Sarah Carter // Art, Eros, and the British Enlightenment
Art, Eros, and the British Enlightenment investigates how thinkers, artists, and curators working in London grappled with evidence of ancient cultures’ exuberant sexuality at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book follows erotic antiquities sourced from the ancient Mediterranean and South Asia into the worlds of antiquarian scholarship, private collecting, public museums, commercial publishing, and artistic practice. It argues that Eros, whether disguised as vulgar Priapus, celebrated as the primordial “Prime Mover” of an ancient cosmology, or apprehended simply as sexual desire, became a crucial force of negotiation in British culture at the advent of modernity.
With the support of the James Loeb Fellowship, I will complete the book’s second chapter, “A Modern Cult of Priapus: Insider Knowledge and Art Publics at Park Street.” It centers on the affluent collector Charles Townley (1737–1805) and the host of collaborators he involved in the interpretation of his private collection of classical art. But insofar as I demonstrate that his museum on Park Street in London functioned as a cosmopolitan knowledge hub involving an eclectic coterie of hired hands, East India Company agents, close friends, and colleagues, I likewise consider the ways in which Townley used the space to demarcate new boundaries. Through formal analysis and critical contextualisation of the “Parlour Catalogues” that he produced for his guests, I argue that the collector emulated the hierarchical dissemination of knowledge characteristic of an ancient mystery cult. Townley used his guides to initiate his general audience into the “lesser mysteries,” by giving them the information they needed to appreciate his antiquities as important works of ancient art. It was only through his personal mediation, acting as a hierophant (the high priest who inducted initiates into the mystery cult), that select guests were admitted into the “greater mysteries.” The collector would verbally explain what the parlour guides omitted: the fact that his collection celebrated the esoteric and erotic aspects of ancient culture. This “double doctrine” allowed Townley to cater to different art publics—a fashionable beau monde and the likeminded antiquarians of a “modern cult of Priapus” that flourished in cloistered, elite privacy.
[Caption: William Chambers, The sculpture collection of Charles Townley in the entrance hall of his house in Park Street, Westminster, 1794, Pen, grey ink, and watercolour. London, The British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum]