Note 8 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.
On Michelangelo, see Cross, II, 155, 157, 162, 182-85, 188, 197. On Tintoretto, see Cross, II, 201-04, and "Italy 1864," entry for May 16. Here is an important difference between George Eliot's taste and that of Henry James. As Viola Hopkins Winner has shown (Henry James and the Visual Arts, pp. 83-93), James preferred the mannerist style above all others. He was therefore not disposed to think well of George Eliot's taste when he learned that she had described Michelangelo's manneristic statues of Night, Day, and Dawn in the Medici Chapel at Florence as "affected and exaggerated" (Cross, II, 184, and Critical Heritage, p. 499).
Last modified 20 September 2000