Pots in performance: Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes

During the 1790s, Emma Hamilton, wife of collector and diplomat Sir William Hamilton, developed an innovative form of performance art, tableaux vivants known as the ‘(Grecian) Attitudes’. Notoriously transgressive both sexually and socially, Emma also transgressed materially, transposing the scenes depicted on Sir William’s vases into a kinaesthetic medium. That performance remains a subaltern or illegitimate mode of relating to ancient material culture (as opposed to visual display) is a cultural bias rooted in economic relations. Outside the context of the Attitudes, contemporaries were anxious to (re)place Emma in terms of class, describing her as promiscuous, ‘common’, and ‘vulgar’. Modern scholarship has proved similarly anxious to limit her agency through the repeated assertion of a ‘Pygmalion’ paradigm in which responsibility for developing the Attitudes is assigned to Sir William. I argue that, on the contrary, Emma should be credited with a mode of embodied reception alternative to that of the collector and connoisseur.