Note 24 to Chapter 5 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.
See Dahl, "When the Deity Returns," pp. 83-86, 92-93; and Wiesenfarth, George Eliot's Mythmaking, pp. 152-55. On "the conception of Bacchus as the Care-Dispeller," see also George Eliot, "Art and Belles Lettres," Westminster Review, 65 (1856), 637. There may be a reminiscence of Hawthorne's Faun of Praxiteles in Tito's totemic statue of "a young faun playing the flute, modelled by a promising youth named Michelangelo; Buonarotti" (20:303).
Last modified 20 September 2000