The Welsh-born sculptor John Gibson (1790-1866) was one of the most popular British artists in Rome during the nineteenth century. 2 His studio on Via della Fontanella near the Piazza del Popolo was a mandatory stop for visitors on the Grand Tour. 3 Ever the classicist, Gibson praised the sculptural achievements of the Greeks, declaring 'Whatever the Greeks did was right', and 'In the art of sculpture the Greeks were gods'. 4 Best known today for his Tinted Venus, 1851-53, in which he reintroduced the ancient aesthetic of polychrome sculpture through wax-based pigments on marble, Gibson came to be derided by critics who considered this sculpture and his other coloured figures to be failed experiments. 5 As a result, for 1 The ideas presented in this article developed during research award periods at the Henry Moore Institute and the Yale Center for British Art, evolved into part of a paper presented at the College Art Association conference in 2012 on the rethinking of sculpture production, and became the basis of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation. I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of colleagues and friends for their feedback on these ideas over the years, but special thanks go out to Martina Droth, Greg Sullivan, and Richard Woodfield. 2 The primary sources on Gibson's life and career are:

This essay demonstrates that Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci (1855–56) not only illustrated a popular literary narrative, but also responded to specific Roman historic, cultural and artistic touchstones as a performance of romanità through visual literacy. It addresses and challenges the accretion of historical myths around Hosmer's sculpture, its models, and its modern interpretations through the written and visual sources available to her in the nineteenth century. I draw attention to the conflation of key historic events in Rome, the execution of Beatrice Cenci, and the production of Stefano Maderno's Saint Cecilia. These narrative parallels and an emphasis on identifiable women's bodies has led to scholarship repeating the rumour of Hosmer's aristocratic model, which I demonstrate is problematic for evidentiary and interpretative reasons. The essay argues that a scholarly emphasis on her biography and psychology as a queer woman has ignored the sophisticated visual and historic citations in her sculpture.

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This paper explores how Harriet Hosmer (1930-1908) positioned two early busts, Daphne (1853/4) and Medusa (1854) in opposition to Gianlorenzo Bernini's works of thes same subject through careful deployment of Winckelmannian principles. This engages with the first English translation of Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity by Giles Henry Lodge in 1850, as well as the rich body of antique material available to Hosmer in Rome. It problematises art historical approaches to Hosmer's work that emphasise biographically-led readings over object-led interpretations informed by contemporary translations, discourses of originality, and display practices. It demonstrates the conflicting position of Bernini in the middle and late nineteenth century as the "Prince of Degenerate Sculpture", and shows that Winckelmann's victimisation of Bernini led to his poor reputation. This reputation as skilled but degenerate provided the foil for Hosmer to reclaim these subjects, demonstrate her correct understanding of classical principles and citation, and prove her superiority. Ultimately, however, the two artists will be shown to have more similarities than differences in their use of classical references; only access to Winckelmann's writings separates their reception in the nineteenth century.