Florence as Muse: Byron and Shelley’s Tuscan Competition

Abstract

ABSTRACT Florence’s art and poetry captured the imaginations of Byron and Shelley. During the nineteenth century, the city-state and the surrounding countryside inspired literary tourists and Byron and Shelley were no exceptions. This article focuses on the Florentine dimension of the Byron-Shelley relationship. It considers Byron’s and Shelley’s poetry inspired by the art each saw in Florence, before going on to discuss each poet’s response to Dante’s and Petrarch’s examples. It shows that the influence of Florence’s art and Florentine artists was the centerpiece of Byron’s and Shelley’s connection to the city. First considering Byron’s stanzas on the Medici Venus from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, and Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, in the Florentine Gallery,” this article claims that The Triumph of Life reveals a sea change in Shelley as he approaches Dante and Petrarch in the wake of Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante. Shelley rejects Byron’s technique of “centring the self” in favor of poetry woven from carefully controlled allusion that places the visionary mode at its core. Reading Shelley’s creative relationship with Byron through their responses to Florentine art shows how Shelley found a distinctive voice designed to counter and even surpass Byron’s.