The visual world and its representation figure large in the romances as well as in the life of the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (PI 1). In The Howe of Seven Gables, published in 1851, one of the chief characters is a photographer, and, in the last of his great 'romances', The Marble Faun, the whole plot is built around a sculpture. However, Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, in their Taste and the Antique, rap Hawthorne over the knuckles for the unreliability of his aesthetic judgements, and for not being able to make up his mind whether the Medici Venus is a sublime classic or a botched version of some finer original. In Hawthorne's brushes with the sculptural world attention has focused, rather to his detriment, on the period he spent in Italy between January 1858 and May 1859. There are two obvious reasons for this. One is that, in his travel notebooks, he represents himself as undergoing a sort of initiation into the mysteries of the art, through contact with lauded examples from antiquity, and profiting from the advice of such luminaries as Anna Jameson, Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story and John Gibson.