THE ICONOGRAPHY OF SAPPHO, 1775-1875

Sappho, the most celebrated woman poet of antiquity, and the ancient exemplar of feminine genius, was the object of an unprecedented interest in European arts and letters during the period 1775-1875. At first honored as both an author and as a subject in her own right in book illustrations of the 1760\u27s and in paintings in the 1770\u27s, Sappho gradually lost this duality in the eroticized academic art of the 1860\u27s. Initial fascination with Sappho was nurtured by the new enthusiasm for the classical world, the revaluation of lyric poetry, and the doctrines of ut pictura poesis and the Sublime. The late eighteenth century manifested an heightened interest in women, expressing a new concern for womanly subjects and emotions. In significant numbers, women artists and writers were attracted to the subjects of Sappho and Corinne, Mme de Stael\u27s Sappho-like heroine. Artists used as sources the new translations of Sappho\u27s own poems, Ovid\u27s Epistle (Heroides XV), which described her unrequited love for the boatman Phaon and her subsequent leap from Leucadia, and contemporary pseudo-antique travelogues and biographic fantasies. This thesis discusses in detail the following works: Angelica Kauffman, Sappho and Love (1775) and Angelica in the Character of Design... (1782); A. Zucchi, Homer and Calliope (1781); Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Mme de Stael en Corinne (1808); E. Fragonard, Mme Recamier en Sapho; Gerard,(\u27 ) Corrine au Cap de Misene (1822); Abilgaard, Sappho and the Lesbian Maid (1809); David, Sapho, Phaon et l\u27Amour (1809); Tresham, acquaints from Le avventure di Saffo (1784); Girodet, Sappho compositions (1829); Gros, Sapho a Leucate (1801); Dannecker, Sappho (1797-1802); Pradier, Sappho, (1852); Simeon Solomon, Sappho and Erinna (1864); Gleyre, Le Coucher de Sappho (1868); Alma-Taddema, Sappho (1881). After a consideration of the tangled biographical data, and a survey of images of the poet up to the eighteenth century, the study concentrates on several Sappho archetypes, influenced by a sequence of prevailing stylistic tendencies. Sappho is the poet as muse, the virtual personification of poetry in romantic classicism. Sometimes the active poet of Venus-like charm is accompanied by her erotic muse, Cupid, or her lover Phaon. In the 1790\u27s, Sappho is shown in the sublime and melodramatic moment of her suicide leap. As romantic notions of requisite suffering became an accepted indicator of creativity, Sappho was transformed into an incapacitated genius, stalled in her art by a perfidious lover. A popular icon of melancholy and unhappy love, Sappho\u27s dual status as a poet/lover is lost by the 1860\u27s. Before the bias of modernism rendered images of Sappho an iconographic and stylistic irrelevance by the close of the century, Sappho appears as a school-mistress and as an erotic corpse. A final chapter chronicles the historiography of Sappho\u27s sexuality and the tradition of erotic images. Although Sappho of Lesbos may be today synonymous with female homosexuality, this was not true until the 1890\u27s. Her poems were translated with male rather than the original female love objects until the twentieth century. Yet the abiding fiction of a second Sappho, who was a courtesan, explains the presence of her name in frankly pornographic contexts during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the fascination with Sappho as a woman of legendary passion and unbridled sexuality finally obscured her literary reputation in the nineteenth century, we find images of her in such roles as a solitary voluptuary, an heterosexual lover, and, in two rare instances, as an homosexual amorist