Philipp Ekardt’s project investigates the emergence and circulation of the so-called Attitudes of Lady Emma Hamilton. In performances for highly select audiences, Hamilton adopted poses that reminded her late-18th-century contemporaries of stances and gestures familiar from figures on ancient Greek vases. Within the span of a few years these exclusive presentations had become a reference point for educated Europeans from Naples and London to Weimar and Paris, their impact exceeding the range of their actual viewers by far. The project contends that at the core of this development are processes of formalization, and that the key question requiring an answer is: How the Attitudes became forms.
To this end, the project looks at contemporary visual media, artworks, and sources (e.g. by Goethe, Hirt, Vigée-LeBrun, Tischbein) and systematically focuses on topics such as: Emma’s record as a highly skilled painter’s model – a career that preceded her performances; the function of the model’s pose as a form that is at once sufficiently specific, and open enough to connect to wider iconographical strands; neoclassicism whose line-based and reproduction-oriented forms, realized in outline drawings and engravings, dominated the visual representation of the Attitudes, settling them within a panorama of frequently commercial companion-forms in which schematized vase figures and wall-paintings were circulated across Europe, which became the Attitudes’ formal infrastructure; and a peculiar dialectic by which these highly mobile forms that traveled across the continent still retained a ‘localizing’ character, indicating their origin in the region in which Emma resided, and where ancient vases and architectures were being excavated – the kingdom of Naples. Not at last, the project seeks to provide a sociobiography of the Attitudes as forms that solidified in an environment in which reproducibility promised financial or aesthetic rewards, while providing Emma Hamilton – who had been born in poverty – with considerable agency that buttressed her trans-class trajectory.