As we know, in John Ruskin’s works ethics and aesthetics are closely related. In The Stones of Venice (1851-53) Ruskin stigmatised painters such as Salvator Rosa and Caravaggio as ‘Sensualists’, claiming that these artists were attracted only to the brutality and misery of human life, that is to say to ‘evil’ rather than ‘good’. This classification, which condemned all paintings of sensational and/or erotic subjects as basely sensual, takes us to the heart of Victorian culture, with its emphasis on the moral dimension of art, and invites us to read with more attention some nineteenth-century literary works where painting is associated with the representation of evil, notably those fictional works that were inspired by the life of a notorious ‘criminal-artist’, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. A friend of Fuseli and Blake, Wainewright exhibited various paintings at the Royal Academy in the early 1820s and in the same period contributed a long series of articles on art and literature to the London Magazine. After being arrested as a forger, Wainewright - who was also suspected of having murdered some relatives, either to inherit their money or to cash in a life insurance policy - was transported to Tasmania in 1837, where he died ten years later. Wainewright’s ‘exemplary’ life fostered a thriving literary ‘myth’, starting from the publication of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, the Children of Night (1846, 1853). The plot of this sensation novel pivots on two characters - Lucretia Clavering, a villainess whose name aptly evokes that of the Italian Lucrezia Borgia, and Gabriel Honoré Varney, a poisoner who is endowed with a ‘sensual’ talent for painting and music. Both Lucretia and Gabriel can be regarded as alter egos of Wainewright, who provided Bulwer-Lytton with the basic attributes of his two villains. The ambivalent figure of Wainewright, however, was revisited with very different intents in the second half of the century, in relation to the development of the aesthetic movement. Already in 1880 the articles Wainewright had written for the London Magazine were collected by William Carew Hazlitt and published in a volume entitled Essays and Criticism, while Wainewright inspired Oscar Wilde with his notoriously flippant essay ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (1889). My paper aims to explore some aspects of the ‘myth’ of Wainewright - notably with reference to Bulwer-Lytton’s underestimated Lucretia - in order to highlight the emblematic character Wainewright took on in the Victorian period as a forerunner of the aesthetic movement.
M. Ascari (2008). The Aesthetics of Evil: the "Artist-Criminal" in Victorian Literature. VENEZIA : Editrice Cafoscarina.
The Aesthetics of Evil: the "Artist-Criminal" in Victorian Literature
ASCARI, MAURIZIO
2008
Abstract
As we know, in John Ruskin’s works ethics and aesthetics are closely related. In The Stones of Venice (1851-53) Ruskin stigmatised painters such as Salvator Rosa and Caravaggio as ‘Sensualists’, claiming that these artists were attracted only to the brutality and misery of human life, that is to say to ‘evil’ rather than ‘good’. This classification, which condemned all paintings of sensational and/or erotic subjects as basely sensual, takes us to the heart of Victorian culture, with its emphasis on the moral dimension of art, and invites us to read with more attention some nineteenth-century literary works where painting is associated with the representation of evil, notably those fictional works that were inspired by the life of a notorious ‘criminal-artist’, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. A friend of Fuseli and Blake, Wainewright exhibited various paintings at the Royal Academy in the early 1820s and in the same period contributed a long series of articles on art and literature to the London Magazine. After being arrested as a forger, Wainewright - who was also suspected of having murdered some relatives, either to inherit their money or to cash in a life insurance policy - was transported to Tasmania in 1837, where he died ten years later. Wainewright’s ‘exemplary’ life fostered a thriving literary ‘myth’, starting from the publication of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Lucretia; or, the Children of Night (1846, 1853). The plot of this sensation novel pivots on two characters - Lucretia Clavering, a villainess whose name aptly evokes that of the Italian Lucrezia Borgia, and Gabriel Honoré Varney, a poisoner who is endowed with a ‘sensual’ talent for painting and music. Both Lucretia and Gabriel can be regarded as alter egos of Wainewright, who provided Bulwer-Lytton with the basic attributes of his two villains. The ambivalent figure of Wainewright, however, was revisited with very different intents in the second half of the century, in relation to the development of the aesthetic movement. Already in 1880 the articles Wainewright had written for the London Magazine were collected by William Carew Hazlitt and published in a volume entitled Essays and Criticism, while Wainewright inspired Oscar Wilde with his notoriously flippant essay ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (1889). My paper aims to explore some aspects of the ‘myth’ of Wainewright - notably with reference to Bulwer-Lytton’s underestimated Lucretia - in order to highlight the emblematic character Wainewright took on in the Victorian period as a forerunner of the aesthetic movement.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
