From Cleland to Byron: The Unexpurgated British Version of Italian Art

Abstract

AbstractThe article seeks to provide a sample of non‐canonical eighteenth‐century British responses to Italian art – sometimes of a salacious nature – and to tie such responses both to the interaction between aesthetic education and sexual opportunity on the Grand Tour and to the wider eighteenth‐century narratives of scepticism, irony, taste and sentiment. Its protagonists range from art critics such as the Richardsons and famous writers such as Smollett, Burns and Byron through John Cleland (author of Fanny Hill) to Grand Tourists and collectors such as Charles Townley and John Bacon Sawrey Morritt.