George Eliot and Titian's St. Peter Martyr

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 19 to Chapter 3 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

Of St. Peter Martyr, she wrote: "In this picture, as in that of the Tribute-money at Dresden, Titian seems to have surpassed himself, and to have reached as high a point in expression as in colour" (Cross, II, 203). On the high regard in which St. Peter Martyr was held in nineteenth-century England generally, see Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain c. 1750-1850 (London: Tate Gallery, 1973), p. 22. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867.

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Last modified 20 September 2000