Note 32 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.
Most commentators on Piero have connected his aesthetic with George Eliot's, though none has noted that the most important similarities derive from Ruskin. See Hurley, "Piero di Cosimo," pp. 54-56; Davis, "Pictorialism in George Eliot's Art," p. 48; and William J. Sullivan, "Piero di Cosimo and the Higher Prim- itivism in Romola," Nineteenth-Century Fichon, 26 ( 1972), 390-405. Sullivan, I think, underestimates the extent to which Piero is a seer and a Christian artist.
Last modified 28 November 2004