1One May afternoon in 1901, the writer Katharine Bradley visited her friend, the artist Charles Ricketts. Ricketts presented Bradley with an unexpected gift: a Neo-Renaissance pendant, designed by the artist, containing a miniature portrait of Edith Cooper, Bradley’s niece and life partner (fig. 1).1 Bradley recorded the events in Works and Days, the collaborative diary she had kept with Cooper since 1888.2 The day, unusually for the diary, is titled with the portentous heading ‘Miniature Day’. Bradley relieved the experience on the page: ‘I look down—her face is there: My eyes grow wet as I look’.3 Cooper is shown in profile, her bust placed next to two initials and two interlocking rings. As if commemorating a marriage, the rings evoke the vows that the couple had taken privately over a decade previously.4 Next to the rings, the two initials reveal the authorship of the pair: an M and an F, signifying ‘Michael Field’, the name under which the two authors published. Bradley was known as Michael, and Cooper as Field: together, they were Michael Field.5

Fig. 1: Front, reverse and interior of hinged enamelled gold pendant, Pegasus Drinking from the Fountain of Hippocrene containing miniature of Edith Cooper, miniature painted and pendant designed by Charles de Sousy Ricketts, pendant made by Carlo & Arthur Giuliano, 1901, accession number M/P.3 & A-1914

2This article argues that Michael Field’s writings on art offer an intriguing means to revise understandings of collaborative late-nineteenth century art historical practice. Although known in their lifetime as poets and dramatists—they are both listed as ‘dramatist’ on the 1891 census, and ‘Writer of dramas’ in 1911—the large body of work left behind at their death in the form of diaries and letters reveals an exceptional engagement with European art, in particular the art of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.6 Whilst Michael Field’s literary collaboration has received considerable attention, comparatively little attention has been paid by art historians to the Fields’ unique position as critics, observers, and theorists of art.7 Hilary Fraser, however, has re-situated the Fields’ work within a burgeoning market of ‘women’s art criticism’, paying particular consideration to the ‘lesbian sexuality’ explored in their ekphrastic poetry.8 Anna Gruetzner Robins has examined the significance of living presence in the couple’s treatment of Botticelli, shifting focus onto the ‘queer desire’ at the centre of their engagement with Renaissance works, whilst Sarah Parker has explored the collaborations between Michael Field and the art historian Mary Costelloe.9 This article, building on such foundational work, focusses on Michael Field's Renaissance art writing and places Michael Field within the context of an emergent discipline of art history, in which the boundaries between amateur and professional identities had not yet fully been determined.

3Michael Field minutely detailed their responses to artworks in letters and diary entries, alternating between so-called poetic objectivity and deliberately subjective, even visionary narration. Encounters with artworks, as Dustin Friedman has argued, offered queer aesthetes like Michael Field an imaginative realm to ‘envision new modes of seeing, thinking, and living’.10 After Cooper examined the gift on her own, the pair sat together in the evening to look at the miniature, and Bradley read Cooper an unpublished poem called Old Ivories.11 The poem describes the encounter with an unnamed figure who is next to a window filled with golden ivories. The narrator is moved ‘by pleasure of similitude’ since this figure seems to be comparable in beauty to the ivories themselves, ‘herself a perfect thing | She stood by that time-burnished reliquary | Simple as Aphrodite by the sea’.12 For Cooper, the miniature and poem are not only perfect companions, but the poem is actually that ‘wh[ich]: the miniature simply illustrates’.13 As Bradley narrates the poem, Cooper is transformed into the object of the work, entwining text and image, human and artwork. As the object is held and loved, the gift exchange facilitates an intimate poetic intervention that is at once publicly displayed and privately recorded. This is a form of art history that speaks to the ‘“coded”, complicated relationship between homosexuality and material culture’ at the end of the nineteenth century, and stands in stark contrast to the professionalization narrative typically afforded the period.14 As critics have noted, this misleading narrative has led to the neglect of so-called amateur contributions, disproportionately affecting women and queer authors and viewers in the process.15 Through a more expansive understanding of what constituted art history in this period, however, the discipline’s ‘blindness’ towards non-normative methods and subjects can be countered.16 The writing of Michael Field offers one opportunity to reconsider art history as it was being developed in England at the end of the nineteenth century.

4The Fields created a queer and corporeal art historical past, in which artworks could be unanchored from a historicized setting to mediate between times.17 Ricketts’ pendant encapsulates this pliancy, placing Cooper at once between two historical styles. The blue azurite background, miniature background, and gold lettering is evocative of Elizabethan miniatures, such as the Windsor miniature of Mary Queen of Scots, which the Fields had previously admired at the New Gallery (fig. 2).18 The strict profile, linear outline, and curling hair, in contrast, recall Quattrocento portraiture, such as the Portrait of a Young Woman then attributed to Piero della Francesca at the Museo de Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, or the Berlin Portrait of a Young Woman by Antonio del Pollaiuolo (fig. 3).19 These evocations of Renaissance portraiture were recognised instantly by the art critic Robbie Ross, who exclaimed that ‘you would have to go back to the Renaissance for such a face’ after being shown by the miniature by Ricketts.20 Well-versed as she was in the available corpus of Early Renaissance art, Cooper riffed off this proximity in her own diary entry on the pendant, her praise of the golden ‘serpents of hair’ calling to mind the entwined snakes of Piero di Cosimo’s Portrait of a Woman, or the writhing hair of Leonardo’s La Scapigliata.21 Bradley, on the other hand, was amazed by the interconnection between art and life, sending a copy of Old Ivories to Ricketts and noting that ‘it is curious our impressions of her are the same’.22 The connection between personalities and artworks was a favourite theme of the diary. Revered as the ‘sacred ones’, Ricketts and his partner, the artist Charles Shannon, were often described as like living art objects.23 When Cooper first met Shannon in 1894, for instance, she noted his striking proximity to works of the Renaissance: he seemed ‘exactly like one of the comely angels of della Francesca—the face round, the features round, a smiling sobriety of expression’.24 The queer couples recognised an affinity with each other from the outset, Bradley recording that ‘[Ricketts] adores Shannon as I adore Henry’, united in their respective ambitions to create a totalizing aesthetic environment, ‘2 men living together exactly as Henry & I live’.25 The home, not just the museum, became in the hands of Michael Field and their friends a site for aesthetic experience.26 The miniature, and its manner of exchange between couples, furthermore exemplifies a working process that valued collaboration as much as individuality.

Fig. 2: Nicholas Hilliard, Mary, Queen of Scots, c. 1578–9, Watercolour on vellum laid on card, 5.5 × 3.7 cm, Royal Collection Trust

Fig. 3: Piero del Pollaiuolo (then attrib. to Piero della Francesca), Portrait of a Girl, c. 1470, oil and tempera on panel, 45.5cm × 32.7 cm, Museo Poldi Pezzoli

5Shifting in their tastes towards Early Renaissance art over the course of the 1890s, the Fields are indicative of a generation reckoning with the intellectual legacies of the likes of Jacob Burckhardt, Giovanni Morelli, and Walter Pater.27 They travelled to art galleries throughout Europe and educated themselves through the latest publications in European art scholarship.28 Bradley’s skills in attribution were valued by the critic Bernard Berenson, who sent her articles for revisions.29 Berenson encouraged Cooper to develop her art criticism through ‘croquis’ (sketches), or prose poems, claiming her ‘nature too wide to be expressed only in drama’.30 The critic explained that she was the only person he could look at art with, and that she even endowed him with a ‘new set of feelers’ for art appreciation.31 Cooper, however, felt constrained by her amateurism. Discussing the possibility of publishing a work on Botticelli, Cooper protested that it would be impossible, for she had ‘so little knowledge’.32 Berenson, however, argued this lack of expertise was secondary to her qualities of observation, since ‘it is not knowledge we want—but to be made to feel Botticelli as you feel him!’.33

6In June 1892, the Fields travelled to Paris to receive tuition from Berenson, in order to gain a familiarity with ‘recent art’ and be instructed in the ‘Morellian method’.34 The trip, however, was nothing short of a disaster. The Fields felt that they had been ‘induced’ to Paris on the pretence of education, only to find out that they had been brought there as a cover for Berenson’s affair with their friend, the art historian Mary Costelloe. Dismayed, they laid bare the limits of their method in the diary:

We have been decoyed to Paris by Mary’s promises of Morellian teaching from Bernhard & we are left with no shepherd among the tangles of attribution: Aesthetically we know the Louvre very well—historically, critically, not at all.35

7This feeling of alienation from the critical methods of historical research was not unique amongst women writers at the end of the century.36 Indeed, it may even be seen as a critical factor in shaping the Fields’ art historical practice, certainly contextualising their resistance to publish in more traditional formats. As Fraser has demonstrated, women in the nineteenth century articulated visual agency in ways that were ‘generically diverse’.37 With the exception of one article on the effigies in Westminster Abbey, the Fields’ engagement with art took place through more experimental genres of art writing in verse and prose.38 They remained, in their words, always an ‘artistic personality’, rather than formal critics.39 Whilst Berenson’s aesthetic tutelage evidently informed their taste and practice, their friendships and home-environment equally offered a space in which an art historical imaginary could be developed. Despite moments of self-scrutiny, the pair were ultimately reluctant to take up Berenson’s counsel on what form their writing should take.40 Largely disinterested in publishing essays and articles, Michael Field’s art writing intimately enfolded art into everyday life. Any beautiful object could become art historical at the hands of the Fields: a simple posy was ‘Leonardesque’, silk could be that of ‘Correggio’, whilst the rain hitting the roof of the Uffizi one afternoon became an immersive extension of Botticelli’s Primavera.41

8This art historical intimacy first emerges in the letters between the couple when Bradley left for a tour of Italy in 1880. As Ana Parejo Vadillo has noted, the real and imagined touch of artworks played a central role in virtually enacting desire in the letters, Bradley recalling how the Venus de Milo had ‘breasts so sweet one longs to drink from them’.42 Carpaccio's St Ursula, which Bradley knew from her membership of John Ruskin's Guild of St George, summons up a whole natural environment, its ‘lovely troop of girls’ with the ‘dew of morning upon them’.43 A Venus by Titian is a ‘ripe peach in the sun’, whilst the famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci has a mouth that seems to move, ‘the trembling agony of the parted lips’ so acute that the mouth appears ‘tremulous’.44 These artworks are almost animate in the figuration of desire, as if they were living persons that could be held and loved, participating in a long tradition of the erotic charge of art's living presence.45 For Bradley, these animated artworks were mirrored by the thought of Cooper, since ‘it made me think of my Pretty Persian—and the spirit convulsions to wh[ich]. her lips are subject’.46 Cooper is told to share in the living artwork through reproductions, to ‘have joy in our photograph—it is marvellously faithful’.47 Back at home, Cooper sealed their commitment to shared sight and touch by instructing Bradley to behave in certain ways before particular artworks. Bradley is told to kiss Jacopo della Quercia's effigy of Ilaria, a work which had long excited the attention of poets and authors:

This morning you will Kiss the perfect at Lucca, and thank God for having sent her on Earth and Jacopo della Quercia for having Kept her there. I have sent a pilgrim-Kiss; may it reach you in time to be pressed by your lips on her shrine!48

9Replaying a familiar scene of agalmatophilia, of falling in love with statues and touching them—like the eighteenth-century antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann touching the sculptures of Rome—Bradley dutifully kissed the stone figure.49 Only in this instance, the experience sends Bradley reeling straight back to the thought of home, ‘the softly-folded hands; & it seemed as if I were again at Ivythorpe’.50 Bradley re-enacted the moment for Cooper in writing, creating an imaginative staging of the scene that Cooper could experience by reading the letter:

I bear on my lips the marble of Ilaria’s brow! I walked straight to the left transept, and saw her, and by and by all left, and I kissed her on the calm forehead, the tremulously sweet lips, the sweet round chin.51

10As Bradley kissed and bowed before statues and portraits, Cooper created an erotic visual surrounding for herself, describing a photograph of Bradley as if it were also a sculpture: ‘You always sleep with me in effigy—for your portrait under my pillow and I kiss it’, and even directly compared her to Ilaria as an object of tactile attention, ‘your portrait, like Ilaria’s effigy, is being worn by Kisses pressed on it’.52 Bradley, memorialised, is turned into an artwork in the desiring imagination of Cooper.

11These letters speak to the complex authorship behind Michael Field. If their authorial personality remains quite distinct in the letters, they also clearly created a shared aesthetic environment that stretched across boundaries of place. Cooper instructed Bradley to ‘Picture me Italy in the journal!!!’, praising Bradley’s ‘little-word-painted pictures’.53 Bradley similarly revelled in how ‘blessed’ it was to send news to ‘Ivythorpe with all I find of my most precious art in my travels’.54 Home and abroad, artworks fostered emotional and imaginative connections between the couple. In the journal their identity is further entangled. Whilst there are two distinct hands, the couple switched seamlessly between entries, recorded each other’s observations on art and prefaced each other’s entries with short commentaries and headings. There are passages in Cooper’s hand recording Bradley’s opinions on contemporary French art, whilst in another section Bradley begins to record Cooper’s observations of early Italian work, the entry switching without break back to Cooper’s hand.55 This collaborative work can be compared with the experiments of Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson and Vernon Lee to record the physiological and psychological effects of artworks on the body, united in interrogating, as Sarah Parker and Alex Murray have suggested, ‘the qualities of aesthetic objects […] experienced through the body’.56 For both couples art writing became a form of life writing, an intimate portrait of the vitalizing properties of artworks. In Lee’s ‘Gallery Diaries’, the effect of a school or style is dependent on the viewer’s mood: on one day a Piero di Cosimo is ‘fatiguing’, on another day Rubens seems ‘gibberish’ after viewing the ‘Primitives’ (early Italian work).57 The Fields likewise paid close attention to the bodily stimuli aroused by artworks. In the Accademia in Florence, they are too tired ‘to hear or see anything the pictures could give’, with ‘mind so grotesque’, that only the ‘earliest, Giotto or Lorenzetti’ are suitable viewing material, sharing Lee’s primitivizing assumptions of the pictorial and psychological simplicity of early Italian art.58 In the Louvre, estranged from Berenson and Costelloe and the ‘knowledge I am starving to hear’, the pictures seem nothing ‘but a manufacture’, and none of them will speak anymore, remaining simply ‘dead canvass to us’.59 As with Lee in the ‘Gallery Diaries’, pictures and persons had emotive and contingent relationships.60

12The diary furthermore contains multiple drafts in different hands of work that would be revised and published under their single name Michael Field. Giorgione’s Venus, for instance, is first mentioned in February 1891 by Bradley who admiringly noted the curves and undulations of the body in the landscape.61 A few pages later, Cooper described the same afternoon in Costelloe’s apartment looking at photographs with Berenson, in which Cooper is likewise awed by Venus, ‘I have never seen anything more consummately lovely than the Venus of Dresden’.62 The landscape is transformed into a feminine space, as ‘The limbs repeat the feminine amplitude of the Earth’, evoking the pastoralism of their Sappho poems of the 1889 collection Long Ago.63 Unlike the Sappho poems, however, which were based on the 1885 translations by Henry Wharton, the evidence here shifts from the verbal to the visual, a process elaborated by Cooper in 1891 sitting in the National Gallery before Piero di Cosimo’s Death of Procris: ‘I feel that as I learn the power & value of the picture a poem will be born’.64 Earlier that year, the couple had travelled to Dresden, armed with a list of pictures to view from Berenson.65 A long description in front of the work began:

And there she is—[Giorgione’s Venus!] This is perfect womanhood […]. There is in the picture that ideal sympathy between woman and the land.66

13The affinity between women and nature that is again elaborated transforms the body into a topography, displacing the conventional art historical claim that Giorgione’s landscape marked a departure or innovation in Venetian painting.67 This is found in the picture’s colouring—‘a heap of pomegranate red—that fertile red that is the right bond of colour, between the solemn flesh and the grave slopes’—and in the shapes of the body—‘the curve from the elbow to the knee has the extensive softness of undulating land’.68 Cooper’s description then switches to recording Bradley’s opinion on connection between landscape and the body, ‘Of the Venus she writes […] It is only Italian landscape that could thus take flesh in a Venus’.69 This passage, amongst the most well-known of the Fields' art writing, demonstrates their insistent turn towards the body of the artwork as a living entity, whose beauty is capable of arousing pleasurable, erotic, and creative sensations in the viewer. The couple collectively reworked this commentary into the poem ‘The Sleeping Venus’, published in the ekphrastic collection Sight and Song in 1892.70 The professed end of the volume was, as many critics have noted, an exercise in translation.71 Based largely on their observations of pictures in Dresden and London, the Fields spent time in the journal detailing the difficulties of moving between the two media. After writing a draft version of Venus and Mars, Cooper visited the National Gallery to ‘judge’ whether the poem had been successful in capturing the image, concluding that whilst ‘it has caught the broader poetry of the picture’, the picture itself has so ‘much poetry’ that it ‘would injure the outline of a poem to delineate’.72 This intermedial process was laid out in the preface, which stated that the collection’s aim was:

To translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate.73

14The preface thus claimed to move beyond the viewer’s subjective enjoyment in order to facilitate an objective poetic criticism of art, a subtle reconfiguration of Walter Pater’s treatise on aesthetic criticism Studies in the History of the Renaissance.74 Their friend Alice Trusted praised their ability to give voice to this normally inarticulable aspect of aesthetic experience, writing in a letter to Cooper that the volume had ‘embodied in these records that which is of an incommunicable kind’.75 Critics such as William Butler Yeats, however, expressed outright hostility to this approach, complaining that:

This interesting, suggestive, and thoroughly unsatisfactory book is a new instance of the growing tendency to make the critical faculty do the work of the creative.76

15Yeats’ comment neatly sums up the tensions between proper ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ work that is characteristic of late nineteenth-century writing on art.77 For Yeats, the work was nothing but a ‘guide-book’, a comment alive with gendered implications. Whilst the comment tacitly acknowledges the many genres of art writing then being developed, it also rejects their critical or creative value, demanding generic insularity rather than the aforementioned ‘generic diversity’ that characterized many women's art writing by the end of the century.

16The Fields’ use of the Sappho fragments in Long Ago had participated in a broader history of classical reception that saw the classics divest from a male elite to include a middle-class female audience.78 Shanyn Fiske has called such histories examples of a ‘heretical Hellenism’ that typically took place at home rather than the university, often reliant on second-hand knowledge, and frequently the site of critical re-interpretations.79 The Italian Renaissance—particularly the Early Renaissance—was also subject to its own critical re-interpretations at the hands of a broadly amateur audience.80 Unlike the classics in which women were gaining increasing prominence at university level, history of art in 1890s England remained pre-institutional. The Slade Professorship had been running since 1869, but there was no opportunity study art history at the level of higher education.81 Berenson made an income in London by lecturing to a public audience; attending his lecture series ‘A Course of Ten Lectures on the Italian Masters’ in London in 1894, Michael Field noted the increasing number of women attending the series.82 Education about the Renaissance, particularly for women, largely existed in these informal routes in England in the 1890s. The Renaissance was a historical period that was not constrained to the university, and could be studied in the rich public collections in Britain, through travels on the continent, or in widely circulated publications and reproductions.83

17Fiske describes the re-invention of the classics by Victorian women as demonstrative of the ‘counter-discursive possibilities’ developed by the new audience.84 The Fields’ adaptions of the Renaissance likewise suggests new ways of reading the period, transforming figures of fifteenth-century Florentine painting into startlingly contemporary characters.85 Sitting for a long time in front of Venus and Mars, Cooper recorded:

How tragic are the two great figures male + female—he sleeping in illusion, she already above it, and watchful lest it cheat her even again […]. She is modern, cold, she is sad, she is awake.86

18The Renaissance becomes a modern woman, not only the archaic femme-fatale popularised in the criticism of writers such as Algernon Swinburne, but a self-aware individual.87 The modernity of Renaissance art is therefore not only in its design of ‘fearless simplicity’, but also its sentiment of ‘exquisite pessimism’.88 The journal paints Berenson and Costelloe as the living embodiments of this ‘cold’ modernity, their supposedly passionless relationship governed by the new rules of ‘modern candour’.89 Likewise they described Botticelli’s rediscovered Pallas and the Centaur as a ‘gift to the century’ because of its emotional coldness, ‘how relentlessly impersonal the face’.90 The diary presents the ‘modern’ as a transhistorical category that included both people and objects from diverse historical periods. Admiring the works of Shannon, for instance, Cooper is reminded of the reliefs of Florentine Renaissance sculptors, leading to the pronouncement that Shannon’s work is ‘modern in effect’.91 Frequently reflective over their own place within the modern age, the Fields wondered on New Year’s Eve in 1893, ‘I do not yet realise where modernity is taking me’.92 Fretting that they ‘were becoming antiquated + leaving “the modern” quite behind us’, the Fields transformed the Renaissance into its own site of modernity.93

19This is demonstrated in the redecoration of their study in 1893, when, driven by the need to ‘Be contemporaneous!’, ‘every Millet, every Turner has been banished from study + blue-room. Italian art remains’.94 Such domestic alterations were evidently integral to the Fields’ wider critical agenda. The entry justifies the need to redecorate because ‘today’s dreams + desires […] these are the things to be expressed on our walls, in our furniture, in our dress’.95 The Renaissance was on some level literally present for the Fields, a history that could be handled and desired, much like the miniature. Thanking Berenson for sending a reproduction of Flora’s head from Botticelli’s Primavera, Bradley wrote that:

Before her eyes & mouth I am dumb. She really is most terribly alive—herself, herself through every pore of her skin…I am laying down my pen to stare her.96

20Photographic reproduction had become an indispensable tool for many art historians by 1892, in part building on Giovanni Morelli’s call to establish a new practice of scientific criticism.97 The Fields, however, also transformed these impassive scholarly objects into living creatures, taking them out from under the imaginary microscope of the connoisseur, even as they followed its call by observing ‘every little flake of her’.98 On her birthday in 1892, Cooper received ‘the largest size Braun’ reproduction of Giorgione’s Venus.99 The couple had breakfast before it, surrounding it with sprays of myrtle and berries, since their ‘austere colouring’ seemed to fit well with the ‘gravity’ of the picture.100 The mounting and support are tenderly and minutely described, and the pair profess themselves to be struck dumb by the beauty of the piece:

Its beauty makes one grave; there is such solemn imagination, such noble treatment of line + landscape one’s joy becomes a suppression of the heart.101

21When they receive a reproduction of Timoteo Viti’s Magdalene, in contrast, they ‘dance with joy’ before the ‘soft photograph’.102 At home and abroad Bradley and Cooper describe long evenings and afternoons pouring over photographs, alone, together, and with companions. Photographic reproductions did not only stand in for the ‘real’ artwork, but facilitated intimate encounters between the couple not possible in the regulated space of the gallery. Cooper told Bradley in 1880 that she ‘must not tell me about photos from Angelico or I shall begin to want you back again actively’.103 These reproductions, as Ana Parejo Vadillo has suggested, were a Victorian ‘imaginary museum’ in which objects were like people, visualizing friendships and extending the boundaries of the home.104 Whilst staying at Berenson’s empty home in Fiesole, they wrote to him saying ‘How could we be otherwise than happy and at home when we wake to the same pictures & influence & books as at Durdans’, and record their sadness at leaving: ‘we shall miss the austere sack-cloth walls, the poetic photographs’.105 A year later Cooper still mourned the loss of Berenson's ‘intimate photographs’.106 After dinner with Shannon and Ricketts in 1894, Cooper connected photographic study with the creation of queer fellowship :

there is a yell for Bellini! + all our photographs from his pictures are brought out. Finally we bid our guests goodbye with a sense we have walked into friendship as deep as mowing grass […] These 2 men live + work together + find rest + joy in each other's love just as we do.107

22Such accounts indicate the importance of photographic reproduction not only in aiding the study of ‘new criticism’, or connoisseurship, but in fostering queer kinship that was continually identified through reference to Renaissance visual and material culture.

23How can we account for this domestic rendition of Renaissance art history? It is scattered throughout their friendships: Herbert Horne, creating a settee for the Fields’ ‘Botticelli room’, told the pair that his sprays of dry Butcher’s Broom had an ‘Early Florentine look’.108 Berenson wrote to the Fields that his study was like that of St Jerome’s in the Carpaccio fresco; the Fields called him ‘the Faun’ as his suggestion for many years.109 These playful forms of make-believe mark another instance of the counter-discursive possibilities of the Fields’ writings. In transforming their guide to the Renaissance into a living survival of antiquity, the Fields created new intersections between the classics and the comparatively recent field of Early Renaissance studies. The two productively informed each other, as when Field exclaimed that their copy of Melozzo da Forlì’s angels is ‘full of […] Bacchic life’, or when they visited the Medici’s country house Villa Careggi and recited lines from Sappho.110 Such intersections suggest not only the pliability of the imagined past at the hands of Michael Field, but also the Fields’ own contribution to art historical debates then taking place in Florence.111 Like their more famous colleagues, the Fields were concerned with charting the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance.112 By offering both sapphic revisionism and domestic re-enactment, however, the Fields also developed alternative avenues of historical research, that at times threatened to destroy the boundary between the scholar and their work. By thinking together, writing together, desiring together, as amateurs and without institutional support, Michael Field invite us to revise the tired period model of the male art historian before the feminized artwork, or the lone figure struggling in the archive. Their example furthermore gives prompt to reconsider what exactly constituted art history in this period, and whether, in fact, we need a more expansive approach in order to recognise the rich contribution to the discipline of otherwise marginalised figures.

24Michael Field, though, were fatally aware that their work was not in line with the privileged tradition of male scholarship. Early in their shared diary, Bradley reckoned with her gendered exclusion from the homoerotic world of antiquity and the Renaissance. She wrote that there was ‘one sentence of Pater’s which I would not say I could never forgive, because I recognised its justice; but from which I suffered, and which was hard to bear—that in which he speaks of the scholarly conscience as male’.113 The same phrase hauntingly recurred several years later in the diary, this time in Cooper’s hand, as she recorded her frustration at being unable to talk in the manner her male companions would like her to:

I spoil all, I shake from my person all poetry, I demonstrate that woman cannot have the scholarly conscience. I am an occasion for cynicism.114

25Yet despite these anxieties, the Fields constantly strived to reform and refine their manner of working. In her final entry for 1894, Cooper reflected on the past year, that ‘our love of art is more central again, not feeling out from the surface of ourselves—restless, experimental, shallow—but under our own protection, warmed by our most intimate vitality—which means by our own wills + emotions’.115 This intimate vitality neatly captures Michael Field’s neglected form of art history.