An interesting rabbit trail in Goethe's Italian Journey--
"Sir William Hamilton, who is still living here [in Naples] as English ambassador, has now, after many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature, found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of twenty with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this, 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 sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations - standing, kneeling, sitting, reclining, serious, sad, playful, ecstatic, contrite, alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose following 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 headdress. The old knight idolizes her and is enthusiastic about everything she does."
I was intrigued, so I looked up Sir William Hamilton to see if he'd ever been painted with his young wife, and discovered that she was famous in her own right. She was later the famed long-time mistress of Lord Horatio Nelson, had a daughter with him, and was devoted to Nelson until he died. But she squandered everything he left her and died in poverty in her fifties. She and Nelson had always pretended that the daughter was adopted (because they weren't married) and, even years and years later, the daughter herself refused to ever admit that Emma had been her mother. Emma is the subject of the Vivien Leigh/Laurence Olivier movie, That Hamilton Woman. When she so impressed Goethe, she probably presented an image similar to this painting of her:
And here's another interesting quote from the same book, Italian Journey, by Goethe.
"The storms of the last days have presented us with the picture of a magnificent sea and allowed me to study the motions and the forms of the waves. Nature is, indeed, the only book whose every page is filled with important content.
"The theatre, on the other hand, no longer gives me any pleasure . . . To me the theatre is merely a peepshow on a larger scale. I seem to have lost my taste for such things."
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