Note 88 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.
See Andrews, The Nazarenes, pp. 75-76
Overbeck and Cornelius were personally acquainted with Alexis-François Rio, whose De la poésie chrétienne (1836) inspired pioneering British studies in iconography such as Lord Lindsay's Sketches in the History of Christian Art (1847) and Mrs. Anna Jameson's The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850), and Legends of the Madonna (1852). Didron's Iconographie chrétienne (1843) was translated into English in 1851, and Louisa Twining published Symbols and Emblems of Early and Medieval Christian Art in 1852. A good summary of the literature available to English readers by 1848 may be found in Charles Lock Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts, 1st ser. (London: John Murray, 1848), pp. 18-19. George Eliot owned a copy of Rio's De la poesie chretienne; see Baker, The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Library, #1831.
Last modified 20 September 2000