The Source of Eliot's comparing Dorothea with Santa Barbara

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 58 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.

As Mario Praz points out (The Hero in Eclipse, p. 358), the comparison of Dorothea with "a picture of Santa Barbara looking out from her tower into the clear air" (10:131) probably refers to Palma Vecchio's Santa Barbara altarpiece in the Church of Santa Maria Formosa at Venice, which George Eliot noticed in 1860 (Cross, II, 205).

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Last modified 20 September 2000