• 1 Mazzini to Lamberti, 8 February 1845, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 27, p. 131.
• 2 Lamberti to E. Scab[erras], 6 October 1844, Protocollo della Giovine Italia, Mazzini 1906-, AP. 3, (...)

Un libro consecrato ai martiri dovrebbe ispirare […] delicatezza e profumo d’Arte.1
Giuseppe MazziniSi sta combinando per funerali e medaglia pei Band[ier]a e martiri.2
Giuseppe Lamberti

• 3 Mastellone 2007.
• 4 By contrast, Parkes n.d.; Smith 1973. More recently, Janowitz 1998, Lovett 2003 and Haywood 2004.
• 5 Fox 1988.

1Salvo Mastellone, who has done so much to bring to the fore Giuseppe Mazzini’s role as champion of “European democracy”, has also sought to rectify the relative neglect suffered by William James Linton, a prominent English radical and republican. Yet Mastellone says very little indeed about Linton’s work as an artist-engraver;3 near silence in this regard clearly limits our understanding not merely of Linton, one of the most accomplished British wood-engravers of the day,4 but of Mazzini also, given his strong views on the role of art in politics. Besides, wood-engraving, more even than lithography or engraving on steel, had come to be of great importance to graphic art in general, and, more specifically, to popular illustrated journalism, a pictorial revolution in that sphere occurring in the decades that Mazzini was resident in London.5 It is no more justified to bracket out Linton’s work as a wood-engraver, in favour of his activities as a militant republican, his political prose, his translations or his poetry, than it would be, say, to set to one side the films of Pasolini.

• 6 Ruskin 1890.
• 7 Scott 1869.
• 8 Scott 1892, vol. 1, p. 44-45.
• 9 For an account of his old friend, see Linton 1970, p. 61-63. For reproductions of propaganda in wo (...)
• 10 Holyoake 1896.

2John Ruskin, the most celebrated art critic of Victorian Britain and latterly a prophet of ethical and social renewal in the mould of Thomas Carlyle, was much exercised by the question of the mass production of images made possible by the advent of new print technologies. In his view, both Albrecht Dürer, one of the greatest of the northern European artists to design wood-cuts, and Thomas Bewick, the eighteenth-century reviver in Newcastle-upon-Tyne of the art of wood engraving, were “reformers”, a judgement that brings the moral and religious connotations of engraving on wood to the fore.6 By the same token, for many British artist-engravers of the nineteenth century, the sixteenth-century German engravers’ workshops and their propagandist contributions to the Lutheran Reformation seemed at once familiar and instructive. For example, William Bell Scott, the author of the first serious study in English of Dürer,7 and the son himself of a successful engraver, plainly had no difficulty in conjuring up in his imagination an apprenticeship in Nuremberg, for his father’s workshop in Edinburgh seemed to him to belong to the same world as that inhabited by the German masters.8 In the great Victorian mission – common to Scott, appointed Master in 1844 of the newly founded Government School of Design in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and to Linton, his close friend – of raising levels of aesthetic appreciation and artistic attainment among both artisans and the industrial working-classes, the democratic implications of the combining in the German sixteenth-century cities of movable type with wood-cuts were all too plain.9 For Linton’s values were derived from the saints and martyrs of the English seventeenth-century Commonwealth, and in that vein he had hoped to educate, as much in engraved images as in prose and verse, working men and women steeped, for the most part, in Old Dissent and non-conformity. Indeed, he displayed a constant readiness to use his engraving tools, often free of charge, for the benefit of any radical cause with which he was in sympathy.10 In order to recover here whatever agreement as to politics, religion and visual culture the London wood-engraver may have had with Giuseppe Mazzini, himself fascinated by the idea of martyrdom and committed to a visionary replacement of the Papacy with an ecumenical Council of Humanity, I propose now, reversing the customary order, to begin my account not with Mazzini but with the neglected Linton, and with an account of his early experiences in London, his apprenticeship as a wood-engraver and his understanding of the uses of art in politics.

• 11 Wiener 1983, ch. 9.
• 12 Ibid., p. 130-134, 165-166; Epstein 1994, p. 136-144.

3Suppose, then, in imagination we were to walk in the spring of 1830 with the apprentice Linton from his master’s workshop in Kennington, perhaps to deliver some engraved blocks to Fleet Street, we would pass, on Great Surrey Street, the celebrated Rotunda.11 Here, for two crucial years, in the course of which the July Revolution erupted, the Great Reform Bill was enacted, and the unstamped press re-emerged, the diehard freethinker Richard Carlile and the flamboyant Rev. Robert Taylor, dressed in a bishop’s robes but with a tricolour draped over his shoulders, gave public expression to their scandalous “infidel” opinions. Delving into works by Charles Dupuis and Constantin-François Volney, Taylor used philology and astrological lore to buttress a general theory of world religions as allegorical. According to these arguments, religious beliefs across the globe were no more than traces of an original phase of sun worship, with the names of Gods and prophets being merely masked references to the signs of the Zodiac.12

• 13 Thompson, 1968, p. 843.
• 14 Hollis 1970; Wiener 1969.
• 15 Linton 1895, vol. 1, p. 6-10.
• 16 Smith 1973, p. 8; Mineka 1944.
• 17 Mastellone 2007, p. 27.
• 18 Lamennais 1840; Linton 1839.

4Though primarily a den of “infidelity”, the Rotunda was also the headquarters of London working-class radicalism, hoisting the tricolour, for example, when the Duke of Wellington resigned, in November 1830.13 That autumn saw the launch of unstamped papers14 by Henry Hetherington and James Watson; these publishers and journalists, in my judgement Linton’s earliest mentors, would later become prominent within “moral force” Chartism and then within the Mazzinian Peoples’ International League. Drawn into their orbit by a fellow apprentice, Linton’s earliest writings and engravings are steeped in the deism of Volney, and in the Ruins of Empires in particular.15 Nonetheless, as his biographer F.B. Smith observes, he remained deeply religious, though heterodox, the second great cultural influence upon him being William Johnson Fox, a Unitarian minister and editor of the Monthly Repository.16 At Fox’s house, the France of indigent pressmen and jobbing engravers was overlaid by the France of the party of movement, of Romantic art and poetry, and above all of Lamennais. Mastellone rightly observes that a common French culture served as a bond between Linton and Mazzini in the 1840s, and that the latter, who often wrote in French, had regular need of a translator.17 Since Lamennais was the contemporary thinker whom Mazzini admired most, how could he fail to warm to a man who had translated the rebellious French cleric?18

• 19 Linton 1970, ch. 1.
• 20 Prothero 1981, ch. 7.
• 21 Wood 1994.
• 22 Linton 1895, 9, p. 165; Maidment 2013, ch. 7.

5Linton later observed that his “real recollections began with 1820”, the death of George III, and the celebrated trial of Queen Caroline, the separated wife of George IV.19 Rumbustious campaigns had been mounted by the city’s artisans in defence of the defamed Queen,20 and Linton’s father, a staunch “Queen’s Man”, had owned copies of the famous pamphlets issued then by William Hone and George Cruikshank. It is worth noting how Linton himself, instead of referring first to Thomas Bewick, preferred to tie his entrance into the world of wood-engraving to an insurrectionary conjuncture, at home and abroad, in which outrageously subversive cuts had for the first time reached a mass audience.21 His memoirs thus linked the inner pattern of his life to a historical moment of carnivalesque, anti-monarchical upheaval, and, though usually favouring a gentler, more whimsical humour, conveyed in Punch and elsewhere by John Leech and Kenny Meadows, he sometimes returned to the fiercely jagged graphic style of Cruikshank, thereby transmitting the grotesqueries of Georgian caricature to mid-Victorian Britain (fig. 1).22

• 23 Fox 1980, p. 1-13.

6It was both Linton’s good fortune, since he could make a reasonable (and independent) living, and his misfortune, to enter the wood-engraver’s trade just as it was undergoing at one and the same time a great expansion and a grave deterioration, lapsing into mass manufacture and merely reproductive facsimile cutting.23 Assisted by advances in printing technologies (the invention of the steam press) and in paper production, those cutting with gravers on the end grain of boxwood rounds produced blocks that could now, in contrast to copper plates, both be combined with letter press and be used not just two or three thousand but indeed countless times.

• 24 Smith 1967, p. 266.

7Despite Bewick’s fame and the gravitation of many of his Northumbrian apprentices to the capital, a London wood-engraver’s shop was still a modest affair in 1828, and a rarity. Always at pains to assert his own credentials as an artist, and indeed a gentleman, since engravers in general had a lowly social status, not being admitted to full membership of the Royal Academy until 1853, the fear that wood-engravers might be mere “mechanics” never ceased to haunt Linton. Furthermore, engravings on copper had more prestige than those on wood, in part because of the association of the former with high Renaissance art and of the latter with broadsides, ballads, murders and public executions,24 and with the advertisement of popular entertainments.

• 25 Linton 1889, p. 180.
• 26 Linton 1895, vol. 19, p. 189-192.
• 27 Ibid., p. 116 and p. 104.
• 28 Linton 1884, p. 35-36. In fact, Linton would often qualify the opposition between white and black (...)

8In the case of those wood-engravers who, like Bewick, designed, drew and executed their own works, there was plainly little doubt that they were indeed artists, and yet the emergence of specialist designers of drawings for the block, and the resulting division of labour, was surely to the detriment of the art.25 Linton’s own stance was in fact complex and nuanced. Admiring Bewick chiefly as a naturalist, draughtsman and artist, Linton thought him overrated as an engraver, revering the school as much as its founder.26 The key point about Bewick’s Newcastle apprentices is that they had produced “tinted drawings”, that is to say, watercolour drawings in which all the lines were not marked in but merely inferred. Engravers were thus free to use their own systems of marks to represent a wash, free, in other words, to interpret.27 Where a drawing is transferred to the block, we talk obviously enough of “black line”, since the essential task is to clear away the wood on either side of the inked line.28 Where there is no design, or only a tinted one, the engraver is at liberty to draw in light, every single mark with the graver printing as white, and hence the use of the phrase “white line” to describe the school that Bewick founded (fig. 2).

• 29 Linton 1895, vol. 19, p. 108.
• 30 Ibid., p. 104.

9Himself an accomplished translator, Linton likened good artistic engraving to literary translation, as had others.29 He insisted that John Thompson, for example, “did not engrave mechanically even line for line, but regulated, cared for relations, used his own judgement and taste”,30 an observation that captures well just how an engraver, when faced with a drawing done by another hand, would appraise multiple relationships between marks in one medium, say wash or pen and ink, and translate them into the specific idiom of wood (fig. 3).

• 31 Berenson 1984.
• 32 Mazzini to L. Melegari, 8 April 1837, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 12, p. 369; 24 October 1837, to the same (...)
• 33 Isastia 1982, p. 69-90. The plight of Poland, a “Christ-Nation”, was of crucial significance in th (...)
• 34 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 12 March 1840, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 19, p. 25.
• 35 Morelli 1962, p. 311-338.

10In January 1837, with Switzerland no longer a safe haven, Mazzini took refuge in London. Without rehearsing here his earlier political activities, I wish simply to draw attention both to the signal importance to him of the French Revolution and to its essentially religious recasting within the later French Republican tradition.31 When first in England, he insisted that it was not conspiracy that he now advocated but an apostolate, and therefore a labour of education in the light of God’s own (Lessingite) education of the human race.32 Mazzini thus shared with Lamennais and others a concern to view the Year II in eschatological terms, but differed from French Traditionalists (and Saint-Simonians) in apportioning the duty of fulfilling God’s word to all the principal European nations rather than to the Grande Nation alone.33 Convinced that Christianity had fulfilled its historical role, Mazzini foresaw the emergence of a new, “humanitarian” faith, to be announced by one people in particular, the Italians, at Rome – who had twice before unified the world, once through the military might of the Caesars and once through the moral and religious authority of the Popes. Now a third Rome would establish “the council of humanity”, where proper expression would be given to the specific missions of each of the European nationalities. Europe was destined to witness an apostolate proselytising among the labouring classes, as receptive in their humility toward the Humanitarian word as their counterparts in the early Christian era had been to the word of Christ.34 The church of the future was to be established in Rome through the agency of the abovementioned council, but in the meantime a “Church of Precursors” might be founded, if Lamennais would only undertake the task.35

• 36 Riall 2007, p. 30-31.
• 37 Mazzini 1986, p. 136-137.
• 38 Mazzini to G. Lamberti, 23 January 1844, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 26, p. 27.
• 39 Banti 2000.

11In an illuminating passage from her biography of Garibaldi, Lucy Riall has drawn attention to the “expressive” and “symbolic” aspects of Mazzinian insurrections.36 In suffering martyrdom, figures like Jacopo Ruffini and the Bandiera brothers served as hortatory “examples”, demonstrating what it was to believe so fervently in a cause that you would die for it. Rejecting art for art’s sake, Mazzini urged artists to “tradurre il pensiero in azione” and to transform a patriot “di contemplatore in apostolo”.37 Uprisings were thus intended both to be military facts and to serve as performances, around which inspiriting rumours were deliberately sown.38 My concern here is to elaborate upon this interpretation, which draws to a degree upon certain prominent tendencies within recent Risorgimento historiography,39 and to explore the relationship between politics, religion and art implicit in Mazzini’s attitude towards new developments in the illustrated journalism of early Victorian London. Now, through the reproductive magic of the stereotype and the electrotype, spectral armies of material impressions, on paper or metal, could cross borders as swiftly as sibilant words.

• 40 Mazzini, to M. Mazzini, 20 August 1838, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 15, p. 144; 1 January 1840, to the sam (...)
• 41 Sponza 1988; [A Working Artist] 1841, p. 160.
• 42 [Anon.] 1840, p. 180.
• 43 Linton 1846, p. 146; Cironi 1862, p. 21.

12Many Italian exiles were in fact engaged in activities associated with the arts, trading upon the cultural profile of a homeland still largely defined abroad by the Grand Tour; in the British Museum, for example, there were several employed in the restoration of Etruscan vases.40 The local Italian community included many gilders, silverers, restorers and framers of pictures, even artists’ models.41 Indeed, the public image of Mazzini’s fellow countrymen had become associated, for good or ill, with plaster statuette sellers, and with organ-grinders, most of them children, whose travails had led him to campaign against their exploitation and to open a school for their benefit. In his immediate circle, moreover, were Filippo Pistrucci, an improvisatore, painter and engraver, and the Director of the Italian school, but also the brother of Benedetto, a celebrated medallist, and the father of Scipione, a member of Giovine Italia, an engraver and a sculptor. One of the other exiles running the school, Celestino Vai, had been a stage-hand in Naples and was an accomplished model-maker.42 We know that “architectural and ornamental drawing” was taught by Vai and others, with the boys also producing models in wood and clay.43

• 44 F. Mazzini to Mazzini, 22 June and November 1835; M. Mazzini to Mazzini, 6 July 1835, Luzio 1919, (...)
• 45 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 10 March 1838, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 14, p. 312.
• 46 See Cole 1838, p. 265-280.
• 47 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 31 March 1838, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 14, p. 332; 18 April 1841, to Q. Magiott (...)
• 48 Didot 1863, p. 282.
• 49 As to Luigi Sacchi’s pioneering attempts to establish wood-engraving in Milan, in the early 1840s, (...)
• 50 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 8 August 1838, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 15, p. 130-131; 31 October 1838, to the (...)

13How aware, though, was Mazzini of British pictorial innovation in the sphere of print journalism? His sister Francesca had shared his fascination with the new illustrated press,44 and during his first months in London he would gaze at lithographs and engravings in printshop windows.45 Alert no doubt to the intense interest then surrounding wood-engraving,46 and appreciative of the skill of English practitioners,47 Mazzini may well have known that the art in its modern form was said to have been introduced to Paris by Charles Thompson,48 the brother of John Thompson, that English wood engravers continued to figure prominently there, and that stereotyped English and French blocks were flooding into Italy.49 He did at any rate send prints home, and followed the progress of an illustrated Shakespeare, noteworthy for the exuberantly imaginative use of wood-engravings.50 Perhaps inspired by this lavish tribute to one national poet, Mazzini entered into negotiations with Pietro Rolandi with a view to the publication of a serial Dante. The illustrations were all to be sketched by Scipione Pistrucci on the spot. This ambitious project was too costly and complex to stand much chance of ever becoming a reality. Indeed, by contrast, the Rolandi edition of the Foscolo commentary on Dante (1842-43), a labour of love on Mazzini’s part, contains only a few engravings.

• 51 Isabella 2006, p. 493-520.
• 52 Riall 2007, ch. 5; Sorba 2008, p. 80, on Mazzini’s appreciation of the importance of “material cir (...)
• 53 G. Mazzini to P. Giannone, 2 July 1845, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 28, p. 44-45; Mazzini to GLamberti, 30 (...)
• 54 Mazzini to Lamberti, 30 July 1845, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 28, p. 80.

14So austere a publication, dedicated to Jacopo Ruffini and featuring an engraving of Foscolo’s tomb in Chiswick, reflected Mazzini’s preoccupation with exile, martyrdom and mourning.51 The claim has been made that Mazzini, a propagandist of genius, approached print culture with great enthusiasm and deployed it adroitly.52 Indeed, his initial plan was to publish an open-ended series of portraits of eminent figures, literary, scientific, religious and political, modelled upon Nicolò Bettoni’s Pantheon delle Nazioni,53 but subsequently he also contemplated launching a collection of Italian popular melodies with piano accompaniment. The song book was to be illustrated with wood-engravings supplied “a buonissimo prezzo da un amico inglese”, presumably Linton.54 Neither of these projects ever came to fruition, but Mazzini’s propagandist efforts did meet with success in the field of political portraiture.

• 55 Yet Teresa Confalonieri appears in the Apostolato popolare, albeit as a mother, and George Sand in (...)
• 56 Adams 1968, and Adams 1848-, 3 February 1849: “the glorious circle of Patriots of all nations whic (...)
• 57 Herzen 1968, I, p. 122.
• 58 Chase 2009, p. 76-93; Plunkett 2003.
• 59 Mazzini, in Cironi 1862, p. VI.
• 60 Mazzini to E. Ruffini, 24 June 1840, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 19, p. 172. Mazzini to Giannone, 2 July 1 (...)

15Across Europe, and beyond it, embattled early nineteenth-century liberals and republicans were in the habit of creating miniature picture galleries of their heroes, the great men (and men, for the most part, they were)55 of the Republican tradition. W.E. Adams, one of Linton’s loyal followers, gave a celebrated account of Chartist practice in this regard,56 while Alexander Herzen recalled how Russian students collected the portraits of the French Radicals, and referred to an ikonostasis of heroes that he himself had assembled.57 In Britain the spectacular proliferation of portraits of the young Queen Victoria led the Northern Star to issue in its turn portraits of Chartist leaders, their respectable and dignified countenances betokening a future elite of working men in a reformed Parliament.58 Inspired perhaps by this precedent, Mazzini, who wrote often in the 1840s of the democratic movement’s need for “capi visibili”,59 likewise endeavoured to create, through portraiture, inspiriting images of a saintly band of martyrs serving as moral examples. Thus, for the Apostolato popolare, the journal produced for the Italian labouring classes, Mazzini hoped initially to procure a portrait of Jacopo Ruffini, intending to “proporre il nostro Santo come modello alla gioventù Italiana”.60 In fact, Santorre di Santarosa appeared in the first issue, Lamennais in the second (fig. 4), Dante in the third, Teresa Confalonieri in the fourth (fig. 5), and Luigi Angeloni in the fifth. The final seven issues contain no illustrations.

• 61 Smith 1973, p. 53-59; Sarti 1997, p. 117-119; Mastellone 2007, p. 25-27. The account in Linton 197 (...)
• 62 Mazzini to N. Fabrizi , 14 August 1844, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 26, p. 290.
• 63 Smith 1973, p. 53-59; Sarti 1997, p. 117-119; Mack Smith 1994, p. 40-44.

16The complexity of Mazzini’s engagement with the new pictorial dispensation is reflected in the episode that first brought him to the attention of the wider British public. Linton, a central protagonist in the whole affair, had by chance discovered that the seal of one of Mazzini’s letters had been tampered with, and therefore he, in conjunction with William Lovett and Henry Hetherington, devised a test in order to prove the point.61 Finding that the Post Office, under instructions from the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, was indeed intercepting correspondence, Linton and Mazzini got up a petition, to be presented to the House of Commons on 14 June, 1844. The resulting scandal brought Mazzini to national prominence, and did much (but not all) to banish the lingering suspicion that he was given to murder and assassination. Early in July there followed a second petition, alluding to the interception of Emilio Bandiera’s letters, and to the subsequent imprisonment of a number of Italian patriots by the Austrian authorities. For several weeks the fate of Emilio and his brother Attilio, who had deserted from the Austrian navy and attempted an insurrection in Calabria, remained unknown. Executed by firing squad, along with seven of their companions, on 26 July, Mazzini did not learn of their deaths until the second week in August.62 Though Sir James Graham and Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, were cleared by the subsequent parliamentary enquiries, their reputations were tarnished by the fact of their having apparently communicated information to a foreign power that was reputed to have lured Italian patriots to their deaths.63

• 64 Linton 1970, p. 56-60; Punch, 7, p. 4, 6 July 1844. The figure of Sir James Graham recalls the fam (...)
• 65 Evans 1970.

17Linton’s orchestration of the Radical response to the scandal naturally involved the use of caricature and satire. Indeed, it was Punch that did most to turn the hapless Graham into a figure of fun, renamed “Paul Pry”, a top-hatted gentleman peeking into sealed letters.64 The periodical also published “Punch’s Anti-Graham Wafers”, whose motifs included crocodiles, bees and foxes. A Beehive, together with an outsized bee, thus displayed the caption “TOUCH MY WAX AND YOU’LL FEEL MY STING” while a crocodile with gaping jaws declared “YOU’RE WELCOME TO THE INSIDE”. Sometimes these wafers were used to seal anti-Graham envelopes, drawn by Leech and engraved by Linton (fig. 6).65

• 66 Punch, 7, p. 34, 20 July 1844.
• 67 Punch, 7, p. 118, 14 September 1844.

18In one of the early anti-Graham cartoons, “THE POST OFFICE PEEP-SHOW”, the caption grandly informs “Emperors, Kings, Princes, Grand Dukes, Viceroys, Popes, Potentates, Infants, Regents, Barons, and Foreign Noblemen…” that letters posted at 9 will now be opened at 10 am, while those posted at 11 will be opened at 12 am etc. The cartoon depicts dignitaries queueing up before a peep show (a post office); a huckster brandishes a sealed letter and cries “A Penny a Peep – only a Penny!”66 Another cartoon, also by Leech, “GRAND REVIEW OF THE LONDON POSTMEN”, features Graham drilling his men, the commands being “Present letters! Feel for seal! Thumb on seal! Open letters! Read letters! Re-fold letters! Reseal letters! Pocket letters!”67

• 68 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 26 June 1844, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 26, p. 221, referring to a common practic (...)
• 69 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 11 July 1844, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 26, p. 239-240.
• 70 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 6 September 1844, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 27, p. 15.

19Living in the same neighbourhood as Linton, and using the wood-engraver’s workshop as an address for correspondence, Mazzini’s familiarity with the Punch cartoons is no cause for surprise. Linton cut the block for the anti-Graham envelope, and in all likelihood some of the other Leech cartoons, so how could he have resisted showing them to Mazzini? The latter in turn could not resist telling his mother about the mockery to which the Home Secretary had been subjected, and of how he was daily receiving letters with a note on them saying “guaranteed to contain nothing of any concern to Sir James Graham”.68 Mazzini then refers to the Anti-Graham envelope; proposing to send one, in the meantime he encloses “THE POST-OFFICE PEEP-SHOW”, which he describes as “very witty” – as indeed it is.69 Maria Mazzini subsequently receives another of Leech’s cartoons, namely, “GRAND REVIEW OF THE LONDON POSTMEN”.70

• 71 Maria Mazzini was delighted, however, by her son’s comical account of the dress and manner of Brit (...)
• 72 Spadoni 1932, p. 733-771; Stefanelli 1989, p. 1-6.
• 73 Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 15 September 1840, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 19, p. 270.
• 74 Silver medals representing Dante were distributed as prizes at the Italian school, Mazzini 1842, p (...)
• 75 Mazzini to Lamberti, 21 August 1844, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 26, p. 301. Benedetto Pistrucci, who had, (...)
• 76 Mazzini to Lamberti, 8 February 1845, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 27, p. 131, expressing regret that the p (...)
• 77 Mazzocca 2002, p. 89-111.

20It is only in letters to his mother that Mazzini mentions the anti-Graham caricatures. He utters not a word about them to any of his political associates, nor does he enclose copies; neither Lamberti nor Giannone, Mazzini’s chief lieutenants in Paris, get to see the antics of “Paul Pry”, even though in the French capital Charles Philipon and Honoré Daumier had already shown through lithography just how trenchant a political weapon graphic satire could be.71 Indeed, Mazzini, ever mindful of the symbolic power of official emblems and insignia, was less concerned with jeering at discredited royalty than with limning an angel band of martyr-souls and with trumpeting a counter-state. In the person of Benedetto Pistrucci, Mazzini’s circle included a celebrated medallist, entrenched at the Royal Mint, who had designed and engraved coins and medals of great significance to the British state, not least the magnificent, long-delayed (and never struck) Waterloo medal.72 Spending long hours with Benedetto Pistrucci’s nephew, the loyal Scipione, and with his brother, Filippo, the director of the Italian school, Mazzini had pondered deeply the question of honorific emblems.73 Indeed, he never missed an opportunity to circulate emblems and slogans in a material form, for example, in the guise of inscribed seals. Now, perhaps, Giovine Italia could vie with the Papal state and Piedmont-Savoy, which were issuing honorific medals of their own.74 The decision was therefore taken to strike a medal for the Bandieras, although the notion that Benedetto Pistrucci might dare to take on the task was swiftly scotched.75 In the event, two medals were struck, one in Paris, the other in London. The Paris medal was designed by Pietro Giannone, sculpted by David d’Angers, a republican and a close associate of Lamennais, and engraved by Émile Rogat, while the London medal was drawn by Scipione Pistrucci. As my epigraphs indicate, the Ricordi, the medals and the Bandieras’ funeral were inextricably intertwined;76 the art of the early Risorgimento was essentially an art of mourning.77

• 78 Laugée 2011.
• 79 Mazzini to Melegari, 22 February 1839, Mazzini 1906-, vol. 15, p. 390; Mazzini to M. Mazzini, 29 J (...)
• 80 Mazzini 1986, p. 74.

21A portrait in Mazzini’s view was capable of capturing the lineaments of a patriot’s soul, and he therefore bitterly regretted his failure to discover any engraved portrait or daguerreotype of the Bandieras. The Paris Bandiera medal was in fact one of the rare occasions upon which David d’Angers, who had created an entire pantheon of republicans in metal, sculpted a medallion that did not feature a portrait.78 The portraits reproduced in the Apostolato popolare were designed to be representations of apostles, if not martyrs. Insisting always that Christ’s work was done, Mazzini believed that he was living in the age of the Paraclete, or Holy Spirit, and he plainly had in mind Pentecost and the baptism of Christ’s apostles by fire.79 This apocalyptic vision is reflected, I believe, in the iconography of the Paris medal, and in these words from the Ricordi: “Alla fiamma di patria ch’esce da quei sepolcri, l’Angiolo dell’Italia accenderà, presto o tardi, la fiaccola che illuminerà una terza volta … dalla Roma del Popolo, le vie del Progresso all’Umanità”.80 The medal depicts the same scene, with a figure in classical dress, at once the Angel of Italy and an official from republican Rome, lighting a brand from the urn containing the martyrs’ ashes (fig. 7).

• 81 Much the same might be said of Mazzini’s lack of engagement with the brilliant political caricatur (...)
• 82 Lovett 2003, p. 152-154. For a later use of this same graphic device in Italy see Bibolotti 2005, (...)
• 83 Punch, 5, p. 23, 15 July 1843.
• 84 “Death in the Drawing Room, or, the Young Dressmakers of England”, The Illuminated Magazine, 1, Ju (...)
• 85 Roberts 1998, pl. 51.

22Even allowing for the obdurate fact of censorship in the Italian peninsula prior to 1847-48, what is striking about Mazzini’s response to the notable flowering of graphic art in early Victorian London is its narrowness, when considered in relation to the wide variety of styles and genres deployed by Linton.81 Alastair Lovett has noted that much of Linton’s writing, in line with the most radical of the cartoons drawn by Leech for Punch, and with a long-established tradition in English caricature, turned upon contrast between the privileged and the unprivileged, the wealthy and the indigent, the represented and the unrepresented, an approach often involving either a dyadic or a layered and hierarchical division of social space.82 Consider, for example, “SUBSTANCE AND SHADOW”, the celebrated depiction by Leech of the ragged poor, in the National Gallery, gazing at painted images of their smug aristocratic counterparts.83 Though horrified by the inequalities of an England edging ever nearer, Mazzini reckoned, to its own 1789, or rather its Terror, he seems not to have grasped what graphic artists might do by way of representing the sufferings of the Italian labouring classes. Along with lacerating depictions in the early 1840s of the two nations, the illustrated periodicals sometimes featured bleak and admonitory images reminiscent of Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death. Indeed, Kenny Meadows’ rendering of a famished seamstress in the guise of a skeleton, in an issue of the Illustrated Magazine edited by Linton, possesses some of the qualities of outraged moral denunciation found in the militant graphic art of the Reformation admired by Linton himself, and, as I noted above, by William Bell Scott and by John Ruskin.84 As in the case of the Post Office caricatures, however, Mazzini apparently failed to understand how work in a like vein might advance his cause, or, indeed, how the reportage favoured by the Illustrated London News,85 for which Linton also engraved, might be put to other uses.

• 86 Mazzini, end of 1846, to James Stansfeld, in Richards 1920, 1, p. 46. The illustrations to Bob Thi (...)
• 87 Holyoake 1896, p. 74.
• 88 See, though, Mazzini to Lamberti, 17 November 1845, in Mazzini 1906-, vol. 28, p. 206. Roland Sart (...)

23A similar case might be made for Linton’s National, or for some of his graphic contributions to The Odd-fellow. We know, moreover, that Mazzini was fond of Linton’s Bob-Thin, or the Poor House Fugitive (1845),86 and yet he appears not to have grasped how its brilliant, and extraordinarily various, graphic inventions, ranging from fantastical initial capitals to visionary or spiritualised landscapes, might be politically useful. Linton was in fact one of the first in radical milieux to publish illustrated children’s books, exquisite little volumes, with flowers drawn from nature.87 Until very recently the weekly Pellegrino and its successor, the Educatore, had been almost lost from view, and it has therefore proved difficult for scholars to ascertain whether these two periodicals, produced specifically for the Hatton Garden school, contained illustrations.88

• 89 Cironi 1862, p. 66-67. For valuable accounts of the halting emergence (or re-emergence) of caricat (...)
• 90 See, however, Bocchi 2005, p. 16.
• 91 Mazzini, [Friday …] 1841, to P. Rolandi, SEI, 20, p. 403-404.

24Further confirmation of the view that Mazzini, being committed to an intrinsically religious and, indeed, sepulchral vision of Italian nationality, turned away from much of the new graphic art flourishing in London (and Paris) is provided by a book on the Italian nationalist press by Piero Cironi, which makes barely any mention of a graphic element. He in fact espouses a very narrow conception of political art, commenting first of all on busts of Mazzini and Buonarroti then on a statue of Andrea Vochieri, a Mazzinian martyr of 1833, and then, at some length, on the two Bandiera medals, as if to mark them out for special notice, and then on a third medal (for Agesilao Milano and Baron Francesco Bentivegna). When Cironi comes at last to refer to graphic art as such, his exposition is limited to a single lithograph, depicting a cemetery containing a pyramid surmounted by a cross and alongside it a tricolour, and featuring geographical references that invoke Spanish, Greek and Italian patriots, nor does he comment upon the explosion of caricature in the Italian peninsula in 1848-49 either.89 So far as Mazzini himself was concerned, the whimsical, the mischievous and the impish, let alone the rumbustious, the scurrilous or the mocking, could have no place in what was always a thanatocratic art designed to spur patriots to act by virtue of the sacrificial blood of martyrs.90 For Mazzini the comedy of Punch, a periodical explicitly intended for polite consumption within the family, and the graphic work there and elsewhere of Leech, Meadows and Linton, belonged essentially to the private, domestic and pacific sphere – to be shared with his mother in the fondly remembered space of home in distant Genoa and with Emilie Ashurst and the “clan” at his adoptive home in Muswell Hill – and not to the public, political and martial sphere. At an earlier date Mazzini had in fact rejected a proposal to include in the Foscolo commentary on Dante an engraving of Chiswick cemetery, by Scipione Pistrucci, in which the tombs of both the exiled Italian poet and William Hogarth featured. He insists that even if other illustrious Italians had lain there he would still have rejected the idea of representing their graves in the vignette, for “il nostro è libro che deve essere esclusivamente sacro a Dante ed a Foscolo”.91 Yet here Mazzini protests too much, fearing perhaps that the dismal Hogarthian round or road of convivial hilarity, social entrapment and moral ruin might distract from the allegorical flame of patriotic sacrifice. Just as in France, however, where the July Days had led to an uproarious explosion of graphic satire and caricature, so also in Italy revolutions would before too long give rise to a veritable Charivari of the pencil, the pen and the graver. A prominent advocate of Mazzinian republicanism in the 1850s, Linton would for his part leave Britain in due course for the United States, becoming in his old age perhaps the most celebrated living practitioner of the white-line tradition and in fact its custodian and chronicler (fig. 8).