Note 4 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.
Cross, II, 47; Letters, II, 472; and "Life of Goethe," The Leader, 6 (1855), 1060. James himself acknowledged the importance of the Sistine Madonna to George Eliot when he placed two photographs of it, together with all of her writings, in the Cape Cod cottage of his feminists in The Bostonians (chap. 36). Philip Wakem refers to the Sistine Madonna in The Mill on the Floss when he tells Maggie: "The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child" (V, 1:58). Mrs. Jameson called The Sistine Madonna "probably the most perfect picture in the world" in Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845),1I, 147. Ruskin ranked the painting among the "few works of man so perfect as to admit of no conception of their being excelled"; see "Preface to the Second Edition" of Modern Painters I, in Works, III, 13.
Last modified 20 September 2000