Always Reminding Us of the Body”

In his volume on The Fine Arts in Renaissance in Italy , published in 1877, John Addington Symonds maintains that “the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations”. Indeed, he goes on to identify “the difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity” as “the most thorny question offered to the understanding by the history of the Renaissance”. Signifying the historical moment when, in Symonds's formulation, “Christianity and Hellenism kissed each other”, the Renaissance held a particular interest for aesthetic critics and cultural historians at the fin de siècle, such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and Michael Field, who were, like Symonds, grappling with the conundrum of the body and its legitimate and illicit pleasures and desires. Drawing on critical work over the last decade on the connections between late Victorian art and aestheticism and the emergence of the homosexual in the social and cultural arena, this article explores Symonds's highly embodied and erotic engagement with Renaissance art, and locates his corporeal aesthetic in relation to other late Victorian art historical investigations of the tactile imagination, embodied optics and physiological aesthetics. Notes 1Symonds, Fine Arts, 18. 2Quoted in Grosskurth, 271. 3Hatt, “Physical Culture”, 255 and 254. 4Davis, 188–216. 5Evangelista, 97. 6Symonds, Fine Arts, 78. 7Calè and Di Bello, 7. 8Hatt, “Physical Culture”, 255. 11Ibid. 9See Cox-Rearick, 329–54; and Cornelison, 311. 10Symonds, Fine Arts, 21. 12Ibid., 78. 13Ibid. 14Cox-Rearic, cited in Cornelison, 312. 15Symonds, Fine Arts, 169–70. 16Davis, 210. 17Symonds, Fine Arts, 231. 18Ibid., 230–1. 19Ibid., 231–2. 20Ibid., 237. 21Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, 322. 25Ruskin, vol. 5, 77; vol. 12, 148–50. 27Ibid., 243. 22Symonds, Fine Arts, 239 and 237. 23Ibid., 240. 24Ibid., 240. 26Symonds, Fine Arts, 25. 29Ibid., 299. 31Symonds, Fine Arts, 299–300. 28Ibid., 284. 30Symonds, Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, vol. 2, 160. 32Ibid., 301. 33Ibid., 311. 34Quoted in Grosskurth, 271. 35Symonds, Fine Arts, 317. 36Ibid., 317. 37Ibid., 318. 38Symonds, Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, vol. 2, 161–2. 39Ibid., 127 and 154. 40Ibid., 166. 41Ibid. 42Ibid. 43Symonds, Fine Arts, 17. 44Ibid. 45Ibid., 18–19. 46Symonds, Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, vol 2, 166. 47Ibid., 98. 48Ibid., 285. 49Ibid., 299. 50Ibid., 311. 51Berenson, 62–3. 52Ibid., 63. 53Lee and Anstruther-Thomson, 25–6. 54Lee, 294. 55Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, 321–2. 59Symonds, Italian Byways, 118. 56Symonds, Italian Byways, 3; Duke Letter V, quoted in Younger, 5; both quoted in Evangelista, 89 and 91. 57Symonds, Memoirs, 177, quoted in Evangelista, 90. 58Evangelista, 91. 60Ibid., 138. 61See Evangelista, 99; Hatt, “Book Beautiful”, 174–5. 62Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 398. 63Symonds, Memoirs, 99. 64Symonds, Fine Arts, 78; Symonds, Letters, vol. 3, 791. Additional informationNotes on contributorsHilary Fraser Hilary Fraser holds the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies and is Dean of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London

Aestheticism · Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Christianity · Embodied cognition · Fine art · Literature · Relation (database · The arts · Theology · Visual arts · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Philosophy

• Late Style and Speaking Out

  Amber K Regis•English Studies•2013

  Add to list

• Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures

  Open Access•Luisa Calè, Patrizia Di Bello•Illustrations, Optics and Objects…•2010

  Add to list

• The unsympathetic exemplar in Vasari's Life of Pontormo

  Open Access•Sharon Gregory•Renaissance Studies•2009

  Add to list