PROCEEDINGS OF THE

THE CITY AND THE BOOK V  INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON

THE AMERICANS IN FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY IV

SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER 2008

'The Significance of Florence in the Life of William Wetmore Story and his Family'. Kathleen Lawrence, George Washington University
'A Storied Life: Marble Fauns, Angels, and Cemeteries: William Wetmore Story and Friends in Italy'. Elise Madeleine Ciregna, University of Delaware/ Forest Hills Cemetery




Kathleen Lawrence of George Washington University speaks on Florence and William Wetmore Story's family.

'The Significance of Florence in the Life of William Wetmore Story and his Family'
Kathleen Lawrence, George Washington University. Abstract.

Henry James

Marking the beginning of a life-long relationship with the Storys, Henry James wrote home in 1870, “I have now (proud privilege) the entrée of three weekly receptions—the Terrys, Storys, and Mrs. Wister’s.” James’s bond with the Storys proved to be a tangled web of association filled, on their side, with trust and friendship, and on his with complex emotions including jealousy, loathing, and guilt, climaxing in his two-volume biography William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) that, while commissioned by the family as a tribute, ultimately treated Story with artistic condescension and moral condemnation. James revealed what was to be a life-long tone of suspicion and critique of the Storys’ Roman life in another early letter to his mother in 1870:

Mrs. Story is fair, fat, and fifty, her daughter chatty and an agreeable partner and very handsome withal and Mr. Story friendly, humorous and clever. An apartment in a Roman palace is a very fine affair, and it certainly adds a picturesqueness to life to be led through a chain of dimly lighted chambers, besprinkled with waiting servants, before you emerge sonorously announced, into the light and elegance of a reception-room with a roof, not a ceiling.

Palazzo Barbarini

James’ sense of the inappropriateness of this grandeur for Americans as well as his dictum that art required renunciation only deepened with time, culminating in the censorious tone of William Wetmore Story and His Friends, a subtle deprecation that ultimately had devastating consequences for the Storys’ stature and place in the art historical canon. William and sons Waldo and Julian, sculptor and painter respectively, fell out of the canon until American art historians rehabilitated the elder Story in the 1960’s and 1970’s; Waldo Story has yet to be resuscitated, and, in fact, this talk and my forthcoming article for the journal Sculpture (March 2009) serve as the beginning of the effort, to be followed soon by a monograph. But while James chronicled what he thought to be the deleterious effect of Rome on the Storys, nevertheless it was in Rome that Story played a role in the civic lives of the Anglo-American expatriates, serving not only as reigning host but also as legal counsel and activist whenever art intersected with politics, in both small matters of internecine battles among artists and larger matters of taxation of artistic works bound for the United States. Finally, it was in Rome’s Protestant cemetery in 1894 that Story installed his last and perhaps greatest sculpture, the “Angel of Grief,” as a memorial to his deceased wife Emelyn a year and a half before his own death. Suspending for once his critical venom, James wrote the following to Francis Boott about the “Angel of Grief:”

I read over your letter for the twentieth time, and light upon a mention of Story’s monument to his wife which I saw not in the Cosmopolitan, but, the last time I was at the Barberini, in the divine immortal marble. Seriously speaking, it struck me as the most genuine and graceful of his endless effigies, showing, perhaps, that emotion had for once taken the place of the other thing—I leave you to say what—that he never had.

This letter, while dated 1897, refers to James’s 1895 Roman sojourn, just after the death of Emelyn Story. After dutifully calling on the Storys, (William, now bereft of his wife, was not alone in the Barberini but living with son Waldo and daughter-in-law Maud Broadwood), James wrote to Boott that Story was “just the shadow of his old clownship” and the Barberini looked horribly “shabby.” James would have seen the “Angel of Grief” with its graceful neo-Florentine wings at Story’s studio rather than the Barberini, but curiously conflates the two here, using the “Barberini” to apply metonymically to the Storys’ entire Roman sphere. James’s reference to Story’s domain foreshadows language in the 1903 biography where he condemns Story for a life of “great extremes of ease” lived amidst the “golden air” of Rome. In describing the “Angel of Grief,” James, eliminating the precise word for “the other thing…that he never had,” leaves Boott to supply his own word, perhaps “talent,” “beauty,” or “genius,” a technique James used in his fiction to heighten ominous implications, seen, for example, in The Turn of the Screw where the reader never learns exactly what evil the ghosts perpetrate on the children. This method of indefinite suggestion in novel and letter bespoke not James’s delicacy or discretion but rather a way to enhance drama and suggest the worst by sparking the imagination.

 Conceding its genius, James saw the “Angel of Grief” in pristine condition at Story’s studio before its installation in the cemetery. What James did not fully appreciate was the Florentine influence on this masterwork, an example of neo-Florentine refinement that late in the elder Story’s career infiltrated his strict neo-classicism. Amazingly, the angel’s face is fully bowed in grief, yet it is fully carved; to this day, no one knows how Story achieved that feat of sculpting. The angel’s sweeping wings find their real source in the work of quattrocento Florentine master Desiderio da Settignano whose feathery wings adorn the angels and sarcophagus of his memorial monument to Carlo Marsuppini (1464) in Santa Croce, giving it richness and elegance.

Desiderio da Settignano, wings on tomb of Cardinal Marsuppini, Santa Croce

Son Waldo adopted these luxurious Florentine wings cascading with a sense of languorous grace for his first great work, the exquisite “Fallen Angel” (1887) that I believe inspired his father’s last great work, the son’s aestheticism softening the father’s neoclassicism and embodying the elder Story’s final abandonment to his emotion, his deep love and devotion to Emelyn.

Henry James and others refer obliquely in letters to this great scandal, but James scholars have not known exactly what happened to Bindo, for Victorians were discreet and saved details of gossip for intimate fireside colloquy. Given the nature of the scandal in the years following Oscar Wilde’s disastrous trial for indecency in 1895, Bindo was erased from the annals of history. I happened one day at last to find out the truth about Bindo when, after years of scouring archives across the globe, I simply “Googled” “Bindo,” getting a reference to an article by Natalia Wright from the 1940’s in which the name “Bindo” appeared in a footnote, the footnote directing readers to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoir European Experiences (1935). Luhan, it turns out, as a young bride living in Florence befriended Bindo in his ignominy, as her status as an American freed her from strictures of Florentine societal rules. Luhan heard from Bindo his tragic tale and became his confidante, discovering as well his and his mother’s spendthrift habits that led Luhan to give her pearls to Bindo to be sold to pay his debts. Luhan claims in her memoir, although this may be a narcissistic version of the truth, that it was after her jealous husband refused to allow her to associate with Bindo that he shot himself. What is less well-known about the Storys and Florence is that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s son Pen Browning would become Edith Story’s longest and closest friends, standing by her during Bindo’s downfall. During this tragic time, Pen continued to visit Edith and Bindo at the Peruzzi residence at No. 28 via Maggio, furtively entering Bindo’s downstairs rooms when all other friends deserted them and refused to communicate with or be seen with Bindo. The final tragedy of the Peruzzis was Edith’s estrangement from her other son Ridolfo, later first world war hero, who deplored his mother’s spendthrift habits, expelling her from the family quarters and forcing her move to the Via del Giglio between the train station and San Lorenzo. Unpublished letters from Edith to her father reveal the financial strain that this court life placed on her, requiring servants, jewels, and lavish entertaining. Her father partly supported her with yearly endowments running into the thousands of Francs and Lire. This monetary burden was exacerbated by the requisite summer retreats at Vallombrosa and Antella, where she maintained extensive estates. Henry James somewhat expiated his guilt over the Story biography and decried this final tragedy, writing to Story daughter-in-law Maud Broadwood, "I am distressed to hear of the relations between Ridolfo and his Mother. What tragedies upon tragedies, and what a dark vision of poor Edith alone and embittered and uncomforted in her dark, black, corner of Florence today—with only the ghosts of the Medici to console her!”

Maud Broadwood

The Storys’ other important connection to Florence was aesthetic rather than genealogical and geographical and came through Waldo Story, sculptor son of William who imbibed the influence of quattrocento Florentine masters. As related above, Waldo Story has been almost completely erased by time and fortune, a serious lacuna in the canon of late nineteenth-century Anglo-American artists. A combination of factors led to Waldo’s exclusion, beginning with modernist bias against Gilded Age aestheticism at the turn of the last century, aggravated by reverberations from James’s book on his father, and last but not least exacerbated by the scandal surrounding Waldo’s running off with opera singer Bessie Abbot, eroding his position in Victorian society, artistically and financially. Waldo paid dearly for his belated reaction to the exacting rigors of his studio workshop and adoption of the moral double-standard of international society.

Bessie Abbot  as 'Queen of the Night' and as 'Margaret'

As a young sculptor, Waldo Story sought an artistic path separate from his father’s Romantic-neoclassicism, developing a style imbibed from lifelong exposure to art in Florence. It was in Florence that Waldo discovered Renaissance masters Donatello, Rossellino, Mina da Fiesole, and Desiderio da Settignano, artists whose influence led him toward a delicate quattrocento aestheticism seen in his portrait bas-reliefs with their Donatello-esque schiacciato, meaning extremely low relief, as well as his portrait busts and life-size statues balancing naturalism with graceful refinement.

Mino da Fiesole, St Helena Empress

Waldo Story, Portrait Relief

Waldo Story’s memorials especially looked to Florentine models for their form and content. His Portal Monument (1897) in Winchester Cathedral, Crawshay Memorial (1903) in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, and Belmont memorial (1903) in Newport, Rhode Island all looked to Florentine examples, in particular to the concept of the tabernacle or wall memorial seen in Santa Croce’s Tomb of Cardinal Marsuppini by Desiderio and Tomb of Leonardo Bruni by Antonio Rossellino.

In addition to his plethora of commissioned busts, bas reliefs, and statues, Waldo Story created magnificent fountains for elite English aristocrats across Britain as well as American magnates. In his work on fountains, Waldo departed from the quiet elegance of quattrocento models and looked for inspiration to later Renaissance and Baroque statuary and fountains in the gardens that ring Florence, including Villa Castello, Villa Petraia, and Villa Medici Pratolini, now Parco di Demidoff, and most importantly the Boboli Gardens. Waldo Story’s colossal and playful “Triumph of Galatea” (1890) for the Rothschilds at Ascott House, his “Elixir of Love” (1894) for the Astors at Cliveden, and his “Mermaid Fountain” (1899) at Blenheim are based on Italian and Florentine prototypes that employ mythological tritons, mermaids, dolphins, and sea-horses. Steeped in the Florentine celebration of nature and myth, Story brought Italy home for English and American upper-class Grand tourists who yearned to fuse Italian beauty with their local flora and fauna. For example, William Waldorf, First Viscount Astor was a great Italophile who had spent formative years in Rome studying sculpture under Waldo Story’s father and had later returned to the Eternal City as Ambassador in the 1880’s. Employing Waldo Story to transform the gardens at Cliveden, Astor ordered the monumental “Elixir of Love” to be the focal point of the main approach to his grand house, as well as the smaller “Turtle” fountain to add charm to his lower terraced grounds, along with benches, balustrades, gates, and urns. Story’s studio operated like the classic Florentine renaissance workshop to supply decorative stonework and bronze in all forms and genres, blurring the lines between high art and low in filling the needs of the client, the modern marquese or count.

Waldo’s great sin was to escape the exacting demands of his huge studio in Rome and his position of de facto head of the Anglo-American expatriate community in Rome by running off to America with opera diva Bessie Abott, whom he had met soon after 1900 on one of his transatlantic crossings. The strain of Waldo’s great success providing sculptural works to the highest elites in England, America, and the Continent had led to a decrease in his health around 1899, a situation that alarmed even Henry James, who wrote to their mutual friends the Curtises in Venice that “Waldo needs imperatively six or seven months complete rest, which he will not get, thanks to his vast marble workshop.”

A Storied Life: Marble Fauns, Angels, and Cemeteries: William Wetmore Story and Friends in Italy
Elise Madeleine Ciregna, of the University of Delaware and Curator of Forest Hills Cemetery

The development of American sculpture in the nineteenth century owed a great debt to Italy and that country’s rich artistic heritage.  Horatio Greenough, often called “America’s first sculptor” since he was the first American to pursue sculpture exclusively as his career, settled in Florence in the 1830s, to train with Lorenzo Bartolini of the Accademia di Belle Arti, and where Greenough would spend most of the rest of his life.  In Florence Greenough became part of the artistic and literary circles that included Samuel F.B. Morse and Thomas Cole.  Aspiring American sculptors for the next two generations would follow Greenough’s example, leaving their native country to train and work in Italy, and to become members of the expatriate artistic community.

One of the greatest lights of that community was the sculptor William Wetmore Story.  The son of eminent American jurist Joseph Story, William Wetmore Story dutifully, if reluctantly, followed in his father’s footsteps and became a lawyer.  But his father’s sudden death in 1845 gave the younger Story an opportunity to follow his artistic leanings.  Responding to Mount Auburn Cemetery’s (Cambridge, Massachusetts) search for a sculptor capable of producing a worthy monument to Joseph Story, William Wetmore Story, without any professional experience but with all the right social connections, gained the prestigious commission.  Incredibly, recognizing that the aspiring young sculptor would have to actually first learn his craft, the Mount Auburn Committee agreed that Story would close his law practice, move to Italy, and train and work for nearly ten years before expecting a finished product.  The Committee was pleased with the statue, delivered in 1854.  Thus the career of one of America’s greatest nineteenth century sculptors and one of its most famous expatriates was launched.[1]

Story’s life and career, once based in Italy, did, indeed, become the stuff of fiction.  Story’s close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne—a writer who was enamored of Italy and an admirer of stonecutters and sculptors—immortalized Story as the character of Kenyon, the sculptor, in his novel “The Marble Faun.”  Story became one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and successful American sculptors.  He lived in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which was a vibrant center of artistic and intellectual exchange with the many other artists and writers Story knew, among them Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Thomas Crawford, Randolph Rogers, and James Russell Lowell.  Many of Story’s most celebrated works were inspired by classical mythology and by figures of the “Antique” world, for example his celebrated statues of Cleopatra and Sappho, regarded as models not only of exquisite workmanship, but as examples of an admirable archaeological attention to authentic detail.

As Story’s first professional sculpture was a tribute to a close family member and destined for placement in a cemetery, it seems fitting that his final major work was also an important cemetery sculpture: The Angel of Grief, created in 1893 for his wife Emelyn’s gravesite in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, and under which Story himself was laid to rest in 1895.  The Angel of Grief has proven to be an enduring and resonant work; at least seven copies of it exist in cemeteries across America and elsewhere. 

Henry James, an acquaintance of Story’s, would later write a “biography” of William Wetmore Story and his friends.  James found Story’s celebrated friends more compelling than Story himself, but in recent years Story has been the subject of critical reevaluation, most notably in the work of art historian Jan Seidler’s as yet unpublished dissertation.[2]

This paper looks at the career of William Wetmore Story and his life in Italy, inextricably linked to the romance of white marble and cemeteries, Italy’s tradition of sculpture and history, and to the artistic and literary expatriates Story counted as friends.  William Wetmore Story, regarded as one of nineteenth century America’s greatest sculptors and yet largely ignored after his death, will be restored to his important position within the context of nineteenth century Italy and the artistic community.

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