Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (Dec 2018)
Une reconstruction progressiste du passé : Renaissance et Risorgimento dans « Old Pictures in Florence » de Robert Browning
Abstract
One of the main roles played by Italian history in the works of Robert Browning is to serve as a model for a general political reflection on how societies evolve and on the connections between art and politics, which are as valid as regards nineteenth-century European history as more specifically English debates within the Victorian society. At the centre of the poem ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ stands the figure of Giotto’s Campanile, whose design was left unfinished after the fall of the Florentine Republic, as the symbol of this reflection. From an aesthetic as from a political viewpoint, the fact that it remained unfinished is precisely what gives the work of art its main strength, inasmuch as it leaves open the necessary space for a taking up, a progress rooted in the ambitions of the past, and the promise of a political evolution which uses the past, against all reactionary fantasies, as the model for a progressive momentum. This apparently paradoxical point of view, which searches the past for the forces of renewal, is in direct opposition to the reactionary trends that can be traced in the majority of Victorian attempts to extol the past, first among which are the Young England movement and the Oxford Movement, which Browning satirized in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ (1845) and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855). This dimension of Browning’s work echoes a reflection on the role of the past in politics, which he opened in Sordello (1840) : instead of looking for a Golden Age in contrast to which the present could be criticised, he adopted the viewpoint of the past itself, which allowed him to reconsider the contemporary situation in the perspective of a longer evolution, symmetrically opposed to such reactionary nostalgia. Browning does not regard the Florentine Golden Age as a lost perfection which should be recreated, but rather as outlining in its very shortcomings the promise of future progress. In this, his reflections espouse the impetus of the Risorgimento, which he was witnessing first-hand in Florence (his wife, Elizabeth Barrett, gave an account of this in Casa Guidi Windows, 1855). This political movement gave artists a central role in creating the political identity for their contemporaries. Browning explores the way in which reformism can achieve real progress, by turning reconstruction into a form of reinvention, against the revolutionary hope of making a clean slate of the past.
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