Page 48 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.
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its place with later works in which he commemorates particularly in Britain, Republican Rome had been
the origins of particular arts. In 1783 Josiah Wedg- taken as a model of civic virtue, and its writers, re-
wood commissioned a painting to symbolise the his- garded as the supreme literary models, were widely
tory of his own craft of potter, asking for an idealised, imitated, particularly Virgil, Horace and Ovid. The
feminised allegory that would please his high-born pat- stated aim was to recreate a new Augustan Age, epit-
rons. In two companion pieces, The Corinthian Maid omised by Dryden’s translations of the Aeneid and
and Penelope Unravelling herWeb by Lamplight (spinning Pope’s adaptations of the Eclogues. But whileVirgil re-
being another great Midlands industry), Wright mained a staple of school education, the vogue in
linked making with myth. Both are stories of fidel- 1770s was for all things Greek. In Britain, in the
ity, showing a woman as artist and maker. While 1750s,The Society of Dilettanti had sponsored the ex-
Penelope was familiar from Homer’s Odyssey and pedition to Athens by James Stuart and Nicholas
Ovid, the legend of the Corinthian Maid came from Revett, whose resulting four volume work The Antiqui-
Pliny, via Hayley’s 1778 Poetical Epistle, which told ties of Athens was enormously influential, particularly
how the maid, lamenting her lover’s imminent depart- on British architecture. In Germany, the high priest of
ure, outlined his shadow on the wall as he slept under Hellenism, Johann Joachim Winckelman, published
the lamplight.21 Both these paintings, however, are his History of Ancient Art among the Greeks in 1763, mak-
cool and elegant, neo-classical rather than Romantic. ing bold claims for the superiority of Greek art and
Beautiful as they are, they lack the energy that em- for Hellenic political and spiritual freedom, casting
anates from Virgil’s Tomb. an enduring spell on the new German literature linked
to Lessing, Goethe and Schiller.22 (While Goethe’s
lll father wrote of Virgil’s tomb in 1740, Goethe himself
was markedly incurious about the poet’s grave.23)
O ddly, Wright’s romantic tribute to Virgil was
slightly out of temper with the time. In the late In this climate of Hellenism, where Virgil was al-
eighteenth-century European intellectuals and writ- most eclipsed, despite the appearance of fine schol-
ers generally condemned Virgil as tame in compari- arly editions, and was damned as derivative, artificial
son to Homer. In the early years of the century, and second rate, Wright’s painting might seem rep-
resentative of an outmoded aesthetic. ‘If you take from
21. The Corinthian Maid 1782-5, National Gallery of Washington, and Virgil his language and metre, what do you leave him?’
Penelope Unravelling herWeb by Lamplight 1785, J. Paul Getty Coleridge asked.24 This question, often taken to imply
Museum, Malibu: Egerton op.cit., cat 68,69. that Virgil lacked deep feeling, was prompted by
Wordsworth’s translation of the first volume of the
22. For discussion of this subject see Geoffrey Atherton, The Decline Aeneid in 1823, the very act of translation necessarily
and Fall ofVirgil in Eighteenth-century Germany:The Repressed Muse, deprivingVirgil of ‘language and metre’. In Coleridge’s
Rochester, NY, 2006. view,Virgil was not worth translating anyway, being
‘a stiff mare mortuum [dead sea] of dullness’.25 But
23. Trapp, op.cit. p.23. Wordsworth’s translation was a significant act of
24. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (8 May 1824), London 1836,
p.27.
25. S.T.Coleridge, Poems:Variorum Text, ed. J.C.C. Mays, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 2001, p 1221.
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