Vernon Lee (born Violet Paget, 1856–1935) was a prolific author writing on literature, feminism, economics, art history and psychological aesthetics. Widely influenced by Walter Pater, Lee translated his impressionist approach to aesthetic appreciation into the modern language of psycho-physiological aesthetics. In 1895 Vernon Lee started a collaboration with her lover, the painter Clementina Anstruther-Thomson (1857–1921), on a number of aesthetic experiments to assess how agreeable and disagreeable forms in ancient sculpture relate to our organic life. In their co-authored article ‘Beauty and ugliness’ (Contemporary Review 72 (1897), 544–69, 669–88), Lee and Thomson employed the concept of Einfü hlung (empathy) to demonstrate how form is apprehended through mimetic embodied processes.

As the Paul Mellon Centre Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome, I have had the chance to investigate Lee's experiments directly in front of ancient sculpture. In particular, I have focused on a number of statues held in the collections of the Vatican Museums and Museo Nazionale Romano. By using Lee's ‘Gallery diaries’, partly published in 1912 (in V. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London)), I was able to reconstruct Lee's network in Rome and focus on the role that women played in her experiments and in the dissemination of her ideas. Research in the Archive and the Library at the BSR has illuminated the importance of her exchanges with archaeologists of the time, including Emmanuel Löwy and Eugénie Sellers Strong, but also with women's body culture, in the figure of Diana Watts, who read Löwy's theories to develop a number of gymnastic exercises inspired by ancient statuary.

Research at the Bibliotheca Hertziana has been useful to review literature on aesthetic psychology and its influence on art historical writings at the fin de siècle. Also, I have expanded my readings in the field of phenomenology and critical museum theory while I was developing the argument of my chapter. During the period of my Fellowship, I have completed the chapter of my monograph that deals with Lee, and have also started to collect some of the illustrations that will go in the book. In this chapter, I explore the resonance of Lee's work on ancient statuary in conjunction with modern representations of the New Woman. Dialogue with other award-holders has been invaluable in helping me to envisage the importance of the concept of ‘aesthetic sociability’ in Lee's writings, especially with regard to her critique of modern museums and spectatorship.