On Statues & Marble & Poems & Paper & Iris C Love

Dear Void,

I’ll just start and let’s see where this blog post goes.

Lisa Robertson in ‘Time in the Codex’ says the reader and the text (‘impersonal speech’) 'test and inflect and mix into one another.’ The book provides a condition for this to happen. It conditions too; I hear it as a training, habituating the reader. What does the text receive from me? Does it have receptive capacity?? Perhaps that’s why Robertson’s phrase is: ‘it receives in me’. The person is the space of action. Now we get to the question of power dynamics between people, if one is ‘reading’ another. Is the body of the one being read of semiotic importance? They are objectified in this way of being read. They are made thing. It is the reification of one in order to position them as less than human. To turn them into a thing, a statue that moves, perhaps? This is the myth of Pygmalion, a king and sculptor. Lady Mary sent to the much younger Francesco Algarotti in Dec 1736 her poem, ‘This once was me’. Lady Mary was well-versed in Ovid and she uses the figures (Pygmalion & Galatea) from his Metamorphosis, Book X, to ask that a portrait (that she sent with the poem) of her younger self be brought life and her former beauty restored.

    Pygmalion warm'd to Life his Ivory maid,

    Will no kind power restore my charms decai'd?

* * * *

This project is about connections. Finding them, not forging them (as I’m wont to do). And today’s connection is . . .(drum roll please)

Pliny!

I began reading* Short History of the Shadow because its author, Victor Stoichita, in his introduction, cites Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. Actually, I started reading it because it was on my list of books to read, but then the mention of Pliny jumped out immediately and off I went. I’d connected to Pliny earlier via a poem written by Frederick of Prussia to Francesco Algarotti in 1740 just at the time that Lady Mary was arriving in Italy expecting to meet up with Algarotti. No, wait. There were more steps in the chain of connection between Pliny and Lady Mary. 

Let’s see.

Copy of Praxiteles; restorer: Ippolito Buzzi (Italian, 1562–1634) 

Pliny has an account of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, a statue made by Praxiteles. The statue and sculptor are given a shout out in Frederick’s poem. We’re leaping through time here. Lady Mary, moving to Italy, 1739. Algarotti, nowhere to be seen, is asked by Frederick, who has just ascended to the throne, to come and hang out at the palace because he was very smart and a bit slutty, and he made Algarotti a Prussian count. The poem Frederick wrote Algarotti has only recently surfaced (2011) and adds a bit of detail to Lady Mary’s story, or condition of having been left alone now on the Continent after having left her own life behind in England. (She may of course have been a spy, since everyone around this time was, by necessity. Hello, looming War of the Austrian Succession). Caveat: I’m just blogging here.

Back to our time-jumps. Praxiteles and the Aphrodite of Cnidos, referenced in a poem in 1740, were making and being made 300 years before Pliny wrote of them in AD 77. Now, when the 1740 poem was being written the Aphrodite and her temple at Cnidos had been lost to the elements. Until…

Love found her again.

See this article on the wonderful Iris C Love. Sadly, Love died of Covid in 2020. She was 86.

* * * *

How is everything connected? Well, NOT linearly.

2022) Lady Mary’s commonplace book being given an artistic portrait by me

1925) Commonplace book is given to Fisher Library, University of Sydney

C1740-1760) Lady Mary compiles commonplace book manuscript throughout her life in self-exile. (It may have been used before she went and picked up again when it was sent over to her in a shipment of books and belongings. Details sketchy)

1739) Lady Mary moves to Italy hoping to met up with Francesco Algarotti, who is busy doing other things and people.

1740) the love poem is written

2011) Frederick’s poem found by French literature teacher Vanessa de Senarclens at Berlin's Humboldt University.

c360BC) Praxiteles produces the Aphrodite for open market and the people of Cnidos buy it after the people of Cos rejected it (they did not know a good, or soon to be very popular, thing when they saw it)

77) Pliny writes up Praxiteles in his Natural History, the section on marble.

1969) Iris C Love, the American classical archaeologist and art historian, found the sanctuary and in 1970 excavated the temple. Love found the marble base and fragments of Praxiteles' statue. 

And round and round we go. This is the arts my friends.

And on, Void.

Jx

*Please don’t @ me for always ‘beginning to read’. This is my method. I’m a Rake in reading. I’m a slutty reader.