England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [80]
She lets down her hair, and, with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc, that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He [the viewer] sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him… standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows another without a break. She knows how to arrange the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has a hundred ways of turning it into a head-dress.1
Once the gossips found out that Goethe loved the Attitudes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tourists followed in his wake. Nearly twenty-five years later he included a scene in his novel Elective Affinities in which beautiful young Luciane thrills her audience with Attitudes. Emma's performance for Goethe when she was twenty-two ensured that she would be asked to present Attitudes for the next thirty years—a move she only occasionally regretted.
Another early spectator was Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, who marveled at Emma's ability to "suddenly change her expression from grief to joy… With shining eyes and flowing hair she appeared perfect as a bacchante; she could then change her expression immediately and appear as sorrowful as the repentant Magdalene…. I could have copied her different poses and expressions and filled a gallery with paintings."
Soon, every guest at the palazzo demanded to see the Attitudes. One raffish French visitor, the Baron de Salis, described how Emma, "covered herself with flowers, gives a living spectacle of masterpieces of the most celebrated artists of antiquity. She is very obliging and gave a performance to a little group of us. You have to have seen her to conceive to what degree this lovely figure enabled us to enjoy the charms of illusion." Adelaide d'Osmond, later the Comtesse de Boigne, a young refugee from Paris, described how Emma clad herself in a white tunic, her hair over her shoulders, and took up two or three cashmere shawls, an urn, a lyre, and a tambourine.
With this scanty equipment and in her classic costume, she would take up her position in the middle of the drawing room. She would throw over her head a shawl which trailed to the ground and which covered her entirely, and thus hidden she draped herself with others. Then she would lift the shawl suddenly or sometimes throw it aside altogether; at other times she would half slip it off, and it then served as a drapery for the model she personified.
Attitudes of Lady Hamilton, by Pietro Antonio Novelli (1791). Novelli's drawing shows Emma using her shawls to move through the poses, ending with a drunken bacchante, revealing the clever manipulation that thrilled Goethe and made her one of the biggest tourist attractions in Europe.
To the young girl's excitement, Emma sometimes used her in her performances.
One day she made me kneel before an urn with my hands joined in an attitude of prayer. Leaning over me, she seemed to be absorbed in grief and we were both dishevelled. Suddenly she stood upright and, withdrawing a little, she seized me by the hair with such a sudden movement that I turned round in surprise and even a little fear, for she was brandishing a dagger! Enthusiastic applause from the artist spectators was heard, accompanied by the exclamations of “Bravo le Medea!” Then, drawing me towards her bosom with the semblance of protecting me from the wrath of heaven, she wrung from the same voices the cries of “Viva la Niobe!”2
The comtesse's report shows how the Attitudes worked as a type of parlor game or charades, in which the