ABSTRACT
In July 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal: “In Boston, I trod the streets a little proudly, that I could walk from Allston’s Belshazzar’s Feast to the Sculpture Gallery, & sit before Michel Angelo’s “Day & Night,” and the Antiques.”3 That year, Washington Allston’s huge painting, begun over two decades before but left unfinished at his death, was exhibited in the Corinthian Gallery of the Boston Athenaeum. Horatio Greenough had made a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Day and Night in 1834, which was housed in the Athenaeum gallery alongside copies of antique sculpture. Michelangelo’s figures were famously both finished and unfinished: while Night is fully finished, with all its iconographic details complete, Day is rough-hewn, its face possessing the vagueness of form that an unfinished carving and a timeworn ruin hold in common.4 That Emerson could mention Allston in the same breath as Michelangelo and the great statues of antiquity indicates his high estimation of Allston’s achievement. But given the unfinished status of Day and the fragmentary condition of many ancient sculptures, Emerson’s association of Allston’s painting with these works may have been suggested by its incomplete form. Following an exhibition of Allston’s works in 1839, Margaret Fuller had famously condemned Allston to the “Domain” of “the Beautiful,” while “the Prophets and Sibyls [were] for the Michael Angelos.” Allston’s was
“an altar without fire,” the fire having been extinguished by the barren and frigid New England climate.5 With his great work left unfinished, Allston seemed to symbolize America’s failure to sustain an artist of sensibility. But Allston’s epic treatment of prophecy and damnation permits Emerson to entertain him as an artist of the sublime. And the vision of man’s encounter with the ineffable may even have been enhanced for Emerson by the painting’s unfinished state.
