LUISA CALE. Fuseli's Milton Gallery: 'Turning Readers into Spectators'.

Abstract

‘[R]eal lovers of art must feel great pleasure in visiting the Milton Gallery’, announced the Morning Chronicle in June 1799, warmly congratulating its creator, celebrated Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, for ‘an effort of genius almost equal to the Poet himself’: the ‘exhibition we consider as a national honour, and we are happy to find that all ranks of people have sufficient taste to admire, and liberality to encourage it’. Fuseli was infused by a sense that grand British literature could be a resource for a ‘grand style’ of British art (which was still overshadowed by the Continent); during the 1790s, he rendered 40 magnificent pictures out of Milton's epic. In the wake of Richard Altick's The Shows of London (1978), several studies have been turning our attention from solitary, inward, ideal, visionary Romanticism, to social and historical Romanticism and the bustling, popular, sociable, and visual cultures of the age. Among the most notable reconsiderations are William Galperin's iconically titled The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (1993), Gillen D’Arcy Wood's The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (2001), and Christopher Rovee's Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism (2006), in addition to compatibly theoretical work on intersections of literary and visual culture, including the cinematic undertexts of modernist literature in Garrett Stewart's Between Film and Screen (1999). To this we can now add Luisa Calè's capacious, adventurous study (graced with an insert of 23 black-and-white plates), about Fuseli's Milton Gallery and the wealth of contexts that informed it: aesthetics, psychology, optics, gallery culture, the gendering of spectatorship, theories of the gaze and the proto-cinematic procedures of the gallery array, and the Romantic reception of Milton. If Calè's advertisement, ‘I will seek to restore visual dimensions to Romantic reading practices by way of the intersections of literature and art in … a culture of exhibitions’ (p. 5), feels belated considering the precedent studies, you’ll want to stay with her, because her work on what produced Fuseli's gallery, and what it in turn produced, is fresh, resourceful and informative.