Tom Stammers’s The Purchase of the Past won the 2021 Gladstone Prize. He is a cultural historian at the Courtauld.
In 1926, Aby Warburg taught a seminar at Hamburg University on the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the ‘exemplary pathfinder’ whose investigation of the Italian Renaissance anticipated Warburg’s own. Burckhardt was, he argued, ‘a necromancer in full consciousness’, who conjured up sinister shadows but ultimately eluded them. Invoking a character from Faust Part II,...
On 20 December 1857, Eugène Delacroix recorded his thoughts on seeing his studio on rue Notre-Dame de Lorette being dismantled. ‘My ambition is bounded by these walls,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘I enjoy the last moments available to me to feel myself still in this place which has seen me for so many years and in which was spent the great part of the latter period of...
In 1975 Angela Carter published a withering review of a star-studded production of Die Walküre, staged in the Roman amphitheatre at Orange. The classical setting was not Norse-friendly; the acoustics were horrible; the evening temperatures plummeted; and the wind wreaked havoc on the singers’ voices (Carter thought it was ‘probably blowing directly from Israel’). Of...
The first academic book I read on Goya was by Fred Licht, for whom Goya distilled the ‘modern temper’ in art. It was thrilling stuff. Goya, it seemed, was a rebel and a nihilist, who profaned the nude, renounced the Enlightenment, mocked the royal family, championed the masses and anticipated war photography. His work contained in embryo much of modern art to come. I...
Rosa Bonheur set about trampling ideas of feminine decorum in the pursuit of professional excellence. Determined to understand animal anatomy closeup, she waded into the Abattoirs du Roule and conducted her own dissections; eager to explore the Pyrenees, she applied for formal permission to travel in male attire and was granted an exemption from the arcane law against cross-dressing.
In the first episode of a new four-part series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill is joined by Tom Stammers to consider how an argument over the ‘improvement’...
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