Gusto: Keats, Hazlitt, and Pictorial Art

It is well known that Keats found the word ‘gusto’ in Hazlitt’s lectures and writing, but the concept itself, as a term used particularly in relation to pictorial art, and Keats’s own development of the idea, have less often been examined. This essay builds upon a hint in Ian Jack’s study Keats and the Mirror of Art, examining the issue of Annals of the Fine Arts in 1819. In this journal appear Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Gusto’, Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and also an intriguing article by Michael Sharp on representing emotions through hand gestures in art. This is linked speculatively here with Keats’s enigmatic and chilling fragment, ‘This living hand…’.