Note 16 to Chapter 6 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 resemblance between The Blind Girl and the emblem "Superna Respicit" in Otto van Veen's Amoris Divini Emblemata (Antwerp: Martin Nut and Johannis Meurs, 1615), pp. 38-39, is so strong as to suggest a possible source for the painting. The emblem was available to Millais in the Royal Academy library, and is reproduced in Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery, 2d ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964), fig. 53.
Last modified 28 November 2004