Forms of the Future

Chapters 9 and 10 start to consider the longer-term aesthetic effects of 1848 on writing and art, extending into the 1850s and 1860s. The publication of Casa Guidi Windows and its immediate translation into Italian marked the fuller entry of the Brownings into the Italian and expatriate nationalist community in Florence. There they encountered the Macchiaioli painters who were trying to find a new visual language for the time of interruption and delay as they awaited the next stage of the revolution. Margaret Fuller’s arrival in Florence in 1849 led to an important friendship with Barrett Browning. The angry and uncompromising 1860 Poems Before Congress owes much to Fuller’s feminist influence as Barrett Browning extends the category of the ‘political’ to include women’s experience. The poems bring together the wrongs of slavery with the Italian cause to make a transatlantic case for human rights and draw upon the universalist moment of 1848.