Abstract
<span>Recent scholarship on the nineteenth-century serialized artists’ monograph has argued for a reassessment of this particular genre of art writing and its role in the development of art history as a discipline. Women art writers number prominently among the authors within such series, which proliferated in the English art press at the turn of the century. Significantly, many of their contributions form the first separate English-language study of several important quattrocento Italian old masters. Yet these artists, such as Luca Signorelli, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Andrea Mantegna, were for the most part considered unpopular and ‘difficult’ for the general public to appreciate. This may explain why, despite substantial foreign-language scholarship and Mantegna’s never-waning reputation as a ‘great’ artist, it was not until 1881 that he became the subject of a dedicated study in British art historical scholarship for the first time, with Julia Cartwright’s dual monograph <em>Mantegna and Francia</em>. Taking Mantegna as a case study, this article traces the various forms in which the artist became increasingly visible to the British public from the mid-century onwards via the practices of acquisition, display, reproduction, and travel, and how this visibility translated into Julia Cartwright’s monograph, in which she set out to reinvigorate the reputation of an artist well represented in British collections, but deemed distasteful to the Victorian eye. As earlier women writers such as Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and Maria Callcott had successfully promoted the much-maligned Italian ‘Primitives’ to a wider British public, a later generation of women took advantage of gaps in English-language art criticism as they worked to establish themselves professionally in the face of an over-saturated British art press during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.</span>
Highlights
‘Such a pleasant little sketch [...] of this irritable artist’: Julia Cartwright and the Reception of Andrea Mantegna in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain. In these days, when we cannot walk through the streets even of a third-rate town without passing shops filled with engravings and prints, when not our books only but the newspapers that lie on our tables are illustrated; when the ‘Penny Magazine’ can place a little print after Mantegna at once before the eyes of fifty thousand readers [...] we find it difficult to throw our imagination back to a time when such things were not.[1]
Writing in 1845, the art historian Anna Jameson (1794–1860) encapsulated a moment in British visual culture when the development of image reproductive technologies and the expansion of the printing press brought the art of the old masters to the British public on an unprecedented scale.[2]
Despite singling out Andrea Mantegna as the recipient of the gaze of fifty thousand readers, it would take almost forty years before the artist came into the spotlight in the form of a dedicated study in English art criticism, with the publication of Julia Cartwright’s Mantegna and Francia.[3]
Summary
In these days, when we cannot walk through the streets even of a third-rate town without passing shops filled with engravings and prints, when not our books only but the newspapers that lie on our tables are illustrated; when the ‘Penny Magazine’ can place a little print after Mantegna at once before the eyes of fifty thousand readers [...] we find it difficult to throw our imagination back to a time when such things were not.[1]. Cartwright’s diaries detail the voracious range of her reading, which ran the breadth of the popular journals and literary magazines, accompanied by a steady diet of John Ruskin, Giorgio Vasari, Anna Jameson, Lord Lindsay, the Brownings, and George Eliot While her tastes during her early twenties clearly reflect the influence of such authors, demonstrated by her preference for the early Italian Primitives, as Cartwright established her name in the periodical press her subject matter broadened.[8] As a regular contributor to respected journals such as the Magazine of Art, Art Journal, and Portfolio, her articles covered lesser-known historic sites such as the Sacro Monte of Varallo and late-quattrocento painters like Lorenzo Lotto.[9] Thereby, from her very first publications, Cartwright proved herself a reliable authority on the latest topics of art historical interest, ‘plac[ing] her in the forefront of those who in turn influenced and reflected the emerging new taste’.10
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