William Wetmore Story's marble Sappho

William Wetmore Story's sculpture of Sappho, the Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos, was carved in Rome in 1863 and came to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1977 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Often called the tenth Muse, the brooding, tragic figure of Sappho was a favorite subject among Victorian artists, including the sculptors Jean Jacques (called James) Pradier (1792-1852), whose figure of 1852 is now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and Giovanni Dupre (1817-1882), who modeled her in Florence in 1857.(1) Probably inspired by these works, Story's marble Bears witness to the important connections that Boston, once called the Athens of America, had to Greek revival art in the high Victorian era.

Story was educated at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and practiced law in Boston. He was known for his published writings on the law and also for his poetry and art criticism. At first, sculpture was just a hobby, but in 1845 he was commissioned by a group of Cambridge citizens to make a monument to his father, Joseph Story (1779-1845), a justice of the United States Supreme Court, to be placed in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. He went to Europe to prepare for this task and never practiced law again. Settling in Rome, he became the foremost American sculptor of his generation; his work inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's Marble Faun (1860) and was the catalyst for Henry James's two-volume William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston, 1903). Nonetheless, most art historical texts gloss over Story's work as merely representative of second-generation American neoclassicism. Fortunately, in her 1985 doctoral dissertation for Boston University, Jan Seidler Ramirez rescued the sculptor from this undeserved obscurity.

Story had no interest in reviving the form and proportions of ancient pagan sculpture, arguing that they were inappropriate for contemporary Christian artists and patrons. His Proportions of the Human Figure According to a New Canon, For Practical Use... [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED] challenged the conclusions of the English sculptor John Gibson who, in 1857, had collaborated with Joseph Bonomi in the publication of The Proportion of the Human Figure, in which they promoted proportional theories as interpreted from the writings of Vitruvius [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Story believed he could improve on the Greek system of ideal proportions with a whole new approach, which he claimed fitted a divine plan that was consistent for Christian artists. At a time when religious revivalism was intense and the import of signs and symbols accepted, there was a definite American culture prepared to accept such a hidden spectrum of meaning beneath that of the visible world.

Story first introduced his readers to Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendour) - an ancient Jewish book of creation based on cabalism that had also been mined by William Blake (1757-1827) - which offered insights into the ultimate mysteries through signs, symbols, geometry, and numerology. Story claimed that by using geometrical figures and units derived from the circle, square, and equilateral triangle, he had devised a system of proportional divisions from which to construct the ideal human body. The sculptors small statues of Bacchus [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED] and Venus Anadyomene [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED] embody his new canon of proportions.

Story was already utilizing his theory when he modeled the figure of Sappho, but since she is seated and nearly fully clothed, it is difficult to deduce if, in fact, he applied the system in modeling her, although it seems reasonable to assume that he did. In 1862 he wrote from Rome to his friend, the Boston art critic Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), that he had just completed Sappho as "a lovelorn lady...very tender, very sweet, very sentimental."(2) He based his depiction on the tale from Ovid's Heroides in which, rejected by the Greek ferryman Phaon, Sappho suffers severe depression and hurls herself off the cliffs of Leucadia (now Leukas). The statue shows her pondering her fate, a lyre leaning against her chair, a wilted rose draped across the lyre. The message seems to be that without love, art and poetry depart and beauty withers like the rose. Story composed a companion poem to assist the viewer in understanding how Sappho's outwardly passive countenance masks her inner turmoil. Such tensions are emblematic of creative genius. The sculptor's knowledge of ancient art ensured an accurate archaeological depiction of the klismos chair, the sakkos binding Sapphos hair, her clothing, and her necklace.

The museum's Sappho is the first of three [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. I OMITTED] carved by Italian marble workers for Story in the 1860s,(3) and also the best preserved. Made for his patron William Stirling Crawford of Edinburgh, it remained for some time lodged in a men's club in Scotland after Crawford's death. Subsequently it passed to a Scottish dealer, who sold it to C. B. Arnette, an antiques dealer in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from whom it was bought by the museum. Its surfaces are remarkably pristine: the marble that represents skin retains a smooth polish while that replicating clothing is matte. The jewelry is highly polished. Astonishingly, there are no breaks in fragile parts such as fingers, toes, or the attached lyre and its rose. Writing to Norton in 1862, describing the sculpture as his best work, Story also summed up Sappho's story perfectly, claiming he had "put all the Love into it I could."(4)