When Jane Williams met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in Pisa in 1821, she delighted them with her musical ability. She played piano (a relatively new and very "modern" instrument!), harp, and guitar. She also had quite a "Romantic" personal history. In 1814, at age seventeen, she had married Captain John Edward Johnson. When he proved an abusive husband, she flouted convention by leaving him. After some time, she met Captain Edward Ellerker Williams, an aspiring writer and artist retired from military service in his mid-twenties. They ran off to Geneva--allegedly after Jane proposed to Williams that they do so. He saw them as refugees and rebels. “We seem to be flying from ourselves,” he wrote in his diary, “from a life which promised nothing in the perspective but misery, to one of peace.”[i] In Geneva, they met Percy Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin, who advised them to go to Pisa to join the Shelleys, Byron, and other countercultural English expatriates. They did so, arriving in 1821. 

In Pisa, Percy Shelley found Jane exotic in a decidedly Orientalist way. In an unfinished play, he depicts her as an Indian princess, and elsewhere represents the Williamses as persecuted exiles. His poem “To ________” (Jane, or perhaps the Williamses both) narrates a dramatic transoceanic elopement suggestive of theirs. “Drive we not free / O’er the terrible Sea, / I and thou?” one member of a fleeing couple asks the other. This poem employs a adrenaline-fueled, sexualized meter:

One boat-cloak doth cover
The loved and the lover--
Their blood beats one measure,
They murmur proud pleasure
Soft and low.

While both Jane and Williams’s “blood beats” this way, Jane is the more transgressive of the poem’s couple. “Curs[ing]” his “child,” the heroine’s father “devotes to the blast /  The best, loveliest, and last / Of his name.” This detail is fictitious, as Jane’s father had been long dead, but it pits her against patriarchy defined in the most obvious manner. As unconventional and dramatic as Jane Williams’s young adulthood was, it might have vanished from history was it not for Shelley’s impression of her as not only an adventuress and muse, but a musician. He gave her some of the lyrics he had written. As his biographer Richard Holmes explains, “a characteristic covering letter with one read: ‘Dear Jane, if this melancholy old song suits any of your tunes, or any that humour of the moment may dictate, you are welcome to it.’[vi] For instrumental accompaniment, Shelley wanted to give Jane a harp, a sumptuous instrument associated with inspiration and poetry, as in the Romantic metaphor of the “Aeolian harp.” Shelley wrote to fellow poet Horace Smith in England, asking him to buy a harp for Jane, but Smith, knowing Shelley’s financial history, refused. Instead, in 1822, Shelley bought her a guitar and presented it with a poem, “With a Guitar, to Jane.”

In Pisa, Jane didn't have access to a harp or a guitar. Percy Shelley looked into getting her a harp with the help of a friend in England, the poet and stockbroker Horace Smith, but Smith refused. Maybe he knew that Shelley had a habit of being in spectacular loads of debt and not reimbursing his creditors. Soon thereafter, Shelley obtaining a guitar locally, from Pisan luthier (stringed instrument maker) Ferdinando Bottari.

About Bottari, nearly no information has survived. No Bottari instrument other than the guitar that Shelley purchased is known to survive, but Shelley seems to have thought highly of him. “I have contrived to get my musical coals from Newcastle itself,” Shelley bragged in a letter to Smith. This convoluted variation on the cliché “carry coals to Newcastle” suggests he meant its opposite: not that getting a guitar from Bottari is as pointless as carrying coals to the coaling-center of Newcastle, but that Shelley has got his guitar from a source known for guitars.

Pisa does not seem to have been broadly understood as the global center of guitar-making, but when Shelley wrote to Smith, guitar virtuoso Marco Aurelio Zani de Ferranti (1800-1878) lived and performed there.[i] However, Bottari was no widely acknowledged master luthier. His guitar boasts distinctive, possibly unique stylistic innovations, but they are evolutionary cul-de-sacs in guitar history (no guitar-making conventions are known to have evolved from his ideas.) It seems that no luthiers copied Bottari’s work; at least, not in the nineteenth century, not in instruments that survive. Like the "sculptor" who "well those lifeless passions read" and "mocked" in Shelley's "Ozymandias," Bottari is now known only by a single work for what seems like a rather obstreperous artistic patron.

[i] Phillip J. Bone, The Guitar and Mandolin: Biographies of Celebrated Players and Composers for These Instruments (London: Schott, 1914), 329-330.