What's on Zucchi's chimneypiece?

For once I'm providing a promised blogged follow-up within a few days... This message constitutes the follow-up I said I've give to the posting of last Friday in the light of my research in the Paul Mellon Centre library/archives. In place of answers to issues I raised before heading over to Bloomsbury, I'll be mostly presenting some further questions.

One thing I've been trying to do this morning, with no success to date, is to find a colour image, or indeed any image, of Antonio's Zucchi's A Student Conducted to Minerva who Points to Greece and Italy which formed the frontispiece of the Adam Bros's Works for two main reasons, and whose choice was likely to be 'of Adam's choosing' (Tait, Robert Adams: Drawings and Imagination 1993: 90).  I've been looking for this image firstly to gauge whether Minerva as represented here might be inspiring, or the inspiration for, Industry-Virtue-&c as she's represented in the Adam Room's Choice of Hercules chimneypiece, and secondly, to find out if I can what the panel on the left of the painting might be showing - something appropriately allegorical presumably to match the allegory of the painting overall? Could it even be the choice of Hercules?  I've not been able to discover, yet, where the painting now is, if it's extant.  The illustration I've picked to accompany this posting is a 1775 engraving in the BM prints collection after Zucchi's work by Bartolozzi, a contemporary of Zucchi who was active in Britain between 1774 and 1799 (my source for these dates: the BM database) which won't I think help answer the second question, but will help with the first one.

The key question I wanted to address last Friday was: could the chimneypiece have been designed by Rysbrack? Back last summer when I was composing my abstract for the Hercules conference (for details see various earlier postings) I said that the paper would investigate whether this could have been the case.  When I began revisiting the topic last month I became worried that I'd been naively taking two pieces of evidences I'd found and considering that there might be some connection between them: i.e. out of premise A) there is a chimneypiece in the Adam Room designed by Adam (well, possibily: see below), and B) Rysbrack did a design for a Choice of Hercules chimneypiece, proposing that C) Adam used Rybrack's design.  I'm now thinking that my either instinct might have been right, or that at least it's worth positing whether this is a possibility. One thing I've become aware of is how much interaction there was between Adam and contemporary artists so much so that one can talk of a circle round him (ref. to follow for key bk on this topic...) incl. Rysbrack, and Zucchi as briefly looked at above; also Wedgwood?.  So I want to find out more about interaction between Adam and Rysbrack. 

But I do also want to consider whether it could Adam's own design, starting perhaps by looking at the Adam prints in the Soane Museum archives which include a large number of designs for chimneypieces.  If there don't turn out to be any Choices, I'll still be able to assess the kinds of allegorial/mythological scenes that Adam depicted.

There is also this question: was the chimneypiece or the 'Adam Room' generally actually designed by Adam? I'll follow up here on an intriguing document in the Froebel Archive referring to the designs as 'Adameque' (ref. to follow). That said, to be 'after Adam' is itself to be engaging with his brand of neoclassicism.

Another question: why a chimneypiece? Perhaps because they are key to a room - as fixed items, providing a focal point unlike moveable furniture, which would in any case be moved out of a room for funcions (functions can't be an 18th-c term..), which was why Adam didn't focus heavily upon furniture design (add ref.).

Another question: which mythological symbols were used on fireplaces, by Adam, Rybsbrack and others, and why were they used.  E.g. why Diana and dancing nymphs for the Adam chimneypiece in Syon House (ill. to right)?  What messages did this image convey for a showpice drawingroom? What image of antiquity is being appropriated?  I want to keep my focus on 'why Hercules' Choice?' and 'why Industry/Virtue as Minerva?' but the question of why other figures were chosen will need some consideration.

Now I'm going to be looking more the Adam chimneypieces discussed in Stillman, The Decorative Art of Robert Adam (1966)...

Industry, Idleness and the Adam Room

Charlesworth (see link in previous posting) explores how the myth of Hercules' choice was, by the 18th-c, 'thought suitable for inculcating morality'.  He reflects on how 'the morality was often updated to match that of a mercantile Protestant nation' (2003: 265).  Today I hope to move closer to being able to assess one instance where this morality was 'updated', the Adam Room's chimneypiece (see photograph to left). I'm off to the Paul Mellon Centre library to look at holdings relevant to Adam to find out more about the choice of image, to try to find out more about why a chimneyplace of a showroom was thought the appropriate place to depict the choice, and to try to find out whether the chimney piece and the room more generally is in fact by Adam or after Adam.  I'll report back.  One update - I've just revised my previous posting of a week ago (26 Apr) - it now reflects my thinking since I originally wrote it.

At the crossroads

V&A D.234-1901

As I start to write my paper for the conference at Leeds on the reception of Hercules I'm negotiating my own Herculean dilemma.  I'm writing about one aspect of the myth of Hercules - the choice he made between two paths when he reached a parting in the road. This posting muses on my progress to date with the paper on Hercules' choice and on my own sense of being at a crossroads.

The English/ed Myth
The paper will be about how the choice of Hercules was envisaged in the 18th century as one between quintessentially English concerns.  The ancient myth, 'about' many things, e.g. how to steer a course between two different lifestyles and philosophies, gets turned into a myth about being an 18th-c gentleman.  The hero who can stand as a metaphor for various 'national' identities, Athenian for instance esp. in the 6th century BC, and what it was to be Greek more broadly, is 'Englished' to employ the term for the translation of a mythological work into a foreign context in Sandys' edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Hercules' choice is made into one between two paths that I'm starting to wish that I hadn't expressed as 'Virtue' and 'Vice' in my title and in the abstract I submitted to Emma Stafford several months ago. 

The two females are conceived as such in ancient versions of the myth (and there aren't all that many ancient versions: this is a myth whose 'afterlife' is richer than its ancient lives: link to follow to discussion by Stafford and others...).  It was phrased by 18th-century thinkers, politicians, artists, landscape gardeners as a choice between what they were desirous to promote, and either avoid or control.  The 18th-century 'Englished' Hercules is turning his body towards the personification of indolence, idleness, pleasure and the body.  He is turning his gaze towards the more arduous path of industriousness/capitalism (see here. Charlesworth 2003: esp. 279)/the mind.

My choice

...between classical reception studies and eighteenth-century studies: I'm writing as a classicist interested in how the 18th century stands as one moment in the reception of a particular myth. Or am I writing as an18th-century historian interested in how the myth configures 18th-century values? Or can the myth illustrate how the dilemma only exists because of the disciplinary boundaries I've internalised? 

Herakles doesn't actually make a final choice - either that or it's the case that he's always crossing between two paths. When he labours he does so to excess; when he rests, he again takes his pleasures excessively or at least embraces them: I can't think of an image where he is getting ready to take up a life of toil: instead he's for example stepping onto a bema to make music; reclining while Athena or some other figure waits upon him. It's when he takes rest that he is caught between the choice between the two personified concepts and their gifts. 

Hercules-like, I'm going to form my own path out of what is offered to me.  Or, Hercules-like, I shall remain caught between the appeal of two different paths.  And (as Oedipus finds - this is a point I'm going to develop for a lecture to first year students next term on the OT) a place where there is a fork in road is actually a place where three roads meet - the two new ones and the one that the traveller has already been travelling along.  There is a further opportunity, of returning, retreating even, back along this familiar path.  This is what Hercules tends not to do.  I won't go back either as a classicist seeking some relationship with the ancient world unmediated by the reception of that world, when conceptualising in such a 'classical world' is to involve oneself with reception.

I'll update this posting at a later point including to explain the connection between the drawing that heads this posting, which may be Rysbrack's design for a Hercules chimneypiece, and my key image of the Adam Room Hercules.  I'll add bibliography too.

Our Greek temple

One thing that I have been struck by this term as I've been teaching my third-year module, Ancient Greek Religion, is how far the students have become engaged with the study of ancient Greek religion.  One the one hand, aspects of the topic have got them taking a fresh perspective on the study of antiquity. For example, it has let them build on the study of the Greek gods that some of them undertook as part of their study of Homer in the second year, or it has enabled them to add to the overview of aspects of Athenian religion that were covered in an introductory module on ancient history two years ago. But as well as enabling the students to go deeper into their degree programme, what I've gained a sense of from class discussion and their assignments is that many of them are thinking in new ways about their own relationship with the ancient world. 

For instance, they have thought about how the Greek gods seem familiar to us - they are depicted in modern Western cities for example where they convey messages about, say, British cultural values.  But as we've been considering, they are also alien, strange entities venerated and created by a people who remain 'other' to us even though they 'gave' us so many concepts fundamental to our culture (democracy, philosophy, tragedy...).   But most of all, some of the students have been exploring how far our own religious concepts, christianised though they typically are, and apparently 'monotheistic' too, help or hinder us study the religious concepts, sacred places, beliefs and personages of the ancient Greeks.

Yesterday, some of us went on a visit to a temple, and it felt like something of a pilgramage - we'd planned it for some time, worn particular clothing (stout shoes), left together for the walk to the site, pushed through the undergrowth as it came in view, then two-by-two were allowed to do what is generally forbidden - look inside where we were confronted with this:

It's a panel of two gods as they were represented in the 5th century BC on the Parthenon, Demeter and Ares.  This temple is Doric, and conforms to ancient ways of building temples. But it is not Greek, it is British - it's on our campus, in the corner of Mount Clare.

Here are the experiences of one of students:

"I have been waiting a little while for today and really was taken by it ... I was really impressed by the plaster cast(?) of the inner panel-how much was remaining and how personal rather than academic that it felt, (compared with seeing the Elgin marbles ...) ... I was very astonished, and still am now, the sense of 'yeah, there's a neoclassical temple just sitting nearby'. For me it makes my experience at Roehampton even more 'alive' ... and almost like there's that chance to be a part of what you've been studying..."

And here are the pilgrims - the unexpectly beautiful weather helped instil a sense of otherworldlinees under dappled sunshine more like the Greek countryside rather than SW London in early March.

Minerva in Marquetry satinwood

I watched one of the episodes of the recent BBC series Carved With Love, on Thomas Chippendale, hoping to find about the neoclassical aspects to his work that came out of his collaborations with Robert Adam and so add some depth to my appreciation of the Roehampton Adam Room and chimneypiece (see previous posting). Around half way through the episode I discovered that a piece of furniture regarded as one of Chippendale's greatest achievements includes a representation of the goddess on whom much of my research has centred, and continues to centre: Athena/Minerva. 

The item in question, pictured at the start of this posting, is the 'Diana and Minerva commode' which is the showpiece item in the State Bedroom at Harewood House.  One of the programme's talking heads described the piece as 'astonishing' by virtue of its 'design and quality'. I'd like to focus upon a third aspect, its representation of the goddesses on the two roundels.  I want to consider why these two particular goddesses were picked, and - in view of my past and current work on one of the deities - why Minerva in particular.  Is it enough, as the documentary noted, that Minerva was the goddess of craft? If so, why is she being juxtaposed with Diana, a goddess of wild spaces?  What messages are being constructed via inclusion of these figures about classical culture in a Georgian neoclassical grand house if not would-be palace? The piece was intended as parade rather than functional furniture and helped put the wealth and status of Harewood on show.  Nothing seems to be done to chance.  This expensive piece, using various exotic woods, has been executed following some thought - as the documentary discussed, it is like a work of architecture in miniature replete with frieze.  Ebony and ivory are used to inlay the roundels. Would any two mythological figures have done the job equally well?

Answers to follow!

 

‘There is still nothing like Roehampton anywhere in London to get an impression of the aristocratic Georgian country villa’

As Pevsner put it, ‘There is still nothing like Roehampton anywhere in London to get an impression of the aristocratic Georgian country villa’ (Buildings of England 687).  I have just sent off my abstact for a conference on the reception of Hercules that Emma Stafford is organising in Leeds.  What I say in the abstract is that the paper will focus upon one aspect of this ‘impression’: the ‘Choice of Hercules’ on the chimneypiece of what is now one of the showpiece rooms of the University of Roehampton: the ‘Adam Room’ in Grove House.   I state that to explore why the myth was thought suitable for display in an eighteenth-century gentleman’s residence, I shall first consider the key inspirations for the chimneypiece, notably the works of Matteis and Shaftesbury, and the Farneze Hercules, the ‘must see’ of the Grand Tour and staple feature of the gardens of the men who were transforming their estates into simulacra of classical sanctuaries.  I shall also consider whether - as I discussed in a previous posting to this blog - the chimneypiece is following Rysbrack’s design for a ‘Choice of Hercules’ chimneypiece. I will explore the place of the chimneypiece within the iconography of the room, which, usually ascribed to Robert Adam, has been described as ‘a good example of classical restraint’ to quote from Audrey Coe's History of Grove House). I plan, too, to discuss how the image exemplifies eighteenth-century uses of Hercules as an every(gentle)man, while also appropriating the concept of the ‘underside’ of Hercules by pointing to the hero's connections with the decadence and indulgence of ‘Vice’.

Classical religion on the doorstep: finding the Garden Temple/Temple of Fortune/Temple of Hanover

I want to emerse myself in 18th-century garden architecture: while I was consulting the Froebel Archive at Roehampton University in May to research the Hercules Chimney Piece in Grove House I made a discovery that has been changing my life, namely that there is a neoclassical Doric temple, that I've since discovered might include some classical artefacts, in the Grounds of Mount Clare, one of the neoclassical villas of Roehampton bordering Richmond Park.  The next day I sought it out, feeling closer than I ever expect to Cockerell et al., as I pushed through the undergrowth to the edge of the grounds, came on the columns ahead of me as I turned a corner, and gauged its ruined state as I got closer.  It has given me a route, finally, into the reception of the classical world.  Some outcomes of my enthusing about the temple to anyone who will listen: I've recently been asked to write about the temple for CA News, and to lead classics teachers on a 'pilgrimage' to it next year. I'll report on my progress/experiences.