Note 37 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.
Barbara Hardy (The Novels of George Eliot, p. 174) refers to the portrait of Tito as a "prophetic picture," but claims that it anticipates Baldassarre's interruption of the supper in the Rucellai Gardens (chap. 39) rather than the scene on the Duomo steps (chap. 22). The most important prophetic images in The Marble Faun are the so-called Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, whose ambiguous expression of guilty innocence is shared by both Miriam and Hilda as they come into contact with evil, and the clay model for a bust of Donatello, in which the sculptor Kenyon inadvertently creates an expression of pure ferocity that is true to character even though the artist has never actually seen it on the model's face (chap. 30).
Last modified 20 September 2000