreground that taste judgements involved collective practices and shared affective experiences is not only to make substantive arguments about what taste was in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. It is also to take the theoretical position that the establishment of communities and intersubjectivity are crucial sources for the stabilization of taste and knowledge. Haydon, by contrast, presents a case of the individuation of judgement: the process whereby judgements come to be experienced as solely one's own, as subjective, and yet have epistemic validity because of this fact. In addition, this study argues for the continued usefulness of the case as a unit of analysis. As several historians of science have noted, case studies, microstudies and microhistories have functioned primarily to reveal the local nature of scientific knowledge. Their very success has impeded our ‘big-picture’ understanding of science, fragmented our disciplinary conversation and raised worries that the case has run its course.Footnote 25 Here, I highlight another function of the case: its ability to prompt questions about the ultimate ends of common history-of-science explanations and bring these ends into sharp focus.
A first moment of valuation
When Benjamin Haydon first saw the Parthenon sculptures in 1808, they were fragmented objects of uncertain aesthetic value, and he was a ‘tyro of taste’.Footnote 26 Centuries-long Ottoman rule had limited European travel to Greece. Occasional visitors to Athens wrote little about the Parthenon, and some identified its sculptures as Roman, rather than Greek. A few eighteenth-century antiquarian expeditions to Greece had introduced to European audiences the images of the Parthenon, but because the sculptures were considered architectural ornaments, their nature had not been conveyed adequately. The study of the Parthenon and of antique Greek sculpture more generally had remained restricted.Footnote 27 Haydon, who was born in Plymouth, had been a student at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools in London for less than three years. His ambition was great. It was reflected in the size of his canvases and his pursuit of historical painting, the highest genre in the academic hierarchy. But both the ‘essential details of actual life’ and the ‘heroic style’ he claimed to have discerned at once in the Elgin Marbles eluded him and left him sleepless. Haydon's state was inexperience: not a blank slate, but a matrix of half-knowledge and uneven vision, determinations that faltered into indecisions, promising orientations that became treacherous directions, and hope that abruptly turned into despair. Out of this matrix crystallized the first rung on which he stepped to judge the marbles.
So acutely aware was Haydon of the difficulty of observing details of the surface of the human body that he was ‘mad’ at Joshua Reynolds. The first president of the Royal Academy – and through his Discourses, the first theoretical teacher of Haydon – attributed the knowledge Greeks had of the body to the scantiness of their clothing.Footnote 28 But Haydon considered overwhelming the innumerable particulars even an easily observable body presented, ‘a thousand … little accidental markings, a thousand little bits of fat, a thousand little wrinkles of skin, varying in every body without end’.Footnote 29 Their configurations were as impossible to grasp as the ‘momentary beauties of a shooting star’.Footnote 30 Shifting and fleeting as they were, the fluid and irregular contours of the body had made even Michelangelo appear an inventor of anatomical forms.Footnote 31 Details and configurations of details were not only hard to see and interpret. They were also dangerous; to be dreaded, not cherished. Encountering them too early made impressionable young students like Haydon too attached to the wrong objects. William Blake stated forebodingly what was wrong with particulars of the living body: veer too close to them, he warned artists, and your figures will smell ‘of mortality’.Footnote 32
The real objects of artistic desire were loftier and more permanent, at least according to the art theories Haydon was absorbing. A mixture of proto-Aristotelian and proto-Platonic conceptions of beauty guided artists’ aspiration away from ever-changing appearances and towards the general, the ideal. The imperative to depict the enduring essence of the human figure – ‘ideal beauty’, of which ‘heroic style’ was one manifestation – was so compact and common that historians often describe it as dictum or maxim. There was a distinct tension, however, between the obviousness of the imperative and its imprecision. Platonic conceptions construed ideal beauty as emanating from the mind of God, whereas theories like Reynolds's placed its origin in nature.Footnote 33 The latter obliged the artist to choose between two alternatives: synthesizing ideal beauty by combining beautiful parts from different bodies, or abstracting particulars to create a generic human form. Each option presented challenges. For if the ideal was an amalgam of actual parts, how was one to decide which were beautiful? Abstraction demanded the elimination of ‘accidental deficiencies’ that the artist observed in nature.Footnote 34 But, ‘if you know not what is accident and what essence’ prior to observing nature, ‘how can you distinguish’ them in nature?’Footnote 35 The paucity of guidance made Haydon despair. In ‘all the treatises on the Ideal Beauty, the authors … exhaust their powers in useless [deliberations and leave the student] as uninformed as he began’.Footnote 36
Antique sculptures promised a way out of the labyrinth. A specific set, more precisely. Unearthed in the vicinities of Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and reproduced in bronze and plaster for the nobility and art academies throughout the early modern period, the Apollo of Belvedere, the Farnese Hercules, the Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso, the Borghese Gladiator, the Medici Venus, and a few other sculptures had become central to the education of the artist.Footnote 37 Two important developments, however, problematized Haydon's reliance on this antique canon for the discovery of ideal beauty. In 1764, Johann Joachim Winckelmann published Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, a systematic history of the progress and decline of ancient art that elevated fifth- to fourth-century BCE Greek art as an apogee and demoted Roman art as derivative. Winckelmann attempted to synthesize available textual evidence with a visual analysis of material remains, but the latter could not be firmly linked to particular ages.Footnote 38 As his systematicity invited more systematicity, antiquarians became convinced that what Winckelmann had regarded as the best productions of the Greek classical age – the Apollo of Belvedere, among others – were not originals but Roman copies.Footnote 39 The emergence of new notions of authenticity lent incendiary effect to these ideas. Before the eighteenth century, connoisseurs had included studio productions as part of an artist's style. But the conception of artistic authorship became narrower, so that new weight was given to the artist's hand, ‘a signature set of manual and mental habits’.Footnote 40 The copy became suspect, and the sorting out of the two increasingly crucial.
The more difficult it became for Haydon to rely on the antique canon, the more certain consequences emerged as pernicious. Because he came to believe that Roman art was plagued by ‘affectation’, nothing seemed to him ‘more disgusting than to see young men square out their forms with all the Pedantry of knowledge’ that Roman copies displayed.Footnote 41 Another problem was that their quality was uneven. Certain aspects of canonical statues such as the Apollo of Belvedere could constitute beauties, parts of the essential, but certain other aspects faults, accidentals. Not knowing which were beauties and which faults defied the function that canonical statues were supposed to fulfil in the first place; that is, as exemplars that taught the student how to make those distinctions. The process required that the student rely on them unhesitatingly, even blindly. But such a reliance became untenable in Haydon's opinion. It was blind faith that enabled Michelangelo to learn from the Belvedere Torso, but it was this faith that ‘ruined Michelangelo in his taste’ because it committed him to the Torso's mistakes.Footnote 42
The condition in which Haydon found himself in 1808 turned him to the Elgin Marbles in a specific way. The cracks that had appeared in the solidity of the canon loosened Haydon's determination to learn from these sculptures and made looking for guidance elsewhere a logical possibility. The Elgin Marbles could be that elsewhere because Phidias, one of the greatest sculptors of antiquity, according to textual sources, was associated with them. But the name of Phidias could both orient and disorient. There was scant knowledge about the nature of his greatness, and the attribution of his name to the Elgin Marbles was contested. All the problems and dangers associated with learning from the canon surged the moment Haydon considered committing to the Elgin Marbles. For his painting of the Roman tribune, in fact, Haydon only borrowed postures from the Elgin Marbles for two marginal figures. The principal figure intended to embody the ‘heroic style’ is a mosaic of the Belvedere Torso and the Borghese Gladiator.Footnote 43 Haydon's present was unstable. All that he had learned in the past outpoured as possibilities that he could not distance himself from and that pulled and repelled him equally strongly.Footnote 44 He lived in a ‘mixture of torture and hope’.Footnote 45 This difficult balancing act meant, however, that Haydon was already looking forward, already stepping on a rung, already compelled towards the formation of a taste judgement. That was less because he identified this telos than because of the need to steady his vacillations. That need Haydon felt to his bones, for between figures too close to living bodies and too close to Roman copies, between the smell of mortality and the ‘smell of stone’, one wrong step could have irredeemable consequences.Footnote 46 The higher the stakes, the greater the urge to press ahead. Haydon's valuation of the marbles thus began as an unsteady but necessary orientation towards them. It arose not out of a flux of experience, but out of a structured ‘state of experience’.Footnote 47
Observing the marbles
If we know what we know about Haydon's states of experience, it is because the self was a matter of intense concern for him and his contemporaries. This concern and its modalities – introspection and reflection – were cultivated in the eighteenth century but became pronounced among Romantic poets Haydon admired.Footnote 48 This was a moment when terms were coined to describe kinds of consciousnesses and when William Wordsworth re-envisioned the epic poem as the history of the ‘growth of a poet's mind’.Footnote 49 For Haydon, the diary became a medium in which to decipher feelings, assess progress and form resolutions – a record of the growth of an artist's mind. But we know a great deal about Haydon's judgement also because he drew extensively and kept his drawings for future use.Footnote 50 Standing on the first rung of his judgement, Haydon embarked on a vigilant search of wide latitude, directing his scrutiny to the antique canon, the marbles, dead bodies, and living ones. He frantically deployed all the tools and tactics at his disposal to observe surface anatomy details and configurations. In time, his discernment and experience of these features changed qualitatively, and former perils became fecund promises. As he shed the ill-at-easeness of the novice, he projected more defined paths of action and a vision of himself as a special kind of artist.
Haydon obtained permission to draw the Elgin Marbles in May 1808 and visited them intermittently for several years.Footnote 51 An analysis of his sketchbooks and drawing manuals of the period indicates that he used drawing not just as a record of his observations but as an instrument for exploring the surface of the marbles.Footnote 52 Drawing manuals encouraged amateur drawers and artists to ‘Mind frequently or compare [their] Copy with the Original, tak[ing] particular Notice of what is amiss’.Footnote 53 Apart from instilling a habit of frequent and close attention to objects, drawing fostered an analytical approach: objects were to be considered first in their entirety and then inspected in their minutiae. These virtues were the reason drawing was promoted as a means for educating the senses, for turning passive seeing into active looking. Natural historians, who made observation a fundamental form of knowledge acquisition, appropriated drawing in order to school a ‘peculiar economy of attention’ that was ‘pointillist, magnifying’, and that atomized the object ‘into a mosaic of details’.Footnote 54 The sequential method of education in art academies reinforced this style of attention. The student began by copying isolated body parts from manuals or prints of Old Master paintings, and proceeded to draw fragments of antique sculptures, then a full antique cast, and finally the life model. Haydon's sketchbooks evince these habits of attention. Although they include some full-figure drawings, most consist of fragments of the Elgin Marbles. To discover subtle hints and complicated arrangements of muscles, Haydon deployed a variety of tactics. He drew the same figure from multiple angles. In one of the drawings of the Theseus, for instance, Haydon could clearly discern the external shape of the latissimus dorsi as it merged with the thoracolumbar fascia and the external abdominal oblique (Figure 2). Sometimes, Haydon drew from perspectives that produced acute foreshortening, accentuating certain undulations into salient contours.Footnote 55 Other times, he would move his ‘solitary candle about, above, and underneath’ the marbles to make some features prominent by the shadow they cast.Footnote 56
Study of the Theseus from the Parthenon sculptures, Benjamin R. Haydon, sketchbook, black chalk heightened with white on brown paper, 413 × 524 mm. © Trustees of the British Museum, London. The parts indicated are (A) latissimus dorsi, (B) thoracolumbar fascia and (C) external abdominal oblique.
Haydon also took advantage of the characteristics of the drawing medium.Footnote 57 His drawings are exploratory, each style bringing out an aspect of the marbles. Note his drawings of a Lapith foot (Figure 3). They are less evocative of marble and more of living flesh, as Haydon uses chiaroscuro to emphasize the bulge of the big toe, making it appear more like ‘flesh [that] must rise up all about the nail’.Footnote 58 Other drawings seem schematic linear indications of shape.Footnote 59 The line had been long thematized as fundamental for representation, but in the eighteenth century it became more fully theorized as capable of grasping three-dimensional truths and more real in and of itself.Footnote 60 It was William Hogarth who articulated these ideas more clearly. He encouraged artists to think of objects as thin shells consisting of closely connected threads. Exercised continually, ‘the imagination will naturally enter into the vacant space within this shell, and there at once, as from a center, view the whole form within, and mark the opposite corresponding parts so strongly as to retain the idea of the whole’. This ‘conceit’ of Hogarth that subjected the world to a linear analysis seems to undergird some of Haydon's sketches, where every suggestion of volume is suppressed in favor of what appear abstract conceptualizations.Footnote 61
Benjamin R. Haydon, 19 October 1811, black chalk, heightened with white, on brown paper, 251 × 415 mm. © Trustees of the British Museum, London. The three drawings on the left are studies of feet from the Parthenon sculptures.
What Haydon was after was details of surface anatomy. Artists’ study of anatomy was a matter that divided opinions and even brothers. Samuel Northcote encouraged Haydon to seek it, but the painter James Northcote declared it useless.Footnote 62 Many Royal Academy students and professors shared the latter's view, but Haydon heeded the former, convinced that the greatness of ancient Greek and Renaissance Italian artists depended on deep knowledge of anatomy.Footnote 63 Before he studied the marbles, Haydon had gone a long way to pursue such knowledge. He had procured Bernhard Albinus's Tables of Anatomy (1754) while still in his hometown and ‘hugg[ed]’ John Bell's The Anatomy of the Human Body (1797) as soon as he arrived in London in 1805.Footnote 64 In the Royal Academy library he would have encountered additional anatomical atlases.Footnote 65 Focusing on myology and osteology, atlases divided the body into parts, classified the bones and the muscles, pointing out origins and insertions of muscles, offering Haydon information he learned by heart, ‘like boys at schools’.Footnote 66 From their images and from additional ones he produced, Haydon learned to discern anatomical parts better. Several anatomical atlases used an iconography that exaggerated the musculature to render constituent parts more visible.Footnote 67 In his own anatomical album Haydon copied many of Albinus's plates, adding his own notes and observations.Footnote 68 He also clarified difficult features by numbering anatomical parts, eliminating visual clutter, and even reducing some drawings to diagrams (Figure 4).
Anatomical drawing of the bones and muscles of the lower leg. Benjamin R. Haydon, anatomical album, 5 June 1805, pen and black ink with red, light brown and grey wash on off-white laid paper, 465 × 302 mm. © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
Dissection proved more enlightening for Haydon. One of the features that makes the observation of surface muscles difficult is that they end abruptly and continue as thin tendons. Haydon was ecstatic, therefore, when he gained access to a cadaver in 1805, for a real body ‘exposed the secrets of all the markings’.Footnote 69 Exploring with a knife allowed Haydon to ascertain the natural boundaries of muscles, tendons and bones. What must have clearly helped him was feeling these parts with his hands – the virtues of tactile examination were extolled by contemporary anatomists, particularly Charles Bell, a surgeon and anatomist whose private course Haydon took in 1806.Footnote 70 Apart from matching what he saw on the surface of the body with what lay underneath, Haydon also learned to identify certain parts as anchors of vision. The vertebra prominens was ‘literally … a lighthouse’, whereas the ‘point of the coccygis and the two processes of the ilium’ he found ‘excellent guides’.Footnote 71 Anatomy instilled a ‘spirit of minute observation’ and provided an interpretive frame for organizing his perception.Footnote 72 It directed attention to the essential detail, enabled him to grasp patterns, and bestowed an ability to see apparently ‘unmeaning variations in the outline’ of the Elgin Marbles as meaningful parts.Footnote 73
Such parts became more meaningful as Haydon studied nature in action. In September 1810, he engaged a life model named Wilson to draw in various poses. Wilson was a black sailor from Boston whose physique was admired by a number of artists, but Haydon outdid all of them in enthusiasm.Footnote 74 So eager was he to study Wilson's figure that he undertook an adventurous enterprise to obtain his full body cast. The resulting mold captured his figure ‘with all the purity of a shell’ and included the wrinkled skin under Wilson's left armpit.Footnote 75 When Haydon later checked the Elgin Marbles, he recognized with great ‘delight’ the same feature in the sculpture he identified as Jupiter.Footnote 76 Wilson's figure helped Haydon in other ways. Haydon observed that Wilson had ‘all the markings’ of the canonical antique sculptures, but they varied as he moved.Footnote 77 What was more, the moment these alterations took place, ‘his intentions were evident’.Footnote 78 He had previously studied similar ‘variations of form’ in the Elgin Marbles.Footnote 79 Now Haydon felt a ‘great principle [of form] … more strongly impressed than ever on my mind’.Footnote 80 Form, or the outer contours of the body, was the main vehicle for communicating meaning in life and art. Unlike colour, which conveyed ‘a mysterious sentiment’, form spoke with the clarity of language.Footnote 81 Like words, each marking had meaning; like sentences, particular configurations conveyed more. They indicated the movements of specific muscles and bones and therefore actions (such as raising an arm), the quality of actions (such as vigorousness), their intentions (such as exhortation), and passions (such as anger). The body was as expressive as the face.Footnote 82
In these years of agitated circumspection (1808–11), Haydon's overall movement was characterized by to and fro.Footnote 83 But Haydon, this movement and the Elgin Marbles also changed qualitatively. Haydon's observational tactics augmented his senses – his eyes were endowed with tactile capacities and his hands with visual ones, as Charles Bell, who envisioned the eye and the hand as analogous organs, taught Haydon.Footnote 84 These tactics introduced some distance from the academic canon of antiquities, the Elgin Marbles and nature. Whereas before they had tugged and repelled Haydon with equal force, the amplitude of that force diminished. Instead, anatomical details and their configurations, or markings, arose as central heuristic entities for negotiating the relation between them. Markings were not any more accidentals to be dreaded (the opposite of idealized features, essentials) but indexes of the dynamic movement of the body and thus of other legible meanings. They became the direct objects of Haydon's observation – discernible, reassuring, even attractive. He detected anatomical ‘beauties’ that had ‘passed unheeded before him’.Footnote 85 The ‘complicated’ surface of the body turned into a familiar map.Footnote 86 Moreover, anatomical beauties ‘affected’ Haydon, impressed him emotively.Footnote 87 Thus transformed, markings changed Haydon's valuation of the Elgin Marbles. The more he detected ‘little exquisite truths of nature’ in them, the more eagerly he sought others.Footnote 88 They functioned as hooks that more stably compelled him towards the marbles, over the canon and nature. The marbles became a reliable reservoir of markings whose correctness Haydon did not have to certify in every individual instance. ‘[E]very muscle that ought to move’, he decided, ‘trembled on the marble[s]’.Footnote 89 It hardly mattered that they were fragmented. Even toes (Figure 3) promised to eliminate uncertainties he experienced and decisions he had to make.Footnote 90 In other words, if valuation as an unsteady orientation had initially incited Haydon to observe, his observations led to a more precise identification of distinct features of the Elgin Marbles, grounding his judgement in referential aspects. But observation as such grounding also led to an intensified valuation of those aspects that involved affect, not just orientation. A feedback loop mutually potentiated and refined his observation and valuation of markings.
Having reached a new rung of his judgement and attained more clarity about his present, Haydon could assess his past with more discernment and look to the future with more assurance. Disagreements with the Royal Academy over artistic pedagogy had forced Haydon to forge an idiosyncratic path. Haydon had not simply studied anatomy alongside medical students while other artists barely looked at anatomical atlases. He had left no ‘atom … uninvestigated’ and veered close to transgression.Footnote 91 Obtaining Wilson's cast had been risky. Too eager in his zeal, Haydon had allowed the plaster to set around Wilson's lungs and almost killed him.Footnote 92 Haydon now knew that he had been right to study anatomy. He was an exceptional artist ready to go to extraordinary lengths. Moreover, he could plan more definite future movements. As authorizing entities for markings, the Elgin Marbles appeared to him a dense forest of almost imperceptible signs – ‘every muscle that ought to move trembled’ there.Footnote 93 This suggested to him clear tasks. To remedy the haphazardness of situations that revealed details like Jupiter's wrinkled skin, Haydon created ‘artifices [to keep] his attention ever on alert’, keeping the ‘productions’ of the Greeks ‘in every part of his house’ so that they could ‘catch his eye, and entrap him into reflection’.Footnote 94 Second, it enabled Haydon to delineate the nature of knowledge he wished to acquire. A precise catalogue of markings would make ‘all nature [appear] laid open, all animated being [ready] at [his] disposal’.Footnote 95 The totality of knowledge of surface anatomy he cast as a landscape viewed from a moving and zooming viewpoint that made everything surveyable and retrievable. But Haydon marked this knowledge as destined to become inarticulate. For if bodies were instruments of expression, each anatomical marking had to be known as a ‘vehicle’.Footnote 96 Vehicles do not draw attention to themselves, but by becoming exactly precise, they became absolutely unobtrusive and therefore effectively expressive. This was knowledge that would become tacit in a mature judgement but whose precondition for tacitness was perfect articulateness.
Evaluating the marbles
It mattered that Haydon organized his observations of markings under the ‘principle of form’. Like rules and precepts, principles represented synthetized forms of knowledge that enabled its transmission but were more generative than them.Footnote 97 It was the principle of the ideal human body that was believed to have endowed Greek art with its power. This principle, too, Haydon wanted to find. The dense connections he envisioned between body and mind convinced him that form indexed not only changing features guided by the principle of form but also permanent ones dictated by the principle of ‘ideal beauty’, ‘ideal form’, ‘standard figure’ – Haydon used them interchangeably. This principle was lost. The treatise of the Greek artist Polykleitos, who articulated a version, had not survived.Footnote 98 But, as Winckelmann wrote, the moderns were like a lover seeing off her beloved – ‘we … have … only a shadowy outline of the subject of our desires … But this arouses so much the greater longing for what is lost’.Footnote 99 Haydon's longing was more concrete and the principle of ideal beauty a more proximate object.Footnote 100 But he hesitated for some time to rely on the marbles for their identification. Instead, alongside his observations, he conducted another restless and broad search, comparing canonical sculptures, the marbles, living bodies and animals. These comparisons enabled him to evaluate the marbles – he determined their aesthetic difference and placed them securely at the top of a hierarchical scale. Haydon came to realize that the marbles were more important than principles. They made his eye and mind swift and induced an affective receptivity he had not imagined possible.
In late 1809, Haydon examined the proportions of the Apollo of Belvedere, the Farnese Hercules and Paris, a statue unearthed in eighteenth-century Rome.Footnote 101 He concluded that there were several principles for different proportions that produced idealized figures embodying strength (while guarding from heaviness), or gracefulness (while avoiding feebleness).Footnote 102 These derived from the principle of the standard figure, but what was the standard?Footnote 103 His conjectures took a different turn in February 1810. Having procured a lioness to dissect, he studied its bones and muscles and was struck by its similarities with humans. He put the lioness on its heels (Figure 5) and then saw ‘the whole system’: since the lioness could not stand erect on the same bones as a human, a comparison of their construction would reveal their differences ‘as marks of brutality on the lion's part, [and] as indication of humanity on that of man’.Footnote 104 This was the principle he sought: ideal beauty consisted in what was strictly peculiar to humans and the furthest from animals. When in September 1810 he drew Wilson, he developed these ideas. He found that, although Wilson's proportions were the same as a European's, he displayed ‘the radical deficiencies of the lion's construction’.Footnote 105 ‘His deltoid was too short’, his feet were ‘flatter than the European's and [this was] a link to … animal Nature’.Footnote 106 To fix the ideal figure, all he had to do was to ‘reverse ... the deficiencies of the lion’ and of Wilson.Footnote 107 When Haydon consulted the Elgin Marbles, he realized that ‘the principles of a standard figure were so distinct’ in them, that it was impossible that they were ‘developed … without intention and … knowledge’.Footnote 108 Clearly, the Greeks had derived the principles from comparisons like Haydon's.
Sketches. Benjamin R. Haydon, Journals, February 1810, Houghton Library, Harvard University, fMS Eng 1331(5), fol. 74. Haydon visually tested his hypothesis of a lion standing erect and a human walking as a quadruped.
The logical slippages are patent even in Haydon's sketches (Figure 5), yet he was convinced he was correct. That had to do in part with the nature and content of the sources he drew from. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, human variation was tethered on anatomical structure.Footnote 109 A conception of organic form as interconnected – responding in concert to partial modifications – had generated a search for the part that best revealed essential differences between nations. The Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper identified it as the cranium profile, presenting his discovery with widely reproduced images that placed two apes, a ‘negro’, a ‘Calmuck’, a European and the Apollo of Belvedere in an order of increasing facial angle.Footnote 110 To Charles White, an anatomist Haydon read closely, the order on the page suggested an actual order in nature, a chain of being whose gradations were fixed. The gradations were also hard to discern, so White extended comparison to the entire body and extolled comparing ‘extremes’ – the ‘African’ and the ‘European’ – for inferring other imperceptible gradations.Footnote 111 He also pegged mental capacities on the morphology of the cranium. For the anatomist Charles Bell, Haydon's teacher, Camper's inclusion of the Apollo was necessary because art was ‘a science’ for the Greeks.Footnote 112 Like Bell, the Greeks had discovered that animals lacked the muscles that enabled the expression of passions and had outdone Camper in ‘revers[ing]’ all the peculiar features of animals to obtain the ideal human form.Footnote 113 This is why Haydon compared the morphology of the lion, Wilson and the Elgin Marbles; took their positions to be fixed and distanced enough to make the comparison illuminating; assumed a teleological view of the body that made permanent features in human form (including the bones and muscles that enabled humans to stand erect) indexes of ‘intellect’ and therefore ideal beauty; and even used his sketches to make consequential inferences. His certainty was an interstitial effect, produced by the movement of concepts and images between (Greek) art, (anatomical) science, and back to art. This endowed the Greeks, anatomy, and images with epistemic authority and transmuted Haydon's speculations into proofs. Moreover, Haydon was no passive recipient of ideas. By his estimation, he had made an original contribution to anatomical debates by identifying the Elgin Marbles as bearers of the principle of ideal beauty.Footnote 114
Standing on the second rung of his judgment with his principles at hand, Haydon did not rest satisfied. Instead, he kept returning to the marbles so that their ‘essence’ could ‘be interwoven about my soul … be mingled in my blood and circulate through my being’.Footnote 115 He also made other evaluations. Many art theorists maintained that the only way to determine whether a work was good, bad or the best was through comparisons. One corollary was that the judgement of a particular artwork became more precise the more artworks it was compared with, which is why extensive travel was recommended for artists and connoisseurs and comparison was adopted as a display principle in private and public collections.Footnote 116 Haydon had the benefit of Continental art come to him. Collecting paintings and antique statuary had been limited in Britain, but several factors had combined to bring parts of European collections to London by the early nineteenth century.Footnote 117 Haydon himself amassed a collection of casts, and drawings and engravings of Old Master paintings.Footnote 118 In 1814, he ventured to France to see the Louvre and other collections.Footnote 119 As Haydon compared, he noticed errors everywhere. The painter Henry Fuseli always marked the muscles of the chest in the same way.Footnote 120 In June 1810, Haydon studied Sebastiano del Piombo's The Rising of Lazarus. He knew that Michelangelo might have drawn Lazarus, but he was disappointed to find that the shoulder muscles of the figure were ‘parcel[s] of little unmeaning marking’.Footnote 121 Even the Apollo of Belvedere increasingly appeared to him ‘marbly, puffed’,Footnote 122 his flesh ‘like puckered silk stuffed & stitched down’.Footnote 123 Haydon's conviction on the significatory power of correct anatomical markings turned ‘errors’ into his chief heuristic tool of comparison. This had further implications. First, errors enhanced the value of the Elgin Marbles because each error committed in ancient and modern artworks was an error not made in the marbles. The totality of errors served as an almost quantifiable measure of the superiority of the marbles and their aesthetic distance from other artworks. Second, noticing errors made Haydon realize that his ‘mind’ was reaching ‘a new & truer turn’.Footnote 124 Third, it was absorbing the ‘essence’ of the marbles that enhanced his mind and eye. ‘The Elgin Marbles have so refined my eye’, he noted in February 1813, ‘that errors strike it instantly’.Footnote 125
Haydon's exercises gradually gave him independence from the material conditions that enabled them. The facility in detecting errors was also thanks to the comparanda becoming objects in his mind – returning from France, he felt ‘greatly enlarged in everything’.Footnote 126 There were concepts that shaped this experience. The taste of genius, as Haydon took himself to be, was thought to have integrative powers that Joseph Wright of Derby foregrounded in a 1770 painting (Figure 6).Footnote 127 Unlike the figures on the right, still bound to the concreteness of drawing and prints, or the leftmost figure, representing taste that only observes and admires, the protagonist genius looks away, his collection closed in hand, a sculpture behind him, part of his mind's collection.Footnote 128 With this collection, the philosopher Dugald Stewart told Haydon, the mind became a ‘laboratory’ where one could perform ‘experiments’ by the ‘power of Imagination alone’, generating ‘ideal trials at will’.Footnote 129 These endowed taste judgements with a ‘celerity unknown in our operations on Matter’ and made the ‘mind tremblingly alive’ to artworks.Footnote 130 By November 1815, Haydon's aliveness to the Elgin Marbles had reached a new pitch. Looking at a Lapith figure, he
dwelt on it with more intensity than ever. Its beauty, its divinity, came over my soul like the influence of an angelic spirit … I never was so acutely impressed before. I thank God my feelings are ripening … Its influence came over me stronger & stronger & stronger till I could scarcely bear it. I felt as if a supernatural being was directing the beam of a burning lens to fire my soul.Footnote 131
The Elgin Marbles had become ‘the finest things on earth’.
Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97), An Academy by Lamplight, 1770, oil on canvas, 1270 × 1010 mm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, public domain.
Haydon's experience on this last rung appeared removed from knowing and shared experience. What he felt could be described only evocatively. But if this state was subjective, it was also a knowledgeable accomplishment. Whereas Haydon's observations had made the anatomical markings of the marbles first visible and then affecting beauties, his evaluations – comparisons for establishing relative worth – now propelled the marbles into the highest evaluative category, the ‘finest … on earth’. This was not a generic phrase. The scope of Haydon's comparisons was vast. His focus on form as the crucial communicative tool of art made form a capacious net that captured living bodies and dead ones, painted figures and drawn ones. The accumulation of artworks in London turned the capital into a synecdoche for the world and made the marbles ‘the finest … on earth’. Haydon's peculiar mobility, his will to interlace various concepts and venture into diverse cultural spaces, wove a connective tissue between disparate comparanda. It solidified, furthermore, the superlativeness of his judgement. For it was the realization that the marbles encapsulated the principle of ideal beauty that launched them into vertiginous evaluative heights. The certainty he experienced by deeming his discovery scientific fixed the marbles there. It is for these reasons that Haydon recast their ‘beauty’ as ‘divinity’. Only sublime art could be called divine because the sublime was the truly superlative aesthetic category.Footnote 132 The sublime was also what induced the ‘strongest emotion … the mind is capable of feeling’.Footnote 133 Haydon felt the sublimity of the marbles once all the particular experiences were folded up to operate subliminally, once all the vacillations and deliberations left the place to ‘ripened feelings’, not just capable of detecting individual beauties, but receptive to an almost mystical influence.Footnote 134 This was the strongest emotion, but it was also calm. Haydon did not fear, as he had in the past, that he could be wrong. A valuation that had begun as uncertain orientation had now turned into an intense and stable emotion that knew that the marbles were the finest on earth. And Haydon would challenge anyone who thought this was ‘merely … enthusiasm’. He stood ready to demonstrate he was one who ‘knows & feels & can prove’.Footnote 135
Haydon shared with William Wordsworth this understanding of transformed states of experience too. As James Chandler has shown, Haydon's admired poet modified the term ‘sensibility’ on similar grounds. Wordsworth defined poetry as the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, but both spontaneity and the power of feelings were products of lifelong meditation, a continuous molding of ‘influxes of feeling’.Footnote 136 The result was an ‘achieved sensibility’.Footnote 137 The stakes in attaining such states were great. ‘High is our calling’, Wordsworth wrote to Haydon in 1815.Footnote 138 For Wordsworth, the poet was a special kind of knower summoned to confront a crisis: the sensibility he had achieved in solitude would subtly enable readers to break a ‘state of almost savage torpor’ induced by new conditions of life.Footnote 139 Haydon too felt the calling. With his own achieved sensibility, he identified the marbles as exemplars that would change the art of the nation. The marbles would reduce canonical sculptures like Apollo to the ‘old antique’, becoming themselves, paradoxically, the new antique.Footnote 140 As artworks ‘unmixed in excellence’, they would ‘impregnate the minds of the rising Students’.Footnote 141 In 1815, Haydon established a school to rival the Royal Academy and used his drawings of marbles as central pedagogical tools.Footnote 142 In 1817, the Elgin Marbles were placed in the British Museum, and as the art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued, they did ‘serve as a school’ for an art with a new temporality – modern art.Footnote 143 Turned to the future with a far-reaching gaze and a sense of his self as a seer, Haydon could have well said in 1815, ‘I foretell’ the glory of marbles and proclaim ‘I foretell’ such fate.Footnote 144
Conclusions
The features that appear to make taste judgements subjective are the result of a long and structured process. Valuation as an intense affective response to an artwork, observation as rapid discrimination of referential subtleties, and evaluation as assured assignment of aesthetic rank – all that Haydon reminisced as his first response to the marbles – were effortful accomplishments. These features are necessary (though not sufficient) elements that qualify (rather than disqualify) individual taste judgements as candidates for knowledge. The incorporation of these features makes taste judgements a distinct form of knowledge. Lorraine Daston has singled out coup d'oeil as a specific mode of understanding for similar reasons. Coup d'oeil grasps an object as a whole, reveals structural connections, occurs immediately, and is inscrutable. These characteristics were conjoined around 1750–1850 to describe skills of military engineers that recalled the glance of the connoisseur.Footnote 145 Like taste judgements, coup d'oeil was often construed as the opposite of discursive knowledge, procedural reasoning and painstaking investigation. The ladder that Haydon had to climb shows that these were in fact propaedeutic to mature taste judgements. It is the fate of the ladder to become invisible, however, and of taste judgements to appear suspended in air. As Denis Diderot wrote, when all the ‘minute experiences’ that cultivated judgement ‘dropped out of view’, judgement seemed instinct.Footnote 146 Haydon's and Wordsworth's claims that their transformed subjectivities were useful for others could be depreciated by a phrase like ‘the egotistical sublime’.Footnote 147 Theirs was no more than a solipsistic consciousness. The long eighteenth century produced a range of positions on the nature of taste judgements that also allowed the movement of arguments across cultural domains – Dugald Stewart enlisted the military coup d'oeil to make taste judgements epistemically solid.Footnote 148 But that range and the inconsistencies it introduced had consequences. The existence of the ladder did not become an established meta-fact about taste.Footnote 149
Yet it is useful to make the ladder conspicuous so that we may, in addition, appreciate individual resources for knowledge stabilization. Communal resources have garnered considerable attention. For eighteenth-century amateurs, Guichard has emphasized, taste was a shared passion capable of creating new communities around objects that temporarily suspended social hierarchies.Footnote 150 The art historian Kristel Smentek has stressed eighteenth-century connoisseurs’ ‘self-consciously collaborative practices’ to show that connoisseurship was a science.Footnote 151 As Steven Shapin saw it, we have methodologically repaired the subjectivity of taste judgements – and deflated objectivity – by making them more intersubjective.Footnote 152 Intersubjectivity matters, but so does subjectivity. Guichard and Smentek do recognize this. They examine how sensory epistemologies were used to generate practices for training the connoisseur's eye.Footnote 153 But there is more to connoisseurial expertise than a trained eye and mind. Mature taste judgements constitute not only skill acquisition but skilful becoming, a holistic transformation.Footnote 154 In 1815, Haydon's judgement of the marbles was a full compelled involvement – perceptual, cognitive and affective. And this was achieved in three ways. First, valuation, observation and evaluation tethered and reinforced each other in feedback loops. Second, Haydon's was a self with pronounced reflectivity – a self with introspective habits, with a keenness to acquire autonomy from materiality and to turn shared experiences into experiences that felt uniquely his own.Footnote 155 (This reflectivity has an analogue in the linguistic function of the indexical ‘I’, which marks communal meanings as individual utterances with intended private meanings.Footnote 156) Third, the formation of his judgement involved identifiable tools, exercises and their repetition, but, crucially, particular profiles or states of experience that served as preconditions for Haydon's final state of experience.
I have for these reasons argued not just that taste judgements were for Haydon a form of knowledge but that they are a form of knowledge. A hermeneutics of faith adopted to describe Haydon's judgement and recover its meaning led me to a normative claim about knowledge. This is a common explanatory arc in the history of science, although it is not explicitly identified as such. When historians of science examined early modern European artisans’ engagements with nature, they showed ‘how deeply embedded in making is the sense of knowing’.Footnote 157 When historians of science insist that Islamicate forms of empiricism are ‘science’, they affirm them as legitimate epistemic methods.Footnote 158 But yielded by Haydon's case, this explanatory arc obliges us to ask, if we take Haydon's judgement to count as knowledge, does it imply that we accept his conclusions on Wilson? Do we dismiss his judgement as wrong-headed, but keep the category of taste judgements as potentially valid knowledge? Or do we revert to the simple historicist claim that Haydon's judgement counted as knowledge in the period? The literary scholar André Jolles has argued that the case presents questions that cannot be avoided, that point to a conflict between higher norms in a domain, and that force a weighing of them.Footnote 159 I highlight this function of Haydon's case to suggest that the case is not a limited unit of analysis. The proliferation of case studies of single episodes, controversies and locales has made several historians of science wonder, what do these particulars tell us about the general history and meaning of science? Can they transcend their singularity?Footnote 160 Haydon's judgement is a singular, but it necessarily foregrounds a general issue: that the relationship between the descriptive and the normative in our explanations may need more clarification.Footnote 161 We do more than history, or historical epistemology, whenever the telos of our explanation is to appreciate past forms of knowledge as valid, whenever we restore as legitimate epistemic practices obscured by dominant epistemologies. It is worth weighing again what this means and what kinds of scepticism our normative claims need beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion that undermines description.Footnote 162
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my teachers Katharine Park and Steven Shapin, as well as James Delbourgo, Daniela Helbig, John Brewer and James Chandler for their insightful feedback. I have also benefited from discussions with colleagues at Columbia University's Society of Fellows and the Huntington Library and, in particular, from the incisive comments of the two anonymous reviewers of this article. Any mistakes are my own.
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