William Wetmore Story was an expatriate American attorney and legal scholar, poet, art theorist, essayist, and sculptor whose successes in multiple endeavors encouraged the belief among many of his contemporaries and all of his intimates that he was an original "Renaissance man." Although he was committed to Romantic aesthetic theory and practice, Story rarely endorsed any of the intellectual, social, or political movements associated with the nineteenth-century American Renaissance. During brief sojourns in Italy during the 1840s and early 1850s, and then as a permanent resident from 1856 until his death in 1895, he served aesthetic, social, and political ideas primarily as a facilitator of them in conversations among his many American and English friends who gathered at his studio on Via Sistina in Rome or at the apartment he and his wife maintained in the Palazzo Barberini. For nearly fifty years, the Storys were at the center of the...