Note 3 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.
G. H. Lewes's journal for 20 July 1858 (Letters, II, 472). A more articulate discussion of the painting occurs in Lewes's essay on "Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction," Westminster Review, 70 (1858), 493-94; rpt. Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes, ed. Alice R. Kaminsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 88. Furthermore, the Sistine Madonna is mentioned twice in Lewes's early novel, Ranthorpe (London: Chapman and Hall, 1847), pp. 12, 284. The half-ltalian heroine, Isola Churchill, has "a pale, olive complexion, large lustrous eyes, black hair, and a certain look of Raffaelle's Sistine Madonna." Later, the hero, Percy Ranthorpe, spends "some months" in Dresden, returning to London only "when he knew by heart every tint of the Sistine Madonna. "
Last modified 20 September 2000