Note 25 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.
The allegory presents "three masks -- one a drunken laughing Satyr, another a sorrowing Magdalen, and the third, which lay between them, the rigid, cold face of a Stoic: the masks rested obliquely on the lap of a little child, whose cherub features rose above them with something of the supernal promise in the gaze which painters had by that time learned to give to the Divine Infant" (3:51-52). This design resembles no known work by the original Piero di Cosimo. It is a nineteenth-century historical allegory devised by George Eliot herself to represent the three phases of western religious sensibility that preceded Chris- tianity. Reading the masks from left to right, we encounter a progression from an animalistic paganism that takes pleasure in this world, to a philosophical stoicism that endures this world, to a metaphysical sorrow that yearns to transcend this world. The cherubic, Christ-like child is the new dispensation of Christianity, which promises transcendence and thereby absorbs its oredecessors. But Tito interprets the child as "the Golden Age . . . [or] the wise philosophy of Epicurus" (3:52), failing to see that those stages of mind are represented by the masks of the satyr and the Stoic. For differing interpretations of this "symbolical picture," as Tito calls it, see Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 176; William J. Sullivan, "The Sketch of the Three Masks in Romola, " Victorian Newsletter, 41 (1972), 9-13; and Richards, "The Use of the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth-Century Novel," pp. 302-03.
Last modified 20 September 2000