Figuring, page 31
Hosmer referred to the statue as her “first child” and sent it across the Atlantic to her patron and dear “Pater,” Wayman Crow, Cornelia’s father, in gratitude for his life-changing support—“as a love offering to the whole family, and as a very slight return for the many kindnesses.”
That November, a Liberator review of Hosmer’s Daphne and Medusa lauded them as “convincing proof of her genius and success,” just above an op-ed urging the newly established Tufts University to open its doors to women. (The school did not—it would be another half century before the trustees voted to admit both sexes on equal terms.)
Meanwhile, the famed English actress Fanny Kemble—who had visited the Sedgwick School frequently during Hatty’s studies and had taken a great liking to the energetic girl—traveled to Rome and witnessed Harriet’s growing success up close. She reported to Wayman Crow:
I think she will distinguish herself greatly, for she not only is gifted with an unusual artistic capacity, but she has energy, perseverance, and industry; attributes often wanting where genius exists, and extremely seldom possessed or exercised in any effectual manner by women.
But then Kemble added:
Hatty’s peculiarities will stand in the way of her success with people of society and the world, and I wish for her own sake that some of them were less decided and singular, but it is perhaps unreasonable to expect a person to be singular in their gifts and graces alone, and not to be equally unlike people in other matters.
This was odd coming from Kemble, who was often cited as a major influence on Harriet’s “peculiarities.” Kemble, who sympathized with the cause of abolition, had married a wealthy American heir, but after he inherited his family’s slave trade, she had found it impossible to remain in a marriage of such clashing values. She would later write to Hosmer of the outcome of the Civil War: “Surely there never was a more signal overthrow of the Devil and all his works, in the world’s history since it began.” How much of the acrimonious divorce was motivated by these political differences and how much by her growing impatience with heterosexuality we may never know, but by the time Kemble first met the teenaged Harriet at Lenox, she was a single woman who would spend the remainder of her life frequently clad in men’s clothing, enjoying the company and courtship of women.
To Harriet, Kemble continued to be a force of loving encouragement. In one letter, she wrote with astronomical affection:
My sweet little Hatty…[tell me] of what interests ever so little or much; your work, your plans, your ideas; what you are doing and what you are thinking of doing, what new shapes of beauty and of grace are haunting you, whether you have fixed any of your fair sisterhood of stars in clay or marble, or whether your heavens, with all those pretty creatures floating in them, are still only planetary?
Conscious of her own growing stardom, twenty-two-year-old Hosmer commissioned a photographer to affix her image in a portrait. But rather than making her “peculiarities” “less decided and singular,” she played them up, deliberately sculpting her public image as what was fashionably, though not always flatteringly, known as “an emancipated female.” In the portrait, Hosmer is wearing her daily studio outfit—another uncommon decision, for women were rarely photographed in work clothes, but especially daring since she sculpted in male attire. The intention is clearly to create the impression of being captured in the midst of creative labor during her regular workday. But salted paper—the photographic process used in the portrait, invented by Talbot in the early 1830s just before John Herschel helped him perfect the calotype—required at least an hour of exposure for a crisp image. Hosmer must have held her Puckish smile for quite some time—a living sculpture before the camera.
Her butch aesthetic—to use another anachronistic shorthand—was frequently remarked upon, but always with a warm acknowledgment of how her choice of clothing and her short curly hair seemed to emanate from her very nature. Gibson often addressed her as he would a man, by her last name—“my dear little Hosmer”—and affectionately wrote that she was a “clever fellow” no other pupil of his could match. Hosmer left an arresting first impression on Maria Mitchell. A “pretty little girl wearing a jaunty hat and a short jacket, into the pockets of which her hands were thrust” had rushed into the studio Mitchell was visiting in Rome and commenced “a rattling, all-alive talk” with another artist. The Hawthornes were there, too. “I liked her at once,” Sophia wrote in her diary, “she was so frank and cheerful, independent, honest and sincere—wide awake, energetic, yet not ungentle.”
Even the grouchy traditionalist Nathaniel Hawthorne, appointing himself as the voice of the patriarchy, reluctantly gave Hosmer permission to be herself. Describing her as “a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright,” he remarked on her male attire—“a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man’s, with a brooch of Etruscan gold, and on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet”—then wrote:
She was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts.
But he ultimately twists his permissive fascination into capitulation to convention, adding:
I don’t quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman.
Hawthorne, who would later use Hosmer as inspiration for his characters in his final novel, The Marble Faun, was interpreting her dress not as a statement of identity but as youthful sartorial rebellion. But Hosmer was very much carving out her identity—Rome had become her Paradise Found, both its thriving community of artists and its expat coterie of queer women. She wrote to Cornelia:
Don’t ask me if I was ever happy before, don’t ask me if I am happy now, but ask me if my constant state of mind is felicitous, beatific, and I will reply “Yes.” It never entered into my head that anybody could be so content on this earth, as I am here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else but in Rome, if you would give me the Gates of Paradise and all the Apostles thrown in. I can learn more and do more here, in one year, than I could in America in ten. America is a grand and glorious country in some respects, but this is a better place for an artist.
Her conviction grew firmer as the months rolled by, illuminating the monumental influence of genius loci on what we call genius in a personal sense. That fall, she wrote to Cornelia:
If I could come out of Paradise to this place, I should think it perfect….The longer I stay, the more frightful seems the idea of ever going away, and the more impossible seems to be that of being happy elsewhere. My father says that of all places in the world, Watertown is the place for him, and I say that of all places in the world, Rome is the one for me. Nothing this side of Eternity will induce me to go to America to live for the next twenty-five years.
Two weeks later, she exulted to Cornelia again:
It is a moral, physical and intellectual impossibility to live elsewhere. Everything is so utterly different here that it would seem like going into another sphere, to go back to America.
Hosmer’s use of the word “sphere” is doubly significant—in the sense of celestial spheres, going back to America would be like moving to another planet; but this was also the heyday of the “separate spheres” rhetoric, which granted men the public sphere and relegated women to the domestic sphere. Harriet Hosmer was determined to live the public life of the artist, not the domestic life of the wife. There was no place for her in America—she was now a cultural refugee, blissfully encamped in the subcultural mecca of Rome’s queer artists.
16
FROM ROMANCE TO REASON
Rome became Hosmer’s sandbox of self-invention. It offered the strange alchemy by which we transmute our former selves—barely recognizable in their different bodies and different minds holding different ideas, values, and beliefs—into the fleeting constellation of what we so confidently claim as a solid self at this particular moment. The chain of umbilical cords by which one self gives birth to another again and again at once fetters us to our past and liberates us into a novel future. That chain is invisible, except for the rare moments when we feel it tug on the confident present self with its formidable weight. “My life is so unlike what it was then,” Hosmer wrote with an eye to her teenage days at Lenox. “I think and feel so differently it seems to me I must have left my former body and found another….These changes make me feel twenty years older.”
In Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had limned the singular self-reinvention of such new beginnings amid the “perfect solitude of foreign lands,” where you can
be, as if you had not been till then,
And were then, simply that you chose to be,
where you can “possess yourself” in
A new world all alive with creatures new,
New sun, new moon, new flowers, new people—ah,
And be possessed by none of them!
[…]
Such most surprising riddance of one’s life
Comes next one’s death; it’s disembodiment
Without the pang.
Another letter to Cornelia escalates Harriet’s elation at her rebirth:
There is something in the air of Italy, setting aside other things, which would make one feel at home in Purgatory itself. In America I never had that sense of quiet, settled content such as I now have from sunrise to sunset.
Harriet’s serenity was punctuated by a lively sociality—she was beginning to meet the intellectual royalty of Europe: the Longfellows, the Thackerays, the Trollopes. She was careful, though, not to let her social life interfere with her art: “To a certain extent I suppose it is right to indulge in social gayeties,” she told Cornelia, “but the difficulty is to draw the line between just enough and too much.”
In her twenty-third year, she befriended Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who would remain loving parental figures for the young artist until Elizabeth’s death seventeen years later. In a letter to a friend, Barrett Browning relayed her powerful first impressions of
Miss Hosmer…, the young American sculptress, who is a great pet of mine and of Robert’s, and who emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly “emancipated female” from all shadow of blame, by the purity of hers. She lives here all alone (at twenty-two), works from six o’clock in the morning till night, as a great artist must, and this with an absence of pretension, and simplicity of manners, which accord rather with the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks, than with her broad forehead and high aims.
Hosmer herself was so taken with the Brownings’ love story and their mutual championship of each other’s artistry that she asked if they would consent to her casting their hands in plaster. When they did, she honored their love in her most unusual work—a bronze sculpture of the Brownings’ clasped hands. Nathaniel Hawthorne would immortalize it in The Marble Faun as a symbol of “the individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives.” Both full of tenderness and resembling a handshake, Hosmer’s homage to the Brownings gives physical form to the marriage of equals that Margaret Fuller had condoned in Woman as the only form of marriage worth entering.
Alongside such labors of love, Hosmer was beginning to support herself through commissions—an achievement almost incomprehensibly thrilling, as she wrote to Cornelia with her characteristic fusion of perceptiveness and good-natured humor:
Now that I am supporting myself I feel so frightfully womanly that I cannot describe my venerable sensations, nor could you “realize” them, any more than dear Miss Elizabeth Peabody did the tree at Lenox, when she walked into it, and upon being asked about it, said, “Yes, I saw it, but I did not realize it.”
Beneath her characteristic jocularity, Hosmer was taking a serious stance—radical at the time for a woman artist and to this day too feebly defended by all who survive by creative work—that artists ought to be paid in more than appreciation and flattery. To Wayman Crow, whose patronage had made her career possible, she wrote:
It is time that I was paid in more glittering currency than “glory.” Glory does not drive the machine, though it makes it glisten, and at this very moment I have far more of the glitter than of the precious metal.
Hosmer had taken a path not only alternative but almost entirely untrekked in a society in which marriage was women’s most standard and almost only means of support. Watching her peers marry all around her, she wrote to Crow:
Everybody is being married but myself….Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man, it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage eternal feud with the consolidating knot.
It is difficult to disentwine Harriet’s resentment of marriage as a trammeling of talent from her resentment of the fact that it was available only to heterosexual love. A decade later, she would meet a woman to whom she would consider herself a “hubby” and a “wedded wife” for a quarter century, until death did them part. But, for now, she was wedded solely to her art, as she intimated to Crow:
One must have great patience in matters of art, it is so very difficult, and excellence in it is only the result of long time….Oh, if one knew but one-half the difficulties an artist has to surmount, the amount of different kinds of study necessary, before he can see the path even beginning to open before him, the public would be less ready to censure him for his shortcomings or slow advancement. The only remedy I know is patience with perseverance, and these are always sure, with a real honest love for art, to produce something.
Meanwhile in America, the early fruits of Hosmer’s labor were garnering growing attention not only as a feat of art but as a feat for women. In a Liberator op-ed that opened with the words of Mary Wollstonecraft—“If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test”—Caroline Dall extolled Hosmer’s Hesper as a masterpiece animated by the promise of “new life and light; new power to act and see,” turning it into an emblem of early feminism. “It is a significant feat,” she wrote, “that, during the past year, one of the most beautiful works of art, ever produced upon this continent, has been conceived and executed by a woman under twenty-one, gone now to perfect her powers in sunny Italy.”
In 1857, as Maria Mitchell was packing her trunks for Europe, Hosmer received a commission for a monument from a wealthy Italian woman who had lost her young daughter, Juliet. The marmoreal elegy she composed—Juliet reclining on her deathbed, hovering serene between life and death—became the first monument by a foreign artist permitted to be displayed in an Italian temple.
While working on the private commission, Hosmer was incubating what would become her two greatest masterpieces—self-initiated works of art perfecting the intersection of beauty and tragedy, amplifying her previous commentary on women’s rights in a patriarchal society.
* * *
—
In 1856, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh was going to press as a manifesto for women’s right to art, proclaiming that “a woman…must prove what she can do before she does it,” Hosmer had begun working on a sculpture of Beatrice Cenci—a young sixteenth-century woman, whose devastating story and the mythology that enveloped it had become an icon for antiauthoritarian Italians, fomenting the ideas of the Roman revolution.
Beatrice’s father, a violent and depraved nobleman, had raped her repeatedly. When the papal authorities to whom she reported the crimes did nothing to protect her and to serve punishment, Beatrice took her salvation into her own hands. Together with her brother and stepmother, she hired two assassins to murder the abuser. They attempted to poison him, but the poison failed to kill. Beatrice saw no other recourse than to complete the task herself, which she did either by driving a spike through the rapist’s eye or by bludgeoning him with a hammer—the stories vary. (Did Hosmer see analogs to the chisel and mallet she wielded daily in these tools of vengeance?) Only then did the papal authorities leap to punishment—they executed Beatrice in 1599, beheading her with a small ax in a public spectacle after extended torture. Margaret Fuller, upon visiting the prison cell where Beatrice was tortured, observed two years before Hosmer arrived in Rome: “There is, undoubtedly, foundation for the story of a curse laid on Eve.”
Moved by Beatrice’s story, Percy Shelley had resurrected it in 1819 in a verse drama in five acts. Although his good friend Lord Byron—a man thoroughly uninterested in women’s rights—criticized it for having a subject he considered “essentially un-dramatic,” Shelley’s poem-play was so popular that it became his only work to reach a second edition in his lifetime. (The poet was buried in Rome.) Reproductions of a famed seventeenth-century portrait of Beatrice were as prevalent in nineteenth-century Rome as the Mona Lisa is in the Rome of today, but given Hosmer’s love of poetry, it is probable that Shelley’s poem is what awakened her to the human drama of Beatrice’s story and planted the seed for her sculpture.
Hosmer depicts Beatrice in the final hours of her life, wearied by the torture, lying on the scaffold specially erected for her execution. Her turbaned head rests on one arm; her other hand hangs over the edge of the platform holding a rosary. Hovering between despair and dignity as she hovers between life and death, Hosmer’s Beatrice arrests with the contrast between the tragedy of her fate and her final beauty—it is impossible to view this work of immense subtlety and immense intensity without being overtaken by a tidal wave of emotion.
That November, a Liberator review of Hosmer’s Daphne and Medusa lauded them as “convincing proof of her genius and success,” just above an op-ed urging the newly established Tufts University to open its doors to women. (The school did not—it would be another half century before the trustees voted to admit both sexes on equal terms.)
Meanwhile, the famed English actress Fanny Kemble—who had visited the Sedgwick School frequently during Hatty’s studies and had taken a great liking to the energetic girl—traveled to Rome and witnessed Harriet’s growing success up close. She reported to Wayman Crow:
I think she will distinguish herself greatly, for she not only is gifted with an unusual artistic capacity, but she has energy, perseverance, and industry; attributes often wanting where genius exists, and extremely seldom possessed or exercised in any effectual manner by women.
But then Kemble added:
Hatty’s peculiarities will stand in the way of her success with people of society and the world, and I wish for her own sake that some of them were less decided and singular, but it is perhaps unreasonable to expect a person to be singular in their gifts and graces alone, and not to be equally unlike people in other matters.
This was odd coming from Kemble, who was often cited as a major influence on Harriet’s “peculiarities.” Kemble, who sympathized with the cause of abolition, had married a wealthy American heir, but after he inherited his family’s slave trade, she had found it impossible to remain in a marriage of such clashing values. She would later write to Hosmer of the outcome of the Civil War: “Surely there never was a more signal overthrow of the Devil and all his works, in the world’s history since it began.” How much of the acrimonious divorce was motivated by these political differences and how much by her growing impatience with heterosexuality we may never know, but by the time Kemble first met the teenaged Harriet at Lenox, she was a single woman who would spend the remainder of her life frequently clad in men’s clothing, enjoying the company and courtship of women.
To Harriet, Kemble continued to be a force of loving encouragement. In one letter, she wrote with astronomical affection:
My sweet little Hatty…[tell me] of what interests ever so little or much; your work, your plans, your ideas; what you are doing and what you are thinking of doing, what new shapes of beauty and of grace are haunting you, whether you have fixed any of your fair sisterhood of stars in clay or marble, or whether your heavens, with all those pretty creatures floating in them, are still only planetary?
Conscious of her own growing stardom, twenty-two-year-old Hosmer commissioned a photographer to affix her image in a portrait. But rather than making her “peculiarities” “less decided and singular,” she played them up, deliberately sculpting her public image as what was fashionably, though not always flatteringly, known as “an emancipated female.” In the portrait, Hosmer is wearing her daily studio outfit—another uncommon decision, for women were rarely photographed in work clothes, but especially daring since she sculpted in male attire. The intention is clearly to create the impression of being captured in the midst of creative labor during her regular workday. But salted paper—the photographic process used in the portrait, invented by Talbot in the early 1830s just before John Herschel helped him perfect the calotype—required at least an hour of exposure for a crisp image. Hosmer must have held her Puckish smile for quite some time—a living sculpture before the camera.
Her butch aesthetic—to use another anachronistic shorthand—was frequently remarked upon, but always with a warm acknowledgment of how her choice of clothing and her short curly hair seemed to emanate from her very nature. Gibson often addressed her as he would a man, by her last name—“my dear little Hosmer”—and affectionately wrote that she was a “clever fellow” no other pupil of his could match. Hosmer left an arresting first impression on Maria Mitchell. A “pretty little girl wearing a jaunty hat and a short jacket, into the pockets of which her hands were thrust” had rushed into the studio Mitchell was visiting in Rome and commenced “a rattling, all-alive talk” with another artist. The Hawthornes were there, too. “I liked her at once,” Sophia wrote in her diary, “she was so frank and cheerful, independent, honest and sincere—wide awake, energetic, yet not ungentle.”
Even the grouchy traditionalist Nathaniel Hawthorne, appointing himself as the voice of the patriarchy, reluctantly gave Hosmer permission to be herself. Describing her as “a small, brisk, wide-awake figure, not ungraceful; frank, simple, straightforward, and downright,” he remarked on her male attire—“a shirt-front, collar, and cravat like a man’s, with a brooch of Etruscan gold, and on her curly head was a picturesque little cap of black velvet”—then wrote:
She was very peculiar, but she seemed to be her actual self, and nothing affected or made up; so that, for my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts.
But he ultimately twists his permissive fascination into capitulation to convention, adding:
I don’t quite see, however, what she is to do when she grows older, for the decorum of age will not be consistent with a costume that looks pretty and excusable enough in a young woman.
Hawthorne, who would later use Hosmer as inspiration for his characters in his final novel, The Marble Faun, was interpreting her dress not as a statement of identity but as youthful sartorial rebellion. But Hosmer was very much carving out her identity—Rome had become her Paradise Found, both its thriving community of artists and its expat coterie of queer women. She wrote to Cornelia:
Don’t ask me if I was ever happy before, don’t ask me if I am happy now, but ask me if my constant state of mind is felicitous, beatific, and I will reply “Yes.” It never entered into my head that anybody could be so content on this earth, as I am here. I wouldn’t live anywhere else but in Rome, if you would give me the Gates of Paradise and all the Apostles thrown in. I can learn more and do more here, in one year, than I could in America in ten. America is a grand and glorious country in some respects, but this is a better place for an artist.
Her conviction grew firmer as the months rolled by, illuminating the monumental influence of genius loci on what we call genius in a personal sense. That fall, she wrote to Cornelia:
If I could come out of Paradise to this place, I should think it perfect….The longer I stay, the more frightful seems the idea of ever going away, and the more impossible seems to be that of being happy elsewhere. My father says that of all places in the world, Watertown is the place for him, and I say that of all places in the world, Rome is the one for me. Nothing this side of Eternity will induce me to go to America to live for the next twenty-five years.
Two weeks later, she exulted to Cornelia again:
It is a moral, physical and intellectual impossibility to live elsewhere. Everything is so utterly different here that it would seem like going into another sphere, to go back to America.
Hosmer’s use of the word “sphere” is doubly significant—in the sense of celestial spheres, going back to America would be like moving to another planet; but this was also the heyday of the “separate spheres” rhetoric, which granted men the public sphere and relegated women to the domestic sphere. Harriet Hosmer was determined to live the public life of the artist, not the domestic life of the wife. There was no place for her in America—she was now a cultural refugee, blissfully encamped in the subcultural mecca of Rome’s queer artists.
16
FROM ROMANCE TO REASON
Rome became Hosmer’s sandbox of self-invention. It offered the strange alchemy by which we transmute our former selves—barely recognizable in their different bodies and different minds holding different ideas, values, and beliefs—into the fleeting constellation of what we so confidently claim as a solid self at this particular moment. The chain of umbilical cords by which one self gives birth to another again and again at once fetters us to our past and liberates us into a novel future. That chain is invisible, except for the rare moments when we feel it tug on the confident present self with its formidable weight. “My life is so unlike what it was then,” Hosmer wrote with an eye to her teenage days at Lenox. “I think and feel so differently it seems to me I must have left my former body and found another….These changes make me feel twenty years older.”
In Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had limned the singular self-reinvention of such new beginnings amid the “perfect solitude of foreign lands,” where you can
be, as if you had not been till then,
And were then, simply that you chose to be,
where you can “possess yourself” in
A new world all alive with creatures new,
New sun, new moon, new flowers, new people—ah,
And be possessed by none of them!
[…]
Such most surprising riddance of one’s life
Comes next one’s death; it’s disembodiment
Without the pang.
Another letter to Cornelia escalates Harriet’s elation at her rebirth:
There is something in the air of Italy, setting aside other things, which would make one feel at home in Purgatory itself. In America I never had that sense of quiet, settled content such as I now have from sunrise to sunset.
Harriet’s serenity was punctuated by a lively sociality—she was beginning to meet the intellectual royalty of Europe: the Longfellows, the Thackerays, the Trollopes. She was careful, though, not to let her social life interfere with her art: “To a certain extent I suppose it is right to indulge in social gayeties,” she told Cornelia, “but the difficulty is to draw the line between just enough and too much.”
In her twenty-third year, she befriended Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who would remain loving parental figures for the young artist until Elizabeth’s death seventeen years later. In a letter to a friend, Barrett Browning relayed her powerful first impressions of
Miss Hosmer…, the young American sculptress, who is a great pet of mine and of Robert’s, and who emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly “emancipated female” from all shadow of blame, by the purity of hers. She lives here all alone (at twenty-two), works from six o’clock in the morning till night, as a great artist must, and this with an absence of pretension, and simplicity of manners, which accord rather with the childish dimples in her rosy cheeks, than with her broad forehead and high aims.
Hosmer herself was so taken with the Brownings’ love story and their mutual championship of each other’s artistry that she asked if they would consent to her casting their hands in plaster. When they did, she honored their love in her most unusual work—a bronze sculpture of the Brownings’ clasped hands. Nathaniel Hawthorne would immortalize it in The Marble Faun as a symbol of “the individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives.” Both full of tenderness and resembling a handshake, Hosmer’s homage to the Brownings gives physical form to the marriage of equals that Margaret Fuller had condoned in Woman as the only form of marriage worth entering.
Alongside such labors of love, Hosmer was beginning to support herself through commissions—an achievement almost incomprehensibly thrilling, as she wrote to Cornelia with her characteristic fusion of perceptiveness and good-natured humor:
Now that I am supporting myself I feel so frightfully womanly that I cannot describe my venerable sensations, nor could you “realize” them, any more than dear Miss Elizabeth Peabody did the tree at Lenox, when she walked into it, and upon being asked about it, said, “Yes, I saw it, but I did not realize it.”
Beneath her characteristic jocularity, Hosmer was taking a serious stance—radical at the time for a woman artist and to this day too feebly defended by all who survive by creative work—that artists ought to be paid in more than appreciation and flattery. To Wayman Crow, whose patronage had made her career possible, she wrote:
It is time that I was paid in more glittering currency than “glory.” Glory does not drive the machine, though it makes it glisten, and at this very moment I have far more of the glitter than of the precious metal.
Hosmer had taken a path not only alternative but almost entirely untrekked in a society in which marriage was women’s most standard and almost only means of support. Watching her peers marry all around her, she wrote to Crow:
Everybody is being married but myself….Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man, it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage eternal feud with the consolidating knot.
It is difficult to disentwine Harriet’s resentment of marriage as a trammeling of talent from her resentment of the fact that it was available only to heterosexual love. A decade later, she would meet a woman to whom she would consider herself a “hubby” and a “wedded wife” for a quarter century, until death did them part. But, for now, she was wedded solely to her art, as she intimated to Crow:
One must have great patience in matters of art, it is so very difficult, and excellence in it is only the result of long time….Oh, if one knew but one-half the difficulties an artist has to surmount, the amount of different kinds of study necessary, before he can see the path even beginning to open before him, the public would be less ready to censure him for his shortcomings or slow advancement. The only remedy I know is patience with perseverance, and these are always sure, with a real honest love for art, to produce something.
Meanwhile in America, the early fruits of Hosmer’s labor were garnering growing attention not only as a feat of art but as a feat for women. In a Liberator op-ed that opened with the words of Mary Wollstonecraft—“If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test”—Caroline Dall extolled Hosmer’s Hesper as a masterpiece animated by the promise of “new life and light; new power to act and see,” turning it into an emblem of early feminism. “It is a significant feat,” she wrote, “that, during the past year, one of the most beautiful works of art, ever produced upon this continent, has been conceived and executed by a woman under twenty-one, gone now to perfect her powers in sunny Italy.”
In 1857, as Maria Mitchell was packing her trunks for Europe, Hosmer received a commission for a monument from a wealthy Italian woman who had lost her young daughter, Juliet. The marmoreal elegy she composed—Juliet reclining on her deathbed, hovering serene between life and death—became the first monument by a foreign artist permitted to be displayed in an Italian temple.
While working on the private commission, Hosmer was incubating what would become her two greatest masterpieces—self-initiated works of art perfecting the intersection of beauty and tragedy, amplifying her previous commentary on women’s rights in a patriarchal society.
* * *
—
In 1856, just as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh was going to press as a manifesto for women’s right to art, proclaiming that “a woman…must prove what she can do before she does it,” Hosmer had begun working on a sculpture of Beatrice Cenci—a young sixteenth-century woman, whose devastating story and the mythology that enveloped it had become an icon for antiauthoritarian Italians, fomenting the ideas of the Roman revolution.
Beatrice’s father, a violent and depraved nobleman, had raped her repeatedly. When the papal authorities to whom she reported the crimes did nothing to protect her and to serve punishment, Beatrice took her salvation into her own hands. Together with her brother and stepmother, she hired two assassins to murder the abuser. They attempted to poison him, but the poison failed to kill. Beatrice saw no other recourse than to complete the task herself, which she did either by driving a spike through the rapist’s eye or by bludgeoning him with a hammer—the stories vary. (Did Hosmer see analogs to the chisel and mallet she wielded daily in these tools of vengeance?) Only then did the papal authorities leap to punishment—they executed Beatrice in 1599, beheading her with a small ax in a public spectacle after extended torture. Margaret Fuller, upon visiting the prison cell where Beatrice was tortured, observed two years before Hosmer arrived in Rome: “There is, undoubtedly, foundation for the story of a curse laid on Eve.”
Moved by Beatrice’s story, Percy Shelley had resurrected it in 1819 in a verse drama in five acts. Although his good friend Lord Byron—a man thoroughly uninterested in women’s rights—criticized it for having a subject he considered “essentially un-dramatic,” Shelley’s poem-play was so popular that it became his only work to reach a second edition in his lifetime. (The poet was buried in Rome.) Reproductions of a famed seventeenth-century portrait of Beatrice were as prevalent in nineteenth-century Rome as the Mona Lisa is in the Rome of today, but given Hosmer’s love of poetry, it is probable that Shelley’s poem is what awakened her to the human drama of Beatrice’s story and planted the seed for her sculpture.
Hosmer depicts Beatrice in the final hours of her life, wearied by the torture, lying on the scaffold specially erected for her execution. Her turbaned head rests on one arm; her other hand hangs over the edge of the platform holding a rosary. Hovering between despair and dignity as she hovers between life and death, Hosmer’s Beatrice arrests with the contrast between the tragedy of her fate and her final beauty—it is impossible to view this work of immense subtlety and immense intensity without being overtaken by a tidal wave of emotion.
