Note 5 to Chapter 9 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.
On Leighton's acquaintance with Vasari subjects in Florentine academic painting, see Leonee and Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton, p. 8. On the popularity of such subjects in French salon painting, see Francis Haskell, "The Old Masters in Nineteenth-Century French Painting," The Art Quarterly, 34 (1971), 55-85. On the connections between paintings from Vasari and Browning's artist-monologues, see Leonee Ormond, "Browning and Painting," in Robert Browning, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1974), pp. 184-210.
Last modified 20 September 2000