From Ancient Rome to Modern Italy: Italian Art in Melville’s Print Collection

• Published in: Leviathan (Hempstead, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2013-10, Vol.15 (3), p.41-54
• Main Author: Wallace, Robert K
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age; English language; Marcus Aurelius (121-180); Poetry
• ISSN: 1525-6995; 1750-1849; 1750-1849
• DOI: 10.1353/lvn.2013.0036

The entire group gives added interest to the image in "The Banker" canto of Clarel of "Holbein's Dance of Death / Sly slipped among his prints from Claude" (NN Clarel 2.12.30-31).2 By the second half of the eighteenth century, when many of the above prints after Claude Lorraine were being engraved in London, English painters such as Richard Wilson took up extended residencies in Rome, Naples, and the intervening coastline in search of their own images of serene pictorial classical beauty. Piranesi gives us an urban vision of "Nature in vigor" in the vegetation high above the curve of the arch, and achieves the restoration of the "art in ruins" through his imagination.\n Eleanor left a touching remembrance of this print, when she described returning from walks with her grandfather in the very last years of his life: "We never came in . . . but we stopped in the front hall under a coloured engraving of the Bay of Naples, its still blue dotted with tiny white sails.