A Claude Glass

A Claude Glass

Contributor: Ellen Harvey

Location: Brooklyn, New York, USA

Description: Looking at this photograph of my husband holding a Claude glass reflecting Manhattan as seen from our Brooklyn rooftop, I can’t help thinking how much my feelings about both the view in the mirror and the mirror itself have changed. For the last months, during the lock-down, Manhattan has hung like an inaccessible mirage across the river, first uncannily silent, now backed with the low drone of the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. A dark mirror means something different in dark times.

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A medal commemorating the performance of Viganò’s ballet Prometeo in 1814

A medal commemorating the performance of Viganò’s ballet Prometeo in 1814

Contributor: Lilla Maria Crisafulli

Location: In the possession of the author

Description: This medal, struck in 1817, commemorates the work of one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of  ballet history, creator of the so-called choreodrama, Salvatore Viganò (1769-1821). It reads:

A SALVATORE VIGANO’ / IMPAREGGIABILE COREOGRAFO/ CHE COLLA/  RAPPRESENTAZIONE DEL PROMETEO/  DATA  L’ AN MDCCCXIV/  NEL REGIO TEATRO DI MILANO / IMMORTALATOSI. /TANTA GLORIA. NELLA MIRRA / E NEL PSAMMI / BRILLANTE. TVTTAVIA / SOSTIENE/  GLI AMMIRATORI DEL BELLO/ SACRAVANO MERITATAMENTE/  NEL MDCCCXVII.

[TO SALVATORE VIGANO’ SUPREME CHOREOGRAPHER WHO WAS IMMORTALIZED FOR THE STAGING  OF HIS PROMETEO  IN THE YEAR 1814  IN THE ROYAL THEATRE OF MILAN. MUCH GLORY FOR HIS MIRRA AND BRILLIANT IN PSAMMI. HOWEVER ADMIRERS OF THE BEAUTIFUL PRAISED HIM DESERVEDLY IN 1817.]

Viganò’s Prometeo opened on 22 May 1813 and met with an unprecedented popular triumph. This ballet was one of Viganò’s fantastic-allegorical dances that Ritorni calls pantomimo-dramas, transitional ballets located somewhere between the ballet en action and the danced poem. In all, Viganò composed more than 40 ballets of which 15 were these pantomimo-dramas, heroic dances or grand ballets animated by hero-comic or tragicomic actions. The so-called “passo d’azione alla Viganò“ [pas en action à la Viganò] was to dance what Wagner’s infinite melody was to opera. The ballet entirely danced à la Viganò disappeared with his death in 1821, until, a century later, the Russians rediscovered it, and used it as a basis for their choreographies. Admiration for Salvatore Viganò and his revolutionary dance had a lot to do with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Italian experience and underlies the expression of his revolutionary poetics in Prometheus Unbound (1820).

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The Flora Danica Dinner Service

The Flora Danica dinner service

Contributor: Cian Duffy

Location: Royal residences in Copenhagen (Christiansborg, Amalienborg and Rosenborg).

Description: According to (disputed) tradition, Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark commissioned the 1895-piece Flora Danica dinner service in 1790 as a gift for Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Frederik, the son of Christian VII of Denmark and Caroline Matilda of Great Britain, had ruled Denmark as regent since 1784, following the collapse of his father’s mental health; his mother – ‘poor Matilda’, as Wollstonecraft called her in her Letters written during a Short Residence (1796) – had been divorced and exiled from Denmark in 1772 when her affair with Johann Friedrich Struensee, the king’s physician, was exposed. In 1790, Danish-Russian relations were reeling from the Russo-Swedish War (1788-90), during which Denmark-Norway declared its neutrality despite having committed to a defensive alliance with Russia under the Treaty of Tsarskoye Selo (1773). (1) Frederik’s extravagant gift, so the story goes, was intended to help patch the rift – and no doubt also to eclipse the 980-piece creamware ‘Frog Service’, which had been presented to Catherine the Great in 1774 by the Staffordshire-based Wedgwood Company.

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The volcanic fissure of Lakagígar, Iceland

The volcanic fissure of Lakagígar, Iceland

Contributor: Tess Somervell

Location: Vatnajökull National Park, Iceland

Description: Lakagígar is a 27km-long volcanic fissure in Iceland. The name means ‘craters of Laki’, after Mount Laki, the highest point at the centre of the fissure. Lakagígar was formed through a huge eruption in 1783-4 that had massive environmental, social, and cultural consequences for Iceland and indeed the rest of Europe, and which leaves a record in early Romantic literature.

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Livre d’or de la Flégère

Livre d’or de la Flégère Visitor Book

Contributor: Patrick Vincent

Location: Musée Alpin, Chamonix

Description: The Livre d’or de La Flégère, a 635-page, folio-sized, leather-bound book held at the Musée Alpin in Chamonix, is one of the few extant alpine visitor books from the first half of the nineteenth century, and the only one to cover such a wide time span. It contains over fifteen thousand names, comments in various languages, and roughly a hundred and fifty poems, sketches, and doodles, offering us rare insight into the cultural practices of European Romantic travel as well as the concomitant commoditising of the Alps. Belonging to what historian Kevin James has described as ‘an experimental space of self-exposure’ with its well-established dramaturgy, visitor books such as this one played a central role in disseminating and democratizing the Romantic Sublime.

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A Mauchline Binding

An edition of Scott’s Marmion in Mauchline binding, bearing the inscription of its owner.

Contributor: Bill Bell

Location: National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Description: This object is tied to Abbotsford, the home of Walter Scott, a globally famous literary tourist destination in Britain. It not only embodies the connection between literature and place, but negotiates, in quite explicit ways, some of the tensions between conceiving of literature in an age of mass consumption and recognising the intimate experience of the pilgrim reader.

This is a fairly common edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, printed and published in Edinburgh by the firm of Adam and Charles Black in 1873, and now held in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Marmion, originally published in 1808, remained at the end of the nineteenth century, along with The Lady of the Lake and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, one of the most popular works of Walter Scott and one of the most celebrated works of English Romantic poetry. Black’s was associated with the author through the multi-volume Waverley novels that they had produced in their thousands since the mid nineteenth century. In 1871, they had produced a lavish 25 volume centenary edition of Scott’s works.

What makes this item unusual in the first instance is its covers, and in the second an inscription by its first owner.

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The Offices of the Minerva Press, Leadenhall Street

Watercolour Image of The Offices of the Minerva Press, Leadenhall Street

Contributor: Anthony Mandal

Location: Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

Description: This engraving shows Leadenhall Street in the City of London at the close of the eighteenth century. Today, the thoroughfare is primarily associated with banking and finance; then, Leadenhall Street was one of the publishing centres of Romantic London. Dominating the image on the right is the unmistakable, pillared building of the East India House (demolished in 1861 and now the site of Lloyd’s of London). A block away, opposite the pink building near the back of the image, was No. 33, Leadenhall Street. It was here that William Lane (1738–1814) established his Minerva Press and Library in 1773, a major influence on the Romantic book trade and a key player in the history of fiction. This illustration appeared around 1799, during the golden age of the Minerva Press that spanned the 1790s to the 1810s. Yet, no image of the Minerva Press survives, and nor do its archives. The only traces that remain are the books and circulating library catalogues that the press produced. Still, these reveal the extent to which the output of the Minerva Press depended on translation and adaptation both to sell to British readers and to sell across Europe, and other evidence underscores the press’s market penetration in continental Europe.

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Dorothy’s Room (2018) created by Louise Ann Wilson

Image of Dorothy's Room art installation

Contributor: Louise Ann Wilson

Location: Rydal Mount, Ambleside

Description: Dorothy’s Room (2018) is an immersive, multi-media installation made in response to Dorothy Wordsworth’s Rydal Journals, written between (1824 -1835) whilst she was living at Rydal Mount near Ambleside.

The installation makes material Dorothy’s deeply-felt longing to be outside when, due to illness she was bedroom bound for long periods, and also reveal how she was able to walk her longed-for landscapes by using the ‘power’ of her imagination.

The installation was originally created for Dorothy Wordsworth’s bedroom at Rydal Mount, Ambleside, Cumbria where she lived with William and Mary Wordsworth from 1813 until her death in 1850, before transferring to the Wordsworth Trust Museum, Grasmere, the Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster and the Royal Geographical Society, London.

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Newstead Abbey: Lord Byron’s Inspiration

Contributor: Simon Brown

Location: Newstead, Nottinghamshire, UK

Description: Newstead Abbey was Lord Byron’s ancestral home, nestled in the isolated landscape of Nottinghamshire.

Byron’s attachments in his short life were always transient, and usually deeply powerful. That was true of his affections for people, objects or places. But he had an extraordinary capacity to see beauty and inspiration in everything around him, and absorb that into his work and his actions.

Newstead is a hugely significant example of that. He lived there for only a small proportion of his tragically short life. Yet Newstead’s influence on him was huge, and his influence on Newstead is, of course, timeless.

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A handwritten poem and sketch by famous Polish novelist Kazimierz Bujnicki (1788-1878) in the album amicorum belonging to the young countess Michalina Weyssenhoff

Contributor: Teresa Rączka-Jeziorska

Location: The Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw

Description (English): These pages of manuscript come from a richly ornamented and once padlocked carmine book from the years 1815-1841, held since 1996 in the collection of the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw. On these pages, we can see a verse by Kazimierz Bujnicki, a talented literary doyen of Polish Romanticism. This small, handy canvas and paper object, partially covered in leather with sophisticated ornamentation, the back and cover of which bore a gilded plant motif, suggests to us today a girl’s intimate diary or a secret casket. Such items in the first half of the nineteenth century were usually referred to as an “autograph book”, an “album amicorum”, or a “Stammbuch”. This particular example belonged to Michalina of Weyssenhoff Targońska (1803-1880), niece of General Jan Weyssenhoff (1774-1848), who was a participant in the Kościuszko Uprising (1794), the Napoleonic Wars and the November Uprising (1830-1831). Although she did not, as was the romantic fashion of the period, place a knot of hair or dried flowers into her album amicorum, she kept equally precious treasures of memory within it. It bears witness, indeed, to the Romantic culture of memory given a patriotic turn.

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