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Mark Roberts, Julia Bolton Holloway, Anglo-Italian Studies
ANGLO-ITALIAN STUDIES
BOOK REVIEWS
In Progress:
Geoffrey C. Munn. Castellani and Giuliano: Revivalist Jewellers of the 19th Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1984. 208 pp. Colour Plates. Index. ISBN 0-8478-0527-I.
An important book for Browning scholars, who may not know it. Pages 40-41 tell of Robert's purchase of the now-stolen golden ring. It fails to mention the Casa Guidi plaque preceeding The Ring and the Book. Nor may Browning scholars know of Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe standing in tears before a black onyx statue shown to her by the Castellani in their shop, and explaining to her that Italy, too, was a slave, an episode which is recounted in Giuliana Artom Treves' The Golden Ring: The Anglo-Florentines. Plate 136 shows such work.
During the Risorgimento, in the face of strong censorship, against the red, white and green Italian flag taken from Dante's Beatrice, against novels and plays, anything that could challenge foreign domination, many resorted to the past as ways of speaking to their present. Especially Niccolo Tommaseo did so, in his case delving into the comunal history of medieval Italy in his verse plays. The nineteenth-century patriot goldsmiths, the Castellani brothers, mentioned in Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, made use of the even-more distant and Etruscan past and its artistic jewelry to attempt to speak of a self-governing Italy.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning generally spoke directly about the present. It was Robert, her huband, who typically donned masks from ancient times. At her death in 1860 the Florentine comune arranged for a plaque to be placed on Casa Guidi, its words composed by Niccolo Tommaseo, and which speak of her poetry as a golden ring forged between Italy and England. Robert, in taking up that phrase, recast it both in the contemporary Risorgimento politics Elizabeth had so loved by speaking of the Castellani brothers' work, and by antiquing it as of Etruscan work, 'Etrurian circlets found', as was theirs in the face of censorship. One Castellani brother, Alessandro, was even imprisoned in the Castel Sant-Angelo for his political activites, 1853-1856, pp. 24-36.
This book, despite these omissions, is important for studying one of the strands of Victorianism, and is well worth investigating side by side with the Medievalism of that period, with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and with the Oxford Movement. Unintentionally, it especially helps illumine a corner of Browning studies with a glint of a golden wedding ring, between individuals and between nations.
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